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.
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."
Richard Yates based the fictional Dorset Academy on a school he attended, Avon Old Farms School, and 15-year-old William Grove is Yates's stand-in. Dorset, like Avon, is not an elite school.
Grove struggles in every class except English. His talent for writing eventually leads to a role as editor-in-chief of the school paper. Through work, he builds confidence and gains purpose. He also earns some respect and makes some complicated but meaningful friendships.
Yates includes personal notes in a foreword and afterword. He writes in the afterword that his time at Avon "taught me the rudiments of my trade." He also mentions his and his father's skepticism of the school and each other:
And is there no further good to be said of the school, or of my time in it? Or of me?
I will probably always ask my father such questions in the privacy of my heart, seeking his love as I failed and failed to seek it when it mattered; but all that—as he used to suggest on being pressed to sing "Danny Boy," taking a backward step, making a little negative wave of the hand, smiling and frowning at the same time—all that is in the past.
Notes:
A Good School was published in 1978.
See my other posts about Yates: something about “Revolutionary Road” by Richard Yates, something about Richard Yates, and something about Richard Yates’s “Liars in Love.”
