Review Summary: If sorrow is a forest, Muscle and Marrow find their way out.
Besides gifting us Have A Nice Life and all the other Dan Barrett offspring, the enduring niche of music pumped out of The Flenser is its best accomplishment. This might not sound like much – record labels tend to cater to a specific market – but The Flenser deals with the atypical much more than the majority. The dark aesthetic is easy to find, yes. It's the variety in which it's used that keeps the engine running. You can't just say "industrial electronic" three times in a mirror and have Black Wing appear. This is why you can have Epitaph and Nuclear Blast, for example, provide us with Converge, Every Time I Die, and Opeth and still have much bigger underdogs. You can fill seats with those names long before you will with Wreck and Reference, Bosse-de-Nage, or a man and woman called Muscle and Marrow.
Continuing The Flenser's tradition of musical duos, Muscle and Marrow use their latest LP Love to wedge into a fine corner of the niche they’re shoulder to shoulder with. Pushing through bleak passages, the duo enters the swamp of their label predecessors with deft and pleasant sonic twists. Minimal instrumentation clearly hasn’t instituted boundaries; vocal layering and slabs of heavily distorted guitar (both of which are turned in by Kira Clark) are abundant. But the taijitu is completed with the employment of tip-toeing clean guitar and electronics with Keith McGraw maintaining a simplistic approach to percussion. The best encapsulation throughout the seven tracks is the anthemic “Sacs of Teeth”, delivering their style of drawling interlude before burying it with tribal tom pounding and a mix of legato and staccato chanting.
It's easy to say that a mix of love, loss, and hope would inspire music like this. But Love isn't your simple slog through melancholy a la Different Stars (a great album). It's much more dynamic than that, taming short bursts of catharsis with quiet reflection. This includes Kira's voice as well. While the singing often contrasts well with the brooding of the music, this is only in pitch. Whether it’s desperate wailing, her urgent shrieks, or the pleasurable high crooning you’re soothed with on “Bereft Body”, she still piles on the emotion in an album already drowning in it.
This isn’t a disclaimer of overwhelming despair though. There is ebbing to be found with the flowing, with the slow-building monotony of “Womb” and “Light” being almost too dreary for its own good. But when push comes to shove on emotive tides, there’s plenty of Love to keep your head above water.
so far anyways but no its a great record for sure
