Thy Slaughter – “Bronze”
In Ancient Greek lore, the Sirens were two (sometimes told as three) mythical beings who lived alone on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean. Any wandering sailor who passed by their home was immediately and forcibly drawn to their call, a song that was said to be both overwhelmingly beautiful and soul-crushingly sad. It’s never entirely clear what happened to the men who were bewitched by the Sirens, because those who were never left. In The Odyssey, Circe tells Homer that the Sirens reside in a meadow at the edge of the island, surrounded by piles of the rotting corpses of men they had cast aside. I like to think that the Sirens were searching for their one true love, some unattainable Adonis figure with the perfect ratio, and the tragic irony behind the story is that they could never find that perfection because it doesn’t exist. This do-or-die approach to love is found in the latest offering from the enigmatic PC Music collective. “One boy in the world to be my boy,” the song goes, sung by another inflectionless programmed bot that goes by the name Thy Slaughter. For a movement that has been centered around perfectly composed porcelain figures and hyperrealistic and embellished women, it makes sense that they would take a look backward to the one society that was just as obsessed with the desire for perfection as we are. The artwork for “Bronze” shows an ancient coin with the two Sirens poised longingly on its face, suggestively beckoning towards you. The coin is frayed around the edges, though; semi-melted because that perfection is an impossibility.