(written by Islander)
As a band name, Mirror Neuron is an intriguing choice, and so is the artwork on this Toronto duo’s spectacular debut album, Great Content.
A “mirror neuron” is an actual thing, present in the brains of humans, primate species, and birds. According to The Font of All Human Knowledge: “A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron ‘mirrors’ the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting.” Its function has been the subject of much speculation, which you can read about via that link above.
As for the cover art, it’s a painting by Justyna Koziczak (used with her permission) called “Dante and Virgil in 4th circle of hell” (that’s the circle for the greedy).
But the intrigues don’t stop there. Consider the way the Mirror Neuron duo have characterized the music on their album:
Like the city they’re from, Great Content is a mosaic of influences: the proggy metalcore of early Between the Buried and Me, the crusty aggression of His Hero Is Gone, the spiderweb counterpoint of Anata, and the blackened atmosphere of Krallice – the band members’ decades of dedicated listening to the totality of extreme music has shaped a furious hybrid of sounds.
The song names are also interesting. Take, for example, the first single from the album, “The Planck Era“. That refers to a period less than 10 to the minus 43 seconds after the Big Bang in which the universe was infinitesimally small and what we know as the laws of physic and space/time had no meaning (for more about that, see this article).
At the end of this article we have additional interesting details to share about the band and the album, but we ought to get to the music now.
Musically, “The Planck Era” doesn’t follow many rules either, and it certainly doesn’t move in a straight line. At the outset, the riffing generates a wild, pulsating whine which is interspersed with bludgeoning, battering-ram grooves and maniacal percussive outbursts.
That whining riffage accelerates and becomes more shrill, deranged, and warped in its frantic twists and turns, but as the pacing changes and a throbbing bass becomes even more noticeable, the music eerily flows, shimmering and chiming like a strange and seductive audio hallucination.
As the seconds pass, more changes arrive, presenting a panoply of jaw-dropping percussive alterations; guitar work that blares, blazes, and squirms; nimbly murmuring and thuggishly slugging bass-work; a moment of silence; bouts of brutish jackhammering; and the reverberation of ringing tones that create an aura of cosmic beauty.
The vocals don’t take a back-seat to this musical kaleidoscope. They’re harsh and scary, but also wide-ranging, reaching from beastly guttural roars to maddened screams and lots of other crazed and harrowing manifestations in between.
As first singles go, “The Planck Era” is a real genre-spanning head-spinner. And it’s not an outlier, as we’ll prove through the song we’re now premiering, “Interior Semiotics” — and there’s another interesting name, the meaning of which is discussed in the band comments at the end of this feature.
This new song is also intricate and utterly crazed, featuring guitar work (brilliant in its tone) that freakishly vibrates, swirls, and jubilantly spins, again backed by frequently gear-shifting rhythms and fronted by hair-raising vocal intensity, hostile and ravenous.
The bass again plays a prominent (and eccentric) role in this elaborate whirligig of sound, and gets a chance to step forward into the spotlight near the end, just before the song’s riotous and ramming finale.
Great Content is set for release on December 6th. It was engineered, recorded, and mastered by Harley Tamblin at Acrylic Recording, and produced by him and Mirror Neuron. It’s available for pre-order now, at this location:
https://neuronmirror.bandcamp.com/album/great-content
You can follow them on FB here. And here’s a teaser reel of excerpts from the album as a whole:
And now, here are comments from Mirror Neuron in response to a few questions we asked them:
How the band came to be:
The band has existed in different forms for 15 years – starting with the intention of becoming a dark hardcore band along the lines of Trap Them and other bands on Deathwish at the time. Our tastes have grown to include a lot more material on the fringes of the genre, and we really just want to create something that incorporates everything we think is cool about heavy music. While a lot of the new record was written within the last couple years, much of it also dates back to song ideas from the last 15 years.
The songwriting process:
Logan (guitars, vocals) guides the songwriting, coming up with the main riffs and structures. Alec (bass, vocals) and Logan hash it out and talk about ways to enhance melodic ideas and layer in more rhythmic complexity. Though we’re not as proficient and shreddy as some bands, making technical music that also retains that Deathwish hardcore energy the band started with is something we aspire to do with our songwriting. We’re inspired by bands like Dysrhythmia and Baring Teeth where guitar and bass have parity and share similar goals, so Alec will write the bass parts with polyphony in mind. Our original drummer Andrew initially composed a lot of the drum parts on these songs, so those were carried forward on the new album.
Alec used to do much more high pitched “hardcore”-style vocals in the band but lost his voice after a serious illness many years ago; so now he’s been reborn as more of a “low guy” and Logan has likewise come into his own as a hardcore vocalist – It’s really benefited the the record (and the band going forward in general) and made us commit to a more brutal sound.
The lyrical themes:
The songs on Great Content follow the overall theme of modern media consumption. This song (“Interior Semiotics”) is named after a video on YouTube that is a filming of an “infamous” performance art piece; we won’t speak to the subject matter of the art in question, but what has stuck with us over the years is the camera-person’s intuition to pan across the audience. There’s a variety of reactions: some are heavily invested, some are uncomfortable, some are looking down the lens mocking the artist. It turned the video into something less about the performance it’s filming and more into something about viewership in general. The video replaced the thing it was trying to capture; we’re seeing the performance mutate into “Content”.
The lyrics also detail real stories we’ve encountered, like a father who spent their family’s savings on a collection of Bored Ape NFTs, feeling it has finally provided him future status and an inheritance for his young children. And finally the overall anxiety for creative people that after all the vilification of AI, are we actually good enough to out-compete it? A lot of threads carry across the record.