Last year, Tony Jacome of Canadian sludge metal/noise rock trio Shallow North Dakota passed away at age 45 after a battle with cancer, and now 29 bands have come together for a tribute album, Rhino Body Lover: A Tribute to Shallow North Dakota, out today on Learning Curve Records and No List Records. It features Fuck The Facts, Bleeding Out, Throat, BEDTIMEMAGIC, Fashion Week, Worse, Them Teeth, SIANspheric, adolyne, Swarm of Spheres, fiftywatthead, Bison, Drug Sauna, The Swine, Intercourse, Cell Press, Naw, Evil Age, Not Of, and more. The description (written by John Crossingham from Not Of) reads:
There’s a predictable thing that happens when bands of a similar sound first get together. They talk about other bands. Specifically, what inspired them. What blew their minds. What got them believing that there was a place for a sound like theirs.
You go into those conversations expecting to hear certain names. The big ones. The canon. The touchstones. That’s all well and good. But what really hits home is the moment when you find out that a band that felt like your own private discovery is just as special in someone else’s heart as well. And hold on, that person knows about them, too. And that one …
For many of us in the noise/sludge/heavy music scene, that band is Shallow North Dakota. Despite a relatively slim recorded output through the 90s, capped by a self-released double LP swan song in 2004 that was barely promoted and never toured, this trio left behind a Velvet Underground-sized impression on those who heard them.
Part of that was their monolithic volume, a seismically registering force that dealt cannon blows to anything not welded in place. But more significant was their inversion of the classic power trio format. The axemen—guitarist Dan Dunham and bassist Michael ‘Biff’ Young—neither pounced nor preened. Instead, they faced inward, eyes trained deeply on the fulcrum of the group’s might and character. Drummer and vocalist Tony Jacome. With Jacome acting as the accelerant, the three men spat particles of ionized sound into their own core—a reactor sealed by focus, bearing the brunt of their own nuclear force. Sound bonding and breaking. Over and over.
Near the start of this year, it was announced that Jacome had pancreatic cancer. By the end of September, he was gone. In the months between, many musicians found themselves engaged in that conversation all over again, but this time with an added dimension. The true breadth of Shallow North Dakota’s influence seeped to the surface, rapidly and passionately. Still somewhat secret, but now known. And with all of this knowledge, came a sense of urgency to cement this shared experience.
That’s what Rhino Body Lover: A Tribute to Shallow North Dakota is. This 29-song tribute covers the majority of the band’s catalogue—a honouring of the fact that if the SND catalogue was a touch slim, that was only because it was fat free. Every tune had its advocate—and this advocacy came from far and wide. From Finland’s Throat to Vancouver’s Bison, Montreal’s The Great Sabatini to Minneapolis’ Asbestos Worker and Texas’ Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the assembled bands reflect the expansive respect the band still commands to this day.