Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt
Each component on the Serfs’ new album Half Eaten By Dogs—every blown-out drum machine, muddy bassline, and snarled vocal—is jostling for auditory real estate, as if each part has been fed through the same overloaded mixer. You can easily imagine the three members of the Cincinnati-based dance-punk trio squashed shoulder to shoulder, cheek by jowl, hunched over their studio mise en place, furiously operating a coleslaw of wires and cityscapes of equipment. In quieter moments, there’s an audible white noise fry of switched-on electronics. Everything bleeds in.
Such is the turbulent quality of the record that the vocals in tracks such as “Cheap Chrome” and “Order Imposing Sentence” seem pushed off to the side, like a manic presence somewhere just offstage; Andie Luman and Dylan McCartney sound malevolent, while Dakota Carlyle seems almost queasily uninterested. In Alan Vega fashion, the lyrics are frequently unintelligible, but random phrases occasionally emerge from the confusion—”triangles of terror!”, “disconnect!”, “elec-tric!” Although the meaning isn’t often apparent, their interplay with the monochrome, nocturnal arrangements suggests a series of disconnected vignettes in a film or book played out against the backdrop of one city on one night. (The songs even share the terse, punchy wording of pulp fiction titles—“Ending Of The Stream,” “Suspension Bridge Collapse,” “Beat Me Down.”) The meaning might not always be apparent, but the feeling always is.
Although Half Eaten By Dogs is The Serfs’ third album, you would be forgiven for thinking it is their first. It has the ferocious, listen-to-this-immediately quality of the best debuts. There are slower moments, granted—“Spectral Analysis” is one highlight, a kind of sewage runoff from exotica music and George Michael—but this expedient style stretches across the record, with simple drum machine patterns repeating until they short out, flurries of garbled lyrics, and a barrage of electronic flotsam and jetsam like gnarled keyboard sounds and static-y textures. Despite the frenzy of this wonky success, though, there’s still the underlying sense that everything on this record has been placed precisely where it needs to be.
