Album review: Sucioperro: 'Pain Agency'

SUCIOPERRO: 'Pain Agency' (Maybe Records)

Macabre by name and macabre by nature, Sucioperro’s second album comes tearing out of your speakers with the ferocity of a malcontent Velociraptor, clawing and gnashing at your senses. This is a perilously unforgiving record, awash with bitter, twisted melodies and ear-bleedingly distorted guitars. Heavy doesn’t even begin to describe the sort of brusque noise on offer here: at times, it feels almost like the band have discovered all new levels of volume, not satisfied with the ‘max’ setting on the studio’s equipment. Opening track ‘Liquids’ is recklessly extreme, painting its bleak picture of human dependency with a whirlwind of musical brushstrokes, a cacophonous litany of unpredictable clamour.

It’s a technique that they administer to great effect throughout the record, puncturing fairly catchy, accessible melodies with unusual stops and starts, unexpected course changes in the rhythmic structure of the songs. Beats move out of time, altering patterns; tracks slow to a deathly snail’s pace, as in the superlatively ominous ‘Hate Filters’, and then speed up again, schizophrenically messing with the listener’s head. And then there are the unusually delicate moments: straight after the bilious ‘Liquids’ comes the jangly, jaunty ‘The Dissident Code’ which, for all its melancholic subject matter, has the sort of irresistible hook and sparkly guitar work of an R.E.M. single. Such juxtaposition and antonymy make for decidedly unnerving listening; you’re never quite sure where the record is going to head next, which sudden, unusual avenue it’s going to turn sharply down. ‘Are You Convinced?’ transforms from fairly airy Biffy Clyro single territory to a colossal metal behemoth in its last forty seconds as JP Reid screams the album’s most crucial line into your earlobes: ‘do you think it fucking matters who we say we are, what we think we are and who we try to be?’

‘Pain Agency’ is an utterly terrifying record, laying bare a veritable horror show of human excess and depravity, delving deep into decidedly disturbing thematic territory and unleashing a tidal wave of criminally intense, magnificently harrowing guitar noise to soundtrack it. This is certainly no easy listen, but this is exactly what gives the record its power. From the lilting acoustic sway of ‘Conception Territory’ to the death metal tones of the thoroughly evil ‘Mum’s Bad Punk Music’, ‘Pain Agency’ refuses to be pigeonholed, taking the listener on a gloriously sporadic sensory journey and, for all the ride may be a harrowing one, it proves all the more rewarding for it. Pain never sounded, or felt, quite this good. (9/10)