If you've been following my work for... well, any amount of time at all, you've probably noted that my taste in music is fairly diverse for the most part. Not trying to jerk myself off or anything, but it's pretty empirically true that I have a lot of appreciation for a lot of different styles, within and outside of the metal umbrella (though that is obviously my forte). But one thing that holds true, and I can't stress this enough, I fuckin' hate two things in particular: prog metal and excessively wanky jazz. I don't know if I can really explain why, exactly, I just can't stand it. Noodly, overlong, cacophonous nonsense absolutely overwhelms both styles of music, and it's just an irritating chore to listen to. The only Dream Theater album I like is the stupid heavy one with rapping on it that every Dream Theater fan hates, the worst Death album is unquestionably the one that throws all of their strengths out the window and buttfucks the very idea of coherence in pursuit of some idiotic idea that anything jazzy is automatically cool and good. I hate them both.
So now let me explain to you why I adore this experimental jazzy prog metal band.
Freak Kitchen is... a weird band. The Swedish freaks led by guitar wizard Mattias Eklundh play an unquestionably complicated and intricate form of prog metal with leads that are just straight up jazz guitar shredding. This should be my nightmare. But there's one special thing that Freak Kitchen does that nearly none of their contemporaries do that make them extra special. You know how I reference God is an Astronaut all the time because they're really good at taking a style known for incredibly drawn out self indulgence and compressing it down to digestible 4 minute chunks with great hooks and melody? Yeah what GIAA is to post rock, Freak Kitchen is to prog metal. Everything on Dead Soul Men is within the 3-4 minute range, perfectly suited to radio play, loaded with catchy hooks, off kilter rhythms, and wild squealing guitar solos played with such mindboggling precision that they don't even sound human.
Their career is pretty split, with the first four albums having one continuous lineup, before two of the three guys were swapped out and that new lineup has held steady for the last 20 years. The only major difference between the two eras is that the original lineup was extremely quirky and experimental, before Move came out in 2002 and suddenly they had an impossibly bass heavy production and started adding in double bass and more overtly aggressive riffs. With Dead Soul Men being the last album from the original lineup, obviously this one isn't quite as heavy as their newer stuff and relies a lot more on the lighter influences they were knee deep into at the time. The self titled album prior to this is almost entirely lame pop rock, and unsurprisingly it's pretty clearly their weakest album, while Dead Soul Men takes the same basic idea of pop-heavy rock and adds a few dozen more layers of dirt on top of it. So, in essence, this is some awful bastardized version of late 90s alt rock like post grunge run through a filter of aggressive prog metal. This sounds like my nightmare, but The Freaks struck an impossible middle ground between accessible rock hooks and dizzying prog metal to create a sound I've never heard before or since.
The term "post grunge" should scare most of you, because it's one of the few genres that almost exclusively produces terrible bands. I'm not even joking when I say the best band under the label is probably Nickelback, so for Freak Kitchen to be exploring that style you'd expect some top tier trash, but as should be clear by now, they had an approach that basically nobody else had that helped them stand apart from most other bands in the style. While they did indeed take the basic aesthetics of grunge and run them through a much less depressing and abrasive filter, they have more than enough metallic edge in tracks like "Silence" and "Gun God", some heavy punk influence on "I Refuse", some Prong-esque groove metal on "Black Spider Flag", and that's not even mentioning "Ugly Side of Me" which is basically a Racer X song with how fucking zippy that main riff is. Despite all that, heavy rock is definitely the flavor of the day, with nearly every song I've mentioned carrying a chorus tailor made to be as catchy and inoffensive as possible in the aim of maximum radio airplay. Luckily, Eklundh's ear for hooks is off the charts and nearly every song has a real chance of getting stuck in your head.
The album is pretty front loaded, with the first seven tracks more or less murdering the latter five, but nearly everything is at least worthwhile. The lone stinker in the first half is "Everything Is Under Control", which is just a sluggish bore, but it's sandwiched between two of the most aggressively infectious numbers in "Ugly Side of Me" and "Get a Life", the latter of which has a frustratingly lame chorus but some of the best verses on the album. I'm probably making this sound fairly uneven or weak, but it's mostly because I just want to get the bad stuff out of the way first, because I'd be lying if I said I felt anything other than excitement for Dead Soul Men. "Silence!" is probably the best song here, and a very smart opener in the sense that it's easily the heaviest and meanest song here, and therefore the most likely to hook wayward headbangers like myself. On the whole, it's just like any other song on the album, but if it's a great first exposure in the sense that it opens with an off-kilter 7/8 riff that just swirls your brain into mush. 7/8 isn't a particularly mind melting time sig on its own, but in the context it's used here, it's definitely unique, and the band never shies away from these weird rhythms and polyrhythmic patterns where the drums seem to be in complete opposition to what the guitars are doing. It transitions out of that into semi-acapella verses with Eklundh presenting his trandmarked "we live in a society" lyrics which probably sound deep when you're a teenager but really read like a shitty political cartoon to me nowadays but are still fun anyway, and then finally into an explosive chorus with some wildly impressive bass runs. It should only take this opening minute to convince you of the band's technical prowess, and despite their rigid adherence to simple catchy hooks they never waver from this outside-the-box insanity when it comes to their actual riff construction. And that's not even mentioning Eklundh's solos, which is where the jazz element really shines. Every last one of them is a technical powerhouse of weird high pitched squealing and unbelievably clean arpeggio runs. They can sound atonal and bizarre at times but they are so quintessentially Freak Kitchen that I can't imagine any of their songs without them.
Special shoutout has to go to the couplet in the middle of "The Sinking Planet" and "Dead Soul Man". The former is probably the most radio friendly song here, with the main riff having a strange cadence but at least still containing 16 notes by my count so it's not too proggy and weird for the cavemen like me. It's main strength is honestly the same as all the rest of the great songs here, the hook in the chorus is just sublime. That is peak 90s heavy radio rock and it absolutely fucking smashes the likes of Foo Fighters or whoever "properly" held the title to smithereens. Eklundh's voice really shines here as well. I haven't talked about it but it has that same kind of grungy strain to it that was popular at the time, and he can come off as nasally or whiny in some sections but a vast majority of the time he fits the sound like a glove, and there's no better example of where he fits best than the chorus of "The Sinking Planet". Not even kidding when I say it's one of my favorite songs of 2000, it just hits every single note perfectly for me. "Dead Soul Man" isn't too far behind, though it slots much nicer into a sort of crushing groove in the main riff. It's very "Freak Kitchen Turned to 11", because the lyrics are as goofy as they'll ever be ("You think Treblinka is a new Playstation game" is simultaneously the best and worst lyric I've ever heard in all my years), the solo is wild, and they try some wild-out ideas like some heavy handed gospel influence in the chorus.
I've read over this twice and realized I've probably undersold this album a bit, but I don't care, I love it. It really boils down to that opening thesis: Dead Soul Men is the sound of a complicated prog metal album run through a filter of extreme accessibility, and thus, has made a normally dense and incoherent genre fun and easy to swallow. If you'd like it to be heavier then go ahead and give Move or Land of the Freaks a try, but for my money, Dead Soul Men is the sweet spot.
RATING: 87%
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