Review Summary: Uncharacteristic from any perspective
It’s a little funny that Thou began without him, because Bryan Funck is frankly as integral to the sludge lords of Baton Rouge as distortion. He has always carved into each groove, intensifying, animating, and illuminating at every step. He has always collaborated with equal dexterity, as a simmering catalyst for The Body’s screech or an arid counterpoint to Emma Ruth Rundle’s croon. Thou’s success is certainly
more than just one man screaming, but starting here feels appropriate for a release like
Myopia. Of all Thou-collaborators, Liam Neighbors’ black/doom offerings as Mizmor are nearest them stylistically (and so alter their usual approach the least), and he splits vocal duties with Funck near 50/50 (and so draws the most immediate comparison). While I’d like all this to be setting up a tale of seamless integration, the overlap here just doesn’t produce a consistently compelling experience.
We’ve established it’s uneven, so there must be some highs! Fear not.
Myopia is studded with standouts, each inseparable from the vocal wizardry that enflames them. Through its barren wanderings, ‘Indignance’ arrives at a peak crowned in thunderous sludge and arcing feedback. Funck whips the rhythm ever tighter, embellishing each lunge with “Pain / and pain and pain again / sealed within a book, a thought, a fleeting memory”. Not to be outdone, Neighbors’ groans and gasps utterly transform ‘Drover of Man’, charging an otherwise pensive affair with hair-raising anguish. At their most affective, both vocalists howl back and forth like primordial ghouls, wailing our transgressions from the mires of time forgotten. If only time’s mires would suck away those rheumy inhales. They’re as frail and flat as they are on every Mizmor release, and in this context, about as dynamic as wind whistling down a trach hole.
Neighbors should not take all the flack in this department. ‘The Host’ already treads a well-worn path in heavy music (human-parasite imagery) and couples this with a few strange declarations. “I’ll ruin this for everyone!” smacks of pre-teen petulance, and the follow up “You gave a promise to me / and you broke it” is delivered over a wailing guitar like some kind of contagion break-up anthem. Likewise, the swell of ‘Myopia’ is spoiled when we are commanded to “question [our] comforters”; any impact that follows is severely diluted by imagery of a nearsighted man interrogating his bedding. Both occur at points of climax – the vocals a clear driving force – and rob whole tracks of their hard-fought momentum. It’s disappointing to hear Funck botch an area of songcraft he so regularly excels at.
Turning more directly to the band,
Myopia’s heaviest sections are another area of inconsistency. Rank sludge has always seeped from Thou’s doom metal passages, and Mizmor’s wandering, downtuned brand mixes uneasily here. ‘Prefect’ is the best result; as it shudders to a near-dirge, a two-note blues groove tries vainly to resuscitate it, ground down each time by a few droning tones. This same unflinching density peels back the solemn overture that ends ‘The Roots’, but only after utterly bleaching its midsection of color, and the aforementioned ‘Drover’ wrenches to a halt over a doom riff that yawns featurelessly. There are many elements that synergize (Neighbors’ black metal jaunts segue nicely into the searing leads Thou has perfected for years), but it’s intensely weird that the group seems so unsteady on the terrain they most readily share.
This has always been the curse of making excellent music, but Thou pays more heavily for how nearly right
Myopia is. Mizmor can line a cap with this; it certainly beats the pants off anything
Wit’s End had to offer earlier this year. For Thou, however, it represents a clear dilution of style and narrative, made significant by a career historically steeped in both.
Still, there’s plenty of delectable heavy bits to gnaw. Eat your veggies and doubt your mattresses, kids.
