Hit with the Joke Hammer "Self-Titled" Cassette (Crooked Branch Collections, 2021)
Is life fucking with you? Is it possible that every good thing you’ve ever done in your life has been all for naught because nothing matters anyway? Might it be true that depression and existential dread really are the only reasonable reactions to being a self-aware living being on this shit planet? New project Hit With The Joke Hammer treads this ground in a broad and abstract sense, utilizing the sounds of misappropriated instruments, broken appliances, and decayed stuttering tape loops to create tracks that lean much more toward confounding weirdness than harsh aggression.
Within the aforementioned framework, this debut release finds HWTJH examining something highly relevant to the artists’ own life: the experiencing of frequent and often debilitating headaches. While such a subject may seem to call for an onslaught of swirling snarl, nuance and subtlety are instead the angles; the A side is all fire crackle slow build and otherworldly animal fuck sounds. The B side gets a bit more belligerent and gives the feeling that the tracks were failed experiments that came out sounding interesting rather than well thought through compositions.
Inspired partly by the excitement of simple novel experimentation and partly by classic bizarro noise acts like Small Cruel Party and Prick Decay, people seem to have a visceral reaction to this one, either finding it deeply interesting or thinking it to be total bullshit; I wouldn’t claim either reaction is right or wrong.
C24 w/ risograph printed j-card. Edition of 50.