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 her family possessed.
The glinting keys and stomping percussion of these spoken word narratives spill out into a molasses-thick stew or morass of genre diversions which incorporate everything from musique concrĆØte to thrash metal to shrill industrial noise with techno lashings and sit somewhere between Frozen Niagara Falls by Prurient and Adore by The Smashing Pumpkins. The opening to the standout ‘This Is My Body’ evokes Bjƶrk and the lurching, crumbling trip-hop of her Post opener ‘Army of Me’ while ritual chants from one moment to the next prove redolentĀ 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 long album centrepiece Goff recalls his mother’s words after that 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 separate vocal tracks, while the record closer ‘I’m Never Coming Back’ proves a long goodbye haunted equally by the voice of God and reminiscences drawn from Goff’s childhood, with the creek he and his brothers used to play in, nearby train tracks and the tree under which the author used to write each summoned to stirring effect. Swaying from an overhanging branch or hovering in the middle distance, he regards all of these elements with a certain curiosity or even fondness while harnessing their power and setting them back in place, as This Is My Body, This Is My Blood steers hard between misty recollection and torched retreat.
