Cutting a swathe through the contemporary landscape with a scorched penchant for Southern Gothic and Appalachian Horror, the Cacophonous Revival Recordings founder Samuel Goff structures his new album This Is My Body, This Is My Blood around three vignettes of his upbringing in a fervently religious household, with a charismatic father who was both pastor and snake handler and a disagreeable if well-meaning mother, who in a blood-strewn rage rips out chunks of the family Bible when her husband shacks up in a traveller’s motel with his brother’s wife, even though that selfsame Bible was one of the few fancy things they possessed.
The glinting keys and stomping percussion of these spoken word narratives spills out into a molasses-thick stew or morass of genre diversions from musique concrĆØte to thrash metal to shrill industrial noise with techno lashings that sits somewhere between Frozen Niagara Falls by Prurient and Adore by The Smashing Pumpkins, plus ritual chanting which might from one moment to the next be redolent of Tuvan throat singing or the dry heaves offset by microtonal percussive clanks and Dutch hardstyle of the rambunctious Javanese duo Raja Kirik.
A drummer by trade whose previous record was a call for diminished borders loosely based around the collection Spit Temple by the Chilean poet Cecilia VicuƱa, with Goff’s bristling polyrhythms undergirding Camila Nebbia and Patrick Shiroishi’s duelling horns, for This Is My Body, This Is My Blood the artist plays keyboards and piano, turntables and electronics, autoharp and bass alongside a plethora of percussion from bowed cymbals to oil drums while accompanied by a retinue of instrumentalists. On the album centrepiece Goff recalls his mother’s words after the aforementioned biblical breakdown, her admission that ‘Faith quenches the violence of fire. But tonight I lost my faith’ serving as both sonic rationale and leitmotif. ‘Witch Spit’ utilises the slaver of 176 vocal tracks, while the closer ‘I’m Never Coming Back’ proves a long goodbye haunted by the voice of God, the creek Goff and his brothers used to play in, train tracks and the tree under which the author used to write, swaying from an overhanging branch or hovering in the middle ground somewhere between misty recollection and torched retreat.
