For fans who’d seen One-Eyed Monsters earlier this year, the local riff lords’ studio debut, the six-song 34-minute album Ambrosia, documented the trio’s near-telepathic live-jam alacrity in digital (and analog, because they also released it on cassette) form, capturing their fuzz-heavy sound in all its massive, smoky majesty.
And then, shortly after they put that album out, they wrote another three songs, self-producing them in the spring. The result, the three-song EP Beneath that the band will release at a show at the Boiled Owl Tavern on Saturday night, keeps its predecessor’s heavy, hoary guitar tones and stoner-riffic atmospherics but otherwise veers in the direction of another realm.
“It’s very different,” said guitarist/vocalist Sam Stevens. “It’s a lot moodier, darker, more intense. It’s a lot more technical. We got a lot deeper into different time signatures and time changes.”
Indeed, where Ambrosia’s music and lyrics meandered into the haziest regions of the cosmos across multiple movements and many minutes, Beneath’s three tracks are comparatively short — next to the solo-covered expanse of a 9-minute Ambrosia track like “Bongilogy,” Beneath almost seems like it happens in the blink of a weed-reddened eye.
This is not to say that One-Eyed Monsters are suddenly a thrash-metal band, though given the complexity of their arrangements in the three new songs, the band could probably shred at high velocities if they wanted to. The speed on Beneath never crosses the mid-tempo barrier, but instead of the riffage drifting outward to space between the stars, the EP’s songs are circumscribed by a sense of impending doom.
That ominous feeling isn’t a concrete theme as much as it is a vibe. The music still sizzles with brain-searing riffs, but the songs sound threatening in the way that they crunch and crack through your headphones and end before five minutes are over. Those vibes are underlined by drummer Nathan Alec Walters’ words. In “Europa,” he imagines Jupiter’s frigid moon as duplicitous “abominations” that “freeze their friends in the ice and snow and hold you in the depths below.” In “Trial by Fire,” he seems trapped in his head with his own intrusive thoughts, and in “The Greatest Truth,” he realizes that notions of reality, truth, and freedom are all subjective and often the opposite of how they appear.
“I don’t think the words for any of these songs were written until after we’d recorded the music,” Walters said. “The form kind of presented itself … and writing the lyrics was like piecing together a poem. … We would get the music going and come up with a [lyrical] concept and then bring it back to the jam room, and everyone came up with ideas.”
Stevens said that he and his bandmates had been listening to “a lot of different music” when writing Ambrosia, “a lot of early Tool stuff, still a lot of Sleep, but also a lot of old country music and the Byrds, in particular that Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. … That’s where the melodic ideas I contributed to the new songs kind of came from, but as for the darker, moodier side … that came from how the three of us were feeling, in the band, in our own lives. … It’s been a very hard year for everybody.”
Bassist Tyler Lee Ryan didn’t go into too much detail, but he agreed that the three of them had done some soul-searching over the past six months, the kind of thing that plagues every band that’s been a band for a few years. But, ultimately, writing, recording, and listening back to Beneath reaffirmed for them the power of their music.
“What we got here,” Ryan said, “it’s incredible. All of us listening to it, we just thought it was amazing.”
Stevens added, “It’s not like we have a hard time being in a band together. We’re all best friends.”
Their camaraderie is part of what makes them such a tight band, and it engenders a lot of good ideas.
“We are good at actively listening to each other,” Ryan said. “It ends up making something that couldn’t happen otherwise, and it’s incredible seeing ideas come together [among us] spontaneously.”
So, while the outside world might be oppressive and difficult, at least the time One-Eyed Monsters spends making music is productive and positive. And in terms of building a following, the bond they’ve formed around riffs has put them on a lot of listeners’ radars.
“We are seeing more people show up at shows,” Walters said. “I’m excited to see what the response will be for Beneath, because I think these songs have legs. Seems like the people who’ve checked out [the new songs] really like them.”
Walters recalls learning a lot from listeners at a recent show at Doc’s Records & Vintage in the Foundry District. “People I didn’t know who heard the new songs were like, ‘The new stuff is the best!’ ”
That kind of affirmation is well-deserved. Beneath shows a band willing to push the limits of their established sound — as long as it still sounds good loud.
One-Eyed Monsters EP Release
Sat at the Boiled Owl Tavern, 909 W Magnolia Av, FW. 817-920-9616.
