Stephen Brodsky has never gotten his full due as the driving force behind 1998’s Until Your Heart Stops and 2000’s Jupiter—two entirely disparate masterpieces by his best-known band, Cave In. By turns technically punishing and spaciously anthemic, that pair of records still casts a shadow over his latest project, Mutoid Man. With Brodsky on vocals and guitar—along with Converge drummer Ben Koller (who in the '00s also briefly played with Cave In) and bassist Nick Cageao—Mutoid Man released a debut EP in 2013 titled Helium Head that combined every element on Brodsky’s periodic table: hooks, mathy precision, metallic hardcore fury, and a lust for classic-rock extravagance.
That hasn’t changed on Bleeder, Mutoid Man’s first full-length. If anything those elements have become more pronounced, fighting each other in a war for supremacy that ends in a clench-jawed détente. The tension on tracks like "Sweet Ivy" and "Deadlock" is delicious; Brodsky’s needling riffs and liquid runs pit themselves against his alternately melodic and murderous vocals. Brodsky is his generation’s unheralded master of clean/scream singing, and that Cave In dynamic of old rears its head on "1000 Mile Stare" and "Dread Dreams", both of which recapture the magic of a dynamic that’s become a cliché since Brodsky helped pioneer it in the '90s: drawing you in with sugary, sensitive tunefulness before baring fangs and ripping out throats.
Bleeder’s greatest strength, though, is in its wholehearted embrace of both numbskull hard rock and cerebral progressive metal, at a time when the two approaches have become almost mutually exclusive in heavy music. The album’s title track—which, at six minutes, is twice as long as any other song on the filler-free disc—simmers, lunges, and edges toward the dissonantly psychedelic, even as it throws off a chunky post-hardcore vibe. Like Red-era King Crimson after botched brain surgery, or the Mars Volta after the miraculous intervention of an impeccable editor, Mutoid Man merges highbrow fretboard architecture with immediacy, punch, and a merciless severity.
So what is Brodsky singing about on Bleeder? A bunch of random cool-sounding stuff, apparently, without much concern for anything beyond how the syllables sound when pushed, pulled, or dragged past his tonsils. For someone who once labored manically over every note, blip, lick, texture, and phoneme—Cave In’s 14-minute prog-core magnum opus "Controlled Mayhem Then Erupts" being a prime example—Brodsky is cutting loose and letting it all hang out on Bleeder. At least as much as he might be able to allow himself to do that, considering his virtuosity as both an instrumentalist and a songsmith. Mutoid Man may not be the resurrection of Cave In’s on-again-off-again majesty, but it savagely boils down Brodsky’s brainy ambition to a primal scream.
