In the grand tradition of Liars, Pere Ubu, among many other messed-up geniuses, What Is Success is a relentless slog of a record (complimentary) that drills into the listener with an unrepentant, slippery cacophony (still complimentary) and just the right amount of melody and groove as counterbalance underneath.
Genuine Dexterity is a release that might have lit the scene on fire and cemented itself as a collaboration arguably more important and revelatory than the others which raised Segal’s profile in years prior. Every song has an earnestly elliptical understanding of hip hop as a sonic and social force in a way few artists in the genre do today.
Pop music that’s unafraid to be messy, frayed around the edges, and even a tinge dissonant scratches a very particular kind of itch. On Behold, Melbourne’s Parsnip fits this bill quite satisfyingly, never relying on the gritty texture of lo-fi production or the posturing of a scuzzy garage revival band.
The music in question is, well, difficult to describe in typical genre buzzwords, though many have tried. Neither “psychedelic” nor “trip-hop” do much of any justice to the twosome’s defiant sound. Then again, “sound collage” doesn’t help much either because even that movement tends to focus more on the process than the end-product.
