The last few days I've been spending most of my time boxing up my life so that my wife and I can move into our new apartment. Moving is horrifying, and though I probably don't need to explain to you why it's so unpleasant, I'm going to anyway, because I'm bored and don't have any better ideas for how to start this thing. Moving affords me the opportunity to sift through all of my crap and see what kind of bullshit I've managed to accumulate and hide away in the little nooks and crannies of my apartment. It's all scraps of paper from a year ago with names of music shops written on them and a surprisingly thorough collection of joint braces, which includes a $350 ankle brace that I had to purchase from the doctor after my ill-fated trip to Las Vegas, where I came back with a ruined cell phone and a broken ankle.
That might have been the pinnacle of stupidity in my life.
So I get to sift through all of that crap and make snap decisions about what can be kept and what I can afford to purchase a second time should I ever go rolling fully clothed into the swimming pool at the Golden Nugget again. Then the rest of the stuff gets unceremoniously shoved into an old box where I hope it doesn't get damaged in the next couple of weeks while it's stacked up awkwardly in my formerly not-that-messy living room.
Sigh.
The most disturbing thing about getting moving is the filth that I've discovered that I'm apparently not only continuously generating, but that said filth is just going to be left behind for some jerk to clean up. Take, for example, my bed. Because I'm so successful, my mattress sits on the floor, thus allowing easier access to my mouth for the many bugs that are always crawling around my apartment, and also to show off to anybody who glances how I can't afford to buy a bed frame.
Because I make blogger money.
But I had to get back there the other day to see if there were any giant spiders or delicious treats hidden behind the mattress (that place has historically been a treasure trove of Goldfish snack crackers, and I wasn't nearly covered enough in crumbs), and I noticed that the wall where my head sits all night is disgusting. It's black with head dirt! I never really took into account how dirty the top of my head was, or how often I'm apparently mashing my head into the wall and spreading said head filth all over the wall on my side of the bed. It looks like the wall inside of an insane asylum padded room, but with slightly less feces smeared on it.
Coming the realize that my apartment is a dank den of fart smells and head dirt is a jarring sensation. But it's not as jarring as listening to Baring Teeth's latest offering, Atrophy.
Baring Teeth are a Dallas-area band (or they used to be) that I became aware of a couple of years ago when they were in Austin playing with Disrhythmia on a lonesome Wednesday night or something. I was so impressed with their live performance and angular riffing that I bought their demo and promptly lost it (I found it just recently in the course of my daily rummaging. It has two tracks that made Atrophy, and would have made me feel like a big shot had I ever listened to it). Their angular, unsettling attack translates perfectly to the recorded medium, resulting in an album that is a perfect representation of the inside of a schizophrenic's head while he writes his anti-government manifesto in pigeon blood.
Stark dissonances and doomy passages lend Atrophy a feeling of impending doom, like the army of clowns are arming themselves and lining up in battle formation inside their secret underground Evil Clown bunker. The skronking dissonance of tracks like "Distilled in Fire" challenge the listener to gaze, mouth agape, into the dark abyss of pure vitriol. The entire album in draped in a disturbing miasma, making it sound like what would happen if you gave my bathroom musical instruments and said commanded the toilet to express itself. Such frantic, angular, hateful music (and my thorough enjoyment of it) proves unequivocally that I should have given that therapy that my mom forced me to go to as a child a fair shake.
The point is that you should really go listen to this music. It's avante garde death metal at it's finest, and it totally earns the label that Colin Marston gave it while he, myself, and my good buddy Van Damned stood there watching their set two years ago. Colin (we're on a first name basis in this scenario) leaned over and said "Total Goreguts worship." True story.
Go do yourself a favor and stream the album on Invisible Oranges or be a winner like me and listen on Spotify. Or you could buy it, but you aren't going to buy it. Just admit it.
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