- Courtesy of the artist
In April 2010, when Cleric released what’s still their only full-length album, Regressions, I abused my privileges as music editor to publish a 1,300-word review I’d written, even though I was pretty sure nobody in Chicago had heard of the band. (They’re not to be confused with the Dallas death-metal outfit of the same name, who were broken up at the time anyway.)
“The music this Philadelphia four-piece plays is a kind of metal the way Lost Highway is a kind of movie,” I wrote. “It’s an elastic tissue of creepy electronic noise and barely human screaming, impregnated with patches of riff-salad grind and hypercube mathcore.”
Today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Allotriophagy” (the word refers to the pathological desire to eat unnatural or improper things), is the first “song” on Regressions. A lot happens in its 19 minutes and change. As I said in 2010, “It opens with knotting and unraveling chugga-chugga, which slows and dilates into sandstorm ambience that’s in turn overtaken by spidery Middle Eastern exotica; sometimes it sounds like two bands overlapping. For its last seven minutes the song has no fixed tempo and only rarely a pulse, maintaining suspense by continually suggesting a resolution that never arrives.”
When I wrote about Cleric, they were planning a tour that would’ve brought them to Chicago. I was very keen to see them execute this intricate, fluid, borderline incomprehensible music onstage, but the tour never happened: in August 2010 the band’s gear was stolen from their van in Philadelphia after a show in Brooklyn, and then their practice space was robbed.
- Courtesy of the artist
- Drummer Larry Kwartowitz and guitarist Matt Hollenberg model the new Cleric T-shirts.
Those blows might’ve finished Cleric off without any help, but it got worse: According to vocalist and keyboardist Nick Shellenberger, one of his bandmates (I’d rather not say which one) suffered a devastating death in the family and went through a detox and breakdown that required him to rebuild his personality practically from scratch. And when the group at last began to recover its momentum, more than two years later, it underwent a painful lineup change, replacing bassist James Lynch with a friend of a friend named Daniel Kennedy.
Those tribulations notwithstanding, Cleric have returned to the studio with Regressions producer Colin Marston to work on a compilation of music they’ve written for films over the past three years. They’re in preproduction on a new album, and material from it has already appeared in their live set. They’re also finally hitting the road: tonight at the Empty Bottle, Cleric play their first Chicago show since 2008 (to the best of Shellenberger’s recollection) on their first proper tour in almost ten years. Because they’re opening for Yamantaka//Sonic Titan and Electric Hawk on a Tuesday night, they go on early, at 9:30 PM. No fooling.
You can stream “Allotriophagy” below. By the end of the track, you may curious to see what listening to 76 minutes of Cleric all at once will do to your brain. Just let the music run, and the whole album will play.