I don’t know about you but I’m still pretty angry about what happened yesterday when the Oscar nominations were announced. Seriously, how could The LEGO Movie not be nominated for best animated film? It’s almost as if the Academy is prejudiced against plastic toys.
*Le sigh*
So, normally, when I talk about The LEGO Movie, I find an excuse to include the video for Everything is Awesome.
But you know what?
EVERYTHING IS NOT AWESOME!
And today’s song of the day — which is also taken from The LEGO Movie — reflects that point. As performed by Will Arnett, here’s Batman’s Song (a.k.a. Untitled Self-Portrait.)
I was basking in the golden glow of San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall when I first laid eyes on The Decemberists. It was Summer 2004, and it was a day I still remember well. I arrived alone, but I ended up befriending two girls about my age from Sacramento. It was a pretty thing–three kids too young to buy drinks and too engaged to harbor ulterior motives, thrilled to witness a band that seemed to capture every novelty of a world we were only barely old enough to traverse independently. It wasn’t particularly crowded–we walked right up to the front of the stage–but there wasn’t a stranger in the audience. “Billy Liar” was a hall-wide sing-along. On “Red Right Ankle” you could hear a pin drop. Chris Funk dawned a fake beard and marched through the audience pounding a drum strapped to his chest for “A Cautionary Song”. “California One / Youth and Beauty Brigade” was a swaying dream that will resonate in me until the day I die. I wanted to marry those girls by the end of it–both of them, and I never bothered asking their names.
Austin Texas, fall 2006, I stumbled into Stubb’s BBQ in a daze. “Indie rock” had become the musical movement of the decade, and I felt like a king in the middle of it all. It was a crazy two-week stretch: The Album Leaf, The Mountain Goats, a trek out to Houston for Built to Spill, a return to my metal roots for Between the Buried and Me, and somewhere in the midst of it all I found my sleepless self in a sea of humanity as Colin belted “Culling of the Fold” outdoors to a sold-out crowd. He was exhausted but elated, grinning from ear to ear the whole set, and so was I. The irony of “I was Meant for the Stage” was not lost on either of us.
Pittsburgh, 2009, I took my seat at the Byham Theater to witness The Decemberists in a traditional performance hall. I had traded in faded proofs of attendance for garb with actual buttons, and the band was decked out in full suit and tie. The Hazards of Love was larger than life–Shara Worden striding across the stage like a spidery temptress to a majestic display of lights and an unprecedented rock opera. The Decemberists rose to their fame as only they could, and the result was in one breath a self-aware mockery of their grandiose ambitions and a brilliant realization of the same.
…I wrote of The King is Dead‘s simple folk rock sound that it seemed like The Decemberists were “coming down off their own high. I imagine it’s difficult to be as… musically intelligent as they are without some fear of becoming pretentious.” The album title might even hint at this, and the band’s subsequent three year hiatus seemed to confirm it. Now it is 2015, more than a decade since that wonderful night in San Francisco, and What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is due out in just over a week. I don’t really know what I expected, but I know what I was feeling. It certainly wasn’t the grandeur of The Hazards of Love, nor epic ballads reminiscent of “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” and “The Island”. I was waxing nostalgic on Colin at his sweetest. “Grace Cathedral Hill”, “Shiny”, “Red Right Ankle”, “Of Angels and Angles”… Because The Decemberists were no longer a novel in their own right. That beautiful rise ended with The Hazards of Love, and the hiatus laid it all to rest. Theirs was a tale to look back on fondly; the story had come to an end.
What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World gives me that sweetness, in a way. Tracks like “Lake Song”, “Make You Better”, and “12/17/12” are absolutely beautiful. All of the songs fall somewhere between these mellow numbers, blues/folk tracks like “Carolina Low” and “Better Not Wake the Baby”, and upbeat pop like “The Wrong Year”, “Cavalry Captain”, and “Philomena”. I could live without the latter three, but suffice to say the album is generally pleasing to listen to, though Jenny Conlee’s accordion has sadly all but left us. “Lake Song”, “Make You Better”, and “12/17/12” definitely steal the show for me, but I won’t soon forget the catchy choruses of “Anti-Summersong” or “Mistral”, nor the lulling blues melancholy of “Till the Water is All Long Gone”.
But this album breaks my heart. Through it all, I can’t escape the feeling that some fell force sucked away Colin’s joie de vivre, substituting mellow content to lead a normal life where once the world had been a playground. The music is still great, but I can’t feel the synergy between it and the lyrics anymore. At least “Lake Song” has been spared this fate. Here is what I can understand of “Mistral”: “So we already wrecked the rental car, and I’ve already lost my way. I feel entombed in this tourist bar, for a day anyway. So lay me out on the cobblestone, and unfurl this aching jib. The streets are built on ancient bones, and the crib of the rib. Won’t a mistral blow it all away? Won’t a mistral blow away? So it’s me and you and the baby boy, and a ? shed away, reeking out a little joy. What a waste. Bad mistakes. Won’t a mistral blow it all away? Won’t a mistral blow away?” I don’t know. It’s just… kind of shallow–a bit of babbling around the surface of a theme–and it’s pervasive through much of the album. “Better Not Wake the Baby” is packed with creative one-liners, all tied by a refrain of “but it better not wake the baby“. What does that mean? Plenty of Decemberists tracks have sent me to Wikipedia in the past, but I’m not going to find an answer here, and for that the song means nothing to me. “12/17/12”, my favorite track, still totally jars me out of my happy daze when Colin appears to rhyme “grieving” with “grieving” and “belly” with “belly”.
Go ahead. Crucify me. Point out the most obvious meanings; remind me that Colin still has a robust vocabulary; explain how it’s none of my business to criticize someone else’s creativity; note that it’s still better than 90% of popular music; tell me to shut my mouth and go listen to something else if I don’t like it. I don’t care, because the sad fact is I will go listen to something else. I spent more time on Castaways and Cutouts than on What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World while writing all this. I don’t want that. I want to love this album and hold it dear, but I can’t. I listen to the lyrics and more often than not I just hear Colin going through the motions without any of the magic. From the 5 Songs EP all the way to The Hazards of Love it was a constant indulgence, and now it is gone.
The opening track, “The Singer Addresses His Audience”, is the reason I can still listen with a faint smile. It is not one for the album, but for the memory of all that The Decemberists have meant to me over the years. In almost a parting farewell to Colin’s old stage persona, he sings in classic form: “We know, we know we belong to ya. We know you built your lives around us. Would we change? …We had to change some. We know, we know we belong to ya. We know you threw your arms around us in the hopes we wouldn’t change… But we had to change some, you know, to belong to you.”
And they still do, and I still love them, and I still look forward to catching them on their upcoming tour, but What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is a bittersweet experience.
Continuing our look back at 2014, below you’ll find 14 of my favorite songs of the past year. Now, you should understand that I’m not necessarily saying that these are the best 14 songs of the year. Instead, they’re just some of my personal favorites. These are the songs that either made me want to dance or that I inevitably found myself singing off-key while I was in the shower. These are the songs that got stuck in my head and which I found myself singing whenever I was stuck in traffic.
These are 14 of my favorite songs of 2014.
(By the way, click on the links in this sentence if you want to see my favorite songs of 2013, 2012, and 2011.)
14) Everything is Awesome — Tegan and Sara featuring The Lonely Island
13) Mess Is Mine — Vance Joy
12) Summer Nights — Kaskade featuring The Brocks
11) Chandelier — Sia
10) Take Ü There — Jack Ü (featuring Kiesza)
9) Blank Space — Taylor Swift
8) Runaway(U & I) — Galantis
7) Blue Sky Action — Above & Beyond featuring Alex Vargas
And finally, here’s my pick for the worst song and video of last year. In the past, I’ve defended some of the notoriously awful songs that have been produced and promoted by Patrice Wilson, just on the basis that they were, at the very least, memorably weird. Friday remains one of my favorite singing-in-the-shower songs and it’s fun to sing when you’re trying to annoy people on Monday. Chinese Food is — well, Chinese Food sucked but I do love Chinese food so I could at least relate to the song. But then, in 2014, came both the song Sush Up and the video featuring 11 year-old Alison Gold playing a sexualized criminal who gets electrocuted in the electric chair. And, of course, Patrice shows up to rap. And seriously — BLEH!
While I’m not going to share the video for Sush Up because it’s really creepy and icky, I will share another video that’ll make my point about Patrice Wilson.
Tomorrow, my look back at 2014 will continue with 20 good things that I saw on television in 2014!
Two years removed, Kentucky has left a unique long-term impression in my mind. For all of the excitement over an authentic and well-crafted mingling of traditional Appalachian folk and black metal–the term “blackgrass” got tossed around a lot–I honestly don’t remember how most of the songs went. This is because Kentucky‘s message managed to trump its sound. I remember the old man talking about organizing strikes against the coal company. I remember Sarah Ogan Gunning’s boldly defiant calls to overthrow capitalism. I think of settlers slaughtering Indians, mountains blown into dust, rivers running black with pollution, grim-faced miners broken in body but never in spirit, a modern generation abandoning everything their ancestors worked so hard to accomplish… That is my memory of Kentucky.
Chase the Grain
I can’t detach myself from Kentucky enough to appreciate Roads to the North as an independent entity. That’s probably fine. I had never heard of Panopticon before Austin Lunn nailed his bloody heart to his sleeve in 2012, and that identity will persist through my perception so long as it remains true. Roads to the North has no explicit message, no lyrics sheet, no spoken tracks or American folk covers. But it has Kentucky, and because of that every song takes on a deeper, more robust meaning than it might have otherwise.
It would be interesting to know what a folk/black metal fan unfamiliar with Panopticon takes from this album. Does the music alone stand far above and beyond the norm? I like to think it does. The album incorporates some entirely unexpected but highly effective melodic death metal moments, especially in the opening track “The Echoes of a Disharmonic Evensong”. This track also gives us perhaps Lunn’s best incorporation of fiddle directly into black metal to date. “The Long Road Part 2: Capricious Miles” transitions out with a long and enthralling jazzy progressive rock chill reminiscent of mid-era Opeth. The whistle in “Where Mountains Pierce the Sky” sounds nothing like what we’re used to out of the European scenes, harkening instead to a western indigenous sound I have only heard from some obscure Mexican folk metal bands. “The Long Road Part 1: One Last Fire” is an unconventional six minute acoustic bluegrass piece that feels more like something straight out of Lunn’s imagination than Appalachia.
The intensity hops around so suddenly that Roads to the North may feel disjointed at first, but the stark contrasts are never forced. Because you don’t always see them coming, they are striking rather than cliche. Lunn performs each of the album’s myriad instruments better than a lot of people who specialize in only one, and there aren’t many producers on the black metal market that can compare to Colin Marston. He has a knack for subtlety that is hard to come by in the scene. I absolutely love the way the tremolo emerges around 30 seconds into “Chase the Grain”, for instance. It’s so soft that you feel its effect on the song as a whole long before your brain consciously recognizes it.
Norwegian Nights
But I suppose I don’t really care about the finer musical details of Roads to the North, and that is why I found this album so difficult to review. This music is only a gateway. Like an engaging book, you never notice that it is well written. Roads to the North is not the guided tour we found on Kentucky. It leaves us be to explore where the feelings take us within the context of the world Lunn has already shown us. Those paths can be rocky. It’s not the glorified past of so many European pagan metallers. The should-be eternal is tainted. The land is marred. It’s the introspective melancholy Americana of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, and your heart goes out to so many things that you can never hope to save.
“Lie beneath a cold blanket and watch the mountains sleep. The train rolls by every hour, as I wake and dream. The woods and the hills–faces so dear to me. Frozen lakes, flatland snow, where I’m called I’ll go. Such still quiet, then the whistle echoes. My fragile sleep torn from me, as many other things will be.”
If someone asked me what the most significant metal band of the past decade was, I am not entirely sure which name I would ultimately drop, but the elite circle of finalists would definitely include Agalloch. Pale Folklore (1999) and The Mantle (2002) pretty much defined America’s brand of folk metal, influencing countless bands to come as that global musical movement picked up steam. Ashes Against the Grain (2006) gave us one of the earliest incarnations of post-black metal on record. It might not sound much like what that term conjures to mind today, but in its day it was monumental, and time has not lessened the epic weight of tracks like “Limbs”.
But then there was Marrow of the Spirit (2010). This album was ugly. I can’t think of any better word for it. I won’t go so far as to say it was bad, but it was sufficiently displeasing to my senses that I never engaged it long enough to responsibly draw that conclusion. I didn’t want to listen to it, and it left enough of a bad taste in my mouth that I didn’t really want to listen to The Serpent & the Sphere either.
Agalloch – Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation, from The Serpent & the Sphere
But I did listen to The Serpent & the Sphere. I listened to it quite a lot, actually, in the background as I worked or played games. It was pushing a dozen on my last.fm charts before I got to thinking “Hey, I ought to give that new Agalloch album a spin and review it.” Wait, have I heard this before? “Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation” had been lulling me into such a passive state that I must have forgotten I was listening to anything at all by the time its ten minutes ran their course.
It’s the antithesis to Marrow of the Spirit‘s “Into the Painted Grey”, in a way. Where that track summoned in me the instant urge to rip my headset off my ears and put on something else, “Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation” dug its way into the back of my skull and set its roots where I would barely notice them. It didn’t just get tuned out; it etched itself in my subconscious. And it’s no wonder. On my first really attentive play through, with the volume blaring, I find the track completely enthralling. It’s a brooding neofolk masterpiece best experienced without anticipation. If you listen wondering where it might lead, you are bound to grow impatient. If you just embrace it in the moment and let it consume you, you’re in for a treat.
Agalloch – The Astral Dialogue, from The Serpent & the Sphere
The next track, “Serpens Caput”, is a gorgeous and rather brief acoustic instrumental, and then “The Astral Dialogue” kicks off like Pale Folklore was just released a year ago. The many inattentive listens before had engrained the melody in my mind without my knowing, and the familiarity was so strikingly similar to their 1999 debut that I found myself shocked to realize I had only first heard the song a few months ago. A dubious avant-garde interlude at 3:14 aside, “The Astral Dialogue” is old school Agalloch to a T. At least, I should say, the composition is. The feel is a bit different. Where Pale Folklore was as crisp as a cold winter sunrise, The Serpent & the Sphere has a much fuller sound. (Youtube, as usual, can’t hope to capture it all.)
The Serpent & the Sphere feels a bit frontloaded, with the opening 20 minutes being the most compelling, but “Dark Matter Gods” and “Celestial Effigy” carry on the Pale Folklore mid-tempo folk metal tradition. “Cor Serpentis” offers another fabulous acoustic interlude track much like “Serpens Caput”. I think the album loses steam a bit on “Vales Beyond Dimension”. We get a catchy hook at the beginning and near the end, but the plod in between feels a bit contrived.
Agalloch – Plateau of the Ages, from The Serpent & the Sphere
“Plateau of the Ages”, the final track before a brief acoustic outro, more than makes up for any second thoughts about “Vales Beyond Dimension”. It kicks along in the Pale Folklore tradition we are by now thoroughly reacquainted with until 4:20, when we hit a wall of post-rock. It switches back after a two minute taste of things to come, and we get the real grand post-rock exit from 9:30 to the end. It might not be the most breathtaking use of the genre that you have ever heard, but I love the way Agalloch take it and make it their own, masterfully fusing it to the sound that has defined them for years.
I have actually read a lot of comments suggesting that Agalloch lost their touch on The Serpent & the Sphere. It’s hard for me to see any grounds for that. I suppose it is not much like Ashes Against the Grain really, and not at all like Marrow of the Spirit, but I don’t regard those albums as Agalloch at their best. Ashes might have been their most significant work, but my heart was always for Pale Folklore. The Serpent & the Sphere feels like that album, more than anything they’ve released since it. Oh, it might not be quite as catchy, and it’s certainly not as raw or black metal infused, but it’s a pleasant blast back to the Agalloch I loved most.
Cormorant are a 4-piece San Francisco Bay band formed in 2007. They released their third studio album, Earth Diver, back in April of this year. Lacking major ties to any other band I have heard of, it’s probably no surprise that they stayed off my radar until now, but this is a band that definitely deserves some attention. Their well-crafted mix of folk, progressive rock, post-rock, and black metal sets a high standard at the cutting edge of metal today. While Earth Diver may possess a fatal flaw, it offers a world of potential that few bands can hope to realize.
Cormorant – Daughter of Void, from Earth Diver
Earth Diver opens with “Eris”, a two and a half minute instrumental folk guitar track with a bit of a Spanish flare. As nice as the song sounds in and of itself, I am not convinced that it was the ideal choice for their opener. The second track, “Daughter of Void”, kicks off acoustic as well, and with the two tracks combined, the intro just seems a bit overdrawn. Don’t worry though; that’s the last time I’ll be complaining about the album’s structure. The acoustic portion of “Daughter of Void” sets the stage nicely and gets us straight to the point without much delay, kicking the metal side of the song off theatrically. We start with a nice metal groove lacking any of the repetitiveness you might expect from a band with the “black” tag, and at two minutes their prog tendencies start to show. Black metal vocals give way to something reminiscent of Opeth or Mastodon, and the song shifts through a variety of genre norms without really breaking from the overall feel. The song hits a peak at 4:05 with an Amorphis-esque vocal melody and a really catchy rhythmic hook. The bending tremolo behind the vocals starting at 5:35 is sick, and they build on it further at 6:25. The song is just packed with little standout moments that never last long enough to seem like overkill. (The youtube video ends early, but you’re only missing eight seconds.)
This is the sort of track you could easily remember from start to finish, if you could get in to it enough to care. If. The down side to “Daughter of Void” is a fairly mediocre production job that fails to really pull me in. I can hear everything clearly enough, but I can’t really feel it. They are going for classic low-key grit over big, booming sounds, and I get that, but it feels pretty washed out. The sort of sound Agalloch accomplished with Ronn Chick on Pale Folklore could have pushed this song from above average to outstanding.
Funny fact I didn’t realize until I wrote this: Cormorant actually do share some production history with Agalloch. They work with Justin Weis, who did a notoriously shitty job on Marrow of the Spirit. Go figure.
Cormorant – Sold as a Crow, from Earth Diver
“Sold as a Crow” has a very different feel about it. We kick off with some delicious post-black metal. A pretty tremolo melody warps into a desperate cry as the distortion and blast beats kick into gear. The snare does not always feel quite on point with the guitar, but Lev Weinstein might just have me spoiled in that department. This is the kind of black metal I live for. I love the single-beat stop at 1:46 and 2:00. I love the harmony at 1:50 and 2:05. I love the octave shift at 1:52. I love the three seconds of guitar flare at 1:55. This constant barrage of subtle nuances tends to distinguish post-black metal from its ancestor, and it’s the reason I can recall every note of a 15-minute Krallice composition while an Immortal track might fade into the back of my mind in seconds.
At 2:36 the main melody returns with a sort of flowing, jazzy feel, and then the majority of the song repeats. We get some new variation at 4:03 as build-up to a minute of soloing to close out the track. Maybe because the ending doesn’t appeal to me quite as readily, the production of the album starts to eat at me again. It still feels a bit of a wash, lacking depth or crispness without a good reason. I can appreciate “Sold as a Crow”. I can love listening attentively to every note from every instrument, especially in the first two and a half minutes. But I’m left without that desire to hear it again, right goddamn now. I can never listen to a whole Krallice album at once, because I always get stuck on a track and set it to repeat ad nauseam. “Sold as a Crow” could have been a song like that, but its beautiful structure is not matched by compelling tonal quality.
Cormorant – Broken Circle, from Earth Diver
What you’re not going to hear on Earth Diver is more of the same. This isn’t the sort of album where I can describe two or three tracks and feel like I’ve summed the collective up well. Every song is a masterfully complex beast unto its own. With Opeth always on the tip of my tongue, peppered by Amorphis, Agalloch, and Krallice, Cormorant manage to remind me of a lot of the most unique bands in metal without ever paralleling any of them for long or losing its own unique flavor. “Broken Circle” has jazzy acoustic guitar a la My Arms Your Hearse Opeth, straight-up in-your-face black metal, a break to a distinct Orchid-era Opeth sound at 3:29, brief allusions to math rock, and a world in between. When the singer isn’t barking in classic black metal fashion, he might be pulling off his best Pasi Koskinen or Mikael Åkerfeldt impression, letting out a bellowing roar, or even shouting at the top of his lungs (2:04). You can often catch the bass running wild, sounding especially like Johan De Farfalla during the Orchid moment (why oh why did Mikael fire that man?). But as many band references as I can throw out there, the majority of “Broken Circle” sounds like Cormorant’s own unique creation.
And yet. And yet I can’t pull this album in and hold it close for long. What struck me as mediocre production from the start begins to feel like a travesty in the face of such absolutely brilliant compositions. This album was robbed of its well-deserved glory by a quality of sound that totally ostracizes me. I keep cranking the volume up louder and louder, hoping that I am just not experiencing it immersively enough to feel the pull. But it’s never there. Oh, it doesn’t sound half as bad as the transcoded garbage you’re hearing in these youtube samples. It would be fine for an average, run-of-the-mill album. But Earth Diver is not that. It deserved above-average attentiveness–something carefully crafted to showcase their sound in all of its uniqueness. I can’t help but think that if Colin Marston had gotten his hands on this raw potential it would have been molded into the best album of 2014.
I don’t normally step beyond the threshold of metal these days, but I was no stranger to post-rock in the late 90s and 2000s. It and indie were the defining musical genres of the last decade, and I gobbled them up for a time. I lost touch with ex-Godspeed You! Black Emperor legends A Silver Mt. Zion shortly after Horses in the Sky (2005), though “God Bless Our Dead Marines” was my favorite song by them until now.
I guess that wasn’t a very subtle hint of what’s to come. I picked up Efrim Menuck and company’s newest album because of its name. (Not the band name, presently on its fifth incarnation as “Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra”.) Their seventh LP, released this January, is titled Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything. That was just too delicious to pass up.
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – Fuck Off Get Free, from Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything
I stumbled into one of the most novel and delightful sounds I had heard since, well, the days of post-rock and indie. It is in effect a merger of the two, utilizing classic GY!BE post-rock instrumentation and techniques in songs with distinctly indie structures and vibes. The opening title track sold me instantly with its warbling, almost unidentifiable instrumentation fused to a rock beat. These are sounds you would expect in some 20-minute build-up from silence, and they sound totally unique in their new environment. I suppose A Silver Mt. Zion had been heading this way for a while, but this is the first time I’ve listened to them that they’ve fully embraced the merger.
It’s not just the sounds themselves that make this song so convincing. The lyrics are paramount, infusing a crafty title with a great deal of depth and rendering the sounds relevant to the message. It shouts a pseudo-cryptic political/social statement with a keen eye we haven’t seen since the 60s and a punk rebel’s spirit, rocked back at the haters with a power to counter Ted Nugent’s whole discography. It begs the establishment and their drones to hate it. Need some harsh, gravely vocals to waggle your cock to? Sorry, voices don’t get more sissy than Efrim’s. They slam “wide white men” where a country star cries “freedom”, and the rejection of coherent grammar and sentence structure from a group totally fluent in English is an affront to the many that view their proper American English with some odd sense of pride. And it has a cuss word in the title! *gasp*
It’s a totally harmless song with a positive message, but I know a lot of people who would feel really insulted by it, and you probably know some too. I could easily see my mother showcasing this song in one of her Sunday School lessons about the corruption of youth, totally oblivious to the fact that it’s pushing her buttons on purpose. It’s what this song is all about: not letting the outdated, self-serving values of the ruling class tone down a message of peace and equality. Fuck off. Get free. We pour light on everything we see.
And how about that drop down into a stoner metal chug at 6:40? Last thing I saw coming, and I love it.
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – What We Loved Was Not Enough, from Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything
The album never really drops the slack the whole way through. It’s edgy, it’s angry, it’s indie in spirit, it’s eclectic as hell, and the message is great. There is really no down time at all–not something you might expect from the descendents of post-rock’s favorite son. “Take Away These Early Grave Blues” is especially intense and makes compelling use of a melody that I have to think came from some old country western film. I’m not going to go into detail on any of it; it’s hard to even begin to describe what’s going on with their odd choices of instrumentation. Suffice to say the first 34 minutes of the album pass very quickly, holding my attention all the while. It all leads to a grand finale with “What We Loved Was Not Enough”. This song is mind-blowing. With the sort of lengthy, escalating waltz common to many indie album closing tracks, the build-up is glorious and the lyrics cut deep.
This song uses a lot of excessively dramatic, over-the-top lines that remind me of The Decemberists, only A Silver Mt. Zion’s purpose is not all tongue-in-cheek fun and games. It has an apocalyptic flare, positioning the band at some breaking point where modern society crumbles in self-destruction: We can try to teach people to be open and understanding–to abandon their bigotry and love one another–but this vision will never come to pass. “What we loved was not enough. The day has come when we no longer feel. All our cities gonna burn. All our bridges gonna snap. All our pennies gonna rot. Lightning roll across our tracks. All our children gonna die. And the west will rise again.”
The band has tried their best. They pour light on everything they see. But in the end, it is up to the masses to let go of their pride and embrace a future of peace and love. Efrim knows they won’t, and he calls upon them mockingly: “So goodnight vain children. Tonight is yours. The lights are yours, if you’d just ask for more than poverty and war.”
This is an album for those of us who want to make a difference but know we can’t do shit to dent a machine that has mastered every art of cultivating people’s fears and hatreds. It’s an album to make you feel good about yourself, and to let you know you aren’t alone. I like that. “Kiss it quick and rise again.”
Fuck Off Get Free‘s only shortcoming is that they plugged a seemingly pointless four minute post-finale track after “What We Loved Was Not Enough”. I can easily forgive that.
I have a bad habit of failing to keep up with bands in the years after their big breakthrough albums. As a consequence, I tend to be caught off guard when I find an old band doing something drastically different from their old sound. That is not the case with Alcest. I have eagerly gobbled up everything Neige has thrown out there since Le Secret (2005), and I was well aware ahead of time that Shelter was not going to be a metal album. That did not phase me. Neige’s sound has evolved dramatically over the years, and as early as Souvenirs d’un autre monde (2007) you could not detect a residual shred of the style he presented on Tristesse Hivernale (2001). A dream pop/shoegaze/post-rock album was a reasonable thing to expect given the general direction his music had been going. I clicked play on Shelter fully convinced that I would enjoy it.
Alcest – Wings and Opale, from Shelter
If I was going to have doubts, they might have been about the level of external influence surrounding Neige’s music of late. Was it going to show? Would this not quite sound like Alcest? Neige claimed no knowledge of shoegaze music when he recorded Le Secret and Souvenirs d’un autre monde. I remember his publicized surprise when an early release of Souvenirs‘ title track got plastered with the genre label all over the internet. Since then, Neige has developed quite the fondness for those classic bands to which he was compared. Shelter even features a guest appearance by Neil Halstead of Slowdive. If Shelter was not going to be metal, there was certainly a chance we would hear a lot more of that influence in place of Neige’s self-derived affinity to the sound.
I don’t think that is an issue here at all. I can’t say I have heard much classic dream pop or shoegaze outside of Loveless, but if Neige had continued to boast total ignorance of the genres, I think I would have believed him. Shelter sounds deliciously like Alcest, whether the style is a departure or not. The album opens with the angelic, echoed vocal chant that by Les Voyages de l’Âme had become a staple Alcest sound. For the first minute and thirty seconds, there is nothing to distinguish Shelter from another Alcest black metal album. The instant familiarity is a pleasant relief for any fan that had major doubts. You might still wonder whether he could pull off a full 46 minute album of “soft” Neige without ever using metal to vary the dynamics, but that question dissolves into air a minute and a half in, as the first full track, “Opale”, kicks off. It’s so vibrant that your speculation seems a petty distraction in the face of the musical moment.
Alcest – Voix sereine, from Shelter
This feeling definitely persists through the third track, “La nuit marche avec moi”, and on it Neige’s trending toward post-rock, audible on “Opale”, becomes substantially more apparent. “Voix sereine”, 11 minutes into the album, is the first time things really calm down from a pretty jubilee to get your mind wandering again. It kicks off slow and simple, rather dull really, and I for one had a hard time remaining attentive for the first three minutes. Was this the sort of “down time” I ought to have feared could come with a complete abandonment of metal? Perhaps it is, but 3 minutes of bore could be easily forgiven from most musicians. At the three minute mark, the song transforms into something substantially more palpable, and my second thoughts are largely forgotten. Much to my delight, I do find out that Neige fibbed a bit about the album’s contents. We might not encounter any blast beats or gut-wrenching screams on this album, but he did not forget how to turn on the distortion altogether. As the song gets heavier and substantially more… substantive, the boredom of the build-up fails to hold. It becomes a really great song. On a re-listen, knowing that something fairly aggressive will come of it, the lull is easier to swallow.
Alcest – Délivrance, from Shelter
The next song, “L’éveil des muses”, finds a more interesting starting point, but another slow build-up gives me serious doubts for the first time. What holds post-rock in the moment is the knowledge that something earth-shattering will come of it all. Knowing that “Voix sereine” is likely as heavy as the album is going to get, and without the instant gratification of the opening dream pop tunes, I struggle to give the song 100% of my attention. Track six, “Shelter”, is a much needed return to something more upbeat. It opens with the sort of pitch shifting distortion made famous by My Bloody Valentine, and from start to finish it’s an enjoyable ride. “Away”, the track featuring Neil Halstead on vocals, is a beautiful composition that, I think, would have been a thousand times better with Neige singing. Halstead kind of kills it for me–not because of the quality of his singing but because it sounds totally out of place on an Alcest album.
And then we close with “Délivrance”. The longest track by far at 10 minutes, it carried the weight of my overall opinion of the album. Shelter had so far offered a lot of stellar moments, but at its calmest it dangled dangerously on the edge of boredom. “Délivrance” needed to be a pretty epic piece of post-rock. At 3 minutes, a really classic post-rock guitar kicks off to confirm my hopes–at least to a point. It’s where the song heads from here that really disappoints me. We’re building, and we’re building, and it’s definitely a fun ride, but then right when you expect the song to really cast its shell aside and go all-out…. did it just end? Not a ten minute song after all, “Délivrance” concludes with a three and a half minute toned down outro.
It’s not common for me to speak of a song being too short, but “Délivrance” feels so incomplete to me. I accepted the first 3 minutes because I assumed we were going somewhere. I loved the next 4 because we were going somewhere. But we never really got there. Neige is the guy who made post-black metal a reality in the first place. Granted the full-fledged, conscientious post-rock/black metal cross-overs came later, I guess I expected such a hero of modern metal to aim a bit higher when confronting a fairly traditional post-rock sound. I can try to enjoy “Délivrance” for what it does offer, but I can’t help but think that he failed to see how much further he could have taken it. It’s something that would have sounded appealing in the late 90s but seems incomplete to me today, when post-rock bands are a dime a dozen and competition is a bit more formidable. I can’t quite get over that enough to fully enjoy it.
In the end, I guess you might say Shelter disappoints me. Maybe that’s because I came into it with really high expectations, where a lot of fans might have set the bar low when they found out there would be no black metal element. The first three tracks boosted my expectations all the more by offering a really novel sound that grabbed me and held on. But that dream pop vibe did not last, and the more he got back to sounds you might expect from an Alcest album of old, the more they felt depleted of the old energy rather than infused with a new one. Where the post-rock kick would normally give way to a black metal rockout, here it just fizzes away. Tracks like “Opale” set a precedent for how I wanted the entire album to sound. I got half of that, and half something that just makes me hope he goes back to his roots on the next release.
But you shouldn’t have been looking at that. You should have been looking at the two words surrounding it, because it suggests something we haven’t heard much of in quite a while. Beginning with Japanese Heavy Rock Hits Vol. 1, Atsuo Mizuno, Takeshi Ohtani, and Wata have spent a lot of time playing at pop stars. Their really quality works of late have mostly been pop oriented, and in the world of metal they’ve been mostly playing around. Heavy Rocks 2011 felt like a joke–a quick fun studio session to take some of the stress off of recording New Album and Attention Please. Präparat offered us the total mindfuck known as “Elegy”, but “Method of Error” and “Bataille Suere” could hardly be taken seriously. We got the long-overdue Boris performing “flood” and a rerelease of The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked, but that wasn’t new material.
Boris deserved a break from their old traditions. Christ, they have 78 releases to their name, and like 95% of that has been beyond fabulous. But as good as their pop and chillout sounds of late have been, we’ve all been itching for some good old Boris noise. Not Absolutego drone. I mean I want to hear some “Heavy Friends”, some “Akuma No Uta”, some “Farewell”, some “My Neighbor Satan”, something to make my brain turn inside out and hug itself. Well, Boris did deliver. They did it last year, in the easily overlooked The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked Extra. In fact, it was so easily overlooked that I am only just now skimming through its tracks for the first time! I can already tell it is awesome, but that will have to wait. Tonight I spin Noise for the first time.
Boris – Melody, from Noise
If you are a Boris fan, this opening track needs no commentary. I suppose no track on the album does, really. But if you are not a Boris fan, picture yourself in our shoes for a minute: You have ridiculous, irrationally high expectations for this album. You can justify it, because the band has never let you down before. But you don’t have a clue what’s in store for you. The graceful drone in the opening 40 seconds could go on for the entire track, and it would not be out of character. Suddenly we’ve got a pretty, shoegaze guitar, and for a brief six or seven seconds your mind wonders whether they might be trying something akin to Alcest. At 47 seconds, a techno beat comes in, and we are on pace for something totally novel. Is it going to be some weird psychedelic technogaze? I wouldn’t put it past them, and I just might like it. But things are picking up… something is about to give….. and bam, at the 1 minute mark Boris unleashes everything I could have ever hoped for and more.
Takeshi slamming out a crushing stoner metal groove under Wata’s wailing blur of blissful noise, and in five seconds we find that techno beat wasn’t just an intro. What IS this amalgamation of mutually exclusive genre standards into an inexplicably majestic whole? This is Boris, doing what Boris always do: taking everything they’ve done before and making it even better. This is a band that remains totally aware of everything going on in music at large and has had twenty three years playing together to master their class. Wata has one of the most beatiful guitar sounds in the world. She slides around the neck with a grace that puts Billy Corgan to shame and rocks the effect pedals so keenly that “Paranoid Android” sounds amateur. Atsuo drums with a persistent intensity that rivals Jimmy Chamberlin (I’ve always felt a bizarre connection between Boris and The Smashing Pumpkins–two bands that defy all categorization.) Takeshi’s mastery of bass and distortion is as good as any stoner band on the market, and his vocal control has come miles from Smile and earlier works.
Stonergaze techno pop? Yeah, we can do that.
Boris – Vanilla, from Noise
The next track, “Vanilla”, is just as fascinating. For the first 40 seconds (55 in the official video) we get a vocal melody and beat that wouldn’t have been out of place in a mid-90s up-tempo rock track–it bizarrely made me think of the Foo Fighters–layered of course with Wata and Takeshi’s constant motion. Then we hit a deep, brooding pause with haunting synth, doomy bass crunch, and a spooky arpeggio loop that says this song is going nowhere near where we expected. The song quickly move back into rock mode, but now we’re expecting something. The guitars embrace a rhythmic metal crunch, and the hard shift to a bassy stoner/doom beatdown for six notes at 1:20 (1:35) makes your brain jitter. No other band would even THINK to do something like that. We’re back into the opening motion, then another break and… is Takeshi playing a death metal riff? Mmhmm. And it’s not like the trashy games they were playing on Heavy Rocks 2011 and a few Präparat tracks. It’s fully immersed and totally appropriate. Wata goes wild, and I am in bliss.
Boris – Heavy Rain, from Noise
I could narrate every track on this album and never be at a loss for commentary. “Ghost of Romance” might offer the fewest surprises–a traditional Boris chillout song with a pensive undercurrent brought to life with haunting guitar tones and a breath effect that suit the title. It offers a modest post-rock build-up to louder levels of chill, but never at the expensive of a full break from the main vibe of the song. “Heavy Rain”, my personal favorite on first listen, virtually demands you crank the speakers up to 11. Despite the tempo never changing and Takeshi’s heaviest tones coming out within the first minute, this song accomplishes a mindblowing progression. They manage to accomplish the build-up in reverse, putting forth a bunch of sound at once and increasing the suspense by slowly peeling it back. The moment we reach the point of dead silence, the explosion hits, and the rest is all driven by Wata’s ever-growing layers of noise and Atsuo’s knack for making every single percussion count.
“Taiyo No Baka” is a bizarre, sugary, initially minimalistic pop ditty that should confound anyone unfamiliar with the band. But far from filler, it’s quite delightful and has a lot of really interesting effects going on throughout. If I am going to keep the Pumpkins comparisons rolling, this might equate to Mellon Collie‘s move from “X.Y.U.” to “We Only Come Out at Night”. “Angel” is the traditional post-rock track of the album, with six minutes of minimalistic build-up to a crushing guitar plod spiced with Atsuo’s hyper-intense slow drumming and a crooning Wata solo. This in turn serves as build-up to a spirited, meaty rock-out at 9:30 peppered by a highly mobile bass line and some good old post-rock tremolo. We’ve still got over 7 minutes to go as this part winds down, and the rest of the track plays out with a lot of eclectic, melodic experimentation that has to stand among Boris’s best. I’ll be surprised if “Angel” doesn’t grow into my favorite track on the album once I’ve given it a good dozen listens.
Boris – Quicksilver, from Noise
“Quicksilver”, the second to last track, might be where Noise gets its name. Dirty, wild crust with classic tremolo solos encase a sad and pleasing heavy punk chorus. Takeshi’s sung vocals run totally counter to what you might expect in this style of music, and Atsuo’s accompanying screams are out of this world. This is only the beginning. The song is ten minutes long, and while I’ll humor the possibility that it does drag on without much variation at times–it could go on for an hour and I wouldn’t complain–this is the most punk song Boris has pumped out in years. I would die if I saw them play it live–possibly literally. At 6:20, the main thrust of the song climaxes with a monotone tremolo wail, a crusty three chord repeat from Takeshi, and a total Atsuo explosion that for all its collective simplicity doesn’t sound quite like anything I’ve ever heard in metal before. The last 3 minutes of the song are weird to the point of being a little creepy–totally out of character with the seven minutes preceding them and featuring a bubbling static sound that makes your hair stand on end.
The closing track is “Siesta”, and I have to think it was inspired by Atsuo and Michio Kurihara’s recent collaboration with Stephen O’Malley from Sunn O))) and Bill Herzog: Ensemble Pearl. It’s a slow, echoed, jazzy chill-out that wraps Noise up nicely. I would feature it here, but I couldn’t find a version on youtube.
So what do I think of this album? Do you even need to ask? It’s everything I could hope for. Sure, it doesn’t offer a killer stand-alone track like “Elegy” from Präparat or “Farewell” from Pink, but it just feels so complete. There is absolutely zero twiddling around, zero wasted time, just 58 action-packed minutes of every technique and style Boris has incorporated into their sound across their illustrious 23 year history. It is a really mature work–perhaps their most mature album to date–and I think it’s the most start-to-finish shear brilliance they have offered on a full-length cd since at least Akuma No Uta–maybe even since Flood. It doesn’t get much more original and imaginative than this.
The history of Saor is a bit deceptive. If you’ve heard the name at all, you didn’t until last year, but the man behind it has been around for some time now. Before Scotland’s Andy Marshall chose this name for his solo project, he released Eternity as Askival in 2009. He was also a major factor in Where Distant Spirits Remain by Falloch in 2011. Neither of those albums stuck with me well enough for me to remember how they sound off the top of my head today, but I do have them. That tells me this is a musician with a good bit of experience, who managed to get his name out there well before he changed it to Saor. Aura is apparently his second release as Saor — he released Roots last year, and I’ll have to make a point to go check it out. If it sounds anything like Aura, it will be well worth the trouble.
Saor – Children of the Mist, from Aura
It does not take long for this five song, 57 minute album to convince you that it has something special going on. The opening track, “Children of the Mist”, erupts almost immediately into a graceful, distinctly Gaelic sweep of woodwind, layered atop well-mixed metal that lets the folk melody shine without much intrusion. The piano and string that follow seem to float in the air, painting a vivid landscape that seems to mirror the album’s cover art. The vibe is similar to Waylander of Northern Ireland, and it feels like it could drift on forever without losing any of its opening grandeur. Around 4:20, the metal briefly gives way to a beautiful cloud of strings and traditional drumming, soon to be met by blast beats that, much like on Kentucky by Panopticon, manage imbue the landscape with life rather than darkness. As the song continues on, you hear a wide variety of folk, pagan, and black metal techniques employed towards this same end of adding a feeling of life and spirit to the nature scenes that the traditional instrumentation invokes.
Saor – The Awakening, from Aura
This approach holds true throughout the grand bulk of the album. The melodies always arise from the folk instrumentation, with the metal serving a supplemental role of forcing you to feel directly engaged in the moment–a temporal witness to some eternal tranquility. It is a devout album, alive in reverence for the spirits of the land. From start to finish, it varies relatively little but never disappoints.
I suppose the terms “folk” and “pagan” can get thrown around rather haphazardly at times, without much of a clear distinction. One tends to conjure to mind lighter, “fun” bands like Korpiklaani and Alestorm, the other more serious bands such as Waylander and Drudkh. Sometimes this seriousness generates a sort of militarism or savagery, rendering bands like Arkona and Nokturnal Mortum far more intense than anything traditional black metal has produced on its own (and far too often, in Nokturnal Mortum’s case for instance, this gets vandalized by absurd notions of supremacy). But this does not always have to be the case. On Aura there is never a hint of desperation or brutality. The feeling is purely of peace and reverence boldly denying that the tradition it embraces has been in any way weakened by the modern world. “Folk” and “pagan” both denote music focused on ways of life that are no longer socially acceptable or possible in a modern, technologically advanced, monotheistic world. If folk suggests people, pagan suggests religion, and the religions of old were not based upon some highborn Greek notion of divinity. Their gods took hearth in wood and water and earth. Saor feels like pagan metal in that sort of sense to me. Its folk instrumentation paints the landscape, and the metal imbues it with supernatural life.
Aura is undeniably one of the most beautiful recordings of 2014. Don’t let it pass you by.
Through the Shattered Lens 