We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Your Afterlife Is Cancelled

by Amateur Childbirth

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $1 AUD  or more

     

  • 12" Record
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Released via Blackest Ever Black on 12", includes insert and download code.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Your Afterlife Is Cancelled via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
All Doomed 04:23

about

This is Amateur Childbirth's Christian Rock album. The previous LP from Ivan Matthew Hicks' solo project, 2015's Pripyat, concerned itself with the blighted belief systems of UFO worshippers, Your Afterlife Is Cancelled expands this compelling solo project's field of enquiry to look at a wider array of "religious anomalies" – cults, for want of a better word. Each song is about a different such anomaly.

To call Hicks' vision apocalyptic would be to underplay its cruelty. The Bible's rampant sadism pales in comparison. This is a world where faith – in a god or gods, in astrology, morality, or any meaning whatsoever - is merely a prelude to punishment. His lyrics are vivid glossaries of pain, abjection and indignity; the songs' protagonists swim in blood, piss, shit and ejaculate. Eschatology and scatology are indivisible here. Drugs are rampantly abused, albeit to little benefit. There are scalpel-flashes of humour in Hicks' wordplay, rhyming and dour Brisbane diction - but this offers scant consolation for the songs' embattled subjects, who wait, in vein, for salvation, while crows peck out their eyes, blood pours from their ears, and psoriasis ravages their skin.

These words, for all their pessimism and body-horror, are cradled in minimalist, folk-rock arrangements that are quite dazzling in their beauty and grievously earned simplicity: Hicks' monochord strum embellished with subtle violin, synthesizer and percussion shading. Amateur Childbirth's caustic end-times worldview inevitably prompts comparisons with Current 93, but also a wider (non-)tradition of caustic and disturbed loner psych that includes Simon Finn, Patrik Fitzgerald, Robyn Hitchcock, Peter Jefferies and Roy Harper.

Your Afterlife Is Cancelled is a depressive tour de force from one of the most crushingly eloquent voices in the Australian underground.

credits

released September 15, 2017

Words and music: Ivan Matthew Hicks
Drums: Nicholas Rowan
Violin: Joshua Watson
Additional keyboards: Benjamin Casey

Cover art: Jordan Grant
Recording: Marly Lüske

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Amateur Childbirth Australia

...

contact / help

Contact Amateur Childbirth

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Amateur Childbirth, you may also like: