Album Review: xLESIONSx - Tired of Being Pushed Around and Told Just What to Do

Surprises - I’m not really a fan of them in real life, but I’m all about them when it comes to music.

Case in point: after their first two releases—Nan Elmoth’s Void Serpent and the At Dusk/Sacerdos split—I had Pacific Threnodies pegged as another really solid kvlt black metal cassette label. And then they went and released Acheulean Forest’s The Enchantment, which is a dungeon synth record. But okay…I mean, a lot of kvlt dudes are into dungeon synth, so that makes sense. Unexpected, but not a total curveball…

When I heard that the label’s fourth release was from a band featuring members of Nan Elmoth and At Dusk, I was expecting a return to the black metal of their first two releases. And that’s where the surprise comes in – it’s not even fucking close to black metal. In fact, I’m not quite sure what to call Lesions’ (stylized as xLESIONSx) debut EP Tired of Being Pushed Around and Told Just What to Do. The first word that comes to mind is ugly, but that feels like selling the record short. I mean, the cover image is of a burning police SUV. If that doesn’t tell you exactly what to expect, then you may be reading the wrong site.

Still, if I were to write a recipe for Lesions’ sound, it’d go something like this -

In a high-speed blender, combine the following:

- two heaping scoops of powerviolence

- a can of butane

- liberal amounts of both D-beat and crust punk

- four or five large, bloodied shards of broken glass (possibly from a bourbon bottle, definitely from a fight)

- several dashes of old-school, beatdown-style hardcore

- a handful of rusty nails

- a pinch of caustic doom

And if the fucker somehow doesn’t explode when you hit the ‘puree’ button, you’ve got a pretty good approximation of what Tired of Being Pushed Around and Told Just What to Do sounds like. It also underscores the surprising amount of diversity Lesions shows across the EP’s thirteen-minute run time. The opening salvo of “Hood Shit” and “We Are No One” may only last a little over a minute combined, but they deliver such a vicious, well-aimed kick to the crotch that you may feel like you’re choking on your own balls for the rest of the EP. “Corey Williams” adds a bit of melody to the crustiness, sounding a bit like I imagine Khemmis would if they went on a three-day meth binge. “Vacant” is pure rage from start to finish, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the people who set the fires in that Wal-Mart in Texas the night before Thanksgiving had it blasting in their headphones as they went about their arsony business. “Solace” brings the proceedings to a close with a blast of bad drug-fueled self-loathing.

In case it wasn’t clear from the above descriptions, I really fucking dig Tired of Being Pushed Around and Told Just What to Do. In fact, since I absolutely loathe the holiday season, it feels like the perfect record for this time of year. Instead of buying some half-assed present for that cousin you never really got along with, just say fuck it and pick yourself up a copy of this instead.

Tired of Being Pushed Around and Told Just What to Do is now available via Pacific Threnodies.

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