On Repeat: Street Pulse Beat By Special Interest Is Punk For The End Times
Tristan Young @talltristan
If you’re looking for a sign of the times and a tangible symbol of just how crazy things have gotten, Special Interest is about as emblematic as it gets. The New Orleans quartet combines industrial and electronic punk into something primal, disfigured, and jarringly salient. Their new album The Passion Of is an incisive and apostate satire of our wilful decline into reckless partisanship and Orwellian dystopia. Detuned synth and terminal drum loops stampede over sickly and squalor-lined guitars, but it’s vocalist Alli Logout (cool name) that is the real draw. Logout is a true threat as her writing, ranging from blistering irony to melancholic dramatics, is elevated by her feral and remorseless howls. The Passion Of has several standouts but the clear zenith is the uncompromising and vulnerable mini epic Street Pulse Beat. Grinding electric viscera spreads like an opaque haze over relentless and punishing drums. It’s intentionally grotesque yet within that mire there is beauty in the form of triplets of pristine and delicate guitar. The fragility of those chords, ensconced in the cesspool of the rest of the song, makes them all the more effecting, as if they were meant to be a metaphor for something like empathy, or all the other better angels that are slipping away from the world at an increasingly alarming rate. Logout begins her tirade in alluring poetic contexts, “I can’t take you there, where desire unfolds/ your pleasure is not mine to hold”, articulating that we are all losing the ability to simply be there for people. “Why can’t I take you there, why does your heart withhold”- the gulf between understanding and addressing the problem has grown perhaps too insurmountable. Her guttural vigour and theatrical drawl makes for infectious wordplay. The way her phrasing rolls together so flamboyantly upon singing, “I got my mind in the gutter and I’m thick like mud/ the boy with more than two lips and he can’t shut um”, is oddly seductive. She turns her attention towards a potential genesis of our ills that led us to this extreme but logical conclusion- not any kind of specific religion or form of worship, but the idea of “isms” in general. “I go by many names, such as mistress, goddess, Allah, Jah, and Jesus fucking Christ”. Even after such a blaring invective, no time is spent to let it sink in. Instead Logout efficiently rolls right back into the next verse with one of the better lines of the year so far, “For am I not your necromancer, your lover in the end of time, in the end of days”. The transition from her main point into something of an epilogue is seamless- merciless even- but the execution is exhilarating. Logout compels us to take her hand and listen to the natural rhythm of the world implying perhaps that there are enough of us that want to change, even if we don’t yet know how or what that will look like. Therein lies why this track is worthy of such encomium. Street Pulse Beat acknowledges the real time collapse of the world as have known and grown comfortable within, but vitally, it promises that something comes after.