Flora

And from Chicago it rumbled. Chord's debut album benefits immediately from a several specific connections: i.e., released on the Neurot label, mastered by James Plotkin, the bandmembers' own membership in acts like Pelican and Unfortunaut. And it starts with a loud howl of drone feedback that isn't quite Skullflower, say, but isn't that far off either in intent (if not necessarily in end results). Living up to the band's name by exploring a single chord as described in the song title, "Am7" continues in that vein for the rest of its length, the first of four songs that take the now standard view that metal really can be anything you want it to be, and that anything can be metal in turn. In the same vein that Sunn 0))) have made being an ambient group one of the loudest things on earth, Chord happily dedicate themselves to the simple but effective principle that ominous noise — as the concluding "Am" shows from the start just as much as "Am7" — is enough to work with rather than riffs and singing. Certainly the start of a song like "E9," simply a restrained cycle of guitar/bass notes at a slow pace, is anything but classic metal as such, for instance. While Chord retain the feeling of a side experiment, their own identity comes to the fore in moments like the carefully placed bursts of felt-more-than-heard bass and the lead guitar falling away here and there, to return with a calmly aggressive crunch before exploring newer tones. Sometimes the band is so quiet as to be essentially playing nothing but subharmonics or something near to that — consider the start of "Gmaj (b13)" — which almost makes this akin to the work of Terre Thaemlitz, at least until the calm-as-can-be tones begin to emerge and transform into a steady, slow-building lope.