draag me - Lord of the Shithouse (August 18, 2023)

ItsAndrew · Aug 17, 2023

ke a nuisance (ft. CRASHprez)
cut the checo
wax figures in the rain
throwing rocks
memory 107
death cull
faces of vultures
dangle from the smoke ring
blade in the view (ft. Body Meat)
donny path (ft. Pedazo de Carne Con Ojo)
the process (ft. Devin McKnight)
nightclub
following
lord of the shithouse
faster now (it’s almost late)

Philly-based draag me, the project of Spirit of the Beehive’s Zack Schwartz and Corey Wichlin, is music for after hours internet wormholes, bus rides at night. Your eyes are bloodshot, the city from outside your window is grayscale, wet with rain. All of this is told through heady loops of samples, sinuous waves of distortion, the occasional moment of resonance by way of a keys or guitar. This is the kind of aesthetic terroir of "lord of the shithouse," draag me’s second record (and the first with Wichlin), the follow up to 2020’s "i am gambling with my life."

"lord of the shithouse" materialized during the pandemic. Schwartz and Wichlin, both stuck at home, sent emails to each other with ideas for songs. And over the course of a year, file sharing turned into fully realized tracks. Songs left on the cutting room floor of Spirit’s landmark record "ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH", got rejiggered, made stranger, and put into the draag me universe along the way. But make no mistake — draag me isn’t a Spirit of the Beehive side project, it is a project that exists in a swirl of its own. The songs on this record are far more knotty, circling the drain of psychedelic pop, industrial music, r&b, and electronic. There’s no need for labels here: "lord of the shithouse" is a record free of genre, and in its penchant for experimentation there is a real sense of clarity.

Opener “like a nuisance,” is like coke and mentos in the middle school parking lot. A buzz of an old rotary phone, yanked off the hook. Synths and percussion crash into a strident flourish of strings. And at the halfway point, the rapper CRASHprez comes in, free associating. “Smile it’s all recorded,” he raps, “I’m lost like all importance/it’s all performance.” His verse is one of four features on the record. Each of these four artists wrote their own lyrics, Schwartz and Wilchlin wanted to give these artists the chance to improvise, to make their own art within the space of the song. “blade in view,” features Body Meat, a fellow Philly-based experimental weirdo. The song is woozy, moving at a drugged-out pace.

“death cult,” similarly underscores that wooziness, of walking around outside and feeling like the trees around you are floating, that the sun could burst into a midday eclipse at any moment. “nightclub,” is a comedown, a bad vibe after a shitty day that ends with staying up until four in the morning inside of an algorithm-curated YouTube hole. Much of "lord of the shithouse" is like this: interested in being nebulous, at capturing a feeling and pining it to a piece of cardboard like a dead bug. Don’t look for a narrative over the record’s forty minutes, look for these energies that exist within abstraction. And these energies are highly curated, labored over, controlled.

Aaron Mook · Aug 18, 2023

Hell yeah, excited to listen

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draag me - Lord of the Shithouse (August 18, 2023)

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