By day, Thad Calabrese and Justin Foley are mild-mannered, bespectacled working stiffs in New York, toiling away on PowerPoint presentations and diaper changes. One trip inside the telephone booth, though, and this unassuming duo transforms into one of the most impressive rising metal acts of the year. Formed in 1997, the Austerity Program have taken 10 years to spawn their full-length debut, and the wait's worth it. Despite the Program's tame background, Black Madonna mercilessly fires one skull-crushing riff after another, reinforced by beats so mosh-worthy you'll want to buy their drum machine a beer.
Some metal diehards will inevitably levy charges of amateurism or phoniness against these guys, bitter that advanced equipment and recording technology permits the making of an album like Black Madonna without a lifetime of nosebleeds and Satan worship under one's belt. True, Black Madonna's riffs favor the mathematically precise over the technically dazzling, and the drum machine's inhumane drum rolls and double-bass sixteenths seemingly mock the limitations of carbon-based percussionists. But these subversions of metal's tenets inject a playful punk ethos in a genre oft-parodied for its, um, austerity.
With a cursory listen, the duo's charisma is hard to detect. Opener "Song 12" (all tracks are systematically numbered) slowly burns over an unfeeling riff not unlike one of Jesu or the Jesus Lizard's metal/shoegaze hybrids, each of its transitions marked by a dramatic vamp or drum fill. However, after closer inspection (and a few viewings of the band's goofy YouTube album promos), Black Madonna hedges its earnestness with the sort of over-the-top metal tropes reserved for violent video game soundtracks and monster truck shows. Sandwiched between the seven minute-plus epics, you'll find brief 70-second explosions like "Song 18", a frenetic, tightly-wound mini-boss theme that acts as an adrenalin shot to the album's heart. On the flipside, there's 15-minute closer "Song 16", a lurching leviathan that takes nearly five minutes to establish its main riff, let alone kickstart a steady programmed beat.
If all this astutely calculated headbangery sounds kinda dorky, Foley's ticked-off caterwauling should provide the fist-clenching fix you've come for. Rather than relying on tried-and-true Cookie Monster affectations, Foley shares a piss-and-vinegar howl with curmudgeon ad infinitum Steve Albini. While not quite as enraged or verbose as Albini, Foley slings tongue-in-cheek venom that nicely meshes with the cataclysmic instruments, setting up the inevitable downfall of his songs' characters. On "Song 17A", he tells an antagonist that they can keep coming around, but "Pretty soon you're gonna have to stop coming around/ 'cause you're dead." On "Song 17B", he briefly appears in the eye of the metal storm, happily lecturing on the effectiveness of poison on a "quiet man" with a cold schadenfreude and bouncy bass backing.
With its uniform distortions and canned percussion parts, Black Madonna doesn't quite have the texture and dynamism of the best metal. Still, considering their limited experience and DIY guidelines, Calabrese and Foley get great mileage out of their shades of gray. The prospect of adding keyboards or a living, breathing drummer to this sturdy drum/bass framework is exciting, especially if these white-collar workers devote their full attention to it. Dudes, please quit your day jobs.
