I sat down with the album on headphones (on a personal CD player bought specifically for the occasion) and wrote down what I heard during the running time. The following is just a piece of wordfun, and is intended as a tribute to Foetus (1981-2025) in all its/his glorious inglory.
HALT
Starts off with American militaristic
drumbeat a la Tom Waits, then onto theme for a Bond film never made, epic,
sweeping, right into sneering bratty Foetus vocals, paranoid, fever-feared,
vicious, seditious, insanity-swarmed, up close and impersonal through
headphones, rough vocal gravel over purring musical honey, tone and tenor of
the times, severed whims, sandstorms, siren laughs and bleats, sounds I can’t
describe on the tip of my confused tongue, bombast on top of smooth sailing
passages, carpet bombing crowd blanket Trump accusation in a time of no sanity
and maximum trouble, lowered into a scalding worldview acid bath, end of a
near-half-century era, it’s a conspiracy inside a mushroom cloud I’m not your
property, bold declaration of yank independence from an Antipodean escapee,
never take me alive copper, shitkicker melancholic vocals, it’s called the
culling of the herd, every netbound true false half-true accusation and
insinnuendo a la Don Logan in one weird nailbomb, Guns Germs Steel ref, Jim
sounds tired, sporadically firing, almost Scottish folk sound sonics, European
forest dancer madness, stillborn, still born, swillburn, skullskills, necro
frenzy summation, Martian protestations from the sidelines and sane confines, a
dropping of decades of sociopathic babybrand presentation swept aside for a bit
for raw human emotion, I could not look the other way fifteen children died
today, I’ve been impaled by the sins of World War Two can’t sleep for the skins
of six million Jews, human pain misery horror torment always the through-thread
frontline in the wars of the peaceless, electronic currents curling through the
disturbed charged air, beating the drums of conquest with your bones, full of
piss and vinegar rare expletive, slow crushing death march, mocking musical screams,
negro spiritual echoes, knowing society-bottom firelicks, broken links, 404
errors, 405 dreams destroyed, look at fingers frown hmmm think absorb tinnitus
symphonies, arrhythmic scurrilous accusations of terminal velocity, throat-slitting
smiles, Heavenly Hell orchestral female trillslut choirs, a fat man dancing in
an ever-slowing sagging-animal circle, a parody of grace and style, the world
is broken, the word is spoken, the word is token, art is a nonsense, a straw in
the mouth of a man sinking in inorganic quicksand, sperm volleys, death
valleys, gone echoes, and here a fast punky snap epic sound a wee bit like
Holiday in Cambodia startwise is rightwise, frantic frenzied furied
ruby-slippered, let me die alone, but die informed, spiritually deformed were
there such a thing as fucking spirit, a rare Jim rock stingsong, Sonic Reducer
screaming vid Youtube flashbacks, negative gains, maggot art explications, laughing
at catharsis, swooning over the idea of deliverance from pain and existence,
perfect burning path nods, slower even reminds me of the start of the
Nekromantik theme, gargantuan lilting murder purity spirals, a huge blind dumb
beast knocking all doubters and faithfuelled thisawayandthataway, a grand
guignol porno spraying horrorshow, a usual Thirlwell-drawn non-sequitur,
monolith footfall groundshake (sneeze twice in rapid succession) heartbeat
juxtaposition, threatening death or satori, revelation or destruction,
revolution or restriction, and throat-clear proclamations from the mouth of the
genius damned, echoing across hills Highlands haggis heather outback of genetic
inheritance, striving for something but never seeming to quite reach it, or
maybe surpassing it and missing the pole position point, maybe flogging a dead
horse, maybe screaming from an emptied visceral pit, random sonic stop,
opposition, gut craters, summation, ecstasy, hawking up empty lung infections,
and that always Thirlwell sound, like somecunt dancing on his last twanging
gonnae-snap nerve, the verve of a massacre art-averted, in the Hells of the
mountain king, king of the decay swingers, the abdication of the throne of
agony, the end of one bumpy putrescent self-educating road, and always warnings
from the west of oblivion, prayorama fetish pyre and it still won’t help,
pain-skelped, Australia groaning south of the Yabba, organic yelps and patriot
acts, flies swarming over dead kangaroo flesh woken in fright, ticktickticktick
lightvein beat I will not soon forget fuck you mantras, sneering Joker smiles,
telling that genetic traitor what they are worthless, pulling down lies, don’t
want to upset the clientele, memories, graces, ignorances, dancing on hot muso
coals, firefrights, coalcrashes, levity attempts no escape from four walls I
built up while trying to knock them down, odd 80s riff ripped here, longterm
narroweyed viewing of the pig scum cultural blandscape, understand me, give me
liberty or give me a lobotomy like all the rest of you cunts, submission would
sometimes seem like a hand-quarters-raised gift as Salman Rushdie laughs from
the condemned rafters, and Jim has things to tell, scores to settle, truths to
sell, lies to dispel, anaesthetised Heavens to Hell, smelling salts under the
nose to awaken to reality ignored and deeply inhaled, a music box from the 19th
century in an Iowa cornfield playing down to unwound nothing under an accusing
religious fundamentalist sky, and Australian Christian inculcation meeting and
shrinking back from American psycho Jesus fun-damn-mentalism, void schisms,
rapist jissom, Pink Floyd doing The Wall back there somewhere in the exploited
DNA, DNR notice, do not resuscitate, this Foetus is flatlining forever and ever
ah man, bouncing off the established walls and jumping over them into new
strange deranged clover fields, young orgasm squeals, disturbed flora and fauna,
fissure games, faster and faster and faster and please understand this crime
this time and mibbes aye mibbes naw just like any attempted art ejaculation and
pain annihilation, anything to escape from the planet of the apes, the damned
dirty apes, the internet scumscrapers, the insanity shapers, the canker
vapours, the tragedy laughers, the dirty tech lickers, the pretty mendacious
ditty slingers, and what song are we at now eight Star Trek soundtrack start,
to boldly go where no genius maniac has gone before, and Middle Eastern
soundswarms and incantations, Scottish and Arabic pipes could be mutant
different-weather twins, laughing virus assaults, coming from here there
neverywhere, female Spartan emergency ululations, church-burning liplicking
playbook followings, oddball early 80s robot crackling cackles, flying free and
uneasy across the decades untrammelled by gravity or sanity or dignity or
responsibility, I am the light or I am the life or I am the life of light both
neither either or, sudden unclimbable mountain vistas of ecstasy meddling and
psychosis medley, desperate tunes from a dying torched one-man village floating
through the awed charged air, burned witch projects, subjective dementias,
Alzheimer sopranos, aural sex slaves, more Celtic-like heritage saluting of
magpies and history, never wrestle the personal controls from the shaking
sweating Foetus hands, here lies the tombstone of the work of a few dozen
years, tears, traumas, dramas, no ifs and buts and whys just goodbyes,
psychodramas windmill-kicking round the Moulin Rouge, whatsiscunt eh Morricone
meeting Shane MacGowan here in a twisted spitting fistfight, I dunno I dunno,
words always fail at the collapse of lifelong friendships and relationships and
every single syllable just makes the waters more muddied, I will push back hard
against them til I die, salute to block-frozen existential rebellious stances,
so much better and easier with real talent backing, tubercular lungs hacking
and spitting, swillborn anthems, run the gauntlet north and south march on up
to the cannon’s mouth and say I can do any goddamned thing I want, you can have
my volition when you pry it from my cold dead brain, quickfoot beatspit now, mental
institution fresh death boogie, broken-necked pas de deux, murdered ballerina
trackmarks and ah fuck the Walkman’s stopped walking frenzied stunburst hot
fuck rhythm interrupted the blunders of modern technology crackle fart squelch
laugh yacuntye ah one sec – dirty fucking album-apex-cheating cunt of a thing nearing
vinegar strokes smack it off my knee that’ll work let’s see splays shockingly
open batteries crack onto floor try new ones don’t tell me it’s self-destructed
like in Mission Impossible after the delivered message but no ah seems to be
working again and were I pretentious I would say like Coleridge interrupted
except I am not English and not that good and don’t give a fuck and am
laughing, fuck man talking about interrupting yer rhythm just as you get close
to the lucky spasm jackpot ah well these things happen, warships multiplying,
crucifixes look like iron crosses, Nazi Trump cunts, sad opp shop knockoffs,
not even got the stylish Huge Boss threads unravelling, Clint and various
sweaty near-death spaghetti western dwellers getting ready to pull and shoot
and go, something about killing cattle, another upbeat beatup soundwound beat,
could check the lyric booklet but ah what the hell, in for a penny in for a
pounding, the whole album’s a Hellish malfunctioning drone recon over failed
ruined cratered American territory, snapshots of measurable infinity,
sputtering confused prophecies, post-20th century foxholes dived
into to escape the modern grand mal seizure circus, a narrowing of horizons, a
meeting and mating of endings, my life is at an end, an examination and high
burn nation aesthetics, the grinding of creaking groaning composer bones
together ever-nearer to compost reclamation, funeral final tune tone, feral fun
eclipsed, the slow sweet sad steady melancholic setting of a tragic
life-loving-and-loathing internal quietening braggart sun, memory ember
blowing, shame and fear and regret never seemingly surpassed, sharkswim
never-slowing-or-stopping puritan work ethic brilliance seemingly not much of a
crutch, a widening pool of blood and the ancient communicative centre cannot
hold and there is nothing more to say with this particular Thirlwell
incantation incarnation, this internal bleeding examination, this counting of
enemy scalps and spurburn scars, this ectopic ents enterprise, a final dead
tired admission of defeat in the feat of life and death, but as Norm Macdonald
said your cancer dies with you so it’s a draw, fuck it, we are all fit for
nothing but beautiful temporary fury and no-further-future assignation
regardless of briefly-dwelled nation and the rusty splintered nails slide
down the shale slate cliff
and the sounds vanish
into the
dead void swarm
eulogy lullaby
forever.
Silence.
The author with JG Thirlwell in London in August 2023:
Signed copy of the Halt CD:
My 2024 interview with JG Thirlwell about his lyrics:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2024/10/bringing-foetus-to-halt.html
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