The quintessential moment from Part Chimp's excellent new album Thriller comes 50 seconds in to "Tomorrow Midnite". How does the self-proclaimed "loudest band in Britain" (a title originally appended to Spinal Tap, incidentally) get louder? They've cranked it to 11 (perhaps even 13) on each of their previous two albums, perforated their eardrums (no, *really*) in various punishing tours, played at breakneck speeds, slowed their riffs to molasses-like sludge, all the while shredding their vocal cords just trying to be heard above the maelstrom. But what they do here is genius: they simply *suggest* volume. A bass and guitar play a sliding figure (replete with the kind of snare-rattles most sound engineers try to avoid) twice, setting up what you'd expect to be another pummeling wall of distortion. *Instead*, the lead guitar chokes – quite literally. It's simply too overdriven to even play the suggested theme; it gets out about two strangled notes before succumbing to a peal of squalling feedback. It's not that this type of thing hasn't been done before – the Melvins and their sludgecore progeny have made a living with just such dynamics. It's that it's so *well done*, it's breathtaking.
Besides that, Part Chimp are just damn fun. This kind of primordial ooze requires a joy factor, and I think that's one of the main things that's set them apart from other bands operating in this genre. The album cover tells you just what sort of ride you're in for: "Hey rock fan, do you like jetpacks? How about lasers? What do you think about a post-apocalypic landscape covered with radioactively mutated zombies, all ripe for imminent carnage?"
So often we expect too much from our favorite musicians, not wanting them to change, but accusing them of stagnation when they don't. Part Chimp's solution is to just keep doing what they do best, all the while improving with age. While this album doesn't have the brash intensity of Chart Pimp or the giddy eclecticism of I Am Come, what it *does* have is nine excellent songs from a band that loves you enough to give you just that.
--written by M@
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