Pop. 1280’s Step Into the Grid 12” cleaned our clocks with the heaviest nosebleed of post-industrial sludge since John Sharkey went AWOL to hang with kangaroos and make babies. It’s been two long years in transit, but Pop. 1280 has returned with a new full-length to recharge our inner demons to four bars. A misanthropic landscape of dripping bass and saw-like guitars buried beneath lyrics of the darkest imagery imaginable, The Horror aspires create the soundtrack to Hell. Ultimately, it falls just short, an honorable soundtrack of sick finesse for a superlative subway strangling (or two). 

We’ll readily admit that an album opening with the words, “two dogs fucking” is indulgent. By the time the hook and title, “Burn the Worm,” comes around, however, Chris Beetle’s vocals are already secondary to the ripping saw of Ivan Lip. You just go with it. On the other red hand, “Bodies in the Dunes” does what the opener attempts to a tee. A creepfest of hair raising proportion, the track rekindles the hyper-paranoia that bled from Pop. 1280’s early output. Beetle’s lyrics  resemble those a guard finds scribbled on the walls of a serial killer’s empty solitary cell or Joe Spinell’s apartment, spat in an emotionless drawl that seeps into your soul. Eli Roth (or some other wash) would sell his to recreate this feeling. 

Few bands attempt to explore the dark field of aesthetics Pop. 1280 is channeling, and even fewer do it well. TV Ghost and K-Holes come to mind, also working in between the dots of Nick Cave and David Yow. The main difference is that Pop. 1280’s sound climbs higher on the psychological ladder—-Shining to Poltergeist— heat lightning across the DSM, and thus very, how you say, 2012.