4 out of 5
Label: Superstar Destroyer Records
Produced by: Tom Peters
Volume is the name of the game for Alpha Male Tea Party: it is instrumental math rock that finds space between its heavy hits, and doesn’t explicitly build them in. It can take a listen to appreciate this – beyond the initial feel-good bluster of their compositions – but once you’re adapted to the pace, not only does this trio’s sophomore release wholly land, but you can also spot the intentionality of its design, which, again, can get lost behind the volume and silly song titles.
Somewhere between the 00s emo-hardcore of Dischord and the same era’s emo-pop of Suicide Squeeze you’d find AMTP’s sound; and while locationally that’d be mid-America, the band is from the UK, which is maybe what tips the group into its more jovial approach versus the sludgier sounds of that US region. But if you’re put out by songs with names like ‘God Is Love But Satan Does That Thing You Like With His Tongue’ (sigh) which was already a tired shtick by the year 2000 and this was a good decade after that, push past and spin up the record… and then, er, sigh again when bassist Ben Griffiths shouts over the album’s only vocal track, ‘Happy As Larry, Larry Is Dead.’ It’s… a bit of a whiff. Not necessarily because of Griffith, who gets us to some pretty fist-pumping moments, but because the song just isn’t really structured for singing, and this ultimately comes across as a “we need to do one song with singing” bid.
Thankfully, the rest of the album makes contact – sticking with this metaphor, even multiple home runs in a row – and on subsequent listens, you’ll find the pace of “Larry” as well, it’s just definitely the weaker feature of the listen.
Elsewhere, man, this is some of the tightest playing we’ve heard in this sector, where everyone gets to dial up to 11 but remembers to not noodle, and keeps all the bravado around a central melody or theme. We have some shorter tracks that lean into slightly more linear punk – ‘Your Happiness Was Stored On A Hard Drive And Is Now Corrupt’ – and longer listens that actually make use of some quiet / loud dynamics to wring out some emotionality, first introduced on ‘Athlete’s Face’ amazing build-deconstruct-build approach, and then turned into full-on slowburns on the aforementioned ‘Satan’ and closer ‘I Haven’t Had A Lunch Break Since Windows Vista Came Out.’ This is where the album’s intentionality comes into play: interstitial ambient track ‘You Are My The Rock’ clues us in to the B-side’s differing approach, which is more layered and patient than the A-side’s all-out attack, the album as a whole truly marrying the complexities of groups like Q and Not U with the hard-hitting directness of These Arms Are Snakes.
Tom Peters’ even-keeled engineering is a plus and a minus: as mentioned, because all sounds and songs hit at a similar level of intensity, it can be hard to appreciate where there are pauses in the momentary time-change switch-ups or pitch shifts, but the way this allows both the mathier and more linear paths to meet sonically together – even if the album could maybe lose a track or two to tighten this up – makes for a much more enduring, impactful listen in the long run.
