The House Flies are not the type of group to offer you music that just idles in the background. “Derelict Crawl,” the leadoff single to the band’s forthcoming second album Lions and Ore finds the Moline, IL trio leaning hard into a sense of claustrophobic, insistent repetition and guitars with something deeply unpleasant to say.
At its core, “Derelict Crawl” features what can almost be called a classic post-punk rhythm section, built as it is on layers of heavy guitar work. The song is punctuated by strategic passages of quiet as it goes, making this one of Lions and Ore’s more straightforward pieces. Its key assertion is almost startlingly simple: “We don’t belong.” By repeating it frequently enough, the refrain of “Derelict Crawl” transforms the song from merely having lyrics into something more akin to a chilling diagnosis.
Part of the brilliance of the song’s success stems from how little it truly does in terms of establishing this mood. The House Flies allow this one insistent pulse to drive forward, piling one layer of thick, suffocating guitar on another as the music swells. Suddenly, it becomes overwhelmingly insistent and pulls back into sections of stark silence just when things seem poised to become entirely too much.
This dynamic movement imbues “Derelict Crawl” with its personality. It sounds heavy, but not because the band is cramming a thousand sounds in your face all at once; the weight of it is purely a matter of cumulative effect. Fans of the darker corners of post-punk should quickly be able to discern their influences; touches of Protomartyr, Interpol, even some of Joy Division and even New Order to some extent, but also of gothic, shoegaze and grunge.
You don’t need to break down any of the components to appreciate the power of “Derelict Crawl”. It proves the truth in the adage that sometimes there is nothing quite as effective as repeating the one thing you just cannot shake until it sinks beneath the skin. “We don’t belong”, they repeat like a mantra or a reminder. After playing it a few times, it’s very hard not to come to that conclusion with them.
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
