From the beginning of its history forward, heavy metal has had a very diverse umbrella of aesthetics comprising its most brooding and significant releases, and while I’m hesitant to call the new album from Darren Michael Boyd an outright tribute to the metallic gods of yore, its unique blend of surf elements, rock intensity, and the heavy tonal presence of metal has got a lot of listeners abuzz this winter. Boyd’s work has already attracted critical acclaim in the past, but with Thoughts & Scares – that’s right, leave your prayers at home, folks – he touches on creative ground even some of his lifelong fans might be surprised to discover.
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Like eyes panning across us in a fit of paranoia, “Proof of Monsters,” the first song on Thoughts & Scares, takes a silence broken by aggressive guitar chords that seem to be a call for us to stand up and run away from the darkness and expands on the thematic elements implied by the juxtaposition of sounds. The magnificent potency of the guitar is fascinating; one moment it feels both pure and angst-ridden, the next almost bucolic and yearning for a sense of self-control it isn’t about to find. It took a lot of influences being compounded together to make Darren Michael Boyd’s vision, but the most protuberant among them for me has got to be Dick Dale. I hear much of Dale’s experimental, pushy sensibilities present in Boyd’s output here, but he isn’t recycling anything we already know. Boyd’s nimbleness and his haunting backup band take us far from where we initially start, with songs like “Galactic Blood Ritual Roadshow,” a very texturally expressive track on the record, conjuring the feeling that we’re on an epic adventure.
Roughly two decades ago many music critics started to use a term that I initially wasn’t fond of; “post-metal.” The term implies that these acts are deriving their structures from mainstream songs and relying more on the instrumentation than the vocals to make their artistic point. I have never liked how limiting that kind of definition feels because when I listen to a record like Thoughts & Scares, I don’t feel like I’m listening to a second phase in the history of heavy music.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/nz/album/thoughts-scares/1649622446
This is the kind of music that stands alone and doesn’t follow after other artists. Just the range of styles and total lack of uniformity in the songs is so stimulating as a music fan that I almost feel like putting Darren Michael Boyd anywhere near the post-rock box is disrespectful. Just as “Toad Rage” is an anthem for a never-ending excursion, “Where the Crawdads Scream” is a furious whipping of anxious notes against each other, each one fighting for some sort of release. If there is one recommendation I have for those who are going to give Darren Michael Boyd’s Thoughts & Scares a shot, it’s to try not to listen to it at an excessive volume. This is a record that beats its chest with pride, and among all of the lagging rock I’ve heard lately, it’s a true treasure.
Heather Savage