I am more of an album guy than an EP guy. This makes the trend of releasing several EPs and combining them into a full album a bit frustrating. Thankfully, I glommed onto Melted Bodies’ plan to do the same with The Inevitable Fork. After reviewing the first EP in the 2022 roundup, I decided to leave the remainder be for the inevitable1 album review, which is now upon us in tandem with the third EP. But don’t worry, in addition to the 13 tracks that are part of the piecemeal release, there’s a bunch of extra cuts and intermissions meant to glue together the shuffled and re-arranged combinatorial tracklist. Still following along?
If not, good. Bewilderment and anxiety are the correct mindsets for Melted Bodies. Straight from the gate with 2020’s debut Enjoy Yourself, the LA quartet has carved its own path, one that’s difficult to map on musical charts. If you prompt a maladaptive AI to blend System of a Down, Mr. Bungle, harsh noise rock, a bit of mathcore, and a slew of mental illnesses brought on by modern society, it might vomit out something akin to this. And it’s kind of fascinating how easily Melted Bodies molds such a specific concept into different sounds, because The Inevitable Fork is nothing if not diverse. There are intense bursts of frustrated energy squeezed into a series of barbed hooks (“Bloodlines,” “Liars”). Other tracks consist entirely of one long runaway violent tangent, like the title track and the incessant “Splitting.” There are talkative songs (“Relax You Are Lazy” and “The Avalanche”) and harsh grindy tracks (“Wrath of the Flies”). And on one occasion, The Inevitable Fork even gets tender and heartfelt with the subdued “Talk Some More About It.”
The Inevitable Fork LP by Melted Bodies
But why is there so much of it? This album really should not be well over an hour. Melted Bodies doesn’t do long-form compositions. Prog or doom are not in their vocabulary. Rather, it attempts to establish a kind of flow by using interludes (most of them featuring Angela Seo of Xiu Xiu) that touch on the overarching themes of life choices and their consequences. But they fail to glue the rather disparate tracklist together, and instead, they add to the bloat. The actual music suffers from the same. None of the material is downright weak, but it’s not consistently great either. The tracks are such self-contained entities, a cross-album thread fails to develop, and the band’s efforts toward the opposite serve to highlight rather than solve this issue. The Inevitable Fork is an overlong playlist album cosplaying as a cohesive journey.
Playlist albums need tight curation, and in light of the bloat, the weight of the lesser cuts is magnified. “Relax You Are Lazy” and “The Avalanche” are both uneven in their use of spoken word, which is unfortunate given they’re separated only by another interlude, and closer “Something is Wrong” is the most forgettable song of the lot, especially when the rest of The Inevitable Fork has inevitably exhausted me. But the good tracks still far outweigh the mediocre. “Talk Some More About It” is beautiful and poignant, and would have worked well as an end to the album were it not followed by three more songs and two interludes. In this tail we also find “Therapy,” an excellent, wry, and upbeat track I loved on the first EP as well, but it would have worked better earlier in the running time. It does go to show Melted Bodies does best when they keep the energy high and the tone sarcastic, as opener “Bloodlines” and highlight “Liars” do.
The Inevitable Fork is a somewhat frustrating album. There is more good than bad; most of the music falls on a scale of ‘great’ to ‘okay,’ rarely below it. Melted Bodies is a highly talented group that managed to find a strong sound early on and have no qualms testing its limits in all directions. The production has plenty of punch and grit without sacrificing fidelity. At the same time, it’s easy to see how it could have been quite a bit better. A bit more selectivity on what tracks from the EPs to include on the full album, less bloat from interludes, and a little shuffling of the tracklist could have made The Inevitable Fork a truly worthy follow-up to Enjoy Yourself. Instead, with the saving grace of a strong songcraft, it’s the albumcraft where Melted Bodies sees its ambition flounder.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Self-release
Websites: meltedbodies.bandcamp.com | meltedbodies.com | facebook.com/MeltedBodies
Releases Worldwide: October 18th, 2024
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