Tribulation Live at Allston, MA’s Great Scott
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2015 was a breakthrough year for Sweden’s Tribulation. The band’s third full-length, The Children of the Night, was their most visible and widely acclaimed yet, and also their most confident sonic achievement. Its nuanced, gothic heavy metal sound wore a range of influences without sounding tied too directly to any of them, and both critics and audiences responded enthusiastically. Moreover, the quartet spent plenty of time on the road with high-profile tourmates of various inclinations from Cannibal Corpse and Behemoth to Deafheaven, impressing a diverse range of crowds with deftly executed opening sets. The buzz has only continued to grow more deafening, and at last Tribulation have a chance to justify it as headliners with their fall 2016 North American tour.
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Boston’s September 7 date found both the stage and the floor packed for a show that seemed to exceed the scope of its humble bar setting. Philadelphia’s Horrendous opened the night with a satisfying blast of vintage-styled death metal. The group, who are also touring an acclaimed 2015 release in Anareta, performed with ferocious drive while still frequently betraying how much fun they were having up there.
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Youth Code, whose blistering electro-industrial rippers also found a home on the road with Baroness earlier this year, followed. The Los Angeles duo don’t jump out as the most conventional choice for metal tours, but their abrasive aesthetic actually translates brilliantly in that context. Vocalist Sara Taylor restlessly stalks every free inch of space barking apocalyptic lyrics while Ryan George works a table of gear into an earth-scorching frenzy. The results are arresting, even if they’re not what you came to see (although, as with the Baroness show, Youth Code clearly did pull in a few diehard audience members of their own).
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Following a slight delay and an agreeably shuffled thrash playlist over the PA, Tribulation emerged in trademark makeup and stormed into Children of the Night opener “Strange Gateways Beckon.” Their staging was dramatic, with ultraviolet lights illuminating guitarists Adam Zaars and Jonathan Hultén as they stared down the audience and prowled the stage with an eerie sort of grace. Bassist and vocalist Johannes Andersson handled the formal interactions, expressing his excitement to finally deliver a full-length set in Boston (where by my count Tribulation have played as openers at least three times in the past two years).
The expanded timeslot gave the band an opportunity to deliver a more well-rounded overview of their strengths. A solid half of Children of the Night sounded polished and powerful, and some of the lengthier selections from 2013’s The Formulas of Death highlighted the group’s most adventurous genre-blending. Lest anyone forget their death metal roots, they ripped through a brutalizing take on “Seduced by the Smell of Rotting Fish” from their 2009 debut The Horror for good measure.
With a well-paced hour-plus set, Tribulation confidently made the leap to headliner status. Formulas and Children have the slightest tendency to meander, but the band’s live show is all kinetic energy that brings out the best in the material. They have the style, the songs and the presentation to make it much bigger than Great Scott; Don’t be surprised to see them do so in the next few years.
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Horrendous
Horrendous at Great Scott
Horrendous at Great Scott
Horrendous at Great Scott
Horrendous at Great Scott
Horrendous at Great Scott
Horrendous at Great Scott
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Youth Code
The Colors of Baroness: John Baizley and Sebastian Thomson Talk “Gold & Grey”
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The latest Baroness album Gold & Grey comes out this week and is already streaming online. Back when we spoke with vocalist/guitarist John Baizley and drummer Sebastian Thomson, the band was in a kind of semi-stasis: the album was finished, but final touches were being completed (Baizley, who has always had a hand in nearly all of the band’s artwork, had just finished the cassette layout the previous evening). They had a North American tour with Deafheaven and Zeal & Ardor in tow culminating with headlining Decibel Metal & Beer Fest, but could only tease the forthcoming album, playing the two pre-release singles “Borderlines” and “Seasons.” It’s sobering to realize that Baroness, who emerged from Georgia on independent labels such as Hyperrealist, have the same management team behind them that guides the careers of Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Metallica. The band skipped away from Relapse Records to release 2015’s Purple on their own Abraxan Hymns label, and the Gold & Grey has the expectations of taking the band to “the next level,” as those in the biz are wont to say. The band, rounded out by bassist Nick Jost and brand-new guitarist Gina Gleason, definitely lived up to their end of the bargain. The record straddles both what we have become accustomed from Baroness -- Baizley’s sturdy baritone is as ubiquitous as his artwork on dozens of album covers and gig posters -- but also offers unexpected twists. The progressive nature of the group seems at first glance to be muted, but the band insists it’s just far subtler this time out, something that checks out with repeated listens. In the back of the band’s cluttered tour bus just outside of Washington D.C., Baizley and Thomson chowed down on carry-out sushi and discussed how Gold & Grey was both the easiest and also the toughest record they ever made....
https://youtu.be/k3n8RBaUMpc...
There was a quote that I found online from John that said on the last record, "Sebastian and Nick have been in the band long enough that they understand what we do." Now you’re gearing up toward Gold & Grey coming out and you had Gina come in as someone who did not have the benefit of being around for very long. How did that all mesh to create the new record? Baizley: I actually think there was a pretty critical moment when we were writing Purple. I think I had one idea in mind with what we were doing and [Thomson] and Pete and Nick had a very different thing in mind! The way I was going about the record wasn't… I didn't really have as much of an articulated direction. I'm pretty sure it was you [motions to Thomson] who kind of laid out, for the first time in my life, what the band was in a pretty brief couple of sentences. It all made perfect sense to me. At that point I was like, "Okay, you definitely understand what's going on better than I do." To me that really helped get everybody really linear in terms of how we were going to do Purple. So I think with this record that Nick and Thomson and all had a pretty clear idea in mind that we didn't want to do… Thomson: Purple number two. Baizley: Yeah. That's always really been the cornerstone of each record; it just has to be a big move away from the former record. Not necessarily all the former records, but whatever each successive record has been. I don't know what Gina expected, but I think the lack of her experience recording and writing with us and between Nick and Thomson, the idea that we had, and being a little bit more open-ended and a little bit more expressive or broad and diverse in how we were writing ended up becoming this very interesting thing that I don't think any one of us really understood at any point during the process. It was kind of awesome. Thomson: I think she was more surprised. Obviously she was the new member, but I've had this experience in other bands too. There's like a sort of automatic reactionary thing in a band, I mean it as a positive thing. “This last album was great, let's do something different.” It's an automatic reaction. Because Gina wasn't there... Nick, John, and I all knew that this was going to be reactionary toward Purple without really even saying it. We just expected it. But Gina was like, "Oh hey guys, we're making an album now." And I don't think she realized how different it was going to be from Purple. We all kind of expected it. Was there any kind of an epiphany where she kind of caught on? Baizley: I'm not sure that anybody was ever left in the dust more than anybody else. I think one the fondest memories I have of the past couple years is just how on the edge of doing something new it always felt like we were. I don't know how everybody else filters that feeling, but I know that at certain points we'd be listening to playback as we were recording or we'd be writing something, and just sort of like the four of us kind of had to throw our hands up and laugh. Thomson: In a weird way… Baizley: ...Because we don't know what it is! Thomson: And I'm not saying that to be like, "Oh we're the most unique band ever," but honestly I do think some other very awesome great bands are like, "We are going to combine Deep Purple with Acid House," whatever, as an example, right? And that's cool. There's nothing wrong with that. “We're going to combine Black Sabbath with John Lennon” [he says, pointing at my Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats shirt]. Awesome! I'm way down with both of those artists and that combination! That's an awesome band! But this time we're kind of like, "this is happening." Not that we're clueless, but we just let it. We didn't have an agenda. Baizley: We let it roll and we let a lot of improvised moments become scripted. We improvised a lot. Thomson: There was one or two straight up things that just didn't get edited that are just on the album. Such as? Baizley: The last track on the record [“Pale Sun”] was just a jam. It was based on really just one bar grooves and base lines. I think it stands to reason that I've probably come up with some routines or habits that are somewhat idiosyncratic, but not entirely. The thing that was really interesting to me though, was that we had so many ideas. We wanted to cover so much ground and we didn't spend a whole lot of time arguing over what details would have traditionally been sticking points, or at least 45 minute discussions. I found that in the spirit of some of the more free ideas on the record, I found we really didn't argue. Thomson: We debated a hell of a lot but it wasn't arguing. It was all… Baizley: It was never like, this is a good idea or this is a bad idea. It was: [here are] two or three ideas we have, we need to choose one of them. It was never as antagonistic as it has been traditionally, where you're speaking about one idea and whether or not that one idea is going to be the valuable one to record or to write. We would have these looser, more open-ended ideas and we just had to choose between multiple good ideas as opposed to trying to identify what is bad. Thomson: It was also like what you said before, it was less antagonistic because it's not like everybody had a specific goal. Like, “this is going to be the Rush number of this album,” or whatever. You know? That didn't happen. So nobody was defending their one specific particular vision for one track or whatever. So nobody had a baby. Thomson: Nobody had a baby. It was all our little weird babies. Baizley: There was a vocal baby. That ended up taking a while because in many cases, we had to kind of retrofit the vocals to the music, because we had written so much music. I found that this happens every other record. [With] Purple, the lyrics and vocals were written in tandem with the music. Actually, Yellow & Green was pretty much the same -- we had the songs finished, the demo, chorus and everything. Blue Record was lighting in a bottle. We had to record vocals on Wednesday, we wrote Tuesday night. Wednesday night, we wrote Thursday's vocals. This [Gold & Grey] was like that but on a bigger scale and kind of more intensive. And the music was far more challenging to find songs inside of. That is interesting to hear. There are a few songs in the “Steel That Sleeps the Eye” mode. “I'd Do Anything," in particular, but also “Tourniquet” and “Emmett-Radiating Light” that seem like some of the more intimate lyrics you’ve penned. Baizley: That's why I said the lyrics were kind of the baby on this record. I haven't really figured out a way to explain this yet but typically in Baroness, there's a real push and emphasis on creating these almost vocal-like guitar harmonic moments. I think it's a hallmark of our sound. It's never going away, like the harmonized leads. In the past, I’d write these really slow, languid things that fit over the music and I’ve come to realize that they're pretty much just vocal lines. The pacing, the breath of it is more a vocal thing than an instrumental thing. With this record having sort of realized that, I was more interested in finding actual vocals for those lines and then saving the over-the-top guitar harmonic moments for… not the same point in every single song on the record. That really quickly shifted the focus of the instrumentation to me. And I think in addition to that, very early in the process, Seb and Nick and Gina were talking. Nick felt one thing we could do with Gold & Grey that we hadn't done as much development with on Purple, was to define Sebastian and Nick as a rhythmic duo, rather than try to split the difference between who they are as musicians and the historic sense of Baroness rhythm structure. Thomson: I don't remember actually having… Baizley: You said, "It would be cool if we focused a lot more on hypnotic based stuff." It’s not hypnotic but it is groove. There is a deep groove. Thomson: Nick would probably say the same thing. On Purple I felt a little bit of an obligation to continue some of the language of Baroness, as far as the drums goes. And I still do, to this day. But on this album, I was like, "I'm going to put a little bit of my old original style in here see what happens." And it's on there and it's, I think it's cool. Baizley: I think that the way that Baroness traditional gets there, and we have gone some permutations with all the lineups that we have -- we can talk about that at length -- but it takes quite a bit of touring to figure it out. And then, I think in some cases, it takes recording a record with Baroness to really see how putting your technique into action on an audio recording by this band, the way that we do things, how that pans out. I always felt like each of the four of us can put a significant amount of our own personal character into the songs and the parts that play, without losing the sum that's greater than its parts. I think it’s maybe just more of a reflection of the confidence that we had gained....
https://youtu.be/tQX_oVVORFU...
Speaking of the personal character and grooves, I found that a few songs such as “Front Toward Enemy” and “I’m Already Gone” that have an almost post-punk new-wave rhythm which is a little bit of a departure from what Baroness is known for. Thomson: I agree but ironically, before when Allen [Blickle] was in the band, that was also Allen's thing, He's a heavy drummer who didn't want to do the obvious heavy stuff. He just wanted to add different elements in there. And it's still happening. It’s just different. Baizley: We‘re all tight with Allen still and he and I have even laughed about this a lot, but the thing I always said after Seb joined, we had Allen who just couldn't help but be John Bonham all the time. He’d try to put a little disco or electronic kind of groove flair in there but it would always belie his tendencies to just hit as hard as he could. Then we got Seb, whose background leans that way more so, but on Purple, I think you were just like, "I'm just going to be rock drummer!" Thomson: I was like, "Finally, I'm in a heavy band! Yes!” Baizley: So it's kind of like, we traded one guy who was 90% this, but working at that 10% of this, for a guy who is 10% this, working for the other 90%. Thomson: I think we said before that Allen and I came at a similar thing from opposite ends. It's kind of like convergent evolution how shark and a dolphin have the same shape. Relatedly, I think Nick is all over the place on this record. There are some songs where he really takes the lead in ways that hadn't really happened before. Thomson: I think it's the way you and Dave [Fridmann] mixed was a conscious decision. Baizley: Yeah. I’ve always thought Dave's recordings as being extremely friendly to the bass lines. If Dave hears a hook in the bass, he's going to make sure that that bass hook is the audible hook. And I think that's a very valuable thing. And that's something that clearly I like. I think a band like Baroness where the external tendencies, it's a guitar band with loud vocals. We can still play all that guitar, but if at the mix level, or presentation level, you pull the guitars back and let the drums and bass breathe through that, you're no less a guitar band, it just sounds a little bit more well-rounded to me. But the other thing is Nick is just unreal… Thomson: He's a very talented bass player and it's a shame to not make it louder. Baizley: [On] Yellow & Green, I had to play bass, because our bass player [Summer Welch] quit. The fortunate thing was I wrote all our bass lines up until Purple so the bass had some hooks in it because I was kind of writing bass as a guitar player. When Nick joined the band, I was like, "I'm not telling this dude what to do." I wouldn't even know where to begin! Every variable that changes, especially when you it comes down to the lineup, those variables make a huge impact. The more we highlight that, and go with it, I think the better and the more successful we've been. It's never been a case of, "Well let's play those old songs like we used to play them." I think it's more interesting moving forward for us to say, these forms are good. These structures are good. But there is a little bit of room to play within them and then as we were writing this record, I think we made some conscious efforts to make sure that there would be even further room inside the context of what we're doing to expand it in the future, as we get tired of playing songs the same way. We've been making efforts on this tour -- this is first tour since the record's been done -- to test our mettle when it comes to opening up the technical floodgates of letting ourselves apply new ideas. Maybe we can slow down the song or maybe we can take a section, allow it to breathe a little bit more and not just play the record. I think that shit gets really boring to me. I think it’s especially prevalent in metal, where things tend to be written in a way that doesn't allow much for deviation. And our older records certainly feel a whole lot more locked into specifics, so I think for me, having a history -- I've been in the band since 2002 -- it's been nice. It's been really invigorating and inspiring in recent years and especially with this record to approach music in such a way that we don't need to totally get caught up on specifics. Thinking about generalities, the record seems more direct and less progressive than recent albums you’ve done, even if the first two songs that you released from it don't fit that thesis at all. Thomson: There's definitely more space in some ways. Baizley: I think in the audible sense of the word, we've let the music be a little bit rawer, more raw in some ways. But I can say, two feet on the ground, hand on the book; this is the most difficult record that I've had to play. It's just not difficult in a showy way. Thomson: Yes, it's not shreddy. Baizley: There are extremely convoluted and sophisticated things that we're doing that are completely unnecessary. In the song “Cold Blooded Angels” which starts off really mellow and has that build and then stops. We spend most of the work on that song developing the first half, because it felt like more powerful. To me it felt like it was the more powerful half. It's just like a nice, pocketed groove and core progression. And then Gina and myself and my daughter sing. Then the second half of that song, it is the same chord progression, or a very similar chord progression of the first half. It goes through three different treatments, all of which sound incredibly different. What Gina and I do a lot on this record is where traditionally if I'm playing an open chord, somebody could play a power chord or an octave or something. What we're doing is if I'm playing root note, it's not the base note, it's the higher note. And then I'm playing some harmony off of that root as the note that sounds like it's the root. And then Gina's playing the two notes that I should be playing with those. But she's playing them backwards too. So we're always playing chords but we've always split it up in a way -- it's almost stupid the way we did it. It doesn't really make any sense, other than it sounds a little odder, because we're not playing chords you're familiar with. Thompson: It's like a long journey through inversions. Baizley: Yeah. Everything gets inverted and then on top of that, in every song we've hidden another song. Thomson: Also for example in “Tourniquet,” which has a pretty head-bobbing, half-time groove, the kick happens every fifth sixteenth note. So, the rhythm repeats every five beats. Baizley: But the rest of us are playing it in four. Thomson: And it's totally hidden. It's kind of proggy, and it's hidden. Baizley: There are so many rhythmic tricks and melodic tricks and harmonic tricks. The only thing that didn't get the hyper-chaotic psychotic overload inversion treatment was vocals. It felt like the music had so much of that so now, as a vocalist I'm just going to try to make the song great. I just want to make a better song than I thought I was capable of writing, but over top of such weird, counterintuitive stuff. When you shit it out, you mix it and master it and everything, there's just a little oddness that you'll pick up. And it may even sound like it's raw. But what it is, it's a very weird neighbor to get songs to the right way. Very, very weird....
https://youtu.be/CvuY9GFBH8A...
I get the feeling that another thing that you were cognizant of was the album pacing. You got all of these short interludes, a couple of two minute long instrumental things -- it all allows the whole record to flow together. Baizley: We did it as well as we could with Blue Record. We would reprise songs, we would change the key of songs a little bit and play it backwards and hide it… We had a theme on Blue [Record] that was consistent across it and we had a little bit of theme with Yellow & Green that kind of gets reprised a few times. But this is a system of semi-familiar melodies being played across the course of a 17-track record repeatedly. Almost incessantly, we're repeating melodic devices and harmonic devices. What might be the hook of a vocal in this song might be the bass solo in this song and then might be a backwards piano part in something else. Things happen repetitively a lot. How do you do that when you're coming into it with a completely blank canvas, by your own estimation? That seems like it is exceedingly difficult to throw 52 cards in the air and have them land suited. Thomson: It wasn’t totally blank. Baizley: It wasn't totally blank, but we definitely threw 52 cards in the air. And yet you managed to have the whole record kind of fall in line with a theme. Some people spend years trying to develop a theme for a record before they write any of the music for it. Thomson: We worked really hard the second visit, the second two week visit in the studio, because we only had a couple of riffs, really, and a couple of beats. So that was a lot of work. I don't mean it was a bad experience; it was a great experience. But we would wake up and work and go to sleep for two weeks, just discuss and record. That's how you get to finish an album when you are not entirely sure… Baizley: We would do the over dubs in between set, the proper sessions at my home. We did a lot of vocals there. This was a record that was worked on pretty constantly for quite an extended period of time always with the caution or fear in the back of my mind that, at a certain point, we've overworked it and it'll start losing flavor. So as far as I'm able to, I was just trying to pay attention to that, the idea of overembellishing something to the point where you lost the plot. As soon as I felt like I was on the precipice of that, then it was done. You mentioned that lyrics came after you wrote the music. When does the album cover kick in? Because you of course, doing the album cover art. Baizley: The artwork came around the time the record was wrapping up and being mastered. It took so much emotional energy and creative energy and physical time to create the music, to the level where I was happy with it, that when we had the music, I was like, "Shit, okay.” I was back-burning the lyrics for a while; that was such a task and I just didn't stop until I was really happy with it. Then when I was, now I [have] to do the record cover. Then I [had] to do layout and packaging. The work never stops with me. When Purple came out, there were a lot of people who felt Baroness wasn’t a metal band anymore, even people who still liked the band. Would you say Baroness is still a metal band at this point? Baizley: If I'm being objective and going song by song, album by album and looking at the things that we actually do in the band, I can't say we're not metal, but neither can I say that we're a metal band in the traditional sense of the word. We're all metal fans and we're all punk fans. We came up in punk, hardcore, metal; that's the scene that we came from. We use the elements of that music that we love. We celebrate aspects of metal that are suitable for us that we want to hear. But I would be lying if I said I thought we were ever writing the style of music. I think it's hard, it's as hard for me to say we're a metal band as it is for me to say we're a rock band. But that's just me. I'm supposed to be in a position where I don't want genre tags and then I'll follow that by saying, I should have been careful what I asked for. Because when you’re driving in your own lane, some of the times it's difficult. It can be isolated and lonely. But we identify with those scenes in a broad sense and we feel as at home on stage at Hellfest or Graspop or you name it metal fest, as we do on some of the mainstream or more Indie rock [shows]. It's as fun for us to play in a dingy club to a hundred people as it is to hop on stage to play in front of 2,000 people. We want variety. We seek variety. We seek adventure. We like to cast a wide net. And I think that makes it a little difficult for anybody who's very genre specific to totally identify with us because there are too many curve balls. This is the second album on your own. In theory you worked out the kinks of doing it yourself, you spent the most time in between releases touring and preparing for this. It seems like a pivotal record in terms of the popularity of Baroness. How psyched are you about that happening, and what would it even look like? Baizley: I will say that the business of what I do is important to me because I have people that depend on it. I've got a family. We've got families. We've got a crew. We've got a team and everybody puts their best effort into helping a group of weirdos like us reach an audience. But I've never ever -- I will never write a song or mix an album or make any decisions based on the salability of that record. As you said before, it's about our trajectory as a band with a vision and that doesn't include doing things that specifically meet the end goal of having a larger audience. Not in that way. What we would like [is] more the philosophy is that we're going to give you a 100% of everything that we have, every night of the week, on every record. We're going to keep our arms wide open and anybody that will have us, we're here. We don't want to limit the scope of what we do. Balancing those similar ideas I guess can be tricky. But we are more successful when we are pushing more buttons and reacting a little bit harder to the status quo or what's going on around us, which means we have to make risks. I think this record was almost a return filled with risks that were absolutely, 100% worth taking. I think that we're incredibly hungry now to take this out with a new stable line up and just run ourselves ragged. Let's see what we can do with this. Because I think there's something in there. I think there's material on this record that can really reach across the aisle and I mean both ways. We can reach from the hard rock world back into places where we've been in the past and then from where we've been in past toward the future. I think it's a very exciting record because I don't know what else sounds like it and I'm really proud to say that. I don't think I've been able to say that as firmly about other records. Yellow & Green, a little bit, but I just thought that it was going to piss everybody off. I don't know what this one is going to do. It's kind of mysterious to me. I know that we couldn't ever make it again the same way. And we didn't skimp on anything. We gave everything to this album. Everything we had. A scary amount of everything we had....
Gold & Grey releases Friday via Abraxan Hymns -- pre-orders available here, and you can stream the whole album now via NPR. After some intimate acoustic performances at independent record stores in the American northeast, Baroness will tour South America in June and America in July and August before hitting Europe with Volbeat through the end of November....
Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon; check out Invisible Oranges merchandise on Awesome Distro....
Crushing Denver: Electric Funeral Fest IV is Poised to Pummel This Weekend
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Electric Funeral Fest, Colorado’s premiere gathering for doom, sludge metal, stoner rock, and all things low and slow will see its latest iteration unfold this Friday and Saturday on the streets of Denver’s South Broadway, the geographical center of the city’s thriving metal and punk scenes. Aptly named for that legendary Black Sabbath track from Paranoid, an album that inspired the entire slew of genres represented herein, the event was originally conceived as a cordial neighborhood get-together for the then-burgeoning doom and sludge scenes in Denver and the surrounding area. Though Electric Funeral Fest's lineup remains true to these roots by perennially incorporating dozens of up-and-coming bands from the local scene, its scope has expanded immensely since its inception in 2016, with the fest now functioning as a full-fledged block party with three separate stages and featuring nationally renowned headliners such as Torche, Thou, and Dead Meadow. For more insight into the fest's inner workings and its quick rise to prominence, I spoke with the event’s main organizer Shaun Goodwin, the fearless leader of the relatively compact team behind DUST Presents (and also the guitarist of Denver doom outfit The Munsens). In anticipation of the upcoming weekend’s festivities, we discussed the event’s origins, its rapidly expanding scale, and the atmosphere its inventors intend to create year after year....
Additional details can be found on the event Facebook page. Tickets available via Eventbrite. https://youtu.be/-vsj1Hcy0k4...
Looking back at the origins of Electric Funeral Fest, what were your earliest inspirations for its conception? How did it first come together? I went to school for business, but all I really care about is music and I was trying to figure out a way that I could do something with whatever I had learned. I think it was Cinco de Mayo five years ago -- we had been involved in the Denver music scene for a little while by then -- and we were sitting having margaritas over at Las Margs right around the corner here. We were just chatting, I think it was my brother and I and some other friends, and we were just like, “Let’s do a festival. Let’s see what happens.” So the first year it was just one stage, it was at 3 Kings Tavern. That one went really well, for a first year. We had a lot of our friends’ bands come in to play, we had Sourvein and Radio Moscow; it was a really good time. Then from there we added a second stage the second year, Hi-Dive, which is just a hundred yards away. Then last year we added Mutiny as a third stage, and we’re running with the same format this year. It takes a lot of work, you know, it takes a whole year to curate it. But it’s been a fun process, it had just been an idea to throw a big party, more or less. It went well and it caught on -- there wasn’t a big festival like that yet in Denver, so I think it was a right time, right place kind of things. What’s your vision for what kind of experience you’re ultimately striving to create? Are you aiming to cultivate a more holistic cultural event in addition to the music? I think we have something unique with what we’re doing here. There’s a lot of festivals now, and you really have to have your thing to stick out, or you will get drowned out. What we have going for us is the intimacy of it, and the small/mid-size clubs that we play that are all on the same block of South Broadway. So it’s just as much of a block party as it is an indoor festival; everyone’s walking from venue to venue, passing each other on the street, so I think that’s what we really value and what’s prevented us from taking it to a bigger festival ground where we can sell more tickets. So it’s kind of like a little boutique, intimate festival. Capacity is very small, and we try to keep ticket prices low, which is difficult when you’re trying to bring in bigger acts -- you do need some money to do so. But we found this cool little balance of bringing in big bands and giving new bands a shot at the spotlight, and I think that’s another cool part of it; it’s not all big name acts but everybody’s awesome, so it’s a great chance to discover new bands. It’s also pretty cool watching bands from tours around the fest, it’s amazing to see. So getting back to your original question, that’s our vision: keeping it this intimate Denver block party hosted at all independently owned clubs. And that’s another big thing: there’s no bigger hands involved. We have really close relationships with all the owners and managers, and they love what we’re doing too. That’s what we’re going for. Since Electric Funeral first started, how has its stylistic range expanded and evolved over the years? I try not to limit myself to anything, I tell myself I’ll book anybody that’s good. I think we have expanded that over the years -- the first one was definitely a little more rock and stonery. The next year we had Acid King and Corky Laing, so that was kind of the same route, but I think last year we expanded quite a bit more. I listen to just about everything, and I think it’s also just a good idea to include all types of genres so there’s something for everybody. This year is probably the most diverse lineup. We have bands like Fotocrime all the way over to death metal bands like Thra, so I think we want to continue to expand in that direction and not limit ourselves to anything. I don’t really want to call it a “rock and metal” festival, but it is. We’re open to booking all types of things. Within the booking/organization process, were there any particular highlights? Any interesting stories behind that part of the procedure? Honestly, we just work with different agents and try to brainstorm. We reach out, see if they’re available, see if they’re willing to throw a tour around it. Chrome Waves is touring with Tombs, that’s how we got them on, so that was a really cool opportunity. Torche and Thou are flying in, and Dead Meadow was already passing through town on the same weekend, so we’re like hey, let’s join forces here. It probably wouldn’t be best to split the crowds [laughs]. Were there any big obstacles you faced that impeded you, anything you had to work around? Like I said with our capacity and keeping ticket prices low, there’s only so much we can spend. There’s a million bands you can get and fly in, but we really have to limit ourselves to what we can do. People get offered shows -- bigger bands are getting offered gigs left and right, so they have to choose their summer plans. Oftentimes you have things on the line, it's 99% booked and it falls through, and you were planning on that so you have to fully clean slate. Sometimes it’s like, “What are we gonna do here? We need another headliner.” So those things happen every year, there’s always cancelations for one reason or another. You can’t really blame anybody, you know? I’ve been in that position as a musician where you have to cancel shows for different reasons, cancel tours. So you kind of have to be ready for those things and be on your toes. The first couple fests, those things got to me. It was like “No! We’re a week away, what do you mean you can’t?” Now it’s just like yeah, I expect it, those things happen. Un had to drop off recently so we brought on Dysphotic, a really awesome thrashy death metal band from Santa Fe. When those things happen, it might open up a door to book a band that you wish you had room to book but didn’t until somebody canceled. There’s always obstacles, I’d rather not get into specifics of certain ones but it’s a fuckin’ trip every year. It’s always, always something: that’s just the nature of the music business. Do you feel that you were able to accomplish anything this year you that you couldn’t in the past? What aspects do you feel will be different, if any? Last year was the first year that we added Mutiny, this year we’re trying to do the same thing but better. We’re trying to build off of last year -- last year we had the Speedwolf reunion, so that was in itself a sellout show for Denver -- we’re trying to learn from certain things that may have not been perfect with this new three-stage format try to really nail them this year. And then next year, do we add a fourth stage or do we just do it the same way again? You know, same capacity, sell it out and just keep riding with that? So I don’t know, we’ll see after this year. I think that it’s definitely a step above the last one, every year the lineup is a little bit bigger. We’re just trying to take it step by step here, year by year. What kind of team is DUST Presents? How many people are behind it, or is it just you? It’s basically just me. My brother Mike does a lot of the media stuff, photography, video, and some of the design work. We’ve lived together for several years, so we’re always around each other shooting ideas. He’s got his Ritual of Sin magazine that he does, so that’s kind of like a DUST Presents media partner, we work together quite a bit. My friend Sarah does hospitality - she's awesome, last year was her first with us. She does awesome work, she’s done tour managing before. She’s great at taking care of the bands so I don’t have to do a lot of that. It’s more like I do most of the stuff behind the scenes, and date of show I’ve got a lot of great people helping out. I hire a lot of friends that are musicians to run stages, be stages managers to have someone hands-on at all times in case something goes wrong. But luckily the venues we work with are so great and their staff is so awesome, their sound people, their door, so we don’t really have to do that because they have staff set up already. So yeah, it’s a pretty small team, I’ve got lots of awesome friends that are willing to step up and help out when needed. How does the three venue system work with Hi-Dive, Mutiny, and 3 Kings? All the set times are staggered; they do overlap a little bit, but if you wanted to you could catch a bit of every band. But because they’re fairly small rooms, it doesn’t mean that set times overlapping will mean anybody’s getting a small crowd, there’s enough people to go around and everyone will have a solid crowd, if not a packed room. But when it comes to the headliner, that’s the only band playing at that time at 3 Kings, that’s the biggest room. It’s fun because you can pop in, see a band, maybe you’re not feeling it, you can just pop around and there’s always something playing at all times there’s no breaks. The idea is that during a headliner’s set, most everyone will be in the one room. So with that in mind, how will capacity work? Where are you capping the ticket sales? We can pretty much only sell about as many tickets as 3 Kings can hold, because when everybody floods there for the headliner you don’t want anybody stuck outside. Last year, we sold it out but we realized we could sell some more. The numbers are there, but some people can’t make it, or go home, so we realized we could push that a little bit without people having to be outside, if it got to that. We never got to that point last year and we hope it doesn’t this year, so like I said this’ll be another way to test out the waters of maxing out this three-stage system. Hopefully it all goes well. With the way you’ve curated the event thus far, what are your biggest expectations for this year? I hope it’s just as much fun as last year, the feedback was awesome. I hope we sell out, tickets are moving quick as usually happens this close to the show. I personally don’t buy tickets until close to the show or if I hear there’s only 50 tickets left. So think we just hope everything runs as smoothly as last year. A lot of that relies on the awesome staff at the venues, and they always do a really great job. There haven’t really been any crazy issues, everything always runs on time, there’s 20 minutes between each set so that gives everyone breathing room to set up for the next band. So I guess we hope we get a sellout with no major hiccups and no flights canceled. That’s another front we’ve been very lucky on in the past, the weather. We’ve had a little bit of heat before, but that’s okay, it’s June....
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Gatecreeper Share “Anxiety,” Prepping New Album
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Not only does Spirit Adrift have a great new album out, but Nate Garrett's other band Gatecreeper has been promising to follow 2016's Sonoran Depravation with a new album this year, and while they haven't released anything from it yet, they're now sharing a non-album single from the same sessions. It's called "Anxiety," and it's a real crusher that defies the death metal genre that Gatecreeper are often pigeonholed into. As vocalist Chase Mason explains, "We wrote and recorded this song together with all the songs for our upcoming album. Musically, this song is a little more adventurous than a normal Gatecreeper song. This was the last song that I had to finish lyrics for so I ended up writing it about all the stress and mental torment I had put myself through while working on the whole project. It's oddly fitting that this is the first song to be heard from what we have been working on." Album info and release date are still TBA, but stay tuned. Listen to the song below via Adult Swim....
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Update: A previous version of this post stated that "Anxiety" is on Gatecreeper's new album, but it is actually a non-album single....
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Brilliant Madness: Mr. Bungle’s Ever-Wild “California” Turns 20
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Editor's note: this album's release date is actually July 13th, 1999, not June 13th. There was some discrepancy among the typical sources for release dates. In any case, it's still a great time to celebrate this one....
We have barely embarked upon the Information Age and already our understanding of the science behind existence has left us drooling like blockheads impatiently waiting for recess; the more granular we see the universe, the more complex the system appears and paints our tenure as a random stroke of fate. Floating in that expansive landscape of knowledge sits Mr. Bungle, the San Francisco treat who, over a decade, laid waste to a prude musical landscape content operating with earplugs and blindfolds. They cultivated their own complex universe whose parts, embracing both regimen and disorder, inspired awe with increasing perspective and closer examination. Over three full-length albums, they matured from funk metal madness to tenebrous soundscapes and concluded with the beach musings of a madman. California, released 20 years ago today, finalized a trilogy of what amounts to a documentary of their own interests. A trip through their early demos reveals a group degenerating from early thrash and death metal to their self-titled debut, which captured elements of ska, funk, metal, and teenaged sexual inclinations with an unscrambled Spice channel. Their notorious live shows presented them as asylum ward escapees blending the worlds of BDSM and a circus freak show. It made a significant impact and fans came to develop expectations -- little did they know, though, that this era was only a phase, one they treated as subject matter purely of their own interests. Four years later, Disco Volante, arguably one of the more dense and sophisticated pieces of modern music, removed the clown masks only to reveal living monsters. Gone are the playful lyrics depicting lewd sexual acts and odes to masturbation; they had been replaced with avant-garde collages and invented languages. Whereas they previously reveled in the balance of light and dark, Disco Volante steered primarily toward the uncomfortable. Live, they no longer covered Mr. Rogers but instead Ennio Morricone, Peter Thomas, and Corrosion of Conformity. They took power away from the listener and presented them with something so foreign and intriguing that you never saw the bat swinging for your temple. Another four years quietly passed before California emerged as a compromise, albeit one reached with no regard for outside opinion. While more friendly on the ears than Disco Volante, it manipulated the dense and obscure into something more objectively palatable to the casual listener. The Beach Boys, and Pet Sounds in particular, play an obvious influence but despite the return of a playful spirit, the boys are dead serious. Skits have been replaced with tight and focused compositions that lure you in for a second drink before your eyes flutter open in a bathtub full of ice. This is their glorious, hideous, and revolutionary interpretation of pop music....
https://youtu.be/PwO8mFNIbNk...
Seagulls introduce opener “Sweet Charity," evoking contemplative walks on the beach before Burt Bacharach invites us to a picnic and offers something funny to smoke. The sun symbiotically reflects off the waves, and for a moment you believe that you’ve found utopia, but you can also see the waste lapping ashore while a couple on holiday snaps photos. Before long, you question the limitations of beauty when paired with existential grief and suddenly the album establishes a theme, one of simultaneous glamour and gore that forces you to either redefine old terms or mature into new ones. The track “None Of Them Knew They Were Robots” shakes the foundation with country western swing orchestrated by the devil and answers the question, “What would Mr. Bungle sound like as the house band for a 1950s flick documenting the antics of rebellious teenagers?” It moves with vengeance and those are Mike Patton’s hands pushing you closer to the cliff’s edge. His cadence attacks the groove and encourages your inner demons to dance, while Trey Spruance spews madness and fire from your right. He transforms his guitar into a ray gun from an Ed Wood flick and polishes rather than overplays. Collectively, they have hijacked the sermon and the parish loves every moment. There's even a soulful ballad that has the audience raising lighters and pumping fists by its arena rock conclusion. Partners out for an evening may feel inclined to sway in rhythm with the slower and more forgiving tempo on “Retrovertigo”; Patton transmits earnestness and a lover could close their eyes and melt into their companion’s arms during the chorus. Once bassist Trevor Dunn shares the track’s larger meaning, all amorous thoughts quickly evaporate with the icy touch of sober truths:I was thinking of stylistic trends in fashion and music that I saw happening in a way I found vapid and superficial and I jokingly asked ‘if looking to the past is so cool, why not go back to famine and stylize that?’ And then I thought, well, famine still exists actually. It has never completely gone away, it has out-lived all fads and there is a sickening imbalance to that versus people with too much money who are so bored and soulless that they latch onto trends… In the lyrics I say “Post-ironic remains a mouth to feed”. In other words, the ‘real’ and the authentic and the genuine are starving to death while irony thrives and a bored and jaded Western culture markets that starvation. The rich get richer. The have and the have-nots, etc.
-- Trevor Dunn (from an interview with Faith No More Followers)
Inspired by spaghetti westerns and one-sided relationships, the song “Pink Cigarette” atypically stays on track and documents the sweet taste of revenge via the selfish act of suicide. The band, sympathetic to the fragile nature of our narrator, gently delivers the music and shows how well they can perform with each-other, rather than out-performing one-another. It ends with a flatline interrupting the music as Patton counts down the hours until the villain returns home to find a lovesick corpse… you know, another lyrically uplifting track. In many respects, “Golem II: The Bionic Vapour Boy” most closely resembles something from their first album and imagines Stevie Wonder performing on an underground cult horror classic. The funk makes you quiver rather than boogie and feels composed by a basement dweller with stained sweatpants. In an album full of punctual swing, it feels spontaneously composed and together lightens the mood and compels you to double-check the locks. California's closing song does away with the formalities and demolishes the walls between several clubs, leaving the audience for reggae, Middle Eastern music, and heavy metal to enjoy each other’s company. Unsurprisingly, none of the genre blending feels forced, and Patton navigates roles like he’s on Broadway. While the lyrical meaning remains esoteric, his ability to slide through multiple perspectives within the same song is unparalleled. Much like “Dead Goon” and “Merry Go Bye Bye," Mr. Bungle memorably end the album with an epic game of tension and release that leaves you sweating and in dire need of a cigarette....
https://youtu.be/HldyUz5FR_M...
Music nerds love to examine how past albums fit into the modern landscape, but Mr. Bungle orbits an entirely different galaxy. They aligned with no genre and therefore felt no obligation to an audience, which allowed them to create timeless and irreplaceable works. Bands pilfered from their brilliance, but their influence predominantly came from obscure sources, thus rendering them foreign within the greater music context. No matter what your enjoy, the collective members have studied it more thoroughly, better comprehend its larger meaning, and will document it through their own lens as a last will and testament. Much has changed in music since its release, but two decades later, California remains a landmark. It made the complex seem effortless, in contrast to their earlier work which make the difficult sound laborious, and it transports you to a world where the impossible manifests. With each piece, they labored over every sound to best encapsulate a specific intent, no matter if that noise captures klezmer, death metal, and free jazz concurrently. They perfected a style no one knew existed and their legend will only continue to grow as our inability to grasp larger concepts maintains its downward trajectory....
California released on June 13th, 1999 via Warner Bros. Records....
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Tribulation
The Ember, The Ash: Unreqvited’s 鬼 Talks Embracing the Dark Side
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The power of the Internet presents unique conditions for various DIY scenes. On one hand, dissemination is easier than ever, but on the other, the competition has grown. In 2016, an album came out of the atmospheric underground that made waves for its unapologetic willingness to keep the genre propelling forward; certainly, there is no time for stalling on Unreqvited's Disquiet, a tear-jerking trek that appeals to vast emotional depths and towering mountain peaks. The mind behind it all is 鬼 (with whom we spoke in last year’s DSBM retrospective) -- he has since gone on to release nautical epic Stars Wept to the Sea, starry-eyed dreamscape Mosaic I: l'amour et l'ardeur, and fully ambient rain, all under the Unreqvited name, and all fit for a coffee date with your cat. Also, there was 2017’s split Imperfect, on which 鬼 joins the likes of Violet Cold and Sadness to prove that there are still trails left to blaze. Throughout all of Unreqvited’s manifestations, 鬼’s roots in post-hardcore ring out in the form of bright, building riff-walls that welcome the dawn of a new day. More of a DSBM artist through his general emotional intensity that escapes the prison of despair, Unreqvited becomes a candle in the depths of darkness. Surely, there needs to be a place to store overwrought feelings in order to arrive at a place of hope, and that’s where The Ember, The Ash comes in. 鬼 has added the new band to his list of rock and metal ventures, and it is arguably the gloomiest yet. While his songwriting still very much mimics the building of a staircase, it is one that aims steadily downward to the pits instead of upwards to the heavens. Together, Unreqvited and The Ember, The Ash are two halves of the same heart. To learn more about what is to be expected from The Ember, The Ash, we caught up with the sweet spirit himself....
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Can you update us on what you've been up to generally in music, as well as in life? There’s a lot going on currently in my personal life and in my loved ones’ personal lives that I’m struggling to cope with. I think that’s the primary reason I’ve been writing so much music. I can’t really say I’ve been doing a whole lot of anything else. Why did this feel like the right time to embark on a new project? Coping mechanism, mostly. I just had a lot of dark music within me that I didn’t want to attach to Unreqvited. The upcoming Unreqvited album is the darkest one yet, but I don’t want it getting any darker than that. I also wanted to take a different vocal approach with actual lyrical content. How would you describe the tone of The Ember, The Ash? How does it compare to Unreqvited? I wanted it to be pretty different from Unreqvited. There aren’t a whole lot of similarities apart from the fact that they’re both heavily atmospheric. Perhaps once the new Unreqvited album is released the similarities will become more apparent. I would describe The Ember, The Ash’s tone as extremely somber and depressive, but lyrically there is typically some relief from that feeling as each track comes to an end. What inspired the fiery imagery invoked by your name? I like the idea of fire representing life and ashes representing death. Everything I’ve written lyrically for this project is centered around these two things. When can we expect a full release from The Ember, The Ash, and what might it entail? Sometime this year, for sure. I already have a label involved, so we’ll begin planning everything out once it’s finished. It’s conceptual, or at the very least thematic. The lyrical concept of the debut single is something that continues throughout the record. The sound is heavily black metal influenced. You’ll hear lots of things that span from Xasthur to Emperor. You've released splits with some pretty big names in the underground in the past. Do you think The Ember, The Ash will follow suit? Possibly, I haven’t really thought that far ahead yet. Right now I’m solely focused on this record. I can’t really think about the future of this project right now since there’s a lot coming up for Unreqvited that’s taking up much of my time. What do you think is the most exciting aspect of black metal right now? Innovation. The re-application of the same ethos that founded the genre, which I think was essentially a reaction to metal’s complacency. I think constantly revolutionizing what it can look like and what it can sound like is the most exciting thing about black metal. What are your hopes moving forward with music, particularly as a solo artist who embraces the new wave of metal? I hope I can continue to create emotional music that resonates with as many people as possible, I hope I can collaborate with more like-minded artists that are pushing the genre to new heights in imaginative ways, and I hope I can influence a new generation of musicians to pick up an instrument or engage in/tend to a creative exploit....
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Underground Unusualities #6: Asphodel Meadows’ “I-VI” Paints Nightmares Under Eyelids
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In this series, Jenna scours the musical expanse for unusual (but fitting) albums to soundtrack life’s tumult....
After the annual 14 hospitable days, the air was gaining the soft static that turns carrying body weight into a battle against gravity's pull. A turn of a corner brings sudden blindness with flames that turn fair skin pink and eyes all white; the angle of Earth hardly ever seems to get it quite right. The straps of my backpack were turning into wet sponges pressed into my aching shoulders. School was out for summer; the days of walking to hours of statistical programming with flurries buried into the waves of my hair were nothing but a distant dream. Now all that’s left to do is soak up too much of a good thing. From “raw dogging reality” to drinking up sun until you lose your first layer, summer’s strike is always sudden but never swift. As I walked home from moderating a final for my intro course, I could already feel the static trying to stretch my limbs like the Blair Witch. The blistering knives that had kept me jumping all semester had slowly been scratched dull. My heart-shaped sunglasses projected the album to which I was listening: I-VI by Asphodel Meadows. As the cover boy collapsed clean on the cool floor, I wished to succumb to the same cavernous atmosphere....
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My apartment building impending, I saw a trio on the stoop set up amongst strewn materials. I considered taking the back entrance but couldn’t fathom taking another step under high beams. As the album cycled from the beginning, echoes accompanied the soft crunch of my sneakers tip toeing on empty wrappers and tarp scraps. “I think… someone… needs,” a graying man began, loitering upright but stumbling backward. “Needs to get in… in the thing.” His leathery arm gestured to the front door. I heard something murmur up from my sneakers. “I’m sorry.” My eyes moved down to a younger woman with a pixie cut seated at my left. She was holding a syringe to her forearm, a few centimeters of blood flooding from the needle’s nucleus. Her eyes remained on her task, but not with the fixedness of precision. I stopped for a moment as my clanging keys were rendered silent in my fist. The older man continued to repeat his initial sentence, but their voices were becoming but soft whispers through the growing hisses in my headphones. I glanced back down, this time to my right, and saw a young man with his eyes closed and his chin pressed firmly into his shoulders. “It’s okay,” I finally let out, emphasizing “okay” to be sure that I could hear it through siren-like lo-fi sonics. I hovered my key fob over the sensor just a few inches above the young man’s head and slinked inside. The clasping of the lock behind me might as well have been the turn of a vault. The unairconditioned air, whose presence I, for some reason, pay to grace, had a bad case of rigor mortis, intensified only by the globe fixture overhead that was dotted with gnats. Knowing that the condition would only worsen a few floors up, I followed the matted damask carpet down to the basement. I was hit by a lessening of light and texture, picking up steam past the row of mailboxes and laundry room fluorescence to the small lounge at the end of the tunnel-like hallway. Discarded board games and empty Leinenkugels bottles sat with sounds of dying laughter. I tucked my sunglasses into the front of my tank-top and slung my backpack to the ground, sending one hollow vessel rolling until it was muted by cinder block. To the unbending couch, I collapsed, my eyes shuttering the array of metal cubbies at the opposite end. The earbud lodged between the suede and me was pumping billowing winds from a seasonless dimension. A low voice eventually emerged at the surface: “I hear their silent screams, their dark faces painted on the back of my eyelids. Be not afraid, be not afraid…” In my dreams, I trekked through crisp wilderness, greens and browns offset by spots of melting snow -- a maze that ended in the crash of waves weathering stone. As I wisped around with no apparent purpose, my view was briefly interrupted by the clanking of pipes and replaced by a dark red thickness bubbling up from a small drain in the corner of concrete. Too cradled to decipher reality from muddled brain waves, I turned on my other side, regaining sight of the horizon....
I-IV released March 12, 2017; follow the project on Bandcamp and Facebook....
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“New Organon”: The Lord Weird Slough Feg’s Mike Scalzi Talks Latest Album (and Philosophy)
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While walking with Mike Scalzi from the Kung Fu Necktie -- the Philly venue that was hosting The Lord Weird Slough Feg -- to a cheesesteak joint nearby, the vocalist/guitarist reminisced about his past. Some of it was geographical: he lived in Pennsylvania as a youth and he had a great story about the strange night he had trying to sneak into the nearby Tower Theater to see Frank Zappa (spoiler alert: he didn’t get in). The rest was more specific to Invisible Oranges, specifically his past as a contributor. In 2010 and 2011 he wrote a quartet of Bullpen Bulletins. All these years later, he still laughs recalling the controversy of them, specifically the first installment “Welcome to the Grind Ole Opry.” He still thinks that title was clever, and unsurprisingly continues to relish the controversy he caused within the metal community. Half of metalheads wrote him off as an old man screaming at clouds while the rest agreed with NPR’s Lars Gotrich who called it “a damning clarion call for quality control” in the metal scene. Whether you were on his side or not (and he’ll be happy to good-naturedly discuss it either way, even to this day), it’s obvious that Scalzi is a man who walks it like he talks it. His band might have had two names -- the shortened moniker Slough Feg as well as the elongated version that is back -- but it has always played only one thing: traditional heavy metal that refused to consider trends or subgenres. It was that way when he formed the band not far from Philly nearly 30 years ago, and it was that way through ten albums, the latest of which, New Organon, comes out next Friday (in America, the EU release date is today) on Cruz Del Sur Music. The album is full of the majestic riffs and pounding percussion; however, instead of using science fiction and fantasy as themes, Scalzi taps into the greats of philosophy. The title comes from Francis Bacon’s 1620 book that bridged the gap between Aristotle and the general sciences as we know them. Stream the new album below. Between bites of cheesesteak, Scalzi was happy to dissect it and discuss Slough Feg’s place in the metallic history....
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This is a great day for traditional metal in Philly. Slough Feg is in town and right down the road is the hologram of Ronnie James Dio. It is? That's where all the metalheads will be. I didn't realize that. It sucks because some of those people probably would have come to our show. Maybe some, but I was thinking like you're a real band and he's a hologram. Yeah, but people usually don't make that distinction. You're making that distinction. I don't think it's going to… I don't really have an opinion about it actually. I miss Dio. I think the important part is not what I think about but what everybody's probably asking is what the fuck would Ronnie think about it. And I'm sure they convinced themselves that he would love it but I'm not so convinced that Ronnie would love it. But I'm not sure that he wouldn't either. I just don't know. Would you want a Slough Feg Hologram tour? I was about to bring that up! I think I'd have to say no, even though in a way it would be extremely flattering because it will never happen unless it happens to everyone. But not really. I wouldn't do that. I'd be dead. If I can make money off it and it can happen now, sure. The name of the new album comes from Francis Bacon. I sort of gleamed that it was this transition between Aristotle thousands of years before and the scientific method as we would come to. Am I getting that right? I think so. I don't know much about it as I should either, but it's a book that I like. I wrote the song first -- I didn't know the record would be called that. The song is basically about Aristotle, there's not much beyond that in the song, but the name “The New Organon” was Francis Bacon, he wrote the book which is a revision in a sense, written in 1627. For 2000 years before that, all through the middle ages, everything was sort of skimmed from Aristotle and philosophically and scientifically. Everything seemed fixed. It was a different set of physical laws, if you want to call them laws, governing the heavens and the earth… very weird laws. For the major portion of western civilization that was the way things work. Francis Bacon is one of the people that we hear about now who sort of amended that saying we shouldn't just drop in universal conclusions from these observations. There was a primitive scientific method with Aristotle where you observe things and you focus in on the similarities and edit out the differences and then come to a conclusion. For these particular examples of things you draw universal conclusions, universal laws or general rules about the way things work and those things seemed fixed. For 2000 years those things were fixed. Francis Bacon was one of several people who broke that open. Maybe there aren't fixed laws the universe? And his big maneuver was to sort of implant the experimental bit into the science, so you don't just observe things and draw a conclusion; you have to manipulate the data, mess around with it. So he did a lot of weird experimentation, doing things like freezing chickens and refrigeration. It wasn't easy to freeze things back in the 1600s either. No! He died as a result actually. He got pneumonia I think sitting out in the snow, stuffing a chicken with snow. He died so every time you open your refrigerator you should see Francis Bacon! You can infer from what I just said that this is just a fun idea to write the album about. Although it sounds dry and academic, it's really just a lot of fun. I wrote the song about the Aristotelian method and a little bit about it being changed or revised in that way, and I threw in a lot of stuff about, you know, just textbook simple phrases, induction, the timeless forms, the square of opposition. These are sort of slightly technical terms that I use teaching this stuff, so it was going through my head a lot. I just thought it would be a fun and then the thought came in my head: why I don't I just make the whole record or at least most of the songs about different philosophers in a fun way and a gritty way because some of the songs are about like the neighborhood we practice in and the people I see in the streets. So the first four or five songs are just literally the names of philosophical texts except the first one called “Headhunter” which I wrote way back in 1992. The second song, “Discourse on Equality,” is based on “Discourse on Inequality” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau about the beginnings of civilizations and contract theory, not very interesting stuff for a metal song! All the phrases you find in the book are all “I represent the civil creatures, I read forever in the state of nature.” There are things you can say in a song and they sound somewhat metal. You just kind of get in there [and] write some general ideas down about these things and as long as you sort of own it when you sing it, it sounds good and then you get some of that meaning in there....
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So you started with Aristotle and you even go as far as “Coming of Age in the Milky Way” which is based on a book from 1988 by Timothy Ferris. You sort of run the gamut of human knowledge and not just in one discipline either. I had to get a little bit of Neil deGrasse Tyson and astrophysics in there even though I know nothing about it! “Coming of Age in the Milky Way” is a textbook about that stuff and it goes the whole way back to Isaac Newton and all these guys. I sort of threw around and played with these ideas that interest me and try to make fun songs about them. That's about it. Just like I do about disembowelment and cattle raids and Celtic-Viking wars, it's the same, it was just something in a book that I enjoyed studying and I guess I just dramatize it in the song. That's about it. At what point did you realize that the album was going to have an overriding theme? Did it all just fall into place or was there some kind of epiphany? There wasn’t an epiphany; I had the idea for years. I actually had the idea for a much more involved project that would serve as a textbook, a CD that would serve almost like a textbook supplement where there are really specific organized instructional songs that go from the pre-Socratics and Plato and the ancient philosophy but that are actually not with this record. The main goal is to actually lay down the philosophies so you can learn from it, to give my students. That was my idea. I had that idea for well over ten years and think it would be cool to do that, but I've never been able to. I never really wanted to make a Slough Feg album that was that academic and towards that kind of purpose, that didactic to use an academic word, as a teaching tool. So instead, something more organic happened which is a more realistic, metal, enjoyable record rather than the ABCs of philosophy. And it has some songs that have nothing to do with it as well. There's “Uncanny” written by [bassist] Adrian Maestas and “Headhunter” written by me. “Uncanny” is actually sung by Adrian. Is that the first time since the first demo that there's been somebody taking over lead vocals on a Slough Feg song? We had a guest vocalist -- Bob Wright of Brocas Helm [who sang “Tactical Air War” on 2010’s The Animal Spirts]. Nobody else in the band ever sang besides the original demo which was a different singer [Omar Herd]. That wasn't a conscious decision. He had been writing these riffs and I had the song. He did not say “I'm going to sing it,” but he's written songs before like that one that Bob Wright sang. He was a little bit… not shy but at first he was like, “you’re going to sing this, right?” “No, I want you to sing it. I like your voice.” Adrian and [guitarist] Angelo [Tringali] could sing some things and it takes the pressure off me. I didn't want to be responsible for writing an entire album by myself. I've done it so many times. Nine records are almost everything written by me. I sang on plenty of Slough Feg songs, so he did it and he did a really good job. It sounds very different. His vocals aren't particularly metal, which I think is cool. As far as I was concerned, it worked out great. We're going to play it live tonight. Your lyrics were initially rooted in science fiction and fantasy. With this album, you inject reality, and some of it is modern. I’m wondering if your life in academia is responsible for that transition. To some extent it has to be, that it's about philosophy and that’s what I teach. But I don't think so; I think I would have done it anyway even if I wasn't teaching. My academic career was getting reduced significantly in the last few years anyway. I'm not teaching as much as I used to. I teach still but not as much. I think I would have done this no matter what. Quite frankly, I get bored rather easily like a lot of human beings. You can say that a lot of bands, the first three albums they sort of shot their load and it's over. You keep regurgitating mediocre shit and I started seeing myself going that way. I don't want to fall into that trap where these bands that have been around forever. I don't even need to tell you who specifically I am talking about who keep making records that are so bland and so pointless. I started to feel that I was going that way, and that's a very bad thing. I hope that what people have said about this record so far, that it's sort of a return to form, is true. I would listen to the last album we did and go, oh god! That song should have been edited out or we should have done this differently. So this one, the motivation and one of the reasons why it took so long is because I felt like I'd said a lot of what I wanted to say in nine records. And why the hell should I say something just to say it? So I waited until I had something to say. I enjoy writing these songs, the riffs, and the melodies come to me regardless of if I want to write songs or not. So I figured right now I want to this. I wrote a lot of songs. I had a lot of riffs that ended up on the cutting floor. The biographic record material said that you probably wrote more for this than any other record and threw out more as well. The approach was to do it like it was our first album in a sense. When a band does their first record or their second record, they often write the songs before they have a record, they play them out live, not always these days, but that's how it used to be. You play them out live. You test them out. You see which ones get a good reaction. You see which ones suck. You test them in front of audiences. We did that for a lot of these songs. I wrote “New Organon” and we played it live within a couple months and it went over well. Then we wrote “Uncanny,” Adrian's song, and then several others and we played them live and they went over well. Last summer at this time we toured all over Europe playing three, four songs from the new album every night and they went over great. At least half the songs were tried and tested live in that way. It sounds to me like after nine albums you felt like the band was kind of a rut that you really needed to shake things up to get out of. What caused you to feel that way? Listening to the last few records and going, some of this doesn't sound as inspired as I'd like it. I don't want to play a bunch of songs from this album. I'm not crazy about it, you know. I want to enjoy the hell out of playing these songs. I want to play them live with a live band. That's the ultimate test. It wasn't like bad reviews or this guy sucks, or anything like that. I'm sure some people said that, but it was more just me not being excited about some of the things we'd done, thinking I don't want to end up like some more successful bands people put out a new album, but you go to see their old songs. So it wasn’t a coincidence that this was the longest span between two albums since you started. No, it wasn't. But also, I’m older now. Life gets in the way. We all have jobs. We're not one of those bands that tours for months and then goes, “okay we have nothing else to do, let's make the record!” It's a lot more difficult than that....
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You hold the band and yourself to high standards. The Bacon text in “New Organum” spoke of the “Idols of the Mind,” four pretty negative traits that bog people down from enlightenment. These are easily identifiable in modern society even though he spelled it out centuries ago. Does it kind of bum you out that we've gone all this time and we still haven't figured shit out yet? Well, you have to remember that in 1620 Francis Bacon was writing this book not for the masses. He was writing them for the five people in England [who] could read it. So we're talking about a very elite group of people who would even be able to understand what he was saying. And he would practice sometimes philosophy or science, so it's possible that some of those things have been weeded out of the most certain academic populations or whatever. I don't know; probably not. Does it bum me out? Yeah, it's ironic. This is the way we should operate and of course everybody's still all messed up, falling into those traps. I mean, sure I am disappointed that the human race that we have all this technology that requires a lot of effort and a lot of critical thinking in order to come up with, but the people that operate it, and the people who use it don't think critically at all. In fact it seems to be causing ignorance and I think about it all the time. But I've accepted that stuff a long time ago [laughs]. So at this point, I'm not even... yeah it bothers me all the time. Do you think Francis Bacon would like the record? I doubt it! He would have no reference point with which to... You never know, he might. I don't know, but it's really possible to get that kind of progression. Probably not. He would probably say this is a degenerate form of art and I compliment you by calling it art, something like that. This is a vulgar representation, Philistines who don't understand what's going on here. That kind of thing. He'd be a harsh critic. He would. When you started Slough Feg, it was homage to the classic metallic sounds. Now, maybe not in terms of record sales, but in terms of quality of product, the consistency, probably some influence and certainly longevity, you went from emulating these storied bands to becoming a storied band. That's a very nice thing to say. I don't think it's true. I would like to believe that. I would like to think that. I would like to agree with that. If you think about it in those terms, it must be pretty rewarding. Well... yeah, it is in a way. It's tough because honestly each record we made has been a tremendous struggle. It really has. We're doing it on a small budget, and not just that, the logistics of being able to do this, keeping people motivated, keeping the lineup together, and keeping my life such that I can be able to do this in the most expensive city in the country. It's seriously challenging. If it wasn't, I wouldn't be doing it, I suppose. I come to these places and people know all the words and all that stuff. I can go to Europe there are seas of people that know the words to my song a -- not deep seas, but small lakes of people. That must be rewarding! And in a way, although I'd rather be hugely successful, I have absolutely no trouble admitting that! Just like every band that is stupid enough to try to convince people that they don't want to be successful, which is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Even though I'd like to be more comfortable, there could be a very strong argument made that the reason the quality has maintained to whatever extent it is because we have not been successful. This last record was a lot of stress, a lot of agitation, a lot of difficulty -- that may have caused but it sounds livelier. Some the best art comes out of things like holocausts. And a lot of people rest on their laurels and become really rich and famous and popular and they put out garbage, you know. Not everyone but in most cases I would say it's probably true. There's nothing like the conqueror. They're not ambitious anymore. One form of success is kind of inspiring other people. That’s the most rewarding thing about doing this. Having people saying, “I've been listening to you since I was young and now I have a band…” You had some of your other job as a philosophy professor cross over into the Slough Feg, certainly on New Organon. Has it ever gone the other way and had metal cross into your classroom? So walk into the classroom and by mistake start yelling heavy metal lyrics instead of Aristotle? I've made references; I’ve gone “Descartes, Evil Genius, Evil Deceiver, doesn't that sound like a Judas Priest song?” That’s about as far as I go. With the new album, you will impart 2,000-plus years of philosophy upon a bunch of metalheads. I suppose. Again, that's a very ambitious statement. I hope that I'm doing something near that. What I'm hoping is that the ideas in this record, the song titles; they’ll go “I kind of like that song, but it's called ‘Being and Nothingness,’ what's that?” They look it up and it's John-Paul Sartre's existentialism. “Maybe I should check that out.” That would be cool. “The Apology” -- “Oh that's actually one of Plato's dialogues; maybe I should check it out. Oh, wow, the lyrics are in there, this is about something, this about something interesting.” We often talk about what is “metal” and what is not. Though some may question how “metal” college philosophy courses are, obviously in your mind “metal” is more than just songs about Satan. Philosophy has always been kind of metal. Bands have always written about Nietzsche and all that shit, whether they understand it or not. And as far as Satan goes, you can fit Satan into anywhere. It's easy....
New Organon released today (EU/digital) via Cruz Del Sur Music (NA physical release is next Friday)....
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Tomb Mold Share “Accelerative Phenomenae” From Upcoming Full-Length
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Tomb Mold's anticipated new album Planetary Clairvoyance comes out July 19th via 20 Buck Spin, and they've now shared another song from it, "Accelerative Phenomenae." It's an intense six-and-a-half minutes that finds the middle ground between fretboard-racing death metal and punishing sludge, and guitarist Derrick Vella calls it "a vicious journey through the time tombs." "It's labyrinthian structure leaves you twisting and turning until the shrike has drained you of all your fluids," he continues. "It's a perfect representation of what we want to hear in a death metal song. It's Tomb Mold, from start to finish." Drummer/vocalist Max Klebanoff adds, "'Accelerative Phenomenae' is about the culminating event of sorrowful intimacies before your final meeting with death where the lines of self and other are blurred. Your senses are heightened during the final racing of pulses, your cumulative earthly doubts are cast aside to embrace an elegiac ultimate." Listen below. Tomb Mold are also touring with their 20 Buck Spin labelmates Superstition this July and playing the awesome Psycho Las Vegas....
https://youtu.be/ibDv77P7YVk...
Tomb Mold -- 2019 Tour Dates 7/11/2019 Sanctuary - Detroit, MI * 7/12/2019 Cobra - Chicago, IL * 7/13/2019 Cosmic Charlie's - Lexington, KY @ Clairvoyance Fest 7/14/2019 529- Atlanta, GA * 7/15/2019 Slims - Raleigh, NC * 7/16/2019 Gallery 5 - Richmond, VA * 7/17/2019 Atlas Brew Works - Washington DC * 7/18/2019 Once - Boston, MA * 7/19/2019 Kung Fu Necktie - Philadelphia, PA * 7/20/2019 Cattivo - Pittsburgh, PA * 7/21/2019 Saint Vitus Bar - Brooklyn, NY * 8/16-18/2019 Psycho Las Vegas - Las Vegas, NV * w/ Superstition...
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True to Form: Baroness Excels on “Gold & Grey”
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In just over a decade, Baroness have cinched themselves up as one of the heavy rock bands that really matter in a broader pop-cultural sense. There has been, of course, no shortage of excellent heavy and progressive rock music made in the same timeframe, but the cultural window has since shifted, rendering groups of this type largely outside of the considerations that accepted such other groups as Mastodon. Baroness enunciate their legacy as a seminal band, not unlike the way the Smashing Pumpkins permanently etched themselves into the annals of rock history with Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness -- and to do so with a record as superb as Gold & Grey is merely an additional bit of icing on the cake. A record as large as Gold & Grey (large not only in terms of the band and the quality of the album itself, but just the sheer girth of the thing) demands a response covering a range of associated topics. First and most banal: yes, it is fine to retitle this record Orange in your personal library if you so choose. Interviews in the time between the release of the first single "Borderlines" and its release have clarified that its working title was as such and (obviously, clearly) influenced the direction of the album art. There's even a bit of "orange"-ness phenomenologically to boot, which we'll address in a second. The name change, for better or for worse, was likely meant to sound more like a traditional title than the borderline cliche set of colors they'd been working from before. This is an understandable reason to change the title but misses, at some level, that phenomenological "orange"-ness which still pervades this album. We did not collectively bat our eyes at the previous color sequence: Red Album felt like a brewing and stewing liminal sun casting first/final rays of light, Blue Record felt like a tangled snarl of weeds cloaking catfish all submersed in Georgia swampy marsh, Yellow & Green felt sunny and verdant, and Purple felt like it emerged screaming out of a hydrocodone haze. Likewise, Gold & Grey feels like it would fit somewhere between Red Album and Yellow & Green by way of Purple, mirroring the sonic structures of Purple but timbrally sitting somewhere nearer the haunt of Red Album and the wide-winged and creatively joyous span of songwriting demonstrated on Yellow & Green. On paper, Gold & Greymay not be a proper double album, but it certainly has the internal structure of one. This largely comes from its superlative size: 17 tracks over an hour's duration. While on paper this may not feel necessarily long enough to constitute a double album, remember that Yellow & Green was only 75 minutes, short enough to fit onto a single disc, with the average Baroness record outside of these two clocking in at just under 45 minutes. This sense of doubled-ness does the name change a favor; there is, whether intentionally or not, discrete Gold and Grey portions, signaled by the timbrel change from driving, noisy heavy alt rock tunes to more brooding and atmospheric fare, like the light and color was sucked out of it. However, despite the size of the record compared to their standard lengths, they manage to pace this affair far better than their previous double album, with Gold & Grey having a clear emotional arc aligning each of the tracks. That is not to say that the album will not be a formidable challenge to newcomers. Unlike Blue Record, which was at once (still) their best sequenced work, playing out more like a grand Southern Gothic novel in a 45-minute span, Gold & Grey has substantial differentiation between its tracks, more so than the band has shown before. Where on Blue Record the interludes and even full songs included repeating melodic and rhythmic motifs to tie the album together, Gold & Grey is a linear affair, abandoning each concept as the track number changes over. What's left instead for Baroness is the trickier task of making sure where one track leaves off emotionally can be properly expounded or else satisfactorily challenged by the following track, a task they thankfully do accomplish. It creates a subtler and ultimately richer album than Blue Record but does noticeably rob the album of the same immediacy. It will likely take a handful of listens before the average listener can make it all the way through and still feel like they are actively following the music rather than getting mentally fatigued by the number of ideas. Speaking of which, we see Baroness not only at their most adventurous in terms of new ideas but most conclusive in terms of cataloging old ideas. There are moments of heaviness that rival (but admittedly do not best) the early EPs: sweeping and complex progressive metal numbers that hearken to their first two albums, melodically driven alt-rock salvaging the adventurous but largely unsuccessful attempts on Yellow & Green, plus the new-school standard of noisy, heavy, weird-out rockers from the Purple era. Baroness seem consciously aware that this is the end of a cycle, albeit one they likely didn't fully understand until they found themselves near its conclusion. And yet, despite this sense of encyclopedic span, marking King Crimson-esque mathy prog on one interlude and noise rock on another -- Smashing Pumpkins grandeur on one song and then accessible and warm pop rock on another -- Baroness do not feel like they are attempting to impress anyone but themselves. Yellow & Green was their most ambitious but least inspired while Purple felt like a band fully loaded with ideas they were chomping at the bit to employ; with new guitarist Gina Gleason joining their ranks, it seems like the final barrier was removed, and Baizley's group can finally do anything and everything under the sun....
https://youtu.be/RQeAvbTVWiU...
There is a narrative regarding the band that has to be addressed to properly internalize Gold & Grey. Baroness may have emerged from the same mathy sludge metal origins as the early days of Kylesa and Mastodon, but they were misapprehended in the same manner as those other bands, viewed by fans and critics alike as primarily heavy as fuck instead of progressive. But while Mastodon and Kylesa pursued progressive ends without internal qualm from two separate directions -- Mastodon shooting for classic prog and Kylesa for dense psych rock jamming -- Baroness wanted something subtler. So was born the borderline-symphonic approach to Southern rock and heavy metal found on their first two albums; but this too saw the band with raised ire, with Baizley decrying Yes as bullshit and The Jesus Lizard as closer in his mind to what the band was trying to achieve with mathy progressive ideas in metal/rock contexts. It wasn't a surprise that the follow-up to Blue Record would err more to discernible rock forms and less to overtly prog ones, achieving progressive space more in arrangement and timbre than in stacking the record with songs that eschewed verse-chorus writing. Then came the horrible van accident, one that certainly shifted whatever direction the band would have naturally grown in as they lost both their bassist and, worse, their drummer, a founding member and a player that had a deep foundational influence on how the group approached rhythm and structure. Purple then was not just a sign of Baizley's return to functional health -- the existential weight of the crash and the long-tail of medical trauma perhaps shifting the sonic direction of the band -- but also the integration of an entirely new rhythm section, one more versed in noise rock and punk and jazz than in heavy metal and prog. Gold & Grey should be seen, then, with its replacement of the sole remaining member of the band from before Purple, not necessarily the sixth Baroness studio album but more as the second of this particular line-up; as much as it gestures back, this is an affect you have to dig for within a record that seems substantially more comfortable moving forward from its immediate predecessor than any of the others before it. Which leaves Gold & Grey a substantially more subtle and mature record than either Blue Record or Purple, the group's two prior high points. Blue Record felt more novelistic and cohesive than Purple but was almost emotionally crass in terms of how grandiloquent and, in spite of Baizley's protests, Yes-like in its development of themes and moods; Purple is the group mastering the art of being a rock band first and foremost, allowing them to incorporate prog, psych, and noise concepts at will, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of all the goodies of non-mainstream rock music. Gold & Grey is a hybrid of these two approaches, giving itself a superstructure that reads more as a single cohesive statement made up of 17 seemingly unrelated shards, a greater mosaic that only reveals itself in assemblage and not at all in isolated individual components. You may feel you understand the record from the singles, but that would be incomplete: moments that catch the ear suddenly don't in the greater context of the album as a whole, while other subtler moments suddenly feel like more substantial emotional comments on what came before. And yet it contains songs, great and anthemic songs, some of the very best of the band's career. Baizley, Gleason, Thomson, and Jost seem to effervesce joy even when singing about sorrow, and the whole album crackles with a fierce and seemingly limitless creative verve, one we've needed to hear made explicit in rock music for quite a while. The album feels honest-to-god adventurous for a change, instead of day-in, day-out genre pastiche and ripoffs. The record is less grand but only because its gestures are less crass, patient not as a code-word as boring but instead sure of the fact that they can move the whole ship with little touches and still make the whole thing rattle and shake the way a good rock record should. This in turn makes the elephant in the room grow bigger: the production, overseen by David Fridmann, clips horribly across its span, rendering stretches almost unlistenable in their noisiness… not in the noise rock sense, where the wailing walls of distortion and feedback snarl together into formidable tidal motions. Those moments spot this record too, but the noise Fridmann adds comes from maxed-out waveforms absolutely crushing not just the guitars that generate it but also all sonic nuance underneath. It's an issue that doesn't resolve itself with good headphones or sound systems either (the same stretches tested on my high-end stereo versus earbuds produced the same artificially noisy unlistenable periods). This is, mind you, something from the producer and not the band. We know this because the precise issue plagued tracks on Purple (the only negative of that album too) while being noticeably absent from live performances of said tracks which then adopt a good bit more air and warmth to them. This is frustrating not only because of how it mangles and potentially ruins this record for some, but also because Fridmann has an undeniably great resume behind him, having worked with groups like Flaming Lips, Tame Impala, and even the recent quite-good MGMT album over the course of his career, not to mention The Great Destroyer, Low's greatest achievement. It's easy to see why Baroness would want to work with him, but it seems like a group this heavy is just a bit out of his command, especially compared to the superlative work John Congleton did on Blue Record and Yellow & Green; hell, for all its faults of often uneventful songs, Yellow & Green sounded absolutely beautiful, making the change-up make little sense in that respect. Overall, the issues of intense clipping don't necessarily ruin Gold & Grey, but they do place a noticeable barrier between the absolutely great songs and immediate rich satisfaction. Without those issues, Gold & Grey would undoubtedly be the greatest record of the group's discography. It is a development in all senses not just on Purple's approach to more immediate heavy progressive rock but also on their mastery of the album as a cohesive statement within rock music. The issues of the mix, however, are substantial, and that combined with the length and subtlety of the album produce a much more challenging listen than fans of the group will have faced before. For some, I would venture, it will prove too much, and we will hear much about the faultiness of this record as overlong and mangled in a manner not unlike the infamous Death Magnetic. However, this feels overly damning; the issues of clipping diminish in the affect the more you listen, thankfully only reaching its apex when all four band members are really roaring, which on an album spotted with so many subtler songs and moments is less often than you might think. Eventually, the ear becomes better at parsing structure and substance through the noise, and the problem lessens as a result. These issues, however, will not sink the record ultimately. Gold & Grey is destined to cinch itself up against all of the other records of the band's esteemed career as yet another reason why the group has become a seminal one: one that already is among the all-time greats and seems destined to be a permanent fixture on any decent list of quality rock, metal, or prog bands. Further, it will undoubtedly (rightly) appear in many year-end and decade-end lists, likely edging out its own sibling Purple for Baroness's representation on such lists. Cherish it. Music this good doesn't come around every day....
https://youtu.be/DF8qC-Xlay8...
Gold & Grey released last Friday via Abraxan Hymns....
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Upcoming Metal Releases: 6/16/19 — 6/22/19
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Here are the new (and recent) metal releases for the week of June 16th to June 22nd, 2019. Release reflect proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see most of these albums on shelves or distros on Fridays. See something we missed or have any thoughts? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging. Send us your promos (streaming links preferred) to: [email protected]. Do not send us promo material via social media....
Surprise Releases and Things We Missed
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Worsen -- Cursed to Witness Life | The Hell Command | Black Metal | United States (North Carolina) Excellent "atmospheric" black metal, even though that particular tag seems to be redundant despite its common usage. Cursed to Witness Life doesn't fall for the usual trappings, either: this isn't the riffiest black metal out there, but Worsen know how to tear it up anyway with excellent layering and dynamics and, where needed, sheer speed. If this album had an aura (that is to say, if anything had an aura), it'd be twisted, dark, and visceral for sure....
Lunar Shadow -- The Smokeless Fires | Cruz del Sur | Progressive Heavy Metal | Germany Whatever classic heavy metal is nowadays, it's probably not as gleefully wild and blisteringly hot as The Smokeless Fire -- wrapped up in progressive dressings but thoroughly grounded in a heavy metal ethos, Lunar Shadow have penned an easily digestible but thoroughly enjoyable sophomore full-length here. The clean vocals help beautify the otherwise rock-your-heart-out mood of this album, and the softer interludes (including piano) help keep the package well-rounded....
Skelator -- Cyber Metal | Gates of Hell Records | Heavy Metal | United States (Washington) I only have one thing to say about this album: fuck yeah, motherfuckers....
Upcoming Releases
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Murk Rider -- Exile of Shadows | Black Metal | United States (California) This three-track debut full-length from California-based Murk Rider is a big one: big songs, big riffs, big moments. When bands aim for "epic" proportions, sometimes things can become overblown or overwrought, but not here: despite the length of these tracks and complexity of their depths, Exile of Shadows balances itself between blissful blasts and acutely sharp guitar riffing. Over an hour's worth of esoteric, hard-hitting black metal from our West Coast is something never uninvited. [We could not locate any early song streams from Exile of Shadows.]...
Abyssal -- A Beacon in the Husk | Profound Lore | Blackened Death Metal | United Kingdom One of the year’s most terrifying releases thus far, Abyssal’s A Beacon in the Husk is a gargantuan serving of depressive, nihilistic death noise (that being a combo of death metal and harsh noise). Clocking in at well over 60 minutes, the fourth full-length from this UK outfit stays extremely true to their name: a yawning, cavernous, and often blackened void of swarming noise and aural chaos, A Beacon in the Husk is also surprisingly meticulous, with a technical edge that gives it just enough definition to not drown the listener entirely.-- Thomas Hinds
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Organectomy -- Existential Disconnect | Unique Leader | Brutal Death Metal | New Zealand I'll put it this way: Existential Disconnect is the exception, not the rule, for brutal death metal. You get the demented pig-like vocals, slams, and deathcore adjacency, but without the over-distortion or formlessness this arena sometimes breeds. Unique Leader continues to have a great ear for bands like Organectomy who take artistry to the maximum under the sometimes Very Straightforwardness of certain death metal subgenres. Then again, if you don't like brutal death metal, this still won't be up your alley....
Bull of Apis Bull of Bronze -- Offerings of Flesh and Gold | A Moment of Clarity Recordings + Tridroid Records | Black Metal | United States (Colorado) Sublime, anti-fascist black metal from the beautiful state of Colorado. As their Bandcamp states: "[Bull of Apis Bull of Broze] are for the downtrodden and disenfranchised." Hell yes, and hell yes to this black metal not a) swimming in its own politics, and b) sacrificing the music for message. These three monstrous tracks rip and roar across devastatingly thick atmospherics and plenty of dramatic ascents/descents… and, well, I won't spoil too much, because we'll be back later this week with a full stream prior to the album's official release date....
Supersition -- The Anatomy of Unholy Transformation | 20 Buck Spin | Death Metal | United States (New Mexico) Are you feeling very superstitious? Have you been seeing writing on your wall? Then look no further than Santa Fe’s most promising new death metal outfit Superstition. With their venomous yet somehow fun and upbeat interpretation of old-school blackened death metal, the group’s lurking, arcane energy has now culminated on their debut full-length release, The Anatomy of Unholy Transformation. Comprised of nine tracks of churning instrumentals grime-soaked vocals and defined by a dungeon-crawling monochrome aesthetic, it will undoubtedly cement Superstition’s repute as a band to watch in the coming years.-- Thomas Hinds
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Flesh of the Stars -- Mercy | Doom Metal | United States (Illinois) Big, beautiful doom metal from Chicago. Riff-forward, patient, and laden with clean vocals and mild(er) distortion, Flesh of the Stars juxtapositionally finds itself fitting for things like highway drives and group listens, despite being so somber and impassioned (like doom metal should be). There's a level of mercy on Mercy, actually, which renders listens very emotional but also very comforting and soothing, especially as the vocal layering builds up to grand climaxes....
Itheist -- Itheist | Black Metal | United Kingdom A newer acolyte in the temple of experimental, atmospheric death metal a la Gorguts, Ulcerate, or Deathspell Omega, UK-based outfit Itheist is a relatively young group creating relatively ancient material. After a handful of releases under their old moniker Aetherium Mors, the duo of multi-instrumentalist Dan Couch and vocalist/lyricist Kane Nelson switched their name and began work on their self-titled full-length album Itheist. As stated by Couch, the philosophical themes of the record “focus on forging one’s own reality through the Satanic virtue of discipline and creating an environment that cultivates the causal advancement of personal greatness and power.” With a decidedly chaotic and claustrophobic ambience, Itheist enters into a harrowing yet meditative space reserved for only the most esoterically-minded groups. In keeping with the lyrical concepts, the album itself is dramatically powerful, with songs that are rampantly dynamic, often electrifying, frequently disorienting, and almost always fearsome.-- Thomas Hinds
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Immortal Bird Tears Earth Apart on “Avolition”
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There’s a certain kind of meandering anguish that arises from residing in that nefarious region of America that is the rust belt. And with Chicago standing proud as the industrialized, deeply corrupt capital of that region’s hatred and malaise, it comes as no surprise that some of America’s most extreme and eclectically pissed-off metal outfits hails from the Windy City. With their seething combination of death metal, grind, hardcore, and even blackened elements, Chicago’s Immortal Bird have staked out a formidable reputation for themselves in their own local scene, and are now beginning to grow the undeniably potent violence of their sound. Recently listed in Kerrang’s hotlist of the 50 most important metal bands of the last decade, the group’s rise to success has turned meteoric. Thus, it is with bated breath that fans and extreme metal enthusiasts from all walks of life await Immortal Bird’s upcoming second full-length, Thrive on Neglect, due out July 5th on 20 Buck Spin. In anticipation of the record’s quickly approaching release, the group has now unveiled a punishing third single “Avolition," streaming below....
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A tour-de-force demonstration of the feral rage of which the group is readily capable, the track explodes into violent action with a dissonant blackened staccato riff and thundering blast beats before vocalist Rae Amitay’s derelict vocals descend upon the grime and chaos of the group’s sonic misanthropy. The album’s longest and most sprawling track, “Avolition” progresses with a forlorn yet majestic pace, seemingly leaning more heavily toward black metal before introducing a decidedly death metal passage just before its halfway point. In its final moments, the song takes on an almost melodic demeanor with melancholic treble guitar leads melting into an airy clean outro, leaving the listener bewildered after running a true aural gambit. In Immortal Bird’s characteristic fashion, the track infuses the group’s blackened death metal compositional style with the jarring instrumental tone and hyper-irreverant attitude of hardcore, representing the punk-oriented perspective that lies at the core of the band's identity. Capturing the more personal, introspective pain of black metal and perfectly combining it with the primal rage of their deathgrind roots, they have transmogrified seemingly oblique styles into a consummate and idiosyncratic mix for the modern dissident. Carefully electing to keep their compositions more organic than mechanical, they effortlessly maintain a human element within markedly inhuman music. Bearing a unique brand of angst, “Avolition" and Thrive on Neglect as a whole are a perfect synthesis of the group’s immediately distinct attitude, aesthetic, and message, and furthers their already bewitching sound to even greater heights....
Thrive on Neglect releases July 5th via 20 Buck Spin...
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