Accidents Grotesque Review/Interview
By James Ballinger
In the few years that Great Falls has been a complete unit, they have somehow stayed off the radar of tastemakers supreme. Sure, the impressive resume of all the members looks good on paper (Playing Enemy, Kiss It Goodbye, Jesu, Hemingway, Undertow), but maybe people aren’t as accustomed to having their teeth knocked out as they used to be. This isn’t to say the band has gone unnoticed, that’s not the case at all. Truth be told, Great Falls just isn’t everyman’s draft swill that’s easily digested. Musically the band sticks its fist down your throat, and lyrically it can be dark, jaded, angry, and sharply observant; yet personal.
For their first released full-length as a trio, Accidents Grotesque is nothing short of a soon-to-be classic. Released this week on Irish label Hell Comes Home, the record grabs you by the throat, slams you to the ground and keeps pummeling you until the needle hits the dead vinyl. The band began working on songs for the record back in 2011. “We went on tour in 2011, partially to record with Coextinction. They had a digital EP that they were putting out one a month at the time, with Dave from Unsane. So we were forced to write some new material,” says bassist Shane Mehling. “Those are kind of the first songs we wrote with Phil (Petrocelli, drummer) in mind. Before that we had written songs with a drum machine.” Even though the band had recorded a demo with Phil, one of the first official releases was the Coextinction EP. Released digitally in September 2011, that three song EP would feature early versions of two tracks re-recorded for Accidents Grotesque (Stringer, Replace Me with Fire). “We really enjoyed Stringer and Replace Me with Fire from the Coextension release,” said guitarist/vocalist Demian Johnston. “I think initially we thought one of those songs would be on the record, and Replace Me with Fire people really liked live.”
The record is available now digitally and on vinyl through Hell Comes Home, based in Ireland. “Hell Come Home asked us to do a split, so we did a track called “Everything but Lightning”, so that led us to actually meet up with Hell Comes Home later on, say Mehling. “So during that time we started writing for the new record.” “It usually starts with the riffs, we are writing now actually. So the process is kind of the same,” Shane says about their writing process. “Usually Demian has something, then Phil will start playing something, and we usually just put together a part a, and a part b, or something like that, and work on it. Sometimes Demian and I will have something, sometimes a full song ready and we will bring Phil in, and Phil will be like ‘That doesn’t work at all”.
Coming in at around 37 minutes with 8 tracks, the record is brilliantly separated by two longer tracks, at the ending of both sides of the record. “It was the first time we were doing a release as the three of us, so we wanted it to have an arc to it,” says Demian. “I think that’s something we like to do, put together a record not as individual songs, but a whole movement.” “I don’t think it was something we thought about right away, especially when we started noticing how short a lot of the other songs were. The record is about 50 percent those two songs,” Shane says. “I think we did have the sequence of the vinyl in mind,” chimes in Petrocelli. “The way things get released have suddenly found itself as a vinyl only with download code. And I think that’s good,” Phil says. “Side per side of the record, when you listen to it, it becomes a momentum game. So the record really gains momentum, and then kind of dumps out in to those really long songs. And we spend time thinking about what songs don’t need that two second pause between tracks. So that keeps it going, and when you get to the last song on each side it’s kind of a release I think on a lot of levels, both lyrically and musically.” A release is a relatively passive term for what really happens. The first four songs rage along in the two to four minute range, then goes in to one of the albums defining moments, “Replace Me with Fire”, a nine minute downward spiral that comes to a restrained dirge halfway through, breaking into noise, then back into an intense build, then explodes.
Things resume in a similar fashion on the second side, acting as almost two separate movements of a larger arc as the band intended. Things start out strong with the track “Bruxism”, progressing into “A Parade of Horribles” with chunks of drums, bass, and vocals, and then capsizes itself into “The Forgiveness Machine”. One of the more personal songs on the record, “The Forgiveness Machine” has an opening riff most doom bands dream of calling one of their own. Slow and abrasive, it’s a fitting end to a draining yet rewarding album. “I’m always going through some sort of fucking disaster personally,” says Demian. “This record has been an outlet to kinda talk to everyone about what I’m going through, without really being super specific. Sometimes it’s not really literal, sometimes its characters being taken on, it’s kind of abstract. But the real difference on this one is that I’ve got kids, you know. A step daughter and a daughter. A lot of it is about how I feel my own short comings are affecting them. I mean every parent fucks up their kids somehow. You do what you can, and you hope they don’t come out psychotic or something. I’m hypersensitive to it, you know. Even if we have some tiny little argument, I worry that they will think that’s acceptable behavior. I’m super aware of it.The Forgiveness Machine really encapsulates how I feel my relationship with my wife is hurting my daughter,” Demian states. “It’s not so much about getting along, we get along great. It’s about giving her an example of what partners should be to each other. I don’t want to give her the example that two people that get married are just two people that function well together, I want her to feel that it’s two people that passionately feel that they want to live life has hard as they can until they die together, and that’s not really what we have going on anymore. It wasn’t really one person or anything that destroyed our relationship; it was more I think us becoming the people that we are. When you have a kid, everything changes, and sometimes it’s not for the best.”
Recorded at the Vera Project by Jeffery McNulty (Android Hero, ex-Bloodhag, Seattle Passive Aggressive writer extraordinaire) and mixed by drummer Phil Petrocelli, the band had nothing but good things to say about the recording process. “Jeff was awesome, super low key, no bullshit,” Phil remembers. “Really funny and smart.” “He doesn’t really take anything seriously, except his work,” Shane says. “He kind of does what he needs to do and he’s always on point, and he’s never like, “COME ON” you know. He lets us fit comfortably in to where we need, to do what we need to do.” “We just recorded the music with Jeff. Then I’d go down and do the vocals on my laptop, then send them to Phil,” Demian says. “To me it just takes the pressure off of having to do the guitars and vocals in the studio. And I can kind of try different things out. Also doing a full length, and deciding later to double something or add something, all those options go away when your recording vocals in a day or two. You get tired, and lose power. It becomes obvious in the recording. There are songs I can go back to in Playing Enemy’s catalogue where I’m like ‘yep, I wasn’t in the zone’ and it shows.”
The record also features artwork from Demian. It’s a gorgeous looking gatefold vinyl, complete with lyrics printed inside. “It’s a street map, of some of Ballard. I didn’t include every road. I had done a couple drawings that looked like fake street maps, just kind of fucking around. And Shane made the comment that it looked all black-metaly,” “Yeah, kinda like this” as Shane points down to his shirt with an obvious but unintelligible black metal logo. “So I decided to follow actual streets, so it would have this human…logic behind them, it wouldn’t look so organic.”
The record will be available to order through Hell Comes Home on vinyl, digitally, or with an exclusive bundle including the LP, shirt and screenprinted poster, as well as from the band starting at tonight’s (10-4-13) record release show at the Josephine with Heiress, Dogs of War, and Caligula. This record is absolutely one of the years finest, and is an absolute must own.
http://hellcomeshome.bandcamp.com/album/accidents-grotesque
http://greatfalls.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Hell.Comes.Home.Records
