Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
What often gets lost is what’s real in the world around us, the stories that make the people who occupy this planet tick. What we perceive as the real world has been mangled and contorted by the internet. This distorted sense of reality hasn’t just come from the recent bursting bubble of AI and its infinite dirge of doctored images. It comes from our own accelerated relationship with media in general, and the messages we absorb. It’s a refracting lens that we’ve viewed our perceptions on the world through, distracted by the images.
They Are Gutting a Body of Water has used the internet to construct their image. Basically every band has. It’s what the new-wave shoegaze bands of the 2020s have done. It’s unavoidable in this environment. But TAGABOW, in their time, has focused more on the lasting and the concrete—the details seen as you go down the sidewalk of your neighborhood at night, or the inherent buzzing and hovering feelings in your transient body. The band’s new album LOTTO speaks to these things even more, dissecting them further and displaying each coarse texture.
The song “sour diesel” opens up with a fuzz tone that sounds like a saw whirring through brick while the verse makes space for little glints of lights. On “baeside k” the opening riff is like a machine screaming through a tube, distant but loud, like it’s at the end of a tunneled turnpike. The guitar riff that sits under “rl stine” waves out like water under a single finger, undulating while the distortion rips it up like a downpour. The sounds all over LOTTO are caustic and acrid, but they’re tinged with something muted and gorgeous.
There are fewer of the one- to two-minute loosies from TAGABOW’s SoundCloud (or last year’s swanlike) on the album, but they still show up. The track “slo crostic” is an instrumental fronted by a lunging bassline, and “chrises head” resembles the vocaloid from electronic producer Downhill2k01’s song “When the Fat Lady Sings” reflecting off of itself. It returns at the beginning of the closer “herpim,” which also ends with a blown out, bumping club beat. It’s electronica allowed to falter and left gritty, seeped with the imperfections of reality.
That gritty reality is painted in LOTTO. Both “sour diesel” and “rl stine” mention the corner store that bandleader Douglas Dulgarian goes to every day in Philadelphia, his friend T who hangs outside asking for spares, and the frozen TV propped in the window. The opening “the chase” describes one of his drug relapses, wrought with breakdowns and vile feelings within his own body. It’s matched with a surreal acute awareness of small, littered details, like the “green box of Pampers in the middle of the slushy winter pothole street getting run over and over and over,” or an ominous leering feeling of death over a grocery store.
These lyrics get at the poverty and hard times that a majority of Americans face. At any moment, one uncontrollable slip up could mean you’re out hungry, or can’t make rent for the month and are forced to live out on the street away from your home, tucked away in a corner. This is all part of a system that benefits the wealthy imperialists. They sow division, through the messages boosted by seemingly random algorithms online or the productions broadcast on TV, all so nobody organizes to fight it. It’s a process that has been escalated to bring in even more money to them, profiting off necessities like food, shelter, medicine, taking from everyone else so they can be more hungry and supposedly work harder, but people suffer because of it. Drugs can provide a brief reprieve from it for people to rely on, even if it degrades things in the long run.
Dulgarian has talked about his experience with addiction before, in interviews and on the band’s Instagram—drug use has occupied his life for the past twenty years. He described his past relationship with drugs as gambling in a sense. He’s used drugs to feel better when times are rough, just for the feeling to collapse soon after. Dulgarian tells Stereogum that he has a lot to cherish, his friends and the community he’s helped build up, and it can feel like he’s sacrificing that. Those are the people he should be giving in to, the people he should be placing his bets on. That’s what’s worth living for, worth fighting for. When the world is degrading around you, what gives you purpose is to try to make other people’s lives better. That’s the main sentiment on LOTTO.
The most scalding moment of the album is the lead single “american food.” Dulgarian’s clean vocals are delivered in spoken word from his gravely voice, sitting over a mauve acoustic arpeggio framed in by a boxy breakbeat. At the chorus switch, it begins to warble. Sung through a clenched jaw, cracking face, and welling eyes are the words “tell me there’s a better world, and I’ll go get my gun”—a beautiful resolution but a scary one. He realizes what he needs to do, realizes it’s a difficult thing, and says “yes.” It’s the only way meaningful change will materialize in this system. If there’s the chance there’s something better after the end of this world, something better for those we love to live in, then it’s worth betting on, it’s worth fighting for. It’s worth taking extreme measures to make that a reality.
At the end of LOTTO is a jubilation for that life and its possibility. Closer “herpim” has everyone clapping once the plane lands, escaping imminent death. On “baeside k” Dulgarian states explicitly that he’s grateful for his life, smiles piercing at the back of his mind. He’s reveling in that feeling for a moment, where the love of everyone he cares about, the thing that matters in the world, reaches out. It feels tenderly warm in the bitter cold.
Disappointing / Average/ Good / Great / Phenomenal
LOTTO is out now.
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John Glab | @glabglabglab_
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