It’s a little after 7PM and I’m sitting on my couch, sweating due to our lack of air conditioning and having brownies with whiskey because of the kind of bullshit today served up. What kind of bullshit, you ask? It involved maggots falling out of the console of my car and onto the floorboard and a smell of rotting death coming out of the vents. Seems like sometime over the last three or four days a mouse or rat got into my engine block and/or car vent system and died. And rotted. And now there is the possibility my car may be so contaminated that it won’t even be cost effective to clean given how toxic mouse and rat stuff is. The insurance company will decide. Ironically, the insurance company I work for.
So there’s that.
What does that have to do with Unfiled, the latest in techno-electro-industrial-screeching out of Reykjavik? Well, this music is what my brain feels like right now. Fried. Angular. Sharp in a dangerous way. Beats like the arrhythmia of my stressed out heart. Electric surges like the synapses of frustration firing off in my brain. But enough density to, well, fit the smoothing of those rough edges by the Jack Daniels and brownies. Because fuck it. It’s just one of life’s not daily, but more once-a-year, kind of hassles, the industrial disease as Dire Straits might have called it (fortunately I did not need to move a microwave oven… custom kitchen… deliver-ay-ayyyyyy….).
I like this record. I like it A LOT. And not just because I’m in a whacked-out headspace (OK, maybe because of that), but because it’s some legit modern industrial, with beats that sound like they could have been sampled from a factory floor, the sound of relentless capitalism, of your mind being pounded to paste, but with a depth that gives it feeling, a rhythm, a primalness (primality? primalousity? Optimus Prime?). Mrs. Life in the Vinyl Lane describes this as being more “early morning dark” than “late evening dark”. It’s a different vibe, right? At night it needs to cover you, swaddle you, swallow you whole. In the morning you’ve got that caffeine from the first cup of coffee kicking in, a bit more energy, a little surge. And I’m feeling it too.
I couldn’t fid Unfiled on Spotify at the time of this writing, so check it out on Bandcamp HERE. You can buy the heavy (160g) vinyl there as well, which is rad.