Review: Fake Meat – 腐肉
Your stomach audibly growls as you near the grocery endcap, your salivary glands pumping like bellows to prime the mandibular furnace. The fluorescent refrigerator lights hum softly, casting an alluring light over a host of delicacies: Peatballs in Marinade, Grillable Meat from Beyond and Seitan Laughing Spreads His Wings. You reach over to the New! section, passing over the bricks of Tempeh Arizona and grab, much to the disappointment of your alimentary canal, the latest full length 腐肉 (Carrion) by Taipei supergrinders, Fake Meat.
The packaging is bold, bright and evocative, promising an entire banquet of auditory cuisine. As you tear away the wrapper like a pair of Velcro pants you are greeted with a swampy bouquet, moist and eerie, before ravenously sinking your ears into the squelching riffs oozing with rending fats and a crunchy mouthfeel of echoing cartilaginous drums. The greasy bass slides into your auditory meatus like stewed potatoes; firm, chunky and peppered with the sour shrieks and sweet gurgles of a master chef honing their family recipe with just a dash of MSG to awaken the Bowels of Umame.
But culinary competition for our attention is fierce and overbearing monoliths of unregulated capital often swallow and squash the true nuggets of delight and uniqueness, making it difficult to stand out and be heard. While the less scrupulous will attempt to surmount this by adding cancerous preservatives, nitrites, high fructose corn syrup, casual misogyny or slurp juice in a shallow bid to stay relevant, those with a real dedication to the craft will always rise to the top with a careful artisanal blend of cheeky medical plausibility and amorphous body horror.
And what better way, what more compelling medium, than the all-encompassing artistic experience that is The Music Video, for it satiates both the most gluttonous of ears and most cavernous of eyes, drooling over the promise of engrossing cinematic excellence.
Temporarily satisfied, you hurry to the next aisle, careful not to slip out of your bootleg Slayer Crocs as you shuffle over the linoleum floor to grab the nearest bulk package of 69-ply toilet paper: with looming indigestion like this, tonight will surely warrant an extended stay in The Mens Toilet.
And as you slouch upon the hellish throne and gaze long into your underpants, when you see only one set of skid marks, it was then that I carried you.
4.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hurl
