Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Mass Burial: Giant Squid, The Ichthyologist





The Ichthyologist picks up exactly where Metridium Field leaves off, with a slower, hypnotic track in “Panthalassa”. And what a way to start their second full length. An album that holds a special place in my heart, although a different one from the spot occupied by Metridium Field, The Ichthyologist has a dense and unsettling atmosphere about it that can, at certain times, be downright suffocating.


Released in early 2009, The Ichthyologist is a concept album that would mark the beginning of a loosely collected story that would span the last three Giant Squid releases about a man lost at sea, struggling to survive. It would also mark the beginning of the songs being subtitled with scientific names for various marine life. The opening pair of “Panthalassa” and “La Brea Tar Pits” lurch along, setting a tone that is at once both soothing and unsettling before “Sutterville” comes along as a general tonal balm. Yet there is something is the more ethereal and clam “Sutterville” that always seems out of tune, like there’s always a note that is just off, ever so slightly enough that no actual calm can be established. It’s the sound of something always being wrong, despite outward appearances being fine. “Dead Man’s Slough” continues the sonic lull, and is perhaps the actual calming track. This merely sets the table for the frantic rerecording of “Throwing A Donner Party At Sea” from the Monster in the Creek EP, here with the added vocals of Karyn Crisis who, despite not having a lot of familiarity with, is instantly recognizable. She helps to give the song, already a stomping affair, a real sense of urgency and menace.

The albums’ second half begins with the haunting beginning and furious ending of “Sevengill,” a track that may be in a nutshell be a showcase of everything this band does. Featuring some lush guest vocals by Anneke van Giersbergen, I think still of The Gathering at that time, “Sevengill” combines the narrative power of the band with the slow build and the sludgy roughness and the unsettling atmosphere that makes the band such a tense joy to experience.

“Mormon Island” and “Emerald Bay”  are both almost seven minute long exercises in creepily relaxed tension. Tension in the sense that you know something is wrong, an eerie clam that belies some real problem or danger or something, lurking. Some may say, ‘lurking beneath the waves,’ and that would be appropriate. The band does not simply employ a nautical or marine theme, but captures the atmosphere of the quite moments on the water of movies like Jaws or, well honestly, I can’t think of any other good shark movies. To say Jaws is a huge influence on the band is to make a laughable understatement, as said film has seeped into everything the band has done since its inaugural EP. A Giant Squid album is a montage of those scenes where someone is swimming in a clear and serene ocean, only seconds later to be ambushed by a shark that viciously destroys them, before the water returns to its calm appearance. As an observer, or audience to something like Jaws, you know that the calm surface hides something terrible, yet not malevolent, but something violent and ferocious nonetheless. You know that what that swimmer is mistaking for calm serenity is simply waiting to erupt, without knowing when it will happen. Tracks like “Panthalassa” and “the beginning half of “Sevengill” are those calm moments that hide a beast: you, as audience, know that this alleged calm is soon to burst into frenzy, yet are confined to merely float along until it happens, knowing that once it does, there will have been nothing that you could have done to avoid or preempt it.

When I first heard The Ichthyologist, I was dealing with some pretty bleak personal times, having been unemployed for a little while was really starting to eat away at my mind. While my associations with Metridium Fields are universally positive, the same cannot be said of this album, unfortunately. That uneasy quality, something that I love so much about this band, and from music in general honestly, brings me back to a time when everything was unease, and this album was the soundtrack to a lot of late, late nights of disquiet and unease as I sat frantically around my apartment, mind racing to sort an incredibly limited number of options. The creeping dread of life at that time married perfectly to the creeping unease of Giant Squid, making a near perfect soundtrack for those dead-of-winter nights with nothing to do, either at the moment or the next day, and the general sense of there being nothing that I could do, either at the moment or the next day. Fitting maybe that my relistening to The Ichthyologist came along at the end of the semester, where feelings of relief at being finished with nonstop work for a few weeks butt heads with feelings of creeping dread, and a sense that nothing can be done.

But music is supposed to stir the emotions,  like all good art. Giant Squid again crafted a completely beautiful and emotionally draining soundscape with this album, one that is alternatingly beautiful and completely terrifying, for reasons of the music, not limited to the connections made with it on a personal level. No, this one runs real deep, and it is the potentially unfathomable depths of it that inspire curiosity and admiration, as well as instill untold terror.

No comments:

Post a Comment