(((O))) Review: Intercourse – How I Fell in Love with the Void

Honesty is a prized commodity in music. Look back through commentary on recorded or live music – be it from last week or a century ago – and you’re sure to find a writer (and indeed the artists themselves) grappling with the concepts of honesty, authenticity, and legitimacy.

For those serious pieces, from whenever or wherever they were commissioned and recorded – and not transfixed by the more modern concerns of honesty; that of fitting in with a scene identity, for example – this issue of honesty was about the music and lyrics themselves; authenticity of seeing their vision through to its aesthetic end.

It has been, for many, an obsession. Think Dylan; think The Velvet Underground. Can one be influenced – albeit a joyous influence, truly loved – and allow that to be a fundamental, defining part of your artistic make-up? Think Presley, latter-day Beatles, or, for a more contemporaneous example, the cringe-inducingly poorly researched critique and subsequent (somehow ongoing?!) furore of Beyoncé’s courtship and sublimation of country.

Music is fixated with honesty.

In the 1920s, ‘L’Art Brut’ [raw art] was a movement that eventually inspired the idea of what we now consider the ‘outsider’ in music (ironically, an ‘everyman’ sort of figure, when employed in this way by critics or indeed the subject self-identifying as such). Before that, outsider was attached to genres of music (certainly to jazz in the 50s and also the earliest forms of rock – so shocking with its amplification! – in the 60s, coupled with the societal paradigm shift that happened across those two decades).

In the 70s, ‘outsider’ and ‘music’ were formally put together to refer to a form of naïve musicality – ‘outsider music’ somewhat of an American counterpart to L’Art Brut – that sometimes referred to lack of formal learning, but more often than not would feature (non)-artists that were either children and/or had learning difficulties or varying severities of mental illness.

Although people who listen to ‘outsider music’ may refer to many different factors as to its appeal, by far the most often cited I’ve ever heard – and that I too share – is the honesty of what we hear. Unencumbered by the pretence of “artistry” and sometimes even without discernible intent, we listen to a Daniel Johnston or a Wesley Willis song and hear something totally unfiltered and pure crackle from their simple, direct-to-cassette recordings. It is similar, some might say to having one’s breath taken away the questioning of a toddler, breaking up an otherwise quiet afternoon; unintentionally deep, potentially cutting.

Perhaps in recorded music the closest I’ve come to a recording artist giving me this goosebump kind of ‘emotional ultimatum’ is the infamous 2017 album by Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked at Me. I shan’t delve into the history of that record, and the pain Phil Elverum was conveying here, but it remains a monument to honesty and authenticity in music. Unconcerned with the trivialities of commercialism or the ego of an artist curating their catalogue, it is an album that speaks to the very heart, the very soul of what it means to be.

Why have I meandered through an incongruent number of musicians across a wide scope of genres, before finally settling into a focused look at the fourth Intercourse full-length, How I Fell in Love with the Void, you might ask. The Connecticut quartet are, above all else, honest. Candidly so. Viscerally so. Never more than on this record, filled as it is with razor sharp laments on the futility of work, relationships and subsequent divorce, fracturing friendships, and all of life’s recognisable woes. Their metallic, noise rock infused hardcore punk is no frills, necessarily lean and lithe like a predator in the wild, with its penmanship akin to a poet striving – nay, crazed – for ever more concise and imagist expression and phrasing.

Tarek Ahmed –Intercourse’s vocalist – has always been an outsider. Of Egyptian descent in a small white town in one of the smallest American states, the outspoken frontman has ploughed his own musical furrow with bandmates Sean Prior (guitar), Pete Stroczkowski (bass), and Caleb Porter (drums). While he and they may well have found some kinship in the US post-hardcore, metal, and noise rock scene(s), it is with their own fans that the band delight – “Every time we play a faraway place that we haven’t been to before, there’s always one person there that has followed us for years and is there specifically for us. They are always the weirdest person in the room, and I love that. Those are my people.”

Even the aforementioned presumption of kinship in the music scene is mercilessly called into question by the band due to their searing honesty. In a raw, unfiltered moment on the record – opening track ‘The Ballad of Max Wright’ (using the fantastic, beloved actor, who despised being best known for his star turn on the sitcom, Alf, as a metaphor) – they confess they can often get jealous of contemporaries being offered cool opportunities when they’re still out on the road, slogging their guts out at local shows, sometimes feeling like the handbrake to whatever progress might mean these days, still being on.

Not only due to the various musical influences they have, but because of this agonised-over streamlining of message and material, an EP by Intercourse often only clocks in at ten minutes, with each of their “long players” barely doubling that length. This being very much true of this new rabid collection of tracks, as well. In terms of similar contemporaries, the most obvious reference points in the burgeoning swell of heavier-than-ever noise rock that bares all, are surely Chat Pile and Couch Slut, both of whom are similarly known for their searingly honest reflections of life under the oppressive force of capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and much more.

In similar fashion they refer to the void that Intercourse explicitly cites – with all three bands relating to attempting to fill that blackened empty horror with booze, drugs, sex, or other addictive, repetitive, circulatory vices, without ever beating it’s blank gaze. As Nietzsche said, “He who fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Be it ‘Zoloft and Blow’ or ‘I’m Very Tired, Please Let Me Die’, the quartet’s bullet-shaped blasting isn’t giving advice, or even offering any solace except for a disconnected camaraderie, at best. It is simply the cataloguing of life’s despair and anguish – recorded and offered up for our own void-filling consumption.

On this new record, Intercourse perversely runs the thought experiment of if one allows oneself to become the monster and falls in love with the abyss, what happens next? If we are disenfranchised by capitalism, if we do work ourselves to death and for absolutely nothing, what to make of that? If our rage can’t undo that violence wrought upon us, how to reckon with what?  In typically bleak and punishingly honest fashion, this album simply answers, thus: rage anyway.