Recorded as though destined for the void, just like everything else. But with its endless invention and wry rage, Neat Defeat is also a statement of opposition. A small rally against the encroaching doom. If or when someone hears it is almost besides the point. It’s there, it’s waiting. Why not lend a ear?

Regal Murk has taken on a big challenge in 2022. Each month will see the release of a brand new EP, a year-long project that will eventually culminate in a full-length album in 2023. “Generally speaking the project is made in defiance of death and as an attempt to not practice resignation,” Schwartz explains. A statement to be read in both its literal existential meaning and as a more general metaphor for what life asks of us in these times. A refusal surrender to a culture which encourages the deadening of creativity. As Schwartz continues:

It is fundamentally just an account, a record, or a journaling of sorts. A small logs of attempts, to keep honest and active. Some receipts I can refer to in order to prove I’m not exclusively a consumer. And to that end I continue entering an assortment of melodic phrases into a blank word document as though they are passwords that will unlock my life.

The tone is set from the first EP, Dead Dream Team which releases today via Bandcamp. Opener ‘if it ain’t the fire it’s the flood’ arrives with its stark tones, playing like a condemned man finding curious humour in his predicament.

if it ain’t the fire it’s the flood
two things that you can get enough of

if it ain’t defiled check again
but I have not been to heaven, maybe never, an prospectus

‘Never Ask If…’ might be brighter but its rhythms hide a naked loneliness, its consuming preoccupation with death a nod to Ernest Becker’s Escape From Evil, which Schwartz cites as an influence, before the clamorous ‘Peculiar Mostly’ arrives with its dense drama. The tracks are world apart in sound yet very much tied within the Regal Murk aesthetic. Attuned to both individual experience and societal forces, and furthermore how these inform one another to drive the inhospitable conditions of modern living.

Dead Dream Team is out now and you can get it from the Regal Murk Bandcamp page, as is February and March’s EPs, Without the Luxury of Perpetual Lamentation EP and awash EP.

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With its lo-fi textures and intimate delivery, the Regal Murk sound is rooted in the traditions of bedroom pop. But to confine it to the genre is to ignore its sheer vision. And there is plenty of room for invention, as Neat Defeat clocks in at twenty-seven songs which sprawl out between the poles of folk, indie rock and ambient styles. The frantic energy of ‘magic is dead’ is worlds away from the downbeat, Dusted-esque simmer of opener ‘fresh hell (heaven is a prison part 1 or 2)’, while ‘the beautiful uncut hair of graves (a trifle)’ has all the offbeat charm of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. The experimental ‘voicemail’ interludes combine push right out into ambient/drone territory, their creepily automated voices pressing through like hauntings.

It is this mood which links the eclectic mix across the record. A blend of playfulness, pessimism and fury, casting Schwartz as a kind of self-aware, self-hating preacher at the end of the world. This might present as tongue-in-cheek gloom, as typified on the wonderfully titled ‘precambrian days (manichaean nights)’—”You believe the earth was made by some bored cunt in seven days,” goes the opening line, “now sacrifices must be made”—as well as a more defiant tone that challenges the society in its sights. Take ‘Archduke’, a song rising from the humming stillness of an empty room, sitting within a quiet fondness but soon reaching out with a kind of desperate plea.

dead i stand, demonstrably damned
the heart i need was hidden inside cut my guts out
wear them with pride and desert your homeland

In many ways, the story of the album suits its overall mood. Recorded as though destined for the void, just like everything else. But with its endless invention and wry rage, Neat Defeat is also a statement of opposition. A small rally against the encroaching doom. If or when someone hears it is almost besides the point. It’s there, it’s waiting. Why not lend a ear?

Neat Defeat is out now and available from the regal murk Bandcamp page.

The post Regal Murk – Neat Defeat appeared first on Various Small Flames.