The Golden Age of Wrestling - Scorpion Deathlock
INTRASET
Released on January 12th, 2024
As the unremitting force behind the projects Devours and The Golden Age of Wrestling, queer producer, artist, and overall luminary Jeff Cancade has dedicated years to the task of lovingly glitter-gluing together gritty synth pop, chiptune and glambient with wild and beautiful abandon across his remarkable oeuvre. Under the moniker The Golden Age of Wrestling, the Vancouver-based musician dons a sparkly golden cloak which he wears over his head, intoning his missives on social media in a faux macho persona (with the occasional back and forth occurring in the comments with his other persona/project, Devours). This joyful embrace of both the performatively self-serious and the wonderfully silly is at the heart of his project’s namesake, as well as being at the heart of his highly conceptual approach to music-making. It is a volatile concoction that fizzes and sparks at the edges of all of his compositions— though never more so than on his latest album, Scorpion Deathlock.
Cancade has described Scorpion Deathlock as the most uncompromising and least commercial release of his career. It found its home on newly-born ambient label INTRASET (an imprint of Vancouver mainstays 604 Records), a rhinestone-studded black sheep nestled between more traditional, capital “A” ambient records. While Scorpion Deathlock certainly embodies many of the hallmarks of that vast, oceanic genre, the album is far too complex, slippery and metamorphic to sit comfortably in any one box.
From the slow-burning “Blood for Shakespeare” and arcade racer “Ferrari Rocher” to the mighty beats of “i____x____i,” Cancade takes us on a whirlwind tour of aesthetics. “Paperhouse” is a gorgeous tapestry, featuring many of the most dazzling melodies on the album even as they warp into melted plasticine figures, and personal favorite “Labradorite (feat. Future Star)” is a dizzying climb into the clouds: an ethereal, paradisal ending to an album full to the brim with earthly delights.
The range of the sounds deployed to paint the landscapes of this world are many, and what is maybe most astonishing about the album is Cancade’s ability to make all of these disparate tonal palettes— chiptune jams, melancholic pads, video game soundtracks, reverb-drenched vocal lamentations, skittering beats— feel strangely at home together: alien planets in an uncanny universe. As the ringleader of this circus of sounds, Cancade is in masterful form as he spins these worlds on his fingertips, and the result is a truly spellbinding listening experience that is one-of-a-kind.
- Harman Burns