Labels: At A Loss Recordings
Review by: Kunal Nandi
Days of fire indeed! These ten songs are positively brimming with burning rage and fiery desire. Meatjack have been ploughing their own furrow of noisy rock mixed in which tricky sludge elements for the better part of a decade, and have no intention of sweetening the pill. Of course, they’re still resolutely unfashionable, and they have that unfortunate name, but I’m still slapping myself very hard on the forehead for not checking them out sooner.
What I love about this album is that there is so much variety to it, without it becoming a noticeable gimmick. It runs the gamut from fast to slow, pounding to technical, quiet and loud, with a remarkable amount of control and cohesion, so that it works both on a song-by-song basis and as an album as a whole. There’s also an innate sense of melody at play here, which makes the songs immensely satisfying to these tired ears. I mean, it’s still noisy as fuck, but you can actually still hum along to it!
“Sleep” is the album opener, and is perfectly placed there. It grabs your attention with its evil melody and unsubtle shifts between sections. Give the album a few spins though, and the power of the less volatile numbers shines through. In fact, the slow-burning numbers are the best, often beginning with slowly picked-out fuzzy bass-lines, building in volume as the guitar joins in before reaching a crescendo where everyone’s going all-out. “Crawl” does this in 12 minutes that feel like 4.
The vocals are very similar to stone-cold Steve Austin’s from Today Is The Day much of the time, although this benefits from not having TITD’s usual tinny production, so it’s like the best of both worlds! Killer vocals and a beefy sound. Add the experimentation of Melvins and the brute force of Unsane to the mix, and you’ve got yourself a party! It’s not one of the
craziest, loudest, heaviest or most technical albums out there, but it is one of the best.