Bandcamp The title is a riddle, and an old one. Eternity begins with it, time ends with it, every end begins with it and every place ends with it. The answer is the letter E, which is a very long way to go for a joke, and a band willing to go that far for a joke is usually worth five minutes of your time. Johnny Tirade, billed in full as Johnny Tirade and The Circle of Futures Past, give you thirty-two of them.
What they do not give you is a genre. “Hey Man” opens as sludge with hardcore in its legs, all abrupt tempo changes and a drum kit recorded so openly you can hear the room around it. “Lizard Johnny” trades a low, resonant spoken verse against genuinely unhinged screams in the chorus, closer to noise rock than to anything the Monster Magnet comparison in their own press would suggest. Then “American Dream” arrives, two minutes and sixteen seconds of crossover thrash, and is over before you have adjusted. It is also the only track where you can hear a limiter working, which is telling: the rest of this record has been left alone.
That restraint is the best decision on the EP. There is real dynamic range here, drums with a wooden thump instead of a synthetic click, cymbals that decay rather than hiss, fuzz thick enough to feel like weather while the riffs stay articulate underneath it. It sounds like a band playing in a room, because that is what it is.
“Memory Hole” is why the record exists. Seventeen minutes, and it uses them: dry, close-miked spoken monologues against reverb-drowned growls, long ambient stretches where nothing much happens on purpose, a tempo that keeps dragging its feet, and then a saxophone and piano outro that has no business working as well as it does. It is funeral doom, sludge and something closer to film score, and it is the one piece here where the patience is the point rather than a side effect. Whether you have the attention for it is a fair question. They clearly did.
The closer, “Improv”, is a solo acoustic guitar and nothing else. No drums, no bass, no voice, the low end carried entirely on the wound strings, every fret squeak intact. After the preceding half hour it reads less like a bonus track than like someone putting the lights out.
The reservations are the ones sprawl brings with it. In the heaviest eruptions the low-mid density swallows the middle of the picture, and “American Dream” sits at odds with everything around it, both in length and in how hard it has been squeezed. Five tracks that behave like five different bands is a lot to ask of a debut-length release, and the seventeen-minute centrepiece means the EP effectively has one long song and four fragments orbiting it. That is a structure, but it is a precarious one.
Take it as a statement of range from a band who would rather overreach than repeat themselves, and go to “Memory Hole” first. The riddle in the title has one answer. The record has considerably more.
The whole thing has been left largely uncompressed, and that is the first thing you notice: real dynamic range, drums recorded openly enough that you hear the room, a kick with a wooden thump rather than a synthetic click, and cymbals that decay instead of hissing. The guitars carry a thick, grainy fuzz that pushes hard in the lower middle while the riffs stay surprisingly articulate underneath it, and the vocals cut through on raw midrange presence rather than on boosted highs, switching between dry spoken passages and hoarse shouting. The seventeen-minute centrepiece is the clearest example, moving from close-miked monologues to enormous reverb-soaked walls and ending on saxophone and piano without the level ever being forced. Two costs: in the heaviest passages the low-mid density covers the middle of the picture, and the one short, fast track has audibly been squeezed by a limiter in a way nothing else here has.
Standout tracks: Memory Hole, Lizard Johnny
