52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #47

Carcass – Heartwork

(Earache Records, 1993)

Buy the album here

This was the beginning of the end. Carcass, previously described as a grindcore band, had produced an album that thrust them in to the MTV mainstream. For many fans at the time, it marked a point of no return for the band: an opinion proven both true and untrue. Heartwork showed the simultaneously gritty and groovy sound that Carcass could accomplish, and had Columbia Records pushing for big money success on their follow-up, the oft-derided Swansong. As the title of this new album may have suggested, the band did not stay together, or with the record label, even long enough to tour that material. Ironically it is the earlier Heartwork's brilliance that precipitated their demise, but also cemented their status as legends of British death metal, and paved the way for their successful return to recording with 2012's well received, Surgical Steel.

The artwork of Heartwork is the visual embodiment of the sonic balance between underground grind/death and traditional rock that Carcass found here. The most widely known of H.R. Giger's works are disturbing blends of biomechanical eroticism and Freudian castration fears. Art as dark and horrific as his seldom finds widespread acceptance or appreciation, but with the success of the Alien film franchise his xenomorph and face hugger designs entered the mainstream and came to define the science fiction and horror genres over the last four decades. The album cover displays a reworked version of Giger's sculpture, Life Support 1993, originally produced in the 1960s, which perfectly draws together the cold, medical terminology grindcore of their past with the warmer, catchier populism of songs like, “No Love Lost”. Carcass, like Giger via Ridley, took their dark and horrific vision to the mainstream by way of traditional song structures and more groove-laden, headbanging riffs. In so doing they created one of the most memorable death metal albums of all time.

Tighter and more focused than their other great album, Necroticism:Descanting The Insalubrious, no time is wasted getting straight to the heart of this piece: great riffs. The opening riff of “Buried Dreams” is absolutely killer, with little peaks of harmonised guitars tingling the spine, while Ken Owens' controlled, mid paced double bass work accentuates the catchy foundation. Fans of extreme metal shouldn't be disappointed though, as Jeff Walker's vocals are still unique, violent rasps that somehow don't permanently injure his vocal cords, and Bill Steer's and Michael Amott's leads are crisp and suitably high in the mix. Second track “Carnal Forge” comes tearing out with a thrash death riff that had a huge impact on At The Gates as they worked on 1995's Slaughter of the Soul. With its speed and lyrical preoccupation with human fleshly decay, “Carnal Forge” is the only track on Heartwork that looks back to previous albums' atmosphere of desensitised dissection, and perhaps works to counter the relatively soft, mid-paced groove found in “No Love Lost”. This is as close as you'll get to finding a warm, love song from Carcass, but its thick riff, heavy drum sound, and screeching, overlapping solos are an ideal lead in to title track, “Heartwork”.

Here we find Carcass in reflective mood concerning aestheticism, emotion, art, and perhaps even their own artistic creations. While the mainstream will always disregard the “noise” of their earlier recordings, perhaps the band struggled with what they must have known was a more “acceptable” sound, and in Walker's lyrics there is a sense of pursuing the darkness of their art to ensure it is honest and meaningful:

Works of heart bleeding dark

Black, magniloquent art

Monotonous palate, murky spectrum, grimly unlimited

Prolific food for thought

Contrasting, fed with force

Abstraction, so choking, so provocative

Bleeding works of art

Seething works so dark

Searing words from the heart

While using more traditional verse-chorus-verse structures, TV and radio-friendly four minute songs, and more emotive lyrics, Carcass are still expressing their unique take on heavy metal, and influencing a whole sub-genre along the way.

In “This Mortal Coil” Carcass's impact on the development of the Gothenburg Sound can be clearly seen. Incorporating blast beats, Iron Maiden-esque galloping bass lines, harmonised riffs, and straight thrashing, it is a mid-album highlight guaranteed to set off a pit even in your bedroom. “Arbeit Macht Fleisch” keeps the quality flowing with some of the most interesting guitar work on the album; furious riffs that seem to turn back on themselves, pinched harmonic punctuation, and solos that act as counter point to an otherwise unrelenting song. This is carried over in to the start of “Blind Bleeding The Blind” with its bluesy lick trade-off invoking memories of Steve Vai – an image that is quickly shattered with Walker's magnificent opening growl. “Doctrinal Expletives” and “Death Certificate” bring the album to a close in suitable fashion with killer riffs, perfect solos from Steer and Amott, drumming that is equally comfortable dealing out blast beats and laying down heavy rock foundations, and snarling (and incredibly well enunciated) vocals.

It's this professionalism, the near perfect execution and production of every note on this album, and the sheer quality of the riffs that seems to turn off some fans, but for me this is Carcass at their pinnacle. Every song has my attention, every riff stands out, every growl makes me pull a demonic face. So while it may have brought about the conditions for a decade long hiatus, it stands as a landmark in British extreme music, and means Carcass will never be forgotten. Like the late H.R. Giger and his dark creations, their artwork will outlive their bodies.  

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #51

Earthtone9 – Off Kilter Enhancement

(Copro Records, 1999)

Buy the album here

When metal fans of my age think back to 1999, they are probably met with unwelcome thoughts of Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, and Korn. They might even have the mental strength to endure memories of bands like Dope and Static X who benefitted from the success of the world's most immature sub-genre, nu metal. While these mental and aural traumas may never fully heal (partly because I still listen to some of this stuff), it's important to remember that the final year of the 20^th century provided us with metal albums of which we can still be proud. Botch's We Are The Romans, the emergence of The Dillinger Escape Plan with Calculating Infinity, and Still Life by Opeth are among the moments that mean we shall not banish 1999 from our memories. It was a key time for my changing musical tastes: I had access to my Mum's Ford Mondeo 2.0 with its reliable cassette player, money saved from years of being a paper boy, free time in between leaving school and starting university, and the small reviews of lesser known bands in Kerrang! every week. One review in particular captured my imagination, and culminated in me buying Off Kilter Enhancement by Nottingham band Earthtone9.

Perusing the mostly indecipherable track titles and listening to the album for the first time, I found myself thinking, “this is the strangest thing I've ever heard”. And while Buckethead, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and others have since made that thought seem ludicrous, it was a transformative moment in the development of my attitudes to music and the arts. I had never felt like I was listening to an “underground” band before, and the heaviness and obscure nature of the lyrics pushed me towards bands like Neurosis, Today Is The Day, and The Dillinger Escape Plan. Its bass-heavy guitar sound, crashing drums, and lurching vocal barks and wails left an impression on me that I still feel today. It felt simultaneously animalistic and intellectual; bursting with ideas and always threatening to do something unexpected, Off Kilter Enhancement was the esoteric escape from nu metal's high school self loathing. While kids everywhere were copying Fred Durst's backwards red Yankees cap, vocalist Karl Middleton was screaming unintelligibly and wearing nothing but clingfilm pants on stage; simultaneously conjuring images of rubbish performance art and adult incontinence.

Opening track “grind and click” is a cacophonous flurry of hardcore energy broken only intermittently by Karl's nearly monastic, clean chorus line of “blows my mind every time”. The heaviness continues in sludgier form in the wonderfully titled, “zechariah rush (uru shalom har meggidon)”, where we get our first example of Earthtone9 just making stuff up. I remember an interview with the band where they claimed that all of the weird non-words and strange lyrics were just nonsense, and I am inclined to believe them, but the title track of sorts, “off kilter,” might suggest how the music is intended to be received:

receive
receive - the revelation beaten on a skin drum
using instruments of bone

sheens gone, so tune in
feel the drone

to writhe
to writhe - to a rhythm with the blank eyed primitives
suffer the fire ritual

Off Kilter Enhancement is memorable because of the unique sound created, rather than an overarching meaning to the arrangements or lyrics. The animalistic force of the music is what carries the listener through and dumps them at the other end feeling exhausted and badly beaten. Even a delicate song like “0...0...0...” gives way to the senseless violence of “i nagual eye” and its atonal thrashing, while “enertia 65800” contains that very dynamic within its melodic and atmospheric verses, uplifting chorus, and brutal, crashing comedowns. Earthtone9 are not concerned about you not getting the point of all the heavy weirdness, but would rather you treated the whole album like a metal gig, and just smash yourself off the walls.

The album closes out with “nameless (the 4^th and 10^th)”, a personal favourite, and “simon says”, in which the fury built up since “grind and click” crashed in to existence seems to spill out in undeniably heavy and cathartic fashion. The relative thoughtfulness of “nameless...” gives way to the all out speed and aggression of “simon says”, before the album fades out with the random groaning and hitting of instruments you would associate with the end of a set. In fact, Earthtone9 used to enjoy stepping off the stage one at a time, leaving drummer, and Marlon Dingle from Emmerdale lookalike, Simon Hutchby, pummelling his skins as if the fury of the last hour would burn on forever – this is what Off Kilter Enhancement is about. Do not try to make sense of a man in clingfilm pants, only know that it is and will always be.