www.mioceneonline.co.uk

location	author	size
candyfactorylines.com	tim johnson	3.5 / 5.0

Nowadays, most people seem to have lost track of early human evolution. Ardipithecus kadabba, anyone? Orrorin tugenensis? Sahelanthropus tchadensis? Its not like science journalists have a clue, unwittingly ensnared as they are in providing a comforting, linear fairy story, confirming all our suppositions about the inexorable march towards “modern humanity”, whatever that means. To expose a few naked emperors, most people digging up bones in Africa have no idea either. They don’t even begin to examine the philosophical basis or implications of their own work. It’s all an unseemly race to find the oldest bipedal ape. For the last decade, a series of fragmentary finds of such putative human ancestors have been assigned to the Miocene, that period before 5 million years ago, before the ice ages shook everything up for ever (a bit like popular culture in the aftermath of the second world war, but without the Beatles). Its here our cunning genetic clocks tell us the common ancestor of the human and chimpanzee is most likely to have been knocking around somewhere in the Rift Valley. Like you give a shit.

The thing I always found amusing about this area of study was that, despite the fact that the coarseness of the palaeontological record means that every new find throws every assumption up in the air again, palaeoanthropologists will still insist on a nice, well-ordered family tree of species to satisfy Nature's subscribers or stick on the office wall. Its like publishing a comprehensive history of popular music with sole reference to Steeleye Span, a Cast single, the early career of Michael Bolton and the drummer from Def Leppard’s missing arm. Sounds a bit like what broadsheet newspapers try to pass off as music journalism, no?

Maybe there’s no point reading a synthesis, the evidence has already changed. All bets are off. Wouldn’t it be great if music was more like that? Fuck scenes, fuck genres, I want chaos - perpetual novelty. Like the geological period after which they’re named, Miocene always have a surprise up their sleeves, and I’m not talking adaptive radiation of grazing herbivores. Any nominally ‘metal’ band which paraphrases DJ Shadow, naming a song ‘Why Metal Sucks in 2002’, and publically baits Ozzy Osbourne are clearly ambitious, but had better have something special to show for it.

The band certainly don’t fit neatly into any particular musical tradition. Their 2002 EP ‘Cellular Memory’ marked a transition from what was, dare I say it, tail end nu-metal, towards a more unique and refreshing brand of electronica-laced futurecore (Yes I recognise how ridiculous that word is. Irony, yeah?). Their long awaited, hugely over-budget debut album expands on this formula. I want to love this. Nowadays, most of the best rock bands know how to construct an album, rather than just writing songs, and this is no exception. Variety is often mistaken for incoherence, but I very much like the principle of an album that, like Old Man Gloom’s latest, travels in waves, running the spectrum between driving metallic onslaught and soothing, almost ambient electronic passages. The album’s sonic scope is huge, and lyrics, revolving around the disruption of insouciance and discipline in all its manifestations, range from indictments of the rapacious US regime to the stagnation of the capital-dominated music industry.

Opening with a bang, as the vocalist spits rhymes, sounding a bit like Tricky, we move through prog-metal epics with churning bass, and synths weaving in and out of complex guitar arrangements, to glitchy Warp-style breakbeat interludes. The album actually flows very well, though does have a potential downside in that the more traditional instruments and electronic elements are not as satisfyingly integrated or interwoven as they are in the recent work of, say, 65daysofstatic.

The band’s eclecticism makes them very difficult to pigeonhole, or evaluate. The vocals and instrumental arrangements have drawn frequent comparisons to Tool, and these are not misplaced, though give me Miocene over any of M.J. Keenan et al's output any day. For me, the record also occasionally exhumes memories of Incubus’s earlier more listenable efforts, an obligatory hint of Isis, and some of the experimental fervour of Sikth, though notably minus the humour. And that's not even starting on the beats. So what is novelty? If we celebrate the decline of the transcendent and embrace the end of the tyranny of the subject, there’s no real space for personal “originality” in the strict sense of the term. Its all about combining old components into a whole which pushes some of the same old buttons, but maybe finds some new ones. There are indeed some great uplifting moments – the whirling synths at the climax of ‘The Fall’ or where ‘Sympathy for Gordon Cornstock’ breaks into full-on drum ‘n’ bass, which is certainly more Squarepusher than Bad Company. However at times, the band does seem a bit overburdened by the gravity of their mission. They do take themselves awfully seriously.

Ultimately, I feel slightly unsatisfied by the album’s synthetic feel, all the guitars and vocals are so clean and effects-laden, and the impassioned spoken word samples seem a little ‘obvious’. Vocalist Ben flows about as well as Mike Skinner, and I’m not sure whether the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” might be appropriate. Does it matter? So much care and attention has gone into this album that I almost feel guilty criticising it, I can’t help escaping the feeling that Miocene aren’t quite raw or dangerous enough to inspire the kind of instant emotional response we often expect from music. There's a fine line between meticulous and calculating. I’d like to see them live before I could make that call. So how much did I actually like this album? Er…ask me next week and I might disown this review. Its not like ‘I’ wrote it anyway.