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20:16 · 3,441 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The headline arithmetic: 25 albums in just over a decade, an average of 2.27 a year, which puts their hundredth record somewhere around 2056.
▶ 00:00:33
- The recommended entry points are named outright: Nonagon Infinity, I'm in Your Mind Fuzz and Polygondwanaland, with Flying Microtonal Banana if you want the odd one.
▶ 00:01:11
- Gumboot Soup is the exception that proves their method. It is built from songs that did not fit the other four albums of 2017, so the absence of a concept is the concept.
▶ 00:01:48
- The one real gap was 481 days without a release, the longest since their 2012 debut, and they spent it touring and reissuing rather than resting.
▶ 00:02:51
- Infest the Rat's Nest, their full thrash metal record, was made by only three of the usual seven, and its climate-fiction story of humanity fleeing a catastrophic super bug was written before the pandemic.
▶ 00:04:28
- Polygondwanaland, released free for anyone to press and sell, led to Bootlegger, a program inviting fans to download, manufacture and sell the band's live recordings, on the condition that some copies come back to the band's store.
▶ 00:05:43
- Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava was recorded in a week with nothing prepared. Each day had a given word, tempo and musical scale, and the first letters of the title's words are the scales used.
▶ 00:10:58
- Changes took them longer than any other record because of its rule: the tracks alternate between two keys, which gives them 14 chords instead of seven and forces every note to be chosen so the shift still sounds right.
▶ 00:13:08
- The Silver Cord came from the drummer buying an electronic kit, after which the band moved to synth-based sound entirely, and it exists in both a 28-minute version and an 88-minute extended one split across two discs.
▶ 00:18:03
- The post-2017 shortlist the video lands on is Ice Death, PetroDragonic Apocalypse and Omnium Gatherum, which it treats as the proof that the jam-band era is their strongest stretch.
▶ 00:19:20