MEAT MALLET

The one thing I will say about "Meat Mallet" is that it is at the very least more interesting than a lot of the progressive music happening right now. A Formal Horse has an intuition for heaviness, a sense of humor, and at times, a fairly avant-garde approach. That being said, much of this album is just grungy psych rock with complicated guitar rhythms; there's a lot of stuff on here that really isn't very inspired. By about halfway through the album, it mostly all sounds the same. Especially with the more relaxed, clean guitar-driven passages, it feels like the band doesn't have very many tricks up their sleeves. That being said, I do quite enjoy the subdued, acoustic-driven nature of "Let It Run", which is probably the band's most successful attempt at a more relaxed song. Additionally, most of the heavier passages really are fairly excellent; notable tracks on this front include "This One's Just a Warning", "Someone's After My Malted Milk", "Heavy Hit", and "Mr C's Two Thousand and Threes".

Perhaps the weakest aspect of the album is the lyrical content; a lot of the lyrics aren't very interesting, and many sound either like disjointed artsy phrases, or phrases that the band feels sound edgier than they really are (e.g. "This One's Just a Warning" or "You've Got a Billion and I've Got a Half"). They aren't terrible lines, and can certainly carry weight in the right context, but the band repeats them far too many times to be effective. "Space8" is probably the most lyrically egregious song on the album with its anti-social media angle. Unlike Love Over Fear by Pendragon or Virtual Human by Orion 2.0, I do think that the band is going for a more valid criticism of the internet age and social media (i.e. the negative influence social media can have on people's self-image and its addictive nature), but unfortunately it ends up sounding like just another generic and uninspired anti-internet anthem. Also, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why the lyrics continue to reference Asia? There are at least 6 songs on the album that mention Tokyo or Japan or Asia or Hong Kong, which feels like a lot for a band from Southampton. To be fair, this is less of a criticism and more of a confusion on my part.

Despite dragging for most of the album, "Meat Mallet" makes up some ground at the end with the excellent closing three tracks "Let It Run", "Mr C's Two Thousand and Threes", and "Turkeys 2000s", which really function all as one continuous piece of music. As I mentioned earlier, "Let It Run" is easily the most effective mellow track on the album; the acoustic part is very engaging, and it flows wonderfully into the crushingly heavy "Mr C's Two Thousand and Threes", which is probably my favorite track on the album. "Turkeys 2000s" comes directly out of this, and while the lyrics are rather odd, the instrumental has some great technicality and heaviness, and it serves very well as a closing track.

All in all, this album is alright, and while it's not an excellent album all the way through, there are certainly some excellent moments. The middle of it had me wanting to bring it down further, but the excellent ending holds it solidly at a 3/5.

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