Harmony Drinks of Me

This is the end of Nuclear Death - and a very strange end it is. Well, relatively speaking. See, Harmony Drinks of Me would probably be a standard swan song for any nineties alt-rock band... but it's different when you're Nuclear Death. Harmony Drinks of Me is not the deathgrind of Bride of Insect, not the death metal of All Creatures Great and Eaten, and not the avant-garde metal-book-soundtrack of The Planet Cachexial. Instead, it's that turn-of-the-millenium sort of alternative music that all kinds of bands tried their hand at - from Radiohead to Ulver (and I can't believe I just referenced Radiohead in a Metal Archives write-up).

Let's get this out of the way: Harmony Drinks of Me is not a bad album because it isn't metal. There are many, many metal bands out there who navigated genre-hopping to great success, like the aforementioned Ulver. Harmony Drinks of Me even foreshadows a lot of Lori Bravo's later works under Lori Bravo Raped (that's certainly a name!). No - Harmony Drinks of Me simply feels like a hanger-on to the experimental music phenomenon that creeped its way into indie and alternative spaces at the tail end of the nineties. Which is a little ironic for two reasons: Nuclear Death is certainly not an indie/alternative band by any stretch of the imagination (making this a curious case of convergent evolution), and Harmony Drinks of Me paradoxically sounds like their least-exciting release.

The album opens with what's probably the best track - "Electric Spaceboy". If there's a Nuclear Death single out there, it's this song. It begins with a somewhat danceable drumbeat that goes into a gothic bass-and-keyboard groove. This could absolutely be played in your choice of underground NYC Chinatown dance clubs. Bravo's alto singing is immedately noticeable; one would be forgiven for thinking this is a completely different band, and not just for the alt-rock leanings. Her croon is actually pretty fun, and it has a sardonic bite to it that recalls a disturbed PJ Harvey. Midway through, the track brings on this short electronic/noise freakout with spoken word elements that works better than might be initially believed.

But there's a lot missing here, too. Steve Cowan's jazzy drumming is nowhere to be found - and he was one of the few elements that made The Planet Cachexial an interesting (if severly flawed) listen. Instead it's such a straightforward kick-snare beat that one wonders how four years led the band to regress so far in experimentation and technicality. Likewise, Bravo's guitar shreds are nowhere to be found, which is understandable given this is a completely different type of album, but is still absolutely lacking when considering the previous four LPs' worth of material. "Shoot" is two minutes of pleasantly awkward bass freakouts and percussive rumbling; it's one of the few moments where the restraint serves the experimental rock textures.

Following "Electric Spaceboy" is the eight-minute "Eyes Closed (The Sin)". There's a lot of issues here, one of which being the enormous runtime that nobody asked for. It's so much padding. This is even worse on "The Baths", which is six minutes of psuedo-sound collage and ambient ministrations as Bravo recites wrung-out vocals with some hella reverb. It gets old fast. But by far the worst offender is the final untitled track - 10 minutes of random snippets from the other songs on Harmony Drinks of Me that are played backwards. If we're going to do another indie rock comparison, then at least The Stone Roses had the gumption to reverse a song and then play that backwards recording as a live band in real time ("Don't Stop", for those counting at home). This is just lazy, and tacking it onto a 36-minute runtime means way too much of the album is just a backmask. Nuclear Death deserved to go out on a much better take.

The production sounds a little cheap. Again, another Nuclear Death irony - those early LPs weren't exactly known for their glowing fidelity. But when the band traded in that lo-fi cassette culture essence, they received lifeless plastic. The strings on "Eyes Closed (The Sin)" sound completely cheap, like we're hearing a Casio keyboard preset or early MIDI. Their reappearance on "The Baths" is even more egregious, as there's over a minute where the strings are the main compositional element yet are almost completely buried beneath the percussion and electronic effects. It's gothic rock and dark caberet with problems solved by Killing Joke and The Mission 15 years prior.

The Planet Cachexial has many issues, but at least it had a vision and had genuinely avant-garde moments. I can't recommend Harmony Drinks of Me to anyone, unless they're really hard-up on dark alternative rock from the year 2000. I like that Bravo continued to approach darkness in genres outside of deathgrind and death metal, but I just can't see this as anything more than unfitting of the Nuclear Death name.