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.

(posts) scenes from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley

about waiting at the gate

The pilot pulled us up to our gate at Reagan. The old couple in the row in front of me immediately stood up. Husband had the aisle seat; wife had the middle. Deplaning is a slow process. One by one, starting in the front, the passengers stand up, gather themselves, step into the aisle, open the overhead bin, pull down luggage, check themselves one last time, and then head for the exit. So the old couple in row 14 waited.

The wife had to hunch over, as all middle-seat passengers do when they stand up. The husband, in the aisle now, stretched. And he shifted, readying himself, sort of, as if he was deplaning imminently. But the Southwest deplaning process proceeded as always: indifferently. The old husband lifted his hand to his wife's shoulder and made a rubbing motion. Then he gave her two slaps on the back as he would the Pontiac after a successful road trip. The slaps said, "You made it, and I respect that." She held steady, elbows propped on the headrest in front of her, and faithfully absorbed the wordless encouragement her husband offered. Welcome to Washington, D.C., and thank you for flying Southwest.

something about "Potomac Landings" by Paul Wilstach

Paul Wilstach shares with us the life of the the lands pinning in the Potomac River. The encyclopedic Potomac Landings is written with care and traces of affection. Much of national importance in America is rooted in the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area (also known as the DMV) along the river. Bits that I found particularly interesting include how many wealthy people settled the area, the plantations, the way children of rich men established estates near each other, and the way those estates became counties.

Covering little bits of everything, Wilstach gives us a book to leaf through. He occasionally indulges in details about, for example, oil lamps. But the bulk of the text traces plantation and estate operations, well-heeled families, social conventions, the landscape, agriculture, architecture, and legal developments.
 
I especially enjoyed stumbling upon brief passages in which the author reveals his talent for literary writing. For example:

So, in brief, civilization came to the Potomac, seated itself at the river's mouth, and began its slow sweep up the shores from point to point, and from creek to creek. It came upward like the tide whose ebb and flow had for ages been as the river's respiration and life. If however, the flow of this tide was slow as centuries, its ebb was eventually just as inevitable as the ebb that twice daily perpetually bares the sandy beaches and the landing piles along its way.

Notes:
-Potomac Landings was published in 1920. I read a 1937 edition.
-The book is somewhat Maryland-centric.