Who would’ve thought that a musical equation including elements of pop, prog, metal, math rock and punk would ever end up surfacing? Nevermind that, who would’ve thought it would appear sounding fully formed, complete and with a proof? While no reasonable hands could be raising at the moment, that’s exactly what Mt. St. Helens has concocted on their debut. Of Others doesn’t just display all of the aforementioned sounds to pay lip service to a couple of them and focus on sensible combinations of the others either—the Chicago-based band measures equal amounts of the into the melting pot to see what alloy appears. That said, the nearest sonic relative to Mt. St. Helens’ assault is probably …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (or Human Abstract to a certain degree)—but unlike TOD, who shifts the centre of their music with some pretty exhilarating, off-beat dynamic alterations and underground affinities, MSH keep songs including “Want Out”, “Seething Is Believing” and “Strange Navigation” rooted squarely in mainstream orthodoxy with tightly sealed mainstream notions of structure and convention. The expansive moments on Of Others (“Omission” is representative of this) expose the band’s musical ideas as being very finite insofar as there’s no way of extrapolating sonic possibilities from them beyond the constraints that the band itself sets forth; as with most math rock albums, there is no room for error or deviation. That doesn’t make the album formulaic however—you can’t mix this many different styles and not keep audiences guessing—and it doesn’t make it a poor record either; there is just a canny progression of ideas on Of Others. Granted, it is a very complicated one that sounds incredibly good for what it is, but doesn’t allow for audience imagination or curiosity regarding what’ll come next.
