Live Report: Ogrefest X
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America remains the largest market for extreme metal music in the world. However, the vast majority of the country remains relatively devoid of metal–or musical culture period. I grew up in a musical desert in northern Ohio, many miles from what people would call an “A” or “B” market. No bands relevant to my interests booked shows near me. I had no reason to like anything that was not mass-marketed.
Ogrefest II, in 2007, changed that. I knew the lineup was supposed to be good–my best friend stole a car to see the first edition of the fest the previous year (he brought it back in one piece). What I didn’t know, was that artists with no major label support, with no budget, could be more engaging and stimulating than the mass-appeal music that I had access to beforehand. These are the sort of bands that we feature on Invisible Oranges.
Held every year at Mac’s Bar in Lansing, Michigan, Ogrefest was a 12-hour showcase of bands with no deference to subgenre or scene politics. Every band got exactly 15 minutes to set up and a half hour to play, period. Bands often shared members, but nobody played favorites. If something went wrong and it meant that a scene favorite like Genocya or even fest organizer David Peterman’s band Satyrasis had to skip their set, then they skipped their set. The headliners were shown no more respect or significance than the opening band. It was well-run, and on the whole, every band had something to offer. A bad Ogrefest set was usually better than the average local opener I see today in Seattle. If I ever book an Invisible Oranges fest (and the thought has crossed my mind many times) I would follow the Ogrefest template.
In that sense, by design, Ogrefest was a pure expression of reverence to metal as a performance art–sometimes literally. Almost yearly Peterman booked at least one band whose merits rested more on entertainment value and absurdist spectacle than tunefulness. Hell, sometimes that set was the highlight of the night. EG: Maggot Twat.
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That balance of reverence and entertainment value earned the fest a small but vociferous local fanbase. People came to Ogrefest early (2 pm) and often stayed from the first bands to the last.
This year’s Ogrefest was the last iteration of the festival. I’ll miss it. Here’s the fest, band-by-band.
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Drink their Blood
Burly dudes with modern looking guitars walked onto the stage wearing contemporary hi-fi metal tee shirts and I thought I knew what to expect: Deathcore. Nope! Drink Their Blood play sophisticated technical and progressive death metal the kind you’d expect to come out of Norway. That may just be the saxophone solos talking. These guys have more talent than Kalamazoo, Michigan, deserves, trust me. One band in and the first curveball was thrown.
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Hordes
Noisy like an outboard motor being lowered into filthy water over and over again, Hordes aimed for a specific sound and hit it well so long as their gear was working which, sadly, it was not for some of the time.
What If In Flames & Dark Tranquillity Never Swapped Singers?
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Every local music scene is rife with creative inbreeding. When you get right down to it, most scenes are just a collection of 15 or so musicians orbiting a small collection of profoundly overworked drummers who get rearranged into as many combinations as their schedules will allow. Usually, by the time a scene’s biggest names breakthrough to an international stage, the lineups calcify slightly -- but traces of their intertwined past aren’t hard to suss out. Take for example, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity, two of the biggest names to emerge from the Gothenburg melodic death metal scene of the 1990s. Despite taking substantially different paths in their careers, the two bands will always be linked by their singers, Mikael Stanne of Dark Tranquillity and Anders Friden of In Flames. Oddly enough, on each band’s debut full length, these two singers performed for the other band, with Stanne singing on In Flames’ Lunar Strain and Friden handling lead vocals on Dark Tranquillity’s Skydancer. Beyond being a neat piece of metal trivia, this strange lineup swap presents a fun thought experiment: what if Mikael Stanne had stayed in In Flames and Anders Friden had stayed in Dark Tranquillity? Before we tease out the results of this alternate timeline, a few rules must be established. Because this is wildly speculative, the potential unanticipated consequences of this change to history are endless. Who knows how far the butterfly effect of having two singers in international touring bands switch places for a span of 20+ years would spread? Do you want to end up like a suicidal limbless Ashton Kutcher? Me neither. In the interest of keeping us from getting tangled in the web of unintended causality, we’re going to keep every other aspect of both bands’ careers static. This means that the music that Stanne and Friden are singing over will remain exactly the same. The band’s touring history will remain the same, and they still would shoot the same music videos, just with a different frontman at center stage. Inside that rigid framework, everything else is possible. The lyrics, vocal melodies, and stylistic choices of each singer are all open season for speculation. Those are not insignificant changes, even for bands with as many similarities as these two. With that out of the way, let’s break down the effects of this trade....
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Dark Tranquillity With Anders Friden
There’s a certain segment of In Flames fans who will think they’ve completely fleeced Dark Tranquillity. Friden’s stock has not been particularly high for the last decade or so. After three albums worth of competent, if unexceptional, harsh vocals, Friden began to rely on clean singing. Nothing wrong with that; Stanne messed around with similar ideas throughout his career too. The problem wasn’t that Friden was singing, it was that he wasn’t singing all that well. The polite way to describe it would be “emotive;” the correct way to describe it would be “whiny” and “lacking in pitch control.” Around the same time, Friden’s harsh vocals started to give out, leading to a period of time where In Flames were barely treading water. This wouldn’t be a problem for our hypothetical new Dark Tranquillity, at least earlier on in their career. The Gallery and The Mind’s I would have fit right into the peak of Friden’s harsh vocals, and the guitar work is so central to the appeal of those records that you’d have to be a real schmuck on the mic to mess with their quality. On this timeline, Friden’s voice would have started to follow right as Dark Tranquillity released Haven in 2000, right as the band dug into the synth-sparkled and streamlined aesthetic that would define the rest of their career. This means that right as Dark Tranquillity were entering their comfort zone, Friden was wavering out of his. On paper that doesn’t sound like a great combination, but I’d argue that in the long run it would work out for both parties. Hear me out. Right around the same time that Friden started experimenting with more melody, In Flames’ instrumental writing started an even more severe decline. Put an album like Reroute To Remain against Dark Tranquillity’s Damage Done and it’s night and day. Dark Tranquillity were operating on an entirely different level of musical nuance and confidence. Friden probably wouldn’t have been able to live up to the material in the same way Stanne did; it’s easy to imagine him mishandling bangers like “Lost To Apathy” or “Inside The Particle Storm.” But, it’s just as likely that the rest of the band would cover for his deficiencies. Would this mean that overall quality would suffer a bit? Yes, but the band would hardly be ruined. Instead, their stability would carry Friden through the rough patch of his development. Besides, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Through sheer persistence, and maybe a hint of studio magic, Friden turned himself into a solid hard rock singer on 2016’s Battles. That album suffered from a pinch too much sugar and one to many “millennial whoop” choruses, but the technical flaws that had nagged Friden’s voice were largely washed away. It isn’t hard to imagine that Friden’s new all clean vocal approach could breathe life into Dark Tranquillity, who despite still putting out enjoyable records, haven’t done anything to substantially change their sound in over a decade....
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In Flames With Mikael Stanne
Almost immediately, In Flames walk away from this trade looking much better. I mean that literally. Replacing Friden’s white-dude dreads with Stanne’s golden locks is about as strong of a style upgrade as you can get. (Thankfully, Friden has lost the Ras Trent look recently and is now one of those metal dudes who wears a beanie all the time). More importantly, if Stanne had stuck with In Flames, the band would have been more than just the biggest name in melodic death metal; they might have been the best. In Flames, even before they dumbed it down in the early 2000s, were never as compositionally adventurous as Dark Tranquillity who built their sound on intricate guitar interplay and uneven rhythms played at breakneck speeds. Essentially, Dark Tranquillity aimed to take the sounds of American thrash metal and the new wave of British heavy metal and play them with the intensity of their 1990s death metal contemporaries. In Flames, while a product of the same influences, had a much more direct approach. Starting with The Jester Race, In Flames always made sure that even when their guitarists split into multiple directions that the primary melody would stay crystal clear. They essentially wrote song-length versions of Metallica’s most harmony-focused bridges. All of this means that Stanne would have significantly more room to work compared to the lattice of interlocking counter melodies that defined early Dark Tranquillity. Stanne, a much crisper and deft harsh vocalist than Friden, would push In Flames’ best material to the next level. Could you imagine Colony with Stanne on vocals? Would the slew of American metalcore bands that copped their whole style from that record even have bothered ripping it off? Sure, you can copy the riffs, but can you scream over them better than Mikael Stanne? Even when In Flames started going for a simplified, mainstream-ready sound, Stanne would have been ready to shift with them. Starting on Dark Tranquillity’s Projector, Stanne started using a baritone clean singing voice that, while limited in range, added a gothic tinge to the band’s repertoire. This was never going to be the strongest weapon in his arsenal, but in limited amounts it would be exactly what an album like Clayman needs. After that, things get pretty dire. The best of In Flames’ worst records would suite Stanne just fine. Songs like “My Sweet Shadow” and “Take This Life” would be strong, if unremarkable, metal singles from a big tent band. Songs like “Crawling Through Knives” and “The Chosen Pessimist.” Look, it should be clear by now that I think Mikael Stanne is a great singer, but he’s not doing anything to salvage this stuff. From 2006 to 2014, In Flames were one of the most unengaging bands in metal’s mainstream. With Stanne fronting them, they could only have been mediocre. Stanne’s skill as a harsh vocalist doesn’t give him much power to recontextualize the music beneath him, and as nice as his clean vocals are, he’s never displayed an instinct for vocal melodies that can stand as the primary focus of the song. This means that he would likely be flummoxed by an album like Battles that is built entirely around big, dumb vocal parts. Verdict: “In Stannes” comes out the gate hot, cements their legacy as one of the best metal bands of their era but ultimately peters out. “Frid Tranquillity” has a rough patch in the middle of their career but has a surprising third act turnaround....
Maximum Mad: Noise Rock With Minimum Bullshit
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Noise rock has experienced a plethora of emerging talent over the last few years. As a genre, it tends to be unencumbered by mediocrity; bands usually either do it very well, or not at all. That may be due to most of the people involved not taking themselves too seriously and having, you know, fun. From the sound of things, Portland newcomers Maximum Mad are definitely having a ball. Though they’ve been together barely a year, all four band members have put in time with other projects like Men Of Porn, Kakihara, and Year Of The Coyote. Their musical chops are on point, right from the first lurching lockstep riffs and rolling rhythm on opener “Affluenza.” “I’m so fuckin’ bored / And you’re so fuckin’ needy” exclaims bassist/vocalist Jayson Smith, just acerbic enough to make one wonder if he’s sincere or not. Song titles like “Lucky Coward,” “Weird Hand, ” and “Obscene Gestures,” along with the front-loaded bass and caustic guitars that accompany them, recall the AmRep and Hydrahead back catalogues that Maximum Mad obviously worship, and rightly so. Stephan Hawkes (Red Fang, Gaytheist) recorded the band live, resulting in a raw, punchy vibe and kinetic energy that recalls classics like Hammerhead’s Duh, The Big City and Cows’ Sexy Pee Story. Unlike, say, the countless stoner rock bands that just try to rewrite Welcome To Sky Valley or Master Of Reality, Dear Enemy can trace its lineage to a widely varying group that includes everyone from Botch to Coalesce, Unsane to Nirvana. Their common threads – a simmering-to-boiling tension, the dizzying pull and release song structures, feedback as its own instrument – are built seamlessly into Dear Enemy. Abrasive? Definitely. Aggressive? Sure. That noise rock sweet spot, where it’s just catchy enough to worm into your brain and nest for a decade or so? Welcome to the big leagues, guys. Dear Enemy will be released on 9/15 via Good To Die. Follow Maximum Mad on Facebook....
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Sutrah Explores Death Metal’s Complexities with “Effervesce”
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Another day, another Quebecois death metal band. This time, though, it's not a Beyond Creation or First Fragment clone. Think more along the lines of Intonate, with an old school Martyr twist. Technical for sure, but not at the expense of rockability or cohesion, i.e. something which sounds unfamiliar, but immediately classic. The name is Sutrah, and their upcoming debut album Dunes foregoes the usual reliance on raw speed and aggression in lieu of a more tactical approach. Check out an exclusive stream of the album's third track "Effervesce" below....
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With ever-modulating pace and tempo, "Effervesce" feels nimble even during its most intricate arrangements. Sutrah definitely understands the value of straightforwardness, like with the riff which ties the unsettling introduction (more on that in the band’s statement below) into the song's remainder. But even their most complex guitar and bass lines don't feel ridiculous, even though they really are finger-twisters. To its benefit, Dunes isn't hyper-produced -- just the right amount of rawness to it -- but the bass rings out clearly, and the guitars are not always given primary focus. This results in an easier listen than expected, and perhaps a more enjoyable one at that. "Effervesce” also features extremely precise and foot-happy drumming to tie things together, but again, forced aggression is not the driver here (though the vocals do take a harder-edge approach). That said, Sutrah know how to land a gut-punch: just check out the album's penultimate track “The Plunge” here when you're done listening to "Effervesce." If these two tracks together say anything, it’s that Dunes as a whole will comprise a technical sprawl -- from hammering, forthright death metal to mind-boggling instrumental calisthenics -- but with refreshing order and smoothness....
Dunes releases on September 22nd and can be pre-ordered here....
From the band:The instruments used in the intro of “Effervesce” are reyongs, one of the many instruments that constitute a Gong Kebyar ensemble from Bali Island in Indonesia. The Gong Kebyar is one of the leading types of Balinese gamelan (literally “orchestra” in Indonesian) of the past century in both sacral music and innovative compositions. The reyongs themselves are small gongs made of bronze and aligned in a row, played by four musicians to ornament melodies played by other instruments. Here, of course, they are used in a very different context and also deprived of the dozens of other melodic percussions that usually make the gamelan whole. However, we still applied a key concept in Balinese music: the notion of “interlocking” melodies, or kotekan in The Balinese language. Basically, the idea is to split a melodic line into two groups of players so the result can only be heard when both parts lock together. Individually, these patterns sound like simple rhythms played on no more than two notes, but when combined together they create rich, complex melodies and harmonies that obey certain implicit rules. In Bali, this technique is used most notably to play incredibly fast melodies and ornamentations that could not possibly be played by a single musician. In “Effervesce,” we applied this basic idea to build a kotekan that imitates the first guitar riff.
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Croatone
Guitarist Edward Emmerich was wearing a Dangers shirt. Maybe that means nothing to you, but to me it meant technically proficient and really nasty hardcore, which is exactly what the band served up, albeit instrumentally. Call Ben Weinman, Croatone have Party Smasher Inc. Signee written all over them.
Remembering Red: Baroness’ Best Turns Ten
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In September 2007, I was a lad of 15 in the process of developing a deeper understanding of metal. At the time, Baroness was on tour to support their then-newly released Red Album. As they were making a Louisville stop, I journeyed down to the notoriously grubby Keswick Democratic Club one muggy Saturday night to see them. I’d heard of Baroness before, but I’d never heard them. So, I was going on name alone. After a few decent (but forgettable) locals, Baroness took the stage and played Red Album in its entirely. I was floored: I had expected a heavy, oppressive doom show, but what I received was grandiose rock fury that shook the KDC from its worn linoleum floors to the decaying ceiling. It was an arena-size experience, but totally compressed. I left that night with a Red Album CD -- it remained in constant rotation for the remainder of the year. Listening to Red Album again a decade later, I’ve realized it was never meant to be considered a “metal” record. Baroness had started as a “sludge” band before that term lost most of its credibility or meaning. Listen to it with the intention of hearing a metal record, and you may be disappointed. The production is incredibly clean with none of the grime and grit that make a good sludge record. And while at the fore in the mix, the guitars have a fairly mild tone -- not the oceanic weight of bands like Isis or Neurosis....
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As a rock album, however, Red Album sounds as relevant today as a decade ago. There’s a reason why I listed Baroness as the foremost influence in my review of Bask’s terrific new album earlier this year. Red Album is a bold, majestic American rock album -- the type that seemed to be going out of style in 2007. It’s riff after riff after riff: the key licks to “The Birthing” and “Isak” were actually touchstones in my early guitar playing. J.D. Baizley and Brian Blickle’s playing on Red Album is tight, tuneful, and virtuosic. The moments when the metal influences shine through serve not a heavy purpose, but rather a melodic one, such as the excellent dueling guitars on “Isak.” (In talking about Bask, I mentioned that they were “heavy without being brutal.” Red Album is the Ur-Example of this: all jubilation and triumph without the darkness or brooding lurking at the horizons of metal proper). To be sure, Red Album was of its time. I wrote last year about the “beard metal” revolution that began around late 2005 and 2006 with the advent of The Sword, Saviours, and other retro-metal acts that spawned a legion of imitators and created an entirely new sub-scene of metal adherents (beards, stovepipe jeans, flannel, Pabst Blue Ribbon, etc.). For me, Red Album represents an important tipping point in the “beard” trend: the point at which “beard” culture expanded out of metal and into more conventional heavy rock. It is quite possible that the conversion of many metal acts toward more straightforward rock music may have its precedent in Red Album. Consider Mastodon. Though they had been moving in a more melodic direction for some time (and likely would have continued to do so), the gulf between the more conventional metal of 2006’s Blood Mountain and the prog-rock of 2009’s Crack the Skye is quite obvious. Perhaps the success of Red Album from a band they’d had ties to in the past may have convinced them that they could take a more rock ‘n roll direction without sacrificing their fanbase. And, Mastodon’s not the only one: consider Nachtmystium’s flirtations with rock modalities on 2008’s Assassins, or the subsequent rise of bands that neatly flirted at the border of metal and rock like Kylesa and Red Fang. I still return to Red Album every now and again, even if it doesn’t have quite the magic now as it did when I was 15. To be honest, I feel like Red Album may have been the end of the line for my interest in Baroness: with each subsequent album, I found myself growing less and less interested. Maybe I felt like Red Album’s spontaneity was gone, a flash-in-the-pan that could only have happened in 2007 and metalheads were just beginning to realize that there was no shame in revisiting rock. Whereas Red Album came out of nowhere, the other “colors” just seemed like revisiting the same, even as the band achieved greater degrees of critical praise. As my tastes in music broadened with age, I often found myself gravitating more toward successor bands, like Bask, or those artists that had influenced Baroness to begin with, like Earth or Crazy Horse. However, even in 2017, in today’s jaded post-hipster/post-everything musical climate, Red Album remains an excellent slab of unfiltered American rock music. This was an album that demonstrated a transition in a scene, and can still work as a unifying force. Metalheads can still appreciate the meaty riffs, dueling guitars, and giant production values, while fans of rock can take pleasure in the intricate vocal and guitar harmonies and emphasis on melody. For my money, it’s still the best record in the Baroness catalog. Even if it may not be as “fresh” to me as it was in 2007, it still takes me back to that hot night at the KDC, watching four sweaty men at the height of their abilities put on one hell of a rock show....
Method & Madness in Slipknot’s “Day of The Gusano”
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Say what you want about Slipknot, but don’t question their ambition. In their 16-year career, the Iowa nu-metal act has had little use for subtley. Why have one drummer when you can have three? Why merely sound like a riot when you can bring that same anarchic spirit to life on stage? Day Of The Gusano, a concert film that captures Slipknot’s first performance in Mexico City, is both a representation of the band’s world-beating ambition and a product of it. Directed by Slipknot’s own Shawn “Clown” Crahan, the film is a feat of balance, finding screen time for each of the band’s nine members, the elaborate stage show, and a teeming mass of adoring fans. Crahan smartly places cameras in the audience, and some are almost immediately pulled into the vortex, knocked off balance and swirling. After the ominous aerial shots that open the film, with shades of Fincher’s Zodiac, the sudden jolt of kinetic energy pushes you right next to those who are feeling the exhilaration of seeing their favorite band emerge from backstage. Crahan and the band’s DJ, Sid Wilson, also handle their own cameras, giving an intimate view to the madness on stage. For Crahan, it was key for the film not just to show the band performing, but to give the audience a feel for what it was like to be in attendance that night. Even he realizes this is a next-to-impossible task. “Anyone who was at that show is going to watch the film and say ‘that’s not what I saw.’” Crahan tells me over the phone. “It may feel like the show that they saw, but unless I have ever band member filmed at all times, all on Timecode, we’re not going to get everything.” Crahan, who also is also one of Slipknot’s percussionists, has a perfectionist streak that manifests in a mix of supreme confidence in his vision and open frustration with anything that prevents him from realizing it. He’s undeniably proud of his work, telling me that if I were to watch Voliminal with him, he could point out edits that would blow my mind. But he’s also quick to acknowledge that the work necessary to achieve those details is painstaking and often requires him to cede control to people that might not be as invested as he is. “There’s one hour before the show, two hours during the show, and one hour after it where I don’t have any control of the cameras.” Crahan says. “I have to trust the second units.” In a way, this removal worked to the film’s advantage, allowing the film crew to get reactions from the fans that would have been colored by the presence of one of the musicians they were their to see. Even with these technical limitations, it’s clear that Crahan has a great eye for striking images. When the band unleashing mayhem, he zooms in on specifics: Wilson brandishing a Mexican flag, fire leaping from the stage on a downbeat, a baseball bat clanging against an iron drum. He’s just as adept at building tension, e.g. framing percussionist Chris Fehn in a spotlight during a moment of eere calm and executing a beautiful zoom-out to reveal the scale of the crowd in attendance....
https://youtu.be/2n0GRckCptQ...
At the same time, the band faced the difficult task of summing up their whole career in a single performance. “It’s tough. We have generations of fans, so we have to build the setlist with that in mind,” Crahan says. “We have fans who want to hear ‘The Devil In I’ and ‘Killpop,’ but others that have been with us since the beginning. We brought out a few songs we haven’t played in years like ‘Eeyore.’ Back in 1999 when we only had 30 minutes, we would play that song to show off our punk and thrash side.” A lot has changed since those days, however, and not everything that worked on Slipknot’s rise translates during their reign at the top. “Eeyore”’s runaway-train energy barely holds together when played on a stage of this magnitude. Some of the band’s early cuts fare better: “Wait And Bleed”’s chorus works at any size, and a classic jump-the-fuck-up routine turns “Spit it Out” into a raucous spectacle. Others, like the creepy-crawly “Prosthetics” or “Metabolic” from Iowa feel like early drafts of ideas better executed elsewhere in the set. The nature of live filming may have more to do with this disparity in quality however, because the crowd in Mexico City devoured songs old and new alike. “I don’t rank our fans,” Crahan says. “But Mexico City was fucking loud. Usually I can’t hear much of the crowd through my mask and the in-ear monitors, but there were times during ‘Before I Forget’ where I could barely hear the bass drum and snare. It’s like, ‘god, could you people just shut the fuck up?’” It’s songs like “Before I Forget” along with “Psychosocial” and “Duality” that demonstrate why Slipknot have become a global phenomenon. These are grade-A hard rock hits that make space for singer Corey Taylor to show off his melodic chops. The joy of Slipknot often comes from how cluttered their music is; how it feels like every inch of the arrangement has someone bashing away at their instrument with all their might. But these songs, along with “The Devil In I” from 2014’s .5 The Grey Chapter, reveal that even at their most chaotic, Slipknot are guided by razor-sharp pop songwriting. Those instincts have led the band to astonishing success, but Crahan isn’t interested in running a victory lap. He’s quick to undercut the prestige of the band finally making it to Mexico City. “There are still maggots who haven’t seen us in China, we’ve never played Iran. Even Mexico City didn’t get to see us with Paul [Gray, the band’s bassist who passed away in 2010] or Joey [Jordison, who was fired in 2013].” Instead, he’s already got his eyes set on the next mountain to conquer: stadiums. Unprompted, Crahan outlines one potential version of a Slipknot stadium show that starts with a parade “full of pagan rhythms and goosebumps on goosebumps.” “Our next album is going to take us there,” Crahan continues, on a roll at this point. “One day you’re going to be in your car and you’ll hear the first few notes and you’ll ask yourself, ‘could it be?’ Then you’ll hear Corey’s voice and you’ll know that the monster has returned from the woods.” Until then, the band will be screening Day Of The Gusano in theaters around the world. You can find info related to those screenings here....
IO Presents: Nails at Knitting Factory Brooklyn
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Blind Haven
Death doom ought never skimp on the blues. My ideal permutation of the genre is pretty much Black Sabbath’s Volume IV but with pissed off screaming instead of the Ozzman. Blind Haven build from that blessed blueprint.
Sannhet: Numb By Design
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It’s early evening in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. Tourists filter in and out of pop stores, name dropping high-end fashion lines. A group of young women dart through traffic to set up for a photo shoot. Nearly everyone is either a model or wants you to mistake them for one. I shove vegan food down my throat and desperately scrub hummus off of my face while surrounded by well-dressed New York music/media types. We are inside The Sonos Store. The outlet looks like a Men In Black satellite office, uncomfortable egg-shaped chairs and all. A mix of dream-pop and new-wave drowns out most of the polite chatter. The bass response is almost too good: get too close to the walls, and The Cure’s “Fascination Street” will rumble your guts (and their vegan contents) out all over the floor. After making the rounds through a lightly boozed crowd, Sannhet bassist AJ Annunziata gives a short statement of appreciation to those in attendance: “We got to make an album with one of our favorite producers, Peter Katis. It’s called So Numb, and we’re very proud of it. Now let’s break some Sonos speakers.” To my knowledge, no Sonos equipment was damaged that night but it wasn’t for lack of trying. So Numb is a clear step up from Sannhet’s previous material, but hasn’t diminished their bite. Guitars smash themselves into a paste and spread through the mix over lean, muscular bass lines. Each time Sannhet ease off, they leave behind a dense drone which permeates the room like a fog. Even pumped through the highest-of-high-end home sound systems, the setting doesn’t lend itself to the nuances of Sannhet’s music. Sonos turned the album into nothing more than another luxury item. At a glance, the record fits the bill: it’s a sleek record, full of tasteful melodies and carefully designed soundscapes. For the crowd at Sonos, it set a nocturnal mood, becoming another chic example of modern architecture in a room full of statement pieces. But, So Numb isn’t meant to tie the room together. It is the room....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLX9BhEqDc...
If this sounds like a strange setting for a metal listening party, it might be because So Numb isn’t a metal record outright. Prior to the shindig at Sonos, I met up with Annunziata at a nearby dive bar. Dressed in stylish all black and topped by a tuft of curly hair, Annunziata explained that the shift away from heavy metal wasn’t intentional, but a natural part of their creative process. “I’ve always admired how Liars never sound the same from record to record,” Annunziata says, pushing a lime along the edge of his drink with his straw, “Our first album was a sludgy black metal album, the second one was more refined, and this is our ‘rock’ album.” Liars isn’t the only New York band to come up during our conversation. Over the course of the hour, Annunziata peppers in references Lou Reed’s interview tactics, how listening to Interpol immediately takes him back to the early 2000s, or how he felt a kinship to Arthur Russell while wandering the city listening to his band’s demos (“I hope that doesn’t make sound ostentatious,” he apologies). This doesn’t feel like a put on either. Listening to So Numb, or Sannhet’s radio show “No Dawn” where they mix old-school post-punk with modern Nine Inch Nails singles, it’s clear that the band have musical interests that don’t fit squarely into the heavy metal aesthetic. The shift from tremolo picking and blast beats to chorus leads and reserved tempos wasn’t just a stylistic decision. It also reflects a level of personal growth and newfound maturity. After four years of troubled relationships, addiction, and therapy sessions, Annunziata, along with drummer Chris Todd and guitarist John Refano, now approach Sannhet with increased patience and deliberation. “For a long time we felt like we needed to keep up with the speed of New York. If there’s anything of New York in our music it’s that frantic speed of life and the toll it takes,” explains Annunziata. Despite this, they don’t care to dictate what the material on So Numb is actually about. Sannhet, as Annunziata explains it, doesn’t just mean “truth” in Norwegian; it means something closer to “perceived truth,” meaning that the music will inspire different interpretations in its perceiver. They aren’t trying to tell a story so much as building an environment for the listener to fill with their own experiences. The conversation turns to Frank Lloyd Wright, and his design for the Guggenheim Museum where a small hallway opens to an enormous atrium. A tight space makes the open space feel even more overwhelming. In order to floor their listeners -- to provide them with a scope appropriate for the emotions that Sannhet wanted to evoke -- they needed to learn how to build better hallways. “One of the first things Peter Katis told us is, ‘Sorry, but you guys aren’t a metal band,’” Annunziata says. The original demos that Sannhet sent in were harder edged, but Katis pushed Sannhet to explore a wider range of textures and moods. The result is something that the band consider to be their take on a rock record, one that retains the volume and blast beats of Sannhet’s last two albums but places them next to more reserved sections, heavy on electronic drums and mournful clean guitar playing. Katis has co-produced records with The National and manned the boards for Kurt Vile, Jonsi, and Frightened Rabbit, but it was his involvement with Interpol’s landmark Turn On The Bright Lights that drew Sannhet to him....
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Katis’ mix for Turn On The Bright Lights is a work of alchemy, turning Interpol’s interlocking guitars and hyper-detailed rhythm section into a single complex organism. Each instrument is distinct and so clearly defined that it seems impossible the record should have such sonic weight to it. Sannhet call for a different approach. Interpol turned post-punk into highly syncopated needlework, but Sannhet’s songs are more like an inch thick layer of paint on a canvas. Katis doesn’t dilute that viscosity on So Numb, but the brightness to the drums and delicate care in getting the tones to sit just right is unmistakably the work of the same master. When I asked Annunziata if working with Katis was a sign that the band had moved past looking for metalheads for approval, he was quick to correct me. “We don’t care about anyone’s approval.”...
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Whether they’re looking for it or not, Sannhet have earned plenty of accolades, from both inside and outside the metal community. One of their t-shirts even made its way into the possession of indie darling Sufjan Stevens, and subsequently into numerous promo photos. This brings a smile to Annunziata’s face. “Apparently he’s not that into the band, but he loves the shirt,” he says. This doesn’t seem to bother Sannhet. In fact, because they design all of their own merchandise, and offer the same service to other bands, they view t-shirt sales to be as much of a victory as album sales. Even when Hood By Air liberally plucked design elements from one of their shirts, Annunziata took the imitation at face value as flattery. This might seem cynical to music fans who want to keep commerce and art separated, and to be fair, Annunziata carries himself with the brusqueness of someone familiar with the ins-and-outs of the music industry; however, Sannhet’s approach is informed more by pragmatism than bitterness. Having recently quit their day jobs to do Sannhet full time, the trio no longer live the luxury of idealism. “For most people, a vinyl record is just a Russian novel on their bookshelf,” Annunziata jokes. “At this point, records are a souvenir for the live show.” Appropriately, Sannhet put just as much thought and sweat equity into their live shows. When the topic of Sannhet’s live presentation comes up, Annunziata perks up. “There is absolutely more pressure for instrumental bands to put on a show,” he says. Sannhet’s light show has one constant rule: abstraction. No recognizable shapes or images from any other source. Currently, they’re working on a rig that would distort video footage from the performance itself and spit it back out over the band. This ensures that each performance is different, and responds directly to the band on stage, an idea inspired by an early Pink Floyd tour through the US where the band used rotating tri-color gels that picked up speed the harder each band member played. “Ever since we started, we’ve tried to have an involved light setup, and any time other bands catch up with us, we have to step it up,” says Annunziata....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJwxUmW8HAA...
The following week, Sannhet showed off the fruits of their labor at The Park Church Co-op in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The Co-op -- a neighborhood church tucked away between brownstones and across from McGolrick Park -- is another unassuming venue, but one far more appropriate than the sterile halls of the Sonos Store. Prior to the show, John Refano dryly joked that the venue’s natural booming reverb took some of pressure off to perform well. The church’s high ceilings made it next to impossible to understand the words of openers Planning For Burial and Miserable (featuring Kristina Esfandiari of King Woman), but Sannhet faced no such impediment. Instead, in sweltering humidity and complete darkness, So Numb came to life. Here, the difference between Sannhet’s new form and their old material is stark. Refano’s self-deprecation was right on the money for songs from Revisionist, where the dense tremolo picking smeared out any rhythmic definition. The new songs, in all of their gothic post-punk glory, flourished under stained glass. Todd and Annunziata’s emergence as a true-blue, post-punk rhythm section anchored the band during their softer moments, allowing Refano to soar as the band picked up in volume. The lighting followed suit, moving from ominous static and austere black and white to blown out floodlights at the drop of a hat. Near the end of the set, Thom Wasluck of Planning For Burial joined Sannhet for “Fernbeds,” So Numb’s longest song, and the one that best exemplifies their meticulous approach to design. The track is a testament to the band’s newfound patience: a slow burner which spends its first half in long whole notes and guitar at a whisper volume. By the time Wasluck kicked in for the aching lead melody, the song swells to fill the church, and in the final moments it was the church. It was the walls, the glass. It was the heat rising from the benches. It was a hallway opening into a vast atrium....
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Centenary
This requires some backstory. Perhaps the longest running and most beloved Ogrefest band was Genocya, who played something like a mix of Edge of Sanity and Obituary. Their death metal solved equations and dragged knuckles at the same time. A tough balance to strike. That band is now over. Beloved members Jim Albrecht (bass) and Matt Cunningham (guitar) now play in Centenary, and I’ve gotta say . . . upgrade. There’s bias: this project plays HM-2 Swedish death metal worship and that style is my comfort food. High pitched snarls and a focus on metal over hardcore set their sound apart from other, earlier American adherents like Black Breath and Trap Them.
The Crushing Doom of Monte Luna’s Self-Titled Debut
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Doom metal, at its very core, engages directly with our sense of time. Something about slow tempos evoke one’s own limited time on Earth, or in some cases, human kind’s less than miniscule role in the cosmos. Heady stuff, no doubt. Austin-based duo Monte Luna tackle this head-on with their self-titled debut, constructing songs that stretch time through the use of massive riffs and hypnotic repetition. The duo -- consisting of James Clarke on guitar, bass, and vocals and Phil Hook on drums, FX, and synths -- possess ambition in spades. Their first release is a concept album, and many of the tracks range from ten to nearly 18 minutes in length. The scope of the narrative is vast. Monte Luna tell a story from a distant time, of armies on a “6,000 Year March” doing battle with a necromancer while scaling an “Inverted Mountain” and invading a “Nightmare Frontier,” an engagement with a fictional history that defies any conventional conception of time and scale. The effect of all this is akin to Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian breaking the confines of Hyborea and wandering on to the set of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain.” Anyone familiar with the latter’s masterpiece of Mesoamerican psychedelic cinema knows the hypnotic power it possesses, the ways in which hallucinatory imagery gives the film a mythic quality. Monte Luna, like many of their doom and sludge cohorts, use repetition to achieve their trance-inducing ends. But they succeed where so many others fail: they manage to not only capture the listener’s attention with their earth-shattering riffs, but they hold that focus as well. Case in point is the album’s third track, “6,000 Year March.” The opening riff, a simple two-chord progression bathed in waves of feedback, is brought to life by unique and captivating drumming. It’s essentially a doom metal homage to the Godflesh track “Pulp” from their seminal Streetcleaner album. When the immense riff of the next section kicks in, Clarke’s the gritty crooning float above the tectonic waves rolling underneath. Here, as on the other tracks, Monte Luna draw a direct line of influence between both Sleep’s Jerusalem and Isis’s Celestial. References to that opening drum pattern continue to make appearances throughout the track’s 18-minute run time, giving cohesion to the song’s massive totality. Using these simple tools throughout the album, Monte Luna invoke a sense of powerful minimalism, allowing each track to mutate just enough to keep the narrative moving forward. The aforementioned drumming on “6,000 Year March” possesses a slight marching feel, and “Inverted Mountain” contains a spacious middle session that seems to invoke a descent into the peak of the megalith. Throughout the record, the vocals alternate between well-executed clean singing, and a paint-peeling screech that brings to mind Khanate’s Alan Dubin. Various snippets of sampled movie dialogue help lend the material a cinematic feel, sneaking in and out at various times while waves of noise and synths roll underneath each song’s primary architecture. Occasionally, the drums and guitars slip away, and all that is left are desolate drones and feedback. The final song of the album, “The End of Beginning,” invokes Black Sabbath’s namesake tune, connecting Monte Luna’s wide-ranging record back to doom’s roots. The whole thing eventually winds down to just a gently strummed guitar before fading out. This is doom metal doing what it does best: invoking a sense of timelessness and vastness on a mythic scale. Monte Luna tell their story not as a narrative arrow plunging forever forward through time, but rather as the vast grinding gears of history in which every beginning is just cycling through until the end again....
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Woe & Couch Slut Added to Nails @ Knit; Aura Noir Play 2 Nights at Same Venue, Touring
Live Report: Pallbearer @ Brighton Music Hall
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A steady stream of classics rang out between sets at Brighton Music Hall on a recent Tuesday night, greeting revelers assembled for an appearance by Arkansas doom quartet Pallbearer. Judas Priest, Metallica, and a bit of Stooges for the sake of balance provided a fittingly retro atmosphere for a band often cited as having one foot in the past. And it’s true that there’s plenty of tradition in Pallbearer’s epic musings – particularly in their reverence for the sounds of genre pioneers and an old-school approach to meticulous work in the studio. But to simply call Pallbearer “revivalists” glosses over their knack for melody, atmosphere, and pathos – qualities that have made them a breakout band with a broader appeal than your average doom act. A gambit for that crossover success seemed to inform the band’s third LP Heartless (released in March) and the tour which brought them back to Boston for their biggest headlining show in the city thus far. First up in Pallbearer’s supporting cast for the night were Bask, a North Carolina quartet sharing some common influences with their hosts. The group’s widescreen songs fused melodic post-rock slow builds with thunderous, doom-tinged crescendos in satisfying fashion --their loud-quiet-loud dynamic visualized by a periodically illuminated kick drum head. The songs occasionally meandered, but usually ended up somewhere worth following. Backed by earnest enthusiasm, the band’s first Boston appearance left a positive impression. Brooklyn’s Kayo Dot were next, emerging sunglasses-clad and looking like a budget version of Nine Inch Nails at the Roadhouse. The long running, shape-shifting group, led by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Toby Driver, originated from Boston once upon a time. Nowadays, they operate as a trio who channel some intermittently intriguing tension from an icy goth-rock sound. For much of this night’s set, though, they struggled to land on a tone or a solid rhythmic footing. An extended final song, where an auxiliary guitarist helped the band veer toward a deconstructed sludge metal assault, was far and away their most engaging moment. From Pallbearer themselves, there were few surprises in store. They know their strengths, and they played to them loud and clear. Opener “Thorns” succeeded in dispelling any concern that Heartless’ doubling down on the band’s stateliest qualities, and its occasionally more toothless results, would take away from their live prowess. From there on, the set was all oceanic swells of down-tuned grandeur from four guys utterly playing their hearts out. For a band whose thematic concerns so often revolve around death and loss, Pallbearer exhibited a surprisingly cathartic sense of joy on stage. Their evident love for the craft also shone through in just how good these songs sounded live. Those dense studio creations seem like a self-imposed challenge to replicate, but there was nothing lost in translation. Both the old songs – a solid mix of cuts from both 2014’s Foundations of Burden and 2012 debut Sorrow and Extinction – and the new ones were appropriately massive and moving. Front to back, it was an set to remind us why Pallbearer continue to captivate....
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Farting Corpse
Recall the aforementioned ‘performance art’ band that crops up at every Ogrefest? See Farting Corpse in all their blast-beats-plus-Kaos Pad ‘glory.’ My friend and IO contributor Jason Gilbert had a ball with them. Me, I stepped outside. Here’s hoping the Daniel Radcliffe film is better.
Upcoming Metal Releases 9/3/2017-9/9/2017
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Something something Jon something vacation something... hanging with me for the next two weeks. Does anyone actually read these preambles, anyway? Here are the new metal releases for the week of September 3, 2017 – September 9, 2017. 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 Friday 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. 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 after this is published will not be covered....
ANTICIPATED RELEASES
Cannabis Corpse -- Left Hand Pass | Season of Mist | Death Metal | United States I’m feeling a little rebellious this week, so what say we kick things off with some Cannabis Corpse? Because really, if you don’t like Cannabis Corpse, then you don’t like fun. By now, everyone knows their shtick: old school death metal + lots of weed puns on classic death metal song titles (with Tube of the Resinated still being my favorite). And while they may be scraping the bottom of the bowl in terms of the puns this time around -- the closing pair of Nile references are particularly cringe-worthy, especially “Papyrus Containing the Spell to Protect Its Possessor Against Attacks From He Who Is In the Bong Water.” Landphil (Municipal Waste, Iron Reagan) and his twin brother HallHammer can evoke Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse with the best of them. A lot of people write off Cannabis Corpse as a joke band, but doing so is a mistake. Remember that Landphil pretty much wrote all the music for Crypt of the Devil, which was the first good Six Feet Under records since… ever? As an added bonus, this iteration of the band includes Brandon Ellis (aka Ryan Knight’s replacement in The Black Dahlia Murder) on lead guitar. As a side note: I highly recommend catching Cannabis live if you ever get the chance, if only for the between-song banter. Landphil is much funnier than I ever would have guessed. Grift -- Arvet | Nordvis Produktion | Black Metal | Sweden And, on the complete other end of the spectrum, we have Erik Gärdefors, the man behind Grift, who is basically the black metal version of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, Cries and Whispers, etc.). All the same vocabulary I would use to describe one of Bergman’s movies applies just as easily to Arvet (“The Heritage”): strikingly poetic, emotionally turbulent, and existentially bleak. Yet his films are also really beautiful in their explorations of inevitability of death, the uncertainty of faith, and the futility of man’s existence. In much the same way, Arvet is heartbreakingly gorgeous, with plenty of acoustic guitars and folky melodies to balance out the more aggressive moments. Biesy -- Noc Lekkich Obyczajów | Third Eye Temple | Blackened Death Metal | Poland Okay… now this is different. I’ve mentioned in past columns that it seems like every time I substitute on the UMR, I end up being totally blown away by at least one band that wasn’t even remotely on my radar. This week, it’s Biesy (Polish for “fiend”), a mysterious project that kind of sounds like a cross between one of the more austere German black metal bands like Nargaroth and a less claustrophobic-feeling version of Ulcerate. It’s a weird mix on paper, but the band somehow manages to balance compositional density with an admirable sense of restraint. It’s weighty music, but there’s also plenty of room within the songs for each note to breathe. A pretty remarkable record. Check back later today for an exclusive full stream.OF NOTE
Usnea -- Portals Into Futility | Relapse | Blackened Funeral Doom | United States Long-form funeral doom might be the most difficult style of music to pull off convincingly. For every Yob, there are at least twenty other bands that can do the “down-tuned and slow” well enough, but stumble when it comes to writing compelling songs. I thought Usnea’s 2013 self-titled debut showed a lot of potential, but its follow-up Random Cosmic Violence engaged in a bit too much navel gazing. They seem back on track, however, with Portals of Futility, thanks to a widening of their sonic palette to include more varied tones and textures. Or, as Ian put it in his discussion of the video for “Pyrrhic Victory”:This might not scan as heavy in the traditional sense, too slow for a proper headbang and too drawn out for a raised pair of horns, but the psychological effect is the same as any traditional riff-fest. It is a sonic burden, one that leaves the listener unmoored from the song’s structure. When the band gives shape to the song’s conclusion, they still don’t offer easy catharsis. The song’s stuttering climax gradually folds over itself until the band’s instruments crumble into digital distortion. Is “Pyrrhic Victory” a difficult question left hanging, or an uncomfortable and pessimistic answer?Arch Enemy -- Will to Power | Century Media | Melodic Death Metal | Sweden Speaking of bands whose shtick we should all know by now… I will always have nothing but love in my heart for Michael Amott because of the two records he made with Carcass. That said, Arch Enemy is basically fast food metal at this point: readily available, enjoyable if your expectations are low enough, but ultimately just not very satisfying. Like many, I was hoping that adding Jeff Loomis to the band would result in a renewed creative spark, but he didn’t contribute to the songwriting on Will to Power (a Nietzsche reference? really?) at all. I also really think Alissa White-Gluz is being woefully underutilized in Arch Enemy. It’s not like I loved The Agonist or anything, but she has a much more versatile voice that she’s been able to demonstrate thus far with Arch Enemy. She deserves a lot better than just being Angela Gossow 2.0. Sanhedrin -- A Funeral For the World | Independent | Trad/Heavy Metal | United States Brooklyn-based trio Sanhedrin may include Black Anvil guitarist Sos among their ranks, but don’t hit play on this one expecting anything even remotely resembling black metal. A Funeral For the World sounds like 1987. More specifically, they’re cut from the same cloth as Warlock’s Triumph and Agony. Cocksure, catchy riffing, hella tasty leads, and the voice of former Amber Asylum and Lost Goat vocalist Erica Stoltz soar over it all. A lot of the female-fronted trad metal bands out there right now know the right moves, but their music always seems to lack for something. Jon usually dismisses them with something like “eh, sounds like motorcycles.” Sanhedrin, however, is the real shit.
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FOR THE ADVENTUROUS
Osi and the Jupiter -- Uthuling Hyl | Independent | Pagan Folk | United States Sean Deth is one of the hardest working dudes in modern metal. It seems like every few months at least one of his myriad projects is releasing something new, and it’s always of consistently high quality. Thus far in 2017, his black metal projects Burial Oath and Ulven have both released excellent new records. His stoner/doom band Witchhelm also dropped an outstanding acoustic/dark folk EP called All Hail… and Death which Graven Earth issued on cassette a couple weeks back. I thought that Witchhelm EP was the best thing Deth had ever done, but then I heard this Osi and the Jupiter record. He calls it “Northern Pagan Folk,” which seems like the perfect description. A gorgeous acoustic record that also prominently features the cello work of classically trained ex-Empyrean Throne member Kakophonix, this music would fit perfectly on the soundtrack to a show like Vikings....
OTHER RELEASES
Atrox -- Monocle | Dark Essence Records | Avant Garde Gothic/Progressive Metal | Norway Yep, that’s progressive metal all right. If you can handle prog metal vocals, then you’re made of much sterner stuff than I am. There’s a surprising amount of palm-muted chugging on this one as well. Fun fact: two members of Atrox are also in Manes. Not as fun fact: it’s not the same Manes that became Ved Buens Ende. Argus -- From Fields of Fire | Cruz Del Sur |Heavy/Doom Metal| United States Psst… hey kid… ya like Grand Magus? Then do I have a band for you. End transmission....
Biesy Captures Urban Ethos with Debut Album (Full Stream)
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Urban or rural, cityscape or countryside, man-made or natural: we're dichotomous when it comes to place. There's an inherent conflict between the built environment and pure nature. For everything humans construct, we replace (or displace) something else's natural existence, or its possibility. How we arrange our surroundings reshapes our lived experience, i.e. how we interact, how we move about, how we understand ourselves in context, and how we respond to stimuli. The type of environment surrounding us profoundly affects who we are; who we eventually become profoundly affects how we understand that which contains us. Atmosphere, then, can both make and break meaning altogether. Metal has been written explicitly about nature from innumerable perspectives. Maybe it involves escape, or seeking purity, or exploring einsamkeit and verloren. Beauty, too, and powerlessness in the face of nature's infinite might and will. The urban environment, though, presents an entirely different set of emotional, existential, and symbolic touchpoints. Usually, they're more intense, more involved, and more taxing: more stimuli, tighter spaces, greater stress. Loneliness, but for different reasons. Reality itself takes on new forms, some so extreme that we sometimes self-protectively detach from it. Surreality can take over. Is that a death, or some kind of transcendence? What is "adaptation" anyway? Resting squarely on hard-edged atmospherics, Polish blackened death metal band Biesy explores lived experience vis-à-vis urban environments on their debut full-length Noc Lekkich Obyczajów. Musically and aesthetically, the album generates headspace conducive to truly imagining urban space: furor, harsh noise, rapidity, unpredictability, and subservience. The album however is not un-grounded. Its approach is acute, its execution is precise, and its structure is architectural. Below, check out an exclusive stream of Noc Lekkich Obyczajów prior to its September 9th release date....
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Even amidst urban hustle, sanctuary can be found. Likewise, Biesy is not incessant or overly forceful on Noc Lekkich Obyczajów: they understand the importance of pause, even mid-song. But the tension remains… the city still lives and breathes outside your door, as it will forever and invincibly. The encapsulation aspect is of focus here: Biesy maintains significant tension throughout the album's six episodic tracks. Each one gripping, in a sense, but not always choking. Maybe that's what real suffering is: forever moving back and forth from the edge. Forever moving inside to outside, outside to inside. Out there it's pure commotion, a veritable tumult: a ravishing and perplexing sight, but also morbid in its helplessness. It's the chaos that exists only because it exists -- because that is the absurd nature of the universe and all things. Noc Lekkich Obyczajów, while not entropic, spasms with chaotic delight from introspective, melody-driven retreats to mind-exploding, blast beat-driven assaults. The most aggressive moments -- like the climaxes on "W Krew" and "Czerń Nas Prosi" -- are furious and lucid; the soundtrack to the world's busiest, dirtiest, most human streets. That's not to say that there isn't a dark melody to it all. Biesy operates with surgical precision in extracting melody from the madness: with tense build-ups, rockable verses, and unusual asides. If you think about it, there’s a bizarre symphony to the way densely-packed humans move about. Production-wise, Noc Lekkich Obyczajów balances the shrill tearing of high-string chords and cymbal crashes with punchy and pronounced bass, all crystal-clear. Some may actually prefer grittier and raunchier, but that would distract from Biesy's superb (and understated) instrumentation. Long-drawn, angular, and interwoven moments (mostly guitar-driven) -- like the ending to the 11-and-a-half minute penultimate track "Rzucony W Przestrzeń" -- add an almost progressive flavor. A movement from sordid brooding to eye-watering exclamation, with a frightening, ambient-inspired twist in the middle. Noc Lekkich Obyczajów, in both its avant-weirdness and aesthetic perfection, carves out a little niche in the nexus of black and death metal. It feels like it was written aesthetically first, then materially: perhaps mad thoughts driven by the madness of urbanity. The album is a reflection upon itself in that sense, and what it sees brings dread and horror -- yet in the process of recognition, acceptance occurs. You live there, so you must survive. An at-oneness with chaos, almost by necessity. The truth, though, is that the city will kill you, eventually; whether mentally or physically, it does not care....
Biesy is a three-piece act: PR (music and lyrics), Stawrogin (vocals), and MP (drums). Follow Biesy on Facebook here. Pre-order Noc Lekkich Obyczajów here....
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Pan
These Ogrefest vets have fine-tuned their proggy seven-string guitar doom into something very unique. If they lived closer to the coasts, they’d probably be swept up in the nascent New Wave of American Doom Metal (™) that’s been floating around alongside Spirit Adrift, Crypt Sermon and Kehmmis, though Pan is far and away the most prog-inflected of them all.
Live Report: Psycho Las Vegas Day 2
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The rooms at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel and Casino have some of the most effective blackout curtains I have encountered, blocking out the early-to-late morning desert sun, letting you get the precious rest needed for another day’s marathon of indulgent metal-related activities. Every Thursday through Sunday, the Hard Rock hosts a daytime pool party known as Rehab. This is marked by an 11:00 a.m. wakeup call of extremely bass-heavy dance music that reverberates through walls and windows, porting directly into your room. The only silver lining to this situation is the resultant haste with which you complete your morning rituals and get downstairs to discover what sustenance the day will require. The most popular choice is Mr. Lucky’s Diner, located on the casino floor. This is where I ended up. I used my time during breakfast to map out another day of human ping-pong between all three venues. It was all leading up to a King Diamond finale -- like a mountaintop in the distance acting as a beacon (and reward) for making it through another desert day. Having made it through Day One reasonably well gave me confidence and enthusiasm about the long road ahead to The King, so I paid my bill and set off to my first stop....
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The music was set to start at 1:00 p.m. at the Joint, and in a rare occurrence for the festival, there would be only one band to choose from: Richmond, VA-based Cough. The doom label gets thrown around so much these days -- it is hard to remember the term’s power. Cough, however, does an amazing job of reminding you. The tempo and melodies evoke images and scenarios of true demise and despair, like wounded but immortal mind trapped in a well with no foreseeable way of making it back to land above. As bleak as this may sound, it ended up being a fitting primer for the rest of the day, as there was much more like-minded heaviness to be had. I decided to stay at the Joint to experience the current form of Diamond Head. I had no basis for expectations outside of the chatter from nearby metal critics leading up to the performance. The general consensus from this gaggle of aficionados was that it would be interesting at best, and a trainwreck at worst. The venue was about 30% full when Diamond Head started, and there was not much reaction from the audience at first. This did not have an effect on the enthusiasm and playing of the band, though. Most noticeably, the range and ability of singer Rasmus Andersen (who joined in 2014 and recorded with the band in 2015 for their most recent self-titled release) was impressive. The rest of the band delivered a solid, but not remarkable, performance. At the set’s midpoint, there was a noticeable increase in the number of bodies in the room, and active crowd participation finally started to appear. While the negative predictions turned out to be untrue (and seeing “Am I Evil?” live was definitely a treat), the new material may take some getting used to....
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The debates, slander, love, hate, distaste, and adoration for the next performer have been bubbling and brewing into a frenzy online, and that energy and discussion bled into the real world before the curtains opened. Myrkur is a black metal-inspired project lead by Amalie Bruun, a Danish-born musician and actress, and the center of heated debates surrounding the authenticity of her take on the genre. Some black metal fans take it upon themselves to be more of a council or tribunal that judges the legitimacy of bands claim of black metal-ness. This judgement and policing has been swirling around Myrkur since the project began, and neither side of the argument looks poised to bow out any time soon. Bruun emerged wearing a long, white gown, giving her the appearance of an apparition glowing in blue light. Her voice pierced through the ambient murmurs of the audience as she started through an arrangement that included the bassist’s use of a bow to create underlying noises and swells. Going through the first song I did hear and see many of the well known hallmarks of black metal influence, such as blast beats, tremolo picking, and folksy 6/8 rhythms. These techniques were used with a different intention when compared to the originators of the genre, and Myrkur should not be held to the same level of inspection as those who claim rank in the true northern darkness. The pool stage opened its doors at 7:30 p.m. with Weedeater bringing their humid sludge-filled riffs to weigh the sun down below the horizon. Even by their third song, people were still flooding into the pool area to catch what is a notoriously heavy but hilarious set. The charismatic stage presence of bassist and vocalist Dave “Dixie” Collins is entertaining on its own, but when combined with the band’s adept execution of fan favorites such as “God Luck and Good Speed,” it is hard to find anything that compares. A truly unique heavy music experience that you feel personally invited to based on the band’s warm southern style hospitality and inclusive personal engagement with the audience....
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Weaving my way through a now-packed crowd at the Joint, I headed toward Vinyl to witness The Skull, a group consisting of members of Trouble, as well as Witch Mountain. Despite being one of the pioneers of doom, Trouble have become a well-kept secret within the genre. While there is a version of Trouble still active, The Skull are the closest to the real thing. Running through songs such as “R.I.P. Assassin” and “End of My Daze,” we were treated to some of the best of Trouble’s catalog. The Skull have been writing and recording their own new material as well, which thankfully does not fall far from the tree of Trouble’s rich Chicago-inspired blues steeped in Iommi’s influence. And right back into the Joint for Neurosis. From the balcony, the size and scope of the venue could be felt, and it was easier to focus on the performance itself. Seeing Neurosis live has always been a reality check, or at least has aided in contemplative thoughts about personal situations, serious or trivial. The thoughts for me that night, however, were completely focused on the band: I found myself contemplating what makes this band such a complete juggernaut. When a massive beast or object moves, it appears slow… but it is in fact covering more ground than its more nimble counterparts. It is that type of power and movement that make Neurosis so awe-inspiring. This set also featured the first real display of aggression from the audience, and my vantage point was perfect to watch the bursts of energy from the band result in explosions of movement from the crowd. I was also able to see that a few of the security personnel got swept up in the moment and decided to participate in the pit as well -- not to hurt people and get away with it -- but for their own sheer enjoyment....
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It was time to come down from my crow’s nest and work my way toward the front for Saturday night’s massive resolution. Random outbursts of instruments rang out from the PA as the final sound checks were performed in preparation for King Diamond. The lights finally went dark and the loudest cheer so far of the festival roared, almost drowning out the sample from “Out of the Asylum” from Them (1988). The curtain was now again drawn open revealing a stage set with as much detail and quality as you find for a theatrical production. Right as the sample ended, the drum intro to “Welcome Home” incited for cheering as King and Grandma appeared on stage. (If you are at all unfamiliar then I urge you to look into the storyline of King Diamond’s concepts for the band’s albums as they are as bizarre as they are entertaining. The music associated with King Diamond requires a large amount of technical ability from every member of the band, and the band that has been assembled and back the show for the past several years is nothing short of amazing). After running through three more King Diamond and Mercyful Fate songs, it was time to start the full play through of the album Abigail. Released in 1987, Abigail is the second studio album from King Diamond, and the first concept album from the group. The concept is an original story developed by the vocalist that tells the tale of a happy couple moving into an inherited mansion with a bad past involving a stillborn child and adultery. This entire storyline is also played out on stage by King and a woman playing multiple roles. There are props and backdrop changes throughout the set making it a true heavy metal horror opera. You will be hard pressed to find more entertainment and production value in a heavy metal concert.-Alyssa Herrman & Guy Nelson
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Monarch Cover Kiss on “Diamant Noir”
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one. You’re a young kid ruffling through some old records, maybe your dad’s, maybe at a record store. You happen across a beat-up sleeve featuring four figures, decked out in all black, with studded necklaces and facepaint. You’ve seen these figures before, sometimes stomping across a landscape, sometimes surrounded by smoke and brandishing impossibly cool looking instruments. Since you’re a naive youngster, you immediately assume that these guys must be playing some heinously evil stuff. Besides, you’ve heard old heads talk about this band with serious reverence, in the same tone that the teenagers your older sibling hangs out with use to talk about horror movies that you’re too scared to see. Those older teens scare you a bit too. But now’s your time to shine, to prove that you can hang with the big dogs. So pull the record out of the sleeve, put needle to vinyl, and gear up for the heaviest shit on earth. Then, three minutes later… “What the fuck is this?”...
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As undeniably influential as Kiss are, to a younger generation of metal fans, listening to them for the first time can be something of a let-down. Beyond the facepaint and cult-like branding, Kiss are (when you get right down to it) a pretty approachable rock ‘n’ roll act. That’s not a bad thing, rock ‘n’ roll is awesome, and Kiss have some undeniable hooks. But it’s easy for their image -- combined with their widespread appeal to heavy metal fans -- to give young music fans the wrong idea. Luckily, France’s Monarch are here to deliver the Kiss that you imagined in your innocent mind so many years ago. Their cover of “Black Diamond” from Kiss’s self-titled debut, appropriately retitled “Diamant Noir,” would likely slip by unnoticed by anyone unfamiliar with the original. Monarch don’t budge an inch toward the song's gravity, instead they force the material to come to them. “Diamant Noir” like the rest of Never Forever is a cavernous and minimalist doom trudge. The only connective tissue comes from singer Emile Bresson, who maintains the original song’s vocal melody but stretches it out into a ghostly recitation. Even more chilling, and somewhat mystifying, is the band’s addition of lyrics from Outkast’s “Aquemini.” Taken in concert, the two groups of lyrics are a memento mori. “Even the sun goes down, heroes eventually die… Darkness will fall on the city." This ain’t your father’s Kiss record....
Stream “Diamant Noir” below, and check out a statement from the band about the cover....
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I think that we first started toying with the idea of doing a KISS cover during a soundcheck, for a show in Dublin a few years back. Wizards of Firetop Mountain were on the bill. They are so good! That was a wild night. When working on the intro, we were brainstorming ideas, and with Emilie we were thinking that we needed to find something cool, something Outkast would do. Then we were like 'fuck it, let's just use the lyrics from Aquemini on the intro'. I'm glad we did. Once we had the Outkast thing sorted for the KISS intro, we deemed it necessary to use wolf howls to balance out the second solo. And that was it.
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Never Forever is out on September 22nd via Profound Lore. Follow Monarch on Facebook here....
Maryland Deathfest 2018 Additions & Schedule (Satyricon, Incantation, Inquisition, Misery Index, more)
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Failed
Mike Erdody from Acid Witch, Temple of Void and formerly Borrowed Time does no wrong. His Am Rep-style noise act Failed played their entire upcoming album in full from start to finish. They also talked a load of shit about employment. I agree. Fuck a job. Send them Bernie Sanders memes.
Confident Evolution: Yellow Eyes’ “Velvet on the Horns”
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Let no conversation about the New York City black metal scene go without mention of Yellow Eyes -- especially following the release of their third full-length Sick with Bloom two years back. That album in particular was a grounded, more straightforward approach to "postmodern" black metal amid more esoteric offerings from Krallice and Liturgy. Yellow Eyes, however, did not lack any texture or complexity; rather, they thrived in them, just perhaps more subtly, and within a more rigid instrumental framework. Although any notion of subtlety goes bye-bye when you see Yellow Eyes perform live: foreboding, dark, climactic, raw... but above all else, shockingly present. Not that Sick with Bloom was desperately lacking it, but that performative energy/spirit has been of great use to Yellow Eyes on their upcoming fourth full-length Immersion Trench Reverie. The new album sees a renewed invigoration and aptitude for experimentation for the band, but they're just as surefooted and aware as always. Check out an exclusive stream of the album's fourth track "Velvet on the Horns" below....
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The entire gamut of paces Yellow Eyes explores on Immersion Trench Reverie is on display throughout "Velvet on the Horns," from its patient intro to its bewildering climax, and finally toward its quiet and uncertain release. Back-throat yowls and screeches generate significant dark atmosphere throughout, coloring the otherwise crisply produced guitars and drumming. All the while, the music seems to dance from moment to moment, with transitions well-blended for a seamless effect. To its benefit, "Velvet on the Horns" feels woven together (non-linear and unpredictable); the band have indeed sharply increased their arrangement complexity. Yellow Eyes, perhaps with a newfound sense of confidence then, are not afraid of over-expression. Guitar riffs go on spasmodic asides and blast beats explode without warning; tracks may be short (save for the ten-minute finale), but each one packs an unique array of one-two punches. The band has always been well-groomed, but they've managed with Immersion Trench Reverie to be leaner (yet wilder) than ever. Tracks like "Velvet on the Horns" feel optimized -- no moments wasted, no asks for the listener's patience -- without detriment to their complexity or flow. Still retaining their no-nonsense magic, Yellow Eyes has muscled their sound toward greater eloquence and more enthralling drama....
Immersion Trench Reverie releases October 20th via Gilead Media....
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Upcoming Metal Releases: 9/11/17 – 9/15/17
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Week two of me playing in the UMR sandbox. Jon will be back next week to resume his regularly scheduled… Jon-ness? That doesn’t sound quite right. Here are the new metal releases for the week of September 10, 2017 – September 16, 2017. 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 Friday 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. 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 after this is published will not be covered....
ANTICIPATED RELEASES
Hate Moon -- The Imprisoning War | Fólkvangr Records | Symphonic Black Metal | United States I’ve waxed rhapsodic on these virtual pages before about Fólkvangr Records and their impeccable slate of black metal releases. While the label has focused primarily on reissues or co-releases thus far, Hate Moon’s debut full-length is the first exclusive title in their catalogue, and it’s a damn good one. The Philadelphia-based duo plays lo-fi symphonic black metal heavily indebted to the early 1990s Scandinavian scene, but with a marked Norse-Gael influence, especially in terms of the lyrics. On paper, “lo-fi symphonic” might seem like an oxymoron, but the band make it work because they embrace their limitations. Tuathail’s synthesized string tones seem like they were chosen precisely because of how artificial they sound, but they completely fit the music’s overall aesthetic. Add in Tohmar’s blistering riffs and shrieked vocals that sound corrosive enough to strip the finish off a car, and you’ve got one of the most impressive debut records I’ve heard in a very long time. Gigan -- Undulating Waves of Rainbiotic Iridescence | Willowtip Records | Progressive/Technical Death Metal | United States From my premiere of “Elemental Transmography:”...progressive/technical death metal outfit Gigan must secretly be spiders from outer space. All due respect to Ziggy Stardust, but based on the psychedelic nebular mind-fuck tendencies of their first three full-lengths, mastermind Eric Heresmann (ex-Hate Eternal) and company have to all possess extra limbs. Nothing else makes sense. Gigan’s fourth album Undulating Waves of Rainbiotic Iridescence might be the strongest argument yet for their extraterrestrial origins. A nearly hour-long excursion to the furthest reaches of time and space, the album sounds light-years beyond the comprehension of mere humans, right down to song titles like “Ocular Wavelengths’ Floral Obstructions” and “Hideous Wailing of the Ronowen During Nightshade.” For all the technical ecstasy, though, the music still retains a surprising degree of catchiness and accessibility.Howls of Ebb/Khthoniik Cerviiks -- With Gangrene Edges/Voiidwarp | I, Voidhanger | Black/Death Metal/Death/Black Metal | United States/Germany Somehow I completely missed the news that Howls of Ebb decided to call it a day, which likely means With Gangrene Edges is the outré San Francisco duo’s swan song. The three songs they contribute to the split are a bit short by their standards, but still fall in line with what they were doing on their last full-length, Cursus Impasse: The Pendlomic Vows -- dense, tumultuous, and more that a little frightening. No band’s music better personified the law of entropy, which roughly states that all things naturally move towards chaos, and they will definitely be missed. As an added bonus here, the other half of the split features the Voivod-on-LSD stylings of Khthoniik Cerviiks. It’s a bit of a mystery to me how their excellent 2015 album SeroLogiikal Scars (Vertex of Dementiia) didn’t garner more attention. Don’t let their predilection for strange spellings dissuade you from listening, because for my money they’re one of the more interesting bands on the current Iron Bonehead roster. Verge -- The Process of Self-Becoming | I, Voidhanger | Black Metal | Finland At first blush, Verge’s approach to black metal sounds a bit traditional for an I, Voidhanger band - I generally associate the label with more boundary-pushing acts like Locust Leaves, Spectral Voice, or Ecferus. However, Verge aren’t completely beholden to their apparent second wave influences. Their use of slower tempos, moody chord progressions, the occasional clean vocal, and some uncharacteristically lyrical guitar solos all help elevate The Process of Self-Becoming above the rest of the black metal crowd. It also has that high-concept lyrical premise I’m such a sucker for. Loosely structured around Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s writings about the three phases of man’s ethical development, the record is a concept album divided into three chapters. The lyrics deal with the existential crises an individual must overcome as he or she passes through each stage: the aesthetic (where one lives for pleasure and beauty), the moral (where one finds a direction in life and forms commitments to others) , and the religious (where one transcends earthly desires for a higher purpose). Thought-provoking material to be sure, and Verge give it the treatment it deserves.
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OF NOTE
Battle Dagorath – II – Frozen Light of Eternal Darkness | Avantgarde | Black Metal/Ambient | International Even though they take their name from Tolkien, Battle Dagorath are not one of those high fantasy, Ren Faire-sounding black metal bands. II - Frozen Light of Eternal Darkness is a dramatic, hypnotic record, but at almost 80 minutes, it’s also extremely long. Potential listeners must have a high tolerance for ambient synths. Belphegor – Totenritual | Nuclear Blast | Black/Death Metal| Austria I’ve always appreciated Belphegor’s over-the-top approach to blackened death metal, and Totenritual is another solid entry in their long and remarkably consistent discography. Part of me does wish they would do another Satanic S&M record like Bondage Goat Zombie. Their last couple of records have just been so grim in comparison. Squalus – The Great Fish | Translation Loss | Sludge/Doom Metal | United States I was kind of looking forward to this Squalus record, which features several former members of Giant Squid. I miss the hell out of that band, but unfortunately The Great Fish does nothing to help ease that ache. It almost sounds like they took all of the least interesting parts of Giant Squid’s sound and said “let’s write an album that sounds like that.” It’s a disappointingly monochromatic record: lots of meandering sludge and goofy lyrics about fish that I think are supposed to be at least slightly tongue-in-cheek. Where’s Jackie Perez Gratz when you really need her? Blood Tyrant Departure Chandelier – Split 7” | Nuclear War Now! | Raw Black Metal / Black Metal | Netherlands/International Blood Tyrant is probably the better known of the two bands on this split (or at least the more prolific), but the mysterious Departure Chandelier is the real draw. Their track “A Supernatural Being Arose from Kindred Stock” makes this one a must buy for fans of raw black metal.FOR THE ADVENTUROUS
BIG|BRAVE – Ardor | Southern Lord | Experimental Rock | Canada Ardor is one of those rare records that seems damn near impossible to classify. Imagine the most recent iteration of Swans fronted by Julie Christmas, though, and you’re off to a good start. Dense, difficult, and deeply engaging. Sum of R – Orga | Czar of Crickets | Instrumental | Switzerland This one’s kind of difficult to describe without engaging in some serious adjective abuse: droning, minimalist, ambient? Avant-garde instrumental soundscapes? Whatever you call it, Orga is a remarkably calm record and reminds me of some of the less guitar-centric projects that Stephen O’Malley does outside of Sunn O))), like Ensemble Pearl. No preview tracks are available for this one, so check out previous full-length Lights on Water instead to get an idea of Sum of R’s sound.OTHER RELEASES
Ensiferum – Two Paths | Metal Blade | Epic Folk Metal | Finland Ensiferum: the kings of elf metal? If you’re into that kind of thing, you already know exactly what this sounds like. If you aren’t, you still already know exactly what this sounds like. Definitely not a vegan-friendly album due to the egregious amount of cheese contained within. Sheidim – Infamata | I, Voidhanger | Black/Death Metal| Spain Violent, dynamic black metal in the Dissection/Watain vein, featuring vocals from NSK of Teitanblood. Vattnet – Vattnet | New Damage Records | Progressive Rock | United States Vattnet (f.k.a. Vattnet Viskar) used to be a pretty decent atmospheric/post-black metal band. I don’t know what this is supposed to be. Oraculum – Always Higher | Invictus Productions | Death Metal | Chile Decent riffs and lots of atmosphere. Plenty enjoyable, if that’s your kind of thing....
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Voyag3r
I’ve only got one toe into the whole synth soundtrack revival scene. For people already swimming in the deep end, Voyag3r (pronounced Voyager three–get it, they’re a trio) will be of interest. Lukewarm feelings toward the style aside, the power trio played with charisma and a bottomless low end. I found myself carried away and especially charmed by their brief rendition of Pink Floyd’ “Comfortably Numb.” Voyag3r went over so well that the crowd demanded more music, resulting in the first and only encore of the night (and, to my knowledge the second encore ever in Ogrefest history, after a live rendition of “Living After Midnight” by Sauron in 2009)
A Brief History Of Long Songs
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Bell Witch, a Seattle based doom duo, recently announced Mirror Reaper, their third full length album due out on October 20th. Here’s the tracklist for Mirror Reaper: 1. Mirror Reaper That’s it. Mirror Reaper is one song, clocking in at roughly 83 minutes and split over two discs with the subtitles “As Above” and “So Below” (more on that later). As a drone-intensive doom band, Bell Witch are no strangers to lengthy songs. Their previous album, 2015’s Four Phantoms was made up of (as the name implies) four songs that range from ten to 23 minutes each. Even for a band that regularly writes songs as long as episodes of Bojack Horseman, Mirror Reaper is a massive escalation of scale. It’s nearly 3.6 times longer than the band’s longest song and outlasts Longing, their heftiest record, by 16 minutes. Bell Witch are far from the first band to stretch a song to this length, especially in a genre as prone to one-up-manship and extremity creep as heavy metal. It’s only natural that as tempos in doom metal slowed, songs would gradually expand to the very limits of recorded music formats. Bands like Sleep and Boris turned the single-album-single-song gimmick into an artform on Jerusalem and Absolutego, respectively. Both records treated the basic principles of doom -- slow tempos and meditative repetition -- as golden rules....
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With the new expanded storage capacity of compact discs, up to 80 minutes, single track albums grew like goldfish in an oversized aquarium. At this marathon length, it feels silly to consider these pieces to be “songs” in the traditional sense. When a riff can last several minutes without substantially changing, thinking of a song like “Jerusalem” in terms of verses or choruses is pointless. They become something that happens to you rather than something you observe from a distance. Play long enough and loud enough, and you can dissolve time itself. By the mid-2000s, long-song fever had spread even further. Nadja’s Thaumogenesis combined doom metal with shoegaze, Corrupted alternated between delicacy and demolition on El Mundo Frio, and even a grind band like Pig Destroyer took a stab at the form on Natasha. Writing one song longer than the entirety of Reign In Blood is a sure-fire a way of showing the world that you mean business. For any band slow moving enough to attempt it, the risk of failure is surprisingly small. If the album is meant to be experienced in a single, exhausting listen, getting rid of those pesky track divisions isn’t just ambitious, it’s efficient. Doom isn’t the only subgenre of metal with a penchant for the single-song albums, it just happens to be the medium that Bell Witch selected for Mirror Reaper. Metal’s other super-long tradition operates in a vastly different way, but in order to break down how and why, we’ll need to enter the dreaded “prog zone.” Do you have your shimmering cape and refrigerator-sized modular synthesizer ready? Good. Just like the doom innovators of the 1990s, progressive metal bands also saw the birth of the CD as a chance to push forward the genre’s limits. During the age of vinyl, progressive rock bands, routinely made albums -- like Yes’s Fragile or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon -- that were divided into distinct songs but flowed seamlessly from one to another, suggesting that each song itself was a movement of a larger composition. This only became more explicit as the “side-long epic,” a single song long enough to take up an entire side of a vinyl record, became commonplace. Songs like “Close To The Edge,” “The Gates Of Delirium,” and “Lizard” proudly delineated their subsections by Roman numerals. Freed from the physical limits of vinyl, modern prog metal bands were quick to expand on this concept. Both traditionalists (Dream Theater, Fates Warning) and more extreme acts (Edge Of Sanity) carried the single-song album to the turn of the century, where Meshuggah, Green Carnation, and Between The Buried And Me pushed the form into even stranger territories....
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(It should be noted that the more conventional side-long epic still lives on. More bands than we could ever name have found the space for 20+ minute songs on their records, and other bands like Cephalic Carnage, Skepticism, Swallow The Sun, and Gorguts have released EPs with single tracks around that length). These prog records, while similar to doom’s feature-length releases in size, are worlds different from albums like Dopesmoker. If doom bands value repetition and glacial variation in structure, progressive rock and metal are built on continuous change and development. Instead of letting you explore a single space in fine detail, prog takes you on a whirlwind tour of the entire neighborhood. Or, to take an example from modern television, doom metal works like an episode from Twin Peaks: The Return, resting on a static image for as long as it feels like, even if that means that you’ll be watching a man sweep an empty bar for minutes on end. Progressive metal single-track albums are like “The Dragon And The Wolf” from the seventh season of Game Of Thrones, so crammed full of plot points that an hour-and-a-half runtime is the only way to fit them all in....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrc1ch3O9Fs...
From the ten minute excerpt that Bell Witch have released from Mirror Reaper, it looks like they’re more Dougie Jones than Jon Snow. Using an organ to fill space, Bell Witch ring every ounce of pathos that they can from a limited range of notes before gradually building to a heartbreaking lead. Given the rest of their discography, it’s safe to assume that the rest of “Mirror Reaper” keeps this funereal tone, but 83 minutes is a long time, plenty long enough for them to make a few detours before looping back into the procession. Who knows? Maybe the second disc will break into upbeat bluegrass for no discernible reason. (Sorry BTBAM fans, low-hanging fruit). Jokes aside, Bell Witch’s decision to split Mirror Reaper across two discs is a necessary one, given the spacial limitations of both vinyl records and CDs. Mirror Reaper’s runtime pushes against the boundaries of any popular physical media, but a large portion of its listeners will hear it without moving their needle. People’s listening habits favor streaming music (legally or otherwise) versus consuming CDs, cassettes, etc., and that trend isn’t likely reverse anytime soon. Unlike the old mediums, digital releases aren’t constrained by physical limitations and could, theoretically be as long as the artist desired. Spotify happily hosts 90 minute podcasts, and Bandcamp allow artists to upload hefty files after they’ve reached a high enough number of sales. YouTube, the nearly lawless international waters of the digital ocean, is teeming with videos that cross the ten-hour mark easily. An 83-minute long doom song is an eye-catching premise now, and broadly speaking single-track albums will always be an oddity, but Mirror Reaper only scratches the surface of the form’s capabilities in the digital age. In the coming years, ambitious artists looking to push the long-song tradition further have vast, untouched depths to explore. A single song longer than The Godfather is no longer out of the question. The walls of the fishtank no longer exist, the goldfish are free to be godsized....
“Snacking For Vengeance” Offers Appetizer
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I want to tell you a tale of two burgers. Back when I lived in Chicago, there were two burger joints roughly two miles away from each other -- one you may have heard of, the other you probably haven’t. The former is Kuma’s Corner, a metal-themed bar/grill famous for long wait times, absurdly huge burgers, and blaring heavy metal. The latter was Indie Burger, an obnoxiously twee restaurant that served overpriced, under-seasoned burgers within the vague trappings of “indie” culture, i.e. the meat was locally sourced, grass-fed, served on wooden trays, and the benches were repurposed from an old church, etc. Basically, it was a joke straight out of Portlandia, and it was treated as such, going out of business within a few months. Kuma’s, on the other hand, has expanded into multiple locations throughout the greater Chicago area. While there were other mitigating factors at play here -- namely that Indie Burger’s meat was objectively mediocre and served on brittle, flavorless buns, while Kuma’s is fucking delicious -- the divergent paths these two businesses took offers insight into the intersection of food culture and music fandom. A burger joint trading in on the culture of indie rock doesn’t sit right with people. There’s no blatant connection. A metal-themed hamburger, while obviously a bit ridiculous, makes a certain kind of sense. Maybe it’s the inherent brutality of preparing and eating meat, or maybe it’s all the fire and knives, but metal and food culture seem to overlap a surprising amount. To wit: a new online cooking show from Chris Pacifico and Frank Huang called Snacking For Vengeance. The premise is fairly simple: the two sit down with various metal bands, including Pyrrhon, Inter Arma, Gatecreeper, and more, cook them up a meal based on their band, and then interview them as they chow down. The real hook -- for those like me whose knowledge of cooking barely extends beyond omelets and throwing too much garlic on everything -- is the interview segment. This is where the hosts talk to bands about how they eat on tour. Tour life is rough, especially for underground metal acts, so stories of the garbage your favorite metal bands put into their bodies are likely to be gross-out funny… but also illustrative of the grim realities of being a working musician. For those with more interest in the cooking side of the show, the food (at least from the trailer) looks pretty damn good, and a promised cast of guest cooks should help keep things fresh from episode to episode. Watch the trailer below, and follow Snacking For Vengeance on Facebook....
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Sicarius Bare Their Teeth On “Serenade of Slitting Throats”
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Over the past several years, few metal genres have been consistently interpreted to yield such a stunning array of outcomes as black metal. From the atmospheric meditations of Wolves in the Throne Room to the artful incantations of Agalloch -- from the soaring arias of Deafheaven to the impenetrable madness of Krallice -- black metal has been carefully manipulated and shaped to fit a striking range of creative visions. Sicarius, on the other hand, have ventured in a far darker direction. Theirs is a vision steeped in anger and aggression, a noxious brew of blackened thrash with a healthy pinch of genre-appropriate misanthropy to aid in fermentation. Sicarius wield metal as a blood-soaked weapon blunted over time by repeated hackings through the bones of their enemies — an approach exemplified by the title track off their upcoming album Serenade of Slitting Throats. If the listener is a jumper perched at the edge of a building, the song’s relatively peaceful introduction represents one final look back over the shoulder to safety before taking the plunge. It’s the last chance to turn back, as a tremolo guitar sets the mood over which a scratchy, reverb-laden voice issues the opening salvo. Seconds later, a sinister shove from behind in the form of a punishing three-bar drum fill casts us headlong into the abyss. The band maintains the song’s punishing pace for the next three minutes until shifting gears into a languid, chugging outro. Backing vocal chants add weight and depth while K. Karcass’s painfully rasped lead vocals deliver a final monologue, until a softly melodic guitar lead brings the song to an eventual close. Here, Sicarius demonstrates both a willingness to take risks with song structure as well as the songwriting skill required to execute those risks successfully, an approach that -- when considered together with the tight riffing in the track’s previous movements -- bodes well for the rest of the album.-Ivan Belcic
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Sicarius will release Serenade of Slitting Throats via M-Theory Audio on October 13th. Check out the lyric video for the title track below....
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Cavalcade
Another longtime fest veteran group, Cavalcade bend genres, plain and simple. Sometimes they sound like peak Isis with Ihsahn on vocals, other times like At the Gates. Their set, complete with light show, felt like a grand sendoff to the fest. They drew the largest crowd by a margin, and played the absolute best I’ve ever seen them. At that time events came to a climax. This set was the moment that all the momentum of the fest’s decade-long history came to a head. One rarely experiences sets like that. It was a pleasure to witness.
Poison Blood’s Punk Hypnotism
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Sometimes the best combos hide out in plain sight. For Jenks Miller of Horseback and Neill Jameson of Krieg, the fusion of black metal, punk and psychedelic wizardry has proven bold. The two musicians have forged together to form the sparkly new extreme outfit, Poison Blood: a group scary, dreary, but also hopeful. Something brutally honest drips all throughout the band’s self-titled debut record. You sink deep into it; the walls echo off your inner chamber like church bells at dusk. It’s amazing that these guys haven’t even physically met each other. “I assume we'll have a play date eventually if our parents are okay with it,” Jameson laughs. “For me personally this isn't the first time I've done long distance projects, I've been doing these style collaborations since the 1990s.” The debut record is grimy and oozing, and completely full. It’s raw as hell, and experimental (you’d expect nothing less). There’s a real variation in terms of environment, but it blends seamlessly. You’re left floating in a surreal and cubist-like haze, swaying down, then up, over, and then around. It’s conceptual, but simple: sort of like walking simultaneously through the night desert and some snowy blizzard in hell....
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“Neither of us in our main outlets tend to venture into anything that doesn't have an organic footing,” Jameson notes. “Digital or overly polished recordings are sterile, boring sounds for boring people. “My other heavy-ish project, Horseback, has a big conceptual element to it,” Miller adds. “Usually a concept pushes me into new places creatively. But sometimes I like a more direct channel, which is what Poison Blood is. It's far more raw. Neither Horseback nor Mount Moriah [Miller’s project with Heather McEntire and Casey Toll] are extremely polished, sonically (though Mount Moriah has cut a clean sounding record in Nashville!), but I really tried not to ‘overcook’ the Poison Blood record, even by those standards.” There’s rigid simplicity to Poison Blood’s music. Never is there overindulgence in form. Each shape has a sense and a purpose. The band has that early second-wave black metal tribalism tattooed across its heart: the churning, the anger, and the unprocessed realism. It’s reminiscent of the early and more acute days where each riff and rough drumbeat pounded like an eternal hammer through the mind. The skies, the wind, and the Earth were moist, and even the concrete was fluid. “I just hooked up a thrift store cassette player so I can listen to mixtapes I made 23 years ago,” Jameson says. “Early second- and third-wave bands had an emotional honesty which was valued higher than ability. While a lot of these bands sold their souls long ago, the really early records still capture the mysterious and creepiness that moved in like a fog when I was a young man. Not many bands capture that anymore; now everything is too concerned with trying to sound like dead languages professors while spending more time buying witch hats and incense than writing something captivating. Everything is all dissonance now; it's like listening to two reverb pedals fucking in a cave. It tries to be mysterious, but in order to have mystery, you need to have something that draws people in to be curious. Most modern bands don't, they just have record labels that know how to market them so they sell out quickly and go for moronic sums on Discogs.” There’s an infinite darkness and swirling appreciation that both Jameson and Miller weave throughout Poison Blood. The technicality and the symbolism live in tandem with the punk rock fury. Both musicians lay out a grand statement on how to deliver direct power and hold back just enough to create the tactile depth of mystery that proper black metal exhibits. There’s nothing faked here, it’s all laid out, bled from within, boomeranged from youth to adulthood: the two life periods interwoven as one epic spasm. “Growing up, punk was more of an abstract ethos or an idea,” Miller explains. “When I was younger it didn't matter what bands you listened to -- punk was about making something and finding your own way of putting it out into the world. It just meant ‘independent.’ Now it's more of a commodity, or a sub-cultural signifier, with a well-trod history and a specific image and an established canon of bands associated with it. These days it seems like it doesn't really matter what you're doing as long as you listen to the right music or wear the right clothes. But maybe I'm just old and out of touch.” Jameson concurs. “My interest in punk didn't really become obsessive until ten or twelve years ago,” he says. “Until my discovery of Amebix and Rudimentary Peni, I really never even went to punk shows. Growing up in Ocean City, NJ, the punks and metalheads stuck together unlike a lot of places, I guess out of a shared sense of being the community fuckups, but if I'm being honest, I thought what they listened to outside of a few bands sucked. I never gave a fuck about GG Allin or Crass. Still don't. But we watched each other’s backs, at least until drugs came into the picture. As for punk now, it's kind of a reversal for me: I love a lot of punk bands but think a lot of the people in that scene suck, but I can say the exact same thing about black metal, or any music, really. It's a lot of people talking about big ideas they never follow through with, or people who are so frighteningly sensitive to the most minimal shit that they tend to damage their credibility with causes that actually impact more than someone's hurt feelings. Rationality is fucking dead, everything is for sale, and nobody's driving.” The brutal and desolate “Circles of Salt” closes the new record out in haunting style. The song is lonely and vast -- but like the entire record, there’s some definitive hope nestled up in there. You can walk with purpose, crawl with reason. Jameson showcases some wickedly reverberating scowls and yelps throughout, almost like an ancient hymn to the endless night sky and torture of existence, albeit tweaked with modern technology. “That was painful,” he says. “I used to be able to do vocals like that, the higher register, for hours. Now age and smoking has left its mark, so I tend to only do it for the right moments. And as it's the ending of the record and the least direct song on the record, I felt that it needed the most amount of that weird desert chill through its bones, so I wanted my vocals reversed. I think on almost every recording I've ever done something's been reversed, I fell in love with the process on Danzig’s IV, and it's stayed with me since.” The song creates a door in the sky, like something out of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. You step through, are bathed in the morphing tones, the outer rings. You can see the outside, and ponder walking back through, yet you’re drawn intensely. This is the circular atmosphere of Poison Blood shining its core. “I like repetition in music,” Miller states. “Both as a listener as a compositional method for my own music. I enjoy being hypnotized by music, and that can happen quite easily when tracking this kind of song.” Poison Blood’s debut offers a trip into many worlds, a chance to walk the earth and skate the skies. The band creates a dimension bore of rage and technique: the perfect combo for a duo with some honest intentions....
Editor’s Choice: August 2017
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A solar eclipse is unlikely, but not inexplicable. Unless your brain has been completely rotted by flat earth theories, the mechanics that explain the moon temporarily blocking of the sun are fairly simple. Despite being much smaller than the sun, the moon is significantly closer to the earth. Thus, when its orbit brings it between the sun and Earth, it appears to be roughly the same size. This prevents the sun’s light from reaching Earth. Easy enough. You can could recreate this geometry with a penny and a ceiling light to get the same effect. Well, not exactly the same effect. Even outside of the path of totality, a solar eclipse is something to behold. You can understand intuitively what you’re witnessing, but at that moment it’s hard not to be taken aback. The sun -- as much of a constant as you can ask for in life -- is suddenly inverted into a hole in the sky. A black mark on the face of the natural order. Even if looking directly at it didn’t ruin your eyesight (tough luck, Joey Bada$$), an eclipse would still feel like a vaguely Lovecraftian event, something that would permanently leave an imprint on your mind if you gazed into it for too long. It’s hard to blame earlier cultures for associating solar eclipses with ominous upheaval. Some imagined that a massive predator was devouring the sun only to spit it back out. Others just took it as a sign that their rulers were in deep shit. As Sam Kris laid out in his article about sungazing, the sun has been symbolically linked to authority figures throughout history. The moon’s sudden, attention-grabbing interruption is a coup. For a brief moment, the king is dead; the subjects are left blinded and bewildered. Then the usurper regurgitates its victim and order is restored. Of course, in a vacuum the eclipse doesn’t necessarily mean any of this. It’s just a natural phenomenon, an event that would happen with or without human involvement. We are involved, however, and that means that we’re going to spin myth and meaning out of the world around us, whether the sun likes it or not. What those myths contain will always say more about us than the sun itself. For example: I see the solar eclipse as a metaphor for rebellion against an established order -- this may mean that I have unresolved issues with authority and a general distrust of the powers that be. I doubt I’m the only one. Heavy metal doesn’t exist in a vacuum either. When you get down to the bottom of it, a sequence of notes played through a distorted guitar (absent any other context) is apolitical and signifies nothing other than itself. The problem is that zero heavy metal songs exist without context. Like the myths that we tell about the solar eclipse, music is a way for us to explain how we see the world. It is the vehicle for the stories we want to tell about our communities, an expression of our values and grievances. So what do we want to say about ourselves? What stories do we want to send out to the world? This week, Matt Harvey of Exhumed wrote an article for Decibel magazine defending Hells Headbanger’s right to sell music made by white supremacists. All this following an open letter posted on MetalSucks asking the label to drop Nazi releases in the wake of the events of Charlottesville. The essential point of Harvey’s argument is that heavy metal isn’t guided by any single ideology but is unified by a spirit of lawlessness and disregard for social mores. Because of this, Harvey claims that actively attempting to prevent racists from having a platform would be antithetical to metal’s “fuck the rules” ethos, and is tantamount to censorship. Doug Moore already addressed many of the problems with this essay over at Stereogum better than I could, so I won’t waste your time hasing out each and every point. There is one thread that I can’t leave untouched, however: the claim that heavy metal has no rules is ludicrous. Metal exists under a form of governance, just like every culture has its “rules,” even if they aren’t strictly enforced. There is a customary style of dress; there are patterns of speech, slang, memes; there are loose aesthetic guidelines to music and art; there is always crowd mentality at shows. These are all driven by rules -- though many of these rules are gladly bent. Thus, in order for metal to be anything, it has to actively not be other things. Harvey quotes a relevant Sarcofago lyric: “If you are a false don’t entry.” The thing is: we get to decide what false means. Is it that outlandish to ask that Nazis get barred at the gates? When I listen to heavy metal, I am looking for something similar to what I experienced staring up at the eclipse. I am looking to be awed, and to be simultaneously humbled and invigorated. To have my place in the universe affirmed by a phenomenon that challenges all of my assumptions. Like the eclipse, heavy metal can and should be terrifying, but that doesn’t mean we should let into our lives the parts of it that are unambiguously harmful without at least considering the possibility of long-term damage....
After all of that, I would be remiss not to promote music by metal bands that actively take a stand against racism. Black Metal Alliance, a loose conglomerate of bands ranging from drone to stoner metal to just about every variety of black metal imaginable, released Crushing Intolerance Vol. 5 in August. All proceeds from the mammoth, 21-song collection go to the Indigenous Environmental Network, a grassroots environmental justice organization. I can’t in good faith say that you’re going to enjoy every song here -- simply because there are so many of them -- and they vary so greatly in style and production quality. But that same variety means you’re likely to find at least one or two tracks to hit the spot. Personally, I’m a fan of Arktheron Thodol’s melancholic and acoustic tinged “Spiritum Viridis” and Kosmogyr’s heavy-as-all-get-out “Quiescent.”...
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Don’t worry, not all of my recommendations this month are tree-hugging “save the animals” types. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Owlcrusher. I don’t know why you would ever want to crush an owl. What the fuck have owls ever done to you, except dispose valuable wisdom and do cool-as-hell Linda Blair impressions? What, did you accidentally press A too fast and get stuck in one of Kaepora Gaebora’s endless dialogue prisons in Legend of Zelda? Did you see one too many O RLY memes back in the ytmnd days and declare war on an entire species? Whatever set them off, this Irish doom metal band is not toying around. Generally, when it comes to agonizingly slow doom, I tend to gravitate toward bands with a more psychedelic or spiritual edge. Think YOB and Usnea and their ilk. Owlcrusher moves at a similar speed, and their guitars aim for the same bowel-shifting frequency. However, their music doesn’t inspire transcendance. This is doom as crushing realism. No escape, no mercy....
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Alright, let’s pick up the pace a bit. Common War continue the grand hardcore tradition of turning metal subgenres -- in this case, black metal -- into brolic mosh anthems. Possess Yourself is dressed in the antichristian veneer of black metal and uses some of its harsh minor harmony... but that’s just seasoning. The real meat of the record is crowd-killing, gym-playlist-ready hardcore. Check out “Lower The Casket,” a song that satisfies the graveward glance of any longhair but delivers that message with the physicality of an elevator with its cables cut....
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This is less of a recommendation than an observation, but in a month that featured an increased risk of nuclear warfare between North Korea and the United States, two moody rock bands released songs that used the detonation of Fat Man and Little Boy on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a metaphor for unhealthy relationships. The first, “Be My Hiroshima” by Grave Pleasures, is a catchy death-rock tune that gets a lot of mileage out of some good guitar arrangement and a hooky chorus, but it suffers from a verse melody that leans just an inch too Count Chocula for me. The second, Brand New’s “137,” is about as overwrought as you’d imagine a Brand New song that involves nuclear armageddon would be, but the Iron Maiden-ish lead during the song’s climax is inarguably rad....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-OxW0KcyoQ&feature=youtu.be...
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Idylls’s “No Virility” is a perfect storm of acquired tastes. Noise rock. Saxophone solos. Australian accents. The song is the purest distillation of skronk imaginable. Perpetually off-kilter and seething with unarticulated rage, “No Virility” is the sound of someone working themselves into a frenzy while pacing back and forth. Like the best noise rock, even the song’s most accessible moments feel like a sardonic joke at the listener’s expense. Just when you least expect it, Idylls switch to a herky-jerky midtempo groove straight of out the most hellish version of “My Sharona” imaginable to bring the song to a close. If you’re reading this after a particularly fun night out, I’d steer clear. This track is liable to extend your hangover well into next week....
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If that last song is too caustic for your taste, try Capture The Sun instead. Terra Firma, the group’s second full length, is a sumptuous progressive metal record that demonstrates that openly flashy music can still be a soothing listen. The mostly instrumental band, barring a handful of vocal cameos, aren’t afraid to show off their chops, but their meter changes and fretboard acrobatics are the vehicle for a gorgeous harmonic language. Think world map music played with boss battle intensity....
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Live Report: Couch Slut & Pyrrhon @ Saint Vitus
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If you were lucky enough to be in the crowd at Saint Vitus last Thursday, you probably came face-to-face with Couch Slut vocalist Megan Osztrosits as she prowled the floor, screaming about physical and psychological torture. The double album-release show for Pyrrhon and Couch Slut, featuring opening sets from New Jersey death metal band Replicant and Philadelphia grindcore band Mob Terror, was confrontational from start-to-finish, with plenty of light violence on the audience’s part to match. Couch Slut has a track record of putting out fascinating and eclectic metal that blurs the lines between hardcore, harsh noise and thrash metal, and their new album on Gilead Media, Contempt, is no exception. Lyrically, Couch Slut is unparalleled in their ability to conjure doom and terror. It’s one thing to listen to Osztrosits talk about horrifying sexual violence from the safety of your iPhone. But to hear her scream “Dressed like that at a funeral? You’re gonna give someone the wrong idea” as she writhed and hiked up her shorts to reveal the word “dream” scrawled on her ass, you are forced to confront the reality behind her words. Sitting on the sidewalk outside the venue after the show, Osztrosits underscored the necessity of such an aggressive performance: “It’s alienating but it’s my only choice. It’s not something I like to do. If I wasn’t doing this, I would be screaming on the streets. Cops don’t believe you. I have to scream at people in their face.” Brooklyn-based heavyweights Pyrrhon followed Couch Slut’s sprawling set with a comparatively traditional performance of fast technical death metal. That’s not to say that vocalist Doug Moore let the crowd off easy as he paced the stage, at times shoving his fists in the air to punctuate the brutality in his lyrics. If the reaction from the audience was any indication, Pyrrhon has reached legend status as local heroes in the three years between their last full-length release, The Mother of Virtues and their new release, What Passes for Survival. The album is already a shoo-in for year-end lists thanks to Pyrrhon’s trademark mix of poetic musings on body horror and politics (“Not Nazis, just into the aesthetic” Moore assures us on “Goat Mockery Ritual”) and cross-genre instrumentality. Moore’s low growl was even more captivating in person than on the album, due in large part to his theatrical performance, glorious mane, and bulging muscles. Guitarist Dylan DiLella paid homage to avant-garde hardcore with his Neurosis T-shirt, and fittingly, his riffs alternated between melodic and abrasive with impressive technical proficiency. By the end of the night, the audience looked emotionally and physically exhausted, but that may have been exactly what Couch Slut and Pyrrhon intended.-Arielle Gordon
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Past Tense
See Past Tense and witness their spot-on recreation of classic and thrashy traditional metal. This sort of music is experiencing a mini resurgence with Razor and Exciter touring again, and Grim Reaper just having played the states. Past Tense don’t have the history of those bands, but they have the sound and the songs to box with them. Don’t judge a digital drum kit by its absurdly small kick pads: all the people who left after Cavalcade missed out.
“Keeping It Different” with Dave Witte
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Are you in full on Brain Tentacles mode right now? Or are you balancing all those bands at once? I'm balancing everything. How do you keep track of all that, if you don't mind me asking? Well, there's no really easy way. You gotta make it all happen, you know? I like to be creative. I like to play with people who are creative so it pushes a lot of good sets out of me. And, you know, for the right music, you just gotta play it live. So you just take it like one band of the time? Well, yeah. I don't know, man. I'm trying to make everything happen at once and I'm pretty good at it. If something comes up, you just gotta do it. We were doing this run. It's 14 days, a bunch of stuff with Inter Arma and some pickup shows. And then we end in Chicago with Mastodon for the "Hope for the Day" campaign, the anti-suicide suicide prevention organization. It's gonna be a great show. So the River Black record; you’re playing with a bunch of the Burnt By The Sun guys again. Do you view it as sort of a continuation of that band or is it just something entirely new for you? Well, I consider it an extension and also a new endeavor as well. I mean, there's three-fourths of us there so we all know how one another operate, we're comfortable with each other, and we know what to expect from one another. You know, I guess we grew a little bit. We fine tuned a bit, a little more streamlined it so to speak. So we wanted to make it more focused and more heavy and angrier than Burnt rather than relying on like a speed or spastic element, you know? Streamlined was one of the words that I was thinking of too. It feels like you're picking your spots a bit more when to go faster or when to bring in some outside element. But it's all about that sort of really crushing like mid-tempo approach on that record. Yeah and, you know, we've done that. We've touched that. We'll use it here and there. That's what John really loves to do. John writes all the riffs and he just brings it out of me and everybody else. So it was easy to keep going with that direction. Outside of just streamlining it, do you have like a different approach for it compared to the way played drums with Burnt By The Sun? Or do you just go in there and do your thing? Well again, it's about John. John brings a bunch of stuff out of me that no one can the way he does. So it makes me approach the drum set and look at things a little bit differently. I'm always able to come up with some interesting stuff due directly to him. The process wasn't too far removed from the Burnt stuff because John and I wrote most of that. It's usually just him and I in a room but like I said before, I wanted to focus on just making it heavier and more mid paced. You know, we did all the fast stuff and that's great. That's fine, don't get me wrong but all right man, we did that already, you know? Right, you don't want to repeat yourself. It's a new chapter. We went through various name changes, various vocalists. And you know, when Mike [Olender] was interested and decided to hop on board, everything that we had laying around popped into place. He really poured the gas on the flame, so to speak. He brought a lot of stuff to life that we thought was just okay. You know, him and Ken involved, it really made it as best as it could be, I suppose. The records sounds like a lot of those songs were written with space in mind for a vocalist. You know, it's funny because, we don't really think about that when we’re writing. Mike's always good at figuring stuff out. When he signed up we all sort of moved things here and there and extended some parts here and there for vocal patterns. So we adjusted to him. There's that one moment on “Haunt” with clean vocals. It totally pops on the record because you guys didn't overuse it. It's the same thing with the string section. It's like you guys really carefully selected where to do that stuff. Yeah, we're not that type of band man. You know, a lot of people do the sing and the screaming thing. And that's cool, that's good for them and some of those people do it well. But we were never that band. We're driven to do what we do. So a little cherry like that, it's pretty well placed and it's nice little departure for the record. For the strings, we had this girl Jessica that I know that I worked with down in Richmond. She's a great player and it just came to me one day that that song would sound great with a string section. And it just happened to work out. You do a lot of 16th note riding on the bell. But then every once in awhile you throw in these little patterns that are really different and not what you'd expect. Like there's that bit on "Everywhere" where you're alternating between a four tom and a high hat. Is that something you thought of in the moment or do you write the basic form of the drumbeat and then embellish it later? Again it goes back to John. For some reason he just gives me these riffs which enables me to turn something else out of my brain and think outside the box. I start with patterns and just elaborate on it from there. I guess that's one example of a polyrhythm. I know what you're talking about there but I like a simple approach. It's like a painting or so to speak. So I'll have a simple approach to the beat and when I'm looking at it and going down the line, I try to have every fill in be different and be more intense and work with the next part. I try to arrange everything that way. I feel like one of the drummer's jobs in a band, especially a band that's so guitar oriented is you have to dictate structure a lot of the time, you know? You've got to set up the next section and make sure that the energy is going correctly from one part to a next. That's something I really liked on the River Black record. Oh thanks, man. I think it's super important to know when to not play and to know when to play for the part of the song, you know, be a part of it. What's your plans for River Black going forward? We have plans to do another record. Touring on it too? I mean it'll be selective. That's not gonna be a full-time thing. We're gonna play, we're gonna make it special. We'll do what we can. Everyone else is really busy with life and other bands and stuff. So when we get to do it, we try to make it as fun as possible. We will play more. But we're gonna be highly selective on what we do, you know? That's just the way it has to be with that band. (editor's note: two booked dates are listed below.)...
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Since you play in so many other bands at once, do you see things that you pick up from one act bleeding into the other bands? Or do you try and separate between them? Totally. I try to keep everything different but every once in awhile...that's the best thing about doing other projects. It makes you think differently and come up with new patterns and do fills and stuff like that. Then you can start cross-pollinating. Something you would have never thought of working in one band might after taking a little detour with another music project. Of course, it's gotta be contextual too because the super groovy ghost note stuff that you're doing on Brain Tentacles, that wouldn't fit on Municipal Waste, you know? That's why I have multiple things going on because I have a lot in me that I can't get out in one spot. Is there anything in you that you feel like you still need to find like an outlet for in terms of how you play drums? I need to learn more. I mean, you can never know enough, you know? What do you feel like you need to work on now? Like what's the thing that like is challenging you at the moment that you want to improve on? Well, I'd like to work on more four-way independence. More rudiments in general and building skills back up. You get so busy and you tour so much it's hard to focus on like moving forward learning because you're locked into playing those songs all the time. Sometimes you're playing so much you need to break some plans and it's hard. I don't know. It's a never ending battle to learn stuff because there's always someone out there that comes up with something new that relights the flame to inspire and learn more. That never ends. There's this great Instagram site called "Play This Beat" I recommend for anybody that wants to learn some more stuff. It's a bunch of guys playing beats and everyone does their interpretation of it and puts it up. It's a really good resource. I was gonna ask like who, what are the places that you're finding inspiration from lately? Well, there's this guy Carter Mac that I've been following. He's the drummer for The Lion King, does a lot of New York session stuff. That guy's a monster. He's such a great drummer. I'm surrounded by people that enjoy music and are highly talented. So everyone has a wide range of tastes. It's easy to find out like who's pushing the envelope forward in a bunch of different circles. What's good is you can recognize creativity and sort of judging with greatness. It's totally inspiring. I don't necessarily go out and seek it, I just have it genetically because I have so many different friends that play. "Oh have you heard of this guy yet?" Like, "Oh no. Oh wow, I didn't even know he existed. He just blew my mind." So I passed it on to some other guys. There's this other guy named George Hooks. He's a klezmer drummer. There's like a link of him on YouTube playing a bar mitzvah or a Jewish wedding or something, I forget what it is [Editor's note: we found it]. He's like an older dude, is that right? Yeah, the video's a few years old but he killed it. He's like almost a metal drummer. It's pretty fun to watch. There's this other guy, Dafnis Prieto, that I really love. He's this Cuban guy, big afro, monster jazz player. He'll be doing like the clave pattern with the cowbell and changing the tempo the whole entire time while his body solos over the rest of it and that's changed tempos sometimes too. It's crazy. Those kind of like latin jazz players have like I think probably the most limb independence of like any genre. It's unbelievable. Yeah, those guys have forgotten stuff I haven't even learned yet. They're like next level. If you could pick up more of that limb independence, where would you want to apply that in a current band that you're in? Probably Brain Tentacles. Brain Tentacles is pretty free. Sometimes it's very liberating too. Brain Tentacles feels like the limitations are really wherever you set them because it's so different. Something like Municipal Waste on the other hand, you're going for a specific genre. Yeah, that's what it is and that's what it always will be, you know? With Brain Tentacles, there's only three of us. It's just endless possibilities to stretch out as far as you want or reel it in. You know, keep it tight. It's cool. It's exciting every night. Are you guys working on any new music or is it still just mostly the record you all came out with last year? We've actually planned a new one for this trip. And we're trying it out. It's going over pretty well. It's a lot of fun to play it too. Where have you guys taken the sound on the new album? I don't know. We're stretching out this one. It has a little more speed and heaviness to it. It's a little more dynamic. It's fun. I mean, we're just figuring it out. It's gonna develop while we're out. What’s cool about this band is that everything was put together quickly and recorded and then when we went out and played it everything's evolved and it came to life. The personality of the songs were flushed out on the road....
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Going back to Municipal Waste. You mentioned that it is what is it and it's always going to be going for that sound. How do you personally keep that fresh for yourself? How do you find like new ways to approach that sound like on each record? Oh, you just listen to some old stuff and you listen to some new stuff. I guess the biggest factor is that this time around is we added another player. He was able to bring some cool stuff to the table. We should have did it years ago. Now all the harmonies on the old records are totally coming to life. It's just fuller, heavier, more focused. When you got another guy in the band, you gotta really be on your "A" game and keep it precise. There's no leeway because the guitars have to totally be in tune with one another on time. It forces us to look into a little harder, you know? You've gone out of your way to work with so many different artists, it makes sense that you would be inspired more in an older band by bringing in someone new. Having different people to work with seems like one of the drivers of your creativity, at least from the outside. Yeah. And it's a never-ending cycle too. There'll be a young band that comes up. You're like, "Wow, these guys are doing something cool." you know? It makes you work a little harder. It re-inspires you to play what you're doing, you know? Oh, holy shit. What just happened? Oh, nothing. Just someone's driving like a dumbass up ahead. Are you generally the driver when it comes to tour or you guys switch it up? No, we switch it up. Aaron's driving right now. I had a drum teacher for a while that compared driving and drumming because they involve using like all your limbs and all of your senses all at once. You know what's funny? He's right because I talk to people about learning drums and I ask them two things. Do you know how to dribble a basketball and do you know how to drive a stick shift ? Because they're both very similar. Are you a big basketball guy? No but, you know, when you bounce the ball, you want it to come back to you. Same principle when the stick hits the head you want it to come back. You're totally right that it's all playing with rebound. But also the drummer is like the point guard of the band. You're setting everyone else up, you're passing to them, you're making sure that they're getting their touches so to speak. That's true. I never thought about that. It makes total sense. You're steering, you got the pedal and the brake and you got the clutch, and then you got the stick. It's totally like drumming, just a different way of doing it. You're setting the tempo for everyone else. You're responsible for keeping everyone is that car safe. Yeah. I know that you're a big foodie and beer guy. Do you relate those outside interests to drumming or do you like to keep your passions separate? I mean, I don't know. I never really thought of it that way but I guess it's just all one big thing, you know? Everybody likes all kinds of stuff. And I guess the one thing about having good food and beer especially on tour is that you're stoked to try all this stuff and then when it's really good, you know, your body's happy and then your mind becomes happy and it just leads to a better performance. You're like, "Oh man, I just had this great meal and I had this killer beer," and you're all excited about it and then you go play and you're in a good frame of mind. So, you know, you apply yourself in a different way I think. I went through phases. First, it was all about eating the craziest thing I could find and then you know then it was like trying to find the craziest beers. Then it was drinking the sickest roasted coffee and I'm totally nuts about chocolate and always looking for crazy chocolate. But over the last couple years, it's been vegan and vegetarian cuisine because it's come so far. It doesn't really matter even if you're a vegetarian or not, it's just good food. I actually opened a food truck with my girlfriend. An all vegan food truck. Are you vegan or is it just something you're interested in at the moment? I'm not vegan. I just love the food. My girlfriend's vegan. I don't eat as much meat as I used to. I'm just doing my own thing. I'm helping in my own way, you know? For sure. The best thing about playing music is you're exposed to all these things that you'd, you know, never come across normally and so much information and inspiration. And you can try and apply it. You know, find some killer recipe and try it out at home. I'm glad you brought it back to music because I see a similarity. You're talking about going through these kind of phases of trying the most extreme coffee that you can find or the best chocolate. I feel like that's what you do musically too. You bounce around from all these different projects. On one side there’s Discordance Axis where it's the fastest, craziest grind that you can get into. Then you're also working on doing Burnt By The Sun which was alternating between super fast and the slower, heavier shit. Now with River Black it's all about that midtempo crunch. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's like going to the buffet all the time. Where do you think you like picked that up, as like a person? I was raised in a meat and potatoes household you know, in the suburbs. My mom would make the same 5 meals and rotate it every week or every other week. When I met Joey Capizzi and Xavier and Eddie Ortiz, these New York guys, that was my first exposure to vegetarian and veganism back in the day. I found out about like Indian Cuisine, Thai food, you know, Korean food, all this stuff I really didn't know about. Of course, I knew what Italian and Chinese were because they were super popular, you know? I was exposed all this ethnic stuff I didn't know existed. I just started trying stuff. That was the gateway. Those guys gave me the gateway to try all that stuff. Then just from traveling so much, just picked up so much stuff from around the world. Why not try it? Musically, was it kind of the same thing? Did you grow up in a particularly musical household or was it the same kind of like meat and potatoes thing for music too? Same thing. My uncle was a drummer though. He gave me drumsticks when I was a kid. He's a great blues drummer. He's got the meanest shuffle in the game. But, you know, same thing with those Staten Island guys I just mentioned about the cuisine. Those guys taught me how to play really heavy. They played really heavy music and I was just all about being fast and precise. I learned the heavy dynamic with those guys. You pick things up from, you know, people along the way and just start applying them in other places. Was there ever a particular band that you feel was a turning point in terms of becoming the drummer that you are today? Human Remains, for sure. Steve and I had a really good relationship. It's Human Remains, and Discordance Axis, and then Burnt by the Sun. Those were like the building blocks for everything. They made me think outside the box, you know? All those bands were unorthodox, did their own thing, people didn't understand it. I know that sounds lame but it forced me to be more creative and try new things. So right off the bat, I was totally just getting pushed, you know, to work differently. I think that was a huge advantage. I would say just from an outsider's perspective, it seems like Brain Tentacles is the thing that's like really pushing you in a similar way now because it's allowing you to apply all those different like skills that you've learned. Everything's there, it's a blank canvas with Brain Tentacles. So there's a shitload of colors I can put on it, you know what I mean?...
River Black have two upcoming shows, including an opening slot at Saint Vitus with Tombs. River Black -- 2017 Tour Dates SEP 15 @ Kung Fu Necktie, Philadelphia, PA w/ Artificial Brain, The Longest War SEP 16 @ Saint Vitus, Brooklyn, NY w/ Tombs Slow Death, Longest WarSatyricon’s Constant Motion
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When a shark stops moving, it dies. I suppose many know that fact, be it from the neurotic narration in Woody Allen's Annie Hall or flipping to a random page in a trivia book, but most do not consider the futility of the shark. Lacking a swim bladder, the shark cannot fully sleep for fear of death. The apex predator is flawed, but it compensates with constant motion. It is hard to be a shark. Always swimming, always consuming, and it can never fully stop. There is no rest for this machine. Satyricon is a shark. They have been in constant motion from the beginning and have yet to stop. From their dual debut albums in 1994 to their constantly evolving musical approach, the duo of Sigurd "Satyr" Wongraven and Kjetil-Vidar "Frost" Haraldstad have defined their lengthy career with wild motions and stylistic backflips. Could Rebel Extravaganza have been made by the same band who created The Shadowthrone? Certainly so, and there has never been a sign of stopping. Not even a brain tumor could slow this creature of the deep, opting for perseverance over sinking. Satyricon's most ambitious album, Deep calleth upon Deep, is slated for a September 22nd release on Napalm Records. Frost discussed creativity, constant movement, and, of course, this new album's controversial album art with us, which you can read below....
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Deep calleth upon Deep can immediately be recognized as a definite departure from, or at least an extreme amending to, the more rhythmic, rock-oriented direction in which Satyricon has moved across your last few albums. What led to such a wildly different approach? Satyricon is an organism in constant motion. At this point it felt right to make a diverse, creative, open and deeply spiritual album. The quintessence of Satyricon is anyway of a spiritual nature, and not a formula or set musical expression. Diversity and creativity certainly dominate the album, and, though I'm sure people will concentrate on Satyr's songwriting creativity, there is a greater expansion on what people would consider to be the "typical Frost approach" to the drumming. You tap into a deeper vein of rhythmic intrigue and a type of progressive "groove" which people would consider atypical for Satyricon. How did moving outside of your perceived comfort zone feel, and how did it help shape the album as a whole? The material itself demanded a progressive and bold approach. I tried to connect fully and deeply with it and move with the flow of energy in the songs. Satyr also guided me as to what kind of rhythmic solutions he wanted his compositions to have. The whole album project was a huge learning process for me. Sometimes very rewarding, sometimes really challenging and sometimes terribly frustrating. The album no doubt benefited from all the hardship, though. Conventional solutions simply wouldn't have cut it. Your previous, eponymous album experimented with a clean-voiced ballad ("Phoenix", sung by Sivert Høyem), but Deep calleth upon Deep eschews that song-type entirely. Was that ballad a one-off experiment, or is it something which will resurface on a future album? I do not in any way consider "Phoenix" to be a ballad. Rather do I find it to be classical Norwegian black metal with unconventional vocals. The song is brilliant in my opinion – but as you may have figured out we don’t enjoy repeating ourselves, so if we were to do a clean-voice song again it would be something quite different from Phoenix....
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There is a definite textural element to the new album, with brass, synthesizers, and operatic voice used as tools of expanse and intrigue. What inspired the more consistent utilization of larger textures? We felt that the songs had space for various textures and that the album as a whole could potentially benefit greatly from it, and I certainly believe that the different textural elements have added depth to the songs. Sometimes enhancing the ambience, sometimes raising the excitement, sometimes emphasizing core melodies or elements. But never dominating the songs. A good band playing good songs – that’s what the album is about more than anything else. Satyricon has historically been a two-piece band, at least as a creative and recorded entity. How has that dynamic changed over the last almost-thirty years? In that sense, if no other, we have found a formula that works for this band – Satyr functioning as the creative leader of the band and I working to rhythmically support his ideas and compositions. Over the years, Satyr’s composing skills have developed, deepened and matured, while I have tried to enhance my intuitive understanding of the compositions and worked to adapt accordingly. Our musical communication has also improved considerably. This has resulted in a constant evolution that still takes place, and – hopefully – a band that keeps getting better and better. Though, as you've said, Satyricon follows its set formula, Deep calleth upon Deep still carries a remarkably different sort of atmosphere that fans who have become "used to" the more rocking, structured Satyricon sound might not expect, compared to more weathered fans who will be able to catch various references from across your discography. How do you feel, or hope, the album will be received? I imagine that people will perceive of the album as soulful, atmospheric, inspired - they will understand that it is the real deal. I hope it move the listeners on a deep level and that they feel it’s nerve. The Edvard Munch piece, what press releases are calling an "obscure [pencil] drawing from 1898", used in the cover happened to draw a lot of attention upon the album's initial announcement. While a stirring piece of art in and of itself, much like Ved Buens Ende's Those Who Caress The Pale demo, such a minimal cover was unexpected. What drew you to this piece? How does it fit in conjunction with Deep calleth upon Deep? Satyr was lucky to get access to a wide range of Munch works, many of which being relatively unknown to the public. As Satyr stumbled across this one drawing – “The Kiss of Death” – he immediately and instinctively connected with it, realising this had to be the cover for Deep calleth upon Deep. A superb and striking visual reflection of the expression and dynamics of the album. How do you feel about and approach the band now as opposed to 1994, when your first two albums were released? Is there a sense of familiarity and similarity, or do you think, even though the band revolves around the two of you, it has become something different? As we have been in constant musical motion since the beginning, we have necessarily come a very long way over the years that have passed. Which is definitely a good thing. We have always been in touch with our roots and fundamental spirit, though. Even when you hear Deep calleth upon Deep, which sounds like nothing else we’ve done, there is still no doubt about it being Satyricon. To me, that tells about a band that is guided by it’s own spirit and ideas rather than external influences and forces. Where do you think this maturation of style from both Satyr and you will lead to? Will there be a furthering in this more intricate sound, or, as you've said before, will Satyricon avoid repetition and try something new? Satyricon will continue to move along into new territories for as long as we exist. That is our call and our nature. Exactly where that might lead to not even we ourselves now -- but it will for sure be somewhere exciting....
Live Report: Psycho Las Vegas Day 3
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Sunday started much like the previous two days. I needed the same movements and gestures to prepare me for one last onslaught of noises, both musical and otherwise. I was confronted with both relief of having made it this far and sadness that it would soon be over. I would never have come to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino unless it was for something of this magnitude, so it would make complete sense for me to be pretty well burnt out on my temporary home. But it was quite the contrary. I had found my own reason to be in Las Vegas -- my own way to have an expensive, borderline self destructive vacation even without booze. To be honest, I was in a decent amount of pain and discomfort from the sheer amount of walking, running, and standing over the previous two days. My realization, though, helped me to wear the pain as a badge of honor instead of a burden. This spurred me on for the rest of the day… and what a day it was....
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The first offering of the day started at noon with Windhand at The Joint. The simple, yet massive riffs alongside Dorthia Cottrell’s haunting and soulful singing was like a large train leaving the station -- steady and determined -- but still slow and accessible for the those who wanted to take the ride. Looking around at the crowd, I could plainly see the toll that had been taken from the past two days. But it began to melt away as Windhand’s set moved on, acting as a bloody mary of doom curing their headbangovers. Seeing and hearing Zeal and Ardor for the first time was quite an experience. Two things stuck out: black metal-inspired tremolo-picked guitar and extremely soulful blues-based singing. Well-executed and dismal riffs danced around powerful melodies inspired by spiritualistic hymns and chain-gang chants, cutting right into your core. For a project started on an online comment thread, Zeal and Ardor’s small spark of inspiration ignited into an amazingly well-written collection of music. It is a clear testimony to Manuel’s creativity that he basically created a modern metal version of Robert Johnson....
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I have never had the chance to see Abbath or Immortal, so I was well happy to stay put after Zeal and Ardor. Being one of Black Metal’s most recognizable figures, Abbath continues to retain a fervent following after leaving Immortal in 2015. The setlist consisted of several originals with blocks of Immortal covers, as well as a cover of “Warriors” by I. In between songs, Abbath would bless us with his best Elvis impersonation or several lines from Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” (with a hauntingly accurate Lemmy impression). He was clearly smitten by the Las Vegas atmosphere. On multiple occasions, Abbath would hoist up a banana brought on stage -- as if to raise a glass to the festival and those in attendance -- before plunging back into another frigid song....
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Corrosion Of Conformity were running through their last line-checks as I entered The Joint. Mike Dean started priming the sludge pump with the ominous opening bass line to “Bottom Feeder,” soon being joined by Reed Mullen on drums, and eventually getting the signal from Pepper Keenan to sink into the main riff of the song. This led to a slick transition into “Paranoid Opioid” with a considerable uptick in tempo and energy. The rest of the set was heavily laced with tracks from Deliverance, a fitting and well-received choice considering this was the lineup responsible for that record. This set served as a reminder of what Corrosion of Conformity have done in terms of inspiration and influence to a good number of the bands on the bill....
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It was now time for the Pool Stage to open itself up to one more night of poolside punishment, starting with Manilla Road. The setlist was a full run-through of the album Crystal Logic (1983) which has been heralded ever since. Those unfamiliar with the band had some interesting reactions: from laughter and surprise to downright confusion. Manilla Road has a more traditional heavy metal sound that apparently seemed cheesy to some, while others reveled in this aspect. I enjoyed the energy and technicality as a welcome contrast to an overwhelming amount of slow-moving music during the festival. The band played the material with a great amount of finesse and authority, and lead guitarist/vocalist Mark “The Shark” Shelton can still shred with the best of them....
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Having cleansed my palate with Manilla Road I was ready for something thick and heavy again. Year of the Cobra took over Vinyl. Even though the two-piece does not completely fill their area on stage, they definitely filled the room with people and sound. The music they create is maneuverable and lively, while still being able to bare the classification of doom metal. The symbiotic relationship that has been created is one of the tighter doom rhythm sections in modern times and was well favored by the audience. Johanes Barrysmith is unrelenting behind the drumkit, making up for any open space you would want to fill with guitars or other sounds and has a great musicality with his powerful playing that supports Amy Tung Barrysmith’s articulate yet fuzzed-out riffs. This is a relatively new musical endeavor, so their advancement thus far speaks to their determination and interest from fans....
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By the time I had made it to The Joint, the curtains were still closed and preparations were still underway for the heavily anticipated Swans set. When the curtains finally opened to reveal a semi-circle of amps and instruments tightly packed next each other, the members of the band were just moving to take their positions. Front-and-center position was Michael Gira, analyzing lighting and placement of the other members. An imposing single-note swell filled the room and continued to sustain as the band settled in and started to add to the sound. Gira acted as the conductor, moving back and forth, keeping eye contact and gesturing communication with those on stage with him. We were then graced with nearly two hours of a living and breathing performance unlike anything else. The pictures can never do it justice. With events of this magnitude, there can be times when you wish you were already at the finish line due to fatigue or sensory overload, but once you realize it’s done, you never wanted it to actually be over. I wanted to make sure I got everything I could out of this last performance, and thankfully Mastodon are one of my personal favorites and have been for well over a decade. Mastodon started their set off with “Sultan’s Curse,” the opening track of their new album, Emperor Of Sand. A good portion of the crowd was already familiar with the song and responded with a decent amount of movement. The setlist was put together with the aim of interspersing the new material in and around older favorites. Seeing and hearing the fresh material live brought new appreciation to the songs I expected to be less enthusiastic about. With the tunings and techniques Mastodon uses, it can be hard to showcase the heaviness or technicality of their songs on record. To truly give the songs a chance, you must experience them live. They of course played many of their older, more progressive and aggressive tracks throughout the 20-song setlist, making sure to show that they can still pull off some of the more difficult and impressive arrangements. Basically, Brent Hinds stole the show that night. Hinds has always done well to make sure he can fit a guitar solo into as many songs as possible. Every time one of those solos came up, he would crack a smile and put everything he had into it....
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With the lights now up, I let the remainder of adrenaline run its course and watched the remnants of the crowd scour the ground for anything of value. We had made it to the end. In my three days here, I did not witness a single fight or altercation, no one got kicked out for bullshit reasons by security, and every single band I was lucky enough to see played with well above 100% effort. The spirit and vibe of this monster event has taken on its own life and is nurturing its own culture and reputation. Even though some of the branding and imagery is a bit over the top, and the “Fear and Loathing” vibe is too much gravy, it is all a part of something that heavy music fans have been hoping for. This is definitely a new high-water mark for the progression and acceptance of what we hold dear as heavy metal fans. Here’s to next year’s lineup.--Alyssa Herrman & Guy Nelson
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Dead Hour Noise
Featuring members of Croatone and pulling their own young fanbase, Dead Hour Noise played misanthropic hardcore to a small but energetic audience. They sounded like a shoe in for Throatruiner records provided their amps were bigger. I enjoyed myself. That said, the whole snotty hardcore frontman bit was passé when I was a teenager. There’s no reason to keep it up in 2016.
In Twilight’s Embrace Get Technical with “The Great Leveller”
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As much as black metal involves, invokes, and invigorates atmosphere, it also showcases speed and aggression. Often we get lost in the aura of an album, losing sight of the raw, mechanical details which help generate it. Especially hard-hitting, ripping albums are gifts from bands who explore black metal's technical components more closely than others. There are dangers present, though: forgetting the importance of melody, relegating atmosphere to after-effect, or becoming obsessed with instrumentation and outright skill. There's a balance to be struck when writing clear-cut, no-nonsense technical black metal. Poland-based In Twilight’s Embrace have found this balance on their fourth full-length Vanitas, scheduled for release on September 22nd. With noodling guitars, spasmodic drumming, punchy bass, and spacey vocals, Vanitas feels like it should be a mishmash of ideas, loose and chaotic. Instead the band tightly wraps each moment -- transitions are distinct, production is clear, and guitars are tactically honed -- rendering songs easily followable and even more rockable. For them, atmosphere evolves naturally, meaning it doesn’t feel penciled in. Check out an exclusive stream of the album's culminatory track "The Great Leveller" below. Subtle but sudden chord changes pepper the verses on "The Great Leveller," but as its first and final moments indicate, In Twilight's Embrace does not shy away from straightforward (and textured) walls of blast beats. Constantly shifting from segment to segment, the track feels more expansive than its six-minute runtime would typically allow. It carries the same dark and angry energy throughout (which Vanitas' other tracks helped establish up to this final point) -- tying both ends together. Certainly, the build-up before an almighty climax helps demonstrate that In Twilight's Embrace have not forgotten the importance of atmosphere, especially amid the fastidious detail they’ve worked into the music.Vanitas, to its benefit, isn’t always an eyes-closed, headphone listen -- there’s a lot of invigorating power to be extracted from this album via sheer volume pumped through large space. Luckily, they’ve taken clarity into consideration, as each track has a bell-like ring when it comes to nuance -- but, occasionally, the downs break and In Twilight’s Embrace pours out abstractly (and delightfully) powerful walls of sound....
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A statement from the band:There is a thread which links this one with the first single, “The Hell of Mediocrity.” Although the title phrase is often used to portray death itself, it also reflects the sheep mentality versus free spirit, mass versus individual and, finally, the idolisation of the lowest common denominator as opposed to independent thought and action. From the very beginning, until the very end, this bitter undercurrent is present in every single line and note on Vanitas.
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Follow In Twilight's Embrace on Facebook here and Bandcamp here. Preorder Vanitas here....
Not (Really) Deathcore: Rings of Saturn’s “Ultu Ulla”
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We're writing about Ultu Ulla more than a month after its release for a three reasons: life’s incessant hecticness, the blinding shitstorm of Rings of Saturn-related press, and the time it takes to fully absorb this exceedingly frustrating album. What follows is a take on deathcore through an Ultu Ulla lens, mostly because the album says more than it actually contains. That's not to say that Ultu Ulla is vapid or vacuumed (more on that later), but that Rings of Saturn had actually been granted a real/rare opportunity to reshape the subgenre altogether. Credit where credit is due: they took a valiant stab at a giant and wicked beast. Bottom line: Ultu Ulla is okay, but deathcore is special because you can appeal to the subgenre's connoisseurs by just being better than Suicide Silence or Emmure. This is a function, aesthetically, of deathcore's inherent single-mindedness: slam, slam, slam, slam, slam. Innovating deathcore without abandoning its foundations requires centering the slam artistically, bolstering it with the surrounding music. Bands who aim to do more than just slam typically draw their influences from technical death metal. This makes sense, given the obvious crossovers, and Rings of Saturn throughout their discography have been this far at least....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmu3zjmkJZ0...
Ultu Ulla is fast, it's furious; it has innumerable breakdowns, it has bonkers sweep picking, i.e. it checks off all the boxes across its ten manic tracks. It’s good enough, then, for deathcore fans who really want a freshly complex type of deathcore that nobody is writing, but can settle for slammy tech-death. They’re used to it, anyway: plenty of tech-death bands already dabble with deathcore-esque slams, like Shadows of Intent, without copping the subgenre. The talent gap and desperate ears exist on deathcore's end: the slam must always be worshipped above all else. Deathcore does have somewhere definitive to go, and a cut-and-paste job from another subgenre isn't going to cut it. Bottom bottom line: Ultu Ulla is an okay deathcore album because it's a pretty great tech-death album. Simply tracing over tech-death tropes instead of creatively reimagining them can only take you so far, however. Aside from all the box-checking, the album sees the transformation of the slam into tech-death componentry: removing it as subject, replacing it as object. This is fine, in context, but keep in mind that all prior Rings of Saturn records have had this at their heart: how to make slams (and breakdowns, for that matter) as interestingly ridiculous and ridiculously interesting as possible. The same doesn't go for Ultu Ulla. The breakdowns are faster than they are heavy, they come expectedly instead of unexpectedly, and melodic considerations now outweigh displays of blatant, raw aggression. Rings of Saturn have pulled closer to the likes of Inanimate Existence and Archspire (both of which are solid tech-death bands). It’s okay, really. Some people get their kicks reading dense instruction manuals, or assembling incredibly minute replicas of ancient buildings in pickle jars with tweezers. Fastidiousness suits them; perhaps they work in business, like accounting. Ultu Ulla is the perfectly-formatted spreadsheet: musical information organized perfectly, as if a machine (or human corporate slave) had prepared it. But there's nothing absurd about it, i.e. nobody has inserted "penis" somewhere in small font. The album has a bewildering architectural beauty to it for sure, but also an unnerving coldness, as if smiling and fun were alien concepts. Basically, Rings of Saturn got serious....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQYWC9ezebw...
This process started, to some extent, on Lugal Ki En (it even has a Rusty Cooley solo), but there artificiality was leveraged for aesthetic impact instead of being the sterile byproduct of intense complexity as with Ultu Ulla. The whole “morally indifferent super-powerful killer outer space beings” shtick really came through for Rings of Saturn on their last album. Lugal Ki En balanced its sterility with all the bonkers, brand-name Rings of Saturn spasmodic energy that they've since corked. (Just compare the Ultu Ulla-era music video at the beginning of this article with the Lugal Ki En-era one above this paragraph). Rings of Saturn indeed took flak in the past for their ironic/idiotic (read: smug) attitude -- but we can't assume they gave a shit; this shift in intensity on Ultu Ulla was intentionally artistic (a clear attempt), not reactionary. They never wavered in the face of negative press, and it’d be a stretch to assume that they’ve ever half-assed anything. Rings of Saturn truly sought real deathcore in tech-death, but found nothing; in an experiment, a negative result is still a result. It's just a shame they didn't approach or design it differently, i.e. carried on with the outlandishness and unkempt fury of Lugal Ki En. A damn shame, actually, because truly excellent deathcore exists out there but gets no recognition. One shining example is Echoes of Misanthropy (who are recording a new album now) and their Shades of Ugliness EP (check it out below this paragraph). It's 12 minutes of textbook how-to on making slamming interesting without relying so heavily on tech-death material. They certainly know how to noodle and shred, but in doing so never lose target of the end deathcore goal: to slam so goddamn heavy that the universe breaks. Indeed, the EP’s tracks are resolutely deathcore songs, albeit heavily decorated; the point is that they’re not tech-death songs which happen to have deathcore slams. As far as Rings of Saturn goes, Lugal Ki En has more in tune with Echoes of Misanthropy than Ultu Ulla does, and that says something about how the band has changed (or evolved, depending on your point of view)....
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Different strokes, for sure, but there are two camps of deathcore revolutionaries here. One says “fuck deathcore” because it’s inherently vapid, all scene and no content, and basically uninteresting -- so they turn to tech-death for hope (e.g. Job for a Cowboy on Genesis). The other camp recognizes the heap of deathcore garbage, hates it, but loves the genre for its honest potential -- so they seek purity and innovation within deathcore itself, limiting outside influence as much as possible. The point is that Rings of Saturn seem to have changed sides with Ultu Ulla, for better or for worse. While not exactly the bullet in deathcore’s back, it won’t be inspiring deathcore innovators from within. It looks like deathcore shall be shaped from without. There are bands like NovaThrone, who in 2015 released Revenants as a symphonic, atmospheric take on actual deathcore. Tracks like the penultimate ”Hollow Sea” flirt with progressive and tech-death influences, but the structure is always this: build up to a grand slam, hit the heaviest climax, and include bass-drops for extra effect. NovaThrone do get arguably close to ripping off Rings of Saturn (pre-Lugal Ki En, anyway), but think of it like this: a son can emulate his father. This is to say that without (early) Rings of Saturn, we wouldn’t have bands like NovaThrone, or even Echoes of Misanthropy. Undoubtedly, each Rings of Saturn album -- up to Ultu Ulla, that is -- has been essential deathcore listening. Ultu Ulla is an important album for sure, and from a narrow perspective a worthy one, but it doesn’t bring any of its found sustenance back to “deathcore home.” Embryonic Anomaly (2010), Dingir (2013), and Lugal Ki En (2014) all delivered stylishly hyperbolic deathcore that few others were able to nail down at the time. These no-shits-given albums made Rings of Saturn mega popular, especially Lugal Ki En. While there’s no necessary connection between fame and the departure from one’s artistic foundations, it does happen. What that means for the subgenre when one of its defining bands evolves significantly is yet to be known. Whether “deathcore home” and the traditions which live there wither and die may not actually matter anymore; things change, and people deal. But if it actually does matter, someone else might have to save it. Who, though?...
Ultu Ulla was released on July 28th on Nuclear Blast. Stream the album via Spotify below....
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Steely Dad
This is how my favorite fests ended, not with an amplified bang, but with a bunch of musicians playing acoustic hair metal covers. Whatever. At two in the morning teetering between intoxication and hangover, a crooning rendition of “One in a Million” by Guns N’ Roses did sort of hit the spot. This set felt like a family gathering, a big in joke shared by people who bought deeply into the Ogrefest experience.
Dyscarnate Channel Strength with “Traitors in the Palace”
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Death metal can be more balladic. More triumphant and dramatic. Bigger, in a way, to the point where sheer size is more frightening than danger itself. We’re stuck with the small picture, bogged down with complex riffage, intricate song constructions, and recycled production tropes. What about the oomph? This micro-path leads us to analyze and decode pesky details to discern how anything actually sounds any different. This is fine, and doesn't necessarily ruin musical appreciation -- it's our way of understanding music, it's how our minds work. But nobody asked the question: does any of that even matter? Maybe, but if it doesn't, UK-based death metallers Dyscarnate have come to say one thing: just shut the fuck up and bang your head. To wit, their third full-length With All Their Might releases on September 15th. Check out an exclusive lyric video premiere of the album's fourth track "Traitors in the Palace" below. Structure: "Traitors in the Palace" smoothly transitions from its thundering, brooding introduction into a climactic thrash-core riff festival. Mood: Sullen, indignant, desperate... but rightfully pissed off about it all. Production: crystal, modern, some bass boost where needed, for effect, but not overdone. "Weaker begets weak begets strong begets stronger / All born equal shall remain as such no longer." This is all about power, absolute might; Dyscarnate delivers raw force through groove, carried on gigantic, down-tuned riffs and bombastic drumming. But there's patience and precision to it all. The remainder of With All Their Might features intricate constructions of head-bang-mandatory riff after riff -- indeed, this album is guitar-driven. Though that's not to outshadow the well-ranged and layered vocal performance (with a special metalcore touch), nor the on-point and tight bass, all of which serve to amplify swing and groove. This album is about movement: fist-thrusting, foot-stomping, and moshing. Think of it as a celebration of heaviness, an homage to that which causes you to physically react to live sound; specifically, death metal....
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Follow Dyscarnate on Facebook here. Pre-order With All Their Might here....
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