Howls From The Holographic Heart: the mathcore band saves its argument for the exit

Twenty-five years in, with a six-year gap in the middle, The Number Twelve Looks Like You have made the record where the noise is no longer the whole argument. Howls From The Holographic Heart is twelve tracks on Equal Vision, and its bet is on air: how much room a mathcore band can leave inside a song before the song stops being theirs. Mostly the bet pays. Where it doesn't, the record has already moved on.

The band came out of Bergen County, New Jersey, in 2001, assembled more or less by accident: Justin Pedrick was going to sing, Jesse Korman was going to play drums, Korman found out he was a bad drummer, and the group ended up with two vocalists and, at the start, no bassist at all. The name came from a Twilight Zone episode. Put On Your Rosy Red Glasses landed on Brutal in 2003. Eyeball signed them in 2004 and put out the An Inch of Gold for an Inch of Time EP, with a cover of "My Sharona" on it, in January 2005. Nuclear. Sad. Nuclear. followed that June, Mongrel in 2007 charted highest of the run, and Worse Than Alone arrived in 2009. Then six years off, a secret show in 2016, and Wild Gods in 2019. This is the first full length since.

It arrives October 16 as a digital release, ten dollars or more, with a 24-bit/96kHz download for anyone who wants the headroom. No producer, no studio and no session detail is named in the material published with it, so the record has to explain itself, which it mostly does.

The tags the band lives under are mathcore, grindcore and post-hardcore, and the direction pushing at all three is alt rock: longer shapes, choruses with somewhere to land, a band testing whether the thing it built can carry a tune as well as a switchback. Alexis Pareja's guitar and Korman's voice have been the center of this band since the first demo, close enough that the two of them are most of the point.

You can read the record's intentions off its shape. Trust Chaos goes first and is the shortest thing on it, a doorway rather than an overture. Glow in the Dark Skin, False Face and Fangs Out fill the front half at the record's standard length, and A Candle Awaits lands at track six as the second briefest cut, splitting the album clean in two. Dancing Before the Flood is the one that gets singled out, and it's the shortest of that mid-record run, which tells you where this band's audience keeps its ear. Then the last two: Become a Ghost and Joy Is a Weapon are the only tracks that pass five minutes, they sit back to back at the end, and the closer is the longest thing here. A band that saves its length for the exit is either confident or still deciding where the weight goes.

It is for the people who stayed through Worse Than Alone and came back for Wild Gods, and for anyone standing in the American mathcore queue next to Chat Pile and The Callous Daoboys. It is not for the listener who wants the grindcore end held down for the whole runtime; that listener will find the back half indulgent. Play it twice if Mongrel is your record. Skip it if you came for the blast and nothing else.

The flaw is placement. False Face, Fangs Out and Indeciso sit at the record's standard length, and the short A Candle Awaits between them is too brief to reset the ear, so the middle flattens and the band's alt rock case gets deferred to the final pair, where it arrives as a payoff rather than a development. The burden falls on Indeciso, sitting exactly where the record needs something to break the run: nothing in the published material tells you what it does that the songs around it don't.

Howls From The Holographic Heart earns a 3.5 the way this band earns everything, by making the hard part sound easy and the easy part sound like work. The last ten minutes are the ones you'll come back to.

The tracklist

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