Top 13 Releases of 2018

Top 13 Releases of 2018

13

Sleep – The Sciences

Sleep’s Holy Mountain and Dopesmoker are odd albums in my musical experience. My mind knows I’m meant to like them and everything is there to bring that response about, but they’ve never really grabbed me. In some ways, The Sciences is the same, but the parts that work really work. The guitar tone and overall sound are insanely good. Worth the price of admission alone. Just listen to the “Marijuanaut’s Theme” and the way the guitars swirl around each other. Like clouds of smoke spiralling in the air.

Try listening to: Sonic Titan

12

Will Haven - Muerte

As much as anything it’s reassuring that a band that started when I was a teenager, can pretty much disappear, re-form, make new music, and still cut it. Muerte does not strike out in to new territory, but it does what Will Haven did at their very best, and at times does it better. It’s bleak and abrasive like they were on El Diablo, WHVN, and Carpe Diem, but there is a lifting energy that underpins it all creating the feeling of a new beginning. From death, a rebirth.

Try listening to: The Son

11

Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite – No Mercy in this Land

Man, I always doubt Ben Harper, and he regularly proves me wrong. I always feel like I’ve heard all I want to hear of what he does, and he finds a vocal hook that I can’t resist. I always think that his collaborations will go places I’m not interested in, and then he pulls out something so full of heart that he could be working with a rock and I wouldn’t care. Luckily, Charlie Musselwhite’s harmonica sound has way more of both subtlety and power than a rock. And when combined with their shared dedication to the blues as an art form and a historical document, you are gifted beautiful music crafted from its own heritage.

Try listening to: No Mercy in this Land

10

Ghost – Prequelle

I don’t like Ghost. Which is a ridiculous thing to say, because this album is an absolute hoot. It’s the party I always wanted but could never have. It’s like watching a cheesy 80s action movie soundtracked by a bonkers metal band. The combination of that bizarrely insistent clean vocal, hard rock riffing and tempos, and the faux religious horror imagery really shouldn’t work for me, but it does. The transition from intro track “Ashes” to “Rats” is a delight. “See The Light” is the best sing-along tune I’ve heard in ages. It’s fucking fun. It’s good to be reminded that this stuff should be fun.

I still don’t like Ghost though.

Try listening to: See the Light

9

At The Gates – To Drink from the Night Itself

Something about the production on this and At The Gates’ previous album, At War with Reality, smooths the edges too much, takes away the kicks of all the explosive moments so many people loved from Slaughter of the Soul, but stick with it long enough, and make sure to see some of these songs played live, and it will jump up in your brain. These are vibrant, kick-ass metal songs. And while it doesn’t stray far from the band’s identifiable style, there are moments of ingenuity and creativity that will surprise long time and brand-new fans alike.

Try listening to: The Colours of the Beast      

8

Obscura - Diluvium

Ah crikey. This is tiring stuff. No time for rest as Obscura lurch and dive from one insane passage to another. Tech death with progressive elements, it sounds like Gorguts and Cynic got locked in a room and the only way out was to write an album. Obscura may actually work in this manner, because much of what they do sounds like the results of a group suffering from cabin fever. It’s unhinged musically, stylistically, and thematically, keeping the listener on their toes long after the album has finished.  

Try listening to: Convergence 

7

Yob – Our Raw Heart

In at number 7 is 7 mammoth tracks of emotional honesty. Fully embracing the fragility that makes Yob stand out from their peers, Our Raw Heart is a near spiritual journey through the dark and light of the human psyche. Mike Scheidt’s crystal clear clean vocal is fantastically forlorn. You could be on a crowded train on a Monday morning and as long as this was in your ears, you could be standing on a rock all alone looking out over the ocean. It’s a work of staggering beauty at times, and it would definitely be higher on this list if it weren’t for “The Screen” – a song that seems so unnecessary on this album, that I’m still sure it was a mistake at the CD pressing factory. Still an amazing album.

Try listening to: Beauty in Falling Leaves

6

Clutch – Book of Bad Decisions

Inevitably Clutch couldn’t continue the outstanding quality of the last two albums, Earth Rocker and Psychic Warfare. This is purely because you cannot make rock’n’roll better than those albums. It’s impossible. Clutch weren’t about to shy away from the challenge though. While things are a little stop-starty overall, and there are a couple of tracks nobody would miss if omitted, tracks like “Weird Times”, “Spirit of ‘76”, and “Lorelei” grab you by the ears and throw you in the air.

Try listening to: Emily Dickinson  

5

Corrosion of Conformity – No Cross No Crown

No Cross No Crown was the album I was hungering for the most in 2018. That fact probably goes some way to explaining why I struggled to enjoy it as much as I thought I would. After waiting 13 years from Pepper Keenan’s apocalyptically good last work with the band, and my favourite C0C album, there was an inevitable period of disappointment. Now that I’ve worked through those complex emotions, I’ve found an album with delicate textures, warmth, density, and great song writing. The production doesn’t have the punch that I needed when I first listened, but it lends itself to more personal and intimate listening sessions, just you and those big overhead earphones that you really shouldn’t wear outdoors. Combining the hook-laden America’s Volume Dealer with the sonic intensity of In The Arms of God, COC’s latest has life well beyond the first listen.

Try listening to: Nothing Left to Say

4

High on Fire – Electric Messiah

This album scared the hell out of me for about a week before I managed to find a way in. I absolutely adore High on Fire, but on the first eight listens it was overwhelmingly heavy. I accept this is a good and necessary thing every now and again though - need to test those boundaries and expand into new territory. After recalibrating, I fully enjoyed being dragged behind the runaway horse that is “Spewn from the Earth” or getting my bones smashed by Des Kensel’s cudgels on the slower “Steps of the Ziggurat/House of Enlil”. But it’s “The Pallid Mask”, bringing back memories of the brilliant “Carcosa” from the previous album, that kickstarts a furious riff-fest that dumps you at the “Snakes of the Divine”-esque closer, “Drowning Dog”. Matt Pike is my electric messiah.

Try listening to: The Pallid Mask  

3

Slugdge – Esoteric Malacology

There is nothing more fun in metal right now than saying “Slugdge” over and over again. I also enjoy correcting people for not pronouncing it properly. But this is not your average metal-band-with-a-funny-name. Textured, vital, and challenging; their progressive, melodic, techy death metal takes formal chances in songs with titles that never stray far from the band’s slug-based theme. Four albums in and hardly anyone speaks about how brilliant they are. Maybe that name, while I love it, wasn’t the best idea they ever had.

Try listening to: Slave Goo World

2

OHHMS – Exist

Listening to OHHMS is personally challenging. There is no softening of their beliefs to make their lyrics more palatable for potential listeners. There is no room for interpretation of the issues and themes presented. This is an album that tells you it’s wrong to kill or mistreat another animal. It’s up to you how you react. If you are willing to accept the challenge or change your views on meat, the album is a stomper. Dominated by the 23-minute contemplation of humans’ treatment of animals that is opener “Subjects”, Exist has a dynamism that allows OHHMS to be equal parts esoteric and catchy beyond belief.  

Try listening to: Subjects

1

Boss Keloid – Melted on the Inch

I love Boss Keloid. A unique sound, a unique approach to heavy music, and a uniquely inspirational madness. The epic, heavy, oddball theatricality of their music somehow brings you closer to the quietly touching personal truths at its heart. Every track displays a willingness to take unexpected turns, but every decision the band makes brings elation to my ears and soul. I feel like I’m being lifted, weightless, above all the unnecessary nonsense around me and in my mind. Alex Hurst’s soaring and beautiful voice is a huge part of that, but every aspect of Boss Keloid’s sound pushes you towards peaks of emotion that will stay with you long after you stop listening. And then, of course, you’ll come back for more.

Try listening to: THE WHOLE DAMN THING. Any track. Any time. Any where.


[Honourable mentions to Emma Ruth Rundle, Alice In Chains, and Pig Destroyer]

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #2

The Paper Chase – Hide The Kitchen Knives

(Southern Records, 2002)

Buy the album here

This is somehow the most twisted and the most musical moment in this entire blog. The Paper Chase was a band that revelled in distorting and choking notes until they died in front of you, yet celebrated melody with unbridled joy and delivered perfectly timed hooks as second nature. The domestic darkness at this record’s core is more frightening for all the catchiness and lush instrumentation, but it is the theme pulling the music towards a unifying central line that makes Hide The Kitchen Knives the band’s best work. While other albums, especially the band’s final release Someday This Could All Be Yours, Vol.1, proved their musical ability and their acute vision of everyday demons, none of these works had such focus and single-minded intent. Hide The Kitchen Knives magnifies minute domestic details until they burst through their own cells, splattering the listener with emotional gore and aural distortion that will never wash off.

John Congleton is, simply put, the maestro behind this madness. For most people, he’s more likely to be known to them through his vast catalogue of work as a producer with acts as disparate as Saint Vincent and Baroness. His attention to detail as a producer clearly plays into the flow of this album and the richness of its sounds. Take “A Little Place Called Trust” as an example. Scraping into existence along the sharpening blades of the title’s kitchen knives and bolstered by the mumbles of what sounds like sampled news reports, this song displays all the diverse architecture of a John Congleton song where angles, curves, wood, stone, and glass clash repeatedly but somehow unify to create a powerful yet fragile family home. The distorted guitars jump over and are then swamped by discordant piano and bleating lambs (really). Behind this madness the deep percussion and thick bass provide steadier ground for the overly sweet melodies of Congleton’s voice, allowing their insidious hooks to take hold and making his cries of “you are not the innocent” unavoidable and frightening.

And “frightening” is the word needed to describe the portentous atmosphere and sickening rhythm section of “AliverAlungAkidneyAthumb”. Its opening repetition of a spoken word sample recounts the hypnotic power of cntrl-alt-delete-u but The Paper Chase aren’t hanging around on this one. Even with the gut-churning constancy of those plodding toms and bass, the pace is frantic once Congleton breaks his silence with, “how could you let it in your house and let it in your bed”. The lyrical flow is astounding and takes you on another tour of domestic terror replete with spiritual and physical metaphors yet always grounded in a grim reality. Signing off with the darkest delivery possible of the line, “drive carefully dear” transports us seamlessly into the song of the same name with its jammed out opening and pained vocals. These songs also share the lyrics, “my little nest of vipers”, a recurring technique in The Paper Chase’s songwriting drawing the listener into this dirty world of minute details and gigantic emotions. In fact, while there are amazing standalone songs, the impact of listening to the album as a single entity exponentially magnifies the intensity of each song, so as we drift into album closer “Out come the knives” we are hanging on every single word of the worrying and evocative tale Congleton tells:

did sweet daddy die square on your birthday

in some macabre-ish attempt to see you’d rue the day.

or appear in the end and be happy he made it back,

to be just in time to cut the cake and watch you

boil alive in your own butterscotch

Congleton’s expertise as a producer and performer creates the impression that the band simply stood mic’d up in a room for roughly an hour and just jammed this out in one take. And that’s an incredible feat when you consider the thick layers of instrumentation that make this production so lively and re-listenable. It also makes a mockery of trying to explain the greatness of this record one track at a time. There is only so much we can learn from isolating these tracks when the relationship they have with their neighbouring material is important and strong. I think the best I can do is to describe the sensations I have experienced while sitting/standing/dancing and listening to Hide The Kitchen Knives. Initially I felt the imagery of the lyrics pulling me in to the titular kitchen scene imagining my own stories of familial or romantic turmoil, while the live feeling of the production pulled me to the centre of the band’s rehearsal room. But more recently the record has felt like the soundtrack to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I feel myself being drawn near to delicate and detailed characters while the fear of a horrible crime lingers behind me at all times. And much like Capote’s novel, it is the attention paid to the extended reality of these stories that holds this power over the listener and made such an important record in my musical life.

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #4

Neurosis – Times of Grace

(Relapse Records/Music for Nations, 1999)

Picture this: a young man wearing oversized baggy combat trousers, Airwalk skate shoes, and a dope Korn T-shirt has just listened to a free Kerrang! CD highlighting releases of 1999. This kid was blown away by a weird, angry lot hammering on about not being able to “see California without Marlon Brando’s eyes” or some such nonsense, but he couldn’t recall the band’s name. While wandering around HMV in Aberdeen going through a “Swimmy, Swammy, Swanson… Samsonite!” process in his mind, a bolt of recognition struck mid-perusal of the metal section. Neurosis – Times of Grace! This had to be it. Why else would the recognition feel so strong? Plus the artwork was incredible, so the young man tripped over his own trouser legs in his hurry to the till. A few hours later at home with his trusty Aiwa CD player, confusion and fear washed over him. The dark and obscure sounds weren’t what he expected at all, more Wicker Man soundtrack than Blade, and on inspecting the aforementioned Kerrang! CD it became apparent that he had intended to be a Slipknot boy rather than a Neurosis man.

Nearly 20 years later this Neurosis man is thinking back to one of the best mistakes he ever made. Times of Grace is a majestic, frightening, and bewitching album. It’s pure, heavy, and regularly surprising. It might not have converted that youngster instantly, but the quality of those dark sounds was intriguing enough to bring him back again and again. On seeing Neurosis, sandwiched by Today is the Day and Voivod (still one of the best line-ups I’ve seen?), at The Cathouse in Glasgow during freshers’ week at university, my bleeding ears told me that I was a complete convert. The bleak yet warm heaviness, the visual show that was so carefully curated to complement the music, the brilliance of both vocalists, and the dedication to music that ignored genre boundaries was inspirational and perspective-altering. Even if all Neurosis ever did was make me a fan of their music then Times of Grace would still occupy this position on the list, but without them it would have been a much longer route to Isis, Mogwai, Aereogramme, Swans, OHHMS, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Sleep, and so many other bands that have enriched my life. Other than doing an Arts degree, that HMV purchase in 1999 might be the most influential mistake I’ve made in life.

“Suspended in Light” begins as something from 2001: A Space Odyssey, those sci-fi-like beeps still send shivers along my spine, but by its end the earthy tones and grounded focus of this album have begun to shine through. The listener may want to hold on to the light that exists in that most atmospheric of opening tracks, as the first 90 seconds of “The Doorway” is bleak and bruising stuff. It’s not quite the near death of listening to Through Silver in Blood but it is an oppressive and heavy sound that will have you clinging to any metaphorical security blankets you have stowed away. Steve Albini has used his apparent genius to draw out a more natural sound from Neurosis. The guitars are gritty and crunchy but retain a hint of warmth that brings the music that bit closer to your heart than Through Silver… which, while stunning in its own way, holds you at arm’s length with its intensity. The drums have a depth that somehow brings gargantuan sounds and wonderful subtlety to these tracks at the same time, while nurturing a naturalised tribal quality. This is most evident in “Under the Surface” with its slow burn powered by rumbling toms, whining, squeaking, groaning guitars, and a delectable control of the desire to unleash untold fury. Like edging, but less hassle. Structurally it’s hard to describe but Neurosis show no fear of allowing the momentum to crash out from underneath the song. They extend ambient passages for minutes, almost tormenting the listener with the anticipation of the cataclysmic sounds that surely await them, and with dual screams from Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till of, “your shell is hollow, so am I/the rest will follow, so will I”, that climactic aural wall collapses on you with piledriver force.

“The Last You’ll Know” pursues this crushing feeling with landslide plunges into an imaginary mire, but the scything guitar sound makes it an even more bleak and extreme experience. However, intricate, barely audible backing vocals, keyboards, and samples are indicative of the detailed approach Neurosis employ, and even in their most oppressively heavy songs there is a wealth of aural and emotional stimulation to balance the overwhelming waves of heaviness. Here, the naturalised feel that Albini encourages is promoted by the undeniable beauty of the world’s favourite instrument, bagpipes. It is one of the more memorable passages, evoking a Celtic longing for open spaces and rugged wilderness, on an album that specialises in unforgettable and unique sounds. “Away” is equally evocative but is willing to bring this to bear with a pared back folk approach that is so gentle it repeatedly threatens to lull itself to sleep, at one point almost being carried off on the wind. This track is a startling achievement, fusing folk, post rock, and doom with patience and care that belies the raw emotion at its heart. The founding minutes of the song will send listeners in the direction of Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till’s brilliant solo folk projects, while the latter stages of this song will find their continuation in two of Neurosis’ most thoughtful and “gentle” albums, A Sun That Never Sets and The Eye of Every Storm.

The title track reignites the intensity that fuelled the record’s opening tracks before “The Road to Sovereignty” carries us quietly to a much-needed rest. At this point your mind will start to slowly recover memories of the physical and spiritual challenge you just endured. My mind inevitably returns to the sounds and feelings of “End of the Harvest”. It feels like a séance gone wrong and is powerfully primal, tearing at your soul with lines like, “have you ever tasted the soil (destiny)/and felt your own death in your veins”. There is a dedication to texture, progressive repetition, and vocal viciousness that develops the song into an emotional epic that, even on a record of this quality, stands out. It is a song you will simultaneously wish to revisit yet feel too drained to even contemplate. “End of the Harvest” is inspirationally destructive music.    

Times of Grace feels like a reverse Wicker Man where what appears to be violent and awful turns out to be organic, life-loving, and spiritual. Obviously, that wouldn’t make such an entertaining film, but as a piece of music it is an incredible decades-long journey that promises eternal enrichment. I haven’t even touched on the accompaniment record Grace that Neurosis produced under their instrumental and ambient Tribes of Neurot alternative identity, but there is so much depth in this record that I feel no urge to complicate or cloud the experience. Neurosis recorded an album that defines a whole genre of music for me. Every crafted sound pulls at me, crashes over me, or carries me away, and while it may be nearly 20 years since I first listened to it, Times of Grace still surprises, scares, and inspires me.

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #14

Tool – Ænima

(Zoo Entertainment, 1996)

Buy the album here

On the CD of Tool’s Ænima is the image of a person performing an act of incredible flexibility, perhaps in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and physical stimulation of the chakras found in yoga… perhaps attempting to fellate himself.  This is the tone Tool struck on their second full length release.  Even the title - a combination of Carl Jung’s term ‘anima’ representing the feminine archetype in his theories of collective unconscious, and the word ‘enema’ which is the flushing of faeces from the bowels – is equal parts intellectual and scatological.  Throughout the album there are challenging ideas, lyrics, and song structures, but Tool are more than happy to throw them in your face as if it was an elaborate rouse, or a stairway to nothing.  Disdain dominates the tone.  If I imagine the band sitting together while I’m listening to it, Adam Jones, Justin Chancellor, and Danny Carey are looking away as if they don’t care whether I’m listening or not, while Maynard James Keenan is giving me the finger with his twisted-up, little rat face.  This combination of disaffection and anger is Tool’s reaction to the vapid and flaccid cultural surroundings of mid 1990s Western capitalism, but feels even more relevant in the age of the internet where readily digestible content has elevated the meme to our primary form of emotional self-expression.

Ostensibly an alt-metal album with prog leanings, Ænima’s songs are frequently interspersed with odd conjoining tracks of varying tone and content.  These range from the distorted record sounds of “Useful Idiot” to the infamous recipe for hash cookies found in “Die Eier von Satan” which is read in German with the stylings and crowd reaction of a Hitler speech.  It seems to be an attempt to disorient the listener, making them evermore vulnerable to attack or new ideas.  After softening them up Tool hit them with the Altered States-like closer “Third Eye” which, in true Tool fashion, references both a transcendental gateway in human consciousness, perhaps found through psychedelic drug use, and the human male urethra.  It’s a mammoth song with musings on psychedelic drug use “prying open” the third eye, childhood memories, enlightenment, and freedom.  Opening on a pounding heartbeat and Bill Hicks eulogising drug use in artistic creation, the song is birthed by way of searching drum lines, slowly building bass, criss-crossing guitar distortion, and more of Hicks’ challenging comedy.  Keenan’s vocal is gentle and instructive, but as the tension builds his voice and the guitars heavily distort, and the song feels as though it will burst.  This passage seems to represent the trauma of drug use, and the calm and melody that are found on the other side stand for the enlightenment that may be reached in discovering the true meaning of the “third eye”. But ultimately, the album leaves us with the vicious heavy screaming, crashing drums, and sheet metal guitars of the line “prying open my third eye”.  It suggests violence and damage in finding enlightenment, but also conveys that passivity will never discover anything new, that meekly accepting the commodified life of capitalism will never enrich your life.

Tool are more musically accessible than this would suggest.  The intensity and focused malintent of a track like “Hooker with a Penis” is indicative of Tool’s ability to write direct, aggressive, powerchord-driven rock music.  “Forty Six and Two” takes a different tack, drifting in on warbling bass sounds, deliberately picked guitar notes and what sounds like bongos, before Maynard’s delicate vocal carries us patiently to the instant hooks of the track’s huge chorus.  And in “Jimmy” and “Ænema” Tool carefully build and nurture a desire for melodic catharsis that they are unafraid to fulfil.  The peaks of “Jimmy” are awe-inspiringly, spine-tinglingly intense with the dense riffs and melodic wails creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously claustrophobic and epic.  “Ænema” is more upfront with its riffs and melodies but matches this with an aggressive chorus that builds with each reprisal and Maynard’s soliloquy on “this stupid shit”.  The band’s suggestion that we all “learn to swim” is made more convincing by the sheer weight of sound that swamps your brain in the furious build towards this album’s climax.  Maynard gives us the rest we need with his beautiful delivery of the line, “I’m praying for rain”, but it’s a momentary distraction as landslide guitars crash in to this beauty, driving it out of our minds with thoughts of Armageddon.  Tool will make you feel like the world is ending, but that worse things could happen.

If you need to convince a friend that they need this album, the opening three tacks of Ænima will do that work for you.  “Stinkfist” is an immense opening track.  I can still feel the surprise I felt on first hearing that pulsing bass, Maynard’s equal parts fragile and angry voice, and the lilting, scratching, searching sounds of Jones’ guitar.  That sense of awakening is sustained through “Eulogy” and “H.”, and it’s in these two songs that we become familiar with Tool’s progressive sensibilities and soaring choruses.  “Eulogy” wanders, but is always mere seconds from exploding with melodic force, taking advantage of the tight, almost sinister, chugging of the verse riffs to provide a sense of elevation.  As the song closes one of the album’s defining moments leaves a lasting impression: Maynard screams “goodbye”, holding that final vowel sound for 12 seconds.  It’s an awe-inspiring, breathless moment that never fails to grab my heart and pull me closer.  This connection is further cemented with the more abrasive passion of “H.” with its similarly powerful chorus of brilliantly gauged drumming and truncated syllables and instant vocal hooks.  And this is Tool’s true strength.  Concepts, themes, enlightenment, deconstruction of western capitalist emotional wastelands, and even the undeniable skill of each musician all fall by the wayside when you are grabbed by these passionate, uplifting, and hook-laden outbursts.  Tool fans talk about interpretations of lyrics, album art, interval tracks, and even Bill Hicks, but what we’re all really in love with is that almost every song on Ænima lifts you up, shakes your bones, and has you singing and screaming along until you slump exhausted on the floor.  Music for self and global annihilation.

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #27

Primus – Frizzle Fry

(Caroline, 1990)

Buy the album here

As with so much of the music I love, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey deserves the credit for bringing Primus into my world.  A rat-tailed Les Claypool screaming and grumbling about some cat called Tommy was unlike anything I had heard, and I can remember rewinding the soundtrack cassette over and over to try and get my head round it.  The whole thing felt dirty and weird, like some sort of anti-music to my 10-year-old ears.  I don’t think I knew if I liked it or not, but it was the most intriguing song on an album I still listen to today.  And while that film’s soundtrack sent me in the direction of Primus, Primus also guided me towards Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, and Buckethead.  Their influence on my ears has been immense and undeniable, and no album has caught their attention more than Frizzle Fry.

From start to finish Frizzle Fry is the band’s most accessible album, punctuated with catchy “hits” like “John The Fisherman” and “Too Many Puppies”, yet it still displays the full Primus portfolio.  “Mr. Knowitall” and “Pudding Time” contain all the irreverence you would expect from a band that created the theme song for South Park and named a record Brown Album.  “To Defy The Laws of Tradition” and “Sathington Willoughby” play with tropes of gentlemanly white male norms with which Primus often clash.  Bassist and singer Les Claypool bumps up against imagined histories in much of his work and can be seen equally drawing inspiration from and usurping ideas of any collective past we might share.  Things get slow and strange with “Frizzle Fry” and “The Toys Go Winding Down” before Les turns brutally honest or scathingly cutting with “Spegetti Western”.  All of this is wrapped in the bass-heavy alternative punk-metal madness that made Primus so unique in 90s mainstream heavy music.

The middle stretch of this album contains a flurry of phenomenally groovy, catchy, and intriguingly odd tracks.  While “Too Many Puppies” may have to bear the blame for Korn existing, it is an insanely catchy and heavy stomper on an album that isn’t afraid to be direct.  “Mr. Knowitall” continues this approach with its pounding bassline, heavy guitar riff, and near perfect lyrics: “They call me Mr. Knowitall/I am so eloquent./Perfection is my middle name/And whatever rhymes with eloquent”.  Up next is the exquisitely judged “Frizzle Fry” which combines Les’ popping bass sound with Larry LaLonde’s squealing guitar to maximum effect, and goes on to display the unbelievable prog jamming talent of both them and Tim Alexander on drums.  “John The Fisherman”, with its downright memorable likeability, and “The Toys Go Winding Down”, imbued with foreboding and creeping oddities, round up this flow of youthful and creative genius with a reminder of the range of Primus.  They drew from all sorts of sources and allowed themselves to go in any direction they wished.      

If you don’t know Primus, trying to describe their sound is particularly tough.  It’s like Frank Zappa, The Stooges, Minutemen, and Metallica all mashed together, but delivered by a bass-wielding genius who’s simultaneously voicing all the animal characters in a twisted cartoon about what goes on when humans aren’t around.  I once said to a friend about “Too Many Puppies” that it made me want to strap a platypus to each foot and go stomping around the pit.  Sadly, I don’t think this blog post does any better a job than that one sentence does of encapsulating the bizarre and primal power of Primus.  They can worm their way into your brain almost against your will, and before long you’re hooked on the mutterings of madmen, the basslines of faux-historical figures, and the unreal world of a band who undoubtedly defy the laws of tradition. 

Oh, and I almost forgot… Primus sucks.

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #45

Katatonia – The Great Cold Distance

(Peaceville Records, 2006)

Buy the album here

On the way to Tower Records in Shibuya in 2006 there was a small, and I assume independent, music shop. Unlike the amazingly durable Tower Records which still exists, I also assume that the shop has long since closed, but on that sunny early summer day over 10 years ago they performed their greatest moment of capitalist charity. They were selling off CDs sitting in boxes left on the pavement in front of the shop window. You would assume that these CDs were the unsellable rubbish of 2006, such as Nick Lachey's What's Left Of Me, and that may have been so, but there was at least one gem in there not even hidden from the eyes of Tokyo's shoppers. Was I the only one seeing this? Katatonia's The Great Cold Distance was in plain sight with a price so low that I still think I'm misremembering it. The exchange rate has changed a lot since then, but in 2006 ¥500 would have been equivalent to roughly £2.50, which makes this album one of the greatest value purchases of all time. It was still a very new release at that time, and I've failed in my attempts to apply logic to its pricing other than to surmise that Japan isn't hot for sorrowful, melodic, doom-inspired metal from depressed looking Swedes. Japan's loss was my gain, and Katatonia and I have been having a love affair ever since.

Some might think that it's difficult to get close to a band with the appropriately cold and distant approach to songwriting that Katatonia display here. But the almost clinical delivery, crisp production, and Jonas Renkse's restrained melodic vocals lend their sorrow a certain Brechtian distance that promotes deep contemplation rather than expressive anguish, and allow the more “metal” moments to stand out. That's not to say this record isn't sonically as well as emotionally heavy. With brutal thrashers like “The Itch” Katatonia display the ferocity that makes clear their associations with acts like Opeth, Bloodbath, and even their legendary British indie label, Peaceville. But Katatonia's music works in different ways to heavy music predicated on the notion that lighter moments, such as a groovy guitar riff in an otherwise brutal grindcore song, provide the necessary relief and respite from the intense building of tension that precedes it. On The Great Cold Distance the musically heavier moments are the listener's chance to escape the sorrowful darkness of the gentle instrumentation and introspection that are at the heart of what Katatonia do. Banging your head to the heavy parts of “Soil's Song” provides an escape from the oppressive wintery feel of the opening and bridge sections, as if releasing you from the tundra of this Swedish soil.

“My Twin” and “Consternation” encapsulate all that later Katatonia have come to represent: the former providing a forlorn ballad with a catchy and floating chorus, while the latter displays Anders Nyström's vicious guitar sound, superb songwriting, and drumming equally at home in death metal and acoustic folk. In fact, it's Katatonia's songwriting excellence and skill with their respective instruments that sets them apart from other bands that have tried such melodic dark metal. No other band can appeal equally to fans of Evanescence and Death. If you are in the position of trying to convince a friend that metal is for them then Katatonia might be the ideal gateway band to get them hooked on even harder stuff.

“In The White” is the cold, distant heart of this album, and is the perfect song with which to introduce newcomers. The poppy bass line counters lilting guitars that lead us to Renkse's opening lullaby:

Are you in or are you out

The words are stones in my mouth

Hush little baby don't you cry

Truth comes down

Strikes me in the eye

The verses float along on the bass line allowing the vocal to gently guide us through this dark loneliness before the chorus offers a solution:

To overcome this

I become one with

The quiet cold of late November

But as with all Katatonia, this respite is fleeting and we are pulled back down to the “quiet cold”. It's a song, an album, and a band that balances hope and despair, light and dark. Even though it was a warm, sunny day in Tokyo when I was a newcomer to Katatonia, I will always remember it as a sharp, cold, dark, and beautiful moment in a frozen Scandinavian landscape. Japan has had my heart since I lived there over 10 years ago, but my musical heart has been pulling towards Sweden ever since that day in 2006.

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.