The shredders of Tomb Mold seem intent on being anything but straight-ahead death-metal musicians. Since establishing their main outfit as one of the beastliest OSDM groups in recent memory, each member has stretched their tentacles further outward. In Dream Unending, guitarist Derrick Vella has embraced heavenly post-rock guitar tones and slowed his riffs to a luminescent crawl, while Tomb Mold’s latest album, The Enduring Spirit, is less a sludgy beatdown than a skyward journey into chorus-pedal-fueled prog. Payson Power and Max Klebanoff, now two EPs into their Daydream Plus side project, have ditched the distortion and devil horns altogether for a breezy fusion of smooth jazz and math rock.
If Tomb Mold have been unfairly maligned for dressing like nerds, Daydream Plus practically dare the haters to come after their lunch money. With artwork straight out of an old city-pop record and riffs so smooth you can practically hear the laughter erupting between takes, the whole project feels like an inside joke being wheeled out to the public just to see if it has legs. If the duo’s crisp 2022 EP set the tone, their follow-up, Escape at Your Own Pace, pushes their sound further, adding a new bassist and guitarist to the mix and bringing in the slightest of metal touchstones to create a silly yet satisfyingly light experiment.
Once again clocking in under 15 minutes, Escape at Your Own Pace briskly powers through its four short songs, reveling in its low-key vibe. Though the artwork may call back to jazz-fusion albums from the likes of Masayoshi Takanaka and Casiopea, the closer Japanese comparison would be the clean guitar tones of bands like toe and tricot, with Payson fluttering his way through one sweetly melancholic riff after another. “Gently Technical” opens the EP on a surfer’s high, its winsome melody building to a finale laden with show-offy finger taps and cheeky, wind-swept chimes. “Neighborhood Watch” makes the metal connection even more apparent, opening on a blast-beat run from Klebanoff before settling into its sunny groove, with Power firing off the occasional screeching pinch harmonic for good measure. The flourishes are integrated so subtly that if you didn’t know these guys were metalheads in their day jobs, you might miss it entirely.
The EP’s remaining half goes down just as easy, even if the tracks are mellow to a fault. “Hourglass” phases through one anime-credits-ready riff after another without offering much in the way of a build, while “Try to Relax” takes its own advice a little too much to heart, cruising on a slow, dreamy riff that effectively puts the EP to bed. The project’s greatest achievement is in the way it continues to widen Tomb Mold’s musical universe. As each member has experimented with brighter tones, it feels like brutality is becoming less central to what this group is trying to achieve. Turns out that once you strip away the monstrous riffs, torrential drums, and imagery of unholy interstellar oblivion, Tomb Mold might actually just be beach-blanket music in disguise.
