The newest release from Hip to Death is a split cassette with Oakland’s Night Shapes, a succinct combination of the Atlanta group’s foreboding noise-punk and Night Shapes’ tripped-out surf jams. Like some sort of elaborate heist, this split has been in the works since 2012, and the result is well worth the wait.
The opening track on the cassette, “Reefs,” is Hip to Death at their most assertive, channeling the explosive power of Destruction Unit with the hollow noir of Dirty Beaches. John Breedlove’s guttural vocals are mostly inscrutable, unlike his wife Kasey Breedlove’s more quintessential punk taunts on the following cut, “Forward Progress.” Happily, Hip to Death seem incapable of making a conventional song as evidenced by the turbulent fadeout, which serves to deconstruct any commercial value you might be able to ascribe to the track.
Somehow, Hip to Death’s contribution to the cassette is a delicate blend of chaos and desolation. The result is both nuanced and threatening, a mind game which becomes insistently torturous, like Kerouac losing grip on reality at Big Sur. Hip to Death’s music is always in flux, but here they perfectly balance on the razor-thin edge between cataclysmic noise and echoey narcotic depths.
The Hip to Death/Night Shapes split cassette is available now via Wiener Records and Bandcamp.
More Info
Bandcamp: hiptodeath.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @hiptodeathnoise
SoundCloud: @hip-to-death
Twitter: @hiptodeath