Lucid Dementia
Trickery (Buried Productions)Comforting to know that Sheldon Reynolds' veteran industrigoth freak out remains committed to peeling the tatty fishnets off of bad, black reality and administering a sonic cat-o'-nine-tails to the post-millennial American blood-farce. Trickery, cranked up to 11, nearly nails the locals' live weaponized-puppetry theatrics and throbs with enough rusty iron hooks to sate even Uncle Frank's Cenobite fetish. Opener "Pie" sets a frantic pace, with Lord Byron Payne's paint-stripper guitar coiling around the thrusting, tribal percussives of Azil X, but it's Reynolds' trademark creep-shriek that scuttles inside your head and deposits its hatchery of nightmare-peeps egglets there. Uptempo shout-along "WTF" captures the zeitgeist and then paddles it pink and raw, while "Deadly Sally" nicks a page from Tim Burton. Pessimistic misfits to their core, Austin's Lucid Dementia derail the "Lies" that have resulted in "Billions for the War" with spiky sweet, perpetually pissy graveside panache. Dig in.
