Cryptopsy‘s Lord Worm’s death-ish, very slightly symphonic industrial black metal band: Anaal Nathrakh covering Marduk with Regan McNeil occasionally guest-singing.
Ridiculously ferocious, foaming-at-the-mouth psychotically manically furious, and, if you’re reading this site, Great: and This Much More So Than One Would Think.
Exemplary Numbers: “Violence is Golden,” and “Hunt with Murderworms, sculpt with Flies,” the latter of which also wins 2012 Title of the Year.
Seriously, what does the fucking band name mean? That’s just weird.
Also, I love bands that fall confusingly perfectly between genres: if I had to try and nail down RG’s genre, it would be Thrashing Deathgrinders, or Deathly Thrashgrinders, or Grinding Deaththrashers….
This is a fun record (if you like grindcore/ death metal/ thrash metal, I mean); there’s a certain irreverent bounce to the whole thing, like many grind acts have, and which somehow reminds me of the late 80s band Scatterbrain– remember them? Like much grindcore, there’s an obvious debt, to the ethos if nothing else, of punk.
Further, there’s blistering riffs/ tempos, sections-generally-virtually-impossible-to-play-as-an-ensemble (à la death metal), and change-on-a-particularly-tiny-dime arrangments (like thrash) to further obscure genre and influences.
You know, sometimes I fucking love the internet age: it has birthed, in records like this, extreme metal that is otherwise virtually unclassifiable… one of the perks of the future….
Anyway, give it a listen and see what you think.
It was time for a change. We recently moved past 400 posts, we finally got our boobs and pubic hair, we were declared a Man at our Bar Mitzvah, we passed the rites of the Ugandan Shaman and were made to commune with the Earth Spirits beyond the Sacred Smoke….
It was time.
Time for a zeitgeber, time for an indicator, a delineator, nay, a delineanator of flux…!
And so,
You see before you,
The newest incarnation…
of Sawtoothwave.com.
And… SCENE.
Anyhoo, I dig it. I find it airy, yet clean… clear, yet mysterious… streamlined– yet flashy.
And so, to celebrate, here, in nano-review form (i.e., a few sentences, so you can scan them quickly and get what you want from them, like the little whoring eye candy that they are), are all the latest things I’ve been blasting and/or listening to patiently in a quiet room with a glass of sherry.
Also a smoking jacket.
Here, for the first time on this site, are not one…
not ten…
not twenty…
not even twenty-one….
…but twenty-five— reviews for you, the lover of the metal and/or the jazz.
There are three categories, listed in order of slightly decreasing awesomeness, as perhaps you will notice. Please… do enjoy.
Pig Destroyer, Book Burner: Their …And Justice For All. No low end, weirdly boxy production that somehow contributes to the overall pure dexterity and fury of this band. This and Monolith of Inhumanity fucking tower over ever other grind/ death grind release this year. Prolly in my top 3 of the year.
Anaal Nathrakh, Vanitas: No appreciable evolution over their previous Passion… but this English black/industrial outfit still show you how pure, literal, psychotic rage sounds. Top 10 of the year.
Christian Scott, Christian aTunde Adjuah: Miraculously, a spin on Miles Davis’ hollow, beseeching sound without kowtowing to him. A somehow New Orleans-warm yet icy-terrified trumpet bleat over doomy lyric song titles. Highlights: “New New Orleans (King Adjuah Stomp),” “Who They Wish I Was,” and “Kiel.” To me the best new jazz album of 2012.
Ramesses, Possessed by the Rise of Magik: From former members of Electric Wizard who found Dopethrone too pussy– disgusting, gritty blackened doom riffs if they were played in a garage and/or torture chamber. Production value zero, and somehow perfect.
The Sword, Apocryphon: The detuned perfect heaviness of Age of Winters, but with a tiny splash of that Texas blues that was probably too obvious on Warp Riders. They can do better, but still pretty great. Top 10 of the year.
mind over four, The Goddess/ Halfway Down: Two-decade-old alterna-progressive-metal that is still disgustingly/ criminally underrated. Either album should be in your top 50 of all time.
Law & Order, Guilty of Innocence: Cock rock with a southern flair (from LA) from the late 80s that still is awesome and not embarrassing in any way. One of the only bands to make me wish I was playing in a rock, not metal, band. Not a bad song on this one. Classic– top 50 of all time.
Dragged Into Sunlight, Widowmaker: Amazingly, these utterly-decrepit sludgy, stonery black metal anonymous weirdos evolved on this record, noticeably so from their previous release, Hatred For Mankind. Neurosis if they were Satanic black metallers.
Saint Vitus, Lillie: F-65: Meh at first, eventually moving up to thrilled and loving it. The new version of the American blues, lapsteel-playing, deal-with-devil-making howls of despair. Top 10 of the year.
Nachtmystium, Silencing Machine: Perfect stoned black metal. The Cure or The Church if they loved Darkthrone.
Chet Baker Quartet, Jazz in Paris, Vol. 53: Chet Baker Quartet Plays Standards: Baker gets some shit from critics, like the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff, for not giving a shit about evolving as an artist– and truth be told, he never really did. But he’s the only soloist, to this day, who loses energy and slowly dies as he solos, rather than building up to a crescendo. Easily my favorite trumpet player of all time, over Miles Davis and Christian Scott. Makes me wanna take up trumpet, to this day. Buddy Bolden reincarnated as a white junkie matinee idol.
Menace Ruine, Alight in Ashes: Black metal so weird it practically becomes spectral classical music. I dare you to listen to this on acid.
Incantation, Vanquish in Vengeance: Like Asphyx, generic but truly great (American) Brutal Death Metal. You know if this is for you or not.
Havok, Point of No Return: “Re-thrash” as powerful and energetic (though generic) as it gets. There’s two covers on this EP, “Raining Blood,” and Sepultura’s “Arise.” They should not have included them. Havok’s originals are great, but not that great, and they’re just asking for unfavorable comparisons.
Down, Down IV, Pt. I– The Purple EP: Down is never as good as they should be, as you think they’ll be. “Bury Me in Smoke,” “There’s Something on My Side,” and “On March the Saints,” are truly great stoner metal tunes, as are Purple’s “The Curse,” and “This Work is Timeless.” But from these guys? There should be more immortality.
Witchsorrow, God Curse Us: Title track, with the refrain of “God curse us, every one…” a cheeky Dickensian nod, or seriously-depressed Shawn-Spencerian perveyoring of dispairitude? Ha! Anyway: doom-worshipping, Hellhammer-loving greatness. Sounds like modern mixing/mastering, but also sounds like a NWOBHM album, where the band was rushing, in 1982, in the studio to record their ideas, when they were sucked into a time vortex and got their asses wormholed into a 2012 studio….
Bedemon, Symphony of Shadows: The other half of Pentagram– Interestingly, sounds like Witchsorrow, but was actually recorded nearly two decades ago. Astoundingly prophetic. Could’ve been recorded yesterday.
Bison BC, Lovelessness: Vaguely NWOBHM-ish sludge that loves to eventually gallop and whorl, to take off from its slower stoner metal tropes… not better than Dark Ages, but just as good.
Neurosis, Honor Found in Decay: “We All Rage in Gold,” opens with third/fourth dyads, played as clean/ crystalline as humanly, as Scott Kelly-ishly as possible; at around 1:00 we gets the GEE-tars… sounding a bit Sisters of Mercy-ish, if we’re being truthful… at @ 1:35 there’s a human throat sounding off over the crystal… 3:28, and there’s a lonely bass and a Hammond-ish synth effect…. “At the Well” begins with the dying emanations of a suicidal homeless man, or something to that effect… at 4:20 a bitter and romantically-mournful sitar riff (are they called riffs?) that seems perfectly appropriate and perfect… at around 7:00 we get a combination of meditation music/ Zen sounds and heavy fucking metal, as the entire album continues this now very familiar Neurosis blueprint….
Nails, Obscene Humanity: A 3-song ep to tide you over until their new one. Pretty much just like Unsilent Death, for better or worse. Ripping hardcore punks worshiping Entombed….
Weapon, Embers and Revelations: The thrash metal band that wants to be as mysterious and eeeeevil as black metal bands.
Acid Witch, Witchtanic Hellucinations: Rob Zombie as a sludge-metal act.
Dysrhymia, Test of Submission: Instrumental sludge/ prog that will fuck your stoned ass up. Pelican on benzedrine.
Norska, Norska: Other members of Yob, dooming your ass beyond recognition.
Indesinence, Vessels of Light and Decay: Death metal that never goes fast, only threatens to, and so ends up sounding most like extreme doom….
So! There you are:
a full quarter of a hundred albums to check out.
Don’t say I don’t love you.
Y’all come back now… hear?
I won’t bother to do a track-by-track here; I’ll just hit on the great tracks and why I consider them so. Sound good? Sure it does. You’ve got shit to do.
Overall, Endless Procession of Souls is on par with Asphyx’ Deathhammer— a great, slightly-modernized version of old-school/ brutal European death metal, with wildly detuned riffs and gutteral death growls not particularly-heavily modified electronically… no blast beats, but fast as fuck for the most part, with completely-unintelligible yet ironically-literate lyrics….
“Amongst Marble and the Dead” has a great sludge/doom riff between its galloping sections (and you notice the production is particularly nice: dirty/ ugly, yet each part is surprisingly distinct and clear… you’d think those two states would be mutually-exclusive, and yet this is apparently not so)…. “Flesh Epistle” swirls, back and forth, to and fro, hither and yon, like Discharge covering Swedish DM… “Passion of the Weak,” besides having a great title, flies hard and ugly out of the gate with a great riff and tempo… “Winds of Chains” (wouldn’t it be cool if this were a perverse cover of the Scorpion’s tune?) also starts with a great doom-ish riff and chugging drums (does anyone in Grave have a side project in doom/stoner/sludge?) and at 3:20 falls back into another great riff (reminds me of Ramesses for some reason)… and finally, “Perimortem” lashes forward like the second half of Slayer’s “Postmortem” (ironically or intentionally? I couldn’t say)….
It’s worth checking out. Investigate. See what you think. They put some serious work into this one.
So here’s my thesis:
Death/grind is the new thrash metal, updated from around 1985, to now:
it’s sophisticated in terms of musical structure, rapid key changes, and challenging melodic (riff) formations– it’s hard to play, yet blisteringly furious (i.e., aggressive and fast)… a great balance of savagery and technical ability: witness Danny Lilker’s definition: technical and yet intense….
So, I got the advance copy and promptly burned into onto a blank CD and played it at jet-engine volume on my Tank-like If Outdated Speakers ©… because I know one thing, and I know it well:
Death/Grind, as a genre, is useless played at anything less than loudest-sound-possible (194 Db) volume: that’s where it’s made to be.
Like extreme forms of free jazz, this music is meant to permeate you, to absolutely be your everything for the time you’re listening to it– or to be nothing.
This is the complete opposite of background music.
BUT: give it the chance, and this will OWN you. It’s perfectly, ridiculously extreme in that Death/Grind way, but is also full of surprises and tiny evolutions and tempo, key and texture changes enough to keep your cerebellum interested, while your reptile brain writhes in ectothermic ecstasy….
There’s sweep-picked solos, blast beats, breakdown (all while being respectably detuned), blah blah blah— you like extreme metal?
Monolith of Humanity is worth your while.
Deathhammer is prototypical “brutal” death/ doom metal: i.e., grunted/rasped vocals over wildly-detuned-yet-fairly-simple riffs– It’s more primal, simpler, than Martin van Drunen’s other extant outfit, Hail of Bullets…
There’s two types of songs herein: fast/deathy and slow/doomy. Thus follows the highlights of either category….
Slowish, doom-metally:
“We Doom You to Death,” is particularly memorable and a great riff in general, like a European Sleep tribute band… “As the Magma Mammoth Rises” is a 7-minute-ish lurching doom-metal-by-way-of-death-metal tune: they’re both great, and yet though somehow slow and low-tuned, somehow still reminiscent of Hail of Bullets without being an obvious ripoff the said act… more like Death (the band and the phenomenon) on Quaaludes….
Fastish:
“Deathammer,” “Reign of the Brute,” and “Vespa Crabro,” are all (tempo-wise) fast and (chronologically) brief: all under 3:00. All way-detuned and all furious and bombastic.
The best part of both types of tunes is probably van Drunen’s vocals: rather than sounding like he’s imitating harsh, angry vocals, he genuinely sounds like someone being tortured, and being enraged by it. Like a schizophrenic screaming on the streetcorner about God/ aliens/ CIA implants….
Truly metal, in other words.
Acephalix’ last full-length was my no. 7 album of last year, so I was excited to hear this one.
It’s very similar to Black Breath’s newest, in that there’s a marriage of Entombed to New York City Hardcore– the difference here is that Acephalix are much closer to Entombed than the NYHC– they’re boldly detuned, and overall slower than BB.
“Tomb of Our Fathers” is the first standout, with its groovy, Asphyx-like riffing and completely unintelligible lyrics… “Raw Life” is a lurching, undead-Golem of a riff/song, and highlights one of the qualities of this record– it’s just as rawly-produced as its predecessor– you can hear absolutely every ambient sound during the recording, and (during the silences at least), it’s pretty fucking cool; it underscores the heavier riffs once they start back up, and “Raw Life” clearly shows this effect.
“Blood of Desire” roars out of the gate, blastbeats at first then D-beats, then, with a Zeus/ Odin-like bellow, hits what is arguably the most “memorable” of the tunes here….
Short version: they’re Entombed, got very fat and very pissed off– can’t move quickly at all, but weights 300 pounds (136 kilograms to my European brothers and sisters, 21 1/2 stone to my Irish homies) and would squash you without even thinking twice about it, though probably wheezing through the whole endeavor.
“In Arms of Nothing” intros with the same badass bass than Interminable Night started with….
Overall, there’s a very slight change (I hesitate to say “evolution”) from their previous record, and this consists in inching further down the death metal spectrum, ever-so-slightly away from the D-beat that characterized their previous record, Interminable Night. I can’t say it’s better or worse; just very slightly different.
To reuse a metaphor, it’s death metal Coca-Cola. It’s not new Coke, it’s not diet Coke, and it’s definitely not Cherry or Vanilla coke, what with their increased sweetness….
But how many Cokes have you drunk in your life so far? Hundreds to thousands, right? And they were all pretty good, yeah?
Deathless Master is your latest two-liter of D-beat-ish Death Metal.
If you love this very particular beverage, this is for you.
DRINK.
UP.
I actually did send away for the “uncensored” cassette cover of Tomb of the Mutilated, i.e., the undead cunnilingus, and had the first three CC cassettes.
I’m not gonna lie– for the most part I didn’t get them, or death metal in general, as I’ve written about before. Beyond Cryptopsy and Asphyx, death metal usually seems trite to me, like the sort of things that an adolescent would write about “the world” before they’d ever actually been in it. Ben Ratliff, the music critic for the New York Times, once said, regarding Cannibal Corpse, that they had a fascination with gore and zombies that “bordered on sweet.”
I’ve never been able to lose that comparison when listening to most modern death metal, particularly the “brutal” kind, versus “tech” death.
It really is sweet. Like your kid brother who collected monster figurines. Like Mark Petrie from Salem’s Lot (pre-vampire hunting) and his collection of Hammer horror figures.
There’s a manufactured horror here, one they think real horror comprises, rather than what it actually contains. Henry Rollins screams about real horror. The disillusionment of genuine black metal, screaming about a “loss of faith and the hysterical fear and sadness it contains,” (Ratliff again) sounds that horror. Even Bad Religion evoke a real freaking out in the face of modern life.
Most death metal, Torture included, is a parroting, an echo, of horror– one sounded from the safe suburban zones that have managed thusfar to successfully avoid genuine agonizing friction with the “real world,” as it were.
Is it bad?
No, not a bit. It’s well-written, groovy death metal, from guys who’ve been doing it for many years.
It’s just that it’s got to be experienced with the same mindset you use when you see a horror movie that’s well done.
You know it’s fake as hell (as opposed to a drama or even a documentary), but it still gets under your skin. It still rocks you, as it were.
“Demented Aggression” roars out of the gate with blast beats (and shows other bands who haven’t been around for decades that age doesn’t mean you have to mellow– this could’ve been recorded by 18-year-olds); “Scourge of Iron” and its initial open-chord chug stand out, as does the blistering “Encased in Concrete”….
“As Deep as the Knife Will Go,” and “Followed Home, Then Killed,” are comically personal to me: as a forensic psychologist for almost 15 years now (and this in 7 medium- or maximum-security prisons in 6 states), about half of these song titles are the MOs of the vast majority of my former clients– someone’s been reading John Douglas— or watching a shitton of Law & Order: SVU and taking copious notes.
Anyway, it’s Cannibal Corpse– it’s death metal at its best.
For what that’s worth.
[Torture comes out this Tuesday.]
The Vernon Club, just off the interstate in Louisville, Kentucky, is about the space of a really spacious apartment. It’s under a bowling alley. A double Jack Daniel’s costs $12 (£ 7.5). Not much compared to Boston or New York, but still….
(Maybe) interestingly, this whole endeavor became, at least while wading through the opening bands, a sort of amateur sociological study:
At a casual glance, band members and audience members tended to look like metal fans tend to look– i.e., homeless and probably suffering from at least several personality disorders: old black clothes, dreads, very long hair and beards, et cetera.
What might not be as obvious is how much money they spent to look this way– by my estimation, there were thousands of dollars’ worth of tats (full color sleeves, back tats, everything) and musical equipment ($2000 Hamer, Paul Reed Smith, Fender and Gibson guitars –and two or so of these per musician), not to mention the amps and electronics through which they played them.
It’s the John Cougar Mellancamp haircut issue: an hour on your hair, spent to look like you just got out of bed.
The dress code, too, was even more narrow than the first time I went to a metal concert– I was wearing, comically literally, the only white t-shirt and white shoes in the whole venue (and after noticing this after about an hour, I consciously scanned the place to see if I was being paranoid– nope).
And I am not giving up my Hanes v-necks. Fuck you.
Of all people, I would argue Billy Joel summarizes this phenomenon the most succinctly:
Ah, metal– 25 years after my first concert, still a fashion show. (Not that other genres aren’t.)
I drove two hours to see Goatwhore and have been standing this whole time because chairs are apparently not metal. Don’t get me wrong– I’m in good shape and I work out five days a week– but I’m essentially middle-aged and after five hours of just standing, watching bands, my goddamned feet hurt.
They still do, as I write this.
And so after five (fucking five!) local opening bands, one of whom I’ll write about later, New Orleans’ Satanic-blackened-death-thrash-metal outfit Goatwhore go on at 11:15 pm.
At this point there was so much smoke from the smoke/fog/haze machine my sinuses are still nearly completely blocked– but Goddamn…
it looked cool.
Black (ened) metal needs theatrics… it needs features that highlight and exaggerate the ceremonial aspects of the performance… just ask Watain and their blood-fests. They set the stage.
I would argue, anthropologically-speaking, that they play up an essential human need to connect to the Divine, and are accoutrements we find psychologically necessary to facilitate that process.
But that’s just me.
You know… it’s whatevs, as the kids say today. (So I hear.)
So with no curtain, Goatwhore walked onto the stage and started talking, via the PA, with the sound engineer: they were particularly (in my experience, anyway) specific and demanding about their “wedges” (i.e., stage sound monitors)– noticeably the specific combination of what they wanted to hear as they played: guitarist Sammy Duet, in a rather intimidating tone, I venture to say, needed snare and bass in his; singer Ben Falgoust wanted the vocals way down in the mix, but wanted the guitars way up; and bassist James Harvey, all six foot four of him, never said a word– he just kept gesturing up and down until he nodded approval with whatever he was hearing.
Once this was settled, Ben Falgoust looked at the other members of Goatwhore, a few seconds passed…
…and shit EXPLODED.
I mean, surprisingly so, considering the band members were discussing trivialities for about a full five minutes in front of the audience.
But once they started playing… they became– Something Else.
In all seriousness… irony aside: fucking… wow.
This is why you see bands in person.
Maybe the openers were there only to reinforce the star power, for lack of a better word, of Goatwhore.
The other bands were fine, very technically and musically competent– but there was always that seeming hesitation, that subverbal lack of confidence: and after five bands’ worth of this, you start to think maybe it’s just you.
And then Ben Falgoust starts singing, and his sheer stage presence is comically obvious compared to the previous five other bands.
Metal doesn’t use the term “star power” or “stage presence” that much (thank God), but here, it’s genuinely deserved– once Goatwhore started playing, it was obvious they had that certain something (particularly Falgoust): you wanted to watch him; you wanted to hear whatever he had to say, you wanted to do what he told you to do (generally involving screaming HEY and fist pumping)–
it
was
fucking
COOL.
What’d they play, you might’ve asked, droolingly…?
Let’s see: “Collapse in Eternal Worth” and “When Steel and Bone Meet,” from the upcoming Blood For the Master; what I think was “Into a Darker Sun,” from The Eclipse of Ages into Black; “Alchemy of the Black Sun Cult” from A Haunting Curse; “Blood Guilt Eucharist,” from Funeral Dirge for the Rotting Sun; “The All-Destroying,” “Carving out the Eyes of God,” [see below] and “Provoking the Ritual of Death,” from Carving Out the Eyes of God.
Falgoust’s stage banter between numbers was funny and/ or hilarious: a bit about Blood For the Master being released on Valentine’s Day –“Maybe it’s a reference to your significant other’s time of the month,” got a lot of laughs; and when he asked if anyone had pre-ordered the upcoming album, one guy screamed something– after this Falgoust said, “Hey listen, I don’t care if you buy it, I don’t care if you steal it, I’m not here to accuse you, I just want you to rock the album… I got an idea: everyone [here], just borrow that guy’s copy, and in a couple of months, when we come back, everyone’ll be on the same page.”
AND they played the intro to Sab’s “Into the Void,” causing an embarrassing amount of THRILL on my part.
Finally, they closed with “Apocalyptic Havoc.” When they hit the line in the second chorus–
“Who needs a god, when you’ve got Satan?!”
Which EVERYONE, from the bouncers, to the kids up front, to the bartenders, knew–
it was practically liturgical– (perhaps ironically)… but the thrill was still there in screaming the line, with both hands making the HORNS.
All in all, there were about 100 people there at the end (about 25 of whom, no exaggeration, were in opening bands)– not bad for a cold Monday night with no other major bands playing.
I recorded about 30 seconds of “Carving Out the Eyes of God,” which you can see below (I would’ve recorded more, but I’m not a fucking documentarian– I came to rock out, baby).
What with a recent hype-up of their (as of this writing) upcoming album Blood For the Master, and my having tickets to see them play on Feb. 6, I revisited Goatwhore’s previous LP, Carving Out the Eyes of God, playing it on tank-like, if outdated speakers, at jet-engine volume.*
At its best, in other words.
“Apocalyptic Havoc” the lead single (see below) opens with all-out Venom/Celtic Frost 32nd notes, updated for this year (which actually is pretty good synopsis of the entire album), and contains the immortal line “Who needs a God, when you’ve got Satan?!”
“The All-Destroying,” next, is blastbeats then D-beats then flat-out downbeats and contines the tradition thusfar of grimly-satisfied-nodding-to-riffs, rather than out-and-out funky jams… and I love every time singer Ben Falgoust says “Ooooh!” à la Tom G. Warrior.
“Carving out the eyes of God,” has a cool, melodic blastbeaten chorus (and is pretty hummable), and on the right sterio/headphones, the triplet bass drum patterns are Alex Van Halen on “Hot For Teacher” cool.
“Shadow of a Living Knife,” in its middle section fires up a great triplet-bass-drum blast beat and segues into a sweet semi-sweep-picked solo… “Provoking the Ritual of Death” opens with tribal drums and sludge riffs before its blastbeaten percussion returns… “In Legions, I am Wars of Wrath,” with its refrain of LIES! is fucking Epic… “Reckoning of the Soul Made Godless” slows down and rocks out in 4/4, “Razor Flesh Devoured” is pure fury, blastbeat to D-beat to-blastbeat, ad infinitum, wherein it fades out (officially ending the album), although…
“To Mourn and Wander Forever Through Forgotten Doorways,” a bonus track, comes up next, ominous minor-chorded arpeggios leading to a spoken-word invocation, easily the moodiest track here, not unlike “Lucifer” from Behemoth’s Evangelion. I can see why it wasn’t on the official LP, but it probably should’ve been: it’s might’ve worked well in the middle of the released album, as a high-velocity-tempo breather….
The entire album is perfect “blackened death metal,” i.e., the guitars are detuned (i.e., bass-y as hell) and there are as many hyper-kinetic D-beats as there are blast beats, but the lyrics and imagery is occult/Satanic.
Overall, generic but completely invested in what they do:
8.5/10
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