YOU NEED TO GET SLUDGED, TODAY!
Photo via Instagram
Gao the Arsonist’s GORDIAN came out today, and if you aren’t foaming at the mouth in anticipation to listen to it, you should be. The track is a single released as a supplement to his last album– “AND THEY MINE FOR OUR BODIES”– which continues his dive into the lore and characters of his post-apocalyptic world: the Sludge-verse.
The song itself is just as great as his other work. It has a sound welcome to ears trained on electronic music, experimental rap like JPEG Mafia and Death Grips, as well as goth, punk and metal, but it is also a completely different beast. GORDIAN sounds like everything Playboi Carti and other opium rappers want to sound like and can’t quite grasp. It is haunting, melodic and catchy with a very distorted–and dare I say sludgy–mix. The soundscape of this song can only be described as maximalist; every inch is taken up with heavy bass, eerie melodies, and obsessive vocals. It is horrifying, but it does not insist upon this; you come to this conclusion on your own. I think, to Gao, this song is beautiful. He is a fanatical, heretical, post-apocalyptic preacher basking in the glory of the end of the world.
The lyrics in the description of the YouTube visual for the song start off with the hint “Josephine Haskell scorns Prometheus.” Josephine Haskell is a fictional character and one of the main villains in Gao’s graphic novel, The Sludge Tapes. Prometheus, is, of course, the figure from Greek myth. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of Josephine as she goes on a dramatic monologue directed at Prometheus and the Gods. She is saying there is no hope against her. She is so powerful that she can conquer the Gods should they defy her. They are so beneath her that the challenge they pose is laughable, just as the challenge of the Gordian Knot was laughably easy for Alexander the Great. Josephine will conquer all, even the Gods, just as Alexander the Great conquered Asia, so what chance do you, or anyone else, have at stopping her?
This song just continues Gao’s legacy as an unflinchingly great musician, producer, songwriter, poet and storyteller. He is pioneering and perfecting a new genre–his own genre, Sludge. You should listen to GORDIAN, and while you’re at it, listen to everything else he’s made in the past three years. The only thing this song leaves me wanting for is more, and unfortunately for me, and by his own skill and design, there is nothing else out there that sounds quite like this.
