i'm certain that my milder reaction to this compared to their other works is at least in part due to its posturing; 'very shallow listening' in the liner notes as purposeful bait, lots of extreme violence and feigned imagery, and lyrics filled with digs at their audience, their imitators, and seemingly all of suburbia (which happens to line up well with those other two). but in part it's also because their previous works were so poignantly extreme in an abstract, existential, and broadly futuristic way; this record by comparison feels like treading—mind you, in very abrasively brutal, immediately and insanely catchy waters, but still in a place they've been before.

not that it's some pitiful attempt at the extremities of what constitutes catchiness, since that's the main draw still. Spikes, BB Poison, and Ring a Bell are maybe the most obvious examples of what happens when you create some of the most incessant grooves out of buzzing, unforgiving clamoring. in those moments, it feels almost as boundary-pushing as The Money Store was just four years prior.

but for all of its successes, the lyrical posturing is likely what brings it down the most; they had every right to be as brash and self-aggrandizing as they were on this record, given the leaps they took album after album prior to Bottomless Pit, but in this context of macho violence on slight rehashing gives it less weight.

it really is a set of ear-shattering treats, a terrific playpen that offers some of their most distilled, raw emotions; Hot Head to this day is nearly as petrifying as No Love was, albeit fueled on pure rage instead of a totalizing paranoia. and as much as the span of tracks from Warping to Houdini has yielded less and less appeal since its initial release, both Eh and Trash highlight new takes on similar themes to their past records in a compelling methodology. additionally, 80808 is likely the album's best take on putting down others for biting their style, and the arena rock hook of Bubbles Buried in This Jungle is still utterly confounding in just the right way sometimes.

there's just not a lot of connections to be made between many of the tracks here; the transition from Hot Head's babbling to Spikes's horrific imagery with one of their best hooks goes off without a hitch, as do the instrumental similarities between BB Poison and Three Bedrooms in a Good Neighborhood, but the lyrical themes jump around even more than the instrumentals rattle their frames. as opposed to the set-up and tearing down present in most of their major releases, Bottomless Pit conversely feels like a simpler statement of intent, of ego and of tearing down an 'other', without as much purpose given to why. that's simultaneously a deserved angle for such a boundary-pushing group (and a worthwhile commentary on more widely-popular acts co-opting their style) but a bit lacking in the overflowing ideas they had on those other projects.

plenty of Ride's lines are worth exploring and unpacking, and connecting themes towards as the record goes on, but they're more tangential, more loose than they've seemed on other releases. it's not an album just to glower at in fear, but that's most of what the record feels it's trying to go for. so as the record ends with repeated lines of "I fucked you in half", i can't help but be appreciative that the instrumentals carried it along so well, enough that i didn't have to pay nearly as much attention to what Ride was saying—even if his vocal affects & flows fit pretty perfectly. because there just aren't many strings tying together what would otherwise have been one of their most cohesive statements, if only there was more value ascribed to what it was trying to say.