The USA Is A Monster: Amikwag (Yeggs Records)
From our own, Mr. Jim McHugh:
“DIY noise-rock monolith USAISAMONSTER has reformed across the continent, a decade since they split, to drop a new album on the End of the World.
Far from inert spiritually, sonically, psychically or genetically — Colin Langenus and Tom Hohmann do not pick up where they left off; ten years in new realms imbue Amikwag with a different sort of intelligence and heaviness, a patient pace prioritizing space and vocal connection, replete with energies radiant in wavelengths distinct from those awesome leaden bombs of lumpen-prog they lobbed via the visionary and defunct Load Records.
The Monster’s best stuff has always played wise with its raw sonic materials: disorienting metric shifts, global musics; Bill Ward, Beefheart and YES; sudden stoner-metal sinkholes, insatiable, and bracing aggro youth-blasts; a droning, modal melodic sense that recalls Celtic and Non-Western folk traditions; childlike synth sounds and vocal harmonies sung in fifths.
The humongous thrumming heart of USAISAMONSTER’s unassailable power lies in their bracing mastery — earned thru ten dogged years of touring in various iterations, with this duo as the core.
Amikwag is surely built of these, but the ratios are all skewed. Oozier grooves, slower of tempo, plant the vibe, as does an exuberant and assured vocal tack unheard in the Monster of yore.
Certainly, Colin’s post-Monster work as a sound-engineer endowed him with a practical knowledge of contemporary pop music, a toolkit and the aptitude to use it, just as Tom’s activist-vigilance targets those dire existential threats as they emerge in real time.
Amikwag’s penultimate piece should be heard as a spirit-revealing overture: We Are Not Alone is an oath of solidarity and strength in a time of cataclysm. Intoning bilingually in Farsi and English, Colin and longtime collab Sara Shaper depict a dream, and we’d be wise to hinge open our skulls and absorb its enormity; in it, we maintain unified resolve as the flames engulf us, then comes a vision to embolden us, audacious as the stem emerging from a buried seed: gone is all this violence and solitude, the grand bleakness has abated, and our lives go on, resplendent, on the other side of it all: I am lost…..The world is lost….I can’t see…..Can You see me?…..The sky is on fire….. Flames burn higher….We Love All Of You….No plans all out of time….my life continues to shine…..”