Review Summary: "Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful"
And BAMM, 2011's calculated challenge to what we know as grind just happened in front of your naked ears. Fractalizing and ReFractalizing you during every second of your listening experience, Meek is Murder takes no prisoners but, on the other hand, lets us all free.
Triumphantly announcing its birth with "Hello, World", a lot of Algorithms is about swagger. Mike Keller serves as MiM's Van/Halen-just-all-around-guitar hero, so he needs all the swagger he can find. And that's ultimately what this album is about. The former Red Chord 2nd guitarist completed his first album, "Mosquito Eater", after working as a solo project for a while and constructed the band around his, ahem, highly particular style of playing afterwards. And while drummer Frank Godla and bassist Ryan Brodsky ravage their way through the long player, the band coalesces around its guitar hero the way bands like Opeth do and the way that bands like the Red Chord, well, don't. And thats why Keller couldn't last in the ultra-manlyawesome RC. His style is all about generating confidence and then delving into moments of sincerity, feeling. The jaw gropingly delicate finale to "Sundowners", more than anything ever, confirms that.
Allow me a metal album review cliche: before I go any further, I am going to describe you what kind of people will hate this album. ..(you may not have noticed this, but every metal album review ever {definitely every positive one} promises the ignorant reader that " well you know, the X-metal fans are goin' to hate " blah blah blah)..
1) People who refuse to believe that Screamo/MetalcoreScenster/young people's Punk Metal of today can produce anything of value. These are the people who think Deathcore is the end of metal (and hipsters are the end of Western Civilization). These A-A-Aholes are, of course, meant to be dismissed, at least more so than..
2) Grindcore/Deathgrind classicists. Well, I understand you need your grind to be mercilessly pumped out like a factory. And this album doesn't do that. At all. And it's not afraid to be nice, sensitive, unreliable. Algorithms, is after all, not there to kiss your ass. It's about a guitarist, like I said, a hero, ready to noodle guitar solos or slice open breakdowns after a solid DM chugfest. Witness the title track and "Recursions". It will annoy these traditionalists even further because, more often than not, Keller's ADD style leads him to bust out awesome grind riffs, only too quickly leap to a new (sometimes more melodic) style. Which leads us to the album's biggest secret...
3) That people who need huge, hulking, big-man metal will not like this album. Perhaps Red Chord were the first to identify Keller's softiness when they kicked him out of their band with a measly phone call. Keller loves this fleeting, mercurial style where he can leap to and fro. And despite their history with steelier bands like Empyreon, his bandmates reciprocate his brevity. "(null)", the most varied track on the album, has Frank Godla pumping out a machine gun rattle of a blastbeat instead of lumbering about. Godla is a beast (shout out to UnTr fans, holla my doom brothers), and no reviewer worth his salt will tell you otherwise.
I know, I know. It's sloppy of me to have a numbered list in an album review. But you'd be hard=pressed to find a better way to describe the calculus behind MiM haters and MiM lovers. And oh there is a whole lot to love once your ready. But not every metalhead can handle the occasional black metal chord explosions, weird subharmonics, and surprise endings of "Sundowners" and "Hope Springs Eternal" (at least they don't abuse the whammy bar, I'm looking at you See You Next Tuesday {but also blasting Intervals wherever I go...} ). Keller is open-minded, and shockingly multicultural for a metal virtuoso in his '20's. As the record progress, his screeching vocals perfectly match screeching guitar chops, and then, out of nowhere, descends into doom metal. Literally the opposite of grindcore. But he's too cocky to fall for someone else's genre constraints, and honestly lets loose some of the lightest doom riffs I've ever heard.
This lightness I keep annoyingly referring to has a lot to do with the producer Kurt Ballou. The sound he helps craft with Keller and Brodsky is melodic, sharp, and never too-tough-for-your-stuff. Brodsky is particularly awesome at smoothing in killer riffs, and being able to go from thrashing to chilling. Again, he does not try to be as abrasive as possible, and that's a good thing. This overall approach from the band can get Converge-y, but it's both too intimate and grinding to ever really be confused for those masters of the previous generation.
"(null)" pulls the rug out of from under us quicker than any of the album's other left-hand-turns. A piano, basically ripping Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", plays lofighily onward with an unknown contraption creaking in the back. I don't know what Ballou was thinking when he helped the guys insert this coda, but I really want to. It's interesting, and for some reason, makes me feel like ***. But MiM can do that to you after spending so much time trying to forge an explicitly emotional connection with their listens (I feel like Brodsky's humble style really helps in this regard). Whatever, anyways, the show ends 21 minutes in. But you're effin exhausted anyways. "Garbage Collector" really flips Keller's grind-lite on its head, morphing into a surf country suite that focuses more on composition than texture. But, like on so much of the album, these two aspects of music fuse together: Meek is Murder organizes and controls its presentation, and brings it to crystal clarification.
