Be warned: Misanthropy Pure is one of the most accurately named albums ever, its eleven tracks containing more fury and bile than a lifetime subscription to the Daily Mail. Quite how you square that with a band who named themselves Shai Hulud after the giant sandworms from Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune, I have no idea.
But seriously – listening to Misanthropy Pure is like having platoon of crack-revved Black Flag-era Rollinses screaming their not-so-pent-up disgust at their fellow human beings into your face. It is not, in any way whatsoever, an easy-listening experience … although it may have a special appeal to Catholics, as they’ve been conditioned to accept a weekly psychological browbeating. That said, I doubt many priests couch their confessional manner in quite the same uncompromising language that is Shai Hulud’s lingua franca.
The music is no easier to swallow. To tell the truth, after I listened all the way through Misanthropy Pure the first time, I got to the end and nearly wrote it off as an unlistenable cacophony - a triumph of technical proficiency and obtuse kitchen-sink song structures over anything even slightly resembling a tune. But in retrospect I’m glad I gave Shai Hulud another chance, because on the second cycle I started to notice the architecture beneath the aggression.
Misanthropy Pure’s architecture is - on paper at least - metalcore. Rhythmically powered by rapid-fire hardcore blatter from the drumkit, angular discordant riffs that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Dillinger Escape Plan track brandish their fists stage-centre, while growling chords lurk menacingly to the side and that afore-mentioned condensed Rollins-ness howls over the top of it all, shaking its finger and threatening to pop a number of veins – yours and its own.
Big deal, you may be thinking, and who could blame you – every third band seems to be churning out the metalcore clichés at the moment. Shai Hulud’s ace in the hole is their ability to fit an album’s worth of styles, ideas and hooks into one single track. The textbook case would be “The Creation Ruin”, which spans the entire gamut of forms, flashing between them like a Powerpoint presentation on Channelling Your Aggression Constructively. It is the microcosm to Misanthropy Pure’s macrocosm, if you will.
But let me reiterate – Misanthropy Pure is a challenging album to listen to. Having given it a good few runs through, I can easily say I’m impressed by it, and that I think it’s a record that deserves to be heard. Whether I actually like it, however … well, the jury’s still out on that, to be honest. I know I can’t imagine listening to Shai Hulud for pleasure, as such. I’m not sure pleasure is a part of their musical vocabulary.
But next time I have some demolition work to do, I think I have the soundtrack sorted.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: hardcore, metalcore, Misanthropy Pure, Shai Hulud
