Review: Samogonka - The Importance Of Being Wasted

The screams of Derek Crozier protrude out of the noise. A head jutting out of the window, cradled by the closing jaws of a car compactor, forced to the surface by the buckled metal pressing into flesh, crumpling ribs. The noise smothers itself. Feedback jolts with low drum machine plosives, curling around guitars and the amplified crunch of collision, as each individual component bends and groans under the pressure of being forced into eachother. Each member of Samogonka is stripped of personal space, and the noise sounds like the primal fidgets of suffocated movement. Hands twitching against strings and fists pushed through sheet metal, granting exit to a catharsis as urgent as shitting and pissing.

On second listen I hear the mangled remnants of guitar melody. A sad, tattered outline of minor key sits limp amidst “Drink With The Devils And Murder The Rest”. The memory of a blues solo glints beneath the hurricane of “The Blood In My Alcohol Stream Wonders What Your Insides Look Like”. They are allusions to what Samogonka’s former self, before physical and psychological burdens came to break them. In light of this, the record becomes a snapshot of a sinister process – the last flails of life as the body slips into the black hole of death, thrashing against the inevitable, futile and earnest.