"I can't believe my heart": Tim Midgett offers that thought in the middle of "Human Out of Me", the sixth track from Bottomless Pit's debut album, Hammer of the Gods. Ideally, this album wouldn't even exist. If anything, some of these songs, or the seeds of these songs, would have ended up on another Silkworm record-- what would be their 10th full-length. It would be an album full of Andy Cohen's Neil-Young-as-post-punk guitar heroics, and Midgett's thick but nimble bass plucking, with Michael Dahlquist flailing away at what sounded like the biggest drum kit in the universe. Instead, the woman whose vehicular suicide attempt claimed the life of Dahlquist and two others has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, and while Silkworm's abrupt ending is obviously inconsequential in light of these events, it doesn't make the band's demise any less disappointing. Thankfully for fans, Cohen and Midgett are still making music together, and Hammer of the Gods is as fine a debut as folks could hope for.
Hammer of the Gods is a solemn affair, both in sound and spirit. It's arguably the prettiest record either Midgett or Cohen has been associated with, but it's a prettiness that comes with a mournful pallor. New drummer Chris Manfrin, who had a tenure in Seam, may have fashioned a link between that group's shimmering torpor and the angles Bottomless Pit chooses to measure out over the course of eight songs. Just as likely, the distance the songwriting duo attempts to establish between their new endeavor and previous works extends beyond just picking a new band name and some new bandmates (Manfrin, bassist Brian Orchard). Cohen's three contributions aren't dissimilar from what he offered in Silkworm. But where his lyrical fondness for hard luck and harder knocks was usually abetted by furious and frequent cone-shredding guitar solos (both on his and Midgett's songs), Cohen shows restraint on this record. He only cuts loose on his tracks, and only in brief spurts, making those moments of distortion (especially on the war-torn "Greenery") all the more bracing.
Midgett, on the other hand, forgoes any sort of storytelling pretense in his songs, choosing instead to simply come clean with what he's feeling. The lyric quoted at the start of this review is a fitting summary of what drives his five tracks-- trying to come to grips with a powerful and terrible event, and how such a thing can change you. It's there in the album's lead-off track (fittingly called "The Cardinal Movements"), when he wonders about "[getting] it in your mind to live again." It's there in the few lyrics found in "Leave the Light On"-- "someday you'll wake up." It's especially present on "Human Out of Me", an awkward yet proud tribute to an unnamed person that honors without succumbing to treacly sentiment ("you were a king when you knew what you were worth"; "you helped teach me how to talk/ Showed me how to work a room"). I won't attempt to assert that Midgett means the song to be explicitly about what Michael Dahlquist meant to him, but it would be a fitting tribute if it were the case. In fact, the entire album could be seen as a tribute to both Dahlquist's memory and Silkworm's legacy-- a bittersweet yet hopeful remembrance of fond memories, and the hope of more such moments in the future.
