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| Album Score: 8.5/10 |
Giant Squid are a slippery bunch. They began as an indie-rock outfit with Monster in the Creek, hit us with the contemplative, doomy Metridium Fields, and then threw the playbook out the window on their wonderfully bizarre follow-up, The Ichthyologist. Attempting to pin Giant Squid’s sound down is an exercise in futility, but much like their namesake, it’s generally dark, massive, and mysterious. In crafting The Ichthyologist, Giant Squid gallivanted about between genres that should never have worked together: swamp-rock tinged revenge tale “Dead Man Slough” led into the morbid, bluesy rocker “Throwing A Donner Party at Sea”, followed by the half-dirge, half-duet “Sevengill”, which in turn gave way to the heartbreaking and dissonant “Mormon Island”, composed entirely of banjo, strings, and Jackie Perez Gratz’s haunting voice. And you know what? The result was one of the most interesting and refreshing albums of the year. Sure, it was a lot to digest. Maybe “Sutterville”, with its stop-start rhythm and crazy jazz chords, took a while to warm up to. But what The Ichthyologist lacked in accessibility, it made up for with near-infinite replay value. So what does a band do for an encore after it’s already pulled out all the creative stops?
