A Brief Nightmare with Alpha Maid, by Kurt Gottschalk

I’m not sure where Alpha Maid comes from, but it seems like a scary place. Reports say South London, although Godard’s Alphaville seems more likely. I might also have guessed Bristol, where producer/rapper Tricky comes from, but that might be an overgeneralization. Like Tricky, though, or at least Tricky at his best, Alpha Maid make disturbing mixes, putting unadorned vocals over unsupportive, glitched-out tracks, like a dystopian dancefloor, like a post-human world where human pain remains.

CHUCKLE (out digitally from C.A.N.V.A.S. March 19, with a vinyl release to come at some unspecified date) is the trio’s second EP. Like 2019’s Spy, it runs barely a quarter of an hour—all the time they need to set a mood and leave you with it. The tracks grind and jitter, heavy but sparse, unstable. Lopsided glitches and trumpet spurts, plodding bass and distorted guitar seem pasted over beats that come off as almost accidental. Melodies arise only occasionally, as if to make some sardonic point. Leisha Thomas’s voice is filtered and coated in reverb, words eroded into core attitude.

It’s a remarkable little record, streaming in full on Bandcamp. If it doesn’t unnerve you, you just don’t have nerves.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn   “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air