Unbest

Ian Mathers on Subrosa’s No Help For the Mighty Ones (2011)
(Bandcamp)

I freely admit to not being a huge/devoted metal fan, although when I fall for something I fall hard. And my first listen to Salt Lake City doom rock quintet Subrosa’s newest album was the hardest I’ve fallen for anything in years. I heard “Whippoorwill” via The A.V. Club’s “Loud” column, loved it, downloaded the album super illegally, listened to it on my iPod and just ADORED it start to finish, and now I am going to slip Profound Lore some money for a CD copy as soon as I get paid again. I have been forcing it on as many people as I can manage and will buy a ticket and as much merch as I can manage if they ever make it to Toronto. That’s the way the post-major label era of music is supposed to work, right?

But enough about my perfidy; this was easily my favourite record of 2011, my most-played record of 2011, and the only record I could listen to every day in 2011 without getting sick of it even a little (although I didn’t listen to it quite that often). I like it so much that it’s hard for me to not just babble about it, so let’s stick with some facts: The band is made up of your fairly standard rhythm section and then three female singers, one of whom plays electric guitar and two of whom play electric violin. One of the songs here is a chilling a capella version of the folk ballad “House Carpenter,” but the other seven are all impossibly towering, crushingly heavy and melodic in equal measures, full of rage and defiance of the predominant religious and political systems of control active in North America today. The album is so angry, in fact, that it’s hard to tell whether it’s the vocals or the music that hit harder. And yet, the hooks on this album are so huge that even on the very first listen, from the opening drum salvo and guitar fuzz of “Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes,” I was hooked. The violins mostly add a kind of melodic drone to the doomy stomp of the music, and the massed vocals are insanely catchy.

It’s safe to say that even in the metal records I like, there’s nothing else that really sounds like Subrosa, and for whatever reason it’s like this record was specifically engineered to hit the pleasure centers of my brain. If you can listen to all of “Whippoorwill” and not like it at all (even if you’re not already wailing along to “I knowww, there’s nooo, turrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrning back” like I was), I suspect we may want very different things from music.

Ian Mathers is a writer living in Canada.