A Darkness in the Light

The Dismemberment Plan - Change (2001)

2009-06-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

The Dismemberment Plan - Change

-------

there are times when you will not like the sound of my voice
there are days when a warm look from a strange face will make me forget my name
there'll be nights when you wonder where the party's at now
and you wonder why you never split this beat scene when a higher life awaits
there'll be days when you don't know how you picked the wrong life
in a second when it's over in our own minds -- and it's gone without a sound
there are fights that'll hear things that we know we don't mean
and we say 'em 'cos we don't know what we both want and we can't get to the other side

there are years that'll fly like wind across a flood plain

unaware of its own weight, free of friction, and immune to its own speed

there are weeks that'll crawl like slugs across a hot road

only moving 'cos it just don't know how to stop on a search for god knows what

and there are songs that'll make your skull ring like a dropped cup

resonating with the reasons why you worked through -- and the reasons why you stayed

for the long nights when you found a new resolve that i never knew was there

for the cold eye and the warm embrace now

for the righteous vibe that i need like the air i breathe

there are times when you'll think you've got my funny number figured out

there'll be days when I don't feel like i ever knew you all that well

and there are lines, drawn around, behind, above and over everyone

in an effort to figure out the place and time, the right, the wrong, the yours,

the mine, and i'll be damned if I feel like I will ever know anything

but if don't keep moving on that last hill,
we'll never know what's on the other side

-The Dismemberment Plan; The Other Side

-------

Not a lot that I need to say about this because it speaks for itself. Some of the most poignant lyrics from one of the best albums by one of the most inventive, interesting and downright awesome indie bands ever. Travis Morrison has a fantastic, very funny and heartfelt storyteller-esque lyrical style and delivers some absolute gems here. Get.

The Dismemberment Plan - Change

Mark Kozelek - Lost Verses Live (2009)

2009-06-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

fall tonight sweet paris rain

shower me in her warm kisses

Live albums are rarely something that I have the patience for. Usually, a band or musician is best represented on record, and live releases can become an indulgence on the part of the musician, a stopgap between studio albums or a tool to boost sales. In any case, they usually end up being relegated to the bargain bin. There are certain exceptions, of course, where a live album captures the essence of an artist perfectly and becomes essential listening for anyone with a passing interest in their music: think along the lines of Bob Dylan's 'Live 1966' Bootleg Series record or James Brown's 'Live at the Apollo'. Sure, comparisons to those two seem pretty lofty and hyperbolic, but Mark Kozelek's most recent solo outing, 'Lost Verses Live', could quite easily be deemed part of that minority in its own way.

Since discovering him roughly around the time that Sun Kil Moon's 'April' came out last year, Kozelek's work has grown on me to the extent that it now holds its own firm place somewhere in the list of music that I consider personal to me. Stripped down to his own sparse acoustic playing and gently soaring vocals, which resonate here perfectly while retaining a satisfying clarity of sound, the record captures the intense, soul-baring intimacy that lies at the heart of the songwriter's work and makes him so endearing. The tracklist reads like a well-put-together best-of collection of his work in Sun Kil Moon, comprising a large number of songs from their latest full-length 'April' but also a healthy number of songs on previous records, including two songs from his Modest Mouse cover record 'Tiny Cities', an excellent rendition of Stephen Sondheim's 'Send in the Clowns', and a very affecting reinterpretation of the achingly autobiographical Red House Painters classic 'Katy Song' that, through a new arrangement in his more recent fingerpicked acoustic style, lends the song a newfound warmth that makes it a more approachable prospect than the desolate Red House Painters studio version. As such, 'Lost Verses Live' is an excellent and cohesive introduction to Mark Kozelek's back catalogue for people unfamiliar with the man's previous work. Of course, there are flaws here - the track that the record names itself after lacks the drive that the original has, and the applause kicks in strangely abruptly at the end of certain songs - not to mention the omission of the career-defining 'Duk Koo Kim' - but the overall atmosphere of this record is so intoxicating that such complaints seem like minor quibbles.

Mark Kozelek

Something that I have always loved about Kozelek's music, particularly in Sun Kil Moon, is the beautifully warm, aching sense of nostalgia in his music. In terms of better-known artists to reference for newcomers to his style, one other act I could compare Kozelek's more recent work to, in terms of emotional content, is Beirut - aside from having a similar vocal style, both him and Zach Condon share the same affectionate longing for old flames and the same running lyrical fixation on travel and moving from place to place, and the personal significance of certain locations and people in their memories. 'April' in particular was a very intimate tribute to a departed loved one. Songs performed here like 'Moorestown', 'Tonight in Bilbao' and 'Blue Orchids' are great examples of this and are given absolutely beautiful renditions here. For lack of a better word, there's something very mature about his music in Sun Kil Moon which I love: every memory and every image is portrayed beautifully, with a longing fondness for these pasts of his and a warm, understated love for life that contrasts greatly to his more emotionally fraught work in Red House Painters. If you give them the required time and patience, 'April' and 'Ghosts of the Great Highway' are records that can reveal enormous amounts of depth and beauty, and I guess that someday, I'd like to be able to write music that's as warm, intimate and endearing as this.

soft light pours into the room
fingers glide over my face
a voice speaks, a figure moves
how could i walk these old dim halls again
how could i leave this room all alone

when she comes by every morning
brings back pink and pale blue orchids
when she comes by every afternoon
piano music weeps quietly
as may melts into june
when she comes by every evening
lays down beside me softly breathing

-Mark Kozelek; 'Blue Orchids'

Mark Kozelek - Lost Verses Live

Portraits of Past - 01010101 (1995)

2009-06-25T08:36:00.000-07:00

Portraits of Past - 01010101

Portraits of Past were a Bay Area emo band active between the years 1993 and 1995, recently having also played a series of reunion shows across the United States. Most people familiar with the band's name know them for the bands that their members went on to form - the seminal screamo group Funeral Diner and the more recently formed ...Who Called So Loud who have been gaining quite a bit of momentum in the hardcore scene in the past couple of years. Portraits of Past are arguably not just a great band in their own right, but perhaps even more important than those two in terms of influence and just how ahead of their time they were. Both the aforementioned bands that their members were involved in are not known for being particularly chirpy, so it comes as little surprise that Portraits of Past dealt in very dark, brooding, lengthy and bludgeoningly intense pieces, essentially laying down the blueprint for every "screamo" band to come in a time when the term hadn't even been coined.

Portraits of Past

01010101 is heavy stuff. The bass rumbles like huge looming storm clouds rolling in over the horizon, the singer and drummer sound possessed, and, when they reach full force, the guitar riffs sound like they could cause fissures in the ground. One of the things this band excels at is being able to maintain an intoxicatingly dark atmosphere and sense of melody throughout their music despite alternating between chaotic frenzies and drawn-out dirges and having an impressive dynamic range (sometimes even sounding, god forbid, pretty.) Perhaps due to the fact that their music sounds startlingly different to their peers at the time and yet far rougher and rawer than anything the bands that followed them created, this feels like a refreshingly unique record. Despite the intensely depressing downward-spiralling quality of the music, which can affect replay value a bit, this is definitely one of the most killer emotional hardcore records to come out of the 90s.

Portraits of Past - 01010101

Flying Lotus & Declaime - Whole Wide World (2009)

2009-06-14T03:13:00.000-07:00

Flying Lotus & Declaime - Whole Wide World

Steve Ellison is my favourite electronica or hip-hop producer and his latest release does nothing to make me want to retract that statement. Far from it, Flying Lotus' latest release, a 12" collaboration with hip-hop MC Declaime, sees the producer moving in a direction that I had been hoping he would explore for a while, and the resulting recordings deliver. FlyLo's last full length release Los Angeles and its accompanying EPs occupied sonic territories that sat very comfortably on his new label Warp, fusing the sense of experimentation of the pioneering electronic acts on its roster with his appreciation for hip-hop and jazz. The result was a great but uneven effort, producing some incredibly strong moments but also some weaker forays that didn't measure up next to the likes of "Breathe. Something / Stellar Star" and "Auntie's Lock/Infinitum". Flying Lotus' music has always felt most satisfying when he channels his sound into a more obviously hip-hop context, and it seems that this year he's been dabbling more and more in proper hip-hop production: that is to say, lending his beats to rappers, be it donating a beat to Finale's latest record as a tribute to the late J dilla or getting Blu to rap over the Los Angeles cut 'GNG BNG'. This 12" represents his first real collaboration record with an MC. Essentially, Whole Wide World consists of two cuts which Declaime rhymes over, two instrumental versions of those tracks, and another new instrumental in the form of the excellent 'Keep it Moving'.

Declaime

The title track is the real hit here. FlyLo drops a hazy beat with vocal and piano samples that evoke some scratchy old jazz record being spun in outer space, Pattie Blingh's vocal contribution providing a nice touch as the song reaches its midpoint. The bassy, guitar-laden boom-clap of 'Lit Up' meanwhile is clearly indebted to J Dilla's livelier efforts. While lyrically Declaime isn't much to write home about, his rhyming is competent and his flow has a nice balance of aggression and laid-back attitude that anchors both the songs here very well. 'Keep it Moving' is classic Flying Lotus, its relaxed, jazz-infused groove hearkening back to his early works on 1983. What this release proves more than anything is that if and when Ellison decides to produce a full-length rap record, it's going to be something very special. Let's keep our fingers crossed that we won't be kept waiting.

Flying Lotus & Declaime - Whole Wide World

"This Is Bob Dylan To Me"

2009-06-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

Just a quick one here - I've been digging Minutemen's landmark record Double Nickels on the Dime lately, and the song below, 'History Lesson - Part II', is not only one of the album's very best tracks (out of 43 contenders) but also one of the most awesome two-minute songs ever written.

our band could be your life
real names'd be proof
me and mike watt played for years
punk rock changed our lives

we learned punk rock in hollywood
drove up from pedro
we were fucking corndogs
we'd go drink and pogo

mr. narrator
this is bob dylan to me
my story could be his songs
i'm his soldier child

our band is scientist rock
but i was e. bloom and richard hell,
joe strummer, and john doe
me and mike watt, playing guitar.

My friends have a record out!

2009-05-15T04:47:00.000-07:00

Just as a preface, I never post a record if I don't think it's killer regardless of who made it. This blog has always been and always will be reserved for the purpose of presenting people with records that I believe have a lot of value musically and emotionally. Posts will never, ever be intended to massage someone's ego. As such, it's testament to the quality of a friend's work if it finds its way onto this blog.

All the Empires of the World - Last Rites EP

All the Empires of the World is a three-man project based in Nottingham. Last Rites is the latest release of theirs and their first 'official' release through a label. It's always easiest to define a band like this by the heavier parts of their sound, but Last Rites has as much light in its sound as dark. It is not a "post-metal" record. There is way more going on here than Isis/Neurosis/Pelican [delete as appropriate] worship - as much attention is given to the properties of each sound and how it resonates as is given to the riffs themselves. These explorations of ambience give the record a cavernous sense of space that makes it sound freaking huge. 'Prophecy at the Ruins', as the title suggests, sets an apocalyptic tone, starting with the slow pounding of a bass drum that is met by long peals of rumbling guitar that sound like a call to prayer from deep within some enormous temple. Instead of the release of tension that we'd expect, the rumbling gives way to a sequence of subdued fingerpicked chords that make the eventual release of tension even more worthwhile. These quieter passages on Last Rites have a considered, dreamy quality to them that reminds me a lot of the calmer moments of maudlin of the Well's music. After the long build of 'Prophecy at the Ruins', the music finally erupts in 'Simon Helen Elizabeth (The Gate)' with the kind of music that Pelican should be writing these days - proudly triumphant riffs shrouded in enormous swathes of ambience. At the climax of the song the addition of some deeply buried vocals within the wall of sound works as a really great finishing touch. These two songs work as a kind of suite, but are followed by a similarly great reinterpretation of one of their older songs '...Will be Laid to Waste' which manages to sound strikingly different from the original version and yet still as great.

In terms of the actual meaning behind the record it might be best to quote Mark directly:

"This record is a testament to finding the best in everything - it was influenced by my brother and two sisters and their complex and wonderful lives. Denial of the spirit is denial of the self."

I'm not in the position to extrapolate further about the emotional content of Last Rites but one thing that is obvious is that it is clearly a very personal record. This, combined with the attention to detail in the writing, recording and mixing makes it a very rewarding listen, and I will recommend it to anyone who is interested in records that explore the possibilities within the outer fringes of heavy music.

It can be downloaded for free from Records on Ribs, a great Nottingham-based record label run by a bunch of lovely people who release high-quality music for free online under Creative Commons licensing. While you're downloading this record, check out the rest of the acts on their site too, there's some great stuff there - some of my favourites include EL Heath's ambient work and the Talk Talk-esque melancholy of Les Étoiles.

All The Empires of the World - Last Rites

The One Up Downstairs - S/T (2006)

2009-05-12T03:41:00.000-07:00

Will I be seeing you next spring?
Well I hope so
If not, would you skip a stone in your lake for me?

This is probably the wrong season to be posting this, but whatever. The One Up Downstairs were a short-lived project by Mike Kinsella and Steve Lamos of American Football and two members of Very Secretary that recorded one 7" before American Football came into being that never really got released until 2006. The American Football LP is a really beautiful indie-rock album and one of my favourite records ever, so it's always annoyed me that I can't really find anything else by the Kinsellas that has a similarly nostalgic and reflective feel to it, besides Mike's solo project Owen which never really did much for me. The discovery of this EP, then, was a nice surprise for me, having played both American Football records to death. The opener 'Champaign' sounds like classic American Football, slowly unfolding and meandering in a kind of ponderous way. Lyrical and musical ideas come and go gently much in the way that your mind works in those beautiful moments of calm, contented reflection that come once in a while. It paints a lovely picture in my mind, like the speaker's a little tipsy after a couple of glasses of wine and is taking a walk outside in the snow at nighttime, and what we're presented with are just the thoughts in his head as they come and go.

'Rememories' is more uptempo, with a bouncy riff that almost sounds like something out of a Don Caballero song. Lyrically it deals with the feeling when you're moving from one place to another of looking forward to making more - and maybe better - memories but also hoping that you'll be missed and wondering if the people who were important to you will think about you when you're not around, which is a sentiment I can relate to pretty easily. This running theme of nostalgia for people, places and certain periods in your life in American Football's music also finds itself in this EP and is something that makes both bands so endearing for me. The last instrumental 'Franco the Bull' feels a little tacked-on at the end compared to the two songs before it but is worth a listen too. But overall, for anyone that wishes American Football had released a little more material or just digs music that deals in slow, intricate, nostalgic beauty, this EP is a really nice little fix.

The One Up Downstairs - S/T

Minus the Bear - Highly Refined Pirates (2002) & They Make Beer Commercials Like This (2004)

2009-04-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

I thought it might be about time that I did something on two of my favourite records in the world. Minus the Bear are probably the coolest band ever. They write glitchy, complex songs full of lots of complex and often really gorgeous guitar tapping, but they sing about the simple pleasures in life: booze, cars, swimming pools and sex. Let's face it, if you hate them it's only because you're jealous that your life isn't that great. Because what kind of person doesn't like those things? Oh, and as a bonus, their songs are pretty catchy too.

When I was first getting into Minus the Bear with Highly Refined Pirates it was with the real hits of the record: 'Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse', 'Monkey!!! Knife!!! Fight!!!', 'Get Me Naked 2: Electric Boogaloo' - explosive pop songs that pack hooks big enough to land blue whales. But while most of the songs on this album have an ostensibly feelgood vibe with lyrics about booze-soaked good times, there's an underlying romanticism behind it all, a nostalgic or even longing feeling for the things described in the lyrics. The real beauty in Jake Snider's lyrics is in the subtlety and the simplicity of his attention to small but beautiful little details, like in his description of an encounter with a girl in 'I Lost All My Money at the Cock Fights' where he ends on the line 'Her hair streaked her shirt with rain/and that did something to me'. Nothing verbose or elaborate, just subtle, understated beauty. Another real highlight of this aspect of his lyrics is 'We Are Not A Football Team', which perfectly captures those rare moments of comfortable silence that speak more than anything else could:

She was sitting on a swing
and dangling her feet
like the leaves of a tree
I think I heard her singing.

We're still out at 10 in the evening.

I knew her in the way that
I knew not to speak.
Quietly took a seat
and thought I'd stay for a week.

Highly Refined Pirates

'Get Me Naked 2: Electric Boogaloo' is one of the record's real highlights. On the face of it, it's just about someone struggling with a lifestyle filled with stress, anxiety and sleep deprivation. The way that it's delivered, though, means that the listener can relate and fill the gaps themselves, giving the song a much deeper, more personal meaning. The chorus is the most poignant bit:

You said, "My life's like a bad movie"
I said, "That's true of all us"
You said, "I've got to wake up so fucking early"
And I said, "Maybe the director's turned on us"

The album's closer 'Let's Play Guitar in a Five-Guitar Band' took a long time to creep up on me but is currently my absolute favourite on the record. Jake sings about an encounter with an ex-lover who has left him emotionally fraught, maybe his "one that got away". It's all described very simply: he sees her through a shop window, which evokes fond memories of him when he was with her "just having sex and listening to jazz/and that was the life", but he tells himself not to involve himself with her again and to move on, nervously lighting up a cigarette as he walks by. The real ache of the song is in the longing of the repetition of the last few lines "I should go back to/see if she's still there/standing like a statue". Perhaps this is just me relating to a feeling that I've felt a lot, but that final repetition is really emotionally exhausting. The feeling of knowing that someone who's passed you by was special, but that sometimes you have to move on and leave those memories behind. The simple power of the images here mean that the song doesn't need any over-the-top embellishment to be hauntingly powerful.

They Make Beer Commercials Like This

The follow-up EP to that album, They Make Beer Commercials Like This, is similarly brilliant and summery, with Minus the Bear's most danceable song 'Fine + 2 Pts' and several other great songs, but I'm mainly posting it because of my love of two songs: 'I'm Totally Not Down With Rob's Alien' and 'Houston, We Have Uh-Oh'. The former doesn't really need a lot of explanation, just resonates with me a lot as one of the most relaxed and beautiful songs I've ever heard. 'Houston We Have Uh-Oh' has a real sense of underlying melancholy to it that makes it one of Minus the Bear's best songs, albeit oddly one that was originally just a b-side. Anyone who's ever travelled much will be able to identify with this song: it captures the isolated feeling of being a tourist, of being separate from your surroundings, and the kind of subtle disorientation and loneliness that can bring up. As someone who's spent a lot of their life moving between places and, more recently, revolved their life around relocation and travel, this song means a lot.

people used to live here
and lived their lives on this ground
raised them in these fields
and lost them in the future
and we just take pictures
of hearts that stopped beating

sometimes you're a tourist with a camera
stealing souls for scrapbooks
sometimes you've got a life back home
sometimes you're really alone, you're really alone

Minus the Bear - Highly Refined Pirates
Minus the Bear - They Make Beer Commercials Like This

Madlib - The Beat Konducta Vols. 5 & 6: Dil Cosby Suite & Dil Withers Suite (2009)

2009-04-18T03:28:00.000-07:00

since you've been away so long...

It's practically unanimous opinion among hip-hop fans that J Dilla was not only a great producer and beatmaker but a very influential one too, shaping the face of contemporary hip-hop with a sound dubbed by many as "neo-soul". Since his death, numerous tributes have been scattered across his peers' and mentees' records. Arguably, though, none have been quite as respectful, understanding, entertaining and strangely touching as this one. Certainly if you believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, at any rate. Madlib's latest two records in his Beat Konducta series - records where he takes the time to focus on and explore various styles of music and convert them into his own distinctive brand of instrumental hip-hop, with varying but often brilliant results - are dedicated to his old friend, peer and collaborator James Yancey.

madlib: doing what he does best

It's no secret that through tape-swapping and, sometimes, direct collaboration - as seen on the impressive Jaylib album Champion Sound - there was a two-way pattern of influence between Dilla and Madlib that showed itself as their sounds continued to evolve, one record always informed by another. And, to an extent, particularly Madlib's Beat Konducta records have always mirrored Dilla's last masterwork, Donuts, with their short soundbite-like tracks and their particular way of structuring samples, basslines and drumbeats together. This latest release, though, is altogether more faithful to Yancey's sound, the clearly meditated-upon result of a close study and deep understanding of Dilla's production style. The Dil Cosby Suite is particularly stunning: it feels like Madlib's own stab at Donuts, but, with Otis Jackson Jr.'s own particular style also evident, it comes across, to me at least, as at least as soulful, sincere and musically fantastic as the record it borrows from. Sometimes there's the boom-clap ruckus of Dilla's rowdier stuff, but the prevailing mood is a rather gorgeous, mournful kind of calm, particularly on songs like 'Floating Soul (Peace)' and 'Sacrifice (Beat-A-Holic Thoughts)'. Every sample is picked meticulously here, always contributing perfectly to the album's flow, the vocal samples often giving across a touching message - such as the introductory track's clear homage to Dilla, 'Infinity Sound's provocative "If the world should end tomorrow, have you lived enough today? Has each hour been fully tasted..." or the closing 'Anthenagin (?)'s burning cry of "Emptiness is all around". Nevertheless this still has Madlib's trademark sense of humour, evident in some of the spoken samples and also his musical sample choices, like his bizarre manipulation of a Buzzcocks song in 'The Get Over (Move)'. This combination of brilliant beats, touching tributes and subtle humour makes this record not only a rather moving one when properly listened to, but also a wonderfully entertaining listen from start to finish.

dil cosby & dil withers suites, respectively

The Dil Withers suite is somewhat more aggressive in approach, taking influence from Dilla's funkier side (but also, quite clearly, Madlib's own love for the green stuff) and doesn't flow quite as well as its counterpart, as it seems like the majority of the best beats were slipped onto the first record for maximum impact, but it's still a great instrumental hip-hop record and has highlights of its own, like the cavernous 'Smoked Out (Green Blaze Subliminal Sounds)'. One could forgive him for the fact that he starts to run out of steam on this disc if you consider that 41 tracks is an awful lot to make when focusing on a very specific style, and it is a pretty exhausting exploration of Dilla's work as it is. If you're only going to listen to one record here, make it the Dil Cosby suite, which is one of the best instrumental hip-hop releases since lord knows when. But even as a combined piece of work, the Dil Cosby and Dil Withers suites are some of Madlib's best work so far, a brilliant tribute from one stellar noughties beatmaker to another, and should be heard by anyone with a passing interest in instrumental hip-hop.

Madlib - The Beat Konducta Vol. 5: Dil Cosby Suite
Madlib - The Beat Konducta Vol. 6: Dil Withers Suite

Mount Kimbie - Maybes (2009)

2009-04-17T15:26:00.001-07:00

Mount Kimbie is a duo of relatively unknown young musicians from the south of London working together to craft electronic music. Listening to their debut EP Maybes, however, you get that gut reaction of excitement - the feeling that you've stumbled across something fascinating that has no real contemporary or equivalent in the current music scene - like that first time you heard Burial or Flying Lotus. Ok, so that's probably silly hype. And, to be perfectly fair, I chose to namedrop those two acts in particular for a reason: Maybes feels like a perfect meeting point between the two: lush, soulful but moody electronic soundscapes filled with the loveliest clicks and blips imaginable. The music is informed by all sorts of current electronic trends - dubstep, garage, hip-hop, the so-called "wonky" - while never quite conforming to any of them. There is also a decidedly downtempo, atmospheric feel to the music too, one that evokes the British trip-hop scene of yore, so if the words "Bristol" and "1990s" mean anything too you then this is worth investigating. The EP packs some really lovely chopped-up vocal samples - see the astounding title track or 'Vertical' for prime evidence of this. The beats are very inventive, using all sorts of unusual whirrs and clicks to create something that's really satisfying to listen to. One real highlight is in the last minute of 'William' where the track takes a sudden but nevertheless subtle tempo shift as the beat kicks in and transports the song to an even more gorgeous place. It is very tempting to lazily slap an 'IDM' tag on this as a way of pigeonholing it, but that is overlooking what this really is: a brilliant release that takes the rudimentary elements of all sorts of electronic subgenres and adds its own ideas to create a satisfyingly unique and emotionally resonant voice in electronic music.

I normally provide download links but people should try and buy this EP if they can. You can find details on how to order it here.

Suis La Lune - Heir (2008)

2009-03-07T11:03:00.000-08:00

This kind of stuff makes me so happy. Even if they're technically an emo band, Suis La Lune's most recent EP feels anything but depressing for me. The four songs here are bursting with a passionate but playful kind of energy that makes me smile. There is a kind of bittersweet quality to them, sure, but it's that kind of nice bittersweet feeling you get when reminiscing about good times - awesome shows attended, beers shared with friends, long summer holidays - and knowing that the nature of things like that is that they're going to come and go, so you need to just enjoy them while you can. At least that's what it does for me, anyway. 'With Wings of Feather and Glue' really sets the tone for this brilliantly: a lovely slow guitar intro with the sounds of birds chirping in the distance gets you in the smiles-and-sunshine mood right from the outset, until the song bursts into life, and what follows is fifteen minutes of raucous screamo that rouses and invigorates more than it laments and whines. Suis La Lune are typically associated with the Euro-screamo scene but have quite a lot in common with the guitar theatrics of US bands like Kidcrash and early Hot Cross as well as having traces of the sound that you get in continental peers like La Quiete and Raein. The real thing that needs to be said about this EP, above anything else, is that it's just so enjoyable: it's too short to ever become boring, but there are all these little moments throughout that are so satisfying. The guitar work is great - as said, it kind of traverses the current emo scene quite nicely, from the more technical fiddly stuff to the melodic post-rock-ish tendencies of a lot of the European emo groups playing right now, and the occasional bit of all-out octave tremolo picking in true Orchid style (see 'September Gave Us Awkwardness, October Gave Us Nothing'). Even if you can't understand a word the singer is screaming out, Heir is still just a great, thoroughly enjoyable, feelgood screamo record (I don't know if I'm ever going to use the words "feelgood" and "screamo" next to each other again, but there we go). Put this on when you're down in the dumps, then thank me later.

Suis La Lune - Heir

Carousels

2009-02-27T15:34:00.000-08:00

I'm not a religious person. I don't think I could ever be, really. And while I couldn't say I believe in God either, I struggle to budge from my agnostic viewpoint into either full-fledged atheism or any sort of real belief, despite having thought about it until the point of exhaustion at times. Even though I can't say that I can wholly relate to the subject matter, there's something about mewithoutYou's 'Carousels' that makes it one of the most profound and powerful songs I've ever heard. It gives me shivers every time I hear it. It was the song that made me fall in love with mewithoutYou in the first place. Everything about it is overwhelming: right from the wonderfully atmospheric descending guitar line in the intro that leads its way into a deep groove, the song completely immerses me emotionally from start to finish. This serves as a great platform for Aaron Weiss' performance, which is one of the most passionate and inspiring lyrical and vocal performances I've ever heard. The opening stanza, to me, is one of the most poetic and beautiful ways of saying "I believe in God" that I've ever read:

on a bus ride into town
i wondered out loud,
"why am i going to town?"
as i looked around
at the billboards and the stores
i thought, "why do i look around?"
and i kissed the filthy ground
at the first dry spot i found
and i didn't have to wonder
why i was laying down.

Weiss' lyricism continues to be consistently astounding from there onwards. The song touches on loneliness, doubt and confusion, but, most importantly, the profound faith in God that keeps the narrator anchored despite everything. Sometimes I feel like I am "lost in sinai" myself, and listening to this song, I can't help but wonder. I can't really explain why this song is as powerful for me as it is. Whether you're a devout catholic or decidedly anti-religious, all I ask is that you listen and discover what it means to you for yourself.

if i didn't have You as my guide i'd still wander lost in sinai
or down by the tracks watching trains go by to remind me:
there are places that aren't here.
i had a well but all the water left
so i'll ask your forgiveness with every breath
if there was no way into God,
i would never have laid in this grave of a body for so long.

Ten Grand - This Is the Way to Rule (2003)

2009-02-19T07:05:00.000-08:00

I was lucky to find this one for only £3 a couple of months back - thank God for Anarchy Records. Once upon a time there was an awesome midwest emo band called The Vidablue who, at some stage in their career, got approached by some douche from Phish who desperately wanted to nick their name. And so The Vidablue became Ten Grand - allegedly an allusion to the sum that they were paid by said hippy to change their name - and went on to make even more badass music that those jam-band wannabes could only dream of creating. Ten Grand are an emo band in the original sense, but their heavy post-punk influence sets them apart from their peers and gives them a much more diverse appeal, making them a good starting point in the genre for fans of indie-rock and post-hardcore. The racket they make is tight and explosive, filled with satisfying post-hardcore riffing and instrumental grooves, fronted by a singer who has a pretty unique and unhinged style that works perfectly with the music.

The urgency of Ten Grand's music is immediately obvious from the opening song 'Hands Off the Merch'. The first minute builds up tension brilliantly, the initial burst of chiming guitars giving away to the continuous thumping of a bass drum - until finally the drums hit their stride and the song explodes into action, vocalist Matt Davis shakily proclaiming "Who's a wreck? I'm a wreck." Then after just two intense minutes it's over, but the rest of the album doesn't lapse in quality for a second. Touches of backup melody in songs like 'Wedding Song for Steve and Angie' and 'Now You Got What I Got' add an interesting dynamic to the record, making it seem much less obviously emo and potentially more approachable for those who aren't necessarily familiar with the genre. 'Fuck You Guyses Teams', one of the record's highlights, has a really tight groove to it that is surprisingly catchy, to the extent that to my ears it could almost be a Bloc Party song. The band has a great ear for dynamics, often bursting from a steady groove into a more intense one to keep the listener hooked. 'This Isn't Heaven, This Sucks' is a perfect example of a song that, while lacking a refrain, manages to be consistently gripping through the explosive riffing and the rapid but fluid changes between sections, building in tension towards a climax at the end of the song. 'Get Out of My Dojo' includes a steadily building rhythmic assault that shows the band's taut interplay at its best, recalling the progressive leanings of other emo bands like Gospel and Kidcrash. Ten Grand specialise in songwriting over experimentalism, though, and this much is evident in the frankly amazing album closer 'Now You Got What I Got'. Fulfilling the "emotional" part of "emotional hardcore" by all means, it tumbles chaotically towards an intense and emotionally exhausting coda, wringing as much feeling as possible out of the song through the soaring tremolo guitars and Davis' ambiguous but nevertheless very affecting repetition of "it's like an accident that we keep on knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting" until the song collapses in on itself.

Never has an album title been more accurate. It should go without saying how tragic it is that Matt Davis passed away following the release of this album, especially as the band could have potentially been very big news indeed had they carried on down the same path. As it is, we're left with this brilliant Southern Records-released memento of one of the best emo/post-hardcore/whatever bands ever to exist. If anyone ever knew the way to rule, it was Ten Grand.

$i feel like a veteran$ i forgot how to leave. $i feel like j. gosh$ i will not go back to school, $i i feel just like bill buckner$ i forgot i need it, $and everyone that you forgot$ i forgot how to need it. for all the time i keep waiting, the times you kept saying go, you're done twisting arms. backed up and down, a new ratio, for who's laughing now, who's winning now? i hide my jokes inside the kitchen broom so you can start practicing for the rest of your life, they wrote you in to stay down, we mean it, stay down, you can't move, the wait is so hard, but you blew it all.
i recall saying you'll never forget this again for the rest of your life. $what's the word on the street?$
somehow i recall...
$it's probably nothing, baby$
i'll never have the time to explain, i don't think i'll find the time to explain, i know i won't ever want to have to explain, let's give up on verbs and nouns, because sometimes you mean it, but everybody's got too many words, and sometimes you mean it but everybody's got too many words, just shut up once for me, please shut up once for me, just shut up once for me, just shut up for once in your life, while they were talking to you, i kept on driving in and ran down every thought, who's waiting now, you've got to dig yourself out, you have to dig yourself out, you have to dig yourself out.
-Ten Grand; 'This Isn't Heaven, This Sucks'

Ten Grand - This Is the Way to Rule

(Check out how good they were live!)

Ten Grand

The Van Pelt - Sultans of Sentiment (1997)

2009-02-13T01:03:00.001-08:00

Something about this one typifies 1990s indie-rock for me perfectly. The title of the album kind of hints at its prevailing mood: The Van Pelt are one of those bands that, a lot of the time, ooze that lovely kind of bittersweet sentimentality that seems to be practically unique to '90s American indie-rock bands; bridging the slow, tempered grooves and spoken word approach of Slint with the nostalgic beauty of American Football, sometimes cutting their teeth in a bit of off-kilter distorted riffing. The guitar playing on this album is great, mostly revolving around intertwining clean guitar lines that never show off more than they need to but always complement the rhythm section perfectly. Frontman Chris Leo makes this band pretty special: most of the time he employs a spoken word delivery, going from cool and collected to very impassioned at the climaxes of songs. His wordy and literate lyrics are sometimes ponderous and whimsical, sometimes political, and sometimes, well, downright sentimental, but always great. The album finishes on a really high point with 'Do the Lovers Still Meet at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial?', a brooding ballad that, over the same three chords, conjures up beautifully bittersweet images: ghost towns of lost youth, empty bottles and empty dancefloors, and the times that we wish we could take back. Sure, its melancholy brand of romanticism might be almost cloying to some, but it's the kind of stuff that I eat up every time. Sultans of Sentiment, though destined to always remain on the margins, is an indie-rock gem that should not be overlooked.

let's make a list so we can feel like we're accomplishing something, so we can feel like we're working together. let's sit in a circle adding to the list as we move around the room one by one, as you make a suggestion begin sternly - you take no shit - to give credence to your semi-constructive argument. tomorrow we'll wonder where this generation gets their priorities from. tomorrow my heart will skip a beat as it does every morning nine months of the year. it has to do with this list. before the bells even ring. before the hair is even combed. will the approach ever change or will it begin as i've said and end with a lighthearted twist to prove we're all adults? it has to do with this list, which we'll put in our pockets to throw away at a later date. it has to do with this list, which makes me feel more uncomfortable than i've ever felt, more apple pie than i've ever been. we are not housewives, executives, or entrepreneurs. we are teachers by trade, complainers by role.
-The Van Pelt; 'Let's Make a List'

The Van Pelt - Sultans of Sentiment

John Frusciante - The Empyrean (2009)

2009-02-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

A preface: this entry is, in some respects, going to be pretty personal and, inevitably, pretty long. Most people I know who are really passionate about music have at least one artist for whom their appreciation is so deep-seated and whose music has contributed so much to their personal growth that a careless criticism directed at the artist can feel almost like a personal insult. No matter how strange it can seem to an outsider, I almost feel bad for those who don't understand an appreciation that deep, because they're missing out on something really beautiful: being able to develop, over time, a personal relationship and an incredible emotional connection with a piece of art. For me, that artist is John Frusciante. His solo works have stayed with me long since my early teenage obsession with the Chili Peppers faded. He was the artist that initially motivated me to pick up guitar. Also, importantly, discovering his solo output back then felt like a revelation: it was the first time it really registered with me just how much personal depth and power music could really have, far beyond simple catchy choruses or stoic experimentations. I connected with that depth, and to this day he's been a creative role model for me. His solo records have, at numerous points in my life, provided warmth and consolation even when little else has been able to. Five years after a large amount of my favourite material of his was released, it only makes sense to gather my thoughts on his most recent release, The Empyrean.

Critically evaluating a record like this is difficult for me, since my predisposition to Frusciante's work means that it doesn't feel natural to listen to it with my critical faculty, I'm always so emotionally immersed in it all. As a fully-fledged concept album, it's certainly his most cohesive effort to date by nature. Sonically it's his most impressive effort yet next to Shadows Collide With People, his outstanding 2oo4 synthpop record. There's all sorts of interesting things going on: string quartets, choirs, analogue synthesizers, and lots of strange treatments and effects on the instruments and vocals that really contribute to the texture of the album, giving it a dark psychedelic quality and ensuring that more and more details are picked up on with repeated listening. There are some criticisms that could be levelled at it: it has been remarked by many that the opening 9-minute instrumental 'Before the Beginning', while providing a wonderfully atmospheric introduction to the record, sounds awkwardly similar to Funkadelic's classic psychedelic guitar solo 'Maggot Brain'. As one will inevitably find in the work of a prolific songwriter who writes what are, harmonically, quite simple songs, it does sometimes sound like he's almost recycling melodies. Actually, there's one decidedly deliberate instance of this in the album itself, with the songs 'Enough of Me' and 'One More of Me', but I will address the significance of this later. The second part of Dark/Light can drag on a bit - as interesting as the clash of the raw drum machine with the very orchestrated choir is, it starts grating a couple of minutes into the repetition of the chord sequence, sounding like a half-cooked idea from To Record Only Water For Ten Days. Though as an album this is one of Frusciante's most thought-out and accomplished efforts yet, the songs themselves sometimes don't quite stand up on their own next to his best efforts from the rest of his catalogue (ironically, one of the best songs on the album is a Tim Buckley cover), but they do work in the context of the rest of the album. That's an important thing to bear in mind when listening to this: it is an album that needs to be experienced as a whole to have its proper effect. Another thing about the album is that it's very, very serious in tone. People familiar with Frusciante's work will have no problem with this, as his work has always dealt heavily with spiritual, almost religious concepts, but it does require that the listener is prepared to take it at face value when listening, otherwise the lyrics can come across as quite pompous and bizarre. I mean, it's a concept album of sorts - it's inevitable that it might come across as pretentious to some.

The concept behind The Empyrean, however, is certainly not a bloated Mars Volta-style one (you know, the type involving characters with funny names and foetuses and Ouija boards and all that crap). It is a highly personal "story" that only John Frusciante himself could have written. As far as life stories go, his is pretty intense: joining a band at the age of 18 that goes on become the biggest rock band in the world, facing extreme disillusionment, depression and loss, sinking into several years of heroin-fueled down-and-out hell, only to come out the other side as someone much more enlightened, successful and creative. He's had bigger ups and downs than most of us could dream of having in a lifetime. Essentially, The Empyrean is the bringing together and clarification of themes that have always been present in his work, presenting us with a coherent explanation of his beautiful perspective on life and spirituality. It's all left deliberately open to interpretation, but from John's perspective, there are only two "characters", so to speak, involved in the album: one person who experiences life's ups and downs and goes through a turbulent process of enormous personal growth, eventually coming out at peace with himself and the rest of the world, and the "creative force, which constantly creates and perpetuates existence", which he goes through a process of slowly becoming in harmony with. Anyone unfamiliar with Frusciante's music reading this right now will most likely think he's a rambling pothead. Upon reading his writings and listening to his music, it actually all makes a surprising amount of sense - his approach to spirituality is optimistic, level-headed and philosophical. The album echoes the Zen mantra "this too shall pass" - any given moment in one's life is ephemeral, something that will inevitably give way to the next moment. As such, life inherently contains cycles: it's not an emotional plateau, it constantly ebbs back and forth between good and bad experiences and the most important thing to remember is that the so-called bad experiences are just as important as the good experiences because the ugly gives meaning to the beautiful and provides us with the drive to be creative, which, in Frusciante's mind, is the most important act in life: contributing to your reality. One particular point he makes on his blog really struck me, even more than the rest of it, kind of summing up the album's message:

"Trying and giving up go hand in hand. But it’s trying that deserves the attention of our will. Giving up is just breathing out. Breathing in is the one we need to remember to do. Breathing out naturally follows. The important thing is just to keep breathing. To try and then just go through all that happens, including not trying. And so we hold our breath sometimes. These things aren’t problems. They are just living."

I would go on to explain the concept further but I can't do anywhere near as good a job as Frusciante himself. It just happens that his blog provides a really interesting, eloquent and detailed explanation of the philosophy behind the album, and, if you are at all interested in finding out more about the lyrical message of this album, I recommend you take a look through it at johnfrusciante.com. It's worth it.

The first song on the album that really grabbed me was the cover of Tim Buckley's 'Song to the Siren' - while arguably not an improvement on the original, Frusciante's own arrangement is still spellbinding - beautiful warm synthesisers and a wonderfully tranquil atmosphere backing one of the most heartbreaking love songs ever penned. Two of the three epics on the album ('Unreachable' and 'Central') are particularly stunning, building to brilliantly compelling conclusions, using all sorts of sonic manipulation to provide incredible atmospheres, with Frusciante's trademark guitar playing here being some of the most expressive instrumental work he's ever done. 'Enough of Me' and 'One More of Me' make a very interesting pairing, lyrically representing different points in life and different perspectives - one being despairing, the other full of a renewed sense of energy and purpose. The effect of the way he sings in an unusually low register in the latter is particularly startling, as are the strange screams halfway through and the strings, but it makes for a brilliant listen. Musically, it makes sense that they sound very very similar because, as two sides of the same coin, they sync up (severely trippy stuff!). It kind of embodies the album's concept of life's cycles, of trying and giving up and trying again, over and over in a harmonious process. My personal favourite on the album is, however, its closer: 'After the Ending'. I don't know what it is about it - I guess a combination of the haunting atmosphere, the incredible melodies and, most of all, the lyrics - but it has left me emotionally exhausted and stunned after every listen. The first time I heard it I was walking down the street listening on my iPod and for a minute during the last few moments of the song I was almost stopped in my tracks, momentarily feeling a little dizzy and intoxicated by it all, just about snapped back into reality by the startling ending. The next time I listened I had a lump in my throat. By the third listen through, while reading the lyric sheet on a night when I felt pretty low, I was bawling. Not a lot of songs make me do that. It has already taken its place as one of my favourite songs, perhaps even my favourite song, by my favourite artist. Which says a lot.

As an album, The Empyrean isn't without its little flaws, but it has such an emotional impact on me that criticism seems to miss the point. Like some of Frusciante's other work, it's one of those rare albums that I can listen to at times where things aren't going as hoped and I feel a little lost as to where my life is headed - it takes you outside of your current reality and gives you a vital bit of perspective that helps you rationalise even the worst of times, and for that I think it's an incredibly valuable record. I'm throwing in two of my favourite Frusciante albums, Shadows Collide With People and The Will To Death, to give a little perspective on why I love Frusciante as much as I do. Hopefully they might even have an impact on someone else. Who knows. All I know is that this music is immeasurably important to me.

pain runs through life
pleasures' other side
fear, some say, gives us such long lives
leads us where we drive
time will soon be born
it is starting at the dawn
and the world is moving towards
things like opposites and wars
and one knows to hear birds sing
there was nothing until the beginning
and the water from my eyes
is because i care who dies
although death is transforming
there is nothing after the ending
[everything is eternal - nothingness does not exist - no thing has ever become nothing - and nothing has never become something - what is has always been and will always be]
-John Frusciante; 'After The Ending'

John Frusciante - The Empyrean
John Frusciante - The Will To Death
John Frusciante - Shadows Collide With People

I Hate Myself/Twelve Hour Turn - Split LP (1998)

2009-02-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a quick fix of mid-90s emo. Both bands bring a solid side on this split LP - the majority of I Hate Myself's side revolves around slow-burning, Slint-worshipping pessimism, the first and third songs both building to great conclusions with melodic but bleak guitar playing. What makes I Hate Myself so great is that, well, as you would expect with a band name like that, they don't take themselves entirely seriously, delivering their songs with a bucketload of self-deprecating irony, yet their lyrics, while consciously silly and melodramatic, are also very sincere and poignant. A great example is album highlight 'Song For All The Young Casanovas And Casanovettes': musically it is much in the same vein as their classic song 'Drama In The Emergency Room' (which is on their '2 Songs' release and which I highly recommend you check out). This song is dedicated to those out there that won't be celebrating Valentine's Day either: lyrically kind of ridiculous but very funny and very true, it's a brilliant 5-minute long cautionary whine about loving and losing that picks up intensity until it collapses in on itself in a cathartic final section.

Twelve Hour Turn, meanwhile, were an excellent post-hardcore-laced emo band from Florida. Think interweaving instrumental melodies, dynamic buildups, and the occasional discordant and loud section with desperate rasping vocals and tight grooves, similar to bands like Ten Grand or Maximillian Colby. They bring five quality songs to the table on their side. Good stuff.

I suggest you only ever tell lies, because once you tell the truth they'll break your heart. Don't ever look them in the eyes, because those eyes are gonna rip your heart apart. I recommend you keep your distance, because once you get too close you'll lose control. Don't ever fall in love; just stay buried in your lonely hole. Take it from experience: desperate acts are ridiculous. Don't ever tell the truth, because the ones you love will do the same to you. If they lose your hand and drop you and you fall, you'll have to pretend it meant nothing at all. You know sometimes the saddest laugh the loudest.
-I Hate Myself; 'Song For All The Young Casanovas And Casanovettes'

I Hate Myself/Twelve Hour Turn - Split LP

Say Anything - ...Is A Real Boy (2004)

2009-02-06T01:31:00.000-08:00

And the record begins with a song of rebellion...

This was the album, along with Set Your Goals' "Mutiny!", that was largely responsible for being the catalyst of my belated love affair with Pop Punk. It has several gateway qualities that make it perfectly approachable for someone who would normally flinch at the mention of Pop Punk: musically, it's very varied and bursting with awesome ideas, be it the Weezer-esque pop of 'Every Man Has a Molly', the splashes of synth on 'Yellow Cat (Slash) Red Cat', the shuffle of 'Alive With the Glory of Love' or the quasi-hardcore of 'Belt' and 'An Orgy of Critics'. Every song bears enough toe-tapping hooks to embed themselves in your brain from the first listen, but the album contains a lot of depth for such an unapologetically 'pop' album. The thing is, it's Max Bernis' lyrics that really make ...Is A Real Boy such a classic: bursting with wit, humour and painfully relatable verses, the words to these thirteen songs present us with a glimpse into the labyrinthine mess that is the young male psyche - if you've heard the album Alopecia by Why?, I could easily draw a lot of parallels between the two records in terms of lyrical content.

Well, okay, maybe not the average male psyche. Bernis has a history of serious mental problems: anxiety issues, bipolar disorder, drug abuse: the whole shebang. The very intro to the record makes this clear to us immediately: a recording of a conversation he held with his producer reveals the following admission: "I have to record the spoken word introduction to the record. It's only a few lines, but I'm having anxiety about it." Bernis initially intended the record to be a preposterously ambitious concept album complete with script and characters, with the focus being on "the artistic struggle, the fact that every creative person has this sick ambition to affect some sort of change in society with their art, to be more than just a guy in a band or a poet or a sculptor." However, the pressure of recording the album saw Bernis buckle, having a nervous breakdown and ending up spending weeks in an institution. ...Is A Real Boy is the band's second attempt at the album, this time with no over-ambitious script or narration: just a bunch of magnificent songs filled with poignant and often bitter ruminations that can sometimes get uncomfortably honest, touching on themes like artistry, people and their frustrating character flaws, drugs, and sex. Lots and lots of sex. If Rivers Cuomo was less happy-go-lucky and a hell of a lot more neurotic, this would be the album that he'd write.

Okay, let's get the sex part of it out of the way first, because this is Bernis we're talking about and this is something that preoccupies him a hell of a lot. One thing I love about Max Bernis is that, unlike many other songwriters, he doesn't try to give off the impression that he's any more enlightened or morally likeable than the next person. On the contrary, he's all too willing to expose his dirty flaws and ugly but sometimes scarily familiar thought patterns. 'Spidersong' is probably the most obvious example here: addressing (probably trying to seduce) a woman, it hints at a guilty conscience, the narrator very aware that he only wants sex while also aware that, meanwhile, she seeks affection. He treats it like a twisted game, manipulating her to his own ends, only to lazily declare that his heart's not in it, going in a few verses from this:

no more promises
i have made them before
and broken them
give me the go ahead
and i'll undress myself for you
if you're at all interested

to this:

i am cool
too cool to call you
far too stoned to leave my bed
i'll write this song to win your kiss
but stay asleep instead.

The song 'Every Man Has a Molly', one of the most instantly accessible songs on the album, a neurotic anthem that deals with an ex-girlfriend of his that broke up with him "over the revealing nature of the songs". It addresses the clash between his love life and his self-image as an artist, sarcastically pointing out the attention-seeking nature of the songwriter: "Molly Connolly ruined my life/I thought the world should know". The song has one of the most awesome lines in the album: "You god damn kids had best be gracious with the merch money you spend/Because for you I won’t ever have rough sex with Molly Connolly again". I mean, come on, that's funny stuff.
'Woe' similarly deals with the artistry/sex issue. Its opening lines sort of sum up the album: "All the words in my mouth/that the scene deemed unworthy of letting out/banded together to form a makeshift militia/and burrowed bloodily through my tongue and my teeth". These words are messy, unpleasant and certainly not all smiles and sunshine. One verse deals with his guilt and frustration with the fact that he is used for sex "most likely because of [his] band". The line "I can't get laid in this town without these pointy fucking shoes/my feet are so black and blue and so are you" is kind of a comment on the ridiculous way that people go all out to try and impress the opposite sex, night after night. The final half of this song is a more general expression of his frustration with the hypocrisy of his surroudings, and his desire to escape and surpass his environment which bogs him down. The last line, "I'm still the optimist, though it is hard/when all you want to be is in a dream" gets me every time.
Other songs obviously deal with this theme too: 'The Writhing South' is a rumination on lust, while 'Alive With the Glory of Love' appears at first to be a perfectly catchy love song but reveals itself to actually be a much darker story about a couple in love and "screw[ing] away the day" while in hiding during the holocaust.
'The Futile', an especially strong track, is a full-on doom-and-gloom fit of nihilism. Max states his mantra ("Eat, sleep, fuck and flee; in four words that's me") lamenting the futility of everyday life while declaring:

love! i shall not love
yet i’ll still sing about it
hope it covers the ocean in slime
the drama and drool
i’m leaking the blood of a fool

But just when you thought that Bernis had a totally fucked up perspective on sexuality and love, he goes ahead and writes a song like 'I Want to Know Your Plans', which is pretty simply just a really sweet, honest and gently humorous love song with no fancy trimmings or catches.

Some songs are, essentially, calling out various aspects of society on their bullshit. 'Belt', for example, is a rebellious statement about the music industry and an expression of Bernis' frustration with modern society. Meanwhile, 'Admit It!!!', the album closer, is a brilliant and very funny rant about hipster culture and the self-righteousness and hypocrisy that goes with it, ending the record on a rousing high note with the declaration "I'm proud of my life and the things that I have done/Proud of myself and the loner I've become/You're free to whine, it will not get you far/I do just fine, my car and my guitar".

My favourite track on the album is definitely 'Yellow Cat (Slash) Red Cat'. Over some really gorgeous pop production, Max writes a pretty much perfect set of lyrics that deal with the inevitability, predictability and unpreventable nature of various characters' personal flaws, essentially saying that these problems are a part of some people and are often so deep-seated that trying to change them is useless. The imagery is all fantastic and, brilliantly, can be taken either literally or metaphorically without changing the message of the song in any way. All of these characters have their own little repetitious flaws, from sexual dependancy to chronic laziness and tragic artistry, and the narrator feels that he can't do anything to change them, even seeing himself in these characters he's conjured. The final build of musical intensity accompanies a double-verse one-two punch that really hits close to home and sends shivers down my spine every time I hear it:

i watch my neighbor’s son play
with his shotgun in the street
i think i’ll blaze all day and marvel
at the mass of food i eat
it’s strange, i’m skinny when i’m standing
but i’m buddha when i sit
and if i’m truly so enlightened
why’d i waste your time on it?

as i look back at countless crossroads
and the middle where i stay
right up the beaten path to boredom
where the fakest fucks get laid
by the faux-finest finds it’s been that way
god damn you, how you stay
with every scummy, crummy hour
of the scummy, crummy day.

these are my friends
this is who they have been for always
these are my days
this is how they stay.

One word of warning: ...Is A Real Boy is an incredible album, one that I end up finding myself listening to quite a lot in periods of cynicism and frustration, but you won't find much in the way of enlightening Zen in it. Max Bernis' mind is full of ugly knots and dark corners - this album is simply a brilliant exploration of those knots, and one that might find you doing a similar bit of introspection. But do go ahead and give it a listen, because it's a real ear-opener that gets better with every listen and every read through the lyric sheet. I consider it a damn near perfect record.

Say Anything - ...Is A Real Boy

2008, #1: Off Minor - Some Blood

2009-01-28T08:10:00.000-08:00

2008 was a crucial year for me in terms of personal growth. As inevitably happens in a person's first year living away from home at university, I went through an emotional rollercoaster that, I feel, ultimately reshaped me as a person and saw me going through a maturing process where I ended up confronting, reconsidering and coming to terms with all sorts of personal values and aspects of my personality. I guess one part of this accelerated personal growth was that my musical tastes matured quite a lot, or, at least, music played a different role in my life and I developed an increased appreciation for records that had both intelligence and emotional relevance.
In this regard, Off Minor were probably the biggest musical discovery for me last year. Records like The Heat Death of the Universe and Innominate really struck a chord with me with their perfect combination of intense emotional expression with thoughtful maturity, their music hanging in a careful balance between cathartic chaos and jazz-tinged beauty. Unlike some of their peers in the emotional hardcore scene, Off Minor's music never falls into the all-too-common trap of post-rock buildups and unnecessary self-indulgence (one could argue otherwise about 'Practice Absence' on the latest, album, but I will address this later) because every song is an intensely personal statement: the music is constantly ebbing and flowing between chaos and beauty in a very subtle manner, always mirroring the emotional realities that are expressed in the lyrics. These lyrics are very poetic and thoughtfully written, never descending into drama queen angst because they instead tend to be more observational: written from what appears to be a careful step back, they point out emotional truths in such a painfully poignant, concise and eloquent way that I often can't think of a more effective way in which to express them. While containing an impressive vocabulary and allowing for plenty of ambiguity and personal interpretation, Jamie Behar's lyrics often speak for themselves better than any one interpretation from a fan, something that I particularly like about Off Minor's lyrics. Here is an example of one of my favourite Off Minor songs lyrically, from their debut album The Heat Death of the Universe:

I told the new me:
"Meet me at the bus station and hold a sign that reads:
'Today is the first day of the rest of your life'"
But the old me met me with a sign that read:
"Welcome back"
Who you are is not a function of where you are.
-Off Minor; "The Transient"

Or, as an example from the new album, take the way 'To An Ex' perfectly sums up the bizarre thought processes that occur at the end of a relationship:

'oh, sweetest piece of me'
you say 'i've found your place in me has grown too small to fit
and still grows smaller everyday in retrospect.'
the me in you has changed,
the you in me still stays the same,
each has no bearing on the other,
so we could say of one another.
so sweetest piece of me,
it seems we'll take each other piece by piece apart
and place each in the safest place within our holding hearts.
-Off Minor; "To An Ex"

Some Blood, the band's latest effort, represents the latest step in Off Minor's musical progression, and from the maturity of the sound in here and the enormous respect that they have gained in the DIY hardcore community from their dedicated touring and their practically flawless output it would be absurd to argue that the band have still not shaken off the albatross hanging around their necks from former musical projects (most notably, screamo legends Saetia). Lyrically, where previous records were often very personal to the band members themselves, this is still just as emotionally powerful, but now mostly applicable as commentary on wider social trends and principles as well. Take 'Neologist', a comment on the problems of censorship, or 'Everything Explicit', a brilliantly poignant lament on the way that we all too often fail to communicate everything we would like to have said to another person before it's too late. The title track and 'Practice Absence' both seem to have extremely personal subtexts, but they are masked by so much ambiguity that, while they are still extremely powerful pieces of poetry, they are very much subject to individual interpretation.

Musically, the album manages to pack a lot of ideas into its 22-minute runtime: the jarring but extremely compelling dissonant rhythms of 'Neologist', the snaking guitar lines of 'Some Blood', the rapid-fire chord progressions of the 43-second 'No Conversationalist I' (which, brilliantly, mirrors its lyrical content - a concise reflection on the narrator's ineptitude at conversation - in its brevity and awkwardness) or the more drawn-out 'Practice Absence'. The latter is a bit of a departure for Off Minor, breaking their general trend of relative conciseness at almost nine minutes, perhaps being the first time that they have written a song that builds up slowly to "epic" conclusions. It's also the first time that they've included properly sung vocals as opposed to the urgent yelping of most songs. Both of these moves are made all the more effective by the way that they contrast with the rest of the band's material, meaning that these ideas work in this context. One could also argue that the drawn-out nature of the song is not for the sake of self-indulgence but rather mirrors the themes of distance, removal and absence that the song deals with. My personal favourite song, however, is 'Everything Explicit': one of the most perfect songs I've heard in a while, it ebbs and flows beautifully, being at the same time perfectly composed and amazingly passionate. The intricate instrumental interplay - one of Off Minor's biggest strengths throughout their discography - is here at its peak, the flawlessly tight grooves giving every instrument an opportunity to shine, gracefully building up to a melodic but nevertheless extremely cathartic, compelling and urgent conclusion. The melodic interplay between the guitar and bass in the clean midsection just before the final distorted conclusion of the song is one of those details that one sometimes picks up in music that is very subtle but which still makes me melt inside. The song sounds sort of like an interpretation of something off of Unwound's Leaves Turn Inside You in a hardcore context. In other words, that means it's really, really good.

There are rumours that this might end up being Off Minor's final release, but if it is, then they've accomplished a hell of a lot, sporting one of the most consistently brilliant discographies I've seen from any band. It is very hard for me trying to identify faults with this record, as every time I listen it engages me perfectly both emotionally and intellectually, providing a perfectly cohesive and hugely enjoyable listening experience. Adhering to the "shorter is better" rule common to hardcore, there is very little wiggle room when it comes to quality here, also ensuring that one never gets bored throughout the record's duration. Simply put, Off Minor have pushed hardcore punk to an unprecendented level of complexity, poeticism and emotional maturity, and the standard that this sets for other contemporary hardcore bands is phenomenal. Listen to this to understand why they've quickly become one of my all-time favourite bands over the course of the last year. I'm also chucking in The Heat Death of the Universe and Innominate, because they're also pretty much perfect records.

What’s best left unsaid? A speaker spent, a listener left with regrets in his stead. In a life of loss, silence can cost you more than you expect. Held tongues relate a bitter taste when prone to reminisce. Anamnestic but recipient absent, the circuit’s dead. As we live linear lives, unidirectional, towards an inevitable end and we must make everything explicit. That’s how we left it: unsaid. I’m at a loss for words.
-Off Minor, Everything Explicit

Off Minor - Some Blood (official label website: pay-what-you-want scheme)
Off Minor - Innominate
Off Minor - The Heat Death of the Universe

2008, #2: Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness

2009-01-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

This time last year I made one of the most surprising and unexpected musical discoveries I've had in a long time. After hearing much enthusing from one or two people on a music forum I posted on, I glanced at the band's website which held the bold claim "The band Have a Nice Life would like to announce that they have recorded the most depressing record in the history of music". Did I think that it was an overambitious statement? Of course. Did I think that there was a certain element of pretension to it? Undoubtedly. Did it have me hooked? Absolutely.

Have a Nice Life is essentially the Connecticut-based musical partnership between two friends, Tim Macuga and Dan Barrett. Formed in 2000, it's been a long road to where they are now: Deathconsciousness is the product of their musical endeavours during a five-year period. Spanning two discs and accompanied by a fascinating 75-page booklet that explains the dark religious history that the album references, it is a triumph of the DIY home recording approach, showing just how ambitious and emotionally accomplished an album two people can make using a laptop, a guitar, a microphone and Logic. Initially given almost no real promotion whatsoever, what started as a few enthusiastic whispers about the album's brilliance spread like wildfire through word-of-mouth on forums and sites like RateYourMusic.com, eventually making it a cult hit and leading to the first CD-R pressing completely selling out on the label's webstore.

Deathconsciousness

With the facts out of the way, let's touch on the album's concept. Though in practice the album is a hugely personal statement from the authors that spills out way beyond cold conceptual ponderings into something that is emotionally pretty intoxicating and affecting, all the lyrics of the album are tinged by a fascination for the symbolism and religious history of an obscure religious cult named Antiocheanism that supposedly emerged during the later years of the Roman Empire. The central teaching of this sect was the idea of Deathconsciousness: the all-consuming awareness that death surrounds us, is final, and is utterly inevitable, therefore prompting the question - "What is the point?" I don't have the booklet to hand and it's a while since I've read it, but while this is a very grim viewpoint that I certainly wouldn't want to dwell on for too long, the booklet alone is a reason to buy this: written by a professor at the University of Massachussets, it is a beautifully harrowing read, detailing the life and legacy of the near-mythical Antiochus and the terrifying themes of his teachings. When read while listening to the album, it makes for an overwhelming experience - so while I provide you with the music here, which is really the principal reason I love this album, if you enjoy what you hear I strongly recommend you purchase the album from the Enemies List website as the only way you'll really get the most out of this album is if you combine it with a read through the booklet.

To some of you, that probably (and understandably) all sounds pompous and self-indulgent. Allow me, then, to sell you on the music itself, which is why I'm writing about the album after all. The Enemies List site describes the album as falling "somewhere between My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, and Swans" - that's probably as good an introductory statement to the sound of the album as anything else you're going to find. Mixing dark fuzzy shoegaze guitars with hulking great cavernous industrial drum sounds, everything thoroughly soaked in reverb, the production relies on lo-fi sensibilities but at the same time manages to sound enormous. The rawness of the mixing may put some audiophiles off, but frankly I can't imagine this working with a more polished sound - part of the charm of the record is the emphasis on home recording sensibilities, and besides, the hazy fuzz that many of the songs shroud themselves in is part of what makes the mood of the album so powerful. Despite these initially abrasive production values, Deathconsciousness is a surprisingly accessible album: 'Bloodhail' is a weighty, moody and utterly brilliant song with a wonderful bassline and echoing vocal harmonies that would find themselves very much at home in The Cure's discography, while the first half of 'Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000' is a lo-fi indie-pop ditty with some wonderful lines ("I've replaced my heart with metal parts/And I'm working just fine, but I can't get it to start") and the massive hooks of pacier post-punk numbers 'Waiting For Black Metal Records To Come in the Mail' and 'Deep, Deep' are barely contained by the raw production. My personal favourites on the album are 'The Big Gloom' and 'Earthmover': the plaintive melodies of the former are initially anchored by a wall of fuzzed-up guitars and bass, before the drums kick in and the wall of sound becomes something unbelievably gorgeous, enveloping your ears and tugging at your heartstrings. The latter has a kind of graceful beauty in its monolithic fuzz, the noise eventually giving way to a serene wash of vocal harmony before the gloriously loud shoegazing conclusion kicks in to end the album in style. Quieter, more understated numbers like 'I Don't Love' and 'Who Would Leave Their Son Out in the Sun?' give the album an even greater sense of depth. The instrumental 'A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut', despite its ridiculous title, destroys me in the best possible way every time I hear its subtle but overwhelmingly affecting chord progressions, setting the mood for the album wonderfully. Some of these songs have become kind of personal for me, providing the soundtrack to many of my more brooding moments over the last year.

I could write a lot more about this album, but it would get even more indulgent than this article already is, so I'll round things up. Deathconsciousness succeeds in that it is simultaneously accessible and brilliantly ambitious, setting the benchmark for home recording and really challenging DIY artists to record something similarly creative and engaging using a laptop and microphone in their own bedroom. Musically, lyrically, and conceptually it is a very powerful emotional experience that, when combined with the accompanying booklet, will likely keep you fascinated for a while if you're anything like me. Regardless - check out the two discs linked to below, and, if you enjoy them, I really recommend that you download the $5 booklet/album package from the band's website because Deathconsciousness, at its most rewarding, is a sprawling experience to fully immerse and lose yourself in.

Sleeping in and out of an ice bath
No warmth, no life without
It's too much, my arms, my legs are wood, unconscious trees with roots deep in the ground
We will all be out, soon, an ocean ringed with tile.
I know that's not your style but it certainly will be mine if I can't make this right.

So please, please, please, release me.

Can you hear my faintest breath, is it amplified?
The number that I've become will put you inside
I've got a message that I must relay
No, I can't delay it one more time (it's not going well)
It is desperate, can you relate, can you please, please relate? (I'm not holding up)
I am trapped, I'm stuck here on this bathroom floor and I don't have much more hope or pride
No air, no food (but I'm sure that I'm still alive..)

Just open your eyes, your dead ones (all ashes on the floor)
I will never need you more, just open your eyes, your dead ones.
-Have a Nice Life; "Bloodhail"

Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness (Disc 1: The Plow That Broke the Plains)
Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness (Disc 2: The Future)

2008, #3: Kayo Dot - Blue Lambency Downward

2009-01-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

Despite having finally decided upon it being my third favourite album of the year, I found this record hugely difficult to form an opinion on and it was a particularly conflicting thing for me. Kayo Dot are my favourite band, and after the absolute transcendence of previous outings Choirs of the Eye and Dowsing Anenome With Copper Tongue - which I cannot even begin to sum up in this introductory paragraph - they had a lot to live up to with their third full-length. Whether or not they did has been debated endlessly among their fans, and, so far, it seems that the general concensus is that the album is underwhelming in comparison to its predecessors, but here are my two cents on how this album is not only a great album in its own right but on how it is a necessary step in Kayo Dot's evolution.

Approaching this album is difficult. Kayo Dot have never been remotely describable as accessible, but unless you have a serious aversion to metal, this is probably their least user-friendly album to date. They have completely dispensed of their enormous celestial crescendos first demonstrated on Choirs and later honed to a finer, subtler art on Dowsing, which did, in a way, provide the listener with something to latch onto on the first few listens (such as the sudden saxophone solo over waves of distortion in 'The Manifold Curiosity') and have completely phased out the dark, heavy side of their sound which provided dynamic contrast and thus some of the most incredible moments in the first couple of albums. But quite honestly, where could they have gone from Dowsing Anenome With Copper Tongue, having exhausted the direction they were going in and in the process created one of the most mind-bogglingly complex and magnificent albums ever? Toby Driver, the classically-minded prodigy who composes all of Kayo Dot's music, has never been one to retread his footsteps, always seeking to explore new territory like a real composer should. Trying to recreate the extremity and grandeur of previous releases would have seemed contrived and fickle. Instead, Driver has turned his focus towards the more melodic side of Kayo Dot, pelting the group face-first into a hazy brand of avant-garde progressive rock that harks back to the Rock In Opposition movement of the 70s. This move may have been made easier by the departure of all the group's members except for multi-instrumentalist Driver and violinist Mia Matsumiya following their last album, and Driver's subsequent enlistment of contemporary prog musicians from bands like Time of Orchids and Behold... The Arctopus that similarly integrate modern compositional techniques into rock music.

The opening title track is a great example of this new sound. The song has a mid-section with hazy flutes, effects-laden guitar and meandering but clearly deliberate drums that progresses using repetition and subtle changes in a similar fashion to some of the buildups in Dowsing, but what stands out is that Toby Driver sings much more frequently than on previous releases, something that is applicable to the album as a whole. Where Driver would previously scream like a madman on tracks like 'Gemini Becoming The Tripod' his voice now never rises above a Jeff Buckley-esque falsetto. What sets this new melodic sound apart from some of the progressive rock releases that it evokes is the sense of very careful composition in the melodies that evokes the various modern masters of composition that Driver reportedly draws influence from, particularly noticeably, to these ears, Claude Debussy's chromaticism and unresolved cadences. Take, for example, 'The Useless Ladder', which finishes on an unresolved cadence: this would irritate and confuse some, but it actually works rather beautifully and effectively. The influence from modern classical music is as present as ever, it's just warped in typical Driver fashion to accomodate all his other ideas.

'Right Hand is the One I Want' incorporates a creepy kind of Eric Dolphy-style jazz, alternating between eerie piano/vocals and gorgeous woodwinds. Just when you think you've got it figured out, though, it heads off on a tangent into a lovely, ethereal midsection which is punctuated by a beautiful violin solo from Matsumiya. Five out of seven tracks on the album are under seven minutes long, something that is unusual for Kayo Dot who have become known for their sprawling 15-minute epics. The concise nature of the album makes it a satisfying listen because it never overstays its length. 'The Awkward Wind Wheel' is an interesting track in that it, over its chaotic three and a half minute duration, manages to match the ideas of pop and the avant-garde much in the same way that Time of Orchids do.

The best track on the album, and the one that seems to be closest to the ideas and sound of Dowsing Anenome With Copper Tongue, is closer 'Symmetrical Arizona'. The track progresses slowly and deliberately, with a gorgeous melodic progression first carried by the woodwinds, then by a surprisingly conventional (though sparse) guitar solo, and finally by Mia's violin, but always anchored by what sounds like a vibraphone (another idea that seems to hark back to Eric Dolphy). The tension eventually reaches a high point - and, for the first time on the album, the tension is resolved by a crashing drum fill which gives way to four minutes of all-out progressive rock bombast. The fact that prior to this point the album has been constantly building tension but then leaving it unresolved makes this release all the more surprising and effective, Toby Driver again subverting expectations. The most interesting bit of the final few minutes is the rhythmic groove which they slip into towards the end... jittery clarinets provide some beautiful ornamentation, but the whole thing builds only to fade out again. This whole theme of unresolved tension seems to be a statement of Toby Driver's, an act of rebellion against all the yawn-worthy "progressive" and "post-rock" groups in the scene who rely far too often on the crutch of "epic" build-and-release music which has now been done to death. While this may annoy some listeners, I find it to be an interesting change in the musical landscape that is far more satisfying than another album following the same formula.

I need to stress that Blue Lambency Downward is not a good place to get into Kayo Dot due to its awkward nature. Readers that have never listened to Kayo Dot, I implore you to get either Choirs of the Eye (probably the best place to start) or Dowsing Anenome With Copper Tongue (my personal favourite) and give them several listens to sink in. Like any other Kayo Dot record, the biggest virtue of Blue Lambency Downward for me is that even after tens upon tens of listens, I am still noticing details that I hadn't picked up on before, and it's this amount of buried detail and complexity that really makes Kayo Dot so rewarding and fascinating for me. If you're feeling brave, put some time into getting to know its nuances and see what the fuss is about for yourself, because nothing can describe Kayo Dot's music as well as the music itself.

Kayo Dot - Blue Lambency Downward

2008: Asva - What You Don't Know Is Frontier

2009-01-02T12:27:00.000-08:00

Now for something on the other end of the spectrum. Asva's debut album Futurists Against The Ocean fascinated me back when I first heard it, being one of the most creative and emotionally resonant drone/doom metal albums that I had ever heard. The band, featuring alumni of Sunn O))) and Burning Witch among others , for once created an album that, thanks to its experimentation in different instrumentation and even operatic female vocals (the idea of which I would have barfed at on paper but, upon hearing them, was mesmerised by), actually managed to be pretty beautiful instead of being one of those run-of-the-mill drone albums that tries and fails to sound as evil as it possibly can.

Sometime inbetween Futurists' recording and the recording of the latest album, What You Don't Know Is Frontier, guitarist and bassist Stuart Dahlquist's brother died. Understandably, Dahlquist has mentioned that the loss has directly influenced his work ever since, and even if it wasn't a conscious effort, this feeling shows in What You Don't Know Is Frontier. The album is an absolute tour de force: only such a horrible loss could provide the catalyst for such terrifyingly dark and vast soundscapes. The album is structured in a very similar way to Futurists Against The Ocean: four long tracks, the first two almost serving as harbingers of the second two. However, this album feels infinitely darker and deeper, and where 'Zaum, Beyonsense' on Futurists seemed more like an interlude or an introduction for 'Fortune', 'Christopher Columbus' on WYDKIF is interesting - and terrifying - enough to prove itself as a great track in its own right. The title track sets the stage, like a Morricone theme as interpreted by Satan himself - enormous twangs of spaghetti western guitar resonating against thunderous drums, humming organs and vast bursts of guitar noise. 'Christopher Columbus' is very abrasive indeed, starting off with an ominous bassline that slowly builds with lots of other stuff like bizarre electronics going on towards its ungodly conclusion. Randall Dunn (responsible for the latest offerings from Earth, Kayo Dot and Wolves in the Throne Room) has done an incredible production job on this album: it really feels implausible that something this huge could have been recorded in a mere studio.

Just as you're feeling suffocated by the unrelenting heaviness of the first two tracks, 'A Game In Hell, Hard Work In Heaven' arrives to blow you away. Certainly the album highlight, the piece is a lot more meditative and graceful, featuring a woman singing beautiful eastern-style vocals on top of the ever-present organs, punctuated by mournful guitar melodies. The song picks up in intensity as it goes on, the coda picking up the pace dramatically as the track races towards its astounding conclusion. At this point in the album, the all-consuming feeling of remorse and solemnity is overwhelming.

A Trap For Judges is by far the longest and most testing track on the album at 24 minutes. A gargantuan beast of a track, it is almost impossibly heavy - sort of like an 80s sci-fi flick soundtrack on a downer overdose, with gargantuan drum/guitar attacks pounding steadily accompanied by enormous sweeps of synth. The track marches steadily on, constantly descending further and further into its sonic bludgeoning, subtly changing throughout. After 20+ minutes of this exploration of the abyss, we are finally treated to a glorious release. A triumphant church organ pierces the darkness, resonating until it's all you can hear. It's like the light at the end of a long and tortuous tunnel. In a way, the album seems, intentionally or unintentionally, to perfectly mirror the process of grievance: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and, finally, acceptance - it's like the musical representation of a person mourning a loss and eventually finding a way to move on, and it's unbelievably powerful. Its testing and abrasive darkness has a cathartic nature too - after listening to it from start to finish, as that church organ fades, the colours of the world will seem brighter. Never has a drone album seemed quite so emotionally powerful and exhausting as this one: it's the album that Sunn O))) wish they could have made. For that alone, it deserves a standing ovation.

Asva - What You Don't Know Is Frontier

2008: Sun Kil Moon - April

2009-01-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

Following up from the last entry, here's my other folk favourite from 2008 (well, there's the Bon Iver record too, but you've almost definitely already heard that and there's so much that's already been said about it that posting my own two contrived cents on it would be an utterly pointless exercise.) Sun Kil Moon's April was an odd one last year in that it attracted quite a bit of media attention and, rightfully, got glowing reviews; but it received quite a cold and indifferent reception from most people I know. The most obvious reason I can think of for this is that, unlike certain other records that got really popular in 2008, April requires patience and it's an unfortunate fact that a lot of listeners are lazy. You're probably not going to walk away after the first listen whistling its tunes. Those familiar with Mark Kozelek's work will know that he doesn't like to rush a good record and so to people that have heard his other work it won't come as a shock that the album's running time is in excess of 70 minutes, but to the uninitiated, it's going to require some getting used to. In fact, truth be told, April was my introduction to Kozelek too and it took me about five listens and a good read through the lyrics for its charms to really sink in.

The work was rewarding though. People seem to hold the assumption that April is a depressing record, but I think this couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, sure, it's not something you'd listen to in the company of others, and there are some darker and moodier moments in the album like 'Heron Blue' ("Don't play those violins no more/Their melancholic overtones/They echo off the floor and walls/I cannot bear to hear them"), but there's also a lot of sunshine, something that opener 'Lost Verses' shows. 'Like the River' contains one lyric that really sums up what the record is about: "I have all these memories, I don't know what for/I have them and I can't help it/Some overflow and spill out like waves/Some I will harbour for all of my days". Over the course of the album, Kozelek sifts through old memories and brings them to the surface, from romantic recollections of old flames to fond family memories. The charm of the record is in the sheer affection that he presents these memories with - he sings all his stories with a fondness and warmth that never fails to make me smile. Of course there is a melancholic aspect to it all in that there's sometimes a certain yearning to relive the past, but the record is easy to become quite attached to because of its intimacy.

The musicianship on April is excellent too - the often long and winding songs are carried by deft fingerpicking and, now and then, a tasteful bit of guitar noodling ('Tonight the Sky') or subtle dynamic/tempo shifts that really carry the songs forward ('Lost Verses', 'Tonight in Bilbao'). The album alternates between full band songs like the Neil Young-esque opening epic 'Lost Verses' and more intimate acoustic numbers like the beautiful closer 'Blue Orchids'. And for the trainspotters among you, the record is liberally sprinkled with guest appearances from the likes of Ben Gibbard and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy that aren't too obvious but nevertheless keep things interesting.

Despite all this, April isn't a particularly complex record - like the Pygmy Lush album, it carries a very simple charm in its honesty and warmth. The beauty and the emotional depth of Kozelek's storytelling and the sheer class of the songwriting, however, will ensure that in the coming years, this record will be looked upon as a classic.

I’ve risen up from the dead
With the burning leaves of autumn
If only for one last chance
That all of whom have been defeated
To put on my father’s wool coat
To smell my mother’s fragrances and perfumes
To find my young brothers and sisters
To never leave or let them go
-Sun Kil Moon; Lost Verses

Sun Kil Moon - April

2008: Pygmy Lush - Mount Hope

2009-01-02T04:27:00.000-08:00

2008 was a great year for folk. Bon Iver, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Sun Kil Moon all released great albums that, to some extent, received a good deal of critical attention. Grouper also generated a modest buzz for her rather lovely album Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (which I wrote up earlier this year in this blog). One of my favourites, however, went completely under the radar of most publications and music fans, when it matched the quality of even its most hyped musical cousins. Pygmy Lush's background might go some way in explaining this - started by ex-members of DIY hardcore legends Pg. 99, their first record Bitter River was the sound of a band who were still finding their feet, trying to do too many things at once. Featuring forays into folk, Tom Waits-esque songwriting, experimental noise and even vicious and chaotic hardcore, while most of the material on there was at very least solid, the record came across as incoherent, more like a sampler of the various directions the band could have gone in than a cohesive album. Mount Hope sees them fulfilling the potential shown in Bitter River by taking a decisive step into the more mellow side of their sound and releasing an all-out folk album.

The breathy opening lines of the album give away the record's preoccupations: "The asphalt is leaning on me like a mountain/The pressure is building and I'm exhausted/I know you know there is nowhere to go." This weary, melancholic and sometimes even despairing tone surfaces in the lyrics to many of the songs on Mount Hope, resulting in an album which carries its heart on its sleeve and is emotionally very honest, something that gives the record a lot of depth and replay value. Despite this, Mount Hope isn't necessarily a depressing album persay - musically it is very laid back and subtle. Take the slow strumming, harmonica and xylophones of 'Frozen Man' which is lyrically pretty bleak but musically feels like such a relaxing listen. The album has its fair share of excellent and hummable tunes too - take the resigned melancholy of 'Hard to Swallow' or the album opener 'Asphalt'. The album mostly hinges itself around strummed or picked acoustic guitars as one would expect, but it features varied enough instrumentation to not feel too bare. The reinterpretation of Bitter River's 'Red Room Blues' is a real highlight on the album, the band having turned the previous two-minute incarnation into an absolutely gorgeous eight-minute bliss-fest that slowly dissolves into a shoegazing haze towards the end. There are a couple of rockabilly-style shuffles, such as 'Mount Hope' and 'Butch's Dream' thrown into the mix that contribute to the album's flow quite effectively. And, of course, the album ends on a high note with my personal favourite 'Tumor' - an amazing seven-minute number that takes its time, gently working towards its lush reverb-laden climax while its poignant lyrics slowly but surely destroy you from the inside (kind of like the nature of the song's namesake, then...)

With Mount Hope, Pygmy Lush have made a great record that proves that they're not just a bunch of screamo musicians dabbling in folk, but one of the genre's finest practitioners around today in their own right. It's a simple record with simple charms, but spend a little time with it and its personal depth and emotional honesty will, surely enough, win its way into your heart.

you never listen when i'm talking. you're always waiting to hear yourself. well, how am i doing? "how do you feel?" to be honest with you, simply ill. simply ill. simply ill. simply ill. simply ill. i had a tumor. it never healed. it just stayed there. until it killed. until it killed. until it killed. until it killed. until it killed.
-Pygmy Lush; 'Tumor'

Pygmy Lush - Mount Hope

2008: Verse - Aggression

2008-12-29T13:48:00.000-08:00

2008 was a sad year for the melodic hardcore scene in that its brightest beacon, Modern Life Is War, announced their split. Despite this piece of news, one band really managed to mark themselves out this year as the most musically and lyrically impressive contemporary band in the genre, as well as one of the hardest-touring: Verse.

Aggression is a logical and mature progression from Verse's previous two outings, both filled with raging melodic hardcore. To my ears, Sean Murphy's brilliant, wordy delivery stands out from that of other hardcore frontmen, perhaps due to the fact that his talk-shouting style has echoes of Zach de la Rocha and Cedric Bixler's angrier moments on At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command. Lyrically, he has a tendency to direct his anger outward in political lyrics, the theme of resisting the hand of oppression and thinking independently being a recurring theme not only in the brilliant opener 'The New Fury' but throughout the whole record. At times it can get a little preachy (have a look at the words to 'Old Guards, New Methods' - "What about the overcrowded projects where desperation calls? What about the lack of education and the lack of love? But most of all: what about the innocent in rooms with bars and three walls?") - something that is particularly noticeable at their shows where Murphy has the tendency to rant slightly, and they're the only band I've known to include a reading list in the insert of their album's packaging - but the overall quality of the lyrics and music means that unless you are easily irritated by politically concerned music, it doesn't really matter.

Especially when you've got a centrepiece like 'Story of a Free Man' on your album. While the rest of the album is consistently great, this three-part song sees Murphy take on the role of storyteller and it really makes the album. He narrates the tale of a boy whose father went off to fight in a war, only to come back, as Murphy harrowingly puts it, "in a body bag". The boy receives no solace and comfort from his family, and, as an attempt to escape from his reality, slips into addiction. Finding himself homeless and at rock bottom, he eventually decides to sober up and start afresh, eyes now wide open to the cruel nature of the world that put him in that position in the first place. Thanks to Murphy's brilliant lyricism and delivery and an excellent instrumental performance, the song is an epic that could easily stand next to even the finest jewels in the aforementioned Modern Life Is War's crown as one of the best moments in hardcore to date.

Having made a huge impression on hardcore fans everywhere, Verse have proven with Aggression that they are something very special. Be sure not to overlook them - listen to the album, read the lyrics, go to a show, and discover one of the most important hardcore bands in today's scene.

No more control. No more rules. They try to make you and me live life by their design: No free thought. No free speech. No peace of mind. They make a move to confine. But they’ll never silence me as long as I can breathe.
-Verse; The New Fury

Verse - Aggression

2008: Gregor Samsa - Rest

2008-12-29T10:54:00.000-08:00

To put this record in context, Gregor Samsa started out as a band that took a heavy influence from moody, snail-paced indie-rockers Low and combined it with a love for orchestral post-rock in the vein of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The product was something quite simple in its build-build-climax approach, even possibly quite generic, but nevertheless something startlingly emotional and affecting. In fact, their previous full-length 55:12 was quite a special record for me in that it soundtracked a few months when I was in a very vulnerable place emotionally, and so songs like 'Makeshift Shelters' and 'Lessening' still hold great significance for me in the associations they bring up when i hear them.

It came as a pleasant surprise to me earlier on this year when I read a newspost saying that Toby Driver and Mia Matsumiya of Kayo Dot, among other musicians that I admire, would be making appearances on Gregor Samsa's new outing, Rest. And, from the moment that I heard the opening track 'The Adolescent', it was evident to me that here was a new, more mature and more restrained version of the band. Gone are the sweeping string crescendos and obvious post-rock buildups, replaced by a careful, controlled sense of composition that sounds not far off from the tendencies of chamber classical music. The instrumentation is carefully chosen: 'The Adolescent' opens with a glockenspiel intro, soon accompanied by a chiming piano and then Toby Driver's delicate woodwind arrangements. Keyboards then enter, and the band's gorgeous vocal harmonies provide the icing on the cake and turn it into something really quite beautiful. As is evident here and throughout the rest of the album, the band are still using the crescendo as one of their main tools, but this time around it's a lot more subtle and clever, using minimalist repetition and subtle progression to great effect instead of the bigger post-rock guns that used to be in their arsenal. Where guitars used to be their weapon of choice, pianos now provide the anchor for most of the songs on Rest, a decision that is quite refreshing in a genre that has somewhat exhausted the possibilities of what you can do with a guitar and a delay pedal. This minimalistic tendency is particularly evident on centrepiece 'Jeroen Van Aken'. The first half is, perhaps, the section on Rest the most reminiscent of previous releases by Gregor Samsa - slow, moody, and utterly heartwrenching balladry. This leads onto an even more hushed but just as devastating second half that works through the repetition and slight change of the same line, culminating on the line "All things come and go/but we won't, no we won't, break". It's not immediately obvious stuff, but with close listening, it's so affecting.

My personal favourite on the album is the beautiful but bleak 'Pseudonyms'. Probably the moodiest piece on the album, it is a reflection on, among other things, futility and loneliness. The song progresses slowly but towards the end climaxes in a lovely and understated crescendo where gorgeous clarinet lines are played over shimmering pianos. Ambience is also used elsewhere in the album - as a segue between songs, or, in the case of 'Company', a full blown excursion into Stars of The Lid-esque guitar ambience territory. Rest is, indeed, a very varied album instrumentally and benefits hugely from it. But, above that, its careful restraint means that not everything is immediately apparent, something that affects the replay value as the album really must be listened quite closely to in order for its real beauty to show itself. For those who are fans of post-rock, classical music, moody indie-rock or just about anything you could describe with the word 'lovely', Rest is highly recommended from me as one of the most beautiful and heartmelting albums of 2008.

Murderous art has its grips on me - can't wrap myself around internally. I can't seem to put my name on anything. Our innocence yields to American dreams. Our innocence yields to pathetic conceit. Our innocence yields when our pocket's empty. The softest hearts break when the deed is done. I'll patiently wait for new days to come, then I'll wake and rise to write another song. Our innocence yields when we do it alone. The exodus begins now. I'll travel 'round and find you once more. You're reaching out less than before, but I know you're there.
-Gregor Samsa; Pseudonyms

Gregor Samsa - Rest

By the way - if any of you do enjoy what I post here, don't be afraid to leave a comment and say so! It's nice to know when your work is being read and when other people share your enthusiasm :)

2008: Fennesz - Black Sea

2008-12-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

This should really be far higher up on the list but I've been enjoying it so much recently that I decided it was best to strike while the iron's hot. For those not in the know, Christian Fennesz is an Austrian electronica artist that masterfully meshes glitch, noise and ambience to create collages of sound that are as wonderful as they are difficult to pigeonhole. His highly lauded 2001 effort Endless Summer incorporated a subdued but evident pop sensibility into his work, the album's playful, glitchy and initially abrasive exterior eventually giving way to an underlying tranquility with repeated listens. Venice moved towards slightly more peaceful waters but was still very much the product of a man enamoured, in a slightly abstract sense, with pop music: this was most notable on 'Transit', where David Sylvian's guest vocals turned what would otherwise be a wash of Fennesz noise into a beautifully melancholy ballad.

Black Sea, however, sees the maestro completing his swing towards abstraction: taking a much more compositional approach, the new album, as the press release puts it, goes for the "slow reveal" method over Endless Summer and Venice's more song-based structures. This is, in all sorts of ways, a brilliant move: moving away from the repetition of previous song structures allows for a much more vast and expansive sound. One only needs to listen to the ten-minute title track for affirmation of this. Fennesz's music has always had quite a visual element to it, painting beautiful pictures in your head as you listen, and on Black Sea this is more evident than ever: the introductory swell of noise morphs into something sweeping and grandiose, giving the impression of a vast expanse of violent, crashing sea. The clicks and whirrs and abrasive sheets of static soon fade quite abruptly as we, the listeners, are pulled under the surface of the waves, down into the echoey depths of Fennesz's sonic sea, the crashing of the waves beating down in the distance. And suddenly all is peaceful: gentle sweeps of guitar ambience grace our ears and purposefully picked-out notes on an acoustic guitar reverberate wonderfully, providing a reassuring organic quality that would have otherwise been lost in all the sheets of fuzz.

That's one particularly impressive thing about Black Sea as an album: for a piece of experimental electronic music it comes across as surprisingly organic and human; bottomless in its depth and full of sweeping emotion. This may be due to Fennesz's immense attention to detail and recording technique: during the recording of the album, he reports that he experimented greatly with the quality of different rooms and microphones. As a result, each sound resonates in just the right way, creating whole open spaces with layers of echoing noise and distant, fragmented melody. Speaking of melody, that's another thing about Black Sea: where with previous releases Fennesz would have relatively obvious tunes anchoring his songs, this latest release is a lot more abstract for most of its duration, instead placing a lot more emphasis on texture and atmosphere, allowing the songs to build and envelop the listener. This is not, by any means, background music: Black Sea is an album to listen to on headphones and lose yourself completely in. There is so much going on at any given moment - distant rumblings, soft sheets of noise, washes of guitar, echoing strings, even prepared pianos - that the album is a totally engaging listen throughout. There are entire worlds within these sounds, ready to be explored.

My favourite thing about Fennesz is the sheer capacity for emotion and reflection within his sculptures of sound, and Black Sea is in this respect particularly powerful. The best pieces of music have the ability to say things that words cannot adequately express. 'Glide' does this perfectly: building ever so gently, it's easy to let your thoughts wander throughout its duration, but there's a moment halfway through where it subtly but powerfully hits home - and at that point it transports me completely, dredging up all sorts of memories floating around in my mind, reminding me of things, people and places that i miss, or that i've lost and that i wish i could have back. 'Vacuum' has a similarly intoxicating sense of melancholy throughout that lends itself very well to introspection and reflection.

While it's not the kind of thing that I'd like to come back to too often because of its sheer emotional weight, and while this is a purely subjective thing that others may not find here, there is a certain beauty in discovering pieces of music like this that can have such a strong emotional effect. And for all its emotional weight, its all-encompassing atmosphere and its beautiful complexity, Black Sea is one of the most fascinating and rewarding pieces of music released this year. If you have the patience to lie down with some headphones and lose yourself in its sound for a while, you will, with any luck, find the payoff immensely gratifying.

Fennesz - Black Sea

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

2008-12-29T03:24:00.000-08:00

You're going to be sick of this one in a few months' time. Trust me. Predictably, the backlash has already started and Pitchfork haven't even posted their review yet. One thing's for sure, though: the new Animal Collective is a corker. In fact, after several listens, it's my favourite album of theirs yet. Their last effort, 2007's Strawberry Jam, was a good album (marked particularly by the raucous single Peacebone) but suffered from a slight lack of cohesion and an irritatingly tinny production job. Merriweather Post Pavilion corrects those errors: the album sports a much warmer, richer sound, keeping the electronic elements that were introduced on Strawberry Jam but also featuring rich vocal harmonies and a greater pop sensibility than ever before, suggesting that the band have also taken cues from Panda Bear's own 2007 solo effort, Person Pitch. It's also Animal Collective's most accessible and danceable record to date: in fact, if there's any justice in the world, the absurdly infectious 'My Girls' (which features an absolutely enormous beat that could rub shoulders with even Lil' Wayne's biggest hits) will become a dancefloor-filler in indie clubs in the coming months. 'Summertime Clothes' is also a hit waiting to happen: matching a Beatles-esque vibe to a squelchy synth-laden stomp, it's ironic that the song will be hitting our stereos in the middle of the winter because it would make the perfect summertime pop song. And, of course, I challenge you not to be compelled to dance around your room like a madman the first time album closer 'Brothersport' works its way into your ears: perhaps the most jubilant moment so far in the discography of a band who are no strangers to smiles and sunshine, its gloriously rhythmic call-and-response hooks give way to an instrumental mid-section buildup that is, rather surprisingly, very reminiscent of techno or house, before resuming the hooks and handclaps right up until the album finishes.

There couldn't be a more perfect way to start the record than with 'In The Flowers': starting with a floating cloud of psychedelic noise over which Avey Tare sings a dreamy melody, following the line "If I could just leave my body for a night..." the heavens open and gigantic rays of sunshine synths and thundering percussion tumble down from the sky. It's like falling asleep and finding oneself in a surreal but beautiful dream. The remainder of the 55 minutes is one giant trip: Merriweather Post Pavilion is a hefty dose of celebratory psychedelia, from the gorgeous free-form midsection of 'Daily Routine' to the candyfloss synth arpeggios of 'Taste' and the bizarre didgeridoo sample in 'Lion in a Coma'. There is a prevalent Beach Boys vibe too, particularly evident in the beautifully sugary lovesong 'Bluish' or its followup track 'Guys Eyes'. 'No More Runnin'' provides a nice respite from the madness, its nocturnal balladry allowing you to catch your breath before 'Brothersport' comes to finish the record in style. A wonderfully cohesive effort that retains all of the experimentation that we've come to love from Animal Collective while providing their catchiest songs yet, this album will inevitably get the hype-avalanche treatment in the coming months. Get in early before everyone from your dad to your grandma is jabbering about it.

In keeping with Domino Records' wishes, I've removed the link that was here before. Sorry!

And Just Like That The Year Is Gone: 2008 / Ohana - Dead Beat

2008-12-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

As much as I enjoy writing end-of-year lists and reading others', the end-of-year list is still, I would say, an awkward concept. For one, it seems pointless putting albums in exact numerical order - for all the importance I try to place on using your critical faculty, my mind doesn't quite work that way, and an action like deciding between my favourite albums of all time feels like choosing between my own children - so I'm deciding to do things a little bit differently here. The reason I set up this blog was to present people with good quality music where I assume the case is that they might not have heard of the band or album in question, and I'm sticking to that goal here. In an effort to keep things interesting, I'm largely omitting from my list albums that have already been hyped to death or that people will have already either heard or made their mind up on even before listening. That means sorry Bon Iver, Portishead, Fucked Up, Deerhunter and The Mars Volta, you've already had your fair share of coverage. I'm not placing things in strict numerical order either: the general trend will be that I'll work my way up and post my absolute favourites last, but the idea is mainly just to present a few records that I think have been particular musical highlights this year. And without further ado, I present you with the first record on this rundown:

Ohana - Dead Beat

As a very recent discovery this feels fitting to start with, although with more time and more spins it could end up a lot higher on the list. Ohana are/were a tight-as-hell post-hardcore outfit from Australia that, in true Refused fashion, just broke up straight after releasing a kickass record. Comparisons could be drawn to Off Minor, Unwound or Fugazi musically, particularly in the way the band write their music around tightly constructed grooves where all the instruments interlock perfectly. They make the most out of having two guitarists by building fascinating textures with their instruments: the tone of each instrument is clear and razor-sharp and the arrangements, while consistently complex, are never too dense, the band constantly allowing for clarity in their sound. An excellent example of this emphasis on texture can be found, for example, in the last minute of centrepiece 'The Birth of the Clinic' where the exclusive use of harmonics alternating between the guitars makes for something that sounds pretty unreal and really impressive. There are other great points where, perhaps, one guitar will be playing razor-sharp Drive Like Jehu-esque dissonant chords while the other will be playing minimalistic reverb-drenched riffs over the top, and the effect of the two working together is brilliant. It's also refreshing to see a band that draws as much attention to the bass and drums as their guitar players: Dead Beat sports some of my favourite basslines this side of Off Minor and some great, detailed drum playing. Ohana also show a tendency to drift towards minimalism and repetition in their work: however, it's always used as a way of subtly but powerfully keeping the music progressing forward and it makes for some of the album's most interesting moments. The best example of this is opener 'One On Four', which, though repeating some riffs for most of the song, constantly shifts and works towards a subtle climax. For a more obvious build towards an emotional climax, look no further than 'The Birth of the Clinic', which gains tension as it goes along, only for it to be released in a sparse yet cathartic vocal-and-drums section at the end. It's a real highlight, although you'd be hard pressed to find a moment on Dead Beat which is less than enjoyable, as it really is one fantastic moment after another. The record is never boring, wisely clocking out at 26 minutes, leaving you reaching for the repeat button. The vocal performance is also of note: lyrically, the album is intelligent and emotionally loaded, while the angry shouts and yelps of the singer are, once in a while, replaced by a bizarrely effective use of the voice as a melodic, wordless instrument, singing melodies that interweave with the guitar lines. Another great thing about the vocalist, of course, is that he knows when to shut up and let the instruments do the talking, a crucial awareness of space that some bands in the genre lack. Perhaps it's time that I shut up and let the music do the talking too: what you really need to know is that Dead Beat is a stunningly tight, intelligent and enjoyable record that is one of the finest examples of post-hardcore in recent times.

Ohana - Dead Beat

Versoma - Life During Wartime

2008-12-21T04:51:00.000-08:00

One look at the curriculum vitae of Versoma's members (the group included past and present members of Hot Cross, Transistor Transistor, Anodyne, LickGoldenSky, Orchid, Bucket Full of Teeth, Saetia and Wolves) and you'd be forgiven for immediately forming the preconception that this is some sort of screamo supergroup. Well, you're not entirely wrong, but this is not the kind of well-trodden emoviolence you might expect - Versoma's glorious racket is as informed by 90s indie-rock as it is grounded in the passionate catharsis of emo. The ghosts of My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth and Fugazi all lurk within these six tracks, something that is immediately obvious as the noisy tremolo guitars of opener 'Gods and Queens' hit your speakers. Most songs on this 18-minute EP blend the dark aggression and heart-on-sleeve nature of emo and hardcore with the melodic sensibilities and guitar styles of the aformentioned masters of indie and shoegaze, creating something unique and fascinating as bludgeoning riffs meet desperate vocals and shoegazing guitar wizardry. 'November 2004' is an obvious highlight: opening with a major-key plod reminiscent of Pelican, the song is propelled by its urgent drumming and superb vocal performance towards an emotional climax before dissolving in a wash of MBV-esque guitars. The following track '4.' serves mainly as a segue but is an interesting departure in its own right, sticking to more ambient sensibilities as sheets of noise and clean guitars are layered up with yearning yelps. The song this gives way to, 'Black Train', is the most obvious indication of the sound of members' previous projects, mostly sticking to dark hardcore riffage layered with subtle noise experimentation. The intro of closer 'Come In Alone' could almost be that of a My Bloody Valentine song (I wonder what brought that band to mind - maybe the impossibly blatant reference in the song title?) but the song morphs into a perfect crossover between hardcore punk and 1990s indie-rock that really sums up what Versoma is about.

I need to order this from the Robotic Empire webstore sharpish because, while not able to find the lyrics anywhere, I bet that if they're anywhere near as good as the music on this EP, this record is a keeper. It's just such a shame that this, along with the demos of this release that can be downloaded from Robotic Empire's rarities blog, represents the only material that Versoma ever recorded before their premature split. However, ex-members are currently making great music in projects such as Tombs and Gods and Queens, both of which follow similar ideas, so be sure to check those out if you enjoy Life During Wartime.

Versoma - Life During Wartime

The Cold Return

2008-12-08T05:51:00.000-08:00

As another hectic semester draws to an end I find myself with a little more time on my hands than usual. Or, rather, I'm decidedly ignoring the fact that i have two essays due and four exams to take after the Christmas holidays. I'll be taking this opportunity to get back to updating this blog hopefully a little more frequently, with plenty of music for you to feast your ears on, as well as providing the obligatory rundown of my favourite records from 2008. Watch this space.

The record I've been listening to the by far the most recently is Gospel's The Moon is a Dead World. Produced by Kurt "Midas Touch" Ballou of Converge, the record is, sadly, the only studio output the band have ever released. The band sound like what you would expect City of Caterpillar, perhaps, to sound like if they were closet Yes fans. In other words, Gospel play intense hardcore with massive prog leanings - insane drumming, psychedelic riffage, keyboard solos and nine-minute epics. This might sound absurd on paper, but The Moon is a Dead World is one of the most visceral, compelling and straight up awesome records ever to grace my ears. Its dense and dark racket will overwhelm on the first couple of listens, but every subsequent listen will reveal new nuances and amaze even more than the last time. Your ears will start to isolate awesome moments: be it the blinding riffage in 'Yr Electric Surge is Sweet', the superb melodic and dynamic changes of the epic 'A Golden Dawn', the stuttering rhythmic breakdown in 'And Redemption Fills The Emptiest of Hearts', the build and climax of 'What Means of Witchery' or the furious keyboards of 'As Far As You Can Throw Me'. Before long, you'll not only realise how tight and damn-near perfect this album is - you'll find that you're addicted to its propulsive dynamics and practically flawless instrumentation. In the realm of emo, The Moon Is a Dead World has little or no match in terms of how inventive and cohesive it is - fans of Circle Takes The Square and their ilk should probably download this. Right now.

I've also been listening to quite a lot of Harvey Milk. One of the more underrated bands in the field of sludge, it's suprising that, given their eccentric approach to the genre, more fans of bands such as Kayo Dot or Boris haven't picked up on them - or, rather, their early releases, which are particularly spectacular. They have admittedly received a bit of a buzz recently due to their most recent release Life... The Best Game in Town, touted by the likes of Pitchfork as a return to form. As entertaining as that album is, it seems to lack the extremity and astounding sense of experimentation that one finds in the band's early work, and thus comes off as comparatively lacklustre. My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, the band's debut, is a perfect place to start with Harvey Milk. The opening track 'A Small Turn of Human Kindness' throws you into experimental territory straight away: as an ominous cymbal counts the song in, one expects to be bombarded with sludge filth straight away. But Harvey Milk don't work that way: they choose, instead, to mess with their listeners' heads - playing around with keyboard noodling for a bit before reverting to cymbal counts, and then messing about a little more with some creepy strings. and then about three and a half minutes in, the real onslaught starts: one of the most vile, evil riffs you're ever likely to hear, backed by thunderous drums and horrible bass, rears its ungodly head. The band uses extended periods of (near-)silence, carefully controlled tempos and unconventional instrumentation (including the odd folk ballad) to contribute to the general disorienting effect of the album, along with the employment of a singer who could just as easily be a pissed-off walrus as be a human being. All of this leaves you wondering what you've just been hit by, but knowing one thing for sure: you've just heard one of the best experimental sludge albums you're ever likely to hear.

The follow-up to My Love..., the ironically titled Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men, dives into an even more serious - and sometimes surprisingly emotional - side of Harvey Milk's sound, while still retaining the experimental edge of their debut that makes the band so special and rewarding. One might argue that Courtesy is a bit more cohesive as an album than its predecessor, as it retains a constant feeling of utter gloom and misery throughout, while the predecessor tends to inject the band's bizarre sense of humour into tracks that otherwise might be more depressing, as well as having a few more particularly upbeat tracks among its numbers. The negativity of Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men is not necessarily to its detriment, but it certainly means that the album tends to lend itself a lot more towards moods where the listener is feeling a lot more, say, despondent. It has some disarmingly poignant moments: particularly the emotional climax of the album, a straightforward acoustic cover of Leonard Cohen's 'One of Us Cannot Be Wrong', a song that lends itself rather well to the singer's bizarre voice and is a surprisingly effecting respite in what is mostly a crushingly heavy sludge album. On an album full of highlights, one song to watch out for is the marvellously tense and evil opener 'Pinocchio's Example' which features - get this - a hoover. Yep, seriously. Also listen out for the interestingly structured and at times downright vile 'Sunshine (No Sun) Into the Sun', a great centrepiece - it starts with thirty seconds of a misleadingly charming ballad before propelling you straight into a black hole of downtuned bass and absurd guitar noise that lasts for the rest of the song. Nice. Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men may not be the most chirpy or upbeat of albums but it is certainly a powerful listen, and is one of the best sludge albums I've heard in a long time.

I'm also throwing in the new Glassjaw song as a bonus because, well, it fucking shreds.

Gospel - The Moon is a Dead World
Harvey Milk - My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be
Harvey Milk - Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men
Glassjaw - You Think You're John (Fucking) Lennon

Final Fight & Life Long Tragedy - Split 7"

2008-10-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

The 7-inch is a tricky format to make a really good record with. Due to its brevity, it often feels more like a showcase of the artist's material than a well-rounded record. But as far as the format goes, Final Fight and Life Long Tragedy's split on Deathwish records is one of the best "showcases" ever put to tape. Each side shows the pinnacle of each band's recorded output to date.

The first side by Final Fight kicks off with T.S., a solid but comparitively unimpressive cut that feels like a little bit of a false start, but all is forgiven when Rage kicks in. An anthem by any standards, it is undisputably the finest song in Final Fight's discography and one of the most perfect examples of melodic hardcore ever written. The song is a soaring and impassioned tribute to "all the people swallowed whole and ignored/tagged 'scary' by precious daddy's girls/left in fields to crack in the sun" and an angry attack on the mindless drunken culture of "disconnect and privelige" that is so easy to lose yourself in. As a song it holds a lot of meaning for me as it soundtracked a few months when it more or less exactly summed up my feelings about what was happening around me and, in a way, that sense of connection was comforting.

The Life Long Tragedy side shows no let-up in quality, demonstrating a masterful prowess both lyrically and musically. The two songs here easily rival anything that Modern Life Is War has done in terms of passion and quality and are painfully relatable for anyone who has ever experienced disappointment, depression or disillusionment. The lyrics in 'Sweet Innocence' ("And true love was just a marketed ploy/So guys could hit their lines and girls could grab their boys/Sweet innocence with loser's luck/I know you think you're giving love but you're just getting fucked") are incredibly bitter but ring so true that they hit you like a freight train. Despite the undisputably pessimistic outlook, some rays of light still show through, especially the emphasis on how important friends are amidst all the doom and gloom. These songs have helped me through a lot and I hope that perhaps through this they might at some point hold a similar meaning for others, too.

Shivering with you, we shoot our breath into the cold
We see the shine from a town that sucked the life straight from the desperate souls
And out in the distance are silhouettes from the headlights
That brighten up our faces and the tears inside our tired eyes
And I finally realized that no matter where we go
We'll never truly find ourselves if we only ever look alone
We drank too much and here's to us
'Cause we succeeded in forgetting that we were still alive
And I lost myself along the way, still got ambitions
Because hope is the one thing that keeps me going in the worst of times
I know I never claimed to have a heart of gold
I haven't been myself lately and I felt so strong a year ago
Silent cries for help echo through late nights and empty streets
And I'd suffer outloud but no one would care enough to be listening
Proving to our heads that our hearts have reasons to still beat
Is sometimes harder than it seems, so beat some life back into me
But on nights like this say "fuck the world" and pass the drink
We'll only be alive one time 'til we rot in hell for eternity
And when I'm burning I don't want to fucking regret anything
So if life's a joke then show your teeth and raise your glass and sin with me
-Life Long Tragedy; Soul Search Party

Ampere - All Our Tomorrows End Today & Split w/Sinaloa

2008-08-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

"Young hearts don't always beat to standard verse & chorus", and that is certainly the case with Ampere themselves. Featuring alumni of the much-celebrated Orchid, they are one of the very finest bands currently active in the emotional hardcore scene, outstripping even their previous bands in terms of technicality, intelligence and impact. Those familiar with Orchid will be able to expect a logical progression in sound and extremity: the almost grindcore-like intensity and short song lengths leave no room for breath, the chaotic but intricate guitar lines grab you by the throat and the singer packs in as much lyrical wisdom into one song as he possibly can.

The band's most solid release to date is the full-length (if you can call it that, featuring 11 songs and lasting 10 minutes) All Our Tomorrows End Today. Opener 'Remain Unadapted' is the ultimate statement of intent at only 24 seconds, and the subsequent two songs, while increasing in length, still last under 45 seconds each. It is only at the fourth track that the real standout of the album is dropped: 'Woodlawn', the album's longest track at (gasp) nearly two minutes, is a powerful song about the loss of a close friend or relative that still haunts the singer. The culmination of the song, to me, is the part that is, interestingly, not written in the lyrics, where the singer screams "we have lost you" desperately, over and over again. The rest of the album from there onwards is, with the exception of the interlude 'The Old World is Behind Us', a barrage of more short, to-the-point outbursts, culminating with 'In Memoriam', a homage to the french situationists of the 1960s. My favourite thing about Ampere, as with many of my favourite hardcore bands, is the lyrics. They are full of a kind of confrontational, youthful spirit that seldom found in many current bands. Some may call them preachy or pretentious, but the thing that I like about Ampere's persistent message is that it essentially boils down to the idea that you should choose your own path in life without using fabricated and impractical ideologies as a crutch. It's an attitude that smacks of being fiercely DIY and punk, and this seems fitting given the likewise extreme musical approach Ampere take. The greatest virtue that they possess is the tendency to not waste any time in expressing an emotion or idea: there is not one note or lyric on the album that is superfluous, and this fact makes All Our Tomorrows a brisk but overwhelmingly affecting listening experience.

"everything we own, we have stolen. we've no regrets. obscurity and clarity collide. we've swallowed down these words for too long. all that is said can be disproved, and all that's not can be upheld. don't be content with being a spectator. speak up and choose a point you've made and expand it. choose a point you've made and destroy it. or critique the critiques. destroy the ironclad."
-Ampere; The Jailors Speak of Freedom

The band's more recent split with Sinaloa is another highlight in their career. It features marginally longer tracks, with four of seven lasting over a minute and two scraping the two-minute mark. Essentially, this is an EP of 'Woodlawn's: the songs here are all extremely powerful and emotional, from 'At Its Heart & At Its Head', a song that expresses the need for hope in the midst of deppression and ruination, to the haunting chord sequences of closer 'In Antiquity'. The 'Woodlawn' reference I make here isn't entirely superficial, either: in my opinion, 'Wormwood, Radiation' is, in subject matter, a continuation of that song. The contrasting lines "there is life here" and "this doesn't get any easier. this is a wound that time can't heal. it leaves a scar" seem, to me, to say that while you can regain perspective and compusure in the years following a loss, it is nevertheless an event that leaves an irreversible mark that one sometimes never fully recovers from. 'We Live Like Lost Children', by contrast, breathes positivity throughout: it is a life-affirming expression of the need to "reject the notion of modeling our patterns on archaic moral codes not in line with our lives", to live by your own standards. The last line of the song really encapsulates the spirit of Ampere: "now is the time to stand back and ask, "are we living the lives that we want?"'

"blood is filling our lungs & the room won't stop spinning. it's only now that we notice the ghosts in the mirror are us. we built these walls. somewhere, choking on words, in some far-off room, away from the fallout, we'll never make it out. and should this room become a morgue, our bed a coffin, our secrets will die with us. so still, so sterile. there are ghosts there, behind the headboard, under sheets. they keep us from sleep. footprints on carpet, and stark white walls keep secrets hid in plain view. and when our buildings topple, we will meet in the wreckage. among ashen remains, we'll be burning ember and we'll not leave any tracks. by sunrise, the wind will displace us. it'll be as if we were never there. and you said that there's not a word to believe in either of our whispured assurances, but we find solace... and we won't forget the sound of ruined gray cities, of shadows, and the silence..."

-Ampere; At Its Heart & At Its Head

(The Sinaloa side is also good but hey, it's Ampere I'm talking about here, right?)

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

2008-07-23T01:39:00.000-07:00

Flying Lotus is Steve Ellison. Yes, he is well-known for his relation to the Coltranes, but he also churns out some awe-inspiring instrumental hip-hop on the Warp stable. With Los Angeles he has brought us perhaps the best in electronic music that 2008 has had to offer so far. Here we have seventeen cuts of sublime beats, skittering noise and beautifully hazy melody. FlyLo himself has said about his music that “I have this beautiful lemon tree in my backyard, and on a sunny day the light shines through. Little things like that inspire me." This kind of inspiration through mood shows; each track has a flowing sense of atmosphere to it - the opener Brainfeeder is like being skyrocketed into space, and from then on you're floating among the nebulae and the comets, right up until the moment that you're sucked into the black hole of bliss that is the vocal-laden closer Auntie's Lock/Infinitum. The songs here are engaging and layered, but never too dense or abrasive, always keeping a tempered sense of melody and space, making them perfect for either active or passive listening, whichever suits your mood. Headphone listening recommended.

The Carrier - One Year Later

2008-07-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

Following the untimely demise of Modern Life is War and Life Long Tragedy, hardcore started to look like a downhill slope for a while. However, there are a valuable few bands that seem to have the capacity to fill that gaping hole, and The Carrier are one of them. Combining a dark yet melodic sound similar to that of Shai Hulud with the intensely personal lyric-centric approach of early Modern Life is War, "One Year Later", their debut album, bleeds emotion from every pore. Anthony, their vocalist, sings of personal struggle: covering depression, self-loathing and loneliness, the fact that these tales of personal troubles are coming from someone who is "nineteen years young" makes them instantly and utterly relatable. This relatability is strengthened by the simplicity and urgency of his delivery: it's even the simplest lines like "I want to see better days, I want to see hope in things" that are perhaps the most breathtaking, because of how direct they are, because of how much we see ourselves mirrored in those words. This sense of relatability is the reason that I love hardcore: it's that "we're in this together" feeling, that knowing that there's others out there that feel just as bitter and disillusioned as you. It's a feeling of community spirit that's difficult to find in any other genre. The title track of this album is particularly poignant in its story of consuming and stagnant self-hatred, but it's the powerful undercurrent of hope in the anthemic Panicstricken that really provides the gem in the crown. "One Year Later" is The Carrier's "My Love. My Way". Give them a bit of time and they may well write their own "Witness".

I chose death over life, wanted to meet my maker, I was dying inside. Pain too great to deal with me made me try to take my life. But now I've seen the light, I've got a second chance at life. I'm not retracting my old tracks. I'm never going back to the locked doors and the blinding lights, to the uncertainty of whether the next will be a good or bad day. I never want to wonder what life would be like without me in it, because I'm alive. I'm done wanting to die. I've taken what I've learned with me, it's all I know, and I'll been kicking my old shit out the front fucking door. Because I don't need it anymore. I'm taking steps forward one foot at a time, making sure not to fall. And it will be the last trip of my life. Reaching up while the ship sinks to the bottom of this dead ocean. A thousand stars couldn't shine through everything we've been through, in this world that has no ending. I'm never going back to locked doors. I'm never going back to blinding lights.
-The Carrier; Panicstricken

Converge - Jane Doe

2008-07-17T04:46:00.000-07:00

Jane Doe is probably my favourite record ever. If not, it certainly comes close. I wouldn't normally post something like this because I assume that the two or three people that actually bother to read this would be familiar with this album. But then I had this staggering realisation that, you know, there are people who haven't heard this album, or people who, worse, don't "get" it. It saddens me that people are missing out on something so incredible. Well, here's your chance to repent.

Jane Doe is an album and needs to be heard as such. I need to stress the importance of this. It is a cohesive experience, the expression of and expansion upon a single emotion to overwhelming effect. It is highly unlikely that you are going to "get" Jane Doe just by listening to Concubine or The Broken Vow as standalone songs. Every moment in this album contributes to the next, hurtling madly towards those last three minutes of the title track. The album is a perfect example of the powerfully cathartic nature of hardcore: a comprehensive outpour of an emotion, like wringing water from a sponge until nothing is left.

This album is a rollercoaster of emotion recorded in the aftermath of a heartbreak that left Jacob Bannon feeling low and damaged. It shows, because all the associated emotions are there: from the shock, denial and desperation following loss to the ensuing feelings of spite and hatred, the nadir of defeat, depression and self-loathing, the cold grip of loneliness and, tucked away in a corner somewhere but nevertheless present, hope.

The lyrics, for one, are stunning. They don't necessarily match up to the music in a linear fashion - rather, Jacob Bannon writes them like poetry, then uses them as inspiration for the songs, lifting lines and placing them in appropriate places for maximum impact. Take Concubine's desperate cries of "Dear, I'll stay gold just to keep these pasts at bay", Bitter and then Some's vitriolic chant "Death to cowards, traitors and empty words" or the beautiful penultimate part of the title track "Lost in you like Saturday nights/Searching the streets with bedroom eyes/Just dying to be saved" and you have just some examples of Bannon's skilled and heartfelt lyricism. There is a particularly haunting passage in Hell to Pay, as another example, that really sums up the kind of engulfing depression that takes its hold post-heartbreak:

"That night, I think he cried himself to sleep
Just maybe, he felt more than we could ever know
And I think he pulled that trigger to empty that memory
I think he cut the weight to end the floods of you
Let him soar, let him ride as budding gravestones do
Just sleep, girl, just dream well"

Jane Doe, of course, isn't anything without the music. And what sublime music it is: from the discordant opening measures of Concubine the listener is thrown into some of the most intense, chaotic music ever written. The mood varies; from raucous and chaotic in Homewrecker and Bitter and then Some to pensive in Hell to Pay, with its enormous bassline, and epic in Phoenix in Flight. There is a sense of uncontrollable and climactic chaos throughout the album, untamed amounts of passion that are hard to find in any other album. One particular highlight is The Broken Vow, an anthem that finishes on the rousing and desperate chant "I'll take my love to the grave". There are some interesting but also successful experiments on the album such as the eerie "Phoenix in Flames", a short slice of chaos that sees the band stripping themselves down to a core of drums and vocals. Thaw is also particularly climactic with its jarring riff and its crushing closing chord sequence. This still serves as a mere warmup for the album's title track. There's a rather clichéd phrase that goes "it's always darkest before the dawn" - to me, much of the song Jane Doe represents that state of rock bottom. It charts that feeling of hopelessness, of being completely lost. There's a moment about 45 seconds into the dirge where Bannon suddenly switches gears into a voice that's so different to his usual scream that it's ethereal, singing "I want out" like a desperate cry for help. It's one of the most incredibly affecting parts of the album. The song repeats itself in a cyclic pattern, spiraling more and more into that pit of despair until something happens - something changes. There's a break in the music, and a wonderful sense of space and release. There is one final chorus, like a sigh put to music, before it kicks in. A searing crescendo that has so much intensity that it could easily rival anything that Godspeed You! Black Emperor have ever written, rising out of the gloom like a phoenix in flight, the culmination of so many things gone wrong but perhaps a sign of determination to move past those events, a sign of hope. And that concludes not only the best album closer these ears have ever heard, but perhaps the best album too. Jane Doe is an album of limitless passion and honesty, an intensely personal statement that stands as an incredible work of art. Whether screaming, chaotic hardcore is your thing or not, take a chance on this album - spend some time with it, get to know it well, and perhaps, soon enough, you too will feel its rewards. If you haven't felt anything by the time that culminating crescendo fades out, you can't be human.

Those nights we had and the trust we lost
The sleep that fled me and the heart I lost
It all reminds me
Just how callous and heartless the true cowards are
And I write this for the loveless
And for the risks we take
I'll take my love to the grave
As tired and worn it is
I'll take my love to the grave
-Converge; The Broken Vow

Converge - The Poacher Diaries

2008-07-17T04:05:00.000-07:00

In all my excitement about seeing Converge tomorrow, I decided to do a bit of a Converge special today. And so, to get things going, I present you with their 1999 split with Agoraphobic Nosebleed, The Poacher Diaries. (Agoraphobic Nosebleed's side isn't worth bothering with. Trust me on this one. Regard it as a Converge EP).

This split has some of Converge's most punishing cuts to date. Opening with Locust Reign (a short but sweet live favourite) and This is Mine, the four-piece waste no time in announcing their presence with two short, sharp blows to the eardrums. From there on it gets a bit more pensive with the almost psychedelic They Stretch For Miles (featuring a very well-placed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas sample) before resuming the skull-crushing riffathon in My Great Devastator (the album's best track) and The Human Shield. Minnesota concludes the album in epic fashion, featuring some great slide guitar and clean vocals (yes, your ears aren't deceiving you, that's Jacob Bannon doing some actual singing). The brutality and relative brevity of Converge's side of this split, alongside the overall strength of the songwriting, makes this one a keeper.

Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill

2008-06-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

Grouper is the Oregon-based Liz Harris. Noone more, noone less. Over the last few years she has been quietly making a name for herself through her ethereal and haunting songs, shrouded in a thick fog of vocal loops and guitar ambience, akin to perhaps My Bloody Valentine if they decided to ditch their "louder is better" approach and go acoustic. It seems that these days she's decidedly walking out of that fog: here on her latest effort, we have twelve folk songs that shine with a new-found clarity. Liz's stellar vocal harmonies float effortlessly above her gently strummed, reverb-drenched guitars to create something utterly mesmerising. Don't be fooled by the creepy cover art and equally creepy title, there's something about these songs that's beautifully calm and delicate - they lull you into a sense of total serenity where nothing matters but the haunting melodies that drift around in your subconscious. These are folk songs that are as subtle as they are powerful, taking a gentle but hypnotic approach that works its magic slowly but eventually becomes very endearing. "Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill" is the light at the end of the tunnel in musical form.

Buy

(link behind cover art)

Rites of Spring - End on End

2008-06-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

Before the formation of Fugazi, there was a band that was every bit as good.

Depending on whether or not you've ever done a bit of research into the history of a certain infamous three-letter term, you may or may not already be familiar with Rites of Spring. Yes, they are often credited as being the originators of emo - or, that is to say, emotional hardcore. Obviously the real value of this term is highly disputable - as Picciotto said himself, "honestly, I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands. The reason I think it's so stupid is that - what, like the Bad Brains weren't emotional? What - they were robots or something? It just doesn't make any sense to me." As such, it makes more sense to think of Rites of Spring as a hardcore punk band for the purpose of this post, as it will also aid in understanding why the band were so important.

You see, context is everything if one wishes to properly appreciate Rites of Spring. Imagine this: the year is 1985. The DC hardcore scene is stagnating. Its giants, the likes of Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Black Flag, are showing signs of slowing down. Cracks were beginning to show in the movement: Hüsker Dü and their ilk were already taking steps to destroy hardcore as most people knew it, integrating more of a pop sensibility and elements of other styles into the otherwise straightforward, aggressive punk that had been established as the trademark DC sound. Suddenly, out of nowhere came an album on the legendary Dischord Records that used the hardcore blueprint, but introduced a new sense of pacing and melody that had barely been seen in the genre before. Not only this, but Picciotto's lyrics forsook the usual outwardly directed anger of most DC hardcore, instead favouring subtlety, depth and introspection. This, combined with his desperately passionate delivery, resulted in music that was unusually personal and emotional. It is interesting to note the staggering difference in lyrical depth between Rites of Spring and other DC hardcore bands - for the sake of contrast, here is a sample from perhaps the quintessential DC hardcore band, Minor Threat:

I don't want to hear it
All you do is talk about you
I don't want to hear it
'Cause I know that none of it's true
I don't want to hear it
Sick and tired of all your lies
I don't want to hear it
When are you gonna realize...
That I don't want to hear it
Know you're full of shit
-Minor Threat; I Don't Want to Hear It

Note that the lyrics are to the point and simple, full of outwardly directed anger. Compare this to the following sample from Rites of Spring's 'All There Is' and the difference is positively startling:

It's more than love
And it's less than love
It's what I give to you.
All there is is the knowing that this never had to end.
All there is to know.
If I could take, heart in hand, what I'd give to you.
All there is is in the knowing that this never has to end.
All there is to know.
-Rites of Spring; All There Is

The subject matter here is much more abstract and vague; far more personal and emotional than the former sample, dealing with deeper thoughts and ideas, using much more subtlety and leaving parts to speculation. Picciotto also had a notable sense of wit, providing a dry sense of humour in For Want Of''s declaration of "I woke up this morning with a piece of past caught in my throat... and then I choked" 0r Persistent Vision's "I was the champion of forgive-forget, but I haven't found a way to forgive you yet". Rites of Spring opened people up to the idea that hardcore could cover a greater spectrum of emotion than simply anger.

Picciotto's voice is awe-inspiring here, too. His unhinged delivery in Rites of Spring makes his contributions in Fugazi sound positively tame - a passionate, gravelly rasp that breaks into a desperate yelp at emotional climaxes. The band's songwriting made use of a pop sensibility that gives them a sense of immediacy that separated them from less accessible early emo bands such as Moss Icon's labyrinthine spoken word passages.

And the band's importance doesn't stop at the invention of emo - there is even a precocious post-hardcore gem in the form of album highlight 'Drink Deep'. The song sounds startlingly similar to newer bands such as mewithoutYou (who wouldn't come about for another 15 years) and uses the same kind of groove that would be later expanded on fully in Fugazi. Simply put, Rites of Spring were not only an incredibly influential and important band, but a wildly emotional and enjoyable one that is absolutely worth devoting some time to.
Download the band's compiled discography 'End on End' here.

Mix one: Nostalgia

2008-06-21T06:26:00.000-07:00

Instead of doing the usual album-review entry, I felt like compiling a mix around a theme for this one. Lately I've found myself coincidentally listening to a lot of music that has a cutting sense of nostalgia to it. I'm not talking about songs that are nostalgic in that they remind you of a certain era: there's no mid-nineties europop here, no eighties cheese. Here I present you with twelve songs that sigh themselves: be it with over fond memories that never lasted, missed opportunities, opportunities that you never even got, friendship, love, or perhaps something even more abstract. In all honesty, it's not a good feeling at all, but it's a feeling that one tends to want to wallow in. In some way or another I have a strong emotional connection with each of these songs, and I strongly recommend that you investigate the output of all the bands featured here.

1. Mahumodo - April's
2. Trophy Scars - Assistant. Assistants
3. New Found Glory - Coming Home
4. Minus The Bear - The Pig War
5. American Football - Never Meant
6. Joanna Newsom - Sawdust & Diamonds
7. Gregor Samsa - Young & Old
8. Sun Kil Moon - Moorestown
9. Hopesfall - The End of an Era
10. Modern Life is War - I'm Not Ready
11. Thrice - Red Sky
12. Neil Young - Ambulance Blues

Download

Rinoa/Crydebris

2008-06-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

So... mounting coursework, exams and general stress overload put a stopper on this blog over the last few months, so apologies for the lack of recent updates to the grand total of zero people who read this. Now summer has well and truly kicked in, however, I intend to do a bit of a posting marathon, so fasten your seatbelts.

So to kick things into gear again, I bought Rinoa's debut EP today. This four-piece comprises ex-members of the incredible Crydebris and the similarly brilliant purveyors of pg. 99-esque chaos Chariots. Sonically, they play emotionally intense hardcore laced with post-rock, very similar to Envy and labelmates Devil Sold His Soul in many respects. From the moment the introductory buildup of 'Between the Pillars' peaks, the music remains wonderfully climactic for the duration of the EP, only letting up on the intensity front for the dense ambient segue 'In a Single Day and Night of Misfortune' which serves as a way of lulling the listener into a false sense of security right before the monstrously riff-heavy assault of closer 'Atlantis' comes to leave the listener mouth agape. The four tracks are shrouded in Mono-esque atmospherics: soaring tremolo guitars and swirling ambience that adds an impressive (if perhaps a little "tried and tested") sense of expanse and majesty. Also particularly endearing is the permeating sense of pessimistic desperation - and anyone who has heard and loved Devil Sold His Soul's latest opus A Fragile Hope will know where I'm coming from - that last mustering up of hope, the desperate clinging on to that light at the end of the tunnel. As such, the repetition of the line "Watch me wade through water/I'm not waving/I am drowning" at the swelling conclusion of 'Atlantis' is the musical equivalent of a stake hammered right into the heart.

This brings me on to Rinoa's now-disbanded predecessor, Crydebris. Crydebris were special. They were one of those depressingly short-lived bands that released one incredible EP that reminded you of everything you loved about your country's underground music scene, then split up just when they appeared to be going somewhere. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? The Severing spliced the dissonant time signature-shifting chaos of Botch and Eden Maine with the spaced-out beauty of the likes of Mahumodo and No Wings To Speak Of-era Hopesfall, resulting in a sound that, at the time, felt like a refreshingly unique punch to the gut. Particular standout moments include the incredible explosion after the ambient lull in the middle of the title track, or the gang vocal-laden finale of 'Mononoke-Picture'. I was lucky to get my hands on a CD-R copy of this EP while the band were still together but, as the EP is no longer in circulation and available for download on the band's myspace anyway, I figured that it would be a safe bet uploading the EP for your listening pleasure.

I've been told
that hate will break your heart in two
and change the face that I once knew
So try just once to see life unclouded by hate.
- Mononoke-Picture; Crydebris

Download the track 'Atlantis' from Rinoa's self-titled debut here.
Download Crydebris' EP 'The Severing' here.

Set Your Goals - interviewed

2008-03-23T08:44:00.001-07:00

This article is due to appear in a future issue of the University of Nottingham's official music magazine The Mic. Many thanks are due to Natalie Passingham for helping hugely with the interview.

“I’ve been really frustrated the past couple of days. I feel everything’s changing musically. It’s sort of pushed onto us. People keep coming to us asking ‘what do you think of working with this producer/this songwriter?’ No one’s thinking for themselves anymore, everything’s being so mass produced.” Jordan Brown, one of Set Your Goals’ two vocalists, is pouring out his laments on the music industry in the dingy backstage area of Rock City. “At the same time, as much as that scene’s thriving and is dominant in the mainstream, there is always such a strong underground scene. I feel like it keeps me in a constant reality check, I really want to be such a part of that, it’s so much more real.” The band’s debut album Mutiny! is riddled with lyrical references to this strong independent ethic that they adhere to. “It’s important for bands to know they don’t need anyone, and that’s what the song ‘Mutiny’ is about - it’s about us taking over and doing it for ourselves. You need to be self-sufficient. Like the song says, people are telling you that you need to be their friend to get anywhere, which is not true.”

“There’s so many good bands out there” interjects Matt Wilson, vocalist number two. “If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from punk rock it’s that you don’t need that whole music industry, there are so many elements that don’t belong there. It’s not necessary - with the way things are now, bands releasing their CDs for free, anyone can get exposure. You can put it up on MySpace and if people react positively, you can press your own CDs.”

“It’s also true on a band-by-band basis. This tour is a perfect example of how punk you can be in the mainstream,” exclaims Jordan with more than a hint of excitement – “they [‘they’ being tour-mates Gallows] emailed all of us on this tour asking if we wanted to be on it. Obviously agents were involved in booking shows, but it wasn’t a case of ‘is this band going to help?’ It was more ‘these bands rule, these are bands we want people to know about’ and I think it’s important to have these bands in the mainstream that will bring others in.” “None of these bands give a shit about what people think of them”, explains Matt, “and Gallows are just interested in helping people out who they’re friends with that and that’s so awesome, all the bands deserve so much respect.”

Indeed, they’re no strangers themselves to the punk-rock touring schedule. Last year, they slogged it out on an enormous European tour – “7 and a half weeks with one off date” states Jordan, a figure that exhausts us just thinking about it. “We’ve learned our lesson as far as booking extensive tours go, you should take an off date every 3, 4 days. Especially to have time to see the locations you’re at.” Matt looks on the bright side, though – “It was amazing being able to go to places like Portugal, getting to experience their culture. I think it’s one of the best things of being in a touring band, getting to travel so much.” “I think it’s good to play in places outside of major cities, too” states Jordan. “Because obviously, France is not just Paris, not everyone can travel to Paris”.

Some major excitement has been coming their way as of late. On top of a support slot with Paramore and a coveted main stage appearance at Give It A Name this year, they have been approached by Vinnie Caruana to be his backing band playing songs by The Movielife at Bamboozle this year. Matt clarifies all: “We’d become friends with him through I am the Avalanche. Jordan met Vinnie back when he was in The Movielife, and we’ve been Movielife fans for a long time so it was an honour when he asked, it’s amazing.” “This is him giving closure to the Movielife so he can continue with I am the Avalanche and give back to the Movielife fans” beams Jordan, slightly bowled over by the whole thing. “We were thrilled when he asked. It was like ‘You didn’t even have to ask, you should have just booked it and told us ‘by the way’’…’’

Given the love they have for all things DIY and independent, we knew that SYG would have some bands that they would want give mention to. “I’ve been listening to a lot of A Wilhelm Scream recently, I think they’re awesome. I always try and plug The Swellers from Michigan, I think they’re doing something so amazing” says Jordan, eyes lighting up. “They’re really committed to touring and have a really good ethic. Even if you just go to our MySpace, we’re always switching up our MySpace friends so people can know who we think they should know about.”

So what is punk’s current situation in the midst of all this mainstream tomfoolery? Matt is confident about its relevance - “As long as the mainstream gets worse, there will be more revolt against it.” And as long as bands like Set Your Goals are around to affirm this, we couldn’t agree more.

Sika Redem - Entheogen

2008-02-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

Sika Redem are a sadly underappreciated band from Coventry. Their schizophrenic, cathartic yet beautiful sound could be broadly generalised as screamo, but there’s so many different elements to take note of in their music that it’s quite hard to tell. While it fuses together so many different influences, never once does Entheogen sound contrived or, indeed, anything less than unique. There is a broad sonic range on display here: the epic album opener “The October Bird of Death” showcases Sika Redem’s capabilities perhaps better than any other track here, an impressively seamless flow from jarring discordance to inventive mellow guitar-tapping; from furious screamo to enormous epic climaxes. ‘Mr. Hunk’, ‘The Race From Hominid To Star Flight’ and ‘Shields’ sound, to throw some lazy journo metaphors out there, somewhat like Off Minor teaming up with Mogwai to fend off Isis at their most colossal. Their noodling post-rock guitar lines are juxtaposed with towering walls of almighty noise. ‘Euglena’ and ‘Proud Sons of a Magnanimous Land’, meanwhile, show that they also have the art of short bursts of cathartic screamo-meets-mathcore firmly under their belts. Sika Redem’s sense for the epic is, opening track aside, most noticeable in ‘The Protagonist Fails, The Pugilist Falls’ and ‘Stretching for the Zenith’, two sprawling, gargantuan tracks that reward attentive listening immensely. Tommy Jones’ vocals also display an impressive range, flitting from impassioned, abrasive screams and desperate yelps to ethereal crooning. Browsing the lyric sheet only makes things more involving – Entheogen is a complex, compelling album brimming with emotion. The production, done by Magnus Lindberg (most notable for his involvement with Cult of Luna), is also of note – it sounds enormous,s yet distinctly unpolished, a raw titan of an album. This review makes Entheogen sound frankly all over the place, but that is simply because it is hard to describe the sound without resorting to lazy comparisons. It is a very coherent and unique-sounding record, each song carrying with it a distinct sound that could only be attributed to Sika Redem themselves, whilst displaying an impressive amount of invention and variety. Don’t miss out, immerse yourself in their chaotic, dizzying wonderland – it’s a trip that you won’t forget.

Download three tracks from this album here.

American Nightmare - Background Music

2008-02-15T05:28:00.000-08:00

Despite acknowledging that “Screaming gets you nothing”, Wes Eisold decided, regardless, to pen the lyrics to Background Music, a 24-minute hand-grenade of lovelorn desperation. American Nightmare (now using the moniker Give Up The Ghost) play hardcore in the hard ‘n’ fast tradition, coupling their short, frantic songs with Eisold’s passionate, throaty rasp. His delivery makes words often undistinguishable on first listen but, when accompanied with the lyric sheet, Background Music is a tour de force. You’re not even getting half of it if you don’t listen to the lyrics – behind this album’s incessant power chords and drumbeats lies a lifetime’s worth of upset and frustration. There is the odd Modern Life Is War-esque tale of suburban depression (‘I.C. You Are Feeling Drake’) but the most poignant thing here is Eisold’s stories of heartbreak and unrequieted love. It is something that most of us have been through, and he puts his frustration in such an eloquent way that the listener feels an immediate connection with what he is feeling. He displays a keen sense of wit with such gems as “I took a shot at the world/and I missed” and “If imperfections are illegal/Then you should call the cops/and they should lock me up”. In these lyrics you can hear how many lonely nights he’s had, how many times love has pushed him to the edge, how many times he would have rather been dead. Despite all this depression, you can still hear how much he values the world around him and those close to him in the final stanza of ‘Farewell’: “I've lived through days/I've lived through nights/I've had my loves/I've had my fights./You've got to know, you have my heart.” Background Music is the perfect soundtrack to being young, male and lovesick, and it is nothing short of inspiring.

Download three tracks from this album here.

mewithoutYou - [A-->B] Life

2008-02-15T04:14:00.000-08:00

mewithoutYou have always been a band that have been misunderstood and mislabelled as a “Christian” band. Yet even the most hard-hearted atheist should be able to appreciate the lyrical genius of Aaron Weiss: his ruminations on faith, love and life are well thought-out, passionate and intensely personal. It is clear that his views on religion are well informed, intelligent and honest, far from the imagined black-and-white ethical system that so many misinformed Dawkins-worshippers jump to criticise. Lyrically as well as musically, there is an interlinked trajectory to be noted in mewithoutYou’s discography: the first two albums show increasingly searching reflections on faith, showing the difficulties and moral tests Aaron has faced on the path to finding God. Meanwhile the latest offering, Brother, Sister, is a more mellowed-out effort with a new-found penchant for lush instrumentation, its lyrics suggesting that while Aaron still faces plenty of tests, he has also found many answers to the questions posed on earlier albums. As such, [A→B] Life is a more endearing album to many fans, because, as the raging and yearning beginnings of mewithoutYou, listeners find themselves searching and asking questions alongside Aaron. Musically, it is far rawer than its successors, with an increased emphasis on post-grunge-isms and raging punk-esque guitars, while Aaron is more likely to be found screaming his heart out than speaking soft spoken word passages. The main element that makes the album what it is, however, is Aaron’s incredible lyrics: there are still ponderings on spirituality here, but what is more evident is a theme that is familiar to everyone, believers and non-believers alike, and is thus instantly relatable: love. Throughout the album there are so many eloquent passages that send instant shivers down the spine – take the line in ‘Silencer’ “She put on happiness like a loose dress/Over pain that I’ll never know” or ‘Gentlemen’s declaration of “And I’ll live without your love/But what good is one glove without the other?” Aaron’s poesy is made all the more authentic by his honesty: he is unafraid to admit that he is imperfect, that he makes the same mistakes that everyone makes in his relationship both with other people and with God. His impassioned delivery adds to the power of his lyrics, frenetically mumbling over spine-tingling breaks in the music. The beauty of his lyrics here is that many of us have felt exactly what he feels, while he communicates his problems in a way that is simultaneously breathtaking and heartbreaking. mewithoutYou have, to this day, maintained a near-flawless discography that is as affecting as it is essential. Whatever your beliefs, mewithoutYou are more than merely a band to check out – they are a band that you need in your life.

Download three tracks from this album here.