Tag Archives: post-rock

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco5QNfpbIw

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqevYzJrhks

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoeqDqIvqwQ

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1XiAg0XDs

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfPXY6mtq4U

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.

Review: Alcest – Shelter

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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.

Review: Boris – Noise

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Black cat. Halloween. Coincidence?

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GndQg8SsU1o

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.

/fanboy.

Review: Woods of Desolation – As the Stars

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Has it really been two years since I’ve reviewed a new album? The fact came as a bit of surprise, but here it is late October and I’m staring at a massive horde of 2014 releases that I’ve barely cracked. I was a bit more diligent about keeping up with these when I actually took the time to write about them!

I hope to jump back into this business in force, but in case I fail, I’ll not put off the cream of the crop. My album collection is starting to get overrun by “Woods of” X artists; it seems to be the most popular black metal prefix after “Dark” these days. But one among them might be destined to distinguish itself with my #1 album of the year pick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePHvl9vFmeo

Woods of Desolation – Unfold, from As the Stars

I spent a great deal of my late teens and early 20s basking in the polarizing glories of post-rock and black metal. The likes of Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós, Emperor, and Nokturnal Mortum pumped the residual poison of rock and roll out of my blood and raised me to higher expectations of musical fulfillment. I listened to them not with a care for technical precision or physical skill, but in search of an experience I did not fully understand. Both genres approached this through similar means, but fell short as social stigmata demanded modesty or brutality carry the day. As I grew into an adult, the ice was broken. Neige’s Le Secret whispered its meaning into my ears just as I was old enough to embrace it. He’d broken the Berlin wall of music, and what awaited beyond was strange and beautiful.

Post-black metal, shoegaze metal, “transcendental”, call it what you will. Ten years ago, this album–what the woefully uninformed all-purpose reviewers will write off as a Deafheaven copycat–was not possible. It emerged as many musicians with the same thoughts and greater talent than myself caught glimpse of that beautiful beyond and embraced it. You can name a dozen artists that might have influenced the Australian solo project known as Woods of Desolation, but this brave new genre demands our presence in the here and now. It calls on us to bask in glorious tremolo sweeps triumphant over entwined barricades of light and darkness. “Proud to be living in the echo–the mist of all things combined,” Krallice once wrote, and though they designed to crush it, we retain the luxury to return. When I hear a song this triumphant, that line always comes to me, and the albums that accomplish it are still few and far between. I still love Explosions in the Sky and their ilk, but they offer a different sort of grandeur. Theirs is an experience of climbing to the peak. Songs like “Unfold” allow us to explore the pinnacle at length, from start to finish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2n9kglppQ

Woods of Desolation – Like Falling Leaves, from As the Stars

To start at the summit and know where you stand. That might be post-black metal in a nutshell. What we can do there… that is still an on-going exploration. Where Liturgy and Primordial roar like lions into the jaws of death, “Like Falling Leaves” is something of the opposite. It accepts the end awaiting it. In this track we don’t hear any of the overarching optimism of “Unfold”. Instead, we’re accepting that something dear is gone forever, and we are held fast in that moment of realizing the fact’s finality. The bulk of the album seems in keeping with these two vibes, sometimes heightened, sometimes subdued, sometimes entwined. “Withering Fields” and “And If All the Stars Faded Away” seem peculiarly triumphant and longing simultaneously, while “Ad Infinitum” is pretty enough for a new Alcest album. Nearly every track bears a sufficiently memorable hook to sound familiar by the second or third play through, and at a mere 35 minutes, it does not waste much time dragging out build-up in between.

I don’t know that As the Stars will retain my #1 spot through the end of the year, especially if I start to pump out album reviews in force again. It is nothing remotely on par with my picks for the last three years, and it suffers from muddy production that can’t always do the song writing justice, but I stand by it as my favorite so far. This is one I’ll keep near and dear to me long after the bulk of my 2014 collection has been forgotten.

Song of the Day: The Rains of Castamere (by Sigur Rós)

Posted on by Arleigh

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In season 3 of HBO’s Game of Thrones we saw a wedding come to a bloody conclusion as one of the five kings who were warring for the Iron Throne in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros was finally brought low through betrayal and the machinations of the Lannister patriarch. It was an event that will forever be known to fans of both books and the show as “The Red Wedding”.

Tonight, we find ourselves in just the second episode of Season 4 of the show. With his power over the Seven Kingdoms pretty much solidified it was high time for King Joffrey to have his wedding to Margaery Tyrell to help cement the alliance which brought the powerful House Tyrell to the Lannister side of the war.

The wedding has been dubbed “The Purple Wedding” by fans of the books due to the color symbolizing the color of royalty and this wedding one of royal means. So, while season 3 had the shocking “Red Wedding” it looks like the fourth season will have the eventful and memorable “Purple Wedding” to get post-episode tongues wagging.

It is with this wedding event we have our latest “Song of the Day” and it’s another appearance by a very popular song from the show (outside of it’s opening theme song). “The Rains of Castamere” has already made an appearance before when it was sung by the group The National. Tonight’s version was sung by the Icelandic post-rock group Sigur Rós.

The Rains of Castamere

And who are you, the proud lord said,
that I must bow so low?
Only a cat of a different coat,
that’s all the truth I know.
In a coat of gold or a coat of red,
a lion still has claws,
And mine are long and sharp, my lord,
as long and sharp as yours.

And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
that lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
with no one there to hear.
Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,
and not a soul to hear.

Ten Years #17: Isis

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
17. Isis (1,416 plays)
Top track (255 plays): Weight, from Oceanic (2002)

Boston post-metal masterminds Isis rose to 17th place on my decade-long last.fm list thanks to one of the most captivating albums ever recorded. A lot of bands have taken inspiration from Neurosis to forge a similar sound, but I have yet to hear anything in the genre that pulls it off quite so perfectly as Oceanic. Considering that I have accumulated over 100 plays on every track and a whopping 255 listens to “Weight” (it is, according to my charts, my third most listened-to song over the past ten years), I can safely say that Oceanic never has and never will tire out. Temperance was Isis’s key to success in 2002. From its most intense moments to its most mellow, Oceanic never gives way to bombast or wilts to a bore. It plods along like the sea in which it is thematically set, crushing through impartial waves of harsh vocal and chugging guitar; it mellows with the tide, diving beneath the surface to a world of echoes and subdued pulsations that never cease their eternal drive, varying only in degrees of perpetual, unstoppable force.

My favorite track, “Weight”, begins with a calm that is nearly complete but for a faint, echoing drum. There is nothing foreboding about its growing intensity, but rather, much like Boris’s similarly themed masterpiece Flood, the song manages to increase in mass without losing touch with its sublime and eternal setting. You experience the waves and lulls in a setting apart from time, never feeling a sense of danger, even as you are slowly immersed and dissolved in a weight that encompasses all. It is something like “Jane Doe” by Converge or “Dust and Light” by Krallice without any of the desperation or finality–an experience of dissolving into the eternal totally free of temporal regrets. As the song fades away and the album moves on to “From Sinking”, the transition feels natural; “Weight” does not need to be a closing track, because it is not an obliteration of time into the void. Time was never present to begin with, and the listener experiences the modes of something eternal as a participant, not a witness. I don’t think any other album this heavy could leave me feeling so utterly mellow.

Oceanic is apparently a concept album, telling the entirely human plot of a man driven by lost love to suicide through drowning. But I for one can’t make out the lyrics without looking them up, and the feeling for me is as if the story unfolds from the utterly disinterested eyes of the water itself. I feel immersed in Isis’s oceanic beast from start to finish, lacking all ties to the human realm beyond and personifying the waves themselves, not the sentient individual taken amidst them. It is not until the closing track, “Hym”, that the listener begins to envision the witness’s perspective, sucked out the waves themselves just long enough to be re-engulfed by the drowning.

Ten Years #18: Sigur Rós

Posted on by necromoonyeti

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dE564e1uz4

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
18. Sigur Rós (1,358 plays)
Top track (84 plays): Ný Batterí, from Ágætis Byrjun (1999)
Featured track: Hún Jörð, from Von (1997)

I made the claim in my last entry that indie rock was the defining musical style of the past decade. If that came across as a bit of a slap in the face to post-rock, rest assured that I listen to far more of the latter than the former. I don’t feel, however, that post-rock is the sort of style or movement that can be limited to its era of origin. Sure, Mono-esque local bands were fairly abundant in the mid-2000s, but the acts that really rose to stardom under the moniker varied wildly in both sound and artistic attitude. I first heard mention of post-rock in 1999 or 2000 in dual reference to f#a#oo by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Ágætis Byrjun by Sigur Rós. Flood by Boris, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever by Explosions in the Sky, Oceanic by Isis, and One Step More and You Die by Mono successively joined the ranks to form a label I found easy to ascribe and virtually impossible to define. Post-rock was and remains a manner of abandoning traditional song structure, sound, lyric, and aesthetic, while retaining standard instrumentation. It can be applied to musicians who predate the term, it can function as a prefix to virtually every established musical genre, and no single property need be present to make it complete. No two bands that have really forged successful careers employing it sound much alike; Sigur Rós’s sound is certainly unique among the ranks.

That being said, I want to talk about this particular feature song and its uniqueness in their discography. Most people who know anything about music have heard a little Sigur Rós by now, and they’ve probably heard the newer material. Von remains an obscurity that was seldom mentioned when Ágætis Byrjun was in its prime of popularity, let alone today. Make no mistake; Ágætis Byrjun blew my mind when I first heard it, and if my last.fm charts had begun two or three years sooner I suspect it would have a thousand more plays to its credit. But my favorite song in the world at the time was “Hún Jörð”. Forget what you know about this band, because you’ll find no peaceful resolution in these seven minutes. Beginning with a static sound that seems to simulate rain, “Hún Jörð” introduces a brief, looping melody so acutely fragile that the listener is instantly drawn to a peak, emotionally wrenched by a vision of something beautiful tottering on the brink of collapse. You want to reach out and hold the melody tight–pull it in–keep it safe–but as the song progresses, that glimmering light tips into the plunge. As the maniacal laughter mocks your helplessness and Jónsi literally screams at the top of his lungs, the song culminates with one of the most gut-wrenching experiences of loss that music is capable of conjuring.

Suffice to say, this is not standard Sigur Rós fare. I used to think the song had been inspired by “Climbing Up the Walls”, but Von was actually fully recorded well before Radiohead released Ok Computer. The vision seems to have been unique to the band, and I did not hear anything approaching it again until the advent of post-black metal a decade later. I don’t know what compelled a band so inclined towards the soft and beautiful to take this child and smash it on the rocks, but by 2013 Von is so thoroughly forgotten that I think most Sigur Rós fans will be in for a shocking surprise.

Ten Years #46: Agalloch

Posted on by necromoonyeti

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIzoyPfPKO4

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
46. Agalloch (653 plays)
Top track (147 plays): Odal (Demo), from The End Records Sampler: At the End of Infinity [Echoes & Thoughts of Wonder] (2002)
Featured track: Limbs, from Ashes Against the Grain (2006)

Throughout the first decade of this century, Agalloch stood at the forefront of some of the most progressive movements in metal. They were the product of a new generation of musicians exceptionally well informed on musical trends happening outside of their own genre. Citing such diverse influences as Katatonia, Ulver, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, they endowed their first major release, Pale Folklore in 1999, with an entirely unique sound. Bleak neofolk guitar and piano merged with black metal as the two most dominant styles to paint a beautiful and desolate snowy landscape that demands the listener’s full attention from start to finish. The folk felt, to me at least, just as influenced by neofolk artists far beyond the metal spectrum like Current 93 and Death in June as by Ulver’s Kveldssanger.

The Mantle in 2002 took this diversity a step further, incorporating post-rock proper as a central structural theme for most of the album. But it was Ashes Against the Grain, in 2006, that really solidified their place as one of the most significant metal bands of the era. It got back to the heavier influences that The Mantle had left behind, offering a seamless fusion of folk, post-rock, and metal that would inspire dozens of bands in the years to follow. As a band first born of black metal, their developed sound helped pave the way for a new era in experimental bm that broke the restraints of the 1990s. These restraints, of course, had long been shattered by Ulver, with Enslaved and ex-Emperor frontman Ihsahn following close behind, but these artists’ credentials as legendary musicians were well established while formulaic black metal was still the norm. Agalloch, alongside Alcest, appeared to me as the next generation, born into a much broader gene pool of music and taking full advantage of their situations. As the seven years since Ashes Against the Grain have shown, progressive and post-black metal was the new wave–and perhaps one of the most outstanding waves in the history of metal in general. I can’t tell you whether Agalloch directly influenced the bands that followed them or not, but their open-minded ability to appreciate black metal for its unique sensory qualities without giving in to the corpse-paint drenched exclusiveness of its accompanying culture drastically expanded the genre’s exposure.

I would say today that Pale Folklore is my favorite Agalloch album, though Ashes struck me the most when I first heard it. The version of the song I’ve played the most in Agalloch’s library though does not appear on any of their albums. It was the first track I ever heard by the band–an edited pre-release version of Odal from The Mantle that The End Records had featured on a free sampler cd. The song is not appreciably different from its studio album variant, but it cuts out sizable chunks of the intro and outro to create a much more repeatable track. Odal immediately struck me as deliciously similar in atmosphere to Matt Uelmen’s Tristram from the Diablo series, and I am often inclined to put the two on repeat together. I’ll leave you with a video of the finalized cd version of the song: