Easy on the Strip Club, Hard on the Ears

Before you can even get into the pure, unadulterated underbelly of an album like Exorcise Tape, you must start from the bottom. Demon Queen came about through the sheer inspiration of hard times, a break up and a strip club, which Zackey Force Funk used as a place of decompression to get away from it all. Enter Black Moth Super Rainbow’s TOBACCO and the trading of music files and you have one sinister Exorcise Tape. Unlike trashy production compatriots Wallpaper., Demon Queen’s sleazy mix of vulgar lyrics and party-happy samples function sincerely rather than as a cheeky nod to the YOLO culture plaguing most contemporary dance music today.

Opening track “Lamborghini Meltdown” starts out with the type of synth riff more reserved for a game of Leisure Suit Larry than today’s LPs but keep in mind that the sexual text game thrived on prophylactic jokes and sleazy pick-up lines. Like a good lap dance, the music is entrancing but almost painfully visceral. This is not the type of disc to leave on at a party for all to enjoy. Demon Queen excel in bringing a soundtrack to a place and feeling that are almost too much to stomach. Tracks are repetitive, downward spirals of cascading synths that pull down bored vocals til they hit the stained and abused floor below.

“El Camino 2” veers a bit toward the Die Antwoord side of freaky, with chanting vocals rolling through at an almost militant, clipped pace. Its less than two minutes of music roll straight into yet another comedown of a track, “Swoll Tongue.” Once “Demon Practice” rolls on through its mildly aggro rhymes, it’s all redundancy til closing track “Despise The Lie.” From a purely aesthetics standpoint, Demon Queen have made a respectable concept album fit for the finest strip club in all of Tucson, but if you’ve come to the Exorcise Tape to truly work it out, you may encounter a few issues along the way.