When I first heard that Graham Tavel was formulating a project with Brannon Greene, I was beyond excited, but I still had no idea what to expect. Would their music fit neatly within Greene’s viscerally engaging punk, or would the duo allow themselves the room to experiment? With Tavel’s main job as a recording engineer who has worked on everything from goth rock (Elysian) to indie (floral print) to glam (Material Girls), I was expecting something broader than Greene’s work with Nag or Predator, but still in a similar universe. Instead what emerged was leaner and far more sinister.

Hospice - Hospice

Throughout the album, the duo capture no wave’s distrust of song structure, the brutal simplicity of early minimal synth, and the agitated clamor of Suicide. Though Hospice channel inward-focused angst rather than the shock rock confrontationalism of Alan Vega and Martin Rev, the duo still have a similar hot rails to hell take on DIY music. The band started as a one-off, but has grown into more than an experiment, although there are a few spots on the record that in their purest form are excuses for Tavel to mess around on old keyboards and pedals, especially the county fair funhouse closer, “Moving Forward.” Still, Greene’s radiating snarl and plunging bass rattle the band’s lo-fi song structures, and provide a foil for Tavel’s pop-adjacent synth lines.

Despite the pop hooks which worm their way through the static, some of the tracks are vaguely industrial. “Taxes” channels the grimy backbeats of Skinny Puppy’s early demos and “Flower” recalls the bleak orchestration of Cabaret Voltaire. Though most of the songs hover around the two-minute mark, nothing on the record feels like a snippet. Even the shortest track—the one minute and change “Arcadia”—is a fully realized punk-through-the-lens-of-synthpop rager.

Rather than aim their sights at grand societal and political dysfunctions, the two have perfected their dystopia-in-a-fishbowl lyricisms, which put a microscope on daily life and expose the pits and cracks in the most basic forms of existence, the panic that comes from stepping foot outside your bedroom, and the terrors we create in our own minds.

Hospice’s self-titled debut is available now via Scavenger of Death.

More Info
Bandcamp: hospiceatlanta.bandcamp.com