By: “Chad
Xander Harris | website | facebook | bandcamp |
Released on September 23, 2016 via Label Name Here
This is a dark, nasty luminescent freak show of an album. It’s the three AM trail through herds of twisted people stumbling with black eyes and drooling mouths. It’s getting black out drunk for days on end and loving every offensive, dry heaving, accident inducing moment of dimorphic euphoria. It’s every bodily fluid flying in a chaotic synchronicity like birds of human waste soaring through the air. It’s fucked up…in the best possible way.
‘The Scarlet Deception’ opens the album with a lysergic spin on reality tinging musique concrete-esque sounds of dripping taps and babbling computers with electronic psychedelia. Every sound is pushed to a stylised Kubrickian distortion of reality, every synth oozing eeriness and excellence. When you start an album like this there is no fear of disappointment to be found; it is a solidly assured, masterful opener that frankly shits on most electronic music and stands near the top of the list of this year’s trippiest music.
Manic laughter, violent whelps and sinister synths, the etymology of ‘Straight Up Satan’ is self-evident. The menacing track broods through several passages of ominous malcontent whilst melodic flutters attempt to soak it all up and find a benefit. Each startling break erupts the track further into a bolder assault with added venom, extra malice and an increasingly awe-inspiring marriage of foreboding synths and brutal percussion.
‘The Basilisk Stare’ hooks the listener through the cheek and drags the catchy melody across the track like falling chunks of viscera, choreographed in chaos, beautiful in it’s imposing maelstrom. The track reaches a surreal dance-influenced conclusion that adds a weight and psychedelia to the genre in a way that is perhaps comparable atmospherically to NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine.
There’s something about the synths in this album and in particular in the opening of ‘The Eye in The Triangle’ that reminds me of Teeth of The Sea. That late 70s/80s twinge referring the listener back to the peaks of horror with John Carpenter’s The Thing and Halloween and Kubrick’s The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. Stylised terror with a nightmarish quality, ‘Altered States’ is perhaps the closest example of the inherent narrative in the album that Teeth of The Sea arguably point to as well; the bad trip or at least the sad awareness that narcotics bring that most people choose blissful ignorance over confronting the unknown; their fears and insecurities. Fear, insecurity, ignorance and greed – there’s a horror film for you.
‘Predator State’ exudes an aura of darkness, its reptilian referent is apt. Stalking pads and malevolent samples haunt the arrangement. The menacing beauty of the album purveys in its almost saddening self-awareness. There are some really tranquil elements in the melody but, those are specks of light shining through the cracks of a door in what is otherwise an enchanting hypnosis of shadow.
The last reptilian stage of squelching acidic synths and dancing beats, ‘Nervous Serpents’ propels California Chrome into a wandering curiosity, pensive, lost. Venturing out into the abyss to bring a part of the unknown back. Its enrapturing melodics may remind some of the Stranger Things opening theme and I imagine synth-wave music will find a minor resurgence with the increasing furore and phenomena around the show.
I’ll be honest, I saw the track name ‘Buckle Bunny’ and heard the huge kicks from the bass and all I can imagine now is a giant bunny hopping down after me in that pink inferno from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. There’s even a strange sample in the background that adds to the whole rememberberry. Interestingly, the track doesn’t feel as bleak or maligned as some of other stuff on the album, perhaps that’ll lead to it being a single for normal people to enjoy; normal people like Depeche Mode and I have to say this is kind of like an instrumental Depeche Mode with an edge.
It’s still getting nicer, even with a finalé called ‘Dirts’, the trip is fading, the gloom is collapsing; everything is unraveling. The ethereal pads and keys add a sense of sublime divinity and a mysticism to the track whilst the blades of percussion act as a final reminder of the sinister undertone that bellowed through the core of the album in the first track resonating through like an echo fading through every piece until the album is left almost on a jaunt.
Get California Chrome and take a listen, you won’t hear another one like this for a while.
