Pheromone

The Giant Panda of central China gets a bad rap. Though it is most commonly depicted in various states of recline, rendering bamboo thoroughly masticated, any zoologist will tell you that they are capable hunters fully capable of creeping into your house undetected and rendering you thoroughly decapitated. Modern technology makes their creep/strike/decapitate methodology all the more effective. This is especially true with their close cousins, the Bloody Panda of central Brooklyn. With the patience of a thousand saints these seemingly docile animals creep into your brain and your heart, harbingers of the blackest funeral filth, pavement stained poets of madness, thinking and feeling their way toward your fear in the dark, and then decapitating you with utter metal.


It is very much to the band’s credit that it feels inappropriate to describe their sound in terms of their instruments. Truthfully they don’t sound very good. They are appropriately huge-sounding and as much guitars, basses, drums, and keyboards as they could hope to be. But this is a band of tonal engineers as much as it is anything; their dynamics don’t come from changes in loudness but in hugeness. The guitar and bass sounds are there to be metal, resplendent in all its characteristic harshness. The distortion, which occupies a special place in the human heart, is part of a lager tonal palette of interwoven turgid mud and nearly ludicrous grandiosity. To put it another way, when this band wants to sound bigger, they seem to project themselves from a larger space. It’s like the difference between hearing them all around you in your bedroom, and then in a gothic cathedral, and then in an airplane hanger.


The untitled album opener is as good as doom metal has ever been and it serves the dual purpose of being totally sweet and offering a comparison point for the rest of record. Guitar feedback and bottomless-bass notes surround the plaintive wailing of vocalist Yoshiko Ohara, while the best ethereal keyboard noise I have ever heard plants ghosts on your face. The drums are oddly dry and dull sounding, which, even stranger, is entirely complimentary to the sound as a whole. It accents the punctuated skinsmanship of Dan Weiss. These sounds are stage-setters for a production that saunters into explorative territory at its leisure. The slowness is ample, and the band has no trouble twisting it to suit their needs.


In “Coma,” they take a tempo used by every other doom metal band ever and through inventive percussion and noises make it the most important, or the least the most post potent. The science of listener-attention says that they guys should make it through minute one without putting everything right to bed, but listening is it’s own reward here, and my adoration for them was instantaneous.


This is all nonsense. Nothing is a lie, but the whole thing stinks. The material point is this: if you’ve come far enough around the bend to be listening to doom metal, then Bloody Panda is a forward-thinking band who absolutely live up to their own aspirations. They are whole-heartedly weird, frequently and unapologetically tuneless, and thoroughly distorted. To consider listening to this band means you’re well beyond the point of no return, and this record will satisfy you completely.