by Alex Hanse (@alexthechemist)
Things are really bad. The government is kidnapping and disappearing American citizens from their jobs and homes. Armed troops patrol tourist areas of major cities, the President threatening to turn them into training grounds for soldiers. Endless horrors from Palestine, Sudan, and Ukraine are livestreamed to our phones in a wash of sickening blue light 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Everyone’s going broke and the money’s been molested. Unemployment is on the rise, no one is hiring, no one wants to work anymore, nothing makes sense. Everyone is angry. Everyone is angry. Angry at the government, angry at nameless and faceless animas that represent something they think is “wrong.” Angry at themselves. Angry just to feel anything at all.
Like a sun that rises over the smoking twisted ruins of some post-manmade-disaster hellscape, or a particularly rough part of Grey’s Ferry in Philadelphia, Phil Spector’s Gun, the grungey sludge rock outfit of Kevin Brusha, Ian Louda, John Wylie, Mark Griffin, Abe Kaplan, and Emily Mukai (who credit themselves under alias as Dicky Dickerson, Yahn Boi, Chief Ned, Sal Burgerstein, and Lil Tib Tib and additional guitar work from an enigmatic coworker, Poncho) are back and ready to give shape to the bleakness of this American life.
Across eight ripping tracks and two noisy improvisations of haunted, delay-beaten cello and an almost four minute segue of sampled television broadcasts haunted by what I can only imagine is an approximation of what the very last seconds of life in a dismal hospital bed must feel like before slipping into oblivion—two sonic experiments reserved as bonuses for those like myself who still cling to the materially-grounded certainty of physical media—Phil Spector’s Gun blend their penchant for in-your-face immediacy and late-70s riffage that’s been passed through one of those everything-shredders at a recycling plant with a renewed urgency and a surprisingly big pinch of real tenderness.
Brusha twists his voice into a gnarled scream to open the album with “Fool’s Gold,” a screamo meditation on the unfavorable odds luck-of-the-draw that is life, forcing anyone who wants anything from it to literally, alchemically, make it for themselves. Another Side Of… sees the band put to tape their longest tracks yet, but formless, noodling jams these are not: “Pretty Flower” repeats a six-note progression for half of its over eight-minute runtime before spinning its head and speeding it up into a doom-lite haunted house soundtrack while asking a mirror, “Why can’t you pretend?/Why can’t you be happy/with what you’ve got?” “The Crash” pushes nearly 11 minutes of stacked guitar interplay that stands comfortably next to Yo La Tengo’s early-90s era output, best experienced live.
Tracks “Fostered Darkness” and “Benadryl Dreams” both sit uncomfortably with the discomfort of a hard-lived experience with little relief in sight, the former providing a tight thesis for this band’s sophomore outing with “I’ve traded melancholy/for anger” before asking to “be gentle with me/I’ve just arrived.” Metaphorical spiders crawl underneath the skin of the latter in a sweaty downtempo nightmare that’s only half remembered, the haze of a chemically-aided sleep leaving the fright half-remembered and hazy in the harsh morning daylight. “Benadryl Dreams” layers guitar work and slyly masterful percussion from Wylie, reminiscent of the best Giallo soundtracks by Goblin, make this a standout track, and a personal favorite of mine.
But for all its darkness and despairing, this is not a hopeless record—far from it. “Blowin’ My Brains Out,” a cover of the New Jersey-based country-stompers Old Lady, takes that temptation towards suicidal ideation and offers a list of beautifully simple reasons to keep going: a birdfeeder at your grandma’s house, holding someone’s hand every now and then, a window seat and rain clouds. It really is that simple. Closing track “To Be Free” is another cover of a friend’s band, an art Brusha tells me he’s trying to revive, this time of Boston-based DIY-lifer Sean Sprecher’s long-running Bad History Month project. Detailing the yoke of dread life can shoulder onto us all before magically, sonically, the weight is lifted through a coda that simply repeats “To be free.” It stands as a fitting closer and serves as a timely reminder. To be free, that’s all we can really ask for; that’s all we really need.
Produced and mixed by the band with assistance from McKinley Yarrington with Dan Angel behind the board (whose credits include Little Big League, Ovlov, and Golden Apples) and mastered by Joni Elfers in the heavy-metal poisoned soil of a brownfield to gloriously scuzzy effect, you can stream the whole thing now below, before it’s official release tomorrow.
Another Side Of… is out October 3 via BLIGHT. Records: