Review: The Truth About Frank - The Carrion EP

The Carrion is “rut” music; the sensation of being jammed down the gap between two states of mind, locked in the moment after meaning dissipates and before new significance can materialise. I feel like I’m cycling through FM radio frequencies, picking up the tail ends of words and emotional debris that traverse the sea of static, clasping at phonemes that crumble into emptiness in my hands, sent into momentary shock by the sudden bursts of volume and punctuative silences on either side.

The sense of rootlessness is only accentuated by the absolute lack of a thematic sonic core. The Carrion does not pour forth from a central point, or expand upon its previous assertions – sure, certain locked grooves may accumulative vocal shavings and scraps of noise as they cycle, adding little bumps of rhythm to the rotary return, but there is no accompanying sense of onward movement. Instead, even the most drastic of the EP’s transitions feel like the mutations of my own hallucinations as I pace around the same cramped room, projecting different disturbing imagery and harrowing flashbacks onto the very same set of walls.

Often this sort of sound collage crafts a new home from the loose limbs of music and spoken fragments, grafting together a new collective home for the remnants displaced. Each element of The Carrion remains uneasy and dissociative in the wake of its new company, and even as familiar rhythms start to throb out of the murk, the music remains a tumult of conflicting direction: a classical symphony jabbing into the side of a news broadcast, the tinny whispers of a disco track evaporating into a boiler room that melts into a pool of light and time, or the gasp of hydraulic machinery spraying over buckled magnetic tape.