LIFE DRAG

LIFE DRAG have been nice enough to visit The Escape several times, and I think that each time they settle a little more into the weird reality that they are making their own. Forty minutes here, for fans of Mark E. Smith and Dilloway and Blixa and Branca and Gira and solitude and emptiness. Flawless. 

LIFE DRAG

LIFE DRAG

People try really hard to be this weird. This dark. This pure. This real. But Minnesota's LIFE DRAG aren't trying.....they are just trying to be. Morose and monotone noise rock dissected and dismantled, dragged back to its most primitive and sinister state. Get loose. Let go. 

FEEL YOUR GRAVE

LIFE DRAG

Likely the final posthumous release from LIFE DRAG, Unidentify You is an excruciating dirge. Thirty minutes of darkness and frustration, manifested through bass, vocal, drum and sound. The  assemblage here is interesting. The opener "Worker" is a disorganized cacophony, followed by "Farmer," which is an intentionally sloppy piece of brutality - awkward to listen to but also the least realized track on the tape. The trilogy that follows - "Polishing Hammers," "A New Trade" and "Unidentify You" - combine to make the most compelling twenty minutes of sound I have heard in a very very long time. It's a ferocious exercise in monotony and deliberation, a calculated assault on all senses and psyche, and it will leave you breathless. I'm not saying that the first two cuts aren't worth your time, but be aware that even when Schmidt and Benjamin shout bury you // one by one in "Farmer," they are just getting started. 

UNIDENTIFY YOU

LIFE DRAG

More anguished submissions from LIFE DRAG. 2016's Feel Your Grave was perhaps slightly more coherent than 2016's Feed Your Grave (that's not a typo), but this offering opts for desolation and darkness and misery brooding beneath a shroud of hollow sound. Well....I guess that's pretty much the same as the other one, but my point is that the vision feels more realized on this cassette. Listen to the dirge that is "Collapse Of Reality." Listen to the brutal monotony of "Transaction." Listen to the sparse desperation of "A Living Trend." Listen to your pain. Feel Your Grave once again.  

FEED YOUR GRAVE