The Mass "City of Dis" CD
[Crucial Blast]
Ehhh, no thanks. This band features members of From Monuments to Masses and Totimoshi and the label calls them "indie prog thrashers" and tags their sound as "Crimson meets Slayer art/thrash/core worship", which does, on some level, fit... but despite a few glowing moments of potential, this is an obnoxious CD that drags on forever. The key problem? Saxophone. Often obnoxious, noisy, random, chaotic saxophone. Now, it's no secret that I like my heavy music sans horns. It's rare that horns are used effectively in heavy music, and make no mistake: Chaotic, noisy saxophone playing is always fucking annoying. It's annoying when noise bands do it, it's annoying when jazz musicians do it, and it's annoying when "indie prog thrashers" do it. It pisses me off even more when the music's not that bad otherwise though, and hell... some of it's really good. Just check out the killer hardcore/punk drive to the start of "Trapped Under a Ice" - which later brings in more musical sax passages that accompany the guitars rather tactfully. When they drop the sax they have a lot of cool shit happening, and when they use it more linearly it can work as well (despite the fact that the horns are mixed louder than the fucking guitars, which is an immense mistake). The bulk of the material is instrumental and definitely bounces back and forth between math metal rhythm patterns and quirky 70's progressive rock riffs - all with a dryer, heavier sort of sound more akin to the former approach. The vocals are raspy yells with a little bit of a filtered edge, and that's fine as well, so with a little more oomph coming from the bass and no horns I think I could really get into this. Sure, some of the riffing gets too acerbic and wild for its own good, and the fact that songs routinely top five to six minutes can do some damage since the structures aren't nearly as fluid as most of what you'd get from actual progressive rock, but there are moments of excellence. "Hex by Hex" has some really awesome little melodic clean breaks and tastefully plain singing vocals that have a dark sort of indie twist and I'm way into the way they contrast that with vicious screams and chunky rhythmic stutters - but that combined with classic thrash riffs can't create a completely awesome song when there are shitty tremolo picking runs involved as well. On the other hand, "Major Strip" has some painfully unoriginal vocal work (and backing instrumentation to boot) that comes lifted directly from the Mike Patton school of wackiness, and for whatever reason it's so blatant that I can't really stand for it at all. The disc comes in a decent looking digipack with nice psychedelic cover art, a band photo on the back, and minimal sketches inside. No lyrics are included, sadly, only brief recording credits and such. The cover definitely looks superior to everything else, but nothing looks too weak so it gets 'em by. Included on the CD-Rom portion of the disc is a live video of a performance of "We Enslaved Elves to Build Our Death Machine" (the longest track on the disc), but it's awful. The quality is marginal, and the performances are sloppy, making things far more irritating than they are on record. I don't know, this isn't for me. Throw out the fucking sax and then come talk to me. 50% of this disc is really good, 25% is so-so, and the rest is complete and total crap. And for my money, it doesn't take but so much complete and total crap to bog down a record. It really creates a great deal of anger within me as well, because this band could totally kick ass if they made a few minor alterations to their delivery. There are a lot of influences being woven together to varying degrees of success, so maybe they ought to bank on that creativity and not concern themselves so much with pushing farther into artsy fartsy territory? Oh well, you can't win 'em all. I'd love to hear these dudes destroy that saxophone with untamed rage and then start cranking out some slightly shorter and more focused tunes. They could still call themselves "indie prog thrashers", or even "progressive jazz metal mathematicians" or something. I don't care. They're wasting talent with this stuff... some of the segments herein are slick as hell. Damn. (5/10)
Running time - 41:21, Tracks: 8
[Notable tracks: no one song wins me over, though a few come close]
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