meth. - I Love You

The second very brief release from Chicago-based “art concept” sextet (a label I don’t decry at all), meth., I Love You is a significant improvement upon the group’s six-minute prototype debut last year, The Children Are Watching, and is one of the year’s most interesting so far for its unique combinations of sounds. Somewhere in the middle of Converge, Full of Hell, and late-career Altar of Plagues, I Love You is a menacing, noisy, and jolting experience for the thirteen minutes it lasts, and it’s a type of project I’ve been on the hunt for for awhile. Mixing the relentless, deathly nihilism of Full of Hell and the volatile energy of Converge, meth. puts together a short project that doesn’t simply assault the will to care about life, but it picks it back up from the ground after it’s knocked it down to further torture it.
Despite its shortness, I Love You is more substantive and denser than many projects this year multiple times longer than it, experimentally integrating harsh industrial noise and dark ambient influences into its chaotic mix, mostly with overwhelming success.
With five rather short (two-and-a-half to three minutes) tracks, the album makes its ominous and frightening impressions quickly and efficiently. The first track erupts from an eerie reverberated guitar entry into a furious blackened industrial storm of screamed vocals and crushing distorted black metal guitar layering arranged in familiar hardcore patterns. “Shuttering Impulse” follows with dissonant clean harmonies and wailing high-end guitar distortion that explodes in jarring, unpredictable bursts until its disoriented ending of sustained guitar feedback that only further contributes to the harshness of the track. The more darkly ambient “Prayer in Shallow Water” segues with haunting nihilism into the album’s fourth track, the highly experimental and sporadic black metal battery, “Ascend and Dispose”, the frightening background vocals/noise of which exponentiate its madness. The final track ups the industrial noise by a notable order of magnitude as a fittingly wild conclusion to the short album.
Certainly one of the more interesting releases I’ve heard this year, and one of the better stabs at noisy, violent, blackened industrial metal with a Converge-esque knack for wrangling sonic chaos, I Love You is an effort that is at least worth a try even if only to experience its novelty. While I have surely been enjoying the shit out of this album, I do hope the band continue to expand upon what they’ve accomplished here and continue to push metal’s boundaries. I definitely look forward to what the future holds for them.
This is where to find them:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Image
Even though it had been in on their Bandcamp page since 2016, I was glad the more official release of Zeal & Ardor’s debut album,  Devil Is Fine , last year gave me the opportunity to talk about it (since I started this blog in 2017). Originally one of multiple solo music projects by creative eccentric Manuel Gagneux, inspired by a comical suggestion on 4Chan, Gagneux recruited ful-time members to form a complete performing band after the huge wave  Devil Is Fine  made, and I have been so pleased to see this project grow in its short time from the enthusiasm much of the metal community has shown for such an unorthodox artist. Devil Is Fine  was a short, but wildly diverse album (only 25 minutes) that blended the soulful blues of slave spirituals and other American folk with varyingly atmospheric black metal, a idea that could have gone terribly that fortunately went terrifically. While I loved  Devil Is Fine  and had it as one of my top top favorit...
Read more

Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Image
I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album. Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade,  Grand Guignol Orchestra  being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and ...
Read more

Saor - Forgotten Paths

Image
Just as the new year delivered a new pair of Panopticon songs, so it gave us a new album from Andy Marshall’s Saor, a similarly naturalistic and folky solo project blending Scottish, rather than Appalachian, folk music with the transcendence of ambient black metal. In the visceral energy of this typically dark music form, Marshall finds strength and fortitude in the connection he makes with it to the natural world. Despite Marshall’s tendency toward sprawling compositions, their presentation of only three of them with one short outro cut to round them off clocks  Forgotten Paths  in at just over thrity-eight minutes. And in those thirty-eight minutes, Marshall really doesn’t do much more than channel the basic essence of his project. The opening title song jumps into the rushing swells of blast beats and black metal tremolo picking turned inside out to channel the silent emphatic resilience of the natural world itself portrayed so romantically in the song’s lyrics, soon e...
Read more