Shade Perennial
Bottomless Pit
Comedy Minus One

By JENNIFER KELLY

“Rolling along like a middle child, happy as we had been in a while, forgot about you, myself too,” sings Tim Midyett in “Null Set,” sounding calm and centered in the space carved out for him. He sings in the midst of crashing guitar chords, blister-y bass, monstrous drum beats and firewalls of feedback, a typical maelstrom for this band formed in the wake of Silkworm drummer Michael Dalquist’s tragic death. This third full-length allows no let-up in the bludgeoning dissonance, the melancholic aggression that has characterized Bottomless Pit from the beginning, and yet it also has an edge of triumph to it, a brutal clarity that celebrates as much as it mourns.

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Bottomless Pit

I struggled with this one, a review of the second full-length from post-Silkworm outfit Bottomless Pit, but I think it turned out okay.

Yeah, I remember I was at a meeting on Wall Street one time and the conversation turned to a research analyst who had, a month ago, been killed in a fatal accident. "Is he still dead?" someone asked, and we all laughed...nervously.

Which is, in an oblique way, why this review was so hard to write.

I finished it like this:

And so, against expectations, Bottomless Pit has turned into an ongoing project, profoundly influenced by its macabre beginnings, closely linked to its predecessor band, but no longer defined by either. The grief that shaped Bottomless Pit’s first record hasn’t gone away. But it has changed. Cohen and Midgett have figured out a way of working together, post-tragedy, that at least allows for a Bottomless Pit record that’s not about Dahlquist’s death. And that’s something no Silkworm fan could have imagined five years ago.

The rest of the review is here

Comedy Minus One is giving away "38 Souls"