There's a particular kind of heaviness that doesn't come from volume per se; it comes from a band refusing to give you anywhere to land. That's the feeling running through La Negazione, the new EP from Chicago metal four- piece Mass Denial, the Italian title translates roughly to "the denial," "the negation," or "the opposite," depending on context in the English language, and it doesn't just double down on the concept, considering the wordplay it shares with the band's name; it bends the idea sideways into something about contradiction and reversal rather than plain rejection. That's the smarter move, and it's the lens this whole EP seems to have been built around. Sonically, this is metal that leans on weight and repetition rather than spectacle. The riffs don't sprint forward so much as coil back on themselves, returning to the same phrases with just enough variation to make the repetition feel deliberate rather than lazy, which fits a record obsessed with cycles and self-negation.
Much of that texture comes from the twin-guitar interplay between Robert Nubel and Sam Millard, who trade off rhythm and lead duties closely enough that it's not always obvious which guitar is doing the grinding and which is doing the coloring. Ted Nubel's drumming keeps the rhythm section taut rather than bludgeoning, favoring pocket and groove over blast-beat density, which gives the riffs room to actually breathe between hits. Maitiu Sexton's vocals and bass work anchor the EP's lower end and its vocal identity work that reads a little differently now, knowing Sexton and the band have since parted ways with each other, and it's almost fitting that a record this preoccupied with denial and dissolution is the last document of a lineup that no longer exists in that form. Chicago's metal scene has never had one defining sound, which probably works in this band's favor. Without a single regional signature to either chase or rebel against, Mass Denial seems freer to pull from a few different corners of heavy music at once; there's groove-laden weight in places, sludgier patience in others, and a vocal approach that swings between melodic clarity and outright snarl depending on what a given song needs. None of it feels like genre tourism; it feels like a band still figuring out which of those tools cuts deepest, and using La Negazione as the place to test that out.
The four-track structure reads like a single arc rather than four separate statements, and each title earns its place in that sequence. "Stain" opens the EP with something that won't wash out: a mark, a guilt, a starting condition rather than a single event. It's the quietest (metaphorically, not in sound) kind of opener a metal record can have: not slow, exactly, but patient, more interested in establishing a feeling of contamination than in announcing itself with a big riff. "Burden" picks that feeling up and adds literal weight to it. If "Stain" is the mark, "Burden" is what it costs to carry it, the EP's midpoint and its heaviest stretch, where the pressure that's been implied since track one stops being subtext and starts being audible in the tempo and the low end alike. "Ouroboros" is the clearest nod to the EP's title and its whole conceptual spine. The ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail, is actually one of the oldest images, going in a cycle that consumes itself to continue existing as a literal illustration of insanity, and that's almost exactly what "La Negazione" gets at in its slipperier translations: not just refusal, but a loop, a thing negating itself to keep being true no matter how crazy or unreasonable it is.
Musically, it's the track most willing to repeat a riff past the point of comfort, which reads less like a lack of ideas and more like the song enacting its own title. It's the kind of choice that only works if the band trusts the listener to notice what's happening, and on this EP, that trust feels earned. By the time "Church Grim" closes things out, the record has moved from personal stain to something closer to folklore: a church grim being the old British and Scandinavian guardian spirit said to haunt graveyards and mark the first soul buried there for death. It's a fitting last image for an EP that's spent four songs working through guilt, weight, and self-consuming cycles: the closer doesn't resolve any of it so much as install a permanent watcher over the whole thing. There's no clean ending here, just a sense that the loop the EP opened with starts with the stain, ends with the grim, and has folded back on itself.
As a short release, La Negazione mostly works because it commits to that arc instead of treating four songs as four standalone ideas. It's less a calling card than a thesis statement, and a fairly disciplined one for a four-track EP; there's a clear through-line from title to tracklist to lineup, and not much filler getting in its way. On those terms, it lands beautifully.
As a short release, La Negazione mostly works because it commits to that arc instead of treating four songs as four standalone ideas. It's less a calling card than a thesis statement, and a fairly disciplined one for a four-track EP; there's a clear through-line from title to tracklist to lineup, and not much filler getting in its way. On those terms, it lands beautifully.
Denial was never going to set you free, now listen to Ouroboros and be consumed in your own cycle of insanity:
Comments
Post a Comment