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Fox Medicine dropped Greetings From Mars on January 31, 2018. Hailing from Eugene, Oregon, Fox Medicine is made up of Neezy Dynamite on guitar and vocals, and Vanny Keeps on drums, vocals and synths. Referring to their sound as “black bubblegum noise,” the duo merges flavors from noise rock, post grunge, art metal and post punk into dark gristly music that’s got guts.
Fox Medicine describes Greetings From Mars: “This album, like most of our songs comes from a place that wishes to obliterate wimpy music, the kind that you are constantly forced to listen to when you go to the supermarket or step outside into the artificial world. This is music you can listen to when you’re on fire and you wanna go out and start some shit! It will empower and encourage you if you are any kind of badass.”
The album comprises eight tracks. “Glitter Alien” rides a proto-punk melody rife with thrashing guitars and shrill vocals. The manic groove pulses with opaque energy, while the down and dirty guitars grind and wail with potent colors. “Supervillain” features avant-garde punk attitude, piercing vocals, and scathingly muddy guitars groaning with shady compactness. There’s an industrial feel to the metallic crunching tones that’s full of dark resolve.
“Licorice Lox” offers a noise rock melody with penetrating grimy guitars and a Jovian rhythm pulsing with challenging proximity. This tune is truculent and bellicose to the maximum degree. “Wife School” thrums along on a punk/rock flavored melody replete with desiccated brittle guitars and pummeling drums. The tune verges on chaotic, but is nonetheless contagiously potent.
“Stars” packs a raging industrial punk melody. Off-tempo drums add a discordant element that grates and trounces your ears into submission. Rampaging dirty guitars ride atop spiraling synth hues adding harsh textures. “Obstacles Popsicles” features a noise rock/punk vehemence pulsating with irrational exuberance and stringy muscularity. Dynamite’s strident vocals jar and trill with paradoxical certainty. The sonic intensity is surreal.
“Gold Mine” features a relentless flow of ferocious dirty guitars rumbling with swelling strident tones. Extravagant burlesque overtones flood the tune with titanic emotion, like a shrill yammer on a single tone. The only way to describe this song is controlled bedlam, severe and starkly powerful. “Mental Hygiene” begins with fuzzy guitars and a reverberating beat flowing into an austere yet hypertrophic metal/punk melody oozing pressure, sound, and frosty breast-beating dynamics. A projection of urgency encompasses the gooey compressed resonances, like the mythic structure of Dante’s Hell.
Whew! The tones of dark gravity on this album completely bypass the normal auditory apparatus. You listen but you also experience the music on a primal and visceral level, like a punch in the solar plexus. This is pure, dominant noise rock, consuming, taut with foreboding, and engaging. If moussed up punk/metal/rock is what you’re seeking, look no further. Fox Medicine has just what the doctor ordered.
Follow Fox Medicine on their website, Facebook, and Bandcamp.
