Featuring members of Protomartyr and Preoccupations, the post-punk supergroup’s debut is refreshingly blunt and ambitious.
In 2018, Protomartyr and Preoccupations, two of North America’s most reliable and forward-thinking post-punk bands, teamed for a split single. The gothic, reverb-heavy songs on Telemetry at Howe Bridge were exactly what you might expect from their collaboration. By comparison, the new supergroup Bloodslide—which features Preoccupations drummer Mike Wallace, Protomartyr guitarist Greg Ahee, and vocalist AJ Lambert, the daughter of Nancy Sinatra—is nearly unrecognizable. Presented as a “multimedia art powerhouse,” their four-song EP and accompanying visuals explode with ambition while showcasing a grotesque, riveting blend of post-rock and shoegaze.
A far cry from the favored sounds of her collaborators, Lambert’s solo work has spanned from jazz standards to Spoon covers, and the theatricality of her voice is a surprising fit for this alien noise-rock project. Often, her presence tempers the brutality. On “Trap Door,” she sings with wrathful, operatic flair about “summer lies that started along like a dog.” The unsettling imagery of “Pica,” meanwhile, is thrown into the light with the frightening evenness of her delivery. As if reciting a spell, she chants of “ash in your gut,” “soap in your mouth,” and “chalk on the tip of your lips.”
The visual aspect of the EP also speaks to the group’s interest in exploring beyond their past work. The bold aesthetic, presented in a series of music videos and the accompanying artwork, is refreshingly blunt: cybergoth in a way that recalls Grimes as much as horror-punks Grave Pleasures, and conjuring the world of Resident Evil in the compulsive motion of its AR-integrated videos. Ahee’s textural experimentation takes a similarly wild approach. His previous collaborations already had a near-hyperactive range—from the woodwind section on Protomartyr’s Ultimate Success Today, to the DIY indie pop of Turn to Crime’s Down in the Basement, through the hypnagogic iciness on Matthew Dear’s Bunny. Here, he and Wallace create immense detail in every landscape, as in the brightly piercing, Interpol-like outro on “MVP” and the leaden electronic teeth of “Pica.”
Occasionally, the wall-of-sound experimentation can lean towards excess, and the momentum of the EP falters with the tempo of the closing Nancy Wilson cover, “How Glad I Am.” For all their ambition and cybernetic innovation, Bloodslide don’t seem interested in writing The Shape of Post-Punk to Come, or offering anything near a manifesto. The complexity and scale of their music instead comes from its intimacy: a shield from outside influence and expectations. They steep themselves in post-punk conventions only so they can more freely brush them away.
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