Review Summary: MJK observes the passage of time in a vacuum devoid of fun or intrigue.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but Puscifer has devolved from an intriguing “island of misfit toys” – as the Tool frontman once coined his experimental side project – to my parent’s attic: old and musty, falling apart in certain places, and full of junk. Even on past efforts where strong song craft was lacking, Puscifer would make up for it by unveiling a catchy song or two – from ‘The Mission’ to ‘The Remedy’. With 2020’s aptly titled
Existential Reckoning, we instead get a swollen, hour-long exercise in patience where nothing is fun, nothing is artistically impressive, and absolutely nobody wins.
As the monotony of
Existential Reckoning marches on, with three minute song ideas routinely dragged out into six or seven minute behemoths, it’s easy to forget why you’re here. After all, Tool at its worst (see: 2019’s
Fear Inoculum) blows this out of the water from a technical perspective. A Perfect Circle’s 2018 effort
Eat The Elephant was an enormously fun rock record by all accounts, even if it drew the ire of diehard fans who lamented its poppier inclinations. I suppose it takes a pretty dedicated Maynard James Keenan fan to trudge through this synth rock wasteland, where we get everything from keyboards that were ripped straight from my toddler’s musical set (‘Bread and Circus’) to the borderline yodeling that occurs at the conclusion of ‘Fake Affront’. You might think that it serves as much needed comic relief amid such a bloated and drab affair, but it’s not. Or, if it is, it’s the equivalent of Jar Jar Binks in
The Phantom Menace – it needs to die.
Much of
Existential Reckoning reminds me of what a whole album of ‘Get The Lead Out’ might sound like. As a standalone moment, that track was the ideal curtain call for
Eat The Elephant: foreboding in tone and slightly off-kilter. However, very few people would want to listen to sixty minutes of a song
that subdued and repetitive. I’ve worried a few times already that I’m being a bit too harsh on this record, because it does contain some unique ideas and possesses the occasional flourish where you think maybe –
just maybe – things are about to get interesting, but typically within minutes those hopes are dashed by yet another reverberating electro-washed beat where Maynard wails for minutes on end about his usual array of topics (time and space, the end of the world, religious hatred, etc). These are lyrical concepts that I’m typically a sucker for, which should tell you how dull the album is that I’m unwilling to sit through this record for my fix of apocalyptic fantasizing.
All in all,
Existential Reckoning can’t really be a disappointment because Puscifer exists precisely as an outlet for such odd-ideas-out which have no place on Maynard’s other works. The difference between this album and past Puscifer releases, though, is that you can truly tell these are half-baked. Too often, the melodies are listless, the song structures are underdeveloped, and the album’s weaknesses are masked by waves of synths and ambience that add nothing to the experience other than time – and that, unfortunately, is time that we’ll never get back.
