With every breath
Thru muck and grime
In every trek
We write …
Greg Bullock has spent enough time around darkwave to know that gloom by itself is cheap, and on 26EP he treats darkness less as decoration than as a blunt instrument for asking ugly questions. Bullock, co-founder of Cyborg Amok, wrote, produced, mixed, performed, and illustrated this four-song set himself at GABWorx Studio B, which gives the record the slightly dangerous feeling of a man locking himself in a room with synthesizers, a bass, an electric mandolin, and several subjects polite company usually keeps under the table. There is nobody here to tell him that mortality, ecological collapse, betrayal, and human endurance might be a bit much for one EP, which is probably why the record has teeth.
In Other Words starts with endurance, though Bullock does not turn survival into a greeting-card slogan. Trenches, mud, climbing, breath, effort: the vocabulary suggests a life measured by what it costs to keep moving. The song carries a reflective sweep that places Bullock somewhere between Depeche Mode’s electronic gravity and Roger Waters staring at civilization with his arms folded. There is comfort in the chorus, but the comfort has dirt under its fingernails.
Then comes Thirty Pieces, which drags betrayal, punishment, commerce, and crucifixion into the same dry stretch of ground. Bullock uses biblical imagery with the instincts of someone less interested in Sunday-school reverence than in the ugly exchange rate between flesh and money. Silver gets thrown, bodies get displayed, peace gets its monument, and the entire arrangement starts feeling like one of those public ceremonies where everybody solemnly agrees not to mention who paid for the nails.
I Ain’t Goin! is the EP’s great crooked grin. Bullock considers death and responds with the cosmic equivalent of hiding behind the couch when the landlord knocks. Angels can drag him away, Saint Peter can check his watch, and eternity can leave another message. Mortality remains right there in the room. Bullock’s electric mandolin and bass give the track a wiry, physical character, and its humour keeps the record from sinking beneath the weight of its own concerns.
Blu-Green Beauty turns toward ecological collapse and corporate arithmetic, with burning seas, damaged forests, fossil fuels, solar panels, recycling, and the familiar human talent for closing the curtains while somebody else totals the profits. Bullock’s anger is clearest here, yet he keeps the song anchored to concrete images rather than vague righteousness. The result has the clipped moral unease of classic synth-pop filtered through the suspicious eye of someone reading the financial pages beside an environmental report.
Across twenty minutes or so, 26EP keeps returning to responsibility: what we owe the dead, the living, the planet, and ourselves while there is still time to argue about it. Bullock’s hooks keep the philosophy from turning into homework, while his arrangements give each track its own shape and temperature. He has made a compact record about enormous subjects, and the best compliment is that none of them feel safely settled.
Listen to 26EP below and order the EP here.
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