#ever never

[dustedmagazine]

Workers Comp — S-T (Ever/Never)

Workers Comp raises a raucous, twanging ruckus on this self-titled debut, spitting home-spun poetry about dead-end jobs off the back end of a bucking blues-vamp. Disappointments are rife, the struggle is real, but it’s always music o’clock somewhere, and that’s something to celebrate.

A stripped-down trio, Workers Comp marshals the talents of Deadbeat Beat’s Joshua Gillis on guitar, Luke Reddick of Divorce Horse on bass and Ryan McKeever of Staffers on drums. Fair warning, however, the new band sounds not much at all like any of its three predecessors. Instead, it evokes the humorous wallop of the Strapping Field Hands, and the drunken rave-ups of Hootenany-era Replacements. This country viewed through a cracked mirror, amped up and agitated, but also extremely articulate.

The disc starts with its honkey-tonk-i-est track, the Cash-worshiping “When I’m Here,” which starts in profanity and an aborted count, and goes from there. Gills drawls in an uncertain croak, but the lines include some doozies (My favorite: “Labor day in Baltimore/that’s time and a half/planting flowers on a plot between a joke and a laugh/if irony were ecstasy we’d rave until we die, eating bubblegum for breakfast or McDonald’s apple pie.” ) Indeed, the combination of absolute commitment and sly subversion might remind you of Ryan Davis.

It’s a good first track, but also a bit of a head fake. The rest of the songs run more to rock than roadhouse, though of a rootsy, blues-fired, early 1960s variety. And, these dear reader, are the good ones. “Pick and Choose,” rolls like a semi-truck on a steep down-grade, driver frantically looking for an off-ramp. “High on the Job,” maybe the disc’s best cut, flares out of a box drum cadence, its blues riff jutting off towards the horizon, as the singer spouts poetry. “Tripping hard in the parking lot of a quick stop on the go/feeling like an open mic at a lip-sync funeral,” drones Gillis, and it make sense in a lurid, trance-y way.

Gillis sings most of the cuts, but Luke Reddick takes over vocals on “Peel Away” and “It’s Fine” have a noticeably different tone to them, less sardonic, more anthemic and with the singing coming from a different place in the mix. In addition, Anna McClelland stops by to sing “Never Have I Ever,” slipping a bit of sweetness into Workers Comp’s bleak, hyperverbal dystopias, and it makes you think about what a different band they’d be with her as the singer. Still furious, still clanging hard, still letting loose an ecstatic “Whooo!” at unpredictable intervals, but lots more pop.

The music is consistently excellent, rough-edged and full of heart, but brainy enough to catch you up short. I played “Gilt Rigs” for a member of the family and asked him if he heard any Dire Straits in the guitars. “It’s like Dire Straits played by the Fall,” he said, and if you want to know what that sounds like, get on Workers Comp.

Jennifer Kelly

[roseworth]

i think theres this idea in the general public that the "best" fanfic gets turned into real books like 50 shades of grey. but the truth is that the best fanfic can never be published as an actual book because its intricately woven into the canon material so its inseparable even if you change the names

[foldingfittedsheets]

Back in 2017 I signed up for one of the Cards Against Humanity sillies and did their Cards Against Humanity Saves America. Basically they were like fuck Tr*mp and his border wall and used the funds from the campaign to buy land and to make all 150,000 contributors part owners of said land across the US/Mexico border.

It was fun and silly and I got a little certificate.

Today I got an email that Elon Musk illegally annexed that land for SpaceX and that CAH are suing him over it. So possibly I’ll get like $100 if they manage to win a lawsuit and stick it to Musk. It’s like even more bang for my original buck.

[sylvies-kablooie]

i do unironically think the best artists of our generation are posting to get 20 notes and 3 reblogs btw. that fanfic with like 45 kudos is some of the best stuff ever written. those OCs you carry around have some of the richest backstories and worldbuilding someone has ever seen. please do not think that reaching only a few people when you post means your art isn't worth celebrating.

[vaindumbass]

love all the cute dungeon meshi pride art but chilchuck would not be caught dead wearing any sort of pride merch. you think that man is going to give out any personal information? for free?????

[stuckinapril]

”match my freak” match my melancholy. be nostalgic about a past you weren’t even that happy in. find something to be haunted about throughout every second of your day

[dendrochronologies]

maya angelou saying the funniest thing anyone has ever said about editing, which i can never let myself forget EVER AGAIN [x]

[sabellart]

“I think I understand a whole lot better than you do”

[cracklewink]

table for one

[dustedmagazine]

Al Karpenter/Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante — The Forthcoming/S-T (Ever Never)

The Forthcoming by Al Karpenter

Al Karpenter swamps threads of song in seething banks of noise and dissonance.  You find yourself focusing on blaring surface noise, while sense and melody percolates somewhere underneath.  It is very modern in that there is too much going on and you are always distracted, always struggling to find the point, but you know it’s there.  If it doesn’t make sense that’s on you. 

This pair of releases allows for fervid collaboration, across and within the noise experimental genre.  The Forthcoming supplements the Spanish outfit’s live line-up—Álvaro Matilla, Mattin, Marta Sainz and Enrique Zaccagnini—with like minded samplers, warpers and droners: Sunik Kim, Dominic Coles and Triple Negative.  The self-titled brings in medieval futurists of CIA Debutante, just off their Siltbreeze outing Willow, Down, reviewed here a month or so ago (“The sound is immersive and disturbing, noises like factory equipment clashing with eerie Suicide-like beats.”).  You can’t really call one disc a solo album and the other a joint effort since both gain intrigue and unpredictability from outside influences. 

But let’s do it anyway  The Al Karpenter disc dissolves and reforms across six tracks, now muttering imprecations over inchoate punk noise (“The Forthcoming”), now approaching bass thumping electro-dance clarity (“A Brand New Brontophobia”), now disintegrating into incantatory chaos (“Poison Sun”), depending on who is involved.  The title track, aided by London’s Triple Negative, launches florid arias out of a chaotic mesh of guitars and drums, where the instruments natter on towards their own ends, unconnected by time signature or key.  A shimmery, shoegaze-y instrumental break tips into lyricism but slides out of true, an antic beat erupting from it like an irregular heart in flight.  Contrast that with the clean, driving agitation of “A Brand New Brontophobia,” where Sunik Kim guests.  A jittering, techno bass rumbles, clipped onslaughts of snare-like drum machines rattle, as Mattin murmurs and croons.  “Happy B-Day,” one of the cuts with Dominic Coles, opens giddily with keyboard before cutting all the way back to guitar notes and murmured threat (“I’m not afraid to kill or die”), alternately minimal and maximal.  “Drood (Can You Hear Me Now?)” offers the clearest distillation of Al Karpenter’s haunted eclecticism, layering vertiginous synths over muttered alienation. 

S/T by Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante

The album with CIA Debutante also delivers dystopic poetry but couched more rhythmically and with the agitation of punk rock.  “Born Dead” lumbers like a giant mechanical beast, its beat slow and inexorable, giving shape to masses of guitar feedback and intermittent shouts of the title.  “Public Scaffolding” bangs more frantically, as a voice rages against income inequality.  It slips into static but doesn’t lose its structure; you can hear the toms rattling all the way through.  “Medieval Cocaine” sounds the most purely CIA Debutante-ish of all these tracks, the ping and squiggle of electronics framing unknowable, evocative verses. “Fuck You All to Fade No More,” dances inscrutably on synth rhythms and shattering machine beats, as the lyrics shatter the f-word into fragments, repeatedly.   

None of this is especially easy listening, and you won’t be putting it on at your next dinner party.  But it is full of layers and passionate inquiry, and the chaos is like the world right now.  Listen and feel the ground under you crumble and everything sure come into doubt. 

Jennifer Kelly

[doom-dreaming]

"when i was your age, i was working three jobs to help support my family" and "when i was in college i was sleeping on a mattress on the floor and living off of soup"

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO DO THAT. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO DO THAT. I DON'T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN TO YOU THAT THIS ISN'T A CHARACTER-BUILDING LESSON, IT'S JUST BAD

[annabelle--cane]

her pronouns are HE/HIM

[demaparbat-hp]

That infamous prison escape.

[marypsue]

Keep seeing that post where OP starts like 'Thinking about...grieving the undead' and then adds on about like. Real life situations where people have not died but have left your life and you would have reason to grieve them.

All respect, that's an important concept, but that is not what I am thinking about when I read 'grieving the undead'.

[elainiisms]

female protagonists will literally go through 30 life altering traumas at the age of 16 and you ppl still have the audacity to call them annoying bc they cry about it and act like teenage girls

[romanceyourdemons]

so much love for characters who are desperately unsure whether they’re a good person, a redeemable person, a person worth saving, but are absolutely certain that they’re a grade a hottie