Meatjack*- Days of Fire (At a Loss)

Balti-boys with a chip on their shoulder and a wired-in hive mind that manages to keep ‘em all in synch, even when the hurricane winds of blistering math metal blow them from one end of the sonic spectrum to the other. Reportedly, these cats laid the competition to waste at the last Emissions from the Monolith (Ohio’s own annual stoner summit), and I can hazard a guess why. Meatjack takes the basic tenets of dope metal- riff worship, deep, rolling grooves, and complicated rhythms- and drags them into all manner of strange and terrible places. “Days of Fire” sounds like Neurosis on a 70’s rock kick, rewriting the soundtrack to “Jacob’s Ladder” in real time. You just know the quiet, spacey moments are merely building up to great, crashing tidal waves of thick, punishing sound, and they never fail to deliver. Of particular note here is the wildly inventive guitar work of Brian Daniloski- it really does take you places, man, and the rest of the band are pros at giving Bri the room to breathe, or to flex his formidable sonic muscles. I haven’t timed any of the tracks, but they seem to go on for a good 5-6 minutes a pop, and there’s about 17 different parts to each song, so these meaty Jacks are obviously top-notch musicians. What they aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination, are good time kids. If stoner rock had an older, smarter brother obsessed with morbid curiosities and Pythagorean theorems, that brother’s name would be Jack. Meat for short.

*Dunno how they came up with the name, but I’m pretty sure that’s what you call it when you go to the grocery store and shove a few steaks down your pants, to get you through the long stretch between paychecks.
 
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