What Have I Been Listening To?

Makari's Wave Machine Blends A Number of Influences For A Musically Dense Album That Kicks Ass

I have a number of more serious pieces working, never fear, but I have been really fucking grooving to this album lately and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. Believe it or not I was a culture writer long before I was a political writer. Go figure.

While I wont be revealing my extensive and rigorous podcast regimen, that’s a trade secret, there’s a particular album I’ve been greatly enjoying and I wanted to share.
This isn’t gonna be a political one so, y’know, don’t expect that.

Wave Machine (2024) is an album that is packed to the brim with sound. The mix is full of raging drums, a loud chugging bass, overdriven guitars and a loud and aggressive vocal stack. While occasionally the mix comes out the other side too muddy or chaotic to catch the finer details, the ultimate effect of this is an album with a lot of sonic horsepower that avoids being single-minded. The progression through the album is incredibly dynamic, bringing new sounds and tricks to each song that still build off of and engage with the things you’ve already heard. The album is diverse, but still very cohesive with a sonic and emotional flow that benefits from a well-considered track order. Throughout the album, there is a high level of artistry in both writing and playing on display. All the musicians get their chance to show off a bit without breaking out from the more cohesive sound of the ensemble and the lyrics are very thoughtful; the sonic qualities and the lyrical content work together to create a paranoid, driving and intense soundscape that runs the emotional gamut. The topics at hand for many of these songs is not new, many are about the reliable themes of loss and heartbreak, but there’s a decidedly manic and disconnection from conventional feeling that elevates it to a psychologically rich and terrifying place.

The opening track, Eternity Leave, is a real tour de force for the album, putting its rawest and sharpest qualities at front view. It is maybe the most driving song with a rhythm section like a runaway freight train, demanding all the other sounds keep the fuck up. The bass in particular is heavy and plodding but never stops being the center of the energy, never falling behind or becoming subservient in the mix. Even when the song slows down for a moment or trims down the intensity, that bass and those drums never stop moving. It is the songs vocals that are forced to stay caught up, chasing down the rest of the song and screaming to keep pace, daring its subject to even try and meet them where they’re at.

The sharp and punchy pronouncements of grief, resignation and manic spiral turn a spiteful song about detaching from someone into a frantic desperation to get away and lose yourself to madness. The choral refrain of “Don’t know what to tell you” rings off the final spiteful shots of love lost.

Contigo, maybe my favorite entry on the album, features relatively restrained verses that break out into these gorgeous, soaring choruses. The rhythm section holds down the whole song, opening with a grooving melody that serves as the backbone of the song with the guitar and vocals dancing overtop. The back and forth is reminiscent of a sensual dance, pushing and pulling and swirling like two partners around one another The verses maintain this playful back and forth before entering these absolutely glorious choruses where the countermelody dissolves and still atop that steady rhythm, rises into a grand crescendo before dissolving into that back and forth again. The chorus vocal line makes heavy use of a really densely layered harmony stack that heightens a very passionate performance in the belting vocal lines that jump around in style with near effortlessness. The bridge takes a bit of a lighter hand with plucking guitars and these rolling drums before breaking back out into a modified chorus that takes the volume, intensity and pitch to new heights. The whole song winks out on a lone piano like a stolen breath and its a really full emotional journey.

The song’s titular lyric shows up in a charmingly earnest and dorky chorus:

I learned a Spanish phrase
To remind me of those days
It wеnt something like, "Contigo siemprе"
I never wanted something so bad
I never wanted something so bad
Until I saw you there, the sunlight dripping from your hair

The line reads a bit clumsily and doesn’t fit so intuitively into the rhythm, but it wears its feeling on its sleeve, unbothered by the bit of silliness and follows it up with one of my favorite bits of imagery on the album with overwhelming desire framed in the sun-drenched hair of the love pined for. This sort of earnest goofiness makes the occasional appearance through the album and serves as a nice emotional counterweight to some of its bleaker moments, lending a sincerity to the whole project.

One of this album’s more impressive qualities is that as you go farther in, it continues to offer you new sounds while continuing to build on existing themes. The sonic layers of Contigo’s chorus becomes the centerpiece of the third song, Gold Palace Kingdom. By far the gentlest of the opening numbers, it showcases the final archetype that the album has to offer. Yes, each song is fairly sonically unique, but the opening three set a general tone and form for what the album has on offer broadly.

Whereas Contigo or Eternity Leave are these driving and heavy sounds, Gold Palace Kingdom is light and floating, soaring even. That is not to say that the ferocity of the track is any lesser, but it is applied quite differently. The bass is sitting at a higher register, the drums take a lighter touch, the guitar is far more twinkling and the punchy staccato of the vocal work gives way to a more flowing and relaxed style. This sound change matches the content well. The singer opines for (another incredibly compelling image) the serene and right state of tranquility in the Gold Palace Kingdom, a heavenly locale where love and peace might flourish far away from the messy and brutal reality of loss and life.

I really hope that someday I will see you there
The golden palace floating in the air
I really wish that someday you'll say
"The trick in life is not to rush
You'll feel so light weighed down by love"

Closer and Breakers, the two least interesting entries for my money, are on the poppiest tracks with mixes more focused on the whinging guitar line and bouncing vocal harmonies. These songs are perfectly fine, preformed very well with solid execution even if I am not so high on them creatively. The song writing is still fairly strong, though I can’t help but feel these entries would have fit better on a different album more attuned to their sensibilities. I’m quite sure people less curmudgeonly than myself would enjoy them more, but I was eager to get back to the heavier, gnarlier and more sonically strange entries that shoot back up in the back-half.

Ask and you shall receive:

Cheers (to the end) and Deteriorate are moody, rhythm driven songs that reach back into the bag of production tricks. The guitar work on Cheers does make use of the tone set on Closer, but puts it in more direct competition with a driving drum kit and rendering it less a prevailing melody and more a shimmering quality that brings to mind shooting stars or the twirling lights of aurora borealis. This sense carries to Deteriorate where that wonderment is carried to a darker place. The layered vocals and the echoing drums harness a dark drive that eventually fades into these screaming choruses that layer and repeat until eventually it all dies and dies away.

Soulstealer splits the middle between the albums’ moodier tendencies and its more pop-punk inclinations, creating a familiar song about heartbreak and wrath that dives into more brutal and harsh sonic textures for its driving choruses. I have often referred to the work of Three Days Grace as embodying a spirit of being so sad you’re freaking pissed and so freaking pissed you’re sad; Soulstealer embodies that attitude fully. The whole song does build up to a crescendo where the singer rips out one last reprisal on the chorus and takes it to a truly impressive height as his gravelly yell proves itself unrestrained.

While Tidal Wave is definitely a poppier entry, I found it to be more balanced and dynamic than Closer or Breakers, but ultimately I don’t have all that much to say about it. It sounds good! Has solid structure, whatever.

The last two songs: Smoke and And Now We Sleep In The Endless Ocean are in stiff competition with the top three for my absolute favorites. That shimmering guitar sound opens Smoke up alongside that vocal layering that has served this album so well, building up to a comparatively simple but incredibly executed push-and-pull of volume and intensity from verse to chorus. The bass and the drum tracks serve as a driving engine that stages the vocal performance for a lonely and wandering melody that binds itself to the rhythm for the band’s characteristically energetic choruses. While most of these songs feature a breakdown section of some kind, Smoke’s is potentially my favorite, dying out to just the twinkling guitar, then the vocal line builds its own sound, then backed by the rolling drums before turning into these screeching harmonies that break it all back open to a chorus reprisal. So damn good. It’s one of those moves that deployed fairly routinely song to song, but is done so with enough ornamental difference and tact that it never loses its punch, even some 100 odd listens in.

And Now We Sleep In Endless Ocean is arguably the most unique song, going all in on the sonic register of dreams, first floating and then soaring through fantasy. The drums, no less driving, take a gentler tone using these delicate tom rolls that maintain the delicate dream. while not absent of structure, the formula of lulling verses and raging choruses is mostly pushed away in favor of maintaining a peaceful and tranquil vibe that changes not in intensity, but in focus, moving from a distant daydream and into a more narrow and pointed expression desire. It’s a beautiful number that serves as a wonderful emotional cooldown from the heights of rage, anguish and passion that songs like Contigo or Soulstealer work like hell to build. Not a let down in terms of quality, but a gentle emotional draw down into a place of tranquility that the album had not yet gone.


All in all, I am a huge fan of this album. I’m not one for number reviews, I find them to be glib and don’t often reflect the actual thoughts, but to give some quantifiable ranking I’ll say that in my month’s most listened songs, this album is responsible for 8 of the top 10

With dynamic sounds, some really tight and thoughtful production work and some really incredible musicianship on display, Wave Machine is going in my personal pantheon of favorite albums and Makari is a band I’ll be keeping my eye on for quite some time. It’s the kind of album that makes you tell the Boomers and Xers who wont shut up about Rock being dead to go fuck themselves.