Artist: Lotus Thrones
Album: The Heretic Souvenir
Label: Disorder Recordings/Seeing Red Records (vinyl)
Genre: Experimental/Industrial/Post-Punk
Release Date: April 7, 2023
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
You’re sitting at the piano. One hand holding a cigarette, elbow resting on your knee. The other thoughtlessly twiddles chords with no connections. Cryptically impressive. Hovering.
A cat walks casually down your arm, unimpressed by the architecture. Mischief tickles the keys and an echo of the resulting triplet mixes well with the smell of wet tires and smoke.
An entire world exists within these three notes; a world that makes itself known with all the subtlety of a hammer to hope. You can hear the glass hit the floor on The Heretic Souvenir by Lotus Thrones.
Perched above the puddles and the trash, you bask in the purple-shaded noir of a nightlife inhabited by characters from Fellini films. Woven between the rungs of a z-shaped ladder. Breathing easy on a borrowed spider web of peace – attached to the failing bricks of cheap apartments.
You inhale memories absent of the city’s ringing in your ears. You don’t hear sirens anymore. Only the madness of industrial vampires shadowboxing sex and violence, and the voices of friends who’ve stopped visiting.
No longer interested in your poetry, or the sounds of saxophones under blankets of reverb, they’re frightened of the strangeness that once felt so much like home. They’ve abandoned their front-row seats. Their positions no longer postured for listening.
This is Swans meeting Godflesh for drinks – at a club down the street from Too Dark Park. “If you know, you know,” they say, waiting to watch The Tear Garden blow holes in the sky.
Rating: 4.5/5
Commenting on “BOTOXDRONE$,” Heath Rave says:
“The pundit, the news anchor, the primetime host, gleaming in the light. Are you buying what they’re selling? This is my favorite song ever created in this project. The ones with Bruce Lamont on saxophone are always up there but I feel like the is the one that is quintessentially everything that is Lotus Thrones. Dark, weird, heavy and sensual. We got to work on this one in the studio together in Chicago and it was such a privilege. Bruce will always be a de facto member of Lotus Thrones.“
Source: Secret Service PR
Preorder The Heretic Souvenir on Bandcamp.
Preorder The Heretic Souvenir on vinyl from Seeing Red Records.
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