a review of an album by one of my favorite bands

Twenty years after its debut, City of Caterpillar released its sophomore album

City of Caterpillar's self-titled debut is one of my all-time favorite albums. Twenty years later, the band released its follow-up, Mystic Sisters.

In 2002, the band was discovering something new. In 2022, it was recovering something old.

"Thought Drunk" starts us off with spacey reverb-drenched guitars behind a menacing bass while tom drums conjure something primal, like war drums just over the hill. A chant falls in with the momentum. The vocal grows manic until singer-guitarist Brandon Evans cuts it off, spitting, "Heads sunk, thought drunk / I'm sick of singing fears / I'm sick of singing fears / I'm sick of losing years / I'm sick to fucking tears." I've always liked Evans's time and phrasing. Then the band stresses the struts with a four-minute noise-rock playout.

So many great debuts are marred by poor sound quality. City of Caterpillar's was. But Mystic Sisters sounds much better.
 

The band releases some tension with "Paranormaladies." Rocking, seesawing riffs impel vocals that somehow sound brash and paranoid: "There's something here / I asked for a sign / Flipped the page, saw old words I scribbled down from my mind—a prior time, with different intentions—they read, 'We'll be waiting for you, best believe that.'"

With the album's release, Evans said, "The band is always focused on mood ... To me, that's the most important thing. I don't really want people dissecting what we're trying to say, because it's not really about us. It never has been. What we cared about 20 years ago was innocent, raw emotion, and that's what we care about now."

The title track builds gradually. Soft, ghostly guitars and a few low-end piano notes haunt. At 1:35, a guitar theme develops. By the three-minute mark, it sounds like an Ennio Morricone hook. At 3:40, this cinematic song breaks from the theme, shifts key, and then builds to a crescendo. Urgency and tension grip tight at 5:10 until a brief reprieve at six minutes. Then the band jumps back in for the coda—

My birth, my death, my ancestors, my brothers, my wife,

My children in the light, mothers birthing this life,

My sisters who have no say

There's mystics in the air,

There's mystics in the air, there's mystics in the...

They're everywhere, everywhere

The guitar drips tension with choice notes softened by reverb to open the album's eighth and final track, "Ascension Theft ... (Gnawing of the Bottom-Feeders)." The notes begin to pool with feedback and noise, then spill as the mood intensifies with the spine-stiffening bass. Then meaty bass notes colossus-walk over hills and through valleys, maintaining perfect control. At 3:30, the song takes off and then triumphs with a bitter, defiant vocal—

Feed your face until it bleeds

For the rest of us it's fight or flight

Spiraling through the thievery

Pockets full of puddled blood

For the rest of us it'll be just fine

Spiraling through the thievery 

Mystic Sisters was released September 30, 2022, on Relapse Records. The band picks up where it left off, building worlds to journey through. It happened the way almost all late-career follow-up albums do: the band reunited for some shows and ended up recording. Is it as good as it was the first time?

Is it ever?

Note:

- A lot of great post-hardcore came out of Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1990s through the 2000s. In addition to City of Caterpillar, the scene produced bands like Pg. 99 (or pageninetynine), Darkest Hour, Enemy Soil, and, later, Majority Rule, Malady, and Pygmy Lush.

- I thought I published this on here 18 months ago.