CLERIC REGRESSIONS (WEB OF MIMICRY)
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“A Rush of Blood” includes tumbling shards of piano, a pell-mell seesawing lick that accelerates like Wile E. Coyote on roller skates, and slingshot swoops of guitar whose pitch climbs to a degraded digital whistle. One riff in “Cumberbund” works like a crude musical palindrome, descending and slowing down, then climbing in pitch and speeding back up. “Poisonberry Pie” makes its winding way from eerie tundra lounge to a dizzying triple phase between the keyboard, bass, and guitar parts—relative to the drums, the other instruments precess like spinning tops, so that each bar seems to begin at three or four different spots. Matt Hollenberg’s guitar is alternately crunchy, glassy, and staticky, and Larry Kwartowitz’s drums range from heavily gated thunks to reverberating detonations.
As is customary in the form of metal Cleric orbits least distantly—furiously dense and intricate stuff like Converge and the Dillinger Escape Plan—there’s nothing catchy or even particularly memorable in the music and no melodic content to speak of in the vocals. They don’t use verses or choruses and pretty much never return to a part after they’ve had their way with it once. Regressions stays interesting for the same reason a tightrope act stays interesting: How will they keep this up? Are they going to throw in the towel and repeat themselves? Will they put a foot wrong and break the tension they’ve been building from their first note? It’s like watching a Jackie Chan fight scene and realizing five minutes in that’s all been shot in one take—you start anticipating the inevitable cut.
There’s a trend in metal, especially technical metal, toward studio recordings that are finessed and quantized and rebuilt note by note, so that the finished product feels like the output of an evil self-replicating machine. (I’m not necessarily complaining; sometimes this is awesome.) Anemic acoustic drum sounds—the faster you play, the tougher it is to hit hard—are digitally replaced by beefy samples, and notes that aren’t perfectly timed are snapped to a grid.
