onions for eyeballs

An assortment of things that have pleased me greatly: part 1

2011-12-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

As an old, old man (ish), I’m liberated from the societal pressure to keep up with the modern world. A shameful admission for a part-time music journalist, perhaps, but I mostly find myself listening to a lot of old(er) stuff. This year, as well as the daily Cardiacs fix (over the past decade or so they’ve become my favourite band. I consider the genius of Tim Smith to have few, if any, musical peers. And I will fight with clubs and spittle those who say otherwise), there’s been lots of Toru Takemtisu, Pierre Boulez, Zakir Hussain, Chet Baker, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Strapping Young Lad, Art Blakey, Naif Agby, Melvins, Arvo Pärt, Sammy Davis Jr, Circle, Tool, Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar, Olivier Messiaen, Alim Qasmiov and Oum Kalthoum – and a considerable amount of time spent with 2008’s Who Killed Amanda Palmer? (of whom, possibly, more anon).

However, in amongst all that, I have heard some new things. Not in strict order, but roughly numerical (the first three are my clear highlights), here’s the first ten of my favourite new albums of 2011. More to follow next week. Maybe.

Handy-dandy accompanying Spotify playlist: Onions for Eyeballs' Best of 2011.

Unless otherwise indicated, all reviews originally appeared in Rock-a-Rolla magazine.

THE BOOK OF KNOTS – GARDEN OF FAINTING STARS

(IPECAC)

After maritime travel and mid-western industry, the third loosely conceptual album from The Book of Knots deals with the endgame of space travel and the death of dream. Here, the band’s somewhat abstracted, subconscious art rock is more focused and fully realised than ever before. ‘Microgravity’, with an appropriate launchpad chorus from Carla Kihlstedt, even feels like a loose approximation of a pop song, albeit built from misshapen power chords and jury-rigged electronics. As ever, myriad guest vocalists and musicians colour the core members’ compositions. Blixa Bargeld offers a queasy narrative full of entomological nausea and jet lag. Elyas Khan and Mike Patton turn in two of the highlights, the former offering lysergic quasi-qawwali to the ether, the latter heading skyward over the album’s sludgiest sounds. Redolent of one of the Flaming Lips’ more cosmically outré moments, ‘Lissajous Orbit’ is a hyper-dramatic realisation of the terrors of intergalactic isolation. ‘Obituary for the Future’, which beautifully offsets Kihlstedt’s bitter-honeyed voice against a palm-muted metal chug, forms a final, tragic lament for humanity’s interstellar aspirations.

KILLL – LIVE

(FYSISK FORMAT)

Comprising members of JR Ewing, Jaga Jazzist and No Place to Hide, Norway’s KILLL have been in existence since 2003, but solely as a live entity, never releasing anything until this live CD & DVD. Their self-described oeuvre consists of ‘stroboscopic avant-metal’, which is about as perfect and succinct a description as it gets. It’s at once maximal and minimal – ultra-lethal no-flab precision riffs, massive barbed sonics, cybernetic pummel and maddening repetition result in something quite shockingly intense, even for the most jaded of aural masochists. Factor in the DVD’s seizure-inducing op-art visuals, the effect of which is like using a heavy machine gun to fire every Bridget Riley print that ever existed directly into your optic nerve, and you’ve got a blueprint for total sensory overload. Absolutely stunning, in both the superlative and concussive senses.

TATTIE TOES – TURNIP FAMINE

(PICKLED EGG)

Glasgow’s Tattie Toes are one of the more idiosyncratic bands to inhabit this flimsy plane of existence. In theory, their blending of elements makes little sense – a stridently proggy post-punk rhythm section, a richly mournful or exuberant violin, and an outrageously chameleonic Basque Country chanteuse, as adept at soaring operatics as she is mellifluous melodies and caustic animalistic shrieks. Imagine Yma Sumac and Lajko Felix jamming with the Dog-faced Hermans and you’re a quarter of the way there. Yet there’s nothing forced about this collision of styles – rather, it sounds like a respectfully edgy update of the centuries-old traditional music of an as-yet undiscovered Mediterranean island nation. Compared to the wayward raucousness and visual drama of Tattie Toes’ live set, their debut album is relatively spare and airy, but no less bold and sumptuous. By turns boisterous, sensuous, explosive and delicate, this is a unique and joyful experience from start to finish.

ASVA – PRESENCES OF ABSENCES

(IMPORTANT)

Asva III turns out to be both simpler and far more complex than its predecessors. Lineup and sound alike are pared back, the former doomy crunch largely supplanted by an emphasis on organs, texture and shifting modes. ‘A Bomb in that Suitcase’ features ecclesiastical reeds, sustained bass tones, vocals alternately liminal and choral. As the drone becomes all-enveloping, drums kick in, the chorale ascends, shapes are hewn from solid bass, dissonant horns join the fray and it unfurls like an embittered rose.

Continuing the bicameral Asvic tradition of offsetting impervious music against a vulnerable human voice, the delicate spell of ‘Birds’ is woven from Toby Driver’s withered, anguished falsetto. The 24-minute centrepiece, ‘Presences of Absences’ is built from organ drones so thick you could race rhinos on them, with intermittent doom stabs that recall Asva’s previous outings. Driver appears again at his most ethereal, floating above the music, harmonising with his own ghosts. The closer, the delicate, labyrinthine ‘New World Order Rising’, finds Asva at their most liturgical, ambiguous emotions ebbing and flowing as it inches towards a dynamic climax with all the haste of a glacier. Intricate, thoughtful and muscular, Presences of Absences is a pivotal album for Asva, one that sees them shedding some of their armour, but all the stronger for it.

MASTER MUSICIANS OF BUKKAKE – TOTEM THREE

(IMPORTANT)

The final instalment of MMOB’s triptych of ersatz ethno-drone is less oppressive than part I, not as pretty as part II, but the most immediate of them all. ‘Bardo Sidpa’ may consist of great washes of truculent gamelan-tinted doom, but this belligerent hum segues into ‘In the Twilight of Kali Yuga’, a beautifully bright, spry and wiry piece of virtuoso raga slink. With its New Age flutery and pineal-gland-caressing cultish chant, you might expect to find ‘Illuminating the Ten Directions’ playing as you stock up on Nitraj and crystal woo, were it not for the crushing guitars. ‘Prophecy of the White Camel’ hits a hypnotic Saharan blues groove – a welcome non-surprise to find Alan Bishop wailing here – and the sweet, quasi-medieval melodies of ‘6000 Years of Darkness’ are contrasted with ‘Reign of Quantity’s robovoices and bubbling body horror. Alas, this glorious and ambitious trilogy ends with ‘Failed Future’ – a miniature John Carpenter homage that’s little more than a throwaway gag. But then, as their name suggests, and as with their spiritual forbears Sun City Girls, self-defeating humour is part of the package, and doesn’t diminish their essential beauty.

MIKE PATTON – THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS

(IPECAC)

After A Perfect Place and Crank: High Voltage, Patton returns with his third solo soundtrack project. Far closer in spirit and tone to the elegant, atmospheric former than the gonzoid latter, this score accompanies both Saverio Cotanzo’s film and the source novel by Paolo Giordano. Devoid of their cinematic and literary context, these 16 prime-numbered tracks – some melodic and beautiful, others murderously chilling – make for a subtle, impressionistic experience. There are certainly elements here that can be readily identified – a Mediterranean feel for melody that’s redolent of Mondo Cane’s source material, a Herrmann approach to lavish string arrangements, Penderecki-inspired looming discord, Carpenter synth pulses… But, as ever, it’s the way in which he draws on, manipulates and recontextualises his influences that makes Patton a distinctive musician in his own right.

What’s interesting about The Solitude of Prime Numbers is the way that a man known for his vocal abilities is gaining confidence in his other voice, as an instrumental composer. Where A Perfect Place was very much in the ‘main theme plus variations’ school of soundtrack composition, this is a more subtly woven work, in which narrative elements that recur do so by stealth. That makes for a less immediate work than his other two soundtracks, but at the same time a more accomplished and rewarding one.

MOMBU – MOMBU

(SUBSOUND)

Mombu: being the fusing of Zu’s Gondorian sax behemoth Luca Mai with serial drum abuser Antonio Zitarelli of avant-jazz types Neo. As you’d expect, it’s supremely heavy and outrageously adept stuff, mainly occupying the bowel-battering end of the spectrum. OK, so there’s no getting away from the fact that it can sometimes sound pretty close to Zu’s manic, jazz-infused prog-hardcore with the bass removed. However, here, Mai’s sax is often double-, even triple-tracked or more, giving Mombu more than enough dynamism, depth and sheer sonic muscle. And the duo are at their most distinctive and effective when their Ethiopian influence comes to the fore – present most explicitly in Zitarelli’s hand drums and other percussive varieties, but also in Mai’s forays into melodic lines redolent of Getachew Mekuria or Mulatu Astatqé. If Mombu’s self-description as ‘Afro-grind’ doesn’t make this connection explicitly and irresistibly clear, then the brain-hugging polyrhythmic assault of ‘Regla De Ocha’ will.

MOGWAI – HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE, BUT YOU WILL

(ROCK ACTION)

Mogwai’s seventh album finds them both delving deeper into familiar modes and exploring fresh ideas with inspiring confidence. The more traditional stuff is as big and beautiful as ever: ‘Death Rays’ is utterly lovely but comfortable, a sombre, yearning instrumental of the type that they can pull off while unconscious, while the sparse piano and mournful violin of ‘Too Raging To Cheers’ collapse into a vast, cascading riff worthy of Harvey Milk. But there’s a new energy here too. ‘Mexican Grand Prix’ is highly atypical, a dreamy Stereolab pulse with heavily processed robo-whispers. ‘How to be a Werewolf’ and the optimistic ‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’ also share this spry, motorik vibe, while ‘San Pedro’s entwined guitars rack up more BPMs than any other song in the band’s history. But the clear highlight is ‘Rano Pano’. It starts loud, gets louder, and has a peculiar melodic, pseudo-mystical charge, its fuzzy central riff a sublime, extended mantra that could have been lifted from a gamelan session. Mogwai albums usually end well, and this is no exception, as ‘You're Lionel Richie’ swells into a monolithic doom dirge that ends about 30 minutes too soon.

REMEMBER REMEMBER – THE QUICKENING

(ROCK ACTION)

Formerly one man called Graeme, a loop pedal, a guitar, a glockenspiel and a box full of toys and trinkets, Remember Remember is now a seven-piece band. It’s not just the line-up that’s grown, but the breadth and depth of the music too. The Quickening builds on the debut’s strengths (grand melodic statements, lavish sonics, carefully woven patterns, slow-burn dynamics) and adds big live-band arrangements and considerable emotional weight. ‘Ocean Potion’ is the most perfect realisation of the new sound, a darkly magical nine-minute epic that blossoms into an unexpectedly proggy, rhythmically askew long-form riff. Elsewhere, the solo piano piece ‘A Larger Demon’ stands out by virtue of daunting bare-bones simplicity, while the achingly sad ‘One Happier’ culminates in some unbearably poignant flamenco-style strumming from acoustic virtuoso RM Hubbert. Wonderful, instantly appealing stuff, but for all its elevated ambition, still unmistakably the work of a guy who finds delight in overlaying sweet melodies with the utterances of a squeaky shark.

COLIN STETSON – NEW HISTORY WARFARE VOL. 2: JUDGES

(CONSTELLATION)

Exactly how Colin Stetson does what he does is a mystery for seasoned sax detectives. He proudly proclaims that his tunes are one-take live recordings, with no overdubs or similar studio shenanigans. Yet this one man and his horn are capable of sounding like a polyphonic analogue synth, a wailing vocalist, a bassist and a drummer, all at the same time. Percussive, multi-layered and supremely dense, his sound is utterly compelling – his perpetual motion breath control alone is enough to induce hypoxia in the listener. But it’s no mere technical flashfest. His compositions are as captivating as his playing, by turns aggressive, playful, sombre and exhilarating. The unforgiving wall of brass is occasionally accompanied by the larynxes of Laurie Anderson and My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Woden – the former, authoritative, lyrical and imposing; the latter, wounded and crystalline. Stetson has created a uniquely involving sound world here, one that reconfigures elements of jazz, gospel, art-rock, heavy drone and even vintage electronica with just a single instrument and a herculean pair of lungs.

PERPETUAL MOTION

2011-06-07T03:59:00.000-07:00

Some music can be an endurance test for the listener, some for the players. Mick Barr’s is both.

For his part: “It can get exhausting. Having to warm up for a half hour before every show and not taking breaks while on stage can be a bit daunting at times. Every now and then I’ll have bouts of weakness in my left arm, but not too much else. There’s more of a mental toll.”

For ours: Hundreds of hyper-speed geometric guitar compositions, both vast and microscopic, scorch our synapses as we try to keep pace. Emotional resonances are bleached by inhuman technicality. Dialogue becomes impossible in the face of a horrifying clarity of vision. The only sane reaction is to let go, be dragged along, eyes wide, mouth gaping.

[A personal note: Several years ago, soon after I contracted RSI in my wrist, I saw Orthrelm play in London. Mick Barr’s relentless performance, displaying the kind of precision, speed and stamina of which only machines should be capable, caused a vivid and painful psychosomatic reaction in my already-tender tendons that still makes itself unpleasantly felt today whenever I hear him play. Talk about a visceral response. Pavlov has nothing on Orthrelm.]

Aside from an early appearance on cassette as Or Rathol Nok, Barr first surfaced in the mid-90s as half of Washington DC’s Crom-Tech, playing the screeching foil to the skitter and batter of drummer Malcolm McDuffie. Over a decade later, Crom-Tech’s two albums of jazz-inflected hyper-prog miniatures remain singularly harsh, thanks to their combination of frenetic velocity, a minuscule attention span, and shrill, treble-intensive attack. Never rest, never repeat.

Taken from a short story written by Barr, Crom-Tech was a prototype for language games to come. Titles such as Norildivoth Crallos-Lomrixth Urthiln, Asristir Vieldriox and Uppragan Srilimia Ixioor Ocrilim Nollfithes Mrithixyl signify a mind obsessed with making startling and complex new patterns out of old material – be it vowels and consonants or snatches of metal guitar-solo climaxes.

“For a long time I didn’t feel comfortable expressing anything artistically with English,” says Barr. “But words are necessary in the presentation, so I made up words that fit the mood to me. I attempted at one point to construct a language, but that seemed stupid right at the start. But having a lot of band names is kind of a fluke. I liked the word ‘or’, so I used that in Or Rathol Nok. Then I needed a name to continue the legacy of that band, so I used Or:12r3. In 2000, Octis came about, which was a Voivodian word to me – but more insectish, which fit the project. Ocrilim came as an extension of that, but with more meaning attached to it. Orthrelm is kind of a fusing of Tolkein's word ‘Orthanc’ and ‘realm’.”

Following the dissolution of Crom-Tech, Barr hooked up with a drum machine to form Octis, and the drafting of drummer Josh Blair completed Orthrelm. (Although, in truth, it’s never that simple, and the boundaries are often blurred.) Both perpetuated, exaggerated and refined the ideas birthed in Crom-Tech – the rudimentary, superfluous vocals were discarded, the brevity surpassed even Naked City levels (Orthrelm’s 2002 EP Asristir Vieldriox easily contains its 99 tracks within 13 minutes), and Barr’s already astonishing playing reached deep into the realms of the absurd. Though his skills are undeniably amazing on a technical level, virtuosic complexity is not the point – this ain’t no Guitar World onanistic fantasy, it’s just the way in which his imagination manifests itself: “There is no philosophy behind playing fast. To me, it just feels comfortable. But my life is not very speedy. Maybe my thoughts are speedy, but I am a calm human.”

In at the deep end: Orthrelm’s OV. Where their previous work exploited the microscopic scale naturally suggested by Barr’s refusal to repeat any phrase or hang on to a note for more than a tenth of a second, OV is Orthrelm writ large – 45 minutes of maddening repetition, minute variation, and dramatic statements that illustrate just how ridiculously micro-composed this stuff is. Think Terry Riley filtered through a grind aesthetic with a shredder’s dexterity. Fractal guitar patterns from the gut end of the fretboard, spiralling outwards into infinity, minute variations highlighting unexpected facets. Every detail is mirrored, anticipated and given physical form by Blair’s knackering dash around his kit. It’s both annoying and delirious, like having a desperate wasp inside your skull, constantly stinging your pleasure centres in its attempts to escape.

Barr’s assessment of his own work is as understated as his music is excessive: “It’s not really experimental…maybe a little. Extreme, sure, but I prefer the word ‘intense’.” But for all his quietude and humility, he has made his presence felt among speedfreaks everywhere. He’s there in the ecstatic math-pop of Marnie Stern, the thrash miniatures of Fantômas, and in every impossible time twist and audacious run by tech-metalcore outfits like Behold the Arctopus, Dillinger Escape Plan and Psyopus. He has also found time to collaborate with the likes of Nondor Nevaï, Quix*o*tic and the Flying Luttenbachers, and to record two improv albums with irrepressible Hella/Marnie drummer Zach Hill. These sessions with Hill have all the energy of Orthrelm, but less of the steely self-control. Both players perfectly complement each other – Hill’s freeform brutalist approach causing Barr to run along the very edge of hungry precipices; Barr’s desperate attempts to rein in the drummer adding a note of beautifully crisp tension. “Zach Hill is one of the only people I have felt comfortable improvising with,” says Barr. “It clicked really well. I prefer not to improvise very often. However, I do like to jam. Improvising and jamming are very different things to me.”

Speed remains the core, even as Barr is multi-tracking himself, weaving warm, welcoming and melodic abstracts. Whereas Orthrelm and Octis were all about shape, about carving tiny figures in sound, Ocrilim uses headlong motion to create texture, wearing it like chain mail. Move fast enough and the blur effect kicks in; you’re no longer a bullet, but a laser beam. Ocrilim is seemingly custom-designed for those who wish Glenn Branca’s music were faster, more varied, more intricate. It represents a considerable shift in the Barr aesthetic, though he himself is unsure how, when and why this happened. “I wasn’t paying attention. Honestly, I don’t really have the best handle on what I’m doing, and why I do it. It’s all very intuitive these days. Perfection is never a priority. Intuition is more of a priority. But Ocrilim’s Annwn is the music I am most proud of at this point.”

Barr’s latest incarnation is Krallice, an obscenely powerful and oddly poignant black-metal collaboration with Behold the Arctopus’s Colin Marston. “It just kind of came together,” he says. “Me and Colin were making some songs for a possible black-metal recording, but then it snowballed into an actual album and band. I was into metal right off the bat. I listen to tons of different musics, but my heart has always been with metal. I've always played music that I consider to be very metal-sounding.” Krallice is more obviously tied in to broader, more recognisable genre conventions than anything he’s ever done. But atop the corpse-painted bludgeon, the pointillist flood of sour sound, made from cascading specks of cold light, is all Barr.

For a man given to prolific and idiosyncratic artistic expression, Barr is somewhat reticent when it comes to exploring what he does in public. The vivid obsessions present in all his work, from the early days right through to Krallice, form a single concept that is very much alive and evolving – and to dissect something that still draws breath is to kill it. “It is much more emotional to me than intellectual,” he says. “However, I can’t really say what the content is, as it’s all pretty subconscious. But it’s also cold and technical, which invokes its own emotions. No one ever misses the point, as the point is all relative to the one thinking it.”

(originally published in Plan B, September 2008)

MOGWAI: A REVIEWMINISCENCE (REVIEWTROSPECTIVE?)

2011-02-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

MOGWAI

HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE, BUT YOU WILL

(ROCK ACTION)

It's tough for me to be objective about Mogwai. It was they who almost singlehandedly* reignited my passion for music, which had been wilting severely amid the doldrums of the mid-to-late ’90s. (Turns out that sufficient ambient exposure to Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene is enough to make you lose faith in an entire art form.) The first I heard of Mogwai was John Mulvey’s review of Young Team in the NME, October 1997. It spoke of “sprawling, reckless music” that was “intensely beautiful” yet contained “searing riff-madness any self-respecting death metal band would kill for”. Who could resist such a prospect? It was alluring enough that, for the first time in my life, I shelled out for a record (on double vinyl, even) without tasting a note. The opener was tantalising enough, warm drones humming as a voice hesitatingly describes the band in almost absurdly glowing terms. Then the ominous rumble of ‘Like Herod’ loomed into earview, and before I knew it that ungainly, incongruous, bastard surprise of a RIFF punched my face right off of my head. Twice in a row. How could something so vicious be so gorgeous? Deep, instant love.

Over the next few years, many a live experience cemented our relationship. Their headline slot at the Astoria in 1999 was a seminal experience. They were beautiful, of course. But even after many years of metal gigs, the volume levels here were revelatory. Mogwai were unfeasibly, ridiculously vast, so much so that for a while everything just went… white… as my brain reeled from the sensory overload. The air itself seemed to be on the verge of friction-induced ignition. It felt like hot pink rain on my skin. Young kids next to me huddled on the floor, their hands over their ears (one of them threw up on my shoe). It was pure visceral pleasure from all-consuming sound – it was the first time I’d experienced this level of blissful sonic extremity, and it ensured that I’d later fall for the likes of Merzbow, Sunn o))) and MBV. And yet, even amid the extremity and brutality, Mogwai were unashamedly, nakedly emotional – romantic, even. Years later, my (now, still) wife and I used ‘Helicon 1’ at the start of our wedding ceremony.

But over the years, they changed. Or, rather, I did. In truth, Mogwai failed to be what they never were, but what my inner teenage metalhead wanted them to be: ALL THE LOUD BITS, ALL THE TIME. With every album, the gnarly passages were scaled back more and more. I kept up, but didn’t really understand any more. Their power seemed diluted by their countless inferior imitators. The words ‘Rock Action’ began to seem like a cruel tease. It was only with The Hawk is Howling, specifically with the way that ‘I’m Jim Morrison’ so subtly and inexorably blossoms, that I finally grasped what they’d been doing all along – striving for a certain form of nameless, profound human beauty, and doing so with increasing eloquence, even if they often whispered about it when the younger me wanted them to yell themselves hoarse.

After the slavish fanboy devotion and a period of mild disappointment/ambivalence, I’ve now entered a more mature and appreciative phase. The most recent encounter was at the Grand Ole Opry on their home turf. Turns out they’re older too. Whodathunkit? More assured and confident. Technically impeccable. Funny as fuck. It was wondrous, but still… they seemed smaller. The loud bits don’t seem to convey quite the same absurd world-ending/creating power that they used to. Have they smoothed out the ultra-dynamics? Or am I comparing the actual experience before me with an impossibly exaggerated memory? In all fairness, the unabated yen they gave me for extreme volume has probably left my gig-ravaged ears in no fit state to judge.

The prospect of a new Mogwai album is therefore a source of both quivering excitement and queasy trepidation. Hardcore… begins with a grandiose mid-paced opener a la ‘Jim Morrison’ or ‘Auto Rock’ – piano, broad dramatic strokes, slow evolution and stratospheric guitar climax, the main guitar line in polyrhythmic relief to the main pulse. Perhaps not 100% satisfying in itself, but an effective, if wrong-footing introduction. ‘Mexican Grand Prix is the first of several surprises – a lithe, sombre pop song with a krautrock pulse and android vocals. Blindfolded and handcuffed, you’d never guess this was Mogwai. Stereolab, maybe? Quickspace?

‘Rano Pano’ is extraordinary, one of their finest tunes yet. The hugely fuzzy central riff is at once alien and familiar, eternal but indefinable, complex but natural, somewhere between a lost Gallic folk melody and South-East Asian temple chant. It has the feel of a sculpture unlocked from marble, something that’s always been there but no one noticed it before.

The downbeat ‘Death Rays’ and ‘Letters to the Metro’ are typical of much of the band’s work since CODY. A sense of melancholy, expressed through pianos, guitars and measured restraint. Melodically beautiful and sonically rich, but ultimately Mogwai at a stroll. The pace hastens with ‘San Pedro’ – an uncharacteristically speedy instrumental rocker, zippier and less brutal than its precursors ‘Batcat’ and ‘Glasgow Mega Snake’, more wiry and sinewy, strewn with intricate guitar patterns. The most optimistic tune here, and not just in terms of its celebratory epithet (the first rule of Mogwai: the titles mean nothing), ‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’ revisits the motorik pulse with vibing synths and processed vocals. ‘How to be a Werewolf’ is softer, but no less redolent of the spirit of Dinger that courses through much of this album. Very pretty, very cheerfully sad, climaxing in some lavish, wibbly Robert Fripp phrasings and a pleasingly incongruous big arena-rock key shift towards the end.

The last two tracks are the most old-school. They pull the tricks that those who don’t really listen to Mogwai usually associate with them – quiet intros exploding into plesiosaur-bruising riffs. But they’re great examples of the form. ‘Too Raging to Cheers’ has a brilliantly ugly and brutal cascading payoff, while ‘You’re Lionel Richie’ is simpler, its melody extending into a glorious climactic, low-end assault. Both are over way, way too soon. But I would say that.

2011 finds Mogwai in undeniably great shape, exploring plenty of bold new ideas and refining old ones, with enough familiar territory to not scare away the faithful. They’re smarter, more proficient, certainly more subtle… in virtually all of the ways that count, they’re better, more fully realised than ever. The only downside is that I hold them to an impossible standard. At one time they saved my life with sound. But fourteen years on, they’re still enriching it – I can’t ask for more than that.

* See also The Monsoon Bassoon.

(unpublished)

obligatory fin-de-siècle list-making behaviour

2010-12-21T01:34:00.000-08:00

Here be my top 10 albums of the past 12 months, most of which I reviewed in print (reproduced below). Big thanks to Rock-a-Rolla for letting me splurge my nonsense in their pages on a regular basis.

Tracks from many of the albums below, plus some other bits’n’bobs, are featured on this here Spotify playlist.

10) Kayo Dot – Coyote

Some bands really do defy easy encapsulation. Kayo Dot make music of a perpetually shifting kind, a writhing, transfiguring sound that possesses elements of prog and jazz and avant-garde composition and art-rock, but inhabits none of them and all of them at once. Their fourth album, Coyote, is a single five-part composition, the lyrics and narrative arc of which were written by artist and close friend Yuko Sueta in the final stages of terminal breast cancer. Given that, lines such as ‘Help me, I’m disappearing’, delivered via Toby Driver’s brittle howl, carry a night-unbearable weight.

Though micro-composed to the point of OCD, Coyote is remarkable not only for its complexity, but for its breathtaking fluidity, the way the wildly disparate moods and methods metamorphose into each other imperceptibly. KD’s former metal leanings have been utterly expunged these days, but it’s notable that they’re just as forceful without them. A greater emphasis on brass adds gravitas and shimmer to the jazzier passages, at times redolent of ’70s Miles, which at any second may flow into doomy, neo-gothic ambience, bursts of kaleidoscopic prog that blossom like fireworks, or an agonising trawl through clattering shaped chaos. More powerful, both sonically and emotionally, than its wonderful but nebulous predecessor, Blue Lambency Downward, this is a unique, draining experience, as immersive as it is ineffable.

(from Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

9) The Ex – Catch My Shoe

As this year’s 30 compilation showed, The Ex’s creativity shows no signs of fizzling out as they enter their fourth decade. Catch My Shoe is their first album sans founding vocalist GW Sok, but new guy Arnold de Boer makes for a painless transition. First single ‘Maybe I was the Pilot’, with exuberant squalls from incomparable trumpetfiend Roy Paci, is a brash opener – its long-form build typical of this band in 2010: jagged, angular riff builds via repetitive drive into an ecstatic frenzy. ‘Bicycle Illusion’ is similarly exceptional, the melodies reminiscent of the band’s infatuation with Ethiopian sounds circa Moa Anbessa, the climax swollen with rambunctiousness. Drummer Kat voices ‘Eolyeo’, an Eastern European folk ditty that weaves together the celebratory and the sombre in an exquisite way. The blazing first half gives way to a simmering third quarter, but ‘Life Whining’ and the uneasy, discordant ‘24 Problems’ constitute a volatile finale.

(from Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

8) Killing Joke – Absolute Dissent

Their 14th album finds Killing Joke both reinvigorated and somewhat nostalgic – understandably so, as this is the first reappearance of the original Jaz/Geordie/Youth/Ferguson lineup since 1982. The title track is 100% classic Joke, barging straight in with a chorus like an unexpected quarry, guitars like mating bulldozers, talk of chemtrails and mind control – a call to arms with disco hi-hats. The heavier tunes perpetuate the metallic bent of the last two albums, especially ‘This World Hell’s brutal, mechanical one-note riff, chorus fuelled by double-bass rolls and flamethrower vocal. No one else sings like Jaz Coleman. His apocalyptic roar sounds like a man vomiting up a radiator, or the last drop of life being squeezed out of the last mammoth. The super-heavy ‘The Great Cull’ finds him giving full vent as he predicts and revels in Armageddon over sublimely chunky riffs. Anthemic, filthy and uncompromising, ‘Endgame’ is an instant classic, with almost a touch of boogie to its shuffling extinction lilt.

It’s not all brutality: ‘European Super State’, a celebration of the EU project, is a return to KJ’s dancier/more electronic side, sidelined since the mid-’90s. Though still noisy and awkward, ‘In Excelsis’s arena-filling chorus is extravagantly poppy, while ‘The Raven King’, a song for late bassist Paul Raven, is comparatively delicate and beautiful. Given KJ’s clear influence on Broadrick, it’s pleasing that the soaring ‘Honour the Fire’ sounds exactly like a faster Jesu, complete with surprisingly vulnerable streak.

Elsewhere, the choppy riff and skipping beats of ‘Fresh Fever from the Skies’ seem to come straight from What’s THIS For…!; the rough, aggressive ‘Depthcharge’ recalls the Extremities era; and ‘Here Comes the Singularity’s lean and wiry riff summons the early days by deliberately invoking ‘Eighties’ (or Nirvana’s ‘Come as You Are’ if you prefer…). In a final bit of broken nostalgia, ‘Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove’ harks back not only to the band’s geographic origins, but also the dub sound of their first EP. Absolute Dissent feels like a definitive Joke document, an encapsulation of (almost) all of their eras and manifestations in one handy, crushing package. Undeniably strong and vital in its own right, but also a great place for dawdlers to jump on board.

(from Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

7) Master Musicians of Bukkake – Totem Two

Part two of the trilogy from the finest band of exploratory musicians ever to be regrettably and incongruously named after a degrading act of group misogyny. Anyway… Totem Two bathes in much the same scrying pool as its predecessor – long-form quasi-mystical and texturally sumptuous ethno-dronescapes with a doom-derived aesthetic – but is blessed with greater dramatic power. Opener ‘Bardo Chonyid/Master of All Visible Shapes’ rises out of dust devils; plague bells chime, a warning horn sounds, guitars strike and slither. ‘Perde Kaldirma’ brings the dubious gift of panpipes, but does so in an instinctive way that complements its hypnotic funereal dirge. But it’s ‘Coincidental Oppositorum’ and ‘Patmos’ that are the most radical and captivating, built on sweeping, time-lost melodies, epic in scale, atavistic in their beauty, reminiscent of Eyvind Kang’s boldest, most sensuous work. It’s here that MMB’s curtain of darkness falls away and they embrace the purity of the sublime.

(from Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

6) Melvins – The Bride Screamed Murder

The third manifestation of the Nth incarnation of the thing known as Melvins brings mostly refinement, but hints of revolution. Half of the tracks continue to build on the principles established by the Big Business-enhanced line-up on (A) Senile Animal and Nude With Boots. For virgin ears, that means knotty, reptilian guitar lines; muscle-bound twin drum attack by Dale and Coady; and refreshingly inviting harmony-saturated vocals from Buzz and Jared. The average tempo and pop saturation of Melvins has increased significantly since the Big Business boys came to town. Buzz’s crispy latterday guitar sound is even more sharp and sprightly, especially on the spiralling, companion pieces ‘Electric Flower’ and ‘Lighten Up’, the latter soaring oddly like Jane’s Addiction if Perry Farrell were two burly men.

However, the strongest tracks are the most anomalous and experimental. Irresistible opener ‘The Water Glass’ starts out in a tangle of suitably crushing riffage, but gives way to few minutes’ Full Metal Jacket-style drill sergeant call and response. Layered vocals and cavernous effects give super-heavy crawl ‘I'll Finish You Off’ a curious high church feel, an impression cemented by queasy, high-pitched vocals from menacing altar boys.

The highlight is arguably the treacle-paced version of The Who’s ‘My Generation’, seemingly sung by a gang of Muppet weasels in an Anderson shelter. Where the original was fuelled by brash hedonism, this sinister dirge resembles a recruitment anthem for sociopaths. As the riff cycles, ever slower and more distant, enveloped by muffled noise, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that your bathysphere has been cut loose and you’re heading for the ocean floor. The closing ‘P.G. x 3’ is one of this band’s strangest works – a surreal collage of suffocating drones, funereal a cappella folk, sensuous guitar resonance, and a lonely child reciting numbers in a hyperbaric chamber. Beautifully balanced between the anticipated and the aberrant, The Bride Screamed Murder is the sound of Melvins continuing to ignore your idea of what they’re supposed to be.

(from Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

5) Zs – New Slaves

It might sound odd, given that this is at no.5, but I’m still uncertain as to whether, as a cohesive album, New Slaves is really that good. For the most part, it’s an interesting enough bit of rumbling cacophony and improv and drone. But. But. It more than earns its place here on the basis of one piece at its centre, the truly astonishing 20-minute title track – a relentless, clanking, genre-dodging atonal grind that smudges the borders between freeform improvisation, ultra-tight, complex pre-composition and dogged, maddening repetition in a way that’s thoroughly unsettling and cortex-shatteringly brilliant.

4) Mike Patton – Mondo Cane

It’s easy to see why Mike Patton was drawn to these 1960s Italian pop tunes. Most share the same heightened, almost cartoonish sense of drama that has characterised the best of his own work, from the sculpted ultra-dynamics of Fantômas to the bombastic power of Faith No More. And of course, their octave-bounding melodies allow him to administer a good seeing-to to those fans who’ve been yearning for him to really cut loose and sing.

‘Il Cielo in Una Stanza’, which eagle-eared cinephiles may spot lurking in the background of Goodfellas, is a simmering opener, bubbling up out of storm clouds and syncopated ‘la la la’s and blossoming into lavish histrionics. ‘Ore d'Amore’s swooping melodrama features fuzzy guitars and sublime moments of swelling rallentando – this one really pushes the larynx too, the verse starting deep in the belly and soaring straight to the stratosphere. Accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, Patton excels himself on ‘Scalinatella’, a sombre heartquake whose strength lies in its understatement. Probably the strongest vocal performance here, though easily the least flashy.

It’s mostly a relatively down-tempo, explicitly seductive collection, though there are exceptions. ‘Urlo Negro’ is a frankly ridiculous song consisting of a stomping riff and a whole lot of throat shredding. Patton plays the sleazy carnival barker on ‘Che Notte!’, a storming bit of Mediterranean swing driven by Roy Paci’s voluptuous trumpet.

Regular touchstone Morricone is represented by ‘Deep Down’, one of his pop outings, though it feels relatively lightweight, both within the context of this album and in relation to his other work. ‘Senza Fine’ brings things to a suitably grandiose close, its delicate sentiment and rich melodies leading to a huge, emotive climax.

These songs are essentially orchestral live recordings tweaked in the studio, with mixed results. The electronics and overdubs and effects are mostly well-woven and subtle, but can at times be excessive – the multi-layered vocals on ‘Urlo Negro’ and the ‘singing in a tin cupboard’ effect on ‘Senza Fine’, for example, are obtrusive and distracting. It also feels a little slight, clocking in at just over 35 minutes. But these are minor quibbles, and shouldn’t detract from a lush, bold, hugely entertaining and often genuinely moving labour of love.

(from Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

NB: Having been familiar with the Mondo Cane live bootlegs, I found the production a little much at first. I’ve since revised my opinion, and now think it’s a beautifully rendered and insanely detailed production job that reveals more and more with every listen.

3) Cleric – Regressions

As statements of intent go, starting your debut album with a 20-minute splurge of vile noise, unsettling sound sculpture and around 50 insanely intricate riffs entwined in an orgy of bones and blood is a pretty bold one. ‘Allotriophagy’ may just be the least welcoming opening track of all time – but it sets the tone. Aside from a handful of ambient interludes and field recordings, Regressions offers unceasingly confrontational, staggeringly dense avant-grind death-thrash and patchwork brutality from start to finish. It’s relentless yet restless – any given moment may bring precise low-end polymetrics, mathematic speedfreakery, doom battery or sheets of rancid guitar noise.

Cleric are pushing extremes of both invention and intensity, but this is no mere mosaic of Guitar Institute exercises. It flows seamlessly and hints at a coherent but impressionistic narrative thread, a painful backstory that the ever-shifting barrage consistently tries and fails to obliterate via extreme, futile catharsis. It’s not until the haunting piano-led coda of the final track that the splenetic rage subsides and a kind of stoic acceptance is reached. Stunning, on all levels.

(from Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

2) Shining – Blackjazz

While 2007’s Grindstone was a wildly eclectic genre splurge, Blackjazz (despite the title) is very definitely a rock album – albeit a supremely heavy, unceasingly brutal and forward-looking one. ‘The Madness & the Damage Done’ establishes the new paradigm of maximum intensity with buzz-ravaged, digitally tooled stop-start riffs, avant-math-thrash beats and distorted vocal rage. Then ‘Fisheye’, ‘Exit Sun’ and ‘HEALTER SKELTER’ each take turns to hit new heights of dextrous, off-balance bludgeon. But it’s with the total system detonation of ‘Blackjazz Deathtrance’ that Shining really outdo themselves (and everyone else) – 11 minutes of perilously exciting hyper-speed 22nd-century industrial technoprog chaos metal that sounds increasingly unfeasible with every listen. At album’s end, Enslaved’s Grutle Kjellson rends his throat during a charred, mutilated version of King Crimson’s ‘21st-century Schizoid Man’, the fuzzed-out bass notes of which could arouse humpback whales. Astonishingly focused and potent, Blackjazz is what it sounds like when a tirelessly questing band finally finds its identity – and it turns out to be a shark-eyed killing machine from an impossible future.

(from Rock-a-Rolla magazine)

1) Marina & the Diamonds – The Family Jewels

So here we are. Much as I’d love to gain hardcore metal/experimental/noise points by putting something truly crushing and brutal at no.1, the truth is that by far my most listened-to, scrutinised and adored album of the year was a collection of eccentric and super-catchy British pop.

Marina was first brought to my attention in 2009 by Alistair Crosbie, who posted a YouTube link for ‘Mowgli’s Road’ on Twitter. I was at first intrigued and then entranced by this strange but urgent tune, a stomping, bizarre paean to the difficulties of self-realisation, delivered by a brash, idiosyncratic voice. Though no Beyonce-style vocal virtuoso, Marina clearly revels in exploring the limits of her distinctive, expressive voice. It’s a versatile instrument, mahogany in its resonant depths, shimmering at its apex, punctuated by odd ticks and purrs and bleats and yelps and a restless (rootless) accent.

The album came out in February this year, and never left my ears for long. It packs some pretty bizarre, unlikely and incongruous ideas and huge amounts of detail into irresistible three-minute pop songs in a way that’s utterly fascinating. Every single song here sounds like a colossal hit single, but no two sound remotely alike. Yet The Family Jewels also has an indefinably cohesive character. Every tune, be it the Moroder bass rumble and arena-rock chorus of ‘Shampain’, the Sparks-esque giddy absurdities of ‘Hermit the Frog’, the heartbreakingly empowered vulnerability of ‘I am not a Robot’ or the pained elegance of ‘Numb’, clearly springs from a single imagination.

One attribute that sets Marina apart from those to whom she’s most often lazily compared (Florence, La Roux, etc. (’cause female musicians must only ever be compared to other female musicians. IT’S THE LAW)) is her lack of self-consciousness. Where others convey lofty insouciance and a need to attain gravitas, she’s not afraid to be silly (‘Mowgli’s Road’, ‘Hermit the Frog’), almost embarrassingly frank (‘Guilty’, ‘Obsessions’) or avowedly ruthless in her pursuit of success (‘Oh No’, ‘Numb’). At times she’s even kind of crass and obnoxious (‘Hollywood’, ‘Girls’), but this only serves to ground her songs, to establish them as rounded whole. The first lines of the first song of her debut album (‘Are You Satisfied?’) talk about signing her record deal, creating an infinite self-referential loop that suggests she didn’t even exist prior to the recording process. Hollowing yourself is hardly the most ingratiating way to announce yourself to the world, but with hindsight, it makes perfect sense and introduces a creative spirit in a state of flux. Though clearly aimed squarely at the mainstream, this is no bland, glossy product assembled by committee, but a peculiarly charismatic warts-and-all patchwork.

Who knows where Marina will go from here? On the one hand, I hope she’ll disregard the need to maintain the success she’s already achieved and do something really way out, unfettered and uncommercial – yet it’s exactly the tension between her wild imagination and the pop format that makes so many facets of The Family Jewels so captivating.

Finally, some other goodnesses from this year, in no particular order, almost any of which could have been in the top 10:

Swans – My Father will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky

Foetus – Hide

Sun City Girls – Funeral Mariachi

Extra Life – Made Flesh

Marnie Stern – Marnie Stern

Carla Kihlstedt/Matthias Bossi/Shahzad Ismaily – Causing a Tiger

Prince Rama – Shadow Temple

Richard Youngs – Inceptor

Watain – Lawless Darkness

Janelle Monae – Archandroid

Bardo Pond – Bardo Pond

Black Sun – Twilight of the Gods

The Ex – 30

Andrew Paine – Chapel of Stars

Hey Colossus & the Van Halen Time Capsule – Eurogrumble

Alistair Crosbie – Sad Faces of the Moon

Rashomon – The Finishing Line

Acid Mothers Temple & Stearica – AMT invade Stearica

Richard Youngs/Andrew Paine – Robot

Harvey Milk – A Small Turn of Human Kindness

Mogwai – Special Moves

John Zorn – Ipsissimus

JUST AN IRREGULAR GUY

2009-11-24T02:55:00.000-08:00

WHY I HATE…4/4

I blame capitalism. As a tiny urchin I’d insist upon watching The Money Programme, to the chagrin of my staunchly socialist dad. Then, as now, I had nary a stock or share to my name – but I did have a yen for the theme tune. Half-inched from the 1964 movie The Carpetbaggers, this Elmer Bernstein-hewn dynamic cartoon hustle was powered by scrapyard brass, its groove a tantalising half-step too long. It made no sense… but I was mesmerised. That extra moment jutted out and snagged me like a splinter. Why did it sound all wrong?

Other pre-adolescent favourites had a similar jarring quality: the Mars suite from Holst; Mission: Impossible; Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’. What initially seemed awkward was slowly reshaping me. Now, decades later, I find myself distrusting symmetry; I think, dance, breathe in odd numbers, askew from the endlessly recycled permeations of 4/4. Take me clubbing and I feel like I’m trying to put on a glove that has one finger too few. Not only is my DNA clustered in fives and sevens, but I yearn for these parts to be diced, stretched, folded into origami cranes and arranged in seemingly random sequences. I crave impossible complexity, music that resists comprehension, so as to relive the thrill of infant bafflement. Not knowing when the next beat will fall can be overwhelming – it locks you into the moment, focuses awareness on the now and forces immersion. It’s easier to lose yourself in a maze than on a straight road.

That said, I don’t really hate the subject at hand. To do so would be to hate Can, James Brown, the Ramones, AC/DC and countless others whose existence is proof of the power of the quadrilateral stomp – it would be to hate music itself. But don’t you weary of 4/4’s increasingly creaky ubiquity? Don’t you unleash a desiccating sigh when the latest highly hyped pop product/beat sculptor/Brooklyn faux-primitivist arrives recycling the same predictable plod, its blank inevitability echoing the linear drudgery of labour? Music is surely an escape from servitude, not a continuation.

The number four has dominated pop so completely for so long that it now appears natural, its appeal spoken of in evolutionary biological terms that reference heartbeats or our gait across the plains in pursuit of a baluchitherium. Yet many non-Western traditional forms are not based on fours – the compound meters of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the ragas of India, the polyrhythms of Africa and South-East Asia. Inherent simplicity is cited as a reason for 4/4’s stranglehold, but this is an argument perpetually eating its own arse. Four-beat cycles do indeed seem the most ‘normal’ – because their simplicity is familiarity in disguise, mere cultural conditioning. Had the waltz won the popular battle, I would be railing against 3/4. In the parallel universe where math-jazz guru Don Ellis is Emperor, this piece is entitled ‘Why I Hate 27/16’. The beat itself is almost irrelevant – it’s the wearisome tyranny that chafes.

‘Odd’ meters are nothing new. Stravinsky perfected irregular rhythms in 1913 (just as Kool & the Gang perfected 4/4 in 1972), and his mastery arguably remained unchallenged until Messiaen or Ruins or Meshuggah. But his descendants – prog, tech-metal, breakcore, math, etc. – remain niche aberrations within a stultifying paradigm. It’s not about demanding onanistic virtuoso complexity in pop, but more rhythmic diversity, greater imaginative freedom, plenty of opportunities to shake our tailfeathers in a lopsided fashion to an 11-beat Britney. Music can inspire action, define reality, shape time itself – so what a waste to reaffirm the norm, over and over again. More liberating by far to cast aside our conditioning, transcend the trudge and dance to disorienting beats.

(originally published in Plan B magazine)

NEUTRON MAKOTO OVERDOSE FROM BEYOND ALPHA CENTAURI

2009-10-21T02:39:00.000-07:00

(aka some scribblings about Acid Mothers Temple)

ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE & THE MELTING PARAISO UFO
CRYSTAL RAINBOW PRYAMID UNDER THE STARS
(IMPORTANT)

Another day, another AMT album, another clichéd review beginning with a reference to their superhuman productivity (that was it, in case you missed it). The band’s legions of followers will be tickled not just pink, but all the colours of the rainbow and some others that don’t exist to hear that this is their finest release for some time, perhaps since Electric Heavyland. It’s AMT at their long-form best over three wild-eyed and exceptionally bushy tailed tracks. They’re in full-on psych-meltdown mode on ‘Pussy Head Man from Outer Space’, a 200-mph riff-fest based around Tsuyama Atsushi’s liquid bass and Kawabata Makoto’s psychotic soloing. The title track begins innocuously enough with a sedate pace and tasteful soloing, but then everything collapses in a heap and 15 minutes’ intense krautrock action begins. Even better, ‘Electric Psilocybin Flashback’ ups the ante with a mind-boggling bouzouki riff and relentless percussive drive, sounding like traditional Japanese folk played by a thrash band. And that’s almost exactly what is – as well as one of the best tunes in AMT’s now-colossal back catalogue.

ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE & THE MELTING PARAISO UFO

MYTH OF THE LOVE ELECTRIQUE

(RIOT SEASON)

Japan’s favourite workaholic intergalactic psychognomic minstrels are back! Not that they ever went away… Unlike their recent run of single-concept albums, such as the IAO Chant Gong homage or the fearsome Starless and Bible Black Sabbath, Myth of the Love Electrique is a varied collection in the vein of their debut or New Geocentric World. All facets of AMT’s personality are expressed here, from supercharged guitar freakouts and proto-blues metal to space-faring drones, monkish chanting and medieval troubadour strolls through purple-speckled toadstool towns. New vocalist Kitagawa Hao’s wondrous wails more than amply supply the cosmic sweetness that was once the reserve of Cotton Casino, and re-inject some much-needed femininity into the AMT sound. At the album’s heart is a new recording of live favourite ‘Pink Lady Lemonade’, the third and possibly best studio version thus far. Another superb album from the superhumanly consistent collective and a great starting point for those not yet converted, but possibly a bit of a retread for the faithful.

ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE – Mono, Glasgow, 14/11/06

Taking valuable time out from a fat-packed schedule that sees them releasing on average nine shockingly good albums an hour, Japan’s premier intergalactic beardshow touches down in Glasgow. Following recent excursions as the Cosmic Inferno, as SWR, and as the Soul Collective, Kawabata Makoto and his fuzzy brothers are once again travelling as Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO. However, it must be said that the major difference between these bands largely comes down to how much room their names take up on a T-shirt.

Given AMT’s cosmic leanings, it’s surprising that they don’t begin with a Big Bang, but rather ease themselves into a drowsy, bluesy groove. But it isn’t long before the band’s kraut-flavoured freakout blows in like Hurricane Hawkwind until wilful ’70s stoner throwback ‘Dark Star Blues’ establishes a colossally heavy metallic chug. While the rest of the band kiss the sky with gusto, it’s Kawabata himself who is the centre of attention. He’s a truly monstrous guitarist, whose furious, intuitive and hugely physical playing can’t help but draw comparisons with Hendrix.

A hilarious, syncopated Occitanian-style chanting interlude sees bass-demon Tsuyama showcasing his throat-singing skills, but it doesn’t explain why tonight he has chosen to model his look on Compo from Last of the Summer Wine. Following a brief burst of herky-jerky Beefhartian insanity, Kawabata gently picks the heartbreakingly gorgeous opening guitar line of ‘Pink Lady Lemonade’, and Mono lets out a collective ‘aaaahhhhh’. It’s a strange and gratifying thing to hear an hour-long lysergic jam greeted as if it’s a number-one hit single, especially one whose beat is in a geological time signature. The delicate central phrase cycles repeatedly, constantly deferring the inevitable moment when the poignant, overdriven lead will break through. Twice during its extended lifetime, the Pink Lady literally fizzes away in intoxicating bubbles of dreamy fuzz, only to rise again, with far more vitality than before, opening rifts in space and doors of perception.

There’s a relatively brief encore of ‘La Novia’, the closest this band get to a singalong anthem, before it all ascends into blissful cloud-borne chaos, culminating in Kawabata’s guitar hanging by its strings from the lights as it attempts to achieve escape velocity. There are certain bands that everyone should see at least once during their lifetime, but with AMT that’s just not nearly enough. Try once per album in their catalogue. That should do it.

(all three originally published in Rock-a-Rolla)

MO' MOGWAI. WHY?

2009-07-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

IN WHICH I MEET STUART BRAITHWAITE AND INSERT A PROBE INTO HIS BRAINBOX

Perhaps the only band ever to appear in both this magazine and Sex and the City, Mogwai have been pursuing their singular muse – often elegant, sometimes crushing – since 1995. On the eve of the release of their latest album, The Hawk is Howling, Rock-a-Rolla cornered guitarist Stuart Braithwaite in Glasgow’s 13th Note to chat about longevity, living in a dystopian future, and Batman.

London ULU, circa. 1997. Mogwai pop in while touring their debut Young Team. Five unassuming Glaswegians pull down the heavens and reach down our throats to squeeze our souls dry. Right now, their shimmering, ultra-dynamic instrumentals seem like the most exciting music that it’s possible to make. Their balancing act between unabashed beauty and extreme physical brutality is so precarious that it seems impossible that it could be sustained for any length of time. We few here in this room ought to revel in every moment, as we may never get the chance again.

Eleven years on, in June 2008, Mogwai headline a cavernous room on the Glasgow leg of the Triptych festival. Older, wiser, the band exert greater control over their powers, are far more adept at wielding that vast, glorious sound. Arguably they’re more restrained now than in the old days, but is that really true when chugging new single ‘Batcat’ crushes all before it right from its opening moments? The most striking aspect of the gig is how utterly adored Mogwai are – every opening drift of notes embraced en masse like a lost lover by the sold-out crowd. At times it feels like being at a stadium-rock gig, where this kind of response would usually be reserved for anodyne but catchy power-anthems that express supposedly universal themes with artless, moronic bombast. But Mogwai’s is an unlikely aesthetic to find itself so dearly beloved – sombre, sensitive, full of yearning, with a flair for the (melo)dramatic and, most significant of all, wordless. It’s remarkable that a band with what seemed over a decade ago like a very special and select appeal has now become something approaching a treasured national institution.

Stuart Braithwaite is as surprised as anyone that a thoughtful, sometimes wilfully deafening and occasionally mischievous instrumental guitar band could achieve Mogwai’s degree of success. Especially when you consider that of those from their mid-90s Glasgow scene – Arab Strap, the Delgados, Ganger, etc – Mogwai are among the last men standing.

“Really, if you’d said to us after we’d made even our first album, which went down pretty well, that 11 or 12 years later we’d be playing even bigger places, we’d definitely have been surprised. You can’t be anything other than happy about that. But I suppose we’re stubborn. We refuse to admit defeat. We all still like it. And we never fell out. I think the only reason to stop making music would be because you didn’t enjoy it or you got completely fed up with the people you were making music with. Maybe we’ve just been doing stuff so long together that we’re just kind of stuck with each other. But I think all bands kind of have to have a siege mentality, that they have to be immune to stuff from the outside and stick up for each other.”

But surviving that long and achieving that kind of status that can make a band feel bulletproof, which brings with it the risk of complacency. Is this a danger for Mogwai?

“Aw, no. No no no no. I’ve seen bands go from complete adulation to a running joke after one bad album. Or another band comes out doing the same style of music a hundred times better. Definitely not bulletproof. I’d imagine that there’ll always be a fondness for the records we’ve made, but whether that will always translate into people being excited about what we do now – who knows?”

Of course, the flipside is that not being bulletproof carries its own dangers, i.e. stagnation, an unwillingness to transcend that which made you a success in the first place. Do you feel under pressure to continue to be the Mogwai that people expect you to be?

“If you mean do we want to do a jazz record, then not really. To be honest, I think that we sound the way we sound completely naturally. We certainly don’t have to try hard to sound like this. When the five of us start playing that’s just what we sound like. And even when we think we’ve done something amazingly different, no one else seems to notice! So we stopped worrying about what it sounds like, and just hoped that it’s something that we’re all happy with.”

An infectiously enthusiastic chap, Stuart seems very happy with Mogwai’s new baby, The Hawk is Howling, and quite rightly so. The sublimely massive ‘Batcat’ stands out as one of the band’s most immediate and ferocious tunes, while unusually bright, almost krautrocky avenues are explored by ‘The Sun Smells Too Loud’, and the wrenching ‘Scotland’s Shame’ should and will massage tear ducts not only in Caledonia, but beyond.

“We recorded some of it last year,” says Stuart. “But most of it this February. One of the songs on the Batcat EP was one from the last album that we didn’t get finished because we got Roky Erickson from the 13th Floor Elevators to sing on it, which was quite a long process. The Elevators are one of my favourite bands, but I don’t think he’s done anything for a long time.”

Getting Erickson, a famously reclusive and troubled figure, to sing on your record is a challenge, to say the least.

“It was quite complicated really… I thought he was completely off of the radar, but I heard he’d played some shows in Austin. He played the most surreal show at half time in a basketball game in Austin. Apparently it was amazing. And there was a recent photograph of him in Mojo magazine. I have a friend who works for Mojo, so I got the details of the photographer from Austin, got in touch with her, and she put me in touch with Roky’s brother. I sent him some music and we just to’ed and fro’ed until it actually happened. It took quite a long time. But his singing’s absolutely perfect.”

“It was all done remotely, but there were a few changes, so I went over to Austin and went into the studio with him. He’s a nice guy, and his brother’s really cool. It was a good experience, especially to meet someone like that, who hasn’t continued to make records. He really had kind of disappeared. He’s pretty delighted that people are still excited about the music he makes and the music he made.”

Although entirely devoid of lyrical content this time around, The Hawk is Howling continues the Mogwai tradition of irrelevant but oddly evocative song titles: the aforementioned ‘Scotland’s Shame’, ‘I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead’ and ‘Thank You Space Expert’. They outdo themselves on the Batcat EP with ‘Stupid Prick Gets Chased by the Polis and Loses His Slut Girlfriend’. Where do these titles that sound like snatches of overheard night-bus conversation come from, and are they at all relevant to the music?

“They’re just silly things people say. ‘I Love You, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School’ is based on a very ridiculous anecdote that I’ve been told not to tell anyone. None of them have any significant meaning. They’re nothing to do with the music. I hate all these instrumental bands that – well, I don’t hate the bands, but I don’t like the tendency of having these airy-fairy fifth-year poetry kind of titles. Personally, I think if you have something to say you should probably have some singing. We do it once in a while, but there aren’t any songs on this record that sounded like they’d be made any better by having singing on them. Otherwise, just let people evaluate for themselves how they feel about the music.”

Mogwai’s reputation to some extent is built upon their devastating sonic weaponry, the potency of which will be only all-too familiar to all those who ever experienced their monstrous live rendition of a Jewish prayer (which was later released as ‘My Father, My King’) – the merest mention of which may well produce painful Proustian twinges in the eardrums. In truth, the bulk of their music has always been subdued, intimate and tender. The occasional crushing riffs and/or head-cleaning noise provide punctuation, contrast, drama – all that simmering tension needs a release somewhere. So while Mogwai are sometimes written about as the quiet-REALLY LOUD-quiet band, this really is an unfairly simplistic reduction of their dynamic approach to melody, based on a relatively small sampling of their work. However, it is true to say that some people still associate Mogwai with that one trick, and to some extent expect to hear it on every release. Is that frustrating?

“Not really. It’d be churlish to complain about that because I suppose that the reason people remember us for that is because we’re pretty good at it, or that it was the first time that they’d heard that kind of thing.

During the tours for Rock Action and Happy Songs, the Mogwai live shows were growing more and more intense and brutal at the same time that the records were becoming increasingly subtle and more delicate. At this point, it almost seemed as if Mogwai was in fact two bands with conflicting aesthetics.

“I think one of the main reasons that that happened was that we felt – especially after Mogwai Young Team – that we hadn’t managed to record what it sounded like when we played like that. So we almost thought ‘why bother?’ So that’s why we got Steve Albini to record ‘My Father My King’, because that’s what he does. He records bands that can play live and makes it sound like you’re in the room with them. But then I suppose that coming up to Mr Beast we did think, well that’s why people like us. That’s the band. We might as well make a stab at it.”

Whereas a more concise approach has characterised much of Mogwai’s recent output, ‘My Father, My King’ stretched to 30 minutes, the live versions of ‘Like Herod’ clocked in at around 20, ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ was 16. Do you miss doing the longer, epic pieces?

“Not really. There are a few longer tracks on the new one. But to be honest we’ll probably start completely ripping the arse out of these ones as soon as we start playing live. It’s good fun. It never feels like we’re playing for a long time. Although on Happy Songs and Mr Beast we did edit quite a bit. I know ‘Ratts in the Capital’ was a lot longer. And it probably did make it a lot better…it probably would have been absolutely mind-numbing to listen to.”

This year also saw the reissue of the band’s debut album. The label, Chemikal Underground, deemed that a fresh buffing and boosting was required, as they were never happy with the original mastering of Mogwai Young Team.

“I haven’t got very sensitive ears, to say the least!” confesses Stuart to an astonished world. “But I was told by a lot of people that this was the case. So they went and did it again and we found some other songs from round that the time and some live stuff, so people are getting something new. I was going to say that most people wouldn’t notice mastering, but I dunno… people seem more conscious of these things these days.”

To mark the re-release, Mogwai revisited their youth by playing Young Team in its entirety at the Spanish Summercase festival.

“It was pretty weird, because there were quite a lot of songs on the record that we’d never even played, and because quite a lot of that record was done in the studio there were songs that one person had done most of the instruments, so it was like learning new songs. And there were songs that we looked back and thought ‘why did we put that on the record?’, which hit home even more when you had to play them in a room. All five of us were just like ‘Jesus Christ…what were we thinking?’”

“But ‘With Portfolio’ [Young Team’s excursion into white noise and stereo madness] was fun, actually. It started on the piano. Me and John played noise and faded it in and then we got the sound guy to pan it. I don’t know how it worked out front, but it sounded pretty fun on stage.”

“The second night that we played in Barcelona they put the stages far too close together, which happens at festivals quite a bit. And in the big quiet bit with the flute in ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’, all you could hear was ‘Belsen was a Gas’ from the Sex Pistols on the stage next door. I kind of liked it. Maybe if it had been any other band it would have been annoying. If it’d been Nickelback or someone it might not have had the same charm.”

Unlike the sometimes hectoring Godspeed You Black Emperor!, with whom they shared an audience and certain basic aesthetic similarities, Mogwai were as overtly political as you might expect for an essentially instrumental band. However, they were moved to make a statement for 1998’s ‘No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew)’ EP, an angry response to Lanarkshire Council’s imposition of a 9 PM curfew on the local kids.

“We got really wound up that they were trying to tell kids when to go home. Now they want everyone’s fucking DNA. It seems like such small potatoes. It was contextualised amazingly by Alan Grant, the Judge Dredd writer, who said he’s never doing it again because it’s beyond parody – everything that Judge Dredd said would happen in the future has happened now. There’s CCTV cameras everywhere watching what you do, the government spying on you to make sure your dog doesn’t shit on the pavement. It’s horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. I do think the way that the state controls people is pretty terrible.”

Does that make you want to do anything more explicitly political?

“I dunno… firebomb Downing Street? We try and get donations and make a bit of money for things like CND, Amnesty International, that kind of stuff. But I don’t really know what we can do. I guess in certain circles we’re pretty well known but we’re not famous. If we suddenly said that we hated ID cards it’s not going to get on the news. So there’s only really little bits and bobs you can do. But we’re open to offers.”

Mention of Judge Dredd leads, inevitably, to Batman. Allusions to the Dark Knight have cropped up once or twice in Mogwai’s history…

“I just really like Batman! Me and Dominic [Aitchison, bassist] really like comics. Aidan Moffat [of Arab Strap] is a really big Batman fan too. His girlfriend had a kid and the kid’s middle name is Batman.”

The extensive comics-related chat that ensued has been excised in order to spare the scorn and bewilderment of non-geeky readers. This is what happens when grown men who spend far too much time in Forbidden Planet find themselves in the same place.

“I actually did think about a Batman concept album,” says Stuart. “But I think it’d be better to do something involving really good comic writers. I really like Alan Moore’s spoken word stuff. It’d be great to do a record with him. The Hawk is Howling is the last record on our contract, so all of these mad ideas are now within our power to do.”

Once emancipated, Mogwai’s future releases are slated to be on their own label, Rock Action. A live album is tentatively mooted, but sadly no superhero-themed post-rock odysseys or collaborations with iconic Northamptonshire comic creators could be confirmed. Rock Action’s current residents include Remember Remember, whose compositions resemble a dream about a dream about a lost childhood kaleidoscope; the unlimited caustic guitar fury of Part Chimp; and the incredible DeSalvo, an unlikely cross between Botch and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

“DeSalvo are unbelievable. It’s frightening. They recorded their album in four days – it’s a record label’s dream. It sounds amazing. And the cover’s all nuns and pigs and stuff – so that’s exciting!”

Though clearly passionate about his own band, Stuart is equally obviously a gushing fanboy when it comes to the music of others. The recent (and astonishing) My Bloody Valentine reunion gigs at Glasgow Barrowlands set him all a-flutter.

“I’ve still got my free earplugs in my pocket! When they did the big noise part in ‘You Made Me Realise’, my wife kept miming ‘IT’S TOO LOUD’, and every time I’d smile and sound would get in. It was unbelievably loud. Kevin [Shields] had 20 amps on stage. You can’t get much louder than that. It was 135 decibels – that’s like the end of the world. It was crazy.”

When someone from Mogwai talks about excessive volume, it carries a lot of weight. And it’s oddly appropriate that, as a man who has spent the last 13 years inducing various degrees of deafness in his audiences, Stuart should receive the mother of all aural pummellings at the hands of one of Mogwai’s prime influences, one of the main reasons this band exists at all. But what’s the point of forming a band? Why make music in the first place?

“I dunno. Just…fun. It’s fun to make music. We just wanted to make a bunch of noise. And I really don’t think the fundamental reason we do it has changed at all. Obviously it’s completely different now – we’re not rehearsing at Martin [Bulloch, drummer]’s parents’ house any more. It feels like a privilege. Especially to be able to do it and make a living from it, it’s amazing. But even just to get to do it and have anyone give a shit about it, it’s brilliant!”

It’s become all too easy to take Mogwai for granted. They’ve been around for a long time now, and unlike My Bloody Valentine, they’ve never been away long enough to be missed. They’ve become relatively omnipresent – in video games, as bed music for televised football, even cropping up in Sex and the City. And they inhabit their style so completely that it’s easy to mistake immersion and evolution for inertia. But, despite their numerous imitators, they remain unique, a band who’ve succeeded on their own terms through continually developing a huge, beautiful and theoretically uncommercial sound that’s truly their own. Revel in them while you can.

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla)

GORILLA JOURNALISM

2009-07-13T02:29:00.000-07:00

SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM

IN GLORIOUS TIMES

(THE END)

Oakland-based avant-whatever collective SGM’s second album out-bombasted their remarkable debut to the exact same degree that their debut out-bombasted everyone else. Album number three, therefore, comes burdened by the unreasonable expectations of their discerningly rabid followers.

They needn’t be concerned. Ten-minute lead track ‘The Companions’ is a bold opening gambit, expressing mortal terror through stark, overtly theatrical means. Nils Frykdahl’s normally domineering voice grows ever more pathetic in desperation as the music swells to a lurching throb. It’s as ominously subtle as ‘Helpless Corpses Enactment’ is excessively metallic, a brutal piece of pure mathematic evil, more rabid goat than song. ‘Puppet Show’ is similarly dramatic, its tinkling music box and thundering celestial choirs a perfect soundtrack for skewering Patrick Troughton with a cast-iron weather vane. Carla Kihlstedt’s beguiling voice shimmers and simmers on ‘Formicary and ‘Angle of Repose’, the latter’s paroxysmal climax her most powerful vocal to date. Best of all is the twisty-turny brutality of ‘The Widening Eye’, whose impossible cerebral heaviness will make Robert Fripp cry tears of proggy blood.

This is a beautiful-sounding, luscious and spacious record. And the combination of a massively heavy backline with violins, glockenspiels and Sleepytime’s arsenal of Heath Robinson-esque homemade instruments gives their super-intense arrangements a unique texture. It’s easily the band’s strongest, furthest reaching, most focused effort yet. But if there’s a drawback, it’s that there’s so much going on – a vast array of styles and sounds, an overload of rhythmic convulsions and melodic ingenuity – that it will keep you from listening to anything else for six months while you obsess over its abundant detail.

A LITTLE CHAT WITH SGM

There really aren’t many bands like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. There’s the name for a start. There’s the fact that they chiefly draw inspiration from arcane literature, the Futurists and the proto-Surrealist Dada movement. Their records are packaged in warm, welcoming sepia, strewn with oblique 19th-century imagery and endless reams of possibly forged historical text. They hit the stage in facepaint and robes, wielding bizarre homemade instruments. Their stage shows have been known to incorporate pseudo-academic lectures and Japanese butoh dancers. In truth, if you didn’t know better you’d think they were a sinister atavistic cult or a performance-art collective, rather than a rock band. But that’s before you hear the music – and if the ephemera that surrounds the band appears to be wilfully obfuscatory, then the task of encapsulating their sound is just impossible.

Suffice to say that if you’re at all intrigued by the idea of a backwoods Meshuggah jamming with a deeply paranoid King Crimson; or a junk-shop Mr Bungle performing monstrously twisted versions of Kurt Weill tunes; or Hair as mangled by a Magma/Voivod supergroup, then Sleepytime are for you. The music is insanely over-complicated, but it’s not exactly prog. It can be crushingly heavy, but it’s not really metal. It’s dramatic, excessive and technical, but simultaneously intimate, engaging and charming. It’s as dark, jagged and discomfiting as it is beautiful, funny and absurd. Lyrically, we’re talking the Unabomber, demonic donkeys, anti-technology tirades, heresy, fear and redemption through ordeal, all filtered through an expansive vocabulary and a highly literary imagination.

And yet this most idiosyncratic, distinctive and inventive of bands has thus far had a relatively low profile in the UK – for one thing, they’ve never played over here. But all that may be set to change. Newly signed to The End records following a two-album stint on Web of Mimicry (the label run by Trey Spruance of Mr Bungle/Secret Chiefs 3), the band have just released In Glorious Times – their most ambitious and darkly rewarding collection yet. When Rock-a-Rolla catch up with Sleepytime, they’re mid-tour in the States, revitalised by simple pastoral pleasures following a gig with thundering stoner-doom trio Stinking Lizaveta.

“We’ve got the day off,” explains a clearly contented and excitable Matthias Bossi, drummer. “We’ve showered for the first time in many weeks and we’re staying at my sister’s place, with her menagerie of dogs and cats and rabbits and kittens and ponies and things. Generally in great spirits. We’re just hanging out for the day and then we’ll probably take off into the woods to go camping or something.”

Camping? Ponies and bunny rabbits? Not exactly what you expect from a touring band. Whatever happened to traditional on-the-road activities like snorting rat poison out of an unconscious groupie…? Mind you, all that stuff can become tiresome very quickly, and Sleepytime have been at this for a good many years. Bassist Dan Rathbun and guitarist/vocalist Nils Frykdahl formed their first band, Acid Rain (later Idiot Flesh), in the mid-1980s in Oakland, California. Nils, a laid-back, affable and thoughtful chap, offers some insights into their dim, distant past:

“It started as a high-school band and transformed into the band that eventually transformed into Sleepytime. It was kind of a long, gradual process. We lived in an anarchist co-op together and we played there. There were huge parties…better than most clubs.”

The late and indubitably great Kurt Vonnegut once summed up the directing force behind our lives thus: “I was the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.” The same is true of the circumstances behind the meeting of Nils and Dan.

“It was a happy accident. Our bass player called to say he couldn’t make the gig. We saw Dan walking around and thought ‘That guy can play the bass’. He learned everything we had in the time it took to play the songs. He’s really sharp. At that point, I was coming more out of a metal background and Dan was coming from progressive rock.”

Not only did the fusion of these two lead to some spectacular achievements on a musical level, but Rathbun’s wide-ranging technical proficiencies have proved to be vital in other ways during their 20-year partnership.

“Dan is able to hold down the material aspects of a rock band,” explains Nils. “He builds instruments, records the albums, fixes the bus – we’d never have left Oakland if it wasn’t for him. And our relationship’s been pretty stable. We established our respective roles pretty early on and we cover really different ground while working together, which enables us to have pretty long-term projects in bands that are somewhat experimental and don’t have big record label interest. It’s not like we stay together for the big money that we’re pulling in.”

Idiot Flesh became something of a cult, renowned for their bizarre heaviosity and extravagant, theatrical performances. Although the band ceased to be in 1998, Dan and Nils’ partnership had barely begun. It was through their work with Jewlia Eisenberg’s gender- and ethnicity-bending experimental troupe Charming Hostess that the two Idiot Fleshers met Carla Kihlstedt, and the singular chemistry for Sleepytime began to come together.

“As Idiot Flesh was starting to unravel, we had in mind continuing to work with Carla as a singer. And then she started also playing violin and we knew we had some shared interests. When we first met Carla she was playing Bartok while warming up, so we knew we had in common an interest in incorporating new classical music into a rock context. David Shamrock (Idiot Flesh drummer) was also interested in classical and rock. But we didn’t know that it would turn into a band.”

“The only wild card at that point was (original percussionist) Moe! Staiano. He was definitely very deliberately that – a physical player, very visceral, very chaotic, very destructive, who played with metal sticks on metal drums. We saw him playing around town and thought he’d be a great foil for David, who could play his ass off, but was the most controlled drummer I’ve ever played with.”

It’s exactly this fortuitous convergence of styles and personalities that allows the Sleepytime sound to exist. Vocal responsibilities are shared between Nils and Carla, his full-bore death-metal roar and vast crevasse of a baritone a perfect counterpoint to her impure, strong and sensuous lullabies. Alongside traditional rock instrumentation, violins, organs, glockenspiels, autoharps, lutes and trombones are drafted into service, as are an array of exceptionally tantalising noise-making devices built by power-bassist Dan – the ‘sledgehammer dulcimer’, the ‘percussion guitar’, the ‘Viking rowboat’, the ‘popping turtle’. New drummer Matthias keeps this potentially sprawling cacophony grounded with precise, powerful polyrhythms, while percussionist Michael Mellender more than fills the now-departed Moe!’s seat as he beats the living cobblers out of a battalion of chains and metal objects. In keeping with the band’s roots on an anarchist co-op, it’s very much a collective effort, every individual playing their part in producing this remarkably complex and densely layered music.

“All five people write,” says Nils. “In Glorious Times represents the widest variety of writing of all our records, with the addition of Michael, who is also a multi-instrumentalist, and Matthias, our new kick drummer. The compositional process really varies – Dan tends to bring in through-composed scores with everybody’s parts pretty fleshed out on paper, aside from Matthias’s drum parts. We then infuse it with our stylistic leanings and tones. And arrangement choices are always open to the whole group as an ongoing process. We kind of work on the material for a while, refine it and then record it and then play it live.”

“I tend to bring in fairly skeletal song ideas, based on ideas that don’t necessarily fly from beginning to end, and we will embellish them and all jam on that. The composing happens through improvisation. By the time we’re playing it live it tends to be very wide open. Part of the benefit for me of that is that everyone’s playing is representative of their emotions and humanity, they’re playing the way they like to rather than the way it’s supposed to be instrumented. It’s very different from they way it would be if wrote everything down as a score, which I used to do more of. I was trained in that.”

“Part of the inspiration for getting this band together was to have a group that could compose from a texture-based start on sonics, and work up melodically from there, rather than the other way around. And with the home-made instruments, if you don’t have your hands on them then it’s hard to imagine what the part would be for them. Like, say, the sledgehammer dulcimer or Carla’s percussion guitar, which is on at least half of the material on the new album, or all Michael’s metal and chains…it’s pretty hard to sit around under a tree somewhere with a guitar and imagine what the percussion guitar part might be.”

So it’s left to the operator?

“Yeah. That way you get something back out of their playing.”

Although all five members of the band participate, In Glorious Times is perhaps the band’s most focused album thus far. In fact, in keeping with Nils’ interest in progressive rock, it feels almost like a (whisper it) concept album. Listening to 2001’s Grand Opening and Closing, the astonishing first record, you’d be forgiven for thinking Sleepytime were several different bands. It’s difficult to reconcile, for example, the explosive trailer-park metal of ‘1997’ with the Victorian Gothic unease of ‘Ablutions’ or the agrarian mosaic-prog of ‘The Stain’. The follow-up, Of Natural History, felt like a band finding their niche, being more confident in their vision, whether they were engaged in visceral avant-metal (‘The Donkey-headed Adversary…’), demonic show tunes (‘A Hymn to the Morningstar’) or Baroque revulsion (‘Cockroach’). Though the bewilderingly wide range of styles is still in evidence on the new record, the overall tone is more cohesive throughout, almost as if the album is one long piece.

“Oh really? Well that’s great!” says Nils. “It was definitely a concern that the diversity, which has always been there, was starting to feel like just that. Not that it’s a derogatory term, but it’s not the overall intent. When somebody brings something in, we want to make sure that it makes sense within our trajectory, within absolutely non-dogmatic and non-defined parameters. We don’t want to cut ourselves off from anything. We enjoy a lot of different kinds of music, a lot of which sounds nothing like what we do…”

Nils is keen to stress that the band’s personal lives have no bearing on their music, but it’s undeniable that there is a deeply personal aspect to the new record.

“The lyrical, thematic concept of the album as a whole was based primarily on the fact of the death of my brother and band artist since Idiot Flesh days, Per Frykdahl. His influence is pretty immeasurable on me and on the whole emotional tone – the humour, the blend of black comedy and warmth – and the album as a whole, the title, many of the lyrical themes of death and rebirth or the recycling of matter or the persistence of form… Interestingly enough, a lot of these themes were already in place as a central theme in our work from the beginning anyway, but they took on a certain clarified form.”

Though a background presence in the music, Per’s presence can be felt most strongly in the album’s packaging, a three-way gatefold adorned with pages and writing from his notebooks. Sleepytime have always had a particular eye for mysterious, elaborate presentation. Exploring the text and imagery of the first two albums is like being given the key to a musty library of occult tomes and anthropological curios.

“We like to steer things in various directions with the album packaging, the liner notes…we want people to delve into another layer. Then people can make it their own, which is what it’s for, after all. We’re not putting it out there to write our biographies. The packaging is very important. The music comes first, but the art is a very big part of the whole. Most of us love books more than just about anything else, so the chance to assemble little books is a real thrill. None of us are writers per se, we’re grubby touring musicians, but we like to make little artefacts that somewhat resemble those that we so readily overload our bus with.”

As well as the heavy, labyrinthine music and intriguing packaging, the band’s theatrical stage presence, the make-up and the robes all contribute to their esoteric air.

“There’s no heavy cult of personality,” offers Nils. “We’re keen to avoid that. I really haven’t had to deal with band fandom. People are hesitant to talk to us while we’re in ‘the mode’, with the costumes. But to counteract that, when I can I like to come out and sell the merchandise and talk to people. Although we don’t present ourselves as the real people that we are, we ARE real people. We’re regular folks.”

Well, that’s debatable…but are the people who come to Sleepytime shows regular folks? Given the many levels on which the band operates, you might expect them to attract as many devotees of Thomas Pynchon or avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch as they do rivetheads in search of brutally heavy thrills.

“Our audience is fantastically varied. There’s definitely an element of rock and metal fans, but also older progressive rock fans, or people who are there partly for the pageantry, the spectacle – there are people who come for various aspects of it. And the fact is that we are all of those people… I was and still am a metalhead at heart. I still get really excited about some nutcase from Norway burning my ears with the most brutal metal I’ve ever heard. But we’re also total nerds.”

If all this talk of theatre and dance and literature has placed anyone in any doubt as to the intensity of the Sleepytime experience, it’s worth noting that a mere mention of things metal sends Nils into an enthusiastic reverie…

“I saw Enslaved recently. They’ve been around for a while but I just saw them live. They were pretty fantastic. They’re getting more into ’70s progressive now. Also Leviathan, out of San Francisco, kind of a Burzum-like, textured black metal… And out of the Ukraine, a band called Hate Forest. Oh my god, they’re really, really intense! Utterly precise and super monotonous, completely fast, unwavering, no fills…”

On the basis of their recent tours of the US and Continental Europe, the cult of Sleepytime seems to be growing, largely due to the rabid evangelising of their followers.

“It’s pretty much word of mouth. Although I think the Internet helps. When we toured Europe last month, nobody had the album, but there were lots of people singing along in Poland, even though they don’t speak a lick of English. Really amazing.”

So does this mean a UK tour might finally be on the cards?

“We certainly hope so. We’re very aware of a potential audience there. The whole front row of our show in Amsterdam had flown over from England, and were the most vocal and wildly enthusiastic people in the room. They were great! We know we have lots of friends over there so we’ll definitely try to make that happen.”

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla)

REBORED

2009-07-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

BOREDOMS/MICHAEL GIRA

THE ARCHES, GLASGOW, 23/10/07

First, a bedtime story. Way back in summer 2002, Boredoms played at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Unexpectedly, a last-minute act was added to the bill in the form of John Cale. Two experimental adventurers for the price of one – bonus. Boredoms played first, spinning infinite amounts of fizzy endorphin magic from just three drumkits and a yelping stick figure with dreads. There was much rejoicing, and much dancing in the aisles. Then Cale played, alone at an electronic piano, his dour Dylan Thomas-informed sprechesang almost visibly corroding the love of life that Boredoms had generated. Many people walked out, desperate to salvage those last remnants of carefree delirium. You had to feel sorry for Cale – it really wasn’t his fault that people valued the rare and lofty peak of Boredoms glee enough to want to keep it for as long as possible.

There’s a moral to this tale. Don’t follow joy with misery; it doesn’t take. Tonight, history repeats itself, though some lessons have been learned. This evening also sees Boredoms twinned with a legendary merchant of melancholy – but at least he’s on first. Michael Gira, revered core of Swans and Angels of Light, almost seems to be mocking the aesthetic mismatch as he darkly croons ‘God damn the sun’. Could he make the dichotomy more obvious? With his Brylcreemed hair, white shirt and braces, Gira resembles a frontier barman. His appearance is an external symptom of his preoccupations, his role as a teller of tales from an forgotten, perhaps fictional America. The songs, performed solo on an acoustic guitar, are dusty byways where everyone is out to rob and kill you. His insistent, heavy grooves are overlaid with guttural howls that demand fight or flight. For all the flashes of primal power and endless darkness, there’s a fine, fuzzy line between a gutsy harrowing bellow and a Stars in Their Eyes Jandek performed by Ian Astbury. Gira crosses this line a few times, but at least makes apologetic reference to his wayward voice. And even though he’s not on top form, his presence and songs guarantee an enraptured crowd.

Gira is impressive, but there’s only so much crushing gloom a body can stand. Antidote time. But Boredoms’ drum-circle line-up – Eye plus Yoshimi, Muneomi Senju and Yojiro – has been plying essentially the same set for a good few years now. Is there anything new in Bore-world?

It’s always a good sign when Eye arrives on stage with his balls out. He throws shapes clutching his glowing, motion-sensitive electronic orbs; with every flick of the wrist, every snap of the elbow, they crack the air with blasts of coruscating noise. It’s so ridiculously exciting, the atmosphere so alive with energy, that you could go home right now and still have seen the best gig of your life. But then the three drummers take their seats and a lopsided, almost proggy beat begins to take shape. The percussive onslaught is as energised as ever, but it’s clear that the well-worked Boredoms set has either been refined beyond recognition or discarded almost entirely in favour of an even more ecstatic aesthetic. The 2007 incarnation is less linear, more intricately structured, with more microscopic attention to stops, starts, sudden shifts. And yet for all its enhanced structure it’s still compellingly danceable, especially during Yoshimi’s funky keyboard arpeggios. She’s a total powerhouse throughout, a blur of silver lamé and skinny limbs, while Eye raises the ritualistic temperature ever higher with his chants and samples. He has a new secret weapon too – a rack mounted with seven guitar necks, each tuned to a different chord and amplified beyond sanity. Beating them with big sticks or small, he’s a one-man Glenn Branca guitar choir. It’s a truly vast sound, one that takes the already supernaturally good Boredoms experience as close as it gets to utter perfection. If this doesn’t move your muscles then you’re probably dead. With so many new ideas crammed into a seemingly limited format, it’s clear that the Boredoms’ evolution from a chaotic experimental punk band into an unstoppable avant-trance joy-machine is still a work in progress.

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla)

DEAR ZU

2009-06-24T03:05:00.000-07:00

CARBONIFEROUS

(IPECAC)

So 2009 has barely begun, but it looks like we have a winner: Roman bass/drums/sax trio Zu are waltzing off with the album of the year prize. Carboniferous wastes no time in justifying this arguably dubious and certainly premature claim… ‘Ostia’ kicks in with an impossibly sexy live techno throb underpinned by obese bass, before evolving through several larval stages, each more obscenely exciting, twisted and hyperactive than the last.

‘Chthonian’, featuring Buzz Osbourne, is so vastly sludgy that it out-Melvins Melvins and then gets all wildly polyrhythmic and irresistibly danceable, just to make you die from joy. There’s no room for slack here: eight more tracks blaze by, each and every one a killer, big on ultra-precise low-end syncopation, bawdy bludgeon and rhythmically fiendish tangents. Somewhere in there Mike Patton shows up twice, to great effect, but his usually domineering presence is somewhat more diffident, audibly cowed by the monstrosity that this band have become.

The degree to which Zu have been enhanced is almost absurd, akin to bolting an interplanetary rocket booster to a Lamborghini. Their former mathpunkjazzcore was peerless in terms of intricacy and invention, but this is the new and improved 2009 model, in which raging complexity is supercharged by serious heaviness and copious grooves. No dry intellectualism, this – Carboniferous’s natural habitat is the dancefloor/moshpit/boudoir. To reiterate: album of the year. No lie.

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla)

ZU INTERVU

A bass saxophone, almost as tall as the man who wields it, thunders like the Horn of Gondor, shaking loose kneecaps and rupturing intestines. A spindly man in shorts chokes and mangles the life out of a seemingly innocent bass, sputtering and stuttering deep-black arcs of metallic crunch. Impossibly twisted beats that lurch and thrash like the death throes of copulating snakes overtake the man on the drum stool, who abandons his post and rattles out trigonometric paradiddles on a speaker cabinet instead. Jaws drop, nodding heads simplify patterns, and stiff bodies dance awkwardly to irregular rhythms. It’s a wet March Thursday in Glasgow, and Zu are headlining Stereo. The three-piece from Rome have been perfecting their dextrous band of hyper-complex, twitchily heavy low-frequency instrumental skronk over the past decade, and my god but it shows. Musically, they’re one mind only ever-so-slightly inconvenienced by the necessity of being split into three bodies. Their post-human tightness and devious compositions have carried them across the world’s oceans, and attracted collaborators ranging from free-jazz legends to the godfathers of experimental sludge. Rock-a-Rolla finds bassist Massimo Pupillo backstage, accompanied by a vast bowl of gratis curry and the room-shaking soundchecks of support bands Action Beat and Vars of Litchi. A personable, inspiring and enthusiastic chap, he begins by explaining how Zu came together:

“Me and Luca [Mai, sax] met when we were 14. We were from the same neighbourhood in Rome, a very, very suburban area near the sea where nothing happens – except a lot of people stealing and a lot of junkies. Those are the main two attractions of the place. So with really, really few people who were into music at all, it was easy to connect with the one other weirdo who was. Friendship and music obsession became a band.”

“But it took a long time for us to focus and understand what we really wanted to do. The band came together in ’97, but we became Zu in 1999. We decided to stop gigging for two years. This why the band is called Zu – it means ‘closed’ in German. So for two years we just closed ourselves off in a room and just practiced until we found the idea of what we are. Everything we listen to is important to us. We don’t choose with a rational mind where we want to go and how we develop the direction of the band. We are such voracious listeners that we want to take out parts of our taste and explore them – we want to do this Naked City kind of thing, where we just slice up, cut and paste every kind of music. You play one bar of country, one bar of hardcore…we want everything digested, mixed together.”

“There were no conscious decisions. Not having a guitar came about because we couldn’t find a guitarist we liked. We try to work with what we have. By itself, the instrumentation we have is very limited. There’s no harmonic instrument in the band, which limits the music a lot. It’s good, it forces you to be more inventive.”

For all its compositional and technical intelligence, Zu’s music has always been emotional too, leaning heavily towards the fierce, the aggressive. Massimo believes a harsh environment may well produce harsh art. “Music and geography are connected,” he says. “You express many things in music, you write your biography. You listen to music by somebody, and through that you speak of your place. We started at an early age listening to metal, then hardcore punk, industrial music, free jazz, avant-garde…everything. All kinds of angry music. We think we express the other side of Rome, away from the classical architecture. Rome is such a Catholic place, and we are deeply anti-Catholic. My parents were completely atheistic, very, very left-wing people.”

A self-taught bassist, Massimo has developed a fiendishly spidery, twangy style that’s highly distinctive. But why pick up this most unglamorous and anonymous of instruments in the first place? “It’s the same story as each and every bass player. In my first band, the guitar player was better than me, so I played bass. It was the perfect choice. I really felt at home. It’s a very underrated instrument. I don’t use a lot of pedals… [One is] a crazy hand-made evil distortion. This also involves limitations. It took me ten years to use pedals. For a long time I went straight into the amp, exploring what it was possible to do with my hands.”

“I’ve always been drawn to bass players that built a structure and not just followed chords – like early Charlie Haden when he was with Ornette Coleman. Rob from Nomeansno has been a huge inspiration, as was Mike Watt, Sasaki from the Ruins, and of course the masters – Mingus, etc. And Peter Hook, who did something different, building the song from a bassline, not just following chords. I think maybe if you are taught how to play then it’s more difficult to unlearn what you’ve been taught and do something new.”

This striving for the new, pushing themselves ever onwards, is what keeps Zu alive, keeps their music fresh – and most importantly, keeps it fun for the band themselves. “Every song contains something that’s new for us, “ says Massimo. “If you repeat yourself, it’s easier to sell records, it’s easier for a journalist to say ‘They do this music’, but it’s less interesting for you as a musician. We want to grow through our music.”

What kind of music that is is open to debate. There are discrete elements of many things in there – prog, math-rock, noise, metal – but no genre’s norms dominate at any given time. And one particular classification raises Massimo’s hackles more than most. “We mostly know what we are not,” he says. “We are not a jazz band. We don’t consider ourselves to be a jazz band at all, especially not free jazz. People see a saxophone and think jazz. But the music is so structured and composed that I don’t know how anyone can think it’s free. I play exactly what Jacopo [Battaglia]’s kick drum plays, or play a counter-rhythm. If you listen, you’ll see it’s not free.”

Though their albums and live gigs more than stand on their own merit, the subject of collaboration looms large when you talk about Zu. Following chance meetings, copious drinks and unfettered mutual appreciation at gigs and festivals, they’ve ended up recording with, among others, electro-ambient composer Nobukazu Takemura, scattergun free-jazzers Mats Gustaffson and Ken Vandermark, and experimental guitar legend Eugene Chadbourne. An album with Nomeansno’s Rob Wright on vocals and second bass is in development. Right now, they’ve just completed a short European tour with Mike Patton, giving avant-rock’s foremost workaholic free reign to splatter his vocal tics all over their work. “The plan is to have the next record on Ipecac, and he will be on some of the songs, but we don’t know how many yet. We’ve done one song with the Melvins too. There are a million bands trying to do what they do, but they’re very clever musicians.”

Massimo promises that the Melvins tune will appear in tonight’s set, and that it’s very easy to spot. It’s an optimistic claim, partly because Zu are far heavier, denser, more vicious than they were when they first visited the UK with (Sweep the Leg Johnny spin-off) Check Engine in 2001. Back then, their complexity, energy and presence was in place, but there was also a brittleness to their disorienting rumble. Zu 2008 have been working out, big style. At least half of tonight’s songs have sufficient mass and crunch to suggest that they are Melvins-bound. There’s a cowload more muscle to their sound, largely thanks to Massimo’s newfound willingness to embrace the effects pedal, but also due to a more bullish attack from the whole band. The cranking up of the heaviness quotient suits Zu, their syncopated sideways assaults more punchy, more brutal, but no less dizzying, no less structurally overwhelming.

What’s clearly evident about Zu, both as people and in their intricately confrontational skree, is that they relish the oppositional, prioritise the importance of friction and struggle in the development of art and of the self. Playing the kind of music they do takes devotion, obstinacy, and courage. “It was really hard in the beginning, in Rome. Even friends of ours were like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ But we gained strength. We really wanted to prove something. That you could live, or at least survive, playing this music. It’s quite a privilege, even though sometimes you’ll be broke, and you’re always at risk. It keeps life interesting…though sometimes you’d like less interesting. But it’s amazing. Being on tour so much is also good for the music. We wouldn’t be so tight if we only played 20 shows a year. And if we hadn’t had such shitty jobs we’d have no perspective. For years I was illegally putting up concert posters in Rome. If I have to live a basic lifestyle, I’d rather be on tour. I never dreamed of playing arenas, I never thought of myself like that. I always wanted to play music for the love of it; I thought it could save your life. And I’ve achieved more than I ever dreamed of.”

(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla)

UNSEEN SCOTTAGE

2009-06-18T16:29:00.000-07:00

SCOTT WALKER

THE DRIFT

(4AD)

You know Scott. Toothsome Europhile American with a stirring baritone. Sang classy downbeat ’60s pop. Waltzed with Brel on four magnificent, eponymous records. Briefly a light-entertainment TV star. Released the industrial, nihilistic Tilt in 1995. Disappeared, resurfacing only to produce Pulp, curate a festival and record a song for a sub-standard Bond movie. One of pop’s most revered hermits.

Naturally, his first new record in ten years comes with an unfair burden of expectation and/or dread. And physically at least, The Drift is exactly what you might expect. A matte-black cover spattered with Rothko red. A lavish booklet sprinkled with cryptic lyrics spatially arranged with the attention to kinetic detail of ee cummings:

‘Stars led to sky/ lash led to eye/ herpes to clit/ then stopped.’

‘Rabbi crater/ keyed for action/ hits the marks.’

‘The chair had/ been shifted/ ever so slightly/ say/ five feet or/ two centimetres.’

‘Cossacks Are’ opens with surprising force. A high-pitched drone. A chiming double-helix of tremolo-laden guitar. Bass and drums grind out a galloping, desperate rhythm. Walker’s voice arrives, intoning ‘A moving aria for a vanishing state of mind’, as an incongruous operatic howl, trading his former sonorous powers for tremulous melodrama. He’s a Dadaist Orbison singing about torsos and cowboys for a minimalist Jesus Lizard. It’s profoundly unsettling – and by far one of most straightforward of the album’s ten songs.

The majority of the tracks are dense, amorphous nightmares, remarkable for their intensity, if not their accessibility. Monstrous mosaics assembled from atonal drones, merciless percussion, subliminal whispers, unexpected bursts of shore-leave jazz. When the massed onslaught of pounding drums, violently woozy strings and meat-slapping arrives in ‘Clara’, the visceral horror of it is astonishing even after repeated listens. But the arrival of the female voice representing the title character, Mussolini’s mistress, is even more jarring in its elegiac beauty.

In many ways this is an even more dark and vicious record than Tilt, but there’s bizarre humour in there too, in Walker’s infantilised use of ‘pee-pee’, the repeated declarations of his intent to assault an Irish donkey, even a Donald Duck impression. Just as baffling is the closing track, ‘A Lover Loves’, a relatively welcoming and upbeat 120 seconds of guitar, voice and some of the album’s most absurd lyrics. It is, apparently, ‘…a waltz for a dodo, a samba for Bambi…a polka for Tintin’.

So does it work? Is it Un Chien Andalou on record, a perfection of the art of the uncanny, the unknowable terror within? A bewildering mishmash of random signifiers of gloom? The most remarkable and unforgettable record you’ll hear all year? Most likely, it’s all three.

(originally written for Beard magazine. unpublished)

TWO SPLURGES ABOUT SUNN O)))

2009-06-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

SUNN O)))
MONOLITHS AND DIMENSIONS
(SOUTHERN LORD)

Being the most suffocatingly intense band in the world is clearly not enough for Sunn O))). No, they insist on gathering Eyvind Kang, Dylan Carlson, Julian Priester and others, referencing Miles Davis and Alice Coltrane, and evolving right out of their robes. Each of these four tracks is a standout in its own right. ‘Aghartha’ splinters under its own mass as chords fall like slabs of meat upon cold tiles, Attila Csihar intones at the speed of granite, and Namoric horns summon behemoths. The astonishing ‘Big Church’ interweaves the divine and the diabolical: a seraphic choir led by Jessika Kenney wards off hellish grinding, to genuinely theologically terrifying effect. Unusually direct and rocking, ‘Hunting & Gathering’ rides a gnarly riff redolent of Boris-era Melvins. But ‘Alice’, the most explicitly Kangy piece, is the apex. Rising swells of brass and electronics puncture prairie chimes, and its overwhelming climax is, quite unfeasibly, like emerging from a barbed nightmare into a field of fragrant orchids. Brutal, evocative, horrifying and beautiful, Monoliths… is the sound of Sunn O))) obliterating expectations.

(originally published in Plan B)

SUNN O))) @ CORSICA STUDIOS, LONDON

A sentient health-and-safety violation shambles his way through the crowd, swinging a hot censer billowing an intense High Catholic fug. Security bricks of intimidating proportions follow in his wake, stern, nervous. O’Malley and Anderson, standing before an altar made of amps, and hidden beneath austere, moon-grey ceremonial robes, cast claw-like gestures of supplication. The acolytes respond in kind. In case the symbolism is lost, this is Church. Yea, we are gathered here to worship. And the divine object of our pitiful, wretched adoration is the first two seconds of the opening riff of Black Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’. It’s in that moment, the first charred chord, a wrecking ball striking a tomb wall, that metal was forged. Many claims have been made for the diabolical influence of the whole tritone riff, but the real startling power lies in the pure intestinal impact of that single chord strike. Sunn o))) take this insight, and extrapolate it to infinity. Lower, slower, louder. Lower, slower, louder. Repeat until dead, deaf or immortal.

In truth, the second of those three options is the most likely. I’ve attended some sadistically loud gigs in my time. For me, Mogwai, a decade ago at the Astoria, was probably the first to go beyond pedestrian levels of stupefying heavy-metal volume and into the realms of Mega-City One sonic weaponry. Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Jazkammer, My Bloody Valentine, Part Chimp, a particularly harrowing one-on-one in a small room with Kylie Minoise – all, in their own way, were thoroughly excessive in unreasonably thrilling ways. But Sunn o)))… Loud, yes. Stupidly loud, certainly. But loud in a way that you hear from the ground up. Music that gives your duodenum tinnitus, drones that reverberate through your skeleton. The knees take the brunt; the pelvis only suffers a touch of purpling at its crest. By the time the shockwaves reach your ears they’re a mere shade of themselves, only capable of semi-lethally roughing up your soft tissues for their lunch money.

Tonight’s one-off is a low-key low-end treat for grimm devotees. In town to plug their upcoming release, Monoliths & Dimensions, Anderson and O’Malley revisit the now-we-are-ten Grimmrobes Demos. (Or at least something potentially approximating them. Let’s be honest, it’s difficult to extract anything recognisable from this overwhelming caustic morass.) In recent years, Sunn o))) have expanded their line-up, their putrefying sound given living, liquid form by freshly disinterred vocals from Attila Csihar; extra muscle and mass from Justin Broadrick; morbidly swelling textures from Guapo’s Daniel O’Sullivan (whose support slot tonight as Grumbling Fur, in collaboration with Alexander Tucker, wove transporting rural gothic terror-drones from mere violin and cello), etc. But tonight, they’re devolved: no guests, no guff, just two guitars, some leftover Rosicrucian habits, a wall of Sunn amps, some really, really, really sloooow and heavy riffs, The End.

Not only that, but their usual obfuscating theatrics are hamstrung. The hot spotlights sizzle O’Malley’s cloak, and every few minutes he makes frustrated throat-slicing cut-the-lights gestures to the techies. The trademark shield of dry ice fails to co-operate too, dissipating almost as soon as it is fwooshed on stage, leaving them looking like thwarted conjurors. (As an aside, a universal gig truth: no matter how loud your band, that fwoosh is much louder.) Yet, denuded in several ways, Sunn o))) are at their most powerful. Underneath all the husks and disguises and grandiose artistic trappings that they’ve acquired lately is a concentrated distillation of the proper heavy stuff: pure mainlined Melvins tar, only without the distracting fripperies of, y’know, actual songs and words and beats and all that extraneous crap.

(Yes, Earth did it first, and arguably better, but Carlson’s gone all Shimmering Jim Jarmusch these days. A noble and beautiful pursuit, for sure, but someone has to keep the bones quaking.)

For all its cultish congregational air, this experience is in fact a solipsistic one, in which each individual locks into the psycho- and physiological effects of extreme bass and volume and slowness. We’re dwarfed by noise. We’ve shrunk to microscopic size and are being fired down a high-voltage cable. We’re trapped inside that Black Sabbath drang like a wasp in a jam jar. Music that moves at extreme speeds, fast or slow, makes its own tempo in a secret, personal pact with the listener. And this intimacy reveals a truth – the trappings of gothic doom and monastic horror, of extremity and misery and degradation, tend to detract from the simple fact that Sunn o))) are both FUN and SEXY, no? So cartoonishly extreme that they’re entertainingly preposterous; so perfectly refined in terms of pure Platonic-form sonics that anyone with even the vaguest love for the crushing chug must surely abandon themselves to this frill-free sensual celebration. This is metal-as-fetish, anatomical riff examination, the frotting of the frets, the orgasm of the overdrive.

Come and worship. Worship and come.

(originally published in Plan B)

so yerrrs.

2009-06-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

this place is intended to be an online repository for my published and unpublished scribblings about music over the past few years.

I mostly write for Rock-a-Rolla, but have also done bits and bobs for The Quietus, and the now sadlydefunct Plan B and Beard.

generally speaking, we're talking avant-rock, weirdo metal, squalling improvisation, delicate sound weavings, gruelling noise, intricate proggery, naive charm, wayward jazz, crushing doom, gauche exotica, crass cultural tourism, exuberant orchestral fantasies, girl pop and lovely sprawling pronk.

from time to time I might write about some other stuff too.

all reviews will be posted in their original, unedited form.

enjoy. or not. what do I care?