Hit Bargain has today released their new video for the track titled ‘Degree Decree’ from their upcoming album ‘A DOG A DEER A SEAL’ dropping November 10th via Get Better Records.
Starting off with a sonic kick to the balls can be a bit risky, but, after I got back off the floor, I realized how much of an attention getter that can be. A fantastically frenetic romp into the maddening mind of these musicians, I find a calm within the storm that gives clarity to this adrenaline anthem and meaning behind said music.
As I try to sound brilliant, all I can say is this song fucking cranks.
About Hit Bargain
Hit Bargain (members of Beach Fossils and Cold Beat), the angular Los Angeles four-piece known for their sardonic explorations of gender, power dynamics, and aging action heroes, returns with their latest album, A DOG A DEER A SEAL. The album is named for the recipe of Chinese three-penis wine, and an apocryphal chimera representing the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. government.
Written and recorded in the heady before-times of 2019 and early 2020, A DOG A DEER A SEAL is a skittish, escitalopram-fueled snapshot of a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The deck is stacked with active shooter drills, tech bro millionaires, true crime, general anxiety, and impending catastrophe. In short, nothing much different than now.
In opening track “Immaculate Vaxxer”, singer Nora Singh menacingly wavers “A warning / Or a premonition to be ignored / Superstition buoying us to impossible shores” against Mike Barron’s ragged guitar stabs, while bass player Sean Monaghan and drummer Anton Hochheim create a roiling, brackish undercurrent that tugs the listener along. The chorus of “My body is not my own, It’s a host” is an exhausted but saintly submission to the unpredictability of ungovernable chronic disease.
Keeping with the theme of disparate animal parts, Hit Bargain flexes their stylistic range across the album. In “Degree Decree”, they lope through a frenetic climate dystopia in a manner that recalls the ghosts of angst rockers The Blood Brothers and the art school agitation of Erase Errata. While “Cloud Cover” starts as a restrained krautrock fever dream that then blooms and imprints like reversed fireworks on the mind’s eye. And the closing titular track is a brutalist bully pulpit that pokes at the taxidermized remains of democracy, before panning to the left, making A DOG A DEER A SEAL highly palatable, even to its bitter end.
Track List
- Immaculate Vaxxer
- Hair Trigger
- Pressure
- Degree Decree
- Cloud Cover
- Worst
- Small Radius
- True Crime
- Cheat Grass
- A DOG A DEER A SEAL