January 2024 - Feature Release - The Fallen Edition

So just like that we find that a new month is upon us which of course means that we’ll be nominating a brand new monthly feature release for each clan. This essentially means that we’re asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter. We’re really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our chosen releases so don’t be shy.

This month’s feature release for The Fallen has been nominated by myself. It's last year's breakthrough fifth album "Objects Without Pain" from Seattle sludge metallers Great Falls. I've been seeing a fair bit of praise for this one but don't believe I've ever heard a Great Falls song before so I'm looking forward to seeing what all of the fuss is about, particularly with the Metal Academy awards coming up in early February.

https://metal.academy/releases/47430

Boasting a line up from bands I have never heard of before coming to this month’s The Fallen featured release, Great Falls’ Objects Without Pain promised to be a voyage of discovery if nothing else. With a quote from a review of “…if you value art as a triumph of emotion over form, then you should listen”, alongside another quote that referenced comparison with Converge’s Jane Doe album, there was an increasing sense of intrigue as I teed up the stream on Spotify.

The first thing to call out is that this has Neurot Recordings written all over it. After just a few seconds of listening to the album opener Dragged Home Alive, there was no need for me to check the label this was released under. Strained vocals and sterile strings that eventually give way to monstrous riffage later in the track told me all I needed to know. The potent and pungent aggression inherent in the vocals and instrumentation reeked of a band with a real emotional connection to their art, presenting their songs from a very real place. Suffice to say that by the end of track two, Great Falls had my undivided attention.

Rattling into mathy territory with some of the more urgent and pressing tracks (guessing this is the Playing Enemy band member/s influence), Objects Without Pain represents a turbulent listen that possesses the perfect element of restraint without ever fully tempering the raging flow or direction of even the most franticly paced tracks. Where this flow does get flipped on its head and undertakes a dramatic loss of momentum it is done organically and sensibly to help inflict the emotional brevity of the messaging perfectly.

In the more sludgey moments riffs ebb and flow like huge tidal waves of black (not blackened) water with all positivity and colour drained from them. This album confronts the point where tired messaging stops being tiring and instead becomes seething frustration. It pinpoints where the collaborative approach to conflict resolution shatters into the lethal emotional shards that scar all parties involved. The notion that all loss is inevitable is never ignored but it by no means attempts to bill it as tolerable. I would disagree with the above line from the review I saw that said this album represents art over form. Objects Without Pain comes across as very structured, albeit with a crude sense of things dropping into place via the sheer brute force of the will of the musicians involved in its creation.

Whilst containing enough sludge to warrant the tag, there is a lot more to Great Falls than just one element of a genre of metal. The number of band members from the four bands that make up this mystery (to me at least) supergroup clearly gives Great Falls a broad palate to create from without ever overloading the listener. For those familiar with them, the band members of Great Falls are from Kiss it Goodbye, Gaytheist, Play Enemy and Bastard Feast.

4.5/5

Wow! Just wow! "Objects Without Pain" is fucking amazing & has left me wondering how I can never have heard of this Seattle outfit before, despite them having released several full-lengths prior to this one. I'd describe Great Falls' sound here as being super-intense & abrasive sludge metal with post-metal & mathcore influences & they've also got one of the most in-your-face hardcore vocalists you'll ever find in front man Demian Johnston to top it off.

This record is honestly one of the best sludge releases I've ever heard, taking the best parts of Chat Pile, Neurosis & Converge & ramming them down the listeners throat with the force of a thousand sledgehammers. The musicianship is absolutely superb, particularly the rhythm section which showcases an incredible understanding of how to lay an interesting platform & in doing so prove themselves to be just as important as the more widely celebrated craftsmen of the band. There are even some lovely progressive sections with the more atmospheric moments sitting amongst the highlights of the release & managing to eclipse the more chaotic mathcore-infused numbers like "Trap Feeding" & "Born as an Argument". I honestly don't why people want to link "Objects Without Pain" to noise rock & post-hardcore as this is clearly a hardcore-driven metal record that's miles too heavy to require need any references to rock or punk subgenres. If it doesn't take out my album of the 2023 award at the end of the month then we'll have a seriously classic release on our hands though. Just listen to the crushingly heavy sludge metal of "Old Words Worn Thin" or the lengthy post-sludge closer "Thrown Against the Waves" & tell me this style of music gets any better than this (Hint: it doesn't).

4.5/5

For sure there are a couple of things I liked about Objects Without Pain, the guitar tone is nicely pitched and best of all the drums sound amazing. I could listen to an isolated drum track of this quite happily and would prefer to over the finished thing. Unfortunately I couldn't take to it other than that. The songwriting is too spasmodic for me, it veers far too much into mathcore, djenty type territory for my preference and although I really like the tone of the album, the actual songwriting leaves me cold. But the absolute killer for me is the vocals. I would be the first to admit that I probably put too much weight onto vocals but I think I am quite tolerant of some very divisive vocalists, Silencer, Cirith Ungol, King Diamond or Demilich for example, but if I take against a singer then it is like a movie with Adam Sandler in it and no matter how good the rest of the production, it still has Adam Sandler in it! Such is the case with Demian Johnston, his vocals amount to little more than shouting at the top of his voice and just come over like some angry child berating his parents for some perceived injustice and which I find wearisome in the extreme. I don't have an issue with shouted vocals per se, but these are just irritating and off-putting to me to the degree where, by the second half of the album, my mind is wandering and I have pretty much tuned out. I seem to be a minority of one and good luck to those who derived far more enjoyment from it than I was able to muster, but this just isn't one for me I'm afraid.

2.5/5