by: Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
Noise rock is often a temple of sonic excess where the distortion and shock theatrics of rock are taken to their logical extremities. It's often a reflection of the times, the genre’s early days a direct reflection of the monstrosity seeping underneath Reagan-era America. But in a time where the United States appears a crumbling temple of greed and Zen fascism, the state of the nation is often viewed as beyond parody. But what of those being crushed under the boot? The people drifting through a gig economy are damned by things outside their control, crushed by every side of a collapsing empire. Noise rocks nihilism was once a deformity; a horror show presentation with lyrics torn from serial killer manifestos. Now the real horror is that any of us could feel like screeching for just existing, for being bleached to death by the sun's raw heat as we sit in traffic. Keep Honking I’m About To Fucking Kill Myself isn’t just a funny title; it’s the state of a nation's psyche.
Philadelphia’s My Wife’s An Angel is a beautiful, beautiful band. They are a proper shrieking beast of clattering drums, buzzsaw guitars, and the unending no-wavey bass. Each release so far has been marked by a mix of classic noise rock rambles on drunken degeneracy, bleak Americana, and self-loathing. But as they’ve progressed, strains have emerged: an anger beyond the self that extends to the wider world.
Garret Van DeMark has always sounded angry and unsettling, but now, rather than a mere psychopath, he appears a prophet. While last year's sample-heavy Yeah, I Bet offered clearer production and a sharper focus on both local and distant despair, Keep Honking is the band's opus. It's so bleak in prospects that it doubles back on itself into an odd joy; a ranting end-of-empire hell-pit that’s as addictive as it is disturbing. It also grooves like a motherfucker.
Lead single “American Dream” sets the stage. Clips of Jimmy Carter's crisis of confidence speech spliced with news reports of lives slaughtered in Gaza break into a blend of guitar noise and thrumming bass. DeMark’s words come through like orders: “smoke weed,” “support the cops,” “head to the strip club.” He appears somewhere between a motivational speaker and a military commander, encouraging the listener to eat up the excess rather than engage with the horror. This biting satire is laced across the whole album, but so is a sense of grand despair.
Keep Honking is an end-of-the-empire record. “Everybody’s gonna be hungry all winter long,” DeMark sings on “Lil Bug,” “Cause there ain’t any work and all the moneys gone.” If Talking Heads’ “Once In A Lifetime” presented an absurd vision of an American dream, “After the money's gone” presents the American reality of desolate hunger in the face of overwhelming poverty. Opportunities are disappearing down the drain like hair clogging a shower drain, and My Wife’s an Angel match the deterioration.
My Wife's an Angel has always traded in a classical style of noise rock. Demented vocals against quasi-dance, quasi-hardcore rhythms, and ear-shredding guitar. But here, it’s pushed to the limit. “Karaoke” mixes frenetic drums with Contortions-style funk, but everything feels faster and nastier than before. The mix of vocal samples and DeMark’s frenetic shouts turns into a sonic whirlpool, destined to suck the listener in and then tear them apart.
Through most of the tracks, DeMark laughs. Before his laugh sounded like that of a psychopath. Now it sounds like a man broken by the world. The nightmarish excess appears here as a survival mechanism, like a desperate attempt to entertain oneself in the face of failure and despair. That despair overtakes DeMakrs' vocals as his delivery bends into new forms. On opener “Goz Chile,” his draining showman drawl resembles the noise-blues theatrics of Oxbow’s Eugene S. Robinson. Like Robinson, he appears as ringleader atop his noise ensemble, and that ensemble always appears on the verge of toppling him. His layered vocals and echoed words are an attempt at sonic dominance against the industrial-grade shredding of his bandmates. Often, the tracks take on a near free-jazz quality in how they play out as soundscapes, before crystallizing into hefty grooves around phrases like “Somebody Help Me.” It causes DeMark's words to appear like screams in a storm. A desperate attempt to get help before the bombs drop.
Keep Honking isn’t just an improvement on the band's formula. Rather, it iterates on it significantly. “Help The Homeless” is the band's heaviest track yet, a rolling swarm of noise that sees the guitarist acting as a one-man Branca orchestra. “PAUSE!” carries a similar sound but in a near junkyard-shoegaze direction. Its endless waves of feedback form a stage for DeMark’s desperate monologue, the candidness of his speech against the melancholic noise is as close as they get to a tearjerker.
As good a shrieker as he is, DeMark’s true talent often appears as that of a character actor. “Imagine A River” has the band go full atmospheric, the guitar turning to wind, the bass to waves, and the drums to clattering rocks as DeMarks aches between sanity and mania.
Like much of the band’s catalogue, Keep Honking is heavy, bleak, oddly funny, but brilliant in its construction. Underneath the noise and degeneracy lay a deeply intelligent band, but it's never been clearer than on Keep Honking I’m About To Fucking Kill Myself. My Wife’s An Angel has made a genuinely brilliant album. One that brings all the hellish pleasures of the nineties pig-fuck greats kicking and screeching into the modern day without ever copying them. Instead, they’ve made a decisively modern slab of noise rock, one that does what all the best noise rock should do; make you feel bad for just how much you enjoy it.