Skeletonwitch live at Somerville MA’s ONCE Ballroom

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Black metal not only spawns, but releases. Bands may begin tied to the genre's tenets; bands may then find themselves far removed from their stylistic home some years later. The same goes for any style really, but with black metal, there's something special which catalyzes the process and produces incredibly eccentric offshoots: the primacy of experimentation. It's an inbuilt feature for the style, and it derives from the sometimes tumultuous wedlock between black metal and the extreme. Surely, in order to be extreme, one must experiment: nothing rehashed or re-molded will do, nor will anything outmoded. "Pushing the limits" is essentially what science does, but this isn't easy when translated into art. Bands can become safely tethered -- or treacherously leashed -- to their histories. They can find formulas, shortcuts, and paths of least resistance. And to their benefit or at their detriment, they can find the answer that fans themselves deliver with glee: popularity. Having remained relatively anonymous and silent since their inception, San Francisco-based quartet Bosse-de-Nage have since departed their black metal roots for unknown horizons defined only by their artistic spirits and creative grit. To avoid limelight isn't a marketing decision, nor is it pure aesthetics; rather, it's a result of something inherently individual. It has to do with focus, and determination, confidence, and the quite-necessary tunnel vision these attributes foster. It's the pursed squinting to find one acute slice of clarity in the world's inane madness, only instead of clarity, you're looking for something even more obscure: meaning.. The important thing is whether the music -- in this case, Bosse-de-Nage's upcoming fifth full-length Further Still -- is both the art of the process/search as well as art unto itself. Stream the album's sixth track "My Shroud" below.

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https://youtu.be/3vlRccuhIf0

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"My Shroud" bisects itself into two faces: the hidden, and the revealed. The unmasking occurs squarely on the two-minute mark, where immediate and momentous blasts pitilessly shatter the simple subtlety of the introduction's ambiance. From a sustained, highly energetic wavelength, Bosse-de-Nage carry their signature rising fury (carried upon frontman Bryan Manning's characteristic howls and wails) across newly wild undulations in intensity. If the band felt more "straightforward" in the past, then Further Still represents not their redirection, but their dispersion into greater space. In a counteraction to the expansion of their breadth, Bosse-de-Nage wrote the new album with pithiness and efficiency in mind, hence the juxtaposition between the one-two punch feel of "My Shroud" and its soft, almost desperate emotional overtones. The same goes for the rest of Further Still's tracks, each of which offers lush emotionality alongside waves of aggressive (but never overbearing) noise. In a rare full interview, we talked with Manning about writing Further Still, the band's past, the new Deafheaven record, what's on his playlist, and more.

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I think the lyrical content has always been a special focus of your band, but I'm wondering how the literature -- or any literature you've been reading -- has influenced the lyrical content of Further Still, the new album. What story does the album tell? Well, I'm always reading lots of stuff, so everything I read influences the lyrics to some degree. It was kind of funny when we started out as the band, we had never intended for the lyrics to be the focal point, it just happened naturally. I'm down, I guess. I'd say my biggest influences recently as far as the lyrics for Further Still would be Bruno Schulz, Thomas Ligotti, Henri Michaux (he was this French poet who would write these weird little segments, like little flash fiction or something, not really poems, necessarily, but little paragraphs or short stories not even a page long that were like bizarre and interesting and have been a big influence on me). Kafka has always been a big influence on me, too. Borges, too. Those last two have made their presence known on all the albums. Probably all these people, too, really -- they've all been people I've been reading for a long time. I've been slowly writing a book, and I think that has maybe more so than anything else influenced how these lyrics turned out. I've been working on it for a couple years (and still working on it), and I'm just figuring out how to write a novel while doing it, so it's taken me a long time. I think the style and the approach that I've been going with there has kind of influenced the weird first-person narrative that ended up making up the majority of Further Still. So, Further Still is then told from a first person perspective but maybe multiple individuals? Yeah, they were never meant to be connected. They weren't even meant to be all first person or anything like that, they just came out that way. I didn't have an idea in mind, or an approach planned out when we were writing the album. It just kind of happened organically, it was just the stuff I ended up writing. It didn't follow any type of plan ahead of time or anything like that. I like it when I hear from musicians that their art arises organically and it's not some pre-planned rubric they're following. It's an interesting aspect to the creation of art. As far as the writing process goes, not specifically for you but for the band collectively, how does that work? What is your guys' approach for putting these songs together? We have a pretty democratic songwriting process. Usually our guitar player will show up with some riffs… three or four, or a couple, depending on how far along they are. We'll listen to them to try and figure out some that work together. We usually just record a few quick arrangements then take a few days to listen to them and get back together. Usually one or a couple of us will have some ideas for a structure. It depends from song-to-song: some songs by that point will be more of a structure or some will be more like two riffs. From there, we'll figure out more stuff that works with that, and then [we go] back and forth between listening to it and writing stuff in practice. Eventually, we'll just get to the point where all it needs is to be fine-tuned a bit, and then usually the lyrics and the vocals are the last thing we figure out. It sounds like you have a pretty good synergy going with everyone. We've all been friends for a long time, so we all know each other well. It's been the same four people in the band since the beginning, so we all know each others' preferences. We all know each other well enough to know how to work together well. On this album, we definitely set out to write shorter, more concise songs. But, it was more like a challenge to ourselves to see if we can pack all of the stuff from a song into a smaller package. It wasn't like a rigid set of rules: we were willing to let the songs run longer if it seemed necessary to that song. I mean, we have a couple songs which went over six minutes long, but most of them ended up being between four and five minutes long. Yeah, you don't have any ten-minute ones like you did on previous albums. There that weren't many long ones on All Fours, that I can remember, but always you just kind of… "long song structures" suit black metal pretty well, though not many do that. I was listening to Transilvanian Hunger the other day and was amused by how all these songs are four or five minutes long, too. It's interesting how the format (ultimately, while the length of song is perhaps not the most important thing in the world) has an effect on the content you put into it. It sounds like it made you guys more economical and perhaps more tactical in how you arranged the pieces of the songs. That's a great description of the approach and the results.

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And speaking of how you're working well with the band and everything -- it sounds like that's been long-going -- is there anything about Further Still that reminds you of Bosse-de-Nage maybe five, six, seven years ago? Maybe the 2012 or 2011 era? Do you feel any of that nostalgia, or are you just focused solely on the future? I don't know. I do think there those parts which hark back to those older songs, but it wasn't really any kind of intentional thing. I think that it just happened naturally. The first riffs in the first track [are] probably the most "black metal sounding" riffs we've had on an album in a while [laughs]. It goes back to the first couple albums, but it wasn't really intentional or anything. I think all of the songs ended up being pretty fast and aggressive for the most part, but it just happened naturally that way. It's cool that elements of your past might kind of peek up here and there but not at your own will (I think the same goes for life in general)... but speaking of what's new in Further Still, what's fresh in your guys' mind when you're writing the album? What concepts and ideas did you come up with that you maybe never came up with before on prior albums? Any songwriting techniques, even musical techniques? I'd say the big thing was just the focus on writing more concise, shorter songs. It took us longer to write this album than I think it took [for] any of the albums previously but that wasn't intentional, either. Life kind of got in the way: there were periods of time where we wouldn't be able to practice much for a couple months or whatever. The songwriting procedure in general didn't change much otherwise though. I think it's naturally evolved from album to album while still maintaining that basic democratic process. I think [the albums] all have equal influence from all the various members: we all end up pitching in, kind of throwing ideas at the wall, and whatever sticks is what we end up with. Sometimes one person will have more the say in a song or something, just naturally [building] a structure quicker or [having] better ideas, but it hasn't really changed much from the previous albums. Each album is one step forward, I guess, but there hasn't been a huge conscious effort to plan things ahead of time with any of our albums. When we first formed the band, it was just three people -- me, our guitar player, and drummer -- and we just wanted to write black metal songs because we were all in a band together [that] similarly started out playing black metal and then ended up being a completely weird experimental metal band. Then, later on, a few years after that [band] split up, we were like "let's get beer and write black metal songs" since we'd all been fans for decades at this point, which is weird. It all naturally evolved from there -- we didn't set out to be the band we are or anything, it was just a natural evolution. I don't think you could really call us a black metal band at this point. I mean it's part of our DNA, but there are so many other influences. I think that any purist would scoff at the idea of us being a black metal band.

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Specific to black metal, what draws you to it, or how does it influence the music your band is writing? Well, I always, or at least for a while now, have viewed black metal and metal in general as a form of exploration of the darker sides of life -- from life to death and the huge spectrum of awful things in between. I've always been attracted to darker themes in music. Really positive stuff never does much for me, usually. I think it's just the natural attraction to that kind of stuff is what led me to black metal. The first black metal thing I ever heard was this Nordic metal tribute to Euronymous compilation which came out in the mid-1990s. I was in high school at the time, and there was such a range of different sounds on there that it just sounded evil to me, I guess. At the time I was a rebellious high schooler, and there was something about it which really just immediately clicked with me. I'd listened to death metal and other metal before that, the more extreme the metal got, the more I was getting into it -- but when I heard that particular thing, I thought, "this is it. This is the music I've been looking for." And I never looked back from there. I still listen to tons of metal and black metal, but I definitely listen to a lot of other stuff, too. There's plenty of other music out there that explores the same kind of things (with a different approach) that I'm into, as well. There's something about black metal, especially that mid-1990s period... it just sounded so unlike anything else that I'd ever heard. It's pretty well known that black metal is a genre which embraces experimentation to a degree. There are plenty of people who get hung up on containing the genre in a rigid system of rules, or whatever; but also, at the same time, even since like the mid to late 1990s, there have been a lot of bands that take the style in weird directions. Bands like Dodheimsgard, Ved Buens Ende, and ...In the Woods, stuff like that. Even classic bands like Emperor and Ulver have just gone wild with the sound. I think a lot of that continues today in spite of the people that think it should just be a four-track recording of people singing about Satan. It's the two sides of the coin, I guess. Even the Japanese band Sigh was on [Euronymous's label] Deathlike Silence Productions, and they're one of the most "out there" bands I can think of in general. Always. It's weird, there's this dichotomy with the fans and what they expect from the genre. It's true, and as hard as people want to contain it, the more it bubbles and slips through their fingers. Totally. To that end, black metal as a form of art is kind of infinite in that way. It can never be captured nor contained no matter what people try to say or put against it. It continues to grow. Maybe that's because, like you mentioned, it has at its heart the idea of experimentation. Something to be extreme has to be experimental and touch unknown territory. I'm wondering, at least as far as your band is concerned, what unknown territory are you tapping into (personal, musical, anything)? Where is this new album bringing you guys as a band? Hmm, I'm not sure, honestly. I don't know how to answer that question exactly. Doing the same thing over and over again always gets boring eventually. I would say that even though our albums sound fairly different, we've taken similar approaches to writing each album. At some point, we'll get to a place where we don't want to repeat the same process, so we'll try something new. Maybe a new approach to songwriting -- I'm not sure exactly -- or maybe try allowing band members to write songs on their own, just to change it up. I'm not sure if we'll ever do that -- it just popped into my head. At some point, we'll have to change up just for the sake of changing things up and not being stuck repeating the same actions over and over again. We've been a basically anonymous band for ten years or whatever, and that, itself, got boring, hence the willingness to be more open about the band. It's not that we were ever against bands talking about themselves, I just find it awkward that anyone would ever hear what I had to say about anything. We never thought the band would ever get to the point that we did (not that we're a massive band or anything like that). So many bands put out an album and nobody cares about it, and we're grateful that people have cared about the stuff that we've put out. I just went in a different direction with that question, but… [laughs]. No, I think that's a pretty good answer actually. I think the way the album resonates with people draws them into your opinions on how it was written or even on the genre in general. Whenever I write about music, I just refer to the album's resonance as the intensity of the reaction which people feel toward it. For instance, the new Deafheaven album -- I mean, you guys did a split with them back in 2012, I'm guessing you've listened to their new one -- it's been polarizing, but not in the same way their previous albums are polarizing. It's almost a leftover polarization of the past, almost as if people "knew" it was going to be polarizing and confirmed that when it came out. It's amazing that so many people have such a strong opinion about them at this point. When they first struck gold with Sunbather, the controversy totally made sense, or at least wasn't surprising. At this point, it's weird that people bother to make comments about them that they don't like them. It goes to the drive for people to always be talking about their opinions, I guess. It's weird at this point that they weren't expecting a new Deafheaven album to sound so much like Deafheaven. I like the new album and think it's good, but it's different than I expected, having listened to them in the past. I didn't know what to expect from it, either. At this point, they can do whatever they want… I mean, they have always done whatever they wanted. Somehow this album sounds a little different but also sounds maybe the "most Deafheaven" an album can sound, if that makes sense? In a way it kind of reminds me of their first album but with more sophisticated song structures. And I'll be quite honest, I didn't expect Further Still to sound like it does. I expected more of a post-All Fours environment. We mentioned them before, but I got these threads of the self-titled and II woven throughout some of the tracks. I found it surprising, as I spend most of my time listening to All Fours when I listen to your band. I listened to II and III and the self-titled, but I returned to them with the different perspective that Further Still gave me, and I'm enjoying them even more. So you have this retrospective enjoyment built into the new album, I think, and it harks back to the old days, but in many other ways it's totally new, too. We weren't really sure how people were going to respond to it.

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I think your audience might be slightly divided. There are the people who know your band and kind of know what to expect... and know to some extent to expect the unexpected. But there are also the people who won't know what to expect -- those who read this interview and figure out about your band for the first time. Would you recommend they listen to your prior albums first or dive right into Further Still? I don't think it really matters -- if I was going to tell someone to listen to my band right now before this album came out, I'd tell them to listen to All Fours. As a "classic band member," I think the most recent thing is the best thing. It's fine that fans have their favorite album, and I do, too. I think with each album we've improved our songwriting abilities and the recording, as well, I think sounds better… our performances on them, as well. All Fours was the first album I was really happy with how it sounded in a long-term way. There is this thing where every time you finish something, you're pretty happy with it (beyond the usual self-doubt stuff which is always there). But, I think All Fours was the first one where, a year later, I could listen to it and say, "yeah, we did a pretty good job on this." I hope I feel that way about Further Still too… I think I will, I feel pretty proud with it, self-doubt aside. It's a weird thing to make an album and know that and other people don't hear it the same way as you do. When I listen to these albums, I generally hear the things I perceive as imperfections -- if I listen to it too many times, it's all I hear. But, if I give it some space then maybe I can get past it. Regardless, I still feel proud of the work we've done as a band and grateful that people enjoy it. I wanted to ask, as a writer, what is your biggest challenge? What prevents you from succeeding or achieving what you're actually seeing? I think all writers have challenges, whether big or small, but what is your main crux? Self-doubt would be the big one, I would say. Discipline. But self-doubt for sure. There will be days where I'll look at stuff I've written and be like "what the fuck was I thinking?" You and me both, man [laughs]. I feel like most writers can identify with that. There will be those days where it's just like… like I said earlier, I've been working on a book for a couple of years, and there are days where I just [want to] delete this entire thing, fucking never think about it again. And then other days, it's just like, "I have to do this. I have to finish this, and I will." It's such a variety of feelings that go toward this one thing, toward this one discipline. Definitely, it can be rough. There've been a few things I've written that I've been really happy with, and it's stayed that way, like "The God Ennui" lyrics was one of the my favorite things that I've written. Some of the stuff on the new album, like the "My Shroud" song, I'm really proud of that one. But there there will be other songs… I wish I could forget them, or that they weren't around anymore, or that I could approach them differently, or that I'd have waited a month before finalizing them. I think everyone that writes -- even to be able to write music or create anything that has similar feelings -- there are definitely people who are really confident who don't outwardly express those things. Have you been jamming anything lately (doesn't have to be metal, of course)? Like, what's been keeping you alive over the last couple weeks? Sure, I work for The Flenser… so, this past week, Jonathan, the guy who started The Flenser, he went on vacation and kind of left me in charge. He made this post on Instagram for people to send me all their demos. Oh, shit [laughs]. This past week [laughs], I listened to people's demos and stuff. Another thing I've been listening to recently: The Flenser stuff all the time, obviously. There are so many points in time where you have to listen to the albums you're releasing. I'm really into the Lingua Ignota All Bitches Die album and the new The Body album (that one's really good). I always had a hard time with that band, but this is the first album where it's like, this album is good. They're a really interesting band that I don't always like, which is one way to put it. The vocals are a big stumbling block, I think. They are at least for me anyway: they're just so bizarre. On this new album I can appreciate them. I've been really into this ambient album by this guy named Dedekind Cut -- it's pretty good, it almost sounds like new age music, I really like it. I've been listening to this album by this person named Midwife -- it's got this weird gloomy, shoegaze/slowcore kind of stuff. Those are the things are coming to mind now.

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Further Still releases on September 14th via The Flenser.

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Some purists think technicality inevitably kills emotion in music, that bands who hit raw nerves do so in following the simplest route possible. While often the case, it’s far from a universal truth. The majority of bands that get labeled as technical might be more concerned with showing off than cutting into the heart, but in the hands of Minneapolis trio Warp and Weft, unpredictable changes, awkward timings and rhythms, and instrumental dexterity are tools to carve deeper beneath skin. Listen to an exclusive premiere of "Seduction/Oblivion" below.

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Consisting of Eric Burns on guitar and vocals, as well as bassist Jordan Koch-Engstrom and drummer Chris Woznicki of the inimitable Morality Crisis, Warp and Weft pierce those nerves without wasting a hint of time. Most tracks on its upcoming debut Patience fall within the two-minute range and still bore through the lungs. “Seduction/Oblivion” is no different in its aqueous noise punk, which combines the energetic shouts of KARP with a constantly changing and dissonant flood of razor-sharp instrumentation. It’s unruly yet concentrated, channeling aggression and unease through chops that would make most jazz musicians jealous. The rest of Patience, dropping in late August via Minnesconsin Records, is just as biting.

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Upcoming Warp and Weft shows: August 18th debut show with Birth Order, Minneapolis -- link August 27th with Serac and Motorrad Reisen at Memory Lanes, Minneapolis

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Nadja's music is more of a place than a sound. Something so vivid you can touch it and feel it surrounding you in its mass and volume. This prolific drone/doom metal duo, comprised of Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff, worships at this place of noise and capacity. Now releasing their 20th full-length album Sonnborner, the ambitious Canadian expats push their place of resonance into reality. Listen to an exclusive premiere of their upcoming album's title track below.

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Thirty minutes may seem like a lengthy period of time, but this is child's play to Baker and Buckareff. Lengths of time are canvases on which they paint, or a portal in which they evoke this otherworld. Slowly unraveling itself, "Sonnborner/Aten"'s first eight minutes swirl with beautifully bowed strings and Baker's plaintive voice, all before exploding forth with walls of distortion. A forgotten review of some Nadja release (maybe their split with 5/5/2000, but I could be wrong) described Nadja's music as "every instrument in existence playing the same note for a very long time," which is fitting. This is an overwhelming but beautiful exercise in volume through doomgazing tension and release. As a purported progenitor of this "metalgaze" or "doomgaze" style, Sonnborner acts as Nadja's master's thesis, a demonstration of the sound worship and noise beauty which cemented them in the first place.

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Sonnborner will be released September 4th on Broken Spine Productions and Daymare Recordings. Follow Nadja on Bandcamp.

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[caption id="attachment_62875" align="aligncenter" width="630"] From GoFundMe[/caption]

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Jamie "Boggy" Sykes, drummer for Thorr's Hammer and formerly Burning Witch and Atavist, was diagnosed with diverticulitis on August 3rd. You may remember that this same disease nearly killed YOB's Mike Schiedt and left him sidelined for months. In response to this diagnosis, Sykes family has launched a GoFundMe in order to cover the cost of treatment, as well to make up for the money Sykes is losing by not being able to work during his battle. You can read their full statement below, along with a link to donate on GoFundMe:

On Friday, August 3, 2018, Jamie was diagnosed with Diverticulitis from a CT scan. He is currently on antibiotics and this issue will be resolved. This scan also revealed that he has a 6.4 cm 'ball' on his left kidney. The radiologist and doctor said that the 'ball' is to be considered Renal Cell Carcinoma until proven otherwise. The Dr. Keith Harrington also said that we were lucky in a way, as if it were not for the CT scan this might have gone unnoticed and become much worse, although it is already very large. We have been to four different doctors and surgeons in the past three weeks. All of whom, up until Friday gave us misdiagnosis. Each of these doctors bills will be arriving soon. He has also had a lot of time off work, and in excruciating pain for this whole time. We are told as of now that his kidney will need to be removed in its entirety. This may or may not take place here in Bend, Oregon (the town where we live). We are told that a surgeon needs to be located here whom is prepared and able to do the surgery. As this is a smaller town, we may have to travel to Portland. We will of course update you all on a daily basis when we get new information. We expect to have an appointment scheduled with a surgeon by Tuesday, August 7, 2018. All of the monies given will go directly to pay for all of his treatment including, but not limited to, doctor, surgeon, imagery, and medication bills, as well as time off work for our regular bills, due to his wife already being on disability and funds being limited. We want our Boggy to keep banging on those drums as long as he can. Thanks for your support. Much love and keep the metal flowing!

Donate at GoFundMe.

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Some albums feature the recording studio as its own instrument. The Prize pointedly does not. The new album from long running Rochester, NY metal act Sulaco only makes time for one fadeout and one dash of reverb on a vocal line. Otherwise, Sulaco have no interest in shaping their music with the use of effects or production wizardry. To them, the studio is just a place where the mics are on. And why shouldn't it be? When you're as technically precise and compelling in your playing as Sulaco are, anything other than a cut and dry production job would be superfluous. The Prize is a no bullshit feat of extreme metal that places Sulaco's inventing writing and chemistry to the forefront. Stream the album exclusively below

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Sulaco make a mockery of subgenre categorization. Their fast paced playing and odd ball sense of melody makes them at home next to death metal acts drawing from the sea-sick dissonances of fellow NY statesmen Immolation, but singer Erik Burke forgoes the theatrics of death growls for a direct and gruff hardcore shout. Sulaco also spend plenty of timing slowing their vicious pace down to a sludgy pummel. The result is an all purpose extremity that recalls the kinds of releases that Relapse records built a name off of in the early 2000s. Trying to determine what box Sulaco slot into is a waste of time when their music offers such a visceral impact. Each moment of The Prize feels expertly crafted and labored over. The band crank through whip-smart rhythmic changes cleanly and efficiently, leaving no note to chance. This tight control over their playing allows them to sell some transitions that would normally leave a song a pile of riff salad. What Sulaco understand is that salads, even riff salads, can be good for you and a delight to take in, especially if the flavors are well balanced. No dressing necessary.

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Here's what Burke has to say about the album:

We are very stoked for our new sounds to hit the streets. It's been a bit since our last release so we're pumped. Also with the release we have 2 extra tracks we recorded that will be available free on our Bandcamp (on release day). Instrumental interpretations of a couple melodies from another band so be sure to grab these along with the record!! This band is built on riffs. Write a crusher, play it endlessly, figure variations, move it around, play it backwards with some swing, the shit makes me mental sometimes because settling on the right recipe is key. Shit can always be changed but finding the sweet spot is gold. I love it. I try to never write filler riffs. Every one must rule. We have always had a mix of tempos in our tunes. Nothing different on this one. Sometimes we grind, sometimes we groove sometimes we are slow and grim. But we are always on 10. Never fucked with dynamics much. I'd rather crush. We are rooted in death/grind but we don't sound like many grind or death metal bands. Most of my influence is late 80s early 90s death and thrash. N.J. metal. Ripping Corpse and Human Remains. I think we certainly fit in with so many different flavors these days.

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The Prize releases on August 17th via Translation Loss. You can follow Sulaco on Facebook.

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Yesterday, High on Fire announced a new album Electric Messiah, and today, they announced a co-headlining tour with Municipal Waste dubbed "The Speed of the Wizard Tour." Opening all dates are Toxic Holocaust and Haunt, and the Richmond show also has GWAR on the bill. The tour includes a Brooklyn show on November 11 at Warsaw. Tickets for that show will be on sale soon. All dates are listed below. Municipal Waste last released Slime and Punishment in 2018. Stream a track from that, along with "Electric Messiah," below. UPDATE: High on Fire have other dates, including European shows with Enslaved, and they released a lyric video for "Electric Messiah." Watch and check out their full tour schedule below. https://youtu.be/paVC2vvMfUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op9E1fhyV2Y&feature=youtu.be Municipal Waste / High on Fire / Toxic Holocaust / Haunt -- 2018 Tour Dates 11/02/2018 Canton Hall - Dallas, TX 11/03/2018 Mohawk - Austin, TX 11/04/2018 Southport Music - New Orleans, LA 11/06/2018 The Orpheum - Tampa, FL 11/07/2018 Masquerade -Atlanta, GA 11/09/2018 Washington, DC Black Cat Saturday 11/10/2018 Richmond, VA The National w/ GWAR 11/11/2018 Warsaw - Brooklyn, NY 11/12/2018 Philadelphia, PA Union Transfer 11/13/2018 Boston, MA Paradise 11/15/2018 Metro - Chicago, IL 11/17/2018 Oriental Theater - Denver, CO 11/18/2018 Metro Music Hall -Salt Lake City, UT 11/20/2018 BossaNova Ballroom - Portland, OR 11/21/2018 Showbox @ The Market - Seattle, WA 11/23/2018 Ace Of Spades - Sacramento, CA 11/24/2018 UC Theater - Berkeley, CA 11/25/2018 Brick By Brick - San Diego, CA * 11/26/2018 Observatory - Santa Ana, CA * * No HIGH ON FIRE -- High on Fire -- 2018 Tour Dates 09/08 - NO, Oslo, Oya Festival 10/08 - BE Belgium, Ieperfest 11/08 - DE Sinzendorf, Void Fest 12/08 - HU Budapest, Durer Kert 8/17/2018 - Las Vegas, NV - Hard Rock Hotel & Casino (Psycho Fest) 9/1/2018 - Cookeville, TN - Muddy Roots Music Festival 9/2/2018 - Asheville, NC - The Orange Peel w/ Enslaved 30/09 - U Bazyla Poznan PL 01/10 - Proxima Warsaw PL 02/10 - UT Connewitz Leipzig DE 03/10 - Kulturfabrik Esch LU 04/10 - Mezz Jupiler Zaal Breda NL 10/5/18 - Los Angeles, CA - Adult Swim Festival 08/10 - Academy 2 Manchester UK 09/10 - Tivoli Dublin EIRE 10/10 - Limelight 2 Belfast UK 12/10 - The Mill Birmingham UK 14/10 - SWX Bristol UK 15/10 - The Dome London UK 16/10 - La Machine Du Moulin Rouge Paris FR w/ Municipal Waste 2-Nov-18 - Dallas @ Canton Hall 3-Nov-18 - Austin @ Mohawk 4-Nov-18 - New Orleans @ Southport Hall 6-Nov-18 - Tampa @ Orpheum Theatre 7-Nov-18 - Atlanta @ The Masquerade 9-Nov-18 - Washington @ Black Cat 11-Nov-18 - Brooklyn @ Warsaw 12-Nov-18 - Philadelphia @ Union Transfer 13-Nov-18 - Boston @ Paradise Rock Club 15-Nov-18 - Chicago @ Metro 17-Nov-18 - Denver @ The Oriental Theater 18-Nov-18 - Salt Lake City @ Metro Music Hall 20-Nov-18 - Portland @ Bossanova Ballroom 21-Nov-18 - Seattle @ Showbox at the Market 23-Nov-18 - Sacramento @ Ace Of Spades 24-Nov-18 - Berkeley @ The UC Theatre

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Extreme technicality both defines and threatens technical death metal. Instrumental proficiency and songwriting complexity are must-haves in this style -- when cranked to the max, though, these otherwise benign features quickly transform into curses. The resultant music can end up overburdened with senseless complications and occluded by a fog of blatant and ultimately tasteless virtuosity. It takes an adept, cohesive band to mitigate these pitfalls: essentially, when to scale intensity back and when/where to utilize (or rethink) tech-death tropes. The goal is to be dynamic but familiar, something definitely tech-death but slightly more emotive and human. This has nothing to do with restraint; it has much more to do with tactics and contextual awareness. Enter French quartet Exocrine and their upcoming third full-length Molten Giant, a tactically aggressive tech-death masterwork both respective of the style's tenets but challengingly deviant. If this band specializes in any one area, it'd be timing: when to nail you with a wildly sweeping guitar solo, when to eviscerate you with a techy breakdown, and when to mind-bend you with layers of ever-shifting riffing. Throughout, there's a dense feeling of effortlessness -- something almost machine-like, but far too creative to be computerized -- plus deft touches of pure, raw fun. For a taste of all this excitement, check out an exclusive stream of the album's third track "Backdraft" below.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiVBbpGdLPA

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As with every song on Molten Giant, "Backdraft" is rife with easily hummable melodies strung together by transitions which include everything from chugging microbursts to spin-off guitar leads. The band knows about blasting, too, as the song's midsection dictates: riff harder, stronger, faster. Things then dissipate into a more upbeat, nuanced rhythm-based section featuring another bonkers (but tasteful) solo, all before returning to the chorus. This undulation is a prime example of Exocrine acting as tacticians vs. demolitionists, too. Molten Giant is not dizzying you at every turn (e.g. it offers plenty of repeating sections); rather, it builds tension and drama to high points only to smash things to smithereens with barbarically primitive weaponry. It's true that some tech-death has forgotten how to be heavy -- perhaps this is a byproduct of the pursuit of such pure/clean levels of technicality across the board. Without sacrificing any precision, though, Exocrine offer up some savagely heavy tech-death over Molten Giant's eight tracks. To wit: the album approaches the fringe radiation of deathcore, but not close enough to suffer any ill effects (more apparent on tracks like "Lavaburst" rather than "Backdraft"). And, if you were to pick an analogue from an earlier era of tech-death, Beneath the Massacre would be a good place to start, though Exocrine are more trimmed, polished, and honed. They're just as bonkers though, without overdoing it, and that's really the magic balance to be struck for success.

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Molten Giant releases on August 17th via Unique Leader. Pre-orders are available here. Watch a lyric video for the album's first single "Hayato" below.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60o535CJYfM

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[caption id="attachment_62851" align="aligncenter" width="663"] By Craig Mulchany[/caption]

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No doubt: Thou's upcoming full-length Magus is hotly anticipated. The Baton Rouge-based outfit have been showing great promise for some time now; indeed, their stellar performances at this year's installments of Northwest Terror Fest and Migration Fest extracted the excitable fandom which has been ever-bubbling underground. Thou have nailed the perfect formula of groove, doom, sludge, and drone: all things balanced, all things maximum, all things powerful. The chord they're striking with listeners now is enchantable indeed, and Magus will be the test of a new Thou era. Check out the brand-new video for "The Changeling Prince," the fourth track from Magus, below. The album releases August 31st via Sacred Bones.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aGuuMEQx68&feature=youtu.be

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“Time is out of joint.” -- Hamlet

“My head really hurts.” -- Black Flag

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Smoke braids itself up from the mountains around Taos and into the darkening sky as we hove close to Raton, a ramshackle sweep of faltering trailers dotted out alongside the highway in northern New Mexico. Bats cut across our high beams. “We’re driving into Hell,” Will, my traveling companion, says. “Well, first Raton, then Denver, then Warped Tour. So yeah: Hell.” “Pioneering,” as John Berryman wrote, “is not feeling well.” And I am becoming unwell as we drive. I’ve made a crucial mistake: I had intentions. I thought I knew what I wanted and needed to see ex ante. I pitched this piece last year, and I’d been thinking about it since Invisible Oranges accepted it. I intended it to be part experiential postcard, part political analysis. I intended to focus on the U.S. highway system, the major piece of infrastructure, now failing along with the rest of our infrastructure, upon which Warped Tour relies. And within this focus I intended to showcase the build-out of the American empire after the Second World War under Eisenhower, under whose aegis the interstate system tethered together our disparate confederation. I intended to point out that you can land planes on the highway, that this is by design, that the highway system is inextricably linked to our “defense” industry, and that there was no way we could have gotten one without the other. I intended to use Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” speech as a fulcrum to show that the death of American optimism (of which Warped is an expression), the toll of maintaining our global empire, and our empire’s benighted final throes would converge and could therefore be analyzed at Warped. In other words, I saw the Denver date of Warped Tour as an object lesson in what has rotten in America, whatever sick fruit it bore before. This instinct was not totally misguided.

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Yet by the time Will and I push through New Mexico’s northernmost reaches the night before the Warped date, the truth asserts itself: my preparations are foundering; I am now adrift. Rather than the rapid coming of America’s demise as it plummets into the maw of nihilistic consumption and imperial over-expansion, what I begin to sense is that what I otherwise and with aplomb spend, waste, kill -- namely time -- veils and beguiles and relucts my attempts to ground myself in any particular “now,” let alone locate a specific “then,” to say nothing of a possible “next.” This is, in part, because of the nature of the Warped Tour itself. I never got to go when I was a kid, but I did go to Lollapalooza 2003, back when it was, like Warped, a traveling tour. Warped is the last of its kind and Kevin Lyman, the tour’s founder, announced in 2017 that after 24 years, the tour’s time was up. After 2018, the half-shopping mall, half-teen haven will expire. There’s no surprise here: guitar music doesn’t generate the kind of cash it used to. But when I saw the lineup it was like doing the Time Warp: Harm’s Way, Sharptooth, Issues, Senses Fail, Simple Plan, The Used, Reel Big Fish. This genealogy of bands spans four different presidential administrations and the majority of my time on this Earth. When I was growing up, Warped was just a thing that is, like police brutality or beans in the soup. It was inseparable from the teenage suburban experience as I knew it. Warped was less a tour than part of a context. That this is its last year certainly feels like the end of an era. As with any ending, the ground drops out from under you. It’s a cartoon physics: your legs keep running in midair and then you turn back: the cliff’s edge, you notice, is behind you. And then there is the terraformed suburban blight of Colorado to contend with: first, there lies Pueblo, which is more a consortium of living situations slapped down around a refinery than anything like coherent municipality; next, there’s Colorado Springs, a composite car dealership and U.S. Air Force base. I begin to dissociate when we enter Denver’s city limits. It’s an endlessness of concrete and strip malls enfenced by mountains themselves made invisible by light pollution’s interplay with night’s obscurity. It looks like home to me, like the quiltwork prairie of Illinois long since patched over with asphalt and cul-de-sacs. We’re driving backward in time: we spend the night at a friend’s childhood home in his childhood bedroom in the basement. The house sits on a corner like my best friend’s mother’s house in a neighborhood just like it back in Illinois. Whatever boundary splits past from present blurs before me. Memories slip through the dilation and enter the present before my eyes. We could be anywhere, I think. This could be any year of my life. I call my partner to let her know we’ve arrived safely. “How are you?” “I’m staring at an open box on the floor.” “What’s in it?” “Nothing,” I say. “It’s empty. It looks like a little kid wrote ‘BAD’ on the side of it.” “Nothing inside it anymore,” she says.

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What is an American to do with history? The obvious answer: Face it. But America is a country perpetuated in part by an inherent dishonesty about its past. Thanksgiving cloaks the dark legacy of settler-colonialism and indigenous extermination -- still ongoing. Black History Month, its province the shortest month of the year, arrives as a litany of “firsts” trucked with a parade wrong-headedness exposed first by the Civil War and corrected by Martin Luther King, Jr. As if chattel slavery did not, even at the moment the ink dried, lay bare the farce of our founding documents. As if a generations-long “debate” exacerbated by a football game with muskets recounted as a contest to see who was honorable enough to decide what ought to be done with the black population healed this legacy and absolved all of any culpability. And this is to say nothing of the eight-hour workday, an eroding “given” I did not know people fought and died for until I was an adult and far from the clutches of any educational institution. Besides, May Day, President Obama announced, is now Loyalty Day. Lastly, it’s scarcely pointed out who benefited, who continues to benefit, and how and why. “The strong decide what is right while the weak suffer what they must,” goes an ethos the powerful hope the powerless forget. Though the powerful in America have themselves forgotten -- if they ever learned it -- that not long after those words left Athenian lips their empire, such as it was, plummeted into plague and cannibalism only to succumb to the depredations of the Spartan oligarchs. It seems the only thing that has truly trickled down in America is amnesia. I do not aim to play the victim here and imply that my inability to disaggregate past from present falls squarely on the shoulders of our disingenuous national story. Rather, it's that I realize -- at Denver’s Pepsi Center, in whose parking lot the Warped date unfolds, backgrounded by a theme park replete with tilt-a-whirls and rollercoasters and flanked by an industrial train line -- that the fact that I cannot synthesize a coherent story of myself, which is to say a story of my past, is itself a distinctly American problem, and that I am, despite myself, well within our grand tradition. The first thing I hear when we make it past the gates comes from a roadie selling a map and schedule to a teenage boy: “I went to my first Warped Tour before you were born.” He is not talking down to him. He is trying to communicate what the words can’t carry: disbelief, maybe. And loss. Nothing gold can’t not stay is how America would like it to be. And yet here we are. It’s a startlingly vulnerable encounter, and like all teenage boys, the recipient of this sentence is at a loss for words. “Yeah,” the boy says, taking his map and schedule and walking away. It’s not long after this that Will and I make our way to one of the Monster Energy Drink-sponsored stages. Those stages sit beside one another. Harm’s Way comes on. What I see of the pit is that it’s as violent as I would have wanted when I was a kid: kinetic, damaging, offering up brief glimpses of camaraderie and transcendence. Harm’s Way kills. They do the impossible: their liveset sounds just like the record, yet better for their actual presence.

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James Pligg, their lead singer, is a walking pillar of death. He hops around as he screams and punches the air just below his waist. As I watch, I feel like I’m getting hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. Between songs, the guitarist says a few words. Otherwise: nothing. They didn’t come here to play to us, but play through us. It’s a type of aggression that does not repeat itself for the rest of the day. But listening to Pligg scream about the dangers of overconsumption and the claustrophobia of post-industrial life makes me look around. The logistics required to bring this tour to bear staggers. I bring this up to the Harm’s Way merch guy after their set. He’s done a few Warped Tours. “It’s crazy,” he admits. “But after the first one you figure it out.” I restrain myself from haranguing him about load-in and load-out. I want the details he is likely unable or unwilling to provide to some rando. But my brain starts to attempt impossible ad hoc computations. I think about how much gasoline is required to pull off the tour -- how many miles driven, how many vehicles, vendors, surprise expenses, the gas to fire up the grills to feed the bands, the merch guys, the sound crews, those responsible for setting up the stage -- whatever other hands are held responsible for the invisible labor that brings this spectacle from city to city and eventually to Japan, where it will conclude. Yet here are still more calculations: how much oil goes into our roads? Both for the machines and for the materials that make them and for the construction workers that build them and -- though this happens less and less -- maintain them. And then to the wars that made and continue to make all this possible. As historian Andrew Bacevich states: “From the outset, America’s war for the Greater Middle East was a war to preserve the American way of life, rooted in a specific understanding of freedom and requiring an abundance of cheap energy [...] Over time, other considerations intruded and complicated the war’s conduct, but oil as a prerequisite of freedom was from day one an abiding consideration.” This war, began late in the Cold War, hit its high notes when I was an adolescent, the same year I attended Lollapalooza, my eyelids blacked with eyeliner and my palm sweaty in my first love’s hand. It was a war that, though to a lesser degree than the Gulf War a decade prior, and to Baudrillard’s observational credit, seems to have not existed. It was a war without casualties, as far as anyone back home could tell. Or rather, a war with statistics that represented casualties, but because of the media blackout on military coffins and war wounded and the strict management of embedded reporters, never felt real to the citizenry -- no flash photography, nothing to write home about. And our film narratives, unlike those in the wake of Vietnam, have been successfully massaged by CIA “advisors.” We look at the flowering of armaments and sectarian warfare in the Middle East and wonder how, why? When I was a young boy, first discovering punk and metal in my older cousins room in Lavonia, Michigan, he and I watched a VHS copy of the second Rambo movie. It takes place in Afghanistan during our proxy war with the Soviets. The film closes with Rambo and other happy warriors triumphantly raising their rifles in the sky. Lettering fades in: THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO THE BRAVE MUJAHIDEEN FIGHTERS OF AFGHANISTAN. Because, of course, we funded them to beat back the Soviets, to give the Kremlin “its Vietnam” when the USSR incurred into the region. Specifically, the CIA funneled money through Saudi spy master Turki Faisal -- once a tutee of President Bill Clinton when they overlapped at Georgetown (Clinton tutored him for an ethics exam; Faisal received a B) -- to acquire provisions for Osama bin Laden and his “brave fighters.”* American military history has, of late, been repeatedly, wistfully asking why our hands are on fire after we’ve pet a burning dog. If we want answers we likely need not look any further than over our shoulders. But what would the answers really mean anyway? We’ve reached a point of stagnation in which no knowledge and no clear thinking animates coherent action or inspires meaningful results. There is no “and then.” There is only “and now.”

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The sun hoists high overhead. Its radiance borders on oppressive and I’m wearing pants like a jackass. Bottles of water are predictably overpriced. Will and I walk around some more and end up seeing the Canadian pop-punk outfit the Story Untold. You can tell they rehearse all the time, practicing their harmonies. They’re not breaking the mold by any means, but punk stopped being about that a long time ago. It’s mostly settled into what I call “genrecore”: better and worse executions of familiar musical themes. The Story Untold play like they’re making a case for this idea. They even go so far as to play a pop-punk medley. The main song I recognize is Blink-182’s “Rock Show,” which details the agony and the ecstasy of meeting a summer crush at the Warped Tour. The album that spawned this single is Take Off Your Pants and Jacket; a tapestry of bygone pop culture unfurls before me. And what was I doing when that record came out? What was my life like? I try to string together some kind of story. When I was getting into punk, in the Internet 1.0 era, there was a word-of-mouth way to learn about it. You had to find other kids with messed up hair, bondage pants, band shirts; kids whose parents’ divorce had scoured their inner lives of safety and trust; parents who worked enough to provide a posh life for their children but too much to pay attention to them; kids who’d spent time in jail, been shipped off to military school and had come home every summer to evidence their underground education in upsetting and subverting every adult authority figure in a one-mile radius; kids who hung out in gas stations; kids who sleeved their arms with jelly bracelets or wore sweaters year-round to hide their scars or tract marks, or who put cigarettes out on each other and laughed; kids who, in other words, never felt the open pasture of the future roll out before them or who, even if it had, were so soured by the idea of having to wake up everyday that it hardly mattered. These kids still exist. I see them everywhere around me in the Pepsi Center parking lot. Teenagers remain disaffected. But I don’t know if this “education” in the history of punk, metal, hardcore, goth, etc. still exists. There was a telos to it: you started with radio rock and moved towards edgier and often older bands in the “canon,” so to speak. Yet something like it must exist, because I stand there while Will jumps up and down, singing along, cigarette in hand, to every word of this medley. I know most of them as well. I smile and don’t know why. Is it recognition? Is this comfort? A profound alienation sets in. It’s not so much that this medley strings together a host of Warped Tour alumni and so presents a sweet excavation recent pop music history. It’s that everything collapses into now. In his collection of essays on 9/11 and its aftermath, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek draws a parallel between communist Cuba and the post-industrial North, or the West -- whatever we mean by that now, whatever’s left of Christendom. Time has stopped in different ways for these locales: in Cuba, because of their use-value economy dedicated to maintenance and refurbishment and their limited access to the global market, it’s as if time stands still in the past -- Canadian public transport buses gifted in the 1970s still carry people from place to place, cars from the 1950s still drive; in the North, the suburban project and a dedication (and the requisite spoils of hegemony for such a dedication) to constantly remake the world anew locks it in the present -- all of history is repaved. The passing of time is but the continuance of persistent projects of ellison. This hits me again as we make our way from watching the consummate showmen in Reel Big Fish play what’s likely the tightest set of the tour. They’re pros par excellence and their set drew the most diverse crowd of attendees.

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https://youtu.be/AEKbFMvkLIc

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Will and I camp at the other Monster Energy stage and wait for Sharptooth. On the stage adjacent, Senses Fail reaches the end of their set. We’re surprised by the lead singer’s naked vulnerability in dedicating a song to his daughter. He then informs the crowd that the band is in its 16th year of existence. Will and I look at each other. “Holy shit,” he says. “I remember hearing their first record when it came out,” I say. And just when something is starting to feel like it has aged, has acquired some kind of sedimentation, the band launches into a cover of System of a Down’s “Chop Suey.” Will passes me a cigarette, “They’re really doing it. They’re really playing this right now.” “This whips.” And from “Chop Suey” they move into a nu metal medley: Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff,” Drowning Pool’s “Bodies,” among others. The Time Warp begins afresh. Readers can refer to my earlier article on nu-metal and America for Invisible Oranges for better purchase of what this music signifies, the bygone era that belched it up; nevertheless, it sent me in a spiral deeper than The Story Untold’s medley if only by dint of repetition. The crowd, midway through the medley, parts down the middle under the singer’s direction. “It’s a Wall of Death,” I say to the open air. But then something strange happens: instead of a wall of death, the crowd, as directed, storms towards each other and embraces. It’s a Wall of Hugs. I’m not too cynical for this -- it’s touching. But then I find out there are also legal reasons for the affection -- a few years ago, Oly Sykes of Bring Me the Horizon got in trouble at a Warped Tour date for instigating a real Wall of Death. The tour (read: Kevin Lyman) let Sykes know that in no certain terms would the tour be held liable -- such stunts were verboten because the artists who inspire them will be held fully culpable for injuries and damage. It’s a catastrophe management strategy anyone who has seen footage of Woodstock 1999 can appreciate. But in hindsight, it’s also domesticating and therefore troubling. The long arm of the law tames everything it touches with its violence. I remember, watching Senses Fail finish out their set, that Korn and Limp Bizkit are headlining the Warped dates in Japan. And now and now and now forever.

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Sharptooth draws a small crowd -- at first. For those not in the know, Sharptooth’s music is overtly political, often dealing with issues of misogyny, homophobia, and rape trauma. Their first record is good enough, but I had a feeling they’d be incredible live. I wasn’t wrong. I’ve never seen a more concentrated burst of energy, a more chaotic explosion of sound. Lauren Kashan, the band’s lead singer, screams like she’s trying to bring the sky down to Earth. Between songs, she rails against society’s ills. Having gone to a fair number of punk shows that feature prolonged political rants, I was ready to cringe. But the band smartly plays instrumental interludes under Kashan’s diatribes about assault, coming out of the closet, solidarity, etc. She’s a rousing speaker. Truly unafraid and absolutely incandescent. As they play more and more people gather. The fellow feeling in the crowd is palpable -- it’s the only moment of togetherness the day has on offer. The only thing that feels like a real connection. Kashan, at the end, storms her way into the audience. Immediately, Will and I get anxious for the same reason. What man is going to ruin this by trying to grab her? I think to myself. But no one does. Instead, it’s as if there’s a forcefield of mutual respect around her. The women and queers in the audience claim the space around her and scream along. Breathless, she finishes the set by telling us how much she loves us, how she’s willing to talk to any sexual assault survivors, any victims of our society’s myriad violent depredations who need a space to talk and to feel safe. She directs us to their merch booth where the band has a meet-and-greet planned in the next half-hour. It’s one of the most moving concert experiences I’ve had to date. Uncool, unironic, unabashed. Their main song, “Fuck Donald Trump,” had exploded. It’s what brought the rest of the crowd over. But in the aftermath of their set, I’m troubled. It seems to me that we’ve hit a moment of decadence. I don’t mean this in a snooty, right-wing way. It’s a technical term, not a smear. We’re falling away, or at least think we’re falling away from old paradigms. Or perhaps we only hope we are. For good reason many of us desire this. Of course, this happens at a moment when the “old ideas” have refastened themselves to pubic life in a way more visible than many remember. Sharptooth’s demolition derby on the macho hardcore culture I grew up with is inspiring and invigorating. But what can replace the horror we have whole cloth? The Trump presidency signals a bleak right wing turn in America, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think it unique -- slaves were, after all, once bought and sold in the White House. There’s little agreement on where to go next, on what’s even possible. America, never one to take seriously its history, has now experienced a foreclosure on the only real estate it ever wanted to have: the future. These thoughts swirl as we leave the Pepsi Center. We bought water from one of the last vendors to have any before Sharptooth’s set. “You guys are lucky,” the vendor told us. “I’ve only got water for another hour at most.” We’re dehydrated and Will has work tomorrow. Will unfolds the schedule and reads off the headliners -- Simple Plan and The Used among them. “I’m not dying to see any of these bands.” I agree. I’ve spent enough time re-litigating the Iraq War in my head all day. I don’t need to hear more songs that rocket me backward. Every Time I Die sounds across the asphalt as we wait for my car to cool down. I’m so hot and sweaty my brain misfires. I’m not sure what’s just happened to me, what I saw, what I’ve done, what I’ve heard. I’m woozy. A vista opens before me when I wake up upon our re-entry into Colorado Springs. We’re cresting a hill on the highway and I see in the distance a series of disconnected subdivisions built into the mountainside. Will has been chugging Red Bull and Gatorade and listening to Lil Uzi Vert. “Welcome back,” he says. “How long was I out?” “We’re still listening to the same record.” “Jesus,” I say and point out to the subdivisions. “I know.” As we make our way back to New Mexico, I start to experience some clarity. In 1988, Joan Didion covered the presidential primaries, during which she saw the dawn of a new kind of Washington insider. She observes that “people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as ‘anecdotal.’” It strikes me that we’re experiencing a revenge of the “anecdotal.” It was theorized that wealth would trickle down and promote new kinds of freedom in the form of consumer choice; it has been observed that it has not, and that it is not, respectively. It was theorized that America had the moral integrity and so the right to decide the world order; it has been observed that absent the former America’s “right” to police the world has revealed only its recklessness and general turpitude. It was theorized that the Obama administration ushered in an era of racial parity; it was observed that this could not possibly be the case. It was theorized that a politics of means testing and middle-management ethos were both what the American people needed and what they wanted; it has been observed that the American people neither needed nor wanted to nor could be moneyballed into magical thinking. It was theorized that the American Century bespoke a common purpose and grandeur to which all subscribed with not just unity but uniformity; it has been observed that this is simply not so. It was theorized that ill-gotten opulence could be enjoyed in perpetuity; it has been observed that it cannot do so without staggering inequality. And, in our longest lasting political fiction, it was theorized that freedom and equality under the law and the law alone is the truest justice possible; it was observed that this is a farce put on by a self-congratulatory ruling class terrified to admit that legal equality means next to nothing without material equality. After all, Bacevich, a conservative cited above, is at least honest enough to point out that there are in fact material “prerequisites” for American “freedom” as it stands today. This disconnect between the theoretical and the observable has intensified the heritage of dishonesties that comprise American life. Thus we’re in the last days of a wind-tossed interregnum and time is running out. The end of the Warped Tour and my experiences in Denver make clear to me that my initial instincts were right. It feels as if there’s nowhere to go and little about which to be optimistic. And what’s the point of America without optimism? Our signature aggressive, cocksure smile must now strike the rest of the world as the rictus of the deranged. The poet Anne Sexton once described life as the “awful rowing towards God.” But this implies directionality and we live in atomized time. “In atomized time,” Byung-chul Han writes, “all temporal points are alike. Nothing distinguishes one point in time from another. The decay of time disperses dying into pershing.” As Will and I re-enter Raton, the mountains near Taos no longer offer only smoke: a curled lip of wildfire rakes itself down the mountainside in the night. Awful, yes. But not rowing. Just drowning.

-- Emmet Penney

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As part of our culture's broader nostalgia for 1980s aesthetics, the sounds of John Carpenter's horror scores have recently come into vogue in the heavy metal scene. Whether this comes in the form of flirtations with synthwave or outright incorporation of pulsing modular synthesis, metal has grown adapt at evoking the world of 1980s horror films in sound. Rarely, however, is the resulting music actually scary. A band like The Lion's Daughter, as enjoyable as they are, are only horrifying by association. They recall being scared by images, but the sounds themselves aren't going to keep you up at night. If you want to truly be wigged out by a record, you'll have to get your kicks elsewhere, and the world of new music is a great place to start. Consider the clarinet. The instrument recalls the kind of music you'd need to wear a tux to hear, but in the hands of experimental artist Jeremiah Cymerman, it is more appropriate for a black robes and candlelight. Much like Colin Stetson's work for the Hereditary score earlier this year, Cymerman's newest album Decay of the Angel turns woodwinds into instruments of terror. Stream the album's finale "Out of Many Waters" below.

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"Out of Many Waters" is one of the few pieces that offers respite from the whiteknuckle intensity of the rest of Decay of the Angel. Even though it scales back the truly freaky electronic elements, "Out of Many Waters" is still a disconcertingly intimate listen. Cymerman labels himself as an electro-acoustic artist, and even in a more conventional recording, his ability to make sound physical is evident. This piece is a feat of recording. Every note, squeak, inhale, and adjustment is clearly audible. It isn't so much that Cymerman places the listener into the room where he's performing so much as he places the music directly inside the listeners body, conjuring the sounds up out of the spine and into the ears. It likely isn't Cymerman's intention to scare his listeners, but rather to challenge them. That "Out of Many Waters" registers as a relief only speaks to how harrowing the rest of Deacy of the Angel is.

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Here's what Cymerman has to say about the piece:

The most melodic piece on the record is also the closer, "Out of Many Waters." Throughout the whole album, the solo clarinet is featured in a variety of sonic settings; electronic accompaniments, pedals, and percussion. For the very last track, the clarinet is featured in a stark acoustic environment, performing with a desperate sense of joy and introspection that hasn't been as readily apparent on most of my previous work. It's a delicate and vulnerable ending to an intense listening experience.

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Decay of the Angel releases on August 17th via 5049.

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Here are the new metal releases for the weeks of August 12 – August 18, 2018. Release dates are formatted according to proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see the bulk of these records on shelves or distros on the coming Fridays unless otherwise noted or if labels and artists get impatient. Blurbs and designations are based on whether or not I have a lot to say about it. See something we missed? Goofs? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging. As a little bit of a challenge, include your own opinion about anything you want to add. Make me want to listen to it! Please note: this is a review column and is not speculative. Any announced albums without preview material will not be covered. Additionally, any surprise releases which are uploaded or released after this column is published will be excluded.

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ANTICIPATED RELEASES

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Rebel Wizard - Voluptuous Worship of Rapture and Response | Prosthetic Records | Heavy Negative Wizard Metal (Black/Heavy Metal) | Australia Hail to the north wind, the south current, the inverted sun, and to heavy negative wizard metal. As always, mastermind Bob Nekrasov transforms the classic sounds of heavy metal into something reminiscent of black metal, but with that special sort of metal-only, engine-revving energy. Sulaco - The Prize | Translation Loss Records | Technical Death Metal | United States Erik Burke is a tenured master of the strange and angular. Yes, "angular" has become one of those words… words like "amazing," "discordant," "scary," and so on. Sulaco, however, is a hill of sharp, broken obsidian. Technical and truly strange, Burke's idiosyncratic style is something which dates all the way back to his tenure in Lethargy, which he shared with Mastodon's Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher. Somehow smooth, but incredibly, ridiculously raunchy, Sulaco does it again… even after a seven-year wait. Innumerable Forms - Punishment In Flesh | Profound Lore Records | Death Metal | United States Pure caveman riffing. My brow grows larger. This is death metal at its purest. Those of us in the know have waited an inordinate amount of time for this one, and Innumerable Forms's debut LP is everything we could ever ask for. In the immortal words of our own Langdon Hickman: "I'm listening to death metal."

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OF NOTE

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Exocrine - Molten Giant | Unique Leader Records | Progressive/Technical Death Metal | France From Andrew's premiere of "Backdraft":

It's true that some tech-death has forgotten how to be heavy -- perhaps this is a byproduct of the pursuit of such pure/clean levels of technicality across the board. Without sacrificing any precision, though, Exocrine offer up some hilariously heavy tech-death over Molten Giant's eight tracks.

Trappist - Ancient Brewing Tactics | Relapse Records | Beer Crust, I guess. | United States DAE beer and DIY? This is perfectly fine hardcore/crust or whatever (you should know what you're getting into), but I can't handle "obvious gimmick jokes" like this. Also, what's with the Coor's hate? I get the whole "we are beer nerds" thing, I guess, but everyone grows out of their "La Fin du Monde is my favorite beer ever" phase. Primitive Man/Unearthly Trance - Split | Relapse Records | Drone/Doom Metal / Sludge/Doom Metal | United States

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FOR THE ADVENTUROUS

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Austin Lucas - Immortal Americans | Cornelius Chapel Records | Alternative Country | United States Some of you might be asking "Jon, why are you covering a [really great] country album on Invisible Oranges?" Well, why not? Austin Lucas's talent runs deep, and his lineage even deeper. Fronting death metal bands in the late 1990s and early 2000s, his transition to Nashville alt-country was seamless and glorious. Immortal Americans is as emotive as it as creative, technically proficient, and gilded.

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