Goldicot Culls The Week - XV

by Goldicot

Tue, 22 Jul 2025

Read in 4 minutes

Load me a demon lung

weekly

What was supposed to be a weekly column of timely reports on current events has become a sporadic smattering of recollections of bygone days with month-long latency. Silver linings on dark clouds be what they are, there is freedom in failure, and an infinity of gestation awaits in the wake of a missed deadline. Perhaps this ephemeragraphy grows greater in import with increased temporal distance. Or perhaps the limits of a dimension are constant, no matter your relation. The important part: listen to music. Here’s some ideas.

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This is the kind of album that punches you in the face, and then you make excuses for it. “It’s good in the gym!” “It’s meat and potatoes!” “It’s just good, dumb fun!” Wrong. It’s knuckles indenting the front of your skull. Do not apologize for it; it will not apologize to you. There’s anecdotal intellectualizations about the intersection of technicality and brutality, and how they coalesce into pure, teeth-gritting drive, but that’s not important right now. What is important is the next blast of adrenaline, the next push from the blood pump, the next full vein and the next punch. Actually, it’s all more sophisticated than that – each song details a different post-Chernobyl geography and its consequences, metaphorically transforming the perpetual musical violence into a kind of canvas for manmade disasters. There’s that anecdotal intellectualization again – still packs a punch.

https://youtu.be/BsKwwgfWX3Q?si=v-E0K4NuXc-P6o9k

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Cliches to run in fear from include describing music as cinematic or visual, and in doing so devaluing the sound itself as merely a vessel for a different sense to project upon. And yet, true music renders entire worlds whole within the mind, architectures and histories familiar and alien at once appear, as if you have entered into them, and not them into you. Aspiral contains multitudes with ease, rousing fictional realms through anthem, penning epic saga through verse, and you yourself are the destined adventurer through chorus and song. Epica’s fluidity between symphonic score of unreal vista and catchy fist-pumping rock ballad is remarkable, striking an impossibly deft tone of delightful exuberance and propulsive determination. Now to drop the artifice and admit: I didn’t know symphonic metal could be this good and I will absolutely be listening to more and earlier Epica in the future. Perhaps the highest value-return an album can give you is a whole discography in exchange.

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Fluid industry, the flows of liquid alloys, the curves of arcing joints, a cascade in unison of gears in harmony, releasing color and light in timed vibrant explosions. Ostensibly some kind of industrial rock, 45 Pounds is unlike anything else around it, paradoxically ripping dance floor groove out of industrial rigidity, driven by Sam Pickard’s jaw-dropping drumwork, dizzyingly complex but immediately compulsive, simultaneously playing heavy-thudding mechanical punk and island Cuban rhythmic bliss. This alone would be worth the price of admission, but it gets better. These unbelievable beats furiously generate power underneath strange, simple melodies, so rudimentary they sound more like a single yawn from a distant siren, or a monolithic squeak from a massive aged pendulum, or the slow back-and-forth swing from a rusted-out childhood. In combination, and perhaps influenced by the album cover, 45 Pounds has a vibe completely original to itself, shadows cast by falling dust on behemoth machinery in the slowly glancing arc of the sun across the blissfully ignored fields of generators. The result is a musical optical illusion, where you insist you think you know the dots aren’t moving as they dance all over you, where you know the lines aren’t bending as you feel dizziness set in, and when you know the shapes aren’t moving toward you as you fall into them. This thing is absolutely brilliant, and indescribably fresh. Check it out.