ASHBREATHER – LA GRANDE BOUFFE

(Andy Synn has spent the last week or so gorging himself on fine food and drink… which makes the new album from Ashbreather an interesting, if not entirely inappropriate, choice for his return to action)

Well… here we are again, almost (but not quite) back to normal operation (that’ll probably end up being next week after we’ve recovered from all the travelling and/or revelling we’ve been doing recently).

So, as we gear up to get ourselves back to speed (although thanks to DGR you might not have noticed too much difference, considering the number of reviews he was able to put together to cover our recent down-time) I’ve decided to turn my attention to a band we’ve only covered once here before (back in the tail-end of 2022) and whom I/we sadly kind of lost touch with in the intervening years.

And, let me tell you this… whatever happened to Ashbreather in those years (which included both an EP and a collaboration which I missed) has only made them stronger/stranger.

Whereas the band’s previous album, 2022’s Hivemind, was a single-track, sci-fi Prog-Sludge epic (with an extra emphasis on the former part of that equation), La Grand Bouffe is an altogether more bizarre – not to mention darker and more dystopian – beast, telling the tale of a future society (though how far removed from our own is certainly open to debate) seduced (or blessed, depending on your perspective) by the Faustian promise of limitless gustatory satiation courtesy of “The Bean Pipe™” only to ultimately collapse into a gluttonous orgy of pseudo-religious, cannibalistic self-consumption (both metaphorically and literally).

And while some powerful sonic similarities to the epic bombast of Blood Mountain-era Mastodon still remain (the dervish-like drumming during the transformative title-track in particular is more than a little Daller-esque) the uglier and more unsettling tone of the album as a whole – replete with gloriously grisly lyrics like “Bodies being crushed by the process / Wading through the stink of the sauces / No relief from the stomach / Of the machine” (“Into the Maw”) and “All equals, just meat
/ We’re all that’s left to eat” (“Feed Us!!!”) that would put Cattle Decapitation to shame – errs closer to the likes of Lord Mantis and/or The Lion’s Daughter this time around.

That’s not to say there aren’t a few sublimely proggy passages – the first half of “Beef, Egg & Cabbage (Out of Stock)” definitely possesses a certain moody magic, while the initial melodic slow-burn of “Pulse” (whose central message, the achievement of iconoclastic corpulence of such vast girth that the only way to restart the natural cycle of death and rebirth is to devour yourself and return your body (and all its corporeal flesh and fluids) to the earth, is pithily captured by the repeated refrain of “You are what you eat / You eat what you are“) eventually gives way to a chaotic crescendo of maddening discordance and murmuring dread – but the emphasis is on the sludgier, more synaesthetic side of the band’s sound… all gristle and grime and gut-roiling groove.

Sure, it won’t be for everyone – its willingness to embrace its own weirdness definitely makes it what you might call an “acquired taste” – but to those craving something a little bit different, something which feeds the brain with its disturbingly high-concept social satire as much as it fattens the gut with its deliciously meaty riffs, I have only one thing to say… praise be to The Bean Pipe™ and all that it gives us!