GENRE: Screamo
LABEL: Independent
Free improvisation skramz band Body War performed their last show two years ago in a Cheba Hut in Las Vegas. The band grew like an engorged parasite, swallowing its extempore performances of rotating brass players, vocalists, and found object performers: their “Endless Valleys of Light Extended Free Jazz Ensemble” included, at the very least, five drum sets. True Brancan punk totalism, experimental-brutal-youth-prog – just one year before The Lamb as Effigy.
The band garnered a lot of unfortunate notoriety due to a well-meaning TikTok, the “trashcan girl-on-the-ground” video. It was also their first performance; or, ascension. It was, likely, a project not destined for permanence: Nicholas Wagner, one half of the band, describes it more as a “conceptual and cerebral” journey in dual spiritual-homoerotic performance. Body War’s phantasm persists in bootlegged iPhone recordings and a reposted Instagram reel on r/shitpost where the caption reads “POV: You’re in Portland, Oregon.” The band’s aesthetic journey had concluded, indeterminate, yet, glowing. It was glorious in an impermanent way, something that lives as myth and sadly becomes one meager sentence in an artist’s Wikipedia page, like many an impromptu noise group.
Crochet features the “true other half” of this apparition, instrumentalist Zach Tarzi, along with the Body War’s many other ensamble members. (I should also add that I was greatly unfamiliar with Body War except for the TikTok until I listened to Cherish this year. All of this is me kind of lamenting over a band I could never be a part of. I feel like I’m talking a lot about the band despite this being a Crochet reivew. Sorry. I am mourning.)
Their 2023 record Birth Piece accrued a lot of (non-TikTok) attention where they embraced their improvisational roots following in a more tried-and-true math rock idiom. Still, sporadic emoviolent poems crept their way into these sawtoothed math rock patterns, it was more than standard Midwest praise. I can’t make it on my own; what once bloomed from sunrays won’t materialize in this flesh.
Their latest, Cherish, has me enamored. I have been to my fair share of underground screamo shows: humid shuffles over PBR-soaked linoleum floors, pseudo-smoke breaks gasping for air in between particularly cramped acts, wooden banisters kissing my soon-purpled rib cage. I have grown accustomed to music that is, at its core, music made by youths that (kind of) sounds like shit but is emotive enough to have your limbs flailing. It gets the people going. Cue the Blades of Glory quote. When the mathy riff on “My russian doll fever” kicks off, you will be in the pit.
I am being facetious, of course; Crochet are very skilled technically, offering twinkling math rock lashings over Cherish’s brief runtime. There are even moments that remind me most of MySpace-era emo (maybe even sasscore), like the prodding synth melody on “Shadowplay” fit for a HxC 2-step. The percussion is lively and takes more from non-idiomatic improvisation than emo, especially on the closing portion of “Worms” where the band collapses in on itself, writhing and moaning in the chaos, scored by a violent clatterstompf.
Cherish is like a skewed retelling of a creation myth. Its songs are reframed tales of our creation and collapse, through the screamo mouthpiece of lost teenage romance. Track one “211” begins on desolate earth: There is nothing left here, and here is my resignation. Deliberately opaque, “211” is about both a dead relationship and a desolate earth, where the vocalist is left depersonalized, thieved of their innocence. I offered you my innocence on a silver platter. Still, the protagonist laments what’s lost, clawing back at what’s left, chunks of dirt in their fingers. The opening sets the tone for the end of times, an apocalyptic love.
After the opener, Cherish flashes forward to the budding love of the protagonist, the street-lit romance of fast German cars, wondering Do you think / there’s / someone watching, working above. The natural world is a byproduct of heaven. The moon watches over the two like this earth is another heaven.
These small moments are what makes Cherish. I particularly enjoy the imagery on “Shadowplay” where the protagonist turns on a ceiling fan so no one else can hear them say ‘I love you’ on the phone. These romantic vignettes are accented by the angular, frenetic instrumentation. Sporadic and tense. Like the performance, this shared love is sporadic and frenetic. It is highly personal, intimate, even. Thus, it is gut-wrenching when the relationship falls apart. The protagonist begs for some cataclysmic divine intervention, for the moon to quit hesitating and “bury us.”
Ultimately, Cherish is an ode to that violent, ecstatic impermanence. Be it a sporadic relationship, disbanded noise group, or heat-death of the universe. Cherish is the soundtrack to emotions so large they can only be captured only through grand gestures. So many punk shows feel life-changing at the moment but are ultimately fleeting. I still think about those house shows in beat-up sheds with 16 people. Short-lived, but forever in my heart.
If you liked this and would like something similar, check out: The Lamb as Effigy by Sprain, The Whaler by Home is Where, or Solitude by Lord Snow. Thanks for reading ❤
Fetid Hog 
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