This is probably the hardest project I’ve had to deal with this year. A massive undertaking, it’s around 70 minutes of work from one of my favorite bands and although I’ve listened to eight of these songs already in the form of two teasing, titillating EPs, they’re shuffled and recontextualized a bit in the form of this full-fledged album. With each Fork EP being only four songs each, I was thinking maybe another four or five tracks to complete the collection, but here come twelve more tracks trampling through the door and I just mopped the place. Usually in these situations, I just stick to the new stuff and maybe dedicate a paragraph or so to how it all coalesces together, but that’s really hard here, so I’m not going to do it. I’ll do my best to not repeat myself though.
I think what’s most apparent with The Inevitable Fork on the first couple listens is how expansive it is, both sonically and emotionally. This album has by far Melted Bodies‘ most touching moments and the most explosive, boiled-over meltdowns yet. I was not ready for it – it would be one thing if the band just went full send on the unhinged, aggressive expression like many other metal and metal-adjacent bands do, but the reality shows something more ardent and volatile, concerning even, with the coin-flip quickness at which moods and tones change just like in our own anxious little heads where one minor inconvenience triggers a cavalcade of negativity that heats your brain like foil in a microwave. The Inevitable Fork is blindingly shiny, able to reflect your own face back at you like a mirror, or a freshly clean bus windshield before it plows into your squishy parts at a street intersection. I like the latter aspect of it, the former proves to be a lot more ugly.
The first single is just about all the introduction you need to the points above. “Bloodlines” is without a doubt one of the best, most affecting songs Melted Bodies have ever written. It balances live-wire electronica, even flirting with breakbeat production near the beginning, with pointed hard rock as it navigates generational trauma and the ripple effects it causes decades later. It’s a spark near a puddle of water you’re standing in, the devious scheming of our DNA rolling the dice on any given day to determine what genetic predisposition will haunt us like a cackling dark cloud. Is today childhood sexual abuse day? What about fatherly abandonment? Family history of drugs and alcohol? “Bloodlines” really captures the self-destructive contending you can go through when reckoning with the fact that you’re your parents’ kid – it’s angry, distracting, and all-consuming, lyrically comparing it all to a knife in your side and a time bomb ticking inside you. I also regularly say the hook’s lyrics ‘I’m a son of a bitch! I’m a regrettable man!‘ in my own head all the time, lovingly of course. I adore the guitar melodies in the bridge too.
“Talk Some More About It” is something I didn’t expect to hear; a cloudy, acoustic wonder of guitar, light synths, and Andy Hamm’s heartfelt croon. It’s so delicate and spacious. Melted Bodies have slower tracks like “Helplessness”, but even that had an air of anxiety and darkness about it – this is all heavenly sunlight, the kind that’ll flambe your eyes if you look at it for longer than half a second. It’s like their “Wish You Were Here” moment for the band to be genuine and vulnerable, aching for understanding or to at least be heard. It’s a really pretty moment lodged in the album’s tumultuous throat, a stylistic foil to “The Avalanche” which builds in similar ways on total opposites of the tonal spectrum. On the other hand, fellow newcomer “Splitting” brims with nu metal ferocity. Some of the shrillest screams are heard on this track, extinguished by an industrial flair that spits mechanical lubricant in all directions as the machine at its heart pumps away and the lyrics form a screed about being flawed. This is a dense song, one of the most on The Inevitable Fork which is saying something.
As one would expect, older tracks from previous EPs get new life. “Relax, You Are Lazy”, “Therapy, “The Avalanche”, and “The Hot Dog Contract” all shine the brightest and it’s like I’m listening to them for the first time again. The first song of those four is one of the most personally cutting:
‘Got that stain on my shirt
It’s in the shape of my life
You hide your mess in your head
While I’m up here wearing red
Maybe your problem’s with you – not me
At least I let out all my anger, stress, pretentious habits!’
The red stain alluded to in the track a few times can mean a lot of things: the hurt and trauma one carries, sometimes with shame, or maybe a mark visible to others to show how damaged you are which, given the conflict at the center of the track, is seen as off-putting and distracting to others, like people can’t handle the ‘real you’. Comparing it to ketchup in the first verse though also hints at the potential temporariness of it and the ability to clean it off of you with enough work and time. You’d always remember what was there before, but it’s gone now and that’s all that matters – you healed as much as you could. Hamm’s two-toned vocals, the bass groove, and the unpredictability of the song smack of something Mike Patton would be wrist-deep in. The spidery, playfully remixed post-punk of “Think Safe” walks with hands clasped next to the driving, acidic drum-and-bass churn of “Liars” to hit similar themes in wildly different ways as well.
Much of the rest of the album’s new tracks are ambient interludes (“Vital Aftermath” bridging between “The Avalanche” and the title track is my fave) or substantive spoken word asides featuring Angela Seo of Xiu Xiu fame, representing what seems to be an inner monologue of the album capturing the common anxieties of being in crowds, in public, the fear of it all, feeling lonely even when surrounded by people. Lots of noise and distortion fills these tracks with Seo’s sometimes indecipherable voice giving the impression of a busy brain, unable to focus on one thing among the scatter, much like how the rest of the tracks are set up. Although they’re all related and themed similarly, they’re erratic. Melted Bodies don’t paint the mind as a palace, but a circus on fire, elephants trumpeting with the bass boosted, trapeze performers flipping and dancing to the EDM beats, and a ringleader speaking in serrated guitar leads. It’s complicated and nasty. It’s the entropic chaos we’re all supposed to navigate while showing up on time for a job that doesn’t pay us enough, go to the store where we can barely afford the food, and mask your quirks long enough in public to not get the cops called on you by an army of brunch Karens. It’s… life.
In the end, The Inevitable Fork is clear – it represents your humanity, your trajectory through life and what paths you choose to take. It’ll either skewer you like a slab of lengua meat or feed you; bleed you out or sustain you. But it’s also what happens to you – sometimes you don’t get a choice or a way to influence what happens. That’s probably the scariest aspect that this album talks about between overstepping bureaucracy that demeans your existence, faulty genetic mapping, judgmental assholes, insistence of help that doesn’t help at all, and way more. It really makes you feel small, but also gives you clarity of purpose and a chance to not feel as alone anymore, to know you’re not the only one that screams just to feel better. On the surface, Melted Bodies confer to us dregs their most captivating, haphazard trainwreck manifesto yet. Plumb the depths enough and you’ll find mercurial pools of reflective water showing you – the real you. How will you treat them?
Real fucking cool band photo by Tim Saccenti
