It’s as if, by giving voice to the mesh of self-loathing strangling so many of our brains, she can momentarily dislodge it. But somewhere between the hypnotic throb of “Spit It Out” and the military clip of “Self-Regulating System”’s percussion, Chardiet’s chaos paradoxically prompts a deepening sense of calm. These songs center her prowess as an industrial vocalist, someone who can transmute the chronic trauma of survival under capitalism into an appropriately scathing outburst. If some of her earlier work, 2014’s Bestial Burden especially, induced a sense of claustrophobia, then Devour does the opposite: It radiates in open space, as though Chardiet were screaming for help into empty darkness.īetween lurches of electronic noise, Chardiet squeals and rasps and growls, her voice lacerated by the barbed-wire sieve of effects. Though she doesn’t uproot her longtime palette of abrasive electronics, Chardiet deploys new strategies for her vocals, which wobble and fray against a blaring bass tone on opener “Homeostasis.” She howls against instrumentation that seemingly wants to smother her, singing deeply from her diaphragm as if straining to be heard. The A and B sides of the record each comprise a single, continuous session, which lends momentum and immediacy to the music. With one of her most harrowing and powerful albums to date, Chardiet zeroes in on the seam between the sick person and the sick ecosystem, the locus where global horrors register on the individual.ĭevour is the first Pharmakon album Chardiet has recorded live in studio. Chardiet dedicates Devour to “all who were lost to their own demise, all who have been institutionalized whether in prison, psychiatric facilities, or drug rehabilitation.” Institutionalized people are often scapegoated for individual problems with systemic causes crime, self-harm, and addiction get painted as character defects, rather than symptoms of a dysfunctional world.
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