Monday, April 15, 2024

Album Review: Speech Odd - Odd World

God damn, what a nightmare! Not just a nightmare though... a presence. A nightmare that's more a premonition of something powerful and frighteningly imminent crashing through your bedroom ceiling and dragging you to hell with it as it plunged through the floor. Unfamiliar and terrible, but also hypnotically alluring. A rendezvous in the dead of night with a beast who speaks many tounges, none of which have been uttered out loud in the past century, but whose every gesture and pronouncement is intuited just the same- its coat like the plumage of crows, its joins creaking in the cold air, eyes never blinking. It's a truly discordant apparition which mars the senses. Seemingly unknowable, the creature still has a name, Speech Odd. It has swam all the way from Thailand to greet you with bared fangs and open arms. Most alarming is that it is actually a chimera of several tortured varmints, with one named Pam acting as its head, another anointed Bom serving as the heart, and a third called Nampan acting as the limbs. They emerge from the salty break of the ocean under the banner of Odd World to tear up the landscaping and resod it with chaos, dividing with plowshares, sharpened by powerviolence grooves, and ground forward at a pace that is more cutting than spite. Youth crew monks have honed their natural tendency towards barbarity, while demons from grindcore-infested spawn pits have cursed them with a deadly sense of timing and endeavored to wear out their empathy for the human race. It is an odd thing to behold, the on rush of your own doom. With luck, you may take it in stride.