5 out of 5

Produced by: Joe Barresi

Label: Epic

It happened: Chevelle dropped a perfect album.

They bounced around for a bit after their big sophomore album hit, In The Red, going for a back-to-basics aggression on Vena Sera before wisely bringing back in some patience and melody on the excellent Sci-Fi Crimes.  Hats Off To The Bull continued the maturation but the album, to me, lacked a sense of identity.  2014’s La Gárgola seemed to bubble up all of these great riffs and pent up energy into am excellent album, though a fair share of silly lyrics made a couple of tracks stick out as somewhat simplistic fist-pumpers.  In other words: Lots of really great material, but all with critizable aspects to some degree.  Still: An impressively solid resume from a group many probably mistook as a flash in the pan.

And now, eight albums deep we get North Corridor, a muscley, intelligent offering wrapped in a slick, minimal silver and black cover, seemingly suggesting the group is confident you can just judge them straight on their merits, eye-catching packaging be damned.

Any longtime fan of the group will recognize the typical Chevelle dynamics at work here – the particular pacing of the guitar breakdowns; the singular moody quiet song; the exact moment any given (forever Maynard-esque) sung line will twist into a howl – but the way its all been re-energized and packaged leaves zero dead time, no lesser-than track that’s a retread of a catchier version elsewhere on the disc.  The group grooves in absolute sync with now longtime producer Joe Barresi, gifting Corridor with the same spacious but stereo-breaking sound he produced on Gargola.  Unlike that album, no extras are used here: We’re back to guitar, bass, and drums, impossibly finding new, instantly memorable riffs amidst the (you’d think) exhausted supply of down-tuned power chords.  Even that quiet track, which is often a minor note on most Chevelle discs, finds new life resequenced a couple tracks before the concluding twelve minute sprawl of the angsty Shot From a Cannon; it’s also not really a quiet track at all, with plenty of volume and shouting applied.

So I don’t really get it: A lot of these flirted-with-the-scene bands do manage to stick around, but they’re often fueled on nostalgia, or eke out occasional goodness between lots of not-so-goodness.  But Chevelle have remained sharp, delivering albums that have continually raised or maintained the bar.  And then North Corridor.  I am so happy to be a fan, witnessing this awesomeness as it occurs.