Since Mamaleek started releasing music in 2008, the band has slyly, playfully engaged the ethos and aesthetics of black metal. Like numerous underground black metal bands, very little is known about the people involved in Mamaleek. The founding and continuous members are alleged to be brothers, perhaps of Middle-Eastern ethnicity (the band’s name is an anglicized version of an Egyptian Arabic word for slave, and some of the music has been recorded in Beirut); but they have never publicized their names, and at many of their rare live gigs, the band has appeared hooded or veiled. Their records have combined the scabrous vocals, dissonant guitar playing and ominous atmospheres of black metal with harsh noise, free jazz and hip hop electronics,…
…and the occasional vocal or instrumental nod to North Africa or the Levant. Mamaleek’s work has often been as mystifying as it has been challenging, and angry. Always angry.
Come & See is still angry, but the record is stylistically a bit easier to contend with than its predecessors. Come & See was recorded with a full band (and Mamaleek has recently gigged in a four-piece configuration). That change seems to have had tangible effects on the songs. Their dominant textures are still harsh and confrontational, vocals are still howled and shouted. But there are riffs. There are melodic structures. You catch yourself nodding and swaying. Those may not be affirming gestures—they are more a set of responses prompted by the music’s sheer force. But this LP feels more sonically legible. It’s nearly a variety of rock music. It’s also a terrific record.
It’s hard to tell if the songs are similarly interested in thematic legibility. The band has refused to share lyrics to Come & See, and the vocal style denies easy access to words, let alone meaning. The album’s title is also hard to read clearly: it’s ambiguously pitched between invitation and imperative. The cover art is more immediate. It implies an act of seeing, of looking. A person’s shadow falls across a photograph, depicting the façade of an industrially scaled housing tower. It’s an imposing image, and the building casts its own imposing shadow. It’s one of the massive blocks of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes, an interlinked complex of projects, infamously besieged by poverty, crime, neglect and racist urban policy. Most of the project was bulldozed in 2011. The history is harder to raze and cover over. Some song titles from the record are suggestive: “Whites of the Eyes (Cowards),” “Elsewhere,” “Street Nurse” and inevitably, “Cabrini-Green.”
Musically, the record evokes the burly, sludgy, punky metal of Cower (see especially their side of the excellent split LP with Thou from 2011); the weird tunings and unpredictable rock power of Sonic Youth, c. 1985; the spiky post-punk of No Wave bands. But those points of comparison fail to capture or do justice to Mamaleek’s idiosyncrasies and intensities. The churning rage of the music often turns on a dime, to jazzy skronk (see the last minutes of “Eating Unblessed Meat”) or to atonal “post-rock” expanses (as in the second half of “Cabrini-Green”). All of the volatility, the bummed feelings and musical violence accumulate and empty into album closer, “We Hang Because We Must.” The title is telling. Can you hang, with the song’s hideous sounds and wailing, with its registration of profound rage? Maybe you should try. The song and the record are remarkable, tunes for our bound-up, socially distanced times. They seek to break through, to an elsewhere. Perhaps less lonely, where the title’s first-person inclusive can become a social real. — dusted