2023-08-29 07:00:53
„A Couple of Thous doing Deftones filtered through Hum“. This in-house advertisement captures the character of To the Rindthe debut album by Big Gardenat least to a large extent quite adequate.
Thou-Bassist Mitch Wells gave birth Big Garden during the pandemic as a solo platform to have a projection screen for your own thoughts and for exorcising inner demons in a world gone haywire during the quarantine: “Turns out writing songs is a great way to work through some stuff. It doesn’t fix anything, but it sorta lays it all out there.“
When that world began to sort itself out again, Wells brought in his pal Matthew Thudium as guitarist and vocalist – hence the almost forty minutes of To the Rind now, of course, inevitably Rhea Sylvia and all the grunge moments beyond that Nirvana-Cover of Thou let yourself think – before Big Garden With the entry of Greg Manson (bass/synth), Ian Paine-Jesam (drums/percussion) and Craig Oubre (guitar/vocals) it grew into a full-fledged band project.
As basic as the humor and absurdity is to Wells, you’ll know that if you follow Wells on Instagram, or even the studio talks interspersed between some of the album’s songs (no, not really skits—but a conversation will catch on somewhere). when the tape continues!) with producer James Whitten, it’s so clear from the first second that To the Rind per se not plowed into funny breeding ground, but with the necessary seriousness quite fun in a wonderful “love letter to, and evolution from, the great grungy, gazey, riffy, mathy, and spacey sounds of the past carried through a modernized songwriting approach‘, injecting a perpetually entertaining heaviness, or rather depressive lightness, into their accessible eclecticism, with the band injecting abstruse titles like Pizza Party Baby effortlessly alongside existentialist a la Stars, Planets, Dust Us able to stand, but always connected by an accessible, catchy heaviness that shakes off the wrist and articulates a bittersweet, optimistic spirit of optimism rather than ensnaring itself in pain.
With that line up Big Garden into a kind of aesthetic 90s renaissance with modern staging density, which also Fleshwater or Cloakroom indulge at the forefront of what feels like a constantly growing scene.
In this, even if it only exists in an ideal form, the quartet asserts itself practically from the start – albeit less through original individuality than through successful songwriting. Because actually the knack for snappy hooks and crisp melodies is quite refreshing here, To the Rind strings together a surprisingly entertaining relay of Spacegaze Alternative Rock catchy tunes that will give fans of the basic sound, or rather all the associative references that appear, a perhaps not inexhaustible but immediate joy.
Songs like the one that opens with desperate begging in the concise 90s thrust create the same A Sliced Up Pearwhich boiled down androgynously before the progressive jam turning off My Joy / Little Bliss or the crisp and direct one Borrowing, Taking behind the mandatory mention of Hum and closely related memories of a conglomerate Alice In Chains and Spotlightsand yes, too Placebo or My Vitriolwhile the singing of Blackmails Aydo Abay could come from a parallel world.
Through melancholic Pumpkins-indulge as in Memory of the Mountain and the more aggressive hardcore-teeth bared Crown Shyness amplitudes arise in the homogeneity, hastily advancing scenes (Wedding of the Sentry) and dreamy, swaying withdrawals with a slightly psychedelic dancing calm (I’m Scared of the Ocean) create a dynamic to avoid uniformity throughout the album, before the finale with the more thoughtful Stars, Planets, Dust, Us and the playful shoegazing with post-rock textures Tension Loop more anthemic and epochal without forcing a really outstanding flash of genius. Just in its consistent sum is To the Rind but an extraordinarily confident round of introductions that you can definitely round up between the points with genre fan glasses and newcomer bonus, because Big Garden here secretly present a quality benchmark for like-minded people.
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