On 999, Toronto-based rapper Sydanie is careful to add dancefloor-ready hopefulness to lyrics about motherhood, loss, and success. But until then, it’s never a bad time to get stuck into AQOM. RVG’s long-awaited second record Feral is out later this year. Recalling post punk icons The Fall, as well as Australian heroes like The Go-Betweens and The Triffids, A Quality of Mercy is rarely anything less than a potent, thrilling listen. A Quality of Mercy is the band’s only full-length, but it’s a record that’s made them revered figures watching them at a rapturously-recieved show in Melbourne last month felt charged and significant, a cult moment in the making. It’s been reissued a few times now, and each time it’s felt like more and more people have grown to find - and love - frontwoman Romy Vager’s vicious, often beautifully lyrical skewering of carceral culture, tortured artistry, and unhealthy romance. This is for the rest of us, who understand that chaos, madness, pain and even self-destruction are natural and inevitable responses to an unjust and disgusting world of our own making.It’s astonishing to see how RVG’s excellent debut A Quality Of Mercy has grown in popularity since it first came out a few years back. To be well adjusted in this system is to be oblivious and unfeeling. Here, where martyrs, slaves, and pharmakos are not eradicated, but simply called by another name. It is for all those ostracized by and isolated from a totality which chews them up alive in a self-cannibalizing caste system. This album is dedicated to all who were lost to their own demise, all who have been institutionalized whether in prison, psychiatric facilities, or drug rehabilitation. Those who see beyond the veil need to obscure the horrid sight by any means necessary, but respite is always brief- nothing can dampen the glare from behind the veil. Those that pit them against each other grin from the sidelines, bellies full. With this view, the blame is placed not within the individual, but with the world they must contend with, and a society that is designed to fail them - to keep them gnashing and wailing, inflicted with an all-devouring hunger that inevitably turns in on the self. Turning these wounds toward ourselves can be seen as an attempt at “balancing feedback”, within a never-ending positive feedback loop of cause and effect. It is an instinctive inward response to a world of increasing outward violence, greed, and oppression.
But this behavior does not happen in a vacuum. In our cells, our minds, our politics and our species, humans are self-destructing. “Devour” uses self-cannibalization as allegory for the self-destructive nature of humans on cellular, individual, societal and species-wide scales. As one of the premiere vanguards of modern industrial and power electronics, Chardiet continuously pushes the genres and everyone involved in them, and with the release of Devour, she has once again changed the game.
Devour also explores new sonic territory, with denser electronics, groovier hooks, and moments of her most unhinged vocal deliveries to date.
The A and B sides were each recorded as a continuous take with vocals from start to finish, marking a totally new process for the artist that allows the ferocity and immediacy of her live performance to resonate throughout. The album was recorded by Ben Greenberg (Uniform) and is the first Pharmakon album recorded live in studio. Each of the five songs echoes a stage of grief associated with this cyclical chamber of self-destruction and the chaos surrounding us that leads us to devour ourselves in an attempt to balance the agony. Like her previous albums, Devour comes with a strong concept that is exorcised throughout the five demolishing tracks on the album, using imagery and language of self-cannibalism as allegory for the self-destructive nature of humans. Devour marks the fourth full-length record from Margaret Chardiet’s project Pharmakon and her most intense output to date.
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