#cuntz

Spiritual Mafia sounds more like Cuntz than any of the other bands, with wild spirallng guitar work surrounding detuned and disconsolate screeds about whatever’s on Ben Mackie’s mind. “My body was built to last/My body was made for me/My body is here to stay,” he chants in the single, “Body.” You could also make connections to Spray Paint in the dogged rhythms and minimalist noisiness of these cuts. But really, it’s its own thing, a furious swamp of echo and distortion focused on some curious subject matter—the joys of eating outside, for one thing, a three-legged dog for another. You might make a connection in terms of pure force to Eddy Current Suppression Ring or in slack heaviness to Blank Realm or in unedited stream-of-conscious lyrics to UV Race, but it’s not like any of those bands, not really.

The disc is structured symmetrically, with two brief cuts and a long one on each side, and while the shorter tracks may well end up getting more airplay, the band really gets going on the extended pieces. “Hybrid Animal” is full of violent clatter, an ear-ringing guitar cadence, a volcanic, eruptive bass. Mackie is spitting, slurring and moaning in an unhinged way that is nonetheless rather trance-like about having a hybrid animal inside of him, and just between us, he seems to have let it out for the moment.

“Bath Boy” is even wilder, with its ominous twitching bass line, its flares of effected guitars, its wavering underwater keyboards. It’s full of menace and threat, and yet, it’s all about taking a bath, alone or in a shared, sexual way. It’s not even a metaphor, as far as I can tell, just an objective description of having a soak together or apart (“I am lonely, in the water, relax with me, in the water, dial my number, call me up, run a bath and invite me over”). And yet, as the song runs on, it warps and twists into something fundamental about human beings, water, love, sex and, you know, bubbles. I couldn’t tell you how it does this, but it does.