AlbumsMarch 11, 20244,371 views

Weston Super Maim See You Tomorrow Baby


See You Tomorrow Baby
1. See You Tomorrow Baby 2. Autistic Kill Trance 3. Slow Hell 4. Johnny Menomic 5. Brute Fact 6. The Bare Maximum 7. Kryptonite Renegade 8. Perfect Meadows In Every Direction
2024 self-released
Our score 8

3/11/2024

The first sentence Weston Super Maim saw fit to sell their new project with in their Bandcamp’s elevator pitch of an album description is, “Imagine if Meshuggah couldn’t count”. It’s apt, funny, and, best of all, somewhat true. It’s easy enough to say the duo are indeed like Meshuggah if they leaned much harder in the opposite direction of their hinges - you know, so they break and become unhinged? - but that most definitely sells the band short as they've fashioned one of the more intensely executed, ridiculously skillful debut albums in quite some time.

Like Meshuggah, Weston Super Maim, which may be the best band name ever, focus a lot on rhythm. All instruments are lockstep in building a visceral pummel to tenderize your soft, squishy body with. While there are certainly melodies to speak of, they never sail too far away from the hammered paces established by the drums, and often you’ll find the drums decide to join the melody anyway to make it stick that much harder.

Nowhere is this more evident than the single “Autistic Kill Trance” which has sludgy turbo slam segments mixed with quickened murder movements complete with synths(?) that sound like baby crocodiles and/or space lasers pew-pew'd in a mic's vicinity. One of the best tracks of the year so far. It also features Stace Fifield and Stuart Henley-Minchington (both from Blindfolded and Led to the Woods, a pre-eminent death metal band) as guest vocalists, two amazing choices who are masters of their respective crafts and complement Weston Super Maim’s sonic lunacy so well. The lyrics are appropriately barbaric:

“I only ever wanted to believe you'd listen
Now I sit alone chewing on your ear like gristle
The amount of organs exposed is so absurd
Ingesting your tongue so I control your words”

Weston Super Maim enjoy a narrow, focused creative funnel as it’s just two people that have to okay each move. Seth Detrick screams it up and Tom Stevens does all the music in addition to mixing and mastering. Even still, See You Tomorrow Baby feels absurdly robust and realized. While you could argue more members could lead to more creative choices and ideas, you kind of stop caring about any of that shit once the off-kilter rhythms on “Slow Hell” blast through your speakers like a Claymore mine. There’s variety though - this song enjoys some of the biggest range in mood on the album with a serene mid-section straight out of your old instrumental prog metal faves from last decade. It’s one of the few elegant and surprising moments on the album between the highly kinetic knuckle sandwiches force-fed into all your holes by the rest of the album.

Still, there’s a lot more tense, hydraulic-powered metal fuckery than anything else here. “Johnny Menomic” (which I don’t know if that’s a purposeful misspelling or not) is a wrecking ball of staccato notes neatly tied up with a melodic bow at the end after the first three minutes paints a wall with your insides. “Brute Fact” is similarly aggressive, catchy, and a bit straightforward though not necessarily to a fault. Because the duo do afford us some delightful change-ups and diversity with tone and pace, they can just power through some songs like this and “Kryptonite Renegade” (love the air horn-esque guitar squeals that accent that track), and it’s a veritable treat, like a piece of shrapnel cake to bite into.

With the style of metal these two play, you can always hear a lightly avant-garde soul in it all. It’s familiar, especially for fans of this specific complicated-ass type of prog metal (or djent if you insist), and yet it’s also a unique hell that’s captured on See You Tomorrow Baby. Reading the lyrics, you get the sense the band revel in that sort of thing and there’s certainly enough horrors in reality to take in as inspiration that the well won’t dry up any time soon. Sonically, Weston Super Maim will endure over future years by innovating different ways to crack our bones and sever our sinews. I, personally, have the utmost faith they’ll find a way.

Bottom Line: See You Tomorrow Baby as a title is pretty salient as it feels like it’s from the future. Musically, it holds tremendous power with little regard for anything else - just two dudes fucking shit up at mach 9 in a painfully precise manner. Weston Super Maim are admirable in their goals as well as their raw skill and if this doesn’t make people take notice, I legitimately don’t know what will.
 


8 comments

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anonymous 302 days ago

Jesus Christ. That first sentence gave me a headache. Not reading the rest.

anonymous 302 days ago

If Zulu had been involved...definitely at least a 9. FYI: eat a dick Eliot.

anonymous 302 days ago

after congress bans tiktok i hope they ban music reviews next

anonymous 302 days ago

That's a really stupid band name and their music is just recycled genericness. Without reading the review I can still say it's better than anything that retard Eliot has ever done so you always have that!

anonymous 301 days ago

Yeah you know what's the difference with Meshuggah? It's not that they can count, it's that they originated the style and thus actually knew how to make it actually interesting to listen to

anonymous 301 days ago

I listened to one song by this song and it sound really overproduced and fake. Totally electronic protools garbage. The difference between this and Meshuggah is that Meshuggah is actually a realy band with real instruments. I used to look forward to Lambgoat reviews back in the day but between this and the Darkest Hour album (definitely nothing anywhere near an 8) these reviews aren't even good on an entertainment level anymore.

Inkongudunk 301 days ago

That first sentence...

anonymous 300 days ago

if they leaned much harder in the opposite direction of their hinges - you know, so they break and become unhinged? Yoy never cease to amaze with the absolute inanity of the dumb shit you come up with and think is clever enough to put out into the world