Vinyl Cape

I remember throwing rocks with my dickbag friends at my elementary school from the dirt lot behind 7/11 across the street. Some Laffy Taffy and my step-dad’s pack of Merit menthol 100s in my pocket and on my lips. My mismatched bike in the dirt. My shoes and shirt and jeans black and full of holes. My hair long and tangled. My expression transitioning from crushingly board, confused, angry, and maniacally pleased with our destruction. 

I had a walkman. It was loaded with tapes of late 80s metal: Iron Maiden, Slayer, Anthrax, Metallica. It is within this collection that the roots for Vinyl Cape’s The Glitter of Putrescence can be traced. Vinyl Cape, made a record full of quality scream raps, noodling guitar screeches, gravelly sung choruses, and the perfect trajectory to bust out the cafeteria window. 

Even though I haven’t been brave enough to enter a crowd at a metal show in years, I can still feel its swell in my balls. It’s that shrinking feeling you get as the crush takes you. When you no longer are able to control where your body goes, swept up in a throng of humanity possessed by satanic lyrics and power chords. The setting for TGoP is either that or a lonely dusty road in the middle of nowhere that heads nowhere and fails to take you from anywhere. These are the desolate images ground in my psyche by rappers and guitar whores, the Maine men Brzowski and C$Burnz. This is doom rap, I guess? I find it a little high school football weight room: angry and dark and full of fast food dollar menu burgers. 

I don’t know if this is the record for me, but for someone just getting their goatee to grow past the ghost of Scott Ian, I can see this being a fucking revelation. This is the kind of record my lost little self used to find solace in. Life’s meanings contorted from twisted metal and bone when everything that was supposed to be stable heaved and shuddered under the weight of normalcy. 

I like this record. I don’t know how many more times I’m going to listen to it. Depends on how pissed off I get at my parents.