Last year, LA noisemakers HEALTH released a collaborative album DISCO4 :: PART II, which featured tracks with Nine Inch Nails, Lamb Of God, the Body, Backxwash, Poppy, Perturbator, and others. Today, HEALTH are back with a new single called “HATEFUL,” which was co-written with SIERRA and features backing vocals from Street Sects’ Leo Ashline. The track is also featured in-game via ULTRAKILL’s latest software update. Of “HATEFUL,” HEALTH kept it simple in a statement: “BACK TO THE CYBER GRIND.” A press release also promises “more collaborations between HEALTH and ULTRAKILL will soon be announced.”
Street Sects
AS220, Providence, RI
Tuesday, November 13th, 2018
Perhaps the best initial insight into Street Sects is the name of their debut first LP, End Position. According to an interview with Clrvynt, frontman Leo Ashline says it’s derived from a lyric in Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s ‘I See A Darkness’. One of Will Oldham’s bleakest songs, famously covered by Johnny Cash in his later years, it portrays a narrator stifled by his depression, his isolation, his darkness. It’s a fitting frame of reference for Street Sects, the Texas-based duo whose music, art, and merch are all characterized by pervasive depression, violence, and lack of faith in humanity and government. But you’d never see Oldham perform waving a chainsaw about a small room wearing a bleach-blonde wig screaming his lyrics into the faces of concertgoers. That was my first experience of Street Sects when they played the small upstairs space at ONCE in Somerville, MA in late 2017, and the band brought their live show to the similarly intimate venue that is Providence’s AS220 on a cold November night, fresh off the release of their sophomore LP, The Kicking Mule, and a landmark show supporting Daughters at Brooklyn Bazaar.
Though the performance lasted all of 30 minutes, it’s hard to imagine a more intense live show. Street Sects’ setup is as stark as their sound. Though they’ve introduced a third lighting state, an oscillating red-and-blue – a nod to Ashline’s fixation on the abuse of power and violence endemic in the police force – the vast majority of the show is either total darkness or a blinding white light generated by four flickering strobes placed around the stage. Extreme lighting to match extreme music. Engineer Shaun Ringsmuth hovers at the back of the stage behind a large case stenciled with the band’s iconic logo (also found as a tattoo on Ashline’s neck), triggering samples and creating the violent soundscapes for Ashline’s lyrical worlds. He’s rigged all the lights to perfectly sync with the setlist, a visual assault to match the intensity of the aural. The room explodes with light and sound all at once, bolstered even more by the addition of a third member, a guitarist, to add even more weight to the wall of sound.
Ashline’s vocal presence elevates the cacophony on-record, but during live performances, just as much can be said about his stage presence – he’s exploding, too. Beginning the show by donning the aforementioned wig, he moves with the physicality of a man who is feeling every note of these songs, channeling the trauma that inspires songs entitled ‘Suicide By Cop’ and ‘Gash Addict’, unspooling tales of abuse and bad choices, real and invented, into the room. Mid-set he rips the wig off, face contorting, veins in his skull bulging, and makes his way off the stage, into the crowd, and gives someone chosen at random a wide-eyed stare, as if confronting them for some unnamed crime with the sheer wild intensity behind his eyes.
The consistency of the band’s craft is quite impressive – all along the merch table are shirts bearing depressing monologues underneath illustrations by AJ Garces Böhmer, who on virtually every Street Sects release has manifested Ashline’s grimy, depraved lyrical world into pictures. The scenes are varied – one shirt strikes a 1920s tone with a depiction of a mob execution; most others feature more modern takes on killers and police brutality, and all include an anthropomorphic version of the band’s logo: a hooded, skeletal, feminine spectre of death brandishing a sickle. This retro feel is perhaps a nod to the inclusion of various old movie samples throughout the band’s discography, generally as interludes before another swell of sound, framing what’s to come. Brief movie reviews are also found often on the band’s Twitter account, yet another facet of life that permeates all the band’s chosen outlets.
Ashline’s world is definitively not a kind one, though arguably reality isn’t kind either. The band’s been doing this since 2014, emerging onto the scene with two EPs, one entitled The Morning After the Night We Raped Death, and the other bearing the image of a cop walking an emaciated Death on a leash. They’ve never lacked for subject matter, but even still, the band’s music seems perfectly suited to this post-2016 age, and the band, currently based out of Texas, is likely no stranger to the state-sponsored violence that has only become more emboldened in our current climate. This is perhaps reflected in Street Sects’ increased output of late, releasing not only The Kicking Mule, but also several split 7” vinyls, and the single Things Will Be Better in Hell over the course of 2018, on top of the late-2017 Christmas Bonus, the second such holiday release, which saw Ringsmuth dig deep into his experimental tendencies on the lengthy ‘Deathdealer’.
Mule continues a trend that started with 2017’s Rat Jacket, blending the industrial churn that defined End Position with more varied synths and samples, as well as placing Ashline’s vocals more forward in the mix, resulting in one of the most diverse arrays of sounds the band has released to date, without compromising intensity. Live, the band assembled an airtight setlist spanning their entire discography, beginning with Ashline’s narration from the point of view of an aging serial killer, the closer from Mule. The band quickly moved back in time to ‘Gash Addict’, the tinny drums, writhing beat, and distorted guitar lines of which likely pulled in quite a few fans of Death Grips’ No Love Deep Web in 2014. And in typical circuitous fashion, they closed with Rat Jacket highlight ‘Blacken the Other Eye’, the opener of that record, which features perhaps the band’s most infectious bassline of all, its natural, supple tone contrasting wildly with the vocals and drums, all of which are processed to sound like the inside of a factory. It recalls a line from David Bowie I once read where he’s discussing Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral – he called it “Nietzsche with a nightclub beat”, or something to that effect [I can’t find the quote currently]. And, quite honestly, I think Street Sects might be the next meaningful evolution of the industrial noise-punk sound. They might not end up soundtracking the foibles of millennials on molly, but their reconstructions of harsh noise, “plunderphonics”, and traditional rock structures, combined with the sheer unmissability of their live performances, has created a soundn and spectacle that will endure and evolve in real-time as the band continues. Street Sects make music unfettered by hope, and, by completely subsuming themselves in that darkness, and in the pressures of the modern world, have created many a pitch-black diamond in their still-young career.
