I kind of hate when the video is just for the audio, but sometimes (this time being one of them) the songs are so worth hearing that it really doesn’t matter.
Earthless is based out of San Diego, creating grimy blues based riffs full of swagger. Each track relaxes into a groove before letting it rip, repeating that form and finding different ways to vary it within the structure. Alternately locking into a groove and then breaking off into a solo, backbeat holding steady, bass matching lead guitar in dexterous maneuvers. I think that if the solo in “Violence of the Red Sea” went on for another 10 minutes I probably wouldn’t mind. And speaking of that song, that bass line sounds about one note off from “Ironman,” but I’m definitely not complaining. Take it and run with it.
Each track is about 15 minutes, give or take, of crushing riffs. “Uluru Rock,” the second side of this 2xLP takes things a little slower, in minor key creepiness. For me, though, the titular track that closes the album is the highlight. Check it out above at the 34:52 mark.
The album is currently available on Tee Pee Records. Earthless is currently on tour in Europe, but North American tour dates in support of “From the Ages” are expected to be announced soon.
As if you couldn’t already tell, I’ve been angling toward the noisiest, most abrasive music that I can find. The more messed up the rhythms, the faster the songs, the more angular and distorted the guitar parts and the less intelligible the lyrics the better.
Bbigpigg is currently on tour through the beginning of November and is also offering a five song EP, “Phantom Photography,” for free at their site. There is also another free download at their main site here.
Similar in overall sound to THIGHS, Bbigpigg takes their energy over the top and keeps it there. Something comparable in texture to At The Drive-In where it’s impossible to discern where one guitar ends and another begins. Everything is just a cloud of interconnected squeals and accents pinned to the ground by a rumbling bass. “Bitch-Hogg” takes a completely frantic approach rhythmically, with air-raid guitars cutting across everything in its path. Everything is just heavy as hell, and worth more than a few listens.
Check their site for tour dates across New England and make sure to grab that download.
Toronto thrash punk is alive and well, apparently. THIGHS sound like Tangiers having a seizure. The disjointed, monomaniacal, throbbing rhythms with ultra crunchy guitars and shouted vocals is nothing but pure energy and raw power. A song like “Tunnelr” covers a lot of ground in it’s 2 minutes, going from stomping, mosh inducing potential energy to the release that comes toward the end in the form of a 3 against 2 rhythm that sounds down right groovy coming out of krautrock-land where they began.
Each of the 9 tracks are similar in their sound: dominating bass pushed almost to the point of distortion, the guitar’s tentative grasp on pitch. Think the rhythm section of “They Threw Us In A Trench and Put A Monument on Top” era Liars with the guitar-as-extension-of-the-drums noise blasts of “Drums Not Dead” era Liars.
It’s actually remarkable how quick THIGHS goes from noise to total silence. The start-stops are so crisp and punchy, placing the intermittent silence at equal footing to the noise-stomp that encloses it, for example in the track “Horse.” A song like “Meat” pushes the mechanical kraut-rock sound to an industrial grind, driving that one chord into your head one measure at a time.
The self-titled album is available as a download on bandcamp for any price you care to pay, though I would suggest grabbing the limited edition (only 100 made) vinyl from Not Unlike for only $15. This should be on your turntable right now, loud enough so that the walls blow out while people 2 miles away call the cops.
The thing about mechanical music, or minimalist music, is that after a while one starts to hear the groove that is buried within the music, despite it desperately wanting to hide that side of itself. Every aspect of music is on a spectrum, but that spectrum loops back around at the ends so that any parameter, if it gets extreme enough, starts to seem like exactly its inverse. Take Kraftwerk for example, that music is so stilted and stiff and mechanical to the greatest possible extent that it actually seems to swing. Or take the incredibly highly organized and structured music of integral serialism. It is so ordered and every parameter is so thoroughly thought out that the music actually goes beyond order and starts to sound like chaos. Boulez starts to sound like Cage.
Well, that was a long way of saying that Chicago Kraut/prog/psych rockers CAVE are back with their 3rd album, “Threace.” Every song, on their previous releases, is an exercise in singularity. The groove (or lack of groove that becomes grove) locks in and doesn’t let go. Every riff is distilled to a thumping, driving, powerful, robotic cycle. Stereolab on acid trying to play Black Sabbath: that’s CAVE. That pretty much says it all.
Check out the video for “Shikaakwa” below, and some of their other videos up on the Drag City page. Highly recommended for fans of, well, yes, Stereolab and Black Sabbath.
“Threace” is currently available on Drag City as a CD, LP, Cassette, mp3 or FLAC download. You can check out more tracks here and here. CAVE is currently on tour around the US.
Well, it might be too late for this now, but I sincerely hope that you heeded the warning at the beginning of the video, because they are not messing around. Oozing Wound wants to make sure that you are headbanging, even if that means it is the result of a seizure.
I’m placing this one right in between Slayer and Liturgy. More toward the Slayer side of things than anything else. For a few minutes at the beginning of the song I was wondering if it was going to be an instrumental or not. The band pummels that opening riff into the ground in a fit of metal hypnosis. It isn’t until about a minute-twenty in that the actual lead line/opening riff comes in, followed by the raspy, vocals that are clenched tight not very far behind.
Three full minutes of thrash metal insanity, going 900 mph straight toward a brick wall. Pretty intense. Pretty awesome. The ending motto is pretty classic too. Check it out above. If you aren’t awake now, you will be.
Chicago’s own Oozing Wound released their debut album, “Retrash,” last week on Thrill Jockey. Pick up a copy of the LP, pressed on virgin vinyl and packaged with a fully artworked inner sleeve and free download coupon; or the CD version in 4 panel mini-LP style gatefold package here. You can also hear a preview of each of the tracks at that link.
There is also a limited edition screen-printed LP version available at Permanent Records Chicago. Grab it while you can.
It’s about that time of year. Album releases are slowing to a trickle as the year draws to a close. I think that since I have been listening to so many new things this year, things that I haven’t had the opportunity to talk about yet that I will begin with my year end posts interspersed with all of the other things that I normally post about. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get through all of them, but I’ll try.
It took me until the release of “Halcyon Digest” in 2010 to really get into Deerhunter. I had made several unsuccessful attempts to really get into “Cryptograms,” but for some reason I just couldn’t. It made me feel out of place, because when that album came out everyone was going crazy for it. I needed to come at the band backward apparently, because after falling in love with “Halcyon Digest,” and now “Monomania,” I have finally gained an appreciation for “Cryptograms.” If nothing else Deerhunter’s latest has done at least that.
Somewhere along the line Deerhunter shed its ambient leanings (and a few band members) to become a powerful and moving rock band. Songs like “Leather Jacket II,” with distorted vocals and guitars that are constantly feeding back, being paired with “The Missing” show the range that the band has developed since their first releases. I don’t want to throw the word “folk” around, because that is really not fitting at all, but the style of Bradford Cox’s lyric and melody writing have allowed the band to sound a bit more vulnerable in general. Deerhunter is perfecting what it means to them to be a band that can release album after album of compact singles.
To me, the band is more effective and affecting in their quieter moments, but that isn’t to say that the title track isn’t one of the tracks that I automatically go to when I put this album on. And there are songs that fit nicely in between the extremes, such as the country twinge of “Pensacola.” That tracks rambling and bluesy vocal approach, “the girl that I loved, well, took another man” followed by a dejected “ohh” is followed immediately by the excitement contained in the line “well nothin’ ever ends up quite like how you planned!” These elements play an important role, the juxtaposition of elation and sadness. The sadness is kept in check through the nature of the tracks being upbeat major key (mostly) 3 to 4 minute pop tunes, but lyrically things may take a turn on occasion. For example on “Sleepwalking” the line “can’t you see, we’ve grown apart, we’ve grown apart?” is repeated or in “Back to the Middle” the lyric “You and me, you broke free. You broke free, and you left me these little pieces,” both obviously come from places of sadness, though that sadness is hidden behind the music.
To that end, maybe it isn’t as upbeat an album as it appears to be on the surface. Perhaps the album is about covering up true emotions, putting on a good face to go out and greet the world. If one was to look at things that way then perhaps this is actually the most tortured album of Deerhunter’s career.
Generally more upbeat in outward tone when compared to “Halcyon Digest,” the album, to its merit, doesn’t exemplify its title. The songs here are not simply variations on a theme, or expressing one color of the musical spectrum. There are differing shades at work that peak with the title track (that, yes, is an undeniably great song to depict the idea of monomania), allowing for the songs that lead up to it a lot of license to go exploring. The closing track allows Bradford Cox some time for reflection. “Punk (La Vie Antérieure),” makes peace with the past, perhaps allowing himself to accept the different phases in his life that have allowed him to get to the place where he is now. I think it’s more a cross between that and Cox still searching for his true self. Either way it is a song about growth and change, and coming to terms for better or worse.
I can’t help but think (and I’m probably fairly safe in this assumption) that Cox’s Atlas Sound project, and the process that he goes through to write and produce those songs, has been influencing the songs that are ending up on Deerhunter albums. A song like “T.H.M” or “Sleepwalking” only have the slightest hints of where the band came from, but nothing as driven and tuneful as these two tracks appears prior.
This album belongs on anyone’s year of, best of list. And a performance on Jimmy Fallon stands as another favorite from this year. Check out Deerhunter playing “Monomania” just prior to the May 7th release of the album below.
Going off of things that I have been thinking about a lot lately, which is to say things that I have been thinking about for a long time but only just started writing about: music should provide the listener with something to think about. Music should be different and it should take a contrastive perspective on things. It’s about development and moving forward, taking things that we thought were familiar and finding new ways to approach that familiar thing to make it less so.
The first time that I heard Ex-Easter Island Head my knee-jerk reaction was to compare the sounds to what Sonic Youth were doing thirty years ago. It came off as variations on a theme of “Lee Is Free,” but I was way off. There is a lot of experimenting with a new approach to the guitar, using it as essentially a strictly percussive instrument, but the focus, the more you listen to it, seems to become less about a non-idiomatic method of playing the guitar, and more about creating swelled drones and minimalist percussion patterns that just so happen to be a result of mallets against the body of a guitar.
This latest installment is the third multi-movement work from the Liverpool collective and a further exploration of their technique. The opening of the first movement allows for the resonant sound of the open tuned guitars to ring, pulsing in their tintinnabulations before harsher timbres are introduced. Multiple layers of smooth, high glissandi combine with lower grating of objects against the wound strings with some bells jangling as a further development of the opening sounds for added affect.
Most notably on this album is the extended use of silence, or at perhaps the extended use of ambiance would be a better way of putting it. Whereas on the earlier albums there seemed to be more of a concentration on the minimalist, cycling percussion patterns, this release is full of lush full sounds. The percussive hits, at least for the opening movement, are allowed to form, grow and decay with little intervention. The attacks are muted and sound more like the amplified ring of a bass drum surging underneath at intervals.
Without having anything to do with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Ex-Easter Island Head is able to capture elements of the less-controlled parts of Godspeed songs, at the end of the first movement, for example.
In the 2nd movement the minimalist percussive focus returns, though it does so with pauses, once again allowing the ambiance to breathe. Despite the sounds of mallets striking the guitars, they begin to sound as though they are completely separate entities where the ringing guitars – though you as the listener are aware that they are being struck – begin to sound as though they are a completely separately generated sound.
New sounds are added as the movements continue. Sounds coaxed from the guitars that resemble piano chords, high pings of tight struck strings, the ever present low rumble moaning below a slow countermelody against the highly active upper motion (another allusion to gamelan composition).
Overall the albums interesting and engaging mix of percussive effects and ambient sounds creates an arc where the fourth movement resembles the tone of the first, focusing more on tone and ambiance than the sharp percussive attacks of the middle movements. The last few minutes achieving the full-bodied and consonant calm resembling the opening movement of Glenn Branca’s 5th Symphony, in it’s satisfying cohesion of tones. In those middle movements, though the ambient drones are featured, the more prominent characteristic becomes the development of rhythm. It’s growth and decay, moving away and returning. It’s not a new concept, but done well it is very effective.
Ex-Easter Island Head’s “Mallet Guitars Threes” is available now on vinyl and as a digital download here.
I always thought that this album was a strange way, of sorts, to follow up something like “Confusion is Sex.” But I think where that album captured the live energy of the band, this one captures them in the studio conceiving of an actual “album” album.
The fact that all of the songs blend together the way that they do is no mistake, it was a way for the band to make smoother transitions between songs when they were performed live. This was all in a bid to do away with 5 minute tuning sessions in between songs, as they didn’t have an arsenal of guitars on hand at this point in their careers, so these transitions were created to allow Lee or Thurston a few seconds to tune for the next song. The result of this is an album that is linked, obviously, harmonically and melodically as well as in timbre and mood.
I know that it sounds cheesy or stupid or whatever to foist the extramusical jargon onto an album, but I’m going to do it anyway. This album has always felt like Autumn to me. Yes, of course the cover has a lot to do with it, but there is a coldness on this album that isn’t on their debut full-length. The songs are languid, they wander (not in a bad way, by any means), the band is not afraid to have some cleaner guitar sounds. You can definitely hear them moving towards the songs on “Evol” and “Sister” a lot, especially on a track like “I Love Her All The Time,” a song that starts off innocently enough with Thurston floating out the lyrics with some percussion and bass backdrop underneath minimal guitar sounds, strings bent and echoing off into the distance. It isn’t very long before they are off and running into a wall of noise and (I assume) drumstick-wedged-under-guitar-strings type maneuvers.
But the songs here are better shaped than the ones that appear on “Confusion is Sex.” Where they came up with one idea for each of those songs, this album finds them needing to come up with significantly more material and to find interesting ways to get into and out of those ideas. I think that this is maybe the most important album for Sonic Youth as a group of people developing a writing process. It finds a nice balance between free and fixed forms.
For me, I can’t remember when it was that I first heard this album, or where I was when I was listening to it. I think that that must mean that I came to it a bit later. I do remember, however, that upon hearing it I did not immediately get into it. I didn’t immediately “get” it. I was of the mind that “there’s nothing catchy on this one” (I’m hearing myself say that in a whiny voice. I’m sure that if I said that or though that that I would say or think it in a whiny voice). I wanted the action of “Inhuman” and the noise of “Confusion is Next.” Now that I’m (significantly) older I can truly appreciate how good this album actually is.
I think that one of the reasons that I found it difficult to get into this album initially is that I couldn’t figure out which songs were which. Because they all blended together I couldn’t figure out what part that I remembered came from what song. Obviously, that is all pretty meaningless to me now. Who cares where the songs begin and end? It’s best to listen to an album all the way through anyway.
The 2nd side of the album is broken up a little bit more and has some more experimental (that’s a relative term. So when saying that something that Sonic Youth is doing is “more experimental” is saying something). “Justice is Might” slowly comes together, pulling itself up and staggering into form, the lazy guitar and vocal pulled through time by Bob Bert’s solid, uptempo drumming. That one doesn’t hang around too long, and we still have some equally spacey tracks like “Echo Canyon” and “Satan is Boring.”
The star of the show, though, is “Death Valley ’69.” In my mind it’s their first “hit.” It’s really just a classic Sonic Youth song. Thurston and Lydia Lunch (who is from my hometown) lazily sing over top of each other while the band focuses their energy on maintaining a fantastic amount of tension for extended periods before all is lost in a scratchy howl from Lunch.
Fast-forwarding to now, 2013, I started thinking about what all of this meant from an analysis perspective, what with the linking of the songs and the guitar tunings as sort of symbolizing the modulations from track to track if we are to think of the first several songs as really parts of one larger song. I started doing some initial transcriptions of the opening, and taking a post-tonal approach to it just to see what is going on, if I can. What I am finding is that it isn’t as complex as it sounds, but it’s definitely weird. Weird is good. Weird gives me something to look into, a coil to unwind. The thing is is that I have so many things that I want to look at and that I have started or half-finished that I can’t take on any more extra projects. The sketches that I have down for this album though have all the notes that I need to pick up exactly where I left off whenever I am ready and able to pick it up again.
So, in short, this album went from being something that took me a long time to get into when I was (much) younger, to something that I still listen to today and realize that there is more to it than meets the ear. The next album, though, is when things really start to get good.
“My God! What has sound got to do with music!” – Charles Ives
If you have been reading this blog for the past couple months since I started it back up, you may have read the series of 3 posts that I did on the recent Merzbow album “Takahe Collage” (123). Those posts were a bit more analytical than they were philosophical in nature, but the two do tend to go hand in hand to a certain extent.
I’ve had some time to put together some more thoughts on the topic of music as abstraction, noise as music and how it relates to the thoughts and motivation of other artists of all types within that realm. I wrote this short paper for a presentation in a seminar on the history of 20th century music. I offer it below:
October 9, 2013
The main thing that I would like to discuss today, and I want to get a dialogue going on this, is the idea of what a group of musicians considers to be music and what they consider “noise.”
We’ve been looking at how the art world relates to the musical world, showing how the Rite of Spring’s choreography relates to cubism, and primitivism. We’ve talked about modernism and post-modernim, and I’d like to talk a little bit about abstract art, dadaism, music and noise.
First, I want to give you an idea of what I’m talking about with a painting by Jackson Pollack. We’ve probably all seen his paintings, and they have given way to many discussions of whether they are or are not art. Is something art just because the artist says it is? Or can anything be art? How about a painting or sculpture by a Dada artist that takes random materials found on the street and fastens them together with purposely no organization? Does that lack of organization become the organization? Or are we, like Taruskin says, finding organization where there isn’t any simply because we are looking for it? Is music music just because the composer says it is, or can any and all sound be music?
Jackson Pollack – “#3”
There are plenty of electronic sound collage pieces that are made from “found sound” that has been manipulated. Is that manipulation what takes something from just sound to actually being an artistic statement? And think back to the first time that you heard Schoenberg or Webern or John Cage, or put yourself in the shoes of someone that only listens to top 40 pop music hearing Webern’s Op. 20 for the first time. What do you think that person would have to say about that music? Would they say that it was just noise? Could noise be just a word that we use when we don’t understand something?
Both guitars, right? But what does the timbre of Julian Bream’s guitar have to do with that of The Telescopes? They are both the same instrument, but the sound of guitar as we know it is an abstraction of what a guitar “really” sounds like. The sound of the guitar, when used in rock music, is merely a symbol. It doesn’t sound anything like a guitar. Instead the sound that is produced stands in for the sound of the guitar. It essentially is a wall of distortion. But, we have learned to accept that particular sound over time as being “a guitar.” Imagine if you were to play that Telescopes song for Andres Segovia, or Beethoven, or Bach. They would have NO IDEA what that sound was. We recognize it as such because we can picture in our head where the sound is coming from. We understand where it is coming from and we accept it. We understand so well that we don’t even think about it anymore.
Do we consider the sound of a distorted guitar from rock music to be noise? Or just noisier than what a “guitar” “should” sound like? And what should anything sound like?
What if we got even more abstract? Now onto Merzbow.
“Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy-chair?” – Charles Ives
Merzbow is Japanese musician and writer Masami Akita. Since 1979 he’s released over 350 recordings, 6 so far this year. Included in that output is the amazing 50 CD Merzbox. This is the track “Tendeko” from the 2nd album he released this year, “Takahe Collage.”
Can we accept this as music? I would say that this is basically, to me, just another degree of abstraction. Merzbow is manipulating the sounds that he is generating, there are different timbres involved, different ideas that are brought in and then go out through the course of the piece. However, is this closer in timbre to “pure noise” for you?
And what exactly is a good definition of noise? Does it have to do with sound? There’s a book by Paul Hegarty called “Noise/Music: A History” that discusses “noise” in all of its contexts. Noise as basically any confrontation against our expectations. It could be in the form of a reaction to norms, or noise as antagonism such as with the band Throbbing Gristle, taunting and angering their audience purposely. Noise as anything added to the music or that distracts one from the music. But what happens when the noise is the music? And we still haven’t solved the problem of what is and is not considered music. If this “noise,” in whatever form that it may be coming in, is part of the performance (and is it really possible to get rid of all noise? Hello, John Cage) then is it really noise at all?
I think of it this way: John Cage’s music is the sound of philosophy. It gives us something that is challenging, it gives us something that questions what it is that we believe about something that we thought that we had such a firm grasp on. This music is something that gets us thinking and it is something that is provocative and it is daring and controversial, but it is also an outlet for something for someone that wants to create something.
Isn’t music itself an abstraction of our words and our voices? And, if so, noise music is still music in just the same way. I think that as we evolve we continually create further abstractions from where we started off, and eventually everyone catches up to that abstraction, and the definition of “noise” changes. Everything is a symbol for something else in music. Just think to the programmatic music of Strauss or Berlioz. Everything is symbol and everything is abstraction.
Jason Molina’s life ended tragically this past March after an extended battle with severe alcoholism. With him closed the door on the possibility of any future Songs: Ohia or Magnolia Electric Co. albums; the last thing that we heard from Molina was his collaboration with Will Johnson from 2009.
His legacy will certainly live on through his prolific output as a songwriter, most notably the final Songs: Ohia album (or the first Magolia Electric Co. release, depending on how you would like to think about it). That album was released 10 years ago, and now Secretly Canadian is giving it the recognition that it deserves with a special deluxe edition release.
To me, the album is masterful from top to bottom. His deeply affecting voice that trembles alternately with sadness and confidence, the entire album is like that in a way. There are lyrics that, depending on from which angle you consider them, are either inspirational or, especially in light of his recent passing, devastating. Take, for example, a lyric from the album opener “Farewell Transmission” in which Molina intones “the real truth about it is, no one gets it right. The real truth about it is we’re all supposed to try,” a line that is accompanied by a pedal steel, pouring all the sadness in the world into the line.
For the most part though, the songs can be heard as hopeful. Molina sings about wanting to make changes, and wanting to just hold on. They all teeter on that edge of hopeful and hopeless. “Almost Was Good Enough” begins with an admission, still referring to trying, always trying. “It’s been hard doin’ anything. The winter’s stuck around so long. I kept tryin’ anyhow, and I’m still tryin’ now, just to keep working. I remember when it didn’t used to be so hard, it used to be impossible. New season has to begin, I can feel it leanin’ in, whisperin…”
These themes of trying and still needing to try harder; the optimism of getting better, mixed with feelings of inadequacy; still not being good enough. The endless struggle and battle with this inner unrest….
“Almost no one makes it out. Almost no one makes it out.”
…and knowing the whole time how it is going to end. But he still holds on to that hope, at least through this album. Despite almost no one making it out he then states proudly “you’re talkin’ to one right now.” Again, a line equivocally interpreted as being one of those who gets out, or one of those who doesn’t. Sadly, any possible ambiguities have been wiped clear from this lyric. Sadder still is the sorrow placed out front on the closing track “Hold on Magnolia.” Molina’s voice soars as the band grows behind him, unable to drown out the complex mix of emotions being belted forth from his powerful baritone.
“Hold on Magnolia to that great highway moon
No one has to be that strong
But if you’re stubborn like me
I know what you’re trying to be
Hold on Magnolia, I hear that station bell ring
You might be holding the last light I see
Before the dark finally gets a hold of me
Hold on Magnolia, I know what a true friend you’ve been
In my life I have had my doubts
But tonight I think I’ve worked it out with all of them
Hold on Magnolia to the thunder and the rain
To the lightning that has just signed my name to the bottom line
Hold on Magnolia, I hear that lonesome whistle whine
Hold on Magnolia
I think its almost time”
This album, if you haven’t heard it, needs to be heard. It’s sad, and tragic and beautiful and powerful and everything that any album should be.
