Review: Pop. 1280 – The Horror
Pop. 1280 – The Horror (2011) [Sacred Bones] // Grade: A-
Last we heard, New York’s scathing noise punks Pop. 1280 were lobbing grimy undulating postcards from their desolate future-world, The Grid (2010) in a way that led us to lovingly run to the mailbox each time frontman Chris Bug and Co. came slithering down the street, another dark tale lodged in their fangs. The troupe now return with their debut long-player appropriately dubbed The Horror for Sacred Bones Records. While the quartet’s Grid played as a mere introduction to a crumbling city’s sorriest of characters — slant-faced street walkers fiercely masturbating or jovial adventurers steeped in a river of feces — their churning full length builds said cast up, chains our asses to the seats and draws the curtain on a crude and wholly scathing production; a playbill for the desolate underground, The Horror is an unavoidably sinister affair that feels much longer than it’s clocked-at time of 38 minutes.
The last recording to come from engineer Ben Greenberg working in Brooklyn’s Python Patrol basement studios, Pop. 1280 now come retrofitted with ex. Twin Stumps drummer Zach Ziemann and attempt to advance upon their dingy and agitated cyberpunk effect, which walked the line of overarching technological benefit grounded by low life attitude. While the band’s overall sonic comparisons still mutate the likes of The Birthday Party/Nick Cave, DNA, Mars, Swans or Glenn Branca, The Horror finds the band moving forward by adding more experimentation, broader conceptual flaunts and slumping walls of visceral noise all fronted by a wonderfully convulsive and dynamic lyrical performance from Chris Bug. While the pushy sharpness of the record’s ugly instrumental frame (crude, tribal playing, bounding dime-store synths, crawling-sick guitar wails) is one of its most obvious traits, The Horror’s best praise is found in the songwriters (Ivan Lip and Bug) mastering of a looming narrative that’s blinded under social norms wherein copulating perverts want more, minds take leaping advances toward their innate human animal and how we are all left filled with the depravity of pending destruction and the harsh realization of mastering an afterlife- it’s no wonder that Bug introduces escapist track “West World” by wailing along about how he “cannot find a bridge to high.”
Like The Grid, their debut is again delivered under nine songs and each, aware of the other’s skin-punctured imprint, is evidence of said warped dysoptioan vision. Opener “Burn the Worm” details “two dogs fucking” as a portrait of a painful life; “Nature Boy” skirts along with a masquerade of clueless zombie-d patrons blinded by the lights of their Paradise Ballroom and “Beg Like a Human” sinks with a slick chorus of “the thing about dogs is that they don’t know what they are doing, I want you to beg like a human, a human dog,” set from a hilltop view under an amber refinery glow overlooking a city in flames. The entire record plays as such and while tales of weird, desolated minds with death crawling nearby is certainly not for everyone’s playlist, the ghastly impact that this New York quartet’s debut delivers is by all means a compelling temptation, an example of perfected outlier pop and a treat oh-so sweet thanks to its smearing of dirge and smut.
