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(04/05/18 11:23pm)
Rating: 5/7
Some folks (like me!) have little love for musicals. If Jeannette: L’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc doesn’t change any hearts (like mine! for example), it does offer itself as a dizzying exception to the rule.
In Jeannette (2017), Bruno Dumont (Ma Loute, Hors Satan) has cathedralized the wet-sky setting of France’s Côte d’Opale with a metal musical, colliding the sacred and the burlesque. Knotting choreography from Philippe Decouflé and music from Gautier Serre (aka Igorrr), Dumont realizes his singularly effective avant-gardism in an imagined history of Joan of Arc’s childhood. With a screenplay adapted from Charles Péguy’s Jeanne d’Arc (1897) and Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910), the film unearths and exacts a version of Joan which had before gone without performance history to throw a wash of weird light on her towering myth.
Being slightly more invested in metal music and its cultural disenfranchisement than the average owl, I’m perpetually rolling my eyes at descriptions of Jeannette’s score. That said, Serre’s compositions defy neat categorization, blending baroque patterning, hyper-produced death and black metal instrumentation and hardcore electronics into a unified mode. The film opens with the young Jeannette singing a long, mournful prayer to God à capella. Once Serre’s score sounds out, instrument and voice all in one pyre– it appears that Dumont had the actors arrange their own melodies on the spot – the mass of the dialogue becomes a kind of operatic extreme metal. The words themselves, Péguy’s words, ride on all this tonality to debate and articulate human misery through themes of Pascalian theology, socialism, nationalism and war. The final thing is decidedly medievalish in character.
And yet, however classically appalling it may be for a mass audience to see a child sing metallic hymns and throw horns, the inclusion of metal in this story of Joan isn’t really heterodox. As it is, Joan of Arc has already been included in metal several times over. As the music becomes the context of speech and motion, the emotional and aesthetic commonalities of these things are rather quickly realized.
Where Dumont etches his style in his film and, time will tell if not, on the legend of Joan is in the configuration of bodies. The truly mystifying thing of Jeannette is how its people dance.
A wavy mirror, dance in the film parallels song and dialogue and, more often than not, apes the scene, twisting all the gibbous heaviness into a paradoxically comedic masque. The treatment of the body is often simple, minor awkward positions and gestures which keep the joke in the air until a rarefied punchline can bubble up, without reason and without reaction (a fact which stretches the eternal diegetic question of musical cinema).
When the film skips to Jeannette’s teen era, we see her standing among her sheep, and we see her best friend, Hauviette, cross the screen in an extreme crabwalk, her elbows towards her legs, her head towards the ground. In the same stupefying vain, Jeanne’s uncle Durand can be seen at moments dabbing rapidly in the unfocused background. Perhaps Jeannette’s most important dance is that which grips the wire of the score and its scourging medievalishness, braiding sound and movement into an obvious gravity: headbanging, which in this movie is without fail entirely off-tempo.
Decouflé’s minimal pop choreography enacts Dumont’s conception of the burlesque, the kinetic joke which alienates the audience from the thing and demands a fresh tally of who Joan was, what she should mean. If one thing is true about the signification of Dumont’s production at this particular moment, it’s that Jeannette, by dint of its arch idiosyncrasy, is useless to the traditional political propagandizing of Joan of Arc in France; it’s too funny, too lo-fi to own. Translating Péguy’s arcane manuscripts through the voice-changer of a modern cinematic surrealism, Dumont has thrown up a siegeless wall in the line of Johannic myth.
I attended Jeannette’s Chicago premiere and so had the pleasure of witnessing room reactions: the laughter whenever the dialogue was interrupted by a human voice in the soundtrack bleating “bahhh” for Jeannette’s sheep, the frenetic arguments about meaning once the lights came up, the slight bobbing of a white-haired head in front of me, matched to the invisible groove of blast beats. But my choice favorite came at minute-107 of 108 when the stranger to my left leaned towards my ear and asked, “I’m fine with the heavy metal stuff, but is this whole thing going to be in French?” His eyebrows wriggled away, as if to say he was satisfied with his joke.
Jeannette is not a film to cry over. It's an attempt, at times overwrought, at the reconstitution of Joan's primary mystery, as well as the continuation of Dumont's revolt against normalcy in art. By its will to be an enigma, it's a work that yanks the wrinkles of the face up to a point of vertigo, leaving us to marvel, guffaw and smile swollen smiles at the spectacle.
(11/10/16 9:55pm)
Release: October 14, 2016 via Temporary Residence
Rating: 4/7
On their ninth studio album Tokyo’s Mono plays out the immutability of formula. Carrying the 17-year torch of loud post-rock first animated by Isis and their ilk and since reiterated ad infinitum, Requiem for Hell doesn’t leave the house, rooting itself in familiar dynamics and looping to the edge of hypnosis -- for better or for worse.
The pounding and stomping anthem “Death in Rebirth” begins the album with the glittering build expected and appreciated of any Mono effort. For 8 minutes high trills oscillate over a rhythmic ascension, a crescent tracing out momentum into louder, louder space. In a turn towards contemporary classical face, “Stellar” provides a breathing moment in silken strings and glockenspiel.
The titular “Requiem for Hell” is an 18-minute opus of repetition which would test even the most patient of post-rock devotees. The dynamic construction and execution vivify at first, then go on to decay the pinnacle to a numbing recurrence of its single discordant riff. Eventually, every compositional shift in the song spent, all that’s anticipated is a hurried end, posing the track as a skipped plague at the album’s heart.
“Ely’s Heartbeat” follows to cleanse the dissonance and offer up its rolling peace, returning to the steady bliss of Mono’s tenure. “The Last Scene” caps the album with classical inspiration in its arcing tremolo and ocean-like timing, exhibiting perhaps the greatest tonal maturity of any of the band’s songs to date; the destination is not an earsplitting heaven or hell but an uncomplicated psychic drift, a pensive sound for glowing and stasis.
Doubtless the live performance of Requiem would make its loud emotional etch on most observers, the endless crescendo and entropy working like huge, sapping ritual. But as a recording Mono's latest album dedicates itself to sameness and simplicity, never surprising and for all that falling into the ambience of background.
(02/08/16 3:12am)
Released: 2/7/2015
5/7 stars
If in the last few years you attended any metal concert in Northwest Indiana, there’s one name you most probably heard, uttered with unmistakable reverence: Monolith.
Born in 2008 as an instrumental metal experiment, the band wasted no time rallying fervor within and beyond the local scene. They became a household name in their sphere of influence not because of ruthless marketing strategy bordering on spam or any other accessories of utility; they grew because the musicianship they exhibited on stage was fucking prodigious.
The untrackable fingerwork and assured battery of four men who had trained their blood into their art was a phenomenon to witness, and astonishment sank its roots in the audience. Of course, the main complaint Monolith fielded was, “Where’s the vocalist?”
Two years ago the quartet, then composed of guitarists Kyle Ludovice and Jason Schultz, bassist Ben Rose and drummer Marshawn Fondren, decided to regard this as a hole and promptly filled it with Jacob Quintanilla, whose tangible resumée at the time amounted to stints in a few fruitless bands and supporting roles in musicals at his high school; despite that, he’s more than proven that he can keep up. Present day the band has blossomed with their new bellowing frontman, his voice contributing empathy and command to the music in recording as much as in performance.
Now, rounded off with a new album in hand, they stand on a precipice, wondering like Chaucer at the House of Fame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR-ufqBZ-Fo
After a three-year recording process, what Monolith achieves in their first proper LP, The Mind’s Horizon: Desolation Within, is at once the culmination of much regional hype and the commencement of a more dispersed excitement as their sound and name makes flight and streams to new cities, states, shores.
Like any proper metal record, The Mind’s Horizon feels like a journey, the musical evolution of the tradition of Homer. Throughout the work disarming tides of acoustic and synthetic cleanliness give way to immense breakers, colored with distortion and raw tension, and vise versa as the concept and crafted sound progress to a resolution, consecrating years of energy. Tumultuous and grave, bellicose and exultant, Monolith has achieved the brilliance of technical music with passion.
The virtuoso-awe of their live shows translates well to the digital format, though it’s hard to say “chops” is worth much once you enter the masturbatory exhibition that is major league progressive metal. No, rather than simply churning out what’s fastest, longest and most unpalatable, Monolith applies the effort to write songs that impress our indulgences and our standards all at once, and that’s why this album stands apart as something immediately accessible, comprehensible and domineering to most any ear, if not consistently pleasurable.
Inspiration is manifest across the spectrum of this work, as the laurels of colossi like Dream Theater, Between the Buried and Me, Rush and Behemoth (and sometimes Ensiferum) are borrowed and repurposed into something unabashed and superb. As elegantly varied as mixing paints, the record twists prog, experimental, death, black, viking, folk, extreme, etc. metal into a drink that some will call nectar while some will say it’s piss. I’m of the former camp, though I acknowledge that metalheads are a choosy folk.
The Mind’s Horizon won’t be as contentious as Ye’s Swish-Waves-So Help Me God, but for the listeners in its niche it’s still worth discussing where it wins and where it drops its keen edge. What is undeniable is that it is metal in its bones, meat and essence.
(01/22/16 12:33am)
A blitz of roiling and inscrutable coolness is crashing upon Blockhouse this Friday night. They’re called Protomartyr, and they’re raucous in all the right ways.
Fresh off a European excursion, the Detroit post-punk ascendants will be performing in Bloomington on the third stop of their 2016 U.S. tour. With the release of their latest œuvre, The Agent Intellect, heads and loyalties have multiplied for Protomartyr. As a band possessed of artistic prowess and prized humor inside the studio and out, their live performances are like sorcery, draping the room with dance, fire and the peeling happiness of mammals.
Booked by Winspear Music, the show will feature support from Amanda X and Bloomington locals, Daguerreotype. Doors at 8 p.m., music at 9 p.m. Tickets are available for $11.54.
(09/28/15 3:39pm)
Release: October 2 via ANTI-
Rating: 5/7
“they fondly thinking to allay
Thir appetite with gust, instead of Fruit
Chewd bitter Ashes, which th' offended taste
With spattering noise rejected”
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
In 2011 Deafheaven played an awkward set at Sound and Fury. Most of the tens of spectators were visibly disenchanted, killing time until (insert generic hardcore band) came on. I pitied and hoped for the band then.
Four years after that little sadness, Deafheaven have attained loud rock sainthood, with their 2013 opus Sunbather (Deathwish) seeded in many thousands of ears, on the Billboard 200, in Apple ads and in Metacritic’s laurels for best-reviewed album of that year. With practice and the weight of prominence, their live shows have matured into a cathartic event, overflowing with fervor, bravura, physical abandon and so, so many stans, some actually dressed in vocalist George Clarke’s exact outfit -- thanks, Pitchfork!
Naturally, there are high stakes in the creation of a follow-up to something often called “perfect.” The burden of brilliance is repetition. And so, New Bermuda.
And so, disappointment.
It would seem that they’ve been sucked through the hole they punched in the roof. The record asserts a Deafheaven that is woefully lost or losing, clouding the distinction between what is truly epic and what is histrionic, sweating away their grasp on the light they once made their own. That is not to say they erred in not writing a second Sunbather, but that the inspiration and magnitude of their past work has fallen off, skinned by shakiness and a motif of artistic choices that are simply annoying, depressing the substance and sublimity of the rest.
It’s perplexing. New Bermuda is a moon phasing in the belly, threatening to burst, a thing which desires to be born alive.
Where there is an incredibly heavy build-up to a snap of melody, there is a vapid thrash beatdown to supplant it. Where there is a dulcet piano coda, there is an overdriven stadium rock solo to shadow it. Sometimes it’s a sustained ugliness, sometimes the misstep is quiet or brief. Nonetheless each song is polluted, imperfected. While I commend the agency of the artists, tenacity has severed and sullied the divinity to be had in smart songwriting. “Gifts for the Earth” would be an incomparable song, if only it didn’t sour after four and a half minutes of delectable speed into the miserable theme of a coal town dive bar. Amazing initially and finally, “Brought to the Water” suffers from a mortifying -- I squirm with embarrassment when it comes through my speakers -- guitar solo in its midsection, as does “Baby Blue,” which exacerbates the odium of a track that consists of incessant chugging for its final half. Around every flowered corner of this album, there is the sigh of tasting that which is unpalatable. But there are flowers yet.
I read perhaps two less-than-gushing reviews of Deafheaven’s Sunbather. I only remember one, wherein the author complained that the vocals were an interrupt of color, a useless blanket over Kerry McCoy’s genius compositions. With New Bermuda Clarke’s dialect has become vile, imbibing and spitting the shining smoke of heavier instrumentation and flayed lyrics. This cultivated furor extends as well to the band’s technical finesse. At present they’re playing metal, post-rock and shoegaze better than most purist acts ever will.
For all the disillusionment of certain passages, the majority of the minutes here are devoted to hot, entrancing spaces. As they bubble and blast without deformity, without meaningless experiment scarred upon their pulse, “Luna” and “Come Back” are the two songs I have no qualms about calling “good.” Every other song, if amorphous on the whole, has true magnificence somewhere in it.
The serein of this record, the gorgeousness expected, is derived from a palette of voyage and domesticity, the incalculable range and atom of what is pleasing to the ear, if challenging to the heart. It is the cooing blood of blast beats, the petit filter-ghosts plucked out, the immense thrum of glittering chords, the silence issuing forth a few shushed notes and a hundred other things which communicate through poetries and trace the funny bone upwards. The ecstasy of sense in consuming New Bermuda is dampened by the negatives and cannot be continuous, but it comes again, again all the same. The album sketches a crooked constellation of emotional amends until its heel is reached, a body sliding down, slowing in the tar of cosmos, received at the bottom by a shore of hands.
***
At Sound and Fury a handful of people slouching over the stage, nodding their heads in accord with the spectacle, had the singular experience of being spat on by George Clarke every time he opened his nervous mouth to howl. And they stayed like that, enduring, their fondness enduring despite.
New Bermuda is not a tantalizing precipitation into heaven. Rather, it is real, espousing the rule of dirty beauty and working it masterfully, which amounts to a complex victory, a black vein throbbing bellicose in the stem of an orchid, shaking its leaves and disappointing. Overlook the disfigurements, recognize the drama and uproar which contrived them and this moth may blur into a butterfly. Or just hit that fast-forward.
At times this album feels unlovable. At times this album commands all love.
(05/26/15 10:21pm)
Release: May 12 via Profound Lore
Rating: 5/7
THIS FEELS MORE LIKE A PLACE THAN A SONG
Music can be hard enough to describe as it is. It seems the best one can do in reviewing a thing so subjective is to choose the most precise words to match an aesthetic in sensation. Artists, album concepts, cover art, lyrics -- these items hang loose for translation and are variably paramount to analysis and consumption, but they are only context to music itself, to sound extant in innumerable unique forms. So when music splashes from a knot of timbres which have minimal precedent in the common ear with common expectations of structure, thereby falling under “noise” as a generic categorization, comprehension between reviewer and reader is especially hard-won.
Even if writing for an audience of connoisseurs, how can one express each arcing phantom of Prurient’s latest double-LP? “Dominick Fernow is really liberal with his application of the whoosh-sound on this one?” In listening through the remote complexity, it almost feels futile.
"Almost" because, while the sounds on Frozen Niagara Falls can only be reduced to one-part known instruments (guitar, drum, synth) and one thousand-parts unknown sources configured in a tsunami of dark pop and frequencies of damage, the poignancy, the undiluted grief and cynicism, the intent behind this slow-blooming explosion cannot be mistaken. Where I would fail to adequately regurgitate the sounding march of the record, emotional and mental response catches everything as a reflection. Quivers under the anxiety of artificial turbulence, half-frowns for the ceaseless shadow, half-smiles for the natural tableau of locusts fluttering all together in one speaker. Though the mouthless language here may be unintelligible, the tones of every syllable are pregnant with feeling, amplifying the desert weeping of the English lyrics.
To weigh how resonant the album can be, I deferred to someone else, setting aside my own hypersensitivity, and did something really spontaneous for my girlfriend, Mia. I gave her a Bandcamp link and one week to write a review.
Surprisingly, she obliged. Mia's shorthand:
“Myth of Building Bridges” : So all I can think is that this kinda sounds like an underwater spaceship / Or maybe if I were, like, inside a storm cloud but, I like it. / Now it’s starting to make me feel a little anxious, like I think these are distorted screams and ?? they’re scaring me a little bc it feels like he can’t get it out ugh / Okay yeah its becoming more apparent that he’s saying words but what are they? I don’t know at all.
“Dragonflies To Sew You Up” : I like this one!!! This was the single and I get the doo-doo-doo part that comes in towards the end stuck in my head a lot / This incessant drum thing – I like that, too; I feel like I’m being put to sleep but also being yelled at idk but this all just seems very personal and I feel like I’m intruding on this guy’s life sometimes
“A Sorrow With A Braid” : Probably gonna get electrocuted soon
“Every Relationship Earthwise” : This is kinda groovy tbh / Okay so I’m starting to get this feel that this album feels more like a movie soundtrack than just music to me
“Traditional Snowfall” : Yeah yeah so I figured it out that he’s more creating a landscape than compositionally/structurally progressing and yet it gets really intense dynamically I guess?? I can’t tell how he does it but like, cool / I wish I knew what he was saying / I wish I knew what I was saying
“Jester In Agony” : I feel underwater or sleepy again / this feels more like a place than a song
“Poinsettia Pills” : This sounds like bugs swarming, eh / More metallic though / This static is making my head hurt but like I feel like he hurts too so it’s okay
“Shoulders Of Summerstones” : This calmed down a little / I guess I’m not meant to make out the words and I’m okay with that
“Wildflowers (Long Hair With Stocking Cap)” : Reminds me of dial-up
“Greenpoint” : !! this confuses me so much / What is this acoustic-y switch?? / Never mind it switched back / I like this one / Except I feel like I’m being lectured / Also the words are sad / “your teeth are yellow sponges” :/
“Lives Torn Apart (NYC)” : I think he just said something about shellfish and I’m pretty hungry right now / Too much jesus stuff for me ew
“Frozen Niagara Falls (Portion One)” : This one is the title track. Intense. I like when It’s intense. I feel like I’m in an electric tornado
“Cocaine Daughter” : Okay this is a new sound, this feels so apocalyptic like there is no way this is from this world
“Falling Mask” : Now this was more what I was expecting / “it’s okay to be angry” / Thank u
“Frozen Niagara Falls (Portion Two)” : Sounds like he’s saying “ass ass ass ass ass” tho / It sounds like something electric was thrown into water / Like I just envision a toaster in a puddle like, exploding and sparking a LOT
“Christ Among The Broken Glass” : So I’m just really confused by these little quiet guitar things / mostly I feel now like I’m drifting away somewhere that’s a lot better than where we were in the middle of this thing.
So overall, this was a good experience. Um, I do feel like I invaded this guy’s life though, like there was just a lot of emotion in this that I was not prepared for. Cool though, I like this “noise” stuff.
(04/15/15 5:20pm)
Release: April 14 via Profound Lore
Rating: 6/7
Human, like Rome, lives and dies in decadence, overstimulation. This existential condition has been the wisdom stitched to the euphony of San Francisco’s Bosse-de-Nage over the last nine years, and it looms yet with the band’s latest album. Born tall in the light of a 2012 split with Deafheaven (The Flenser) and the beloved III (Profound Lore), All Fours, falling upon the ear as a harrowing swirl of post-modernism, analogue noise, experimental and black metal, is a behemoth adorned with textures and colors that can hardly be described and a cultural and sensory holiness fulfilled.
As I struggle to express its contour, it’s a perfectly experimental record, reveling with one hallux irrefutably in black metal’s ash at all times while the remnant body pirouettes and knots self with self in a circus of ravishing hue. Here, as always, Bosse-de-Nage demonstrate that they are capable of flexibility and import in composition and that they hold the exceptional technical ability to actualize composition in high, exact movements. Opener “At Night” digs into the brain with its caliber, hailing smartly like Mastodon’s Blood Mountain (Reprise), melting into the caterpillar fuzz of Smashing Pumpkins and freezing again in the orgasmic tempest loud harmony and dissonance make together.
Spinning, post-punk and post-rock gleam through tender, necking arms behind a matte on “The Industry of Distance” and “In A Yard Somewhere,” and for “Washerwoman” a summer grunge canters beside vocalist Bryan Manning’s ascetic spoken word until both voices consent to a vehement, majestic cough, Manning and the instrumentation together screaming to heartburst for the anomalous oral savior come with “her mouth full of lather.” As the denouement to this work, “The Most Modern Staircase,” introduced by the lithe noise which courses like an auxiliary spine throughout, is the purest song, a near-incessant volley thrashing in and against sentience.
Rhythm, structured upon the immaculate drumming of Harry Cantwell, transcends marks on All Fours. More than the necessary tempo and technique of black metal, rhythm here is a creative and gloriously evocative mode. Be it through the long javelin of blast beats or a clean, loose-wristed tattoo, a timed eroticism constantly respires, rebirths. Originating from a percussive crack, “A Subtle Change” blossoms ochre petals about the cartilage of twirling battery and punk guitar sawing through each other, energy populating a sky as the meridian comes. Perhaps the most affecting phrase of the album passes early in “To Fall Down” as bass and drum buzz and stroke under pleasurably small guitar chimes, all in bliss.
What is not effortless in consuming All Fours, the grape that sleeps upon the vine, is the nuance of beauty. The dynamic grace waving from each strum, the human moan at the ultima of each scream, these indulgent details must be gleaned and gathered as spare sweetness. The brilliance of the album is that it must be felt, heard and read first-hand for any of what is said of it to have meaning and truth. A hyper-sensual memory, it needs incident in the mind and heart.
(03/25/15 1:01am)
Release: March 17 via Northern Silence
Rating: 4/7 stars
In light of its offerings, 2015 has been (Sannhet's Revisionist (The Flenser), Leviathan's Scar Sighted (Profound Lore)) and will be (Bosse-de-Nage's All Fours (4/14 via Profound Lore), Deafheaven's vague third LP) an immense, tears-of-joy-flooded year for American black metal in its countless faces, and Ghost Bath's Moonlover has become one of the pieces vital to the wet memory of this aural year, all at once garnering premature "AOTY" proclamations in the past three weeks. Perhaps the sudden uplift of this album owes to the fact that the media unknowingly propagated the lie that Ghost Bath is a Chinese band playing USBM and Westerners love what they perceive as exotic all the more when it replicates Western culture, perhaps it owes to the moment when everyone learned that the band is actually from North Dakota; either way, the same articles covering Ghost Bath's origin and hoax tend to include affirmations of the brilliant halo of Moonlover, showering it with critical love.
Technically, Ghost Bath masters their genesis with the high-fidelity expected of USBM, playing with the hectic dust of Burzum yet attaining every rhythmic gate. Final track “Death and the Maiden” best demonstrates the marriage of production and skill here, though, judging by the simple composition throughout, the band doesn’t seem to care if people don’t listen to their music because there aren’t enough blast beats or tremolo-picked riffs. What’s to be had here is the modern triumph of dynamics and emotional precision over thoughtless intensity in black metal.
The album is one of gorging sedation -- I write this as the person I’ve split my earbuds with half-sleeps, her posture in accord with the throbbing rain of “Happyhouse,” receiving every glum howl, the jaw beyond relaxed, on every mimesis of a breaking glacier that the instrumentation can produce. Even when the treble comes with eagerness somehow akin to Tom Petty’s “American Girl” in dulcet riffs yearning upwards to an apex on “Golden Number,” the total mass poured into this aesthetic space in anticipation of the depression to follow is palpable and, at times, astonishing.
At the onset the album cover (“La Luna, 1989,” Luis González Palma) and the first oscillating triplets of “The Sleeping Fields” speak a caution that this art has been the torture of the artist and will be the torture of the audience. There are particular moments when the tonal head looks upward with hope rather than mewling supplication as on “Golden Number” and moments of low respite as guitar meanders harmlessly through biological noise on instrumental tracks “Beneath the Shade Tree” and “The Silver Flower pt. 1,” and each of these moments eventually suffers ruin under a shredded throat and an eclipse-filled mind.
The record is a checkered sorrow of black and almost-black, conditions revolving and the heart bending until the theme of “The Sleeping Fields” repeats at the close of “Death and the Maiden.” Of individual peace and depression in the context of eternity, the breaths and the closures on this work, especially those of “Golden Number” and “The Silver Flower pt. 2,” both incredibly textured and lilting phases which nullify every other second of the songs they round off, realize the serene ethic of Moonlover as an album of relinquish and solace.
(01/17/15 5:40pm)
Once there were two girls named Sophia Grace and Rosie who covered "Super Bass" on Ellen and whatever--
Released on January 7, eleven-year-old Sophia Grace's "Best Friends" has been immediately exalted as a second "Lifestyle," the new fruit of the lotus-eaters, on account of its tingling virulence and the fact that one may sincerely, haplessly enjoy it despite all logic and taste. Perhaps regrettably, the lyrics here don't need to be Rap Genius'd because they're totally articulate and lacking ambiguity or hype, a.k.a. club material, b.k.a. The Weeknd needs to come through with the remix. Still, Sophia Grace = Thugger with frosting.
A song, "All Tongues Toward," from Leviathan's next album Scar Sighted (March 3, Profound Lore) was released on January 15. Upon listening, my first sensation (after annoyance with the kvlt sample at the beginning and again near the end) was immaculate gravity as I submitted to the blanket of livid noise, noise like Bosse-de-Nage, Bréag Naofa and Mamiffer all at once, silvery, strong-willed and thundering, and literally put my head down in meditation. My second sensation was an overwhelming gratitude to musicians and to labels. "All Tongues Toward" makes a massive thing because it effortlessly recalls art and its significance, how amazing it is that human beings have generated and sensed and honed beauties.
(11/06/14 12:04am)
Release: November 3 via 37 Adventures
Rating: 5/7 stars
Normally, I would use this space to heap language on the temper and sins of Deptford Goth’s second LP, Songs, lingering on its inoffensiveness, its romantic-yet-not-mawkish, sugar-and-salt loveliness, its congruence with All-American Reject’s Move Along in that neither album will tire my ear after ten hours repeating, in that both albums fan out in tried theoretical brilliance despite their modernity. I would remark on its airy swirls of highness with toy rhythm and juxtapose any of its eleven tracks with the last minutes of an episode of Grey's Anatomy. Día de Muertos is a heavy weekend, though, and I spent half of it listening to “Lifestyle;” as a result, I no longer see any value in the articulate verbalization of ideas, at least for now. So, in the spirit of Young Thug, I refuse to use my words. Here’s a track-by-track review with my thoughts, opinions, emotions and/or dancing illustrated by the art of Auguste Rodin:
I. “Relics”
II. "Do Exist"
III. "The Lovers"
IV. "We Symbolise"
V. "Code"
VI. "The Loop"
VII. "A Circle"
VIII. "Near to a River"
IX. "Dust"
X. "Two Hearts"
XI. "A Shelter, A Weapon"
(10/20/14 3:35am)
Release: 10/14/2014 via The Flenser
Rating: 6/7 stars
"What the fuck am I listening to?" has always been the common response of my friends who hear Kayo Dot's discography playing in the car and rightly so; as avant-garde metal, it's very much an acquired taste, like 100% cocoa. They hate it, they hate the transience of the howling and murmured vocals, they hate the minimalism, they hate the flute.
They hated it. Their question, organic as ever, has been posed several times to the stream of Kayo Dot's next album, the ultra retro-futuristic Coffins on Io. The words have, however, assumed a new tone for the new music, a tone as one uses in contemplating a supreme majesty, one which is distorted by a piercing rainbow of feelings and which is prepared to remain forever on its knees. Something begs to call it beauty despite the album's picaresque concept in themes of murder, shame, highways and toxic deserts, and something wants to say it's the adrenaline of running towards an active volcano. Either way, there's a crippling electricity in hearing this abstraction of the 80's motifs of Peter Gabriel, Sisters of Mercy, Cold Cave -- technically, Wesley Eisold has only been working as Cold Cave since 2007, but -- and, apparently rather influential, Blade Runner. Between this and Pallbearer's Foundations of Burden (Profound Lore) released in August, I've been talking like my dad when he listens to certain songs by Led Zeppelin while sipping his lite beer: "Wow. This is so beautiful."
Like every prior Kayo Dot release, there is a definite coherence of sound and genre across the work. Like almost every album ever, there are songs stronger than others here. Yet each song, all of them rare, baffles by its exhibition of technical and compositional mastery. Founder and frontman Toby Driver sings simultaneously in fiat and shivers, uttering out solid, palpable injury as he glissades in falsetto, as though his voice is performing an interpretive dance throughout the album, competing with the saxophone to see who can cry harder. The instrumentation under him proceeds just as passionately, with the logic of acupuncture to guide its wild magic to a point of tireless charm. This union of math and heart comes out the strongest in general favorites "The Mortality of Doves" and "Library Subterranean," two songs of operatic virtue so immense it's almost sexual. "Offramp Cycle, Pattern 22" retains a drip of forbidden climax in its furling drums and melody of a body in the backseat while "Longtime Disturbance on the Miracle Mile" and "Assassination of Adam" come across the ear as cathartic bursts, the former of experimentation and the latter of playing chameleon. Album closer "Spirit Photography" faces an oblivion of many senses, releasing a final, starved rain of sad sounds unto death.
On the whole Kayo Dot has commenced and killed a renaissance in about fifty minutes. Bubbling and pensive, Coffins on Io inspires nostalgia even for listeners who didn't exist in the reference period, describing a once-future to the effect of introspection. Thirty years from now our concept of the far-off will be different, will have changed with society and culture, and our present will, like the 80's, become an impersonal toy for exploration, not experience. C'est la vie.
(10/07/14 3:59pm)
Release: October 7, 2014 via Mute Records
Rating: 5/7 stars
Nika Roza Danilova, moniker Zola Jesus, isn’t quite a pop star, but she certainly knows how to curve her experimental tones into sinuous and vital pop music. Her genius is embodied in her seemingly-uncomfortable wardrobe. Somehow, she slips into rings of wood and nets of light and performs, owning and transfiguring any discomfort into the pride of art. In analogy she coaxes raw, breathing sound from her own being into a proven structure. Her new record, Taiga, awaiting an October 7 release through Mute Records, conceptually exemplifies accord through mastery, analyzing the human relationship with nature as one of adjustment. Egotism places the angsty human voice at the fore, dominating the sometimes chaotic and consistently cold-while-pretty instrumentals representative of the landscape.
Aesthetically, the record may be off to a poor start for former fans of Zola Jesus, especially of Conatus (2011). That is to say, the album art and track listing on this attempt are so very pop, with no presence of exquisite song titles like “Lick the Palm of the Burning Hand.” Sonically, the artist has, however, not strayed far. Indeed, in writing electronic pop music in the seclusion of Washington’s nature, she has only sharpened and refined her output into something magnetic, more mature than anything in her past.
The radio-intent of singles “Dangerous Days” and “Go (Blank Sea)” is obvious enough, with the former woefully reminiscent of P!nk on the first listen.* “Hunger” and “Long Way Down” could also easily float on the mainstream for a few weeks or so, in which case Danilova’s artistic integrity would be on par with Gotye’s in that both are incredibly talented writers and musicians with an extensive and wonderful catalog besides just song x. That said, the remaining songs on the album stand on their own as independent feats of ability or creativity, tracks “Nail" and “Taiga” managing to stand out for their fine experimental quality despite a hugely dynamic soundscape.
High culture sangfroid and gorgeousness have always been the fixed point for the music of Zola Jesus; this remains the case. Not too much has changed, and every change is palatable, if one can swallow, even enjoy, the ambitious pop bangers. Danilova throws forth her sublime logic in still-marvelous, polyhedral form with Taiga, staying cool and sticking to a minimal selection of synths, brass, bare percussion and the absolute pearl of her voice.
* For me, P!nk is the sound and essence of rancid sweat streaking a spray-on tan. Not good.
(10/01/14 4:02am)
Monday September 29 was a day for audio-visual experiences. Lakutis released a music video for the ever-adored and adorable “Body Scream” (dir. Adam Besheer), and Mastodon let out the like for the most-lauded track of their new album, Once More ‘Round the Sun, “The Motherload” (dir. Thomas Bingham and Jonathan Rej). Both pieces feature long-haired men, bodily contortions, shirtlessness, gold teeth, kaleidoscopes, and delectable, weirdly pop-sensitive anthems.
When Lakutis dropped a clip for “Jesus Piece,” everyone and their family were scared for a month. Contra, “Body Scream” will more than likely have the same everyone enamored and warm. It’s the daisy-water in that backwoods jacuzzi, the meadow so idyllic it belongs in a thousand Febreze promos, the liberty of a bare chest collecting the smoke of plump marshmallows, the tropical wall in homage to Kahlo that leaves you with a cloud of tight, tangible euphoria. Apart from the artist’s customary hair-whipping, eye-rolling, jitteriness and a literal bloodbath in the final shot, there’s not much spooky about his latest -- unless you want to comprehend the parallels between this and Charles Baudelaire’s "À Celle qui est trop gaie." Lovelorn man agonizing in a paradise and greedily defining the feminine focus of his passions, describing flesh which gapes wide like a mouth, and it’s all rounded off with a sorrowful, crimson flourish. Kutis wouldn’t hurt a fly, though; he’s too lovely for that.
Some somber people have hated Mastodon since 2011’s The Hunter, the album which fell abysmally short of the bar set by its predecessor, Crack the Skye (2009), probably mostly because of “Creature Lives;” only Baroness can play swamp ballads, I guess. Once More ‘Round the Sun, released in June of this year via Reprise Records, has changed a few hard hearts and has certainly won many new ones.
That said, Mastodon does seem beyond the event horizon of the black hole that is pop metal, if only because of actual popularity and the haters writhe in anxious little pits of social media to reveal to the band their failure / success. The video for “The Motherload,” the song which almost single-handedly tips the record into a position of mainstream accessibility and therefore garners the greatest criticism, carries the weight of a hundred twerking tushies. Metalheads hate it, uninformed mediators try to defend it as a satire of trends and pop culture, I say it’s Mastodon’s essential and infinite “fuck you, we like fun.” Better yet, Brann Dailor himself says on the subject of blending butts and esoterica, “people would probably think, ‘That shouldn’t be there’, or ‘Those two things don’t go together, they shouldn’t be together.’ I wanted to just put them together because we can.”
Whatever the video is, it's an odassey.
(09/16/14 4:19pm)
6/7 stars
Some deem it fitting that This Will Destroy You hails from Texas. While this may complement the massive nature of the quartet’s sound, it cannot account for the essential gorgeousness of it; sensibility like that can’t be described by any real place. That said, the group’s new album, Another Language, to be released in the United States on Sept. 16 by Suicide Squeeze Records, is an audible paradise.
Seven months after the May 2011 release of the band’s second full-length album, the soul-burning Tunnel Blanket, Holy Other released his remix of This Will Destroy You’s “Black Dunes.” I noted how minimal the changes were, only a new house rhythm and a voice sample laid upon the multiplying ambience of the original track, and I recognized it as a nod to the independent darkness of the song and the record that Holy Other, producer of pitch-black yet scintillating, atmospheric beat music, using past remixes as an opportunity to drown artists like How to Dress Well in sound, didn’t have much work to do. Even without this nod, Tunnel Blanket is an album successful as per the intent of the band in sounding like death in the most moving way. As such, it represents a sonic and aesthetic departure for the group, trading past albums’ tanning warmth and light for a colorless lethargy, a slumber, a death.
And that’s when Another Language picks up, at the moment of waking. Between the album title, song titles, keywords “New” and “Topia” and “God’s,” and the actual, unreal sounds on this effort, one has a sense of being slowly awakened or revived from a stasis and a swelling vision that one has woken up somewhere unfamiliar, different from where they fell asleep. Maybe it is the morning after a night of ivresse, perhaps it is arrival in an otherworld; it could easily be both. For This Will Destroy You itself, for a band whose music and members have passed simultaneously through thematic life and death and periods of jeopardy on account of real world events and have now come to a point beyond death, this theory is description. The album’s philosophy regards the band as much as it does the music.
As to the music, no time is wasted as opener “New Topia” commences in a pivot on a trapeze of lithe guitar, atmosphere, and lush digital droplets, managing an alert pulse without then with drums which are rolling in the charisma of a wave throughout the record, creating and recreating something that is immediately vital, uplifting, and altogether exotic. This easy adrenaline sounds smooth in its summoning yet unearthly in its content and, as the group’s intended quintessence of divine rhythm, doomgaze and sentimental ecstasy, pervades every song hereafter; it is the thesis of the entire album.
More than on Tunnel Blanket, one can hear the kicks away from genre towards a mastery or auspicious discovery of experimental territory. While post-rock, a restraint that bassist Donovan Jones has explicitly rejected for the band, manifests in the efflorescent dynamics at play, it seems a shadow here otherwise, reaching decent length only when the audio spikes with Jeremy Galindo’s and Chris King’s iconic guitar eruptions, as on the first four songs of the album and on “Invitation;” with only one song here breaking seven minutes, there isn’t even room for the maturation of another post-rock opus like the band’s self-titled full length. Certainly, succeeding tracks “New Topia,” “Dustism,” and “Serpent Mound,” though containing magnificent dynamics and pretty, peculiar elements such as sampled chirps and disorienting glitches, are nearly identical in their more customary structure -- soft then loud then end -- and it actually becomes somewhat cloying, rendering “War Prayer” a greater novelty in its kinetic vehemence and heightening an appreciation of new forms in this work, whether they be marvelously ambient as “The Puritan” and “Mother Opiate” which glisten enough to belong in a playlist beside Tim Hecker or a drone of pounding fuzz and light as “Invitation” and “Memory Loss.” All of these songs, regardless of structure and style, form a shower of gratifying brilliance which clutch and pet the spirit into a heaven of noise.
Despite all the attempts at pioneering going on here, one can still hear the E-bow, the dynamics, the overdriven volcanism, the raw feeling and traces of everything from the first releases that has exalted this band to a status worthy of its name, and the fresh elements introduced here are not corrosive or in opposition to the group’s inherent glory. So, while one may adore Young Mountain and This Will Destroy You more than any other records on one’s shelf, it’s very difficult to regret Another Language for its stylistic distance from its predecessors. In fact, it’s very easy to fall in love with this latest work because it sounds different and yet complete, like a true modern masterpiece. When final track “God’s Teeth” culminates in what is one of the most enigmatic last sounds and potentially the most experimental thing about this album, a single, sinuous bass blip that could share a frequency with the beginning and end of the universe, there is nothing left to hear, and there is nothing left to have heard. No beauty unborn, no ear-dream unfulfilled, rather slightly overindulged, This Will Destroy You has done a clean job of transporting listeners to a neural dimension of wordless awe.