Cards on the table, I’m a complete dunderhead when it comes to mathematics. A rube. Anything over short division, and I am not only not to be trusted, but avoided like the plague. Hence, I despise “mathcore”, “math rock”, and the majority of jazz, simply because it’s too wonky and up its own arse to be bothered with. Grab your slide rules, kids, it’s time to rock the fuck out to some 29/16 time signatures! I’m looking at you, THE MARS VOLTA. And don’t even get me started on MESHUGGAH post-None.
I hadn’t torn an album a new rectum in a while, and thus, armed to the teeth with comparisons to all of the above and ready to hurt PUPIL SLICER’s poor widdle feewings, I pressed Play on Fleshwork, the band’s third. And thus, was I bowled over like the unfortunate lead pin in a bowling setup, the threesome rolling a 20-lb ball of crush-your-skull right down the alley, collapsing myself and nine other sad cases upon ourselves with ‘Heather’. Angular, yes. Abrasive, indeed. But memorable? Unexpectedly, yes, and leading into ‘Gordian’. SCISSORFIGHT style jagged riffs in the intro slam against an all out BOTCHfest, multilayered, multi-headed, and striking from every angle. Keyboard work emerges now and again, but only as a seasoning, never dominating the attack.
Industrial clangandbang drives ‘Sacrosant’, warped bass and oil-drum rhythms propelling whirring, bladed guitars as vocal vulture Kate Davies screeches through the factory, machines of our folly and self-importance crashing ‘round our piteous noggins and down to the concrete. ‘Black Scrawl’ welds PIG DESTROYER to TODAY IS THE DAY’s hair’s-breadth-from-sanity delivery, disjointed, collapsing in on itself, and howling in fury all the way to Bedlam.
The title track brings back the layering from earlier, muted clean vocals and keys piling sound on sound on a sound that’s already confrontationally loud and weighty. This one begs to be heard live, in a small venue with little to no ventilation, bodies heaving in an ocean of sweat-drenched release. This is the sort of destruction I can get behind, campers. ‘White Noise’ is the outlier here, dense yet simultaneously expansive, the least bluntly aggressive tune to be found, but its twists and turns show Davies, Andrews and Booth to be far more than your average grind – or math rock – band, able and willing to play outside of the box, and determined to drag the listener along.
Ending with the 7-minute ‘Cenote’, PUPIL SLICER may not have changed my opinion on the “math-“ genre as a whole. If anything, that I’m planning on digging into what came before Fleshwork confirms what an anomaly they truly are.
Review By: Lord Randall
PUPIL SLICER
Fleshwork
Prosthetic Records