Trace Amount – Anti Body Language
Release Date: 15th April 2022
Label: Federal Prisoner
Bandcamp
Genre: Glitch, Deathstep, Sludge, Industrial.
FFO: Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, Black Dresses, Scarlxrd.
Review By: Andy Spoon
When you think of metal music, your mind can often be drawn to the heavy, crunchy guitar riffs, wailing solos, fast and raucous drums, and vocals that reek of intensity and power. For the better part of the entire history of rock music, the guitar was the quintessential instrument for conveying the message of intensity, the mood at the very heart of rock-and-roll. In the 2020s, subgenres of metal using programmed instruments and samples, something largely taken from the electronic and hip hop world, have taken hold, some entering into the sphere of extreme music. Artists like Ghostemane, Poppy, Scarlxrd, and even XXXTentacion have blended the worlds of metal and electronic music.
This is not necessarily a new phenomenon. Skinny Puppy, KMFDM, Ministry, and even early Nine Inch Nails all used the power of the gritty, distorted white noise synthesizers to evoke the same feelings that overdriven guitars and basses could in more traditional metal genres, causing fans and non-fans alike to raise an introspective question: Is this metal music? While we certainly aren’t going to try and answer that specific question regarding those artists in general, we have the opportunity to do so with artist Brandon Gallagher’s most recent release under the pseudonym Trace Amount, in the 2022 LP Anti Body Language.
Immediately, you feel disoriented through mountainous reverb atop overdriven vocals in both left and right channels, one vocal track pitch shifted above the other, giving a demonic “otherworldly” presence to the vocal tracks. The darkness of the themes come across through the distortion and choppy/glitchy drums and background SFX. In some ways, the tones are dissonant, while in others, nonsensical and seemingly just primed for building rhythmic tension across the track. This is important for the purpose of stereo dynamics, and ought to point to a well-planned-out production process.
The drums are in-time, per se, but the hits don’t necessarily have a headbanging pulse. They are choppy and have beats on the offbeats and 16th/32nd notes, making the listener wait in dread for the beat to emerge, never to fulfill that “need”, something that is clearly by design of the artist. The synth pads and SFX are hollow and vacuous, making the atmosphere absolutely dissociated and chaotic. This is something that comes across well in Anti-Body Language, as Trace Amount succeeds in towing the listener through each track on his own timeline, instead of allowing artistic interpretation to come through.
Vocally, Gallagher’s lyrics are full of angst and depressive themes, giving the totality of the album continuity. The nature of disorientation and darkness blends with the musical nature, something that refers back to the “what is metal?” subject matter from earlier. Vocally, Gallagher employs a screechy, chesty vocal speaking layer, blended with his vocal fry for emphasis. The dynamics between speaking/moaning lyrics and the screams transition effectively for the listener. A female vocal interlude (by guest artist KANGA) is present on one track, giving some diversity to the overall vocal experience, helping to split up some of the flow of the album.
Holistically, the album suffers from a lack of diversity and general movements thematically, not something that is necessarily important in a genre like this. It feels much more like a mixtape than a cohesive album, something the writer wishes that Anti-Body Language addressed in the production stage. The last thing an artist wants is to be known for is each song/track on an album kind of running together, sonically. It wouldn’t be fair to call Trace Amount a “one trick pony”, but it stands to reason that the listener gets overwhelmed by the same delivery track after track. Ironically, the last track serves as a dynamic interlude that should have been employed somewhere in the middle of the album to give the listener a mental palate-cleanser to assist in appreciating the rest of the tracks with full effect.
(3 / 5)
