Lament Cityscape – The Old Wet EP
Lament Cityscape – The Old Wet EP
Self-Released
Release Date: 21/12/2020
Running Time: 16:43
Review by Dark Juan
9/10
Good evening, you fine people out there. I trust you are all well and not tearing at each other’s flesh with nails and knives because your significant other has been breathing too loudly and in a deliberately antagonistic fashion? Well, if the annoying bastard or bitch you married has ceased their foul respiration, I request and require that you remove your teeth from the ragged, reddened ruin that is the remains of their throat and go and give your face a bit of a wash. You might wanna brush your teeth too. You look like you’ve been eating raw beefburgers and there are dangly bits of flesh between them and it is a singularly unattractive look. Flossing after using your organic mouth knives to remove voiceboxes is vitally important for good oral health.
After that extremely timely public information message I wish to share with you my views about Buffalo, Wyoming, USA based industrialists Lament Cityscape. “The Old Wet” is the last in a three EP cycle, comprised of “The New Wet” and “The Pulsing Wet” and is the record that that accepts change is occurring and that fighting against it is futile, when the previous two EPs in this adventurous concept cycle examined the fight against change and transformation. This is a three track EP, so because it’s so short I’ll briefly describe each musical piece (there is a good reason I haven’t used the word song…)
The first track is entitled ‘A Rusting Moth’ and encompasses a slowly and malignantly building soundscape from a deceptively simple and gentle sounding piano riff before there feeds in a heavily distorted and engineered animalistic roar and the biggest drums I have ever heard – all supremely destructive bass drum and floor toms rattling my skull, with a bassline that has been transformed by distortion and fuzz into some kind of sinuously weaving poisonous killing machine and keyboards, guitar, bass and voice combining into one massively unstoppable juggernaut of pure sound that is aimed squarely between your immobilized, staring eyes. There are lyrics to this, but I’m fucked if I can hear them through the industrial degeneracy on display here. Rather splendid, actually.
The second piece is called ‘Among The Dead’ and is the most song-like entity on this recording, being as there are discernible lyrics and vocals among the utterly dour electronic sounds and drums used in exactly the same way Godflesh used to use them, not as rhythm instruments, but as the base propulsive force for the madness to build and for the music to assail your senses. Fucking hell, I have missed this style of industrial so bad – the style that sits squarely between metal and electronic music, gleefully raking in influences with both greedy robotic arms and shoving it into the titanium edged maw of its furnace and smelting and recasting them both into something that is shiny and new and ever closer to machinelike perfection. Hang on. The Borg. Lament Cityscape are the fucking Borg. You can’t fool me; you bunch of half-human drone scunners. I’ve set my weapons on a rotating modular frequency. Where’s your disturbingly pale and slippery yet still worryingly desirable Queen?
The final track is called ‘Coagulant’ and immediately reminds this jaded old hack and pretend music journalist of Nine Inch Nails as it combines more electronically enhanced vocal jabbering over a simplistic keyboard line (quite reminiscent of ‘La Mer’ by Trent and his bunch of strangely coiffed misfits, and the drums reminded me somewhat of “Industrial Complex”-era Nitzer Ebb) that repeats throughout the entire song overlaid with more of those propulsive, martial, organic drums and the seemingly omnipresent wall of sound that skirts the absolute edge of what could be considered music.
This EP is an extremely truncated Very Good Thing. I feel cheated because the three pieces on the EP are so fucking good I need more and I am prepared to open my fucking veins to make it happen. Musically, I detect Nine Inch Nails (very obviously the version of NIN around “The Downward Spiral” when Reznor was at his most drug-fuelled, insane and violent) mixed with the sheer percussive overload and power of Godflesh in their “Streetcleaner” incarnation, fused with the avant-garde drone of Swans and finally combined with the hard-edged version of “Land Of Rape And Honey”-era Ministry.
This record is not electronic industrial. It is not industrial rock. It is not industrial metal. It is not industrial mixed with anything. It is simply INDUSTRIAL. It is pure and it is fucking good and I am literally signing off this review and going on Lament Cityscape’s Bandcamp and buying all their records within the next twenty fucking seconds.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System has picked its jaw back up off the floor and wired the fucker shut. It also awards Lament Cityscape 9/10 for a bloody good EP, although a mark is deducted simply because there was not enough music on the record to sate my desire for their industrial aural hellscapes. That’ll teach ‘em to give me more next time. Ha!
“The Old Wet” (Full EP)
TRACKLISTING:
01. A Rusting Moth
02. Among The Dead
03. Coagulant
LINE-UP FOR THIS RECORDING:
Mike McClatchey
Seanan McCullough
David Small
Peter Layman
Lee Bartow
Live Drums, Additional Percussion And Additional Vocals by Ben Hirschfield
LINKS:
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