Friday, 20 January 2012

Thorstein Gullheart: The Maggots' Incest


Thorstein Gullheart return with The Maggots’ Incest after a much-welcomed ten-year hiatus. Or should that be returns. What or who Gullheart is remains a closely guarded secret – his/their/its appearance on stage gives away few clues; the giant squelching dimly-lit mess could be the work of a collective of bodies, human and non-human. But who cares really? This reviewer, for one, had enough of the sort of droning stretched-cat blues that Thorstein Gullheart produced in the ninties. The thought of having to listen to this slime-fest backwater of a genre with this album is almost too much to bear.

In an interview earlier this year Gullheart issued this statement about its music from behind a curtain (and through a vomit-encrusted vocoder no-doubt): “Thorstein Gullhearts considers its music to be plugging into a matrix of free form signifiers constructed from the personal artefacts and disposed consumer shit of cultural masses, both at once life temples and garbage landfills, and by re-evaluating, reconsuming, and (re)presenting the nodes and faces of broadcast media entities, creates a meta-commentary that calls into question the cultural imperialism of discourses surrounding and underpinning the narratives of our age.”

It’s possible that even Thorstein Gullheart itself doesn’t understand this mangled fuck-up of a sentence. Unfortunately though, it’s the sort of waffle that pervades this whole album. Once, around 20 years ago, Gullheart babbled some half-interesting word nuggets, but ever since a stage blackout in ’96 where the pulsating pus-globe exploded, showering the audience in fuck-knows-what sort of slime globs, it has barely even expressed anything remotely approaching intelligibility. ‘Waffle, TV, Consume! Consume!, arachnids, blah, WTF, flange bucket, resist everything and sit on my face’ goes the first track (I’m paraphrasing). It is a testament to the sheer level of piss-in-a-sink awfulness of the rest of this album that I returned to this track for its vaguely hummable coda after sitting through the other ‘songs’, the marrow solidifying in my bones.

Apparently Thorstein Gullheart has already started recording its next album. I bet the recording studio stinks. What a tit.

1 comment:

  1. The phrase "monstrous balls of sub-vaginal guff" may be overused these days, but it's rarely felt so apt as when applied to the sqwawkings of postmodern 'theorists'. The only problem with your parody is that it actually makes a lot more sense than most real 'theory'. Otherwise, brill : 13.5 out of 10.

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