VR SEX - Hard Copy - Black Ice - VINYL LP

Following 2022's Rough Dimension LP, Noel Skum - aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty - made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR S*x into a fully collaborative five-piece band. To christen the new group's camaraderie, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and Inchdid that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.Inch Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments. Hard Copy is the result - 10 tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling S*x doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales. Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel - an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground - the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco's muse of Inchreckless abandon.Inch Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loud-quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR S*x's mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication InchMy goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.InchLyrically, the record revisits the project's perennial fascinations twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between Inchfacsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other - whe