FlushBand It FriCampDay: Anxious Behaviour In Migratory Animals
There’s a word for that.
FKA Pinecones had us all shakin’ our tailfeathers opening for Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band this past Tuesday at the Earl. While the vinyl won’t be out ’til the start of the new year on Sophomore Lounge, you can snag the new Arbor Labor Union early and start chooglin’ and noodlin’ to your heart’s desire. “More bound and freer than ever” captures something ineffably true about the band’s performance and Out to Pasture: things are tight, dialed-in, while everything might be too late, but you get to be yourself. Or channel Neil as much as you want on “Repunzel.”
Speaking of boundless self-expression, Ralph has finally arrived. Back in January after a show in Athens, I threw together terms like “avant-garde noise metal” and “total freaked out two-piece bullshit art grind.” Perhaps, though, it’s more of a nasty noise-rock racket jamming together Melt-Banana, Converge, and warped Floor 7”s from the ’90s. Are we any closer? That’s certainly the vibe I get from standout “hey mister Bigshot.” Cacophonous drums; recursive riffs; scraping vocals; no sense of decorum or grammar. This is all in very bad taste for people who have a constant bad taste in their mouth. Alf’d on benzos.
But there’s no reason that benzo-haze need inhibit your ability to inhabit the planet in the fullness of its grandeur. If the new album from Sydney’s Zeitgeber suggests “that every creature is a kind of prisoner… but also a participant in a shared splendour,” then I think we can feel the laborious union of all flora and fauna striving towards thriving. Or, as Stephen Jay Gould by way of Linnaeus has it: “we are both ordinary and special.” Though, I hazard, there is nothing ordinary in this thrumming, inexplicable collage. Proggy, jazzy, post-rocky, and refined, like a Tortoise in a tophat.
“The space of our primary perception,” writes Foucault, “is a space of height, of peaks, or on the contrary, of the depths of mud; space that flows, like spring water, or fixed space, like stone or crystal.” But what about external space? The space “just where the erosion of our lives, our time, our history takes place”? From Overseas’ latest release, Thinking Like a Mountain, invites us into these heterotopias, if it can be said such places require any invitation. Reflecting, refracting, flowing, fixed. Crests and troughs. The closeness and vastness of all experience, in the dewdrop of a breath.
Following 2023’s much-heralded Blackened Cerebral Rifts, Dead and Dripping return with croaking cosmic colony collapse. Warping together Demilich, Gorguts, and Defeated Sanity, Nefarious Scintillations is weirder and more cohesive than its predecessors. Several songs are stretched to their spaghettified limits, never fully snapping but surely testing synaptic parameters. “Pestilent Hints of Darkened Malodorous Vibrations” and “An Utterly Tenantless World of Aeons-Long Death” are achievements, as mind-bended and skronky as they are effortless and slick. If worlds, galaxies, and ancient transdimensional corridors are really so emptied of human consciousness, why do I feel so very haunted? Horror and atrocity live on.
LET’S FLUSH THIS BANDCAMP FRIDAY!
Stick is TMPin’ while Roldy is TTTin’. Ain’t nothin’ finer in the land.
Stevo has 3.5 flaming toilets for the new Blut Aus Nord.
Falxifer bestows 4 flaming toilets on the new Martröð.
Toilet Radio 595 is classic Joe n Jordan, scouring the world of metal for all its malarkey.
Voided Grimace rewards Phobocosm with 4 cow-printed flaming toilets.
Reliquary Tower goes Tag Diving for Really Awesome Bin Material. [nice ~Roldy]
Look at me writing a premiere. New stuff from Ectovoid!
Big week in the Bowl, y’all! Drop your GBUs in the comments. Share your BCF hauls. All my love.
