The gap between creating familiar art that placates an audience and familiar art that challenges your audience is larger than you’d expect. Band have to put in significant work of they hope to convince their fans to follow their music into the relative unknown. If you want them to step outside of their comfort zone and follow your lead, you must earn their trust as a tour guide. If you want to help your listeners open their ears to new ideas, you must show them and your music the respect they deserve.
Suffice to say, Megafauna regularly goes above and beyond in this regard.
The acclaimed Austin, TX hard rock band has won over fans around the world with their penchant for heavy grooves, impressive shredding, and thundering moods. The group’s sixth full-length album, Olympico combines kick-ass psych with prog and metal influences to delirious results. That foundation serves as a launching pad for a series of short stories as songs with lyrics about heady sociocultural topics.
As always, Megafauna’s music begins and ends with the immaculate talents of Dani Neff.
Her impressive fusion of clean, soaring alto vocals with superb guitar wizardry consistently amazes me. The album ripples with fuzzed-out guitars even as the overall production tone remains articulate and resonant. The rhythm section features the hearty bass lines of Will Krause and Zack Humphrey’s ripping drums. The stellar backing guitar and keyboard work of Winston Barrett complement Neff’s own snarling riffs to generate whip-smart hooks that are never showy or flashy.
On “Bi Postal,” dirty distortion delivers a danceable goth-rock romp that would be at home in a campy horror flick. But after a delicious psych breakdown, it metastasizes in the latter third to reach anthemic heights. The title track absolutely crushes from its first notes. It gallops and cavorts like a bucking mustang resisting domestication, right down to the shrieking guitar tone and Neff’s banshee-like pipes.
“Dozer” finds the band channeling its metal sensibilities through a rich, mathy filter.
The tune provides heavy riffs, pounding drum fills, and doubled vocals with a spectral edge – all while a layered arrangement that provides some delightful theatrics. As the album’s penultimate tune, “Lookout Mountain” offers up a classic slow-burn rock experience. Across six-plus minutes, the band steadily increases the volume, pacing, and intensity of the music. This includes massive shredding, piercing vocals, and triumphant drums before arriving on the mountain’s peak.
Megafauna understands the importance of letting songs breathe.
Look, I’ve listened to enough blues-inflected traditional hard rock to understand what the average fan wants from the genre. They want towering piles of riffs, tinnitus-inducing drums, and an overall mood for head-banging. And that’s great! Those things are good and righteous. But sometimes you want more. You need more. You deserve more.
Olympico is both noisy and structured in remarkable ways. The album stands out from color-by-numbers heavy rock by embracing dreamy vibes and syncopated rhythms. It’s one thing to have off-kilter time signatures that showcase your arrangement skills. It’s wholly another to connect them with ‘60s boogie and ‘70s krautrock. The album relies heavily on walking a tightrope between vintage rock energy and focused art-rock intentionality. The music is propulsive and driven, but it also asks you to take some chances and expand your idea of what hard rock could be.
That’s what makes Megafauna different: it’s hard rock with creative ambition.
Ultimately, Olympico shines in the moments when the group can showcase its tight chemistry. Their collective capacity for musical styles and ideas lie far outside the often constrictive nature of their chosen genre. Not everything needs to be a never-ending series of pummeling lead licks and chugging power chords. Yes, Neff and Barrett deliver interlocking melody lines on dueling guitars. And yes, Humphrey and Krause provide ample levels of low-end oomph that will rattle your bowels. But the band revels in its collective ability to know when they should pull back on the cliched elements of hard rock and let other ideas float to the surface.