German Army is a library — not that kind of library, but a living one, a walking, breathing reminder of the hidden events that pepper our recent past. Their vile electronics gradually crumble like ruins held together by a vast network of webs spun by enormous arachnids. More Bitter Fruit (Discrepant) is the continuation of their history lesson, the latest installment of one band’s search for truth in the veiled corners of modern antiquity.
This document that I’m crafting right this second is the latest installment of one man’s attempt to catalog one band’s search for truth in the veiled corners of modern antiquity. I’ve lost count of how many GeAr and GeAr-related recordings I’ve spat mushmouthed praise at, brain bedeviled by the dub/industrial frameworks of the SoCal band’s sick trax, but I’ve got to at least be past counting on my fingers and now onto toes. So here’s a hallux pointed straight at the cross-section of a face that adorns the cover of More Bitter Fruit, an LP (edition of 300) that takes its title from the 1982 book of the same name that chronicles the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954. Did you know about the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954? I didn’t — I went to public school. Thank Christ for German Army.
Roiling turmoil is the name of German Army’s game. So is smashing their fragile bodies up against the unforgiving granite of the status quo, hoping to crack a hole big enough that they can scuttle through it to the unholy information dump on the other side. Like alternative historians, they whack at floors they think are adorned with symbolic script, hoping against hope that the keepers of the secrets are preoccupied. They follow strange unmarked maps through winding desert paths to unknowable locations. Their armies are the rocks, and the trees, and the birds in the sky. They belong in a museum.
No, they are the museum, projecting glimpses of our deeds back at us from across time, acting as an audible conscience. And they do this while wearing trademark brown fedoras, I’m certain of it.