Unless you’re a devotee of the Seattle heavy rock/light metal trio Big Business, you’ve probably never heard of Gold Metal Records, the label behind the release of their excellent fourth album Battlefields Forever. The record, after all, is GM003, or the imprint’s third title. It follows only two short Big Business releases, 2011’s four-song Quadruple Single and a subsequent seven-inch single. But last October, with a mock press release signed by Gold Metal “corporate controller” Richard Smutley and a staged press conference submitted to YouTube, Big Business revealed that they’d issue Battlefields Forever on Halloween on their own Gold Metal Records in a variety of formats—that is, by themselves, without the support of a third or even second party. They’d stream and sell it through their website.
Both announcements were as funny as intended, with jokes about Mötley Crüe drumming and the ghost of “Jeff Goldbloom.” Behind the jocularity, though, there was a fundamental bummer: If Big Business didn’t want to go hunting labels or, in industry parlance, “shopping themselves around,” they would have to release Battlefields Forever themselves. Their label for their entire career, Hydra Head, announced its closure almost exactly a year earlier, citing both an “imbalance between creative ideals and financial realities” and an asymptotic slide of music sales as primary factors. Suddenly, the force that had done the heavy lifting behind Big Business’s promotion—the mailings and the CD-R’s, the one-sheets and the stuffed envelopes—had fallen, with the responsibility now landed at the feet of the band.
In retrospect, that has not gone well. A quick Google search confirms that drummer Coady Willis, bassist Jared Warren, and new guitarist Scott Martin’s are better at making records than marketing them. Though Battlefields Forever was released nearly four months ago, All Music has yet to list it, much less rate it. Spin has never mentioned it. The album made nearly no year-end lists, despite being out since Halloween. And after the annual flip of the calendar, Pitchfork is finally reviewing it. For a platform that seems to hold almost everything, the internet has nearly made Battlefields Forever seem like a phantom, a rumor that Big Business is still busy.
That disappearance is especially unfortunate considering that Battlefields Forever is as likable and unpredictable as anything they’ve ever done. Willis and Warren have never zigged and zagged stylistically like the Melvins, the other duo they’ve augmented off and on for the last six years, but there’s a patient and patent idiosyncrasy to their sound. No matter how familiar their oversized riffs or refrains first seem, they twist and turn in unexpected ways. On Battlefields Forever, for instance, Martin’s guitar delivers surprising accents and counterpoints. “Heavy Shoes” emerges from a slow bleed of amplifier hum, drums, and voices sprinting suddenly into vivid crisscross patterns. Warren’s low notes are the anchor, but Martin wraps his thin electric lead around the bass, an ornamental leather braid around a very big wooden bludgeon. The wonderfully weird “Trees” starts to feel like a hypothetical game of three-way ping-pong, with various voices bouncing through the mix only to be chased by the instruments. The band starts and stops, roars and drifts, screams and sings, delighting all along with the structural instability of the song’s basic shape. There’s a coruscating instrumental interlude named “Aurum” and a two-minute ripper called “Our Mutant” that suggests stoner metal accelerated by methamphetamine. And “No Vowels” is something of a Big Business prototype, with a riff so wide you want to fall into it and a chorus so casually perfect that it catches without you paying much mind.
But Big Business save the most monumental track here for he parting epic: “Lonely Lyle” shares the story of a shut-in with no intentions of breaking from his fastidious “hourglass.” It starts quietly, voices creeping over chords that suggest Slint. When the drums arrive, though, the song becomes a surge of drama, turning another silly Big Business story into a wake for its own sad subject. Martin chases their lead, inserting his lines between the bass and the drums like a hypeman. This band has never sounded as tough and as tender. Strangely, it suggests the approach and net effect of Deafheaven’s Sunbather, another not-quite-metal record that employed song volume and length to reinforce the weight of their themes. In 2013, “Lonely Lyle” could have had its deserved share of critical and popular company. But, so far, it hasn’t had that public luxury.
Big Business’ last record, 2009’s Mind the Drift, included a paranoid jam called “I Got It Online”. The guitars felt like the wringing of anxious hands. The lyrics—“Can’t even walk down the street/ Too many creeps”—suggested an agoraphobic sort excommunicating himself from the world with the help of Amazon, ebay or, as it turns out in the case of Battlefields Forever, Bandcamp. The online release and subsequently silent reception of these nine tracks makes me think that maybe the democracy of the online marketplace might not serve everyone so well, particularly mid-level metal bands with a sense of humor so strong that they cannot announce their first LP in four years with a straight face. For a young act, throwing the new tunes on the internet and seeing who bites seems like a dandy strategy; what do you have to lose, really? But Big Business isn’t some young band and, despite Martin’s inclusion, Battlefields Forever isn’t some staggering reinvention of what they’ve been doing for the last decade. It’s just a very good record that seems to have been ignored because it had neither the proper label structure to let people even know it existed and, for shame, because its narrative doesn’t fit into the cycles of buzz. Unless you were a devotee of Big Business before last year, you probably still don’t know Gold Metal Records, or worse still, Battlefields Forever. You can always, at least, get it online.
