Minoans is the
last Giant Squid record, in that it is the last record these musicians would
release under this name. This is a good combination of the song composition and
content that the band has always offered, but largely loses the sludgy lurch of
their earlier works.
And that is a quality of this band that I have always
really, really appreciated, so to have it mostly disappear is a little bit of a
personal let down. Not to say that the band has lost its magic, as that is
something that was always provided by the compositions and their atmospheric
moments; but the Giant Squid of Metridium
Fields and the heavier moments of The
Ichthyologist will always be preferable to me to the cleaner, more polished
Giant Squid of Cenotes and Minoans. But enough, lest I become That
Guy, eager to disparage the modern output in favor of toasting unnecessarily again
the old. It is the absence of sonic density that causes the musical density to
be somewhat overlooked, at least by myself somewhat regularly.
What Minoans offers
is eight more Giant Squid tracks which, at this point, although unpredictable
and ever-surprising, means we know what we’re getting. Returning are the Middle
Eastern musical elements, the nautical and aquatic life themes, this time also
skirting around the ancient civilization of the titular society. The story of
Minoan Crete is the story of Sir Arthur Evans, an archeologist mostly because
he said he was an archeologist, and what amounts to an incredibly fortunate
discovery on an island that was largely considered to be empty of any
importance. Essentially, from my memories of a really interesting History
Channel program I saw years ago, Evans found some evidence of an ancient
society, and then found some more, and then decided that this society was the
Minoans of legend, a great seafaring Mediterranean people referred to in the ancient
histories largely via trade encounters. Historians don’t really know what
happened to the Minoans, whether they moved away or were somehow conquered,
some theories mention volcanic activity in the area, and some alternate
historians at least tangentially equate the Minoans with Atlantis.
But enough with the history lesson, we’re here to rock.
Despite having dropped the sludge, Minoans
does retain some degrees of the slower, ponderous tone earlier Squid used
so expertly. Tracks like “Palace of Knossos” display this excellently, as its
main riff takes its time with each play, and much of the album has cello accompaniment
thanks to Grayceon’s Jackie Perez Gratz, and that particular instrument helps to
add a sense of slower crawl. There is a real sense of dread in most of the
songs here, the general unease that a Giant Squid record give the listener, and
it is really on display in songs like “Sixty Foot Waves” and “Sir Arthur Evans”.
The title track and “Mycenaeans” add some tension to the listening experience,
the latter in what I can only describe, poorly, as being the typical Giant
Squid fashion. The “ballad,” for lack of a better label, this time around is “The
Pearl and the Parthenon,” and it is probably the best of this type of song to
be found in the Giant Squid catalog, better than comparable songs like “Versus
the Siren” from Metridium Fields. The
album ends with the mystery of the “Phaistos Disk,” one of archeology’s
greatest mysteries, and the band not attempting to solve it, rather simply
presenting it almost as a description of the object instead of any postulation on
its meaning. Excellent.
Honestly, this is a band that needs to be experienced in
order to be understood. They are a high concept band, and one that, as bad as I
feel saying this, as it is honestly causing me to wince as I type it, requires
a lot of intelligent attention in order to truly get. The sea life theme runs
through every second of the bands’ discography, and in a really intelligent
fashion. Here is a better chance to mention a band like Nile, better at least
than when they came up during my piece on Cenotes.
Nile is a band that also has a strong and consistent lyrical and topical theme
of Ancient Egypt. But Nile generally employs the violent elements of the theme,
focusing on things like rituals and the more violent ends of mythology and
history. Giant Squid contains plenty of mentions of the violence of the sea and
all of that, but does so in a way that is much more thoughtful. None of this is
meant to be a dig at a band like Nile, whom I have always enjoyed and think are
really good at what they do. But Nile is a death metal band, and so the move
straightforward display of violence in images and words is something that
better serves the genre. For Giant Squid, taking the violence and turning it
into something eerie and poetic while often appearing unassuming fits their
genre demands, which are those of post metal art sludge oceanography-core. It is
hard to explain what this band is doing, and for years my personal,
professional assessment of them is that they are one of those bands that is
either for you, or it is not. How they were never picked up by the 2010-2012
hipster metal crowd I will never understand, as those same people who flocked
to the sludge and drone acts for whatever reasons would no doubt find lots to
love about a band like this.
While the official status of Giant Squid is that they broke
up after this album, they would resurface (lol) a few years later, in 2017,
with a new name and a new record and a slightly new direction. But for now,
that’s for another day.
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