The phantasmagorical debut album by Tropical Fuck Storm, A Laughing Death in Meatspace, delivers a fraught vision of algorithmic apocalypse.
Featuring Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitchin from Australian heroes The Drones, Tropical Fuck Storm is an end-of-days consciousness-stream across nine seething tracks. The debut dive-bombs into the realms of mortality and immortality, moralizing and amorality; the passing of time, and how little we have left. These are lurid songs, urgently told through Gareth Liddiard's barbed and byzantine lyricism, abrasive guitar slashes, drum adrenalin, raunchy bass and electronic undercurrents. They're raging, rapscallion, and funny, lyrically delving into everything from internet shaming to the kuru “laughing death” disease of the PNG highlands to Russian chess great Gary Kasparov’s portentous loss to an IBM computer.