Bottomless Pit, Hammer of the Gods

I’ve fought with it and I’ve fought with it, so now I’m just gonna say it: Bottomless Pit sound a heck of a lot like Silkworm. And I mean, seriously, how could they avoid it? With two out of four ex-members of that band onboard, Tim Midgett and Andy Cohen, who were both partly responsible for the sound of that band vocally and guitar-wise, it’s pretty much a given that the new band’s going to sound at least somewhat like the old. It’s unavoidable. Right?

Well, sort of. Bottomless Pit do bear a resemblance to Midgett and Cohen’s much-beloved old outfit (less so to drummer Chris Manfrin and bassist Brian Orchard’s respective bands, Seam and .22), particularly in those half-yelped/half-spoken vocals, the moody, not-too-fast tempos, and sharp-edged-yet-warm guitars that eschew simple power-chord rock in favor of more complex, occasionally nonrepeated, sometimes sparse guitar lines. But hey, so do a ton of other bands — for me Silkworm will always be one of those unassailable archetypes of mid-’90s indie-rock, and you could apply the description above to any of three dozen or so bands from the same era.

What’s really different here, though, is the mood of the music as a whole. Where most Silkworm releases wobbled between being downtrodden and melancholy and saying “screw it” and good-naturedly/drunkenly giving a finger to the whole mess — a la the Grifters, the band made music that always made me wish I drank so I could appreciate it better — Hammer of the Gods is unrelenting and bleak. To these ears, at least, it’s a dark, dark, down-in-the-depths album, made by a crew of musicians who’ve seen a significant chunk of their lives ripped apart in some way or another.

Songs like starter “The Cardinal Movements” (which, by the way, is probably the album’s highlight, largely due to that recurring gorgeously distorted guitar melody), “Dogtag,” and “Greenery” carry an undercurrent of menace and resignation, like the sound of doom, indie-rock-style. “Greenery,” especially, is misanthropic as hell, an apocalyptic meditation on the pointlessness of everyday life at the end of the world, and comes off like close kin of British post-punk acts like The Fall with it’s determined drumbeat, sporadic and flat vocals, and screeching, gouging guitars. It’s the sound of a man who’s decided it’s all going to be over soon, so why bother?

Even the more hopeful-sounding tracks on here, like the U2-esque “Leave the Light On” or the almost life-affirming “Human Out of Me,” where the narrator marvels at the fact that somebody close to them was able to teach them how to behave like a normal human being, still leaves the listener aware of the loss behind the words, the hole revealed when that person went away unexpectedly. Cohen and Midgett’s lyrics have always been the obliquest of oblique, daring you to decipher them or re-envision them to fit what’s living in your own head, and Hammer is no different. There’s a subtext here, I think, whether conscious or not, and the album takes on an elegaic feel because of it.

The elephant in the room that I’ve been trying somewhat to dance around, of course, is the sudden passing of Silkworm drummer Michael Dahlquist in 2005. With his death, surviving members Midgett and Cohen ended Silkworm, knowing full well that there was no way they could possibly replace Dahlquist either as a friend or bandmate. And while I certainly can’t claim to know what Midgett and Cohen have gone through over the past two years, I think Hammer of the Gods is a rare glimpse into the internal world with which the two musicians have been trying to come to grips since that fateful car crash (which may be mirrored in the grungy, grimy pseudo-boogie of “Dead Man’s Blues”).

There’s anger, hopelessness, pain, nostalgia, bitterness, love, and even a little joy in there, all vying for dominance. And while it’s tragic as hell that Dahlquist is gone, it’s fitting that the sound of two of his best friends attempting to deal with his loss sounds this absolutely, heart-breakingly incredible.