Business is good…
Floated on the Rock Exchange by Joyful Noise Recordings on 8 July 2016 and monitored by Gary “greed is good” Cordwell
Big businesses are none too popular in these austere, post-Brexit, anti fat cat days but fear not, these aren’t the bad guys. Band founder members Cody Willis and Jared Warren have been churning out righteous noise since 2005 as Big Business as well as being current touring members of gonzo legends The Melvins. ‘Command Your Weather’ is album number five and, ahem, business is good….
We are eased into proceedings by a wash of ambient white noise and what sounds, to these untrained ears, like a xylophone before ‘Regulars’ hurls us into a Pistols style punk noise riff, tribal drums and crashing cymbals powering us chaotically forward. What is fairly quickly apparent is the omnipresent use of an octave pedal to create distinct guitar sounds and textures – lending a menacing, organ-like lilt to the bludgeon. It’s a technique that seems to be becoming incresingly popular (Boss Keloid also used octave to thrilling, mind boggling effect on their latest release).
And it’s business as usual (sorry) for the rest of the album, the band barely giving us time to catch our breath as they storm onward. In admist the feedback and guitar mangling there is the half-formed, spooky lullaby of ‘Send Help’ – it’s a ghost train of a song, whispered warnings to “avoid the vipers” in a place that’s “colder than you think”. More octave driven church organ sounding guitar leads us into a decidedly black mass. The chanting in ‘Popular Demand’ too, sounds almost hymnal…albeit a loud, gnarly, hymn – I dread to think what kind of creepy, fucked up church you’d hear this in.
The huge doom riffery of ‘Horses’ brings things to an ominous conclusion. The guitars are in the red, infinitely heavy and threatening. Slow moving and immense, they carelessly trample anything in their path. We are urged to “bring those horses in, tonight they’ll surely suffer”…eh?
Those cryptic utterances kinda sum up the album – dark, unpredictable, unique, unsettling. A brooding mash up of the eccentric noise of The Melvins and the whiplash complexity and ambition of Mastodon, who they are currently touring the States with. Despite these times of uncertainty, I’d invest in this Big Business, you won’t regret it.
8 out of 10
Track list:
- Last Legs
- Regulars
- Fathers Day
- Blacker Holes
- Popular Demand
- Own Throats
- Send Help
- Diagnostic Front
- Horses
