FALSE GODS – LOST IN DARKNESS AND DISTANCE REVIEW

Mike Stack and Greg March grew up together in New York’s hardcore scene, but they formed False Gods in 2015 with a different vision for their music. There’d be nothing to hide behind. Despair, disenchantment, and mental anguish need not be bottled up or communicated in metaphors. “Let it all out,” became their new motto. They stand by this conviction on album number three, and that should be great news to those that love to wallow in the existential angst of a sludgy post-metal affair.

A harsh guitar distortion furnaced by aggressive strumming leads into a hardcore-infused swerve of doom metal in opening track, ‘Voice of Treason’. It only takes forty seconds to recognise the imaginative chord choices of Killing Joke buried in the noise. Mike Stack grinds his voice like a recalcitrant piece of analogue machinery that needs a good thump to operate at full capacity. At its loudest, his voice strains like Tom Araya shouting at his highest range. Underneath the heat and steam, you’ll hear an atmospheric density humming in the background like an invisible puppet master. The bass is loud but not abrasive enough to belch its way through the electricity like most sludge bands.

By contrast, the four-string action in ‘Straw Dog’ is thick enough to leave its reverberations in your throat. This is what the Melvins would sound like if Steve Albini left them the Neurosismaster tapes in his will. It’s a New York we seldom see in art these days, but False Gods remind us that this is the city of extremes, where millionaires and labourers rub shoulders on the same subway to work. Is there another sub-genre of metal more focused on creating a sense of stress-release that involves ninety percent of the former and ten percent of the latter?

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this music is its respect for melody. The wash of the semi-electric guitar gives ‘Imposter’ a post-punk vibe using the prism of post-metal. Here, Stack’s anguished enunciation is closer to London than New York in its vitriol. His earnest attempts to force the words into anthems gives the song an added layer of angst, but it’s the only part of his register that needs more work. Fortunately, the band’s decision to step into a heavier thud of beatdown riffing at 04:10 allows him to return to his favourite discomfort zone of roaring like an overworked and underfed hod carrier.

The lyrics are as subtle as a bazooka for most of Lost in Darkness and Distance. A thick bass groove and drum combination opens ‘Suffering in a Strange Land’ through gritted teeth: “You can’t change a fucking thing / All that’s left to do is to run away in the void.” The mistake is to assume a slacker mentality lies at the heart of this. Listen to the sinews straining and bones cracking – this is civilised rage from men who live by the alarm clock. It’s also the most stubborn song on the record with simple palm-muted chords and vocal lines seething in the same pattern until the halfway point. Then, Greg March diverges and drags the band into a muscular mid-tempo crunch while Josh Harrison hammers down on his snares with the finesse of a veteran artisan.

Though it does not occur to them to grant the listener a good time, False Gods do a decent job of entertaining you. That’s because their idea of fun is a self-flagellating one-man play directed by Antonin Artaud for a symposium of redundant white-collar workers. Guitar chords ache like spiritual setbacks rather than stinging flesh lacerations in ‘Worldless’. Much of this torment is in the head rather than the gut.

The comparisons with Neurosis will multiply in closing track, ‘Death is Listening’. If grunge was serious music in schoolboy trousers, then, post-metal is the sound of the administrative class who studied at university only to realise that their promised jobs will be obsolete in the next decade when AI replaces them. This rage is real and will be more commonplace in the near future when the next wave of technological disruption upends our way of living. False Gods won’t be the last group of men in their forties to voice their frustration and disenchantment in this manner.

JVB