We Love: Paula Temple’s Deathvox EP

We Love is an opportunity for EB writers to contemplate, rant, and rave about one of their current musical obsessions and the deeper issues they inspire. In this installment, Daniel Jones finds destructive energy in Paula Temple‘s Deathvox EP, out now on R&S.

During a recent chat with David Psutka (AKA Night Slugs regular Egyptrixx), we talked about the similarities between techno and black metal. He told me that both genres are often built around repetition and low-end bass, engineered to hypnotize and simultaneously propel the body into spasms—”concussion plus tranquility,” as he put it. Paula Temple’s Deathvox EP is  closer to the tribalist industrial techno of Cut Hands, but it attracts me in the same way as a lot of my favorite modern black metal groups, extending right own to the attached visuals.

The stark shots of forest, mountains, and bodies of water in the title track’s video resemble the aesthetics of Northern European metal fiends like the one-woman Danish band Myrkur. When I first saw the video, I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by incense and a picture of a dog with messed-up eyes, like a goats eyes. My friends and angry neighbors often refer to music with pounding percussion and otherworldly screams as “extremely Daniel’s shit,” and upon hearing “Deathvox,” I rose to my feet and started slamming myself into the wooden pillars in my living room, eager to reignite the rush of adrenaline and happiness that the song had poured into me. The video left me keyed-up, so I vented my energy by trying to chop and screw Sunn O))). Ten minutes into the project, I ran out of hard drive space.

Published November 11, 2014. Words by Daniel Jones.