Playing an album can be like opening a musical portal taking you to another time and place. As a listener you should perhaps err on the cautious side as you never know quite where you are going to end up. One second you could be sitting in your listening room and the next find yourself bloody well back in Aokigahara, the Japanese suicide forest again. Thankfully we are not led there by The Lion’s Daughter’s 4th studio album but we are in a place where the clean living among you certainly should have no wish to tread. Here we are back to the late 70’s / early 80’s, pitched up in various places along 42nd Street, The Deuce a virtual Sodom and Gomorrah all rolled into one. The songs place us in various rooms and alleys, we could be walking next to a serial killer stalking the neon lit paths of decadence looking for next victim and thrill. We could be in a worn piss reeking chair all springs and unsavoury fluids with the Grindhouse screen in front of us showing a double bill of Roberta Findlay flicks. We could be seeing a mound of sweaty flesh gyrating in the midst of a sex show or enclosed in a sticky floored jizzy booth watching all manner of sexual depravities unroll in front of our eyes. Be careful who you make eye contact with, they only want to roll you with offers of cheap drugs and hook-ups. If you are staying the night, brave and foolish one, avoid the Bronson hotel and the man with the shifty eyes, certainly do not ask him what’s in the basket? Ah it’s a place I would have loved to visit but only got there just before it was totally sanitised by Disney. Play this album though and you can indeed be back there for the next 49 minutes.
I enjoyed the last couple of albums by the oddly entitled trio The Lion’s Daughter. They basically started out as a sludge band but have moved further down electronic routes to one that today the label simply describe as “synth metal” and what a perfect soundtrack that is for the aforementioned place and era. A classic synthwave line ushers us in to ‘Become The Night’ the backlit projector flashes in time to the beats. It’s a giallo-esque slice of Murder Rock as the performers rear up. Rick Giordano’s vocals are harsh, craggy and guttural as the music seethes into a frenzied pace and the hooks of the compulsively catchy pop-laden chorus hit hard. Things are thumped hard, the drums rather than the performer’s meat thankfully but we are consumed by the sleaze and lust behind it and by the second time the chorus hits you will be pumping certain things and singing along. It hits harder than a whip lashing at an invite only S&M club; the Sanford Parker (who else) production really makes you feel every stroke. ‘Curtains’ are next, what lies behind the flea-bitten drapes is no doubt shocking and an organ spreads the dread of expectation before battering drums and chunky guitars hone in adding industrial pumps to the soundscape and as vocals roar like a lion they have the stadium etched gravitas of a band like Killing Joke about them. Each song-room we enter has its own identity and something about it. We get a twisty Carpenteresque trick or treat from the synth line winding through ‘Neon Teeth’ and here the clean vocals have a touch of London’s own Voices about them. Some sparkling keyboard pulses light the strobes which go mad at the climax of this particular show. ‘Dead In Dreams’ a nightmare on Broadway, simmers down the pace and has a resigned stagger of an inhabitant worn down by the place looking for some much needed slumber and only being able to find it amidst the dangerous inhabitants of the all night cinema. Inside the patrons are watching a hack and slash monster film ‘Werewolf Hospital’ which in this time and place I would buy without a doubt if it only really existed. Needless to say, this one is all slashing claws and violent throat shredding bites.
Flipping the side, a title like ‘Sex Trap’ cannot help but put in mind scenes in certain films such as perhaps Pretty Peaches a classic of the era from Alex de Renzy, anyone who has seen it will know exactly what I am referring to. The sinister synth luring in to this dangerous and unsavoury place take us into a domain of vice, abuse and one where the victims sadly die young. “It’s always the same” this ritual of exploitation presented from the fevered imagination of the artists can be seen in the NSFW video below. Degradation and snuff are the very ugly side of life portrayed here. Other sinister characters such as ‘Snakeface’ and ‘The Chemist’ are still to emerge, they tell their own horrifying tales as the album seethes towards finale on a bedrock of glittering synth lines and vocals vomited out with ever more nauseating distemper. Yes, we may wish to visit but this is a playground for the diseased and the hunters. The prey don’t survive long and there is no shortage of them to line coffins in a paupers grave. The terror may well be human as is mentioned beneath the piggish NiN like march of “All Hell Is Mine’ and the roar of “suicide” is absolution and for many who walked these paths, the only way out. Perhaps one should not reflect on this time and place as one of nostalgia and delight but peel back the layers and the detritus of human life ruined by it. That strikes me as exactly what The Lion’s Daughter have done here and below the poppy hooks and beats the sinister side of humanity has really been tackled on an album that is pure Mondo in execution. Existence is indeed horror!
(8/10 Pete Woods)
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