8/11/2023 0 Comments Big business band albumThere’s a coruscating instrumental interlude named “Aurum” and a two-minute ripper called “Our Mutant” that suggests stoner metal accelerated by methamphetamine. The band starts and stops, roars and drifts, screams and sings, delighting all along with the structural instability of the song’s basic shape. The wonderfully weird “Trees” starts to feel like a hypothetical game of three-way ping-pong, with various voices bouncing through the mix only to be chased by the instruments. Warren’s low notes are the anchor, but Martin wraps his thin electric lead around the bass, an ornamental leather braid around a very big wooden bludgeon. “Heavy Shoes” emerges from a slow bleed of amplifier hum, drums, and voices sprinting suddenly into vivid crisscross patterns. On Battlefields Forever, for instance, Martin’s guitar delivers surprising accents and counterpoints. No matter how familiar their oversized riffs or refrains first seem, they twist and turn in unexpected ways. Willis and Warren have never zigged and zagged stylistically like the Melvins, the other duo they’ve augmented off and on for the last six years, but there’s a patient and patent idiosyncrasy to their sound. That disappearance is especially unfortunate considering that Battlefields Forever is as likable and unpredictable as anything they’ve ever done. For a platform that seems to hold almost everything, the internet has nearly made Battlefields Forever seem like a phantom, a rumor that Big Business is still busy. And after the annual flip of the calendar, Pitchfork is finally reviewing it. The album made nearly no year-end lists, despite being out since Halloween. Though Battlefields Forever was released nearly four months ago, All Music has yet to list it, much less rate it. A quick Google search confirms that drummer Coady Willis, bassist Jared Warren, and new guitarist Scott Martin’s are better at making records than marketing them. Suddenly, the force that had done the heavy lifting behind Big Business’s promotion-the mailings and the CD-R’s, the one-sheets and the stuffed envelopes-had fallen, with the responsibility now landed at the feet of the band. Their label for their entire career, Hydra Head, announced its closure almost exactly a year earlier, citing both an “imbalance between creative ideals and financial realities” and an asymptotic slide of music sales as primary factors. Both announcements were as funny as intended, with jokes about Mötley Crüe drumming and the ghost of “Jeff Goldbloom.” Behind the jocularity, though, there was a fundamental bummer: If Big Business didn’t want to go hunting labels or, in industry parlance, “shopping themselves around,” they would have to release Battlefields Forever themselves.
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