posted 11/20/2006 (Mon) @ 12:44 pm
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Fear Before the March of Flames - The Always Open Mouth (2006)
Fishing for hooks for always open ears
- Absolute Future
- Drowning The Old Hag
- Mouth
- Taking Cassandra to the End of the World Party
- Ten Seconds In Los Angeles
- The Waiting Makes Me Curious
- High As A Horse
- Dog Sized Bird
- Complete and Utter Confusion…
- …As a Result of Signals Being Crossed
- My (Fucking) Deer Hunter
- Lycanthropy
- A Brief Tutorial in Bachanalia (Cigarettes As Currency)
- A Gift For Fiction
- Absolute Past
Here’s a good one:
Q: How do you please all the people all the time?
A: Release an album like “The Always Open Mouth.”
Rimshot, please.
Describing something as unexpected as “The Always Open Mouth” is a bit like describing the taste of the color purple. Whether or not this record will become a classic– or even an underground classic– is up for debate, but it’s quite a Shiatsu brain massage to listen to, in any case. Comparisons to albums like “Nevermind” (huh?) and “The Shape of Punk to Come” (easier to see) seem unwarranted. Really, though, it all smells like teen spirit: this record is the sound of alienation. Such complexity makes for a sound that many will appropriately feel lost in– perhaps mired in– upon first listen. Where previous records from this band bordered on tunelessness, or fit too snugly into an already crowded mold, “The Always Open Mouth” is a piece of art that takes more than a few spins to wrap one’s battered gray matter around.
A rustling sound collage (”Absolute Future”) opens the record with echoing street sounds and a simply-strummed ACOUSTIC guitar figure, which should tip off all but the witless that there was something different in the water for these guys this time around. “Future” segues into the Tourette’s-aggravating “Drowning The Old Hag,” perhaps the closest thing to the band’s older work here. Layered instrumentation lends “Hag” a previously-unknown sonic density, and well-executed prog influence ensures the track stays interesting. Then “Mouth” explodes into eardrums like nihilistic, angry shoegaze. This fire-and-forget cycle continues at a maddening pace for twelve more tracks. The dichotomy is jarring, yet somehow digs its hooks in deep.
And they’re really fishing with this one. If the pond wasn’t such an abysmal scumhole, more fish would probably bite, too; this record is an everything but the kitchen sink experiment: loud, technical metal riffage backlit by electronica/DJ noise, grime/hip-hop beats married to mewithoutYou monotone drawl-singing (”High as a Horse”), confusing noise collages of sirens and synth-bass (”Dog Sized Bird”), vocoder’d dancehall trips hopping headlong into unexpected cascades of metal (”My Deer Hunter”). Apply some spookiness through tasteful use of dissonance (”Lycanthropy”) here and there, and shortly thereafter your head blows a fuse trying to parse the information. What it doesn’t sound like is “Art Damage” (Fear Before’s apoplectic 2004 LP) which is what will probably drive away most post-loyal hardcore scene kids. Where Fear Before the March of Flames’ previous sound was “heavy,” they are now “dense” and “thick.” The evolution displayed is ripe for “White Pony” comparisons.
“The Always Open Mouth” is a big, barbed mess of unconventional hooks. Some work. Some don’t. It may not qualify for album of the year simply because it’s hard enough to swallow, but it is certainly one of the most adventurous records released in 2006, and for that, consumer culture has an extremely potent antidote: general indifference.
What a crime.
Tags: emo, hardcore, metal, metalcore, punk, screamo
1 comment on this article
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Three Star Smash » Blog Archive » Fear Before - Fear Before (2008) Says:
November 4th, 2008 at 6:02 pm[...] early ventures, the everything but the kitchen sink, industrial/electronica experimentation of The Always Open Mouth saw to it that these Colorado natives were henceforth counted among a tiny handful of bands that [...]
