There is no other verdict. You were born with the mark on your forehead. You have always known that you are to be expelled from their circle. And the door will creak; it will be heavy; you will struggle to cross the threshold. You will feel their eyes on your back, and it will be like this even when you reach where it is sylvan. You will smell ash; you will find your veil is burning. The leaves underfoot will be dead. You will walk along the riverbank, and your skirts will catch on the brambles.
There is, somewhere else, innocence. Sin Offering offers only GUILTY, their debut 12” EP for Beach Impediment Records, Sound Grotesca, and Side Two.
GUILTY, named for Georges Bataille’s Le Coupable, is stitched from discarded fragments of metallic punk, deathrock, doom metal, and post punk—think Tožibabe, the Dead Relatives, Potion for Bad Dreams-era Void, Paul Chain Violet Theatre, and Danse Macabre. Or: vocals many have described as “girl Rozz Williams” + the Simmons SDSV + Will Heggie’s bass on Garlands + Mick Mars by way of Randy Uchida. Lyrically, GUILTY fixates on the uneasy proximity between prohibition and violation, drawing from the Pentateuch and the Gospels as much as from nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature of abjection (Mary Shelley’s Mathilda and Colette’s L’ingénue libertine).
Elizabeth Siddal, sketched as Ophelia, opens her mouth to speak: “All changes pass me like a dream, / I neither sing nor pray; / And thou art like the poisonous tree / That stole my life away.”
Each record comes in a chipboard jacket and features a 12 page booklet - all of which was designed by the band.
