★★★★☆
A family sits down for dinner. Elsewhere, a pig is being gutted. A man’s head bobs about the surface of a river like scum.
The message isn’t clear, but it’s there: horror lies in the ordinary. So it goes in the music video for Kaada/Patton’s ‘Imodium’, a fleeting glimpse through a door better left shut. Indeed, everything about Bacteria Cult feels awkwardly snatched. Melodies are grasped at rather than properly held, and Mike Patton’s voice thrashes around wordlessly like a wild animal resisting capture.
Picking the thing apart is useless, however. The record resists even casual critical analysis, and the pleasures underpinning ‘Black Albino’ – a track that sounds like a hybrid of Ennio Morricone and Krzysztof Komeda and yet neither of those people at all – are so vague as to be impossible to properly identify. It’s the devil’s work, a love letter perfumed with the plague, and yet it never distances the audience. Despite the connotations of its virulent title, ‘Peste Bubónica’ is an oddly seductive listen, and even the disturbing ‘A Burnt Out Case’ features the occasional flash of fleshy panache.
Bacteria Cult is the record you’d hear playing in a strip club staffed by the characters from J.G. Ballard’s Crash – damaged human beings exposing every inch of their ripe, ravaged flesh.
