Listening with an open mind. Writing about what I hear.
Do you have something interesting you'd like to share? Write Mick at thasoundblog@gmail.com.
Twitter @thasoundblog
The worst is yet to come! In the chemo crystal ball, you can see the sickness oozing and pumping like crimson cataracts through the heart of this world. Rotten juice for crayon-chewing orphans of lost continents. Drooling in rainbows because their dreams haven't any color to spare. A fire burns in the sky, and it descends to the shore like a chariot tumbling over the knife's edge of a cliff, then all the skeletons rise from the salty residue of the sands, from where dragon's teeth have planted themselves in the surf at low tide, then they begin to speak, and their voices have the sunken timbre of an old hollow oak tree. One man floats amongst the ether of this wilderness of woe. Your most menacing nightmare is his daily inspiration. The ferment of his flow will cause a cold flush bead on the back of your neck. Distinguishably large due to his countless layers. He is Fatboi Sharif!
Hardcore runs in cycles. Constantly in creative motion. You'd think this would tire it out, suck the air from its tires, and leave it languishing, fatigued and broken on cinders eventually, but somehow the laws of physics and the inevitability of decay don't apply to the hardened essence of this enduring style of underground music, which if nothing else, seems to always thrive on the cutting edge of chaos as it teeters on the precipice of entropy. The clearest example of the genre's various vacillations is the turnover from tough-guy takedown to frank, inflected introspection, illustrated starkly by the transformative revolution from 108 to Texas Is the Reason. But by the time that the big hardcore rally crested between 2018-2020, both of these styles had more or less come to exist coextensively and simultaneously in symbiosis, culminating in the success of a group like Turnstile, who while still claimed by many in hardcore (and describe themselves that way as well) have quite simply empirically evolved into the world's loudest and rowdiest pop band. Title Fight is considered canon alongside Inside Out and Turning Point in a world where a band like Knocked Loose can be the musical guest of a tragically untalented skinsuit's network talk show- a move that would have flat-out ended their career in decades past- what am I to make of these irreducibly, and often unacknowledged tensions, where there are clear oscillations, but no enounced ebb and flow? It feels like it should be my job to decipher these headwinds, but really I'm just thankful that this strange state of suspended demarcation can produce a band like girlsbeinggirls, a group with a mid-'00s electronicore name, but who sound like a pageninetynine after surviving a Botch'd trephination, or fallingwithscissors with, well, a pair of scissors forcibly making inroads towards their trachea. Definitionally, these guys are without many fucks to give, with song titles like "Feeling Down (Question Mark) Call 1-800-TALKSHIT," "Menthol Meltdown Take Me to the Freak Bar," and "Prohibition in the Trap House Kitchen," evidently taking their naming conventions from brain-sweat-soaked rambling of a Gibby Haynes psilocybin-induced psychic episode, as opposed to the typical beefs and brooding pissing matches that typify the genre. But the fun doesn't stop there either, girls -oh no- "IDFMAHAMEASMFSIWK" (real title) sounds like a Mouthbreather gasping for air as a spew of bitter tidings wells up in their throat and spills out between their infected fangs, while "There's a Problem at the Wig Factory Are We Nair Yet" sizzles in an acrid stew of fumes uncertain if it should actualize as a deathgrind scourge or plasticize into a powerviolence push and plunder with a side of Southern hospitality on the deep-fried, cancer-culturing skids. "(P)harmacy" is a skin-broth of oily, elastic pulses, with a numbing texture of foaming toxic adverse corollaries complemented by a harsh, chalky aftertaste, numbing you mercifully before "Are You Out of Chicken and the Parm?" performs a mathy, slam strut over your spine, dislodging and rearranging the vertebrae into a punished pearly cobblestone trail and rachialgia mosaic, making the thick and sassy groove of "No Pad Thai… Kick Rocks (36 Dollars a Bottle)" feel all the more oppressive when it lands on the shattered remains of your formerly functional cadaver. A whirlpool of caustic angst without shallows of safe harbors. It seems to break all the rules while forgetting why the rules were there in the first place. Sugar and spice, thumbtacks and vice, listen to girlsbeinggirls, they're ever so nice (not)!
What everyone loves about emo music, myself included, is the ability that its players have to dive into their own turmoil, traumas, and emotional tempests and surface with blindingly relatable insights into their character and personage, which, when conveyed to the listener, feel like they might as well have been scraped from the bedrock of their own soul. Observant of this tradition, Celebration Guns has flourished as peaceful cultivators of many plots of thorny yet lovely desert roses, cultivated from the cradle of self-recognition, to be nurtured in the crepuscular gold and yellow beams of the observer's sympathetic apprehension of the lacerations and petals of their own delicate and damaged, wild and badly pruned interior fernery. Yet, despite the pain, the blood that runs from one's palm when they grip a rose, Celebration Guns keeps returning to the nape of their nursery, and beckoning us to follow in their sometimes maudlin, often exuberant footsteps. For as much as inquisitions into the heart are often harvesters of pain, their stinging intuition is irrefutable evidence of the proof of our existence, and the shared context of the human condition. What Keeps Us Coming Back is Celebration Guns' second LP, first for We're Trying Records, and nearly a decade down-the-road, and a distant ancestor to their 2018 LP (Probably) Worth It. Where earlier releases pondered why, their latest LP affirms eternal reasons for their return. Need I say more? I think not, as vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and founding member Justin Weir has plenty to say for himself...
What Keeps You Coming Back to Celebration Guns over a decade into your career as a band...
Playing music is the only thing that I know and the only thing that I occasionally feel like I’m good at. I started playing in bands in 1997 when I was 15 years old. From there, I played live in at least 20 different bands with genres ranging from pop punk, ska, metalcore, post-hardcore, indie, dance punk, orgcore, and, of course..emo. Most of these bands lasted a year or less, the longer running ones maybe 2-3 years. Celebration Guns was the first band where it felt like we were actually reaching the ears of a few people (this may have a correlation with the rise of streaming and social media, etc, around 2013) and we were receiving consistent positive feedback locally. Another factor in keeping this train rolling is that the genre of emo hit me really hard around 1999 (Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity played a big part in cementing that for me), and it never fully left me. In many of the other bands I played in, I found myself trying to force an emo song or at least a part into those bands’ songs. It was the style that I knew and felt best, so the songwriting came more naturally to me.
...and why was this selected as the title for the new album?
The embarrassing but honest answer is that for a year or longer I had been hoping to come across a phrase (or even just a random collection of words) that sounded interesting enough to use for an album title. I finally found it while I was reading The First Bad Man by Miranda July, where protagonist was explaining to an unrequited love that she felt she knew him in a past life. His album title worthy response was “What keeps us coming back?” I initially took What Keeps Us Coming Back to mean coming back to a past relationship or life situation that clearly wasn’t meant to be. I just really like that it can take on multiple meanings. Like your question above, I kind of hoped everyone didn’t immediately read it as “why is this band still putting out music?” but if they do, fair question.
Tyler Flanagan, who designed our album and single art, came up with the idea of putting a house on the cover (likely not meant as a reference to the popular “house on the emo album cover” trend, as he isn’t necessarily in that scene). He also came up with the man running into the building, a reference to the album theme of coming back to a bad situation. Keeping this in mind, it could also apply to Celebration Guns running back to the genre where having a house on an album cover is all the rage (we did it with 2021’s The Visiting Years)
Do you consider What Keeps Us Coming Back to be part of an anthology with any of your other releases, or is it more stand-alone and self-contained?
What Keeps Us Coming Back is very much a stand-alone and self-contained release as it is our first album with an all-new lineup (besides me). The only anthology to speak of is the fact that we had plans to record LP2 two other times between 2020 and 2022 that turned into 4 EPs and 2 Splits*
*Starting in 2018 we recorded 9 songs with our 2 nd of 3 drummers Peter Coleman Jr., but only half of the songs were finished by the time COVID started, so we released those songs as 2 Eps: …on aging gracelessly (2020) and The Visiting Years (2021). Similar with the 12 songs we recorded in 2021 & 2022 (original drummer Timothy O’Brien back in the band) we decided to spread the songs out between Midlife Vices EP (2022), Split with A Place for Owls (2023), The Ultimate Emo Album Split with Swiss Army Wife and Avec Plaisir (2024) and Enough Already EP (2024). So, in the sense that we have been attempting to release a proper LP2 since 2020, all 32 of those songs may work as a sort of an anthology of LP2.
What was the hardest song to write on this album, and conversely, which was the easiest?
The hardest song to write was "Regrets, Regurgitated." It was originally written in 2018 and felt a little outside of the fast-paced, mathy and chaotic music we were trying to write around that time, so I never introduced it to the band. While trying to think of old demos to go with the new songs we wrote for this album, this song came up and the rest of the band had a good feeling about it.
The band wasn’t thrilled with a meandering riff break I had written later in the song, so I changed that into a more dreamy/dark section with vocals added (right after the 1st chorus). We also decided to change the guitar only intro to piano, which was mostly complicated in finding the best way to capture the sound and make it blend with the decidedly heavier approach this song has compared to the rest of the album.
The easiest song was likely "Magpies in Disguise." It is one of the more straightforward songs we’ve ever recorded. I started playing that palm muted part and was hearing Frightened Rabbit type vocals over it (the song was called “he frighten dagnabit” later shortened to “dagnabit” until a while after we finished recording it), and for once I decided to stop myself from overwriting the music and focus my attention on the lyrics. I hope I got one of those 2 things right.
Did the track "Maudolin" get its name because of the mandolin parts in it, or did you add those parts because of the name? Either way, I'm pretty curious about the intersection of the themes of this track and the mandolin parts, as I (I think others probably as well) don't typically think of it as a somber or lacermuse instrument, but it does take on these qualities in your performance to a degree.
I’m not sure why I chose to include the name of the instrument that features heavily in 2 of the songs on the album, directly into the song title (Vibraphone for the Perpetually at Home is the other). Yes, the fact that the foundation of the song was written on mandolin plays heavily into that title, but I also felt like the lyrics were a bit maudlin at time. And I like puns that aren’t quite funny or clever, so here we are.
The self-pitying, lonesome and hopeless feelings in the lyrics do feel a little disparate from the mostly upbeat and happy feeling of the song. We made sure to throw in a gloomy bridge and a weepy sounding outro to balance things out. We have a song from (Probably) Worth it aka LP1 called Move On that uses the mandolin in a similar way, wringing all the joy and sadness out of it throughout. So when we went about finally writing songs for the true LP2, it felt like it was time for a second mandolin song.
What is a "Why Detective" the going rate for someone considering a career pivot (potentially in middle age)?
The song has everything to do with making assumptions about why a person doesn’t like you back the way you think they should. It’s not you, it’s me?? You don’t have to tell me twice! But I need to know more: was it my looks? My neurotic personality? My repeated questions? I need to know why. I was considering working “lie detector” into a silly sounding phrase, but instead I went with a Justin classic: a bad pun involving a rhyme.
Also worth noting: this is one of three songs on the album that was arranged around some fantastic noodly guitar parts that Johl wrote (the other two being Johl Rides Again and Here’s the Thing). Johl refuses to comment other than to answer your original question and say: “Why Detecting isn’t free: it pays a buck o five.”
What is your favorite bird-related conspiracy theory, and how does it relate to "Magpies in Disguise"? On a more serious note, how does the symbolism of the magpie emerge as a metaphor in the lyrics of this track?
The birds are spies, they report to the trees is one of my favorite band names. That name feels like a big conspiracy theory that explains itself in one sentence. Johl actually came up with the song title “Magpies in Disguise”, but when I asked him to elaborate, he declined, claiming that explaining song titles is “for the birds.”
On behalf of Johl, I will say that magpies in disguise was a saying I was not familiar with until he suggested it. It refers to magpies being easily distracted by shiny things. The song is based on my real-life marriage (spoiler – there was also a divorce) and the wedding that took place, and how we were both excited and attracted to the ultimate big shiny object of marriage: a beautiful wedding. As we all know, there’s a lot of work to come after the wedding and that’s where myself and many others have been unable to follow through. So, I guess that would make me one of the magpies. That’s deep.
What machines are replacing guillotines, and how does the enterprise-level adoption improve efficiencies headed into Q4? Big picture, what kind of social implosion as spectator sport are you describing on this track, and what do you hope the takeaway is for the listener?
The song name Machines Replacing Guillotines is a play on the name of a post-dance-punk band I played in from 2005 called Machines Replacing Teens (https://machinesreplacingteens.bandcamp.com/) My original plan was to make every song name on this album a pun around some of my prior band names. Thank goodness I didn’t follow through on that one.
Lyrically, I was thinking about how I have consistently failed at trying to master the art of social media as a way of connecting within a music community or promoting our band. We first started kind of reaching people and bands outside of AZ around early 2020 when we started working with Chillwavve Records (now defunct: https://cwrecords.bandcamp.com/). When I was in my early 20’s, in the early 2000s, I was all over the message boards and confidently being ridiculous and outgoing. Bringing that energy to 2020 and beyond at the ripe old age of 38 was a different story.
I almost didn’t want to put this song on the album because I didn’t want anyone to mistake it as an “anti-cancel culture” type of thing. It’s just a straightforward explanation of how I kept wanting to be bold and post thoughts and ideas along with promoting the band, but I came onboard this scene when people were being SUPER CANCELLED daily. Mostly for very valid reasons, but we all know that occasionally people get “cancelled” on the same level for saying something-off putting or offensive receiving basically the same level of cancellation as the worst offenders would. So, the machines acting as guillotines are, I suppose, social media – public execution by cancellation type of thing. Yeah, a little embarrassing. But it’s also kind of catchy? I don’t know, don’t cancel me over this
I'm really feeling the dusty, alt-country amble of "The First Strut Is The Deepest"? Do you listen to a lot of country/folk? What were the inspirations for the stylistic framing and execution of this track? Addendum: are you referencing the original or the Sheryl Crow cover?
This song was written back in 2008 and was the first full song that I ever wrote and then recorded using a computer. I used my college graduation money to buy a 2007 MacBook, an acoustic guitar and a midi controller. I packed this first song full of every single fake instrument I could fit from the selections on Garageband on that midi controller, and it turned into a cute song to sneak onto the end of mix CDs I made for crushes over the years.
We attempted to recreate the song using real instruments this time, including: acoustic guitar, a cajon kit, banjo, Suzuki flute recorder, melodica, stylophone and I’m sure I’m forgetting something. It’s the only song where Johl and Justin both did back up harmonies and we are pretty happy with how it turned out. I like how it really stands out as something different for this album
Regarding the song title, I think I’m referencing the Rod Stewart version. I don’t know if that song was around more in 2008, or if I was just in denial about the Sheryl Crow version, but back then I would randomly belt out the chorus in my best Rod Stewart impression. The song title pun was what I saved the Garageband demo file as: it was literally my first “strut” at recording my own music, but was it the deepest? Time won’t tell.
You're free to choose how you want, but if P.P. Arnold doesn't win this thing I'm going to be very disappointed.
Are your chord progressions mostly inspired by other rock and pop music, or do you have influences outside of these as well? If so, how would you say they manifest?
A lot of our songs don’t have actual chords in them, it’s just a whole lot of riffs dancing around each other with bass guitar and drums creating a driving force to keep everything moving. On the occasions that we do use chords, or if we’re just considering the general sound and feel of the riffs or guitar tapping in our songs, I’m sure you can point to bands like Maps & Atlases or TTNG as an influence.
Generally, writing a Celebration Guns song starts with one riff or repeating chord sequence, looped in Garageband. At that point, I will start adding more parts: bass guitar, another guitar part and a general idea of what the drums should be doing.
Once all of THAT is in place, I will start over with another riff, and keep going with this process until I have 3-4 loops that hopefully fit and flow together nicely. When Johl contributes guitar parts, the sections of the song are built around those. Vocals start out as a melody with placeholder lyrics, which I will later try and fit lyrics over.
Are mathy chord parts antithetical to more traditional pop structures, or how do these overlap and complement each other in your mind?
One of my favorite things about Celebration Guns is the challenge of taking songs that rarely have an obvious foundational chord structure and trying to mold them into something catchy (which would likely be influenced by traditional pop structures). We tend to have brighter and “happier” sounding songs more than dark or gloomy sounding songs, although we have occasionally found ways to make our math pop bops into math aggro-bummers (see: "You Aren’t the Only One" from 2018’s (Probably) Worth it aka LP1)
Photo courtesy of We're Trying Records
What are your thoughts on personal growth and the necessity of change?
My thought on personal growth is that it’s a nice idea but super difficult in practice, at least for me. It’s something I write about, read about it, think about, but have a tough time manifesting into everyday life. Instead of growing, I think I do a lot more ruminating on the things I need to grow from. In this way, the lyrics on this album and many of our other songs are my form of therapeutically telling myself “You know what you need to do, buddy. You just need to go ahead and do it. Any day now, pal, just go ahead and get started on that growing”
Change is necessary when there are patterns in life that are preventing you from achieving what is important to you, or potentially harmful or self-sabotaging. I don’t always think change for the sake of changing is necessary. Sometimes it feels like the only way to feel like we are succeeding in life is to prove that we have changed over time and can prove it to that person we know 15-20 years ago when we run into them at The Gap (the only place I like to run into people from the past) or when they take a quick glance at our online presence to confirm whether we are still the same chump they knew back when. Ultimately, change if you need to change for survival, but not for the sake of proving something to anyone but yourself.
Do you think it's possible for a person to change their nature, or do you think they will always be essentially the same?
Human nature sounds to me like something you are born with, something that you’re stuck with unless you do some growing via your natural progression through life or by working to influence a change in yourself. I think there are some aspects of a person’s nature will stay essentially the same, and there are times that trying to deny your nature will feel false to yourself and those around you.
If there is something in your nature that is holding you back or making you feel stuck in a pattern, I think it is (hopefully) possible to shape it into something better. I also worry that trying to force change away from the person you are could do more harm than good, depending on whatever the intentions may be behind pushing for that change (i.e. not being authentic or true to the self that makes you who you are).
In the film Hamlet 2, Steve Coogan's character Dana Marschz in an attempt to encourage one of his young thespian students states, "...you're going to have a magical life. Because no matter where you go, it'll always be better than Tucson." In your opinion, what is the worst place in Arizona, and why?
I saw that movie soon after it came out and all that I can remember, unfortunately, is wishing it was a lot funnier than it was. I probably had the wrong expectations. Johl did say he thinks about that quote a lot but declined to further comment because of the time Steve Coogan refused to autograph his Hey Arnold! backpack when Steve “The Cougar” Coogan visited Johl’s community college a few years ago.
I don’t think the Tucson hate is warranted at all, and the only popular culture refence I will accept related to that city is What We Do in the Shadows “Tucson, Arizonya”.* The worst city is Scottsdale, particularly Old Town. Why? Come to AZ and spend a weekend there and you’ll see for yourself.
Spoiler from Hamlet 1. Sorry...
Editor's response: Classic! However, the best bit in that show is clearly the Jackie Daytona arc. Who doesn't want to start over in a new town where you open a bar that you eventually burn down for the insurance payout? This is what we call the American dream.
What do you love most about the place you live?
The fall and winter seasons are kind of perfect here. As I respond to this, the expected high temperature today is 107 with 48% humidity, so you really caught me at a bad time to answer this. I’m not a huge desert scenery guy, but at the same time some of the mountains are nice to look at.
One important thing that people need to know about Arizona: there are areas about 1.5-3 hours away from the hot desert that have forests and cooler temperatures to escape to. I guess I’d have to say those are my favorite parts of Arizona: Prescott, Payson, Flagstaff, etc.
Do you have any midyear resolutions?
Our resolution is to finally get this album released! September 18th is when the full What Keeps Us Coming Back album comes out.* We’re working on an album release show locally on October 23 rd where we will have vinyl, CDs and tapes to sell in person, but you can get them online as early as September 18th via We’re Trying Records. Also, we hope to get on the road early next year. Oh..was this question not meant to be a space for self-promotion?** I’d say my resolution to get better at self-promoting, but who am I kidding. We’re 13 years in and I’ve always been awful at it.
*Note: This interview was conducted on August 4, 2026. **Editor's response: Oh no, it most definitely IS! Good job! You're well on your way to a better you.
The following is a vignette inspired by 鬱P's Perfect Persona:
A bride, dressed all in white, inhales deeply before stepping through the doors of a small, steepled church with stained-glass windows as it stands in the foreground against a serene small-town backdrop. Her cheeks pink and pricked with a blush of adrenaline, and her long aqua-blue hair is tied into a twin, waist-length ponytail that drifts behind her as if it were in the grip of a pair of rutty, cheerful cherubs. She is empty-handed except for a flower bouquet of red roses wrapped tightly in expensive paper and tied with a dark red ribbon; a cross of lovely soft sashes intersects over her chest and runs around beneath her arms to then come up again over the back to be secured at the base of her neck.
The church's interior is modestly full; 30 or so people stand in clumps of association, chatting and idling on their phones, ordered in two rows of pews, separated by a carpeted thoroughfare leading to the altar, where a man in a conspicuously expensive-looking tuxedo stands opposite a plump and dowdy priest. In fact, all in attendance are a display of painfully embellished, high-thread-count, gaudily patterned suits and dresses of cuts and concepts that would normally not make their way past a Parisian catwalk, let alone serve as formal attire for an occasion in the rural steppes of this community. The bride's entrance has gone unnoticed by most of the crowd, save the tuxedoed man, who stares down at her smugly, a crooked smile splitting his lips and wrinkling the long, deep scars that part the skin on his left side like partially filled irrigation troughs. He runs his hands through his greasy, product-laced shock of sandy hair, almost self-consciously, almost to give the impression that he's not as nervous as he is, as he turns his head slightly to refocus his gaze on an older woman in a severely cut, broad-shouldered, and heavily tapered purple suit with the same flush of filthy cream-colored locks as his own. She doesn't return his stare; her eyes are turned down at her phone, flicking through graphs and columns of numbers. A younger version of herself hovers beside her in a similarly severe navy suit; a bored look sags the younger woman's features as she silently swipes through noxious bursts of luxurious lifestyle content. The older woman pauses mid-swipe before leaning down to whisper something to the younger woman at her side; a large, mustached man in a grey suit shifts tensely in his soft Italian loafers on the opposite side of the woman in purple, scanning the room as he overhears the brief exchange to his right. "The Senator's tip seems like it was spot on; you need to call your broker as soon as we're done here." "Clocked it, thanks." "You know, I'm not even sharing this with your brother; you could act a little more grateful when I share these kinds of things with you..." "Yeah, well, he's going to be set after today, isn't he?" The young woman glances over her shoulder at the bride still standing in the entryway and discharges a disgruntled huff. "What a freak..." The man in the grey suit follows the young woman's line of sight to the bride and coughs up a startled sound from the depths of his throat. "What the fuck? Where is her god damn escort? Someone find Joey and Enzo. I want them on her ass like cheese on my mother's risotto."
Still blushing, the bride's white teeth gleam like the tail of a shooting star, grinning as she sorts through her sashes with her free hand. Finding what she was searching for, she thrusts her arm out in front of her, straight and purposeful as if holding a saber; in her clenched fingers is a small white remote. Directing pressure through her thumb and onto a button, the music piping through the speakers in the small chamber of the building snaps from lofty opera standards to a blare of frantic stings and stormy electronics; a menacing momentum builds in the air. It is then that the man in the grey suit notices the body slumped in the entryway of the church, fresh blood speckling the concrete leading to the parking lot, the smell of iron slowly creeping into the house of worship—he reaches into the breast of his suit and takes hold of the cold steel within as recognition of the tailored suit on the crumpled form and the set of large ostentatious rings on its hands strike his mind like a lightning bolt. "Shit, god damn it! Doesn't anyone have a leash on this harpy?" Waving his piece for emphasis, the grey-suited man barks at a nearby guest, a clear subordinate. "Sal, grab that bitch! We're putting an end to this circus now!" Before the oily, dark-suited goon can fulfill his boss's request, though, the bride reaches into her bouquet and gives something inside a deliberate backwards tug, emitting a mechanical clicking as if something had shifted inside a small metal cylinder. "Holy mother, hit the deck!" The grey-suited man hollers to the room, raising his sidearm level with the bride's torso before his own chest erupts in a rupturing spurt of gore in synchronization with a roar of blast beats and toothy guitar grooves crashing out of the overtaxed sound system. The flower arrangement in the bride's hands has become a biting haze of smoke and fire, petals and stems breaking and bursting, their remnants falling away to reveal the cold countenance of a submachine gun, chattering in hot fury in the bride's talon-like grip. She fans a hot sheet of lead across the confined quarters of the room, cutting down the guest list by half before the attendees can turn to grasp the gravity of the dire straits they'd slipped into. Pews explode into pockets of splinters; the brick interior becomes marred by impacts like a lunar surface; a round strikes the priest in the throat, lacquering the unblemished side of the tuxedoed man's face with arterial splash as he surveys the carnage in awe and anger. Guests take cover where they can and let loose with reply from their own fiery steel in the direction of the bride, but her fatal command of the room is unchallengeable as she strafes along the perimeter, scouring the center of the room with a blazing shower of perdition. Retaliatory shots only ever strike close enough to graze her and rip her sashes and dress, causing them to fall open and reveal bandoliers packed with extended magazines and rows of holstered, small-capacity, high-caliber pistols; the latter she retrieves to pepper the room with while reloading her full-automatic casket stuffer. As she circles the periphery of her collected quarry, the bride pauses her assault only long enough to kick over baptismal fonts; once overturned, they flood the area with a harshly scented liquid, whose fumes could choke the breath out of anyone unlucky enough to take them into their lungs.
The woman in the purple dress is one such unfortunate soul. While hiding behind a pew that has been partially dismantled in the exchange of fire, she finds herself heaving as the stinking liquid soaks the carpet beneath her. In a scramble to seek fresh air, a slug from the bride's repeating saber pierces her spine and bursts out the front of her pelvis, causing her to slump where she is as her trunk pleats into a backward fold like a broken lawn chair. The last thing she sees is an inverted visage of the bride shoving a flagpole through the brassy, looped handles of a door leading to a side room just as angry voices congregate into a crescendo behind it. The barred door begins to shake as it is struck from its interior; curses and pistol-caliber rounds flow from behind the congested gateway into the main room of the church as the bride continues her fatal procession, now wading into the center aisle. A swarthy man in a white suit seizes a wishful window of grace when he believes he is in the bride's blind spot, springing above the safety of the cap rail with a double-barrel shotgun. He is surprised when his collarbone splits, his ribs become flayed, and his right arm is severed at the elbow before he is even able to level his aim; he collapses with a gurgle, losing his grip on his barreled piece. It slides to a stop at the bride's feet. She stomps the narrow point of her heel into the plate of the shotgun's butt, causing it to rise to her arm level in a pinwheel-like whirr. She catches the deadly implement and opens the breach to check that it is loaded. At that very moment, the door she had barred finally gives way in a rain of splinters. A grey and grizzled man whose girth resembled more bison than bipedal specimen, adorned in fine formal attire, has put his entire weight into the now shattered door, and the momentum of his strength has carried him through. Behind him are four equally well-dressed, stone-faced associates, each gripping their sidearms purposefully, scanning for a target. Unimpressed by this entrance, the bride unleashes both barrels into the small crowd of intruders, knocking them backward into a heap before the entryway they had just vacated. She coolly drops the now-empty armament before retrieving a pistol from her sash and picking off the survivors, of which there are only two. One of the surviving intruders is struggling under the weight and horror of the large grey man, attempting to free her arm and revolver from beneath his sunken and ruptured mass, averting her eyes from the bulk of exposed tubes and shredded glands of his now-exposed interior when a gap opens in her temple and the contents of her head slides out the other side. The other, a younger man with spiky black hair, manages to stagger to his feet and register a shot at his opponent before she pierces his jugular, resulting in his final moments being consumed in a futile fit of compression over his open neck before the icy flows running through his limbs cause him to lose his grip and slump to the floor in an awkward clump of clammy flesh, gushing crimson.
Sensing that the cull is nearing its climax, the bride proceeds towards the altar in a progression of eddying pirouettes, maintaining a constant rate of fire as she twirls, catching stragglers in the spray of her leaden claws as they expose themselves in a last gasp of vain bravado or flee for the open exit at the front of the church, including the young woman in the blue suit. A bullet passes through her abdomen; she doubles over, then claws up the side of a pew to persist in her getaway, only to find that her legs have become tangled in her own entrails. Toppling once more, she squirms in her own tangle of innerds and the spongy slickness of the carpet which has become saturated in the noxious, pinguid substance that had filled the baptismal fonts. The sounds emitted by the few remaining speakers is a cacophony of exalted, falsetto vocals, a vicious churn of razor-lined rhythms and bracing, full-contact grooves that accentuate the staccato of the bride's revolutions and relentless cycle of fire as a chorus of Armageddon, a punctuation to pure brimstone.
Finally, this black swan of white fury ascends the stairs of the altar and arrives at the threshold of the tuxedoed man's now-shattered psyche. As she approaches, his legs lose their constitution and he crumples gracelessly on his back, crabwalking backward to attempt to maintain his distance as her shadow overtakes him. Trembling, he cranes his neck as if to bear witness to the parting of the heavens and meets the bride's gaze, a crucifix looming overhead reflected sardonically back at him in the voids of her pupils. She is smiling at him, the most gruesome vision he has witnessed since the advent of the whole bloody ordeal, a more wretched sight than the swath of slaughter that swamps the chamber she has passed through to meet him at this apex. "Listen, there may have been some misunderstanding between us..." He stammers, drowning in sweat and panic. "Maybe you felt like you were getting a raw deal, but you're a very tough negotiator, and you've made your point. I'm willing to hear you out now; let's talk this through..." He flinches as she leans over him, his eyes squeezed tightly shut as to not see the blow he expects is coming. When none arrives, he reopens his eyes and takes in the bride once again as she towers over him. She has taken a tall lit candle from a candelabrum on the altar and now holds it at the full length of her arm by its white stalk overhead, shining like a beacon; her submachine gun is gripped tightly in the crook of her other arm, pressed into her ribs at a slight outturned angle, cradling it like it were her manifesto, her bible in action. She is still staring down at him, still smiling, but now softly shaking her head. "You... you... fucking bitch! You're fucking crazy!" He writhes out from beneath the pillar of her silhouette, stumbles on all fours, and rolls down the steps and away from the altar. "I'll kill you! You're so dead! I know some very dangerous people. You think you saw killers today! You have no idea the people I know... I... I..." His words drift into silence as a chilling sound accosts his ears. It is the bride; she's laughing now, still standing at the altar, laughter bubbling out of her with the effervescence of a thermal spring. He is sinking into the wet mass of fibers around him now, frozen in fear, sick and swamped with the vapors of spilled blood, the sulfurous tang of cartridge discharge, and the suffocating essence and acrid industrial aroma that has suffused the carpet from the overturned fonts. The bride lowers the candle in her grip; drawing it behind her, she then swings it forth in an underhanded arc, letting it slip from her grip. The lit waxen baton sails through the air and lands between the thighs of the now disheveled and broken tuxedo-clad man. He catches a final glimpse of her beaming, chortling face before an ice-colored inferno consumes his world. His body folds and compresses in the flame like old newspaper as the blue blaze spreads in a withering tear to engulf the entire carnage-soaked room.
Outside the church, emergency responders and police have begun to pull into the parking lot and quell the advance of a swarming, curious crowd of onlookers just as the stained-glass windows of the chapel-turned-tomb explode into violent twinkling rainbows of shattered varicolore reverie, flames belching from the front door and now-open windows as if the building were an open kiln. Firefighters hasten to and fro, attempting to wet the building with their hoses and contain the blaze. Around the rear of the building and away from the amassing crowd, a back door bends and creaks until it finally bursts open. A person in a fire-resistant uniform, different, but just barely distinguishable from those of the public servants attempting to battle the hellfire furnace that has swallowed the church- thick material, gas mask, reflective visor, and wide-brimmed helmet—teeters forward after knocking the door off its hinges with their shoulder. They stagger and then falter to their knees. An EMT rushes to the doubled-over figure and, slipping an arm around them, helps them stumble to his emergency vehicle. "What were you doing in there? That place is a fuckign furnace! I thought your captain told everyone to hold back and not go charging in. You could have been killed!" He hands his rescuee a bottle of water, which they accept politely but don't open. "Listen, it's bad that you were in there. You could get canned for being so reckless... what division are you from anyway?" There is no reply. The EMT's brow furrows and he's about to resume his line of inquiry when his attention is diverted by a coworker. "Hey Larry, we just got an estimate of what the body count might be. It's a god damn massacre. Looks like it could be the whole Conti family in there. I just got a text from my girlfriend in dispatch. Take a look at this." The EMT pauses, torn between his duty and morbid curiosity. "Alright, be right there." He shoots his rescuee a stern look. "Don't go anywhere." The EMT lumbers off in the direction of his coworker, his back turned to the mysterious figure sitting on the bumper of his vehicle. Nary a moment passes before the figure has noiselessly slunk off towards an adjoining field, sifting through the ripening stalks of grain; they slough off their fire-retardant clothing to reveal a familiar face. The bride, or former bride, her visage smeared with ash and blood, eyes pricked with a veiny redness and slightly watery from irritation, has shed her nuptial attire, and now slinks out into the night in a black matching set of polyamide athletic bra and shorts; she is otherwise bare except for a smile and a pack of cigarettes tucked into her waistband. As she weaves through the field, she retrieves the carton and plucks out two darts and a lighter; guarding the flame with her palm, she lights both, inhales with ecstasy, and exhales with relief. Behind her, the church continues to burn. She doesn't look back; she doesn't need to. Everything that matters to her at this point lies straight ahead.
The Sunday before last, a pretty prominent personality in the hardcore scene told me I needed to take the next day (Labor Day) off. No work. No chores. Just me, my ass, and a bag of chips. And like the overachiever that I am, I ended up taking the entire week! Facedown on the concrete slab that is my basement floor, no chips though, just lapping up mildew and sucking on mold and spider eggs. Talk about your stay-cays, am I right, girls? So now that I've dragged myself up and homo-vertical again, I'm ready and raring to tell you all about something that matters! Something that I'm deeply passionate about. That's right, New Jersey's very own Merc(k), a high-quality producer of essential medicines and cancer treatments, who leverage the power of heckin' science to save and improve questionably sentient biomass across the globe. Their subsidiaries represent an attractive portfolio for pre-seed, targeted investment for savvy funders looking to finance in the future starting in Q1 of 2027, and... *deafening sonic howl increases in pitch in the background* Um, do you all hear that? *an unmanned Shahed drone crashes through the window and explodes, taking out the whole floor and causing the building to collapse into itself, floor by floor, into a pile of rubble. As the fog of devastation clears, I can be seen casually wandering into frame to survey the destruction. Amongst the heaps of shattered concrete and splintered timbers, I peer down at my own mutilated visage, a mangled human form with sparking wires and other mechanical components jutting out from the crushed and burned formerly human facsimile. I smile, cock an eyebrow, and look at the camera* Boy, AI is really getting out of control? Wacky stuff, cuh! Anyway... *camera switches vantage point, I am now in profile facing left* Let's get back to the REAL review! *an abrupt coughing sound is heard off screen. *In a nervous blur I pivot to face the new angle of the lens, my eyes now meet yours, a strained chuckle of embarrassment escapes between clenched teeth* Sorry, it's hard to see my mark with all this... um, rubble around. Alright! What does North Carolina have that South Carolina doesn't, besides higher taxes and stricter firework laws (so lil' Johnny can keep all his fingers on the 4th)? The only real answer is Merc, the powerviolence duo who have a date with disaster. Following the misanthropically materialized 2025 LP Debhumanized, No One Leaves This Room punches the pedal all the way through to the wheel well as they spin out into a corporate lobby with a trunk full of propane and a grudge to kill. It's as frothy at the gums as its predecessor, with a slightly smoother gait, meaning that each track can close the gap between it and your throat with less effort than previously believed. Slithering without friction in a sea of muck, liquid decay, and viscera, they strike without hesitation like a cobra, poisoning and incapacitating, before bending and breaking the limbs of their rueful targets. From the corrupt to the capricious, if their crimes weigh too dearly on others' shoulders and conscience, then a gashing groove of barbed bass and skull-craving rhythmic acrimony is eagerly incoming to black-bag and tag these tyrants with extreme prejudice. Parsing these bouts of righteous dread dispensary are intersections of moody vespertine waltzes of undertow, wine-dark post-punk vintage from the best years of Bauhaus, a provable spawning ground for banshees and kuntilanak, restless spirits set loose to roam and wrack their cries over your senses, a devilish harem which may help to explain the wailing affliction that suffuses the rest of the record. No One Leaves This Room is a tactical detonation of severe, morbid-future-averting punk, emitting shock wave after rippling shock wave to fry the motherboards of a system that is void of integrity and which is owed no Merc(y). *a whirling howl can be heard incoming* God damn it, this is for that last pun, isn't it? *everything within 20 feet of the impact site is suddenly vaporized or turned to molten glass*
Prague was the right city for Jealous Yellow's chief sonic summoner, Benjamin Rea, to find himself housebound, as he has now extended that city's haunted legacy into our lives, even if only incrementally. So the legend goes: while Benjamin was on tour promoting his solo release Sugarweeper in 2021, he was struck by a sudden illness... a curse maybe, the spite of a venefica, or perhaps he had caught the eye of a ravenous lamia who extended her robes over him in order to squeeze him dry. Whatever the cause (apocryphally, the official explanation was COVID), the condition of his humors lent panic to the public, and he was sanctioned and condemned to quarantine. There in the dark, overlooking an urban waste cleared by plague, a bedevilment during which one may expect to find the avenues patrolled by lumbering golems, Benjamin was visited by 14 children of the night, rapping on his window with a scraping solicitation before gaining entry to his parlor. In his fever, the afflicted young man consulted these cold hematophagous house-crashers about the nature of their appetites, the cut of their toothy jib, interrogated their truths and trimmed the frills off their deceptions, realizing through the course of his inquest the intercoursing circulation of spirit and energy between a city and its denizen apparitions. Czech Vampires is Benjamin's long-awaited exhalation from these encounters, one which relieves him of the tension and mounting shock of his redoubtable rendezvous- a coarse brush with the inevitable that is as sticky, disquietingly supple, and unobtrusively ensnaring as spider's silk.
Vancouver multi-instrumentalist Koda clearly conveys a fair warning about what to expect when cracking the casket on one of their releases under the Swanwriter moniker. No half-truths, prevarications, or distortions (other than in the guitar mix) are present to muddy the refrain on their latest LP, titled Melodies of Despair- a pronouncement of sickly succor you can feel in your bones. This gallery of roguish tunes sounds like an outro that accompanies a slow curtain draw on a reenactment of some gruesome Slavic folk tale where a series of unfortunate events leads to a small pack of adorable children meeting an untimely and tragic end- each a swan song for the unfortunate, hapless, and calamity-inclined. And if you think this is me simply being illustrative and evocative (thank you, by the way, I do try my best), this is literally the context of the opener "The Painted Valley," which recounts an orphaned Hungarian girl's ill-fated adoption and later encounter with the vampiric noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, which resolves with a conclusion that is, let's say, beyond the pale. Much of what you're going to encounter on these dissonant lullabies could safely be described as progressive metal, embracing a philosophy of composition that is less like traditional scoring or pop peddling and more like reverse-engineering a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle- layered, intricate, even confounding at times, and liable to trap you in a head-exploding cage with a nefarious riddle as your only key to survival (sorry, wrong Jigsaw, but still accurate to the material). Far from being bereft of ideas, Melodies of Despair is decidedly baroque in its orchestration, incorporating many stylistic and structural inspirations from composers like Johann Sebastian Bach and others of a similar pedigree, which bestows upon these renditions of woe a weighty mantle of gravebound gravitas. The specificity of its more classical components can get somewhat overwhelmed by the spiteful spur of the album's most manifestly heavy metal-oriented passages, but only in an initial listen, as they often surface like a black iceberg in the sea lane of a pristine, white Victorian yacht and floating hotel, angling to claim its passengers as a fresh crop of human barnacle beds in the trench of the abyss- icy collisions of blackened death, finding harbor in the shadowy shelter of Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse, more so than the deformed theatricality of a Fleshgod Apocalypse. Melodies of Despair is the sound of a final breath caressing the fleshy petals of a black rose before descending to mingle with the miasma of Erebus.
I'll often listen to interviews with DJs for their music recommendations. DJs are essentially professional music appreciators, after all, and will often be more honest, upfront, and concise about their tastes and interests than most recognized critics and cultural commentators. It's a fruitful pastime, and I have no regrets. Although there are times when the subject is somewhat of a blemish on humanity. I remember one guy recently who was being interviewed for a localish metropolitan outlet, and it's hard to believe what the producer was thinking having him on. From his put-on affect to his dated, ill-fitting wardrobe, he did a poor job of concealing that he was one of those failed entrepreneurs and former tech hucksters who fell into disc jockeying as a pivot and alternative model of getting paid for producing nothing of measurable value. Everything he recommended was straight buns, just full-on cheeks. It was astounding to see someone gas for 10 minutes while batting that many strikes in a row. It was like he never actually listens to music for the pure pleasure and simply builds his playlists based on some data-driven hallucination of audience segmentation in an Adderall-induced, algorithmic trance. I suspect that the only thing keeping this guy rolling in ice rather than being laid up on it is his final recommendation, "Scare Em to Death" by Surly. Somewhere along the line, he got clued into the fact that this was a pretty hot track, and it's probably been his saving grace ever since. Regardless of how many bougie bottom feeders attempt to hitch their wagon to it, Surly's 2017 EP Trip to Warsaw is still a rock-solid slice of non-standard juke and footwork, one that seamlessly interlaces Chicago styles of high-energy house and the producer's familiarity with Central European jazz as encountered through his father's career of playing music with experimental musicians hailing from a certain former Soviet republic. While his Polish jazz and Chicago-style jungle bounce fusion is easily his best-known work, he did produce another album's worth of material around the same time that was lost until very recently. Mixed and maestro'd over a little over a week's time in collaboration with his friend MoonDoctoR at the latter's home, the bones of what would become 10 Days in San Antonio solidified after successfully scoring a dance battle in Chicago. According to MoonDoctoR, they were mostly just kicking it down in Texas at his place, and the music just percolated up and out from the ether of the low-key rager they were wading through. Comparatively, 10 Days is a more conventional collection of footwork, infused with a dark intrigue that boldly traces the unquantifiable qualities that separate and blend dance floor and back alley, basement and skydeck, constantly in motion like a shark, inhaling the particulated grit of UK garage, rattling thrums of ravey synths, and hydrophilic diffusions of soul, and exhaling a glowing cloud of syrupy, incandescent composure- a placid romantic melancholy that can't resist coasting in the moonlight on the chromed reflections of low-riding G-funk pump- a fantastic collection culminating in the key collaboration "The Friends," a hypnotically ponderous gyration and intimate looping concord that rings in a finally casting call of the pair's combined potential with its dense layers of dependable vocal brushes, heart-skipping basslines, and brassy blushes of devotion. The session tapes for this record were misplaced somewhere along the way, making it very unlikely to have ever surfaced in any form until some technical solutions were discovered that permitted the dynamic duo to reconstruct it from previously discarded demos. It could have been a real loss, but in salvaging these sessions, we can see that those 10 Days in San Antonio were not spent in vain.
