Epileptic fits of bottled anger, inclined.
Snort up your medication
Prophylactic efforts, penetrate your mind, fair well.
At night the city teaches the body its blunt arithmetic: one nerve numbed for every lamp lit, one mercy spent for every corner turned. Anger walks beside you, not loud now, but warm in the pocket, a small illegal sun. Temptation leans from glass and gutter, promising relief with the tender voice of harm. You keep moving because motion can pass for will, because the pavement, receiving your weight, asks no questions. Yet self-destruction is patient. It does not lunge. It follows, matching your steps, until the whole street seems to breathe with your tiredness, and forgive nothing at all.
With Neon Violence, Ohms turns the city after dark into a theatre of appetite, punishment, and artificial grace. The solo project of Melbourne multi-instrumentalist Lachlan P. Rother, previously of U-Bahn and currently active with GLASNOST and High Control Group, approaches genre as a set of loose electrical wires: synth pop, art rock, damaged funk, and post-punk all hum against one another, sparking in strange little bursts.
The track moves with a deceptively pleasurable gait. Its mechanical drums cut a firm path through cloudy synthesizers, while the production lets each texture warp at the edges, as though the song were being heard through tinted glass at four in the morning. One hears, in its tilted architecture, affinities with Talking Heads, Ultravox, and Cocteau Twins, though the jazz-funk detours bring in a more sly, sideways intelligence, closer to The The’s taste for pop music as urban psychology. The result is sleek and unstable, tuneful enough to invite the body forward and odd enough to leave the mind slightly bruised.
Rother’s lyrics treat nightlife less as escape than as an apparatus. The city glows, beckons, numbs, and instructs; anger becomes another stimulant, temptation another civic advertisement, self-destruction another form of motion. Casino images, medication, violence, and fluorescent glare are folded into a portrait of a person being slowly altered by overload. The repeated refrains suggest a will eroded by exposure, as though the lights themselves have learned to think on behalf of the body.
Neon Violence is great fun in the way certain dangerous evenings are great fun: bright, absurd, a little humiliating, and alive with poor decisions. Written and performed by Rother, recorded, engineered, and mixed with Andrew Robinson, Timothy Dunn, and Stuart Mackenzie of King Gizzard, and mastered by Mikey Young of Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression Ring, the track carries the pleasure of excess without smoothing away its bruises. It dances at the mouth of the problem, smiling with all its teeth.
Listen to Neon Violence below and order the single here.
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