Chevelle's 1999 debut delighted in darkening the spaces between quiet and jagged scrawl.
Peter Loeffler's guitar periodically tore away from the rhythm section's steadying wires, effectively lessening the brotherly trio's reliance on old
Tool albums for influence and pace. Then the boys signed with Epic, which naturally trashed the majority of the interesting noise in favor of amplifying
Chevelle's
Tool-light tendencies. Hit singles followed ("The Red," "Send the Pain Below"), so you can't fully fault the label. But it's that same sound trudging determinedly through
This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In). "Get Some" and "Vitamin R (Leading Us Along)" switch on a gravelly guitar conveyor, powering it with plodding bass and percussion, and
Loeffler sings with hurt urgency over it, sounding exactly -- unbelievably -- like
Maynard Keenan. Typical phrases singe the ends of his wrangling power-chord punctuations -- "A black out/Touching new life"; "The panic makes remorse." The songs are strong dynamically, but sound predetermined -- they don't separate from the general loud rock malaise. The same goes for the majority of
This Type of Thinking. "Panic Prone" does revisit the softer contours of "Send the Pain," and "Another Know It All" lets the rhythm section mix it up a little, even if it just makes
Chevelle sound like
Korn. But for the most part -- from "The Clincher" through "Emotional Drought" --
This Type of Thinking is flatly mixed, lost in depression, and obsessed with rewriting "Sober" for a new generation of lank-haired misunderstoods. [
This Type of Thinking was released on LP in 2017.] ~ Johnny Loftus