The Beast I’m Meant to Be is a record that wears its intentions plainly, perhaps defiantly so. Wolejsza has not arrived attempting to disguise his debts or affect a studied cool. Metallica’s DNA runs through the guitar work like voltage through a live cable \u2014 the crunching riffs, the kinetic forward momentum, the sense that each chord carries a certain obligation to matter. And yet the album never collapses into mere tribute. The production, handled by Tim Boate in Baltimore, is sympathetic and spacious: additional layers shore up the arrangements without suffocating the songs’ inherent urgency, and the mix carries sufficient heft to honour the source material while allowing Wolejsza’s own voice \u2014 as a writer, above all \u2014 to assert itself.<\/p>
That voice is most arresting on the opening salvo, Stupidity Gone Viral, which takes the sewage-strewn landscape of contemporary internet culture and subjects it to something approaching righteous fury. The critique is hardly subtle \u2014 Wolejsza is not a man interested in euphemism \u2014 but the directness is itself a virtue. The song lands with the bluntness of a clenched fist, and there is a certain bracing satisfaction in hearing someone dispense with ironic distance and simply say: this is broken, and it is breaking us.<\/p>
The title track operates on altogether more interior terrain. Depression and self-worth \u2014 or rather, their corrosion \u2014 are subjects that popular music has long courted and frequently fumbled, dressing private anguish in the borrowed garments of generality until all specific pain is extinguished. Wolejsza does not make that error. The song sits close to the bone, and the Metallica-inflected guitar work does something rather clever: it externalises the internal chaos rather than softening it, giving the listener something to hold onto even as the lyrical content threatens to pull the floor away.<\/span><\/p> Then comes One More Hug \u2014 a tribute to Bonnie, his cat, written around the moment of knowing she would not be coming home. Critics occasionally grow squeamish around songs about animals, as though grief requires a certain calibre of subject to be considered legitimate. This is nonsense, of course. Grief is grief. The song understands something true about the particular quality of love we extend to creatures who cannot speak of it, and the emotional precision Wolejsza brings to it is, frankly, the finest writing on the record.<\/span><\/p> The album’s range \u2014 from social corrosion to clinical depression to the particular devastation of a lost companion \u2014 signals that this is not an artist content to inhabit one register. Executive producer Brian Feinstein’s influence in shaping the arrangements is audible; the songs are sequenced and constructed with genuine care, each given room to breathe without overstaying its welcome.<\/span><\/p> What one takes away from The Beast I’m Meant to Be is the impression of a songwriter who has spent years earning the right to be heard, and who now speaks with the earned authority of someone who has genuinely lived inside these songs. This is not a debut calculated for algorithmic approval. It is something considerably rarer and more valuable than that: honest work, honestly released.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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