Lip Critic: Hex Dealer – Interview & Review

Lip Critic: Hex Dealer

(Partisan Records)

Out Now (order here)

DL/LP/CD

As Lip Critic prepares to undertake a tour of the UK this month, Louder Than War catches up with the group and investigates their debut album. An interrogative insight into the mind of a band that sheds light on the increasingly important role of the Hex Dealer and its associated creatures in our contemporary lives, after which their impressive first offering shares a namesake. Interview and review by Ryan Walker.

An album of contrasts and collisions. Cathartic and disastrous. Brimming with dangerous explosions and edges that turn into centres and then melt away again. It’s cerebral yet muscular and primal. A challenging battle…but works. The debut album from Hex Dealer released in May this year via Partisan Records seemed to replicate the rhythms and mimic the movements of the city they inhabit: in a constant state of flux, actors and agents chasing something to satiate the thrill of an everlasting chase where, in musical terms, the squat-grime of hardcore, the manic, palpitations of breakbeat, the nihilistic white spike of no wave, and the radiological pulses of chaos electronica the are conflated together around the same molecular grapevine, microchipped by the band in moments of crazed, imaginative fancy, and superglue the whole lot together to create something astounding enough to turn heads so many degrees it snaps off from the neck’s steaming stump.

It creates the idea of a mixtape with Beastie Boys on one side and Black Flag on the other. It stimulates a strange sting, and simulates a sense of a radio transmitter twitching and twisting onto different random stations, from Odd Future to Front 242, Aphex Twin and Atari Teenage Riot. Or if things start to feel too straight, perhaps fearing what’s been made is subpar to what it is truly capable of, an inferior representation, an imperfection that will blemish their impact from the get-go, are Lip Critic the type of band to abolish all they’ve done and begin again? Is this sort of music easy to write?

”This kind of music is not easy to write, as the writing process is brimming with experimentation. The process of how we create each song varies based on the production, the live drums that may or may not be added, and the vocals that Bret adds to the track” says drummer Danny Eberle. ”We are always trying to challenge ourselves and the listener’s conceptions of what a Lip Critic track is supposed to sound like, adding in different and unique sounds, drum patterns, and vocal styles to the track. With this being said, if we have a song that seems formulaic but we really like we’re definitely still gonna drop it”.

Lip Critic formed in 2019. Prior projects include Brett’s work as Folded Voices, Connor’s work under a myriad of names and Danny’s work with the band On Pink. All of which have blended into what Lip Critic is now. They were students at SUNY Purchase College in New York. Bret (Kaser) and Conno (Kleitz) attended in the Studio Production department while Danny was an Anthropology major. The group was founded on a ubiquitous appreciation of club, heavy and hip-hop variants of music. The mutual adoration of these styles, originating in individual members yet pumped into an integrative whole, oozes throughout the album in a way which is both captivating, dizzying, an infrastructure secure yet capable of collapsing at any moment which only adds to the alluring nature of the work.

The Heart hits hard. Ministry signed to Metalheadz. Beginning life by bubbling away, boiling hot and never coming up for air (ever) for fear of combusting into a confetti of flesh and bones, blood and guts: ”the tongue /The mouth/ The lips /The gums”, thanks to its oil-can drums feasting on a spread of concrete with their pneumatic jaws. ”Standing on the line of my two lives/ But one is the candy. The Heart implodes when pressured by the intense devices that surround it like prey waiting to be dragged through the floorboards of hell. Elsewhere, Milky Max creates a nightmarish image of demon-rave and swaggering, treble-heavy analogue hip-hop sorcery. Neither uprising nor downloading, it keeps the grit sticky between the limbs. Stammering and churning before a blizzard of random chemical noises and musical puzzle pieces swelling at the seams once stuck together.

Genre is dead. Its purposes are no more important than labelling a variety of jam jars according to whether it’s raspberry or strawberry inside. For it’s what’s in between the lines and the bars of a genre, how it’s fragmented and forced to change shape once probed and pierced enough in acts of artistic sadism that makes music alluring. Even more so when style is smashed apart and sutured back together a frantic fancy of juxtaposing opposites, a pulsating patchwork or collection of ideas but in a way which is wonderfully seamless as Hex Dealer more than attests to throughout its labyrinth of various kinetic twists and turns without appearing as though a chimpanzee has unplugged an entanglement of cables to the arse-end of a supercomputer and having an absolute field day slotting them back in. In fact, thanks to the internet and the multiplex of subcultures it has either produced or at least helped the outreach/output of them thanks to the instant circulatory powers of the world wide web (e.g. chillwave, hyperpop, egg-punk) it doesn’t actually matter. Many genres at once (but if pressed you could call it ‘Digital Hardcore’), a mess this is not.

”I have conflicting feelings about genre, as I believe it is important to fit a band or album’s sound into a certain category of music in order to build scenes and interest in and around that certain type of music” Danny states. ”With that being said, I believe that genre is becoming less of a thing that actually matters as music is increasingly becoming more experimental and with the internet people are discovering more and more genres of music everyday and it is all kinda blending together at this point”.

The album’s lyrics often focus on the topic of the body – or how the internal dimensions of the body interact with outside objects to try and solve the Rubik’s Cube of the soul, in turn phasing through the Rubicon and vibrating with a sensual reflex, on the cusp of crumbling at any moment as In The Wawa exclaims: ‘One for the pain/ One on a whim/ Hard to see the point of what lies beneath my skin/ They wouldn’t give it to me/ A vision of the self/ So I drink the image that they sell on the shelf’. It could be the band’s bodies being put under the lyrical microscope lens and the analytical flesh-slabs especially when this relationship between the functions of the body and its relationship to the outside world is a pernicious, inescapable feature of our contemporary civilisation in the throng of the Global North. An album as erratic as Hex Dealer is the only way of articulating that relationship. ”I think drawing connections between the outside world and the human body is a thing that happens without thinking about it all that much’’ states Bret. ”All the lyrics are coming from the perspective of a very warped almost subhuman character so lyrics about a ‘face made of rubber’ and ‘sipping detergent on the rocks’ felt like they came up naturally”.

Tunes in particular pay attention to that phenomenological theory could be Death Lurking or Spirit Bomber. The former explodes like a Looney Tunes fight cloud of aggressive, stomach-punching grunts, all high-pitched pig-squeal electronics, machine factory rhythms rubbing their palms together and tanks of liquiform bass mania. The latter, featuring Izzy Da Fonseca melts into near-unrecognisable shapes of playfulness the more it moves on, from a noise-brimming industrial-punk sermon to a full-blown hyperventilating jungle club anthem, every voice and observable instrument thrown into the baler, only to emerge as some hideous, cyborgian specimen with their speaking mechanism stuck on the same refrain of‘fuck this selfish man’.

All of this begs the question, just what the hell is a Hex Dealer? I think I have one. I think you have one too. I think I have a Hex Dealer. I can’t be sure. I’ve been sold something that snaps as soon as it’s stretched. Been sold something sweet that caused my eyeballs to puke. That explodes as soon as it is plugged in. Dealt something dirty. An implant of an accident waiting to happen on the board games of modern life’s street corners and levels. Gold erodes to charcoal and gemstones eventually bleed into a bag of greasy chips. A Hex Dealer is someone let loose on the streets to sell you something that doesn’t work. That ruins your life. Spells inclined to ensnare you in a lifetime of paranoia and despair. The Hex Dealer occupies a space at the newsstand, neither right nor wrong in its predictions for all of it is a crock of faux-fairytales convincing you that every purchase is a prize draw, that death can be cheated, that fate can be recalibrated to something more bespoke and suited to the desperate needs of the poor sap who contacted the dealer in the first place. The Hex Dealer; seen by some and not all, a phantasmal rumour but grounded in some kind of baffling, private truth (as Bret will tell you having bought an AC support bracket that did not remotely fit his window and the store had no return policy), could be an aloof deity or a conspiracy theorist in disguise. ”A hex dealer knows exactly what they are doing and does it both for personal gain and perverse thrill” Bret discloses on the ambiguous workings of the dealer.

Scholars as well as filthy, electropunk goblins, Lip Critic keep their eyes peeled and ears pressed against the intricate interstices of the consumer society. Neither full of corpses nor promises, it’s the spiritual marketplace, the pleasure dome, the religious supermarket, the postmodern pick ‘n’ mix stands where the dehistoricized individual, afloat and adrift through a landscape of airheaded signifiers emitting an echo on repeat likes to loiter as a bottomless resource for lyrical and musical inspiration for the band. That and the internet that massaged and nourished Bret’s creative brain into shape. This is where their influences converge. Where their colours are collated. ”I grew up on the internet and have always loved comedy/sketch writing in addition to music so lyrically I think everything stems from that. Similarly I think the musical content stems from a love of fast and hard-hitting music and a disregard for cohesion” Bret says.
”It’s hard to say how much of our work is ”New York” influenced given how decentralised music discovery has become from where you live. We were all listening to and being influenced by music from around the earth since we were kids’’ he adds.

One could argue there’s an eerie, religious undercurrent to the album. Folk religion. Fragmented fringe guerilla-style religions. The basement occults and bedroom high-priests dabbling with a certain Paganistic practice of Magick. From the feral bombast of opening song and single, It’s The Magic: at first a slowly melting nuclear reactor core of bass warble and carnivorous croon, before slamming into an acidic spit of pulsating brakes and processed alien orgasms to latest single, In The Wawa (Convinced I’m God), all sampled jungle banshee skreigh and tough-as-trilobite-fossil drums spiralling out of control, tripping into a nosebleed of hardcore romp as everything eventually collides upon climaxing with squalls of feedback to a soundscape of disorienting ambience and lysergic sonic goo; the album definitely has a lot of nods to religious imagery and phrasing. ”Not any one in particular. More a fictional one I hope would not exist” Brett explains.

Me neither.

Yet ‘Postmodern pop for a genreless future’ has a ring to it that is impossible to ignore. May as well phone my Hex Dealer and get down to business. So should you.

Check out the video for In The Wawa (Convinced I’m God) below:

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Lip Critic UK Live Dates:

Aug 23rd | Edinburgh – Sneaky Pete’s
Aug 24th | Glasgow – Broadcast
Aug 25th | Leeds – Headrow House
Aug 27th | Cardiff – Clwb Ifor Bach
Aug 28th | Southampton – Papillon
Aug 29th | Cambridge – Junction (J2)
Aug 31st | Dorset – End of the Road festival
Sept 2nd | Brighton – Dust
Sept 3rd | Margate – Whereelse?

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Words by Ryan Walker 

Photos by Justin Viller ©