Music Re/View 7

All Images: November 2019

It is easy to become selfish as a listener of music / While curled up in the fetal position in the closet at midnight / Let’s be clear – if you’re not used to ‘difficult’ music, this is not for you / Consider yourself warned / Retaining clarity – this new album is different, once again, from the majority of what has gone before / At first, it seems painfully simple, and perhaps missing the explosions of sound one might have enjoyed / in nature documentaries / Its pace sets a dramatic tone, like we're about to meet our maker / But the devil is in the details, and once one begins to peel away the layers / Scavengers may feed on the decomposing meat for months / don't be conventional / You will need time / How much time is left? / despite the music’s severe linearity / It unfolds like a flower in one of those slow-motion shots / after a traumatic personal loss of some sort / It shouldn’t work. It does. Go figure.

The announcement of a new album earlier this year was certainly a cause for celebration, but also apprehension / Imbued with cult-worthy status and cryptic vision / The World's Strangest Band has existed on the outer fringes of the music scene for almost 40 years now / They’re much easier to respect than like / surveying the landscape they travel through with a wicked eye / We too might have perceived the difference between terror and strangeness / have they accepted the joy and peace in fizzling out / Are they venerating such a breakdown / just dimming the lights and pouring red wine / or bursting out in explosive surprises / In the best new music, after all, to create a third entity is the idea: 1+1= 3 / it’s also another example of the band’s central problem / they pivot and move away / while replacing the shock value of references to slavery and rape with the quotidian drama of relationships / there’s definitely something in our brains – maybe that base reptilian part at its darkest core that desires / A bullet through the head of one still so young!

these post-rock monuments reach up from the depths, grab you by the throat and slowly but surely pull you down / into the bottomless abyss / It’s whatever you want it to be / shimmering, flickering multi-guitars and electronic drone feel misleading / and not exactly gloomy or forbidding – resonantly oblique is more like it / things can’t be this simple / I’m naked and drifting / The Jodorowsky-like atmosphere of this buzzard chant is so visual / Boom! It breaks into gargantuan multi-instrumental waves of rolling tympani, chorus and sundry other stuff / they allow her to play the massive church organ, and then she creates these amazing sounds / It’s not like the herky-jerky improv you would expect with some jazz / The addition of what sounds like children’s backing vocals, tubular bells and buzzsaw synths only amplifies / vast spheres of empty space that can inflict a useful sort of claustrophobia / She’s such a positive, jolly person / circling circles of orange/yellow/brown/beige/black/red / and then she comes up with this demonic music.

The lyrical themes here are all familiar by now / His songs catalog human misery—violence / comfortable / degradation, abusive sex / beauty / death / and other equally Parmenidean topics / with an unflinching eye / The verses can be confessions, which become incantations via much repetition / It’s deeply disorienting, recalling the ramblings of a mad man or a soothsayer / There is a nihilistic fatalism constantly at play in the words uttered / there is a nihilistic fatalism constantly at play in the words uttered / he evokes the kind of weary tragedy endemic to sad drunks and wastrels / Salvation is an illusion. Negation is the only certainty / the skeleton then becomes a source of sustenance to mussels, clams, and microbes for years or even decades to come / Printed out, it wouldn’t surprise me to find the words sliding off the page, or bleeding into the page like blotting paper / They exist in a class all to themselves.

I never realized just listening to an album could be as physically and psychically draining as this is / The world is not going to get any brighter / Even when there’s no longer a band. Not really… Except there is / a gathering around firelight / we realize immediately in that we’re still very much in the presence of / a band who just can’t stop / It’s like a soundtrack to exploring some abandoned, centuries-old / sonic skyscrapers / filled with expensive furniture / Few can graze a concrete product / And now there’s this / haunted-house version / on the beginners slopes / You’ll be back. You won’t be able to help yourself / in the grand scheme of things / You know you want / this type of output