Friday Full-Length: Beast in the Field, World Ending
Posted in Bootleg Theater on May 31st, 2019 by JJ KoczanBeast in the Field, World Ending (2010)
The greatest mistake Michigan’s Beast in the Field ever made was not having their slogan as ‘WE’RE BEAST IN THE FIELD. FUCK YOU.’ for the entirety of their career. Talk about a band on whom the entire planet basically whiffed. These guys should have been huge, should have been on whatever the last good-ass tour you saw was, should have had internet dinguses like me eating out the the palm of their hand. Instead, what’ve we got? Five albums, a split, a live record and the wind that still carries outward from that big swing and a miss on the part of everyone who should have appreciated what these two dudes were doing. We’re all complicit. Don’t try to deny it.
Beast in the Field was formed in Mount Pleasant/Midland, MI, in 2007. Guitarist Jordan Pries and drummer Jamie Jahr had played together in a band called And the Sky Went Red, and as bands like Black Cobra were at the time demonstrating just how much devastation a two-piece could really wreak, I guess they figured they had all they needed with the two of them. That would turn out to be largely true. They made their debut with 2007’s Goat Isle Seance and followed it with Lechuguilla in 2009, forming their approach around and increasing density of tone and blend of bombastic production, doomed riffing, and a strong current of noise that would come further to the fore on their later output. An early allegiance to Saw Her Ghost Records persisted throughout their tenure, as the also-Michigan-based imprint released all five of their LPs, their 2014 live outing, Astral Path to Satan’s Throne (discussed here), and a 2018 split with Hellmouth that was reportedly in the making before the band even broke up in 2016. Sometimes these things take a while.
Their first two albums are both shorter and plenty heavy, but with World Ending, Jahr and Pries really started to figure out who they were as a band. The record was a purposefully unmanageable 67 minutes long, and it was in noise-coated extended pieces like the eponymous “Beast in the Field” and the grueling 15:45 “Hallucinations from a Silver File,” as well as in the two nine-plus-minute cuts that followed to close out, “No Hope on Earth” and the head-smashing-into-wall “Your Gods Have Died” that they most effectively explored the dynamic between the two of them. On some level, they were a tone band. Pries‘ guitar took the fuzz aspect of stoner doom and turned it into something menacing and ferocious, lending a sense of threat to the core groove, and Jahr‘s drums, even in the rawest of production settings, were precisely the right kind of punctuation that heft needed to add punch to the assault. I won’t take away from the solo-tearing in “Burning Times” (also over nine minutes) or the more uptempo riff that leads the way into the deluge on opener “Invoke the King of Hell,” but there was just something about when Beast in the Field really dug into a longer-form track that made it all the more punishing.
And as much as punishment was clearly the intent, they didn’t neglect attention to detail in that. Even on the three-minute Sabbathian blastoff “Sermon of the Black Order,” they maintained the locked-in feel that was so prevalent when they stretched out over longer runtimes, and whether it was just a shift in the riff or a change from Jahr on drums, they had a way of making each tiny movement from one part to the next count all the more for the effect they had on the listener and on the piece itself. “Sermon of the Black Order” is a speedy and efficient summary of that, but it’s true of the entirety of World Ending as well, and to make an entirely instrumental record that’s more than an hour long where those moments still stand out is no small feat. It was what Beast in the Field were best at. On paper, there was nothing so landmark about their approach — “cool tone, bro” meets “heavy drums, bro” resulting in “cool album, dudes” — but the chemistry between the two players ran deeper and that’s what most comes to fruition on World Ending, in such a way as to make the album a standout for anyone who was willing to hear it.
It might actually be “Burning Times” that best emphasizes the point, but something else Beast in the Field seemed to be able to do at a moment’s notice was bring it all down. Not just throw in a quiet part, or cut to a standalone guitar, but to really give the impression that the song was falling apart, like, “oh shit, they’ve lost it and put it on the record anyway.” But they were never actually losing it, or at least not to such a degree that they didn’t right themselves and press on into whatever level of the abyss was next on their heading. World Ending was almost (conceptually) jazzy in that way and speaks to some measure of studio improv or happy accidents in their process, but whatever it was, it gave their material another aspect of volatility that carried through in the final result in a feedback-drenched way no less brash than the loudest of riffs surrounding on either side.
After World Ending, Beast in the Field dug further into a “hail Satan” thematic with Lucifer, Bearer of Light in 2011 and, having pushed that apparently as far as they were willing to go, they switched to an earthier take on cosmic destruction with 2013’s The Sacred Above, the Sacred Below (review here), their studio swansong, and, I’ll gladly argue, apex, taking the best elements of the two prior long-players and twisting them to suit an environmentalist, anti-colonialist stance that was heightened by the visceral impact of their delivery. Beast in the Field did not fuck around. Whether you got to see them with their pyramid of cabinets behind them or you’ve never heard them before, they were a band who never, never, never got their due appreciation, and whose work seems all the more prescient in its chaos as the years pass by.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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It’s coming on 2AM in Belfast. I’ve been in Ireland all week. It’s been ups and downs. Mostly downs, if I’m honest, but that’s what meds are for.
The Slomatics guys were cool.
Okay.
Next week: packed. So packed I didn’t have room for a Roadsaw premiere, which is bullshit, but true all the same. I’m gonna be pissed about that forever, but what am I gonna do, ditch out on something I’ve committed to weeks or months in advance just because something else I dig is getting released that week? Hardly seems fair. Sucked when I got dicked over a couple weeks back, certainly.
Whatever.
We leave here tomorrow for I think Galway or Sligo, and are in each for a couple days. It’s supposed to rain, I think, forever. So that’s cool, as me and Toddler McScreamy are stuck plotzing through the latest sky-spit to wherever just because he can’t really be indoors at this point. It’s been a rough trip, on the whole. And I don’t think being on a bus all day tomorrow is going to help much either.
Did I mention “whatever?”
I did some perfunctory CD shopping in Dublin at Spin Dizzy Records. No one cares anymore. I mostly just feel sad.
This is my 11,500th post on this site. I think I’d get a cookie for that except I don’t eat cookies. “No juice for you, you just get more awful.”
Fuck it.
Great and safe weekend. Forum, radio, shirts.
