When the Kite String Pops
The debut album by the band Acid Bath, ‘When the Kite String Pops,’ features a painting of a clown by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Rumour is that it was forced on the band by the record company, but it’s definitely the right cover.
As a whole, ‘When the Kite String Pops’ creates the very strong impression of what feels like the psychological topography of a serial killer; the rage, pain and hatred that would become the driver to harm and kill the things you love.
It achieves all this with a lyricism I’ve never before seen.
The lyrics are profoundly strange, and the limitations of its ‘teenaged poetry’ actually function as a strength by creating a fractured kaleidoscope of images, a succession of jarring, confronting impressions that become imbricated over your mind’s eye.
Lines and even complete stanzas are sometimes repeated in different songs, which seems to be a mistake but effectively makes them function as poetic tropes. It is through the lyricism of these images, deeply evocative without making realistic sense, that the topography of the narrative arises like a dream.
The cocktail of death, murder, sex and disease where one of these properties is frequently a metaphor for the other makes you feel as if you’ve become stained by them as the record evolves.
Cruelty and torture are proxies for love in the rubric of a narrator who vacillates between misery and hate, using violence as the means to reach out to what, in a ‘healthy’ person would be expressions of passion and love. These are the instruments the narrator juxtaposes against primal symbols of beauty and happiness, such as the sun, the blue sky or the body of a beautiful, beloved woman.
The music itself seems to be a draft further refined than the lyrics, in that it is less repetitive and presents as a smoother progression of ideas. The album is built on a series of really strong riffs that rhythmically work against each other in a complementary way.
The first track on the album, ‘The Blue’, opens with one killer riff whose rhythm morphs into another that’s just as addictive, hooking you into the album. That second riff seems to make its predecessor deeper and more compelling by contrast.
When the Kite String Pops is the songbook of the true monster, cleansed of the mythological features culture imbues them with in an attempt to cope with them; to convert them into cartoons and caricatures, so they can be considered and made into objects of interest before the subject is overloaded by horror.
I was continually reminded of Nick Cave, Slayer and Alice in Chains, three of the most effective chroniclers of monsters and mental illness, but even acts as powerful as these couldn’t look upon hellscapes of this nature with this kind of evocative clarity.
The record is profoundly impressive, but I don’t know if it’s something I’d be listening to for either fun or recreation. I guess it’s that step beyond ‘entertaining’, or whatever words we use to describe art that makes us so sick and distressed we shiver like a cold dog in the rain.
Heartbreaking, horrifying and nauseating. I doubt I’ll ever listen to it again.
Five stars.
Theme Park at its Darkest 
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