When the beat drops, it’s like waking up to the sensation of an endless plummet. You come to the quick realization that you’ve landed on your mattress — not the stalagmite-riddled floor of the pit you’d spent the last dream-hour plunging into. And that class you’d signed up for but had yet to attend all semester? It never existed. What was your dream-self thinking getting so worked up about it? You’re not even majoring in neuroscience.
Your pulse begins to slow. You regain control over your arms, and notice that your forehead is sticky with sweat.
While you’re busy in bed, re-stitching the disrupted fabric of reality back together, lycanthropic cryptid-cum-composer MANA CROSS raids your kitchen cabinet in pursuit of creamed chipped beef. Don’t take it personally that they’re hitting a lick on your house: the stuff’s elusive, and it’s not like they won’t clean up the mess later.
Cans rattle as they kiss the linoleum.
There are hints of that old TNGHT-era trap dissonance lurking beneath the footwork-punk thrust of “nightmare creatures too”, giving one the sense that an apron-clad attendant’s stacking non-perishables in another aisle as distorted power chords spill beneath boxes of cereal. Radical chaos and radical order exist here in two parallel planes, each doing their respective best to impose their will on the domain they inhabit, but failing to acknowledge the existence of the other.
As long as there’s a duality, CROSS is happy to escort you from plane to plane, putting your perception at risk the longer you’re listening. They might wax Kane West on the track, but “creatures” is no joke: stick around too long and you just might feel like a wet noodle, compressed and wriggling in the aural sphere.
If that isn’t nightmarish, I don’t know what is.
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