Review Summary: Pucker up fuckers!
Most of us want to start the new year with a bang, right? A spectacle of pyrotechnics and pretty lights shot across a pitch-black frame of darkness. Maybe you wanted to celebrate turning over a new leaf with a bang of a different sort—stained sheets and a clawed back, inhibitions gone for a few fleeting seconds; morning filled with the reek of regrets and the possible repercussions a few more months into the year? Personally, I’m miffed thinking that 2023 will somehow be different to the year that preceded it. How could a person like me be at all optimistic that things
will suddenly get better? Days on a calendar are painted candy pink in order to offer hope to those who long for it.
Karnival’s brush strokes, handled by Disfiguring the Goddess, a one manned slam project from a guy that calls himself Chocolate (or some variation of that brown lumpy shit) blasts in the new year with a succinct twenty-minute EP choc-full of groove, growl, popcorn snare and other turbulent noises…detriment be damned. That is to say,
Karnival is a literal blast, a bang and a song for those new year revelers that couldn’t give one fuck for the pretty lights dancing across city landmarks. “Cut the Canvas” is a stroke of filth, readymade to bludgeon the mindless into perverse subversion. A triage of sore necks and opposable thumbs working together to achieve a new weird plane on the same old filth. That said, the likes of “Clutching onto Bondage” and “Below the Water” aren’t new by any means. This isn’t an attempt at innovation—just a
karnival ride full of gutturals and interplaying samples. A merry-go-round clusterfuck of riffs and belligerent staples hidden under a mask just as pretty as the sick and twisted manipulator behind it.
