Deep Cuts #10: Botch – 'American Nervoso'
Discordant molten mathcore from the End of History.
Artist: Botch
Title: American Nervoso
Release: May 20th, 1998
Label: Hydra Head Records
Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify
Earlier this month, it was announced that legendary chaos merchants Botch had signed to Sargent House Records. And of course, the internet lost its collective shit over the news. Had the band reformed for good? Would there be a new album? Why now?
While rumours of new material on the horizon appear to have been greatly exaggerated, the announcement was a welcome development for avid vinyl collectors eagerly awaiting a re-issue of the band’s now-iconic albums. Which got me thinking: I think it’s time we talked about American Nervoso.
For me, listening to music has always been a process of discovery in reverse. I know that sounds dumb and flagrantly paradoxical but let allow me to explain.
In the later years of high school, I was getting into the prominent surge of second wave metalcore. You know the stuff: Misery Signals, As I Lay Dying, Bleeding Through, Parkway Drive, It Dies Today, Killswitch Engage, Unearth, etc. But lumped along with these bands were a collection of more abrasive and angular entries, namely chaotic hardcore acts like Norma Jean and The Chariot.
Now, my seventeen-year-old self didn’t exactly have the biggest education in obscure subgenres of alternative music. However, what I did like to do was learn. I would read and collect magazines voraciously, scouring the internet for tour posters and merch worn by my favourite bands, before using those as launchpad search material to find their favourite bands.
And it was in one of those feverish moments when I opened up the October 2005 issue of Alternative Press (#207) with Fall Out Boy on the cover, and came across a review of Norma Jean’s second album, O’ God The Aftermath:
Under the laser-sharp guidance of producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Mastodon), the quintet sound like they’re channeling the ghosts of Botch (a whole lot of Botch, actually) and Coalesce via Pantera through most of the album: Time signatures jerk and convulse; guitar riffs slide off the fretboard and cut against the beat; and [Cory] Brandan's vocals-usually fierce, occasionally melodic-beat listeners over the head with lyrics that, while ambiguous and open to interpretation, ultimately lead back to the same God whose presence guides every band on Solid State Records.
Now, this raised some interesting questions. Who was Matt Bayles? Who was Mastodon? Or Coalesce? And, perhaps most importantly, who was Botch, this curious spectral progenitor for Norma Jean’s aggressive sonic chaos? I, for one, endeavoured to find out. And it was during this discovery session that I found two of my favourite artists and records of all time: 2005’s Menos El Oso by Minus The Bear and 2004’s Panopticon by Isis.
Yet, in tracing the legacy of stylistic influence that ran through Norma Jean, The Chariot and the state of chaotic hardcore at the time, I came across an entirely new subgenre (‘mathcore’), a new band and a ‘new’ album that blew my little delinquent mind.
What’s truly crazy about American Nervoso is how astoundingly fresh it sounds, even 23 years on. Hardcore as a musical genre doesn’t exactly have the longest shelf life, but there’s something incredibly engaging, sophisticated and endlessly mutable in the way Botch composed their material, giving it a half-life many of their peers could only dream of. Take, for example, the album’s blistering opening salvo: “Hutton’s Great Heat Engine.”
The track kicks off with Dave Knudson’s serpentine riff magic, winding and slithering across the track’s sonic range. It’s a lick that feels penetrative, like a figurative and literal hook that gets stuck inside you, while bassist Brian Cook and drummer Tim Latona crash and lurch through each rhythmic stop-start motion.
When the quartet finally reach a stage of perpetual motion, vocalist Dave Verellen arrives and consummately shreds his larynx in a matter of seconds with harsh distortion and banshee screams. And this is only the first minute. By the time the breakdown hits, all hell breaks loose and it sounds like the heat death of the universe, as the fabric of space and time breaks down around you.
What makes American Nervoso remarkable is the level of restraint on display. Sure, the band can rocket forward into sheer chaos at any moment, but they’re just as likely to slow things right down and let you soak in the debris for a while.
“John Woo” has an insane mid-section freak out punctuated by a sledgehammer riff that slowly phases into a mild-mannered prog jam session. And then, just when you’ve collected your breath, they’re immediately back to being a sonic wrecking ball.
The band return to this pattern time and time again across the album (“Dali’s Praying Mantis”; “Rejection Spoken Softly”; “Oma”) yet still make each composition singular and unique. Bayles’ production is crisp and punchy without losing any of the band’s grit or texture; heavier moments have this raw physicality to them, where you can almost taste the sweat and feel the basement show heat radiating outwards.
“Thank God for Worker Bees” might just be the best song on the record, and there’s a reason why it’s the diehard fan’s favourite Botch number. Knudson’s asymmetrical riffage is finger-melting, with brisk tempo changes and discordant warbling every few seconds. Cook and Latona sound possessed and Verellen’s lyrics are dripping with sardonic wage-slavery ire:
“And that’s why/
We dine on your design/
I like the look on your face/
It’s bittersweet, and lasts/
For six hours/
Alone for one day and six hours.”
When that final earthquake crescendo is unleashed, it feels like someone taking a jackhammer to your spine, shot through with icepick panic chords and a general sense of all-consuming, pervasive dread.
I think part of Botch’s mystique is primarily due to their absence. They were around in the ‘90s, dropped two albums and a few EPs, before ultimately parting ways in 2002. And that’s it. What’s left is, to borrow a phrase, all on the page (or in this case, the record).
As J. Bennett writes in “The Oral History of Botch” for Alternative Press:
It is entirely possible that many of the bands who have recently appeared in the pages of this very publication would not be the musicians they are today without Botch. At the very least, those bands—the Underoaths, the Norma Jeans, the Thrices—would sound very different had Botch never existed.
At a time when the local hardcore scene (led by Himsa vocalist John Pettibone’s old straight-edge crew, Undertow) was on the verge of extinction, four guys from the suburbs with virtually nothing in common—except a love of Helmet and the (eventual) ability to play the living shit out of their instruments—laid the white-hot template for a generation of bands that followed.
Additionally, their press release for Sargent House makes clear, that Botch’s eventual split “made way for members to form and or to play in other highly notable and influential bands including Minus the Bear, These Arms Are Snakes, Narrows, SUMAC and current Sargent House bands Russian Circles and Torment & Glory.”
And while their follow-up record, 1999’s We Are the Romans is widely considered to be their masterpiece, there’s an air of spontaneity and complete lack of pretension to American Nervoso that will always stick with me.
It’s a collection of nine tracks that are every bit as tense and frantic as the record’s title suggests. The perfect soundtrack for an empire with an uncertain future, staring down the barrel of the End of History.