meth.
Photo Cred 📷 : @vanessaivaladez
What do you do with shame? Internalise it? Have it live in you and metastasise, become a cancer of self-loathing that feeds on low self esteem and ultimately consumes you? Or do you take ownership of it, hold yourself accountable for your "shameful" actions, exercise self-love and self-forgiveness, and take control, reverse the cancer, as it were? Or, do you outright live in it, dive headfirst into the deep end, and in a different shade of control, sublimate its destructiveness into an act of creation that you release into the world, so that others can feel the depth of your shame, perhaps see a reflection of their own, experience catharsis, and be inspired to find a way out of the shadows and into the light.
You'd be forgiven for wondering what all that armchair psychobabble preamble is doing kicking off an album review, but bear with me, as we're talking about the new LP by Chicago multi-metal-sub-genre straddling experimental heavy band, meth., whose vocalist and lyricist, Seb Alvarez has been bedfellows with shame evidently for some considerable time and the result, 5 years after the band's last LP, 2019's 'Mother of Red Light', is an album bearing that feeling's name in ALL CAPS. It's an album that in its monolithic heaviness, uncompromisingly dread-filled and discomfiting atmosphere, and the brutal self-evisceration expressed in its lyrics, earns its portentous title with blood, tears and metaphysical terror.
A band that started as a grind and emoviolence influenced chaotic hardcore act, has over time evolved into a many-headed cerberus of noise, sludge, post-metal and metallic hardcore, seemingly hellbent on creating the most nerve-shredding, uncomfortable experience imaginable whilst still being discernibly listenable and often thrilling. With that in mind, album opener, ‘Doubt’ functions as a litmus test for the listener: it’s a riff-free exercise in rhythmic bashing, the sound of a lumbering giant chasing you down a tightening corridor, all whilst Seb Alvarez trades screams and growls pulled from the bile-soaked depths of his being about having no sense of self. It’s anti-music, a gauntlet thrown down: get through this and you might enjoy what meth. have in store for you; find yourself turned off by its sheer ugliness, its seeming unmusicality, its inexorable beat like the deafening sound of death’s clock ticking down, and you should probably take it as a sign that you might be a bit too faint-hearted for SHAME.
Across the album’s seven tracks, meth. never let up the intensity; this is dissonant, confrontational music that captures and reflects the emotional and mental turmoil that Seb Alvarez went through whilst grappling with addiction, undiagnosed bi-polar disorder and the consequences of his own resultant problematic behaviour. Whether it’s the exhausting blast beats that drag ‘Compulsion’ across the floor, the nausea-inducing waves of guitar squall on ‘Blush’ or the mathy, anxiety-inducing chaos that opens ‘Cruelty,’ the aim at all times seems to be to disorientate, to discomfort, to disturb. SHAME is in that sense, a visceral portrait of one man’s extreme sense of alienation from self, of disgust at his thoughts and actions, all soundtracked by intricately sound-designed aural hellscapes, in which songs seems to be in the process of pulling themselves apart as they are being performed.
Amongst all of these challenging compositions, however, are truly thrilling moments. The album’s title track sees Alvarez embody and give voice to shame itself, trading clean shouted vocals with gut-wrenching roars. The band locks into a queasy noise-rock groove, creepy synths float overhead, and the listener is left positively reeling. Closer, ‘Blackmail,’ shape-shifts over its 8 minute runtime, pummeling us with discordant chugs and elaborate drumfills, bringing us to the verge of a panic attack with perpetually rising guitar notes, tightening like a noose, slowing down then speeding up at the apparent whim of jumbled, intrusive thoughts. It’s bewildering, exhausting, but undeniably effective, with the build to the final crescendo being particularly wrenching in its unbearable tension. However, above and beyond everything else on SHAME, the highlight is the towering track at the centre of the tracklisting, ‘Give In.’ Immediately differentiating itself from the rest of the album with its idiosyncratic drum sound and pattern, and the guitar that buzzes from channel to channel like a swarm of robotic bees, ‘Give In’ injects the noise-rock and grindy industrial post-metal aesthetic with a bit of modern era Swans style post-rock. “It’s growing inside” is the repeated refrain whilst the band conjures up a perfect storm of oppressive sound that somehow manages to be as emotionally rousing as the lyrics are a terrifying portrayal of giving into one’s worst impulses.
With SHAME, Alvarez and his bandmates Zack Farrar, Michael McDonald, Nathan Spainhower, and Andrew Smith have peered into the recesses of the human psyche, have rifled through the bloody viscera of our darkest thoughts and feelings and sublimated self-destructiveness into an an act of brave and often brilliant creation. It’s something to be proud of, something to offset a little bit of that shame.
Purchase and listen to SHAME here: meth.
Writer : @stopcallingthemscreamo
Editor : @just_reidz
02/04/24
