It’s been a long time since the thunderous rumble of Science Man’s 2022 album Nines Mecca blasted our ear canals. Not that John Toohill – band leader and doyen of distortion – has been resting on his laurels having released albums under a number of monikers such as Black & White Cat/Black & White Cake, Brute Spring, The Hamiltones, Alpha Hopper, and Moon People. But Science Man is the band that brought me to Toohill’s punishing world and Monarch Joy is their latest release since morphing from a semi-solo project into a full band of like minded hardcore atom smashers.
The foreboding opening, ‘S.C.I.M.N.’, is a skronk of tortured saxophones over which drums burst with a war dance rhythm, followed by guitars and bass hammering out a low, punishing chord every two bars that deforms as it decays. Then, with ‘Control Collar’, we are truly on our way, surfing a rockslide of full-tilt riffs, power chords, frenetic drums and a gravel hailstorm of barked vocals.
Monarch Joy is a relentless, pell-mell assault on the senses with no time for lighters-in-the-air slow numbers. Just as you have recovered from the pounding of ‘Ruthless Prism’, ‘Animals’ dials up the speed with the guitar riffs and frenetic kit rolls locked in a feverish dance. ‘Surely the band have peaked’, you think, but no, ‘Funeral For An Arm’ explodes like nitro-glycerine; faster, stronger, harder. Within this unrelenting battery there is a brutal finesse to the tracks with the chords often leaping around like Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yo’s tree top fight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The album barely scrapes 20 minutes, but it is so dense and merciless you feel like you have gone 15 rounds with George Foreman sporting his grills in place of boxing gloves. This is an album with so much mass you shouldn’t be able to pick the vinyl up; a subterranean collection of music so low on the sonic register that it will trigger seismometers everywhere. This is spectacularly tectonic and on the Mohs scale – which measures the ‘absolute hardness’ of minerals/rocks – geologists would likely judge that Science Man leave corundum and diamond in their rear-view mirror.
This is drag-racing with the brakes cut and nitrous on, and, like The Hulk, Science Man ‘Smash!’ If you’re looking for rubble then you’ve come to the right place.
John: Vocals + Guitar, Steve: Drums, Biff: Bass, Spek: Guitar + Horns, Carter: Guitar, Aaron: Guitar, Dave: Guitar
The band have also released part one of a three-part set of short films which depicts “the journey and perilous transformations of a nameless protagonist” and utilises “stop motion, elaborate papier-mâché masks, handmade costumes, green screen bastardizations, and the reckless spirt of DIY punk; the result is something akin to if Jodorowsky had made the Last Unicorn with Terry Gilliam on zero budget.”
Science Man socials: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Website | YouTube
Review by Paul F Cook
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