Fall of Troy, Tera Melos @ Atlas - 05/01/07

I am totally baffled by the Fall of Troy. Megan Seling’s recent story about the band captures a few of the more off-putting non-musical aspects of the band—their brattiness, their hair, their apparent self-awareness—but it doesn’t get to the heart of what’s wrong with them, which is of course their music. Seling positively describes their sound as “a big mess” and their live shows as expelling “the energy and noise of a punk-rock orchestra.” I suppose those are exactly the reasons I don’t like them. The band nods to great local bands like Akimbo, Botch, and the Blood Brothers but manages to combine the most boring or annoying elements of each. They basically alternate between big, meaty rhythmic chugs and dizzying guitar spasms, and either aspect could be the mess or the orchestra. We tend to think of metal riffs as messy and guitar solos as classical, but with the Fall of Troy the opposite was often true, with the restrained riffing approaching some kind of composed orderliness and the more “technical” passages barely holding together.

At this point, I have to address the weird, metal-hardcore obsession with technicality. I tend to like my punk rather less orchestrated. I’d rather dance than count time signatures. I’m crazy like that. But there’s this bizarre notion in certain musical circles that just because something is more difficult to play it’s automatically better, a kind of cult of technicality. It’s like insisting that a microchip is better than a house simply because it’s more intricate. (A microchip may be better than a house in some circumstances, but if it is it’s because of what it accomplishes, not by nature of how hard it was to make.) In short, I don’t care how difficult your music is to produce if it doesn’t make me feel anything.

Tera Melos commit similar crimes of pointless though proficient noodling, seemingly unbound by the constraints of song-writing. I’m assured by our new books intern, Jeff, that their onstage (or offstage) theatrics are something to see, but last night they mostly amounted to their busy guitar player doing a lot of goofy mugging.

Fall of Troy warmed up with bits of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today” and Nirvana, and it just made me long for bands that are able to squeeze their technical prowess into actual songs and occasionally give their virtuosity a rest for the sake of a hook.