The Los Angeles group’s second album is a soul-scouring emotional purge that sets a new bar for screamo—and confirms the genre as one uniquely suited to a year as harrowing as this one.
Nuvolascura’s As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination, which the Los Angeles band recorded in December 2019, sounds like an emotional purge—an attempt to shake off the end of a bad year, a bad decade, maybe even a bad life, one that frontperson Erica vividly describes as a “lab test gone wrong.” (Nuvolascura don’t use last names; they’re severe like that). But the group’s second album now joins a growing list of groundbreaking releases that have turned screamo into 2020’s most vital and prescient form of punk rock, one especially suited for a time when being stuck in our homes might have us all feeling like screamo singers—alternately paralyzed and powered by nervous energy, looking for any outlet for release.
Even among the leading figures of modern screamo, Nuvolascura remain a uniquely inscrutable act, refusing to provide the typical peace offerings of post-rock expanse, metalcore musculature, or clean vocal melody. The 21 minutes of As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination are split into 13 tracks, but they might easily have been broken down into twice as many. Songs that last barely 100 seconds still function as collage, flipping the smallest possible fragments of math-y dissonance, ascetic post-hardcore, technical metal, and caustic Midwestern emo before moving onto the next riff. Almost none of it follows a typical song structure. Instead, their songs play out like cinematic knife fights—fluid, intuitive, and carefully scripted in ways that defy comprehension. The carnivalesque tapping riffs of “Pixel Vision Anxiety” might be their very own Kill Bill: a celebration of hyperbolic, stylized brutality.
Though also produced by Jack Shirley, Nuvolascura’s self-titled debut bore the dank, claustrophobic ambience of the DIY spaces where they had honed their sound. The heightened fidelity of As We Suffer has emboldened Nuvolascura as an instrumental unit, one more willing to take risks with technical dazzle and dynamics. The clean guitar figures that introduce the album are Nuvolascura’s one nod toward a traditional post-hardcore arc, preparation for an inevitable full-band crash. But when that does come, Nuvolascura play so punishingly loud that it initially sounds wrong—at least until “As the Mask Slips” maintains the same crushing intensity for its duration. Erica begins “Disguised in Scintillations” cursing her depression, sounding like she’s ducking behind the drum riser before rushing towards the mic seconds later: “Break locks, walk down train tracks,” she rages. “Burn, pine, perish for a moment of euphoria.” The song doesn’t outwardly advocate for burning a LAPD cruiser, but it also doesn’t not. The relatively quiet moments feel like a band in a state of shock, surveying an eerie absence of violence—erratic Morse code bleeping, hollowed-out arpeggios wafting like smoke after the American Football house gets burnt to cinders, the clean-tone guitars of “We’ll Never Know the True Extent of Our Loss” closing As We Suffer with two minutes of bloodletting.
At the center, Erica is constantly on the verge of becoming a casualty in the asymmetrical war of modern life. “Keep your distance/Long for connection/Patterns emerge/If I smile you’ll fuck me/Wear all black/Avoid eye contact,” she shrieks on “Apyrexy.” When hell isn’t other people, it’s a prison of isolation or self-medication: “Remember when I didn’t need 50 pills to function? Remember when my body turned against me?” This is all impossible to discern from the singing itself, and the band’s political beliefs are best discerned from the lengthy syllabus of charitable causes in the album credits. Yet As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination is inherently and timelessly political in the way all screamo is, where anarchic destruction has to come before the message can be absorbed. “Let the chips fall where they may/I’ll never have faith that anything will be OK,” Erica screams midway through, a timely pledge of solidarity to everyone done with trying to settle for “OK.”
View the original article here
0 comments:
Post a Comment