(Super-Extended Rock Critic Codeine Trance Mix)

I haven’t figured out everything I need to say about this record yet; I usually have an album or two that I struggle with every year and this time, it’s because these six minutes are simply too fucking dense to parse on even the twentieth or thirtieth listen. Perhaps it’s because these sounds are the aural embodiment of how I’m feeling lately; next Monday, I’m heading in for my second operation in less than a month to try to fix some serious health problems. The ferocious, grisly sounds on this EP mirror the recent horror of my body—spitting hemorrhaged blood into the sink, looking at MRIs of cranial bone erosion, coughing up unidentifiable masses of solid organic matter that are the shape and size of the first two knuckles of my little finger. My body, at the moment, exists somewhere between the abject and the Kristevan sense of the other; this EP falls along similar lines, both alienated and alienating, ostracized and ostracizing. It is the other side of pop music, the deformed thalidomide twin revealing (and revering) the ugliness which is glossed over by production values and marketing strategies. To understand what it sounds like, imagine running an industrial meatgrinder at full power until it starts to smoke and rattle, until it breaks down completely—and fill it with anguished yelps and screams. It sounds like warfare—the sound of machine guns and dying soldiers caught in concertina wire. It is openly hostile and abrasive; it is guitar-driven and grinding. It is musical dermabrasion for boring ideas expressed in dull ways by uninteresting people and in a decade in which some punk bands have essentially become collaborators, the musical equivalent of the Vichy French (and still more seem to aspire to that capitulation), Some Girls defiantly throw potato mashers whilst engaged in door-to-door partisan combat. This is, effectively, musical terrorism in any sense that matters. It is also the only logical response to contemporary music—the proper reaction to blandness is a sprint to an extreme, to seek out new terrain and leave the old world behind and the new ground unmapped. Let others follow at their own risk; whether they also find the way is irrelevant because they will find something new regardless. In many ways, Some Girls occupies similar music space as other seditious musical minds like Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Archie Shepp, and Ornette Coleman—not in the musical style, but the approach, in the sense that something more is going on or could be happening and that ignoring what is known and staring into the abyss may reveal exactly what that is while teetering on the edge of chaos. These songs spill over with dizzyingly complex musical ideas; like a reservoir well past capacity. Rather than explore an idea or two, Some Girls throws a mass of concepts into a blender and liquefies them beyond recognition, transforming them into a corrosive substance which will eat through steel and concrete, and then plays the result faster than I ever thought humanly possible. The lyrics aren’t what I expect from grindcore or hardcore; they’re simply too literary, using near-rhymes and alliteration to craft images and borrow ideas from both prose and poetry. There is also humor here, although it’s hanging from a gallows as Wes spits out lines like "Yea, well, fate is fucking romantic if you can get off on failure." Like most of the albums that I love, this EP requires just a little more engagement and commitment; it is not easy to absorb and it is not catchy in any traditional way (we aren’t really talking about verse-chorus construction here). This record requires that you dedicate yourself to it a bit, that you put aside what you think you know about music and engage it on its own terms—it draws you onto its own ground for the fight, which is a dangerous place for you to be and an immediate disadvantage. However, you will learn from the beating this record dishes out, even though it’s only six minutes long, and is not for the faint of heart or for people who have weak stomachs. You will learn, you will expand your musical horizons, and you will grow. (Side note: While it’s true that other bands have created similar records—Napalm Death, Universal Order Of Armageddon, The Locust, et. al., just to name a few—Some Girls happens to do it exceedingly well. ‘Nuff said. For now.)