Curta'n Wall - Siege Ubsessed!

LARPing is cringe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekugPKqFw

These losers wander out to their local park wearing halloween costumes and attempt to replicate a board game at scale. Often, I imagine, it devolves into saeying coole olde englisch medieval speak and trying not to whack your Burger King coworker too hard with your +1 longstick. The LARPers are easy to make fun of. But, put yourself in their New Balance greaves for a moment. How much fun could it be if everyone took it seriously?

The Midas touch of irony turns everything into an auspicious ‘cool’. You’re cooler than the nerds if you’re just there to hang out. You don’t know the rules, you’re not dressed up, you’re just fucking around because you’re too cool to care. LARPing ironically makes the game worse for everyone else, but it makes you look cool by comparison. Now, other people want to look cool, so they also intentionally stop caring. Eventually, nobody cares because caring is lame. The game is ruined. Irony wins again. But, if you and everyone else commits and embraces the cringe, you’re in battle against your mortal enemies and the sorcerers are approaching with foul magicks.

This level of LARP is required to cross the rubicon from Style to Aesthetic. (see also: Mayhem circa 1991) The album art for Siege Ubsessed! is the perfect example. Using the medieval Style would be to use an old painting, or Frazettesque fantasy paperback art. A band like Twilight Force tries very hard to present the fantasy Style. I applaud their effort, but their Style is all surface. They look and sound precisely like what you would expect epic fantasy to be. They have epic dragons on their album covers. Instead, Curta’n Wall uses a photo. A sunny day, green grass, and two knights kneeling. These two men have certainly committed to the Aesthetic, and I’m sure their cuirasses and tunics are period accurate. It’s not an action shot, they’re not swinging their swords. They aren’t trying to be knights, they don’t need to prove it to you that they’re knights. Right now, they are knights. They’re all-in and it looks effortless.

Curta’n Wall - Siege Ubsessed! LOOKS effortless. FEELS effortless. Yet, any inspection at all reveals that’s not the case. The entire album is carefully composed. Simple folk melodies are arranged with bouncy blackened polka thoughtfully and deliberately. Throughout Siege Ubsessed there are moments that are so perfectly placed that I wonder if the songs were written top-down from these moments. The high note on the bassoon(?) to start the bridge in Elephantry as the war cry of the elephant, the lyrical lead back into the chorus on the final verse Wiz’rds Hat, and my favorite section of music in 2023: the climax of Timeless Armor when the violin solo is joined by the timpani and it finally comes together with the xylophone. All of these are silly on their face, but in their contexts are natural and exact.

Artists often claim that writing catchy pop music is harder than writing intricate technical music. Siege Ubsessed is incessantly catchy, annoyingly catchy. I’ve played this album for my non-metalhead friends enough that it’s even stuck in their heads. You haven’t truly experienced the song A New Castle Is Born until you hear a room of drunk dudes fail to drunkenly sing along to the LALALAALAALALALALALAA part. At some point this year, every song on this album has been stuck in my head, even the interludes. I feel privileged that I can still find new music that has this ubsessive effect on me.

Siege Ubsessed is Abysmal Specter’s and Grime Stone Records’ finest hour. GSR’s growth from being the Old Nick Bandcamp page to being a boutique curation of whacky blackened goober metal is the most inspiring movement in the metal underground right now. Don your bracers, draw your sword, and head over to the field behind the church. For KING and QUEEN we LARP.