Album Review : Backxwash - I Lie Here Buried With My Rings & My Dresses (2021)
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I’m an angry guy. I might not act angry because I’ve learned young to internalize my feelings and use them in appropriate contexts, but that shit lights me up quick. That’s why I have such a respect for negative emotions in general. They’re a great source of power and transformation if you handle them with enough caution and reverence. So, when I witness anger and pain in somebody else’s art, it hits a part of my brain other emotions don’t really have access to.
Extreme music have provided me with great monuments to anger and inner violence over the years, but none quite like Backxwash new record I Lie Here Buried With My Rings & My Dresses. It’s like listening to someone setting themselves on fire and turning into a malevolent demon.
If you’re not familiar with Montreal-based rapper and producer Backxwash, don’t beat yourself up. She emerged as the new player in industrial rap, in the lineage of bands like Death Grips and clipping. last year with her first effort God Has Nothing To Do With This, Leave Him Out Of It and people (self included) are barely starting to take notice. I Lie Here Buried With My Rings & My Dresses is really the next in this personal, ferocious whirlwind of self-confrontation, inner violence and darkened mental landscapes. It is the soundtrack for a reckoning.
I Lie Here Buried With My Rings & My Dresses starts with Purpose of Pain, a spoken word intro that sounds like it’s been sampled from an instructional tape for therapists, warning the listener that they’re going to experience a controlled level of pain for their own good. It has a really cool disincarnate quality to it, almost like found footage of an indoctrination session for a cult. It sets the mood perfectly for what’s about to come, but it doesn’t quite fully prepares you.
The first song Wail of the Banshee is one of my favorite pieces on the record. It features this deformed SurgeryHead screech drowned in reverb that travels from ear to ear and makes you doubt whether you’re listening to a buzzsaw or the voice of a demon, while Backxwash lays bare her soul about excess, self-medication and the frustration of not being able to escape her self-destructive side. No matter what you do, these fucking demons will never shut up.
The title song is by far the most brutal piece of the album. It opens up with Ada Rook from Black Dresses screaming like a black metal singer: Empty,alone,waiting/Everything that didn’t kill me which translates the state of mind of survivor connecting with her own strength. It’s a song about rejection and not having a place of peace (at least, I think), but it has this angry exhaustion about it that is very precise and peculiar. If you’ve felt that feeling, this song will make you feel it again.
There are so many terrifying songs on I Lie Here Buried With My Rings & My Dresses that I don’t know which one to talk about next. In My Holy Name is another standout with its diffuse, oppressive synth line and thunderous, dramatic bass. Her beat becomes increasingly more chaotic at is goes along and she ramps up the aggression in her delivery. It’s one of the most Death Grips-like song on the record. It’s virulent and sonically hyperactive.
My other strong heartfelt moment on the record went to the closing track Burn to Ashes, which has a this unique, bombastic quality. Backxwash leans heavy on slamming bass and wailing guitars in her beat and raps with so much urgency about her failures and regrets. She talks directly to people in her life, apologizing worrying them and trying to explain and contextualize these demons eating away at her. It’s one of the most emotionally brutal things I ever heard.
Once again, I understand of the emotions she raps about in that song, but I’ve never seen them explained and exorcised in such a precise and satisfying way. It felt so cathartic to hear.
Terror Packets is another good song, albeit more straightforward in terms of industrial horrorcore. The clipping. produced Blood on the Water is a very different, almost like a spoken word interlude. Song of Sinners is this confronting, obsessing, noise influenced indictment of religion with Sad13 delivering this haunting, almost playful chorus. There’s not really a bad moment on I Lie Here Buried With My Rings & My Dresses. It’s too heartfelt and cinematic.
No one ever talks about this, but I feel like the delivery and the voice tone of Ashanti Mutinta, a.k.a Backxwash is one of the important elements of her uniqueness. It’s almost like an instrument meant to modulate your emotional involvement in the song. She’s so pissed and emotionally engaged and I relate to these feelings so much that I can almost feel the state of mind she’s was in when performing. It’s like an audio virus. I’ve never heard someone quite like her.
A lot of rappers emphasize consistency of delivery. Some of my favorite rappers like Daveed Diggs or Vince Staples never really veer from their tone. But the jagged, ultra-emotional approach of Backxwash works beautifully for her. She leans into her songs almost like a metalcore singer does. Her lyrics burn through her with such violence and ferocity, it imbues her storytelling with a vividness a lot of rappers can’t even dream of having.
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I Lie Here Buried With My Rings & My Dresses is a splendid, career-defining record. It’s one of the things Backxwash will be remembered by. It is so musically vibrant and cohesive and emotionally honest that I couldn’t even write while listening to it and that doesn’t happen often. The more I listen to this album, the most obsessed I get. It engages me intellectually and emotionally. I haven’t scored an album this high in a while, but I feel it’s warranted.
