The world is spelled catastrophe
The cawing bird the twisted tree
Light years spread without sympathy
And death is all around
Clock Issue, the brainchild of Philadelphia’s Paul Walker, twists and turns through a maze of post-punk angularity and avant-garde abandon. Cell Damage, the latest release from this duo of Walker and Kyle Press, rattles with restless energy, its jagged guitars cutting through a swirl of saxophone and flute. It teeters between raw punk ferocity and electronic experimentation, a collision of the mechanical and the organic, the beautiful and the broken. The result conjures ghosts of Tuxedomoon’s eerie elegance, Fad Gadget’s sardonic bite, Suicide’s relentless minimalism, Wire’s razor-sharp precision, and Throbbing Gristle’s calculated chaos—an offering both volatile and strangely hypnotic, an echo of the world undone. It is a tour de force of originality.
The first and title track, Cell Damage, is a cohesive cacophony, a metallic synth discordance with jagged guitar spurts that slashes through time with a smirk, spinning a satire where survival begins in caves and ends in self-inflicted ruin. From rock-licking primates to crumbling modern man, the track revels in the irony of progress, charting a course from decay to destruction. The refrain hangs like a warning—cell damage—both the rot of the body and the unraveling of the species, a slow slide into the void.
CivMal with it’s mesmerizing synth-burbles, whispers of civilization gasping on borrowed breath, its bones brittle with industry, its veins thick with disease. Faeries fade, their dust spent, while tankers rust and towers loom like tombstones. Maps, inked in thread and blood, trace the scars of conquest, while the tides rise as relentlessly as the morning sun. Here is a hymn for a world on its knees, a requiem for progress undone, a dirge for the dream that mistook itself for immortality.
Dark Forest conjures a landscape thick with loss, where time stretches thin and solitude settles like fog. A fleeting glimpse through skeletal trees, a hand raised, a voice swallowed by the wind. Memory lingers, dim as dying embers, flickering in windowpanes gone dull with dust. The earth hums with indifference, its twisted branches scrawling ruin across the sky, its crows shrieking dirges to a world unraveling. Light is no savior here—just the low glow of a television humming through the small hours, a lighthouse casting its beam into the void, guiding nothing, warning no one.
Salad Days channels the restless spirit of early Mute via Fad Gadget’s Diminished Responsibility, where blooping synths stutter and sway against the breathy wail of saxophone. The song unfolds like a tense exchange, instruments clashing and converging, their voices shifting between urgency and exhaustion. It feels like a conversation we were never meant to hear—wounded, whispered, tinged with something bitter yet strangely sweet.
Radiation Blue hums with a slow, simmering ache, a longing that latches onto the skin and seeps into the bones. Time drags its feet, stretching miles into eternities, stretching distance into exile. Sleep comes brittle and restless, while memories refuse to settle, burning beneath the surface like embers refusing to fade. The promise of reunion flickers in the distance, a glimmer just out of reach, a thousand miles of yearning that refuses to quiet, refuses to release.
Microplastic sketches a world bound and dissected, a place where autonomy withers beneath the cold eye of surveillance. Machines too small to see slither beneath the skin, the registry knocks with an insistence both clinical and cruel, demanding entry—not just to the body, but to thought itself. The specter of progress looms like an iron obelisk, a monolith of control. No one is beyond its reach.
A Tuxy Mood sprawls across ten minutes of disquiet, a creeping homage to David Lynch’s world of whispers and wrong turns. The saxophone, draped in the ghost of Angelo Badalamenti, slinks through the mix like a detective without a case, while circling synths and jagged guitars build a fractured bridge between past and future. The result is something eerie yet enthralling, a noir-lit corridor leading somewhere unknown, somewhere uneasy.
Listen to Cell Damage below and order the album here.
Formed in 2020, Clock Issue began in the early aughts with The Lesser Known Neutrinos — a scrappy psychedelic quintet — and continued with synth-punk group SGNLS. In the dirty basements and warehouses of the West Philly punk scene, both groups used synthesizers and sound experimentation to play with boundaries and genres.
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