Odor Eater

On Odor Eater’s third album, their first for Feel It Records, But For Who?, Harley Moore and Logan Devlin have appropriated various sonic idioms of the New Wave employing a similarly playful mode of critique lyrically and musically while updating the social context to reckon with the maelstrom of contemporary pop culture. The Olympia/Portland duo have created a record that speaks the language of their influences fluently but with a definitively contemporary accent—a bricolage of the sounds of Devo, Bill Nelson, Vince Clarke-era Depeche Mode, and Kraftwerk. Devlin and Moore bring fresh ears to this style of composition, mixing freely the aforementioned with a more fully developed sound of their own that is brighter this time around—less heavy and more danceable. Over the course of 11 songs, propulsive drum machines bip bap in deceptively simple patterns, with Devlin’s zig-zagging bass lines shuffling under arpeggiated chords and rhythmic synth leads while Moore’s vocals act as a sort of post-everything Virgil guiding us through the contemporary inferno. Lasers zip-zap in the background, machine-like sounds whoosh and whirr, percussive blips and beeps pop here and there, along with occasional clarinet parts provided by Moore. Meanwhile the lyrics, written and sung by Moore, deal with a wide range of personal and political issues, their vocal delivery often calling to mind the expressive dynamics of Stateless era Lene Lovich—at times veering towards the shouts and howls of Lydia Lunch. There’s songs that deal with genocide, the MAGA cult, and social one-upmanship—and there’s a couple of love songs too.

There is a line of logic that suggests that the proper response to social control is playfulness. Think Dadaism, the Situationists, or Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters: this is playfulness with a definite edge, like Marcel Marceau with brass knuckles & a blade. Similarly, New Wave with its kitschy futurism and programmed musical repetitions, exposed the ridiculousness of 1980s American consumer capitalism. If New Wave pop at its best was an implicit critique of the pre-programmed optimism and happiness of the Reagan era, a once faded memory that has come back to us now as a recurring nightmare—or an AI-induced psychosis delivered by phones rather than rabbit-eared TV sets, then Odor Eater picks up perfectly where those that came before them left off. The songs on But For Who? ask the most urgent personal and political questions in a fearlessly playful manner utilizing a sonic palette that has remained relevant musically and politically for forty-plus years. As a result, Odor Eater are able to create music that pulls one in as it skips along, unable to sit still whether through excitement or anxiety—the allure is at least in part because it’s impossible to tell the ratio of either element of such a potent mix. This is perhaps the perfect soundtrack for a world that is both shocking and hilarious at the same time.

—Ben Michaelis