[Cover art by sole band member Evan Daniele]
I had a roommate in college who would regularly say, “I’m gonna spray noodles out your dome” after a few drinks (i.e. shoot your brains out of the back of your beautifully shaped head). Now, this was all in jest and stemmed from a hip hop song he was a big fan of, but sadly, I can no longer recall which one it was. That said, as this funny little ginger continued levying laughable “threats” at us, it became a phrase a group of friends all threw around and remains lodged in my brain today. In fact, I made him birthday cookies in the shape of one dude shooting another one, and I even placed noodles on the end of the pan covered in red icing. “Why bring this up?” you astutely ask as one of our roughly 63-year-old average readers, who has drunk away all of their school memories. Great question, grampy!
I might be slightly inebriated while writing this, but Nefarious Scintillations is straight up hammered.
After a very Cynic-friendly intro, “Pestilent Hints of Darkened Malodorous Vibrations” hits these notes at one point that sound like its attempting to throw drunken haymakers but hitting a wall and being met with a cartoon WHAMMY (complimentary). The very brief “Sickeningly Vague Anatomical Silhouettes” is wobbly as hell, like it’s in the midst of an intoxicated brawl, and notes are being held back in the same way someone might choke down some puke to try and sneak past the doorman. Naturally, that can only work for so long, so the song eventually spews everywhere like that one scene in Drag Me To Hell. You know what I’m talking about? If you’re a real cool guy, you do. Then there’s that slow part in “Horrifying Glimpses of Inconceivably Demented Cityscapes” that sounds like a few loose tendons trying to hold the slowly sloughing skin of a DUI moron’s elbow together as he crawls across the median.
There’s a bunch of other neat stuff here, too. Some of the shorter songs, like “Spontaneous Recollections of Unwitnessable Atrocity,” sound absolutely frantic, and much of “Swollen Torsos Adorned with Pustulating Hexagonal Crania” has the nervous energy of 50 tiny children at their first swim lesson. Then there are those rare moments of leads. The one in “Horrifying Glimpses of Inconceivably Demented Cityscapes” is a meth nightmare, while the one in the aforementioned “Swollen Torsos…” sounds like it plans to wear a suit and tie to dinner in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Ultimately, my guess would be the bass will be the deciding factor for many listeners here. It will either have you feeling like a grizzly hunting salmon, entranced by its slippery nature as you do your best to wrap your maw around it; or, maybe, it will be slipping and sliding in and out so much as to be off-putting. Either way, this one is a writhing, wriggly little thing that at the very least would capture Gollum’s attention.
