Bristol artwork rock agitators Erotic Secrets and techniques of Pompeii return with their torturesome new single, ‘Communicate Medieval’, set for launch on twenty seventh March.
A frenetic assault of chromatic riffs and stop-start rhythms, ‘Communicate Medieval’ explores the delicate threads that maintain communication collectively in a world teetering on the brink. It’s a track of communion and battle, of phrases that baffle and deceive. The track revels within the violent undercurrents of nursery rhymes, dragging them to their pure, grotesque conclusions, the place the gleeful repetition of childhood verse dissolves into one thing much more sinister.
Laden with grotesquely medieval imagery – pricking needles, ergot visions, greased-up geese – the observe conjures a world the place language each conceals and divulges its personal brutality. “I’m trickster, mischief maker…” intones frontman Thomas Hawtin, an unreliable narrator prowling by way of the wreckage of fractured speech, wielding phrases like weapons.
Musically, ‘Communicate Medieval’ is a breaking wheel spinning madly whereas petulant guitars conflict and convulse, rhythms lurch unpredictably, and Hawtin’s vocal supply veers between inebriated parson and deranged storyteller. It’s a track that embodies the chaos it describes, an exciting and unsettling reminder that language isn’t as harmless because it appears.
That is ESOP at their most unhinged—aggressive but whimsical, punchy but elusive.