“Refused a Future”: Stomach’s Low Demon
“…this guilt the insoluble / Final fact…”
Riffs billow out like black cloudsmoke as a short pulse of drums reverberates in echoing dub, choking and sputtering through the disaster like the faintest, fading alarm. A sprinkle of cymbals; a few mournful chords; a fraying, fritzed-out voice roars from the depths of an inverted heaven; all these chance encounters with structure only remind you that the tentpoles of your life are charred beyond recognition. In some ways, it’s an act of acceptance of the moral lassitude and plodding indifference that fanned the flames in concert with one another.
Such is how “Dredged,” the opening track on Low Demon, the second LP from Chicago’s Stomach, begins. We haven’t heard such ominous, world-ending drone since Black One. It is vibrational violence, a bilious buzzing, the whirr of the world-weary and war-wounded. In its short 4 minutes, it carries with it a planetary weight of suffering. As Rosetta tells her fellow barflies in WH Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, “On our present purpose the past weighs / Heavy as alps, for these absent are never / Mislaid or lost…” The absent are forever present and forever pressing down with the weight of the world on our present goals, dreams, ideas, hopes, ambitions, thoughts, philosophies, actions, demands, and desires. “Our lips are dry,” Rosetta rambles elsewhere, “our / Knees numb; the enormous disappointment / With a smiling sigh softly flings her / Indolent apron over our lives / And sits down on our day.” What weighs heavier? The never-absent rising ghosts or the always-present disappointments of the past?
On Low Demon, we are in the thrall of a hellish present built up and out of accreting miserable pasts. Featuring John Hoffman (Weekend Nachos, Ledge) and Adam Tomlinson (Sick/Tired, Sea of Shit), the duo—with live help from Sick/Tired’s bassist Kirk Syrek—cast out any pretense. Ever since the conclusion of Weekend Nachos, Hoffman has sought out blunter, more stripped-down avenues. Ledge, in its very construction, is unsympathetically concrete and rigid… just until it ceases to exist and sends you plunging perilously into the abyss. Stomach, similarly, is the guts of it all, the seat of affect, where indigestion, dyspepsia, and ulcers reign. It’s nothing but bad feelings. It’s gastric distress made manifest. Stomach is droning, antagonistic, agonized sludge/doom that wants little else than to hammer each and every nail into our collective coffin. “Bastard Scum” is over 8 minutes of bludgeoning, the force of the track renewed with each blow. This is as ugly as Corrupted and as primordial as Primitive Man. The repetition of “…unit of time” gives way to the clear-eyed bellicosity of “cruelty as god.” This is the governing thesis of our time. It’s not that cruelty is psychopathic nor the political point; rather, cruelty, always ascendent, is enthroned and worshipped, heralded as heaven’s decree. Be cruel, trumpet the angels, and ye shall be rewarded.
To be sure, some brief flashes of morbid powerviolence streak across the blood-red composition, most notably in “Get Through Winter,” but even these moments are short-lived, given over to and crumbling under an immense sonic pressure. It is winter, after all, so life stagnates. “Frozen veins. Blocked blood. No more dreams.” “Visions of failure” devolve into “failure failure failure failure failure” ad infinitum. The only thing that lives? Agony. To return to Rosetta: “For athwart our thinking the threat looms, / Huge and awful as the hump of Saturn / over modest Mimas, of more deaths / And worse wars, a winter of distaste / To last a lifetime.” The song is both injunctive and supplicating: you must get through winter, as it is demanded and as it is begged. But what lies on the other side of winter? “Oscillate” gives one last burst of energy before all energy is exhausted. Feedback junkies will get their fix, as waves of screeching drone librate and fluctuate. It’s all “darkness.”
Closer “Shivers // Drafts” comprises a third of the album and is the most indebted to at least a sense of doom. There is no melody, rest assured, but you can hear Bell Witch at their most lugubrious and lumbering. Achingly slow pick slides come across like avalanches, shaking loose hard-packed snow that will surely suffocate us all. The song rattles and cracks, a quaking of the earth. It all seems to be ending. And why? Annoyed by Emble, Malin responds to those seated around that bar, “But the new barbarian is no uncouth / Desert dweller; he does not emerge /From fir forests; factories bred him; / Corporate companies, college towns / Mothered his mind, and many journals / Backed his beliefs. He was born here. The / Bravura of revolvers in vogue now / And the cult of death are quite at home / Inside the city.” Even when something tantamount to a riff finds purchase halfway through “Shivers // Drafts,” perhaps when such shivering gives way to those icy drafts, you cannot give way to thinking that the threat is external. It is here. It was raised alongside you. It has intellectual, social support. It was refined in factories and resized in corporate boardrooms. Classrooms gave it a veneer of respectability. There are no barbarians at the gate. The cult of death, worshiping Cruelty as God, is not just inside the city but inside us all. You might attempt to purge those low demons from your stomach, but the truth is that “many have perished; more will.”
Low Demon is out now.
Vinyl copies courtesy of Hibernation Release.
