ALBUM REVIEW: Tallah – ‘Primeval: Obsession // Detachment’

The inside scoop on Tallah’s new album Assemblage Of Vaguely Nu-Metal Words is that a deliberate effort was made to preserve its rawness and chaos. It was tracked with no clicks or edits, and Justin Bonitz’s vocals were all recorded in one continuous take, with the intent of preserving the feel of unadulterated chaos. On one hand, good on Tallah for having that much faith in their abilities; on the other…man, does the lack of checks and balances show!

It’s hard to say whether added context makes for an improvement or not. Without it, you’ve got slapdash nu-metal album with no interest in zeroing in on its creators’ greatest talents, and is more than happy to just splay out all over the place. With context—which includes this being a sci-fi concept album with a regularly updating web game to expand its lore (and not for the first time in Tallah’s catalogue, either)—they’re only spreading themselves far, far too thin. The attempt to juggle a status of multimedia creatives doesn’t feel sustainable in the slightest here, not when the music itself is jeopardised to this degree.

Of course, when Tallah want to be a reincarnation of early Slipknot for the modern age, they probably don’t see things like that. Chaos and madness is its own reward, after all, and striving to mirror Iowa’s most famous nonet is likely what sparked Primeval…’s rawer creative direction. But not only did Tallah do a much better job in their emulation all the way back on 2020’s Matriphagy, it was so much closer in style and approach. By comparison—and despite all of their efforts—Primeval… feels too clean and underpowered for what they want. Guitars seldom hold the necessary weight, and the much-feted looseness in performance and structure is more messy than volatile or combustible.

If there’s one consistent highlight to note among all of this, it’s the rhythm section, blessing Tallah with isolated strips of excellence that lunge out so much further than literally anything else here. In another display of savant musicianship from the Portnoy bloodline, Max Portnoy has moved from behind the drum kit to bass, and between a technicality and the utterly monstrous slap-bass tone he makes his calling card, he proceeds to show up a good chunk of Tallah’s additional personnel. Augmented stands out most for some great isolated moments, but a good half of the album sees Portnoy fully making this his own. On the same half, his replacement on drums Joel McDonald stands out for almost all the same reasons—a technique that handily surpasses the standard set elsewhere, and a sound that brings out the best in the craft. Here, it’s the harsher metallic clank that’s always a great shorthand for industrial brutality, and it, too, always feels streets ahead of most when allowed to come forth.

Unfortunately, they’re both left to contend with Bonitz, who’s less of a weak link on Primeval…, and more a link that’s already been vaporised into nonexistence. For as desperate as he is to be formative Corey Taylor, his penchant for sounding silly rather than brutal or unhinged scuppers his efforts immensely. There just isn’t adequate menace conveyed in his nasal, theatrical gesticulating, pressed right to the front of the mix. Likewise, trying to sound soft and exposed on My Primeval Obsession has Bonitz fully skewered by the bass sticking out from behind him. At his heaviest on A Primeval Detachment and Undone By Fate (sans some iffier whispering and spoken sections on the latter track), there’s something approaching a form that Bonitz handles well. It’s just a shame that they’re almost the only instances that do work for him.

So, with all of that put together, you’re left with a misshapen, half-cocked, directionless album that, for all its efforts towards a deliberate tumult, can’t even be that interesting. The flabbier mid-section of My Primeval Obsession and _la_cuna_ is the worst offender, the latter trying to establish some acoustic-driven sway that poor singing and a lumbering, disconnected mess of an assembly fully puts paid to. Elsewhere, guitar power is hideously marginalised with barely a noteworthy riff to speak of. Their most memorable transmogrification is either the isolated, unsupported wails that crop up sometimes on My Primeval Obsession, or the bricks of fuzz they’re clumped into before being wedged halfway to the back of Depleted. Finally, the ‘commitment’ to early Slipknot extends down to errant sound effects, though Tallah treating them with general disinterest makes them feel like weird anomalies or mistakes that just crop up sometimes. Considering DJ Navi is the band’s full-time turntablist, he doesn’t get much play or a lot of memorable parts attributed to him. If anything, what’s more memorable do feel like mistakes, like the cartoon ‘bonk’ effects that’ll sometimes crop up on What We Know, or the creaking and farts of bass on _la_cuna_ that sound utterly wretched.

By the end, you’re dying for it all to be over, more than anything. Not because it’s substantively worse than your typical ‘bad’ nu-metal album (regardless of whether or not it seems like it’s trying to be), but because the enjoyment factor on this thing leaks out almost from minute one. Sure, there are cool bass and drums parts, but do you really think they were intended to be the standouts? They were probably meant to be good, but so was everything here, and only they get away unscathed by the grace of God. The rest of Primeval… gives off an aura of its mere existence being a chore, where the efforts and talents of Tallah have been so grossly mismanaged under a creative rubric that they probably could’ve lived up to. As mentioned earlier, Matriphagy got to a better place than this; it is doable! But where that album earmarked Tallah as a bold, new prospect within nu-metal’s then-burgeoning revival, Primeval… is something you’d never choose to listen to again.

For fans of: Avatar, Code Orange, a Slipknot cover band

‘Primeval: Obsession // Detachment’ by Tallah is released on 5th September on Earache Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall