3 out of 5

Label: Ectopic Ents

Produced by: J.G. Thirlwell

I fear I’m going to lose my J.G. Thirlwell fan-club membership by stating this, but: the final Foetus album is… okay. I don’t know that I had expectations going into this, as I wholly wasn’t aware that there was a ten-album cycle planned until after I’d gone through the album and consumed the liner notes / lyrics (such is my method: a blind pass, then some context for another pass), but for those similarly unaware: the Foetus project, setting aside remix albums and compilations, was planned with a set end, now achieved with the fittingly titled ‘Halt.’ As such, the eleven tracks on ‘Halt’ do carry an ongoing sense of finality to them, and I’ve tried to bear that in mind – that for as operatic as many Thirlwell releases have been / can be, this is intended to hit in a particular way. Even allowing for that extra grandiosity, though, the album just doesn’t sound exactly like Foetus to me. It’s unmistakably J.G. overall, and definitely more in the Foetus camp than Xordox or something else, and Thirlwell has, on occasion, delivered music that I would say feels Foetus-derivative as opposed to being something truly inspired or unique to a particular release, but it occasionally felt like second- or third-generation Foetus; groups that have been inspired by the sound, fed back into an AI engine told to make them sound like Foetus. Which, y’know, sounds like a very Thirlwell thing, come to think of it, and wouldn’t be far off of the ‘the world is eating itself’ themes of the album, but I also doubt that that was actually the case here, or the intended sound.

To step back, the above sounds more like a snipe than I mean it to be. Halt is good. The mid-album has some pretty earth-rattling moments that advance the Foetus project in a way that feels right for an ending: Harpoon, Crater – these pick up the pieces of the frantic and cinematic aspects of Foetus and slam them into epic, marching odes. They’re powerful. And though Thirlwell is smart enough to not go for ‘epic’ on every song – we get some punkers; some folksy ballads; some mean Foetus stomps, like opener Succulence – I do think that cinematic adjective was maybe favored for atmosphere, and the mix of the album from Ben Greenberg digitizes the edges too much for my tastes, making the performative aspect of Foetus less cynical sounding than usual, hence my feeling like this is kind of recycled sound in a way.

I suppose it just feels too straight-forward. We’ve had two Trump elections since the last Foetus disc, and undoubtedly politics and current events are always wrapped up in Foetus but are very close to the surface here, giving things like Scurvy and The Rabbit Hole a slight dose of old man cringe factor. I went back and listened to the preceding albums for comparison, and it’s just a different vibe; again, trying to allow for how each Foetus album can have its own vibe – Halt is fed up with its own veneer. But in moving Thirlwell closer to the surface, it smoothes over identifying Foetus elements.

I mentioned Ben Greenberg, and I think his presence here is indicative. I didn’t go through every Foetus album credit list, and possibly some people just aren’t credited, but it looks like this is the first album that had someone else mix it. Ben has worked on some other recent J.G. stuff, so whether this is just a working relationship that’s made sense or something more purposeful to allow Thirlwell to step back slightly, it undoubtedly affects how the music sounds, in ways described above. ‘Halt’ is a different experience from the Foetus “norm.”

As a way of concluding this wandering take, I’d point to the album’s closer, ‘Many Versions of Me.’ The song is about exactly what you’d think a song named like that would be about. Musically, it doesn’t twist or turn. Its mix glitters. I remember when Penn & Teller started making the show Bullshit!, they remarked that the final episode would be about themselves. ‘Versions’ feels like that for Foetus; I wouldn’t be surprised if it was written as a conclusion to this cycle a while ago. I think if the preceding album maintained the Foetus mask throughout, it would be a bit more impactful. But whereas the tryhard elements of Foetus were always backed by a snicker or a sneaky punch to the gut, ‘Halt’ removes that for the most part. The theme of ‘Versions’ has been the background of every Foetus song to date, and saying it out loud rather summarizes ‘Halt’s whole vibe.

That’s perhaps the right way to end it, without any ambiguity, and it’s enjoyable on the whole. And lord knows few artists have put out as much amazing work as Thirlwell under his many guises. All the same, I would’ve wished for something a little more clever for this last entry.