I'm about halfway through and really digging it. It's noisier/spikier than the last Fievel and as harmonically/melodically/lyrically dense as ever. I haven't heard either of the two previous Martyr Group albums, so I have some catching up to do...
π¬ππππ π½πππππ, ππ πππ πΎπππππππππ
4/24/23, Brooklyn NY: I've just heard the new Martyr Group album. I'll tell the story so far: cemeterily crabbed by the curfewed Brussels of 2021 and psychosomatically/technologically thwarted from recording to my usual indiscernible specs, I still somehow managed to extract from the general shambles of my congenital brambles a season's batch of bad little birdies. These I entrusted to the direction of Quentin "Big French" Moore, who was charged with supervisorily forcing the cumulative transformation of my hasty Tascam 4-tracks and questionable charts into these here ersatz togethernesses of our geographically fractured Martyr Group. It was agreed I'd be disallowed from hearing the material again in anything but its eventual, mastered form.Established 2014, Martyr Group's original premise was to make 100% live recordings of my dustiest songwriting with 4 guitarists -- Stephe, Quentin, Sam & Tommy -- rehearsed quickly (or not at all) using highly dubious charts, everyone playing direct-in to the Tascam 388, with zero percussive instrumentation and my vocal mic being the only air on the tape, mixed performatively in a deejay style. The sickly-sour air of fermenting mash meant for no potable purpose accordingly wafts from both our previous albums, but the stench off this third salmagundi is so ripe it partially lost us a member. Clocking the derangement of our enterprise, core affiliate Sam "Samuel Boat" Lisabeth immersed himself instead in the adult concerns of that external world these songs deny, though he did deign coquettishly appear, if only to tantalize the listener with his pointed scarcity. Sam's lovingly linear, da-Vincianly precise "coloring between the staves" usually offsets the rest of the group's gravitation toward what my ear tastes as "pickled major," so missing here is the garnish traditional to settle our stomach, and finally it is audibly alone the heroic hatch-battening of Stephe "Turbo World" Cooper (here in both mixing and performance capacities) that stems a would-be-fatal flood of superlydian vinegar.
Then there is Tom "Uncivilized" Csatari's fusional relationship with the guitar, for him more than the others appendage-like, the wagging finger of some deep-seated law. His appearance here is as consistently natural and unified as an old-growth wood bordering the crazy-tilt spires Quentin and Stephe built all over my house of cards, often in their hysterics eclipsing its foundation lines, these mostly to be glimpsed in ostensible highlight by the "unreliable narrator" drummers Nick Baker and Derek Baron. Tommy's peanut butter hedgeline and my original rhodes voicings are alike pierced again and again by the sharp frosting of Quentin's densest-yet agit-prop harmonic layer cakes, greedy greedy stacks that spurred even circumspect Stephe to go more than a bit toppings-mad. According to Stephe, Quentin provided stems almost equal in number to everyone else's trackings combined. No one said you couldn't come to this melee fully strapped, so my friend unrivaled in sideways swordsmanship rolled up like this was Blade 4, trenchcoat double-stuffed with goodies galore.
This dense thicket of words, by the way, derives not only from manic enthusiasm hopefully betraying tacit compliment for all concerned, but also my considerable psychological distance from the result of what originated as my writing, an odd enterprise from which I already find myself routinely removed. I do not, after all, remember writing any of these songs, but that in and of itself is hardly unusual -- what's new is my complete lack of involvement in their development and representation. So in the end, I hear this as a Quentin or Stephe solo album as much as one by Martyr Group. "Collaboration," a dirty word recalling the sins of Vichy, is wonderfully absent here, where it's "every man for himself" through cartoon mazes of button-mashed pentads. Instead of beautifying my little birdies with gratifying "contributions," Quentin and Stephe shunted them through serieses of sieves, dicing and reconstituting their spirits like high-priced deli snacks in a world none of us can afford, then exhibiting their munching. More than this perversion of impetus in the shape of a senselessly fine-wrought task I could not have dreamed. And as in half my favorite art, this excessive and directionally abstruse labor resembles that greatest of fools' errands, the martyr's quest for survival through death. The other half, of course, has never been the jurisdiction of Martyr Group.
-- Zach Phillips, 2023
― J. Sam, Thursday, 15 June 2023 17:28 (ten months ago) link