Lost in Time: Exotic Animal Petting Zoo – Tree of Tongues
Style: Mathcore, post-hardcore, shoegaze, progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Fall of Troy, Rolo Tomassi, The Mars Volta, Deftones, At the Drive-In, Arcane Roots
Country: USA
Release date: 17 July 20121
Discovering old artists can be a blessing and a curse. Any young person discovering The Beatles is going to have a pretty solid discography to chew through, and artier artists like Bowie or Björk will always provide enough creative swings for you to cling on. On the other hand, I don’t envy anyone who commits to slogging through the latter half of Metallica’s output, and if you’re stupid enough to take on the complete works of The Rolling Stones, that’s on you. On the flip side is finding a killer album only to look up the band and realise that’s pretty much it; they appeared, dropped one or two albums, and then they bounced. In the end, perhaps that’s better. Perhaps I’m happier knowing that a group has an unimpeachable batting average and that they’ll never collaborate with Lou Reed. Exotic Animal Petting Zoo only ever made two records, and today we’re diving into one of them.
Tree of Tongues—named after J.R.R Tolkien’s philological diagram of languages from The Lhammas which shows the evolution of Elvish in Middle-earth—was the second and final album from the Chicago-based progressive post-hardcore act. Hope for a follow-up lingered for some time as Exotic Animal Petting Zoo continued to perform live until 2017, and it wasn’t until 2024 that the group confirmed that the project was as dead and buried as any petting zoo animal that had been alive since the band’s formation twenty years earlier2. But what a high to go out on: a peerless blend of mathcore’s intense complexity, shoegaze’s saturated wall-of-sound, emo-tinged lyricism, and a latent manic prog rock tendency, Tree of Tongues is a singular record that stands as a watershed moment in progressive post-hardcore history.
The horsepower behind Exotic Animal Petting Zoo was the Carr brothers: Brandon’s (lead vocals and guitar) vibrato-laden timbre with its emo-y angst frequently intermingles with the agonised screams of Stephen (drums, vocals). Scott Certa’s throaty basslines are nice and crisp in the mix, and Jeffrey Zampillo lays down erratic guitar licks that feel like they belong on a The Mars Volta record. Stephen’s an eight-limbed monster on the kit, but he also knows when to pull back and nuance his performance to suit Exotic Animal Petting Zoo’s frequent drifts into eerie calm and bittersweet melancholy.
Fast-paced, relentless and mathy, Tree of Tongues wastes no time sinking its teeth into the listener. The one-two-three punch of “Pharmakokinetic”, “Thorough. Modern.” and “Through the Thicket… Across Endless Mountains” is a legendary opening run, seeing the quartet veer from frantic mathcore to passages of psychedelic beauty. But beneath that tight sense of aggression is something more sprawling and proggy. The influence of The Mars Volta on the band is often overlooked: the manic, jangly clean guitar parts and relentless drumwork (“The Great Explainer”, “Thorough. Modern.”); the bouncy grooves and weird synth tones (“You Make Wonderful Pictures”); as well as the softer falsetto passages with their use of psychedelic ambience and jazzy chords awash in reverb (“Apis Bull”). Blended into this frenzied tendency is the latent shoegaze influence that suffuses the band’s sound like a summer smog, its tendrils worming into every part of the mix without ever diminishing anything. “Through the Thickets… Across Endless Mountains” demonstrates this capably during the climactic solo which is utterly laden with effects and blanketed in ambience. Similarly, the switch to pillowy reverb halfway through “Apis Bull” builds to an outro guitar motif that’s almost suffocated under the smother. Sometimes the band pull back entirely and opt simply for psychedelic softness (“M.U.M.B”, “Gypsy Among the Pines”), and sometimes they go full Dillinger-style mathcore as on “Whores of Babel”, which ends with a polyrhythmic round assaulted by strange alarm sounds. Across Tree of Tongues, Exotic Animal Petting Zoo manage a deft blend of chaotic mathcore, catchy post-hardcore, and shoegaze laminate.
Vocally, Tree of Tongues has a somewhat frenetic stream-of-consciousness style with lengthy phrases that force the compositions to accommodate them. Brandon Carr’s delivery is prone to idiosyncratic cadences, unusual lengthenings of syllables against Stephen’s rapid bursts of invective. But lyrically, once one gets past the opacity, Tree of Tongues becomes a rather rich text on faith. I might be barking up the wrong tree here, but the references begin to pile up. The title “Through the Thicket… Across Endless Mountains” recalls Saint Asterius of Amasea’s telling of Jesus and the Lost Sheep3, and recounts a similar struggle with faith: ‘We sit with faith and pray / wait to see where it goes / no angels are here to take you away / no second coming to bring you home.’ “Apis Bull” references sacred bulls worshipped in Ancient Egypt and discusses the naked cruelty of gods, culminating in the beseeching line shouted over a pandemonium of noise: ‘As he reigns down from above, spreading your everlasting love’, as though the words are screamed upon the appearance of some monstrous demiurge’s visage blotting out the sun. Opener “Pharmakokinetic” seems to describe the fear which indoctrination into religion instills and the invariable fall from grace: ‘And O my brothers, would you believe your faithful friend / Took pride within himself to take on yet, another burden / Condemned among his flame / Held in a pleasant captive / Not up to par / Dismiss me / Lose me’.
Perhaps most esoterically, “Kaspar Hauser Could See the Stars in the Daytime” retells the story of a foundling who appeared in Ansbach, Bavaria, in 1828 claiming to have grown up in total darkness4—Hauser’s strange and short life as a man who was said to have had limited human contact has attracted all sorts of spiritual and messianic interpretations, something that Tree of Tongues toys with: ‘Should you take him away from here / Will you please bring him back / Cause the harvest will suffer his unfinished play’. Ultimately, for all this wrestling with God, Exotic Animal Petting Zoo sound utterly done with faith, frequently hitting on cynical notes, and scathing hostility: ‘since there is that nothing it will never be there waiting for you’, ‘We suffered for the conman (To them, we’re the children) / To tear their fucking souls apart.’ Still, closer “Arcology” gives a moving depiction of the inevitability of death with an agonised mantra of ‘I will suffer no more’ left somewhat ambiguous by the lines ‘I finally found the center, it’s exactly what I was searching for’. We never know what the protagonist finds; it’s not for us to know.
Bands usually become ‘lost in time’ for one of two reasons. Either the band broke up a long time ago and became a hidden gem, or they continue on as a niche group who never break through. Exotic Animal Petting Zoo belong in the former camp, but their gradual disappearance with no confirmation of whether there was a future for the group granted them a sort of mythic status. Given how promising their career prospects looked, it’s hard to imagine that, had the band released another couple of albums, they wouldn’t have become genre titans. But it wasn’t to be, and their enigmatic disappearance from the scene5 feels as tragic and inexplicable as Kaspar Hauser’s. Like Latin, that dead language, Exotic Animal Petting Zoo may be gone yet they remain influential and emblematic to this day, a tree limb that continues to branch and grow.
Recommended tracks: Through the Thicket… Across Endless Mountains, Kaspar Hauser Could See the Stars in the Daytime, Pharmakokinetic, Arcology, Thorough. Modern.
You may also like: Benthos, Pupil Slicer, Vower
Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook
Label: Mediaskare Records
Exotic Animal Petting Zoo was:
- Brandon Carr (vocals, guitars, keyboards)
- Stephen Carr (drums, vocals, samples)
- Scott Certa (bass)
- Jeffrey Zampillo (guitar)
- While the Bandcamp page lists a release date of July 19th, a trawl through Exotic Animal Petting Zoo’s Facebook page shows the album was delayed from June 19th and ultimately dropped on Tuesday 17th of July. Somewhat inexplicably, Wikipedia lists an August 5th release date but the citation for this links to a defunct review website which now provides tips for planning an eco-friendly trip to Australia. ↩︎
- Admittedly an exotic animal petting zoo could contain plenty of long-lived animals such as tortoises, Greenland sharks, elephants, parrots, and, well, here’s the Wikipedia link, go deep dive for yourself. ↩︎
- “He crossed many valleys and thickets, he climbed great and towering mountains, he spent much time and labour in wandering through solitary places until at last he found his sheep.” ↩︎
- Hauser became the subject of intrigue, experiments, and strange attacks which may have been self-inflicted, and after a death as mysterious as his arrival, became something of a legend. Schools of esoteric religious thought have cast him in all sorts of roles, up to and including a theory among anthroposophists that Hauser was a carrier of the “Christ impulse” and that his murder in 1833 closed a direct link to the spiritual realm which led to the inevitable rise of Nazi Germany in 1933 (final paragraph of page 10). ↩︎
- The Carr brothers returned to music last year with the debut release from their new project, Spy Balloon. ↩︎
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