Machine Head Into The Locust
Jeremias Resendez
More than a decade after releasing 1994's Burn My Eyes, the groove metal group Machine Head, led by ex-Forbidden/Vio-lence guitarist Robb Flynn, won me back with their sixth album, the Grammy-nominated The Blackening. The 2007 effort made it onto my Show No Mercy year-end list and didn't leave my stereo for long stretches. It followed 2003's Through the Ashes of Empires, a solid enough return to form that came on the heels of a couple of misdirected nu/rap-metal duds-- 1999's The Burning Red and 2001's Supercharger. Which is why The Blackening caught a lot of other folks off guard, too. Once someone flirts with Limp Bizkit territory (and then feuds with Fred Durst and friends), it's usually safe to stop paying attention. In that sense, The Blackening was a revelation. I was drawn to its ambitious sprawl and its dark, angry scowls; its impressive scope, melodies, vastness, and unexpected changes. There was no attempt to make it easy: The opener was close to 11 minutes long, the closer not much shorter, and a couple of the tracks went over nine. The sound, too, was huge-- enough so that, at the time, I said the Oakland group was more mainstream than my usual taste. I meant "stadium-sized."
Album seven, Unto the Locust, is just as big as The Blackening, but it feels tighter, more easily digested, and yet somehow pleasingly rougher around the edges. As a whole, I ultimately prefer its predecessor, but Unto the Locust's highs go places only hinted at on the earlier collection. See, for instance, opener, "I Am Hell (Sonata in C#)", an eight-minute, three-movement anthem that starts, somberly, with a mass of a cappella voices, Flynn singing elegantly in Latin about a female arsonist. A few moments later, the band cruises into a violent explosion, Flynn's voice shifting into rawer thrash mode. This is the sort of transition that would be easy to fuck up, but Machine Head pull it off. From there, the seven-song, 50-minute collection slows down for a number of these sort of curve ball intros before breaking open into magisterial head-bangers.
There are curious details worth pointing out-- overlapping guitar and cello, the repeated use of a string quartet, crazy time signatures, a Pink Floyd-style children's choir-- but none of this would matter much if the material weren't strong enough to contain these elements. (Machine Head are still very heavy, they've just done away with their earlier template.) Despite the length of these songs, Unto the Locust is focused, with memorable choruses, expressive riffs, escalating dynamics, and swarming instrumentation. Crunching floor punching shifts easily into acoustic madrigals. Classical moments turn into vintage thrash. The guitar solos are expressive and self-contained but deepen the rest of the track. Standout "Be Still and Know" opens with ultra-technical, dueling double soloing topped only by the track's huge chorus. There, and elsewhere, you get clean vocals messing with and cascading alongside raspy howls. At its best, this music is invigorating, urgent, necessary.
Unto the Locust does fall off a bit toward the end, but that's largely because the first four tracks add up to just under 30 minutes of the most exciting metal you'll hear all year. ("Pearls Before the Swine" is a solid enough thrasher and the anthemic closer "Who We Are" features the first use of kids in a rock context in ages that hasn't made me wince, though we could've done without the nu metal-ish "Darkness Within".) All told, like Master of Puppets-era Metallica, Machine Head are able to intelligently realize their ambition, weaving risky, progressive elements into the mix without forgoing their roots.
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I feel good about it, man. It seems so long since we got into the studio. Going through the whole recording process, then things happening with the mix, Robb and Warren having to mix it. The record came out on the day of our Oakland listening party. We popped a bottle of champagne. It's a good feeling. We feel like we made a really good record and I think it's a good follow-up to The Blackening, so we're excited to see what happens with it.
Obviously we don't want to do the same record twice. We did that on the second record [The More Things Change] and it's just not a good thing to do. An album is a moment in time. Whatever goes along with it is that moment in time. I think the tour cycle for The Blackening being so long, a three-year cycle, and the record as a whole being about a five-year chunk of our lives was the main thing. Finally finishing the last leg of it and just wanting to close the door on that chapter.
As much as we loved everything about that record and everything that came with it, I think the tour cycle being as long as it was, was really helpful because at that time we were ready to go start writing and just get back in the practice room. At the same time, we had no idea where anything was going. When we left the road everybody went their separate ways. I kinda just waited around for a phone call. Robb called me up a couple months later and was like, "Hey, you ready to get goin'?" I had already been practicing and writing stuff. We got together and the first day in the practice room he had what was going to be "This is the End." It wasn't totally complete, but he had a title for it already, he had a lyric concept for it, and a lot of the music. It got us off to this great start. This song had a lot of stuff going on. It's super thrashy, a lot of stops and starts kinda thing, and it was really challenging to play. So that set the tone for the whole writing process.
The last three records we've been in a great headspace. We feel like we're in complete control of our career. For us, challenging ourselves and writing stuff that's a little harder for us to play and Robb pushing himself vocally got us off to a great start and everything fell into place.
It happened over the years. When we recorded Through the Ashes, I'd be at the studio ready to go, and Robb would be ready to go. Sometimes Adam or Phil would be like, "Oh I can't get there 'til one" or whatever. It just happened to be this thing where me and Robb were there all the time. And also, recording as a whole band in the studio, if I'm ready to go and do a take, and you got two guitar players and a bass player in the studio, after each take they'll start playing "Run to the Hills" by Iron Maiden, or some song just noodling around. So it became this thing. We would do most of the demoing while we are writing, so over time it became most of the time in the practice room with me and Robb. It became what I was used to.
Robb's the guy, when we're playing live, he's the guy I lock in to. We definitely have this really good connection. And it's very comfortable for me, the recording vibe with him. He's got a lot of ideas of trying different things on the drums. Going back and forth it's a very constructive relationship.
The process was different this time than we've ever done. We kind of started doing it as we were demoing for this record. There were a couple songs where we were just trying different things as far as drum parts went. Definitely on the song "Darkness Within." Right when the drums kick in after the first chorus. It's really sporadic drum fills going on. What I did when we were demoing, was play that part four or five times and did whatever came off the top of my head. Robb went back in and listened and cut and pasted everything in and came up with a pattern. Because I had no idea what I was doing, it was very spur of the moment. So he kinda made this pattern out of it. So once we started recording we really liked doing that. What we did was, for five days just go in there and do what we would do at practice. Just play every song three or four times a day... never listened to anything that we recorded, just went. The next day the same. So for five days that's what I did. So we probably had like 35 takes of songs. I told Robb and Warren I didn't want to listen to anything. I was happy with my playing. I wanted them to go in and listen to everything. If the whole song was great on its own then great, but if there's something I did on the second verse of the fifteenth take then use that. Just Frankenstein everything together. That's what they did. After about three days Robb called me and told me, "Dude, we got the drum tracks." There's no quantizing stuff on Pro-Tools, we don't play to click tracks, so everything was as it was. There wasn't gonna be fixing just the bass drum. Maybe just that verse and that chorus from one take and maybe inserting the lead section in another take. It was pretty cool. It got frustrating at one point because they weren't telling me the progress we were making. I felt like I was like trying to hit a piata in a football sized field room. But at the end it worked out really good. A very different way of recording for us.
For The Blackening that's what we wrote. For Unto the Locust, we had a couple more songs. I'm sure at some point they'll see the light of day. Once we got in the record mode, Robb had been working on them vocally and melodically, trying to find something he was happy with. He was like, "Dude I'm trying, but I'm not completely happy with anything I'm doing on these songs." So we just put them on the back burner.
There's one song that I wrote the music to and I gave it to Robb and I told him that I just wanted it to be him and the piano, kinda like Black Sabbath's "Changes." We brought the string section in and had them do stuff over the music. I'm sure it's gonna happen at some point, maybe on the next record or during some down time if he's still working on it maybe he'll get to a point where he likes it and we can record it and just release it. It's the same with the other songs; they just never got to that point.
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