Dark Meat
Are We Chaos Makers Or Are We Men?
Dec 29, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Oh, To Find Her Gone
unreleased
Is a cold-death broadside. This time, a man grows so lonely in the dark paused-rot of a northern rural winter that he begins to hear warnings in the wind. They grow so dire he decides he must not ignore them and so he goes to give his former love the black news from the wind. She's gone, without a trace. Her clocks are ticking, though, and her house is in order, and a vegetable smell permeates the atmosphere. He waits, but she never comes. Back at his sad house, he idles in the now-heightened solitude, but is so haunted by dreams of her that he must soon leave to wander other lands, and is therefore freed from his moribund life.
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When The Shelter Came
unreleased
Is a distended annihilation-ballad about a nameless man lost in the desert. He's as close to sun-death as a man can be, and thusly he's hallucinating an entourage of women around him, though they all lack skin and eyes. Suddenly, a house appears on a distant dune, and he and his women become ecstatic. They arrive at the dune to discover it was merely another mirage, and as his friends kneel to ask for mercy, they're swallowed by a great gulf in the land. He dies, too, and the song of his self rises and rakes the sand and the sky, and it's shaped like a beautiful thing Albert Ayler would've loved to sing, and it goes on forever, just like mine, just like yours.
Show business hasn't borne witness to a sensory overload like Dark Meat since it's been deemed show business, which is literally the beginning of the time when money was originally conceived as a means of legal tender. It's as if music now has an act that competes with the old comedy joke of various incarnations, sinews and improvisations - The Aristocrats - only this band from Athens, Ga., replaces the delightfully crass and foul setup with cannons packed full of graffiti, unwashed bodies, war paints, more arms and legs than three basketball teams, every instrument in pairs, a volume that volumizes and multiplies and a littering of beer and alcohol-fueled pandemonium.
The eyes and ears are forced or encouraged to be torn into over a dozen different pieces just to take in the melee that the act we're referring to creams out over the public every time it performs, and that's essentially the way the band should be conceived - as a live entity that also makes recordings of its streams of consciousness. Dark Meat is a lubricated bludgeoning of sound that could knock over the Sears Tower if it scratched its back against the structures side wall. Or one simple song could do the same kind of toppling damage, sending the glass and steel into a freefall of projectile rubble. It's a bullhorn, tied to another bullhorn, tied to a third and fourth bullhorn and the effect of what the sometimes 15, sometimes less and sometimes more band of gypsies and wandering spirits, road dogs and weirdos is the kind of chaotic agenda that Eris, the god of it, would endorse. Whatever the gathering of members consists of onstage or in the studio at any given time, it does not necessarily service chaos, but offer their own sort of abridged and messier amalgamation of what they'd prefer their chaos to be if they were so given a choice to lay their own blueprints. They get to color their chaos, give it a pet name, help its hair grow shaggy and knotty, entice it to try anything twice and just be almost twenty different personifications of the id and the id on drugs, copious amounts of drugs. They must all fight with one another, these separate urges and debacle makers, if only to become heard from out of the blaring psychedelia, the tornado of horns and guitars and voices and wilderness.
There's so much of Dark Meat that's untamed and there's so much of it that's the walking advertisement for their beer coozie, foam advertisement that celebrates vomit and a tour that's supposed to be commemorated in the number of beers consumed over the route. The consumption of these beers happens fast, like an infestation of locusts or grasshoppers. The day their spewing hunk of an ancient bus that Jerry Lee Lewis might have toured on back in the day - which is probably radiating a combined odor of rancid spaghetti, diapers, weed smoke, football players and general vice - rolled into town, nearly one hundred bottles were cracked and consumed over the course of a two-hour afternoon and two recorded songs. It was a mind-boggling display of ravenous drinkery and it couldn't have been out of the normal, but then again, nothing much seems odd to conclude or witness when it comes to Dark Meat - a band with a ticking clock and a pension for sublime, sonic ruination.
Dark Meat MySpace
Vice Records
