Ferocious Eagle, The Sea Anemone Inside of Me Is Mighty

First off: hot damn, the album cover just plain freaks me out (mmm…blood). And kind of in a good way, which is a bit disturbing to me. I like it, though, because it’s a fairly hard-to-miss declaration of what’s to come: whatever the hell this Ferocious Eagle thing is, it’s going to be strange, possibly violent, and definitely not pretty.

Okay, so maybe I’m making a lot of blather out of a stupid picture, but the fact remains that the Portlanders definitely fit the description above on The Sea Anemone Inside of Me Is Mighty. The album is a full-on squall of Fugazi-influenced post-rock — plenty of starts and stops, quirky-yet-arresting sung/chanted vocals, and a sinister, murky feel. The music churns and barrels along its tracks like a less-backwoodsy Federation X, or maybe Refused if they dropped the polemical stuff and dug back through those jazz collections they love so much. The songs get messy and chaotic at points (“Dinosaur,” “Lion Hearted”), but even then they somehow coalesce into something solidly musical, which is no mean feat. There’s a little Modest Mouse craziness here, to boot, particularly on album closer “I Just Don’t Care” (which also makes me think of fellow Northwesterner Kind of Like Spitting), along with a fair dose of Polvo-esque math-rock.

Really, though, what comes to mind the most as I listen to Sea Anemone (and this surprises me, actually) is NoMeansNo — I can vividly remember the first time I listened to “The Tower,” and how simultaneously thrilled and scared the living shit out of me, so much so that I couldn’t stop listening to it. Ferocious Eagle has the same kind of purposeful, dangerous momentum to its music, like a big-ass rock that rolls down a mountain and just plain never stops but keeps on going, crushing things in its path. You know you should get out of the way, but while you’re staring at its destructive progress, you can’t; you’re mesmerized. Similarly, I put on Sea Anemone, my hands and feet start to move…and then the next thing I know, it’s over and I’ve lost a half-hour of my life.

Of course, as you might expect from an album like this, the lyrics make zero sense, barring a brief (and surprisingly uplifting) little pseudo-Biblical interlude in “Be Not Weary, Be Not Weak.” But eh, that’s not the point — the point is in the locked-down groove these three guys drive unrelentingly into your skull. Just step back and watch.