By: Mark Ambrose
Album Type: Full Length
Date
Released:
27/04/2018
Label: Pelagic
Records
Whatever discomfort mounts when you
listen to “Deads” there’s always a filthy, churning riff or shouted chorus to
tug you back towards the joy of top notch music that will probably be blasting
through your speakers for the next decade
“Deads”
CD//DD//LP track listing
1.
Despots
2.
Parallels
3.
Armada
4.
Civilizations
5.
Appeaser
6.
Deplete
7.
Structures
8.
Deads
The Review:
It
was over a decade ago that I first listened to Deadguy’s “Fixation on a Coworker” – one of the most apt distillations of
workday despair I’d ever encountered.
Nihilistic, acidic, indignant at the situation everyone grinding their
lives away in corporate America,
the sole full-length was already a decade old.
Yet with the 2008 financial crisis on the horizon, my time at college
done, and my life consumed by a middling, frustrating job, it felt like it
could have been created mere weeks before for an audience of one. Listening now is both a nostalgic,
infuriating experience, because it seems just as prescient over two decades
from its inauspicious debut. If
anything, the only marker of “Fixation on
a Coworker” that makes it the odd product of the pre-impeachment Clinton 90s is the
personal, rather than global, politics of its running obsessions. Yet no band had as succinctly captured
capitalism-gone-haywire nightmares as Deadguy… at least until LLNN’s “Deads”.
A
cinematic, ambient introduction sets up an auditory sucker punch from track 1, “Despots”. Vocalist/guitarist Christian Bonnensen snarls
invective like a bedraggled street prophet: “Walk
through life with a single purpose. Shirt collar tightens like a fucking
noose. True purpose lies in never
punching out.” For those who have
checked work e-mail during a midnight piss, or a vacation, or major life
crisis, the words feel equally sympathetic and accusatory. The rhythm combo of Rasmus Furbo’s monolithic
bass and Rasmus G. Serjensen’s drum work convey hardcore ferocity and metal
technicality. On tracks like “Parallels”, there’s a really interesting
dynamic between Bonnensen’s guitar and Ketel G. Sejersen’s synth work – it’s
hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. It’s obvious when Sejersen goes off on an
interlude (“Civilizations”) or
incorporates sampling into “Armada,”
but the heavily processed tones of Bonnensen’s guitar make it sound like a dual
synth line, while the distortions on the synth push the instrument to its heavy
extremes.
On
perhaps my favorite track, “Appeaser”,
LLNN
wrests free of my Deadguy comparison by imbuing their personal
politics with global dread. The
apocalyptic scream of “Skies fall and the
fire cleanses in its wake / Run amok / The world is yours to take,” is
chilling in ways both sublime and terrifying.
The slow ramping up of dread, the tightening of musical tension, makes “Appeaser” a truly devastating
masterpiece. And for all the cinematic,
intellectual, or political subtlety on display, the closer “Deads” reiterates the simple power this
four-piece can wield with a quiet/loud dynamic and pummeling guitar riffs. Whatever discomfort mounts when I listen to “Deads” – capitalist existential dread,
political despair, the fear that humanity is teasing out its final days
destroying the planet – there’s always a filthy, churning riff or shouted
chorus to tug me back towards the joy of top notch music that, like “Fixation on a Coworker”, will probably
be blasting through my speakers in a decade… barring any catastrophes to match LLNN’s
lyrical horrors.
“Deads” is available here
