Review Summary: Soundboy Punishments ≥ Untrue
Deep underground, in pitch black, smoke encrusted veins, a thick, pulsing slurry of blood moves unseen. Irresistibly it propels before it immense gusts of dripping warm winds, the laboured breath of the invisible giants that lurk in the secret places of the earth, straining to keep the cracked ribs of the world intact under the crushing weight of the sky. This intoxicating current of decaying air permeates all, eating away at the foundations of the ground with a hunger born of eons of forlorn captivity. Unstoppably, it crawls like an ancient fungus through miniscule cracks, slowly tearing away at its concrete prison until excruciatingly it emerges with a furtive grin into the damp night air. With a final squirm, its sinuous, resonating body falls with a throb onto the forsaken chessboard of the pavement, before dissipating into the softly humming air. The next gasp of sound to emerge is less fortunate; it is not destined to vanish soundlessly into the night. With a sudden flash a dark shape bounds out of the darkness, an inky hurricane of black lightning. A shadowy footstep comes clattering down, pinning its throbbing prey to the path.
It’s midnight, and Shackleton is on the prowl.
Endlessly dark, brooding and effortlessly fascinating; it’s hard to think of music that portrays the dank and sprawling labyrinths of London better than
SoundBoy Punishments, the colossal double album from Skull Disco. Serpentine basslines are seamlessly interwoven with gently pattering yet utterly deadly percussion; these rotten roots resonate with poisonous malice under a web of agonizingly subtle whispers and melodies. Tunes such as
Hypno Angel are filled with such foreboding that they should be forever sealed in a concrete vault with the epitaph ‘doomstep’ scrawled across the vault as a warning to reckless explorers of sound. Frequent contributions from Appleblim round out the sonic palate beautifully with the enthralling and deadly
Cheat I and
Girder being a fitting Scylla to Shackleton’s devastating Charybdis; deadly creatures dwelling in the infinite swamps of sound that will one day emerge to swallow the earth.
Simply put,
SoundBoy Punishments is nothing less than the soundtrack to our apocalypse. When the the rats start fleeing in droves and people begin to sicken and die, the immortal avowal
Blood On Your Hands is the whisper that will echo from the ruins:
When I see the towers fall it cannot be denied,
That as a spectacle it is a realization of the mind.
I’m standing on the mountain top letting out a scream,
It is the language of the earth; it is the language of the beasts
I can’t ***ing wait
