Big Business
Great Scott, Allston, MA
1 September 2019
Seattle-based hard rock duo Big Business arrived in Boston on the heels of their release of
The Beast You Are
, their latest opus. Though the band is just two men – Jared Warren and Coady Willis, both veterans of Melvins, among other bands – that hasn’t stopped them from being one of the loudest shows on four legs, packing the small space of Allston’s Great Scott club with fans and a massive sound.
While Warren and Willis are undoubtedly nice people, and between songs Warren imitates a local who chastised them earlier about their parking chops and wishes everyone a merry Christmas in September, their stage presence can’t help but intimidate. Warren is a mountain of a man who exudes a natural sense of power, bolstered by the deep bellows that make up most of his voice. Willis is lithe and nimble, given to standing up on his drum stool before swinging himself back down for a massive hit; but the ferocity of his playing is unmatched, and his arms move with unparalleled speed as he creates his half of the band’s terrifyingly spacious sound inside his tempest of drumsticks and mallets, even stopping to toss one into the crowd mid-song without skipping a beat.
Often beginning with or punctuated by Willis’ gentle playing of an array of bells, even at a maximum of five minutes apiece, the songs of Beast, which make up the vast majority of the night’s set, are varied and engaging, so much so that you’d scarcely believe it’s only two people if you weren’t seeing it with your own eyes. Warren has an army of pedals that allow him to add a myriad of effects to both his bass and his vocal, often looping a cavernous echo into the mix to affect the presence of another backing vocalist supplementing Willis, who adds his own shouts via a headset. Their music is sludgy, reverberating, heavy, and in no rush; it churns forward with a menacing gait, like a predator that knows you’re already in its lair.
Album closer ‘Let Them Grind’ is the song title that best fits the band’s style, referring as much to the band’s relentless playing as it does to Warren’s teeth in the lyrics of the song, which along with several other tracks on The Beast You Are portrays a pervasive sense of grating monotony and complacency. “I know some people who are / cutting away with the dullest knives,” Warren sings on the poly-rhythmic ‘Abomdinal Snowman’, and on ‘The Moor You Know’ laments and details a herculean, calculated effort to reach a goal that isn’t even desired. It’s an ominously dark record in places, nowhere moreso than on ‘Moor’, but is not without lighter sounds, as evidenced by the Willis-led ‘Under Everest’ which slides along on monastic bells and vocal harmonies and segues into the night’s two-part conclusion in the form of ‘Let Them Grind’ and ‘Horses’, the latter from 2016’s Command Your Weather.
Broadly, the music of Big Business is an exercise in wringing beauty from noise, tempering epic vocal deliveries in white-hot decibel levels. They bring the listener right to the point of being overwhelmed, but never push beyond that, and at this point in their lengthy careers are well-versed in assembling both albums and setlists that journey beautifully between the gentle and the intense – an able corollary to the duality of men.
#project hail mary
#lana del rey
#photography
#heated rivalry
