New Music: Giant Squid - Cenotes

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?

Cenotes sees Giant Squid returning somewhat to their circa-2006 sound – except his time, they’re armed with a whole new array of weapons. Opener “Tongue Stones” starts with a dissonant, churning riff courtesy of Jackie Perez-Gratz’ electric cello, before being joined by a ridiculously low jangling guitar line. While the sludgy melodies of Cenotes are more out of the Metridium Fields mold than their last album, there’s definitely a renewed overall focus. Where Metridium saw the band occasionally wander off course with unnecessarily long jam sessions, Cenotes trims the jetsam to a compact 35 minutes of impressively consistent songwriting. There’s a distinctly linear approach to the first half of the album, as the first two tracks run mostly through-composed for more than 17 minutes. It’s a pretty massive slab of benthic sludge to start the album, and definitely takes about half a dozen listens to, ahem, sink in. Fortunately, Giant Squid are able to keep things interesting by stringing together several massive headbanging-worthy riffs along the way, while strategically allowing you to surface for air with calmer interludes.

True to the band’s word, Cenotes often features a distinctly Middle-eastern sound. Eight-note scales and diminished chords run amok on “Figura Serpentinata,” which, at four minutes, is by far the album’s shortest track. The disparate vocal styles of Gratz and Aaron Gregory are better integrated here than on The Ichthyologist, and the songs benefit greatly from it. Indeed, Gregory actually sings most of his lines (often nearly intelligibly) and his improved performance helps make Cenotes a more seamless listen than its predecessor. “Snakehead” stands out as the best example of Giant Squid’s newfound coherence, as it builds from an urgent shuffle to a ramming-speed rocker, albeit one with deceptively graceful vocal interplay. The titular track wraps Cenotes up in style, combining the thunder of “Snakehead” in its first half with a more contemplative outro that ends the album on an ominous note.

Giant Squid have always been an enigmatic group, and with Cenotes, their reputation for crafting thoughtful and exciting music is secure. In what might be their finest moment yet, Cenotes sees the band enhancing their trademark sound with new influences and diverse instrumentation. If it wasn’t already clear that Giant Squid are due for bigger and better things, then Cenotes is another emphatic step in the right direction.