MEGAFAUNA - I Owe This Land a Body

 

Released: January 3

There is something that is genuinely unsettling about this album in its tone and approach. It’s not something I would call scary or frightening by any means. Rather it just feels twisted for lack of a better. The sound design on each track is stretched and muted while the structure of the tracks is rather sparse with lots of room around the pared down section of sounds. And then there is the percussion. The percussion is some of the most incredible work I have heard in quite a while as it just has such an air around it and it feels like it hits so brilliantly hard. I think one of my favorite examples can be heard on “Sea of Trees.” The rhythm itself is not overly complex but it certainly feels like it just has so much presence. Much of the percussion sounds themselves are pulled from more contemporary production in pop and hip-hop but the contextualization in this dark atmosphere with a disjointed quality makes it something dark and off-putting in a great way. 

Another theme that I really appreciate is the use of weird and unsettling spoken word segments. “This Is Your Fault” actually opens up with this theme - a quiet little degraded piece of speech talking about an explosion that gave life. This is also one of the few tracks that doesn’t feature any real percussion to speak of, just a bit of noise and something that sounds like a very warbly and distorted guitar. It makes it stand out a bit but not nearly as much as the track that immediately follows, “Un-make me, save me from the hell of living.” Despite the rather morbid name, the track is amazingly happy sounding with an overall chiptune quality to it, feeling very much like it might find itself on your old Nintendo with a bit of modern percussion and bass. 

I Owe This Land A Body is a surprisingly multi-faceted album. It kind of establishes a theme of dark and brooding percussion and noise, then goes on to subvert that theme numerous times throughout. But it does ratchet up some tension and keeps things weird and moody most of the time, breaking away to make sure you are still listening. The sound design throughout is impressive and unpredictable with lots of noise and just enough semblance of harmony of melody to keep it from devolving into a melange of cacophonous percussion.