Cheap Thrills - July 2022

This month: art pop, crust punk, and more!

Summer is in full swing, and with it comes a new installment of Cheap Thrills. The following EPs and albums are some of the best "name your price" releases that I have come across in the last month. Support the artists by buying tunes and/or merch!

As mentioned in the June installment, I have also started writing a regular column over at Invisible Oranges that will essentially be a punk/metal focused version of Cheap Thrills. As a result, each entry on my blog will be slightly shorter, consisting of 2-3 non-metal albums along with a link to the IO column at the end. This ultimately results in a few more releases covered each month, which is a win/win situation for everyone!

With that out of the way, here are your Cheap Thrills for July.

Karin Park - Church of Imagination and Alter

Let's open with a double feature from Karin Park, a Norwegian artist who caught my attention with two back-to-back albums of what she terms "apocalypse pop".  The first, Church of Imagination is Park's fifth solo album, but a far cry from her earlier work, which skewed more heavily towards late 90s/early 00's radio-friendly sound. The songs here evoke the work of Bjork, Spellling, and Susanne Sundfor with their lush instrumentation and catchy, yet brooding vocals.

Alter, her collaboration album with dark ambient pioneer Lustmord, strips away much of the orchestral and synthpop elements, opting instead for waves of drone that roll and growl like choirs of alien throat singers (or perhaps double bass as filtered through a black hole). Even a track like "Twin Flames", whose distant industrial percussion provides a steady backbeat for Park's plaintive singing, As a result, this is a much starker and sparser affair, but one that more fully realizes that apocalyptic aesthetic that her solo work was aiming for.

GODSPEED 音 - 天使の会社で

I want to do something a little different with this one. 

A few months ago, I dipped my toe into the world of modern vaporwave and discovered a whole cottage industry of artists inspired by Haircuts for Men. This style of slick, jazzy plunderphonics has been called "barber beats", there has been quite a bit of discourse about the nature of this music and whether or not it the songs are not transformative enough to truly be considered original works. Thus, while this album from GODSPEED 音 does make for a pretty chill listen, it is more interesting as a test case for this particular criticism. 

The art of sampling is akin to creating a sonic collage, mixing and blending clips from various sources to build something new. Ever since the landmark 1991 case Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. Records, Inc., any works utilizing sound samples from other works must be approved by the copyright holders. Thus, while the only thing that separates the main riff of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" from Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby" is 3-5 bpm, Birdsong did receive credit and royalties for the sampling of his track. 

So where does barber beats fall in this ongoing discussion? Well, if we take GODSPEED 音's latest album into consideration, the answer isn't particularly promising. Youtube's Content ID system, for all of its abuse in the world of copyright claims, is able to pinpoint the exact tracks that the artist used to "create" this album. That's how little has been changed. Sure, the tempo is different, and there's some added reverb on each track; however, the similarities are so clear that 天使の会社で appears to be more of a DJ set than an album proper. The anonymity of barber beats artists—as well as their shared motto of "everything is plundered"—acknowledges the controversial nature of the work. Perhaps this album is one whose "name your price" status is more of a legal shield than a sign of goodwill. 

Anopheli - A Hunger Never Sated

Cello? In my crust punk? The combination certainly works for Anopheli, giving their otherwise intense sound a sort of somber grace—think The Pax Cecilia meets Tragedy. This is the remaster of their 2014 debut, A Hunger Never Sated, and even without the additional strings, it would still be a perfectly serviceable hardcore punk album with plenty of d-beats and gang vocals throughout. However, the guitar and cello combo adds a unique texture to the music that is hard to pin down. One would be forgiven for cynically expecting some sort of neoclassical shredding, but thankfully the effect is far more subtle than that, with the various strings—electrified and otherwise—deftly balancing melody with aggression.

Want more punk and metal? You can check out the July installment of my Invisible Oranges column here, which includes some great blackened doom, death metal, and more!