Spectreview: The Armed – ULTRAPOP

Released: April 16, 2020

Post-Hardcore
(Noise Rock)
(Experimental)
(Art Rock)

-LIGHT SLATE BLUE-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

“A crooked lens
Distorted visions
A vat of piss
Artistic Brilliance”

What is The Armed? Are they a band? A project by one dude intent on playing with the expectations of the public? Are they a joke? Are they meant to be taken seriously? And who, exactly, are playing the instruments?

All of these questions have answers, but they create a frustrating paradox where the more you deign to care about them the less interesting the music becomes. The Armed are journalist bait, and that’s kind of the end of it. They’re a conceptual enigma bordering on self-parody making fantastic heavy music that begs (perhaps ironically) to be isolated from the promotional hullabaloo surrounding it.

So let’s do just that. How does ULTRAPOP stand apart from its creators’ intentions? Is it, at the very least, more interesting than its PR campaign?

Well, like a lot of post-hardcore music, it’s loud: exceedingly so, though the mix is a great deal crisper and treble-forward than their last project, 2018’s Only Love (notice, for example, the difference between a white-hot track like “BIG SHELL” and “Fortune’s Daughter”). That new crispness helps in identifying both the individual elements that lift these songs and the transformative journeys they commonly take. “AN ITERATION,” for instance, soars through its drums, kicking off Deafheaven-like with a blast beat before settling into something more mathy, more syncopated. “AVERAGE DEATH” fluctuates between a pulse-quickening pre-chorus laden with static to an ascendant blast of violet shoegaze; “MASUNAGA VAPORS” runs through chord patterns like water at high pressure; “ULTRAPOP” aims skyward like an early M83 song.

Is it pop? Who cares, really? There’s a good argument to be made that pop doesn’t exist anymore. What The Armed do accomplish here is managing to beat a great deal of styles to an absolute pulp. Pop-punk and screamo get Cuisinarted throughout the record’s earlier songs, especially the natural lead single of “ALL FUTURES” and the anthemic “A LIFE SO WONDERFUL.” As it moves along the band inches toward more colorful arrangements and stranger rhythms, which keeps it interesting as you acclimate to the assault. “FAITH IN MEDICATION” is a particular high point, starting at a 10 and only crescendoing in a fireworks explosion of art-punk chords pushed into the red by a searing tempo.

Music like this requires a lyric sheet to be comprehended, but there are some interesting through-lines that match up with Dan Greene’s promotional pulling of the curtain. “MASUNAGA VAPORS” and “REAL FOLK BLUES” are character studies concerning master thieves that hit on the convolution of artistic attribution; “ULTRAPOP” reportedly mirrors closer “THE MUSIC BECOMES A SKULL” in their examinations of the unfeeling camera eye over the entertainment industry. Ultimately though, the words are all impressionistic: well-written and fittingly poetic but mostly there to parallel the chaos of the music behind them. Whatever ULTRAPOP means is up to you. If you care about genre, it plays with genre. If you care about artistic intention, it plays with artistic intention. If you care, it tries its hardest to tell you that you really shouldn’t.

Recommended for whatever Milli Vanilli are doing nowadays.