Devour

Devour is best experienced from front to back. Shifting from Chardiet’s possessed screams (Spit It Out), to the dial-up-modem-from-Hell (Self-Regulating System), to grotesque static (Deprivation), Devour is shockingly sublime, like some warped, morally corrupt gradient. What’s equally mystifying is how textured and thematic these songs are, subtleties and surprises that are only revealed through brave, dedicated consumption.

Pharmakon's devouring is whole and ugly, but it carries a rewarding narrative about the importance of suffering — we're eating ourselves alive, but we're also becoming stronger for it, each act of self-cannibalization and each listen to this album more like a single coil in an upward spiral of transcendence than a snake eating its own tail.

Devour overall is a punishing, malicious force of a record, one focused entirely on the eradication of any sense of self and musical procedure, with no room for reprieve. It perfectly captures the raw, hemorrhaging nature of Chardiet’s thematic intention, and live performances and in this way it is nothing short of an unbridled success.

Like everything else Pharmakon does, this is almost unbearably intense, but in a way that resonates deeply and is almost soothing, as if the only way to justify the horrors of living is to elevate one's self into the most chaotic state possible.

Devour is unwaveringly formless; drills, drones and hysterical screeches become food for trauma. It’s frightening, at many points torturous, but not without emotional weight. The record mirrors what oppression really looks, sounds and feels like – no pool parties, ice tea, sunglasses and shiny colour palettes, just untamed agony, screaming and pain. [Sep 2019, p.60]

That Devour is such a tiring album is a testament to its cohesiveness. These tracks flow elegantly into one another, and the attention to dynamics and tension allows for seamless listening.

Rhythm plays a strong role in all Pharmakon albums, but Devour has a stronger pull and a denser composition. One rhythmic track layers on top of another, sometimes swallowing each other up and sometimes taking songs into different directions. ... Devour isn’t a rallying cry for change, it’s a reflection of the ugliness of it all, from the inside out.

With Devour, Pharmakon furthers industrial music’s decades-long history of seeking truth about the self in noise and negation, of boring holes in the propaganda that assures us everything about the system is working just fine.