Drugs and Animals

Have you ever listened to an album that sometimes scared you, and yet made you want to keep listening? Did it in a way, seduce your ear, whilst slowly gnawing away at your concentration and even your current emotion? I bet there are some of you out there that have never experienced that, but wait no longer for Chicago’s Cokegoat can provide you the auditorily masochistic experience that you desire. It comes in the form of their latest album, Drugs and Animals, a truly terrifying and mesmerizing bad trip that is sure to satisfy. From start to finish, solemn dirges, fast rhythmic undertows, and bone-crushing grooves will assault your ears in this musical, chemical hell.

From start to finish, Drugs and Animals is full of emotion and over-flowing with ideas. Within a single song one can find small “movements,” in which different takes on a melody are employed. One moment the listener is hearing a somber, soft melody, such as the beginning of “Quiet Tyrant,” and that same idea manifests into a much more aggressive form of itself complete with driving bass line, sinister keyboards, angry vocals, and an abrasive guitar attack. Another songwriting technique that Cokegoat effortlessly uses is what I like to refer to as the “Venn-diagram riff transition.” This occurs when a band constructs a melody that contains an easily dissectable part that can become its own riff in itself and in some cases can allow this process to repeat. Just like a Venn-diagram’s comparison of two concepts or objects, the two riffs/melodies share some similarities.This proves to this reviewer and other listeners of Drugs and Animals, that Cokegoat was dealing with one of the best problems that a band can deal with: an over-abundance of ideas. Just listen for yourself on the song “Where the Sun Dies.”

Drugs and Animals is an album just as colorful and frightening as its album cover. Each note is played with feeling and there is always a percussive tone and approach to the riffs of this album. Even the more flowing and fluid lines within “Quiet Tyrant” and “Kreator/Destroyer” have an intrusive and eerie feeling that they give off. Some parts of “Kreator/Destroyer,” “Winter of Fear,” and the sorrowful “Quiet Tyrant” employ melodies that aren’t just dark sounding, but are truly, well, scary. We’ve seen the ominous and horrific in the visual medium more times than we can count in the world of heavy metal. No matter how many reinterpretations of Reek of Putrefaction-like and Hell Awaits-like albums are thrown in my face they don’t freak me out anymore for more than about a minute or so. This leaves metal groups of today to break in the sense less assaulted by fright: hearing. This of course comes in the form of riffs and vocals in ways one might call eerie, overwhelming, fear-provoking, and even disturbing. And good ‘ol Cokegoat brings that to the table with ease.

The riff department of Drugs and Animals’ creators know exactly how to induce your own nightmare. Cokegoat riles up the listener between “Quiet Tyrant” and “The Ruiner” with relentless grooves and riff-based attacks mixed with calm, melancholy sections, and then as soon as one feels as if they are used to this formula, “Where the Sun Dies,” extinguishes that sense of “comfort” and leads the listener into complete musical darkness. And finally at the mercy of Drugs and Animals’ journey through the acid trip that it truly is, “Kreator/Destroyer” slinks along and provokes thoughts of the unknown and whatever horror your brain can muster up. Drugs and Animals ends in a heavy killing blow in the form of a pounding finale full of feedback, screaming, and dissonant rage. Sounds pretty fucking cool when you listen, think of, and even experience a record like that, no?

All of the above is everything one can expect to get out of Cokegoat’s Drugs and Animals if they truly try to feel and live the terror and confusion it attempts, and in my opinion succeeds, to bring forth. From start to finish the listener is provoked by a plethora of different ideas that will get under their skin as the album steadily grinds on. The sound that Cokegoat operates with on Drugs and Animals is quite unique and I can’t say that I’ve heard doom or stoner metal that sounds like theirs. It nearly is an insult to pigeonhole Cokegoat into such a specific genre, even though we are doing that here for organizational purposes. They break through genres, categories, and your comfort zone. Buy this album.