The Bastards of Fate are the corpus callosum connecting the rational lobe of pop to the irrational lobe of the avant-garde. They are the sturdy tether lashing rock’s analog past to its digital future. They ring the tocsin bell of triumph while blowing the slughorn of agony. The Bastards of Fate are nothing less than the auditory manifestation of the dark duality of the human spirit. Will you heed their call? WILL YOU?

The Bastards make music for the 21st century, and possibly — if we make it that far as a species — the 22nd, It’s a cluttered screaming cacophony of connected isolation. ‘Winter of Our Discontent’ may be the bleakest, most emotionally wrecked thing you’ll hear all year, and ‘Own It’ might be the funniest—funny the way Kafka is funny, and bleak the way Bataille is bleak. Or is it the other way around? I guess we’re trying to say that Bastards write like novelists, that they sing with the soul of a choir, and they sound like nothing else on earth.

Vampires is a darker, altogether more desperate affair than 2012’s Who’s a Fuzzy Buddy, sounding less like a studio project and more like a band. It captures the visceral energy of their live shows—a chaotic mess of lightbulbs and screaming. Vampires laughs in the face of its demons; it scowls & weeps when confronted with angels. Cloaked in a sort of Edwardian grandeur, Vampires leaves one’s certainties in turmoil. It is one of the deepest, most extreme, most tuneful records to emerge in recent memory.

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