what passes for survival

Pyrrhon - "Trash Talk Landfill" (Song Premiere)

From their upcoming third album, What Passes For Survival, “Trash Talk Landfill” immediately makes it clear: talk comes cheap. I mean, fuck it, right? The most extreme music is straightforward; though Pyrrhon‘s own music — the strange, gibbering mass of sound constructed at the hands of drummer Steve Schwegler, guitarist Dylan DiLella, and bassist Erik Malawe — might be bizarre and jagged, the incensed intent is clear. Though referred to as “intelligent” or “jazzy,” Pyrrhon’s line-toeing approach to free improvisation and traditional riffcraft is based in angry, straightforward… fucking rage. Just like every other drooling metal blogger, I guess I kind of lost myself in the “pretty worded review” approach. Do you really think I talk like I write? I can assure you: I curse just as much as the veil-lifted (and Invisible Oranges alumnus) Doug Moore in this new era of Pyrrhon, but he sounds even more convincingly annoyed. Moore gives unnecessarily prosaic morons like me the finger.

Why pretty up chaos? Why lighten the load of rage? This isn’t comedic gore worship, nor is it a pseudo-Laveyan-Nietzschean pit of isolated self-idolatry. This more human bluntness and self-condescension is what drew people like me to extreme music, this denial of popular culture and self-ingratiation in favor of extremity. Pyrrhon is the embodiment of that counterculture. Casting off conventional musicality in favor of unbridled death metal Expressionism, Pyrrhon commands the sounds of falling apart, virtually bursting at the seams, and the confidence of pure, straightforward damnation with the enraged command of harsh diction and lyrical elocution. This is not your dad’s death metal — What Passes For Survival is death metal broken apart, and Pyrrhon uses the shards to build an uncanny valley version of it. It hurts. It is extreme. They don’t care. Fuck your subtlety.

What Passes For Survival will be released August 11th on Willowtip Records and Throatruiner Records. Listen to “Trash Talk Landfill” and read its lyrics (which make me feel self-conscious) below.



From the band:

“Trash Talk Landfill”, Steve [Schwegler]’s first songwriting effort with the band, is an expression of the more playful side of Pyrrhon’s personality, both structurally and lyrically. Obviously, it’s still quite dark, so people might just scratch their heads when they hear that we were laughing constantly while putting it together. It’s also a pretty self-effacing song lyrically even though it’s an absurd and ambitious instrumental undertaking, which is an odd juxtaposition, I suppose.

-Doug Moore

Lyrics:

Talk comes real cheap
Expend and dispose, expend and dispose
These days, it’s what I live to do

Oh, I know this junk is tacky
But it’s what I’ve got to offer
I’ll just keep on spitting out more litter
It’ll heap up in disposable drifts
Some poor fucks will sort through it in shifts

Believe me, there’s more where that came from

Where can I buy budget words to describe
The awful hole that gapes inside
Me, and just keeps growing, growing, growing
As I pour in more and more plastic metaphors

You know you’re gonna keep on reading
This shit, lightweight and stripped of the meaning
It once wrapped up, ‘til I used it all up
Now it’s dross, compacted in metonym clumps

And all this waste comes straight from my waist
I’m shitting out tons and tons of this garbage every year
Dumped logotoxins leach into the groundwater
I’ll make every ear my sewer

It’s all trash talk, trash talk, trash talk
Throw me on the pile
No deposit for recycle
One use only

And all that offal is crawling
Back up through the plumbing
It’s clambering out
Of the landfills and rivers

My filth children will wander
While I spawn more, and wonder
Why these refuse similes
All sound so incomplete

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