Texture Freq Masochistic Episode cassette
Six songs of demented, mid-tempo, plodding, disturbing queer punk. This is outstanding. It’s like Minneapolis, MN’s answer to Cleveland’s mighty CRUELSTER. The way the singer barks the repetitive and seemingly idiotic phrasing over and over, you could have even potentially convinced me that this cassette was CRUELSTER taking a slightly different direction than their previous output. Don’t be fooled tho, there are some very obvious and important differences between these two bands, one being that TEXTURE FREQ’s debut cassette comes with a zine entitled The Immediate Stages of the Hardcore Singer, whereas I’m not entirely convinced that the members of CRUELSTER know how to read, let alone write. The zine, written by the band’s singer Jimmy Cooper, has all the lyrics to the demo at the end, but first takes the reader on a bit of a journey which, as an idiot, was a little bit difficult for me to follow. Talks of opera singers, Kierkegaard, and Medusa are peppered through the discussions about queer struggles, formation of a band, lyrical writing, and even a reference to other published reading material to check out. Some of this may be over my head, but I absolutely love it regardless. I would be happy to pass the zine portion along to a credible zine reviewer if someone would be interested in doing a better job of reviewing written words. As for the music, don’t snooze on this. TEXTURE FREQ is top-notch.