Hit Bargain (members of Beach Fossils and Cold Beat), the angular Los Angeles four-piece known for their sardonic explorations of gender, power dynamics, and aging action heroes, returns with their latest album,A DOG A DEER A SEAL. The album is named for the recipe of Chinese three-penis wine, and an apocryphal chimera representing the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. government.
Written and recorded in the heady before-times of 2019 and early 2020,A DOG A DEER A SEAL is a skittish,escitalopram-fueledsnapshot of a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The deck is stacked with active shooter drills, tech bro millionaires, true crime, general anxiety, and impending catastrophe. In short, nothing much different than now.
In opening track“Immaculate Vaxxer”, singer Nora Singh menacingly wavers“A warning / Or a premonition to be ignored / Superstition buoying us to impossible shores” againstMike Barron’s ragged guitar stabs, while bass playerSean Monaghanand drummerAnton Hochheimcreate a roiling, brackish undercurrent that tugs the listener along. The chorus of“My body is not my own, It’s a host” is an exhausted but saintly submission to the unpredictability of ungovernable chronic disease.
Keeping with the theme of disparate animal parts, Hit Bargain flexes their stylistic range across the album. In“Degree Decree”, they lope through a frenetic climate dystopia in a manner that recalls the ghosts of angst rockers The Blood Brothers and the art school agitation of Erase Errata. While“Cloud Cover” starts as a restrained krautrock fever dream that then blooms and imprints like reversed fireworks on the mind’s eye. And the closing titular track is a brutalist bully pulpit that pokes at the taxidermied remains of democracy, before panning to the left, makingA DOG A DEER A SEAL highly palatable, even to its bitter end.
