The Whole of the Dog: Decius Vol II – Splendour & Obedience is Our Album of the Week | The Quietus

The Whole of the Dog: Decius Vol II – Splendour & Obedience is Our Album of the Week

Fat White Family-adjacent club rats prove more sensual the second time around, finds Jon Buckland

Decius by Decius & Tim Perry

“He watched the pale, speed-driven teenagers shiver around the dance floor. Droplets of light sprayed onto their faces and T-shirts. In alcoves, couples were frozen in the trance of foreplay. The beat was too quick to dance to, almost too deep to hear. It was like the roar of water in an underground cavern.” – The Window

Lifted from a particularly harrowing short story by the British author Joel Lane, the above paragraph depicts the initial meeting place of a burgeoning sado-masochistic sexual relationship. It could also double as a description of the notoriously selective Berlin nightclub where Decius’ Meat Divine first caught a taste of electronic music’s throbbing abandon.

If you’ve not encountered Lane’s writing before, his work tended to be set in and around Birmingham, rarely escaping from a bleak world of sordid squats populated by desperate people scrambling to cling on as neo-liberalism’s looming shadow blocks out the light. It’s the fiction of Hubert Selby Jr. rewritten by Mark Fisher. This specific tale finds an evidently troubled young man enlisting a dominant older master to behead him.

Warmduscher. Paranoid London. Trashmouth Records. Fat White Family. Decius’ members count these ventures as day jobs but it’s in the horny court of the swollen Roman emperor that Lias Saoudi (aka Meat Divine), Quinn Whalley, and brothers Luke and Liam May converge to craft their mutant house music with more than one eye on rhythmically grinding pelvises.

Fourth track ‘Ghent’ rolls out on robotic keys caught somewhere between Daft Punk and Drexciya whilst Saoudi’s whispered falsetto slur of “sucking” summons Peaches stuttering through the pain. From the north of Belgium to Islam, where twitching hi-hats and squelching synths do little to distract from the carnal moans and groans on ‘Ibrahim’. There’s randy behaviour wherever you dare peek on Vol. II.

Splendour and Obedience is a more voluptuous effort than the scratchy edges of Vol. I. It is party music for those frazzled by three consecutive nights consuming the hair, the tail, the whole of the dog. A magical thing seems to happen during the third night of non-stop revelry. Your mind and body submit, recalibrating to this new state of constant consumption. The new normal is accepted and, as long as you keep feeding that insatiable beast with liquids, pills, and powders, the sharp claws of a comedown remain out of reach, seemingly forever.

That’s not true, of course. Your mind and body will inevitably catch up with you and rapidly unravel. However, a period of imagined invincibility can be glimpsed through debauchery’s hazy 72-hour lens. Why do you think that festivals run for three nights? Or techno clubs open their doors on a Friday PM, only to spit you out on a Monday AM? Sure, it could be conveniently aligned with capitalism’s demands for a five-day working week. Or it could be to brush up against a state of superhuman excess with half a leg over the threshold of transgression.

Your usual soundtrack won’t suffice for this descent into nihilistic hedonism. You’ll need to go weirder, harder, wonkier. You’ll need something with edge. Something that’s locked eyes with the abyss, thrown back their head and gulped it down into their own interior abyss.

You need propulsive bacchanalian beats with a body-jerking bassline and melodies such as those of ‘Queen Of 14th St’ reaching out like the unfolding arms of a synchronised, cavorting throng as Lias whispers his confessionals: “Show mercy.” You can imagine Andrew Weatherall at the helm of this sunset-seeker.

‘Birth of a Smirk’ swaps oddly shimmering funk leads plumbed from a synth found in a New York dumpster circa ’83. It is Acidic. It is Mutant. It is last night’s Hot Chip found flaccid and cold in a grease-stained bagasse container. Side note: despite their ubiquity, chips are basically the only fast food that you can’t enjoy as cold leftovers in the intrusive light of the following day. Yet the warped whomps of Decius are indicative of a bedraggled mind state where soggy, tepid fries appear quite appealing. “Yes, it’s hard to surrender nothing.

In a recent interview with tQ, Saoudi drew parallels between the suffering and pleasure of dance culture and the notion of order and pain from their Roman namesake. Another European with a penchant for blurring pain and ecstasy was Georges Bataille. He explored these ideas in various novels, essays, and across five issues of Acéphale (which translates as ‘headless’). He knew that corporeal gratification wasn’t mutually exclusive from fleshy anguish. In the 2008 film Martyrs a character is flayed alive in order to see God.

The album’s fifty minutes are ordered into ten near-enough equal tracks of subtly varied rhythmic repetition designed to take you further into the trance. It’s evidently made by heads that have gone long into the morning, surrendering to the rhythm and sacrificing their ego as those moments vanish through clammy fingers.

‘Punishment/Improvement’ transposes Martin Rev to Detroit amid yelps of “Give me that punishment.” And ‘I Gave Birth 2 U’ recalls the linguistic choices of Prince’s ‘I Would Die 4 U’. Its lifting 90s Eurodance vocal affectations add a little Croydon swing and take the mindless delirium into darker territory. There’s always a murky edge, no matter how jubilant these tracks appear.

Whether it’s the lurching swing of blue-eyed soul on ‘Walking In The Heat’ with its strangely cool anxiety-tapped synth arpeggiator juxtaposing the lyrical temperature, or the building sunrise of chords and contorted digital glockenspiel tones that make up the finale of ‘Arctic Spring’, this quartet will be found swaddling a libidinal piston with a dirty electronic veneer. So, if you’re welcoming another wired morning, indulging in orgiastic dance floor exploits, or simply want to lose your head, Decius have got you more than covered.

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