I am a killer of killers of the killing line of men who kill every night
Wa-ooooooooo!
No more mumbo jumbo from your medicine man
Your badland heart is all mine
Mask Appeal came together with the blunt inevitability of a bar fight nobody had to schedule. Mike Shelbourn’s jungle-born drums chase the song through the underbrush, snapping branches, kicking up dirt, and grinning at the damage. Dan Graziano’s bass slithers beneath him with oily confidence, a low-end bad conscience that keeps finding another corner to coil around. Dante White Aliano’s guitar tears at the edges, sometimes with a deathrock leer, sometimes with a garage-punk fever, sometimes like a man carving warnings into a fence he plans to climb anyway.
These are Los Angeles music-scene veterans, and you can hear the road rash in their playing. Their histories run through Detroit Cobras, Oozelles, The Starlite Desperation, Gestapo Khazi, Neighborhood Brats, Frontier Club, and more. They know the racket from the inside: the blown amp, the bent bill, the cheap motel sink, the promoter with soft hands and a hard story.
Their most recent single, Badland Bloodrite, is a song about crossing the line after the line has already warned you, cursed you, spat tobacco juice at your boots, and told you exactly what kind of fool you are. Mask Appeal builds the track around a violent myth of possession and trespass, where love comes dressed as a blood oath, and geography behaves like a trap with teeth. The karst is the key image: porous ground, hidden chambers, sudden drops, the earth pretending to be solid until appetite steps forward and vanishes waist-deep into its own ruin.
From there, Badland Bloodrite sinks into a psychic badland where romance, conquest, inheritance, and murder all share the same cracked cup. The vocals proclaim a murderous lineage while trying to seize another person’s heart and fate, and every warning not to cross the karst lands with the force of an old taboo. This is border music in the least respectable sense: the border between hunger and harm, between wanting someone and wanting to own the air around them.
The reference points crowd around the song like shrouded witnesses: Theatre of Hate and Death Cult with their desert-stained drama; The Birthday Party with their deranged grin; Bauhaus in their theatrical pallor; The Stranglers with their raven-clad menace; The Contortions in their crooked angles; Bow Wow Wow in their tribal snap; PIL in their bass-led unease; and Echo and the Bunnymen in their grand, doomed reach.
Mask Appeal uses those ghosts as gasoline for the fire, but Badland Bloodrite leaves its ugly implications standing in plain view. It sounds hot, sick, funny in the cruel places, and wired to old fear. The song knows trespass can be seduction, theft, ceremony, and sentence all at once, and Mask Appeal rides straight over the karst with their eyes open.
Listen below and order the single here.
Badland Bloodrite by Mask Appeal
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