Throw on a Melted Bodies album and each track will prick the ears of totally different people for totally different reasons. The new wave-infused “Think Safe” is for folks who wore David Byrne-like big suits for Halloween, “Wrath of the Flies” is for grindcore enthusiasts, and then there’s “Relax, You Are Lazy”, which asserts the oft-repeated comparison to System of a Down. This resemblance is apt and complimentary but not fully illustrative of Melted Bodies. They are just as much System of a Down as they are Dead Kennedys as they are Oingo Boingo, though not simultaneously.
All the Los Angeles group’s disparate expressions are unified by an internal logic. It’s a bit hazy, but it boils down to consistently asking “what if,” or more specifically, “why not?” Nothing is off-limits, even if the ability to play their music is out-of-sync with their ideas. Metal’s hedonistic intensity, the one that blasts from speakers with the force of a max effort bicep curl, that propels its stadium class and guilty pleasures, is another binding feature of Melted Bodies. The pulse that powers their most in-your-face tracks is the same one that jitters and twitches when approaching post-punk territory. Levels of distortion and vocal harshness may vary, yet the fuel is all the same.
The quartet’s latest release, The Inevitable Fork, is a compilation of three separate EPs dropped over the past year and tied together through spoken word segments written by guitarist and vocalist Andy Hamm and performed by Xiu Xiu’s Angela Seo. These are painfully uncomfortable pieces. They cut through the noise and do not mince words, as titles such as “I Often Feel Alone While Surrounded by Other People” and “Overinflated All the Same” indicate. Bleak and blunt, they are Melted Bodies without their tassels, streamers, and peeled-back fingernails.
While the group are idiosyncratic by nature, The Inevitable Fork’s structure was purely pragmatic. Each EP was written and recorded by itself to save Melted Bodies time and money. Furthermore, the drip-feed rollout was a response to how quickly bands are forgotten due to the music industry’s unceasing pushing of new products and the accessibility of novel releases through streaming. In Hamm’s words, “it was really all we were able to do because we don’t make a living off of Melted Bodies.”
Read our conversation with Hamm that covers the lack of filter in their writing process and the personal struggles that colored The Inevitable Fork below.
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How did Melted Bodies develop such an eclectic sound?
The eclecticness is just the way my brain works. I listen to so much music and I love so many different styles of music. I grew up sort of a punk and a really big metalhead. Then I grew out of that and I got really into other styles of music. Then I was a founding member of Local Natives and played with them for like seven years, writing more like indie, boy band, pop stuff. It was a big part of my life, but it also was a long time ago. When we finally started catching fire, we had been playing for five years with hardly anything. It was a few years of just non-stop shows and touring.
But with songwriting, I wish I could say that it’s very forced to try and combine all these different styles of music, but it just isn’t. It just literally is how I write stuff. But with Melted Bodies, I wanted to do a post-punk, new wave thing, because I love Talking Heads, Ecstasy, Devo, and that jam. That style has a sarcastic quirkiness, but it’s also very intelligently-written music. Then, thrash, death metal, and nu metal is so ingrained in me. I wanted to combine all of them because that’s sort of how I am, personality-wise. Not all the time, but that was definitely intent with Melted Bodies.
I imagine one of the toughest things is just finding the correct tones that make it so, for example, if you go from post-punk to thrash in one song, neither side’s going to feel cheaped out. Right?
It’s weird because I’m not a tone person. Obviously, I pay attention to it, but I usually just play with stuff in the studio until I’m like, cool, that sounds good. In my opinion, I think you could combine any kind of genre if the song is good. We did a cover of “The Rat,” which is a song by the Walkman, on our first album, and I made it into a thrash song. And the bridge is just new wave. It was easy to do that because the song is a well-written and you just have to imagine different rhythms and the stuff behind it and then capture the energy of what he’s trying to say.
It’s easier for me to combine styles, or record in that style, than it is for me to be like, we just need an alt country song, you know what I mean?
It’s like if you had to dig your boots into one style, it’d feel almost uncomfortable.
Yeah, exactly. I think if we only did thrash metal or we only did doom metal or we only did death metal, I would have a harder time because I would be like, “Oh, no, I want to do this new thing now.” And then I’d be like, “Oh, that doesn’t that doesn’t fit within this.”
That whole world has always been so odd to me, especially in heavy metal, because it’s, how do I say it? It’s rooted in a giant “fuck you” as far as the attitude. There’s also a big nerdy side to it, which I love. A lot of metalheads, including myself, are big nerds, but then there’s also this huge layer of conservatism. It just blows my mind how conservative it still is, where people are like, “That’s not death metal.” But it doesn’t fucking matter. What matters is how it makes you feel.
There’s still a protectionist and a very traditionalist part to it. As if people heard shit when they were 16 and they were like, “That’s all I need for the rest of my life.”
Especially with doing what we’re doing in Melted Bodies, I could feel this chip slowly growing on my shoulder. Why does it have to be categorized or labeled? If you don’t like it, that’s fine, if you don’t like the way it makes you feel, that’s fine. Let’s discuss it. But if you like the way it sounds or you like the way it makes you feel, that should be your answer right there.
What I find with you guys is that, as wide as your sound is, it always seems like you have a base identity. What I mean is that, Mr. Bungle, for example, are all over the place and they don’t have one foundation. They’re everywhere. They have no songs with the “typical Mr. Bungle Sound.” You guys are also everywhere, but there’s a foundation that identifies what is clearly Melted Bodies. Did you ever say, “This is who we are and we don’t want to go too far away because that wouldn’t feel true to us?”
First off, thanks for saying that. That definitely resonated with me. I want there to be certain elements within Melted Bodies that are through-threads. And obviously, for me, I can hear it all. The writing from Enjoy Yourself to The Inevitable Fork was over a long period of time, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted it to be heavier. And heavy is subjective, so I mean that I wanted it to be heavier on a personal level. Heavier subject matter in most of the songs and then also heavier in the sense that I wanted to strip back some of the satirical and comedic elements. I came to find through Enjoy Yourself that for a lot of people, it’s hard to take comedy seriously.
What I mean by that is that, just because I’m delivering something in a comic or satirical way doesn’t mean that it’s untrue or that it’s not a very serious thing. I believe that Melted Bodies, not only subject matter, but musically and energetically, is an incredibly heavy project. I believe that in every sense of the word. So I really wanted The Inevitable Fork to broadcast that.
So, the only music that’s off limits for Melted Bodies is music that’s currently outside your skillset?
No, I write stuff that I can’t play. All the time. I have to. I’ll think of a riff or a melody and then I have to write it at, like 50 bpm slower and then slowly practice it. But the idea’s there. And then, usually by the time we’re recording, I’m not up to speed yet and just gotta rehearse or piecemeal it. Then I start getting it when it’s time for the non-demo versions and playing it live. But I love that challenge. That’s what keeps me excited.
It’s the constant novelty of new challenges.
I’m simplifying this but I think it is a universal truth. You can have a really strong thing and maybe the songwriting is not that great, but the thing is amazing. Alternatively, you can not really have a thing at all, but the songs are amazing. You can’t really tell what the artist means. They don’t have a vibe. Their visual aesthetic is whatever. But the songs are just so amazing. The ideal, in my brain, is the middle ground between those two. I’m trying with Melted Bodies to have a very distinct thing, even if we jump all over the place, and that’s the visual aesthetic, the overall anxiety of it. But I also want to write songs where it’s not just weird for the sake of being weird. And even though we get a lot of feedback where people don’t know what to think, I’m like, I’ll keep listening because, I promise you, the more you listen, you discover more layers.
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The Inevitable Fork deals with very heavy topics. It seems like it comes from a place of anxiety and trauma. Was it a way for you guys to collectively reckon with what you’ve been through?
A lot of the songs were written over a pretty long time because we’re an independent band. It takes a lot of time to record this style of songs. It takes a lot of money. We all still have jobs. It wasn’t like, we’re gonna write a conceptual album. But I just knew going in, as I said, that I wanted it to be heavier. I wanted to touch on more personal things rather than observing pop culture politics. It’s cathartic. I deal with depression and anxiety. I’ve dealt with depression pretty heavily in the past, and I work at it every day, and I’m pretty open about it. I think that it’s healthy for all of us to be more open about it. And the more I’m open about it, the more that I usually connect with people that deal with it too. I can lean on them. But it’s also very vulnerable and I think that that’s probably the level that, for certain listeners, gets uncomfortable. We’ve gotten even a little feedback from people that are like, “Dude, I love the album, but it’s tough to get through. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s heavy.” The things that I’m singing about on there aren’t who I am every single day in every moment.
The joy of writing a song is that I can feel very resentful towards someone from my past, or I can be thinking about bloodlines of things that are installed into me whether I like them or not, and letting it out in a raw and vulnerable way. My hope is that the honesty of it will come through.
Like, “Wrath of the Flies” is about my twisted spine. I have kyphosis and scoliosis, so it’s about the back pain that I deal with. I told the band that, and they all started cracking up. I don’t know if you deal with back pain, but chronic back pain is incredibly heavy. Like, when it’s bad, it takes you out of your life. It’s debilitating. Versus writing a song about mutilating corpses, for example, where I’m like, “I like horror movies and I made this up,” “Wrath of the Flies” is a good example where the subject matter is overly honest about true pain that I deal with in hopes that people can connect with that versus just a fantasy horror story.
There’s no glossing over in your music. And that’s why it can be uncomfortable, because people learn what something feels like, especially with the spoken word interludes on the LP release of The Inevitable Fork.
We got Angela (Seo) from Xiu Xiu to record those interludes. I wrote a lot of them. They’re journal entries that I had over a number of years. I tried to find the most unfiltered and to-the-point entries that tied in with the songs and the story. I sent them to Angela and told her to interpret them how she will with whatever tone she wanted to use. She then called me and said some of them were too real and got her down. I know they’re not masterpieces of written word but she said they’re just so blunt.
Let’s go back to The Inevitable Fork’s inspiration. I was wondering if there were any shared feelings between members, for example, if you were able to combine everyone’s feelings of depression into one vision?
Yeah, maybe more musically, because I write all the lyrics, so it’s definitely more of my POV on things. But we all relate to a lot of this kind of stuff. And I know that the band deals with some of the same things that I deal with, and that. That’s always been something that we enjoy about Melted Bodies–the vulnerability.
Then when we were talking about, like, what do we call this album, I brought up that we could call the album The Inevitable Fork because we all had those feelings of a fork coming in the road. We asked where are we going with this? Weere are we going with Melted Bodies? And then within the world itself, we just keep coming to these choices and they’re inevitable. That was a big part of this–death is inevitable, we’re all getting older, and we pursue Melted Bodies because we genuinely love it. But it’s a shit ton of work and money. We’re not doing something that is immediately accessible. We know it’s challenging, but we also have ultra confidence that we’re doing something that is needed right now and that has a distinct point of view, musically and emotionally.
So it’s like, are we going to choose to stay on that path and really push it, or are we going to see what other options we can do? It’s maybe cliche, but it’s also incredibly potent that everyday I try to tell myself death is inevitable. That’s Melted Bodies in a nutshell. It’s a reminder that death is coming. So what are you doing? Are you doing something that brings you joy? Are you doing something that you’re passionate about? Are you being there for the people that you care about in your life right now? Are you being honest? Are you putting yourself out there?
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The Inevitable Fork is out now via Melted Bodies’ Bandcamp.
