Hit Bargain

Hit Bargain is the Los Angeles band featuring members of Beach Fossils and Cold Beat, the quartet is known for their sardonic explorations of gender, power dynamics, and aging action heroes. The group returns with their new album, A Dog A Deer A Seal on November 10th via Get Better Records. The album is named for the recipe of Chinese three-penis wine, and an apocryphal chimera representing the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. government.

Written and recorded in the heady before-times of 2019 and early 2020, the album is described as a skittish, escitalopram-fueled snapshot of a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The deck is stacked with active shooter drills, tech bro millionaires, true crime, general anxiety, and impending catastrophe. In short, nothing much different than now.

Album highlight “Immaculate Vaxxer”, singer Nora Singh menacingly wavers “A warning / Or a premonition to be ignored / Superstition buoying us to impossible shores” against Mike Barron’s ragged guitar stabs, while bass player Sean Monaghan and drummer Anton Hochheim create a roiling, brackish undercurrent that tugs the listener along. The chorus of “My body is not my own, It’s a host” is an exhausted but saintly submission to the unpredictability of ungovernable chronic disease.