There aren’t many contemporary musicians that can stake a claim to the term of “mad genius” as much as Alex Kent. Gifted with a wild abandon and deep understanding for tension and visceral compositional dynamics, and burdened by the inner turmoil of existential as well as religious dread, with just a few albums to his name he ripped the American underground wide open. Combining post-hardcore, slowcore, no-wave and post-rock – as well as anything that crashes into his trajectory – his records demand commitment and exhaust the emotional spectrum. They are also incredibly loud in places.
So even if I have a few reservations regarding some of his work and joyfully engage with him in a Tom-and-Jerry like dynamic online, the sheer magnitude of his vision is absolute and baffling in its scale and dedication. That is a lot of words to call someone a genius, but how many contemporary musicians push as far or go that deep into a territory of sometimes grotesque, often baroque sonic and lyrical symbolism?
It speaks of Kent’s dedication to the bit that he follows his debut release with Shearling, the one-song, 62 minute album called Motherfucker, I am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”, with a five-song EP that, at 33 minutes, has normal album length: every critic’s dream.
Don’t Look at Me the Way a Dog Might Look at Your Leg is a densely layered, fully-formed record that further’s Kent’s obsessive style. I wonder: does the dog consider peeing on, or humping the human extremity? I suspect both – either way, a genital is involved in possible reference to the emotional struggle of Kent’s ongoing relationship with his audience. Desire and deprecation can intersect, and often do. And indeed, Don’t Look… marks a subversion, of sorts. For the first time, Kent’s quintet focuses on what can only be labeled as apocalyptic folk. Stretching itself across sections sections of noise, tape collage, rhythmic loops and post-hardcore explosions, the instrumentation is dialled down to the moonshine-clear warmth of Americana.
Within this clarity, Kent is able to find an even more assured expression of his unique artistic voice, removing himself further from his reference points and towards a signature style that is wholly his own.
Opener “Three Pebbles (Saltlick)” is a great mission statement of this project, whose only likeness would be the vast landscapes present in Phil Elverum’s work as Mount Eerie and The Microphones. Pushing on from sombre opening moments, the song snakes through labyrinthine experimental sections of rhythm or noise, before finally exposing itself fully in a minimalist audio-acoustic finish. Over this, Kent recounts almost biblical images of historical struggle: “I have heard at the gates / There is a great pillar of salt / Where men line up for miles / One after another / Each of them preceded by a thousand years of thirst / Though days are spent demanding / A rain that never falls / At most, they’re offered pebbles / To toss back and forth within their mouths”. From this central image, he imagines a character whose saviour like qualities are ultimately toxic and scarring. In a moment of vision, the narrator dreams of this figure’s name – called Blank – aligned with Judas and Robert Johnson, figures listening to the tempting words of Satan, on the ass of a horse.
The symbolism of these lyrics is immense and challenging – the pebbles that thirsty men are given could so easily be deduced as a straight capitalist critique, but then they connect with a deeper quest for the soul to find forms of absolution or nurturing tenderness. “I’m not a good person / Like I want to be / And I want to go to heaven”, Kent hums near the end, before confiding in us: “My friend d___ / And I know in my heart it’s all my fault”. The censor is a return to earlier moments on Motherfucker…, where the composition functions to obfuscate the word “died”.
This almost directly connects to the later, minimalist harp piece “Young Man In Idaho”, wherein the narrator laments the death of a teenage love interest, with the two sneaking looks at each other, until the connection demands action: “One day your grandma found you dead / They say you did it to yourself / Only a month after you saw / And imagined how I felt”. Kent has used queerness before in his work and his curious relationship to bisexuality as a form of emotional dread warrants analysis. With the final verse having the narrator castigate himself (“Now I cannot get hard / Without it crossing my mind / I have never got it up / Without it crossing my mind”), it’s implied that his narrators cannot imagine themselves happy, that they quest for lust or beauty is ultimately framed by the doom true desire carries. Is this Kent himself, or his perception of a world that cannot allow anything regarded as abnormal to the structures of society?
Kent often uses animals to magnify their freedom, where humans are weighed down by their conscience. It seems as if god, in creating the world, has given limitless opportunity to beasts and minerals, while humans are forced to follow laws, which bind them in despair. When he addresses the very Earth, on the elysian “Believe Me (Dust)”, it responds indifferently: “I have no offering / For kneeling men upon the ground / Only thoughts I’ve thrown from acres / Colliding with their plows”. Kent finds himself surrounded by the wind of history, which measures his transgressions and carries a sentence: “And when the gavel begs us / “Once more now that the jury is all seated” / We’ll tell them all, “Your honor / We have not the strength now to repeat it” / So they carve your face in mountains / And build examples in your name / But not long thereafter / They turned to dust too all the same”.
“Believe Me (Dust)” is possibly the best song on Don’t Look…, the soundtrack to an unmade Western, eerily beautiful and deeply resonant with culture’s obsession of moralism. The narrator, tortured so often by the consequences of his own desires or actions, observes his actions beyond human comprehension, where all questions lead to spilled blood. Kent has made no secret of struggling with the label ‘problematic’, and likewise doesn’t flinch to shed actual blood when on stage, letting it flow cumshot-style across his face and chest. This dance, of self-immolation and self-reflection, of climactic eruption onto fertile ground that just responds in mocking cackle, might be tiresome to those requesting clean idols – but to Kent, it’s the only creation imaginable.
The threatening, sinister “Surely You Know By Now” extends this at a perceived enemy. “Surely you know by now / If I kill mysеlf / Nothing will get better for you / Nothing’s gonna changе”, the narrator hisses, embodying the merciless dread that comes with unfiltered narcissists. Tenderness was just a form of weakness, and all compassion an exercise of reflection: “And I’m watching your puppy retrieve / The bone that I threw / She looks so stupid / You two have so much in common”. The splintered acoustics and mangled sounds of human breath remind of the serial killer basements in Xiu Xiu’s catalogue, but lack the detached irony Jamie Stewart mastered. This is harrowing, black ice.
Finally, “Your Reward” combines Kent’s unique humour with deep sublimity. A dialogue with an opposite, who seems to have reached some sort of romantic nirvana, leads to the measuring of experience: “Alexander, I am not a Saltlick / I’ve kept account of everywhere our tongues have been / And not just those you choose to acknowledge / And I suppose you are expecting your reward right about now”. Is this an interviewer, castigated for his moralism, as Kent engages in the Samsonian behaviour of slaying enemies with donkey jawbones? The figure merges into Jesus on the cross, and the two wrestle with deep seated questions of existentialism. Can we build a house from the cross’ planks and find a fundament in a religion formed from sacrifice without abusing ourselves? “A saint is neither huckleberry, nor palm frond, nor donkey’s jaw / But anyone we can deceive”. It’s brilliant and vibrant poetry, as Kent finally calls upon Jesus, but the latter has no time for his meek struggle: “But eventually he comes back to me / And asks me – obviously still occupied: / “So, my flock, where were we?” / And at that point / I’ll have long forgotten / It must not have been worth remembering / So I ask him instead: “What was your call about?” / And he says back to me: “Everything””.
The struggle with religion has dominated Motherfucker… and Kent’s last album with previous band Sprain, The Lamb As Effigy, but there is an equal amount of admiration and dismissal towards the spiritual in his work. But here, on “Your Reward” especially, he seems to transform into a Nick Cave-like figure: a goblin that is as keen on praying to the cross as he uses it to shield his urine stream, a figure that will never become Jesus, but nonetheless touches him, again and again. The climactic moments of the song, as he wails “And the only request I have left is: / When you say it / You will look me in the eye” is revelatory and awe inspiring. I say this with compliments: Godspeed You! Black Emperor feel related.
So where does that leave Don’t Look…? Magnificent and lyrical, abstract and sinister, sublime and gothic, it indeed feels much like an EP, by which it is implied that this is a side-venture, an experiment potentially. But still, it often feels destined to be an album, to exist in this strange configuration between formless collage (“Surely You Know By Now”), minimalism (“Young Man In Idaho”) and vast epic (“Belive Me”, “Three Pebbles”, “Your Reward”). It doesn’t exist without progenitors or siblings, but it also sounds like few things out there right now. It is humble in its acceptance of failure, but also threatening and brutal when it draws blood with its demands. It’s gorgeous and disquieting – a short 90 minute feature from a director who usually delivers four hour epics. Potentially: the best thing Kent has done. But who would be a fool to measure this?
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