Sound&Shape
Pillars of Creation, the new album from long-running Nashville rockers Sound&Shape, is the sound of a band hitting its stride. On the 12-track set, the trio hones their progressively multihyphenate approach to propulsive rock ’n’ roll to a keen edge. They launch themselves headfirst through a wormhole of gorgeous hooks and meaty riffs, drifting between profound heaviness and cosmic ethereality. The album revels in the possibilities of “rock,” showing off the amorphous genre’s ability to bend in any direction that seasoned players desire. It’s the sound of artists enjoying the process and making something that is joyous and accessible, yet also uncompromising. They’ve been in excellent company, supporting multifaceted hard-rocking heroes King’s X on the road. I caught up with Sound&Shape before the tour pulls into Brooklyn Bowl on Sunday.
“There’s so many different styles that just come together,” says drummer Ben Proctor. “We’re not trying to be this prog-rock band or this ‘whatever’ band. It’s just like, ‘Here’s some music, what do you feel as a drummer when I play this?’ … We put these things together, and that becomes Sound&Shape.”
The result is a melange of big riffs and even bigger drum fills that taps into a punk-rock sense of urgency while delivering on the kind of instrumental excellence that you’d expect from a band that shares stages with alt-prog icons. Songwriter and guitarist Ryan Caudle builds out stories that are humanistic and inquisitive, while maintaining a sense of the phantasmagorical that doesn’t cross into elves ’n’ shit territory. (See: “How to Talk to Ghosts,” a meditation on loneliness in which the emphasis is on emotional impact and not interactions with the supernatural.) Bassist Pat Lowry has a mycelial sense of timing and structure, keeping the groove anchored deep underground while his bandmates explore the surface and the firmament beyond.
“We kind of stretched out a little bit on this one,” says Lowry. “We felt very proud of the last one and wanted to continue that, but [the goal is] always trying to do something you think is really, really great — and then do it better.”
“The last one” was a landmark record for the group, 2022’s Disaster Medicine. For the follow-up, they called on producer-engineer “Greazy Wil” Anspach, a studio wizard who took home Grammys earlier this year for his work on Killer Mike’s Michael. Anspach helped the group pull off a plan to make the whole record sound bigger by streamlining what went into it. The approach seems counterintuitive, but the end product proves how effective it is.
“We wanted the longer songs to be longer,” Caudle says. “We wanted the riffs to be heavier. We wanted the atmospheric stuff to be more atmospheric. I cut down on the amount of layers in terms of guitar stuff, because I wanted what I was actually playing to shine through a little bit more. So I feel like production-wise the recording breathes a little bit more. … There’s a little bit more space for all the articulation, for everything that all of us are playing.”
Sound&Shape handles that articulation like a child with an action figure: constrained only by the limits of their imagination. The stripped-back moments of pop simplicity give the pummeling metal moments the feeling of, say, the swagger of Saxon welded to the smarts of Squeeze. Tunes like the winding, searing and poignant “Is a Wilted Rose Still Red” may be tailor-made for folks who say things like “I’ve been listening to a lot of Blodwyn Pig lately” with a straight face (like yours truly). But the mastery of storytelling and pop songcraft that goes into the tunes means they will engage someone whose response to hearing the name of the aforementioned English progressive blues outfit might be, “What the fuck are you talking about, nerd?”
“I think what really sets us apart, for better or worse, from being a complete progressive-rock band — or a total metal band, or a total ‘this’ band or ‘that’ band,” says Caudle, “[is] we take all those sort of the prog elements or whatever you want to call ’em, but The Beatles are my favorite band ever, and always will be.”
