Style: dissonant sludge metal, noisecore (mostly harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Nails, Thou, Plebeian Grandstand, Black Tongue
Country: United States-IL
Release date: 2 February 2024
They say Catholic schools are atheist factories. It would have been had I not already disavowed my Catholic upbringing before high school. My dad still forced me through the Confirmation process—I held up my end of the deal that I wouldn’t fight my parents on it if they watched the entire seventy-two minute music video for Warforged’s instant classic I: Voice.1 I largely despise the Church and most organized religion (although I’m a bit more private with it than an r/atheism subscriber), so I can strongly empathize with meth.’s vocalist Seb Alvarez on Shame. He screams in your face about residual harm from the Church in his adult life, namely alcoholism, Catholicism’s culture of guilt, and of humiliation—heavy stuff.
Each member of the five-piece is vital to the minimalist approach meth. takes to noisy, vitriolic sludge metal. Frontman and lyricist Seb Alvarez is a special talent and spits his vulnerable lyrics in a mix of scream and wail, throat-ripping and rather terrifying. Unlike a deathcore vocalist or Chip King (The Body), the monstrousness isn’t that his vocals sound inhuman; no, Alvarez sounds like he’s ripping his soul out of his body through his mouth with each line, like he’s sacrificing his larynx to force each word out in a display of raw emotion. His clean vocals, styled like Pyrrhon’s Doug Moore—in fact, the title track “Shame,” which has the majority of the clean vocals, sounds like it would be in place on Exhaust—also rip, chastising the Church and full of negative feelings.
Alvarez’s style of vitriolic hardcore vocals can only reach their emotional zenith when the lyrics match their intensity, and Shame’s lyrics are stunningly dark. I’m left haunted by several lines, but moments of repeated refrains like ‘I AM PRAYER’ in “Compulsion” and ‘I AM SHAME’ in “Shame” hit hardest. There are a dozen such direct metaphors for the self, each one hard hitting and scathing. “Shame” features the heavy hitter ‘I am the weight of my hands, I am the knots in your voice… I am the guilt that feeds you,’ as well as the titular chant. Other tracks like “Blush” open up about Alvarez’s mental health problems like alcoholism. He truly spills his being onto this record.
If anything, Shame is even more weighty musically than lyrically if such a thing is possible. From the first second of opener “Doubt,” Shame suffocates with a hugely oppressive opening chord—Meshuggah and Gojira wish they could be this heavy with their chugs. The open power chord repeats ad nauseam and while guitarists Zack Farrar and Michael McDonald do little on the track besides provide an absolute wall of sound, their performance is perfect. The tracklist is uniformly hypnotically repetitive and minimalist compositionally, but the destructive riffs are usually all the more powerful for it, creating a sense of claustrophobia as each repeated distortion presses down on your throat. Shame is monolithic, a fortress built of revilement. Nathan Spainhower on bass provides necessary opposition to the two guitarists, his instrument often taking the melodic lead of tracks—see “Blush,” “Shame,” and “Blackmail.” Similar to Alvarez’s Moore-like shouts, Spainhower also feels like he could be on a Pyrrhon album, although one significantly slowed down to a sludgy doom-crawl. Other riffs like the main riff of “Compulsion” which trembles and shivers down the scale with flurries of blast beats sound like they’d be at home on a Plebeian Grandstand album, disgusting and putrid yet coldly calculated. I am tempted to blow out my speakers and eardrums every time I spin Shame.
Finally, skin-beater (drummer) Andrew Smith completes the auditory assault with a stellar performance of his own. His cascading beats in “Compulsion” remind me of Sermon, and the tribalistic feel of the percussion on the slowest track “Give In” is fascinating although the minute-long drone fadeout on the song is superfluous. He fully dictates the pace of the album, and the varying tempos are often the most important differentiator on tracks (since unfortunately all seven can feel a bit too similar in their abrasive, dissonant assault). He never is too flashy for a song, but when he switches from sludgier sections to blast beats, he certainly stands out from the noise as well as helping create it.
Even at a reasonable forty-four minutes, Shame’s pure hatred and weightiness makes it feel longer, and that’s certainly exacerbated by lengthy sections of the same unremitting riff causing me to feel like I’m crammed into a small space cornered by a priest. I hardly even mentioned the glorious spinose dissonance: the album is ugly, too, profoundly uncomfortable to listen to. Shame is among the most grave records I’ve ever spun and achieves the highest recommendation to any lovers of music that makes you feel like you were force fed your own bile. I have become addicted to meth., and there’s no shame in that.
Recommended tracks: Doubt, Compulsion, Shame
You may also like: Knoll, Ken Mode, Glassing, Cave Sermon, Scarcity, LLNN, Pyrrhon
Final verdict: 8.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Prosthetic Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
meth. is:
– Seb Alvarez (vocals)
– Zack Farrar (guitars)
– Michael McDonald (guitars, vocals)
– Andrew Smith (drums)
– Nathan Spainhower (bass)
- This really did happen and they really didn’t enjoy it. My dad doesn’t do much heavier than Dream Theater; my mom taps out around modern Leprous. ↩︎
2 Comments