Local Review: Cudney – live at smoking nun

Cudney
live at smoking nun
Big Maxi Records
Street: 10.27
Cudney =  Killdozer + Unsane x Daughters

Live at smoking nun (stylized all lowercase) is a recording of a live in-studio performance by Cudney at Smoking Nun Recordings in Midvale as part five of an ongoing series of live performances. The Salt Lake five-piece played in a tight, neon-lit space accented with hanging plastic ferns and an army of Natty Light cans steadily forming on the amps.The harsh, snarling demeanor harkens back to that classic Amphetamine Reptile brand of noise: it oozes mean-spiritedness and relishes in the coarser things in life. The chords are dissonant, and between the pummeling drums and the skuzzy guitars, the album charges and lurches along without relent. The riffs are laid out in heavy, fuzzy and delectable slabs, cutting away at times into strange, mind-bending odysseys of pedalwork that bind the tracks together. You listen to an EP like this and you can feel the hair on your chest growing, the insatiable thirst for a long, tall, room temperature beer developing. It’s a noise-rock type release that, despite its 26-minute runtime, is as satisfying and hearty as a Hungry-Man dinner.

In a time of sedate live performances, live at smoking nun comes through directly, like a fist straight to the forehead. There’s no pretension or posturing, no cool-guy poses or tryhard attitudes; the performance feels rich and organic. The songs are feverish, dense and at times paranoid. Songs are cynically titled things like “If You Don’t Think A New Pair of Shoes Can Change Your Life Then You’ve Obviously Never Seen Cinderella” and “Child of Fuck.” The former has nuggets of lyrical gold like “All I can do is just piss in the rain.” It’s harsh, it’s raucous, it’s cathartic and most importantly, it’s fun. 

The band doesn’t linger on the same sound, though. Unsurprisingly, given the song title, “Benjamin’s Bong” sees Cudney shifting into stoner metal, with chugging, palm-muted guitars and even a bit of an Elvis-inflected curl to the vocals. Think Danzig in a bar fight. The last two songs shift into a more accessible, catchy gear that is totally unexpected given the obtuseness of the first half of the EP.

The performance ends with “Anxiety 2”—a chunky, almost thrashy cut. Beatdown drumming and an exploratory, pedal-driven intro make it feel like a descent into the inferno. The lyrics are fittingly apocalyptic, with lines about “your eyes turning red” and “a world full of nausea.” It caps the album off perfectly, with the members demolishing the song structure into a torrent of noise and chaos, as the singer rambles on in a good ol’ boy drawl about something completely incomprehensible that somehow ends with the word “watermelon.”

For the visually inclined, the livestream was uploaded on the Smoking Nun Recordings YouTube Channel and is well worth the watch, not just for its gritty energy but for the weirdo psychedelic camerawork by Smoking Nun’s visual team. –Tín Rodriguez 

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