ME REX
Pterodactyl
BIG SCARY MONSTERS
When you release an album with no fixed start or end, you run the risk of pulling the rest of your catalog into its corona. London indie rock band ME REX made their full-length debut in 2021 with Megabear, an album constructed as a deck of cards—52 tracks, 30 or so seconds each, with no fixed order, so that each shuffle is its own unique, cohesive experience. It was a monumentally original use of digital streaming as a medium, and that’s the only reason it even bears mentioning that their latest release, Pterodactyl—four songs, three to five minutes apiece—is just an EP, but a very good one.
Following the Triceratops and Stegosaurus EPs the band put out in 2020, Pterodactyl is an anti-formalist return to form. ME REX can take big conceptual swings in the first place because of their great talent for writing hooks of prehistoric proportions and snappy rhymes that, even in an intentional order, capture a feeling of cosmic dislocation somewhere between childlike whimsy, post-adolescent angst, and grown-upness. On “Never Graduate,” playing in 10/8 time, relishing the crescendo, they sound fresh, liberated from conceptual constraints. At the same time, in light of Megabear, it’s easier than ever to pick out 30-second chunks of goodness (a verse or some buoyant “doo-doo-doos”). Once the band shows you the arbitrary fashion in which songs mete out the parts that get stuck in your head, you sometimes have to will yourself to unsee it.
Knowing how far out ME REX’s ambitions can reach, I’m tempted to think of the slate-cleaning moves and experiments—a key modulation on “Giant Giant (Destruction Story)” or guitar tapping on “Skin, It Itches”—as sketches and studies for whatever might be next (to their credit, that’s what EPs are good for). I also tend to forget all that past high-mindedness when the band joins in on an emotional, belted refrain (“It hurts a lot! It hurts a whole lot!”). ME REX can make you feel like an alien trying to understand pop music for the first time, then turn around and make you feel like a teenager learning how much heart can be crammed into one chorus on one single.
