Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Sick Thoughts-Deformation demo CS (2013)

I make an effort to post all sorts of music on Drug Punk, but Baltimore's Sick Thoughts is what I started it all for. Crude, lo-fi, loner rock that will never be popular among the masses. As usual with this sort of music, there's a crucial distinction between your records sounding like shit 'cause you're consciously aping a style, on one hand, and sounding like shit 'cause you're too poor and/or fucked up and/or ignorant to do otherwise, on the other. Sick Thoughts is definitively in the latter category, and kudos to this dood.

If you made it through that paragraph, you already have a pretty good sense of what Sick Thoughts sounds like. He's even cruder, however, than most of the lofi trash I post here: at several points on the tape, in fact, the guitar and drum(machine) are out of sync. My favorite track is "Something I don't Have": it opens with directionless tone, then the ram-bam-fuckyouma'am (almost) 4'4 time sleaze kicks in. Dood talk-sings like a drugged newscaster about "you and your bullshit," and I caught the drums sliding out of time at least twice. The song is so crude and slipshod it sounds like two tracks were mixed on top of each other without anyone noticing. "Ugly" continues the descent into wasted oblivion: choppy, clipped drumming and trashed guitar patterns partially mask the drunken burble-singing. "Ugly" is so crude, it's almost avant-garde at times. Fucking majestic.

 The blown-out 4-track (lack of) recording value and slurred vocals make for a grey, muddy porridge overall. This demo is the perfect soundtrack for drunken apathy, being depressed while zonked on speed, drinking too much cheap red wine too fast, yelling at your significant other when s/he is trying to help you out of your self-induced misery, and in general being a stupid dumbshit. I've done all of those activities, so I know what sounds good while executing said idiocies. This.

Make some bad decisions and get fucked to SICK THOUGHTS! Physical copies will be available at the end of July on Southpaw Records. Dood is apparently opening for Oblivians in August, so any drummers in the Bodymore area should help him out by playing. Stay tuned for more from this guy, which I'm hoping will be forthcoming very soon.

2 comments:

  1. Probably the best review I ever read, no lie. This music reminds me of the rawness & pure bare bones garage punk of Jay R. Some great stuff, thanks for getting it out there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks! Yeah, reminds me of early Reatards too. Hot stuff.

    ReplyDelete