It’s Monday and Mondays suck, so let’s grind it out with Focusrights’ Ew, Music!
We all go insane from time to time. Whether it’s a bad day, a bad week, a bad month, a bad year… family, job, election cycles, Lovecraftian horrors, mathcore, pop country—you know, something that just tips the scales and dissolves one’s sanity like sugar in water. Sometime this feeling can come across as…self-inflicted. And by all accounts it may as well be. Like, for example, I never had to open the press release for today’s Monday Grind because I am pretty sure Focusrights were genetically engineered in a Russian lab to turn unsuspecting listener’s brains into stew.
Focusrights 2018 demo probably flew under most people’s radars. Looking back at it now it was one helluva warning shot that the band was openly firing. Chaotic almost beyond comprehension, it was like experimental noisegrind/industrial/mathcore. Something like that. Two years later, the fully fleshed out album Ew, Music! is here. Imagine The Locust meets The Sound That Ends Creation peppered with some Anaal Nathrakh. That’s…surface level for Focusrights.
“Nasikano” acts as the intro for the album. An announcement of the chaos to come, but with good humor. It is with “When Will the Kingdom of God Come?” that annihilation arrives like bulldozer at a harsh noise venue. The track is almost dance-like at times, but more frenzied than anything. In fact, frenzied is the best way to describe this record. Ew, Music!’s only predictable feature is that it will be chaotic. And holy shit does it make for a helluva ride.
Focusrights know no bounds and there is not an element they will not incorporate. There’s melodic moments, there’s unsettling groans, there’s auto-tuned singing, there’s normal singing, bass drops, glitches, a trillion time signature shifts, noise, shrieks, blasts, ape “ooh”ing—if Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope is the PCP of grind, Ew, Music! is the bath salts. Any track one wants to extract from this record is a bombardment on the senses. And it is real damn good.
So what’s the band themselves got say about it?:
“We could never contain our blazing entrails, again and again pushing ourselves into a nervous breakdown during the recordings. All we ever wanted is to ignite like-minded nervous and crazed people with our art, and to gift that very moment of relief, when you exhale the last granules of the remained air during an agonized scream, only to inhale more deeply and continue to scream more furiously. What started as a joke in a messenger, suddenly took the terrifying form of a monster, which paves the way to bigger and scarier ones.”
The first time I listened to this album I do not think I moved for its fifteen-minute run time. Describing the tracks even now is a difficult task. Every time a comparison can be drawn Focusrights do whatever they can to shatter perceptions. Making music this chaotic but still listenable is a feat that not a lot of bands can pull off. A mad cocktail of grind, mathcore, industrial, noise and more await hungry ears. Get grinding on this badass!
