Jody Seabody & The Whirls, Hawksamillion

The first time I saw this band play, they were, well, pretty damn different from what they are now. See, if you’d asked me back then what Jody Seabody & The Whirls — a four-piece that currently consists of Clint Rater on drums, Bryce Perkins and Dave Merriett on guitar, and Stuart Perkins on bass — sounded like, I would’ve hemmed and hawed and shrugged and said they were kind of a mishmash of garage-y, ’60s-style psych-pop and smart, ’90s-style indie-rock. There were plenty of other things in there, too, sure, like prog and a bit of punk, but those were the two biggest things I could hear in the band’s music.

A few years went by, the band put out two albums’ worth of excellent, psych-rock-ish stuff (2012’s Summer Us and 2015’s Holographic Slammer), and then in 2016, I got to see the JSATW guys play live once again, at a rainy outdoor stage at the 2016 iteration of Yes, Indeed! Fest, and I could scarcely comprehend what I was witnessing. Holy shit, was I watching the right set? Dammit, I was going to be pissed if I’d missed Jody Seabody…

But no, there they all were, Clint and Bryce and Dave and a guy I didn’t recognize (I’m assuming that’s Stuart), thrashing and flailing around on the stage while the music blasted, ear-shattering and raw, from the speakers. The Jody Seabody I thought I knew appeared to be completely absent, replaced instead by a band of dudes playing full-on stoner-/thrash-metal, complete with breakneck drumming, screamed/howled vocals, and on-stage moshing.

And it was fucking beautiful. No, I’m serious — it was honestly one of the best live performances I’ve seen from any band, ever. The JSATW guys played fast and heavy like I’d never heard them play before, and they did it with big, unashamed, no-shits-given grins on their faces. They were having fun. The previous time I’d seen them, they’d seemed pretty serious up on the FPSF stage, maybe nervous about nailing the performance for their big festival debut; this time, though, they were here to have a good time, they didn’t care what anybody thought about it, and it was magic.

Honestly, I’d kind of blown it off as a fluke, a one-off set the the guys threw together just for Yes, Indeed!, but as soon as “Intro / Ultra Defiant,” the first track on Hawksamillion, came on, I sat back and said, “Ohhhhhhh. That was for real.”

Unlike the band’s previous efforts, which were all pretty friendly and cheery and melodic, even when they got loud, Hawksamillion is a heavy-ass punch to the face. “Ultra Defiant” sets the tone, starting off stompy and sludgy, a big chunk of Kyuss-esque stoner-metal, but then kicking into full-tilt thrash at the halfway mark and not letting up ’til the end. That second part reminds me of Among the Living-era Anthrax, albeit with a bit more of a hardcore lean to it, and I’m always, always good with that.

“Malignant Terror” does the reverse, entering as a squalling, yell-along blast of punkish rawk fury but then switching up towards the end to morph into something more complex, more prog-rock-like, before rising to a triumphant crescendo. The prog influence carries through to “Terror TV,” which rides a sharp-edged, insistent guitar line that careens back and forth like a pinball while the vocals yowl and scrape and scratchy samples of news coverage of shootings and terror attacks and whatnot float just beneath the surface.

Then comes “All Gone White,” which jumps between slower, grunge-ier rock swagger that’s reminiscent of, say, Monster Magnet and speeding hardcore with shredded-throat vocals, and I feel damn near compelled to start a mosh pit with my cubicle-mates (who probably wouldn’t appreciate it, sadly, so I restrained myself).

At about that point, I’ll admit that I realized I do kind of miss the singing from Holographic Slammer and Summer Us; hell, I’m not even sure who’s doing the vocals here, since pretty much everybody in the band sings at some point on those earlier releases. Right on cue, there’s “Making Demons,” which serves as a nice breather, with fragile, tuneful vocals over quietly hazy, synth-heavy pop that bends and warps subtly as you listen; if you imagine My Bloody Valentine doing a cover of a Beatles song, you’ll get the general idea.

Breather done, they dive back in with “Grenade Green,” which spends its six-and-a-half minute running time dancing between complex, winding, prog-metal guitars that make me think of Mastodon, fellow locals Omotai, or maybe Between the Buried and Me, headbanging thrash, and a — hey, now, that sounds like the band I used to know — drifting, heavy-lidded, organ-filled psych dirge.

To the band’s credit, the Jody Seabody dudes make the whole thing seamless, like it’s a completely natural transition each and every time they go from metal to psych to prog and back again. In the hands of a lesser band, it could all come off as jerky, stop-start gear-shifting, but these guys pull it off wonderfully.

“When Nightmares Can’t Take You” lives more fully in the metal realm, throwing in bits of speed metal alongside the thrash and more straightforward retro-style metal reminiscent of The Sword, and then closer “Violent Tantrums of Destructive Meditation” sounds more fully punk than pretty much anything else on here, with those gang-shouted vocals and hardcore house show guitars. Even then, though, the band can’t resist making things a little weird right in the last two-thirds of the song, bringing back both the organ sound and some seriously Mastodon-/Baroness-sounding guitars.

In my experience, it’s not often a band can reinvent themselves like this and make it work. As open-minded as us music fans like to think we are, most of the time we’re really just looking forward to Band X’s followup to Awesome Heavy Rock Album being Awesomer Heavier Rock Album. Too much change, too much evolution, and we tend to get twitchy, shrugging and saying, “Yeah, it’s okay, but I liked their old stuff better.”

The members of Jody Seabody & The Whirls, though, have actually done it — they’ve broken free of the dreaded curse of the old stuff and have forged a totally new path for themselves as a band…and they’re really goddamn good at it. Sure, there are undoubtedly going to be old-school Jody Seabody fans who hear Hawksamillion and cringe, but from where I sit, the death of the “old” JSATW has paved the way for a seriously badass new beast that stands on its own.

Now, for the love of God, will somebody please book a show with these guys, Baroness, Red Fang, and Omotai? I would do very, very bad things to be able to witness the collected awesomeness that event would bring into the world, honest…