Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Great Falls - Objects Without Pain (2023)

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.