Botch: We Are The Romans

BOTCH: WE ARE THE ROMANS (1999)

1) To Our Friends In The Great White North; 2) Mondrian Was A Liar; 3) Transitions From Persona To Object; 4) Swimming The Channel Vs. Driving The Chunnel; 5) C. Thomas Howell As The "Soul Man"; 6) Saint Matthew Re­turns To The Womb; 7) Frequency Ass Bandit; 8) I Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Terms; 9) Man The Ramparts.

I don't think anyone would guess, just by glancing at these song titles, that the underlying album would be metal. I mean, just how many metal artists out there have references to Piet Mondrian or C. Thomas Howell in their song titles? These ones really look like they'd rather belong on a Frank Zappa record, or at least fit in better with some indie poseur like Sufjan Stevens. It is, in fact, a total pity that such a tremendous title as ʽI Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Termsʼ is completely wasted on three and a half minutes of fairly routine, monotonous metallic riffage and nearly endless head-splitting screaming. Ah well, it was too good to work.

The good news is that Botch's second and final album actually covers more stylistic ground than the first one — and a few of the «artsier» tracks here should actually qualify as some of the finest heavy rock offered to the world at the end of the decade. ʽTransitions From Persona To Objectʼ is the composition that springs to mind first and foremost — starting off with some dazzling poly­rhythms, featuring guitarist Dave Knudson and Tim Latona at their best, it eventually explodes into the stratosphere, as Knudson hits upon a sweet, dry guitar tone and constructs a minimalistic high-pitched solo that is truly mindblowing; later on, as the melody shifts once again and be­comes an angular King Crimson-style trance-inducer, he brews up a few more overdubs that make the guitar(s) sound like a meat-hungry swarm of killer bees for a while. That's a pretty awe­some soundtrack to the process of «transition from persona to object» — "see us conquer all the humans that are left / This is our new home and we're still building", screams Verellen, and we see that the band's rather persistent obsession with the bee imagery (remember ʽThank God For Worker Beesʼ and ʽHivesʼ) still holds on.

A couple of the tracks are not «metal» at all, such as ʽSwimming The Channel Vs. Driving The Chunnelʼ (what could a band from Tacoma know about that contrast, I wonder?) — a slow bluesy shuffle carried forward by low-tuned, scraggly indie-rock guitar, with more of a Sonic Youth in­fluence than any kind of metal flavor, gradually fizzling away into a hazy cloud of electronic hum and hushed feedback. And the epic conclusion, ʽMan The Rampartsʼ, beginning as the most war­like anthem of the album, eventually turns into a sea of industrial bass rumble, then becomes a Gregorian chant of the album title, and then returns to metal for just one brief minute in the cli­mactic coda. But no, this is nothing like Rammstein — Botch have no interest in Teutonic mili­taristic clichés, they have their own equivalent of military brutality.

Even the shorter, more formulaic metal numbers have their surprises. ʽC. Thomas Howellʼ, after an uninteresting minute and a half of bland riffage, is given over to another series of high-pitched guitar overdubs (geez, if only that stupid dick could keep his larynx bolted for just one minute!) that generate a cool psychedelic effect; and in general, I must say that I am impressed by the solos on this album much more than I am by the riffs, which is quite atypical for my metal-listening experience. Whenever Knudson is not teaching his guitar to impersonate a killer bee swarm (which is his preferred trick), he is making it grin, giggle, howl, and go off like an alarm siren, rather than just go off at the usual million notes per minute. Listen to ʽFrequency Ass Banditʼ from about 3:00 to about 3:24 — that's one killer-crescendo solo indeed.

It's not as if the flaws of the record (and the band in general) did not exist, of course — yes, it is still monotonous, yes, the complexity of the riffs is undercut by their inefficiency, and yes, the «singer» should be dragged out into the street and skinned alive (which is exactly what his singing style suggests is happening to him). But that is sort of understood. Maybe some day a good fairy will trot along and issue a record of Botch covers that eliminate the vocals, clean up the riffs, and preserve all the solos. Until then, this is just a very modest, but still somewhat res­pectful thumbs up: I appreciate the effort, and I even appreciate the effort it took to put together relatively intelligent and, occasionally, even poetic lyrics for these songs — despite knowing that nobody will ever be able to decipher one word without some printed help. It takes a while to de­code their message (same old o tempora, o mores! stuff — Cicero would be proud, though), but once you do, it fits the insane, structurally-chaotic music quite nicely. Oh, incidentally, isn't We Are The Romans sup­posed to be a bit of a pun on ʽWe Are The Robotsʼ? I'm sure Kraftwerk must have been one of the influences on these guys in any case.

Botch: American Nervoso

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.