by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
In case you missed it as the great garbage fire of 2020 first started burning, Chicago’s Melkbelly released their second full length album, PITH, via Wax Nine / Carpark Records. The album takes the quartet’s sound and pushes outwards to extremes on both ends, from hook filled pop-accessibility to explosive sprawling noise rock, always careful to bridge the two together and find a home somewhere in the middle. It’s an exciting record thats full of dynamics and every listen is a new revelation into the carefully constructed chaos and splattered rhythmic shifts. It’s one the year’s best albums and a rare bright spot at a time when we all needed it.
The album’s centerpiece, “Kissing Under Some Bats,” is the prime example of Mekbelly’s melodic destruction gone haywire, harnessed at times and unhinged at others. For two and half minutes we’re given a punishing dose of the band’s signature post-hardcore dexterity and noise pop charm, the song swarming with anti-gravity riffs and blistering distortion, but rooted in Miranda Winters’ vocal melody. The rhythm bounces along fractured and rattled, as James Wetzel, one of the best drummers in recent memory, collides from one toppling fill to the next, playing in the space between primal sludge and free jazz. It’s business as usual and then after about two and a half minutes of song building, everything comes unglued and the band hammer… and hammer… and hammer… their way into a brick wall of noise, as the ground drops out and rather go around the wall, Melkbelly push until they’ve gone straight through it. That relentless onslaught pushes far beyond the melodies that proceeded it, pounding away until you can’t remember what came before and you’re unsure if anything will come next.
Today that song gets a video, directed by Jesse Bond and Tyler Liegmann, a psychedelic collage that offers so much to enjoy. The clip an ever shifting odyssey of warped band members, detached body parts, bats, skeletons, dreamboats, french kissing positivity (lots of smooching), and all the wacky video editing you possibly construct and deconstruct within the song’s near eight minutes. It’s like an episode of Tim and Eric… only weirder and with a better soundtrack.
Catch the band on the internet this Wednesday as they play Live From The Hideout in Chicago.