Admitting this will likely make me sound completely unhinged, but whenever I order a drink at a restaurant or a kiosk, I have an irrational paranoia that the person preparing my order is going to bleed in it. This has never happened in experience (as far as I know), and it doesn't cause me much anxiety, but whenever I watch someone pouring coffee or dispensing juice, I can't help but think, "If they got a nosebleed right now, there is only about a foot between their nostrils and my beverage, and then my drink could end up with an extra-iron supplement in it." I can't account for this aspect of my psychology. It could be the result of some starved desire for affection (not that my conscious mind is aware of such a deficit) or the rendering down of the literal transaction occurring (me buying a coffee) into base biological terms (there is a fluid transfer from the barista to me in exchange for currency). Whatever it is, the reality of someone adding their own brand of syrup extract to my morning joe probably wouldn't be that bad for me- the iron would help me maintain my own hemoglobin and might even assist me in warding off restless leg syndrome. Now that I've put this out into the world, someone is probably going to pass me a pink lemonade that they flavored themselves just to vindicate me and my anguished fixations for no reason other than I was foolish enough to say something about one of my mild phobias in public. Oh well, I can always use more viscera to liven up my day- I seek it out in movies, video games and music, why not in everything I consume? Sometimes I think it's the lack of carnality that keeps me from celebrating the shoegaze "revival" as much as others. It's not that I never write about shoegaze bands... It's just that it can be a challenge to get excited about release after release of nearly indistinguishable waves of distortion and weightlessness, inconsequential vocal deliveries that all too often define the genre. D.C.'s Pinky Lemon feels like they are headed in the right direction on their 2024 EP, Pinky Hell, though. I would certainly describe the group as part of the footgazi resurgence taking hold in the corridor between Philadelphia and the Capitol at the moment, but like Soft Body 2, the distortion and feedback that they rely on is slightly more crystalized and concretely compelling than what you might find elsewhere, helping to further focus the sharply toothsome rhythms that they employ. The interplay between groove and texture is a very important sight of exploration for the band, with many moments on Pinky Hell conjuring for me something akin to the spooky, danceable crisis of an early '00s witch house mix, one that reinterprets My Blood Valentine as a sort of lost media artifact, reconstructed from scrapes and slivers extracted from the detritus of an abandoned vaporwave YouTube channel. Opener, "Floodgate" sounds strikingly blown out, saturating the senses with dreamy chords that cluster around the ears like stray daydreams, emitting strobes of brilliant variegated thunder before dissipating into a mist of nectarous talc. The following track, "1 MIL" confirms the overall embodied nature of the album, a suitably urgent pop-punk pounce that skitters on its nails like a cat on ice through portals of elegant clarity- a struggle for preeminence that it can only glimpse before collapsing back into its fleshy confines, and ultimately stumbling over the border of safety and into a discordant gap of mechanical cardiac cycles that is "Reuploading." The reverent plunge of "Cheer" sounds like the band slow-motion crashing a space cruiser they boosted from an Ultra Deluxe album's lore, only to survive their mishap by ruggedly reverting to a post-amplified state of acoustic punk, that graciously molts into a blossom of dissident Deftones inflected tweecore on "i died // nvm." Through all its changes and transgressions, Pinky Hell ultimately settles into its final form on "2 MIL," a breakbeat-backed soul-scrubber that feels like it's exfoliating a deep region of your essence with its raw, contorting chords and cooling scrapes of glassy-glinting synths that ends as abruptly as a title card reading "To be continued...". A sanguine parting note for one hell of an album.
