I saw Dark Meat play a small club in Washington D.C. shortly after the release of their debut album, Universal Indians. The Athens collective, whose members numbered well into double digits, couldn't all fit on the tiny corner stage, so a guitarist and a horn player had to play from the audience. Decked out in warpaint and throwing handfuls of confetti like grenades, they actually outnumbered the crowd, which seemed at the time both sad and somehow impressive. Bandleader Jim McHugh has a vision, and while it may not be logistically or financially feasible, he never leaves that fifth tambourine player at home.
For their second album, Truce Opium, Dark Meat have shed a few members-- they're back down into the single digits-- but they actually manage to expand their sound. Where once they mixed the most avant of jazz influences with the Stonesiest of classic rock, now the band blends in, well, pretty much everything imaginable: metal drone, prog effects, throat singing, Southern folk, even granola-crusted jamband. Predictably, Truce Opium bursts at the seams with ideas: A fife rises out of the din on opener "The Faint Smell of Moss" to give the percussive riffs more emphasis. On "Future Galaxies", the horns swell and subside hypnotically, recalling the Doppler Effect keyboards on Kraftwerk's "Autobahn", and closer "Song of the New Year" is a 12-minute sing-along dirge that slowly accrues instruments even as it threatens to fall apart.
That crammed conceptuality is an essential part of Dark Meat's appeal, but those densely packed ideas don't seem to be arranged as exactingly or as excitingly as they were on Universal Indians, which is another way of saying the new songs aren't as strong. By embedding free-form noise into traditional song shapes, they made classic rock sound exotic and made the conceptual sound earthily accessible. But on Truce Opium, the songs are almost carelessly loose, with no recognizable elements to tether their jamming or shape their noise. "When the Shelter Came" twists and tangles itself melodically, initially coming across as anthemic before eventually wandering off into an extended horn break and then collapsing. It sounds unfinished; the shelter never comes.
Still, the novelty of such an unwieldy lineup translates into a distinctively dense sound, so that even when Truce Opium feels unmoored and aimless, the sheer force of Dark Meat comes through clearly, as on "The Faint Smell of Moss" and the short, spastic "Yonderin'", two of the most lucid songs here. Ironically, the best track may be one of the longest: After a rambling intro, the 10-minute "No One Was There" breaks down into an extended drum-rooted jam punctuated by an ascending theme that makes an effective hook for 10 minutes. Dark Meat still play it as loudly as possible, which compensates for so many shortcomings.
