All Is Chaos

Despite looking like a Limp Bizkit album cover, All Is Chaos became my friend quickly for several reasons. The first is that it was given away for free with a music magazine at the time of its release, which is always a bonus and especially so considering that I was a student back in 2011. The second reason is that the style is not something I would have sought out by myself, this kind of atmospheric sludge metal not being the first subgenre that springs to mind when asked to name my favourites, particularly if the band is as little known and obscurely situated (Belgium is not really a centre of anything except chocolate production) as Steak Number Eight. The final reason, and the one why I'm still happy to listen to All Is Chaos now, is because it's a good album, though not exactly the most straightforward one to get your head around.

The style, in the first place, is not the most uncommon, artists like Isis and Cult of Luna cutting a similar figure on several of their full-lengths, while Neurosis are probably the reason for this kind of music existing in the first place; however, Steak Number Eight take the atmospheric sludge metal classification quite literally, opting for huge, slamming sludge riffs that battle against post-rock melodies and chord patterns, while some of the material here is more specifically post-metal, shimmering and glimmering in more spacious vistas. That still sounds reasonably par for the course until you realise that the four-piece have decided to juxtapose a song like 'Dickhead' (more on that in a minute) against the soft swelling of 'Track Into the Sky', which ticks along like Mogwai are taking Coldplay out for a long walk in a place where there are no choruses, just vast snowy hills and rivers. The lushness of the latter part of the album is smooth and glorious, building the sense of inner love and peace that post-rock is supposed to do when it's not boring you half to death, while the distant vocals of Brent Vanneste drift and rise on the back of the steady climb of guitars and echoey choir.

On the other hand, you remember I said that I would return to 'Dickhead', because that will be your first impression of the album as it squalls into life and a posh lady says, "I say, your head is somewhat shaped like a banana," before crunching into the kind of riff that initially aided my expectations of finding nu metal with rapping. That the riff develops into a swinging sludgy groove is fairly irrelevant too, since Vanneste begins screaming the first verse like his throat might rip, providing the aural nugget that goes as follows:

"One time two times three times that I shoot you down
But now you can suck my fucking cock
You dickless motherfucker
You can suck my dick if you don’t like my shit"

It's...erm...not exactly poetic, is it? And this from the band who would later glide and croon their way into 'Track Into the Sky' and 'The Perpetual' with all the grace of a regal swan. I'm going to defend 'Dickhead' though on the grounds that it feels really fucking awesome to shout those lyrics out of the window regardless of their juvenility, which - lest anyone need reminding - was precisely what Steak Number Eight were at the time, writing this album at the ages of 18 and 19. Therefore, the rather aggressive opening ('Pyromaniac' doesn't exactly do knitting in the corner) is an effective way to lead into an album mostly filled with earnest songs that make you feel good in other ways, as if the unified experience of All Is Chaos were to lead from pure blind anger to a position of understanding by the time of the calmer conclusion.

In my mind, there's another point that marks 'Dickhead' out as more than just an attention-grabbing statement. Listening to the way in which the band build that expletive-riddled verse into a six minute song (there really aren't any more lyrics, only a rhythmic repetition of "Banana, banana, banana, your head looks like a..."), the creativity that is necessary to make such music captivating is fairly obvious, something that can't be said of all the post-metal songs that follow. Certainly 'Drowning in Your Blood' is interesting and 'Trapped' really touches a nerve, but the post-rock parts tend towards similarity, not only to their influences but also to themselves, meaning that there is not as much content on offer here as 66 minutes should offer. That said, looking ahead to 2015's Kosmokoma, the band had reinvented themselves as progressive metal thinkers, doing battle with Mastodon, Gojira, and Burst as much as the Isis contingent. The only song here that explores that territory is 'Man Vs Man', a medium-intensity instrumental, and perhaps 'Pyromaniac' at a push, since it submerges from a vitriolic opening to end up in quite a different place after an odd interlude.

The calmness of post-metal is thus not always present during this album, though one might say that we were warned by the title. If you can stomach 'Dickhead' (perhaps the wrong expression, but whatever), there's a lot of calmer material later on and a surprisingly liberating atmosphere achieved by putting the two styles side by side. Although this isn't the finest post-metal album you can get your hands on and nor the most interesting place to experience Steak Number Eight, the majority of this is well worth your time. Just be careful you don't singe your eyebrows.