I’ve met the ragged brain behind The Vomit Arsonist. One listen through the project’s latest output, “An Occasion for Death” would leave you imagining him as a drugged-out cutter who lives in a dark hole and sleeps on piles of trash. In reality, Andrew Grant is about as personable a fellow as you might find in Eastern Rhode Island. In fact, nearly every person I’ve met involved in creating Power Electronics is the same way. Maybe it’s the cathartic nature of the music that lends them all some sort of inward peace. “An Occasion for Death” certainly sounds as if Grant had gathered up all the bitterness and dank black sludge in the souls of a thousand murderers and filtered it through his own heart, crushing the result into as dark an audio experience as has ever existed. It is an album of unstoppable power, constantly grinding away at the will of the listener.
Finding your path through “An Occasion…” is an exercise in meditative self-injury. From the opening “Think God out of Existence” through to the knife-edged synth swells of “Black Bile”, each track is a pulsing drone meant to lull and engage while simultaneously generating a backdrop of profound illness. Grant’s vocals grind over it all, ranging from a distorted snarl to the raspy effected warble in “Torn Between Will and Desire”. The vocals always ride above the intense drones and serve as the textural focal point despite the battering of the electronic hate wall. While the production might seem overwhelming, the flourishes and textures that emerge with repeated listens draw the listener in with a sense of novelty. I’m still uncovering details buried in the muck of Grant’s audio wall.
The looping and rhythmic nature of the sounds that Grant has coaxed out like a sick shaman lends the entire album a sense of structure and purpose, escaping the formlessness and lack of dynamics so common in dark electronics. The Vomit Arsonist skirts the line between a rock hard rain of blows and a more ambient approach that, while still noisy, is listenable in a way that many artists in the genre are not. Grant displays a firm grasp not only of the drama that can be wrung from such a mutable format, but also keeps a firm eye on the more traditional tropes of harsh noise.
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