(Learning Curve Records) Vincas—the Athens-based post-punk, deathrock band—released their third full-length album on May 29. Phantasma, seemingly a nod to forerunners like The Birthday Party or These Immortal Souls, is unique in its bewilderments. The album’s title is nothing short of epitomizing the sounds pouring out of my speakers and creeping up my leg like animated black tar. The album’s tracks blend together into a book that one could find on Edgar Allen Poe’s bedside table, surrounded by the dim glow from leftover embers in a nearby fireplace while ravens perch by the window croaking. Beginning with “Until It Rains Red,” the interplay of baritone vocals and doom and gloom guitar riff, percussion and synthy beats creates a tension that slowly builds into mayhem and distortion. It’s the kind of anxiety felt during a walk-through of narrow halls bound by smoke and mirrors, where I’m dripping blood, and it’s not my blood, and I don’t know whose blood it is, and I don’t care because somehow, someway I’m having a demented ball and not wanting to find my way out.
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