Review: Odonis Odonis – Post Plague
When Odonis Odonis emerged a few years ago, some quarters drew comparisons to Sub Pop’s METZ. This was basically because they were also from Toronto and came armed with some pretty heavy noise-rock riffs. Should anybody liken Odonis Odonis’ latest effort to METZ however, then they really haven’t been listening. Post Plague’s first track kicks off with some frantic synth patterns and builds rapidly into a fierce industrial thumper, complete with dark post-punk basslines and unhinged vocals about feelin’ fearless. If anything though, Track 2 is even more fearless (and fearsome) with its sinister “I’ve got my needs, needs” chorus and supplementary vocal screams that sound like Prurient’s Dominick Fernow being tortured to death by Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil.
The rest of the record displays the same aptitude for blending an array of anxious, angry and antisocial sounds into an agreeably murky combination. ‘That’s How It Goes’, for example, resembles Gary Numan at his very ugliest shouting over a hip-hop remix of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Only Shallow’, but with the drum beats replaced by military explosions sampled from the 1992 Sega Megadrive game Desert Strike. While it also contains brief blasts of synthetic gunfire, ‘Nervous’ is sparser and more gothy. Think Alec Empire covering The Cure. Or perhaps Robert Smith covering Alec Empire. Or maybe even Alec Empire covering Robert Smith with a makeshift hood and slowly bashing his red-lipped head to pieces with a second-hand sampler.
Other tracks evoke the liberated no-wave- meets-big- beat vibes of Mess-era Liars: ‘Vanta Black’, for instance, which also boasts an interesting quasi-dubstep outro. See also ‘BLTZ’, the title of which we must assume is the word ‘blitz’ translated into the vowel-less language of Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR period. Either that or it’s an unlikely tribute to the hipster wraps that recently appeared on the menu of my local gentrified eatery (bacon, lettuce, tomato & zucchini).
Occasionally, Odonis Odonis prove capable of bringing things down a notch. ‘Pencils’ adds some extra texture thanks to its guest female vocals, something that might be an accordion and a screeching sound presumably made by dragging black-varnished fingernails down Peter Gabriel’s second-hand shakuhachi. The Crypts-esque ‘Game’ is also a little dreamier with its relatively optimistic synth chords, even if the vocals still come across as horribly depressed (“live your life of solitude”, “lie to my face”, etc).
Just as the aforementioned Liars often do, Odonis Odonis sign off their album with a warped brand of “ballad”. Theirs is a crooned shimmer of minimalist sleaze about how “I just want some lust to knock me off my feet”. Not quite the romance I had in mind, but I’ll take what I can get.
Post Plague’s promo sheet mentions the record’s conceptual debt to great sci-fi movies and specifically 1986’s The Fly, in which Jeff Goldblum’s character says we must take a “deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool.” I remember watching an old interview with David Cronenberg during which the director explained that The Fly was basically just a traditional love story, albeit one about a man who transforms into a disgusting mutant insect. With all its tracks ending around the 3-minute mark, you could make the case that Post Plague is at its core a pop album, even if it’s a rather ugly one that’s lying on the cold floor of a laboratory in a puddle of its own gunk with all sharp bits of telepod metal fused painfully into its body, staring down the barrel of its sweetheart’s shotgun. This time, I recommend she doesn’t pull the trigger and allows the ungodly experiments to continue.
Written by JR Moores
