domvan

Shut up about the garbage disposal vocals, let’s ask the real questions: what if a tech death band actually remembered to write riffs? What if a drummer could find a groove in any feel? What if an album of long, meandering songs only got better as it progressed? What if the gutturals are actually cool, huh? At least that way you definitely can’t catch the lyrics. I love precisely two tech death records and this is most definitely one of them.

To think if this had been their first release. As the story goes, it sat dormant, rough copies spreading until a proper release in ‘09. By the time we got My Love, the band had moved onto the broader conceptual horizons that would make up most of their body of work, but this is the band at their most Clear and Focused. This is a band that fuckin’ plays the shit out of some songs, the same feeling they revived with The Pleaser (an album which would also include the s/t’s boisterous, pure classic rock closing track). I would never describe it as simple, though, and much less concise. Spiers’ haunting growl here is mildly cavernous as opposed… More

The sonic equivalent to a specific kind of road trip one takes in their 20s: starts off strong, laughs, joy, everyone’s a little too boisterous, as the trip continues, the fun gets more bleak, the drinks start to choke back with less ease, the sweat begins to build. You feel sticky, tired, angry, sad, nothing. As the long drive home finally starts, none of you wanna talk about the trip ever again, some of you may no longer be friends, and yet this die is cast, you’re set on this new path for the rest of your life. And then you gotta wake up and go to work the next day. That’s life!