Look at the band name, look at the cover art, look at the album title and even the label, and you get a pretty good idea of what to expect from this disc: huge chainsaw guitars, double-bass drums, tricky time changes and lots of screaming, maybe some of it in that Cookie Monster voice that we've all come to love so much. Right? Wrong. Opening with a spare intro consisting of tom-toms, orchestral strings, a hint of electronica and, okay, just a little bit of yelling,
the Black Maria's A Shared History in Tragedy knocks your preconceptions over and then proceeds to run roughshod over them for the remainder of the album's length. That's not to say that their guitars aren't plenty loud, or that their singing isn't plenty aggressive -- it's just that the aggression and noise are consistently harnessed in the service of both great pop hooks and, as often as not, genuinely complex song structures. Note, for example, the structural intricacy and sharp melodicism (and yelling) of "Perilous Curse"; it's a pattern than holds true through such other aggro-pop fare as "Van Gogh" and "Call to Arms" as well. There are a couple of weird moments, like the choral outro on the bizarrely titled "Thief in the Ranks (Your Bike)," and anyone who can deliver the line "I'm a tightrope walker and a vagabond poet who was killed for an artist's guilt" with a straight face needs to be smacked soundly about the head and shoulders a few times. But that sound. Geez. It's like a missile factory run by
the Beach Boys. Highly recommended. ~ Rick Anderson