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/

The New Nine Inch Nails Album

I'm just going to leave this here until i'm done tweaking out over it. Then I'll come back and write a real review.

O.L.D (Old Lady Drivers) - Formula (1995)

I am so wholly infatuated with this album. I've been listening to it since last December when Devin Townsend did a list of his top 10 favorite albums and because he has fantastic taste in music, I immediatly listened to everything I didn't already know. This was on that list.

I can't really describe the sound, sometimes it's like Cop Shoot Cop on Seroquel, sometimes it's just pure sweeping epic beauty with layers and little accents everywhere. All the words are by Alan Dubin (most known for Khanate, which also involves Plotkin) and all the music was written by James Plotkin (I hope you already know the name...), of whom I'm a burgeoning fantard. Between this and his work with Scorn, I really can't count him below God-tier.

This album blurs the line between organic and inorganic to me. The instruments listed are "vocoded voice, looped guitar, synth guitar, bass, tapes, rhythm machine and a drop of 303". The songs often begin on a fairly upbeat note, but slowly morph into introspective, spiraling, sometimes sad audio vortexes. The opening track, Last Look is a great example of that. I usually seek out really frightening, angry, aggressive electronic music, but this is really none of those things. It never feels heavy or weighed down despite the crashing, frequently relentless rhythm tracks. It can be spastic and some of the lyrics are rather dark, like the case of one of my favorite tracks, Thug. This song incidentally features the only party foul on the whole entire album: that weird grindcore breakdown cut and pasted right into the middle of it. It comes in awkwardly, but I like the way it warps back out and then returns to fade the song out. I think if it had integrated into the song more subtly, it wouldn't be a point of annoyance for so many listeners. I've come to just accept it, myself.

Speaking of Grindcore, that's what this band started out as. A Grindcore PARODY act.  I don't really care for Grindcore most of the time and i find their earlier stuff to be unlistenable. But then they drop something like Break (You) which is probably the most beautiful thing ever written and I am not even exaggerating. Hear for yourself:

Are you fucking kidding me?

I have given you enough samples for you to gather what this album is like as a whole, and that's nice because I sure as hell can't describe it. It's distinctly 90's, but doesn't sound dated. It sounds futuristic, it sounds organic, it sounds like all kinds of different things and if nothing else, it is highly original. I've never heard anything like it before and in addition to it's complete hypnotic beauty, that's what I always look for in music: oddities and originality.

I expected this review to be a lot more capslocked and screamy and overly-excited, but now that I've sat down to write about this incredible piece of music, I'm at a loss for words. It's one of my all-time favorite albums ever recorded. I'm quite sure it's out of print, but there are plenty of copies to be found on Amazon or Discogs (if you wanna bother with that...) for only a couple dollars. This is an album you'll want a physical copy of.

Other random info:
http://plotkinworks.com/
http://www.discogs.com/Old-Formula/release/345084
http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/O.L.D./
Current incarnation.
Purchase dat sheeyit.

Steven Wilson - The Raven that Refused to Sing (and Other Stories)

::sigh::

Ok.

Steven Wilson needs to stop. Put the flute down.

There. I said it. And this is where I lose possibly all but one of my readers.

Wilson is riding the 3rd wave prog thing all the way to the shore and scraping up the bottom of his board on the rocky shore when he should have bailed when the wave was giving out. Granted, the man is an audio genius. It pains me to talk smack on one of my old favorites and long-lasting musical obsessions, but he finally lost me. Actually, I was done with him when he released The Incident back in 2009 or what the fuck every it was I don't even care. I want to see him go back and spend some time with his side projects like Bass Communion or doing another album akin to Unreleased Electronic Music (who knew the modern prog god has such an ear for dubby breaky stuff?).

The Raven That Refused to Sing is 90% rehashed cud with a single, solitary track that would be more at home on one of his older, more predatory album like In Absentia.  Not surprisingly, that song is the single, the one that got a video and got everyone all bonered up for the lackluster album. Lackluster isn't even the word for it. And you know what? I was just looking for the video of it on youtube and discovered that the song in question, Index, is not even ON this mess. It's off his PREVIOUS travesty of self-indulgence, Grace For Drowning. Therefore The Raven has no redeeming features whatsoever. Well, alright. Except the super cool bass on Luminol (I was really hoping this would be a Tad cover) and The Holy Drinker has a lot of good jazz freakouts, which I'm always down for. In fact, it's probably as close to a full good song on the album as I'm going to get. The vocals on The Pin Drop are kinda of toeing some new territory for him stylistically, which doesn't say that much because he has always had a limited vocal capacity. I'm sure the production is stellar, but good production doesn't cut it when it's been worked on crap. And can you believe it, this dried up turd won him a Prog album of the year award? Must have been a slow year.
I would rather listen to Devin Townsend's Epicloud album, which I also absolutely hated for it's overproduced Protools circle-jerk bubblegun pop reworking of his last 4 albums. Which were also rather spotty, but I generally liked them alright.

Man, I'm just on a roll here. I can either keep going with this negative tirade that I know many people have been too afraid to speak lest their prog card be revoked, or I can keep this freight train of hate chugging along. I'm tired. I think I'll call it a day on this one. Save your money, folks. Don't buy this drivel. Perhaps you ought to give it a listen to just form your own opinions. Say what you will about mine, but I'm stickin' to it.
That said, I will never rule out the possibility of an album by an artist who's music I have a good relationship with creeping up on me in the future. It's entirely possible that I'm a fucking pleb who just doesn't get it. If that's the case, I'm an adamant and outspoken pleb. If you wanna spin some Wilson, go back for Signify or Stupid Dream.

God help me, I'll never get comped a ticket to see him if he comes through town again with a review like this, but by god I am committed to telling the TRUTH, open your eyes! Notice how much Wilson sounds like Reptilian? Wake up, america!

Extreme Compliment.

Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God (Reissue)

I'm fairly new to Blut Aus Nord, but this year has been all about discovering French metal bands for me. Blut Aus Nord have sadly been overshadowed among the larger metal circles by Alcest, who are brilliant, but are less outright terrifying and have more "16 year old girl" appeal due to the softer beauty of their music and the fact that Neige is a hot piece of French ass.

What kind of way is that to start a review, Novak? God.

Like I said, I'm not ultra familiar with this band, but I know they're not at the center of the melodic metal circle, where they damn well belong. This album (originally released in 2003) has been reissued this year by Debemur Morti which makes it fair game for me to cover as a new release and not a throwback. It's just.... one of the most intense things I've ever heard.  And as if the album alone were not enough, the (highly limited) reissue ends with a bonus track- a cover of Godflesh's  Mighty Trust Krusher. Never have I heard another band do Godflesh justice, but justice has finally been served. In case you had not noticed, your not so humble narrator is an enormous Justin Broadrick fan.

The sound of this album is like they've opened a hole in the floor that goes straight down to hell and the sucking waves of heat and flame and pulling the sound down into the hole. The whole thing is slightly off and a little wobbly sounding. It has many ambient interludes as if everyone is simply exhausted from pouring every shred of soul they have into their instruments. It's like a metal soundtrack to the Hellraiser films.
Axis is just brilliant with it's periodic high and low-pitched screams accompanied by high-power blastbeats
My favorite track, Our Blessed Frozen Cells is possibly the epitome of the genre for me.

This album is really groundbreaking. The band is doing whatever they fucking want with it. I fear I have little to say about it otherwise, but I strongly suggest you give this a spin because if you like fucked up metal, this is where you want to be. I'm glad I got over my long-held distaste for drum machines because this just goes to show that you can create huge sound and complex structures without a live drummer.

http://dmp666.bandcamp.com/album/777-cosmosophy

Author & Punisher @ PDX Antics Electronic Music Fest, Alhambra Theater 10/18/2013

(This write-up is a complete hackjob. Sorry. Don't care.)

This event had problems up the wazoo. Cevin Key and Otto Von Sriracha (HEYYY-OOOO) dropped out and a day or two before the actual event, all kind of rumors were going around that other big names were dropping out or on the fence.  As far as I know, it was only the first two artists who bailed, but I only went to this event to see Author & Punisher. I tried to stick around and watch some other acts, namely Paul barker, but I ended up talking to Tristan Shone and his wife for a little while which to my old ass, was a lot more pleasant than standing in a loud dark crowded room with a load of the great unwashed. I thought I might even get in and back home before Jeopardy! was over, but alas, both that and Wheel Of Fortune had long been over by the time I got home and into bed. But what I did encounter, I will now share with you.  ONWARD! To the smacktalkin'!

The first act, who I won't actually name (let's just call them the Rocky Horror Shit Show)  because I'm not entirely stoked on bashing some kids who are obviously devoted and having a really good time, but people need negative feedback if they're going to improve. A friend noted to someone else that "She can write better music", indicating me, then checked himself when he realized that it's actually true (ohh i'm bad look at me plugging myself).
God, let's just do a checklist: too much dressing up, too many people using too nice of gear for the amount and quality of sound coming out of the speakers, absolutely ZERO clarity of sound, which was partially the space's fault. It is not a good room unless you're right up close and I wasn't about to anywhere near that clown act. I'm not even going into the Performance Art aspect of it. The singer had 3 mics all taped together and I assumed he had pedals to switch between them or something cool, but no, he sang into all 3 for the duration and the distortion was much too intense and not properly mixed. The whole thing came out as a wall of static which I guess is some people's idea of good, but it came off as amateur hour in this case. I could tell they were aiming high, for some breakbeaty Skinny Puppy type sound, but it was not pulling together whatsoever. Like when you want to make pancakes, but the mix is too thin and you end up with a big burnt (glittery) crepe. Yes. YES. that's EXACTLY what it was like, my god I'm a genius...

Next up was David J. of Bauhaus/other goth shit fame. What was he doing? You ask. He was DJing. And everyone came up to the stage to watch him do it too. I was up there because I didn't know he had a full 40 minute slot and was anticipating live music and didn't want to give up my good spot, so there I I stood, suffering through mediocre DJing from some guy with what appeared to be an assistant/minion/facebook updater sitting next to him. I could not figure out what the hell he was doing there, or why everyone was crowded around to watch someone DJ, which is a thing you can see literally every night of the week in this town.

I'm getting weak at the knees just thinking about this.

While this was going on Tristan Shone was setting his shit up and I got all excited and bonery because I'm so infatuated with his gear. The percussion controller especially with the industrial strength bike chain, it looks like a fucking tank-mounted gun or something. I've seen many pictures of the setup, but seeing it in person was super exciting to me, even though I'm aware that they're mostly fucking insane midi controllers. The tactile element to it all is incredibly exciting to me because it makes playing electronic music much more involved and adds a human element. As someone who has the most experience with making music electronically, I know it's easy to goof on computers, but to actually have to put organic, bodily effort into controlling the sound is when I begin to have huge respect for electronic musicians, especially when they're not using a lot of backing tracks and playing the majority of the sound one hears in the moment.
It was Shone's birthday, and he was drunk as hell. He fucked up a number of times, but the only time I noticed a confirmed fuckup was during Lonely, which I've listened to death and know by heart (Terrorbird sounded spot on though). The comparatively irregular, unpredictable nature of his rhythms seems to allow for mistakes because there are a lot of weird pauses to begin with. Besides, I don't go to concert to hear reproductions of album tracks. I go to see music be played by humans and that very much includes mistakes. I only talk about this as much as I am because I think this is an important element lacking in a lot of music, but especially in the industrial/electronic scene. People seem so afraid of lacking precision simply because computers allow you to be precise. This sentiment goes for ALL live music and it's what makes seeing live music so exciting.

There's a quote from Steve Albini which might be my favorite quote of all time:
"I don’t give two splats of an old negro junkie’s vomit for your politico-philosophical treatises, kiddies. I like noise. I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a fucking jolt. We’re so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence we need it like a fix.”

That's precisely what I got when A&P started his set. It started out slow and the shift between checking to see everything was working to actually playing the first song was invisible. All of a sudden I got punched in the face by this wall of sound coming out of the speaker in front of me. I was trying to be a hardass and go without earplugs, but I pussed out. The volume and power happening was totally absurd, all-consuming and overwhelming. So much screaming, both human and machine, it was totally insane and was one of my most intense concert experiences ever. I don't have a lot to say about his performance really, because it's better seen than talked about. If you have a chance to see him live, do it. This is the kind of music that forces your understanding of sound to change. I've lost all concept of what's right and wrong  in the making of music over my years of listening to it, I only know good and bad. People who are fiercely DIY such as Shone and going back to my first life-altering musical experience, seeing Einsteurzende Neubauten when I was 21, really turn my shit upside down and inside out.

The only action shot I got. Bad lighting and I just wanted to listen without distraction.

Next up was another set by David J, and I couldn't help but yell some derogatory shit and demand that A&P just play through his set. I'm such an asshole. Given the cancellations, I feel it would have been a cool move to give the artists longer sets, but I don't think that happened.
Paul Barker was up next, with 2 dudes on laptops, someone on guitar and himself on bass. At first I was pretty stoked on this because I love Ministry and Lard even moreso, but I quickly became bored with the Ministry-as-a-jam-band schtick, so I wandered around to see if I could talk to Tristan. I found him, but he seemed to be having a crappy time loading his gear up, so I left and came back later. Dude asks if I want to have a drink and I get ushered through the loading exit doors, walk beside the stage while Paul Barker is still playing and see yet ANOTHER guy hiding in the back with a laptop. I don't know what he was doing, they had a sound guy already, but it just seemed offputting to see so many laptops in action.
Tristan instantly got wrapped up in, you know, DOING HIS JOB, so I sat around and talked a bit with his wife about San Diego and stuff and briefly fantarded with Tristan about Justin Broadrick.  Apparently, A&P has been asked to contribute to a Godflesh covers comp, which I hope to god actually comes to fruition because that's possibly MORE exciting then when I found that Godflesh cover Blut Aus Nord did. He and his label guy were both unable to help me get a spot on the guestlist, and both were apologetic. Tristan pretty much told me to take what I wanted off his merch table as compensation. I had already bought a copy of The Painted Army EP (yesssssss), so I grudgingly accepted a copy of Drone Machines, since I really wanted a physical copy of it, but didn't want to take a bunch of free shit from a touring act because that's where bands get their money these days. So when you go to shows, buy a fuckin' t shirt or something. 

Tristan is an exceptionally nice, upbeat and unpretentious guy, which seems kinda funny given the music he makes. But then again, I'd probably be a rather different person if I got to man-handle chunks of metal and scream my brains out on a regular basis too. Now I'm having flashbacks to helping at a computer recycling site, tearing apart old housings with my bare hands, harvesting harddrives, chucking monitors into sorting bins and bleeding from every part of my hands because of it.
Good times for an angry Luddite.

Before I gave up and dragged my haggard spine home, I took a look at Martin Rev. Now, I know that he is a weird guy. But I can't help but look at an aging dude in glittery pants, hammering away at a keyboard with his sunglasses and scraggly hair and think of the residential hotel trannies (shut up, I get to say that word because I am a tranny) who used to hang out around my last place of work. I didn't stay long enough to determine if his act was actually any good or not, but my friends seemed to be diggin' it ("Dude, is he sampling Wu Tang???" * ).
I have mixed feeling on aging musicians, I have little interest in silly getups and presentation and it's always nice when musicians age with grace and do not attempt to cling to their glory days. So if you show me an old man in sparkle pants, I'm going to turn my nose up, perhaps unfairly, but that's just me. Maybe that was the point of Rev's thing, to confuse and make you rethink your initial reaction to the crazy bastards you see on the street. Or anywhere.

* A friend says this: A point of clarification, Suicide & Wu Tang both sampled the same song, Different Strokes by Syl Johnson.

Palms - Self-Titled

When I first heard this project was happening, I might or might not has peed my pants. It's basically Isis rearranged with Chino Moreno on vocals. Can you say "Novak is going to piss herself"?
I forgot about the album for a while after it had already been out for a while, but was suddenly reminded by listening to a link to the song Future Warrior. I listened no further and went STRAIGHT out and bought the album. I figured even if the rest of it bombs, it's a thing I ought to have in my Isis fantard collection. But no, it's predictably a solid record and essentially exactly what you would expect from the lineup: they pick up where Isis left off on that split with Melvins, but with Chino on vocals, and commandeering the song structure more than I've ever heard a vocalist do. More recent Deftones material is actually rather similar to Isis, so it's not hard to wedge his style into the music. In fact, it's kind of refreshing to hear the Isis guys forced out of the old style which many people considered formulaic. I can't exactly disagree, but it's a formula that I very much love and am happy to have a lot of.

I listened to the album few a couple days solid after purchasing it, and then slipped back into whatever phase I was having before I was interrupted. Going back to it, it has lost some of it's initial strength. I have to admit that every time I stick it in, I pull it back out after the first track. It doesn't get an A+, not even an A. I would give it a B+ if I were operating on that grading system, but I'm not, so I guess I'll just have to say it's not the most long-term engaging thing I've heard, but the crop of new music this year has been a little disappointing so it really stands out as one of the better fresh releases of 2013. And frankly, one cannot go wrong with anything related to Isis. Except maybe that Greymachine album that not even my Lord and Saviour Justin Broadrick could save (can I possibly write anything without mentioning him?). In fact, I'm inclined to blame him for injecting TOO much noise into it. But I digress.

Palms is an exciting project for people like me, and I hope their next offering (if there is one) is a little...more. A little bigger and more epic and all-encasing.

http://palmsband.com/
http://ipecac.com/

Author & Punisher - Women & Children

Author & Punisher is by far one of my absolute favorite newer acts. Tristan Shone is one of the most through and through inventive and musically original people operating these days and make all the obvious "aggressive electronic metal" comparisons you wish, he still sounds completely original to my over-saturated ear. He's nowhere near the sound of Fear Factory, hard electronic industrial like (my much loathed) Laibach or Combichrist can't even dream of making music like this, and has far passed Godflesh on the weird scale, even during their Songs Of Love And Hate era. With any luck, I'll have the complete and utter pleasure of seeing him live in about a week from now and I'll be sure to tell you all the crazy details, if I can manage to get in.

 After you familiarize yourself with some of his music, I suggest you check out this miniature documentary on him and his process of building ALL HIS OWN INSTRUMENTS. Every time I watch this, I pop a bone when he talks about how his bass controller has built-in resistance. I hear he no longer uses that one though. If you're reading this Tristan, CAN I HAVE IT? I'll come down and get it on my bicycle! No matter how well your ear processes sound and beat, this video will give you a much deeper understanding of the literal mechanics behind this totally bizarre and awesome music that shames just about everything with it's fear-inducing aggression and weight. 

Another point of excitement for me is that the project is based in San Diego, CA. Which is the town I grew up in, So I can now add another thing to the short list of wonderful things to come from my hometown: Tom Waits, The God Machine, Author & Punisher, and of course, myself.

Moving on. There are two things that I find specifically appealing about Shone's music. First, he has an exquisite and particular ear for texture that mirror's my own. He plays it, I seek this texture out and consume it like my life depends on it. That gritty, dusty, windblown, rotting organic matter texture. Naturally, his album Drone Machines is my favorite example of it, but then again I enjoy feeling like I'm undergoing trephination when I listen to music, so don't mind me. Second, his voice has a weird ageless quality that I've been chasing for years and have rarely encountered. It's difficult to explain, but in his harsher vocals, he could be either quite young, or very old or anywhere between. I've only found that in two other singers, Devin Townsend and Mortiis. Hey, don't hate. Once Mortiis got out of the ambient/LARP scores business, he really got good at  what he does and he really does have a great, unique voice.

Women & Children is number I don't actually know in a string of releases from Shone. I've only been listening to his music for a couple (very intense) months so I'm not exactly an expert, but he's got a pretty solid discography of EPs and LPs before this. The first (title) track starts out with this kinda low key weirdy ambient section, it sounds a bit like a child singing when they think nobody can hear them, but half way in, it slams straight into the traditional A&P terrorizing, screaming wall of fucking noise thing. 

The whole album has an odd sense for rhythm which is really appealing to me, but it renders it almost totally unacceptable for play any goth/industrial nights which bums me out because I think the world of hard electronic music has gone to the dogs and everyone is busy programming 4/4 beats into their little laptops and laying some lyrics about the wanna fuck and kill you over them or some trite shit like that. I've been on a personal mission to bring A&P to the nights around town by just bringing my own disc with me and requesting it early in the night and usually people will oblige, but I'm always the only once dancing. Simply because I know the music and enjoy dancing to odd or unpredictable beats. But I digress. You don't care about my personal vendettas against shitty dance music. Moving on.

Rather like everything else Shone has released (even that mostly uncharacteristic Painted Army EP which sounds a lot like Devin Townsend's Ocean Machine*), Women & Children is solid straight through and has no dubious points. Every song is gut-wrenching, be it softer, hard as nails or a combo of the two. It's hard for me to describe this music because it is so strong and it speaks only for itself.
A couple standout tracks for me are Fearce which is probably the archetypal A&P piece. It's totally relentless, abrasive, screaming and switches between orderly beats and chaotic metal-on-metal noise.
The other extra exciting piece for me is Pain Myself which I unfortunately cannot find an audio sample for. If you're not sold by all the other samples you can find on youtube and the links I have provided here, I can't help you. Pain Myself is essentially a ballad, which is entirely why it's one of my favorites because putting a ballad on an album like this seems odd in the first place, but to have it keep pace with everything else is absolutely brilliant. About being filled up with poison at the end of the day and then letting someone crush it all out of you. It's utterly bizarre and uncomfortable to listen to because of how vulnerable it sounds after everything else on the album and that aggression is still there, but it takes on a more angrily mournful tone. It's built on a backbone of a little piano riff, but the noise, the heaviness is still there and eventually builds back up to end the album on the most abrupt, uneasy note.

I'm not a fan of noise music. You know the kind, a couple guys sitting around twiddling knobs and breaking your eardrums. I have a few friends who are or were at some point entrenched in that scene and that's cool. I appreciate the passion for what they do, it's just not my thing. One of them wisely said recently "You're not into noise if you only like it when it has a beat."
Well, if that's you, you've met your musical match. If you look closely, you can see I'm wearing an A&P t shirt in my profile picture.

http://www.tristanshone.com/
http://authorandpunisher.bandcamp.com/
http://www.seventhrule.com/

*I realize that I have drawn comparisons to Townsend twice in this review. I don't mean to say they musically resemble one another, but there are elements that are similar, such as their voices and a certain ambiance shared by two of their albums. Otherwise, don't mistake A&P for some kind of prog rock pro-tools party, because that's not at all what I mean to imply.

Agalloch @ The Star Theater, 10/12/2013

So I didn't hear about this show until just a few days ago, maybe a week. I'm not sure what's up, if it was just a rush job or if there was simply little publicity. Eventually I figured out that it's a yearly event that happens when the colder weather starts setting in. The festival is called Fall Into Darkness and I think that's a pretty rad idea. I'll look forward to the next one.
I don't read the local rags anymore either so I don't find out about smaller one-off shows like this until it's too late and it's sold out or I'm too broke to go. I thought for sure this would be sold out by the time I got myself in line, but no, I got in and everything was just fine. Over all it was a very pleasant show, no drunken assholes making a scene, very little pushing and shoving, polite security guys who I got into more than than one "no, no YOU go first I'm sorry" encounters with (perhaps because it was a nice, grown-up environment as opposed to some dingy craphole where all-ages shows are held in this town... It makes a person wanna be polite). I usually end up at shitty little bar shows, or big venues with asshole security and all that, but The Star theater is a cool place that I end up at frequently for Goth night because... well... habit. You'd never guess that the sound is so good for live music though. There are plenty of options for watching the show too. You can be right up front, you can be back a ways sitting in one of the booths or milling around the bar area, or you can sit up in the balcony which is really cool. I wish I had gone up there for one of the openers just to see what it was like.

Eight Bells opened the show to a lot more interest then I'm used to seeing in the first of a 4-band lineup. What I'm about to say might piss some people off, but I feel like metal bands that are primarily comprised of women are a gimmick, regardless of what the band intends. It's just what they end up being. I also feel like they've given a pass for talent and technicality. Eight Bells were not at all BAD, but they weren't great either. They played music similar to to the main act in that it's largely more quiet and sweeping, then drops into bouts of screamy, blastbeaty metal. I think my biggest complaint os that the singer who was doing the harsh vocals was *just* screaming and not seeming to put any art into it.

Botanist were up next and boy were they going all out... They has drums and a bass, but also a harmonium and two large zithers (actually, I'm not sure sure what they were, but they were close relatives of the zither) which took the place of guitars, playing off one another just like guitarists would. They were dressed in the requisite hooded robes of the current metal scene and chose not to interact with the audience except a curt hello and thank you goodbye unless they were dramatically announcing the title of the next song. I'm all for ambiance and whatnot, but this was a little over the top and i thought the super serious song announcements were kind of cheesey because they all sounded like incantations of some sort. It just all added up to a bit much for my taste.
I don't know how to describe their music due to the bizarre instruments used, but it was heavy and well-structured. However, the songs all sounded far  too alike for me and either they take a lot of familiarity to "get", or they need to keep working toward whatever the hell it is they're aiming to become. They have a lot of potential and I suppose I could best describe them as a cross between Junius and... oh god... what was the other band? There's that damned concert amnesia. They had that strange, many-layered epic sound of Junius, but had much more Black Metal influence happening.

Behold... The Arctopus was the only opener who I had heard before and when they started playing, I was more entertained by the fact they were keeping such chaos in check and were playing so tight. than i was by the music itself. I really want to be one of the cool kids who can truthfully say they like Fantomas, but I'm not and The Arcopus are like Fantomas on PCP. I just don't derive any pleasure from listening to this kind of music, but I can certainly appreciate the talent it takes to play it and it's enjoyable to witness in a live setting. The drummer was getting way aggro over the monitors and it looked like he was about to give up and quit, while the rest of the band just kind of laughed at him and kept playing. that was a weird moment. I later heard that he had driven the band that same day from the bay area, so one can understand his pissiness.

Finally, around MIDNIGHT, Agalloch took the stage. By then I had also found my concert-buddy Yousef of Faces on The Radio.
I saw then earlier this year, in February I think at Mississippi Studios. I had a bad time because I wasn't down with the crowd, I was too drunk, it was just not a good night for me. But I do remember the show being super good and they played Not Unlike The Waves, which if my memory isn't too bad today, they did NOT play lastnight. That's too bad because it's one of my favorite tracks from the band.
Agalloch are great live, but they become a different band to me. I spend a lot of time dicking around in the woods after dark while listening to them. Notably all last winter I would go up to Forest Park after work, have a few beers in one of my hidden spots and walk around until I was good and ready to leave. Repeatedly doing something like that with a band will build up one's own sorta fantasy life around the music that can't be brought into a concert hall. They try to make it as naturey and sacred as possible by burning sage and using a few other small ritualistic props, and the music itself of  course, but it's just not the same and I'm sure the band would agree.

The generic brand bottled water represent's Odin's thirst while hanging from Yggdrasil.

The sound was great, their set went off without a hitch. Their lead guitarist was waaay into it, almost to an 80's hair metal level. Dude was jumpin' around, getting down on his knees, back up, the whole 9 yards. I never see musicians act like that because it's, like, uncool. Agalloch don't seem to care much about that sort of stuff, they just do their thing and write the music they want to write regardless. I don't know what they listen to in their spare time, I don't know their influences, but I'm willing to bet there's a lot more neo-folk and post-punk than there is metal. They're the band people automatically think of when you say "Cascadian metal", and not without reason. Beyond music, they're heavily influenced by the natural surroundings you find in this part of the country, everything is wet and covered in moss, it rains most of the year, cities are spotted with areas devoted to preserving the wilderness that once covered the whole area. If you get in a car drive for about half an hour east or west from the city center, you will reach wild nature. Give it another 30 minutes and you're in places where people get lost and die.

My new camera still isn't great at concert photography but I can assume you this is the band. I'm pretty sure my camera is a stoner who can't focus on anything but stimulating colors. 

By the time they finished their encore, it was 2am. I got on my bike to ride 10 miles home which usually take me about 45 minutes to an hour that late at night, but I didn't get home until 3:30 because of the dense fog covering most of my way back. It was pretty appropriate.

Swans - The Burning World (1989)

Because new releases that are of interest me tend to be kinda few and far between, I want to supplement my album reviews with throwback posts where I talk about old albums that I love, perhaps some more obscure things that have been overlooked in bother their day and now, classics, and grossly under-appreciated albums like the ones I'm about to discuss.

Today we discuss Swans - The Burning World.

{Let it be noted that I wrote this while half asleep and edited it before coffee.}

I have been listening to Swans for years. Not as many as some of my friends, but enough. They are one of my favorite groups and I love every phase of their existence.

The Burning World though has somehow bypassed me. Nobody talks about it, Nobody plays material from it, it's just kinda swept under the rug. I'm notorious for falling in love with albums that are decried by fans and artists alike, therefore this ought to have been a long-time favorite of mine because Michael Gira himself claims to "abhor" the album.

My love and his hate for it are probably almost completely due to Bill Laswell's production. I was listening to it with my Dad lastnight and discussing Laswell's influence because while I enjoy all the Laswell I've encountered (mainly via The Golden Palominos), my dad knows more about him while I know all about Swans. I looked it up after we were done spinning and it turns out that Gira was actually so intimidated by Laswell that he was unable to perform to his personal standard (which is funny because I think his vocals on this album compliment it quite well) and that the album actually got them dropped from their label due to poor sales. AH! Dear god!
One of the things I find intriguing about this album is how far it departs from Swans' usual style. Even their most acousticy material is still dirgey and terrorizing on some level. This album is just wistful and sad, but with a lot of forward motion and hopeful feeling chords. The lyrical content is astounding to me. It's like listening to Flannery O'Connor or Cormac McCarthy in song form. It's so cinematic. My favorite track, Jane Mary Cry One Tear is like the male counterpart to Miss Havisham.
There's a gorgeous cover of Blind Faith's Can't Find My Way Home, voiced by Jarboe. Jarboe is... well... I have trouble with her. I love her within the confines of Swans but her solo work and collaborations with other artists, I cannot deal. I have an irrational phobia with female vocalists. The ones I do like are the ones who sing with a great deal of power like PJ Harvey or Marianne Faithful. Therefore Jarboe ought to be high on my list, but alas, no. She's just too out there I guess. I'm not too cool to cop to that. "Shut up, Jarboe" has become something of an inside joke between my friends and I. It will be engraved on my figurative tombstone.

I should not need to write extensively about a band like Swans. This album though is terribly overlooked and I think regardless of the band's view of it, it's well worth our attention and love. I started out with Swans on Cop and Filth back when I was getting into stuff like Big Black and had already been into Cop Shoot Cop for years. It was difficult for me to digest their later output because I was so entrenched in the avant-garde experimental noise rock scene, but as I've said before, I love artists that take a long time to get into because they tend to offer the most reward and it helps to build a lasting relationship between the music and the listener.
That said, this album is the final hurdle I've cleared with this band and I find it to be a fitting end to my journey with discovering Swans.




Check out this super cool 90's style video for one of my  favorite songs from this album. It's beyond me how this album has been so passed over.

http://www.swans.pair.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Swans/13879391977

Godflesh tour postponed.

Dude. Bro. Brodude.
There have been rumors going around over the last couple days that the tour is cancelled/postponed because they could not get visas. I didn't believe it, but today I woke up to find all the main music news sites confirming it. Brooklyn Vegan and Metal Insider say it is tied up in the gov. shutdown. Go ahead and take my food stamps, arrest the veterans, but do not deny me my Godflesh show. My a-political, nihilistic self is finally ready to riot.
There are mentions of a reschedule as precise as next "April" and vague and uncomforting as "early next year".

I don't think this will be of much purpose but her's is a compilation of links I have wail, moaned and gnashed my teeth over so far today:
http://www.metalinsider.net/touring/godflesh-tour-reportedly-canceled
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2013/10/godflesh_postpo.html
http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/godflesh-forced-to-postpone-u-s-tour/
http://www.metalsucks.net/2013/10/11/aw-crap-godflesh-tour-delayed/
http://lambgoat.com/news/21272/Godflesh-postpones-U.S.-tour

JKB's official explanation can be read here on his facebook.

I had to stop there. It's too enraging. So enraging that I made a mildly amusing meme out of it.

Man, I've got this giant shit of aggression I've been holding in since I heard they were coming here and I don't know what to do about it. Anybody want to volunteer as a human punching-bag? Walls are no good. I need blood.

my little personal message to the american government who is behind this tragic debacle:
EAT IT.

Jesu - Every Day I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came (2013)

Let me get this out of the way right off the bat: Justin Broadrick is almost literally a capital-G God to me. I'm not really capable of writing an unbiased review of anything he does because while i can find some flaws, he has never done anything I outright don't like.

Moving on though, the latest offering from his #2 project, Jesu came out last month, on my birthday no less, and what a fine gift it made. I have written about it numerous times in both small and large chunks, so it's kinda hard for me to organize a proper review, so I'm just going to give you a track-by-track rundown because that's actually my favorite way to talk about new albums.

Homesick: This is my favorite. It's a killer opener, but sometimes when I get hit with an opener that comes right in and blows me away, I fear for the rest of the album. That it might have shot it's load on #1 and the rest will be lackluster. That's not the case with this album, but it is indeed my personal favorite track at this stage in my understanding of the album.
I dig this traditionally "Jesuesque" weightless heaviness. Plodding, steady beat, but with a sort of "minor key uplifting" feel to the melody.
His voice has taken an interesting turn. Broadrick says that regulating his life a bit, giving up smoking and drinking have positively impacted his voice. There's also a theory I read about years ago that states the male voice reaches it's peak in the mid-40s. Well, he's getting there. He's better at holding down a melody and it seems like he's singing in a deeper voice that was always reserved for his totally visceral, uncontrolled screaming of the old days, but I was not aware that he could reach that with a clean style.

Comforter: Warped guitars, vocals that seem slightly off, I can't say I'm massively fond of this song but every Jesu album has a bum track or two for me. This is it. It doesn't seem to go anywhere and acts more as an interlude in the greater context of the album. If not for the structure of The Great Leveller, I would say it's poorly placed for an interlude, but it does balance things out.

Every Day I Get Closer to The Light From Which I Came: Iove the drums, love that undistorted bass. I love the warbly guitar line, it's a little reminiscent of that My Bloody Valentine style of warped sound that just sounds utterly wrong, but somehow pulls together to be right. The song sounds like some kind of lullaby, but a downtrodden, maybe slightly sinister one. Many bands have attempted to use this "fucked up child's toy" or music box vibe and make it sounds creepy, but it sounds cheesy and soulsucking in the bad way, without fail.  Broadrick has talked about how this album revolves mostly around his new role as a father and the seeming existential crisis it brings. To my understanding, the joy and love of having a child, but the looming issue of mortality. I think this song really displays that collection of feelings.
Again, his vocals are really lovely. He is still no great singer, and his voice has been a point of contention among fans and detractors alike. Some love it, some hate it. I was on the fence until it dawned on me that Jesu is a very vulnerable project as opposed to the aggressively defensive aspect of Godflesh. The weak vocals make complete and utter sense and while his "clean" voice is growing stronger, it is not losing and of that vulnerability that is so important to the overall feel of Jesu.

The Great Leveller: Get ready for the big one, this bugger is 17 and a half minutes long. But shouldn't we all be used to that by now? The man is only limited by how much sound he can cram onto one side of a record. Remember Infinity where he broke a single song in two? 17 minutes is child's play. And those strings you hear? They're all real, performed by Nicola Manzan. No programming here.
Then suddenly, WHAM we are back in the early days. Plodding, heavy, distorted. It slowly comes back around to a more gentle, hypnotic approach and builds back up into a heavier, extended outro. I enjoy this track more each time I hear it, especially when I can give it my full attention. There's a lot of movement going on in the sound, swirling, shifting around and whatnot. It may be long and repetitive (when are Jesu NOT long and repetitive?), but it's never boring and you can lose a lot of time listening to this track. I suggest setting your kitchen timer.

Grey is The Color: This is very reminiscent of The Cure, if The Cure were nodding out while playing or something. I'm inclined to say anything with that particular guitar tone sounds like The Cure though, so don't mind me. This is an odd track, it seems almost like an afterthought at first, then it jumps into this lovely, epic yet low-key anthem-like second half which slows down only slightly and then just... ends. I've had plenty of time to let this album sink in, yet this instrumental track takes me by surprise every time. It's a perfect way to end the album.

Give my pick from the album a spin and decide for yourself. While doing so, you can watch Justin sit dejectedly in the woods.

Broadrick's last few offerings via Jesu have been a bit too derivative of his influences (almost purely Mark Kozelek, whose label the Jesu albums were released on) for my taste. Opiate Sun is gorgeous and I listen to it frequently with total adoration, but he seemed to be losing touch with his own "brand" if you will by the time Ascension rolled out. It's good to hear this project back in form yet still growing and morphing and honing in on it's unknowable central nugget of style.
Jesu albums are always slow to grow on me and it actually took YEARS for me to get a grasp on the project at all. This is by no means a negative attribute though because it gives the listener something to gnaw on for a good long time.

Every Day I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came is a good album that I think will eventually reveal it's greatness to the listener if said listener is patient and gives it a chance to wrap itself around their mind. There's nothing passive about  ol' JKB's music. It demands that you actively immerse yourself in it and let it do what it wants with you.

Visit Justin's various websites here:
http://www.avalancheinc.co.uk/
http://justinkbroadrick.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Justin-K-Broadrick/

Ha ha very funny.

Vaital Deul with Megaton Leviathon (abbreviated version), Hawthorne Theater 10/3/13

You know what, fuck Jesu for a moment (but just a very quick, infinitesimal moment). My inaugural post is dedicated to my friend's project, or should I say one of his MANY projects. It would be rude as hell of me to not start out with a friend's material.

Check out this big shit on the marquee with Alcest, Anathema, and best of all TWIZTID! Rollin' with the big dogs.

One of my best friends Mort pulled together a little show in the lounge of the Hawthorne Theater which despite the poor reputation of the larger venue, the lounge is a pleasant little joint for small shows.
The lineup included Vatial Deul, Andrew of Megaton Leviathon (acting as a one-man band), Actuary and Conscious Summary.  The latter 2 acts are noise acts and I'm just not really into straight-up knob-tweaking noise, so I didn't stick around for them. As such I won't write about them because it would be unfair to try to talk about music from a genre that I'm not into and was hearing from outside while fielding some drunken rando's comments about the Czech Republic patch on my sleeve. If you guys read this, my apologies! I didn't even anticipate doing a writeup on the show so this might not be the best job. Hey man, I'm just tryin' to pimp out my friend's badass tuneage so DEAL, yo.

First up was my friend's solo project, Vaital Deul. I recall him playing for what seemed like 30-40 minutes. At this point, it's just Mort with a guitar and backing tracks. This is typically a dynamic I'm not terribly impressed with, especially when my friends are behind it. I have a lot of musical people in my life, but very few of them create the kind of music I would listen to on my own time. Mort is one of them. He opened his set with what he told me was "a cover/mashup/reinterpretation of two video games songs "The Choice" from The Last of Us and "Leaving Earth" from Mass Effect 3." Sir, you are speaking another language, but it made for a rather good low-key, anticipation-building into to his set. In addition to a number of clearly heartfelt original pieces, he played a cover of Coil's 'Restless Day' (you can hear his studio version of it here). Coil are not one of my favorites acts... but I must say that I loved his version of it, partly because he sings in a lower, less monotone voice, and vocals are often a very important aspect of music to me. He often ends up doing a lot of covers just for shits n' giggles, it seems. Check out the brutal acoustic cover of VAST's 'Pretty When You Cry'. The stripped down nature of it really amplifies how fucked up Jon Crosby's lyrics are. You might want to find one of those full-body condoms though because it's pretty soul-raping.
Vaital Deul is a possessed, acousticy, doomy slowcore weirdout experience. I hear heavy influence from Swans and JustIn Broadrick. I briefly participated in the genesis of one of Mort's projects and we made no bones about our flagrant Jesu-worship, it was truly repugnant, rather like this personal superfluous ego-stroking and plea for street-cred that I just engaged in. Over the last 2 years, I've observed his music really come into it's own stylistically and also technically. You can hear Mort's influences, but his music is HIS and his stank is smeared all over it. That's a fantastic trait to have and I think it's one that will take people places because they stand out among the peers as unique rather than just another Godflesh ripoff or whatever. Vaital Deul is big, scary and more than a little soul-wrenching. These are all things I personally look for in music. I've given sufficient links and will allow the music to speak for itself. It seems a little nepotistic of me to go on and on about one of my OMG BESTIE'S music, but like I said, I'm not into my friend's music. I'm probably a harsher critic of their output than I am of any established artist because I have a low tolerance for amateurs. It's nothing personal, but there's a lot of music in the world and I can't give a lot of time to people who don't have to together and produce quality material.

He told me he was going to wear a veil. I said "man that's dumb don't wear a veil." He said "fuck you you're not my real dad" wore it anyway and I said "ok fine the veil is really cool i'm sorry." 

I brought my younger sister along to the show with me and I love watching her enjoy live music. I've taken her to see Mort's other project when it was a two-piece. It was the first metal-style band she'd ever seen (then I took her to the front row at Napalm Death...) and she just kind of sat there looking happily stunned. It's the kind of wall-of-sound extravaganza shit that will do that to a person.

Moving on, Andrew from Megaton Leviathon took the stage with essentially the same setup. I am regrettably unfamiliar with the music of Megaton, though every time it comes on at random at a friend's house, my ears perk up and I always exclaim "Woah, what is this? This is bomb as fuck!" Alas, I am but a slow creature and I do things in my own weird time frame, which may or may not become evident over the course of this blog's evolution.
That said, He pretty much tore the place apart too. Perhaps a little less frightening and little more shoegazey. I'm sorry, it's the term du jour, but i don't say shit just to say it and make things sound hip. That wavy, spaced out element was there for sure. My only complaint with his set was that his vocals might have been a bit louder. I couldn't hear him sing at all.
I wish i could wrote more about his set, but it's difficult when I had no notes and am almost totally unfamiliar with his work. Go check out the links, I know I'm going to because I was quite taken with what I heard from only half the band.

You see, this post is mostly aimed at directing people to my friend's music.  And that's ok. I'm not sure when his next public gig is with either Vaital Deul or V.I.I.R.L but I will post links and details when I hear of anything.

And that has been the first installment of The Same Old Sauce.
Novak thanks you for reading and for listening.

nobody likes an empty blog.

I'm going to be writing concert and album reviews here shortly. I aim to cover new releases, but I know I'm so obsessive that I won't be able to contain myself and will slip back to older material from time to time.

Tomorrow I intend to review the latest Jesu album now that I've had a little time to absorb it get what what the hell's goin' on with it. It's growing on me. But later, my children... later.