Herein I have the pleasure of premiering the video for Hissing Tiles’ brand new track “Boychoir,” from their forthcoming LP also titled Boychoir. You should know that Hissing Tiles are a three-piece “noise-punk” outfit from Cincinnati, Ohio. They fit on to punk bills like a splinter in a finger, hardly noticed until a smidgen of pressure sends out lightning bolt warnings to the brain stem, after which there’s no turning back. Sheets of keening screams, occasional coos too, wallop and buffet when these guys put on their goose-flesh seminars.
Following up on the scuttle of their self-released 2016 LP Aces Read Me To Sleep, “Boychoir” is a surreal smear that weaves a narration of a botched ear-piercing in the back of a Catholic church into a broader dissection of the terror and paranoia that results from any interaction with the childhood gender norm border guards. The accompanying video, with its flashing lights and intercut VHS flicker pinches and zooms at the shredded/re-sewn immensity of the song itself.
The whole scene plays out as if I have invited myself into a souped-up soundproofed basement so that I might more fully spectate the crash test. I open the door and am always already awash. Drums lashing out, steel chains of bass rumbling to affix the listing enterprise to the deck, and howls of bent tens wafting up from an endangered six string on the table. The whole scene looks like a kind of triple speed surgery—there’s precision buried under what I see as pure chaos. Every surgeon knows just where to cut in what looks to a layman like a pile of loose flesh. And like a surgery, there’s a kind of corporeal hope that under girds the whole thing, because why start the cut without an eye toward an eventual stitch? If anything, that’s one of Hissing Tiles’ greatest strengths: through all the breakneck cacophony, there’s a faint trust in the dove of hope’s eventual upward slope.
Boychoir is out on August 31 from Whited Sepulchre. Pre-order here.
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