“War is god.” These are the words uttered by Judge Holden when he discusses the control of war in a mere card game within Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Holden takes his hand through McCarthy’s page and befalls instills in the writer, making the author create a man set on removing the man-made moral faculties that pursue the strong. A similar atmosphere of barren wastes — in the physical and moral sense — has been melded by New York City’s Pop. 1280. Instead of building war and demonstrating god, Paradise strictly adheres to an industrial and cyber way to reach out to what makes a McCarthy novel soul-crushing, whether it be the quoted Blood Meridian or the equally depraved The Road. It is in this adherence to bleakness and style that makes the album’s terrors and its warts — positive and negative — known.
The band might have a drinking game in mind for this third album: drink a shot each time the title is questioned. Yes, Paradise is not the world described on the sides of Fruitopia jugs, but instead one crafted in the style of George Orwell’s 1984. Those basking — the strong — are calling it their paradise, while the weak, the drones, follow all, lest they desire rats gnawing their flesh. At times, the album will become a slab where cults have had their due, while at other times the cyberpunk world and noise rock beats of a band like HEALTH will create a dance-worthy nuclear fallout. Contrivances in metre deliver unnecessary scratches on Pop. 1280’s work, yet the industrial punk qualities and the ferocity of Chris Bug’s vocals create the worthwhile soundscape for those desiring another fixture from the Sacred Bones catalog.
There is a desperation within the lyrics of Paradise that sets it up as a journey, one where the mind involved is paranoid of the motions of everything. The paranoia becomes vicarious, building a fight-or-flight mood for its listener. When “Pyramids on Mars” begins with its villain lair percussion and radiation storm buzzes, Bug’s vocal tones becomes immediately settled into, with the conspiracy theorist-like uttering that is the title’s line. “In Silico’s” lyric “I dream in infrared” releases the band’s inner love for the Birthday Party, creating a catastrophic combination of drums and keyboard courtesy of Allegra Sauvage and Andy Chugg. The lyric also brings about a maddening anxiety within the dream-space. These sentiments can be found within “Chromidia” (“Are you my watch dog… Are you the camera lens?”) and “Kingdom Come” with its returning “infrared”. All of these lines become entranced in a twitch of torture, and with it, the subtle touches of Skinny Puppy, the Prodigy, and the already-mentioned Birthday Party.
The instrumentation posited on Paradise is an institution built along the foundation of the industrial and punk scenes of today and yesteryear. “Phantom Freighter” brings together the visceral tones of Rammstein and Skinny Puppy to create a dance beat surprisingly fitting of a futuristic gloom. “USS ISS” takes Prodigy-like melodies into its infernal background, making its talk of pirouetting something devilish. The title track takes listeners to the moon while also embracing the haunts that Godspeed You! Black Emperor might have came to drink. The unassuming brass and percussion creates an expanse so robotic and philosophically-sound that it brings to mind works of Isaac Asimov. And “Rain Song” progresses in a way where Bug’s singing becomes meandering through a metal house that is rusting quickly from the outside. Though these high-points bring substance to a consistently enamoring darkness, the approach to lyrics holds Bug back slightly.
Though rhyming can be a key piece in songwriting, the use of it on Paradise restrains it from creating anecdotal journeys into a pierced soul. Instead of immersing listeners into the paranoid and battered mind of the record’s character, rhyming brings attention back to the structure of the piece, reeling away from the darkness that can be so consuming. Where musicians can falter in their stylizing of a noise rock angle by randomly putting their noise in ill-fitting sections, Pop. 1280 use their arsenal very well. It is in the desire for complete immersion that dwarfs Paradise from being more grotesque than modern Marilyn Manson.
That said, Pop. 1280 have created a world of two. Paradise can be heard as a record that sates those wanting dark and brooding; it can also be positioned as an electronic mass of epileptic dance beats, fit for the slow and fast dancing of those sober or not. In this way, the record can be both a scene from Blood Meridian or Michael Mann’s Collateral. This is an album that can be someone’s paradise, but not in the way one might think of.