Acrimonious - Purulence
October 13 2009 at 12:43:21 AM
Behold a God! Having recognized the Dante quotation in the Acrimonious CD booklet, I started looking immediately for a fuckin’ e-text of
La Vita Nuova and was side-tracked instantaneously by some suck’s blog that appropriates lots of high lit with low obsessions, namely Amber Michaels – a wanton piece of strange mechanically sheathed in latex suits the color of tropical fruit. I don’t think Acrimonious has a Beatrice fixation. (And I’m not into latex.) But like our friend that “runs”
Hipogrifio Violentio knows, decontextualizing is a form of blasphemy that only registers with folks for whom letters still matter.
Letters mean everything to me. That’s why I find C.L.’s lyrics predictable and oddly puerile. The subject matter is wholly within “Religious Black Metal” confines, which means anyone with a semester of Augustine and some time spent aping Hebrew Bible’s meter could pop off a reasonable body-double. I never really want to read this shit anyway unless it’s by one of those DsO eggheads. I settle for the music and it’s a helluva lot more interesting than its lyrical content. The guitar tone is the halo-of-flies trope Hasjarl sleight-of-handed throughout
SRMC, which is to say it’s weightless and mastodonic, the contradiction serving to empower rather than flaw. Horrific and beautiful, always the two at once – like imagining a
Fast Times era Phoebe Cates naked save for a cloak of cow shit – the songs, especially the opening track, “Call to Disorder,” skirt the perforated line of repulsive majesty, the sort of shtick topic Columbia comp-lit kids pensively self-mutilate to while sucking back Two Buck Chuck.
But, me? I do it for the fuck of it. I’ve got no papers to write. No roundtable discussions to lead. Can’t imagine C.L. would want to be any part of that anyway. Marginalized brother-in-arms Kriss Hades spreads the love that dare not speak its name throughout the booklet in what appear to be graphite drawings I could have pulled off years ago had I stopped writing experimental short fiction for kicks and further cultivated my obsession with geometry, demons, reptiles. Like Tim Kittens’ necronomica accompanying the record of the decade, Hades’ art adds several dimensions to a genre that’s inevitably suffering a bout of understandable fatigue. That the music maker has enough panache to pull off a silly titled song like “A Star Within a Star” shows me Hades was no fool to put pencil to paper. What’s the saying? Oh, yeah: Illiud Latine dici non potest…
[Stewart Voegtlin]
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