Darksmith - Regret Everything (2020)

"Without uttering a single syllable, Darksmith Of California sketches a solid case that everyone has been replaced with replicants. Metaphorically, let’s say, if that’s what it takes to accept the premise. Throughout Regret Everything’s thirty-minute capgras-adjacent mood-kill, corrupted and near-stillborn modulations groom themselves against the bristles of truncated fidelity. Here then is Regret Everything’s apt herald for the invariably bright-with-optimism mornings on the West Coast, with its instances of damaged tape transforming bird-coop piano into anti-erotic asphyxiation, and croaking plank frottage distilled from five-hundred pounds of bird guts pushed out of a trombone. It is a dryly disturbing landscape, to be sure, where pock-marked eggs the size of a kidnapper’s van grind against cement walls, raining down flakes and calcium shards. On this slightly reworked reissue of Mom Costume’s 2018 edition of 10, fumes of diesel fuel rise from the surfaces of amorphous chunks of scorched Styrofoam scattered in sugary puddles of avian placenta. Newborn chicks, writhing in balls of discomfort and dread, stretch to puncture the constricting membrane of disorientation, unaware they’ve been blinded by mercury leaked from ruptured polyps bearing down on them. All the machines have tumors. Hello and welcome."