Mammal Let Me Die LP

I don't know why, but I've always had a particular fondness for helplessly miserable music. Now, I don't go around painting my fingernails with a thick coat of Midnight Raven, or wear an "I AM SMILING" t-shirt to the mall. You would never guess by my colorfully optimistic demeanor, but I am profoundly satisfied when I hear Mark Kozelek wail about his inability to feel love, Swans grind out a slave's horrific nightmare or Townes Van Zandt share the story of a miner's daughter turned diseased prostitute. I've always appreciated music's intense ability to alter my mood and surroundings; hopelessly sad music does this especially well.

That said, Mammal's newest LP Let Me Die froze me in my chair seconds after I dropped the needle, barely able to bob my head as I stared dumbly at the Windows default screen-saver before me. For those unacquainted, Mammal is the solo project of one Gary Beauvais (no relation to Gary Butthead), a Detroit-based electronic artist who has released a slew of cassettes along with a few full-length albums from the early Naughts to present. Most of his material is impeccably monochromatic, with harsh static and corrupted drum machine beats seemingly the only components of his sound. It's a limited pallette, to be sure, but one that he maneuvers with a gratifying dexterity. I suppose his work would fall into the "power-electronics" genre on your iTunes playlist, but Mammal always managed to inflect a distinctly human touch beneath the cold mechanical rumble that so many of his contemporaries avoid, or simply cannot obtain. His debut album, Fog Walkers, started out with what was my unofficial 2003 Summer Jam, built around a popping beat smothered in high-pitched sizzling that had me imagining a few hundred beachballs simultaneously exploding in an industrial-sized microwave oven. It was noise, sure, but it made people smile, cheer and come together. Mammal sucked the color out of "Hey Ya" and recycled it into something real. While Fog Walkers was a fantastic trip to the shore, none of this party vibe is to be found on Let Me Die.

Opening with "Days Into Days", but flowing track to track as one complete thought, it's clear that Mammal has dropped the guillotine on any sort of social outing and has buried himself and his friends loosely under gravel in the basement floor. The pulse is slow and uneasy, like a dying alarm clock that goes off a couple hours early, but the beat is just frequent enough to keep from falling into a complete lack of consciousness. Actually, this whole album could rightfully be described as an uneasy sleep. The aura that permeates through Let Me Die almost reminds one of Metallica's "One", but the cameras are all off, the fantasy takes a sharp turn towards reality, and you're strapped to a table with that deaf-mute stump as your dentist. And yet, while these brutal descriptions are apt for Saw 3's opening scene, there's a deep compassion built into the sounds of Let Me Die. Cover art is always important, and the stark cover image of a hooded human (Mammal himself?) clutching what seems to be an old rosary couldn't fit any better. Sure, you've got pneumonia and the last bottle of Robitussin dried up a couple weeks ago, but someone just cleaned your sheets and left you a glass of water. It's that eternal push-and-pull, the feeling of total hopelessness battling a desire to perservere that elevates Let Me Die past the efforts of any contemporary noise-wranglers to become a defining musical document on the sore struggle of humanity. If life's a swamp, and we're all stuck waist-deep, Mammal calmly rationalizes the grim situation and guides us towards a particularly hungry croc.