Following Sam Pink’s lead, the record is brutal and dark, the instrumentation allowing the violent alienation and dissatisfaction of his words to soar. ‘False-Bottomed Coffins’ opens with an introduction to the album’s themes, with self-consciousness disguised as misanthropy, caring too deeply masked as blank indifference, and the constant pressure of these repressed emotions pressing on the crown of the skull, like a volcano about to blow. ‘I Own You and You Own Me’ continues this, opening with a pretty clear sentiment—”Two types of eye contact: none and fuck you”—navigating a depressive state that feels like “all there is inside your skull is melted plastic.”  Again, the narrator is tangled within their own thoughts, their attempts at freeing themselves only furthering the bind, a predicament communicated with a Wallacean, inside-my-head tone.

“Living as three people: one inside your head saying hateful/depressed/hopeless shit, another as the one inside your head trying to deal with the first one, and the third one as visible to the outside world, trying to keep people from noticing any trace of the first two.

That moment when you start to have a little feeling/emotion and you look back on having just acted out of not having any feelings/emotions.”

‘Bonus Magnets for my Brain’ meanders in a way that could be relaxed or ominous or both, the instrumentation threatening to bubble over but never quite managing the energy required. Hyper-self-consciousness, banal everyday observations and macabre imagery coalesce into something at once relatable and unhinged, where lines like “The feeling that everything is obvious in a way that’s embarrassing” are followed by “Making friends with the firing squad.” ‘One Night, Your Pillow Will Swallow Your Head’ and ‘Making Friends With the Firing Squad’ furthers this feeling, growing increasingly morbid and strange as horror, paranoia and deep-seated anger make violent ends inevitable—either the narrator will be destroyed or else the entire world around them. All the while, a slow creeping dread advances, looming.

“Talking to the lone lobster left in the tank at the supermarket to calm down and feel connected.
Talking shit to the firing squad.
Smiling wide as you allow your latest ghost to slowly come out of you in front of others, unseen.
Smiling wide as you allow someone else’s latest ghost to go into you as if you earned it.
And you have.
You have you have you have!”

Both this nameless dread and the hope of escaping it fuel the entire collection, and these forces manifest themselves as monsters on ‘No Way to Defeat It but Jump In / No Way to Help It but Let It Die.’ The dread is “A monster with a head made of a hundred toothless mouths (No way to defeat it but jump in),” and the hope “A monster with a head full of knives that never dies, just stumbles around shrieking (And no way to help it but let it die).” Within this tale of suffering, a relationship is painted, though one so fiercely held that it becomes its own form of torment, the narrator’s performing a verbal self-flagellation as penance for their perceived inadequacy, lashing themselves into nothingness in lieu of any better ideas. After all there’s no way to help it but let it die.

Check out the striking video from Wild Child Studios below:

Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats plays like the fever dream manifesto of the archetypal Disillusioned Kid, someone who, instead of shooting up his school or oxycontin, decided to let the tirade out as language. Stinging and self-loathing and strange, the narrator is sick and tired of a phony world and phony people yet dying of cold within this self-imposed exile. The record then, feels like one final, fatal gesture—self-immolation just to feel that half-second of warmth before the pain sets in, just to see your own blazing reflection in eyes of the faces around you.

Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats is out now and you can get it from the Be Softly Bandcamp page. Find out more about Sam Pink on the Lazy Fascist Press website.

The post Be Softly / Sam Pink – Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats appeared first on Various Small Flames.

— Noah Cicero, The Human War

There’s a push and pull at work at the heart of Noah Cicero’s debut novella, equal and opposite forces born of the distant, nebulous nature of global events. Collected into his debut 2003 release alongside two short stories, The Human War follows twenty-something Mark on the night the invasion of Iraq began (“Two hours till war. / It’s six o’clock. Bush said at eight, people must die”). War is not just imminent but live on TV—the journalistic speculation whetting appetites, Bush’s rhetoric something like the tagline of a trailer, the idea of war familiar enough to invoke anger yet abstract and removed enough to feel unreal, something possible to ignore.

In his lower-class existence in Youngstown, Ohio, Mark finds himself paralysed by this dichotomy, unsure whether to scream in protest or forget himself in cheap drink and empty sex. Whether to join the fight just to shock some life into his nerves and bones. As such, the book operates on two speeds or levels. The terse, tumbling prose captures Mark’s awareness of all this line by line, confusion and disillusionment and anger against the futility of it all, while zoomed out the structure of the narrative is a glacial, directionless slide. While internally thrashing and grasping in search of answers, it translates to nothing more than inertia, one pleasureless drift through strip joints and bars, sharing the company of friends he doesn’t know and girls he both loves and doesn’t.

“When I die, there better be a heaven, because I want an answer for this.”

The Human War is out now on Fugue State Press (US) and Snowbooks (UK). Noah Cicero’s latest work, the poetry collection, Bipolar Cowboy, was released in 2015 on Lazy Fascist Press.

The post Reading Notes: Noah Cicero – The Human War appeared first on Various Small Flames.