Pitchfork
12 Oct 2020Today’s prompt: “Write a music review that doesn’t refer to any other bands, musicians, or other genres, but can refer to anything else.”
“It’s like…” I held my hands raised, fingers crooked towards the opposite palms, in search of answers. It’s impossible to describe [insert-your-name-here]’s latest album, “Where It All Went Wrong,” in terms of other music. And without the ability to make hand gestures in writing, I’ll just have to do the best I can to capture this animalistic death wail in print.
The first single from the album, “On Pain of Death,” is like experiencing the stigmata. And then having the blood escaping from your palms set on fire by Adam X the X-Treme. And simultaneously feeling the self-doubt and shame of whether it’s okay to be destroyed by a ’90s superhero that was designed to be so cool and has since then fallen so far by the wayside with his backwards baseball cap and his numerous blades all over his uniform.
Track 3, “The Way of All Flesh,” sounds like the scrape of a shovel hitting a rock as someone digs your grave.
The fourth track, “Widow’s Weeds,” sounds like when a pipe breaks in your house and floods your basement and stains your carpets and infests your home with mold, except it’s happening in your soul.
No one speaks of track 6. No one.
Track 7, “Pale Rider,” feels like a monster’s massive, rough tongue licking up the length of your spine.
The next song on the album, “Dead And Gone,” is like watching a Scooby Doo villain fervently mopping his brow as the meddling kids apprehend the wrong person.
“The Way of All Flesh Part II,” track 9, sounds like when all of your internal organs start tingling.
The 11th song on the album, “Oh My God We’re All Going To Die and There’s No Way to Prevent It,” is a lovely mixture of a sort of wind-whipping-through-the-willows sound combined with the caterwauling of a mountain lion. Plus a really good drum solo and bass lick.
The final track, “The End of it All,” incorporates a deep, intense percussion that sounds as though it echoes deep within chambers of magma-rich portions of the Earth’s core. That fluid beat combines with guitar cords that hum as though they were traveling across a graveyard. And of course, the vocals – a shriek as piercing as the pitchfork that penatrated [insert-your-name-here’s] sternum as they were singing the track.
Oh, that last bit wasn’t a metaphor, just an interesting tidbit about the production process.