. . .
A sip of non-carbonated water. Celery. White bread. Crackers. Fried Polenta. Lime. Ginger. Calvados. These are all palate cleansers. We eat them between bites of food, between dishes, to sweep away existing flavors so that we can concentrate on the next item.
Using food as a metaphor for music, or sports, or literature, or any non-food topic is played out. This time, it’s necessary.
Ever been to Fogo de Chao? It’s a Brazilian steakhouse. Wonderful food, pricey, and overwhelming. It’s a once a year experience. It’s an hour and a half of Brazilian men stuffing your face with their meat. After the first seven or eight servings, everything tastes like salt. I had a “Florida death metal day” last month, where I listened to all the classics like Legion and Covenant, one after the other. It all tasted the same after seven or eight servings.
Listening to A Night at the Opera (Blind Guardian), Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia (Dimmu Borgir), and Infinite (Stratovarius), one after the other, might give me diabetes. Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. I could no more stomach that playlist than I could eat bananas foster served on crème Brule with an ice wine chaser.
Sometimes too much of a good thing is a terrible thing. If I followed that chain of consumption above–the food or the music–I’d feel pretty Disma. I’d void my bowels from both ends and feel better after a while. I’m not just saying that because Craig Pillard’s involved in Disma.
Dismal digression aside, sometimes I just get tired of a particular genre of metal. Sometimes I just get tired of music itself. Mixing genres in a playlist helps, but only up to a certain point. When this happens, I reach for a palate cleanser. It’s music that sweeps away all the aftertastes and allows me to focus on the next set of flavors. In a sense, it’s also regenerative, rejuvenating my mind so that I can focus with greater intensity. I’ve tried silence, but as a palate cleanser, it’s too much like a sip of water and a cracker, or a bad date: empty, boring, and tasteless.
Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero is an excellent musical palate cleanser. It’s catchy without being overstuffed with overwrought melodies and harmonies. From a classical musicians’ standpoint, all pop music is minimalist, but Year Zero feels minimalist even by pop music standards. It’s music made out of things which aren’t musical.
Big Black’s Songs About Fucking is another good palate cleanser. It’s Steve Albini howling over the sound of bones rubbing together. It goes through my mind like a wire brush across a penny made bad with gunk, scraping off all the waste.
The best musical palate cleanser is Minor Threat. Not the whole Minor Threat discography CD, just the first 14 songs, when the band was really fast and hard. It’s “Filler” through “Guilty of Being White,” the tracks from before the band got melodic. By the standards of guitar based rock music, I’ve never heard anything more minimalist than those old Minor Threat burners.
Somewhere in Dave Thompson’s Alternative Rock: The Essential Listening Companion, there’s a quote about punk and hardcore. I lost my copy years ago, or I’d look it up again. I think it’s a Henry Rollins quote. It sounds like him. I’ll paraphrase it: “Punk and hardcore were necessary. They came along to scrape all the shit off of rock ‘n’ roll’s boots, the Journeys and the Styxes and all the other adult rock.”
How fitting then that all of these years later, I still use Minor Threat to scrape all of the gunk out of my mind. If Year Zero is a bite of ginger, then Songs about Fucking is a bite of lime. Those old Minor Threat songs are a shot of Calvados: an acetylene torch to the brain.
What’s your favorite palate cleanser?
. . .
Minor Threat – “I Don’t Wanna Hear It”
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Why do I have the feeling that IO is on a decline? I just stared at the number of comments on each post and the numbers are decreasing, and I thought even I for two months now haven’t read a full post on IO. Well it’s slowly becoming like one of those dying malls. damn I feel sad. bye bye IO.
You’ll be missed, “StripperSnatchRemains.”
Get a hooker immediately.
Recently, Julianna Barwick.
http://youtu.be/j48uJwlIp0E
It amongst the festering deathtones and hyperblasts, I find some classic Yes,Queen, the last three Anathema albums and to a lesser extent Squarepusher and Aphex Twin work wonders.
Cal
“It’s an hour and a half of Brazilian men stuffing your face with their meat.”
Wait, is this a description of a meal, or promo-speak for a gay porn?
Anyway, palate cleansers: I always have at least an album or two of some non-rock-based music that serves this purpose. I tend to go for folk music, e.g. Steve Von Till, Scott Kelly, Wovenhand (a little more rock than the others), and lately Din Brad. It definitely has a distinct flavor, but it’s so very different from (most) metal that it serves the purpose well. I’ve also gone in a dark ambient direction (Worm Ouroboros, etc.) or classical (Xenakis, Schoenberg).
I’d like to think it’s a promo-description of a banquet scene during a gay porn.
But seriously though, go to a Fogo De Chau one time. It’ll all make sense.
Wall noise and power electronics are my go-to. Inversely, radio pop, but only the hyper feminine stuff; male pop stars may as well be eunuchs. Every once in a while, it’s Flat and Scruggs. Come to think of it, I don’t really listen to metal anymore because, frankly much of it is boring, but the stuff I go back to is that to which I am supremely dedicated and that is due to the non-metal stuff that surrounds it.
Interesting post…I tend to get attracted to “cycles” of metal; I’ll have a power metal cycle then death, doom, etc. I tend to search out new music that I’ve never heard to drain out the rot. If my palette finds nothing sumptuous, I tend to return to something familiar like 80s hip hop or electro music.
I find pop punk’s catchy lyrics and simple arrangements to be a good palate cleanser when my brain hurts from too much grind prog goodness. River Fenix, really just lets your brain shut off for a while and giggle at the high school humor.
http://youtu.be/Dbd4h1kaFlY
I listen to hip hop almost as much as metal… It helps, a lot. Also, sometimes I’ll listen to something ultra catchy like Pain… That Peter Tagtegren cat writes tunes that you can’t stop listening to sometimes. Great change of pace.
I’ll second you on hip-hop and rap.
My favorite palate cleanser is Fela.
Burial-2 albums of chilled but murky UK dubstep. It’s said of Burial that you don’t get it until you’ve been lost in a rainy London night. -I’ve never experienced that but Glasgow is plenty rainy. Alternatively, New Pornographers’ ‘Twin Cinema’ record is always soothing.
Failing that it’s ‘justice for all’. A dense album for sure, but I know every drum fill and Hetfield snarl by heart, so there’s no need to engage my brain.
I had to fall back on Burial this week during my vinyl catch up session (my wife goes to her parents about twice a month negating any stereo based squabbles). There’s only so much black, death, grind and doom that you can process in the course of an evening.
I like Big Black and stuff like that too, but that’s too close to metal to cleanse my mental palate. For that, I need drifty, drony psych: e.g., Bardo Pond, Roy Montgomery, Stars of the Lid, Fripp and Eno.
@Stripper Snatch Remains: If you want to hang out at the mall, I think Blabbermouth’s doors are still open. There’s a Hot Topic there. And an Orange Julius.
Good topic. For palate cleansers, I listen to jazz from the late 1960s/early’70s (mystic stuff like Pharoah Sanders as well as the CTI roster) and minimalist electronica (Eno, Gas, etc.).
Bitches Brew, ‘70-’74 era Herbie Hancock, Magma, lots of hiphop (too varied to list), aphex twin or autechre…
metal also serves as a great palate cleanser when you’re listening to lots of stuff that’s not metal.
I’m not very familiar with Aphex Twin, but it seems Xenakis’s work in early electronic music was a huge influence on them, and they’ve used at least one instrument he designed. Ever check him out?
I’m sure I’ve heard him here & there, but have yet to make an active attempt to check him out more fully. any particularly good starting point?
“Metastaseis,” though it’s neo-classical rather than electronic. I’ve only begun exploring that side of it, though “Hibiki-Hana-Ma” is one of my favorites so far (it’s kind of a drone/ambient . . . thing).
It seems my second comment was lost somewhere in the aether. Go to the first paragraph of this Wikipedia article (on UPIC) for the connection between Xenakis and Aphex Twin.
nice, I’ll check that out
Xenakis is cool. A lot of the 60’s Nonesuch Lps have some great music in the same vein: “music concrete” or “music for flute and tape loop”. Great bargain bin stuff.
Also a big fan of Walter/Wendy Carlos and David Rosenbloom.
Portishead.
My metal tastes are divided pretty evenly these days among bands that growl/scream/howl and bands that sing, and I find that by alternating them regularly, I can keep my mind fresh for metal. Sometimes I’ll listen to three or four black metal albums in a row, and then it is definitely time for some Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, or Hammers of Misfortune.
If I really need to cleanse the palate, though, I’ll listen to some Simon and Garfunkel or Chopin.
Depends how ‘heavy’ my last meal was – if it’s something as dense as Dragged Into Sunlight, then even Megadeth, Mercyful Fate, etc will help me find my equilibrium again. In general though, Earth is always good, and I have a couple Amon Tobin albums that do the trick as well.
Lately I’ve also found that movie soundtracks are a good way to mix it up. I’m not sure if it’s bad etiquette to namedrop another metal blog in the comments section, but the Illogical Contraption site links to soundtracks fairly recently. Some are hit or miss, but the ‘Taxi Driver’ has been my go-to in-between music recently.
Maybe I’m not the best person to ask on this issue, but here’s what I think about that aspect of blog comment etiquette.
Good etiquette: “Here are my relevant observations about what you said: [Insert here.] This link from Blog X is another interesting take on the subject.”
Bad etiquette: “Very interesting! Here’s a link to Blog X.”
Also bad, but less bad: “I like this blog a lot, and this isn’t really related to the topic of this article but here’s a link to Blog X.”
You get the idea, I think. As long as you’re genuinely contributing and the link or mention of another blog is relevant, it’s OK. Traffic (and idea) cross-pollination is good for both blogs, after all. The second of those examples is spam, or might as well be. The third example is a situation where the commenter should have e-mailed the blog administrator with the link and asked them for their opinion on the topic, in the hope that they would write an article and link them.
Once I’ve had my fill of my death/thrash/grind/crust/sludge/doom/powerviolence/post-punk etc. fill, I usually relax to the smooth sounds of Hall & Oates and Tom Jones. I also have a soft spot for Americana like Neko Case and Lucinda Williams. Hell, even Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits helps me reset my musical taste buds too. If I listened to only metal all the time, I would be so boring as fuck.
I love me some 90’s grunge and alt rock – Pearl Jam, AIC, Soundgarden, Blind Melon, Primus, Helmet, etc. But lately I’ve been getting into neofolk of the British variety – Current 93, Sol Invictus and Death in June in particular. Bohren & der Club of Gore is also a favorite, even though they have a near doom metal aesthetic. And you can’t go wrong with Lily Allen on a bad day.
Seconded on Lily Allen.
Bohren & Der Club of Gore is pretty good too – though as you say, pretty close to doom.
Pink Floyd’s Meddle
Joni Mitchell’s Blue
Karen Dalton’s You can’t make it
Black Flag’s Damaged
Anything by Peter Tosh
…”cause like a Stepping Razor, better watch my sides, I’m dangerous”.
Spoon. Proof that pop music doesn’t have to suck. Big Black as a metal palette cleanser? Whatever works but I don’t get that.
Check out a band called Grant Lee Buffalo. Specifically, the album “Mighty Joe Moon”. Could go either way with this crowd but it’s one of my all-time favorite albums in any genre.
I have a hard time articulating why Big Black works for me. I think it’s a combination of Albini’s recording style and how sparse the music feels. The instrumentation just feels minimalist, a lot like old Minor Threat.
Songs About Fucking is a fantastic album. I feel like Shellac would also be a pretty good pick.
Yes it is. Still too abrasive to be a palette cleanser, for me anyway.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks
Fuck yeah, Tindersticks! I can listen to Curtains, or any of the first three really, just about all day.
Splashdown by Breakwater. Rock a hot deuce, bob my head and I’m back. IO you are not in decline. Cheers.
Good topic; one that my brother and I were conversing about the other day. I like to listen to Sage Francis, as its still pretty musical, and his delivery and lyrics are second to none, but its a far cry from all the metal I consume… Infected Mushroom is another one; full of energy, but a completely different kind. I can still nod my head, to the brink of headbanging along with it. It gets me pumped for the next metal album…. And for one more, trip-hop like Lovage or Massive Attack are good ones, if Im in need of something a little less noisy, but still need to be able to get into the music,
how’s Sage’s recent output stack up? last thing I have by him is Non-Prophets Hope and I love that record.
the production on a lot of the early Anticon and Def Jux stuff is killer, too.
A Healthy Distrust was great, I think. I haven’t heard Li(f)e yet but I’ve heard good things. The backing band was an interesting group of indie rock/pop musicians.
Ohhh he also put out Road Tested, a live album, that includes a bunch of really awesome versions of stuff off of Personal Journals. Gruvis Malt was the backing band for a ton of it too.
gonna hafta check that stuff out, then, thanks!
It totally varies based on current mood, what I last heard, and the weather (seriously), but lately I’ve been coming back to Dead Can Dance and a lot of ’80s goth and post-punk stuff. Comsat Angels, Chameleons UK, earlier Mission UK, for whatever reason that’s where I’ve been heading lately.
On the opposite tip, too much of any one non-metal sound and I find myself in need of an extreme metal “mind eraser”. Yesterday I had to dig up some Origin to set my head straight.
After I try out some non-metal that turns out to be really boring, I have to mainline Behemoth or similar.
I’ll always stay close to “home”, but I’ll periodically downshift with Pink Floyd, Earth, Monster Magnet, or related bands. Sometimes, reconnecting with timeless classics from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden et al is a good way to get a fresh start.
If I need a palate cleanser for metal in general, it has to be easy, clean, poppy and very non-metal. From Austra, Roisin Murphy, Hot Chip, to Mount Kimbie, Gold Panda, Eskmo type stuff.
Interestingly, I saw Torche actually do this halfway a live set: playing some ridiculously sugary R&B song. Worked like a charm. The song after this little break sounded like the heaviest thing I had ever heard in my life. (The other band on this double bill, Pelican, did the same with a The Prodigy song, which for me worked not nearly as well. Feels more like Torche’s idea in the first place, anyway.)
Anyone know any other bands that do this live?
Utterly classic: “It’s an hour and a half of Brazilian men stuffing your face with their meat.”
Palate cleanser: I’m so extreme I unwind with a little Prostitute Disfigurement.
After endless hours/days of straight Black, Death, Thrash, and Grind I’ll usually listen to something less abrasive like punk or grunge/alternative. The two most recent things were Rancid’s first album and Soul Coughing’s “El Oso”. I tend to not listen to electronic music from years spent on Drum N Bass and now it wouldn’t cleanse the pallet as much as make me angry. Same goes for Hip-Hop.
definitely some tacos
Tacos are a good palate cleanser for just about everything. Every day I wake up in Los Angeles I thank the Elder Gods that I live in a place with fantastic tacos on every street corner.
I really like California by Mr. Bungle especially, but all work, as well as all of the Doors and if I go the rap route, Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted and the first Jay-Z record usually do the trick.
About half the music I listen to is not metal/punk/hardcore etc. So i’m not really sure about what would count as a palate cleanser.
However, stuff that I return to incessantly is:
any thing by Will Oldham – Ease Down The Road and Summer In The Southeast are particular favorites, but 90% of his stuff is killer.
Interpol – I used to only enjoy the first album but saw them last year and everything changed. One of the best live shows i’ve seen.
Bloc Party – for some nice almost-happy-pop music their mixture of joy division, the cure and U2 makes for a nice change.
Lily Allen – when in the mood for uber-cheery pop she does the trick.
Plastikman, King Tubby, The Skatalites, Public Enemy, Roky Erickson, Thin Lizzy, PJ Harvey, Neu!,Beatles.
I don’t really “palate cleanse” with quieter, less aggressive genres.
I like to chill with “classic” metal/Hard Rock I can rock out to.
Priest, Maiden, Rainbow, Sabbath, Purple, Floyd, Heep and so on…
If I get sick of that…there is always the radio or death!! \m/
The Orb
Reggae (Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Jimmy Cliff, etc)
Jazz
All kinds of great artists to throw on when you need a break from metal, but those are my go to artist and genres.
To cleanse the palate it needs to be something completely different than metal (and that includes hardcore or any shade of punk) like Morrissey (old stuff), Johann Sebastian Bach or Bryan Ferry. And I find that a good cleansing can only be achieved by something I am very familiar with, something that feels completely worn in and comfy.
I almost always cleanse the palate with rap. Lately it’s been Killer Mike, El-P and Death Grips, but I also get down w/ the classic rap albums I grew up w/ The Chronic, Enter the Wu-Tang and the like. Other things that work well for me are Massive Attack, The Prodigy and classic country like Cash and Hank Sr.
oh yeah, forgot about Death Grips! still haven’t heard the new El-P or Killer Mike and gotta get on that
Johnny Cash
Willie Nelson
Joy Division (Sometimes, this has the opposite effect)
Sinatra
Leonard Cohen
Steve Reich
Burial
Piper at the Gates of Dawn era Floyd
Nirvana (Never cared for Pearl Jam)
Oasis (I can’t help it. I’m a huge fan)
Wu-Tang Clan, Dr. Octagon, The Roots, Beastie Boys
The Cure, The Smiths, Bauhaus, MBV
Sonic Youth
Godspeed, Sigur Ros
If you listen to Songs About Fucking to relax, you are way more extreme than I am (great album, although more of a main course than a palate cleanser for me). To take a break, I usually put on something minimal or quiet like Aphex Twin, the Lost in Translation soundtrack, any album from the current phase of Earth, Sonic Youth’s “Silver Sessions” feedback ep, etc. Do metalheads secretly like Lily Allen? She is one of the few pop singers my wife listens to that I can tolerate.
George Clinton (Computer Games and any of the early Funkadelic albums)
NIN “Pretty Hate Machine”
The Cardigans “Gran Turismo”
Depeche Mode “Music for the Masses”
Leonard Cohen “Songs of Love and Hate”
Jay Munly (anything)
I also listen to a lot of country, of lot being Jamey Johnson, Blackberry Smoke, Hayes Carll and Shooter Jennings.
I use 70s hard rock as a palate cleanser; the analogue production, the classy riffs, the psychedelics and the Sabbath peers, it’s all I want. Typically Night Sun or Bang or Toad are good.
Mozart and Bach, undoubtedly.
Country, bluegrass, and crust.
I love bjork as a palate cleanser, as well as post punk stuff like pretty girls make graves.. also fin fang foom, who are kind of like a mash up of slint and fugazi playing funeral music, enough space and melody to calm down but still has some thought put into the songs and a little bit of noise to contrast the softness.
I like a lot of rap for that too, especially jedi mind tricks (stoups production wouldnt sound out of place on a portishead type of project) one be lo and immortal technique.
Something electronic and poppy. Be it triphop, house or just pop. Hooverphonic – Blue Wonder Power Milk always works great.
oneirology from the cunninlynguists, i’m deep into this LP
Bachs’ Violin concerto’s
Micheal Hedges Aerial boundaries
Mahavishnu Orchestra’ Birs of fire
Tears for Fears/Depeche Mode
Nine inch nails or any jazz album