Doom supergroup unleashes a debut that’ll take a while to get used to
MVM read a book once (honestly). This particular tome was on Aerosmith’s rise, fall and subsequent rebirth. On the eve of their 1987 comeback “Permanent Vacation” they apparently had a meeting with their management and decided they wouldn’t take any longer than a minute to get to the hook in the song. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus” was the maxim.
On that basis then. God alone only knows that The Toxic Twins would make of this.
“Rocket Science” is the debut offering of what amounts to doom royalty. Its roots were in a series of jam sessions involving Matt Couto (Elder), Darryl Shepard (Black Pyramid, The Scimitar) and Tom Corino (Rozamov), after they liked what they were doing they found their singer with the addition of Roadsaw vocalist Craig Riggs.
The resulting album, which is emerging two years after those initial meetings, still sounds like a jam where anything goes. The result is about as far removed from the idea of verse-chrorus-verse as you can possibly get and still be rock n roll.
Like the band themselves say on “Fast Number One”: “make it interesting for me…..”
And “…..Science” is certainly that. There will however, be frequent moments when you listen to this eight tracker and think, why has it done that? Take the opening “German For Lucy” for the first three minutes of its life it’s been happily going along like the bastard son of “Paranoid” when, from out of nowhere, it spends the next four doing something else entirely and rather hypnotically it starts repeating itself on a different riff altogether. It’s like two songs. It’s not. It’s one, and even more surprising it works brilliantly.
At times this is like the best jam session you can imagine. The men behind it are fine musicians and in the case of Couto, responsible for one of MV’s favourite records of 2015. Not that every song here is a meandering thing, “Rabbit Astronaut” for one just gets the job done very well, it’s just that you almost think Kind are happier when they are bending minds, as on the doomtastic “Hordeolum”, which will draw comparisons to Elder.
Even the titles here are brilliantly mad. “Pastrami Blaster” is actually a primal slab of something bluesy from the deep, but the almost funky “Siberia” takes us down a different road. It’s meant to.
Fittingly “Rocket Science” saves it’s most, “what’s that again?” moment for last. “The Angry Undertaker” does exactly what it wants to and still sounds superb. Which makes it the perfect emblem for the band themselves.
Whether making music is rocket science is open to question. However, this is magnificent experiment. Invest your time in it and there are some stunning results.
Rating 9/10
