Album Review: MIDI Bunny - MIDI Bunny LP or, "Songs to Hurt Others​.​"

There is a lot to admire about MIDI Bunny's expansive and somewhat laboriously titled MIDI Bunny LP or, "Songs to Hurt Others​​," but one thing in particular that tickles my pickle is that MIDI Bunny's LP is not an album at all but is instead described as a novel- That's right, a novel. A novel with a jaunty piano riff intro accompanied by a disquisition on dying for your art, which concludes with a skit about how skits are cringe... This is some Max Bemis-level narrative twisting, my dude- an implosion of expectations and blenderized genre etiquette that drives the subjective into the fabric of the real at such a fine point that they invert at the point of impact. A book that your eyes can't read but have to feel instead, like the pen-scrawled indentations in an old composition notebook, or a fresh panoply of singing photographs that you hear with your heart before they congeal into coherent scenes. Looking at the album through a literary lens lends the sprawling 23-chapter work a tether of cogent lucidity as a sort of post-modern inversion of tropes separated into narrative beats by branching musically divergent styles that when taken together, form a cohesive romance with a winding meta-logical that buttresses the chronicle and keeps it on the rails. Songs to Hurt Others is sort of like a gorilla opera rendition of a yuri-subplot in a manga adaptation of Breakfast of Champions (only a version where everyone still fully dissociates, but never-the-less manages to find true love in the end)- it's both real and a tabloid misprint, true and truly unbelievable, a faithful retelling of events and an A&E daytime slot cash-in, the ending in a choose your own adventure where find your way out of the maze but a werewolf grabs you before you can finish turning the page- some chapters are like a big, streamer-popping parade of marching ska bands, other's are self-contained rock operas in the vein of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars with a sheen of Glass Beach' enigmatic panache, still others are mere glimpses of the glamorously drab and quotidian strained through a rainbow-stained hyperpop colander, pulping emo sparkle riffs through a tilting-whirl of jungle threshers to churn out juicy globs of bodacious, breakbeat burlesque. A sapphic bunny/cat romance to define an age of love, tragedy, and the invasion of the internet into the concrete and tangible world. Some epics you read, others to smash play on, this is one of the latter. 

Album Review: This Curse is Gift - A Throne of Ash

Digging into the black, sodden wilds to find hexes and dark enclaves of deep aura with Swedish blackened hardcore oath-keepers, This Gift is a Curse. Rising from the muck of mirthless quagmires and the heap of half-drowned and burnt cast-offs that suffuse and populate the modern world, TGC make hell a place on earth on their third LP, A Throne of Ash. While the band stakes their turf on the well-trodden, viscera-coated bridge that arches between second-wave black metal and crusty hardcore, there is an added depth of desperate searching anguish to the proceedings that help TGC stand out from their petulant peers, claiming the high ground for themselves atop a twisted hoshi and monument to turbulent spiritual angst. One such aspect that defines the group's eldrich embodiment of animus energy is the frankly chilling occult aesthetic they’ve adopted for their album art and stage personas. Surrounded and adorn with hoods, twisted crowns, and devilish-looking farm equipment, they present as a secret society to themselves- one in possession of knowledge that was better off buried or lost to time. I'm not one to doubt the depths of the void they slithered out of; their music is proof enough of their ascent from the pit of raw arcane rupture. The chaotic "Wolvking" is haunted by some of the more esoteric and bone-chilling sounds the band has to offer, while "Wormwood Star" seethes with dark radiance in a rippling pool of black oily rhythms, and the daring death-wish “In Your Black Halo” is pure, unspoiled noise-core. More straightforward hardcore can be found on the Converge-indebted “Gate Dweller” and the power-violence imbued "Thresholds," where you truly get the sense of something ancient and foul invading the plain of Euclidian reason. Plunge into the crimson pyre and arise a regent on A Throne of Ash, awaiting a new dark dawn when you may relinquish your crown to an even more formidable terror. 

*Clears throat for Donovan impression.* Must be the Season of [the] Mist, yeah!

Album Review: Vazum - Western Violence

I came across a comic the other day. Two panels. Very simple setup and punch line. A man is talking to his therapist and says, "I think my greatest fear is dying alone." The therapist, looking out the window of his office and seeing a mushroom cloud in the distance, replies, "Well, I have some good news..." It really sums up what living in America can feel like sometimes. The only silver lines we can expect to glean are those we glimpse on the threshold of unmitigated disaster. The title track from Detriot deathgaze duo Vazum's LP Western Violence is illustrative of this dreary state of reality. Through a veiling mirage of distortion billowing from the seams in a slithering, creaking, descending crawl of a chord progression, venomously sourced from guitarist Zach Pliska's own hands, singer Emily Sturm channels a viciously exacting personification of Romeo Void's Debora Iyall in recounting the fouling of human bodies and souls wrought by the opioid epidemic and its correlative with a rise in gun violence across the increasingly desolate expanses of the American West. There will be no retribution or restitution for the lives lost or the harm done for the sake of greed and cheap thrills depicted here- coordinated in cloud-kicking boardrooms and concluding in trash-glutted gutters and parking lots outside abandoned strip malls, dilapidated churches, and soon to be deserted schools- this long, tragic chapter of our nation's history will not have a poetic moment of justice- the people responsible made their paper, and the miserable details of the entailed crimes will be recorded in feeble ledgers and left to sit on back room shelves, molding until they succumb to the ravishes of moths and the inertia of indifference. The bleakness of the bare facts of this life makes the techno-dystopian fantasies of an AI-tailored tyranny depicted on tracks like the shadow-cast and subduedly operatic "Breach" refreshing in a feat of twisted irony, as there is yet a sense of resistance and defiance in Zach and Emily's bitter and resolute vocal deliveries as they outline a fictional web of control. If the hypothetical ever concretizes where Grok accelerates into the dispatcher of 10s of thousands of T-800-styled killer androids, there will be a clear focal point to which one may target their energy and fury in order to rest control back from a singular and centralized cybernetic dictatorship and restore a priorly displaced state of liberty, presumably enjoyed by humanity. In our present reality though, the evils we suffer seem to flow inherently out of systems and dynamics that operate entirely as intended, and as far back as we can recall... it's never been any other way. It is clear that the plain order of things privileges violence against us, and we are merely objects cursed to bear witness to a pertinacious ontological state upon which we are powerless to force an effective change. What is there to hold on to in this perverse demiurgic domain? Perhaps the answer is close at hand? We have each other, after all. Even in the well of hell's gullet, there is still the solace of company and we do not suffer alone. As indicated by Vazum's sweeping, sanguine-hued and honey-textured, Cocteau-coktail "Stellium," there is always someone with you in the dark- they may be as bloody, bruised and broken, but as long as their pulse runs quick, they will be there. There is a certain solidarity that the recognition of the other engenders. A sympathetic recognition of ourselves in the reflection of a shared humanity- a grain of love in a fallow field- and a glimmer of salvation cutting through a curtain of acid rain- a sunny day that drys the wet terror of an evening past- You see me, and I see you, and together we live in the light cast down into the shadows as it splinters of the silver lining of a rising mushroom cloud.

Album Review: Battle of Santiago - Queen & Judgement

Queen & Judgement. Not Queen of Judgment, but more of a "Yes, and..." type of situation concerning mythic forces, as in more is more in the cornucopia of the cosmos. They arrive together as each other's steed and hussar- Oya, the Yorùbá Orisha manifestation of winds and cyclones, appearing under the mantel of Queen, and the Sky Father, Obatala, creator of the human form, riding in under the banner of Judgment. Ostentatious, sure, but we all meet our makers eventually, and I could think of more ominous conditions to do so than through an album from Toronto's Battle of Santiago. I found their 2017 LP La Migra* pretty compelling, and their 2020 release is every bit of a revelation. Battle of Santiago plays a super fly and stellar seeking mix of Latin American dance music with heavy Afro-beat influences and an anxious strain of post-rock interlaced throughout. On Queen & Judgement, the band tilts into the Afro-folk parts of their sound in an even more unapologetic way, allowing them to spin up and flourish in a maelstrom of jubilance, exploding in a catharsis of hurricane-like proportions. According to the band, their music is written to "invite everyone to dance, have fun and forget about the problems of life..." and I think this is a worthy sentiment even when things seem at their bleakest. There is only so much you can do about the problems of the world, and once you've done your part, all you can do is take solace in each other's company and permit fate to weave its course with the Queen at its back and Judgment as its guide. 

Made with (only the finest) Pencil Crayons

*The title is an informal name for "Immigration and Customs Enforcement," a reference to the terror experienced by displaced Latin American people in the current political climate. 

Album Review: The Marmozets - Knowing What You Know Now

"I can see a major system error in you / You think one plus seven, seven, seven makes two / If your story ever, ever, ever came true / Can you keep it together, ah?" That's the starting line of The Marmozets's track "Major System Error." It's such a juicy and viciously dramatic string of phrases, all of which fill me with an explosive nemesistic zeal- so much so that I'm willing to bend one of the many unwritten rules of this blog in order to cover it.* We've all encountered someone in our lives, some short-circuiting creep who needed to have a few inches shaved off of their pride, and lines like these, delivered with the passion and courage, really do the work of making one's righteous accusations stick while leaning in close enough to flip the kill switch on the bastard. It's a prickly species of lyricism that is nearly extinct in 2024 (at least in rock music), one that is equally directed at facilitating a parable of bad dealing with bad actors, defending one's self from ego-depending manipulation, and empowering the listener to dance in a manner of free-spirited flight that only their body and spirit truthfully comprehend. About 10 years ago, you could still find a dozen bands on the radio that could pen a lyric that strips the copper-coated nerves from a malfunctioning narcissist over a floor-pounding groove in about as much time as it takes to lay down 2/5ths of a chorus, but it's seemingly a lost art now, taken over by cloistered indie and pure pop artists with more or less uneven and middling results. Even when their strengths were more widely shared though, Marmozets still stood out from the troop of their peers, especially on their second LP, 2018's Knowing What You Know Now, on which the jittery head-rush "Major System Error" is the fourth, nail-through-heart driving, track. In their day, the British pop-punk and garage band cultivated a genuinely precocious train of roller-coaster chord progressions, air-tight rhythms, down-tuned guitars, polished production quality, and gripping vocal performances. They first broke onto the scene when the majority of their members were barely 18 back in 2007 and gained the attention of the British music press through their chaotic live shows and vicious stage presence. On Knowing What You Know Now, The Marmozets take the raw material of their 2014 debut Weird and Wonderful and use it to sculpt something sleeker, angrier, and deadlier. These are rock anthems with fangs and a deathwish, with enough hooks and natural charism to charm the pants of the devil himself. Opener "Play" breaks in with a teeth-rattling beat and layers of danceable raucous riffs, “Habit” has gluey guitar hooks and a chorus that is pandemic levels of catchy, “Meant to Be" combines juicy vocal harmonies with vengeance-seeking guitars, and “Lost in Translation” swings and stomps like the Bride of Frankenstein on a bender. Knowing what we know now about how sterile and desiccated mainstream and radio rock has become, would it be too much to ask The Marmozets to come swing back into action? It might be me going out on a limb, but I'm going to say that it's not. 

Roadrunner Records... they might not be Acme, but they still pack a BANG. 

*I usually avoid covering releases on major labels... and Roadrunner is definitely one of those. I honestly can't keep track of which major they're even a subsidiary of now, nor do I truly care...