Style: progressive rock, art punk, avant-garde rock, post-punk (mostly clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Black Midi; Black Country, New Road; Sprain; Black Flag; The Mars Volta; King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
Country: United States-CA
Release date: 2 August 2024
Like it or not, progressive rock has drastically changed. Yes, yes, I’m sad that the heydays of Yes, Rush, and Gentle Giant are gone, too, replaced by a truckload of insipid neo-prog. But on a real note, it’s the post-punks who are keeping the genre alive in spirit the previous half-dozen years or so. Influenced by the freaky prog of acts like The Mars Volta, it’s been impossible not to see praise for the new generation—the likes of Black Midi, Black Country, New Road, and Eunuchs—across the internet. The old prog-heads may not always get it, but with new and exciting projects like those aforementioned and now Cime, the creative boundary of rock is still shining brightly.
From Orange County, Cime have a lot to say on their sophomore album: both in the pointed political lyrics and in the dense musical arrangements. The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble was written in episodes of restless creativity: Monty Cime lived in her friend and collaborator Sean Hoss’s place where she wrote in the closet for sleepless days on end with nothing but a guitar and a “cheap plastic keyboard.” I do not know how one could produce such an ambitious album with this sort of massive instrumentation like that. Like Eunuchs earlier this year, The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble is a post-punk/prog rock album with a menagerie of additional instruments, including a particularly varied and vibrant percussion ensemble. Monty Cime’s feverish inspiration—with I’m sure some sleep-induced side effects—led to the creation of an unusually diverse album with a strong focus on her identity: a Latin swing, noise, punk, and prog along with some jamming improvisations all contribute to an intensely emotional and personal album.
The balance of intricate arrangement and jam-band sensibilities define Cime’s sound, and the latter element of the writing creates a sense of unbridled energy, particularly in climaxes where the classic shouting vocals of post-punk take on their most aggressive mode. Across the album there are dozens of highs due to the loose songwriting—the extended sax solo from around 4:00 and the rippling synthesizers in “A Tranny’s Appeal to Heaven,” the free jazz-informed background to the driving bass riff of “DIYUSA,” and the insane Latin brass sections of halfway through “The North” among them. Essentially all the styles and tracks work in harmony with few exceptions. Brief closer “Goodnight from La Ceiba” is weak after the twenty-five minute epic “The North,” and occasionally the amelodic punk vocals and/or spoken word detract from the more subtle musical moments which don’t demand as much intensity.
Lyrically, Cime is ardent and charged, delivering solid political commentary with some killer lines. For instance, “Lempira (Or, the Lencan Crusade)” (so titled after Lempira, a Lencan (indigenous group from modern Honduras) ruler who fought against the Spanish) features the uproarious line “The smell of war makes me fucking horny.” On “DIYUSA,” there’s a lyrical switch to Spanish as a reflection of Cime’s roots, and the seamless shift to delivering these lines—including some code-switching at the end of the second stanza—makes it a vocal highlight of the album, especially with their more aggressive harsh quality. Cime writes about her experiences as a trans woman, her nomadic life, being homeless; the album has a gravity that even the more humorous lines like in the ironic nature of “The Ballad of Tim Ballard” come across as all the more sinister. Cime reminds me a lot of Ashenspire in the straight-to-the-point attack on the establishment and the lack of sugarcoating heavy topics, her lyrics passionate and hard-hitting.
The twenty-five minute epic “The North” is the musical and lyrical climax of The Cime Interdisciplinary Ensemble although it’s far from a perfect track. Starting with a full nine minutes of noodling atmospheres and flutes, it only breaks out of that stretch to go into a lackadaisical spoken word storytelling segment; however, once Cime breaks from the extended intro, things get intense. There’s shouting about dead bodies on the Rio Grande while migrating northwards, critiques on the economic system, and Latin percussion with grandiose brass parts underpinning the story. But the emotional climax is a paragraph long rant full of vitriol towards herself, her family, her situation, and race relations. Along with the section’s cacophonous music and energetic screaming, “The North” is a song as intense and emotionally charged as you’ll hear all year.
Apart from ten minutes of pacing issues in the ginormous centerpiece and a few vocal choices I dislike across the album, Cime have utilized the weightiness and anarchism of punk to write an emotionally charged progressive music experience. The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble sounds huge and professional, a feat in and of itself considering probable budget constraints, the whole ensemble’s worth of instruments gelling together, clear even through the most chaotic moments of jamming. Funneling the frustration of a lifetime of difficult circumstances into this project, Monty Cime is a prog composer and performer like few others, and her brain will surely produce a wealth of passionate music for a long time.
Recommended tracks: A Tranny’s Appeal to Heaven, DIYUSA, The North (second half)
You may also like: Eunuchs, Maruja, Streetlight Manifesto, Ashenspire, Half Empty Glasshouse
Final verdict: 8/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Instagram
Label: Syzygy Records – Bandcamp
Cime is:
Monty Cime – vocals, bass guitar, triangle, ocean drum
Rowan Collins – electric guitar, bass guitar, synthesizer, vocals
Sean Hoss – keyboard, upright piano, soprano sax, tenor sax, bass clarinet, vocals
riley. – flute, bass flute, alto sax, tenor sax
Austin Jenkins – electric guitar, drum kit
Jonas Phipps – bass guitar, vocals
Brian Watson – trumpet
Elijah Parra – trombone
Lautaro Akira Martinez-Satoh – classical guitar, bass guitar, quena, quenacho, conga, bongos, garifuna drums, djembe, maracas, shaker, guiro, wooden frog, claves, cowbell, egg shaker, mridangam, mason jar, french press, vocals
Kaydi Sweet – vocals
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