The members of Chicago-based These Beasts have a friend named Greg Shirilla. They say he loves a good bath. When the band worked out the song you’re about to hear in a practice-night jam session, they named it “Shirilla in a Tub“, as a kind of placeholder for something else that would be developed after the lyrics were written. As the band have told us, the song “actually has nothing to do with Greg, but we tend to give songs names before the lyrics are written and sometimes those names just stick”.
The name obviously stuck here. Funny name. But there’s nothing funny about the music. It will tear you a new one, and won’t apologize for doing so.
“Shirilla in a Tub” comes off These Beasts‘ new self-titled EP, which was recorded with Sanford Parker at Decade Music Studios situated in the old Cabrini Green neighborhood of Chicago. Compared to what you might have gleaned from the title of the song, you’ll get a better idea what the music sounds like from this comment about the EP by singer/guitarist Chris Roo: “The underlying theme of the whole band is this world is fucked and I just really need to get shit out with my friends by my side.”
Those friends — drummer Keith Anderson and singer/bassist Todd Fabian, along with Roo — collaborated in writing all the music, pulling in a bunch of different musical influences and sounds, with elements that might remind you of Rosetta and Botch, Unsane and Black Tusk, Dillinger Escape Plan and Whores. “Driving noise-rock-infused stoner-doom” is one way that the releasing label, Magnetic Eye Records, describes the music, but it doesn’t really lend itself to pithy labels.
“Shirilla in a Tub“, for example, is remorselessly vicious — meaner than a junkyard dog, one that’s big enough to bruise and batter as well as go for the throat. There’s a deep, corrosive tone in the guitar that claws and gouges at your guts, and the song is loaded with extravagant, neck-slugging, knee-capping drumwork.
Along with the punch of the bass, the drumming and the riffs will get your head going, and the high, wailing vocals are attention-grabbing, too. As the song proceeds, a searing guitar lead emerges over a sequence of pounding, pavement-cracking brutishness, and those high wails become an acid-bath of shrieks, as if the song weren’t intense enough already.
Funny name, angry music. And damned good.
These Beasts will be released by Magnetic Eye on March 29th, on vinyl and across all digital distribution channels. Pre-order info can be found below, along with our premiere and a stream of a previously released track named “End of the Whip“, to give you another example of what these dudes are capable of.
PRE-ORDER:
https://thesebeasts.bandcamp.com/album/these-beasts-3
SOCIAL MEDIA:
https://www.facebook.com/thesebeasts/
https://www.instagram.com/thesebeastschi/