If you've ever set foot in an art gallery, then you know what it's like when an artist's description of their work turns out to be way more compelling than the work itself. Clearly, the act of creating something distorts the perspective of the person making it, which means that artists can sometimes be the least qualified people to shed light on the things they make.
According to the members of Bloodiest, the Chicago sextet's music is related to metal, but has more in common with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morricone. That sounds enticing on paper, but it's not what you hear on album opener "Mesmerize," a fairly straightahead number built on an insistent riff that manages to borrow from Tool guitarist Adam Jones while leaving out the intangibles that distinguished Jones' playing from the riffmongers of his era. The fact that a band so focused on mood and dynamics would emulate the most superficial and brutish aspects of Jones' playing makes you scratch your head—and also speaks to the pitfalls of playing musical dress-up.
Though they're enthusiastic fans of metal, the members of Bloodiest aren't dyed-in-the-wool metalheads. The group identifies as underground indie/post-rock at heart, which makes sense considering that at various points its membership has included alums from experimental Chicago acts like 90 Day Men, Lustre King, and Russian Circles. Founding guitarists Tony Lazzara and Eric Chaleff played together in Sterling and Follows, and vocalist Bruce Lamont plays sax and howls in the more jaggedly experimental quartet Yakuza. For better or worse, they have little collective experience playing heavy stuff that openly identifies as such.
To be fair, sometimes you get very "authentic" results from people who aren't "natives" to the style they play. In fact, several of metal's most iconic trailblazers never actually listened to the stuff much. But as you make your way through Bloodiest, the band’s follow-up to its 2011 debut Descent, it's hard to shake the feeling that Lazzara, Chaleff, and their cohorts handle these riffs with the same combination of fascination and distance that tourists show when they're in the gift shop of a foreign country, where the untrained eye has a hard time spotting the difference between cliché, truth, and the gray area where most cultural hallmarks are actually both.
There are times on Bloodiest where the band does twist otherwise conventional riffs into shapes they wouldn't have assumed in their usual habitat. On "Broken Teeth," for example, one of the guitarists takes the familiar theme from Holst's "Mars" (the same melody you hear at the beginning of Metallica's "Am I Evil" cover), puts it on a cutting board, and dices it up. Later in the same song, Chaleff and Lazzara counterpose another coiling Adam Jones-esque riff against a drum pattern that former 90 Day Men drummer Cayce Key purposely drags so far behind the beat that it makes the whole band sound like it's stuttering. Meanwhile, pianist Nandini Khaund underlays the dense, sludgy wall of sound with elegant chords that hint at what Dixieland jazz might sound like in a cough-syrup induced nightmare. At moments like these, regardless of whether this band falls as close to modern classical, post-rock, or film scores as it would have you believe, it does manage to find itself in art-metal terrain that's still mostly untouched.
When fringe musicians with indie sensibilities dabble in metal, they tend to either put a ponderous spin on it (Liturgy) or a campy one (Dave Pajo's one-off group Dead Child). Bloodiest most definitely leans towards the former, especially during its lengthy stretches of classical-tinged guitar spiked with ethereal chanting. Almost three decades since John Zorn compared Napalm Death to free jazz, the genre still has a way of luring dilettantes who can't resist what they perceive as its lowbrow/junk-culture temptations. Never mind that, musically speaking, Zorn's comparison was totally fair; it still smacked of unintended snobbery.
But Bloodiest doesn't come off as the product of well-intentioned but privileged slumming. After all, this band is from Chicago, where musicians inclined to shuttle between various genres have long felt free to do so. Most of the members of Bloodiest have roots in bands that operate or operated at the outskirts of metal anyway. With this album, they stake their claim to a musical inheritance left behind by predecessors who flouted boundaries and bastardized conventional notions of heaviness. Fittingly, they make the best of that inheritance by striking out on their own.
