Introducing Neocons and their comic industrial news reportage: “Technology utterly abandons us”
Burnished amid the buzzing mediascape of flooded zones and the bleak news cycle, it can be hard to quite distinguish Neocons’ synthpunk snarl from the daily barrage of political rot radiating from our phone screens with grim perpetuity.
A project from Paisley Shirt Records associate Alex Machock, Los Angeles’ Neocons have been scoring the contemporary anxiety via a pummelling score of electronically corroded garage attack and discoloured drum-machine blasts, all fronted by Machock’s anguished lyrical reportage.
“Who we are is not important,” Machock curtly tells Far Out. “There’s two of us, and we play loud guitar and synths.”
The pair aren’t above a little wry theatre to the Neocons package, almost answering our email correspondence with short bursts of regimented communication akin to the pulpy militaristic artwork that adorns their debut album Back to Zero, but such a combative stance is shaped by the all-too-real systems of oppression squeezing its neoconservative grip at home economically and abroad via its ruinous foreign policy.
“Way back when, playing music was escapism,” Machock confesses. “It was fun and romantic and an endless party. By the time 2021 came around, those feelings were long dead, and anything that didn’t acknowledge the violent world we live in and celebrate the cold victory of those who made it so, well, that just feels like bullshit to us.”
Marrying political anger with a love of comic sci-fi, Neocons began to brew a dystopic industrial vision snapping and firing with the jumbling slices of pop culture and historic footnotes that would shape their martial aesthetic and tech-ravaged songcraft. “’80’s cyberpunk anime,” Machock reels off as key influences. “Philip K Dick and William Gibson. Radical-left-wing terror in the ‘70s. Far-right wing terror in the ‘90s. Army commercials. Raptor: Call of the Shadows. The war on drugs.”
Deploying their trusty samplers and layers of guitar pedals, a pulsing soundscape of cinematic electropunk has been afforded a wider canvas for their Back to Zero, teeming with chugging metal riffs and robotic sequencers, illustrating their obsessions with surveillance, systems, and a looming military industrial complex.
Taking cues from their heroes Ministry, Front 242, and Sub Pop Records’ psychotropic LOTION Multinational Corporation, Back to Zero’s laced with queasy media samples affording the digital hardcore pummel extra sting, John Bolton, Ira Reiner, 1970s MKUltra documentaries, and snippets from Timothy McVeigh all curdle on the record’s paranoid angst.
That’s not to say Neocons are dwelling in a po-faced, earnest treatise on political failure. Like a 2000 AD visor over your eyes, such thematic tumult is injected with a dose of fantasy grapple, dreaming up a punked-up version of Michael Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion wandering the scorched earth of hawkish military intervention and Middle-Eastern forever wars.
“After the collapse, or the singularity, or whatever you believe is coming,” Machock elucidates on the album’s Back to Zero title. “A song for accelerationism of all stripes. Eventually, we arrive at a place where we’re like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey in reverse: life is lived with nothing but brute force and muscle while technology utterly abandons us.”
Like a half-tuned garble of old Command & Conquer box art and The Brereton Report, Neocons dare to point to the global failure staring straight into our face, while also ensuring just the right amount of cathartic fun can be had from its panicked EBM announcements.
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