NAH, Worship Gallery, 2020

Mortal Glitch by NAH is sprinting full speed toward me with a ground pounding intensity that only ever breaks to allow a brief inhale before returning to trampling. It has a velocity that doesn’t share the element of flight that is present in many high tempo songs. This album doesn’t float or fly and there are no glitzy keys with an expansive sheen to soar above your head or carry you toward the sun. Instead it uses heavy, imposing percussion to cut into the bloodstream and pump through the mind. During the listen I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the drum machines and the angst that tightens the fingers and whitens the knuckles. At only thirteen tracks and a total run time of less than twenty minutes Mortal Glitch leaves as quickly as it arrives.

“What Good May Never Shine Free?” notes in a shaking voice, “I’m not feeling super great about reality right now” and strikes with the first roll of drum machine propelled percussion. The beautiful lyricism shows up immediately in the form of a chant: “Woes / Abundant not free / Lives not meant to be / Death on the ground / Tension unwound / What could may never be seen”. The howling vocal performance forces me into a state of high tension and it is as if someone else is reaching in and wracking my brain before smoothly switching into the second track, “Swine Without Spine”. Guest feature Kuun takes center stage in my head as he screams the title of the song over and over with the drums heating up and trying to push the eyes out of my head. The song dissipates instantly.

“Replenish” is the first Hip/Hop track. It concerns itself with a cruel reality, and claims that I haven’t become aware of the hand of control that governs the people. Fortunately, the declarative message that we are all manipulated by the system ends on a positive note as featured artist Bik Lexx proclaims, “My spirit can never die, the rhetoric I write will replenish.”

Throughout the albums thus far a kind of low volume, overwhelming hum has been backing up the the primary audio feast of lyricism and percussion, providing a sense of mental fog. The sound reminisces of times when my mind wants to turn off because it has no will to continue absorbing information. The experience is somewhat unforgiving in that sense, and becomes stress-inducing and irritable in the best way possible.

The feeling quickly shifts on “Full Rate” which features the first mildly uplifting sounds. Peppy drums with blown out yelling in the background is complemented with a lovely, upbeat, and invigorating melody that ends with a fun breakdown to conclude. On “Top Friction” Cities Aviv bring in guest commentary on the turbulent social and political state of the U.S. south over a lower fidelity beat which allows for more easily consumed lyric.

The following track, “Big Silence Muted”, has Cities Aviv return to the album’s morale breaking norm with a shrill delivery covering the convolution of U.S. journalism and facing the horrors of the world. It explodes with a beautiful scream that’s annotated on the lyric sheet as “DON’T YOU LET THESE FUCKIN DEVILS IN”, followed by indiscernible howls. The whole time an almost string like note is being let off behind a slow, thumping, beat to punctuate the harrowing nature of the song.

“Let Em Fly” serves as a transition track of sort with screams cut into the beat, a return to gorgeous drum lines, and excellent traditional production work with all the vocal chopping and cutting style found in early 2000’s Hip/Hop tracks. Zekeultra features a short verse on “Butterfly Knife” about the lack of control in life and being lost in a state of escapism to cope with the world. The beat is calming in a morbid way and doesn’t waste any time flinging me into the next track.

“Inferno Code” increases the feeling of brain fog and pummels me with more hefty drumming and brutalizing vocal sampling. The song feels like a hot blooded warning that never really reaches you despite coming from your own head. It climaxes with a pristine switch into mental clarity with the track “Ruby Fucking Red” as more cries back up a beautiful sample of a woman singing indiscernibly. The singing breaks down and somehow becomes sorrowful as the track spirals, decorated with vocal chops as NAH reenters. Begging me to look around at the world and cry into a greying guitar chord. The drawn out white noise becomes the next track, “Divine Uncertainty”, which holds onto the feeling of mental haze and literal static while feeling much more like “noise” than anything else.

During “Divine Uncertainty”, the percussion takes solo stage with very minimal vocal clips of yelling and screaming being muffled in the background. Explosions of drum and bass echo in my head and rattle around before being cut off by a much more acoustic drumming in “Percussao”. A tribal drum line surrounds me and cymbals climax the hot switch between drum types. I wish now, that I could do this track more justice as to me it is easily the most emotional, wrathful, and cyclonic track on the album. It is a great vortex with heat, haze, and drumming swirling around, growing in speed and reminding of the velocity at which the album began. Blown out cries for help echo through the end of the track as a faint familiar melody drifts by to usher in the final song.

“Harm” is the end of this terrible dream. It’s blown out, it has elite drum and bass, and it comes bearing the gift of a shaking opera singer cutting- just barely- through the edges of the white noise. Drumming- drumming- drumming- and the album concludes with the voice from the first five seconds repeating a robotic “ow, ow, ow”.

Washed out by clouded focus, Mortal Glitch is a brain wracking cry for help that has been fixed to the side of a great drum battle between the virtual and physical.