Puscifer Returns With Must Hear Complex Rocker “Existential Reckoning” (ALBUM REVIEW)

Puscifer has always been the hardest of Maynard James Keenan’s nuts to crack.

It’s a joke, but it’s completely serious. It’s a solo project, but it’s a group effort. It’s different from any of his other works, but it’s the same.

Dichotomy and duality have always been part of the game when it comes to Keenan’s works, so I suppose, in a way, Puscifer makes the most sense. Call it his unleashed id, a place where he can get as weird as he wants, away from the dueling spotlights of Tool and A Perfect Circle. But even that doesn’t seem completely right. Especially on Existential Reckoning.

While originally billed as a revolving door project of Keenan and his closest artistic cohorts and compatriots, the line up for the band has solidified over the years in the form of its core membership of Keenan on vocals, Mat Mitchell on guitar, bass, and keys, and Carina Round on vocals and keys. While still ostensibly the brainchild of and primarily driven by Keenan’s musical sensibilities, the forming of this solid core has allowed Puscifer to become, like Keenan’s other projects, something far greater than the sum of its parts.

They’re joined this time by Failure’s Greg Edwards, prolific studio drummer Gunnar Olsen, and drummer Sarah Jones of postpunk new wave band NYPC. The level of talent found on Existential Reckoning is astounding, creating dense layers of sound that are as infectious as they are haunting. This album feels like the most fully formed and actualized release in the band’s strange history. Picking up largely where 2015’s Money Shot left off, both sonically and narratively, Existential Reckoning is a pulse thumping return for this bizarre electropop trio (and friends). They are now far, far more than just Keenan’s weird side project. Puscifer has come into their own.

This is apparent from the opening moments of the album’s opener, “Bread and Circus.” Starting with a simple keyboard-driven riff and modulation, the tone is immediately set for the sonic themes prevalent throughout the whole of Existential Reckoning. “Here we are in the middle of/our existential/reckoning,” intones Keenan. Lyrically, Keenan’s lyrics remain intriguingly impenetrable and obscured. Supposedly, there’s a narrative theme to be found here dealing with alien abduction and the search for greater meaning and purpose.

It’s easy, if perhaps not as fun, to ignore the bits about aliens, however, to focus on the meaning and purpose. That’s been a recurrent theme throughout Keenan’s lyrical career, though here he seems to be calling from the same space that occupied much of A Perfect Circle’s Eat the Elephant and Tool’s Fear Inoculum. Consider “The Underwhelming,” one of the album’s lead singles.

“Formative/extreme conditions/tempering/your will and way,” Keenan sings. “Mindful now/of graceless dullards/plodding through/through vapid cabaret.” Thematical, it fits almost perfectly beside his howling of new beatitudes or contagions on APC’s and Tool’s last releases. While delivered more playfully here than it was there, the message feels largely the same.

Meanwhile, Mitchell and Round take Puscifer’s sound to cosmic new heights. Puscifer has never shied away from funky, but here they create an unparalleled texture of rhythm and sound. Take “Grey Area 5.1,” Existential Reckoning’s fourth track. Sonically, it feels like a gothic club banger with its slow build of hard-hitting beats that recall moments from Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile.

So, too, with “Postulous,” a deeply textured, weirdly danceable track near the album’s end. It’s difficult not to get lost in the groove established by Mitchell and Round, which culls from across the alternative spectrum to form into something wholly unique and mind-bending. At this point, Keenan is almost just an added bonus to Puscifer’s sound. The deeply layered beats and funk offered by Mitchell and Round are the stars here, and Keenan instinctually knows when to take a backseat to let the band do what the band does.

And what they do is mesmerizing. Existential Reckoning is a gem of a record that reasserts Puscifer’s place not just in pop culture but in the whole Keenan milieu. As their first album in five years, it’s a stunning return for a band that now feels on pace to shine as brightly as its founder and leader. Whether an old fan or new, Puscifer delivers dose after dose of electro-rock madness that all adds up to the best album of the band’s career.