(Big Scary Monsters, released Fri 23 June 2017)
For anyone vaguely familiar with the style, the stony math rock of Liverpool’s self-proclaimed “fucking loud instrumental band” Alpha Male Tea Party will have been heard countless times before. So nationally ubiquitous is the style that you can’t even attend a village fete anymore without stumbling across a volatile trio’s jittery note-jam between the tombola and the marrow competition. While Alpha Male Tea Party stand out as a math rock group with an earnest alternative metal streak redolent of Deftones, their third release Health sounds a little bit too pleased with itself – and in a genre already marred by smugness, obliviousness can be positively repellent.
Once you’ve heard the continual rise and fall of the punchy openers Have You Ever Seen Milk? and Ballerina – Alpha Male Tea Party’s light side and dark, respectively – it shouldn’t be hard to guess where the remainder of Health goes. It’s difficult to tell these songs apart through the deluge of their busy movements, like the many whirring parts of an anonymous machine spitting out carbon copies on a conveyor belt. Even these opaque and humorous song titles – in contrived contrast to the wacky tunes therein – are undone by their derivativeness (see any Mogwai or Zach Hill-affiliated track listing). Every now and then bright ideas are permitted to shine through – the slapping bass on The Museum of Walking overstepping magnificently like John Cleese in that Monty Python sketch, the understated shimmering of Carpet Diem’s icy chord progression, the airy hush at the heart of Don’t You Know Who I Think I Am? – but they’re discarded before they’re really able to flourish. The group seem content with fitting wilfully hideous shapes together – certainly a bloody-minded feat – but it isn’t a good sign when the listener spends the duration of the record wondering how the musicians were able to remember their parts so well.
As prescribed by the genre guidelines, the playing on Health is rather good – if it can be agreed that what’s meant by “rather good” is “technically accomplished” (and let’s face it, the entire math rock genre is predicated upon shooting the guitar/bass/drums combo through with muso classicism). Unfortunately, however, proficient noodling doesn’t always equate to engaging music on record. If the group had busied themselves more with mood and less with devious time signatures and kooky song titles, Health might’ve sounded like more than just an uncritical rehash.