{"product_id":"amateur-childbirth-your-afterlife-is-cancelled-lp","title":"Amateur Childbirth – Your Afterlife is Cancelled [LP]","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThis is Amateur Childbirth's Christian Rock album. The previous LP from Ivan Matthew Hicks' solo project, 2015's Pripyat, concerned itself with the blighted belief systems of UFO worshippers, Your Afterlife Is Cancelled expands this compelling solo project's field of enquiry to look at a wider array of \"religious anomalies\" – cults, for want of a better word. Each song is about a different such anomaly.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTo call Hicks' vision apocalyptic would be to underplay its cruelty. The Bible's rampant sadism pales in comparison. This is a world where faith – in a god or gods, in astrology, morality, or any meaning whatsoever - is merely a prelude to punishment. His lyrics are vivid glossaries of pain, abjection and indignity; the songs' protagonists swim in blood, piss, shit and ejaculate. Eschatology and scatology are indivisible here. Drugs are rampantly abused, albeit to little benefit. There are scalpel-flashes of humour in Hicks' wordplay, rhyming and dour Brisbane diction - but this offers scant consolation for the songs' embattled subjects, who wait, in vein, for salvation, while crows peck out their eyes, blood pours from their ears, and psoriasis ravages their skin.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThese words, for all their pessimism and body-horror, are cradled in minimalist, folk-rock arrangements that are quite\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003edazzling in their beauty and grievously earned simplicity: Hicks' monochord strum embellished with subtle violin, synthesizer and percussion shading. Amateur Childbirth's caustic end-times worldview inevitably prompts comparisons with Current 93, but also a wider (non-)tradition of caustic and disturbed loner psych that includes Simon Finn, Patrik Fitzgerald, Robyn Hitchcock, Peter Jefferies and Roy Harper.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eYour Afterlife Is Cancelled is a depressive tour de force from one of the most crushingly eloquent voices in the Australian underground.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBlackest Ever Black, 2017\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"naturestripstore","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42692073586929,"sku":"BLACKEST 059","price":44.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0634\/8859\/0065\/products\/amateurchildbirth_yaic.jpg?v=1653624342","url":"https:\/\/naturestripstore.myshopify.com\/products\/amateur-childbirth-your-afterlife-is-cancelled-lp","provider":"naturestripstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}