AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CELL PRESS — “ORIGINAL URANIUM BABY”

About 3 1/2 years ago we premiered the self-titled debut EP of the Montreal band Cell Press on the eve of its release. We opened our introduction this way:

“If we could see your faces when you listen to it, there would be a great temptation to write nothing about the music and just watch your expressions change as all the surprises hit you like battering rams, expressions that might range from joy to panic to spine-tingling fear, and perhaps revulsion too. But since we can’t see you, on we go….”

And on we went, somewhat spoiling the surprises by referring to the music as “mad, mauling, and mind-bending — sometimes fiery and frenzied, sometimes cold and brutally destructive, and almost always so viscerally gripping that it makes your whole body want to move (even if some of the movements are spasms)”.

And so we couldn’t help but experience a kind of deviant glee when learning that Cell Press would be releasing their first full-length this March, a work named Cages, and more deviant glee when realizing we’d have the chance to premiere the video you’re about to witness for the second single off the album.

According to the band: “Cages jumps all over the place thematically from demanding clean drinking water for the people in the northern communities in Canada, to dystopian fiction in which the radioactive bones of the dead are used as currency, to address the current state of ‘truth’ and what we consume as information on a daily basis and how it has been dividing society to the point that it is almost reminiscent of a holy war with men and political affiliations taking the place of gods.”

The song we’re presenting today is “Original Uranium Baby“, a dystopian tale set in the town of Elliot Lake, Ontario in the year 2088, further described by vocalist/guitarist Sean Arsenian in these words:

“The first half of the tune was resurrected from a defunct dirty punk/noise-rock project that I was in prior to Cell Press. It’s catchy and has some swagger, but we took those riffs and threw them into the ‘human misery machine’ and they came out the other side the way they sound as the 2nd half of the tune… a sludgier, coiling sewer-pipe runoff extrusion of the initial ideas… McGee‘s drumming mutates into a really cool syncopated jazz swing meets primal caveman rage thing, and PQ is serving David Yow by way of Jacob Bannon on top of it all. This song has hooks, pummel, AND a bit of a sophisticated groove to it.”

That’s really all the introduction you need before diving into the song and the radioactively surreal visual presentation of the band performing it. But of course we want to share our own impressions.

The song is indeed a hook monster that will get your muscles jumping, but the hooks are mangled and the beats don’t consistently follow a straight line. It sounds stripped-down, as lots of catchy music often does, but it mutates as it goes.

There’s a heavy throbbing and punching quality to the bass lines, and the riffing seems to blare, quiver, and lurch in differing phases of derangement, while the drumming comes off-kilter just enough to enhance the song’s bamboozling qualities, and the swift fills add to its electric effects.

As the music works its odd magic, and begins to seem like a big ugly bulldozer out of control, a voice howls and screams in a throat-shredding combination of fury and madness.

The video was made by Cell Press guitarist Sean in his guise of Wurmzilla, and Wurmzilla also painted the cover art for Cages, which depicts an in-patient at a psychiatric ward. “The style of the rendering is attempting to express the fragility and mania of the person, and some of the ideas in the songs”.

Cages is set for release on March 8th via The Ghost Is Clear Records (Vinyl), Ancient Temple Recordings (Vinyl), and No List Records (Cassette). You’ll find pre-order opportunities via the linktree below.

Also below you’ll find a lyric video for “Things They Do In France”, the first single from the album — “A song about lost love and what could have been had it not been so toxic.” It’s even more dark and demented than the song we’ve just premiered, and even more ingeniously convoluted, unpredictable, and destabilizing — but be careful of the mangled hooks, because they’re lurking in the song too, even in the soul-sucking tar pit the band drag us into at the end.

PRE-ORDER AND MORE INFO:
https://linktr.ee/cellpress
https://cellpress.bandcamp.com/album/cages
https://www.facebook.com/cellpressmtl
http://www.instagram.com/celllpresss