Phil Anselmo and The Ilegals, Author & Punisher, Hymns and Proven @ Hawthrorne Theater 1/18/2014

I don't have a whole lot to say about this show other than the Author & Punisher set because I just don't really care about any of the other acts. I know it's metalhead sacrilege to be indifferent to Pantera and/or Phil Anselmo, but you have to understand my taste. It's all about vocabulary: I like my metal heavy and weird, not so much fast and hard. I certainly understand the enormous influence Pantera has had on pretty much all metal at this point, but it's just not for me. I don't generally care for hardcore music as a whole.

It was a strange lineup, the first two bands were not particularly interesting by any stretch. They each had a handful of dudes trying to start pits without much luck, but the people surrounding me seemed to be bobbing their heads because it felt strange not to. I know I felt weird just standing there waiting for these dudes to finish their sets and typically I'd have gone outside or sat down in the back, but I knew if I moved, I'd lose my spot for the act I went to see.
The crowd was pretty unpleasant too. There were plenty of alright people, teenage dudes who seemed a little cautious about the whole thing and lots of older people who have calmed with age, but they were all outdone by the droves of Pissed Off White Guys. I'm not exactly a peaceful zen-like soul myself, but dear god. I can only handle so many aggro sweaty bald men. I usually love angry bald dudes, that's kind of my "thing" but this particular breed of them is off-putting and there were many who I suspect are or were at some point, tweakers. I caught one outside trying to pick a fight with the bouncer who was ejecting him for reasons unknown. Brodude proceeded to call the bouncer "pussy" and "faggot" and other such endearing terms and chastised him for not fighting him "like a man". I was not the only person who noticed the intense hypocrisy of the aggressor because he wasn't throwing any punches himself. Now, that's a good tactic in most cases when violence is a possibility. Never throw the first punch, but don't egg people on to do it either because you look like a fool. Watching people get wound up is entertaining, but i most definitely feel bad for the bouncers and I understand why many of them turn into dickheads.

First up were Proven, a hardcore band from... somewhere... They had... some guys in the band. They yelled a lot. The singer was so busy demanding the audience give respect to Phil Anselmo and Pantera that the band could hardly get a note in edgewise. He was also wearing a Pantera shirt and a Pantera ballcap. We get it, bub.
I usually try to enjoy whatever it is that I happen to be seeing when I go to shows, but it's getting harder and harder and it was simply impossible for me to enjoy this. My friend Yousef from Faces on The Radio and concert cohort pointed out that the singer actually tripped and fell down and looked rather embarrassed about it. I didn't catch it myself, but I'm pretty sure that if you fall on stage, you take it in stride and own it, especially at more violent shows.
I don't remember a damn thing about their music otherwise. They were't bad, they were just totally uninteresting.

Next up were Hymns. Just so you know, that's spelled H-Y-M-N-S.  Their singer spelled it out for us twice and I think at one point he also told us that he loves us. "I love you" mumbled into the microphone. That became the main joke between my sister and I for the night.
They were kind of a trip though. I think they might have potential if they developed their sound a little (lot) more and figured out what exactly is is they're trying to accomplish. They had a slightly Chimera-era Mayhem vibe going which is a generous comparison, but nowhere near that level of quality. They did not seem at all comfortable on stage. The singer managed to move around a bit, unlike the rest of the band, but his mannerisms were kind of off-puttingly depressive and self-consciously theatrical. At one point he sat down on a monitor to sing and I think he was aiming to look like a weeping angel gravestone or something.  Theatrics are a given in black metal, which is the closest genre I can pin on this band, but this was just silly and unintentionally so.  They might come to be pretty good if they gain more confidence and direction.

One of my sister's many stupid jokes. 

Finally, Author & Punisher was up. Once the first two bands' gear was off the stage, the crowd was able to see the wild setup Tristan Shone has built for himself. It was to hear people talking shit when they realized there were (gasp) keyboards but  once he began playing, they didn't have diddly squat to say. People were visibly stunned. There was a little group of booers in the back by the bar who were pretty vocal, but I kept looking back at the crowd and every time, more and more people had come up to watch whatever the fuck was going on. Last time I saw Tristan play, it was at an industrial music festival and people were used to seeing keyboards and lots of wires and weird shit thrown together, but at a metal show, this was quite out of place. I love watching people get confused by off-genre acts at shows. I also enjoy taking my sister to concerts and watching her get her socks knocked off. Last year I took her to her first metal show, Napalm Death. She had a blast and last night I think her world turned upside down. She also was not wearing any socks to get knocked off because she was wearing sandals. she's lucky she didn't get any TOES knocked off. Every time I looked over at her, she was slack-jawed and absolutely loving it. I guess I'm just doing my job as the older sibling.

This time around, Shone had a slightly different setup that included a rack of 3 microphones made of ventilators which had moving parts. I was not in a good spot to get a good look at them, but one seemed to have a sort of trumpet-mute effect, one made a bizarre clattering sound that gave a gapper kind of effect and you could see the front piece moving back and forth. The third was attached to a long piece of dryer hose, but I didn't see him use that one. Using these and what I assume was a handheld electronic drum pad, he played  a piece that I didn't recognize. I'm hoping it's a new song! He also had a mic attacked to his throat like a voicebox for people who are mute,  which generated insane elephant-like sounds.

Having seen him before, it's exciting to hear the differences in songs each time he plays them. Given the almost completely live nature of his music, there's almost no programming, human error is a big player and I believe it adds a lot of character to the pieces. Terrorbird and Lonely (which seem to be the big "hits") sounded a little slower than last time or on the albums. In Remorse and Melee (one of my favorites) were totally fantastic. "Extremely extreme" was used to describe his music somewhere once and it cracked me up, but it's absolutely true. I've said it before, I'll say it again: Author & Punisher is the most exciting current  act out there. The sheer creativity that goes into the machines is out of this world. This ain't no washtub bass of shopping cart with contact mics stuck to it. These are thoughtfully engineered pieces of industrial art and the music they make is so absolutely brutal yet also incredibly organic. The word that many people use to describe it, independent of one another, is 'erotic' and it's perfect. The truest sense of the word conveys visceral physicality, passion and humanity. The music is so absolutely brutal, gnarly and frightening. It's everything I look for and more.
Yousef and I bumped into Tristan and his label manager whose name escapes me before the show and he was as cool and upbeat as usual. It's great how he's just such a nice normal dude who happens to make the most freakishly disturbing music I've ever heard. Covert weirdos are the best, especially in the music world because people who are content to stand on their music alone rather than padding themselves with some kind of strange wardrobe and subcultural image make me feel like they're insecure about themselves or their art, which is not an appealing attribute.

He was projecting clips from some of my favorite movies, seen here is Andrzej Zulawski's Possession. 

We didn't stay to catch Anselmo because neither of us were really interested enough to deal with the crowd in order to watch an act that we're not really fans of. Instead we sat outside smoking for a little while and went home. I'm old and need to be home in time to catch the 11o'clock news and go to bed with my jar of icy-hot. Since I have nothing to say about that part of the night, I'm going to shareu some thoughts on social interactions, which I will place behind a jump because they're not standard content for this blog.

Alcest - Shelter (Prophecy Productions, 2014)

My favorite way to review new albums is to do a song-by-song first impression format, "live blog" so to speak. I usually do this on facebook, but I think I'm going to start doing it here instead because it allows me to go into detail without it being a chore due to my less-than-stellar english/composition skills. Writing about music ought to be nothing but fun, especially if it's a hobby and not your day job!
So here we go, let's listen to the new Alcest album.

Wings - The intro, therefor there's not a lot to say here. Some elvish choir shit. Still stuck on the elves, huh? But it builds nicely an if this is setting the tone for the full album, i'm a bit more hopeful than i was.

Opale - This was the teaser. I was not impressed with it. It's pretty upbeat and it has no traces of metal or any kind of heaviness in it at all. I knew that was going to be the case with this album and I had my period of mourning BEFORE hearing the album, and it was nice to get that out of the way and be prepared when the thing actually came out. The thing I love about Alcest's earlier material was the metal aspect. I like shoegaze, not as much as the next guy at this point in time, but it's definitely disappointing to hear one of the more exciting and original metal bands stop being a metal band. Quite frankly, when it comes to shoegaze I only listen to the first 2 Catherine Wheel albums because they've got some weight to them. They're strong and sound passionate whereas with most other shoegaze bands, they have a very indifferent, spaced out vibe and I don't find that appealing. One might argue my love of Spiritualized and they're as indifferent as it comes but there's a dark edge to it because they apathy is a result of heavy drug use instead of just floating around in nowhereland of jingly reverby guitars. I like it when there's a reason for that careless vibe, not just because yo man we're free spirits, ok?

La nuit marche avec moi - Like the last track, this is rather upbeat and it sounds pretty much exactly like one would expect Alcest lite to sound. I will give them much credit for crafting a very recognizable sound.
This song is quite sweet and whistful, neither of which rae my bag. I'm beginning to think I'm not suited to give a fair review of this album, but perhaps I'm best suited to because I love their older stuff so much and am willing to give this a spin. Not every review can end with the writer on their knees with their mouth open, patiently waiting their turn to suck the dick of whatever band they're discussing.
Hard truths! That's what S.O.S is about!
The outro of this track is lovely. It takes an ominous turn, and hopefully this will indicate the vibe of the next song...

Voix Sereine - Nope, more of the same but this is more stripped down. It has a lovely, subtle vocal melody. I'm almost excited about this. It's go ta nice, steady build-up and it actually pays off! That's one of my big peeves in music, when they create anticipation for something big to happen, but do not deliver. This song  is probably going to end up my favorite. The fadeout is fantastic. It reminds me a bit of the outro to Isis' Weight. I have a little boner for really great fadeouts. I also can't get through a single article without using the word 'boner'.

L'eveil des muses - This is a little darker than what we've heard so far, therefore I'm pleased. This has a nice weighty beat to it and it's quite danceable which is one of my few complaints about their prior material. It's difficult to dance to and one of my little missions in life is to bring more variety to the goth/industrial scene by strong-arming DJs into playing me off-genre songs. I've had some lucky with it, but most of the time the songs i plead for are not dancey to the masses because the masses are bad at dancing.
Bit I digress, this song is quite nice, but it doesn't feel long enough, it feels incomplete. It ends on a somewhat awkward note as if there was supposed to be another burst of something, but no. Nothing. Otherwise, this is another quite good song that has potential to be my favorite.

Shelter - Ah, the title track...  We're moving back to laying in the fields of flowers watching clouds drift past and being beautiful and ethereal and and not having hayfever or getting bugs in our underwear and we have not stumbled into patches of poison oak on the way here. Look out our lovely wicker basket of fine cheese and wine. Look at our hair, gently moving with the breeze. Nobody is getting greasy or sunburnt, and there is a fox curled up with a deer next to us.
EH. I'm just not into this kind of atmosphere.

Away - This is starting out quite promising. Neil Halstead of Slowdive is on guest vocals here, and I'm sure Neige was peeing in his jeans, being in the studio with him. He seems to own just one t shirt, and it's a Slowdive one. I must admit that the lower, more masculine tone of his voice grounds the music a little and I like that. It sounds like Neige come in to sing along toward the end and their voices sound very good together.
This is another stand-out track. It seems just right in structure, it's all-around rather good.

Delivrance - Ah! Finally! A 10 minute epic! One of the things about the older epics is that they tended to have a lot of sections or movements, if you will. They went lots of places and changed thing sup flawlessly. This song stagnates around a hypnotic central sound and doesn't really depart fro it for the duration. While this song doesn't feel like it's 10 minutes, long, it probably didn't need to be 10 minutes long. That said, it IS the final song on the album and it drops off into a string and vocal section that closes the whole thing out quite nicely.

Like I said, I was "getting my hopes down" for this album because I'm so deeply attached to their older, heavier stuff. It's so exciting to hear heavy music, almost black metal, sounding so beautiful and otherworldly. This album didn't disappoint me anywhere NEAR as much as I was expecting it to, but it doens't do it for me the way their prior releases do. It's also a little short, around 40 minutes. I've listened to it nearly 3 times while writing this review! It's also worth noting that I'm absolutely not in the mood for Alcest. I've been listening to a lot of Alice In Chains and early Strapping Young Lad recently and I went to see Author & Punisher play with Phil Anselmo last night and the other openers were boneheaded fast "angry white guy" music (I'll be writing about that next). So jumping right into something like Alcest is kinda jarring!

Also as I mentioned before, Alcest has a rather distinct sound that flows through every one of their albums, save for that first black metal album which they released while still getting their footing and figuring out who they really are. In fact, I think it's more that Neige has a distinct sound because everything he's involved with has a particular tinge to it. Les Discrets, Lantlos (my favorite of the other projects he's involved with), Amesoeurs, they're a genre unto themselves.
I'm not fond of this current shoegaze trend, or of the visuals exemplified by the album art. It's like tumblr.com has come to life and is walking the earth with it's pastel hair and floral boots. Call me a jerk or a South Park goth kid, but I'm not into hype, nor am I into trends. It seems a little weird that Alcest have not really changed their basic sound, but the artwork on Shelter looks like tumblr stock. In the past they've had a distinct and coherent look to their packaging. This is an extremely petty complaint though because I don't actually care at all about the packaging if the content is good. It does somehow seem like some kind of trick to suck people in with trendy images. I cannot fault them for that, because ultimately musicians want to sell albums. It's just a little odd that they would sacrifice their otherwise unique art and fitting style for a silhouette of some hippies standing in front of the sun. I think the reason I even took so much room to discuss this is that I think tumblr-hip stuff is particularly dumb and lacking in soul and personality, I'm using my music blog as a bit of a soapbox for my opinions on other cultural things. My point is that it's not particularly becoming for a group like Alcest to give in and use that sort of imagery. It doesn't do them justice.

It's a little sad to lose them from the arsenal of French metal that's been coming together in recent years because it's producing some of the best new music out there. Gojira, Blut Aus Nord in particular. But hey, I really can't complain because I dislike it when artists never change, stick to a certain formula and keep making the same album over and over because they know it sells (coughDEAFHEAVENcough). So all in all, I'm nowhere near as mad about this album as i expected and that pleases me greatly. I don't give numerical ratings, but maybe I ought to start because this isn't the first time I've said "I don't usually do this but I'd give the album" a 6 out of 10. That is based on the actual quality of the music which is rather high, but tempered by my personal taste and the fact that I'm just not down to hear this kind of thing at the moment. Can I go back to 1995 now please? Thanks.

http://www.alcest-music.com/
http://www.prophecy.de/

Novak's 2013 favorites. Because you care...?

2013 was not all that fruitful a year for me when it comes to new albums, it was more about live music. I saw metric fuck-ton of badass shows this year, but 2012 had a larger crop of exciting albums to offer.
This is just a quick little roundup because I've already discussed each of these albums, but I feel oblige to do a "best of" post. Because that's what bloggers do. Right? I guess.

Alter Of Plagues - Teethed Glory and Injury
The river of weird metal continues to flow onward, but this is some particularly weird and particularly scary shit right here. It'll rip your face off and additionally, it's much prettier than your face. Which isn't saying much, really...

Author & Punisher - Women & Children
By a long shot, the most frightening, aggressive things to happen this year and naturally that leaves it very near and dear to my shriveled, ashen heart. I love knowing that industrial music is not completely dead, and this is about as industrial as it gets, in a literal sense.

Jesu - Every Day I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came
Damn that's a pain in the ass to type. But I'm so pleased to hear Jesu coming back around. I liked this album right off the bat, but it continues to grow on me. It's good to hear Broadrick progressing forward with this project and getting out of that hole of imitation he was stuck in for a little while.

Man's Gin - Rebellion Hymns
This could so easily be just another quaint old-timey load of costumey shite, but no. It's 100% legit, honest and real.

Subrosa - More Constant Than The Gods
Dude. DUDE. (incoherent screaming)

Honorable mentions:

Nine Inch Nails - Hesitation Marks
This album was weirdly under the radar. All of a sudden... NEW NIN HOLY SHIT WOW. I was pretty skeptical because I was so impressed with Year Zero and wholly underwhelmed by... uhh... the one that came after it. Trent keeps saying he's done with the project, yet he keeps on truckin'. Hesitation Marks is not great, but it's rather good and it's SUPER poppy. I still feel pretty muddled about it and I can't properly express my feelings on it. It has some killer tracks, but it also some some real bonerkillers and a tendency to build up and not pay off. However, I really like the idea of including 2 different mixes, one that panders to the loudness wars and one for audiophiles. I don't have the most sensitive ears thanks to years of bad volume/earplug habits, but I can hear the difference and it's enlightening about sound in general to listen to them back to back.

Palms - Self-titled
I was really excited for this because I'm a gigantic Isis fan and this is basically Isis with Chino Moreno on vocals. I was quite taken with it when I finally heard it, but it didn't really hold up to my play-it-into-the-ground regimen that I apply to every album I get super freaked out for. It's a shame because there's so much potential here. I hope they do another album because I don't believe that this is the best this group of people can do.

In which your your not so humble narrator takes a step toward legitimacy!

Hey! Guess what!
I'm a guest on this week's episode of Faces on The Radio, which is a weekly podcast hosted by a few of my friends.
This week's episode is the Festivus episode, therefore it is dedicated to complaining and generally tearing a new asshole in 2013.

Give it a listen here: Episode 62 - Grievances

Thanks for having me, people!

Man's Gin - Rebellion Hymns (2013 , Profound Lore)

I used to be really heavy into americana, but my interest began waning as it got kind of trendy and a metric fuck-ton of utterly mediocre and derivative acts started popping up. It didn't put me off because it became "cool", I just don't have the patience to sift through it all. So I just stuck with my Munly and David Eugene Edwards albums and called it quits.

The a few years later, a friend turned me onto the music of Erik Wunder. Man's Gin and Cobalt. Cobalt are rad, but this is what really grabbed me because it's americana and it sounds absolutely genuine. there's no hint of irony here, and that's usually the great downfall of modern music that sounds old timey. This album and the previous one, Smiling Dogs,  are full of A+ songwriting and performance. They're affecting, heartfelt and almost exist in a bubble which goes back to what I said about lacking irony.  It seems completely natural for Wunder to be writing music like this, it's not forced at all.

Once again, I find myself at a loss for what to say. My only complaint is that Jarboe makes a little guest appearance to moan a little in the background of one of the songs. This is a trick a lot of artists are employing, getting Jarboe to do this on their albums. To me it seems like a grab for street cred. "Hey guys, I got Jarboe on my record!" That said, it doesn't detract from the overall high quality of the music and I just happen to find Jarboe to be pretty annoying outside the context of pre-reunion Swans. The running joke is that I'm going to have "Shut up, Jarboe" engraved on my tombstone. So nevermind.  It's tough to write about a lot of the music i want to write about because most of it speaks for itself and it's more a matter of convincing the reader to just listen to the damn album instead of elaborating on the fine points of the music and so forth and so on.  I feel like I need to figure out the internet version of holding a gun to people's heads while I force them to sit through whatever album I'm trying to pimp out.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mans-Gin/163217557044788
http://www.profoundlorerecords.com/

Subrosa - More Constant Than the Gods (2013, Profound Lore)

This made it's way onto my hard drive, and I'm still not sure how it got there. Nobody has fessed up. Thinking it was something else I hadn't listened to yet, I gave it a listen and I was totally stunned by what I was hearing and I haven't listened to anything else in the last 3 days.

This album is like a metal score to a Cormac McCarthy novel, blundering half blind through the mossy, wet, blue backwoods. One of the tracks is called Cosey Mo, after a character from Nick Cave's 'And The Ass Saw The Angel', and I'm convinced that it's not the only song that references that book, which I've read countless times in the decade I've owned it and have reduced it to a crumbling mass of tape and hi-lighter ink. The lyrical content is reflective of everything I love in literature: isolated rejects eking out a harassed existence in hidden parts of the world.

I'm pretty sure that Profound Lore is the new Hydra Head Records. I know HH has been revived, but Profound Lore has not let me down yet and seem to be hoarding all the really interesting acts. Subrosa is 75% female act which to me, is crazy because they play like dudes. This is probably a sexist thing to say, but it's hard to deny that one is surprised when a bandload of women deliver such crushing, frightening music. It's just not a common thing. The vocals are fantastic, powerful and confident. Even whey they drop down to a gentle, ladylike volume, they never fall into that cringeworthy weak breathiness that has been really hip with the singer/songwriter crew in recent years. it's hardly comparable, but it's a trend in female vocals across the board  and one that i loathe.
I also love the use of the violin. It took me a while to even realize it was a violin. I don't know what I thought it was, i was so taken by the music as a whole, really. It sounds like swarming birds, like underwater sonar gone awry, it sounds like all kinds of crazy shit and the whole effect is otherworldly and extremely unsettling.

Another aspect I want to mention before I wrap this shoddy and poorly thought out review up is how melodic and clear this is for a doom metal album. There's lots of variation and while it's pretty damn crushing, there's a lot of delicacy going on here. It's never boring, it never stagnates in one spot for too long and when it does get repetitive, it has enough sound happening to keep the listener intent on absorbing every last bit of information. Doom Metal is a pretty broad term these days and I'm not into over-categorizing music,. Subrosa are pretty tough to pin down anyway. They're very gothic, they've got post- coming out of every orifice, they're heavy as balls and up to said balls in americana. The americana bent is not as readily apparent on this album as it is on their previous ones, but it's there, simmering away. And there's nothing I love more than a metal band successfully hauling totally disparate influences into their music and making it seem like they were never intended to be apart. This band could play with Neurosis or Slim Cessna's Auto Club and nobody would complain. There's a lot of "weird metal" going on right now, riding on the coattails of Isis and the post-metal explosion. Most are pretty mediocre, but some like Subrosa and Altar of Plagues are blowing a hole in the roof of many people's expectations. I'm pleased to that that I feel like this is an exciting time to be a metal fan. I'm not sifting through music from 10, 15, 20 years ago to find stuff I can get off to because new music is being made that's desensitizing me to whole new kinds of shit. I love it.

I have been slacking on reviews, and have been kinda running out of albums i want to write about, but I had to swing by and drop a few words about this album. I'm also going to be a guest on next week's Festivus episode of Faces of The Radio podcast, to which I will post a link when it's uploaded. Some recent content might be nice for any viewers who might make a visit to this blog as a result.

http://subrosausa.bandcamp.com/
http://subrosa.cc/

Altar of Plagues - Teethed, Glory and Injury

I appear to have begun a little tradition of talking to my friend's boyfriend, who is also my friend, about metal when we see one another at the goth night. It's kind of a moment of "I'm not alone in this pile of mediocrity and bad taste". He's never steered me wrong in any of his suggestions either, this being one of his best (along with Author & Punisher). In fact, after he played me a song off the album, I immediately began calling my favorite record store DAILY to see if they'd restocked it yet until they finally told me to give them my email address and they'll let me know so I'd quit tying up their phone line and harassing them. If you're ever in Portland, stop in because DAAAANNNG.

I do not know how to classify this album. It probably falls squarely in the "post black metal" tag, but i find that concept so fucking ludicrous I can't bring myself to seriously refer to anything as such. I'm a sucker for all that Posty McPostpants music, but I'm over the playing-oneself-in-circles connotation of the prefix 'post'. Is it hard? Is it black as the inside of your cat's butthole? Then it's Black Metal. Plain and simple.
However, this album is considerably more... sophisticated. There's a big crop of current metal bands that are taking this sorta progressive approach to black metal and really dragging it up into some heady places. Teethed, Glory and Injury (wat?) makes use of a lot of synth elements that have taken me quite a long time to fully notice. They almost give the album an industrial metal feel which is fantastic for me because I love industrial metal, but it's rarely done in a way that I can really get behind. The synths here don't drive the music, they make a bed for it. Or maybe a grave if you want to be more KVLT about it, but whatever. When they're not popping up with a rhythmic sample or accentuating the action with gnarly saw waves, they're just back there churning and scraping away like a dystopian future-prog hammond organ, creating an ominous, metallic (in the literal sense of the word) underlayer for what is already a particularly frightening album.
Another aspect that I really dig is that it feels very technical, but doesn't stray into that wanky "technical death metal" realm that I just don't understand. I dislike overly technical metal for the same reasons I dislike 4/4 industrial dance music, no matter how hard and aggressive it might sound. It becomes soulless because the focus is on precision and... well... technicality rather than creating a mood, a place, taking the listener somewhere, making them feel something, expressing, etc. This album is incredibly cinematic without the help of lyrics. I only say that because I haven't taken the time to look them up or try to decipher them with my own ears. There are lyrics on the album, but I have no clue what he's talking about. Musically, I get a vibe of encroaching urban terror, the clashing of nature and what people call civilization. Maybe I'm wrong, perhaps you'll get something else completely, and that's the beauty of music!
But I was going somewhere with that little technical rant. I was trying to point out that the technicality plies in the drumming and rhythms of this album. There's no guitar wank at all, just super righteous blastbeats scattered across an album comprised of delightfully modest drum wank. It has a kind of tribal edge to it too which is an interesting aspect that I think sets this album apart.

Got 9 minutes? Check this shit out.

The production of the album is another point of major excitement for me. I'm not well versed in the technical side of making music, but I've done some of it myself and I'm slowing picking things up from my friends who are far more prolific and driven than myself. I developed a taste for this middle-ground metal production that is neither lo- or hi-fi. I first noticed it on Deafheaven's Roads to Judah (I refuse to discuss Sunbather. Fuck off), and found it again here. Combined with the careful use of synths, it makes for an incredibly engaging piece of music. It's melodic, layered, textured, atmospheric, scary, it's perfect.
Their prior albums don't quite live up to the standard set by this album if you're working your way backward with them because they were still only developing this sound and are more along the lines of weirded out Mayhem but more dense, which is by NO means a bad thing. They're good albums, but this takes the fucking cake, man. By a long shot, it's one of my favorite albums of the year.

Their official site seems to be busted, but they've got a facebook. Oh joy:
https://www.facebook.com/altarofplagues
http://www.profoundlorerecords.com/