IRVING FORCE - Sedatives
Review by KIZUNAUT
IRVING FORCE is a synthwave-adjacent artist from Stockholm, Sweden. His style has been a characterful mix of influences from 80s soundtracks, contemporary electronic music, rock and metal, with his black metal roots occasionally showing through. His music has offered an unique mix of kicking rhythms, hard riffs, memorable synth leads and a certain kind of playfulness and ability to smoothly incorporate sudden twists and turns to his music. His work has leaned alternatively on more cyberpunk aesthetics or 80s splatter vibes.
Starting from 2015 onwards, Irving Force has built a rather extensive discography consisting of the Violence Supressor EP, a great many singles, and soundtracks to the adventure game Awaken Alone and the tabletop RPG SIGMATA and a single LP. The 2018’s Godmode album showed Irving Force’s talent at making powerful, fun, cool music that seamlessly wove together a diverse set of influences for an experience like no other. It remains one of my favorite albums that has come out of the synthwave movement.
Sedatives is Irving Force’s newest...yeah...what exactly is it? A single? An EP? Something else? Irving Force himself speaks of “the yellow glove sequence” of tracks which consists of Sedatives, Backroom Surgery, Touch the Corpse and Waste Management Confidential which Irving Force released over the course of several months. At Bandcamp they are their own singles, but at Spotify each release had incorporated the previous tracks, building upon each other, with Sedatives reaching an EP length and being labeled such at Spotify.
It’s an interesting solution, albeit perhaps a bit confusing one, and one that certainly breaks old conventions. But in a digital world, do the old conventions even have their place anymore? One could accuse this kind of approach of catering to algorithms, but with the music being as abrasive as it is and how Irving Force released the slow-burner, obvious-outro feeling Waste Management Confidential first, I find it hard to believe that he is catering to anybody or anything but his own vision and fans.
Due to the way it’s structured, I find myself mentally treating Sedatives as an EP, or at least some kind of cohesive whole, as the four tracks of the “yellow glove sequence” each have similar sounds, themes and, indeed, artwork. The visual aesthetics are fantastic, harking back to Godmode’s effective choice of colors and very stylish arrangement of images and text. At the heart of all the covers is a photo of a hand clad in a long, yellow glove grasping an object: a bag of waste, a bloody skull, and in the case of Sedatives, a very, very large syringe. There is a big bio/gorepunk vibe to it all, and indeed, the “yellow glove sequence” feels like something grown at a lab, the DNA of one track diving and mutating into another.
Production-wise, the release is top notch. I had felt like the couple of singles he had released before the “yellow glove sequence” were decent enough, but that Irving Force really wasn’t bringing his A-game. On Sedatives he is back at full force. The songs hit hard but retain dynamics and a certain intricacy and attention to detail. The choice of sounds are strong yet fun and varied, and each track has a distinct yet coherent sonic identity of its own. It’s as good as Godmode or perhaps even better.
Sedatives begins with it’s titular track, opening with pulsing, oozing basslines, swirly synth sweeps and a down-tuned speech sample. A kick drum comes in to carry the song, and ominous spoken word lyrics begin pouring out, the voice occasionally mutating into snippets of speech samples, painting gloomy pictures of bio-mechanical, psychological, corporate horror: “You are a funnel, aspiring asset....wither away in the absence of adversity, manifest stress, depression, anxiety...stocks plummet as the muscles convulse, timing the heartbeat to a post-human pulse”. A repeat of the word “anxiety” leads to the first chorus of the song, with the line “and they sell you their sedatives” repeating over and over again, a slurry of ultra detuned synths, blasts of heavy percussion, sharp guitars and voice samples of agony bombarding the listener. The second verse retains heavier percussion, leading into the second chorus which features the wailing, tortured, detuned synths in a prominent role. A brief interlude leads into the last chorus where Irving Force now screams over and over again “and they sell you their sedatives”, another quick interlude giving a brief pause before one last repeat of the chorus before the song abruptly ends with a choppy, glitch sample of a man yelping in pain. One of my favorites from the EP for it’s wonderfully inventive and sinister sound.
Klangy, rolling, metallic bassline opens up Backroom Surgery. A steady beat carries the song through it’s intro and a curious synthline occasionally looms in the background. The song lurches forward in starts and stops, samples punctuating it’s biomechanical march that builds into a sinister mix of propulsive bass, panicked samples and machine noises. Soon enough the song finds itself in a section that blasts the listener with a mix of orchestra hits and hard rhythm guitars which leads into an even harder section with ultra gnarly synths and guitars marching over a pummeling beat. A brief buildup featuring a mix of earlier elements and a resonant synth arp that races upwards follows, leading into another very heavy section, which leads into another section featuring the orchestra hits. The song ends with an ultra heavy pummeling, this time with new percussive elements and distressing, breathy swooshes lurking in the background. A perfect example of Irving Force’s ability to weave interesting song structures and subtle background elements into very hard hitting electronic metal tracks.
Touch the Corpse is the most metal-influenced track on Sedatives, opening with a computerized male voice insisting that he wants to “touch the corpse”. The song wastes no time, blasting into an extreme-metal influenced mix of rapid beats, chuggy guitars and screamed vocals. Buzz Saw-like synths back the guitars and drums. Irving Force screams about some kind of an AI-entity that wishes to gather information from the human dead. The relatively brief songs convulses and contorts through faster and slower passages, with occasional robotic voice samples and sound effects punctuating the track. A simple but powerful track, with the relative lack of audio flourishes giving space for Irving Force’s bone-withering vocal delivery.
A slow, pulsing bassline and passes of ambient sounds opens up Waste Management Confidential, a track that features a slow, steady buildup towards it’s climax. A steady beat joins in, as do distant, choir-like pads and brief passages of high-pitched synths. A different kind of bassline takes the place of the previous one, and down-tuned, lo-fi synth chords pulse in the background. The chords fade away and a resonant synth arp takes their place. The drums drop away, and after a while the song starts building up energy again. A moment of silence follows the buildup, and the song explodes into life with new vigor, this time joined in with guitars and passes of synth hits that almost sound like the whistle of a steam train. A breakdown follows, featuring a more chuggy rhythm follows, only for the song to build into its steady course again, this time featuring another resonant, sharp synth arpeggio alongside the guitars and drums. With this the song ends, and the EP with it. Another favorite from the release for it’s wonderful atmosphere and how it builds up.
Sedatives is a brief, but wonderful release from Irving Force. The grimy bio-punk aesthetic is fresh and wonderfully executed here. Irving Force has managed to coax out an entirely new realm of dystopian sounds in a scene that has been exploring the cyberpunk flavored sonic territories for quite a while now. It really doesn’t sound much like anything else out there at the moment.
I would have loved to hear a full-length album of this type of material. To my ears, this is the best material Irving Force has put out since Godmode and one of the best releases of 2021 so far. Extremely recommended for all synth heads who can also digest the metal influences, and for all the metal fans who can take the synth influence. Fans of industrial music might find some similarity, perhaps even influence, within the chuggy machine rhythms and tormented voice samples of the EP. This is a release to be celebrated and cherished.
For more IRVING FORCE, visit irvingforce.bandcamp.com
