ALBUM REVIEW: Into The Hollow – Mothman And The Thunderbirds
A stoner metal album for people that are bored of stoner metal. That’s the description for the debut album Into The Hollow by MOTHMAN AND THE THUNDERBIRDS, the brainchild and solo project of multi-instrumentalist Alex Parkinson. It’s not entirely true, though – this isn’t strictly a stoner metal album. There’s elements of that here, but what it really is is a mish-mash of so many different sounds, voices and ideas that it should be an incoherent, babbling mess. Somehow, it isn’t and is instead an interesting – and completely bonkers – metal album with its roots in stoner metal but branches out into prog, sludge, doom and so many others.
Parkinson knows it’s a weird album and he leans into this. Taking the name from the TV show Ancient Aliens because it was both a dumb and cool band name, the songs draw from conspiracy theories and cryptids but also deals with themes of anxiety, global warming, war and manufactured consent. It’s a multi-headed hydra that needs as many musical directions as it has themes just to begin to make sense of them all.
The opening salvo of Mothman Takes Flight, Hollow Earth and Nomad draw from heavier psychedelic rock and sludge as if MASTODON somehow got even heavier and weirder. The layered vocal harmonies in Mothman Takes Flight sit between slabs of titanic riffs and shouted vocals. Hollow Earth ramps up the psychedelia, with vocals fed through a vocoder to give a robotic, otherworldly effect as well as the towering guitar work and pounding drums.
It gets far weirder – Cloud Giant is almost stoner folk with the crushing guitars swapped out for esoteric melodies as if being serenaded by the forests themselves. It’s a lighter number that adds some different and yet more interesting shades to MOTHMAN’s palette. At the complete opposite end of this is Indrid Cold, a vicious, stomping assault reminiscent of early MASTODON and conjuring sea beasts rising from the depths to bring about the end of all things.
Not everything hits and the dizzying array of guest vocalists can make for an uneven listen; the sludge-meets ALICE IN CHAINS of Infinite Ocean is a particularly obvious example. While the riffing is tight, it’s ultimately a little too mid-paced without much variety, and its proggy guitar solo wig-out after the midway point is incongruous. It finds its feet towards the end with closing section that goes from tar-thick groove to off-kilter prog riffing that’s very reminiscent again of MASTODON, though admittedly their latter-day material.
Similarly, Squonk is a fifty second interlude that feels quite of out place and feels jumbled, as if too much was attempted to be shoehorned into it. That said, it leads into the deliriously heavy Roko’s Basilisk which is an easy highlight. At a hair over two minutes, it’s an incredibly tightly controlled blast of white-hot sludge that doesn’t mess around in the slightest which is an oddity, given the album it finds itself on.
So what to make of Into The Hollow? Well, sludge and stoner fans will certainly enjoy the gargantuan grooves and fuzzy licks and prog fans will certainly like the constantly shifting sounds and textures employed that always lead to something new. Metal fans more generally – especially those who enjoy DEVIN TOWNSEND – will find companionship in the weirdness and inability to stay in one particular lane, as well as the layered approach popularised by the mad Canadian maestro. Ultimately, this is a fun album of massive riffs and heady experimentation that breezes through its half-hour run time without ever growing stale or getting too weird, which could’ve easily happened had the album gone on any longer. If you like your metal stonery, sludgy and downright weird, MOTHMAN AND THE THUNDERBIRDS have got a treat for you.
Rating: 7/10
Into The Hollow is out now via self-release.
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