“Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, I got to think about it,” says the voice at the beginning of “Fruitloopville,” the opener to noise-rock band Grizzlor’s latest release and its first full-length album, Destructoid. The voice is lazy and comical, and doesn’t prepare you for the heaviness that follows. The riff that drives the song is just three notes in chromatic descending order, but it’s more than enough. It comes down like an anvil, again and again, through the singer’s snarling vocals, and keeps going underneath a guitar solo that ladles out the sludge by the gallon.
It’s a fitting introduction to the rest of Destructoid, which finds one of New Haven’s hardest bands digging further into the sound it developed three years ago — one that marries thick slabs of noise with a wicked sense of humor.
Lyrically, that Grizzlor’s collective tongue is half-planted in its cheek is pretty apparent starting with the name of the band, which sounds fairly menacing until you remember that Grizzlor is a character in the He Man toy line and cartoon from the 1980s, an over-the-top campy villain often played for laughs, who fears nothing but his own reflection. And even if you don’t know that, the space-opera album art clues you in. Grizzlor, in short, is going for fun, though it’s fun of a simultaneously self-loathing and misanthropic kind.
Grizzlor.
And it’s often surprisingly relatable. “Every time I turn around there’s someone in my way. / Every time I drive around there’s someone in my way,” singer and guitarist Victor Dowgiallo howls. “You would think that the state was evacuating / When you’re driving to work.” Who hasn’t had these kinds of thoughts when stuck in traffic for the third time in a day? “Wade’s Notes,” meanwhile, plays into people’s worst fears about what their therapist might really be thinking: “Welcome to your appointment. / Come in and take a seat, please. / That’s a nine thousand dollar couch / So don’t scuff it.” And then there’s the song about tooth pain.
Musically, however, Grizzlor is not playing around. On Destructoid, Dowgiallo, drummer John Mohr, and a bassist billed solely as Jon make for a first-rate power trio. “Tooth Pain” finds the band in fine punk form, charging ahead and coming to dead stops for Dowgiallo to spit words through the gaps in the music. On the album’s closer, “Quit and Die,” the band sounds huge as Dowgiallo lacerates the microphone with obscenities.
But “House in the Woods” goes for more space in the sound. Mohr lays down a beat with silence between his mammoth hits that you can drive a truck through, which makes the riffs and staggering fills at the ends of the phrases that much bigger. And when Dowgiallo unleashes a guitar solo near the upper range of his instrument, there’s plenty of room for him to explore. The effect at the end is a real sense of mayhem, of everything coming apart. “Miserable Jerk” finds Dowgiallo choking over a stomping, demented waltz that opens out into a squall of noise that doesn’t let up until the last possible second.
Despite the theme repeated throughout Destructoid that Dowgiallo just wants to left alone a lot of the time, Grizzlor thankfully is not following through on that promise. The band is slated to appear Sept. 23 at Three Sheets on Elm Street, sharing a bill with fellow New Haven heavies Intercourse. Destructoid suggests that three years in, Grizzlor is just getting started.
Grizzlor and Intercourse play at Three Sheets, 372 Elm St., on Sept. 23, 9 p.m. Admission is free.
