BOTCH: AMERICAN NERVOSO (1998)
1) Hutton's Great Heat Engine;
2) John Woo; 3) Dali's Praying Mantis; 4) Dead For A Minute; 5) Oma; 6) Thank
God For Worker Bees; 7) Rejection Spoken Softly; 8) Spitting Black; 9) Hives.
As a rule, the Tacoma/Seattle area is not
usually associated with technically prodigious metal bands — the grunge crowds
is where it's at, unless you start digging a little deeper, and then, quite
early on in the process, you discover oddities like Botch, a band whose
commercial career only lasted a couple of years and who were allegedly shunned
by the community at the time, yet came to be remembered with a certain amount
of reverence over the years. Then again, serves them just right for calling
themselves «Botch». I mean, who wants to pay attention to something called
«Botch»? At least «Stupid Assholes» would have sounded enticing.
In any case, the band was a tight, crunchy
four-piece — guitar, bass, drums (the drummer also played a bit of piano when
the «unpredictability monitor» flashed red), and vocals. Vocalist Dave Verellen
is actually the weakest link: consistent with the basic genre requirements of
«metalcore», he does little other than scream his lungs off throughout, and, as
usual, any possible excitement connected with this wears off after the second
minute, so, honestly, I'd much rather listen to this with the vocals erased, as
they mostly just detract from the complexity of the music. Or, at best, just
keep them in a few crucial moments where a well-placed scream can emphasize the
effect of some sudden powerful musical blast.
Fortunately, I have listened to so many of
these screaming bands over the years that my ears have become largely desensitized
to such vocals — a mistake, perhaps, since the vocals are supposed to be a significant part of the statement, but with a
band like Botch, the stuff that the three instrumentalists are doing with
their instruments is just so much more intriguing than Verellen's one single
trick that I cannot imagine any serious listener wasting nerve channels on that instead of digging all the cool riffs,
tricky time signatures, and crazyass solos. Unless you're heading straight for
the mosh pit, but then why Botch in the first place? Anthrax will do the job
nicely.
Encyclopaedias will tell you that Botch were
one of the founding fathers of «mathcore», and, indeed, I am not familiar with
a lot of metal bands before them who would so explicitly use «metal language»
to put together song structures of such bewildering complexity and diversity.
Because of that language, it all sounds the same, but it really isn't — each
song goes through a whole pack of different melodies and rhythms, as the
instrumental trio attempts to become a sort of «metal Cream», amazing the world
with their freedom flight and faultless technique. On second thought, though,
the allegory is not entirely right — Cream improvisations often, if not always,
featured the players challenging each other, whereas here everything is tightly
pre-coordinated, and all three players are always working towards one common
goal.
The monotonousness of the music is a serious
flaw: apart from maybe one or two special moments, such as the out-of-place
funeral-march piano coda to ʽOmaʼ, it's all brutal metallic riffage, supported
by massive percussion attacks. For this reason, unless you eat, drink, piss,
and shit metal, American Nervoso is
best taken in short, merciful dosages to appreciate its concept of «total
creative freedom within a rigidly restricted genre formula». The songs
themselves do not pretend to be shapeless avantgarde experimental pieces — they
are, indeed, songs, often without
choruses, but with introductions, verses, bridges, internal development, codas,
the works. However, if your intro is in one time signature, your verse is in a
different one, and your bridge dispenses with rhythm altogether, this
certainly creates a disorienting effect. It is not necessarily good: the riffs are not always
meaningful, and the rapid variation dissipates the Sabbath-created magic of
heavy metal — you gotta give that promising groove some valuable time to sink
in, otherwise it's going to be just a juggling lights show. But after a while,
once your eyes and ears get adjusted to the razzle-dazzle, it begins to work.
The overall mood
of the album is, of course, chaotic-apocalyptic: "These mirrors break /
And now we've lost everything / Pieces collect about me / Despite my
efforts", Verellen bellows out on ʽDead For A Minuteʼ, except you cannot
discern these words without a lyrics sheet — but you can certainly discern the
same crazy-panicky feel that does characterize quite a few of their distantly
related brethren from the Seattle area, except that Botch exercise strict
military discipline, and their chaotic panic is precisely orchestrated — not
coincidentally, perhaps, the second song here bears the name of ʽJohn Wooʼ, as
some of its rhythmic pulses would make an awesome soundtrack to a martial arts
movie. Elsewhere, song titles like ʽDali's Praying Mantisʼ or ʽThank God For
Worker Beesʼ show that, conceptually, these guys are much more influenced by
avant-jazz people than the hardcore metal crowds (and, just for the record, it
is said that they actually played Destiny's Child songs during warm-up before
their shows — no wonder they weren't too loved back in ol' Washington State!).
On the whole, American Nervoso is not a great album. Dissecting each of its
compositions from a purely musicological stance may be a fun way to kill time,
and its total may also be worth more than the sum of its parts — because, after
all, most of its songs do sound the same — yet much of the time you do get the
feeling that it is, rudely speaking, too complex for its own good, and topping
that complexity off with ridiculous screamfests is hardly a saving grace. But
for a simple bunch of Tacoma kids this is a major
achievement, one of those records that can be respected just by looking at what
they managed to have done without necessarily «getting» it. Frankly speaking,
there are very few heavy metal records that I «love» anyway, but quite a few
that command my respect, and Botch's debut does belong in that category. Thumbs up.
"this wears off after the second minute"
ReplyDeleteMy respect. It wears me off after the second second. I tried to listen to Oma, but quickly jumped to the coda. It is a bit similar to Golden Earring's Candy's Going Bad, except that that song has a first class and the coda contains way more musical ideas.
first class riff.
DeleteI don't get bands like this. Why deliberately ruin music with idiotic vocals that make you a laughing stock? All the genre trappings of metal developed in the late 80's and 90's seem entirely designed to entice despairing youngsters into developing unhealthy obsessions with bad music, much like how bad fantasy novels seeks to replace all other literature until you can't enjoy anything anymore unless it has dragon or robot thematics. There is more imagination in a good Beatles song than in the entire metal genre to be honest.
ReplyDeleteI occasionally do listen to these bands that you're reviewing and you're painfully noticing minor nuances and trying to feign interest and respect for songs that /all sound the same/ and are all nearly equally bad, or at least not good enough to reward further listening. Really, I'm sorry for the elitism, but metal music is what I think of when people talk of the Death of Art and such things. This is a vicious cycle: let metal fans form metal bands to create tributes to past metal music. Even without the forces of commercialization, these bands have all mentally enslaved themselves to metal trappings and have become creatively dead. I've known religions less dogmatic.
Metalcore is what's shit, not metal. Listen to Opeth, Isis, and Tool to get an idea of what actual metal was developing around this time. (The albums Blackwater Park, Panopticon, and Lateralus respectively, if you want specifics. Yeah, they're a couple years later, sue me.)
Delete