Xoth
Invasion of the Tentacube
(Self-Release)
Seattle’s sci-fi death/prog stalwarts Xoth really pin the tail on the funky color wheel with their newest effort Invasion of the Tentacube. The album has a total sweetness to it, the bass work is punk and jazz and you sort of just drift into the band’s hyper-reality. There’s a goal out there in the Xoth-verse: to play the shit out of everything they can think of. And the band does it respectively, warmly, and in a humorous manner. That color wheel……..it’s spinning like a wizard in a wormhole: all wacked out, lighting bolts, and running on super-cycle.
The record’s a hoot, though it does suffer from overexposure—namely, that constant sweetness. Xoth may come at you in tunnels of death metal (mean and scary), gurgle chasms (vocals), and darkly themed intensity, but ultimately their new album expresses itself with a sort of high-top surfing, spoofy angled, and not-quite-yet mastered, sort of insanity. Even so, it’s still a bunch of fun, and that fucking bass is awesome and perfectly suited. When the band dives into their oft-rendered progressive jaunts, the instrumentation is really doubling and extended: tech-drums, shred, spank-bass, and jelly all over the place. You can’t help but swing.
In the end though, it’s hard to rest your head against anything particularly infinitely illuminating, even though the music is actually such. It’s sort of a strange paradox: you’d think such riffs and compact studio cohesion would be enough, but alas, it never is. I feel like Xoth has more to offer, more space to explore. In the infinite and uncharted universe a band this motivated should eventually find their beyond at some point; they’re just not there yet on Invasion of the Tentacube. It’s a wickedly thrashing and varied record, just a bit bogged down by its grand notions and superfluous nature.
Purchase Invasion of the Tentacube here.
