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.
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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