Mass Burial: Squalus, The Great Fish

I don’t remember when, because Life often moves too fast for my mind to grasp the good parts tightly enough to crystallize them into memories these years. There was an announcement that some of the members of the great Giant Squid were putting together a project that would use samples from the 1975 meisterwerk Jaws, the movie that invented the concept of the summer blockbuster, as well as a movie that has clearly been an enormous inspiration for the members of Giant Squid. The initial announcement made it seem that this new band, dubbed Squalus, was going to use sample, samples, like they did on “Eating Machine” from Metridium Fields. So, my understanding of this new project was a bunch of songs like “Eating Machine”. And while “Eating Machine” does appear in altered form on The Great Fish, I was totally unprepared for what this record really was.

Not an album of samples and musical accompaniment, The Great Fish is eleven songs that condense one of the greatest movies of all time into a tense experience that can honestly only be described as being a Giant Squid record. It feels totally awful to say this is another Giant Squid album, because Squalus is a new band of members of the old band. Each of the eleven songs takes an important portion of the movie and distills the overall narrative to the conflict between Quint, Hooper and the shark. You know, the real important stuff, the “Moby Dick” story. This makes a classic tale (in either movie or original novel form) all the more tense and terrifying, because it removes the Brody stuff. Not like anyone needs to know the plot of Jaws at this point in time, besides my wife, who refuses to watch it for no good reason whatsoever, but the Brody story does only two things: it gives us the eventual hero of the film, and more important in terms of the narrative itself, it provide us a character who is the foil to all three of the other mains, being Quint, Hooper, and the shark, as we watch a story about an obsessive and mindless pursuit of primal desires and the shark that chases the men who are engaged in it. Essentially, Brody is the buffer we have between madness and animals, and by eliminating that part, we are left to witness something truly frightening.

All the classics you know and love from Jaws are here, all the parts that the movie gets so criminally distilled to by those who take either it or “Moby Dick” to be ‘just’ stories about a shark and a whale: the “Eating Machine” speech reappears as the initial phrases of “Eating Machine in the Water,” which will go on to contain the albums’ absolutely most haunting vocal passage. Yes, Quint’s “USS Indianapolis” monologue appears in the song of that title, doll’s eyes and all, in its entirety, accompanied by some real plodding riffage that really captures the spirit of the scene. Drinking song classic “Show Me The Way To Go Home,” yes, it’s here too.

The album also has some really rocking moments, not just a highlight reel of things you remember from the movie. “City Hands” contains the awesome shout along refrain of “sheet shank” that never fails to make me smile. “Flesh, Bone, and Rubber” is another great jam, as is the most chaotic and percussive song, “Town Meeting,” which lyrically presents Quint’s offer to the Amity town council to kill the shark; extra appropriate is the shouted vocals here, as it gives the impression of Quint yelling at the completely oblivious council members, trying to get them to recognize the severity of the situation. But, in true Giant Squid fashion, the record is more about atmosphere and feel than anything else. Squalus employs no guitar, leaving the bass and keyboards to do most of the musical lifting, and they do so in the most unsettling ways at times. The Great Fish returns to presenting that element of open water that is simultaneously calming and hiding untold dangers, and this record with its tale of man eating shark is tailor made to deliver this message. The album is, in equal and alternating measures, calming and engaging, and downright frightening, sometimes within the same song: “Flesh, Rubber, and Bone” and “Eating Machine in the Water” showcase this with effortless ease.

This record is an absolute masterpiece, and should be heard by everyone. Without a weak moment, replacing every second of potential solace with a tense note here and an odd keyboard tone there, The Great Fish never relents, just like the shark it takes its name from. Spoken word track “Jack the Ripper” maybe comes closest to something like a calm, if you can call Hooper’s autopsy report and unsettling and disorienting keys calm.

I couldn’t recommend this album to you enough if I did nothing except repeatedly tell you “You should hear The Great Fish by Squalus” every minute of the day for an entire year. You don’t need to know or like Giant Squid or Jaws even to appreciate this. My only real concern now is whether Squalus is a one-off project, or if there will be more from them, because man, I hope they stick around. I don’t want to come across as That Guy, again, but it seems that everyone else has had the chance to use this phrase this year, and I’m running out of days to do so, so here goes. The Great Fish is not only the best record I’ve heard in 2017, it is also the record that best captures the aura of 2017. You know something terrible is coming, and maybe, just in this moment, you have a brief reprieve; but without warning, here it comes, something monstrous and terrifying, and even though it catches you by surprise, you knew it was coming because you could feel the tension all around you. But the terrible strikes you, unannounced, over and over and over again; you fight against it, but you know that you can’t escape it. Like a shark attack.