by John Glab (@glabglabglab_)
Every day is manic, blazing past in an indecipherable whirl, leaving you flailing in its confluence depositing torrents of unfiltered stimuli on top of you. Buried under the river’s surface, forcing you to sift through everything — the rushed staggered step across streets and between zooming cars while running late for work, finding out that rabbit can talk, deciding whether or not to wave to your old neighbor you see passing you by along the street although the two of you never talked, etcetera, etcetera — trying to claw your way back up for a breath, for some brevity. Yet it’s sunup, sundown, sunup, sundown, sunup, sundown continuously like someone furiously flicking a light switch, disorientating you like everything’s moving in stop motion. The blur of the day indistinguishable from the last. Trying to catch up, but never catching up.
Immediately from the beginning, this is what Billiam’s new record, Animation Cel, feels like. The title track opener with demanding directness drags you from one place to another, jostling your body through an overly animated world which bends in your way forcing you to dodge out of your path. Freaked out screams are drowned out by a jolting hiss as you’re bounced around like a basketball. There’s too much to know how to deal with it. Yell? Cry? Laugh? Sit down and go catatonic as people shout at you with no shred of human empathy to, “Just get it together man!” Are the powers that be human?
All the pressure is starting to increase, one added weight at a time, slowly pressing down on your center until your edges burst and flatten. How are you supposed to get by going about the necessary tasks of the day to stay alive? How do you protect your personal gems from all the rodents? Card won’t scan. Bash my head against a myki pole: a relatable sentiment. Ringing from an anonymous number, “Hey just calling to let you know, every fear you have about yourself is real. You should feel bad.” Slam the receiver. As the buzzing goes silent, the beat of the outside doesn’t line up with your own internal clock. Not like it’s in syncopation or polyrhythms, but just in an agitating incongruency. The feeling is nulled gazing at the nights flashing lights or eyes glazing at the blue raster line glow of a 1997 model television screen while in a sleepless trance.
The daily morning warning sirens have replaced any need for an alarm, as basically every day the unbreathable toxic fog seeps into the city. Go to work, but don’t go outside. You can’t do anything but think it’s seeping through the cracks in the windows or through the vents. Cortisol levels are off the charts effectively turning your body into a red-hot thermometer ready to burst out of your frantic, overburdened head. Just give up. Just relax.
Just chill out. Take yourself to a show in the middle of the day, skirting any responsibilities you may have. It’s fine. Ignore that the rafters are burning, and the stage is splintering apart. It’s alright. Just a little bit of comfort is all you need. Never mind, forget that, immediately when you step out, you’re barreling down a hill in a tram with the break lines cut, speeding up, speeding up, never slowing down, until it crashes. You find yourself crashed out feet up in the bottom of a grave, scanning the blurry lines in the newspaper’s obituary section, holding onto whatever moment of brevity this is.
Here though, the rush simmers, and after 28 minutes it ends. This is basically what the chaotic, dizzying journey of Animation Cel puts you through when listening. Except instead of being expressed through insane, written ramblings, it’s conveyed through the extreme high gain egg punk on the record. Among jumpy crunched instrumentals that tumble on each other and fall into a punctual arrangement, Billiam is always expressive, wavering from indignation to anxious screams. It’s an understandable reaction to an unrelenting world where time is always the enemy of energy. Yet in his eruptions of irritation, the energy doesn’t let up at all until the very end. Animation Cel is only one of many. It comes after several albums and EPs, with many singles in between, released by Billiam in the past four years, varying in levels of refinement, but always equally as livid. There’s just so much to scream about.