Cheap Thrills - February 2022
This month: (post) punk, "drum n' space", death metal, and more!
Welcome to the second installment of Cheap Thrills, a monthly column that highlights noteworthy "name your price" releases on Bandcamp from the past and present. Everything featured here can be obtained for free, but I highly recommend spending a few dollars if you find something that you enjoy.
January's entry can be found here.
Our first release is a Мечты, an EP from Бумажные Тигры (Paper Tigers). The band hails from Tomsk, Russia, and their music pays clear homage to post punk acts of yore. Here's a funny story - I initially listened to this because the cover art features the same illustration as my old paperback copy of The Myth of Sisyphus (the piece in question is Rene Magritte's The Glass Key). I ended up liking what I heard, so I guess it all worked out in the end!
Мечты is very much a nostalgic postcard from the days of the Soviet Union, and to be clear, I'm not trying to stereotype — the title track's music video is mostly archival footage of big, brutalist apartment complexes in winter. Musically, the EP checks all the post punk boxes. Rich, deep vocals in roughly the same register as Ian Curtis and Morrisey? Check. Reverb-laden Fenders that hang and shimmer atop the driving mid-tempo pulse of drums and bass? Check and check. Despite all the snow blanketing the buildings and roads in the aforementioned music video, I found this EP to be quite cozy.
Услышишь стук - не бойся, это я.
Hear a knock - don't be afraid, it's me.
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Every once in a while, I like to unwind with some ambient drone. Artists like Tim Hecker, Lawrence English, Rafael Anton Irisarri, and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma excel at creating deceptively simple but beautifully textured electronic music that almost seems to breathe. Transient Stellar is a 20 year old project from Scott Cortez (of lovesliescrushing fame) that builds on that distorted, hazy sound by adding breakbeats and minimal, ethereal vocals. Cortez gave this new style a few entertaining names, including "blissbeat" and "drum n' space", but y'know what? Both fit pretty well.
In practical terms, rkodr seems to draw inspiration from shoegaze's walls of sound, Fripp & Eno's layers of tape delay, and jungle's manic yet tightly-sequenced drum machines. It is an unlikely combination that manages to feel both mechanical and organic at the same time. Cortez's guitar sounds like it's being played through a stratus cloud, gliding at a glacial pace as it gradually envelops each new set of skittering breakbeats. The indecipherable, dreamy vocals, courtesy of Stella Tran, add a hauntingly human quality to the mix. Whatever you want to call this — "blissbeat", "drum n' space", "ghost rave" (OK, I made that last one up) — rkodr is worth a listen.
Your eyes immaculate
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[Note: this one went a little long because I got carried away]
Up next is another album with a storied history. Back in 2012, the Brazilian punk band Campbell Trio entered the studio to record their debut album. That album did not see the light of day until last year, and while it would be tempting to say something like "it still holds up!", that would be underselling what the band was trying to accomplish. If the Bandcamp page is to be released, the recording process was beset by a number of issues, including dissatisfaction with the material and, more seriously, the loss of someone close to the band. /// captures the sound of a band striving for closure, revisiting the past in order to put it to rest.
Terms like "emo", "screamo", and "post-hardcore" have been contentious for decades now, and I won't pretend that I even had favorite bands from those subgenres until after most of those bands had already broken up. Nomenclature aside, this style of music has had a special place in my heart since my college days (c. 2008), when some friends showed me that there was heavy, emotionally-charged punk rock out there that wasn't just louder pop punk. My brain just about broke when I heard Kidcrash for the first time. I had been missing out on so much!
So where was I? Ah yes — Campbell Trio was a short-lived Brazilian band that put out a handful of splits and EPs before breaking up, as was the style at the time. This posthumous LP contains echoes of Daitro's cathartic peaks and valleys and Million Dead's seamless blend of melodic screaming and singing. Like those bands, Campbell Trio accomplishes it all without sounding saccharine or over-produced. There are even a few surprises courtesy of some guest musicians, whose contributions (I won't spoil them here) add additional texture to the mix. /// still feels fresh and urgent despite the fact that the genre's heyday is long past (or maybe genres', plural/possessive?). Sure, this would have been slightly more 'timely" in 2012, but it still sounds damn good in 2022.
Then again, who am I kidding? My younger self may have been late to the party, but I've remained a fan long enough to see pageninetynine, City of Caterpillar, Gospel, and Jeromes Dream reunite and play shows again. And, relevant to this column, there are plenty of labels like Zegema Beach, No Funeral, and Star Rats still fighting the good fight and reminding us that this style of punk (whatever you want to call it) is not simply a thing of the past.
Every frame and every chord, every page and every word,
Everyone that has touched me or has been touched by me: this is what I call home.
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Kicking things up a notch or two, we have Anwar Sadat, a band that sounds like it has a bone to pick with basically everyone. Its brand of nasty, nihilistic noise rock is not for the faint of heart, but fans of Nine Inch Nails, Big Black, and early Swans will not want to miss this one.
Don't get me wrong — Ersatz Living is an angry album, and its misanthropy and self-loathing border on sadomasochism. However, there is quite a lot of variety to be found throughout these nine tracks, which range from seething industrial diatribes to dark, dystopian dance numbers. I'm not going to tell you that a band called Anwar Sadat trades in anthemic hooks or major-key melodies, but this album does contain moments that could, in a certain light, be described as catchy. The lurching bass grooves, razor sharp guitar riffs, and brash, unsettling lyrics are earworms of the strangest sort. If you'll pardon yet another movie reference, imagine that weird bug from The Matrix, except that it's drilling into your skull.
CUT THROUGH ME
EXSANGUINATE
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Here's another loud one that's good for scaring kids off your lawn or annoying the neighbors. Gaze at the album art below, dear reader, and rest assured — Mortuary Spawn sounds exactly like that.
If you're not content to judge a book by its cover, then I'll say this: Spawned from the Mortuary is a five song EP packed to the malformed gills with old-school death metal goodness. It's not a revelation by any stretch, but it is great fun. Sometimes you just need serrated chainsaw riffs and a few neck-snapping tempo changes to get the blood pumping. Short, sickening, and to the point, Spawned from the Mortuary is just what the mad doctor ordered: a pulsating mass of necrotic flesh hurtling towards you at the speed of death.
Enthralling abhorrence
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Where can I go from there? Well, if you want something that is devastating in a slightly different way, then perhaps you should check out Yew (har har). I recommended Yew to a few folks late last year, but my remarks bear repeating: this is desolate folk/doom straight out of Blood Meridian, evoking images of bleached animal skulls and vast, interminable gypsum wastes devoid of hope or compassion.
Yew is one of several projects from Vincent Ciarlo, an Oklahoma City-based musician and visual artist. Like the natural and emotional landscape of the aforementioned McCarthy novel, Yew's latest demo is soul-crushingly bleak. The first sound on II is that of a chain being dragged across a floor. The acoustic guitar that begins playing moments later sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a well, and the subsequent vocals are half chant and half death-rattle. And that's just the opening track. The longer songs crank up the distortion and become bitter black metal dirges that march, inexorably, into the sun-blasted heart of the desert.
There are no lyrics on Bandcamp or on the tape insert (yes, I bought the tape), so we'll end with a relevant excerpt from Blood Meridian:
“Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?”
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That's all for this month! Another installment of Cheap Thrills is in the books. Thank you for taking the time to read and/or listen. If anything struck your fancy, please consider supporting the artists! Cheers.