CoreCore Pulp – Bell Barrow (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

You know that you are about to experience something a bit different, sonically visceral, boundary pushing, and extreme, when the album in question has an image that looks like a H.R. Giger image… one that maybe got banned when it was first created. And so it is with CoreCore Pulp, the debut album from Bell Barrow, extreme and creatively edgy doesn’t even begin to sum things up.

It’s easier to say what the music found here is not. It isn’t melodic, not by most people’s standards, it doesn’t follow typical structures, most won’t dance to it, although that in itself could turn into a piece of performance art, and it doesn’t fit readily into any genre, which is always a good thing.

So, what are we left with? Skewed darkwave. An abrasive yet cinematic hybrid of analog sounds and digital manipulation. An avant-garde, horror soundtrack. Music made on the cusp where music meets art and art meets noise. All that and more.

Some tracks are happy to creep and crawl through the listener’s consciousness, such as opener “An Eye on the Future.” There are more beat-driven affairs, like “Coffin Text,” but even that is built on structures that feel as if they are on the edge of collapse…right up until the point that they do.

There is murky, drifting Lovecraftian music running through the album, “Glass Negative” echoing perhaps sounds of the ancients and whatever lurks in the depths of the ocean or the vastness of space or beyond concepts of time and dimensions themselves. And with “Peace Field Autopsy,” the music takes on more industrial forms.

To some, this won’t register as music at all, not in the conventional sense, but convention, complacency, and comfort zones tend not to test boundaries. CoreCore Pulp is the sound of someone challenging us to consider what even music is, where it becomes noise, and where it becomes art.

An extreme tone poem for our future selves?

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