TOOMS Premiere “One Ton Soup”; The Orb Offers Massive Signals out Friday
Limerick, Ireland’s TOOMS will release their debut album, The Orb Offers Massive Signals, this Friday, July 17, through Cursed Monk Records. The acronym-monikered three-piece have already unveiled a couple tracks from the offering, as one will, but as the (I assume) last piece to a densely-weighted riffy puzzle, they offer the fitting summary “One Ton Soup,” and as you’ll probably expect given the context of the band’s name, the song’s title, the label putting it out and just about everything else up to the looks on their faces in their press photo, it’s rather heavy. They call it “thicc” and I’m not inclined to argue.
Something else “One Ton Soup” does, though is blend styles in some unexpected ways. The angularity of the opening progression, for example, and the manner in which it gives way to lurching extremity, the overarching weight seeming to rumble in the high end as well as the low, the whole thing sounding fierce and lurching with samples behind, obscured by the next round of pummeling that soon begins. The song runs seven minutes total, so it’s not a minor sampling by any means of the 10 track offering — though I’ll admit to no small amount of curiosity to hear “Megalobong,” especially given their stated affinity for earlier Mastodon — and as “One Ton Soup” breaks at its halfway point to crashes and snare march (and samples), the procession feels all the more extreme-sludge for its sense of militarism; the song almost sounds like it’s beating itself with itself. Like if you were to self-flagellate by slapping your own face, but with the riff.
Is it massive? Well it’s frickin’ called “One Ton Soup,” so yes thank you very much it is. A quiet line of Fender Rhodes comes in to finish, kind of out of nowhere, but the distorted underpinning remains, and the landscape over which TOOMS just marched for the last three and a half minutes of the track is duly flattened. I don’t know what happens when “Krokodil Den” takes hold as the next track on The Orb Offers Massive Signals, but I know listening to “One Ton Soup” makes me curious to find out, so I suppose that’s one reason to roll out the ol’ ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner, if you needed one.
Preorders are up now through Cursed Monk‘s Bandcamp, from which the following player also comes, bringing the premiere of “One Ton Soup.”
Before I turn you over to the music, I’d like to extend thanks to the band for the thought and detail and personality they put into the quote about it. Sometimes you ask a band for a quote about a song and they give you a half-sentence that equates to “duh we wrote it dude.” Fair enough, but it’s clear TOOMS took the time to really give some background — right down to the lyrics and the gear they used — and it is appreciated.
Enjoy the track:
TOOMS on “One Ton Soup”:
With “One Ton Soup” we basically tried to write the nastiest, heaviest choon possible at that time.
The intro was 100% inspired by High On Fire’s “Hung Drawn and Quartered.” The rest of the song? Not sure exactly where it came from, just carved itself out of the stratosphere by jamming, and we managed to stumble upon these riffs.
There is a chord in the slowed down part that we call the Lamb of God chord, and the main part of the song, in hindsight, was probably inspired by “Mother Puncher”-era Mastodon. There is also that black metal tremolo part before the thicc crushing S L O W outro, so we were certainly drawing from many different influences.
We actually recorded the drums for this way before we did guitars, and did this strange slow-down-speed-up thing with the drums during the bridge between main riff sections with vocals. It was super hard to recreate on guitar, and just didn’t seem right, so we chopped the drums a little for that part to make it feel less stumbling, and because of that it gives it a little feel of industrial/electronic music, which was totally a happy accident.
The guitars are layered much on the whole album with many many pedals, from wah-pedals cocked all the way down and drowned in distortion, to filter pedals mangled with custom built fuzz pedals,(“The Sodomizer” being a aptly named one) But on this particular song, the guitar tone is mostly just coming from overdriven amp distortion. Used a modded Bugera head that’s basically a Fender Bassman, and a Jch50 on the overdrive channel. Layered em both, used a 2×12 cab with celestions in it, and boom, TONE.
Our sound engineer and recording genius Chris also came up with some great ideas, one of which being to vari-speed the guitars; which is basically, play the riff twice as fast, record that, then slow it back to its written speed and pitch correct it. It gives a dragging, lumbering feel (have probably got that way wrong, but that is the jist). Chris also played all the nasty bubbling sounds that you can hear beneath the riffs during the bridge. He also followed the guitar’s melody line during the outro and played the Fender Rhodes that fades in and takes the song to a whole new level, which was a collective idea that stemmed from many hours together in little rooms making guitars sound horrible.
The sample just before the outro kicks into full gear is taken from Black Dynamite, just to remind us all that metal can be heavy as fuck, but doesn’t need to be super serious all the time (Looking at you death metal).
Vocal and lyrical wise, it’s a song basically about soup that drinks you and follows the description of you (the listener) becoming used as an ingredient in the Devil’s broth, and describes in detail all the gross ways in which you are dismantled and turned into a human crouton.
It had originally just been the first couple of lines repeated over and over. But on the day of tracking the vocals, it didn’t seem right or do the music justice, so the vocals were written as they were being tracked. As far as the vocal delivery is concerned, it was very much “vocals as an instrument” kind of approach. We thought about putting more vocals on the outro, but felt like it just didn’t need any there, it felt complete and once the Rhodes melody was added, we knew it was done.
Lyrics:
One. One tone. One. Tone soup burns you.
Burns. Boils teeth. Melts. Gums and scalds lips.
You. You chose. The. Special of the day.
Death. Death broth. Death. Death broth drinks you.
Wake. Wake up. Wake. Wake up in wok.
Now. Now your. Now. Now you’re sautéed.
Shaved. And skinned. Hung. You been bleed dry.
Blow. It’s hot. Blow. Or tongue get sore.
Death. Death broth. Death. Death broth bubbles.
One. One tone. One. Tone soup drank you.
Your. Your blood. Your. Blood and guts gone.
Hot. Hot oils. Skin. Crispy garnish.
Taste. Taste good. Hu. Hu-man hot pot.
Devil. Devil chef. Serve. You soup on plate.
Death. Death broth. Death. Death rules world
TOOMS are:
Drums, gong – Kieran ‘Slippy Fingers’ AKA ‘Chodo Baggins’ AKA ‘The Wobbler’ Grace
Bass – Anto ‘The Wizard’ AKA ‘Farmer Arms’ AKA ‘Old Man’ AKA ‘Coldplay’ Donnellan
Guitar, vocals – Alex ‘The Riffsmiff AKA Big Slim(e) AKA The Vanilla Gorilla’ AKA ‘Half-Bar’ Hölzinger
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