Song to Get You Through the Week: Sickert, Blaze join forces for 'Party in My Heads'

“It's summertime in dystopia,” croons Walter Alice Sickert at the end of the avant-garde rocker's collaboration with Boston rapper Brandie Blaze, “Party in My Heads.” It's a fitting summation of the song, which feels a bit like a summertime banger folded inside out. The song, which was engineered by Boston's DJ WhySham and features beats by Worcester hip-hop artist Ghost of the Machine, has a sort of unrelenting, bare-knuckled forward motion, barreling through a psychedelic soundscape that seems to frazzle and dissolve at the edges. If that's not a metaphor for our times, I'm not sure what is.

Sickert has been collaborating with a lot of the local hip-hop scene lately, and the results have so far been stunning. “Love Be the Way,” Sickert's collaboration with rapper Oompa, and “Battle Witches,” the previous collaboration with Ghost of the Machine that appears on the Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys album, “War Gospel,” are both visceral blasts of cross-genre energy. What's really amazing, though, is that each song has a unique feel, and the ground where the genres fuse seems blended. In all three cases, everything feels organic to the song, more than the standard “rock song with rap break,” which can be fine, but at this point feels like a failure of imagination. Here, Sickert and collaborators push past the clichés and create songs that feel like true partnerships.

In a lot of ways, “Party in My Heads” is perhaps the truest example of that sense of integration. Sickert's voice emerges from a dreamlike mass of sound, propelled by a visceral beat. “Welcome to the party in my head,” sings Sickert, “raise the dead/break the bread/keep the children fed,” in a cadence that suggests hip-hop more than apes it, even as lyrics such as, “post-apocalyptic triptych depicting the vision that is spinning, the shoe that keeps on fitting” puts us straight in Sickert's trippy punk rock wheelhouse.

When Blaze's verse appears, it's pure pugilism: “breaking down the barriers/is gonna be a (expletive),” she raps, “but when you're facing justice/you can never flinch.” Blaze's fighting spirit and powederkeg energy take an already amped song and escalates the intensity. When Sickert's vocals return, the tone shifts again, the fever pitch rapidly turning to fever dream, which is a fitting place for the song to end: in that place where barriers seems to dissolve, where the impossible seems strangely, disturbingly real.