Lucius Fox Honors Jupiter's Densest Moon "Io" with Suitably Heavy Metal (Early Track Stream)
Complexity in music is not always a plus, and having more genre tags can start to be a worrying sign. It turns out that it's pretty easy to make music that's just a frustrating hodgepodge with no payoff. Lucius Fox has long impressed me by avoiding this trap: though their music runs the gamut from stoner prog to math rock to far beyond those realms, they're not just tacking on genres to brag about being six different things at the same time. The Michigan instrumental duo is best understood as a consistently inventive, acrobatic operation that explores whatever side of heavy music they damn well please. Their excellence comes down to songcraft, as trite as that sounds: while their new album Medicea Sidera continues their longstanding relationship with intensely complex riffs and changing their minds seemingly at random, there's an order to their chaos. They tie things together into instantly understandable frameworks -- even if one riff drops into another without warning right as it's getting good, there's always a larger, more interesting pattern at play.
On Medicea Sidera, Lucius Fox goes cosmic, exploring Jupiter and its moons through a series of suites. They explore some unusual textures while doing so, too -- ripping, burbling synths and guitars that seem to bubble and distort against the eardrums. The record ranges from quiet, explorative melodies to utter pandemonium, where drummer Paul Drake Jr. and guitarist/synth operator Jeremy Cronk deliver lightning-quick chaotic interplay. The suite we're premiering today, "Io," leans more into the latter--the two-piece moves with frightening agility, although they do settle into a nice mid-paced groove here and there.
The moon Io is locked in a 1-2-4 orbital resonance pattern with the other moons of Jupiter, and Cronk cites this pattern as an influence on the album along with the characteristics of each moon. I won't purport to know the details, but "Io" certainly rips along, in accordance with its namesake being the fastest-orbiting moon in the resonance pattern. Listen to "Io" below and hit up Wikipedia to read up on the moon while you do so.
