Review: Pharmakon - Bestial Burden
By Garrett Bower, Staff Writer
[Sacred Bones Records; 2014]
Rating: 8.5/10
Key Tracks: “Body Betrays Itself,” “Bestial Burden,” "Autoimmune"
Through closed eyelids, there should be no light beyond. In a pitch dark room is where Pharmakon’s newest album, Bestial Burden, is meant to be listened to. Withdrawal is the name of the game here, a hard gaze inward to face frustrations with mortality and insecurity of consciousness. Frustration is the operant word with Bestial Burden, a six track, dense and noisy journey that’s furiously exhausting and deeply unsettling but also uniquely cathartic.
While bedridden and recovering from major surgery, Margaret Chardiet, the brain behind Pharmakon, wrote Bestial Burden as a reaction to her newfound awareness of her body’s own fallibility. Chardiet began to feel a divide between her physical body that failed her and her consciousness that remained strangely whole.
Bestial Burden begins with a breath of life--or breaths, rather--as Chardiet opens “Vacuum” gasping for air that initially sounds like waking gulps after dormancy. As a pervading whirr builds, the breaths become more frantic, eventually laying on top of each other, becoming more rapid and shallow. The whirr fills the empty cavities creating intense claustrophobia, a sudden awareness of how heavy one’s body feels and how consistent all of its processes are. As the track subsides, the calm feels eerie and disconnected.
Right on the heels of “Vacuum” is “Intent or Instinct,” a slow build with pounding drums soon overlapped by swollen and distorted tones with rattling fuzz bursting out in the pauses. Chardiet comes on strong with a primal screech. The shouts are ferocious and sharp, feeling like the urgent stabs of a consciousness fleeing a failing vessel. The wails follow no cadence or structure, making each one jarring and pointed while the noise drones on.
“Body Betrays Itself” is an expansion on the formula of “Intent or Instinct.” It contains even more disorientating fuzz and abstract instrumentation, brilliantly contrasted by more consistent and intelligible shouts by Chardiet; it’s cohesive and focused compared to the previous track’s more primitive cries.
In the wake of “Body Betrays Itself” is easily the most unsettling piece of Bestial Burden, “Primitive Struggle,” a sparse two minutes of a man choking. Despite being a commendable (and revolting) effort of Chardiet to push the boundaries of her own abrasive medium, “Primitive Struggle” disrupts the more textured and dense atmosphere the rest of the album is doing so well to deepen with each progressing second.
”Autoimmune” opens sharply with distorted drums that sound like a failing heart oozing vital blood. There’s an immediate sense of terror and morbid delight as Chardiet takes command of the seemingly devolving mass of instrumentation. The vocals are shrill and harsh, chanting and less inhibited than vocals of prior tracks.
“Autoimmune” drips right into the foreboding payoff of the final track, “Bestial Burden.” The track opens up with low, grotesquely distorted instrumentation that sounds like the dying hum of monitor machines. Chardiet’s voice comes on flickering and broken, resembling something between manic talking and singing.
She sings of shadows and darkness, wailing intermittently before stammering, “I don’t belong here,” at first with confusion but eventually with intense mania, screaming and cackling coercively. The track breaks down as Chardiet screams, “In the end, I am nothing!” Scrambled white noise squeals in, scrubbing the track and distorting Chardiet’s wails and laughter. The din swells and spills outward until fading to plodding, low keys.
Pharmakon’s Bestial Burden is an unflinching insight into the nature of mortality. Chardiet delves deeper with each track, building brutal and intriguing walls of sound that surround and probe while remaining coherent enough to be a palatable and refreshing experience. While not a journey to be taken lightly, the subject material feeling justifiably exhausting, listeners will no doubt feel a sense of reward if they allow themselves to take Pharmakon’s voyage to the more grim reaches of humanity.
