Review Summary: Snip snip.
You are sick. You stumble through life as a lame quail. Your shoulders sag. Your mouth hangs open. Your blood flows thick like mud.
As your mind festers with desires as a feculent dog ravaged by fleas, the last drop of virility leaks from your body.
You’ve got to be in the right mood for it, you know? The wacky and the wild. The stuff that really makes you question what the fu
ck you’re actually listening to. I mean, why exactly did I throw this avant-garde of an album on? It was the eccentric artwork or maybe it’s because these wackheads are from Sydney, Australia. Either way,
The Castration of Gods is an enthralling, expansive and gripping tale narrated by a voice with the likeness to Gene WIlder’s
Willy Wonka and Jim Carrey on the biggest acid-tab bender of their lives.
No seriously. After a short
prelude and even shorter “Procession of the Eunuchs”, “King Reisonas (Powerful)” hits like a few grams of shrooms. Strings (any number of violins, viola, cello, double bass, piccolo) bounce over the top of percussive simplicity, but the track’s larger power comes from the larger story-telling; tales of kings, the making of eunuchs and other life changing concepts. When talking of the record’s larger framework, vulgarities run commonplace. Lyrics vary between [almost] comical discussions of regicide, genocide, killing jesters and...dismembered members—while a twisted, macabre cinematic instrumental dances, darts and otherwise turns the album’s atmosphere on its head.
“Eulogy for the Aral Sea” is just as sonically vast even as it’s mellow introduction is seemingly ripped from some avant-Disney movie composition. Climbing instrumentals are matched by its lyrical focal point. Strings ebb and cut into the fray, while the weird framework that frames
The Castration of Gods continues in spades:
My King is running out of time. I could use a knife or a big stick and pry it.
Fire fire the nomads yell as their arteries. Extinguish the risk of gods losing my house.
My big beautiful house. Cut cut. Open up. Drain your Humours as caviar.
“Bloodletting” has a few moments of contrast; a description that directly compares the song’s title to its contents: Gentle piano tones caress the track’s introduction while the chime and pluck of instruments float away as if caught in a breeze. As always, the vocal narration of Linus “Reisonas” Hilton takes centre stage; Shakespearean in essence, but delivered by a performer wearing leopard printed spanks. Eunuchs’ brand of music is disparagingly not for everyone, or maybe it’s made to cater to those with a nervous twitch and drug-induced paranoia. Even as I sit here, absorbed, and at one with both story and concept;
The Castration of Gods isn’t flawless. Perhaps it was not meant to be.
I mean, as much as I can sit here with a grin-eating *** on my face (or a ***-eating grin if you will), there’s no way I can ignore the drenching of cheese, or how directly
zaney this album is. It doesn’t matter if these guys are locals,
The Castration of Gods is straight-up wacky. After all, the central theme here is the
removal of a certain limb, coupled with an execution of a jester and some
gods—and yet, at a personal level, the escapism on offer here just
appeals for better and for worse. Largely I know this is going to be a mixed bag. A band could give a “God of Performance” and still we might not be ready for our “Ouroboros Excreta” to surface.
