Prologue
"It was a mild and gray winter afternoon that February day at the Nashville City Cemetery in 2024. The drizzling rain hazed the sky as the surrounding trees fragmented the last of the setting sun's dull light. The caretaker removed the key from the brass padlock on the door of the unassuming mausoleum. Stepping back, the man dropped the key in the breast pocket of his coveralls with one hand, and with the other, retrieved a matchbox from the pocket of his flannel lined jacket. He tilted his head down, struck a match, careful to shield it from the wet mist. He circled the rim of the pipe with the flame, sipping the stem as the tobacco caught. He looked up sharply, his eyes squinting from the thick white bellows of smoke, and looked upon the surname engraved above the entry of the tomb. 'Damn shame, that,' he said in condolence to nobody but himself. He turned his head to spit, his eyes never leaving the tall, long letters cut into the stone.
Finally, the man turned to walk away, only making it a few paces before something stopped him. A noise? A loud cracking noise? Did it come from the vault behind him? He slowly turned back around to face the mausoleum, the walls now streaked with channels of a light rain. The man removed his pipe from his mouth in an unconscious effort to hone his senses and focus. The wind rose, shaking the surrounding trees and clattered their branches as if to signal to the caretaker that they had been the culprits of his long inquisitorial gaze upon the mausoleum. Satisfied with his flights of fancy being so immediately put to bed, the man once again turned and continued on his way—if not a hair faster."
Following their 2021 swansong release, Bury Them In The Graves They Dug For You, the tragic and untimely demise of Nashville's sludgy, noise-grind outfit Bled To Submission came in early 2024. Those remaining shadows and wraiths not corporeally bound to the band's mortal remains reconstituted themselves under the name Woundflower. This new entity proved itself faster, meaner and absent of clemency.
No strangers to this blog, Woundflower return once again with their brand new EP, Privatized Collapse. The band's prior release, 2024's Misery, was Woundflower's debut full-length and established the band's mix of burnt hardcore, noise, and grind-violence. Here now, within Privatized Collapse, Woundflower have seemingly strengthened their resolve and focused anew on their unbridled rage and fierce vitriol for contemporary humanity.
From the word go, Privatized Collapse is blasting straight malice and spittle into your face. The EP is a mix of balefully brutal harsh noise and grindviolence—rabid and whetted—lean and focused. It's a claustrophobically manic expression of bitter disgust, traumatic grief, and blinding outrage. It's an indictment of the societal anguish during the last death throes of capitalism. It's a record about the suffocating helplessness as we watch the political climate turn from bad to worse to totalitarianism.
Beyond its lyrical and emotional themes of civil unrest and dystopian dread, Privatized Collapse is a pummeling and aggressive musical tableau of driving force. The EP is as dynamic as it is savage. Its compositions are full of right angles and trap doors designed to mislead listeners and keep them on their toes without betraying the band's bare-knuckle take on the grind-violence subgenre. The listening experience is a surge of constricting turns like a Tron Light Cycle racing through blind channels at breakneck speed.
Drummer and the perpetual motion machine, Ross Winchel, is responsible for hurling every track through Privatized Collapse's sinuous and canted landscape. Whether it's the battering blast beats or the sledgehammering hardcore slugs, Winchel somehow keeps each song consistent and kinetic. His woodblock-toned snare drum and solid impactful kick drum are toned perfectly to ride above the distortion and noise.
Isaiah Rodriguez's guitarwork is a hardcore chugging maze of discordant bleating, thrashing knots, and and cheesy metal divebombs. His scratchy scrambles and skittering riffs are schizophrenically fast. The chords climb over one another in a frenzy, barely manifesting themselves before breaking and turning. The guitar's only semblance of steady repetition is its hardcore plodding mosh riffs that only last long enough to corrall you through the song's more obvious twists and turns before leading you into a wall of feedback and pinch harmonics. Rodriguez weaves a noisy web of crushing violence and distorted momentum that seemingly gets better the more releases he stacks under his belt.
Jesse Weilburg's bass is not as distinct and domineering as it was on Misery, instead, it's regulated more towards the background. The bass's gnarled, distorted tone creates a thick backbone to the songs without overtly overshadowing the other instruments, yet it is upfront during solos and the intro to the titular track, "Privatized Collapse."
Like flies swarming a corpse, the strident needling noise, similar to that of a dentist drill, is often buzzing around the basslines and noise tracks. The "dentist drill" effect is a holdover from Bled To Submission and is a familiar throughline that is as much of the band's lineup as any of the physical members.
Speaking of the song, "Privatized Collapse," I don't think I remember a song in recent memory, or ever, that is so blatantly antagonistic. The song's introduction is a sludgy patterned noisy bassline and a drumming stomp that loops at an escalating and quickening pace. In my opinion, it plays as a sinisterly sardonic jest of what is expected of the powerviolence genre. It subverts the formula by turning it into a mocking caricature of the genre. More than that, it seems just plain malevolent and I don't fully trust it.
Privatized Collapse's harsh noise elements are primarily confined to two tracks—one midway through the EP and another at the end. "Serrated Corridor" is a thirty-second static television screen of shrill, digital regurgitative hacking. While EP closer, "Too Empty To Be Endured," is a sonic atmospheric horrorscape. Starting out, it sounds like the struggle of a moldered hand-crank phonograph playing the tune of an aboriginal bullroarer. The track slowly introduces a warbling drone that grows in intensity alongside an increasingly howling wind. As it picks up, we can hear the rhythmically snapping of twigs and the sweeping of metal chains. Like something from The Blair Witch Project, the ambient dread gradually climaxes in a mix of earthen noises and cyber static. You can picture the dark scene lit with the halo of a flashlight as you're dragged through the dark, through the leaves, over the roots and eventually into the dirt. The garbled cacophony eats you alive before the whole thing pixels away.
I happened to be listening to the track once when I picked the kid up from school. She initially asked if I was listening to a haunted house soundtrack (which isn't completely out of pocket in this family.) She listened to it in silence all the way home until the track was over, at which point she wanted to listen to it again. You can take that for what it's worth.
On the surface, Privatized Collapse is an amazing sounding EP. It's production is more even-keeled than Misery's bass-sentric mix. It's an inspired release and an enjoyable listen. As a record, it perfectly encapsulates the power-heavy and grating onslaught of Woundflower's blistering grind-violence. Imagine if Bled To Submission was run over by an eighteen-wheeler that was driven by Eastwood, their corpse then buried in the Pet Sematary filled with the sour dirt of Stimulant—that's Woundflower's Privatized Collapse.
However, underneath, Privatized Collapse is an invective and spiteful critique of the American Dream and the dreamers within it. I believe something about it is evil or, at the least, cruel. Whatever the case, I think Privatized Collapse is probably one of the best releases of the year.
Epilogue
"That young couple with the flowers were dead; the caretaker knew that. They had to be. He didn't see it, but he had heard it as he ran away. What he did see was that teenager—the one in all black—the 'looky-loo,' as the caretaker privately referred to him. He saw him at the cemetery often, rubbing chalk and paper on headstones. Today, he saw him as those 'things' from the mausoleum dug into him. He saw the flesh go and the blood pour. He saw those 'things' taking him apart.
BANG! The slam against the outside of the workshed door brought the caretaker back. He had the double-barrel shotgun broken open at an angle in the crook of his arm, desperately trying to load the two shells that he had between the knuckles of his violently trembling hand.
BANG! The caretaker jumped, let out an embarrassing yelp, and dropped his ammunition at his feet. He quickly knelt down on one knee, the shotgun cradled in his waist. He kept his eye fixed on the door pounding in front of him as his one free hand frantically searched blindly for the shells on the plywood of the floor.
BANG! His eyes begin to well up in frustration of his situation.
BANG! He knew these 'things'—these people—in life. He had cared for them in death. Now, they were something in between.
BANG! He wished he wasn't here.
BANG! He wished they would go away.
BANG! He found one cartridge and loaded a single barrel before snapping the long gun shut.
BANG! BANG! The door was quickly splintering into more of a symbolic barrier than a physical one.
BANG! BANG! Still kneeling, he raised the shotgun at the entryway, faltered, and lowered the gun.
BANG! BANG! He fell back against the workbench with his legs splayed out in front of him.
BANG! BANG! BANG! He swung the two barrels around and tucked them under his chin. He threaded his thumb through the trigger guard. The caretaker squeezed.
BANG!!!"
FFO: Bled To Submission, Stimulant, Eastwood
Listen to the album: https://woundflower.bandcamp.com/album/privatized-collapse
