Great Falls

Great Falls from Seattle, WA

Read any article or comment thread about the Seattle outfit GREAT FALLS and you're likely to see descriptors like cathartic, heavy, crushing, and unhinged. Maybe even psychotic… And sure, those are all apt. For over a decade, founding members vocalist/guitarist Demian Johnston and bassist Shane Mehling (who also played together in the early-2000s noisecore band Playing Enemy and the experimental duo Hemingway) has honed their sludgy, overwhelmingly intense brand of heaviness, punctuated by delectably discordant riffs, terrifyingly low, thwacking bass lines, and mesmerizingly tight percussion. In the live setting, too, they’re notorious for a stage presence that is so aggressively confrontational and menacing that Mehling once broke his own arm mid-set.

But the most striking aspect of GREAT FALLS, setting them apart from the murky sea of sludge metal and AmRep-inspired noise-rock bands, is their ability to paint a deeply, utterly human story through an all-out assault on the senses: an art the band has perfected on Objects Without Pain, their first LP featuring drummer Nickolis Parks (Gaytheist, Bastard Feast), who joined the band prior to the release of their exhilarating, cacophonous, Funny What Survives EP.