Shearling - Motherfucker, I am Both: "Amen" and "Hallelujah"...

Shearling, the latest project to be lead by Alexander Gregory Kent, release their debut album Motherfucker, I am Both: "Amen" and "Hallelujah". It clocks in at 62-minutes of unadulterated, mainlined lunacy. It is "Music for farms", as the bands Bandcamp explains - of an animalistic state. The ambient-y aspects of Kent's solo works are here, as well as the deranged, progressive capacities of Sprain. Post-rock, post-hardcore, noise rock and flickers of ambient passages all find themselves inside the limitless confines of an experimental frame. It is to be the first of two sister records according to the bands Instagram. 

A continuous journey through a mesh of experimental and genre-blurring feats, Motherfucker opens on soul-stirring stabs of guitar - like Hitchcock for the modern age. Amen and hallelujah - the prayer and the saviour. There's a lot here to unravel, as it further ravels into itself. Smearing the boundaries to the point where definitive edges smooth out and become boundless. They let go of what's inside and everything becomes everything. The first we hear from a human voice comes at the 4-minute mark. Like someone actively trying not to die at the helm of their own words, the album's narrator/protagonist/what-have-you comes to agonising life. 

"I have woven sounds from an artists head and composed it. Poet sentence. But never have I revealed myself behind my master's fences."

"My thoughts are no less solid than the flesh that supposedly contain them."

It sets the stage nicely for cipher/riddle festered waters.  

"How could you have known, Adam?" How could anyone. 

I D A H O H E M I N G W A Y KETCHUM

Clogged thoughts. Greasy ducts. Oozing. Spiritually repungant. The mind spills, all over itself. Madness speaks out. Chokes on its own words. Is smothered by its own speech. Refuses to give up. Turns blue. Keels over. Life has at it. A soul worth its weight in gold - worthless. Fractals of sanity. The fringes come undone. The ribbon ties a noose around its own neck. Buried fifty-thousand feet below the ground. Adam and Steve. Not afraid to drag you down with them. Original sin this. Son of Man that. 

"God may discriminate, but the soil does not, Adam." 

Unapologetic in its gruelling demeanour, Motherfucker makes its way through what you could call movements, musical waves. They crash and crush upon the shore. The ripples aren't as soothing as they may seem. They will tire you, seduce you, use you, sweep you under. Sleepy men will take the easy way out. 

"There's a treat in it for ya, if you can keep your mouth shut. There's a seat in it for ya, if you can keep your legs shut". There's a space in the promise land if you can choke on these deeds, swallow these seeds, give up your needs. 

"Is it best not to believe in anything?" Is it best to float on by? To see everything at face value. To be skin deep and no deeper. Sense enough to know something's going on, but not enough to ever actually be. 

"The ass will melt the maker. And the paddle shall be stiffened. As for the horses...."

The shattering ego. Splitting in two. Pulled apart by horses; pulling horses apart. I am both - everything and nothing; remembered and forgotten; loved and let go. The gruelling discovery that you've been living a lie. The lie collapses in on itself at every conceivable level. Like a set of dominoes that leads to you. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. A Sisyphean battle: me and my boulder of words. 

"He knows that with or without him the world continues to spin." The constellations on his back will reveal what's inside. Too bad they lie.

"No bridge unburned and no stone upturned." No scab not picked. No bone not broken. No eye not blind. No soul not stirred. 

If you are confused at any stage as to what the actual fuck is going on along Motherfucker's runtime, you will not be the first, and certainly will not be the last. It is designed to be as reality-bending and expectation-shattering as possible. Those that caught onto Sprain's 2023 project The Lamb as Effigy should already be well aware of this and in that relative headspace. Artistic statements are not meant to be understood, they're experiences. Some experiences are unexplainable. If we rationalised life itself we would burnout in an instant, combust on the spot - we have blindspots in our being in order to avoid this. The universe knows. It's all a design. We are nothing more than passengers watching it unfold from behind our eyes, wherever that is. You lose sight of it if you're too close. You must be buried in order to ascend. The end is nigh. 

Divisive albums are usually where the real meat is, soul nourishment. Time will tell as time has told. 

"I know in my heart of hearts that this is my ass."