A Laughing Death in Meatspace is the debut album of Melbourne-based supergroup Tropical Fuck Storm, formed by members of The Drones, Palm Springs and High Tension. The band, wishing to step away from the more rock-centric sound that The Drones were known for prior to their final pre-hiatus album Feelin Kinda Free, utilized a range of obscure digital guitar effects, synthesizers, drum machines, and DAW software such as ProTools to create the music. Finished less than eight months after their first few live performances, the speed at which the album was recorded also had a heavy influence on its idiosyncratic sound, which combines genres such as punk blues, art punk, psychedelic rock and noise rock with influences from pop and electronic music. Written by Liddiard with contributions from other members, the lyrics have been described as apocalyptic and darkly humorous; tackling subjects such as technological advancement, political polarization, socioeconomic inequality, xenophobia, culture wars and many others. The album title links a Silicon Valley slang for the physical world with the neurodegenerative disorder of kuru found in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea.
Four singles were released from the album over late 2017 and early 2018. Music videos for each of them (including the track "The Future of History") were also made available on the band's official YouTube channel. Shortly after its release, the band signed with Joyful Noise Recordings, who were responsible for distributing the album in the US. The album enjoyed a "generally favorable reception" internationally, garnering praise for both its raw and unusual style as well as its lyricism. Several noteworthy musicians such as Thalia Zedek and Britt Daniel have also expressed their love for the album since its release, and it went on to appear on numerous year-end lists from publications around the world.
Background
After the release of I See Seaweed in 2013, Drones founder Gareth Liddiard expressed his desire to step away from the more rock-centric style of previous Drones albums on Feelin Kinda Free, their final album before going on hiatus. "Before we moved to Melbourne back in the 90s," he said in an interview with Musicfeeds, "we were a very weird sounding band. It was Melbourne that turned us more into a rock band, which kind of helped us to get gigs. This is a return to the way we were before in a way – getting drunk, getting stoned, noodling on anything you can find and making weird little songs." The year following their hiatus, Liddiard and longtime bandmate Fiona Kitschin started writing material for a new project under the name for the record label (coined by Dan Kelly) under which the last Drones album was self-released. The pair recruited Erica Dunn (Palm Springs) and Lauren Hammel (High Tension) during the summer of 2017, prior to embarking on an American tour. According to Dunn, "They just rang me up. Gareth and Fi were on loudspeaker like excited children. The pitch was 'Do you want to play guitar? We’re just going to do some weird shit.' And I was like 'Okay, sure.' Then Gareth said 'We might go to America in the next month, are you free? And we have to write some songs.' Sure I'll clear my schedule. Hammer [Lauren Hammel] was a bit different though, because [Gareth] didn't know her and he had to take her to the pub." Shortly thereafter, the band embarked on a tour of the U.S. with Band of Horses and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard during the autumn of 2017.
Recording
A Laughing Death in Meatspace was finished in less than eight months after the band played their first shows in September 2017. Recorded by the members themselves at their home studio (titled Dodgy Brothers Studio), Liddiard later said that it was "all done in a rush [...] it was weird. Mad experimentation really, at the same time trying to keep it groovy and succinct. Trying to figure out what kind of weird angle can each of us fit. Everything was written fast, [...] It was a good way to make a record. We didn’t have much time to reflect which is good. We just banged everything out and got on the road." In an interview with Happy Mag, he also stated that the record was made while the members were learning to be a band together: "So it’s not perfect or fully formed or anything but it’s cool."
On being asked of the album's "really interesting" use of guitar fuzz on tracks such as "Antimatter Animals" and "The Future of History", Liddiard revealed that he'd tried to "mix into the box as much as possible.... compress, eq, effects and dirt etc. I like to print it all coz otherwise you never make any hard decisions and shit gets bogged down [...] Digital is crystal clear and clean so it’s actually kinda hard to dirty everything up." He added: "I have a bunch of old Quad Eight and Electrodyne and API and JLM stuff and I just crank the gain and try to knock the peaks of on the line amps. Then I hardly compress anything after that." After recording the drums, the band would use ProTools to manipulate certain portions of the groove, creating "the most unlikely sort of beat". This was done in order to "get away from that four on the floor, classic John Bonham [drumming style]. [...] It’s gotta be groovy."
Musical style
In interviews, the band said that they were "thinking about what [they] were not going to do" whilst recording the album. "The only loose reference", Liddiard revealed, "was a Fela Kuti type thing where it's more groove based, girl vocals and boy vocals, but instead of having boys back girls or girls back the boys, it’s on a more even keel. It's more rhythmic." The band were also listening to Suburban Lawns and hip-hop musicians such as GZA. Liddiard had also expressed his appreciation for pop & electronic musicians & producers such as Rihanna, Blevin Blectum, Missy Elliott and Timbaland, calling the latter two "iconoclasts". In other interviews, Gareth listed Mohamed Rouicha, George Michael, James Brown and Captain Beefheart as influences, and described the record's sound as "funky". Of the songwriting process, he said: "I’m deliberately trying to write shorter, and more sort of pop. In The Drones it’s a savoury thing, but this it’s trying for something sweet and savoury, more like Talking Heads—it’s a minor chord thing but you can dance to it. It’s like a [...] [s]mall budget disaster movie. [...] There’s a sense of fun, a playfulness".
Critics have varied in describing the album's musical style. "There are elements of blues, psychedelic rock, and art-punk," wrote Liam Martin for AllMusic, "but TFS actively resist any concrete genre tags, which gives them the freedom to walk a familiar path before sharply turning into something else." No Ripcord found the band on the album to be "less Gang Of Four than they are The Pop Group, a similar level of poetic critique and takedowns packaged and delivered with unsettling and risky discord, a veritable junkyard sculpture thoughtfully constructed from punk scraps, crusty psychedelia and a rhythmic articulation of ideas bred from the spoken word." Michael Toland noted, with respect to Feelin Kinda Free, that "the empty spaces and electronic atmospheres have been folded into the background, with guitars back up front and in your face. Kitschin and Dunn soak the arrangements in wild-eyed harmonies and Liddiard’s brilliantly wordy lyrics and off-kilter melodies are in full effect." Matt Yuyitung of Exclaim! described it as "a scrappy psychedelic sound that sits somewhere between Tame Impala and the garage rock howl of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard". Loud and Quiet, however, described it as "an absolute noise rock maelstrom. Here is your proverbial tempest in a teapot." Chad Parkhill of The Quietus similarly noted "an unhinged and feral energy that pulses through these nine songs and goes beyond the considerable demented racket that the Drones are able to conjure at their finest: it’s less full-frontal sonic assault and more auditory guerrilla warfare, full of surprising textures and scrappy tones." Punknews, on the other hand, described the sound as resembling "Jon Spencer Blues Explosion jamming with mid-nineties Fugazi."
Lyrics and themes
Liddiard described his lyrical "outlook" in Tropical Fuck Storm to be that of “a flawed narrator thinking about a bunch of flawed things. They're all struggling and it's really hard. Some have it harder then others obviously. But it's like that John Gray quote, “We’re just a bunch of struggling ephemeral animals.” And everyone's dinged up like an old car." The speed at which the album was recorded also ended up influencing the themes that appeared on it: "We had to keep churning out material, [...] So whatever we were thinking about seeped into the music.” He had also expressed his desire to step away from the more didactic lyrics he'd written for The Drones: "I just wanted to de-wank. I just want to keep it straight talk. Sometimes it gets a bit flowery. Half the time I like it and shoot the target. I want to keep it simple." He cited hip hop music and Mark Kozelek as influences on his writing style, calling the latter's "recent stuff" "fucking insane. It’s all about nothing, you go “this guy’s not singing about anything” but then he’s singing about more shit than any other white person is. It’s about everything and nothing like “Seinfeld” or something." He also revealed that he would be helped out by "[t]he other guys in the band" when it came to lyrics: "Often they’ll say “that’s shit” so I have to start again. They’ll come up with the lines. They’ll even say something in conversation and I’ll be like “Oh, that’s good.” It can be good to work on these things by yourself but sometimes you got to work on words with other people." Liam Martin of AllMusic observed: "Lyrically there's a lot to filter through, with layers of allegory and a dense poetic delivery. A scholarly approach reveals much deeper meaning in the lyrics, as they take stabs at online culture, politics, and the mess we're in as a species, yet they can be enjoyed on a surface level for their disorienting nature alone." A Punknews review also noted the influence of Mark E. Smith in "Libbiard’s [sic] ability to turn a phrase" in tracks such as "Anitmatter Animals" and "Soft Power".
Jenny Valentish of The Guardian wrote that the album "mostly laments technological advancement, albeit with a gallows humour". According to Fiona Kitschin, modern social media was a "disastrous factor, worthy of its own category" when it came to writing the lyrics on the album. On having the album compared by a certain interviewer to "a Twitter feed being directly plugged into your mind", Liddiard criticized what he saw to be the superficiality and moral/political polarization of social media users: "The anxiety is just so high, they just cry when they’re talking about it. Feeling like they can’t say anything, so constricted in their social movements, they don’t want to be outed for some tiny misdemeanor, destroyed [in a] completely fucking out of proportion way. It’s like torture. This constant Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. I feel bad for them." (Despite this, "he reckons Twitter has been useful for LBGTQI+ advocacy and for movements including #MeToo".) He has also been critical of the jargon used by those on the political-left, "where people talk in a similar way to AFL footballers, in that they’ve been trained to say this empty bullshit [...] You think in whatever language you speak, and if you can’t understand that language properly, you can’t think properly."
Tying into the above, Lauren Hammel admitted the band were fans of sci-fi and dystopian films & literature. Many critics similarly noted apocalyptic & post-apocalyptic themes in the album's lyrics. Nathan Stevens of Spectrum Culture wrote that the band are "already seeing Mad Maxian futures that are rapidly becoming present realities and might just know how to survive."
Songs
Tracks 1–3