With the release of Orion/Mother fast approaching, Alex Zhang Hungtai has returned with another single. ‘American Burial’ takes inspiration from Tobe Hooper’s 1982 classic Poltergeist, both in terms of the film’s narrative and the wider circumstances of its filming. “[The movie is] about a white family moving into a newly purchased home but the house was haunted because it was built on ‘Indian burial ground’,” Zhang explains. “Trivia: the skeleton corpses that float up from the muddy waters were real corpses cuz it was cheaper to buy unclaimed bodies than to build from scratch multiple skeletons. Hollywood logic! The actors did not know it was real. But perhaps all of us come to this land to bury something, consciously or not. Buildings burn, people die, and new buildings are built over it as if nothing ever happened.”

The image is a fitting one for a release concerned with the ways the past exists within the present, fragments perpetually returning no matter how deep they have been interred beneath the earth. But while other artists might get caught up with this excavation, or else put their energies into covering over the skeletons before they make themselves at home in our lives, Alex Zhang Hungtai aims to do something different. Welcome the past into the present, but not without purpose. Because that which has gone can be broken down and repurposed. From the scraps of the past, a new life might rise.

Photo by Nastya Bezrukova

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The compliation is pleasingly varied, offering a wide range of styles, all linked by the (admittedly subjective) ‘weird’ tag. Some of the songs, such as Goose Lake’s ‘Roses Hallowed’ and Bong Sample’s ‘Wintertime, and the Living is Breezay’, are just plain creepy, but there are other ways in which the collection maintains a sense of foreboding. Camembert’s lo-fi garage rock is immediately followed by Forrest McGregor’s vocal driven folk, the succession from scuzzy guitars to gentle acoustic strumming serving to heighten the sense of strangeness. Similarly Taiwan’s lovely summer jam is followed by the perfectly titled ‘Insane’ by Planet Space; You get that bizarre feeling of reluctance or fear upon seeing or hearing something normal out of place. The non-weird tracks become weird as part of the collective whole, that horror movie effect of placing brightness or happiness completely out of context, the way a stalker wearing a grinning clown mask is weird or the way Clockwork Orange’s ‘Singing in the Rain’ scene is weird. This set of songs is “Lynchian”, they get under your skin, sometimes for inexplicable reasons, and you sense that even when being familiar or ‘normal’ they are probably just pretending.

If sinister or unsettling music isn’t your thing, don’t be put off. After all  this is a compilation from 17 artists and each deserves to be taken on their own merit. Yes, the order creates a sense of strangeness but the Taiwan song really is a great chilled out jam and Wand’s ‘Mt. St. Helens’ is a fast-paced, upbeat folk song. You can take away two things from this release: a damn fine album and a whole host of new bands to explore further.

Weird Pop (?) from the Peace Country is available for free at the Peace Country Diaspora Bandcamp page, and be sure to keep an eye on future releases/shows by PCD on their website.

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