2 out of 5

Label: Hydra Head

Produced by: Greg Dawson

Mare will forever have the unique distinction of being the record that made me think Hydra Head had jumped the shark.  I was buying everything I could that the label put out (…and that I could find new or in used bins, as this was prior to online being my everything go-to) but had sorta kinda prioritized Cave In, Botch, Cavity and other heavyweights, tainting my view / expectations of what the imprint released.

Just prior to this came 27, which… was also shark-jumpy, with its nigh-radio friendly alternative rock backing, but it was at least excusable as being pleasant.  The other album I couldn’t quite wrap my head around was Discordance Axis, but they were clearly birthed of the devil, and so belongeth to a label with a 666 in its catalogue numbers.  So: Mare.  Mare, accompanied by some good press, and, I dunno, claims of genre mixing, making me excited to crack the thing open and take a listen.

In the years since, I’ve reapproached the disc several times.  My ears have opened up to a lot more music during that stretch, and my definition of what the Hydra Head label “should” offer has gotten pretty vast as well.  For better or worse, though, my opinion has remained the same: that this was a group that was trying way too hard to be something different.  Or, more simply: we really like Cavity; we really like Deftones.

This doesn’t have to not work – essentially a meet-up of sludge and a mechanical chugga-chugga with vocals to flip-flopping ‘tween doomly growls and, y’know, ‘soaring,’ – but Mare’s version of it never gets past conceptual.  Opener Anisette is the dics’s best (perhaps coincidentally sharing a name with a June of 44 song; another band I feel always sounded like a forced regurgitation of differing Chicago styles), effectively using its four minutes and forty seconds to shift between pace and tone.  They Sent You, track two, has an admittedly quality death crawl of rumbling riffage in its back half, but its Radiohead atmospherics lead-in kills a lot of good will for me in order to get into it, and by the time I’m starting to get a feel for what they’re doing… we’re back to the Deftones stuff, only now with “jazz” on track 3’s ‘Tropics.’  This mixed bag of approaches (and its resultant mixed effect on my ears) continues on the remaining two tracks.

To be fair, the EP is consistent: the experimentation is pretty much there from the get-go, but, to me, the disc never moves beyond that feeling: that Mare is trying something out, and in a few albums time – albums that never happened – they’d likely settle into a more ‘them’ sound without the kitchen-sink artifice.