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The Skull Defekts, "Dances in Dreams of the Known Unknown"
This latest Daniel Higgs-era full-length is in some ways a logical progression from 2011's memorable Peer Amid, offering up another healthy dose of muscular avant rock and bizarre shamanic stream-of consciousness vocals.  However, significant notable changes have taken place, most notably that group now seem more musically indebted to taut Gang of Four-style post-punk than they do to their messier, noisier influences.  That emphasis on precision, punchiness, and economy proves to be a fascinating backdrop for the band's metaphysical mantras and fables, as that bedrock of normalcy and control makes Dances' weirder elements seem even weirder than usual.
Dances opens with one of its strongest songs, "Pattern of Thoughts," which does a beautiful job of making the group's aesthetic intentions very clear right from the start.  Several (if not all) of the song's themes recur again and again throughout the album, most prominently Henryk Rylander's gift for propulsive, tom-heavy grooves and the guitarists' knack for simple, repeating riffs and jarring, discordant chord stabs.  For better or worse, "Pattern" also makes it clear that the Defekts are lyrically a band like no one else, as they immediately let me know that that are leading an ancient dance that was carved into a cave sealed with human bones.  They also note they the dance in question may be a sex magick ritual or used for controlling animals (or for just having a good time).
My feelings about hearing such lines casually delivered with complete sincerity and conviction are quite complicated, which makes The Skull Defekts a very tough band to fully embrace or wrap my head around, as their surreal, metaphysical and/or science-fiction-inspired narratives are so prominent and strange that is very hard to pay attention to much else.  That is very much a double-edged sword, as I think the Defekts' quixotic devotion to this path makes them quite a memorable and singular band while simultaneously ensuring that no one will notice how great their music can be.  Also, some songs are so outlandish that they almost defy belief, particularly "The Fable," which chronicles a number of curious trips that the narrator took after being drugged at a banquet (spoiler alert: he took a trip to Pluto and back and adapted an anthropoid disguise).  The closing "Cyborganization" is also a tough one to swallow, as the lyrics consist entirely of the titular made-up word endlessly repeated as a kind of mantra (and one with some extra syllables somehow added to boot).
I truly cannot get over how wrong-footing it is to hear stream-of-consciousness rambling about psychic warfare and traveling to the cosmos combined with such bad-ass, snarling, and no-frills post-punk.  It almost sounds like a particularly drug-addled prog rock band accidentally stumbled into a Birthday Party rehearsal and started obliviously recording the spoken-word passages of their convoluted rock opera over the din.  Admittedly that sounds fascinating, unique, and appealing in theory and it sometimes is in reality too, but I am also sometimes left wondering "why on earth are these guys doing this?"
Consequently, Dances is an album that I find thoroughly perplexing and inspired in equal measures.  I do not know that I would necessarily say that it actually works though, as there is literally no band on earth that would not fade into the background when they are seemingly joined by a grizzled prophet from the future eager to discuss his improbable travels through time, space, and his own mind.  Consequently, I honestly do not know quite what to make of The Skull Defekts at this point in their career: either they are making a series of increasingly terrible decisions or they are heroically avoiding the expected at all costs.  I am not sure being interesting or unpredictable is quite as cool as being unambiguously good, but I certainly appreciate that The Defekts remain as enigmatic, lively, and adventurous as ever.
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