Review : Puce Mary – The Spiral
by Derek A. Fisher
This album is from 2016, but they have forced me to review it. They play it non-stop, sometimes at an ever-so-faint, creeping volume, where I can just hear the razor-tightening of the cables in the walls; sometimes they play it so loud that my eardrums are crushed and my eyes bleed. Do you remember the first time you saw a David Lynch film? Do you remember the feeling? Do you remember the first time you saw a film by someone trying to imitate Lynch, and you learned to spot the difference between real weird and imitation weird?
The difference is that real weird is beautiful; it enchants you as it mystifies you. Puce Mary’s The Spiral is exactly that. You can feel yourself running from the predatory creature that stalks you down the alley in the dead of night. You can feel the bolus of saliva tighten in your throat as the razorblade approaches your eyeball. You can feel the dead beneath your feet laughing at you as you walk on their graves. That is The Spiral, a weird, beautiful act of terror forced upon your ears and your frontal lobe. Though it is a languishing slow burn, and its putrid black ambiance tingles subtly and hits you harder over time, every single note, every single strange noise has clearly been chosen with absolute intention. This is noise music, reimagined for the doomsday era. Maybe they’ll stop playing it soon. I can only dread what they will switch to.
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