Sundree's bandcamp mess
VR SEX is back; and here to deliver us their hardest hitting project yet. I mean it when I say that their music speaks for itself.
Favorite track: Inanimate Love.
absinthefaery
Growing up, we used to watch 'Hard Copy' after the nightly news, at the dinner table. Back in those Jerry Springer days. I like this better!
Favorite track: In Great Detail.
Following 2022’s 'Rough Dimension' LP, Noel Skum – aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty – made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR SEX into a fully collaborative five-piece band. To christen the new group’s camaraderie, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and “did that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.” Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments. Hard Copy is the result – 10 tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling sex doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales.
Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel – an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground – the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco’s muse of “reckless abandon.” Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loud- quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR SEX’s mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication: “My goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.”
Lyrically, the record revisits the project’s perennial fascinations: twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between “facsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other – when both come with their own menu of delights and demonic pleasures.” Hard Copy embraces extremes and outliers, delusion and perversion, the conflicted dimensional depths lurking in every exploded heart: “I can be ugly / I can be strong / I can be proper / I can be wrong / I can be lovely / or I can be gone / the thing that will haunt you is still hanging on.”
Never listened to their music until I saw their show at Grauzone in The Hague by accident. This music deeply touched my heart ! "Alive again, I don´t need to die tonight" ! CountBreznak
When Andrew Clinco (aka Deb Demure) was sitting in his Los Angeles bedroom, listening to the Cocteau Twins and mastering his first album, going back and forth inside the soundbooth bathroom conversion, he didn't expect the response he would receive in return. Later bring Alex Nicolaou (aka Mona D) aboard as the keyboardist, the duo have reinvigorated "The Underground Subculture" music genre with a new chapter in a reminiscence of past bands, but heralding a newly defined gantlet...!!! The Spinglass Hydra
Adopting an optimistic, genre-fluid mindset atypical to most contemporary punk rock, the Aussies rage against the machine with glee. Bandcamp New & Notable May 2, 2024
A four-track bout between two of Australia's most formidable post-punk groups, fueled by wiry guitar riffs and vibrant, timely lyrics. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 19, 2022