Bestial Mouths
Dead Lines
Negative Gain Productions
Lynette Cerezo has been releasing records and performing within her Bestial Mouths project for seventeen years. Does that merit “veteran” status within the field of dark music? It’s a semantic question with no firm answer, of course, but one which comes to mind if you’ve tracked all six LPs, with new release Dead Lines coming three years after R.O.T.T. (inmyskin). By making some slight variations on Bestial Mouths’ sound, Dead Lines ironically brings the project’s strengths and larger legacy into sharper relief.
At first blush, Dead Lines doesn’t stray too far from its predecessors: the always arresting and hair-raising virtuoso vocals, the musical bombast, the thematic and visual extremity are all here in spades. But if you’re halfway familiar with Bestial Mouths’ dramatic and at times violent approach to goth and darkwave sounds, cagier moves made by Cerezo and long-time collaborator Brant Showers swiftly become apparent. “Shuttered” and “Conjure” rank as some of the most accessible pieces Bestial Mouths has ever released, perhaps not so much in terms of club readiness (though savvy DJs have long been able to massage Bestial Mouths into sets), but as sweeping compositions which hit cinematic portent and Steinman-esque choral excess, respectively. While less overt than those, the well spaced and place synth strings which tiptoe through the percussive sturm und drang of “Hiss” are the sorts of details which might’ve been lost in a noisier barrage on a previous record.
Flagging these moments in a record that is still as strident and bracing as Dead Lines raises the question of perspective; have changes actually occurred within Bestial Mouths, or have we longtime listeners simply better attuned ourselves to the aesthetic severity Cerezo has wielded for so long? Extremity for its own sake has never been Bestial Mouth’s remit, and there’s a clear purpose behind having martial percussion and klaxon-like vocals flood the zone on opener “Chord”. Is something as direct as an earnest AOC sample something which might have appeared on an early Bestial Mouths record? Perhaps not, but again this might be a question of perspective: that which has always been extreme perhaps seems less so in times of extremity.
To again take the historical long view, Bestial Mouths have weathered a slew of scene-wide sea change since they emerged without ever allowing club trends or flash in the pan micro-genres to sway them; it’s indeed hard to detect in Dead Lines any impetus for what shifts can be found beyond the project’s own internal momentum. Cerezo, thus, is finding new ways of sounding exactly like Bestial Mouths and nothing else, even if what that means in specific changes. Recommended.
