Proving that rock music can be big and clever rather than resorting to being merely loud and cliched, “Cardboard Hand Me Downs” is a smart sonic cookie. What ScreamingMechanicalBrain has done here is think laterally… or perhaps vertically…or more deeply…I’m not sure, but the result is a song that, rather than relying on more obvious elements such as volume and velocity and an undignified race for the finishing line, it instead struts and strides slowly and seductively through the musical landscape with real presence and absolute power.
Perhaps, when you are no longer worrying about how quickly you can travel and how impressive you can make the pace of the song look, you have the chance to think in other dimensions, and so “Cardboard Hand Me Downs” is a colossal affair, big and wide and deep and multi-dimensional, moving at almost glacial speed and changing whole musical landscapes as it scours passed.
It is a long song, too, but that just allows it to move even more coolly, cautiously, and in more calculated ways, giving itself time to build its momentum and internal drive, one that is more about torque and power than pace and propulsion.
The result is the biggest slab of rock music you will have heard in a long time. It has more in common with the forces of plate tectonic theory or glacial erosion than the normal patterns of music. It’s so big, so complex, so ornate—it feels as if it should have its own branch of astrophysics dedicated to studying it.
