Mare

Seriously, this has to be one of the most aggravating albums I own. I picked up Mare’s self titled EP after browsing the Hydra Head website and happening upon They Sent You. The track was so strange that I felt compelled to listen to the entire EP.

Little did I know that this song was little preparation for the utter madness of the rest of the album. It starts off innocently enough with Anisette, a lumbering beast of a tune. If I had to pick a track that would qualify as the most normal, this would be it. Even then, the song has almost no immediate structure, and only repeats once through out its entire 4 minute duration. There aren’t really riffs so much as a constant stream of chords, all played through a crushingly distorted tone. The production on this EP is very good. The guitar is loud and ugly as sin, especially on the more dissonant sounding chords which pop up a good deal over the course of the EP. The drums are very clear, which is both a blessing and a curse as the drum parts are very busy and while it’s great to be able to hear all of the parts, it can be overwhelming at times.

They Sent You, the next track, introduces the other side of Mare’s music. The first half of the song is much softer than the previous doom onslaught and instead sounds more akin to Radiohead. Subdued horns float and flutter around a softy sung vocal melody that steadily grows more intense until guitars and drums kick and the song marches along towards a seemingly inevitable post rock crescendo. Except it doesn’t. Instead Mare opts for a shift and jarring kick the balls via slow caustic chords played about half the speed of the rest of the tune. As if that wasn’t enough the song ends with a pleasant and jazz melody that leads right into the next track. Confused? Just wait.

Tropics is perhaps the only song ever written that can be described as lounge doom. I’m dead serious. Layers of droning guitars, some played by a bow, a heavily distorted bass, and a slow jazzy drum part played on brushes. The best part is, it sounds amazing. After the chaos of the last two tracks, this song would be soothing if it wasn’t downright creepy. The guitars scrape themselves across the track like rusted metal being torn apart. The next track, Palaces is a bit of a let down. Here Mare return to the doom and gloom of the opening number, except by this point lead vocalist Tyler Palmateer’s harsh vocals have lost their intensity. Which is a real shame considering how passionate the man sounds and how god damn wonderful his clean singing is. It’s rare that you ever hear a singer that sounds this, for lack of better words, upset. But ultimately his voice just sounds strained and forced after repeated listens. Other wise Palaces is another great slab of experimental doom, but pales in comparison to its surrounding tracks, which brings us to Sun for Miles.

The final track on this EP is worth the price of admission on its own. Tyler’s cleaning really shines here, which is a good thing because for the first half of the song that’s all there is. No words, no instruments, just layers of melodies all intertwining and weaving around each other. The effect is haunting. But the beauty is soon brought to an end by a tidal wave of monolithic guitars quickly turning the mood from haunting to horrifying. And just as soon as it begins, it’s over, leaving nothing but silence in its wake.

This of course is my biggest problem with the record. For something this completely off the wall and challenging, you’re left expecting a bit more at the end. This looks great on paper of course, a starling and original EP leading up to a magnum opus of a full length. Except it’s not, because there will be no full length. Mare broke up about a year after releasing this EP and because of that, this little gem will fade away into obscurity. So if after a spin of this disc you feel like it’s incomplete that’s because it is. It’s like reading a book that you’re really enjoying only to have it end half way through the first chapter. I feel like the victim of a musical one night stand.

Mare is a band who I have heard some pretty positive things about recently. One day I was carousing around the iTunes Music Store and found their EP for five bucks. "What the Hell" I thought, and bought it. Upon listening to this several times, I can deduce two things about this band: the people of Mare are great musicians with some great ideas, and that they have yet to use these strengths to write songs even remotely worth listening to.

Mare's music can't really be pigeon-holed into a specific genre, but if it helps you, I would call them a combination of doom metal and hardcore, with a dash of melody and tech thrown in. They sort of sound like a much, MUCH slower, sludgier Dillinger Escape Plan. If this combination sounds unwieldy to you, it is. Ironically, its not that the band is trying to combine too many elements at once, as often happens with bands that meld many different genres, its that the band keeps these different elements too seperate from each other. While this EP is pretty much split evenly between heavy and soft, the two halves are almost never mixed together in anyway. I kept waiting for the singer to sing in the heavy segments, or vice versa, but it never happened. Its a very "Black and White" album, and unlike bands employing similar writing styles, such as Opeth, it never becomes grey.

Lets start with the heavier side of Mare's music. Put simply, its boring as hell. Riffs chug along almost painful in their blandness, while the drums crash away at a very slow tempo and Tyler Semrick screeches and screams in a manner that is simply obnoxious. While the man clearly has a good singing voice, his harsh vocals are very grating, and add no emotion or feeling to the songs whatsoever. As for the softer parts of the album, I wish I could say that they compensate for the mediocre heavy parts, but truth be told, they don't. While I feel they are better done, these quiet segments demonstrate the same level of misdirection and lack of cohesive songwriting that plagues the rest of the album. It almost seems like the band is going out of the way to sound unappealing and esoteric. While some may be attracted to this aesthetic, I'm not. I like songs that impact me, that stick in my head. These songs either get on my nerves, or bore me.

It seems a shame to condemn a band that has such an obvious desire to experiment and blend their various influences, but in the end, if you can't write quality songs, it doesn't matter. I respect Mare as being excellent musicians and a metal band with a desire to innovate, but I can't recommend that people spend their money on an album this boring and poorly organized. Mare is a band with some serious potential, they just have yet to realize it. Avoid, but keep an eye on these guys in the future.

Mare's self-titled EP was a little gem that took me aroudn half a year to finally find (in Chicago no less, far removed from the crappy record stores of my hometown) and the wait was well worth it. When I heard that the simply amazing Hydra Head label had signed Mare, a band that supposedly blended crushing, sludgey doom, spacey and heavenly ethereal rock, and mathy hardcore all at once, I knew it had awesome written all over it.
And awesome it is. "Anisette" has some of the best bulldozer-low riffs I've heard in awhile. The vocalist, Tyler Semrick-Palmeteer, has some of the best screeching vocals I've ever heard...the man sounds like he's having battery acid dripped into every bore of his body. The grandois "They Sent You" opens with some simply blissful choral arrangements, soft and light and airy. In other words, angelic. As these quiet words ebb and flow, a kicking riff tears in with a solid drum beat and the song breaks into an instrumental sludge jam with a math piece here or there, sort of like a Pelican song spawned in Geometry class. The ominous opening of "Tropics" is alternated between billowing, foggy, sludge, and noir-ish chord strums. The song builds itself up, then slowly knocks itself back to pieces for track number four. Said track, "Palaces," is in my opinion the best representation of the unique sound Mare have carved for themselves. It's angular, choking doom, with bitter screeches, and almost maddenlingy conflicting passages of light guitar. "Untitled (sun for miles)" follows "Palaces" with some somber vocals and humming effects. The nice contrast between the throat-shredding, bowel loosening feedback, and sheer malice of the end of "Palaces" to this tune's start is solid and interesting. That quiet meditation lasts for almost the entire track, at least until the distortion kicks in and a sludgey wall of sound decimates everything in sight, ending this entertaining ride through bipolar doom madness.
Though short for any doom release (about 25 minutes) this EP is well-worth some hard-earned dough and is suprisingly complex...I find myself catching more and more every listen, and this is after two weeks of nearly constant rotation. In conclusion, stop reading my freaking review and go buy this CD now!!! It should at least hold everyone over until Mare take over the doom underground with what should be (if this EP is any indication) an amazing full-length debut.