Harm's Way is literally why I'm into hardcore... at all, as in completely, as in no Harm's Way and I'm stuck in a painful, decades-long limbo, grinning and bearing it and putting on a brave face to acquaintances while I pretend to enjoy and appreciate Wilco. It's a long story as to how this happened, and I'm not going to get into it here, but it's essential context for why this review of Like Rats's
Death Monolith has come into existence. In the very early part of this decade, I was skimming music discourse, trying to pick up on new hardcore bands that might tickle my fancy, and Like Rats came up in a back-and-forth about Harm's Way and Xibalba (...on Facebook, I think? This was prior to it serving primarily as the internet's trailer park and/or content landfill). I checked out Like Rats's then-latest album
Death Monolith (2020), but since I was expecting them to be a hardcore band, I didn't spend much time with the album... until recently. I've been somewhat nostalgic lately for the high-brow, misery-mired sludge era of Chicago's cross-pollination with Indianapolis and the metal scene it produced, roughly running the gamut of the mid to late '10s and begetting such legendary monstrosities as Indian and Lord Mantis- you know, smart guy, bad attitude type stuff- the kinds of music that Jordan Reyes likely started American Decline Records in order to sign, only to have every viable candidate snatched up by Southern Lord or Profound Lore. A Chicago band, Like Rats, emerged out of this milieu, and while they did not reach the lofty conceptual heights of groups like Coffinworm, they demonstrated a strain of intelligence that is all too rare amongst metal acts, even in boom times- they can really write a song. Sonically obtaining succor somewhere between Atlas Moth and Bones, the group wrings all the tarry goop out of tried-and-true death-sludge dynamics, leaving its tendons and muscles spry and springy, lethal and ready to hone in for the kill, whether it be by a frontal bombardment or an evasive ricochet. As if they were a
Souls-like adversary, they give glints and tells of their movements, subtly, but mockingly concealed, warning you of their intended course of action, with a feint or flourish, before driving their point to a fatal conclusion with bloody intent. If you're quick-witted and agile enough in your faculties, you can catch wind of the strike and dodge well enough to afford yourself a fleeting moment of appreciation before a succeeding thrust angles for your breastplate, or maybe you'll only be granted the opportunity to appreciate their artful, deathly flow posthumously-
Death Monolith is intelligently crafted to delivery you into a prone position, whether this is merely a temporary resting place before a permanent dirt-nap, or a repose before reprisal in proportion to the aggression you've been dealt is a matter of ingrained determination- something Like Rats has in spades, and as I suspect, something they mean to test the mettle of in their audience.
