Cassette Review // Period Bomb/Three-Armed Men "Creature Carousel" (Crass Lips Records)

$5 //

https://cotrecords.bandcamp.com/album/creature-carousel //

This cassette begins with dark pianos and vocals which make it feel eerie, like a murder scene.    It feels like the music is falling apart with the words and I just imagine everything as breaking, as crumbling down around me.    There is something quite beautiful within this destruction though.  

On the second song, we are treated to a song about a dog and a cat and though the cat got stuck in a tree I'm pretty sure the dog got hit by a truck.   This is an experiment in art rock/noise as the guitars just wind along with the drums drumming and the words are slightly singing but mostly speaking.   Hamsters really do all look the same.   "One day he died"  I knew someone once who had two hamsters and one of them ate the other one.  Hamsters are weird.   We end with a goldfish and they don't have souls.

"Abandon That Ship" has that screechy guitars and it reminds me a bit of Hole, but it's also just a lot of Period Bomb.   Once the screaming really kicks in I'm in love.   "Test Me" comes back with the pianos and spoken words, such as on the titular track, and it seems as if the two different vocalists are trading off on each song.    Of course as I type that "Shadow" comes on and proves me wrong.

I'm not sure when the appropriate time to type this would have been so I'll do it now: This cassette is a collaboration between the two artists and not a split cassette, as far as I can tell.    The music really breaks down as we're being told we will all be reduced to a number in the future and, in some ways, we're already there. 

I like the chunky guitars which start off "Didn't Come Here To Cry".  They remind me of Primus.  Then the pianos come in like a crash and the overall vibe is just this march of doom.   This is quite possibly one of the best songs I have ever heard and I think, not to take anything away from the rest of this cassette, but you should go out of your way to hear it.

The final song begins with a lot of music, pulling us in different ways, and for the first time I can kind of hear some mewithoutYou in here.  I really like this song- "Wrong Magnet"- because I've always felt like when I was a kid I would put the same sides of a magnet together to create that force, that resistance which pushes them apart.  Now I do that a lot as an adult but with other people and various aspects of my life.   This is all quite trippy as well.   The vocals fade out with the music.