Category Archives: Music Review

Review: Pyramids – A Northern Meadow

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Pyramids are four seemingly random Joes from Denton, Texas, who have managed to attract some huge names in the world of music, possibly through their completely ridiculous album covers. Well, maybe not that, but the genre-defying oddity known as Pyramids and their associated acts have shown an uncanny knack for recruiting stars to their projects. Originally signed to Aaron Turner’s (Isis, Old Man Gloom) acclaimed Hydra Head Records, they managed a transition to metal’s newest cutting edge label, Profound Lore, as soon as the former went defunct. Their self-titled debut in 2008 scored Colin Marston (Krallice), Vindsval (Blut Aus Nord), and Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu), among others, to contribute to a remix album, while band leader R. Loren’s White Moth and Sailors with Wax Wings projects have featured David Tibet (Current 93), Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot), Jonas Renkse (Katatonia), John Gossard (Weakling), Simon Scott (Slowdive), Hildur Guðnadóttir (múm), and Aaron Stainthorpe (My Dying Bride), to name… a few? The 2009 follow-up, a collaborative album with Nadja, featured Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins), and there’s an Ulver remix of it floating around out there. They also lead some cassette tape project with 49 bands I’ve never heard of and This Will Destroy You.

In spite of the absolutely ridiculous, confounding string of names I just threw out, this band remains pretty damn obscure. A Northern Meadow, their first full-length since 2009, may well change all that, with positive reviews on sites like Pitchfork Media ensuring them a moment in the spotlight. Moreover, Colin Marston and Vindsval are active guest musicians this time, with pretty encompassing roles.

track: “In Perfect Stillness, I’ve Only Found Sorrow”

The opening track, “In Perfect Stillness, I’ve Only Found Sorrow”, kicks off with Marston’s quintessential tremolo and Vindsval’s equally iconic drum programming, while R. Loren’s vocals quickly cue us into the fact that this isn’t going to be a straight metal album. Instead, we face a prolonged melancholy that finds its essence in the vocals and never really resolves into anything. This brooding approach carries throughout the album, but as the minutes tick by you can notice a slight sort of development–little hints at a more complex animal below the surface. “The Earth Melts Into Red Gashes Like The Mouths Of Whales” rises out of the plod for thirty seconds of really catchy guitar before dissolving back into bleak noise. “The Substance Of Grief Is Not Imaginary” feels like a Blut Aus Nord song in slow motion, offering all of their accustomed madness with none of the speed or volume, while Loren briefly confounds the mood with a really beautiful but short lived vocal melody. “Indigo Birds” extends the vocal presence, with Loren singing longer with more effects and range. As the song dissolves out into distorted droning and ultimately three minutes of dissonant synth, the album approaches a modest transition in character. The interlude resets the mood, allowing the remainder of the album to take, I think, a slightly more abrasive or confrontational approach.

Track: “I Am So Sorry, Goodbye”

The second half of the album is more distinct, with more drive in the guitar and a faster rate of transition. “I Have Four Sons, All Named For Men We Lost To War” starts off with the most crushing tones on the album, enhanced in their finality by the still slow pace set by Vindsval’s drums. “I Am So Sorry, Goodbye” has a really memorable industrial groove, with some synth tones that invoke for the first time in me a real vision of something… perhaps ancient, a sort of primordial ruin made all the older by Loren’s forlorn, beautiful vocals. Like “Indigo Birds”, the song dissolves out into low-tuned guitar and synth droning, but the feeling is more complete. The substance of the song gives you more to reflect on in the haze of noise that follows.

On “I Am So Sorry, Goodbye” and growing throughout the remainder of the album, Loren’s vocals start to sound subtly reminiscent of Chino Moreno to me–high-pitch meanderings that feel slightly unstable yet always harmonious. It’s an effect he pulls off well, and it makes the album feel rather back-loaded to me. “Consilience” wraps things up with a turn back to the darker side. More chaotic, and with a new touch of pessimism to the vocals, it concludes an already morbid album on a particularly bleak note. Oppressive synth creeps its way in a bit earlier, and a hard stop takes us to fading noise and silence.

A Northern Meadow leaves me with pretty mixed feelings. R. Loren has a clear aural agenda that he sticks to throughout, yet I can’t escape the feeling that the album’s highest points were those most distant from the overarching theme. The beat-down opening of “I Have Four Sons…”, the synth early in “I Am So Sorry, Goodbye”, Marston’s driving 30-second sweep in “The Earth Melts…”, the short-lived vocal burst at the start of “My Father, Tall as Goliath”… I find myself anticipating these finer moments through a lot of the moody grind, rather than just enjoying the ride and taking the highs as they hit me. That grind has a lot of character at times, especially the further into the album I get, but not enough to match the talent Loren was working with here.

I guess I would say that A Northern Meadow is a very unique album, and I love Loren’s dedication to uniting awesome musicians, but I don’t feel very compelled to keep listening to it as the novelty begins to wear off. If its slightly chaotic morbidity strikes a chord with you, you might love it, but if you can’t connect to that feeling it will inevitably grow tedious at times. Marston’s noodling isn’t extensive enough to keep me constantly engaged the way a Krallice album can–a tall order, considering how equally brilliant that band’s other three members are–nor do I think Vindsval’s drum tones hold up in this sort of mono-tempo drag. It doesn’t help that both musicians inevitably play themselves. Like say, Humphrey Bogart or Morgan Freeman, they are so distinctly themselves that you feel like you’re hearing the actors, not the characters they are meant to portray. There is nothing of the instrumental synergy both produce in their main bands. I don’t hear the chemistry of two great musicians working together here. I just hear two great musicians, like some mash-up with Loren mixing vocals and synth into the pot. There may be some truth to that: if I understood Loren’s recent interview with Decibel Magazine correctly, I’m pretty sure Vindsval and Marston had no direct communication while crafting this.

I’m not saying A Northern Meadow is bad. Not at all. But it does leave me wanting something more. I can’t help but wonder what could come out of Loren, Marston, and Vindsval sitting down in a recording studio together, and I suspect it would be something more substantive than this, with a lot more motion and a lot less gloom. But that meeting might be pretty difficult to arrange, and who knows whether they would see eye to eye if Loren had allowed them less freedom to do their own things. I might yet get into this, if I can get over what it isn’t sufficiently to appreciate what it is.

Review: Blind Guardian – Beyond the Red Mirror

Posted on by necromoonyeti

If Blind Guardian are not by now regarded with the sort of reverence generated by Metallica or Iron Maiden, it is a crime against heavy metal. Formed slightly before I was born, they might be the longest tenured band in existence that still carry extraordinarily high expectations. No one realistically expects a band to stay at the peak of their inspiration for thirty years, but Blind Guardian are the exception. They’ve never shown their age or wavered towards mediocrity. Does Beyond the Red Mirror keeps that tradition running strong?

“Yes” is the short answer. A thousand times “yes”, and only a fool would deny it. But when you’re talking about a band that released the unequivocal greatest power metal album of all time, there is still plenty of room for discussion.

Blind Guardian pulled off a pretty tough transition in 2002. They followed up Nightfall in Middle-Earth (1998), their magnum opus by nearly everyone’s measure, with a relatively significant change in style. A move like that has spelled disaster for many great bands, but when Blind Guardian traded in an edgier, crisper production for smooth and seamless symphonic beauty on A Night at the Opera (2002), it totally worked. Their next two albums continued in that direction, and I never had the slightest cause to question it. While A Twist in the Myth (2006) ranks relatively low in their discography for me, that resulted from what I felt was a bit of lackluster songwriting–not pervasive, but present enough to leave the album somewhat diminished in the shadow of its two groundbreaking predecessors. At the Edge of Time (2010) was a grand return to form, definitively proving that this band would not suffer a slow decline as the years caught up to them.

Beyond the Red Mirror opens up with a lot less steam than “Sacred Worlds” lent to At the Edge of Time. The first track, “The Ninth Wave”, kicks off with a pretty typical epic introduction, complete with a professional choir and orchestra, but it’s the sort of sound that really hinges on what will follow. We’re used to a sort of constant rise from symphonics into metal, but “The Ninth Wave” is far more brooding at the outset. “Underwhelming” might be the right word for any other band, and nothing about the lead in really grabs me, but let’s not forget what band this is. I feel pretty neutral–not negative–about the album until the first chorus kicks off. And when that point is reached–“Sail on till you reach the promised land. We all drown in the fifth dimension. The ninth wave.“–you get this big dump of pent-up anticipation that you never knew you had. The five year wait is over. Beyond the Red Mirror is here, and the chorus carries all the grandeur you knew would be coming. It feels so complete and full, so Blind Guardian to the core, that the introduction isn’t sour in retrospect. Instead, the slow motion into glory lets the album creep into you. One second you’re waiting for something to happen, the next you’re in love, and they don’t have to resort to anything jarring or sudden to create the effect.

“Prophecies”, “At the Edge of Time”, and “Grand Parade” follow this trend of paced execution, keeping you wrapped in the warm vibe that is Blind Guardian’s sound while ebbing and flowing along. Not out of place on A Night at the Opera, these four tracks suit the album’s production well and deliver without any misgivings.

“Miracle Machine” serves as the album’s only ballad, and the other five tracks… they’re pleasantly not what I expected. For all the big name orchestras involved in recording Beyond the Red Mirror, Blind Guardian actually get pretty old-school. “Ashes of Eternity”, for instance, is heavily driven by rhythm guitar, and André Olbrich’s tasty solo near the middle is cast far more in the spotlight than it might have been on previous albums. “The Holy Grail”, “Sacred Mind”, and “Twilight of the Gods” follow a similar pattern, while “The Throne” exists somewhere in between. My initial reaction to these songs was not entirely positive, but they’ve almost all grown on me over time. They make for an interesting perspective on Blind Guardian’s career. Hansi Kürsch’s gorgeous vocals still feel fairly well rooted in the A Night at the Opera sound, but Marcus Siepen and André Olbrich are bringing back a lot of the band’s more classic power metal sound. With Hansi still largely dominating the choruses and rhythm and lead guitar being more focal in between, the songs take on a novel sort of vibe that feels like quintessential Blind Guardian but does not point directly to any one previous era in the band’s illustrious history.

I definitely dig it, yet I don’t feel like Beyond the Red Mirror will leave quite the lasting impact on me that Nightfall in Middle-Earth, A Night at the Opera, and At the Edge of Time did. The problem, aside from the lack of a really stand-out ‘bard’ track–“Miracle Machine” is nice but has none of the sing-along appeal of say, “Curse My Name” or “Skalds and Shadows”–lies in the production. I can’t help but feel like Olbrich and especially Siepen are getting the short end of the stick throughout. Like the three albums before it, Beyond the Red Mirror sacrifices a lot of crispness to encompass the massive volume of vocals and orchestration. That worked really well before, but here I just don’t know. Lead and rhythm guitar alike rang with crystal clarity on Nightfall in Middle-Earth, and that was a major part of what made the album perfect. If guitar is to play a more central role again, it would be nice if I could properly hear it. My one beef with Beyond the Red Mirror is that, while the band continues to evolve in positive ways, their producer may be failing to keep up.

I think that’s a big issue. This album is awesome, but I would love it so much more if they’d filled the symphonic void with louder, crisper guitar. That goes for about half of the tracks. I just sometimes feel like a few modest tweaks would have made them better. I’m looking forward to seeing some quality live videos of these songs pop up on Youtube, because I think a live venue may do them better justice. For now, Beyond the Red Mirror earns entry into my Blind Guardian playlist with ease, but I’ll not be revisiting it quite so often as Nightfall, Night at the Opera, or Edge of Time.

If you want another song to check out, I think “Prophecies” is my favorite. “The Ninth Wave”, “Ashes of Eternity”, and “Grand Parade” come close.

Review: Liturgy – The Ark Work

Posted on by necromoonyeti

You know those last thirty seconds or so of a rock concert, when the guitarists start grinding tremolo on the final note while the drummer pummels out a solo? Then the instruments all coalesce and everyone hits two triplets together, declaring “the end” triumphant into your ears? Yeah, then you have a basic idea of what Liturgy sounded like four years ago. Aesthethica reveled defiant on the brink of collapse, a Dionysian exploration of adrenaline that twitched and sputtered in vibrant light. We may still be a long ways from “black metal” conjuring to mind anything but corpse paint and Satan to the average music fan, but the gales of a paradigm shift have tossed this genre into such a frenzy that even the novelties of 2011 can seem ancient today.

(Liturgy’s record label, Thrill Jockey, has rather bizarrely opted to remove all but two tracks from Youtube, as if silence sells an album. You can still listen to The Ark Work on NPR at this link, thankfully, and I recommend checking out the first three tracks/13 minutes–Fanfare, Follow, and Kel Valhaal–followed by Reign Array to get a good feel of the album.)

An assessment of this album could go off on a hundred tangents, and I don’t think that the band would be averse to discussing any one of them. The most standard response seems to be instant revulsion. A lot of big name critics have given it abysmal ratings of 2 or 3 out of 10–slightly lower than Morbid Angel’s Illud Divinum Insanus–following a brief write-off of the album as an attempt to troll us. A few others will point out how the band’s music has managed to ruffle a lot of feathers, and then leave it to the listener to hash out. Both are valid cop-outs that don’t really provide the slightest bit of context for the oddity before your ears.

In a review a few years ago, I wrote off L’Ordure à l’état Pur by Peste Noire as a “troll” album. With its chicken clucks, farts, belch beats, and sound samples of scat pornography, I was not completely off the mark. But I missed the context: a critique of modern-day France that was at once scathing and brimming over with nationalism, embracing and mocking the same things from subtly different angles. The music was actually quite excellent, as Famine’s compositions always are, and it took a special sort of intelligence to bring together revolting sounds into an appealing musical narrative. But the quality was not spoon fed to you. You had to want to find it.

There is nothing quite so blunt in The Ark Work, but the album definitely produces sounds that your ear will not initially be prepared to assimilate. “Fanfare” leads up to “Follow” in a development similar to the introduction to “High Gold” on Aesthethica, but here the sound of a guitar pick scratching above the fretboard has been replaced by an unorthodox merger of MIDI and real trumpets. Visions of Godspeed You! Black Emperor lifting skinny fists like antennas to heaven break to bells, and an electronic power surge suddenly propels you into a brainfuck of noise that seems to streak through your head in a ball of flame, the tremolo guitar and blast beat drums pulsating at light speed as the bells and glitch tones dissolve into nonsense all around you. The drum machine hangs in space above the dashing guitar, accelerating to drive itself back into Greg Fox’s real drums to a roar like a Roman coliseum. The cavalcade of sound is, for better or worse, something you have never heard the likes of before. And as the spectators cull blood into “Kel Valhaal”, the album moves from its raucous birth to the trance of combat. Arguably my favorite song on the album, “Kel Valhaal” is cryptic in its brutality. The perpetually repeating drum and trumpet beat crush you on every note without the slightest sign of distortion, while entrancing you in a wash of bells and glitches and folk instrumentation that I can’t put a finger on–surely that I am not supposed to be able to put a finger on. When Hunter’s vocals come in, trading off “Follow”‘s croons for rap, the album reaches a height of command you won’t hear again until “Reign Array” towards the end. I don’t understand half of what he’s saying, but my brain tricks me into thinking it is surely paramount–some threshold of enlightenment I must reach for with all of my might.

Or you might just hear noise. I did, the first time I listened to it. Jaded is the listener who can take all of The Ark Work in on first encounter. But I wanted to hear it again, and mull it over. What I had that I think a lot of reviewers lacked was proper context. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix earned a world of derision following Aesthethica when he proceeded to discuss his ideas behind the album. The guy appeared to most of the world as a sort of fascinating clown–a feminine child so high on his own farts that he would presume to declare his music its own unique style worthy of genrefication: “transcendental black metal”. He published a brief philosophical treatise on how transcendental black metal offered a higher state of music than its predecessors, and well, you get the idea. Did I mention he looks kind of like a girl? The alternative label of “trap metal” has been thrown around, and his previous band’s name was Birthday Boyz. Liturgy is a metal band, mind you. Their default audience has never been particularly noted for tolerance.

So most people reviewing The Ark Work probably either never heard Liturgy previously or thought of Hunter as an accident waiting to happen. Or maybe a troll. His pre-existing image was pretty hard to swallow. The Ark Work, moreover, claims to enhance “transcendental black metal” with “cross-fertilized hardstyle beats, glitched re-sampling of IDM, and occult-orientated rap”. …yeah… You can imagine why people have struggled on many levels to take The Ark Work seriously. People who aren’t familiar with the band turn to reviews for an explanation of what their ears fail at first to compute, and they’re told “troll” at best, given some metal meathead’s rant about insults to manliness just as likely.

But Aesthethica was not inaccessible in the sense of The Ark Work, and no amount of self-mockery negated the fact that tracks like “Harmonia”, “Sun of Light”, and “High Gold” were delightful on first listen. If you actually bother to read what Hunter wrote about “transcendental” black metal, moreover, you can see a clear connection to the music. It roughly paralleled a lot of thoughts that had been floating around in my own head since at least Alcest’s Le Secret in 2005, and the fact that Hunter Hunt-Hendrix was willing to discuss metal’s new frontier while actually pioneering its exploration told me, if anything, that he had a lot more potential than even Aesthethica let on. That album was a sort of burst of passion. I would wager that the band did not devote particularly excruciating time to its finer details, and the result was still one of my favorite albums of 2011. Through separate mediums, Hunter showed the raw capacity for great song writing and the level of reflection necessary for fine-tuning an album to perfection. Merge the two, and you have, well, The Ark Work.

Within the first few seconds of “Follow”, I was pretty convinced that The Ark Work had the potential to be breathtaking. My context for this album placed Liturgy near the top of a wealth of new bands committed to employing black metal towards post-rock ends. I expected that Hunter had crafted every last second of it with painstaking care to achieve his visions. When you listen to something in that light, it’s a totally different experience. Take the vocals. Hunter delved very little into clean vocals on Aesthethica, and where he did–“Glass Earth” for instance–the results were weak. His voice, like his appearance, came off a bit childish, and I think he just ignored that fact rather than putting it to work for him. In the spirit of that album, I can picture a rebellious attitude of affirmation: “This is what I sound like.” On The Ark Work, there’s a more intelligent design. Hunter commits to not screaming once from start to finish, and the voice he’s left to work with is in not at all appealing in any conventional sort of way. But if a central idea behind the album is to barely yet perpetually hold cohesive on the cusp of nonsense, his voice naturally caters to it. He seems to intentionally integrate that notion, controlling in each instance the extent to which we hear his voice exposed. He employs a lot of rap, and the rhythmic flow of his lyrics provide the glue around which his marshmallow mouth forms another tipping point into that abyss of absurdity. On “Kel Valhaal” he manages to project the rhythm with such force that he sounds downright commanding. On “Reign Array” he starts out reminiscent of Thom Yorke (many elements of that song inexplicably remind me of Radiohead), while as the vocal style changes in the triumphal conclusion he remains careful to continue to layer his voice just enough to avoid spoiling the exhilaration.

On “Vitriol”, easily the most divisive track on the album, Hunter exposes everything. The song merges the Aesthethica style of “Glass Earth” with a chanting rap and a fascinating combination of minimalistic percussion and sub-bass. You can understand every word he says, and a lot of the lines are so awkwardly groomed to feed the trolls that you can’t help but think he’s doing it intentionally. “Soon the ADHD kids will quiet down respectfully,” “All the girls will get into art school,” a reference to “primordial gender”… In a way, the song is a caricature of everything critics have accused Hunter of being, followed by the refrain “I turn your ashes to gold, you repay me with vitriol,” as if to say “look how much I’ve entertained you, and you have the nerve to criticize me. Psssh.” I would really like to think the idea crossed Hunter’s mind with a bit of a devilish grin while he wrote it. Yet that, if intended at all, is only a bit of an Easter egg in a song that has nothing to do with it. “Vitriol” is actually pretty cryptic and compelling. I can’t piece it together into a cohesive whole, yet each individual line seems to find a fitting notch in the puzzle. A part of me wants to believe that that is the extent of it, and the accomplishment is to leave you with this unstable understanding that feels like a cohesive message yet contradicts itself. For me at least, “Vitriol” accomplishes lyrically what the rest of the album does musically.

The attention to detail extends beyond vocals and lyrics, of course. The instrumentation is vast, delving into dozens of different sources effectively. Hunter’s electronic repertoire both destabilizes and enhances the real instruments that it frequently parallels. Greg Fox, one of the greatest drummers of this era, returns to the band to offer his brilliance, and the drum machine ties together with him nicely. I wish Thrill Jockey had not made it so difficult to share tracks, but suffice to say I highly recommend this album. It is easily the most intelligent and compelling collection of songs I have heard since Peste Noire’s 2013 self-titled, and most of the reviewers shitting all over it fully intended to before they ever heard it. Its apparent madness only strengthened their resolve. But if ever you begin to have doubts, switch to “Reign Array” and ask yourself whether a song like this can arise by accident. On The Ark Work, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix proves himself to be the musical genius that Aesthethica hinted at. And like Jimmy Chamberlin to Billy Corgan, Greg Fox completes him. So long as those two stick together, Liturgy will remain among the most elite bands in metal for a long time to come.

Song of the Day: Untitled Self-Portrait (a.k.a. Batman’s Song) (performed by Will Arnett)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The_Lego_Movie_poster

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.)

All together now…

DARKNESS….

Review: The Decemberists – What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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.

2014 In Review: 14 of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Songs of 2014

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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

6) Fancy — Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX

5) Stolen Dance — Milky Chance

4) Get Low — Dillon Francis & DJ Snake

3) Don’t Leave — Seven Lions (featuring Ellie Goulding)

2) Shake It Off — Taylor Swift

1) Long Way Down — Robert DeLong

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!

Previous entries in TSL’s Look Back At 2014

  1. Things I Dug In 2014 Off The Top Of My Head
  2. 2014 in Review: The Best of Lifetime and SyFy
  3. 2014 in Review: Lisa’s Pick For the 16 Worst Films of 2014

 

Review: Panopticon – Roads to the North

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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.”

Review: Agalloch – The Serpent & the Sphere

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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.

Review: Cormorant – Earth Diver

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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.

Review: Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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.