by Mick Reed
Being an artist is glamorous in the ideal, but humbling in practice. Between working a day job, spending your evenings usually at a second job, and squeezing the things that you need to do to feel like a human being (eat, sleep, spend time with friends, and of course, practice your art) into the thin cracks of time that others overlook and therefore can't force you to be productive in, the exhaustion is ever-present. It's like being a treadmill that is also rolling precariously downhill towards a wheat thrasher. How long can you afford to live in the grip of this grind? How long before your body betrays you or some obligation (either financial or familial) robs you of what precious time and energy you had to devote to your own wellbeing and self-expression? The crushing weight of a life lived in an economic and temporal trash compactor is something that Santa Rosa's Acrylics clearly feel the pinch of, and their Sinking In captures this slow vanishing act of despair with absolute authenticity.
The album breaks open with the sharp, off-kilter rollick of "Haze," a rat maze of acrid razor riffs, tumbling beats, and endlessly descending grooves, capturing the delirium of the all too common work/no-life balance in the form of a crust-punk Pissed Jeans-esque dirge. Watery post-punk vibes toss and roil in a salty froth on the clammy plea for relief "Retreat," while the title track imports the dark-core nightmare of the UK's Bad Breeding to conjure a black cloud of acid drizzling chords and miasmic reverb to blot out the sun over the mockingly sunny Santa Rosa hills. While Acrylics are thoroughly a hardcore band, their sound swerves clear of the increasingly popular metalcore and NYHC revivals of bands like Code Orange and Turnstile, in order to coast the parched back roads of the spiritually barren west with a fatalistic fervor reminiscent of noise-rock infused acts like KEN Mode and Annihilation Time, the latter of which's influence looms largest on the skin shedding blitz, "Awake." Arcylics' ambition at capturing more than raw aggression is made plane by the frigid torpor of the two instrumental interludes included in the tracklist; the pensive and searching "Closer," and the thin mountain pass to hell's twisted mechanistic mow "In Motion."
The world of today is built to bend you backwards over its knee until you spin burst through your stomach. Its pressures and demands are incompatible with human existence or any semblance of enduring or transcendent meaning. Sometimes all any of us can do to survive is to burrow badger style into the Earth beneath and hope to find a comfortable place to sleep in the hole we've dug. Acrylics grasps this fundamental anxiety and have therefore tossed Sinking In up from their own burrow, like a flare in the night, to chase away the shadows and remind us that we do not fight this war against shared humanity in isolation.