According to UFO Identified founder and researcher Ash Ellis, eight sightings of unidentified flying objects were reported in South Yorkshire, three in the market town of Barnsley, with wearebarnsley detailing the sighting of a “silver sausage-shaped object approximately 600 feet long turning black then disappearing”. Is it a coincidence that self-described ‘psyop disaster’ Secret Agent Headcheese has been crafting a conspiratorial mulch of lo-fi synthpunk concerning alien abductions and shadowy government departments so close to the proximity of West Riding’s many ‘visitations’?
Where S.A.H.’s debut EP Headcheese Gets Abducted dealt with rubbery devocore and sped up garage-punk, latest offering Sinful Souls steps into the acid-soaked communes of cultish psych-folk, where ufology and new age millenarianism meet and promise cosmic enlightenment. Slathered with R. Stevie Moore’s home-taped esoterica and Lumpy Gravy‘s aural collages, the scrappy montage of samples and acoustic preaching feel like the final recorded ramblings of a cult leader documenting his ‘family’s’ glorious ascent to the next plane.
Grand exaltations of alien conspiracist Phil Schneider and evangelical faith healers set Sinful Souls‘ queasy theme of plastic messiahs and their promised salvation to the bewildered faithful on EP opener ‘Praise Be!’. Jaunty folk jangles amid samples of Baptist zealotry play out like the haunted fragments of a 1960’s dream that was usurped by Nixon infiltration and Reverand Jim Jones, The Youngbloods ‘Get Together’ fried with quaaludes and pessimism. The gospel spiked title track channels the ghost of The Peoples Temple Choir serving sacred pull to S.A.H.’s proselytising against the evils of Burger King and moving to Siberia, the choir hymns deteriorating to a ghoulish shriek as the sermon segues from the grace of God to the lizard people and the ensuing reptilian end times on the paranoid ‘Alpha Draconis Star System Blues’.
Just when S.A.H. establishes themselves as an expert conjurer of cartoonish synthpunk, the Barnsley psyop experiment point to a possibility of ever-shifting genres and subjects with which to inject their irreverent brand of toxic psychedelia. Sinful Souls is a potent acid-soaked mess of just how lost rationality can be, a scrambled document of UFO’s and cultish worship which is awaiting to be discovered by loners at 4 am searching for the ‘truth’ in a YouTube hole of Heaven’s Gate suicide videos and Coast to Coast AM conspiracies.