Review: Wet Nurse - Lacrimosa

Wet Nurse is sweating. Heat and emotional waste wade up through the dermis and squirm out through the pores, even as Paul Kinasevych does his mortal utmost to keep it all down. Black slugs of melody and stagnant feedback press up against the surface of his body. His mouth slackens into a series of irrepressible dry heaves. The ejected material sounds rotten and horrible, frayed and churned – decayed from sitting at the dank pit of a stomach for far too long – but it’s a vital and absolutely necessary process. Lacrimosa captures the moment that cathartic pressure overtakes the power to suppress it, but where so much noise offsets its own gloom with the sudden, fountain-esque grandeur of the liberation process, I spend the album’s entire 37 minutes watching Wet Nurse perspire treacle.

He’s a connoisseur in guttural, slow-moving drones: intermittent growls of detuned bass guitars, snorting synthesiser noise loops. The low frequencies quadruple the gravity of my soundscape, causing violins to droop out of tune and riddling Kinasevych’s cries with a deadly lethargy. We transit into the final five minutes of “Anticipating Events That Will Never Occur” – during which I feel like a vicarious observer peeking through a sewer grate – and he slumps into a foetal ball. It’s quite clear that Wet Nurse is alone this entire time, screaming himself hoarse without anyone to listen. And as I hear his heartbeat flatline in the album’s final moments (or do I?), I realise that the very toxic matter pushing out of skin was the only thing holding his body together.