Monday, June 18, 2018

Cassette Review //
Flesh Narc
"Songs of Reality"
(\\NULL|ZØNE//)


$7 //
Edition of 50 //
https://nullzone.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-reality //

"Songs of Reality" opens with this chaotic rock song.   It's a little screamy and has this screechy guitar vibe to it as well.   It reminds me a bit of FBMTOF and then... Is that autotune I hear in there?   It certainly has taken on some sort of Frampton Comes Alive form within the distinct scattered guitars and drums.   It feels like the vocals are doing the scales, but it also sounds a lot like when Finn sings during "Adventure Time", which there is an app for, but is that a genre like T-Pain or something?   I guess I've not studied voice patterns that much but perhaps I should.

The second song has more of a video game thrash feel to it with spoken words and this sounds kind of like Tastes Like Burning but aside from that old band (Which might have actually just been one person) I'm not sure what else to compare this with.    Records scratches or radio frequencies take us into the next track- "Optical Intrusion"- which has that weirdo punk rock sound that is somewhere between Fred Schneider and My Name Is Rar-Rar.   This goes into a psychedelic song which has vocals coming through screeches which make me think of modems.

Whooshes and whirrs make it feel like we're in space but the singing comes through with that feeling again like Finn, yet also there is a Sun Hammer sense to it as well.     Louder bass and higher treble come through and this has a feeling of Primus but something else as well.    I checked the Flesh Narc Bandcamp before writing this and I wrote about two of their earlier cassettes but they seem to have put out a decent amount of music since then and if anything it just seems to be getting weirder, more defined in the weirdness and I enjoy that they're really cementing their own sound on "Songs of Reality".

It gets back into that FBTMOF way, but it's not as heavy, it's more of the art rock/punk side of FBTMOF than the hardcore/screaming/metal, though don't get me wrong, at times this does thrash more than you might expect if I was to compare it with some sort of indie rock weirdo band that I can't quite put my finger on.     The flip side comes out really fast though, so it's starting to lean more towards the punk side even though I still don't have the same comparisons to make as I had in the previous reviews for Flesh Narc. 

I definitely hear a jackhammer now and then the music comes through with "Everyone's taking my advice".    Sharpness and grinding come out with these vocals and it's like watching a musical episode of "Adventure Time" on acid.    I then begin to feel as if the tape is going into rewind.    These next few songs just seem to grind through in a way like you would drive fast around a winding road- which I know is a scene from a Carey Grant movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock but maybe not everyone has seen it yet.     I feel like I'm being asked about yarn as the buildings get richer.

What I perhaps enjoy most about Flesh Narc is that they're a weird band.   I don't mean that in the sense that you go, "Oh, this is a weird band" and then they're still out there on Merge or some fucking record label like that.   I mean this is weird in the sense that it's not "cool weird" where people listen to it because they like that it doesn't sound like everyone else even though it still has some sort of underlying pop appeal to it.    Flesh Narc is weirder than what you're likely thinking of when I type the word "weird" and this music isn't for everyone but I absolutely love that about it.








No comments:

Post a Comment