4 out of 5

Label: Veritas Recordings, Pitch-A-Tent

Produced by: Bruce Kaphan, Monks Of Doom

Cracker has kept on making music ever since that album you bought and sold in the 90s; Camper van Beethoven resurrected at one point and has similarly continued their shuffle. The latter band’s original run is still kinda self-aware dumb and then also cool as shit; Cracker’s Capitol Records run always had a kind of dad rock vibe, even from the start, but it was quality dad rock – done with a sneer. In both cases, when the bands continued on, they evolved, but also felt quite out of time: neither CVB or Cracker could necessarily pass for a modern act.

Meanwhile, on an alternate Earth ruled by insect gods, Monks of Doom splintered off of CVB with a much more performative vocalist and a bizarre anti-rock groove and confusingly angry-but-delighted tone, and they delivered a small cache of incredibly memorable, very accessible, but very hard to describe albums.

They’ve also come back now (though apparently casually recording these songs over like a ten year period), but unlike the related bands: MoD sound just as weird now as they did then, and maybe even sound more modern than they did at the time. 80s / 90s MoD were indie rock; the 2018 edition is this proggy, spacey, rock act, keeping the genre-mash spirit of Camper alive but wrapping it all in a much more direct and moody low-end stomp. The music absolutely swaggers – maybe a bit too much, with the bass and drums mastered / mix to the point of kind of clipping the vocals – and the songs warp and weft from meaty riffs to cinematic passages to folk or waltzy or poppier little clips…

David Immerglück’s lyrics maintain their kind of smirking ominousness; you’ll get a general read on a theme, but an image or a line will confuse it – the delivery is emotive, though, and excepting the aforementioned clipping being distracting, makes wanting to parse the words feel worth it.

Musically, I wish it felt like there was a stronger theme, here, since there seems to be a narrative to the album, but no song leaves you without a strong melody, and an almost instantly grabbing groove, and a tendency towards instrumentals encourages that – more room for the talented players to explore, and drill down on riffs that work.

When this thing was announced, I was absolutely curious to see how – if – MoD had aged. They haven’t, presumably because, in their alternate timeline, age doesn’t exist – The Brontë Pin is an album from a world just adjacent to ours, meaning it’s close enough to be music you can recognize, and pretty instantly get rocking to, but is equally alien and wonderfully bizarre.