Alex Latus: Guitar
Isidro Reyes: Percussion
Skyler Rowe: Drums
Mark Solotroff: Vocals
Sam Wagster: Bass

Noise mastermind and Bloodyminded head Mark Solotroff's Chicago supergroup Anatomy of Habit features members of Indian, Tortoise, and Joan of Arc. On their intriguing second album, they negotiate their way through domains of post-rock and doom, math rock and post punk.

For the noise musician Mark Solotroff, Ciphers + Axioms ends in very familiar territory. For eight minutes, amplifiers and instruments scream the sort of feedback, static, and clipped tones that are endemic both to his caterwauling power-electronics band Bloodyminded and his long-running extreme experimental imprint, Bloodlust! The sounds grow evermore dense, ultimately forming a thicket of prevailing hiss. But beneath and around the din, a repetitive guitar riff—just a few notes, really, folding into each other via delay and reverb—illuminate the abrasion, flickering like the light of a warm cabin spotted through a snowstorm. It’s not an accessibility concession that the wonderfully barbaric Bloodyminded would dare make.

Ciphers + Axioms is, instead, the intriguing second album from Solotroff’s Chicago supergroup Anatomy of Habit. The album's dual tracks each clock in around 20 minutes, as did the paired cuts from their self-titled 2011 debut; a subsequent EP split those times into a still not-quite-concise half. Despite the lengths, though, Anatomy of Habit is Solotroff’s relative pop band. He speaks and sings instead of screams, and he moves in lockstep time to guitars, drums and bass, all sharing intentions beyond aural obliteration. Each of these songs has at least one hook you’ll be able to hum, as Solotroff’s strange and droll monotone echoes in your head. During Within the Walls, Bloodyminded’s most recent LP, Solotroff yelled lines like, "mounds of bodies lying unburied" and "air so fouled by the pungent stench of millions of dead children." If you encounter temporary cognitive dissonance while singing along to songs about science and seasons with his Mark Mothersbaugh-meets-They Might Be Giants intonation, just trust that you’re not the only one.

Solotroff has long been a very busy and involved collaborator, but in recent years, his partnership has added unexpected elements to pre-existing projects. He supplied, for instance, essential blasts of abrasion to From All Purity, the latest and best record from Chicago metal act Indian. And there’s Wrekmeister Harmonies, the slow-moving and cinematic collective that works between poles of orchestral splendor and doom furor. Aside from founder J.R. Robinson, Solotroff is one of the project’s sole stable and necessary elements. Such integration is key to Ciphers + Axioms. Only Solotroff and Kenny Rasmussen return from Anatomy of Habit’s earlier iteration, but the new members are copacetic by any standard: Will Lindsay, whose brawny riffs lead the aforementioned Indian, commandeers guitar, while indispensable Tortoise and session drummer John McEntire takes the kit. Joan of Arc’s Theo Katsaounis accents the beats with auxiliary percussion. Chicago metal stalwart Sanford Parker engineered the sessions in McEntire’s Soma Electronic Music Studios. This is an enviable cast of contributors.

By Creaig Dunton

Following up their debut LP and EP, Chicago’s post-everything supergroup Anatomy of Habit (featuring members of Bloodyminded, Tortoise, and Indian, amongst many other projects) continue their penchant for dramatic, expansive rock-tinged music. For their Relapse debut, they provide two lengthy, side-long pieces that distill everything that was great about their early releases into a cohesive, rich album that stays faithful to their previous work, while adding an extra layer of polish.

From the opening moments of "Radiate then Recede", AoH's influences are not hard to place. The pounding drums, subterranean bass and caustic, drilling guitar bear a clear early Swans influence, but with a bit more restraint and less overt violence. The production adds a lot to this differentiation, with the use of reverb and processing bringing a hint of The Cure and Joy Division to their sound. Influences, yes, but they do so without directly aping any of those projects directly, retaining their own distinct style.

At over 20 minutes "Radiate And Recede" works more like a suite than a single song, with the band working through various configurations of the aforementioned sounds. Sometimes sludgy and shambling, other times leaning into chugging metal riffs, it never stops moving nor becomes stagnant. Vocalist Mark Solotroff, the de facto leader of this ensemble, delivers vocals that are the polar opposite of what he is known for from Intrinsic Action or Bloodyminded. Rather than manic screams or shouts, he is detached, calm and clinical. Amongst the dirge and darkness constructed from distorted bass and guitar melodies, he clearly reads off scientific terms with an uncomfortable detachment.

On the other half of the record, "Then Window," the group retains the mood but changes the template a bit. Early on, guitar noise dissolves into militant drumming and wobbling bass rattles. The piece transitions from a looser opening into a more tautly structured passage of almost 1970s classic heavy metal, juxtaposing the differing styles. It is depressive and muddy, with an almost shuffling drum groove driving it.

By the middle it becomes a massive ambient expansive, with Solotroff hypnotically repeating the title of the album like some sinister documentary narrator, with the band throwing out expansive, fuzzy noise paired with the guitar melody present since the beginning of the piece. Compared to “Radiate then Recede” it is clearly a more static, frozen piece, but one that captivates all the same.

There are not gigantic strides made stylistically between the first two AoH releases and Ciphers + Axioms, but instead there is a greater cementing of their identity, as well as a more fully realized sound. Unlike most supergroups where each artist is pushing their "thing" harder than the rest, everyone here fits perfectly with one another. They might sound nothing like each other, but parallels are there between AoH and Kevin Martin's God in that respect. A gathering of musicians who mesh seamlessly together, each acting like a force multiplier to the other to result in a dense, heavy, yet thoroughly enthralling album.

By Eric May

Before you sit down to read this review, you’d better get yourself something to eat and maybe an iced cold beverage. I’ll give you a few minutes. Alright, are you ready now? Comfortable? Good. Because Ciphers + Axioms is unlike anything that you’ve probably ever heard before. First of all it is a very thick album, completely filled to the brim with heavy moments of doom and drone and elements of avant-garde that make the experience something of a sort of ritualistic event, perhaps more along the lines of a science experiment. Out of the five band members, there is only who has actually been in other metal acts and that is Will Lindsay (Abigail Williams, Indian, ex-Nachtmystium) who as you can see has a fairly strong repertoire behind him. But Lindsay isn’t lighting up the sky or being forced to call upon the ancient spirits of the Norwegian frost; rather he’s serving as a mere thump for what really seems to collaborate into its own atmosphere. Perhaps there are little tinkerings here and there throughout the two full-bodied tracks, but it’s arguably much different than anything we’ve heard from him before before. Adding to that, Mark Solotroff’s vocal approach also stands out quite heavily on the record, making me think of a cross between Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry and possibly your college science professor. And just in the fashion of Dead Can Dance, there’s a great deal of dark atmosphere on the album that takes place whilst Solotroff rattles on about a slew of subjects with an oddly monotone, yet hypnotic tone. I’ve listened to the record about four times already and can’t really tell you what it is exactly that Mr. Solotroff happens to be singing about, but I can assure you that it most certainly has everything to do with “cyphers… and axioms” as he repeats this phrase several thousand times during the disc’s latter cut “Then Window.” Both of the tracks weigh in at about twenty minutes, but that seems to suffice in lieu of the massive onslaught of warm and silent atmospheres that appear in each. Unlike other albums, Cyphers + Axioms isn’t really about the words that emanate from it; rather it’s the feeling that you get from listening to the piece as a whole. It’s about John McEntire’s drumming and Theo Katsaounis’s percussion elements, it’s about Kenny Rasmussen’s bass licks and it’s definitely most about Will Lindsay’s guitar soundscapes and Mark Solotroff’s vocal instruments. Yes, Anatomy Of Habit would have been just as effective as an instrumental act, but Solotroff really brings a unique way of thinking to the band and I think that’s what’s going to stand out on your first listen. There are a lot of bands that mix doom and drone together, but never like this. It sounds like science, to be honest – which never really had a sound until now I suppose; so one could even dub it “science metal” if they wanted to even though the scientific community would probably frown upon it. It’s warm and rustic, with a sound all its own, that I just don’t think could be easily replicated to the same effect. Every once in a while a band comes around that you can’t really classify and Anatomy Of Habit are just that kind of act. When I first heard the record, I said in the most unprofessional of manners, “this sounds pretty cool” and have been trying to figure out how to formulate that opinion in the most professional way possible. Which obviously isn’t this. But all joking aside, Ciphers + Axioms is the kind of metal album that you get for the metalhead who has everything. It’s not something they’ll expect and I think that fans of drone, post, doom and avant-garde among other non-metal related genres will also find something to like here. So yeah, it does sound pretty cool.