If the hardest thing for a new rock band to do is be original, then the second hardest is to be scary. Most artists deploying horror-movie imagery and shock tactics inevitably succumb to campy theatricality (as seen in everyone from Marilyn Manson to the earliest iteration of the Horrors), or are quick to explain it away as just a ruse (e.g., Odd Future saying they're just joshin' with all that rape-and-murder business), and lest we forget that the most well-worn metaphor used to describe death metal invokes a character from Sesame Street. But the songs that have startled me the most-- Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop", Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' "Hard-On for Love", the Jesus Lizard's "Killer McHann"-- are unnerving to me not so much for their overt aggression as their matter-of-fact realism, where the line between singer and subject is blurred, and sound and fury coalesce into a vivid, very real portrait of violent psychosis.
New York foursome Pop. 1280 are not shy about showing their hand-- they take their name from a Jim Thompson crime novel about a killer cop, and they've given their first full-length album the self-explanatory title of The Horror. Pop. 1280 wallow in the same pool of pigfuck sloppy seconds as East Coast contemporaries Pissed Jeans and the Men, but where those bands respectively soften their blows (somewhat) with wry observations about domesticity and knowing classic-rock references, Pop. 1280 offer no such salve. If the ray-gunned synth-punk stylings of the band's debut 2010 EP, The Grid, suggested a certain fondness for cheeky, B-movie thrills, The Horror is a far more traumatic experience, conjuring all the dystopian futurism of an early David Cronenberg film, but delivered with merciless, medieval brute force. The first words we hear on the album are "two dogs fucking"; it proves to be The Horror's most romantic lyric.
Band co-founders Chris Bug and Ivan Lip recorded The Horror with a different drummer and keyboardist from The Grid, and the difference is immediately palpable-- rather than provide a clear separation of bass, synths, and Lip's Birthday Party-esque guitar scrapes, the three elements are often compacted into one monolithic, doomy frequency that hangs over the record like a cloud of black smoke. But new drummer Zach Ziemann does a fine job of pushing the proverbial boulder up the mountain. For all its oppressive heaviness, The Horror has energy and verve to spare: "Bodies in the Dunes" sets its apocalyptic death-toll imagery to a heart-racing tribal stomp that doesn't relent for five minutes, while "New Electronix" sounds like a summit between 1990s Touch and Go greats Brainiac and Girls Against Boys. Ironically, when Bug starts shouting out explicit dance-move instructions ("Hips to the right/ And hips to the left!") on "Nature Boy", the song's convulsing groove slows to a sludgy grind, making his directives sound less like an invitation to shimmy than militaristic orders shouted at some poor captive trapped at the bottom of a well.
Bug isn't the most dynamic vocalist-- sounding not unlike Liars' Angus Andrew played at 16 rpm-- but for a band as harsh as this, he need not display a range of emotions so long as he convincingly conveys the right ones: grim and grimmer. And it's The Horror's dirgey digressions that actually best showcase his cold-blooded character, whether shaming a submissive subject into acting like a dog on "Beg Like a Human", or taking no small amount of glee in describing the agonizing process of dying by the noose on "Hang Em' High". In a world this bleak, the best you can hope for is a quick, easy death, and yet even then Pop. 1280 won't let you off that easy-- as Bug cautions us at the outset, "Life after death is a painful life." But he can rest assured that, with an album as unabashedly grim and unforgiving as The Horror, he needn't have to worry about being granted eternal salvation.
