Know Your Product: Various artists, You’re Not As Weird As You Think You Are: Six Years of Public Guilt (Public Guilt)
A week-long, multi-venue festival, a packed-to-the-gills one-night stand, an ambitiously incestuous remix project-qua-baccanal, a 7-inch series, abject silence: there’s no right or wrong way for a record label to celebrate an anniversary. While the compilation is among the most common commemorative expressions, there’s an unfortunate knee-jerk tendency to underthink the sequencing, clotting odds, ends, and alternate takes and hoping the collective mess equates to a declarative state-of-the-roster snapshot. But the best label comps–think Zeromoon Sampler III: An Explanation of Difficult Music and Chronologi 12k: Year 1-Year 4–deftly summarize a collocated aesthetic, attract listeners to related wares, and register as stand-alone triumphs.
Baltimore’s Public Guilt imprint makes its sixth year of existence with free-download comp You’re Not As Weird As You Think You Are: Six Years of Public Guilt. If the two-disc extravaganza isn’t as seamless as the pair referred to above, that’s only because the international stable founder J.R. Fritsch oversees is richly varied, demanding that instrumental thrash metal, magma-hot electronic dysentery, and sinister acoustic folk coexist in a streamlined way is akin to praying for a miracle.
So Weird gamely humors contextual-ambiance upsetters: see Vopat’s majestic, cinematic torpor (think Mogwai armed with pianos), Psychic Paramount’s hyperventilating shred suite, the brass-injected hardcore of Cream Abdul Babar (think Noxagt molesting Pissed Jeans, or vice-versa), Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat’s distraught screamo-folk (think Calla unplugged). And what of Microkingdom’s “Meat Ghost”? It segues from out-of-tune string-section ephemera crossed with burbling digi-tones to full-bore jazz-improv clusterfuck in a flash.
By contrast–by not calling much attention to themselves–Ala Muerte’s maudlin operatic tics and Blister Freak Circus’ tambourine-inflected beardo-strum compliment Weird‘s core ambiance. And about that ambiance: it’s a fizzily wordless mood-quilt of disparate styles that tickles the subconscious ear, hallucinating a state of being that eclipses whatever flow-interrupting effects these outliers cause by sucking the listener firmly back into its matrix. It’s present in Aun’s blotched-tone static-mining, in the constricted, wound-up blare of Perfekt Teeth’s remix of Darsombra’s “Nymphaea,” in Aluk Todolo’s grim amplifier snarl, in the WALL-E bleep, clank, and whir of Magicicada’s “Slow Walk Backwards,” in how Korperschwache’s murderously bleak power-chords hang overhead like waiting guillotines. The ear reels, rights itself, is left hungry for more Guilt.
