The Brambles of Hell (2009)

Angry. Spiteful. Painfully honest. Emotional in the way a pissed-off tactician or scientist might view the world. Mildly technical. Funny?

Themes include denial of God and soulessness, brutal gang rape and the failure of heroes and lynch-mobs, telling cocktail-party righteous believers to go fuck themselves, The sad behavior of drunk administrative assistants - to the point of humiliation and even murder, how a person can have perfectly nasty thoughts about raping and killing and still be perfectly fine and moral, how fucking stupid are politics can be at the bar, how fate and destiny can be subverted and even told off, and how the whole God-damned world sometimes sucks it.

All mired in the Brambles of Hell. Let's go fucking crazy. All hail the king of spite: The meanest fucker you've ever met.

The Brambles of Hell is TASM Lab's eighth release and Jeff Till's first wholly autonomous record. He sings and growls his way through prose-like, crude, thoughtful lyrics. The music is at once aggressive and wildly different, yet mostly acoustic guitars, drums, bells, strings, piano. There's a few heavy metal guitars, but not many.

Maybe it's a little like Elvis Costello's rock music, some of the brazen storytelling of NOMEANSNO (maybe one of their slower records, like "mr. Happy"), a little like New Pornographers. Maybe The Soft Bulletin Flaming Lips. Some has a folkish/countryish twang. But then there's some noisy drop-d guitars and atonal stuff. Even some punk rock ala Decendents (the opening track) and some grand epic stuff like Journey or something. I'm struggling with this.

Of course, it is like Screwtape Y1.993k, and Overman and The Hudson Debacle and Essential cubicle nosepicker and Thing and Nothing. And while it is the companion record to "an Adulty Adipisci", it's only the instruments and a few borrowed melodies that make them cousins.

The ongoing goal here is to be completely unapologetic. To not subscribe to any genre, instead building music with the same innocents I did as a child, meaning I just write what I want, not what I think people would expect to hear. And this goes for the lyrics too. I just want to come out and say it, even if its disturbing or nasty or embarrassing. Fuck it.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to dispel this myth of the soul. A horseshit concept that's murderous by design. I'm here to tell you: there's nothing else. No afterlife, just a world of never-ending darkness where there's no sun, there is no light. So when you run into that asshole from Beverly Hills Michigan, you know the one - that impenetrable douchebag, that unfortunate, arrogant pile of fuck, instead of asking how much time is left, ask him how much of your mind is left, and then punch him as hard as you can in his smug cocksucker. If the crushing gravity from this hateful star overwhelms you, if it arrests your mind in such a frightening way that you begin to see God - go absolutely fucking crazy. I've never seen another woman so desperate She was scared, as she gathered up her teeth, strewn through the dirt, blood stains rained from her skirt, like a death umbrella. The men dropped their pants, to a dead messiah. Hail to the king of spite, the meanest fucker you ever met. I could fuck this up, You could die here tonight. “Fuck you” was all I said to piss them off this time. There’s me, and my friends, and their wives, and their vicious children, on the way to kiss them, their lips stained red with blood. I am the prince of this shit, of this dishonest shitpile. Dumped on my lawn, on my mind, from the bowels of reason, as hate gushed hot from his tongue. Remember all those high school dorks? I fucked them all in my mind. And now every teen I see, I want to cut their throats and dash out their eyes. “Wake up, fuckface”.