Album Review: Tardigrade Inferno - Hush

Hmm.  Here we are, faced with Tardigrade Inferno’s new record Hush, their third full-length since their debut effort in 2019.  And while we are normally loathe to compare albums by different artists directly, it’s hard not to look back a week in time at Rob Zombie’s The Great Satan and remark: “this is what that should have been.”

Such a casual comparison is patently lazy, but it paints the necessary framework of how Hush should be viewed.  Tardigrade Inferno describe themselves as ‘dark cabaret metal,’ and while metal needs another subgenre like it needs a second coming of nu-metal, the epithet is essentially correct.  

By now the reader has put the pieces together - Tardigrade Inferno, originally hailing from St. Petersburg, Russia, have conjured the kind of dark carnival that Rob Zombie blazed the path for with such aplomb some twenty-five-plus years ago (and yes, I am purposefully ignoring the Insane Clown Posse, thankyouverymuch.)

Where TI (which we’ll abbreviate from here forward,) advances the cause is in their dedication to crafting an image within the music.  It’s more rare than ever to listen to a new record, particularly in the digital age without the benefit of liner notes, and feel swept into the proceedings in a tangible way; but close your eyes and it’s easy from the first strains of “The Final Show,” the album’s introductory cut, to feel the harrowing sunset over the abandoned amusement park, that ethereal transition as bright day gives way to the machinations of haunted night, and the hidden, clanking mechanics of the monsters of the midway (not to be confused with the Chicago Bears,) come rusting to life.

An overly dramatic description? Sure.  But also the point.  That’s the kind of twisted, tormented reality that TI presents with skill and conviction, the kind of the layered scenery it deliriously and thoroughly chews on with a broken-glass smile, daring you take the journey alongside.

The linchpin of the entire proceeding is vocalist Darya Rorria, who can vacillate skillfully between teasing laugh and brooding terror as easily as she breathes.  She tempts like a siren, appealing to your inner evils with a saccharine sweetness that entices and disarms, even as she openly sings about cannibalism on tracks like “Goor.”  

There’s an inherent sultriness to both Rorria’s performance and the rhythmic, heavy undulations of the music as a whole that separates TI’s brand of dark metal from their contemporaries.  It’s a rare intersection of roads when a band can be both as menacingly descriptive as Slayer, as literally brooding as Type O Negative and as playfully dangerous as 6:33, but that’s where Hush lands. (For Deep Purple fans out there, you’re going to be disappointed - there is no cover of DP’s 1968 classic of the same name.  Though TI should absolutely give it a shot.)

Which is not to say that TI sounds quite like any of those three in whole - rather, their music takes on, at the risk of being redundant, the affect of a dark cabaret, something like an adult version of the mysterious carnival from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Whether the long-nailed threat of a faux whimsical tune like “Deadly Fairytales,” or the out-and-out, fiery adrenaline of “Hide’n’Seek” or the title track, Hush comes at the listener with a lot of different attractions to lure every taste.

For all the subtle variations in style, there is a thematic consistency to Hush that ties the entire effort together - it attempts to give a window to the demons within, a catharsis to all the greedy, less-than-socially-acceptable thoughts we’ve ever had.  And with Rorria at the helm, blood and darkness and evil never sounded so sexy.  Or, with apologies to classic romps like “Dragula,” so fun.

A small splash of cold water - there are gaps in the proceedings.  Cuts like “Dead Fish Smile” and “I.C.D.” get lost in their own message and founder about too much, subtracting from the album’s overall flow.  There’s nobility in the attempt of these songs, but the band leans hard into their heavier side for them both, and it subtracts from their demonstrable versatility.  And “Goor,” well…as fun as it is, it is about cannibalism or something like it, so that’ll be a tougher pill for listeners who prefer something slightly more metaphoric.

That said - it’s been a long time since there was a metal album that drew the listener into its world like this - that so successfully captured the imagination and took the beholder out of their own reality and into the one the band creates.  If music is an escapist activity designed to make us either channel our troubles or forget them, then Tardigrade Inferno’s Hush is a pure example of that escapism.