By Flesh Tape are built for our current moment. Frontman Larson Ross’s debut from last year, a brilliant standout in a crowded and unrelenting sea of shoegazing punk or post-hardcore noise projects, featured the kind of thoughtful anger and modern framing that has made acts like Chat Pile and Couch Slut feel so essential in recent years.
GRAVESITE, their new EP and first to add full time members to what was initially Ross’s purely solo endeavor, picks up where last year’s album left off, a hazy mix of riffs that capture a specific type of loud, uncomplacent vexing. The sole single on the three-track EP, “Ripoff,” is described as “a song about the industrialization of Los Angeles and its effects on the workers,” as Ross calmly observes “Flown out to a gravesite in L.A. / When it’s my turn / To pick your fingers clean / Use my broken body over me.”
Like last year’s debut, Ross’s observations focus on working class struggles and solidarity, and our time and effort as fuel for the capitalist machines that will eventually kill us—literally or metaphorically. Elsewhere on the EP, those experiences are more the latter, hauntingly juxtaposing “the cause means nothing to me” and “the cause is all we have left” against big sludgy drums on “Band Time.” The highlight here is the longest song, “False Desire,” the most Pumpkins’y of the collection and the one that stares into the abyss with more questions than answers, with Ross howling slight but important variations of the same statement: “I don’t want / I don’t want to / I don’t care / I don’t want you.” As the press release puts it: “Whether it’s steel mills or shoegaze, Flesh Tape is driven by the possibility of a brighter future, and that means persevering into the unknown.” Teetering on the edge of despair and hope as the noise consumes us is what this band has done best to date, and GRAVESITE is no exception.
You can check out an early preview of the EP below, courtesy of Power Goth Recordings, and be sure to support Flesh Tape over on Bandcamp!
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