Comfort zones? Who needs them? Well, not Bell Barrow that’s for sure. Anyone already familiar with any music that Jeremy Moore has made under this or any other moniker will already be well aware of that, and anyone for whom this is a first taste will come to that same conclusion within seconds of “True Human Trough” descending on their sense.
The fact that the press release even warns us that this is “less an album than a hostile transmission from extra-dimensional strata” is a reminder that we are certainly not in the realm of the three-minute pop song, and this, the title track of a full album to follow is a combined teaser and taster and tester of the sonic waters, but also the modern equivelant of seeing “Here Be Dragons” on the map. Forewarned is forearmed.
Sitting somewhere between art and madness, you are hard pushed to find melody or sonic meaning, and are instead bombarded by brutal beat and bombastic rhythms. But like madness, the longer you spend in its company, the more it starts to make sense, or at least you see patterns forming and start seeing things differently. It takes a brave person to dance to it, but it will make you think.
Described as a continuation of the “jazz-core progressive death metal leaning” already associated with the project, the idea here is to express non-human attitudes through barely human music. These salvos and blindsides of feral anarchism and artistic antagonism aim to remove you from the purpose of music as we understand it and to capture something of the primal, primordial instinct and chaos that form this planet’s food chain, from which we have increasingly separated ourselves as a species. This is an embodiment of the world we have left behind.
Music as academia? Music to break down logic and make the listener think laterally? Music to undermine and break down understanding? Music to challenge, both regarding its message and by starting a dialogue about what music can even be? Music to rock the foundations of comfort zones and acceptability? Yes, yes, yes, this is all that and more. Much more.
