Jenny Bolzer

the big bad metal hipster

[theheavyaesthete]

NBBMN daily reviews: Spectral Lore - Gnosis

B+ This album’s Orientalism is its strength and its weakness.  Specifically, on the three metal tracks - Dualism, Gnosis’ Journey Through The Ages and A God Made of Flesh and Consciousness - it’s a strength, stripping away the last vestiges of black metal cliché that remained on tracks on III like “The Cold March” and defining a unique, elegant and mysterious sound for Spectral Lore - one also distinct from the standard “occult black metal” orientalisms by leaning into something like the open-scaled verdant medievalism of Obsequiae, except as much more literate as Persian love poetry to its French and Italian troubadour imitators.  On the two instrumental interludes, Averroes’ Search and For Aleppo, it’s a weakness.  I’m a folk metal apologist, but one can almost always say of this kind of gimmick: “you’re not making black metal better, you’re making [Malaysian throat singing] worse”.  And while non-traditional musicians can sometimes at least pull off traditions meant for non-musicians, like this or that rustic Nordic folk music, this especially goes for extremely advanced art music traditions like the Middle Eastern ones reworked here on the model of generic rock guitar noodling.  Like I’ve just been in a hookah lounge like three times and I can tell this sounds like Sting. The album isn’t just uneven between these two categories of tracks; “A God Made of Flesh and Consciousness” makes every other track pale in comparison, using something like a fractal structure, twice as long as any other track and kept interesting by a linear series of textural variations, to build up to a riff that’s more complex, memorable and huge all at once than anything you’ve ever heard.  An outright bad album would be worth this song alone.

[theheavyaesthete]

Pale - EP

B+ Well what do we have here, a whole EP that sounds like the one good song on the Deafheaven full-length I reviewed on this blog.  Ironically, the best song on this is also the first.  The “atmoblack band just discovered rhythm” herky-jerky gets a bit old, especially when most of their riffs are what you’d expect from a basically functional power metal band and what they’re actually good at is - as the naming conventions suggest - colour.  Always keeping their high and low notes close in an exhaustive aural chiaroscuro, they bring out the inherent cloudiness and wateriness of those post-rock chord progressions, and never forget to stir them before they get inspirational.  And the vocals have an agonized groaning modulation that can’t be easy to mix with this level of athleticism - if only they were a bit closer up in the mix - you’d think a band called “Pale” would appreciate the value of white noise.  The rhythm parts that actually sound like rhythm are the drums. (Link, because I guess terrible SEO is how you stay underground now?)

[theheavyaesthete]

Wow this is the worst execution of the best riff/structure/concept I’ve heard in a LONG time.  What the hell went wrong?  Mostly, the production, I think?  The vocals are way too far up front in the mix considering they’re completely boring.  Babymetal at least sound like they’re feeling something when they sing.  Clearly this is supposed to be a restrained, serene number, but there’s nothing going on in the background to give its minimalism a sense of grandeur, and it just sounds like the producers asked some random people off the street to read sheet music.  The drums are doing NOTHING.  If you are doing a black metal pastiche where is your blast beat?  It’s not gonna alienate your mainstream audience who expect something more poppy or rhythmic, considering nothing of the sort is going on here, just a phoned-in 4-beat that serves only to distract you momentarily from the rest of the song when you realize it’s there.  On the break it literally sounds like a fucking click track, it ruins the solemnity, why is it there?  Why is there no reverb on any of this (the vocals could probably use it in a pinch if you don’t want to hire someone who can actually sing?)  The guitar tone sounds like ass except when it’s soloing the riff - that’s a totally different function from backing, guys, unless you’re going for something genuinely minimalist like a real black metal guitar, which we know you’re not.  It sounds like it’s not actually being played very loud just mic’d too close up, which is probably the case unless it’s literally made in GarageBand, which it also sounds like.  What is this supposed to sound like live?  Can I just get a live version?  Recorded in one-mic black metal quality?  That would probably, honestly, sound better.  And yet, the riff and the melody alone are still good enough to make me come back to it over and over again.  It’s probably my favourite metal song this year.  Just... put some fills in or something, for the love of Satan.

[skrotchevo]

[theheavyaesthete]

GRIM AND FROSTBITTEN

[theheavyaesthete]

Sonata Arctica - The Ninth Hour

A

I almost wanted to dislike this album, which power metal purists are hailing as a return to form for Sonata Arctica even as it largely jettisons the feature that most decisively set them above their peers: clever, grounded, specific lyrics.  I thought “Life” was just another “I Have A Right” the first time I heard it, but at least it knows “It is a dumb thing to say”, unlike “Til Death’s Done Us Apart”: these storytellers ought to know better than conflating fairytale, nursery rhyme and religion.  Between the unprecedentedly lush (and sophisticated: I’ve never heard so much variety in drum textures, for instance) production, orchestral arrangements we haven’t heard since The Days Of Grays, some of Tony Kakko’s most operatic vocals ever, and the romanticism that compels them to have their speaker “gallop across the moorlands/on a branded steed I’d stolen” in the sequel to a song that featured a car crash as a major plot point, it’s clear that their strategy to make up for their own alienated base is to gather the fans that fall from Nightwish every time they change vocalists (to say nothing of their optimistic turn).  But while Sonata Arctica was always the adult in the room whose straightforward earnestness and joy belied Nightwish’s adolescent brooding on “lost innocence”, The Ninth Hour might be their most mature album in quite a few ways.  One is its negativity, which is political, and their politics are still astute.  (“Fairytale” addresses listeners who “got” their conspiracy and anti-globalization songs and might be feeling tempted by nationalist politicians back into the electoral system.)  Two is its synthesis of their musical development to date, which I thought they’d already achieved on Pariah’s Child but The Ninth Hour demonstrates how much more work there was to be done.  Yes, there are power drums and speed guitars, as well as chugs, rock swing and ballads, like there have been on both of their previous albums: the salient point is that you can actually hear them, and not just as a formal feature but a sound that packs a punch.  The melodies they drive are as proggy as anything on Unia, but never too proggy for a good hook.  The sonic space is fully three-dimensional and vast, giving every instrument room to fill out, the drums room to really explode, textural extras background to fade into (allowing for a variety of influences as wide as on their previous two without any songs jumping out as “crossover” gimmicks, except “We Are What We Are”, which is a Nightwish crossover), and the whole an epic scale.  Three is cohesion.  I never took issue with their understanding of an album as a collection of songs, but for a first stab at an extended structure this is a good one: the first four songs lay out their incomplete thesis directly, and the rest try to fill in (or elaborate) its uncertainties with narrative - including some of the most iconic narratives from across their career: “Among the Shooting Stars” seems to be the first direct sequel to “Full Moon”, “Till Death Do Us Apart” explicates the Caleb saga in a more philosophical register, “Candle Lawns” brings the “veteran” storyline ( “Replica”, “What Did You Do In The War, Dad?”) to a close.  Four is sheer consistency.  Musically, there is not one bad or even average song on this album.  (”We Are What We Are” might be the exception if I could resist uillean pipes.)  What nuance the lyrics defer to the whole, some of their most tonally complex compositions ever manifest all the way through. The lyrics, even in their weakest moments, can be taken as signposts pointing in the direction the melody explores - and that’s fine by me.  That’s what Bob Dylan just won a Nobel prize for, if we strip away all the gimmicks.  It’s what pop, and especially metal, lyrics have always done best.

[baroquespiral]

Here’s two power metal songs about being a useless hikki-NEET such as myself. You’d think that’d be tonally jarring, given this is the genre that gave us Dragonforce and is best known for epic fantasy songs and is even called “power metal”.  The disjuncture between the scale of nerds’ fantasies and of their lived existence is fundamental to the cultural concept itself.  OTOH, not only do these songs work affectively for me, but as songs that relate to that experience negatively, as and through struggle, I don’t think that’s just a happy accident.  What I mean is that this kind of social dysfunction tends to relate on some level - be that level trauma, diagnosed/diagnosable “mental illness”, simple shelteredness, neoteny etc. - to a heightened sensitivity to the demands and dangers of the social, sexual, economic, adult world that exceeds how they are represented “realistically” in media or otherwise.  That’s literally how autism, in particular, works IIRC.  (Power metal is great stim music.)  Going outside literally feels like going on a dangerous quest (or at least, like how that’s represented) - the questions of “relatability” or “believability” normies will often pose before the very forms and premises of “nerd” media (see also) never come up.   While CBT, affective techniques, simply contextualizing/checking your privilege, and most of all experience can all “correct” these perceptions to different extents depending on the circumstance, it usually takes some disproportionate emotional exertion simply to resize disproportionate emotions in the first place (before you can say “that wasn’t so scary, you have to be brave).  Which is what the particular mode of excess of something like power metal expresses particularly well. Privileging this moment of delusion as a site of expression does risk what Robert Christgau calls, in his blanket dismissal of metal, “self-regarding emotion”; these songs neither wallow in nor obscure their subject matter, despite the emotionally earned (and tongue-in-cheek) moment of self-regard as self-care at the end of “Hate”: “Life is being a Hero of RPG game has undecided purpose.  There are no confirmation between true friends and enemies.  But in the situation, one gets true friends and find own purpose of life.  Everybody call him “a hero” with veneration.”

[theheavyaesthete]

LISTEN TO IT LOUDER: Ghost - Meliora

A+ I periodically edit these posts to jiggle the grades as my opinions change, but every now and then my opinions change so much I have to reassess my entire review, which it wouldn’t be fair to do without telling anybody.  That happened one night as I was reading Giorgio Agamben, who was talking about Gnosticism so I decided to put on Ghost’s recent Gnostic-themed album Meliora as mood music.  Oh man, did it set the mood.  And galvanized by the mood I soon found myself struggling to focus on my reading because I kept noticing the little details that made it work.  Like the whooshing swell of noise that the end of “From the Pinnacle to the Pit” abruptly cuts off, the metronome intro of “Deus In Absentia” which has nothing literal to do with the song but makes perfect atmospheric sense, the little echoing riff on “Mummy Dust” There are even some nice lyrical touches: I can’t believe I somehow read it as failing to critique capitalism when “Absolution”, however vague, is not just a song about guilt or Faustian compacts in a vulgar individualist sense, but about systemic complicity.  Their flair for occult imagery and camp has really taken off too: “I was carried on a wolf’s back/to corrupt humanity” is not an “I killed a man because he killed my goat” but it’s that kind of intro for sure, and “star-crossed lovers reaching out/to the beast of many names” is the single most grandiose thing I’ve heard all year. My initial judgment of it was also explicitly in relation to their previous albums, which on second examination I was also remembering unreliably - Infestissumam particularly only as its ~3 best, most memorable tracks, “Ghuleh/Zombie Queen” (still the best thing they ever wrote), “Monstrance Clock”, maybe “Year Zero”, maybe “Body and Blood”... mostly “Ghuleh/Zombie Queen” though.  The rest of that album is filler, even more simplistic than their first and only marginally more atmospheric, though that margin felt like quite a lot the first time you heard it.  Every track on Meliora, on the other hand, feels like an attempt to replicate “Ghuleh” and what set it apart from... everything they had previously done.  It shows in the progressive song structures, the hooks themselves catchier by virtue of being a little more complex, the more frequent variations in texture, and the hint of melancholy I now can barely remember ever not having been there.  It also shows in the sheer amount of care put into each one of these, which is practically as much as most people I’ve reviewed here put into a whole album. If anything this attentiveness backfires as the singles feel a bit try-hard, “Cirice” in particular - its piano-based hook is jarring and its riffs more serpentine than memorable.  They’re not the album’s best tracks, which is a complete reversal of previous Ghost albums and probably threw me when I listened to it the first time.  Some of these songs don’t really work until you listen to them in context.  “Majesty” demands a throne.  Meliora really is a concept album, even if there’s no specific extended narrative, and there are no songs that don’t at least sound like songs on their own.  Well, except “Devil Church”, which is an incredible 1 minute and 6 seconds because it steps right up and tells you in no uncertain terms what their musical project is, where it takes off from Black Sabbath and how it completely it humiliates the entire project of “black metal”.  Counterintuitively, the things that make them “not metal”, that make them a heavier Blue Oyster Cult or what have you, are exactly the things that make them epic - not just structurally but texturally - and Satanic.  Ghost have recreated the sounds of the actual “Devil Church” we attend every day: the mall (anthropologists argue that the 20th-century shopping mall was modelled, consciously or unconsciously, on the cathedral, the only comparable space in terms of scale, crowds, and deliberate coercive evocation of intense emotional experience through every sense: sights, scents, and music), in every tinny, canned chorus, in every sugar-or-crack-rush hook and meticulously produced populist Pavlovian response.  They have made a better pop album than any pop artist I can think of this year.  But they have infected it with Sabbath’s sense of doom (born of working-class resentment).  This, not some edgy Norwegian teenagers hissing at broken mics in a forest, is what the Devil sounds like - or specifically, what the organized worship of the Devil sounds like, which has been their shtick since day one (or year zero).  Ghost evokes, condenses and elucidates our full affective experience of the monumental, crumbling immensity of structuring evil in the world around us: both as it presents itself and as we understand - or fail to understand, doubt and tremble before - it.  And it’s a hell of a thing to listen to while reading Agamben explaining how “economy” originated as a religious concept.

[theheavyaesthete]

The Antioch Antioxidant Accident - Heart Eraser

A - Fine, call me fucking sporkcore, it’s a gendered insult anyway.  If teenage girls started liking Swans I bet you’d come up with a derogatory word for that that would seem every bit as self-evident.  Anyway, no amount of oddball texture-switching is enough to change that these songs are damn well-written.  They’re more complicated than their core influences and more vital than their avant-garde ones by a long shot.  Frequently a submerged riff gives form and tone to noodling; there’s an almost baroque sense of ornamentation at points but the manifest content, the approach, is modernist, aiming at startling and new conjunctions in accordance with some transcendent order.  The vocals will definitely be a hurdle for some listeners, but I loved them - they sound like a nihilistic teenage Tom Waits, compressed into near-gurgling and ever so slightly “longer and deeper and rougher” than their own obvious antecedents I won’t even bother to name.  Others might complain about the production.  I challenge them to come up with a heavier alternative to the mountainous, cloudy effect of the muffled bass drum pileups in “Modelling of a Heart Pump Charged with a Non-Azeotropic Refrigerant Mixture (Rites of Summer)”.  It’s almost a shame there aren’t more “lolrandum” passages on this album because the one on the first track is actually one of its best moments: its generic synth riff coming off a purely original guitar riff is deployed 100% correctly, giving a huge sense of liftoff augmented by the guitars coming back in underneath.  But plain old technical and compositional skills tie it all up at “The End”, which does justice to joy. There are a few missteps, particularly as it goes on, such as “Pavlov’s Hierarchy of Needs”, on which the vocals utterly defeat themselves - sounding too pathetically adolescent on one hand and too consciously affected on the other - and a subsequent attempt at an epic progression out of nowhere only multiplies the humiliation, or “The Kraken”, which is just Dream Theater prog without the sheen, although this kid’s vocals make a damn good pirate growl.  Frankly, I’ll take skipping a couple tracks on some self-produced bandcamp album over getting tired of passable riffs two minutes into each seven-minute song on an album that had thousands of dollars poured into it and sounds slicker than the latest Max Martin project.  I like neither In Flames, Thought Industry, Propagandhi nor Maudlin of the Well, but I liked this.

[raggedjackscarlet]

Listening to a random assortment of power metal on youtube, starting to think that the central challenge of composing in that genre is capturing the authentic epic sensibilities of orchestral music and folk ballads, while studiously avoiding the fake epic sensibilities of nu-metal and butt rock.

It’s a challenge because, since power metal falls under the broad aegis of pop/rock/metal, its basic building blocks are already closer to the fake-epic genres than the real-epic genres.

It’s like trying to walk a tightrope with an asymmetrical balance bar.

[theheavyaesthete]

you see all the good power metal I know (e.g. Sonata Arctica, Nightwish, Gamma Ray, Galneryus) resolve this by actually embracing their pop/rock/metal side more

see, by “fake epic” sensibilities, actual orchestral music (apart from action movie scores) or folk ballads (apart from bad neo-folk) aren’t necessarily that “epic” either.  that’s why so many of the people who claim to draw inspiration from those genres because of their connotations don’t actually listen to them and you can tell.  (ask the people who run the this-is-traditional-white-culture blog to name their favourite Childe ballad, lol)  “fake epic” and “authentic” epic-sounding music are playing entirely different games and I think the distinction is much the same as in literature or movies.  “authentic” epicness comes from storytelling: it’s not just huge battles and gore and special effects, it’s characters and stakes and tension.  folk balladry and classical orchestral music were all about expressing epic NARRATIVE in musical form, and bringing the same structures and logic to the actual organization of music, as opposed to just throwing huge string sections or crescendos at you. but the funny thing is, so is pop/rock/metal.  in fact, while less affiliated with “epic” stories as a genre (tending more towards romantic or comic realism and short forms), pop music is INCREDIBLY GOOD at musical storytelling.  that’s one of its defining features.  and the short-form focus gives it the mechanisms to condense a LOT of emotion and drama into a small amount of sound: here’s a straight-up pop song (and obvious model for Nightwish’s “Ever Dream”) that sounds more epic than most “fake epic” metal:

where power metal (and even classic heavy metal) tries to go from there, I think, is to keep all the mechanisms of compression and emotional density of the short form (its verse-chorus structures and anthemic hooks, electrifications), while building it out further with the elaborating mechanisms of orchestral and folk music (the virtuosity, the slowly building repetitions, etc.) to sustain the charge of a pop song through the breadth and scale of epic storytelling.  which, done right, is the most grandiose, excessive and beautiful thing you can possibly imagine.

[theheavyaesthete]

Blood Folke - My Heart In The Brilliance Of Fire

A

This album is as “A” as I’m willing to go without making it A+, and I revise these grades all the time so who knows.  Its sound is unique on every level, which there are more of than you’d expect, as much of this album’s success is based on its incredible layering.  Most noticeable of these layers is probably the viola (which, for anyone extra wary of gimmicks, sounds like a synth or another guitar at its most definable), weaving melodies way above its pay grade, drawing on various dissonant folky interventions into modern classical music of the past century.  Most noticeable to the wannabe musical theorist in me was how they resolved the tension between harsh vocals as formal technique and as formless primal scream by simply dubbing the one on top of the other.  The guitars reverse cushion - insofar as it’s the former that feels constrained by, trapped in between the latter - [a couple layers of] the kind of thick sludge designed to make one guitar sound like several in the first place with searing melodic dissonances that would be outright painful to listen to otherwise.  The drums not only alternate but organize chaotic blast beats, fills, solos into complex rhythms that would be “funky” for some colossal, inhuman body.  There’s so much going on in all these layers that you can’t really take it in all at once, so the album as a whole kind of descends through the strata.  Each song highlights the best of an instrument: the viola on “Prairie”, the drums on “Glass Grenade”, the guitars on the riffy “Viridian”, the bass which is the feverishly pounding heartbeat of “Drug Infusion” (backed up by this sort of... talking bass drum trick you literally have to hear to believe)... C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER there’s no vocals at all on “Deathspa” but it’s still a great track.  The rest of what works is song structure, which these guys could teach a master class in.  The only bad thing I can think of to say about this album is that at its weakest points it kind of sounds like Swans, and I love Swans.  But I also love metal. 

[theheavyaesthete]

Sadist - Hyaena

B No, it’s not about Africa, it’s about Somewhere Hot and Dry and Primitive, but since these guys understand - at least, for a while - that their job is to recreate this imaginary subject from the bottom up in musical language, not throw its pre-existing cultural associations at a wall of sound and see what sticks, you can imagine it as a Dungeons & Dragons setting and it’ll pretty much work.  Sadist vindicate the expressive function of innovation by evoking the brutal savannah not with “tribal” beats (while this is certainly not deliberate, their mournful long-game prog riffs have more in common with a lot of real Afropop than the "groovy” stereotypes most bands would have instantly gone in for), chants and primal screams but with orchestration ever so slightly too warm to be Gothic and a distinctive, soft but insistent gated cymbal. Except on the B-side - not something that’s supposed to exist any more, but maybe something that should because there’s such an obvious point in the middle of this album where they run out of confidence or ideas and it falls so precisely where, in the good old days, you’d get to pause and decide whether to keep listening - all this goes out the window.  I’m not sure if it makes it more or less racist that you can tell there’s a connection between the way “Gadawan Kura” and “Eternal Enemies” - perfectly good tracks on their own - ditch the tonal complexity and furtive atmosphere Sadist’s been doing so well to give you The Soft Track and The Heavy Track in jarring and anticlimactic succession, and the fact that both of them feature guitar manipulated to sound like a kola.  The good thing is that Sadist’s still a veteran band with good musicians who know how to have fun through all this, so you can still bang your head, power through a set at the gym, close your eyes and imagine vicious cinematic fight scenes, and maybe even laugh at the ridiculous way “African Devourers” moves from Afrohouse verse to power metal chorus. You can even take them home, play them on your acoustic guitar without all the bells and whistles, and admire them as well-composed jazz - at least as convincing as Shining’s, if a lot smoother.  Which isn’t to say the successes of this album, like the classically sinister “The Devil Riding the Evil Steed” (what a great name, by the way), aren’t essentially metal in the best sense of the word.  Even though the aforementioned could have been a long-lost Black Sabbath song, sped up with an African radio sample stuck in the middle, my favourite is still probably the jazziest, lead single “The Lonely Mountain”, which is the most coherent, including coherence between its sound and its compositional approach of laid-back, yet dogged riffs alternating with keyboards and each other in a moody chromatic landscape.  Which only goes to show how good this album is when it’s good - potentially year-topping, if they’d kept it to a five-track EP.

[theheavyaesthete]

Ghost - Meliora

B+ If You Have Riffs... you can go a long way.  Hooks help too, and structures.  But you can only go so far, especially if you sound like you don’t quite mean them.  Ghost had gone from sounding like nothing, an empty vessel for formalist hard rock, to a furtive something that snuck between realness and fakeness, distorting both into what “magic” must be supposed to mean on 2013′s Infestissumam.  Now they’ve lost that atmospheric charge, but kept the muted production and progressive song structures, which reveal incidentally that they owe less to Blue Öyster Cult than to Broadway - but they’d make a tackier musical than Sonata Arctica or Nightwish, the kind that only hardcore Broadway nerds like, where every song seems to be expressing the fact that it’s a certain kind of musical number more than what it’s about.  As someone who’s seen Guys & Dolls, I can attest that the difference between what I’m describing and a good musical can’t be reduced to the sheer density of clichés.   What’s interesting on this album is getting see Ghost flesh out their worldview, the story in which these musical numbers might take place: from the art-deco cover art and urban theme to the title/lyrics of final track “Deus In Absentia”, there can be no longer the slightest doubt that it’s a Gnostic one, starring Satan as puppetmaster behind the scenes of a not only fallen but false material and social world, in which context the campy artifice of their sound is actually kind of brilliant.  This would make them not real Satanists but Christians running a Hell House, à la Black Sabbath, a refreshing stance at a time when the guys at Death Metal Underground regularly seem to forget there was metal before Bathory: the temporary nature of Satan’s power is too inextricable from that narrative, and the way they build songs makes obvious that they mean it as a narrative, not just a set of icons.  So why does this still not work as well as their previous albums for me?  Maybe the riffs are finally getting old; they all sound well-crafted by themselves but put together just feel like variations on the same thing, which even the band seems aware of to the point of compensating with random stylistic shifts.  Or maybe it’s that there’s two layers of artifice which cancel each other out; unlike the Sabbath of “N.I.B.”, I have no idea if Ghost actually mean how they’re framing what they’re saying either, or are just getting it from horror movies, except that everything about the theme of this album screams for a critique of capitalism and yet the city on this album cover is never more specific than the churches or Vatican on the previous ones.

[theheavyaesthete]

World Narcosis - World Coda

A Is an album from May too old for me to review if I’m pretending to be professional and up-to-the-minute about this?  Sure, most of its fresh riffs are just generic riffs cut up and folded in weird ways (an approach that makes these post-crusties really good at post-metal riffs, incidentally: they grasp that what makes repeating chords interesting, even expressive, is the suspense as to when they’ll stop).  But one can get so easily physically caught up in the way they lurch: the huge lifts and drops, rears and lunges of “Nigh(t)”, which syncs up rhythmic disjunctures and octave leaps to maximum effect.  Plus, they have an atmosphere that sneaks up on you; on first listen you may hear urban-grit texture to put bands like Indian which built their entire careers on it to shame.  But on second listen you’ll realize this sounds like something else, and, when you try to figure out what, you’ll find nothing.  World Narcosis’, as far as I know, purely original sound is based on a simple juxtaposition: dirty, grimy, grinding rhythm guitars with a clean, resonant, yet raw melodic lead that peals like a church bell at midnight and a fire alarm at the same time.  But it’s not just that: it also has something to do with the key of what’s either is G harmonic minor or some kind of C minor, and the spaciousness of the abyss of tom reverb on a track like “Everynone (Only Murder Walks You Home)” - space haunts this album in a lot of ways, actually - I’ve talked about it twice in this review (once obliquely), three times if I more precisely say gap or lacuna (which can apply to time as well), without even mentioning the bits where the frontman screams a cappella but instead of dissolving into the formless madness-as-sound-effect ranting this usually entails, sticks to the (minimalist, fragmentary) rhythms he would stick to when screaming over a guitar and drums, making for disorientingly long, precisely measured silences - but it’s not just that either.  I can’t say what it is, besides music, or whatever’s supposed to be in music that can’t be in anything other than music, or at least art, more generally.  So it’s not exactly like I can wait for another album to come along that I can recommend along the same lines, at least unless this practically unknown band picks up a following, and even then, I don’t think they’ll be as easy as Deafheaven to imitate.

[theheavyaesthete]

Deafheaven - New Bermuda

C+ Full disclosure - I think Deafheaven, when they got big, came almost as close to ruining metal as you can come.  It’s not that I think they did this by being bad (although I never quite got the hype for them - they seemed mad talented but not very disciplined).  I have a theory that to really “ruin” a genre you need something very good with just the right flaws: for instance, I think pinning the blame on shitty moe shows for ruining anime is off base (it’s just one more kind of fanservice/overriding aesthetic, which anime has always had lots of), and it’s more interesting to consider the role of a few shows I really like, such as Evangelion (so overwhelmingly successful it became the rigid template of nearly every “highbrow” anime for a decade +, so confusing that people thought this was the key to its brilliance) and Haruhi Suzumiya (opened the floodgates of meta).  For Deafheaven, the right flaw was their “soft grunge metal” aesthetic ideology, which allowed an array of not-bad-on-their-own developments in atmoblack and post-metal to be assimilated into the replacement for nu-metal the music industry had been waiting for.  The gap between nostalgia for corporate-constructed teen angst and the uncompromising chuunibyou commitments of extreme metal was large enough that until Deafheaven, “hipster metal” was not really a threat to anything as only massively talented - and independent-minded - bands like Liturgy were able to cross it.  Deafheaven, however, not only crossed it, they made a bridge: a formula of bass-boosted post-rock riffs rescued from the kitschy clutches of Alcest that not only could any hipster copy, but an aging and increasingly basement-dwelling metal community could hardly tell from its own aesthetic commitments, dismissing the grumbles of “forest rock” as the secret-club elitism everyone was rightfully sick of. “New Bermuda” takes this style and plays it to the hilt, and for 8 ecstatic minutes you think they’re gonna make it work so well it’ll shame their imitators into silence. Because “Brought To The Water” is great.  After setting the tone with churchbells and tastefully abstract sound effects, it takes off under the power of - of all things - rhythm, with a genuinely unexpected, pounding one-note riff that continues to ground and enhance, the slower and more grandiose chords played over it, at least for the first few minutes, not letting up until it’s time to fall back to foreground an epic but catchy melody.  Throughout, Daniel Tracy’s drumming stars on this track, seamlessly fusing blastbeats, backbeats, and atmospheric cymbal crashes into a formal free play one listens to the way one watches patterns forming and dissolving in a waterfall or a storm - and rocking the fuck out while he’s at it.

“Luna” opens with another surprisingly fun riff, but sticks closer to a conventional blast beat (albeit one meticulously produced with their characteristic open sound, which by itself is enough to turn it into a hypnotic and endlessly fascinating chaotic system of noise), and when it’s time for something more uplifting, it gives way to lazier sorts of post-rock ones: shapeless ascending and descending scales, major for Posi and minor for Unchill Vibes, Bro, interspersed with almost Satriani-sounding frills.  It’s more or less more of the same from thereon in, as they gradually run out of what ideas they have left.  Typical song structure comes in like a lion and, through some series of permutations, goes out like a lamb.  I’ve listened to this several times now and honestly have no memory of the vocals to comment on.  I’m not sure it’s “soft grunge metal” anymore, despite the increasingly explicit genre splices - it intersects with "hipster” genres exactly where those genres get as escapist and over-earnest, in the same ways, as metal usually is.  But given the reception of one solid track and three failed attempts to reproduce it, it seems like Deafheaven’s going to be ruining metal for a while longer.  (I say three failed attempts because “Gifts for the Earth”, by contrast, is such an obvious knockoff of Swedish depressive black metal it’s insulting - and in case any of this review’s framing reads as a polemic against girly metal (or even Young-Girly metal), listen to some Lifelover or Glädjekallor sometime (the latter has literal slideshows of black-and-white Myspacey photos of teenage couples set to their songs).  These bands - and the depressive/suicidal black metal subgenre in general - do everything Deafheaven sets out to do: the blatant rock and indie and post-rock and emo stylistic imports the remaining purists like to complain about; the sunset- or sea spray-drenched romantic juxtapositions of everything beautiful in life and bottomless emptiness.  Yet they do it more rawly, more totally, and more memorably, creating ambiguities that amount to more than just alteration and melodies one can linger on inwardly and feel new things as long (indefinitely) as one can linger on Tracy’s inhuman, voiceless, objective hurricane of drums.)

[theheavyaesthete]

Sarpanitum - Blessed Be My Brothers

B- In the poetry world, there’s a pervasive norm that you should research those who have gone before you in a subject or form at least a little before attempting to work with it, at least in any significant public/professional context.  If some variant of this exists in metal, its blind spot must be those subjects or forms where various prejudices lead to the belief that any reinvention from scratch will be an improvement on what’s already there.  Thus Sarpanitum’s latest combination of war metal and melodeath (Be’lakor, at the very least, seems like an obvious precedent for such a project) sounds cheesier than an awful lot of the more reputable melodeath out there, with two New Age synth tracks which could have been from the soundtrack to a mainstream video game and altogether too many big dumb power metal guitar lines drenched in reverb.  Which in theory have their place, and are a problem primarily in terms of the structurally and emotionally central moments ceded to them (note that in actual power metal, arpeggiated buildup is used as buildup, not chorus), and the missed opportunities for more interesting melodies like the one at the end of the title track, in which this album’s full wasted potential seems encapsulated. That’s quite a lot of potential, mind you, more than they could waste if they tried.  While heavy-handed, the album’s major sonic experiment works: layering the same reverb on the dense, heavy, chaotic riffs-and-blast-beat base as on the soaring melodic superstructure creates an atmosphere so weird it’s almost Boschian, implicating the romance of the Middle Ages in its brutality and grounding the twisted, chromatic riffs popular in a lot of more “artistically serious” recent metal in something more than shallow Orientalism.  But the bland melodies and sometimes nonexistent structures of most of the songs do nothing with this effect.  They’re empty demonstrations that seem even less adequate in contrast with the two tracks (A-level at least) which get it completely right: “I Defy For I Am Free” is, against all odds, hooky as hell, and the title track, again, is as good as it gets, keeping a linear progression of some of this year’s most original riffs coherent by treating them as a single melodic line, climaxing in a searing solo that stitches together the strewn limbs of (individually effective) militaristic motifs.