Content Hangover No. 5 by: Garrett Crusan
Iguana Death Cult Gently Returns to Form on Guns Out
Post-punk—like jazz, contemporary art, and most other culturally indispensable things America once had to offer—have been bastardized and commodified quicker than you could say “Interpol.” We’ve capitalized on “indie-sleaze” to such a consuming degree that a band as boring as The Strokes have entered the release-ring again with a half-assed comeback single pandering to both millennial I-Was-There warriors and younger audiences fraught with nostalgia for a scene explosion that happened well before they were even an idea; LCD Soundsystem prioritizes ticket sales (and even designates specific shows) to AMEX cardholders and soundtracks SpaceX Super Bowl advertisements. In the decade-old words of one of the great remaining DIY-lifers: “Put an easy demographic into sweatshop denim jackets / and they’ll wonder what just happened when the world becomes Manhattan.”
Enter Dutch art-punk outfit Iguana Death Cult: this idea isn’t lost on them. Intentional or not, their inherently non-American creative output and its tendency towards the push-and-pull of reckoning with both internal and external chaos playfully holds a broken mirror in front of American music-lovers and laughs, as if saying, “Maybe you smashed it yourself.” Their recent reinvention on their fourth full-length project, Guns Out, functions as both an innocuous return-to-form as well as an effectual, calculated study of the breakneck pace of advancement in the worlds both inside and around them.
Auspiciously, a large portion of the Rotterdam quintet’s recent LP is food for the post-punk and garage-rock soul. Twitching, jungle-esque percussion draped over chorused bass ostinatos are familiar enough genre-staples to be promptly palatable when paired with frontman Jeoren Reek’s exaggerated baritone; those primary characteristics are supplemented just enough through unconventional production and blown-out processing that they rarely come off as uninspired or derivative. Such is the case on a track like “Swinging At Ghosts” and its freakazoid carnival-polka refrain or “Low” and its explosive final act that falls somewhere between Korn and Silver Mt. Zion. The tracks are packed to capacity with hypnotizing repetition, breakneck grooves, and dense, fervid arrangements across its brief runtime that rarely let you pause to take a breath.
Lyrically, cuts like “Supreme Leader” and its cheeky air-raid siren synth introduction do a wonderful job of satirizing those who seek unrivaled control of both the world and the self, pairing sentiments like “I’m a man exercising my will [...] and I’ll die upon that hill,” and “I only cry in the shower.” The ball-in-hand single-word refrains on “Heavyweight Champion of the World” are, again, forcing the listener (most effectively an American listener) to view the absurdity of the capitalist condition at its core: “Calibrate, decimate, tolerate…simulate, masturbate, levitate.” Though tracks like “I Like It, It’s Nice” and “Deflated” may fall flat lyrically (even in the former’s mocking nature), they’re propped back up by the engagement of their production value just enough to land on two feet, even if it feels a bit like a drunken stupor.
Closing track “Deflated” and its inoffensive drum-machine dream-pop, however, is so out of place and unaffecting that it almost reads as satire, with its only merit being that it feels like a confused farewell to a record of otherwise successfully-manic and explosive garage rock. The track is categorical proof that Iguana Death Cult are really at their best when they’re inverting a genre’s stylistic devices and not thinking too hard about sentimentality; they thrive most in the urgency felt in the wake of confronting the world and self, and through picking apart the threads that inescapably connect those things.
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Importantly, the first thing I stumbled upon while researching the band was a brief interview and writeup on the title-track single from an anonymous author in an arts and culture magazine whose title I won’t mention here. To my dismay, the entire writeup was 100%, without-a-doubt, written by AI. The shock in this juxtaposition felt like I was being pranked by the universe: a band whose subject matter often satirizes capitalism and groupthink covered by the exact thing perpetuating those cultural viruses was, in a way, absurdist comedic gold. In addition to its dismayed hilarity, it’s a point-prover of the sentiments expressed by post-punk acts for decades. Something like, “We can’t quite escape this thing yet, but we’ll try our damndest to do so and present it for what it really is: destructive, reprehensible, and most importantly, a fucking joke.”
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In regards to its title, you could re-contextualize the entire record with a single apostrophe. “Gun’s Out.” The difference between including or excluding that possessive punctuation is declaration over observation. Iguana Death Cult are observing, sometimes confronting, but they’re ultimately positioning themselves to declare once the levee eventually breaks.