- As the decade comes to an end there’s a necessary interrogation of just what music is, what it’s becoming. What are the implications of Spotify’s calculated playlists and Facebook’s paid advertisements? What are the effects of investing so much time, money and trust into streaming and Silicon Valley? The business interests and the technology they bring blur the line between art as catharsis and art created to monetize. Unfortunately, sometimes, money and technology seem to trump all other concerns. Thus, it is so wonderfully refreshing to hear a record that captures the ugly self. In fact, in this case, our primetime technology is actually unable to translate its overwhelming emotions.
Diploid’s Glorify is, despite that introduction, their most accessible record yet and it’s all due to the timing. On the opener, Intrusive, the three-piece Melbourne band reiterate their excellence at writing an introductory song. We are so caught up in the apocalyptic, bomb-dropping atmosphere, the next five numbers just go by in a blink. Time is blurred, like when the wind shifts sunlight into a tornado of crimson fire. This trance is swiftly cut off by Maria Benjemaa’s howl in Less: “Listen to me / You are no one.”
The rest of the record resembles less of an album to be marketed and more of a Greek play reveling in genre disparity somewhere between comedy and tragedy. The track No Funeral opens the heavenly grindcore/screamo/heavy gates for post-hardcore fans, while adjacent song Homicidal Art conjures Mitski's unhinged vocals at the end of Drunk Walk Home (well, it was her heaviest song to date) and subtly throws them into the impeccably catchy, percussion-filled void. What legacy is Diploid creating? It can be difficult to articulate. There is so much going on in the music, not to mention the pure volume of deafening sound, it’s like it all becomes so super-dense the music collapses inwards, into nothing; a dry dullness fermenting in a lack of clarity. For an album about mental illness, Glorify is a metaphor supremely executed.
The final song, The Narrator of Suicide is where Diploid’s efforts and innovation are bound to be reaped. Brian Eno called it ‘the sound of failure’: when technology cannot control, compress, and capitalize on the volume of certain art. Distortion, cracked vocals, static sound, these are the signifiers of a second so decisive in its extremity that a medium is unable to hold onto it. Glorify has taken all the variables of music and pushed the musicians and the music itself to the maximum. The lyrics rupture themselves, just like the genres that the band erupts out of. Diploid asks their listeners to be vulnerable. How else are you supposed to respectfully respond to Benjemaa’s incomprehensible vocals at the close of the record? Neither our technology, or even our brains are able to fully comprehend the emotion, and that’s absolutely life-affirming.
- Tara Garman.