Pharmakon - Bestial Burden

Pharmakon

Bestial Burden

14 October 2014

Sacred Bones

 

 

4.5 stars out of 5

 

 

 

As Pharmakon, New York’s Margaret Chardiet makes music with only one intention: to scare the living shit out of your cat(s). I’m joking, of course, but also not really. In terms of the pure terror she can invoke with her screams, Chardiet has few peers, if any. Last year’s Abandon was a masterful, convention-defying tour-de-force of industrial noise, drawing on the early, organic work of Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept. Her latest work, Bestial Burden, makes Abandon seem like a conventional pop record. If you’ve just raised your eyebrows at that last sentence, I guarantee you that I mean it. This record is fucking intense. More powerful and far more scary than Abandon, Chardiet’s second LP pierces through your flesh in the most unsettling manner possible.

 

 

Are you sitting comfortably? Good—remember that feeling, because you won’t feel it again for the next twenty nine minutes. Look at that album cover. Closely. Why? Because you are about to be put through the abattoir, without the merciful courtesy of having your throat slit first. Bestial Burden is the sonic equivalent of becoming the meat that you are about to eat. Chardiet’s voice is a weapon, and not a humane one like a sword or a gun. It’s more like a morning star to the face. Her voice renders you into not-so-choice cuts, partly because you haven’t been fed as good of a diet as your typical slaughterhouse-bound calf, but primarily because Chardiet wants you to feel the pain of a thousand slaughtered calves at once. And after you’ve been bludgeoned, bled, and broken down into pieces, you’ll want to put the needle back to the beginning and play the record all over again.

 

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger