Album Review & Full Premiere: Fatso Jetson & All Souls, Live From Total Annihilation
[All Souls and Fatso Jetson release Live From Total Annihilation Aug. 19 on Ripple Music. Stream it in full above, find the complete video below. Ripple has preorders here.]
In the lonely middle of the Year of Our Lungs 2021, All Souls and Fatso Jetson aired the livestream (review here) that would become their joint LP release, Live From Total Annihilation. At the time, it was called ‘Virtual Volumes’ in relation to Fatso Jetson‘s 2010 album, Archaic Volumes (discussed here; review here), and the two four-pieces played with masks on with All Souls in color and Fatso Jetson in black and white, an atmosphere tense like everything but clearly a case of two bands wanting to do what they could in the absence of live shows. Helpful in regards to minimizing personnel involved, the two bands share drummer Tony Tornay, who no doubt has pulled double-duty many times over, but did as well when these two groups toured the UK together in 2017. Eddie Rivas from Total Annihilation Studio recorded and mixed, there were projected lightshows, multiple cameras, and so on. It wasn’t a concert, but they made a quality product. And particularly given how the audio came out, it’s not a surprise they’d follow up with a live album release.
All Souls got to play five songs, one new, Fatso Jetson did five, two new, and of the many hours I spent in front of my laptop watching bands play instead of attending concerts or festivals, it was not one I regretted in the least. Thinking of Live From Total Annihilation as a split, the 43-minute LP gets down to business almost immediately with “Who Holds the Answer,” which gave and still gives an early glimpse of what’s since been announced as All Souls‘ third studio album, Ghosts Among Us, out in October (info here). And true to form for them across 2020’s Songs for the End of the World (review here) and 2018’s self-titled debut (review here), “Who Holds the Answer” packs expansive and jammy vibes into a structured three-and-a-half-minute song that’s heavy rock and post-punk and also neither of them and a whole bunch else. They back it with the salvo of “You Just Can’t Win” and “Winds” from the second record, two highlight cuts together that here flow immediately one into the next, the latter providing a tonal highlight for the outing as a whole and a first unclenched minute for All Souls, who even as they unfurl the more open feeling in the second half of “You Just Can’t Win” held the tension in the rhythm from the earlier part of the song.
“Winds” is probably also the best argument for All Souls as a four-piece, though it’s by no means their only song putting two guitars to dynamic use. Matt Price (Behold! the Monolith) was new on second guitar alongside Antonio Aguilar (also vocals), the aforementioned Tornay — who, for all the melodic wash and ambience around him gives a definitive performance on drums for “Wings”; style and technique — and bassist/vocalist Meg Castellanos, but the track’s complexity and depth even in a ‘live’ setting make it clearer why even after Price left the lineup issue still isn’t really settled for the band. They punk out on “Sentimental Rehash” like it’s 2001 again — hey, wait a minute! — and use that shimmy to reground the set before “Time Bomb” from the debut caps with purpose in its vocal melody, insistence in its groove and a kick of volume at the start that lets you know you’ve arrived. It turns somewhat more severe, the air gets heavier, the guitar solos cascade into noise, but not-doing-just-one-thing and not-doing-the-same-thing-all-the-time are trademarks of All Souls‘ work to this point and one would expect no less.
As regards an act who function solely on their own terms, it’s kind of astonishing how little one can know what’s coming when Fatso Jetson take the stage. Not only have they been around for nearly 30 years — long enough that guitarist/vocalist Mario Lalli‘s son, Dino von Lalli, has been in the band now for the better part of the last decade — but their work is so varied that they could put together representative sets for four different kinds of groups and you’d still come out of it saying “hot shit, what a band.” For Live From Total Annihilation, the new song “Drifting Off to Storybook Deth” sets the tone for what follows, with a methodical six minutes of mellow, methodical groove, bassist Larry Lalli reminding where the weight in Fatso Jetson comes from as Mario and Dino space out rhythm and lead tracks and Tornay continues to hold it together with a same-day-different-band-no-problem-who-else-needs-drums fluidity.
“Drifting Off to Storybook Deth” picks up in terms of getting louder, but the mood remains broad and leads into “Monoxide Dreams” from Archaic Volumes, furthering the languid sensibility of the first track while proving deceptive in its efficiency not unlike All Souls‘ “Who Holds the Answer,” fitting a lot of reach into about the same amount of time. “Monoxide Dreams” reminds how undervalued Mario Lalli (also in the instrumental Yawning Man) is as a vocalist, and it’s fitting the band’s personality that the weirdo-jazz-bounce of the not-a-word-in-it “Dream Homes” follows, the band reaffirming their longstanding commitment to chicanery. Missing from the stream is “Living All Over You,” and the songs have been rearranged, but the fuzzy pulse and vocal harmonies of “Long Deep Breaths” round out to give Fatso Jetson‘s side B not a comedown, but a flow and progression of its own in mini-album style. At five and a half minutes, it’s shorter than “Drifting Off to Storybook Deth,” but there’s still plenty of time for it to get its point across, echoing the drifting beginning and keeping enough movement for the whole thing to be comprehensible as a single work.
This stream was a gift when it was badly needed, and though the shape of the covid-19 pandemic has changed and live music has returned albeit not without risk of exposure, Live From Total Annihilation documents the event, gives both bands a bit of momentum going into whatever’s next — new record certainly for All Souls, maybe one in the works for Fatso Jetson as well? — and serves as a reminder of how precious it is to be able to have people in a room together for the sake of live performance and art. If you didn’t miss that, what’s the point of anything?
