Review Summary: Potential becoming realised
Experiencing music depends a lot on perspective. If you've been cultivated on a diet of mellow material, crossing paths with nu metal has even the most accessible acts sounding ferocious. If you like that, you go deeper. As your perspectives broaden and proper metal acts help contextualise the original gateway bands, you're nevertheless left with the memory of how the stuff felt when you first came across it. Nu-core makes sense, really. You've got a wave of musicians that were likely led into the metal realm via mainstream acts like Korn or Slipknot, with this sort of closeted appreciation of their earliest musical heroes. As such, this is an opportunity to redeem the subgenre in the eyes of the metal populace, to make music that sounds like the memories of initial contact in the eyes of the youngling. Nu metal, being the flexible hybrid that it is, takes well to the various modernised flourishes. A wave of bands sounding like progeny of the early 00's Roadrunner roster deriving from various musical walks of life is the result.
Tallah is part of this cohort, and burst onto the scene with a wildly promising EP in 2018. There were some elements left to iron out, but the potential was tantalising. The proceedings were carried by frantic drumming and a possessed singer of a million voices, adding a unique edge to the style. While inspecting the credits reveals these roles to be handled by Max Portnoy (yes, of those Portnoys) and minor YouTube sensation Justin Bonitz respectively, the material had no air of a vanity project carried to notoriety by name recognition. Unsurprisingly, the band got picked up by a respectable label for a full length. Surprisingly, the band decided to carry over the entirety of their EP and add some extra material to turn it into an album. Were the five songs a fluke, and Tallah was stuck crutching on them?
"No One Should Read This" very quickly dispels this illusion, and reveals the choice to be a purely artistic one. The song is a ridiculously catchy yet monstrously heavy display, the physical manifestation of an unsuspecting tween's formative memory of encountering Slipknot. While there are definitely echoes of the inspiration in how some of the riffs lurch around and one of the myriad of diverse vocal passages on display, the recurring triplet touches that culminate in an unlikely bridge smoothly carrying the song into a gigantic breakdown outgrow the source material. Nearly all of the album's highlights are new songs, revealing the band's growth and addressing the EP's flaws. "The Silo" blends a myriad of cues into a majestic amorphic stew. Intensely processed guitar noises, a particularly memorable vocal line that walks the line between croon and rasp, an understated riff with a punky bounce that serves as a breather in the running order. The guitarist gets a rare opportunity to flex his chops, and the fluid, modulated tone with which he delivers the solo has it sit great in the song. By comparison, a similar shredding display derails an otherwise stellar "Placenta" due to how out of place the whole section is. Growth! The best song on the record would have to be "L.E.D." though, with its ridiculous concentration of skull-crushing earworms. The occasional record scratch cameos. The screeching intro motif with a touch of ring modulation popping in yet again, helping set up the transition into the song's gradual slow-down outro. Masterful stuff. Of the EP tracks, only widescreen closer "Red Light" maintains a similar quality standard.
Given the fact the band figured out how to do transitions better and avoid hero worship, you'd think they'd take the opportunity to sand off the rough edges on the EP songs. This is not the case, with the material given little more than a new mix. "We, the Sad" exemplifies all of the flaws in that batch of material, with the verse sounding like little more than a Korn knockoff and Justin's chorus delivery reeking of a bargain bin Chester Bennington imitation. "Murder Seed" tips its hat to the same vocalist, yet gets away with it as it does so with one held note rather than a whole section. Some attempt at masking the Korn verse was made, with a bit of modulation stuck on the bass to hide the fact it sounds like Fieldy, but it's too little. The song still suffers from sudden lurches into extreme metal, and a particularly poor transition into the closing breakdown. Meanwhile, the pretty solid "Kungan" suffers in an unusual manner, with the song's introduction engineered to open up a record yet stuck following up "No One Should Read This". The unfortunate Jonathan Davis scat mimicry could have easily been left out of that one too, yet is still on full display. That's not to say that the only poor material on here is from the old batch - "Too Quick to Grieve" is a hollow display that has Tallah shedding most of its defining traits and phoning in a by the numbers nu-core track.
Nevertheless, the good far outweighs the bad on Matriphagy. The debut EP was already quite accomplished, and the new tracks on here show the band tightening up the shortcomings of the original batch of songs. Unfortunately, they choose not to do so on the actual EP songs themselves, but future releases won't have to drag the "We, the Sad" anchor around, so there's that. If forced to nitpick, it would be nice if the band became aware of their reliance on breakdowns going forward. Most tracks on here tend to end in one, and the formula is likely to get stale if continuously revisited. Still, Matriphagy is a hell of an album, a successful reimagining of nu metal tropes in a more conventionally accepted metal landscape. Melding syncopation and turntables with the sort of intensity that a kid encountering a distorted seven string for the first time felt from the forefathers. Good stuff, and a band to watch going forward if there ever was one.
