Some of the best projects are born out of a deep love of a specific time and sound of that time – it inspires and molds us, usually spider-webbing us off into new directions of discovery. Nu metal was that for a lot of people of my generation, but it’s persevered thanks to the younger generations falling for the old stuff as we did decades ago and some new-school cats doing their own things with the tenets of the genre. I saw some hype build up for Memorrhage leading up to their self-titled project’s release. The pixelated cover art was eye-catching. The Matrixian code crawl background, a synthetic being leashed by cords and circuitry to create Schrödinger’s Droid – is it alive or dead? I was all in… then I heard the first few songs.
One thing about being a revivalist or innovator using something tried and true as a backdrop is you really have to sell the gimmick hard. Memorrhage goes so far deep into itself that I can’t even pinpoint one singular gimmick or hook other than its dark sci-fi aesthetic that seems tailor-made to appeal to me. Mostly a solo project of one person, Garry Brents, it’s very apparent he felt the same sting of the ’90s and ’00s I did when the music, movies, and video games of that time Spartan kicked me into a love of darkness, dystopia, and heaviness.
This LP is like an aural Love, Death & Robots season, conceptually, and loosely based in a futuristic world where androids, prison planets, and downloading consciences into computers is the norm. Each song is its own story, plasma-scorched with a ruckus of sound; heavy-ass guitars, piston-like drums, haunting and steely atmosphere, and the vocal torments of various characters caught in extraordinary predicaments made commonplace and wrenching. It’s not a happy album, but it smacks of the stories I grew up on and still enjoy to this day. Against its nature, Memorrhage is friend-shaped and welcoming.
And where the hell do I begin? “Memory Leak” is a wild opener about an entity in a video game becoming sentient and causing a huge data leak, which affects other realities. You can feel the panic in the vocals as if it’s trying to hold back a torrent of tangible code leaking from its mouth to absolutely no avail; instead, it’s just carried away in the rush that it’s uncontrollably causing. The chorus really threatened the integrity of your neck with headbangingly good melody and rhythm. Brents’ vocals remind me of Corey Taylor when he really gives it his all on songs like “Wait and Bleed”. Just like the nu metal of yore, this has a dirty futuristic feel to it, scummy and rusted, dangerous even.
“Reek” is a fucking chase sequence given sonic legs. Telling the story of a malfunctioning android that is driven to kill the humans on board the spaceship it’s meant to service, the lyrics sync up with some DJ scratching and turntablism, a key element of full-bodied nu metal, at least if your band had six or more members. Brents pushes limits with their cry of ‘Running around, I’m running around‘ while DJ Mr. Rager goes HAM on the scratching. His mark is keenly felt on the rest of this LP on nearly every following song, one my favorites being “Finesse”, which has some awesome riffing. At certain points, the guitars almost seem to duel the scratches as well. Appropriate given the song’s story of an android infiltrating a dictator’s space station to free prisoners and sabotage the station’s own androids to make the place bleed from the inside out.
I love the drum and bass asides on “Old Wave”, short-lived as they are – or what about the rapping (provided by VoidDweller it seems) and rickety bass of “Ex-Sprite”, which forcefully threw me back into my Korn-loving days. Memorrhage is packed with little moments like that which may seem inconsequential at first, but seem to root the project in this very specific sort of retrofuturist dressing for millennials. Surely, I can’t be the only one that remembers how much music like that pock-marked our movies and games of the time. It’s not so much pandering or an eclectic reference, but a knowing nod or a stage whisper meant to coyly intimate that we’re made of similar stuff. Still, Memorrhage is not lost in the past. In fact, it goes to great lengths to plant itself firmly into today’s sonic landscape with its density that metal kids and a burgeoning cybergrind community will latch onto like a space pirate ship docking with a cruiser to wreck some murderous havoc.
So wow, Memorrhage is a trip. A trip down memory lane, a trip into a blistered bad-ending future we wrought with our own hubris and greedy desires, and a trip just down the road of where a specific sect of heavy music is heading. On all counts, it’s a good trip; great even. I’ve looped this album a staggering amount of times, to the point where I likely make up a lion’s share of the streams on Tidal so far. If you like nu metal, industrial, cybergrind, groove metal, or any permutations of any of those, this will likely pique those interests. This is precisely the kind of revivalist/tribute stuff I love to hear. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go fucking put on some JNCO jeans – with attached chain wallet – drink some Surge, and play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater until my mom tells me to go to bed because I have middle school tomorrow.
