Ben Frost - By The Throat (2009)
oh, god, protect me - november 16, 2025
I’m doing something I rarely ever do today. Which is to say, I’m writing about something I listened to a long time ago, digested, discarded, and eventually came back around to because something about it just could not leave me. This is an album I’m pretty sure I listened to before I even signed up to RateYourMusic seven years ago now. It’s sat, rotting, never changing, in the farthest reaches of my personal catalogue. Time to crack open this old can of herring and see how it fermented.
Sometimes I like to crack jokes about being, generally, a cold weather guy. It’s never too bad, after all. You can always put on more layers, after a certain point of taking them off you’d get arrested for public indecency on the hottest days of the summer. It’s the season of hot chocolate and soup and gingerbread. Heck, my dad used to call us polar bears. However, even though my fat ass has some ingrained resistance to more frigid temperatures, I must bow and concede towards the death that remains within the cold. All it takes is that little loss of fine motor control while you’re fumbling with your keys one snowy night to get you to start thinking about the end. It’s nothing you can laugh at afterwards, because all the cold needs is enough time to do its work. By the Throat spares you the waiting and sends you on an express line right to the end.
This album is like getting torn apart by wolves. It’s like watching your blood freeze as you slowly lose all feeling, getting the life literally drained out of you. All you can think about is watching yourself from your own former perch of safety, from a den, from a fire, fuck, maybe from inside, looking out onto the snow and realizing how fragile you might be. It’s like finally making it back to the Antarctic research station only to find that the door won’t open. It fucking mocks you. It has titles making reference to Twin Peaks and Ghostbusters. It lulls you into safety with soothing piano keys or a morose melody plucked out on a guitar around the campfire, only to drive you back into your dying body with shots of harsh electronics. All you can do is drift back into fading memory while the pain tries to jolt you to life again.
Weirdly, it has some similarities with an album that came out four years afterwards: Tim Hecker’s Virgins. Both are angry, desolate albums that really despise their own labelling as “ambient” and seem really interested in torturing you. This is not ambient, rather only receiving the label as an example of its complete opposite. It’s feral. Ugly. Gnashing. Rabid. Alive. Cold.
I feel like it’s best summarized by “O God Protect Me.” After the abject violence of “Killshot” and the howling wolves on “The Carpathians,” you’re in a hospital room. Or, at least, some sort of medical facility. You’re hooked up to machines. Your breathing is loud and assisted (why is this not the first time I’ve written about a song like that?). Eventually, your new restricted world is completely washed out by a speaker-rattling bass tone. The machines fade away under the din. Your breathing fades away, too. You recede into the dark again. You don’t know if you’re coming back out.
warm water feels scalding