I’m gonna come right out and say that it’s very possible I am biased in my reviews. I also really like everything that I review. Certainly, both are factors in my not being an actual critic. I’m okay with that. And so, good readers, I present to you “Taste This” by oddkin, featuring sceneriesplacements. I know both of these characters, having watched them release unholy/transcendent sheets of noise from the stage, stood side-by-side with them in audiences, enjoyed their various side projects, and even contributed a snippet of my own sound to a creation of theirs.
“Taste This” is representative of their aesthetic while simultaneously anomalous. Sometimes one will hear samples in their world of music—TV dialogue, radio calls, snippets of actual conversations—and it can serve any number of purposes. Opening and closing the song as it does here places the listener on a couch or chair in the center of a slightly worn-in apartment living room, old CRT set on a shaky dresser in the corner, not really being watched because the very room itself is about to undergo metamorphosis into a slow-melting fuzz apocalypse of gathered souls (heralded in by the first cautious but then suddenly fanfaring synths)—the kind reserved for the lowliest of conditions. A central melodic idea takes center stage immediately behind the listener (one almost feels its fingers splayed and pressing into one’s shoulders) and guides the panned red-and-grey vocals (themselves a call-and-response between anguished declarations and pained wordless coos) while guitar tones of every color (white noise, brown noise, pink noise, glorious howls and otherdimensional roars) call forth the shoegaze of yesteryear to give its approval, blessing, and granting of passage to usher this thrumming heartache into the future.
At the moment of complete collapse, everything drops but a few final wails and then, just like that, you’re left alone in a slightly worn-in living room while a 19” rerun machine with wobbly color bars mutters laughtrackless fifteen-minute philosophies that will never bring you nearer the brink of comprehension or annihilation than what has just transpired.