In a recent conversation about music, my wife pointed out that I tend to gravitate towards stuff that is very raw and simplistic. I believe “garagey” was the term she used. She’s absolutely right. I guess this has long been the case, but I had never really thought about it consciously until she brought it up. I mean, I’ve certainly done my fair share of writing and espousing the virtues of raw, primitive music, but I never really considered just how much my listening preferences are dominated by these characteristics.
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Tag Archives: rock
Alice Cooper – Welcome 2 My Nightmare (Universal, 2011)
“The first one is the best.” This is widely regarded as a universal truth when it comes to films, books and albums that are part of a series. Certainly there are exceptions to the rule; I’ve always preferred The Empire Strikes Back to Star Wars and Aliens to Alien, although I’m sure that many will disagree. But by and large, the first piece of work in a series is superior to its sequels, as it is typically the freshest and most original installment, breaking new ground and setting the tone for everything that follows. It also sets the bar, often setting it too high; the more highly regarded the original becomes, the more difficult it is for sequels to do anything but pale in comparison. Continue reading
Spermless Like a Girl: On Lou Reed & Metallica’s Lulu and my fascination with suckiness
I have no interest in reviewing Lou Reed and Metallica’s Lulu. As far as I’m concerned, the definitive takes on it have already been written by Chuck Klosterman and Alee Karim, so there’s no need for me to try and analyze it further or attempt to offer any clever insight. However, I do have a few things I’d like to get off my chest now that this turd record has been officially committed to plastic and unleashed upon the masses.
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Opeth – Heritage (Roadrunner, 2011)
I’ve never been able to understand why musical evolution is largely frowned upon in extreme metal circles. It’s as if something went horribly awry back when rock music begat heavy metal and then heavy metal begat death metal, black metal, thrash, etc. That essential aspect of rock ‘n’ roll’s spirit which calls for constant change was almost completely stamped out in favor of a stunted “different is bad” philosophy that continues to permeate the scene today. Granted, “different” doesn’t always equal “good” either, but in order for any artistic or cultural movement to survive it must continually progress through trial and error, or risk degenerating into irrelevance and ultimately dying out. Yet somehow, metal’s more extreme genres have managed to remain in stasis for nearly three decades. Of course there are many exceptions, but for every one innovator there are literally hundreds of bands that have progressed their sound little (if at all) over the course of numerous albums, lineup changes, etc. Pillars of the various extreme metal subgenres, such as Transilvanian Hunger, Heartwork, Left Hand Path, Rust in Peace, etc are all around the two decade old mark, and yet bands are still contently copying them, and acting like they’ve achieved something of note on their own in doing so. When metal went extreme, it forgot that the bands from which it spawned, the Black Sabbaths and Led Zeppelins and Deep Purples of the world, never released two albums alike or even two songs alike. Production values may improve, bands may become more technically proficient (and in some cases even these two will cause severe backlash), but stepping outside the imaginary, self-imposed boundaries of a chosen metal subgenre is largely verboten.
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Today is the Day – Pain is a Warning (Black Market Activities, 2011)
The American Dream is in the shitter. If you don’t think so, you’re either rich or comatose. Most of us work at jobs we can’t stand for low pay, have health insurance policies that don’t cover anything, are buried under a mountain of debt and lead largely unfulfilling lives that are subject to the whims of a government run by a bunch of wealthy, over-privileged scumbags that couldn’t even be bothered to piss on us if we were on fire. In many other countries, these same conditions would spark a full-scale revolt, but Americans are far too complacent, too content to keep eating shit until they die from it.
But for all of us that are content to ride atop the avalanche of feces that was once the American Dream all the way to the bitter end, there are a few that are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. Steve Austin, mastermind behind Nashville-based power trio Today is the Day is one of them. But what does a musician with a large collection of high-powered firearms and a penchant for creating some of the most intense and abrasive metal/rock known to man do when they’ve had enough? Instead of going postal, Austin has channelled his rage against the dying of the light into a hellishly harsh rock ‘n’ roll record called Pain is a Warning.
Yes, you’re reading that last sentence correctly. Pain is a Warning is first and foremost a rock ‘n’ roll record. In fact, it’s probably the most rocking album Today is the Day has ever recorded. It rocks hard and heavy. It rocks like a goddamn motherfucker. It also sounds like it wants to rip your head off and shit all over the bloody stump, and that might be what really separates Today is the Day from 99.999% of the bands currently professing to play rock music. This isn’t limp-dick radio rock about doing coke and banging sluts. This is real anger, real hatred, real emotions harnessed into pure negative energy and unleashed through guitar, bass, drums and vocals.
Music this brutalizing needs the right production to help it along in getting the point across. For Pain is a Warning, Austin wisely chose to enlist Converge’s Kurt Ballou to sit behind the boards. The result is Today is the Day on steroids. Never has the band sounded so crushing, so ready to come through the speakers and grab you by the throat. Bringing in Ballou has also allowed Austin (who usually also produces) to turn his attention completely towards crafting the music itself, resulting in the most consistent, focused and visceral Today is the Day album in years. While there are a few subdued moments, such as the psychedelic “Remember to Forget” and the almost-country “This is You”, Pain is a Warning is mostly an ultra-noisy hard rock inferno with nods to metal, punk and hardcore. Tracks such as “Death Curse” “Wheelin’” and “Samurai” are violent and pummeling, but also rife with hooks and barbs that will lodge themselves in your memory, forcing you to press the play button again immediately after the album has ended.
Pain is a Warning is every bit as gnarly lyrically as it is musically. Austin sounds so intense delivering lines like “I’m so broke / I can’t feed you / It’s cold / I can’t heat you” and “iPhone iPod iPad PS3 / My life my heart bleeding endlessly” it’s almost as if he has been revitalized by the crumbling of the American Dream. Of course, one could argue that a brand new band lineup (featuring Curran Reynolds and Ryan Jones of Wetnurse on drums and bass, respectively) and a new record label might have something to do with it, but the truth is that Austin has always been this way, he simply needed to have the other pieces in place for Today is the Day to be fully realized in such an effective manner.
Hard times often breed great music. I can’t imagine them getting much harder than natural disasters, a corrupt government, a tanked economy, rampant unemployment, holy terrorism and not even being able to get on plane to escape from it all without potentially having to go through a full body cavity search. With Pain is Warning, Today is the Day have delivered one of the strongest albums of their career, while the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to midnight for the good ol’ US of A. Steve Austin and Co.’s brand of homicidal smash-mouth-super-rock might be too caustic to inspire revolution in the God, guns and government-fearing masses, but it will surely add some fuel to the fire for the chosen few.
http://www.blackmarketactivities.com/label/bands/todayistheday/
Ace Frehley ist Krieg.
Fuck Paul and Gene. Ace Frehley should’ve been writing entire KISS albums. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a KISS fan, but part of being a KISS fan is admitting that there are some horrifically shitty songs in their catalogue and that Paul and Gene are responsible for those shitty songs. This wouldn’t have happened if Frehley had been in charge. Don’t believe me? Just take a listen to his 1978 solo album. That year all four members of KISS released solo albums, of which Ace’s was the best selling and had the highest charting single. Granted, that single was a cover of Hello’s “New York Groove”, but make no mistake, the Frehley originals gracing the album are no slouches either. Just listen to “Snowblind” “Ozone” and “Rip it Out” and try to convince me that Frehley wasn’t the most gifted songwriter in KISS.
The few KISS songs that are credited to Ace, such as “Parasite” “Cold Gin” and “Shock Me” are among the best in the band’s catalogue, but it is on the solo album that Frehley steps out from behind the shadows of the Simmons/Stanley musical dictatorship and really shines as a player and songwriter. The main riff from the aforementioned “Snowblind” (which could have been a Black Sabbath song and ironically shares a title with a song from that band’s fourth album) alone is worth the price of admission, but the album as a whole is about a hundred times more enjoyable front-to-back than just about any of the early classic KISS albums, giving even their rough ‘n’ raw debut a run for its money.
It isn’t just the songs or the makeup or smoking guitar solos that make Ace Frehley great or that made millions of young men and boys paint their faces and pick up guitars both real and imaginary. Ace embodies an idea, the idea that a regular schmuck can can become an icon, a superhero. According to Wikipedia, some of the jobs held by Frehley prior to joining KISS included furniture deliverer, mail carrier and cab driver. From cab driver to motherfucking ROCK GOD. It’s the kind of story we all dreamed of as kids. It will never happen to most of us, but at least there was a time when mere mortals could live vicariously through men like Ace.
Ludicra is Dead, Long Live Ludicra (1998 – 2011)
According to a recent post on their Facebook page, Bay Area black metal quintet Ludicra have called it a day.
Admittedly, I came to Ludicra a bit late. I first started listening to them in 2006, when Fex Urbis Lex Orbis was released. At the time I was living in a suburb just outside Los Angeles, working as a publicity intern at Metal Blade Records in exchange for college credit. Although I worked in a small yet busy office and lived with two other people, I still felt utterly alone and isolated for much of the six months I was there. Back then (and now), I have a tendency to be shy and awkward around people I don’t know and making friends is difficult for me. I would often stay up until ungodly hours sitting in front of the computer, chatting with my friends back home and abroad or writing bizarre, rambling diatribes on myspace (I know, I know…). I was homesick and frequently depressed. More often than not, Ludicra was my soundtrack to these late night self pity parties.
The quintet’s music, especially Fex Urbis…, projected the same “alone in the crowd” despair I was feeling much of the time. Ludicra’s black metal wasn’t trudging through the frostbitten forest at midnight, it was walking down an empty city street at 3am after a night of debauchery, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for a dawn that feels like it will never come. It is gritty and urban, scathing and serene, a truly American take on the genre. Looking back, it seems fitting that I discovered them while lonely, depressed, frustrated and impossibly far from home.
Indeed, Ludicra was an endlessly unique and complex entity, a combination of musical personalities that only comes along once in a lifetime, crackling with the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine energies, bursting at the seams with metal’s chops and punk rock’s attitude. They were progressive and barbaric and crusty and rocking… I can only imagine what their live shows must have been like and I’m deeply disappointed that I’ll never get to experience one. Fortunately I have their four albums, each of which is goddamn electric in its own unique way.
So here’s to ya Ludicra. You were one of a kind, and metal has lost a very special band. See you on the dark side, motherfuckers.
The Lost Interview: EARTH (Dylan Carlson)
Earth circa 2005.
In 2005, I interviewed Dylan Carlson, guitarist/mastermind behind drone/doom pioneers Earth for a multi-band feature on experimental music that I had been working on for my college newspaper. The story fell through when several other bands flaked out, and the interview w/ Carlson languished on a digital recorder in the bowels of my mother’s basement, destined to go unpublished… until now.
THKD: This is the first Earth release in a while for you guys and I was wondering, why such a lengthy wait? [note: at the time of the interview, Earth were preparing to release Hex; Or Printing the Infernal Method, their first album in nearly a decade]
Dylan Carlson: After I did Pentastar, to be blunt, I had drug problems and legal problems to take care of and my relationship with Sub Pop ended, so I spent the next few years sort of getting my life back together and that’s why it took so long.
THKD: Did those hardships that you went through have an impact on the new material?
DC: As a musician, whatever happens in your life is sort of grist for the mill. For a long time I didn’t play guitar. I knew I was going to play music again, I just didn’t know if I was going to do it professionally again or whether I was going to do Earth again and I feel very fortunate, not many people go away for seven years and have anyone interested in their next phase. I definitely feel fortunate in that respect, that a lot of people seem to want to hear from Earth again and seem very happy about the fact that I’m doing it again.
Earth2: A monument unto itself
JH: So, was there pressure because of that when you were working on the new album?
DC: There’s always pressure when you’re doing a new album, especially it seems with Earth since Earth2 has become this kind of monument unto itself and anytime a musician does something that people view as their best work, there’s always going to be that pressure to try and better it or do something of the same caliber. I definitely think with this album we were able to spend the time and the budget to do things right, and I had time to work on the songs and make it the strongest album we could.
THKD: I’ve seen a lot of awesome reviews of [Hex], are you happy with the reaction it’s gotten and how it is being received?
DC: Oh definitely, as a musician it’s always kind of frustrating that you yourself don’t really determine your finest moment, it’s sort of up to everyone else. There’s always the case where someone thinks they’ve done a great album but the critics hate it and the public doesn’t want to buy it, so it’s nice when something that you feel strongly about is also well received.
THKD: You took Earth in a different direction than what had been on previous albums, what made you decide to steer it in that direction?
DC: To me Earth has always been the sum of my interests and the last few years have been sort of a rediscovery of musical roots with the country playing, and also I’ve been really interested in the older forms of instrumental music, like Duane Eddy. Back then it was like instrumental music was popular and it hit the charts, which is unheard of nowadays. Also, I’ve been reading a lot of books about the American frontier and the Cormac McCarthy books and it was just sort of my obsessions at the time and they came out in the music.
THKD: Do you think that instrumental music is starting to become more prominent again? You guys are back, Pelican is getting big now and a few other bands, do you think it’s making a comeback at all?
DC: I don’t know if it’s ever going to be as big as it was, but it definitely seems like it’s ok now to do it. I mean like Kinski and like you said Pelican, I haven’t heard them but I see them everywhere in magazines and whatnot, so yeah it definitely seems like it’s becoming acceptable to do it again, which is cool, I think. I think the last instrumental hit was a Joe Satriani song back in the eighties, before that I think the Ventures were the last, so I don’t know whether it’s ever going to be a chart trend.
THKD: On this album you played some additional instruments, such as the banjo. Did you already know how to play them beforehand?
DC: No, there just happened to be a banjo in the studio and I actually tuned it to guitar tuning. Although I’ve been learning banjo techniques like banjo rolls on the guitar, I’m not a banjo player. It was more like a color to use on the album.
THKD: What’s the recording process like for you? Do you take the same experimental approach to recording that you do to composition?
DC: For this album, we cut the basic tracks, like the guitar and drums, we did one take as the basic track and then just overdubbed the additional instruments, so I guess it was a fairly traditional method of recording. The songs were more nebulous and when we got to the studio, since in the live situation we’d been doing a lot improvising, in the studio we arranged the songs and decided ok we’re gonna do the definitive versions, and so we wrote up arrangements and whatnot. We knew we wanted the other instrumentation, so there’d need to be some charts for the other musicians to deal with.
THKD: Are your live shows completely improvised?
DC: They’re kind of semi [improvised] now, they used to be improvised, now we’re actually playing material off the album. It’s not like exact copies off the record, some of them are longer, some of them are shorter and there’s a couple newer pieces that are more improvisatory. Before when Earth recorded something, I would never play it live, it would sort of get left behind, but now we’re being more conventional and playing stuff off the album.
THKD: I know you’ve performed as a duo and and you’ve also done some things that are just you playing guitar solo, so what is the ideal live setup for you?
DC: I don’t really have an ideal one I guess. Right now we’re touring as three piece, we’ve got a new member Jonas Haskins playing baritone guitar. Part of what I like about the live situation is that it’s like a roller coaster ride and I like trying different combinations to see how they work and see what serves the music best.
THKD: On this album you’ve experimented with some different tones and layed off the super-distorted stuff. Did you have to change your equipment or setup?
DC: I don’t lug around all the huge speaker cabinets and whatnot anymore, I’m too old for that. I’ve sort of become a Telecaster freak and I have a couple tube combo amps, so 1x12s and 2x12s and then this last tour because we had to fly in for the shows, I was using one of those new Crate powerblock little solid state heads which seemed to work pretty good. I’m all about smaller amps now.
THKD: So, the sheer volume isn’t as important to you anymore?
DC: No, no… I mean we’re still pretty crankin’, especially now with the baritone guitar on board. We have the low end covered again so it frees me up to do my new thing.
THKD: Is it harder for a band to convey emotions without the use of lyrics and vocals? Or since you’ve been doing it for so long does it come naturally to you?
DC: I’m fortunate that since I’ve always tried to do that it seems to work. Even before we did the album, when we were playing the new songs live, people would talk to us about how it gave them the image of a ghost town or a desert, so it seems like somehow by obsessing on stuff it comes out in the music. I don’t know if it’s just purely accidental or not but I definitely think that’s the challenge of instrumental music and what makes playing instrumental music exciting. Plus I like it because it allows the listener a more active roll in the music process. When there’s lyrics it’s like the band is telling people what they should feel and what they should think about the song and with instrumental music I like the interactivity of it.
THKD: When someone comes up to you and tells you what they thought of when they heard the music, do you ever feel like it is being misinterpreted?
DC: No one’s ever told me they wanted to rape children or anthing like that. It seems like people get it or respond to it in a pretty similar manner.
THKD: What emotions do you go through when you’re playing or composing the material?
DC: I know the emotion comes out but it’s nothing definite, like “oh this part sad” it’s more like you’re offering the totality of your being. To me a lot of music exists in it’s own realm and you’re channeling it. It’s like if music was water and you’re a vessel and everything you’re obsessed with or feeling shapes that vessel and then music has now come through it and so that’s the shape it takes. Everything that you go through during the day seems to be wrapped up in it. I know that some people have commented that this album seems more hopeful than previous Earth records and I’d think it would have to be, because I’ve become a much more hopeful person and I have better balance and sense of priorities now, so I think it can’t help but come out in the music.
THKD: I was looking at the album art while listening to it yesterday and it is beautifully put together. How do you feel the album art ties in with the music? Does it help tell a story?
DC: I don’t know if it tells a story, but I think it definitely helps, especially since this is music that is fairly visual in its impact I think it’s one more thing that helps the music convey its meaning. Steve O’Malley was telling me basically what he did is spent a few weeks listening to the rough mixes and that’s where he started getting ideas and then looking for pictures. He definitely made the album cover while listening to it, so that’s why that’s such a seamless work, why they work together so well.
THKD: A more general question, how do you think your talents have evolved from say, Earth2 up to now?
DC: I’ve become a better guitar player, I definitely think I have a stronger sense of melody, a stronger sense of direction. My work ethic is stronger. Part of it is when I did Earth2 we were trying to make an extreme statement, we only had less than a week to do it. I think I’ve always tried to do the best album to the best of my abilities with what I’ve been given and I was fortunate with Hex to have a budget that allowed us to explore some options and gave us time to really work our asses off and then also gave us time to sit back and digest it and decide what we wanted to do, and when we decided to add instrumentation to be able to secure the services of some amazing musicians. I was able to devote more time and effort to the music than previously.
THKD: How did you hook up with Southern Lord for the release?
DC: In 2003, Greg [Anderson] invited us down to play at the Southern Lord showcase at South By Southwest. I had met Greg when I was living in LA and he had talked about reissuing some older stuff and it never quite came about but we had maintained contact over the years and then he invited us down for that and then he came to see us a few times after that. He was confident in our abilites and wanted to invest in the future of Earth, so it worked out.
THKD: I’ve seen a lot of interviews where Greg [Anderson] and Stephen [O'Malley] say they formed SunnO))) as an Earth tribute band, and it certainly isn’t just them that consider you influential. How does it feel to be so highly regarded?
DC: It’s very flattering. There’s so many musicians that aren’t fortunate enough to receive the opportunities that I did and I’ve been fortunate to have my music heard by people and have people enjoy it and get into it. I’m grateful for that interest and it’s pretty cool. Obviously, the kind of music I do, success is measured in different ways and being influential is one of those rewards.
THKD: My last question for you is kind of off subject. Have you ever been approached to do any soundtrack work or is that something that would interest you at all?
DC: Yeah, I would love to do that and unfortunately I haven’t been approached to do any! [laughs]
Deafheaven – Roads to Judah (Deathwish Inc, 2011)
Deafheaven are a difficult band to pin down. Visually, they look like they should be playing Joy Division or Smiths covers. Sonically, they combine lacerating black metal with swaths of lilting, shoegaze-esque guitar work. They’re signed to Deathwish Inc, a label that’s known almost exclusively for putting out hardcore records. They hail from San Francisco, a city not exactly known as a hotbed for black metal (with the notable exceptions of Weakling and Ludicra, of course). Sound confusing? Don’t worry, the sounds are what’s important here, and once you push past all the contradictions, you’ll find that Deafheaven is creating some seriously compelling (albeit tough to categorize) aggressive music with their debut album, Roads to Judah.
Scratching the surface, you can trace Deafheaven’s lineage back to the aforementioned Weakling, just as you can with several other upstart US quasi-black metal acts, namely Krallice, and unfortunately, Liturgy. But as far as I can tell, this is the only parallel you’ll find between Deafheaven and the NYC black metal practitioners. You see, unlike Krallice or Liturgy, Deafheaven write songs that actively engage the listener and draw you into their sonic realm. The songs on Roads to Judah are not pretentious museum pieces or college theses masquerading as black metal, no, this is genuinely emotional music that commands your attention. It’s dynamic, painstakingly crafted music, and black metal is just the jumping-off point; even the most violent portions of Roads to Judah possess an ethereal, shimmering quality that’s about a million miles away from the unrelenting grimness of traditional BM. There are just as many passages on this album that sound like they could’ve been lifted directly from Loveless as there are moments that invoke Dead as Dreams. I realize that I’ve been highly critical of bands combining black metal and shoegaze in the past, but this is because so few bands have been able to do so in a way that I find compelling. Deafheaven is one of those few.
But why Deafheaven? The answer is simple. Good ideas. Deafheaven has lots of them, enough to justify stretching songs out past the nine minute mark without ever getting tedious. They do this by letting up on the gas and allowing the corrosive black metal elements to recede so that the aforementioned shoegaze and even some rock and post hardcore influences can take the driver’s seat. The transitions are fluid and a spacious production scheme allows the songs to open up and breathe. I’ve also heard the term “screamo” being thrown around in discussions of this band, but since I don’t know what the hell screamo is, I’m completely unqualified to comment. Whatever exotic ingredients Deafheaven are bringing to the table and throwing into the stew-pot along with black metal, they’re doing it right, and doing it better than just about any other band they’re currently being mentioned in the same breath as.
Is it “true” black metal? Does it matter? When the music is this absorbing, things like genres and labels are secondary, an attempt to put things in neat, clean little boxes that results in utter frustration every time a band as confounding as Deafheaven comes down the pipeline. As I noted at the beginning of this review, the music found on Roads to Judah is difficult to categorize, and I have a feeling the members of Deafheaven wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s an exhilarating and adventurous listen, but it’s also soothing and caustic and beautiful and fucking ugly. You simply cannot ask for much more than that from a band’s debut.
http://deafheavens.bandcamp.com/
http://www.deathwishinc.com/bands/126/
KEN Mode – Venerable (Profound Lore, 2011)
Listen to “Obeying the Iron Will”
Everything about KEN Mode’s Venerable is intimidating. The artwork looks like something that might happen if Ed Gein and Leatherface were partners in senior year art class. The sound is brutal, muscular and discordant, like The Jesus Lizard and maybe Unsane suffering from a serious case of ‘roid rage. This is the kind of album that shits nails and wipes with barb wire.
In spite of its sonic belligerence, Venerable isn’t a constant sledgehammer to the skull. There are dynamics at work here, the music shifting from bruising, noisy hardcore to shimmering textures that border on post rock. But somehow, even the pretty sections of Venerable seethe with an underlying ugliness. It could have something to do with the all-out hostility that surrounds them. Jesse Matthewson’s vocals for the most part sound like his eyeballs are about to pop out of his head as his jugular bursts, covering the listener in a great wash of crimson. The instruments are weapons in the hands of the band, the guitars morphing into nail-spiked ball bats, the drums rusty claw-hammers, all soaked in blood, shit, piss and vomit. When KEN Mode go full tilt, the music is an avalanche of sound, a pummeling sonic piledriver.
Venerable is just as pulverizing thematically as it is musically. It is an album about struggle. It’s about realizing that you’re chained to a cubicle, dominated by consumerism, inundated to the point of numbness by politics, religion and bullshit on a daily basis. It’s about realizing that you live in an ugly fucking turd-world and doing everything you can to dig yourself out of it, scraping and clawing with bare hands until your fingers bleed.
I’ve mentioned blood three times in this review. All of the imagery that comes to mind as I listen to Venerable is positively soaked in it. It’s because KEN Mode play like their lives depend on this shit. The blood is the life, as Bela Lugosi once said. The blood boils, spills over the side. You’re seeing red. Kill. Everyone. Now.
