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Released on February 3, 2015 via The Flenser
I don’t know what I expected. Stench of Exist is my first foray into the world of Boduf Songs, the name under which Mat Sweet records his music; since I’m familiar only with more recent releases from The Flenser and haven’t yet delved into their formidable back catalogue, on initial listens to what, I later discovered, is Sweet’s sixth album, I was left rather confused. ‘Isn’t this coming out on a metal label?’ I wondered. It seemed entirely too restrained for something like that. Then I began to study the lyrics (helpfully printed on the album cover) and it started to click. Its overall atmosphere is sombre, and it’s an astonishingly dark record. It makes for uneasy listening, not because it’s harsh and unrelenting like a good chunk of the label’s more recent output, but for the exact opposite reason – there’s nowhere to hide. It’s just you, Sweet, and a set of beautiful yet heart-crushing songs on which every syllable can be heard; heard and felt.
This is music for listening to at 4am when you’ve just woken up from an anxiety dream and are going over every little detail of your life with a fine-tooth comb. Trust me, I know – I did that myself last week. It’s in surroundings like those that Stench of Exist works perfectly: “A feeling like continually exploding / A feeling like the heart is bursting out / The universe divides to find the process / Lost, alone and stumbling all around”, Sweet intones on ‘My Continuing Battle With Material Reality’, which gets the album going in earnest after the unsettling, noisy outbursts of instrumental track ‘Jacket Cruiser’, doing so in a jarringly intimate fashion that may well catch listeners off guard. Further adding to this aura of distressing closeness, Sweet has a deceptively soothing singing voice, which contrasts nicely with some of the more upbeat material on the album.
Of course, when I say ‘upbeat’, I’m speaking in a strictly musical sense, as there’s no way ‘Thwart By Thwart’ could be a party anthem, driving rhythms aside. “How can we move along when we are so confused?” Sweet asks, an existential bent clearly noticeable in his lyrical approach, neither for the first time nor the last. He sounds restless, and the album is shot through with this desire for continuous progress, with lyrical fragments often reappearing elsewhere – the “I am what I have seen” chorus from ‘My Continuing Battle…’ turns up on ‘Head of Hollow-Fill and Mountaintop Removal’, a stream-of-consciousness lament filtered through juddering beats and the voice of Microsoft Sam that results in something that’s simultaneously strange, beguiling and terrifying; perhaps not recommended for everyday listening, depending on what you’re into. In album context, though, it’s a hell of a wake-up call, and runs straight into the comparatively serene ‘The Rotted Names’, a five-minute dark folk song that features an unshakeable acoustic melody and provides plenty of replay value.
‘Grows In The Small World Of Nerve’ provides another interlude – no bad thing on a record with a well-defined sense of flow – before the album highlight reveals itself. ‘Modern Orbita’ is a fantastic example of repetition as a songwriting device, seeming to lack recognisable structure in favour of being anchored to the rhythm section, guided by bass and drums for seven increasingly tense minutes before deciding to forsake a noisy finale and simply come to a stop. It doesn’t do all that much, but it doesn’t particularly need to, either. It’s left to closing pair ‘Last Song Save One’ and ‘Sky Pedal’s Plan’ to bring Stench of Exist to a close, and they do so in typically subtle fashion. The record thrives on complexity and attention to detail – it’ll stick out as an anomaly at first, but once you’ve made sense of it, you won’t be able to get enough. It makes creeping fear sound almost welcoming.
