Mark Lanegan turns up on the album-closing “The Music Becomes a Skull” to gift it with an ominous vocal worthy of the song’s title. Everything is so densely layered, you keep discovering new sonic elements buried beneath the rush of brutally distorted guitars and clobbering percussion. Take “An Iteration,” which juxtaposes the woozy whoosh of Loveless with hammering black metal drums, before lifting off into light, beatific melody. Throughout the bracing Ultrapop, a dizzying array of genres whip by in a flurry-shoegaze, hardcore, post-punk, industrial music-all of it so blinding that it takes a good four listens just to get your head around it. The Armed are the sound of My Bloody Valentine getting into a fistfight with Refused in an out-of-control Gravitron. But as of this writing, HARAM is my favorite record of the year. There are still six months to go in 2021. On “Falling Out the Sky,” the production of which is a wonderfully bleary take on roots reggae, ELUCID drops the chilling juxtaposition, “Learned to swim in a pool where a boy drowned last year.” You don’t just listen to HARAM you sit with it. On “Scaffolds,” over an icy piano loop, woods raps, “A shred of truth is all a liar need/ but it all burn the same when the fire feed.” The duo’s affectless delivery has been the asset of every Armand Hammer record to date, but it feels even more apt here, as they stack up a catalog of culturally fraught images and leave it to the listener to decipher them. Pairing with the California producer The Alchemist, woods and ELUCID interrogate all of the things we revere. So it’s fitting that their latest-and, arguably, best-LP, HARAM is about the slipperiness of meaning. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to trackĪpplying any kind of set meaning to an Armand Hammer record is always tricky, because Armand Hammer records are never really about one thing.
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March 2023
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