Thrill Jockey / LP/CD/DL / 2024
I had a strange dream just this other day. I observed a dog, of large breed, (a Neapolitan Mastiff, I used to have one in my family) running around a field filled with colorful Chrysanthemums. The beast was playful, even though it didn’t have an inch of skin left on its body. The heavy robot made of flesh touched the ground with its paws creating vibrations which traveled in waves to the limbs. They were penetrating up through the soles of the feet. From where they were, of course, picked up by the appropriate receptors, as their name implies ;) And so on. This album is exactly like that. Like a dream that no tin foil hat’ish www fortune-telling dictionary can explain.
There’s something extremely soothing (mommy issues alert :D) and almost mystical about the juxtaposition of extreme, I would say – pounding (love forever)- with a female voice. Like Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota) and Crissy Wolpert (Assembly of Light Choir) before her (albums featuring them are my favorites from The Body the further are works from Full of Hell and Uniform), Dis Fig takes the lead of the destruction. Sounding seemingly delicate and fragile, the vocals have the ability to swell with emotion and fail to fit in the room. Orchards of a Futile Heaven penetrates the skin and creeps underneath, overtaking control over the neural conduction. Hail diplomacy. Cheers to synesthesia. Cheers to confusion of the senses.
I associated Dis Fig mainly with Mr. Kevin Martin, however, despite Bugs’ unquestionable pull for heavyweights, the impact of The Body is rather like a bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, compared to the fireworks explosion! The differences I’m mentioning here are of course of genre & absolutely not one of quality. Lee and Chip emphasized in the announcing press release, that they wanted to kind of blow up the scale of measuring the power of sound pressure on the psyche into the atmosphere – which they succeeded in doing, probably because it’s hard to impress them in this matter. Felicia, on the other hand, took it as a point of honor to be a counterbalance and to bring balance, but she is happily drawn to the dark side.
Let me use a colloquialism here: there is no more to say, you need to put on the headset. And again. And again. And do nothing else in the process. This is not a soundtrack you can listen to while riding your bike or doing the dishes. Well, unless you want to get hit by a car, or break all the plates. The assumptions of the whole trinity of creators highlighted above resulted in the album of the year, at the end of fucking February. There’s no more to say, you should jump in and drown.
released February 23, 2024
Marta Podoska