Midst’s Noisy Groove Chops Butt
Contrary to popular belief, I used to have a butt. Now, thanks to the hellish new sound of Midst, I look like Hank Hill and likely need a gluteal prosthesis. That is to say, my butt has been chopped, and it will never become unchopped. This is my Humiliation.
Born in the sweltering moors of England via Canada, Midst is the one man noise project of Toilet ov Hell amigo Guacamole Jim. The debut album, Humiliation, spans eight tracks of metropolitan chaos and blinding white noise, sandwiched like human cattle trapped in the endless grind of rush hour traffic. Or like two butt cheeks pressed together awaiting the cleaver of modernity. It’s a sound alien and hostile, yet distinctly human; a robotic butcher’s hand taking your pressed hams to the slaughter. Its whirring electronics and head-bobbing rhythms remind us of the claustrophobic knossos within which we’ve trapped ourselves. Humiliation is the urban experience put to industrial metal, a grinding factory of posterior meat, and it’s as soul-sucking as daily life.
Some tracks, like opening number “Scapegoat” and the exhausting “The Builders” are centered entirely on feedback loops of noise, each a systemic exercise of the dehumanizing causal loops of careers and relationships and so much commuting that chap your ass on the reg. Other songs, like “Marked” or “Long We Await the Coming of the Dawn,” are crafted around metal drum loops and percussive compositions reminiscent of those STOMP tapes you had to watch in junior high, only cracked out after too much krokodil injected up the poopchute. Still other songs, like “Nephilim,” consist almost entirely of swarthy, swarming feedback and distortion, reminiscent of heat blasts and billowing smoke in an industrial foundry. The hammering walls of noise in the title track only serve to further pound home the fact that your butt has been lost forever to the metropolis.
Humiliation is the sound of modernity chopping away what’s left of your hiney, but thankfully it won’t cost you an extra pound of butt flesh at “Name Your Price.” Now that’s a deal that’s easy on the wallet (and thereby the keister). Get it here.
