52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #5

At The Gates – Slaughter of the Soul

(Earache, 1995)

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The second album in a row on the blog with “slaughter” in the title (c’mon metal bands…), and the second band in a row on the Bloodstock 2018 bill. Seeing At The Gates at Bloodstock in 2008, spinning round in a mud pit, is still one of my greatest music memories. While the new material is not up to the standard of Slaughter of the Soul, it’s amazing to see them live when it seemed like it would never happen. The appeal of this At The Gates release over its predecessors is the faultless melding of fun pop brevity and extreme metal sounds. While the melodic death metal movement that At The Gates are credited with spearheading was more palatable than the brutality of outright death from other parts of Sweden, Europe, and America, this is still heavy, heavy shit with some ferocious musicianship. What the band embraced in recording Slaughter of the Soul is that death metal, while messed up and brutal, should be infectious, fun, and fast. No song clocks in over 4 minutes in duration, and this 11-track album is barely 34 minutes long, which is to say that At The Gates obviously liked Iron Maiden, but probably preferred Slayer. While they have influenced metalcore bands like Killswitch Engage, let’s focus on all the sounds that make this album from 1995 stand up so well today.

And let’s start with the first sound: an electrical buzz as if a guitar was being plugged in to an amp. It builds anticipation that increases with each eerily slicing sound effect, culminating in a furious burst of energy. The classically clean production of melodic death metal is infused with thrash-inspired speed that barely relents over the following 30 minutes. “Blinded By Fear” sets the tone sonically and thematically with galloping riffs, smooth lead guitar details, piston drums, and the lyrical creation of hell on earth. At The Gates are preoccupied with a world they see turning on itself, cracking under self-inflicted pressure, and the first of many mentions of suicide is both literal and a metaphor for the self-harming behaviour of humanity as a whole. The pop sensibility I mentioned might seem unlikely at this point but, after the perfectly framed MTV video quality of the opener, title track “Slaughter of the Soul” highlights the band’s focus on immediacy. The opening riff pauses just long enough for vocalist Tomas Lindberg to shout “Go!” and kick everything off in an almost cheap, but undeniably effective, pit-starting moment. Lindberg repeats the trick with a call of “Do it!” just before the pitch perfect solo turning this track into a formidable pop death hit. Don’t be mistaken, the band still embrace the dense and distorted guitar sound, near-permanent double bass pedal, and frosty growl that gives At The Gates such intense atmospherics, but there is a focus on grabbing attention quickly and efficiently. The fact that the Björler brothers, responsible for most of the songwriting on this album, take these elements then do so much with them in such little time is what makes this one of the best heavy metal albums I’ve heard.

They went on to prove their prowess in this regard with several of their releases with The Haunted following the original break-up of At The Gates, but it’s on Slaughter of the Soul where you’ll find their most vital work. “Nausea” is like travelling down river in a barrel: filled with periods of disorienting buffeting and tranquil floating but always thrilling and potentially nauseating. “Need” ups the game, tossing its listeners furiously across the room for little more than 2 minutes. It’s like being accustomed to a gentle jog on the treadmill at the gym then signing up for a HIIT class: it’s hard and fast, but you get so much more done. It’s built on unforgivingly heavy drumming from Adrian Erlandsson, thrashy verse riffs, and typicaly expansive melodic death metal passages that come together to create a bleak yet uplifting plea to “lay your fears to rest”. With all the similes I’ve used in describing these two tracks though, I think the most fitting one for the album as a whole is that it feels like riding a galloping horse through a Mordor-like landscape, dodging arrows, slaying orcs, but every now and again you fall from the saddle, your foot caught in the stirrup, and you are dragged painfully over broken ground. But in a good way.

“Suicide Nation”, “World of Lies”, and “Unto Others” all do this. Each of these tracks has undeniable groove embedded in their opening moments, but the unbridled pace will have you wondering how to get back on your horse. The pop sensibility shows through again at the start of “Suicide Nation” with the shotgun cocking sound effect that ignites the song, but in “World of Lies” it is the album’s biggest and catchiest riff that steals the show. Coming at the perfect moment to reenergise a potentially battered listener for the final few songs, “World of Lies” is brimming with energy and a delightfully bouncing heavy sound that will keep your head banging all day long. “Unto Others” harks back to Terminal Spirit Disease more than any other track here, but its raspy viciousness is the perfect antidote to the giant super groove of “World of Lies” and sends the album in the direction of “Nausea”. On such a focused and brief album, this three-song passage is perhaps the most memorable.

And memorable is exactly what “Cold” and “Under a Serpent Sun”, my favourite tracks here, are. They are arguably the band’s collective shining moment, with sickeningly distorted leads (the solo at the 2-minute mark of “Cold” is insane), absorbing basslines, furious riffing, and some exceptional cymbal and snare work from Erlandsson all clamouring for attention. And they are without doubt Lindberg’s finest tracks as lyricist and vocalist. His delivery of the lines, “I feel my soul go cold/Only the dead are smiling” and “Stricken numb by fear I fall” are two of my favourite things in music and are eternally with me, while his ferocity on “Under a Serpent Sun” is unmatched anywhere in At The Gates’ work. And this is why Slaughter of the Soul means so much to me. That, while it is brutal, obsessed with suicide imagery, and punishing at times, it is so memorable that the songs just appear in my brain at random moments causing me to spit out lyrics like “Under a serpent sun we shall all live as one” while testing the ripeness of avocadoes in the supermarket, or banging my head to a silent beat while walking down a crowded street. All the members of At The Gates probably don’t realise this, but they’re my friends and always in my thoughts. Except Adrian Erlandsson… because I told him.

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #17

36 Crazyfists – A Snow Capped Romance

(Roadrunner, 2004)

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That first experience of moving away from home, of leaving family and friends to live far away, is one of the most testing.  To embark on a new life without that emotional support around you, no familiar faces, and no quick fixes makes those connections you still have even more important.  That’s why packing a selection of CDs before I moved to rural Japan in 2004 turned out to be one of the most important small moments in my life.  That little anchor to home meant I always felt like I had somewhere to turn when loneliness would punch me in the gut, or when I simply needed to express myself in my own language.  There were various albums that meant a lot to me during my two years living in the hills of southwest Fukushima, Black Label Society – Hangover Music Vol. VI and a CD of ceilidh music by The Foundry Band as honourable mentions, but A Snow Capped Romance is the defining one.  Some of my clearest memories of that time have this music as their backdrop, and I’ll never forget how it helped me think of home, appreciate where I was, and remember the love I have for my friends and family.  36 Crazyfists might not be a band name that conjures these sorts of thoughts, but it belies the strength of their songwriting and their emotional honesty, and I’ll always be thankful for those qualities.

While Bitterness The Star was an exciting and interesting debut, “Circle The Drain” in particular capturing my imagination, A Snow Capped Romance represented a gigantic leap in the band’s abilities.  It had always been clear that each of the musicians - Steve Holt on guitar, Brock Lindow on vocals, Thomas Noonan on drums, and Mick Whitney on bass – could play the hell out of their instruments, but in cleaning up the production, adding a dash more emo, and giving more consideration to the “shape” of the whole record, 36 Crazyfists made a truly memorable album with vital vocal hooks, a metalcore guitar masterclass, and an impressive yet self-effacing rhythm section performance that deserves celebration.  Lying somewhere between mid-career Incubus and Vision of Disorder, there is enough outright aggression and heart-on-sleeve sensitivity to satisfy fans of hardcore and emo alike.  Take back-to-back tracks “Bloodwork” and “Kenai” as an example of the whole: the former an impassioned single with loads of melodic clean vocals, an Incubus-esque intro, and big hooky guitar parts that landed it on a Resident Evil movie soundtrack; the latter a knife attack in song form with cyclonic guitar riffs where the choruses are momentary escapes from the assault on your senses.  Both feel like 36 Crazyfists songs and never suggest they are overstretching themselves, but provide a scope to this work that means I return over and over. 

I’m still moved to tears hearing the words from “Kenai”, and I can remember driving the sparsely populated snowy mountain roads alone being reminded of the distance to home, the little hole I felt in my heart, and the honour I had to have such good family and friends:

Over these mountains I feel safe.

And bless the sound, return the day.

Over these mountains I feel safe.

And I guess I miss my home,

I could not stay.

I'll return, it's alright, I'm ok.

These emotions are reignited in “Skin and Atmosphere” with a melodramatic yet insightful examination of a struggling relationship told through delicate verses and driving, powerful choruses.  Brock Lindow’s screams of “I want you to prove me wrong” are instantly relatable, and herein lies the band’s strength: in giving equal footing to expressions of anger, longing, despair, hope, and love, they harness the complexity of human relationships, both with people and places, and give the listener freedom to feel all these emotions at once.  “Destroy The Map” taps into this again with its irresistible chorus and guest vocal by Raithon Clay, while “Installing the Catheter” and “Cure Eclipse” turn up the hardcore intensity again with dark themes, heavier bridge sections, and Lindow’s soaring and scything vocals.  Bringing an album of this emotional intensity to a close could be tricky, but in the patient beauty and emotional brutality of “Waterhaul” 36 Crazyfists manage to consolidate all the themes they have explored in one mid-paced, burning ember of a song.  It seems to be performed both by candle light and wildfire, before it drifts off into the back of your mind leaving only traces of the emotions you felt, the people you saw, and the places you visited along the way.

Even if I lose my hearing as I get older I’ll never forget the sounds, emotions, and thoughts of this album.  There are few albums that have ever managed to perfectly fit my personality, but this is one, and it taught me that music need not always be an escape from real life, but sometimes a reminder of those places and people in that very real life.  It’s an album that makes me think of the people and places I love, and to never take them for granted.  And with that impact on me, this album was one of the first things I thought of when I recently returned to the village in Japan where I had lived over 11 years ago.   

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #20

Zao – The Fear Is What Keeps Us Here

(Ferret, 2006)

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Metalcore is dogged by the reputation that its bands all sound the same.  It is the heavy metal scene’s heavy metal.  But as heavy metal fans we know nothing is this straight forward.  The sub-genre has highs and lows like any other, and for every complete turd there is a hidden gem somewhere.  One of these is Zao’s 2006 effort produced by the incomparably great Steve Albini.  For every over-produced, slick, almost sickly sweet metalcore album Zao have delivered a minor antidote, and as the modern metal world fawned over Killswitch Engage’s all-too-earnest End of Heartache, Zao were working on giving up control in the studio and bringing something raw back to the scene.  The result was the deeply scary The Fear Is What Keeps Us Here.

Built on live performances transferred to analogue tape and over-driven vocals, The Fear… is testament to the immediacy and brutality that can be squeezed out of one of metal’s most maligned sub-genres.  Zao have no fear taking inspiration from hardcore and black metal simultaneously to make a that has its listeners clinging on in more ways than one.  And with Steve Albini helping to craft that sound, it is a cliff-edge experience throughout: the raucous sound is constantly seconds away from imploding, testing the limits of your speakers.  To keep listeners teetering on the brink the whole record without actually dropping them off and losing them forever is a skill, but one that Zao have mastered here.

With the addition of Martin Lunn and Jeff Gretz, surviving members Dan Weyandt and Scott Mellinger pushed the band towards this new sound, and though they’ve looked elsewhere since, it is their most impactful and memorable album.  From the dark, patient, then explosive opening of “Cancer Eater” to the rolling, punk-infused spirit of “A Last Time For Everything” with its petrifying, over-amplified outro, The Fear… is designed to make you feel uncomfortable throughout.  Unlike much of metalcore, and indeed Zao’s other albums, little is offered in terms of melodic escape.  Weyandt’s vocals are almost exclusively growled and screamed with a near black metal intensity, while the live production style lends itself more keenly to aural aggression and abrasiveness.  The lyrics focus on humanity’s helplessness and lack of control in the face of death, loneliness, failure, and the fear these generate.  There is no hopeful and uplifting chorus to look forward to, the listener must endure and somehow come out stronger under their own willpower.  Weyandt reminds us of the simple, dark truths of life, and refuses to see the positive side on this album:

Everything you love will fly away
On the wings of an unknown destiny
Behind the sun and disappearing sky
Everyone you love will pass away

This is not music made to make you happy, but crafted to move you and make you contemplate your own fears.

“Physician Heal Thyself” builds a wall of sound with furious, dirty riffs and cascading drums which Weyandt’s vocals attempt to pull down with vicious growls and Converge-esque grunts.  The breakdown towards the end reminds us that this is metalcore, but third track “Everything You Love Will Soon Fly Away” discards this balance in favour of bleak blackened hardcore.  It rips into existence with the sounds of furious instruments bleeding out through one another, and not until the isolated melodic chorus vocal of “It’s Hard Not to Shake With a Gun In Your Mouth” do we have a reprieve.  The spoken word section and key change explosion of the bridge in this track is the most idiosyncratically Zao, and one of many highlights.  “There is No Such Thing as Paranoia” slows the pace momentarily, but this only allows the sheer weight of the creeping fear to rest heavier on your chest.  With each wretched scream, cymbal crash, and twisted riff it becomes harder and harder to breathe.  The lyrically questionable “Pudgy Young Blondes With Lobotomy Eyes” does nothing to alleviate this feeling with coiled hardcore riffing and an expansive bridge section with sheet ice riffing.  It all comes to a head with “A Last Time for Everything” in which one of the lightest and punkiest songs of the album also succumbs to the fear, being swamped by the deafening mantra, “the fear is what keeps us here”, until it collapses under the strain of its own distorted, broken sound.

This is not an album to be listened to in a darkened room, not as release from hard times in your life, not to be visited in your loneliest moments.  You’d better be ready to listen to this.  It pins you to a wall and asks you all the questions you would rather avoid.  It is relentless in pursuing negativity with horrid sounds, crushing lyrics, and no obvious points of escape.  The Fear Is What Keeps Us Here denies you the cheap “pop” moments that make metalcore so easy to like, and instead invites you to look in to the darkest parts of your life.  If you survive that process you might just find a place in your heart for this record.    

52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #41

Converge – Jane Doe

(Equal Vision, 2001)

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Living in Japan as a foreigner is a strange experience. Parts of your life become diluted to unrecognisable levels, other things become so concentrated and focused you can see them in new and wonderful ways, such as the phenomenon of the Japanese super tour. Bands who would sell out mid-sized venues independently throughout Europe and America find themselves having to combine their tours with other such bands to make ends meet or drum up enough buzz. Previously unimaginable line-ups for club gigs became a stirring reality and dizzying prospect for me while in Japan. The pinnacle of this was the confusingly named “Extreme The Dojo Vol. 11” tour in 2005 featuring Isis, Mastodon, and headliners Converge. All three bands had just released arguably their best ever albums months prior and fans were dying to see new material from Panopticon by Isis, Mastodon's Leviathan, and You Fail Me by Converge. But for me it was the first chance I'd had to see Converge live and my mind started grappling with what it would be like to experience the ferocity of Jane Doe live. The thin walls of my house barely protected the ears of my neighbours as I hit the “repeat” button on my stereo and prepared myself over and over for the frighteningly unhinged pit I expected for songs like “Homewrecker”.

Converge combine hardcore and punk attitude and aggression with the heaviness and technical prowess of extreme metal. It's a frightening concoction, and nowhere is that more clearly evidenced than in “Thaw” with its frantically stabbing main riff, caustic vocals, and gigantic grooves. The coldness of its title is reflected in the unfeeling nature of that malevolent riff, but the passion of Jacob Bannon's vocals, the fury of Ben Koller's drumming, and the big bass sound provide points of emotional connection in the ice storm of pain that is created. “Fault and Fracture” also accomplishes the incredible feat of scaring and welcoming the listener at the same time. Every riff angle and cymbal hit feels like glass is being shattered on your head, but there's always enough to grab hold of in the panic to make sure you don't lose consciousness. In “Heaven In Her Arms” it is the feeling of being irresistibly pulled in to the emotional death of which Bannon writes that creates fear for the listener. The riffs, time changes, drum fills, Nate Newton's rolling bass, and screams come at you from everywhere, giving you no time to defend yourself, and, just as you have given in to the inevitability that you won't survive this song, Kurt Ballou breaks it all down with one of the grooviest riffs on the entire album. It acts as an epitaph to the person who has metaphorically died “in her arms”, but also as glorious respite from the emotional and aural violence surrounding it.

Converge understand that their belligerent metalcore needs shaping and texturing, and we find that in the alt-hardcore of “Distance and Meaning”, and the hypnotic, bass-led, sludginess of “Hell to Pay”. Back to back it's a combination that will throw the new Converge listener way off track, before the vicious attack of “Homewrecker” drags them back in to the maelstrom. And, let's be honest, this is what Converge fans have come for, aggressive riffs, fast drumming, and barked vocals; exactly what they get on the Napalm Death-like opening of “The Broken Vow”, and on metalcore blueprint “Bitter and Then Some”. The latter is as perfectly concentrated a metallic hardcore track as you could hope to find. The main riff is frantic but with the full-bodied sound you might expect from Hatebreed, while the vocals are equally potent going with the riff or against it, and each drum fill is perfectly timed and delivered. And at 1:27 in duration, it shakes you up quickly and leaves you gasping. By contrast, title track and album closer, “Jane Doe” is a heavy, patient, epic, post-hardcore plea for the pain to be killed. It contextualises all of the violence that has preceded it, giving way to bare-chested honesty, hope, and even a sense of understanding. In fact, if you are seeking to understand who Converge are, simply listen to album opener “Concubine” and “Jane Doe”, read Bannon's beautiful, poetic lyrics, and listen again. You shall have all you need to know.

I was seeing a nice Japanese girl at the time of the “Extreme the Dojo” tour in 2005, and there was a bit of a language barrier. There's a sense that it's degrees harder to know and understand a person when you can't communicate easily or express yourself as you normally would, but we got on well. I told her about the gig and how excited I was to see all these bands together and this one album in particular. She asked to hear Jane Doe, so I simply hit “play”. After twenty seconds of “Concubine” she was gone. Out the door, in to her car, and, I assumed, ready to speed home. I convinced her to stay and watch some equally disturbing Japanese game show instead. Months later she confided to me that she had never been that scared by anything before, and spent most of that night wondering if I was an actual maniac. This is what Jane Doe does. It scares people. It makes people question their lovers' character and sanity. It makes people think about what they want from their lives. And for an album written about a relationship painfully deteriorating, it came really close to ending another.