(2020) Chronophage - th'pig'kiss'd album


Review:
Chronophage’s songs are a tangled snarl of complications, composed in good part composed of agitated jitter-splattering guitars and antic drums, but also touched with the lyrical in vocal parts that unfold with a cerebral sort of ease. The slash and twitch and onslaught of their songs might put you in mind of the Fall, the Swell Maps, Fire Engines or, more recently, Protomartyr, but the nervy, baroque singing calls more ornate post-punkers to mind, Microdisney and the Monochrome Set, for example. They are easy to enjoy but hard to get a handle on, partly because their sound varies so much when the singers switch off; in this second full length, two singers switch off on vocals, the guitarist Parker Allen and the bass player Sarah Beames, and the band sounds very different depending on who’s in front. Consider, the opener “Siren Far Away,” one of the ones where Allen sings, kicking off in a razory, stop-start guitar riff with a certain terse, angular swagger. But this is not one of those staccato, pointillist punk bands. There’s an ease and a gravitas in Allen’s hollow-voiced baritone, and in the reedy keyboard melody that makes you think of Blue Orchids. The songs flow as much as they rattle. They do both at the same time. It’s a bit disorienting. Beames has an entirely different quality, though equally compelling. In “Any Junkyard Dream,” for instance, she alternates between a deadpan, Kim Gordon-ish chant and a dream-pop-ish tunefulness, as a rickety mesh of punk sound goes off behind her. Her “Heartstone,” is the album’s least frantic, most melodic cut, a gentle rain of indie guitar and maybe a melodica frame her voice. The cut picks up a drum beat about halfway through but remains fragile and delicate. With no lyric sheet and mix that’s not completely suited for pondering verse, it’s hard to say what the songs are about, but even the fragments you catch seem above average. You might enjoy unpacking the layers of a cut like “Siren Far Away,” that tosses off phrases like “Vision in a schizoid brain/to see the night again,” or the verse in “Passageway” that offers to “carry you into your dreams, transporting your nascent corpse,” but the music crashes full speed ahead regardless, and that’s fun, too. All of which is to say that Th’pig’kiss’d works very well as a spike-y post-punk album but also seems to have more to it than most. It’s sharp and smart and somewhat puzzling at first, but that’ll just make you listen to it some more, until the odd parts turn into your favorites.





Tracklist:
01 - Siren Faraway
02 - Abzurdity
03 - Passageway
04 - Any Junkyard Dreams
05 - Destiny Falls
06 - Heartstone
07 - Talking Android
08 - Animated Rose
09 - At Last I Am Run Dry
10 - Name Story


Media Report:
Genre: indie-rock, post-punk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits