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.

a G1N exercise

Last night's rain fell into jarred monkey brains. This morning's flowering hands accelerate the mind and the grieving process. 

The robot and the broken nucleus of his battery element cure can demonstrate anger physically—its signals render you mentally unwell and unfit to talk, incapable of articulating thoughts. Your mouth fills with treachery. 

a positive review of a technical death metal album

The band Pyrrhon began to drift apart during covid. Then they did something about it.

These songs will make you beg for just one moment of melody—anything to get a little oil into this gear-grinding machine.

But the grind is the theme of "Exhaust," the new album from NYC-based technical death metal band Pyrrhon.

If you feel burned out, Pyrrhon is right there with you. Vocalist Doug Moore says, "It's about the experience of being pushed beyond your ability to sustain things … It's a sense of constantly juggling things and never having a handle on them. That feeling became a big part of this record and the imagery."

"Exhaust" is us in this fucking cyclone of culture. The music channels the onslaught of content, the warping of technologies and time, and our politics of destruction.

The album itself, however, is a product of renewal.

Pyrrhon had just released its fourth album when covid hit. After 10 years of touring and crafting crazy-ass music, spending time apart became normal.

The guys began to worry about their partnership.

So they jump-started their band by gathering in May 2023 at a rural northeastern Pennsylvania cabin and taking mushrooms. Says vocalist Doug Moore: "We hadn't spent that much time together, and it felt like we were able to rediscover who we are and feel the energy of the collaboration."

Thematically the album may be about exhaustion, but the collaboration brought renewal.

Album opener "Not Going to Mars" bombards the wasteland of your attention span. The track is an aggressively chaotic work of rapid-fire snare drumming, dissonant guitar pull-offs, multi-personality vocals, and frequent part changes. It's a shock to the system. So goes the album.

Once I started wrapping my brain around the sound, the drums stood out. I noticed on "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce" how the bass guitar grinds with the drums. The syncopation, the precise, rapid execution and unity of the drums and bass are really something. The music represents a lot of talent and practice.

The album's first steady beat comes on "Strange Pains." Two songs stick out for me, and this is one. I can just imagine how this must hit live.

My other favorite is "Stress Fractures"—a song of sheer wall-climbing madness. The riff spirals up the fretboard as the bass pulls the rug and leaves the vocals gasping. This song exemplifies that "experience of being pushed beyond your ability to sustain things … of constantly juggling things and never having a handle on them."

Pyrrhon brings the creativity and sound of the previous four albums. "Exhaust" might even have a wider palette than 2020's "Abscess Time."

Songs like "Out of Gas" and "Last Gasp" slow the tempo. "Out of Gas" is a concussed brain-bleeder featuring a modulated bass effect, some silly razz-matazz drumming, and a spoken, taunting vocal. Notes ring out on "Last Gasp" and create a scary space that fills with exaggerated spoken vocals that ramble on until overcome by caterwauling guitars.

"Exhaust" suits the moment and a state of mind. Moore says, "We've been through a time of great uncertainty. I tend to get into my head about this stuff."