Look who's back! Agony & the Middle Class may only have appeared a few months ago with their first EP, Pig Cheese, but we're not totally lost as we're pleased to find Antoine Kerbérénès in his new adventures (Null Split, Dague de Marbre, Chrome Corpse, Marble Dagger). This singular artist, hyperactive, creative and always strangely under the radar despite the quality of his work, is this time accompanied by Dana Mukanova. Together, they share both the composition and the artwork, as can be seen on this nightmarish cover which is not without a touch of macabre poetry. Crystal Understudy is an extension of their approach discovered on the previous EP: samples, digital hardcore, EBM and industrial references... and a fiery rage to give life to a raw cyberpunk universe.
Agony & the Middle Class seem to have assimilated, consciously or not, the saturation of audiovisual stimuli in our world: screens are everywhere, constantly showering us with a variety of content in an agonising cacophony of commercials, news, cinema and so on... It's from this constant chaos of over-consumption that they draw a raw material, samples that the duo combine with their machines, torture, loop, break and reshape in an almost alchemical process. The EP begins with a quote from Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, before an onslaught of beats jumps down our throats. The result is at once psychedelic, anxiety-inducing and furious, with Kerbérénès's voice always infusing his projects with the typical snarl.
Agony & the Middle Class shares with industrial this love for corrupting sounds taken out of context and turning them into music, and regurgitates it generously with an energy that recalls the sonic avalanches of Atari Teenage Riot and the taste for visceral ransacking of music a la Nine Inch Nails from the 90s. In this dark, scathingly ironic world, there's also a hint of playful pleasure, as the duo enjoy smashing their toys to reassemble them and create new mutant monsters. For example, Tas de paysans adieu paris curiously mixes a chorus with anthemic potential with a relentless work of deconstruction that shatters the song's structure. The result is both fun and nasty, Agony & The Middle Class have the bite of two brats but also a desire to experiment and take us in all directions. It's intense, zany and refreshing.
