Tone Deaf – Command Your Weather by Big Business
Greetings earthlings. Lower case e on earth because the universe doesn’t know or care about us filthy apes. I’m Contingency Plan, filthy ape among you. I previously did cool things like play in bands and record albums so like most pretentious musicians, I think my opinion matters. I’m here to bore you with buzzwords and catch phrases like ‘earworm’, ‘sick riff’, ‘synergry’ and other banality. Still, if someone buys an album that they truly enjoy that they hadn’t heard of before this column, that’s a win in my book.
Can we take a minute to appreciate this insane album artwork? In the age of digital, in the age of downloads, in the age of people grabbing only singles and the age of run on sentences, here comes this fucking artwork. It depends your attention from go.
Big Business is a stoner/sludge band from Seattle. Their guitars are huge and aren’t afraid of the midrange. The drums thunder from across the hall, echoing and permeating to mythic proportions. Big Business is Big on taking the theater of sludge and stoner to Big proportions. Like most metal outfits, the vocals aren’t a focus here however are catchy all the same. They are down in the mix, only adding to the track and never detracting or pulling around from the mammoth riffs that are throughout. If you aren’t familiar with sludge/stoner outfits, you won’t find any frantic thrash riffs here. (Love them all the same, but sometimes I need my drone riffs) Riffs are more simplified and amplified and muddified here. Instead of grooving and head banging, your whole body might sway to the thunderous tones and mighty mallets of a sludge drummer. Time and a place for everything, friends.
When reviewing an album, I like to name a single song and say “If you like this song, you’ll like the album.” Of course you have eclectic bands like Porcupine Tree where an album can shift genres 10 times in 7 songs, but in general I think this is a great way to get someone a quick indication of what the album will be like for them.
For Command Your Weather, I suggest Popular Demand. If you let this track slam into your tympanic membrane and enjoy it, you’ll enjoy the whole album. A grinding, gruff, midrange heavy bass line pushing the track forward while tribal drums may make you start a fire just to dance around it. Bombastic through and through, its quintessential Big Business. The wordplay never stops with a band name like Big Business. It’s Seriously Big Business.
Other standouts for me are Own Throats, Regulars and Horses. However, I can easily let the whole album go by without being compelled to skip. While I found some stoner metal album releases this year less than compelling, I keep coming back to this one. I keep playing certain songs on repeat. I have to hear it one last time before the car ride is done. That’s a great sign.
While this album isn’t a massive departure from their previous album, I do feel it takes everything that was great and keeps improving on it. I feel the vocals are more refined and there are actually really good hooks peppered throughout.
If you’re a metal fan of any cut and are looking for something more down tempo but not down on the heavy, check this out!
If you read this far, let know if anyone reading this would prefer a letter or numeric grade on these reviews!