Bull Market - Business Rock - Billings, MT
by Jordan Finn
Bull Market’s new album, work weak, is about as authentic and raw as each blast of feedback and larynx-shredding shriek suggests. Make no mistake - work weak is the strongest record from one of Montana’s strongest bands. In terms of intensity, messaging, and (most surprisingly perhaps) personality, work weak stands out as the most convincing embodiment of contemporary nihilism I’ve heard from a band not signed to a label. Make no mistake - this isn’t boilerplate declarations against capitalism or 22 minutes of self-pitying wallowing. Rather, Bull Market deploys parody, rage, and unflinching honesty to not so much solve but vent the collective frustrations of being another left-behind worker in an age of disposable lives.
Led by Phillip Griffin but steered by Nels Jensen’s now-legendary and unforgiving drum performances, Bull Market has slowly but surely made a name for themselves on either side of the Rockies in their home state of Montana. The band has always worked in overdriven noise rock with a comic-edge, but work weak distills their output into a lean seven track record that wastes no words in this conceptually cohesive achievement. Griffin’s angle isn’t to sing about the obliteration of feeling and meaning in a market-driven culture - that would be too political, too on the nose. Rather, it’s a first-person perspective of what it’s like to live in that world, a Sisyphian cycle of mind-numbing self-abuse and soul-crushing banality that doesn’t seem to have any function except to not die or think about dying.
As a concept, work weak is straight–forward. With seven songs in total, each track is named after a day of the week. The fact that the album’s bookends, “Monday” and “Sunday”, are the darkest of the bunch points towards a pessimistic worldview that would make Beckett and Bukowski proud. The simplicity of the working week analogy provides the listener an accessible double-meaning to each song - “Monday” sounds like going into withdrawals with the worst case of the Mondays you’ve ever had. “Friday” is Rebecca Black’s “Friday'' as half stoner rock anthem and half dance-punk satire, and “Sunday” is the sunday scaries for a man standing on the edge of the will to live and you can’t decide whether to help, cry, or headbang to the song’s descending coda.
None of work weak’s seven songs are simple verse, chorus, and repeat affairs. Bull Market makes each song feel like an amusement park ride whether it’s the elongated climb at the album’s start that heightens soon-to-be-met expectations or the listener getting thrown by a sudden loss of gravity into the dance pit one more time by riffs that are shocks to the system. The band opened up their tool kit and threw in enough unexpected drops, shifts, and sections, ultimately lending itself to an album successful in its intentions to unify the record’s pacing and larger meaning. Frankly there are no mediocre songs here - even my least favorite songs in the center of the record have such undeniably wicked riffs at some point that it’s impossible to consider skipping any of the album’s tracks.
Not only is this their best-sounding release in terms of pacing and song-writing but in terms of a diversity of influences, effects, and song structures. Unlike a lot of heavy music - work weak turns away from the repetitious riffing of one’s chosen subgenre and hopscotches between everything from dance punk, noise rock, stoner metal, and country-western. This is simultaneously Bull Market’s heaviest yet melodic work they’ve put out so far. This is largely thanks to Tyson Krieter’s wizardry in the recording booth, able-handedly controlling Griffin’s squealing guitar and Jensen’s punishing treatment of cymbals and shells battered into submission. Out of Bull Market’s corpus, work weak easily has the most extensive use of effects, tones, and styles then anything they’ve put out. Even the inconsistent drum pattern at the album’s opening purposefully sets the tone that this is the work of human feeling and expression.
On the subject of feeling, Griffin’s singing and shouting on work weak (and I mean this quite literally) is hair-raising. Bull Market’s ability to weave cacophony with euphony is most self-evident with each eerily precise wail. With every grating and abrasive chorus the listener is rewarded with a shift into harmony - a balanced economy of difficulty and reward that makes Bull Market a bedfellow alongside the best noise-rock outfits, from bands like Pissed Jeans to contemporaries Chat Pile.
From its plodding introduction to its death spiral conclusion, work weak epitomizes the hopelessness of the times. The lethargy and quiet resignation of “Monday” gives way to a burst of creative rage - the sound of someone faced with either choosing to shut the casket on their unrequited hopes or word vomiting their raucous frustration, amps absolutely dimed to their limit. When the only acceptable slogans seem to be to either to Keep Calm and Carry On or to Get that Bread, Bull Market kicks against the pricks and turns the grave it’s been digging into a tunnel away from the blinding light of corporatist hopefulness and cynicism masked as building back better.
It’s a bit of a consolation that with each step into the future there’s a band like Bull Market to give shape to the feeling that comes with each passing day - the sonic equivalent of losing touch with loved ones, the world, and yourself. It’s a dark album (it fades into black with the mantra “I don’t want to live”) but a necessary statement unafraid to stare back into a void that when ignored only seems to sink its claws deeper in our thin skin of 21st-century living.
But with Bull Market’s strongest record and one of our age’s most representative albums wearing out my van speakers, the void sounds like music to my ears.
Bull Market is currently touring the Pacific Northwest. Click here for a full list of dates.