More than a decade after releasing 1994's Burn My Eyes, the groove metal group Machine Head, led by ex-Forbidden/Vio-lence guitarist Robb Flynn, won me back with their sixth album, the Grammy-nominated The Blackening. The 2007 effort made it onto my Show No Mercy year-end list and didn't leave my stereo for long stretches. It followed 2003's Through the Ashes of Empires, a solid enough return to form that came on the heels of a couple of misdirected nu/rap-metal duds-- 1999's The Burning Red and 2001's Supercharger. Which is why The Blackening caught a lot of other folks off guard, too. Once someone flirts with Limp Bizkit territory (and then feuds with Fred Durst and friends), it's usually safe to stop paying attention. In that sense, The Blackening was a revelation. I was drawn to its ambitious sprawl and its dark, angry scowls; its impressive scope, melodies, vastness, and unexpected changes. There was no attempt to make it easy: The opener was close to 11 minutes long, the closer not much shorter, and a couple of the tracks went over nine. The sound, too, was huge-- enough so that, at the time, I said the Oakland group was more mainstream than my usual taste. I meant "stadium-sized."
Album seven, Unto the Locust, is just as big as The Blackening, but it feels tighter, more easily digested, and yet somehow pleasingly rougher around the edges. As a whole, I ultimately prefer its predecessor, but Unto the Locust's highs go places only hinted at on the earlier collection. See, for instance, opener, "I Am Hell (Sonata in C#)", an eight-minute, three-movement anthem that starts, somberly, with a mass of a cappella voices, Flynn singing elegantly in Latin about a female arsonist. A few moments later, the band cruises into a violent explosion, Flynn's voice shifting into rawer thrash mode. This is the sort of transition that would be easy to fuck up, but Machine Head pull it off. From there, the seven-song, 50-minute collection slows down for a number of these sort of curve ball intros before breaking open into magisterial head-bangers.
There are curious details worth pointing out-- overlapping guitar and cello, the repeated use of a string quartet, crazy time signatures, a Pink Floyd-style children's choir-- but none of this would matter much if the material weren't strong enough to contain these elements. (Machine Head are still very heavy, they've just done away with their earlier template.) Despite the length of these songs, Unto the Locust is focused, with memorable choruses, expressive riffs, escalating dynamics, and swarming instrumentation. Crunching floor punching shifts easily into acoustic madrigals. Classical moments turn into vintage thrash. The guitar solos are expressive and self-contained but deepen the rest of the track. Standout "Be Still and Know" opens with ultra-technical, dueling double soloing topped only by the track's huge chorus. There, and elsewhere, you get clean vocals messing with and cascading alongside raspy howls. At its best, this music is invigorating, urgent, necessary.
Unto the Locust does fall off a bit toward the end, but that's largely because the first four tracks add up to just under 30 minutes of the most exciting metal you'll hear all year. ("Pearls Before the Swine" is a solid enough thrasher and the anthemic closer "Who We Are" features the first use of kids in a rock context in ages that hasn't made me wince, though we could've done without the nu metal-ish "Darkness Within".) All told, like Master of Puppets-era Metallica, Machine Head are able to intelligently realize their ambition, weaving risky, progressive elements into the mix without forgoing their roots.
