by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Oh Great Falls, where have you been? If the first lines of the Seattle heavy music supergroup’s new album Objects Without Pain is to be taken literally, the members of Great Falls have just been waiting here, “hoping for a sign,” like if the Nazgûl had been imprisoned in the shadow world with guitars and amps instead of Friesian horses and sackcloth. Well, whatever sign they were waiting for arrived, and the sludgy post-hardcore band is back with their most bombastic, thoughtful music to date.
Comprised of vocalist/guitarist Demian Johnston and bassist Shane Mehling of Playing Enemy and drummer Nickolis Parks of Gaytheist, Great Falls has been an on-again off-again proposition since its inception in the early teens (their last proper record was 2018’s A Sense of Rest, although they did release an EP of new material earlier this year). Listening to the album’s pulverizing eight tracks, you wouldn’t know it. With all its twists and turns, throat-bleeding vocals, mammoth guitars, rumble-growl bass, and mind-blowing drumming, Great Falls sounds like a band, three dudes who likely work in bars or write code for tech companies and meet twice a week to annihilate every convention of heavy music you hold dear.
Producer Kurt Ballou (Converge, et. al.) tends to get credited as the heavy music producer of our age, but we need to talk about Scott Evans, whose work with Great Falls and his own band Kowloon Walled City, deserves some serious recognition. Objects Without Pain‘s ability to consistently surprise, titillate, and terrify is not only a credit to the musicians who wrote it, but a credit to Evans, whose skills as an engineer and mixer make Objects Without Pain easily the best sounding heavy album of the year. Grant me a bully pulpit and I’ll browbeat anyone willing to listen about how most of today’s heavy music sounds too slick, or too processed, or too retro, or too… Urban Outfitters. Where’s the danger? Where’s the fucking teeth? Turns out, Great Falls as recorded by Evans has been hogging it all.
Objects Without Pain is a trick mirror in its aural attack on convention, appearing both flawed and flawless. Dissonant chord phrasing makes songs sound out-of-tune, song structures writhe like trapped reptiles, vocals scream at the unhinged limit of the human larynx. Listening to Objects Without Pain is akin to watching trains collide in slow motion, but the precision it requires to craft songs as wonderfully complex as any of the album’s eight tunes belies the listener’s sense that everything is out of control. Objects Without Pain is expertly constructed in its mayhem.
“Dragged Home Alive” begins tensely: a car door closes, a solitary bass toggles between two foreboding chords, suggesting the moment in a horror film when the protagonist returns to the scene of a previous atrocity. When Johnston’s voice obliterates the unnerving calm, one hears it as a harbinger of impending chaos. The band takes its time to build to the first crescendo, with each new layer seemingly heavier than the last until finally the breakdown explodes. If you’re familiar with Barkmarket’s track one masterpiece “Visible Cow” from 1996’s L Ron, imagine that, but, like, way scarier. After careening through five minutes of hairpins turns and Tasmanian devil riffs, Great Falls finally returns to the opening two chord progression. It’s a deeply satisfying payoff, especially as they add drum fills, vocals, and guitar in the progression’s gaps, all told sounding like a warped copy of Daydream Nation played at three-quarters speed.
Track two “Trap Feeding,” the album’s dizzying first single, immediately follows. There’s not even a split second to inhale before the band are bulldozing the speakers. The midsection radically changes both the meter and tempo and made me feel as if I’d been shellacked by a crashing wave and was tumbling beneath the surface, bewildered and afraid. Then, without warning, the song returns to its monster first riff. As a listener you’re not holding on, you’re dragged completely under.
“Born As an Argument” follows the same map of destruction. An intro like a typhoon transforms into a totally different groove that evolves over the course of the song, touching on multiple linchpins of the genre, guided by the band’s frenetic playing and Johnston’s unsettling scream. It’s the howl of someone whose past desperation, past helping. When the song finally settles into its quieter, melodic, outro complete with harmonized Oos, I realized I’d still been holding my breath.
“Old Words Worn Thin” is sludgier and slower than the album’s opening three tracks. Chronicling a couple’s breakup and subsequent dismantling of their lives together, “Old Words” is no less menacing than its predecessors, but it does give the listener a chance to recalibrate one’s surroundings. The break is short-lived as the song spirals to its noisy and crushing conclusion.
The album’s second half begins as eerily as its beginning. “Spill into the Aisle” lays bare the troubling anxiety of suburban life, the ambivalence of marriage and kids combined with the inability to keep up with the Joneses. Throughout the album, Objects Without Pain is a running commentary on the banality of post-modern life and the cognitive dissonance that comes with it. We know nothing matters, but then why does it hurt so fucking bad? This simmering incongruence explodes into the panic and rage of “Ceilings Inch Closer” and “The Starveling,” which features bafflingly complex guitar-bass-drum interplay. “This is how we were taught,” screams Johnston on “The Starveling”, “this and TV,” admitting, “we have no plan for you to be okay.”
By the time album closer “Thrown Against the Waves” arrives, you’re inclined to agree. At over twelve minutes, “Thrown Against the Waves” is the album’s “est” song, longest, heaviest, weirdest, and oddly, pleasantest. It’s discombobulating to find such chaos pleasant, but that’s sort of the point of the band. Great Falls wants you to feel like a pebble in a quarry, insignificant and at risk of being smashed to smithereens. Which is quite fun if you give in to it. Near the end, Johnston howls, “It can hurt to be happy.” That’s Objects Without Pain.