Predator – The Complete Earth

The bolt-focused material on Predator’s new full-length has a dirty-hewn estrangement often found in David Cronenberg’s crash-course trauma: heavy-duty, energetic ingenuity that’s both parodic and visceral.

Side one has a punk ache driven by songs such as “Opposite of Clean,” where the bleach don’t cut it, and “Peter Popoff” wishing an evangelist would suffer a heart attack! An arid sense of self-imposed Calvinist cleansing plays imposter to a much broader pharmaceutical theology to such a degree that the title track, “The Complete Earth,” fluidly shifts beyond nuclear checkmate to pull in the drug war as ground zero. The rough-edged Joe-Meek-on-Dilaudid mix on “Medicate” is hung far low, seeding an almost nascent mix-n-match Wire/Feedtime fixation.

“Skateboard fucks, die in a ditch” hints at internal dry heaves on “Skate Slime,” a song that could be an aesthete’s response to the chaotic hindrance of brazen, youthful invulnerability, but more likely than not is a heady dose of unexpurgated stink-eye stylized in the decidedly frenetic American Philistine tradition. Springtime for a tough breed!

The final cut on side one is “Need to Breed,” with the heavy swiftness of mind control leaking hormonal nerve alongside the orifices and appendages destined to prune the family tree while cross-pollinating flower children on a mission of mercy.

The true savage remains oblivious to the grind of woo-bait, as Side Two opens with “Encounters” as though “Need to Breed” has been taken at face value. After getting the hookup there’s a ponderance of indifference where “I’ve been talked into taking you home” looks like sewer gators again. Paddlefeet drumbeats up the masochism to reinforce and recoil against blasphemous guitars on “The Day & Night.” As the sun also rises AND the sun dies, it’s announced, “all I want to do is get high!”

Maybe that’s why “Pica” sounds like a coronation hymn for outcasts before leading to my favorite cut, “Personas,” which recirculates the displaced identity of a decaying orbit, like when Viking I led NASA to conclude that Phobos was a primitive, hollowed out meteorite.

Live, Predator unleash flair and scale-like turbo-swells to push these songs to a breaking point. But on The Complete Earth, there is time to quell the theoretical clawhammer crescendo before a song like “Nervous Laughter” bleeds into “Stoned Into Apathy.” “The Point” looms as foreshadow, rounding out this 13-track recording of mass time velocity. Bleach, as pictured on the front cover, will not erase the elusive malice nor will it mask the impenetrability of that Predator sound. This is the hard stuff!

Predator
The Complete Earth
[Scavenger of Death]