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Chicago's Cave have returned with their distinct blend of momentum rock and it is, fittingly, their most fully realized disc yet. Tighter, funkier, spacier and more driving than anything they've done, this is the group at their best, concocting neo-Krautrock grooves that perfectly soundtrack the continued and colorful descent deeper into the new millennium.
Mixing equal parts Can and Stereolab (who, of course, took more than a bit from Can themselves) with a grooving and cruise-worthy psychedelicism propagated by the likes of Funkadelic, Cave manage to sound at once immediately familiar and entirely original, a trait uncommon in today's increasingly oversaturated music landscape. Where many bands seem to be loosening their belt of late however, Cave is continually tightening, forging their jams into focused demonstrations of their collective potential.
Where Cave stand out is in the band's ability to do this without ever losing the intricacies and feeling afforded to in-the-moment creation. Rather than sterilizing their sound into a palatable and time-wary take on the extended, horizon-minded style they practice, the group takes full advantage of both studio and approach to craft each piece into a work the form of which only elevates the group's output.
Such is clear from the very opening, when the rich guitar line of "Gamm" is built from the ground up into a thudding instrumental. After a patient intro, the unit explodes into pure energy, each instrument contributing to the throb and shape of the whole. No note is superfluous here, and the focus gives the piece an even clearer trajectory. The following "Made in Malaysia," with its hyper synth lines and clacking drum work, fuses a nearly punk chant with an absolutely undeniable and deranged riff whose effect is garnered from the construction of the lines themselves rather than the overall effect. This is an immensely precise spaciness being conjured.
Elsewhere, the group displays the subtle mastery of form they have. The dancey funk of "Encino Men" emanates outward while the brooding post-punkisms of "Requiem for John Sex" built towards a kind of post-rock vocabulary that eschews any sense of wanky self-indulgence in favor of pure group energy wielding. The result is a special disc that easily represents the strongest statement from this group yet. Great material and great production rarely coalesce in such a clear and fertile vision as this.
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Pimmon's Paul Gough has made a career out of constructing dense and complex ambient soundscapes. On this, his first full-length in five years, he shows no signs of rust and delivers a headphone album of striking depth and vibrancy.
Preservation
I recently learned that Paul Gough began making experimental music in 1982 after being inspired by fellow Aussie Tom Ellard's criminally underappreciated Severed Heads, which immediately gave me a favorable disposition towards him. Not that he needs that, of course, as he seems to have been doing quite well before acquiring my goodwill. Unusually, however, he has only been releasing his computer-based abstract experimentations for the last decade (aside from very limited self-released cassettes) and has a reputation for being somewhat reclusive, though he has collaborated with some well-known folks like Christian Fennesz and enjoys a healthy degree of international renown. I have also read that Gough hates bios, so I guess I will elaborate no further (in case he reads this). I don't want trouble.
"Come On Join The Choir Invisible" commences the proceedings with a ghostly mass choral drone, which is quite striking but regrettably fails to evolve into much of anything. I will give Gough the benefit of the doubt here and assume that it is meant only as an introduction rather than a complete work, as the following track ("Evil Household Ceremony") is much more ambitious and fully realized. Its foundations are somewhat mundane (a pulsing, wavering drone and a buried repeating melodic loop), but a chaotic blizzard of electronic blurts and whizzes rages all around it and Gough's singular production abilities make for a very engaging headphone experience.
Notably, those first two tracks illustrate an odd paradox: Gough's studio wizardry often transforms even somewhat pedestrian material into something alive and attention-grabbing, yet he occasionally fails to exploit his more inspired moments to their full potential. That said, Gough gets absolutely everything right with the haunting and near-perfect "It Will Never Snow In Sydney", which is very similar in tone to Angelo Badalamenti's more unsettling soundtrack work for David Lynch (but far more complex). Menacing low-end synths combine with heavily reverbed and echoed voice snippets, thick drones, and mangled swells to create an atmosphere of singularly haunting disquietude. Then an unexpected psychedelic menagerie of shifting digital frogs (or something) drifts into the mix and it stops being near-perfect and enters the realm of flat-out amazing.
Pimmon nails it again with crackling and roaring slow-motion melancholy of "Hidden," but "Sydney" largely eclipses all the surrounding tracks and causes them to seem pale and somewhat anticlimactic by comparison. That is not to say they are not enjoyable- it's just that Gough never again achieves such a brilliant convergence of studio mastery and songcraft. Smudge Another Yesterday is a vibrant, complexly layered work that is quite gratifying even during its least impressive moments when listened to attentively. Gough is a staggeringly skilled and meticulous producer that achieves improbable clarity amidst elephantine density and elevates panning into an art form, so it is probably unreasonable to expect his musical vision to consistently reach similar heights. This is the work of an extremely purposeful and patient man at the peak of (most of) his powers.
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Expanded to a duo, Boy In Static abandons its pleasantly derivative dream-pop, choosing something closer to the saccharine sweetness of Peter Bjorn and John—with uneven results.
Sifting through the melancholy cool and reverb-laden muck of Violet, Boy In Static's sophomore album, I acknowledged this restless songwriter's potential bubbling under the surface. Caught in the trappings of a subgenre with presumably scarce room to trailblaze, Alexander Chen still managed to construct an acceptable and often gratifying facsimile with more than a few personal touches. Now paired up with Kenji Ross, Chen seems eager to leave that part of his catalog far behind, letting his voice ride atop songs like "Starlet" instead of buried below swirling guitar effects.
The album's title hints playfully at a time in a child's development where he discovers ways to emulate the adult men he looks up to. As a boy in the '80s, I distinctly recall buying candy cigarettes—both the gum and chalky varieties—from the ice cream truck that parked itself outside my elementary school the minute warm weather began to creep out from under winter's unkind influence. New York was a different place back then, yet lyrically Chen seems more preoccupied with the West Coast as evinced on "LA Runaways" and the album's most singleworth ditty, "Young San Francisco." On the latter track, AFX-ish quasi-xylophonic twinkles courtesy of a toy piano provide a joyful melody for the bubblegum rhythms and positively precious vocals. Musically, this song embodies everything the new Boy In Static strives to be, and its aesthetic similarities to "Young Folks" from the aforementioned Peter Bjorn and John won't be lost on anyone paying attention.
Unfortunately, Candy Cigarette contains more aspiration than inspiration, filled with fleeting emotive moments and flickers of talent, but so very rarely shining brilliant. What concerns me most about this is whether or not I flatteringly mistook Boy In Static's capacity for imitation for artistic authenticity. It's a decent indie pop record, with novelty quirks and quite a few respectable nods to New Order (especially on "Osaka"), but Chen and Ross need to assess whether or not they're as clever as they think.
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Area C’s newest release borrows its theme from a passage in Claudius Aelian’s On The Characteristics of Animals (written around 200 AD); specifically one that states that doves can protect themselves from wizard attacks by using bay-tree shoots for their nests. From the same book, I also learned that beavers often elude predators by chewing off their own testicles. I suppose I‘m digressing though. I should probably mention that this is an excellent album at some point. I will find another forum for my ramblings about our delightful and industrious mammalian friends.
Students of Decay
Providence's Eric Carlson has been performing as Area C since 2002, largely alone but sometimes with occasional collaborators like Joel Thibodeau of Death Vessel. His work has historically been made with an arsenal of a guitar, a farfisa, a sampler, and a recorder, but he appears to have left the farfisa in the closet this time around. I found some pictures of him performing live and was surprised not to see a laptop sitting on-stage with him, as this album seems very meticulously composed and features a healthy amount of electronic glitchery. Regardless of the enigmatic process, something undeniably remarkable has been emerging from his nest of pedals and wires lately: this first album for tireless drone-purveyors Students of Decay shows a marked evolution from Area C's earlier works. Charmed Birds unveils a warmer, more rhythmic, and more distinctive aesthetic.
"Composition Journal" opens the album with a lazy looping and shimmering drone that is intermittently disrupted by stabs of white noise. The rhythmic foundation of the track is a locked-groove that approximates what Neu might sound like after taking a near-fatal amount of downers, which suits the track beautifully: anything more intrusive would break the fragile, sleepy spell that the multiple layers of guitars have painstakingly woven. As the track progresses, it is masterfully enhanced by some sublimely beautiful treated-guitar washes and given emotional color by minor-key low-end swells. Around the midway point, the rhythmic throb is removed to reveal a languid and sensual bed of sparkling ambient bliss. That, however, is quickly enveloped by a swarm of electronic glitches which themselves ultimately dissolve into an outro of incandescent mournful swells.
The rest of the album largely follows a similar (albeit sometimes less stunning) vein, with few exceptions (like the sparser and darker "Of Set Purpose, No Arrangement"). However, I am more than happy with the aforementioned vein, as Carlson far exceeds similar artists in his feel for melody, dynamics, and arrangements. He also exhibits a purposeful deliberation that is all too rare in the underground improv scene. Bluntly speaking, drone music constructed from guitar loops has the potential to be meandering and spectacularly, infuriatingly dull. Carlson skillfully avoids this pitfall with an intuitive understanding of how long a particular theme can unfold before it becomes tiresome, as well as a knack for graceful transition. He also grasps that even the most beautiful, warm, shimmering drone can start to seem syrupy and boring in large doses, so he has artfully expanded his tonal palette with harsher crackling and rhythmic throbs.
There are several other striking tracks here, but I am most fond of "Sleeping Birds" (which is very effectively enhanced by a crackling cut-up field recording of deceased poet Robert Greeley) and the epic twenty-minute title track, which marries elegant slide guitar to a slow-motion crackling pulse and an endless melancholy backwards-sounding guitar loop.
The English language does not contain a sufficient amount of synonyms for "shimmering," "nuanced," and "warm" for me to effectively describe this album. I am thoroughly impressed. Carlson's earlier albums have been quite promising and likeable, but this is the work of a formidable artist hitting his stride (but presumably not his peak).
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Across the 16 tracks on this disc, the duo of Mark Fell and Mat Steel have taken a clinical, sterile study of the most simplistic and rudimentary of classic techno and electro rhythms that, through their deliberate sense of repetition, forces one to hear all of the subltities that are missed when presented in a more danceable context.
While consisting of a series of untitled tracks, the sense is more that this is a single long piece with track markers put in for convenience, the segments more or less self-contained, but obviously intended to be heard within series. The modus operandi of the album becomes clear once the second track starts: a stiff, rhythmc sequence of bell-like analog tones cuts through the silence, resembling almost the first bar of “Blue Monday” cut apart and isolated. Eventually a handclap focused analog rhythm comes in, safely pushing it into early 1980s electro territory. Being the longest track here, the minimalist development is a liability, as the track feels too slow to get started.
The fifth track is similar in its obsessive fascination with a single sound, this time the analog bass synth sound. Allowed to run throughout in its basic structure, it is subjected to numerous pitch shifts and spring reverb, eventually getting locked into an electro rhythm before stuttering and falling apart. Texturally, this is revisited towards the end on the 13th track, though in this case within an erratic, extremely randomized rhythm.
Even the early 1990s gets a nod early on, with track 3 taking the old school robotic electro sound forward with house influenced synth stabs that harken to the days of old, but with that granular synthesis/fancy technology sort of edge. By the middle of the disc, the comparisons to other similar projects are inevitable. The more simplistic tones but random skittering rhythms are not that far from the modern work of one time tourmates Autechre, though here it feels much less like a statistical equation quantizing a synthesizer.
Some of the shorter connecting tracks are even notable in their own right: the fifth track is one simple tone that is stretched for an entire minute, but it doesn’tf eel forced or just doen for technological ease. Instead, it becomes a slow, cautious study of sound, with each slight variation becoming a major focus.
By the end of the disc, the pacing becomes slower, and the final set of three tracks examine the decay of a rhythm, going from a slow, awkward rhythm into glitchy cut-up chaos to a final silence that ends the disc. The disc is one that is more listened to for artistic appreciation than any sort of casual listening though, as the tracks are too stripped down and nuanced for background listening. It’s not good for doing housework or while at the job, but with a good set of headphones and time to appreciate it, it’s a very strong work.
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Conceptually being the audio equivalent of a cross-country drive through North America, this Danish artist combines the somewhat contradictory sonic elements of guitar amplifier hum and feedback with purely digital synthesized tones and rhythms to unique effect, creating a contrast that is not as stark as one would expect.
The dull hum of a guitar amp that opens "+28° 35 42.88 -80° 37 13.02" is a clear parallel to the sound of an old car motor, swelling up and down while traveling along the imaginary road, which is ironic since those coordinates put it somewhere in far eastern Florida…which is mostly flat. Regardless, the motor sounds eventually meet a restrained bass thump that later resembles a heart beat. When the engine stops, deep organ like notes dominate the mix, occasionally being supplanted by the engines again, with a crackly static rhythm kicking in towards the end.
Transitioning into the second piece, "+43° 35 43.44 -114° 51 11.09," we are somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Idaho, and the sound is more high frequency static and feedback this time. A simple kick drum rhythm and eventually a beat that’s squarely in the "glitch" camp comes in, the swells of amp buzz are more warmer and organic than before.
It’s not until we’re in western Utah ("+40° 11 35.63 -112° 52 31.90") that we end up locked in a solid rhythm, which is far more constant and solid than the delicate ones prior, with the amp swells providing the organic counterpoint to the digital rhythms. A solid rhythm reemerges in "+40° 42 24.12 -73° 59 51.82," which is the most forceful and powerful sounding track, sometimes fragments of what may be actual guitar swell up and fall away. The more raucous sound makes sense, as we’re about halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge at this point.
We end on quiet shards of feedback and miniature click rhythms, all in favor of the louder and more prominent "guitar amplifier as car engine" textures, which are alternatingly cut sharply by the more rhythmic passages, slowly coming to an end at "+53° 47 33.66 -99° 43 57.61," pulling us through the remote, icy parts of northern Manitoba.
Describing an album as an “audio journey” is cliché at best, and purely lazy at worst, but here it is to apropos to not describe, as it is the underlying concept of this disc. Like such a long journey, the individual tracks shift wildly throughout, never locking into a singular texture or tone but instead a drastic and dynamic change all throughout. Thankfully, Jon Egeskov decided to excise things like driving through the Midwest, with all of its mundane cornfields and barren landscapes, and focusing on the more varied elements of a journey across North America.
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Despite having been recorded more than a decade ago with somewhat fledgling technology, Jim's 2001 laptop masterpiece still sounds fresh and vibrant today. That is no small accomplishment, given the avalanche of laptop-based improv works that followed in its wake.
Editions Mego
Jim O'Rourke has had an utterly improbable and singular career. In the span of two decades he has collaborated with nearly every single person in underground music that I admire, ranging from Nurse With Wound to Sonic Youth to Merzbow to Joanna Newsom. He has even done soundtrack work for Werner Herzog, which makes it abundantly clear that O'Rourke was put on earth largely to make me dissatisfied with my own comparatively meager accomplishments. However, while I have generally liked everything that he has been involved with, I have never found any of his work to be stunning to a degree that would warrant such countercultural ubiquity. Of course, I had never heard this particular album, which entirely justifies his status and sets my mind firmly at ease.
The thick, merciless, and unsettling repetition and glitchiness of the opening track ("I'm Happy") favorably calls to mind both Oval and Steve Reich's "Different Trains." The obsessive looping treated guitar (I think) endlessly and subtly morphs, while lower tones create an undercurrent of menace indicating that perhaps Mr. O'Rourke is not happy after all. Eventually, there is an abrupt and jarring shift into a nervous-sounding arrhythmic stuttering pattern that is quite annoying initially. Gradually however, it is augmented by a high-end shimmer and what sounds like a melancholic bowed bass or cello. O'Rourke slowly plunges the stuttering pattern deeper into the mix and the song concludes with the somber beauty of the subterranean strings pushed into the foreground.
"And I'm Singing" is a much cheerier piece, although it is built similarly around thick harmonized loops. However, O'Rourke's bag of tricks also yields some pleasantly melodic piano, a warm purring locked-groove, some odd and inconsistent percussion, and something that sounds like a garbage can falling down a flight of stairs. It continues to escalate in cheery, bouncy intensity until it becomes extremely obnoxious and busy, but then abruptly warps into something that sounds like a sad and ruined caricature of itself. Then it gets fairly irritating again, as it devolves into an amelodic flurry of electronic sounds, buzzing, and clanging. Thankfully, it morphs into an incredibly beautiful stuttering, lurching wall of backwards guitars and plucked acoustic harmonics before it fades out.
The album concludes with a very warm and meticulously constructed drone piece ("And a 1,2,3,4") that sounds like a glacially slow and digitally manipulated field recording of the most heartbroken string quartet in the world. It's an absolutely stunning piece and is probably the most sustained period of brilliance that I have heard on a Jim O'Rourke album. It lasts over twenty minutes and ebbs, swells, and becomes digitally distorted without ever losing its melancholic grandeur or lapsing into the puckish self-sabotage displayed on the early tracks.
Ironically, this entirely computer-based release will not be available digitally (the folks at Editions Mego presumably have an excellent sense of humor), but it does come with bonus disc of similar material recorded around the same time period. The three bonus tracks are enjoyable, but not particularly essential- they lack the warmth and melodicism of the album tracks and veer into harsher, less human territory ("Let's Take It Again From The Top" sounds like it could've been a Merzbow remix of something from the album). That said, the original album is a vital work by one of contemporary music's most intriguing and influential artists.
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Despite having been recorded more than a decade ago with somewhat fledgling technology, Jim's 2001 laptop masterpiece still sounds fresh and vibrant today. That is no small accomplishment, given the avalanche of laptop-based improv works that followed in its wake.
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For many writers (myself included), describing a band as being like "early Swans" is a very easy crutch to use. For those who have at least the most passing familiarity with this era, it calls to mind slow, dissonant guitar riffs, a rhythm section that, at loud enough volumes, feels like getting kicked in the groin repeatedly. And above all, Michael Gira’s growed, hate filled vocals that have been attempted, but never surpassed, by other bands. Quite simply, without this material, it is doubtful that "sludge" or "drone" as we know it would exist. Justin Broadrick may have stuck around in Napalm Death to continue grindcore into stagnancy, Sunn O)))’s members would be in faceless black metal bands, and so forth. Unlike some other works with this sort of legendary status, the LPs and EPs that make up this collection sound just as vital and genre defining as they did some 25 years ago. With word that Gira may be reviving the project, and the consistent influence shown in modern bands, it is a perfect time to revisit this unabashed classic.
Quite simply, without this set of releases, the world would probably not have the likes of Godflesh/Jesu, Nadja, Khanate, Sunn O))), Earth, etc. The original releases on this two disc compilation is ground zero for painfully slow, but undeniably heavy music. Its long title is fully descriptive: the first disc of this set is the Cop LP and Young God EP combined. To be specific, this is what many people think of when they mean "early Swans." The debut EP and the Filth LP came first, but both of them had flirtations with post-punk pacing and other aberrations. The self-titled EP was much faster in tempo, featured saxophone, and owed more to Joy Division than alcohol fueled rage. Filth’s tape experimentations with voice gave it a slightly weird edge, and to be frank, someone could dance to "Big Strong Boss" if they really wanted to. Cop stripped this away to the bare elements of Filth: BPM counts that could barely enter the double digits at times, detuned bass notes that sounded more like the strings were being bashed rather than played, etc.
Through all of this is Michael Gira’s growled and snarled vocals, which end up being a pure indictment of humanity: the disposal of a corpse in "Job," police brutality in "Cop," and the life of Ed Gein in "Young God." It isn’t until this material from the Young God EP that any variation becomes notable: the slightly faster bass/drum rhythm of "Raping a Slave," and the complete dissonance of the title track, and the more varied production throughout. The disc ends with the beginning of the change in the band, "Sealed in Skin" and "Fool" from the singles that would be from Greed and Holy Money. The former maintains the same atmosphere as the prior material, but strips away the guitar and allows in piano, with Gira’s vocals somewhat toned down in comparison.
Hardcore purists often cite this point, which is the same time Jarboe joined the band, as being when Swans began to lose their direction. The simple fact is, would anyone have benefited from an entire career of the same style? I mean, personally, I find it hard to listen to the entire duration of this first disc without any sort of break. Its strength is its repetition and hatred, and, depending on my mood, sometimes it just is too much. In pieces, essentially in the original way the releases were formatted, it’s just fine. I usually play about half of this disc a week just randomly. But to imagine all the subsequent albums sounding like this is a scary thought, and if time had played itself out this way, the respect for the band probably wouldn’t be as great as it is today.
Now, by no means am I a Jarboe apologist, but her appearance on the second disc, the Greed and Holy Money LPs does not hurt the tracks one bit. It is a natural progression in feeling from the prior material, and has some innovations that people often don’t link with the band. Leading off with the "Time is Money (Bastard)" single, one can pretty much hear the creation of big beat industrial. While the song is probably twice the tempo of any other Swans material prior, the thick mechanical rhythm becomes the focus of the song, with just small concessions from guitar and bass quiet in the mix. Gira’s vocals, just as angry as before, bark lines like "you should be violated/you should be raped" with a disgust that one can only be convinced he means them. The similarly up-tempo "A Screw", both in its original and instrumental Holy Money mix, embraces this industrialized vibe as well, a combination of mechanical and organic drums, rhythmic bass and synth horns are far more suited for the dance floor than most Swans fans would like to think.
At other points throughout the slow crawl of Cop appears in different forms, on "Heaven" it is simply added to subtle synth elements and snarling, but minimal guitar lines. The disturbingly tight "Coward" lopes along with the occasional bit of uncomfortable breathing room in the sound. The structure is similar on "A Hanging", but in this case the choir like vocals from Jarboe actually add to the funeral sound more than detract from it. The two tracks she is the lead vocalist on, "Blackmail" and "You Need Me" are actually well done as well: restrained, mournful tones over dramatic, reverbed piano. Unfortunately we all know from here she went onto hysterical vocal histrionics that pushed the band away from this original sound.
From here the band went on to record what is often regarded as their best album, Children of God, which kept some of the violent aggression, but added in more gentle musical elements that eventually pushed them towards the world music edge of The Burning World and into the almost overt goth of Love of Life and White Light from the Mouth of Infinity. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of pretty much every era of Swans through Gira’s work as the Angels of Light, but I don’t think any of their other releases, save for perhaps Soundtracks for the Blind, that so perfectly encapsulated a sound and a style as this collection of LPs, EPs and singles. While it is a daunting listen, simply because this much hatred and disgust compressed into two and a half hours is tough to endure, it is undoubtedly worth the trauma.
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Wolves' third album is a solid monolith of blistering brutality that will likely make black metal fans very happy. Unfortunately, the more melodically adventurous Malevolent Grain EP hinted they were capable of being much more than merely brutal. Black Cascade is not the album that I was eagerly hoping for at all, but I suppose Nathan Weaver must follow his dark muse to whatever sinister place it takes him. Maybe next time.
Southern Lord
This year's Malevolent Grain EP was a brilliant and brief distillation of everything that makes Wolves In The Throne Room a great band, so it is confounding and disappointing that their newest full-length is less melodic, features less dynamic variation, and is twice as long. Of course, they are still absolutely ferocious and heavy as hell, but Black Cascade offers little that their earlier albums didn't already do more compellingly.
"Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" begins the album explosively with furious tremolo-picking, shrieking vocals, and a frenzied blast beat before shifting into a slower, more melodic interlude that uncharacteristically features a guitar solo (these guys are not big on frills). A lot more happens after that, which is the primary shortcoming of the album: no song is less than ten and half minutes long. I have no problem with extended song lengths, but I am afraid Black Cascade is not multifaceted enough to pull off such a feat. Frustratingly, the individual components of each song are often excellent, but their power is diluted by the endless back and forth between frantic intensity and mid-paced melodicism. The tempo and the actual notes may change, but the omnipresent amelodic throat-shredding vocals and distorted, frantically strummed chord progressions create an inescapable feeling of sameness.
"Ahrimanic Trance" follows essentially the same template, but with a much higher ratio of memorable parts to filler. Regrettably, it clocks in at over fourteen minutes, so it still overstays its welcome in spite of its many positive attributes. Nevertheless, there is an absolutely devastating section in which melancholy, elegant keyboards hover above the frenzied maelstrom and Aaron Weaver's drumming reaches almost jaw-dropping intensity that almost makes it all worthwhile. Unfortunately, the drums are the hapless victim of the second frustrating thing about Black Cascade: the production. Aaron Weaver is an absolutely stupefying drummer and probably could carry this album on his own, but he is hamstrung here by production that de-emphasizes the bass drum. His playing, while undeniably virtousic, is all snare and cymbal. A black metal album without rumbling double-bass is at a serious disadvantage as far as visceral, crushing intensity is concerned. Demonic mayhem and emasculation cannot co-exist.
The remaining two tracks do not stray much from what preceeded them, but offer up occasional welcome surprises regardless. For example, "Ex Cathedra" features some very effective dual-guitar harmonizing in the main riff, a mid-song ambient interlude, and an extremely cool outro. The closing track, "Crystal Ammunition" contains a somewhat dull acoustic guitar interlude, but later makes up for it with a lengthy and beautiful synthesizer and chorused guitar passage. Of course, both tracks are still very long, so there is a lot of unsurprising material as well.
Black Cascade is quite simply too much of a good thing (compounded by less than ideal presentation). There are dozens of great ideas strewn throughout this album, but their power is maddeningly diminished by lack of dynamic variety and overreachingly epic song-structures. While I am sure that I am not the target demographic for this album, I am also certain that the black metal genre is teeming with bands that are single-mindedly focused on speed and intensity and that the Wolves will have to be a bit more innovative and focused on songcraft than this if they want to maintain their place near the top of the infernal, blasphemous heap.
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Alex Neilson's name shouldn't be unfamiliar around here (drummer for Baby Dee, Current 93, The One Ensemble, and Jandek). The debut of Trembling Bells brilliantly blends ancient themes with individual concerns and traditional song structures with more modern twists. It has as a euphoric balance of dissonance and melody, fine musicianship, emotional conviction, and a sense of humor.
My first thought upon hearing Carbeth was to wonder what the members of the Incredible String Band or Fairport Convention might have thought of this recording; with its moments of intense restraint and overblown beauty, slight nods to US country music, soaring voices, echoes of eerie plainsong, and vibrant, ecstatic choruses. I didn't have to wait long for something of a reliable answer, as no less an authority than Joe Boyd (producer of both those earlier groups) is very much in favor of Trembling Bells. And no wonder. Their overall sound sways close to that of an unfussy but expertly mic'd gig; the kind that Boyd consistently arranged.
There's a good contrast between Neilson's thinner voice and Lavinia Blackwall's amazing, almost operatic singing. Their shared vocal duties are particularly good on "I Took To You (Like Christ To Wood)," a track which, after the pair wail "I am getting out of Glasgow...into the endless night" erupts into an unrepentantly full-on reel. The charm of their a cappella piece, "Seven Years A Teardrop", has eluded me so far, but it does provide contrast. Blackwall has also been compared to the unique Sandy Denny, but I can't go along with that. Although she is pretty marvelous here, and does have a similar mournful purity, Blackwall fluctuates sharply between a warbling soprano and a deeper, atonal moan, sometimes in the same verse. When she flips betwen the two, especially on the fabulous "Willows of Carbeth," it's as if she's channeling Judy Collins one second and Nico the next. This song is the obvious highlight, not least as the lyrics hint at mythical or metaphorical transformation: an old device, a staple of North European folk music, to describe the madness and magic of love and reveal the mystique of everyday topics (or cloak them in it). In the song, Blackwall remembers a walk with a former loved one who was naming trees, her favorite being the willow sheltering other couples beside a river. Suddenly rejected, she fails to numb her mind with alcohol and instead recalls little things which remind her of those blissful times, before likening herself to the weeping willow, now merely standing by and watching others love.
All the playing is excellent and well-judged, as is expected from such reknowned improvisers as Neilson. Just as admirable is the firm grasp of simplicity and the mostly non-abstract nature of these songs. "The End Is The Beginning Born Knowing" is a good example of Trembling Bells' approach. It incorporates rapid stream-of-consciousness lyrics and a looping melodic theme, but feels like a remake of some ancient music. Many of the pieces on Carbeth have several changes of pace and cleverly appear to have been cut-up and reassembled in a different order- either with chorus preceeding verse, or slow intro coming at the end of the song, as wistful coda. "Summer's Waning" is one exception, maintaining a slow, almost blues-like dirge, close to the style of (1960s UK group) Chicken Shack, from it's first note and memorable opening line: "Summer's waning, I was drinking, to your heath, while mine was fading".
As I'm a sucker for wry, romantic folk, I don't expect to hear a more rewarding record this year and thoroughly enjoyed the rambling references to poets, herbs, crimson lips, blood, dreams, pilgrims, kingdoms, smoking, drinking, stars, trees, nights, incantations, memories, people flying, burdens, the foolish and the wise. But even if these topics don't appeal there's an undeniably satisfactory jangle, crash, and thump to these tracks which will draw in a wider audience. The only complaint with this release is feeling obliged to list the members' impressive other projects! Drummer Alex Neilson backed Jandek on his first live gigs, collaborates with Richard Youngs, has assisted Alasdair Roberts, Ashtray Navigations, Six Organs of Admittance, Will Oldham, The One Ensemble, Baby Dee and Current 93, and has founded Scatter and Directing Hand. Singer Lavinia Blackwall is also in the Pendulums, Black Flowers and Directing Hand. Guitarist Ben Reynolds previously worked with Neilson in Motor Ghost and his solo album How Day Earnt Its Night is out next month: on this showing I can't wait to hear it! Bassist Simon Shaw was the driving force of Lucky Luke, and additional players George Murray (trombone) and Aby Vuillamy (viola) were in the aformentioned Scatter and The One Ensemble.
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