52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #7

Prong - Cleansing

(Epic, 1993)

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I use the term “party metal”, and nobody ever seems to know what I mean.  I refer to music that has all the hallmarks of heavy metal, meaning it would never be able to infiltrate the mainstream, but has the energy, danceability, and sense of fun that might result in a party getting started, even if only by one lonely guy in his front room.  I’m most often referring to bands like Every Time I Die, their no-holds-barred lyrics, and their don’t-give-a-shit charm, but the term started before that band even came around.  For one shining album, Prong made party metal that could have sweaty maniacs moshing hell-for-leather one moment, and grooving all sexy-like, looking for a hook-up the next.  It feels like music for people who would wear leather trousers out even though it’s 35 degrees in the club, but simultaneously it’s for those who subscribe to the Andrew W.K. party uniform.  So even if you’re in your jeans and white T-shirt, grab your leathered friend, get Cleansing blasting through your speakers, and let the party commence.

Produced by 90s metal producer extraordinaire, Terry Date, you’ll hear Pantera guitar tone influences on this record, and at times that groove metal feel might make you think Prong are little more than Pantera impersonators.  However, Prong and Tommy Victor (guitar, vocals) are far less interested in macho posturing and way more into industrial and dance music influences.  In fact, Prong are closer to White Zombie in their sense of musical fun, and, while the explosion of DJs in metal bands wouldn’t occur until later, you can feel the push towards scratching being incorporated into metal with some of the guitar techniques and sampling employed here.  “Broken Peace” begins with a Tom Morello-inspired background riff and a pummelling bass line.  Those Rage Against the Machine-like guitar squeaks hint at the developments mainstream metal would see in the 90s, but more importantly provide a lighter, more danceable backdrop to the industrial riffing that kicks in.  While Prong want you to dance to their tunes and keep everyone happy with their rounded rhythm section sounds, they are a heavy band and the riffs are crushing in their weight and sharpness.  Tommy Victor’s vocals are not the usual frothing, angry metal frontman style, but rather have a slow, deliberate burning intensity to them, exemplified by his delivery of the lines:

Now it's all exploding

Pick up the broken peace

Nothing left to break.

“One Outnumbered” maintains this vaguely politicised burning intensity but balances it with coddling passages of dream-like guitar clouds and soothing bass.  It’s indicative of a band mindful of dynamics and the value of a gentle sway to break up the neck-snapping headbanging.  That’s all well and good, but it ain’t metal if it doesn’t punch you in the face at some point, and the riff here is a series of jaw-cracking jabs, the vocal a left hook to make your head spin.  It’s one of those riffs that makes you wish you could bang your head backwards as well, as if standard headbanging doesn’t fully express your approval of the pacing, rhythm and crunch of that guitar sound.  Tommy Victor displays an exceptional innate sense of rhythm and groove on this record, both on guitar and in his vocals, and at points the album feels like a tribute to the riff, every song designed to put its perfectly formed guitar parts directly into your brain.

Even when things get a little swampy on the later tracks, there is an undeniable guitar hook in each song.  The squeezed riff of “No Question” inspires thoughts of Zakk Wylde’s over-exposed production on Sonic Brew; “Home Rule” hits with the intensity of Rollins Band and its great riff is perfectly complemented by peppery drumming; the staccato phrasing of “Sublime” is a prime example of what Prong do even if it wanders too much.  But the true heart of this album is in its opening third.  First track, “Another Worldly Device”, does not delay its riff attack, shredding your tympanic membrane with a delightfully abrasive guitar sound played at speeds that keep your feet moving double time.  The raspy vocals match that riff, before the solo injects a little left-field lunacy with wailing squeaks that continue to lie below the surface of the closing chorus.  “Cut-Rate” has a lunacy of a thrashier nature, with top speed being reached within tenths of a second of the song’s beginning.  The solo somehow seems to crank that speed up until the song can barely contain itself and it dissolves into some vague industrial noises and a plodding, heavy outro.  While both of these songs are great, Prong’s strength is not necessarily in playing at speed.  The album’s iconic high point is the party metal duo of “Whose Fist Is This Anyway?” and “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck”, both more focused on intense groove, stop-and-start rhythms, and banging of the head.

“Whose First Is This Anyway?”, a song title applicable to so many life situations, is built on an incessant rhythm that allows the guitar parts to chop, stop, roll and generally keep the listener grooving and moving.  The influence of and on White Zombie can be heard most clearly here and is a clear sign of Terry Date’s work across the bands he worked with in the 90s.  “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck” is a bona fide heavy metal classic.  The lyrics of working class hardship seem to carry a self-reflexive heavy metal importance that has made the track a club classic since its release.  The rolling bass intro lines up another cutting Prong guitar sound, but it’s happy to let Victor’s voice stand on its own before lurching back in with a galloping pre-chorus riff.  The picked sections, open string strumming, pinched harmonics, and vicious main riff provide an incredibly varied foundation for the iconic line to grab hold of its listeners, “snap your fingers, snap your neck”.  It’s a song for singing along, swinging your hair, and banging your head with your friends whether they prefer leather or denim.  Christ, even if they prefer corduroy or twill cotton.  Cleansing is an album that exists right at modern metal’s heart.  Welcoming fans from both ends of the metal spectrum to celebrate guitar riffs and party hard.  While Prong have never quite rediscovered this perfect balance, Cleansing stands as a classic metal album with an identity all its own.      

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #22

Meshuggah – Catch Thirtythree

(Nuclear Blast, 2005)

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Catch Thirtythree is a mind-numbing, obstinate, confusing brute.  It’s wilfully bleak, esoteric, repetitive, violent, and it has no concern for your sanity or wellbeing.  Choosing to listen to Catch Thirtythree is like choosing to eat granite for dinner, washing it down with acid, then lying back on a bed of nails to experience the pain in your gut.  Everybody knows you don’t digest well lying down.  Possibly due to the burning darkness inside me, this album instantly jumped inside my brain and has refused to leave ever since.  This appears to be the case for many others as well.  Meshuggah’s popularity/ubiquity (it’s hard to tell) in metal steadily grew with this and next record, Obzen.  Trying to understand why is the purpose of this blog post.

Ostensibly set out as a single suite concept album, the track names that make up the whole piece are little more than signposts along this bizarre journey.  If a listener approaches this album expecting hooks, choruses, or even “songs”, they may very well quit before the end.  Meshuggah give you the bare minimum with which to hold on, pulling out long passages of repetitive “djent” guitar rhythms or eerie atmospheric tracks in between moments of pummelling heaviness which are relieving in their relative catchiness.  The drums are all programmed from samples of Tomas Haake’s actual drumming, and it lends the whole album a punishingly robotic feel.  This is balanced by the sheer demonic power of Jens Kidman’s death growl which is varied, dynamic, and impassioned.  The earth-shattering bass sound on this album doesn’t make it a warmer experience, but definitely contributes to the intimidating size of the sound.  All told, Meshuggah have better albums with better songs on them.

But there is something perspective-altering about the determined and brutal delivery of this concept.  There is a line that can be drawn from the first note through the entire piece to its culmination, around which Meshuggah have created never-ending variations on a theme.  The music never strays from its ultimate mission to surreptitiously pull the listener in to this unforgiving world of paradoxes, so that as the final act of this piece (represented by “Shed”, “Personae Non Gratae”, “Dehumanization”, and “Sum”) plays we are no longer aware of how we got here or why we stayed.  Nothing is what it seems: track beginnings and ends are mostly indistinguishable; dynamics seem to build to imminent catharsis before being discarded unfulfilled; Jens Kidman’s anger is more existential struggle than angst or rebellion; even the drums don’t “exist”. 

Repeated rhythms cast a spell over your mind, pulling you deeper than you could ever expect to go with such unwelcoming music.  It’s like being in a darkened room with a green laser blasting right in to your eye, yet you can’t look away, can’t even turn your head.  Trying to draw out highlights from such an experience is difficult, but the surging pace and riff of the first three tracks, “Autonomy Lost”, “Imprint of the Un-Saved”, and “Disenchantment” are breath-taking, while the sickening breakdown feel of “The Paradoxical Spiral”, “Re-inanimate”, and “Entrapment” is insanely addictive.  The monstrous sounds and robotic soliloquy of “Mind’s Mirrors” are the hinging point of the whole record, before Meshuggah launch themselves head-first in to the hellish explosion of “In Death – Is Life”.  The anticipation alone is enough to survive on, but the song itself is a brilliant standalone track that would not be out of place on Chaosphere.  The protracted hammering of “In Death – Is Death” is a masterwork of controlled dynamics and perfectly sets up the more immediate final act that I discussed above.  But I don’t think that “how good any of the songs is” has anything to do with why I like this album so much.  It’s about its purity of vision.  It’s about the fact that Meshuggah do not care what you expect, or what the rules are.  It’s about having something completely new.  Even if it is sick, disgusting, and completely messed up.  

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52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #30

White Zombie – Astro-Creep: 2000 – Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic
Delusions of the Electric Head

(Geffen, 1995)

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What is Rob Zombie even saying?  Listen to “Real Solution #9” and you’ll be none the wiser thanks to his synthesised ramblings.  Read the lyrics to “Super-Charger Heaven” and you may still be struggling:

Eye for an eye and a tooth for the tooth
I ain't never seen a demon warp dealin'
A ring a ding rhythm or jukebox, the racket
My mind can't clutch the feelin'

Go and see him live and you will have even less idea.  That dude really can’t sing.  But the glory of listening to White Zombie and Astro-Creep… is that, like the Japanese horror masterpiece Tetsuo: The Iron Man, it’s the fear you feel in your gut when primal drives meet industrial forces that is the meaning, the point of it all.  Rob Zombie’s drawls, mumbles, and screams lie lazily over the top of a frantic clash of industrial guitars, weird and diverse samples, and pounding rhythms.  Astro-Creep manages to feel both like a synthetically produced drug, and as if it crawled out of a dank swamp.  Like Tetsuo..., it is the clash of nature and technology, and everything in between.  It plays with pop culture, subculture, Satanism, sexuality, lunacy, and more, and never makes you doubt that they all belong right there together.  Rob Zombie and Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto both have rollercoaster careers that may make you question their personal quality control standards, but each has a shining moment of industrial horror fetishism that fans will never forget.

“Electric Head, Pt.1 (The Agony)” displays all White Zombie’s influences in its protracted horror movie sample intro, “Perhaps you had better start from the beginning” being lifted from the classic 1957 horror film The Curse of Frankenstein, building atmosphere, suspense, and anticipation of phenomenal headbanging to come.  John Tempesta’s first crisp, snare-heavy drum beat cuts through the industrial sounds at the end of the intro, before giving way to the immense groove of Jay Yuenger’s guitar riff.  Zombie’s movie monster vocals are the deep, growly, nearly indecipherable top layer of what is a non-stop flow of samples, sound effects, and industrial clangings.  The album feels like it was recorded on the set of a horror movie being made in a factory filled with working pistons, grinding gears, and vats of hazardous waste, in to which all the members fell, fused with their instruments, and came out banging their heads to some unrelenting and irresistible industrial beat.  It’s a monster album in every sense of the word.

“Super Charger Heaven” pushes this feeling with turbo-charged riffing and a rhythm section so poppy your headbanging will take on a quality of pogo-like perpetual motion destined to give you brain damage.  Zombie’s vocals are sick, dirty, demon growls, and his cries of “Devilman” will hurl you round the dancefloor like a lunatic.  White Zombie change the pace with the groove-laden “Real Solution #9” inspired by Charles Manson and his attack on the Sharon Tate house.  It’s a darker moment on an album that is generally more concerned with referencing fictional horror than dealing with true life stories of murder.  The impenetrably dense riff of “Creature of the Wheel” continues that darkness with the aural equivalent of trawling a swamp for corpses.  This is where you really notice the down-tuned guitar sound that White Zombie embraced on this record in creating the industrial heaviness missing from previous records.  Even the glory of the chorus, “New God kill machine/And man say Lord of the/Engines – Yeah”, is only temporary relief from this tar pit of a riff. 

“Electric Head, Pt.2 (The Ecstasy)” does away with that, drawing on White Zombie’s love of rock ‘n’ roll to hit you with a soul-pleasing hook.  Introduced with a classic Shaft sample, the song kicks the album back to life with its dancefloor-filling energy.  This song, more than any other, set up Rob Zombie for what he would bring us on Hellbilly Deluxe, and shows off the party-starting power of White Zombie.  “Greasepaint and Monkey Brains”, keeps it simple with quiet, eerily croaked and whispered verses that seem like an inspiration for Alabama 3’s Sopranos theme, “Woke Up This Morning”, and giant choruses led by Zombie’s crazy roars and Yuenger’s expansive riffing.  A plethora of samples leads to the album’s coolest riff on “I, Zombie”: a razor thin slice of guitar that feels like a race car taking a corner at speed, hurtling the listener towards the course wall with little to no protection.  Tempesta’s drumming only serves to throw more momentum in to your imminent demise as the danger mounts in this 3-minute rager.   

But even this song becomes mere prelude to the sexualised, gory, ‘psychoholic’ display of power horror that is “More Human Than Human”.  The solid and nearly unchanging rhythm allows the insane main riff to become the twisted centre of this contorted stream of consciousness.  The riff is a like a series of wails winding up the tension, building pressure in your fragile mind, until it explodes into the heavy chugging of the lunatic’s chorus.  But it’s on "El Phantasmo and the Chicken-Run Blast-O-Rama" that Rob Zombie really lets loose with his most enjoyable vocal performance of the whole album.  His screams of “yeah” are things of pure delight giving life to the laconic ramblings of some demented necromancer.  The rocket-up-its-bum opening of that song is probably one of the pit-starting highlights of an album that will have you dancing, grooving, and snapping your neck continually from start to nearly finish.  ‘Nearly’ because “Blur the Technicolor” and “Blood, Milk, and Sky” close things out with a far looser experimental feel that allows the album to drift off rather than burying a hatchet in your already rattled skull.

Because it is an album that bathes in horror violence drawn from films, real life, and the mad (and maddening) imagination of Rob Zombie, people will either be turned on or off the very moment that The Curse of Frankenstein sample introduces the demon-teasing hour ahead of you.  For me this album changed my view of heavy metal and horror movies in one go.  All of a sudden, the music I liked was party music for stupid dancing and dressing up, rather than the angst-ridden teenage anger of grunge, and the films I watched were inspirationally imaginative and quote-worthy parts of a subculture that seeped in to the mainstream drop by bloody drop.  Heavy metal, after all, is exaggerated in all it does, be it huge sounds or absurd character-based bands, and White Zombie tapped in to that vein of running-with-the-devil madness and fun better than any other band of the 90s MTV generation.  In doing so, they may have created a world in which far less party-worthy bands like Slipknot would emerge, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide on the merits of that legacy.  For me Astro-Creep is the haunted house of modern metal: the fear is the fun, the ghosts, demons, and killers are there for your entertainment, and your pounding heart reminds you that you’re alive.