Marie Ann Hedonia
Lunar Eclipse
Paul and Marie’s Country Kitchen
Baltimore artist Marie Ann Hedonia has put out a lot of music in a lot of styles; a quick survey of recent releases will turn up examples of modular exploration, instrumental abstract techno, chanteuse-flavoured electro-pop, manic hyperpop, and more esoteric and oddball sounds. Still, the latest EP Lunar Eclipse feels like something different again, working as a particularly oddball take on synthpunk and electro, delivered with a fair amount of aggression. “Aneska’s Song” marries whirling synth arpeggios and Hedonia’s alternately sardonic spoken vocals and furious screeches with peels of guitar and tense synth bass, ratcheting up tension that it steadfastedly refuses to resolve. “Husband Stitch” creates a lo-fi groove out of discarded percussion sounds and typewriter clacking rhythmics, not adhering to a traditional song structure, but rolling from section to section with an unnerving certainty. The grit and power of “Family Trauma” is directly commensurate with the deadly serious nature of it’s lyrics, as Hedonia outlines a particularly unstable childhood, her shouts and the detuned chug blasting with a deep primal anger, its ugliness a special kind of catharsis all its own. Given the difficulty of what the EP addresses, its probably fitting that it closes with “Malleus Maleficarum”, a bit of horror movie soundtracking complete with screams, as if to drive home the everyday terror of a lived experience.
Corpse Dust
Suffer
DKA Records
We can always count on DKA to source brand new EBM projects on the come up or established acts beginning to put their own spin on the genre, and the latter is very much the case with North Carolina’s Corpse Dust, who are moving away from a harsh death industrial and gabber tinged read on body music and into an arty and dramatic strain with new EP Suffer. The six full tracks on offer feature a mix of chewy EBM rhythms and a part darkwave, part synthpop, part minimal wave approach to vocal and synth melodies. The equanimity between all of these elements which is hit on opener “Suffer” is maintained nicely through the EP’s twenty minutes, keeping disaffection, melancholy and just a hint of aggression in balance throughout. Sole member Nathan Landolt’s wounded croon can be used to put an arch spin on extremity (“I will gouge out my own eyes just so I don’t have to see your face again”), or turn more bellicose on the gothic excess of “Torture Me”, which might remind fellow miserablists of Dancing Plague or Qual without ever sounding like it’s cribbing too heavily from them. With tight compositions and enough variety track to track while still keeping the project’s sound clearly in focus, Suffer‘s a very easy means of having a good bad time.
