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.

Mass Burial: Giant Squid, Monster in the Creek

So, I got a request for this Mass Burial. Maybe a suggestion would be more accurate. My ten year anniversary of my relationship with my wife is rapidly approaching, and in the time leading up to our dating, I had been investing a lot of time in the band Giant Squid, a now defunct progressive sludge outfit from California. Not entirely defunct, so much as they have morphed into an incredibly similar “new” band with a different name: Squalus.