I'm a huge fan of Tomahawk, even though I find the quality of their albums (and tours) highly variable. They don't mind experimenting with rock, and deliberately irritating crowds, and I love that. I always felt they filled a bit of the rock/pop hole that Patton must have been missing after Faith No More and Mr. Bungle.
"Anonymous" is their third album, but it's a bit of a surprise. Duane Denison (main composer, guitarist) researched Native American music while on tour and while he found the melodies interesting, he was disappointed in the lack of powerful recordings of the anonymous songs. His ideal of the music was that it should be powerful, primal, so he recorded an album of the songs with a rock band.
Given most of the source material is minor key, with chopped/prog-like rhythms, how could this not possibly be awesome?
The result is strange. The melodies and rhythms are interesting, but arguably each song is a little monotonous. Usually consisting of one riff, played over and over, with varying levels of power. Much of the album sounds like a band jamming on ideas, and I suspect it is mostly just that: here is a melody, let's rock it out until we get bored.
It's unclear if the songs with lyrics had the words sourced from the same places as the melodies, but given the words are in English that seems unlikely. I'm not sure, given how faithful they are with the melodies, what North America's first people's would think of the liberties taken with the songs. The instrumental songs include Patton simply singing "hey-ho" to the guitar's melody, and I can only assume these are more traditional.
I have to admit I was a bit disappointed the first few listens, and I don't play this album much, but this recent listen was great... as background. I know when listened on headphones, my attention quickly wanders.
Perhaps a few more liberties should have been taken with the songs? Mixing various melodies together into more interesting songs? Added some interesting counter melodies? But that doesn't fit the concept, and on this album the concept is clearly the point.
It's an interesting experiment to record the songs this way, and from that perspective it's a huge success, but as a rock record it fails.
5/10
