Here we have Meanderthal, the second album from Torche, and it’s an apt title indeed. Meanderthal: it implies a certain brutish low-brow heaviness … but at the same time it suggests a playful wandering nature, a taste for aimless adventure.
So - pretty much spot on, I’d say. Torche have made a great album here.
Well, they’ve made an album that’s right up my proverbial side-street, anyway – Meanderthal is a hybrid offspring of epic low-slung sludge-drone chords and the punk-metal melodies of early nineties alt-rock that’s heavy, hooky and fun, fun, fun.
It’s the juxtaposition of styles that really makes Torche work as a band, with the post-metal bludgeon playing off against the pure pop of the song structures. Meanderthal is the good cop/bad cop routine played fast and loose to great effect: one moment you’re fearing for your life (and your speaker cones), the next you’re wanting to bounce around the room singing neighbour-waking loud. Sometimes you do both at once.
The lumbering riffery of album opener “Triumph Of Venus” is enough of a metallic assault on the senses that you expect it to be followed by seventy minutes of bombastic guitar monoliths, but that’s immediately belied as Torche careen into “Grenades”, a short sharp explosion of post-grunge hooks and sheer distorted mass.
Meanderthal is largely made up of these surprisingly short (and sweet) slices of music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of lumbering post-metal paeans to outer space, but Torche’s ability to flip the ponderous sound on its head is nothing short of revelatory.
Because, while the songs are brief, they feel much bigger than they are - “Sandstorm” clocks in at just 2 minutes 19, but its sheer effervescent energy fills it out, while the the wide-eyed wizardry of “Healer” is a liquid landscape study of rapid fuzzed-out barre chords and scattered pentatonic twiddles dropped into a sea of reverb.
Did I mention Meanderthal was fun? Yeah, I did - but I’m fine with saying it again, because this album contains all the elements that made me fall in love with heavy guitar music in the first place. Listen to the shoegazer metal of “Across The Shield” and tell me Torche haven’t written the best three-minute radio pop-song you’ve heard so far this year. SRSLY.
But then compare it to Meanderthal’s longest track, “Amnesian”, where wandering lead lines howl in the distance over subterranean riffola. and a choir of whacked-out surfers sings the praises of a non-existent god …
… or something like that, anyway. I don’t care what Torche are meant to sound like, I just know what they sound like to me. They sound like Dig moonlighting as Devin Townsend’s backing band, and that’s just fine from where I’m floating.
But then Meanderthal closes with its eponymous tune, a sludgy rumble played on guitar strings so loose that they sound like a regiment of cyclopaean trolls bludgeoning national grid cables with concrete clubs; it’s a military march from the gates of Mordor, with all the sluggardly evil and meanness in the universe slouching forward to crush what rests in the light … and it’s so dead-pan doom that it causes me to think that – just maybe, and just for a moment - I’ve got Torche all wrong.
But I guess there’s only one way to be sure - I’ll just have to listen to it again. So should you.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: desert rock, grunge, Meanderthal, metal, post-metal, stoner, Torche
