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Originally performed as part of All Tomorrow’s Parties “Don’t Look Back” series, the Melvins decided after they had played the gigs to actually record the album. So they hired a warehouse and ran through the set without an audience. The end result is an album that shows how ahead of its time Houdini was; it still sounds as relevant and powerful today as it did thirteen years ago.
When I first heard Houdini many years ago, I was mainly used to listening to absolute rubbish (barring the odd exception). Back then it was a revelation in heaviness and this new live interpretation allows me to listen to that album with fresh ears. It also allows me to kick myself harder for not being able to attend the Dublin performance of this album. As this album was recorded live without an audience, the sound quality is great. In many places it’s clearer and sharper than the original studio version. I think that the lack of audience adds to the tension of the pauses in the songs, the end of “Joan of Arc” being an example of this as each time it stops and stutters I expected the roars and whoops of a crowd. Instead the reverberation of the warehouse adds a touch of menace to the music.
These new versions are true to the original recordings in spirit if not always in performance. Houdini Live 2005 opens with “Pearl Bomb” (the song order is different to the original). Instead of the mechanical sounding drum beat there is Dale Crover’s drumming. It’s slightly sloppy but fits the song perfectly which is Crover’s style (he’s the sloppiest tight drummer I’ve heard). Trevor Dunn from Fantômas joins the core of Crover and King Buzzo and he plays like they were his bass lines to start with. Buzzo’s guitar and vocals both sound bigger this time around. Throughout the album he sounds like he’s shouting at me, demanding my attention.
There’s not a version of any song that is inferior to the original album. Equally, this album isn’t better or a replacement for the studio album. Instead this is like an alternative reality version of Houdini. “Night Goat” has an extended intro with Buzzo’s guitar feedbacking like a bitch before Crover comes in with some seriously fuzzed out bass. The song rears itself eventually like some monster from the depths reaching out for dinner. For me, the centrepiece of Houdini was always “Joan of Arc,” a grinding slab of heaviness. Here it is slightly faster but still maintains all of its charms. It is as close to any song comes to defining what the Melvins sound like. It bleeds from the speakers and congeals in the ear canal. Unfortunately it’s still too bloody short.
On the other hand, songs like “Honey Bucket” and “Going Blind” show a more accessible side to the band. They are still the most accessible parts of the album but pack more oomph now. Not considerably more of an oomph but more nonetheless. One track that stands out as being an out and out improvement is “Spread Eagle Beagle.” Over twelve minutes of thumping percussion from all three members of the band. In addition, Lustmord steps up the plate and adds processed percussion of his own. The song sounds huge compared to the original. The space of the warehouse is particularly audible on this track. It’s a colossal way to end the album.
As mentioned previously, Houdini Live 2005 isn’t going to replace Houdini. It does allow reappraisal of these songs. They still sound as breathtaking as they did when I first heard them. I don’t know how many bands can go back to an album like this (especially one that was never intended to be reproducible live) and provide such a wonderful reincarnation.
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2002 saw the release of two Peter Brötzmann related albums, both performed and recorded with his Chicago Tentet. Pillow member Fred Lonberg-Holm was part of that tentet and is joined by Michael Colligan, Liz Payne, and Ben Vida to re- imagine Brötzmann's "Images." An already difficult piece of music, Pillow rework this piece eleven times over, erecting a consistent, if drawn out, album.
Anyone who's heard Machine Gun will undoubtedly think of intensity and confrontation when the name Peter Brötzmann comes up. His style is audacious, bombastic, and all the more enjoyable for it. His work with the Chicago Tentet has been called, at various points, a bit more subdued than normal. While Images (released by Okka Disk) might've been quieter than normal, the versions as performed by Pillow are nothing like what I've heard by Brötzmann in the past. They are more meditative than anything he's belted out of his lungs on sax and, in fact, there's no sax to speak of anywhere in these recordings. Instead, an improvised rumbling subsists over 18 minutes of space, reshaping itself with the calls of trumpets, cellos, guitar, dry ice, and other instruments. Liz Payne's percussion is less percussive than it is environmental; it is a rapidly changing series of hiccups and metallic whines, like the wheezing of a giant printing press in its death throes.
True to many of Brötzmann's own proclivities, there are very few signs of melody and when they do appear they are a brief and welcome disturbance. For the majority of the time, this quartet plays with tonal qualities and stumbling rhythms, squeaking and shaking as much avant garde jazz does, but never exploding into rages like Brötzmann is so fond of doing (Brötzmann sometimes doesn't bother with quiet moments, continually destroying sound as he goes). The album flows together well enough, keeping a safe distance from the bland territory of material remixed over and over again for a single disc. While this saves the music from some redundancy, at certain points the random noise all becomes a bit monotonous, failing to summon up the excitement Brötzmann's playing has often evoked in me.
While my interest is piqued in small increments, I find my mind wandering during large portions of the record, my attention span drawn to what's happening around me instead of the music that's playing—there's nothing that stands out enough to keep me drawn inside the music. There are moments of beauty, especially when the cello parts stand out among the other sounds. It seems that the more meditative and withdrawn the band becomes, the more elegant and capable they sound. The last track is a great example of this, especially when compared to the other interpretations.
Taking in a piece of this record here and there can be entertaining, but as an album it fails to be consistently entertaining; it's status as a work of art is a topic beyond me. Though coherent, the album simply isn't varied enough to warrant the amount of time this band dedicates to this particular piece. "Images" was one half of a record, not a record itself.
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This is the sound of brain stimulation flash storms which play out like the dreams of anaesthetised car crash victims. The floats of electronically altered high violin movements are spread a mile thick over glaring beams of individually picked notes.
This kind of burnt out overloaded minimalism is noisily virginesque and uses the obscurity of excessive sonic cover to shy away from straight up splendor. The closer or louder the listen, the clearer the day below the cloud cover becomes. Like the incidental themes of those ignored by their creator, this is a beautifully lost piece of music that gives of hints of a yawning ache. The fine edges of ever moving loops and percussive splinters give glimpses of what’s buried beneath, but they’re transitory.
The flipside’s subtler build reveals things more clearly through its leisurely pace. “Illiaster” exposes what could be flourishes of harp and electric bouts of fuzzy sound inside a swoon. An intrusive buzz that appears could have ended up being unsettling, but instead it’s like a little sliver of reality towards songs end. Axolotl obligingly provides his own gentle re-entry orbit. Although complete as standalone songs, both sides feel like they’ve been cut from a larger work. It’s hard to take in the scale, or more accurately the sheer depth of the sound, of both the title track and “Illiaster”. This Axolotl (aka Karl Bauer) 12" sounds like it was born to be a long player.
(no samples available: vinyl only)
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I bought this because I’m a sucker for two things in life: a nice sleeve and 3” CDs. This has led to some duds in the past but you get the odd release that makes the random purchase worthwhile. This EP by Elsworth Cambs is one such release. Unfortunately it’s over nearly as soon as it begins but for just over twenty minutes, I was rapt by Leaf or Tree.
The debut release from Elseworth Cambs is an enjoyable EP that although they are not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of songwriting, they produce fine examples of simple but well crafted tunes. On Leaf or Tree there are six examples of folky, pastoral songs. The vocals are relaxed and not really in tune with the music but that makes them work all the better. Musically a gently strummed acoustic guitar holds centre court with piano, glockenspiel and accordion occasionally making an appearance.
For the most part, Leaf or Tree is slow and meditative. “Oh White Swan” starts as a somber piece about seasons before the guitar changes pace and the lyrics turn to spring. Vocal harmonies and piano drift in which leads to a dramatic shift in mood, warmth takes over from the icy start. “My Eyes are Woolin” has a far rockier edge to it compared to the rest of the CD. The tempo is upped and drums add a bit of life to the music. Lyrically there is nothing startling on any of the tracks but unlike most of the current folk artists the lyrics are straightforward; the words sticking to themes of love and nature. Songs like “This Boat” and “The Storm” make me feel like brewing a cup of tea and sitting in the garden for a few hours. Maybe it’s the fact that summer is finally kicking in as I write this but Leaf or Tree is beautiful in its simplicity.
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This double CD set collects songs previously only available on 6" vinyl and adds a second disc of remixes to sweeten the deal. The level of aggression here is almost ridiculous, with every aspect of the music overflowing with testosterone. If anything, this collection is like aural steroids, with any form of subtlety to be avoided at all costs.
Each song has generically distorted guitars, drums that sound like machine guns peppering a toy kit, and ridiculously garbled and hopelessly incomprehensible vocals, which is more or less what I expected from titles like, "Thinning the Herd," "Clorox Bong (Identity Picnic)," and "Crash Course to Maximum Nowhere." Making it worse, or maybe better, is that the songs are more like snippets, with one as short as eleven seconds and none much longer than a minute. With ten songs clocking in at about eight minutes total, at least the assault is brief.
Somewhat surprising, however, are the fourteen remixes included on the second disc. Most of them are just obnoxious, but there are a few that take the minimal source material and manage to stretch and mold it into something unique, with Vinda Obmana’s "Three Ring Inferno Mix" being my favorite of these. Also enjoyable were Merzbow’s "Agorzbow Merzbleed Mix," in what I consider more or less typical of his style, and Justin Broadrick’s "Flesh of Jesu Mix," which to me actually sounds closer to his Godflesh material than his more recent incarnation. I’m a little puzzled why the original songs and the remixes are on two separate discs since everything fits easily onto one, but that’s ultimately irrelevant. Either way, the entertainment I got from this collection probably wasn’t intentional.
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This curious quintet makes sounds that recall the glory days of Nurse With Wound: long, shapeshifting collages of psychedelic murk interrupted by random outbursts of industrial clatter, nightmarish drones, deeply bizarre audio mutations and tangible masses of sticky audio goop of impossibly vague origin. The Sleeping Moustache consists of five ten-minute tracks interspersed with five brief interstitial tracks. Everything blends together well because nothing blends together well; forced juxtapositions and jarring eclecticism are par for the course, just like the finest NWW of yore.
At its inception, Nurse With Wound was a group, not a solo project. However, for the last 25 years or so, even with the large cast of collaborators and producers that have worked on NWW records, it has seemed like the sole autocratic creative domain of Steven Stapleton, lone surrealist wolf. That's why its odd to see Stapleton involved in so much group activity lately, with active memberships in ensembles such as Scribble Seven (with Maja Elliott, Joolie Wood, Freida Abtan, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles and Matt Waldron), the Wounded Nurse Ensemble/Salt Marie Celeste live group (with Diana Rogerson, Potter, Liles and Waldron), and now The Sleeping Moustache.
The Sleeping Moustache is an adventurous fivesome consisting of Steven Stapleton, Jim Haynes of Coelecanth, Matt Waldron and R.K. Faulhaber of irr.app.(ext.), and Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson of Icelandic experimental group Stilluppsteypa. There is no clue given as to who does what on which track, and in fact the album's packaging consists only of five primitive, apparently hand-stamped brown paper slips, each listing the five members of the group in a different order. In the background are fragments of Dada-esque typeset dialogue: "Please sirs, could you help me onto the railings so I might leap to my death into the waters?" or "This malign energy issued forth unchecked, saturating the intimate and the mundane alike to twist the innocent contents of our lives into shapes of vivid, indescribable horror." Each slip is backed with a small print by the artist listed on top. Because of the lack of practical information given about the project, the sounds on this CD emerge as even more esoteric and inscrutable than they would have anyway, and it would be impossible to untangle each artist's contribution. The only entity that can be held responsible for this album, then, is The Sleeping Moustache.
The mind-blowing quality of production is a consistent thread running through this cracked, chaotic journey across unspeakably weird audio realms, remaining vivid and thoroughly fucked for the duration of the album. The album plays like an abstract radio drama in which the narrative could never be turned back into sensible language. Chilling drones and stereo-phased plinks and plonks stretch and dilate while tiny flesh-eating robots force a freight train backwards through a rift in spacetime. Squeaking door hinges and creaking wood stairs slowly sink into a burbling peat bog at midnight, while a gas-fueled generator floods the scene with obscene fluorescent lights. Outmoded machinery and monstrous disembodied spirits battle for supremacy against a backdrop of cosmically generated keyboard drones, which shudder and pulsate as they fester into glowing red sores that blasphemously belch and vent thick steam into the pipes of a church organ. Heavily delayed voices utter foreign gobbledygook which bounces between the stereo channels, farting beings of pure static who cannibalistically consume each other inside telephone wires. Damp, evacuated warehouses serve as the setting for strange and awful ceremonies involving tesla coils, rusty steel beams and quivering electrified gelatin fingers slowly caressing articulated marionettes enacting their own doom.
Suffice to say, fans of classic Nurse WIth Wound will rejoice at The Sleeping Moustache. It's a thoroughly enjoyable resurrection of the sort of classic 1980s audio surrealism that groups like NWW and HNAS perfected, worthy of repeated deep listening sessions on headphones.
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Splitting this vinyl, and the handmade silk-screened covers, between a pair of duos from Canada and Brooklyn shows noise, guitars and drums acts don’t have to follow the routes of their bigger peers. Although Mouthus’ heavily textured freakout is worlds apart from Cousins of Reggae’s broken behemoth, there is a common battleground.
Cousins of Reggae is a massive misnomer. On this spilt they seem to prefer distorted violence to the delusions of herb, but should they ever turn their sights on Babylon, it’ll end messily for The Man. Spewing splint-legged detuned guitar mess into five chunks of ‘no future’ slaughter, this duo make primitive sludgy pummelling seem driven by aggression.
Like light starved subterranean straight edgers they jostle and batter five versions of "History and Prehistory of Hudson’s Bay." With caveman flint whittling torpedoes of feedback spurting from their doomy ham-fisted string punching, this is held down and drowned rock music. This sound of this primitive down-the-well mix of guitars, drums and noise sounds like its coming from behind the screen around the bed at the end of the ward. There’s no massive variety between these most of these songs, maybe a little bit more muscled feedback manipulation here or some distant vocals there. "Part Three" adds some elusive chimes to the staggering surges, and this portions length makes it the most satisfying of the Cousins side.
The first Mouthus cut, "Better than Facemask," layers beat upon beat with sub rhythms continuously deposing the chance of melody with a shot to the back of the head. This propulsive layering of drum is normally the preserve of Brazilian funk or the crusty dreads on a festival percussion jihad, yet Mouthus make it the sound of mechanical insects mating endlessly. Part of their appeal is the fact that the sounds thunder out from different layers of murk, pulling an addictive shadowy curtain over the turmoil like a layer of dirt. The mix seems to bring out certain pieces into the shuddering daylight only to be superseded by another beaten barrel looping rumble. Perversely with "New Drugz" the duo ditch the beats, replacing them with rushing static. Everything else that makes up Mouthus is brought a little closer to the front: the dusty stylus metal buzz, low bass tuning and Muslim / pagan chants. The band unquestionably has their rhythm thing down to a T, and "New Drugz" suffers a little from the lack of steady movement that this could bring. Its lack of flight might be paving the way for the band’s entry into blacker psychedelia, but I prefer my Mouthus to be eight limbed and on the move.
samples:
- Cousins of Reggae "History and Prehistory of Hudson’s Bay in Five Parts - Part One
- Mouthus "New Drugz"
- Mouthus "Better than Facemask'"
 
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Eugene Mirman is a very funny guy, the most promising of the current crop of so-called "alternative" comedians, a group that also includes Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, Michael Showalter and Brian Posehn. His debut album, The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman, was a hilarious, brilliant collection of stand-up material that introduced Mirman's unique brand of self-reflexive, postmodern comedy. In comparison, this follow-up CD/DVD on Sub Pop can't help but seem like something of a letdown, but it's not entirely a lost cause.
Absurd Nightclub Comedy was, to me, an instant comedy album classic, containing so many memorable bits: humorous and bizarre anecdotes told in an incredulous tone, strange meta-jokes curiously devoid of punchlines, hilariously tangential asides and adlibs, and several well-rehearsed routines worthy of a Bob Newhart or a George Carlin thrown in at random intervals. I learned why people with no education were likely to utter phrases such as: "I am bike cheese!" I learned that gay rights aren't rights for gay people, gay rights are just rights that are gay: "Like the right to an attorney. That's a pretty gay right." I learned that my home state of Florida is "kind of like a warm, open-air prison," as well as the differences between crazy homeless people in New York and those in Seattle. Mirman read aloud his cosmically funny answers for an application to appear as an eligible bachelor on TV's "Cupid" dating show. In probably the funniest bit, Mirman created corporate advertising slogans for geometric shapes. "Circle: Now That's a Shape! Square: The OTHER Rectangle! Triangle: HOT, THREE-WAY ACTION!"
En Garde, Society! is not as immediately likeable, and doesn't contain half as many instantly memorable bits. Mirman's delivery remains solid and quite entertaining: his incredulous, self-mocking tone adding a level of self-reflexive irony into the mix on almost every joke. Eugene Mirman is one of the many modern comedians following from influential comedy forbears such as Andy Kaufman or even early Norm McDonald, underlining the absurdity and inherent phoniness of the stand-up comedy art form itself, mocking the form from within the form. Eugene Mirman frequently takes a bizarre left-turn with a joke that may seem incredibly lame, random or sloppy and unrehearsed, but he always saves it merely with his tone and mannerisms, with his linguistic prevarications, and his knowing laugh, delighted in realizing his own potential to confuse and subvert an audience's expectations.
All of that is still there, yes, but the material here just isn't as funny. Where the debut seemed to contain a whole act, from beginning to end, this album seems to be highly edited and assembled from many different shows, snatching a new joke or a new bit from here and there and slapping it all together. Some of the bits are just as hilarious as those on his first disc, such as the Christian beauty magazine routine, where Mirman merely reads the aforementioned publication out loud to the audience, pausing now and then for a sardonic or cutting commentary on the sheer awfulness and stupidity of this shining example of religious propaganda for the young. However, other bits, such as the "Papa John's pizza or not remembering my abortion," seem tacky and not well rehearsed. There are more hilarious bits that resemble humorous personal anecdotes more than they do jokes, which is always good, and rarely found in contemporary standup comedy, except for the great David Cross. More stories about Mirman's background as a Russian emigre' figure in, this time narrating his family's daring escape to America while having their phones tapped by the KGB (all true, apparently).
This sophomore album is a bit shorter than the first, and contains a long and annoyingly pointless filler track towards the end. The track consists of a "skit" with Mirman talking to himself after driving home from the show, which segues into an overlong and very stupid song which will not seem funny to anyone except for those who masochistically enjoy laborious and unfunny "comedy" routines. There was also a silly and superfluous "megamix" track at the end of the first album, but at least it elicited a chuckle or two, more than I can say for the new one. All of these weaknesses, however, are more than made up for by the number of times Mirman still made me laugh on this album, such as the insane screaming of a waiter to a customer about to eat seafood fished from red tide waters: "Your face will shit mice!" When Mirman painstakingly deconstructs some asshole's random comment that he would like to put his "tubesteak" in a passing girl's "hot oven," I nearly rolled on the floor with unselfconscious laughter, and I was listening completely alone, unaided by cannabis. While the "Letters to Nouns" and "Coupons for the Audience" bits don't work nearly as well as they should, other bits are far funnier than they might seem on paper, such as the Jack in the Box chicken strips that are mysteriously advertised as "REAL" on a billboard.
The included DVD is not a video of this standup routine, which would have been nice, but rather a collection of short films that were originally posted on Eugene Mirman's website, or on his Village Voice blog. As such, they have been available to anyone with a high-speed connection for a while now, and thus the DVD seems fairly superfluous, even with Mirman's commentary track, which is generally unhelpful and only occasionally funny. The short films range in length and quality, from painfully unfunny skits such as "Scotch and Soda" to supremely amusing clips like "A Video Eugene Sent Himself From the Future." It all amounts to not longer than 10-15 minutes of video. All told, this is a bit of a chintzy package from Sub Pop, but still, what's there is more often than not embarassingly hilarious, and well worth a listen. In my mind, Eugene Mirman hasn't lost his place as the most talented young comedian of the contemporary milieu.
samples:
- Joking and Lying, Jack in the Box, Extreme Bowling
- Movie, Deep-Fried Stuffed Cheeseburger, What Kind of Animal?, Red Tide, Abortion
- Revolve (The Complete New Testament in the Form of a Teen Magazine)
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Up until very recently, black metal was close to death. The great bands that helped cement the genre had lost their way and most new bands were one dimensional at best. Over the last few years, exciting bands began to rear their heads and life crawled back into the genre. Christendom Perished is one such album that has reaffirmed my faith in all things spikey and Norwegian.
Mord are vicious sounding. The guitars could curdle milk and the blast beats jar my ears like machine gun fire. Christendom Perished is a good black metal album full of menace and fraught with atmosphere, all that is traditionally needed in a black metal album. At first listen, I thought this was a good album but lacking in terms of innovation. Repeated listens reveal how dense the songs are, little elements like what sounds like a processed angle grinder on “Opus II” adds another plane to the music. Shards of noise like this appear at various points throughout the album and push Mord from being just another Mayhem obsessed band to a band that within an album or two could help redefine the limits of black metal.
Another thing that sets Mord apart from the vast quantities of mediocre black metal bands is the thickness of their sound. Many bands have a preoccupation with sounding thin and bleak but Mord have a fattened sound that is more like an inferno than the usual frozen wastes visited by long haired men in corpse paint. “Opus IV” features a bass that sounds like Nordra is playing it with a jackhammer. It sounds great but tends to be masked behind Necrolucas’s double bass drumming. Necrolucas’s style is conventional in terms of the genre but executed with all the power of a napalm attack. The full, fiery music is accompanied by fitting visuals of bombed out rubble in the sleeve. Christendom Perished is a battle album. It is violent, dark and incredibly heavy.
The album is just the right length. Mord keep it terse and tight and the album works all the better for it. Keeping up with the frenzied assault is tiring work; an album of 80 minutes would be overkill. By the time “Opus IX” (there is no “Opus VIII”) finished I felt shell shocked and glad to be alive. Not many albums leave me feeling like I’ve done a tour of duty but Christendom Perished manages to do just that.
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If it isn't swathed in black and grim enough to cause rigor mortis, then it can't rock. That seems to be the prevailing attitude the nay-sayers take towards Boris and their newest record. Without a shred of reason, I've seen Pink hated upon in vitriolic doses, the result of a trendy paradigm shift towards doom metal and its various incarnations. Boris is going to appeal to a different crowd, though, a crowd that thinks My Bloody Valentine could rock just as hard as any metal and that dirty is just as good as heavy.
Southern Lord
The opening "Farewell" doesn't strike me as belonging to the Southern Lord family. Sunn0))), Khanate, Lair of the Minotaur, and Earth—these are the bands that define what the label is all about. "Farewell," on the other hand, sounds like it belongs to mid-90s along with a lot of other shoegazing bands. There's an electric sheen sizzling on the guitars, a melodic emphasis that is absent from so many doom and sludge-laden bands, and a clear vocal part that, though buried in the mix, sounds more important than most growling and shrieking ever does. Boris' Pink (a name that probably pissed off a few fans to begin with) is a monster record, a rabid Tasmanian devil of music that splits homes in two, tears cows into shreds of beef and leather, and launches tractors through people's windows. After the slow pounding of "Farewell" ends, this trio takes a sword to their instruments and slashes out a million mile per hour rock fest; it's a puncturing, balls to the wall album that only slows down long enough to give the band a breather or two. All the recognizable (and sloppy) rhythms that tumble through Pink are what makes it so beautifully brutal and intense. Khanate might crush people under their increasingly heavy heel, but Boris explode with all the power of a semi-truck traveling at a light speed and slamming into a two ton block of steel and human flesh, the impact initiating a flight littered with entrails, shrapnel, and massive explosions. The swift, cutting action of the record is more powerful, more fun than anything Sunn0))) has ever choked out of their E string.
The tones on this album are deep and fuzzy, the guitars humming and overloading like a guitar on fire with too many amplifiers turned up to 11. Initially that might sound like a bad thing, but Boris keep their sound under tight control. The guitars and bass are dirty when they need it to be, and free but concise when appropriate. The point is that the music is fucking gritty, mean, and tough all without sounding like a total mess. This is controlled chaos handled by professionals. I can't imagine this being played anywhere without spontaneous eruptions of violence happening everywhere, putting Axl Rose and his pansy voice and shitty faux rock to total shame. Go ahead and listen to this and then tell me that your favorite metal bands can rock anywhere near as hard. Massive amounts of drugs must be induced when listening to this album. I've never been one to love narcotics, but I feel like I should at least be getting drunk and beating people over the head with chairs when I hear this.
The other side of this album's beauty comes in just how exploratory it is. If the hipster, elite crowd is pissed at Boris for both their pink cover and their enthusiastic embrace of traditional rock elements, they have to admit that this is also Boris entertaining new ground with complete abandon. You can hear how joyful the band is when "Pink" opens up and the drums begin to pound away a groove so thick it's suffocating. When guitar solos erupt from the noise, they sound like volcanic prayers, sprays of heat and lust on a crash course with God. It's beautiful and intense, a rapture beneath a sky of noise and rock. They don't eschew their background, their past, or any of their fans by necessity. Their pounding riffs and long, droning strands of sludge still exist here and there and most notably on "Just Abandoned My-self." The song begins as though it's going to be another fast, orgasmic slice of feedback-laden melody and then transforms into a cannibalistic blob of cacophony. For the majority of the song's 18 minutes, nothing but black, greasy death spills out of the band's instruments. This attitude is all over the record, but within the confines of high energy, thundering and rhythmic pulses. Boris are being as experimental as ever, they're just doing it in a format more people are going to recognize and enjoy.
This record refuses to leave my player. It has been with me everywhere I go. It is a superb rock record littered with enough influences and playfulness to make it both interesting and addicting. I laugh at people who are giving this a cold shoulder; if the underground crowds are too hip to like something that rules this hard, then they're letting go of a band and a record that could make every other heavy rock group around look like a bunch of girls in, ironically, pink skirts. My only complaint is the artwork. While the acid tabs were a good idea, the lyrics and information are impossible to read because of the color and layout. I've noticed this happening with a lot of bands. Why would anyone put white text on a sheet that already contains a ton of white or otherwise light colors? The packaging is beautiful, but unintelligible for the most part. Musically, from beginning to end, this album kicks a whole lot of ass, enough to stick in my mind as one of the better things I've heard this year. The move from droned out, space rock to thrashing, truly dirty rock and back to space again is hypnotic and absolutely a must hear. Don't let the bullshit you've heard or read about this band fool you. That's just the sound of a bunch of trendy assholes getting pissed off over the fact that Boris did something great and did it without being willfully obscure and difficult in the provess. At one point I called this the bastard child of Blue Cheer and My Bloody Valentine and though I now think that Blue Cheer isn't quite heavy enough to make that comparison work, it's a perfectly good explanation of just how dirty this record is and just how beautifully melodic it ends up being. I couldn't recommend an album more enthusiastically or to more people. It's everything a great record should be: a good time, a great listen, and an entirely unique perspective from some very unique musicians.
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Harris Newman is one of the most diverse guitarists to emerge in the last 10 years and Bruce Cawdron is most notably known as the drummer for Godspeed You Black Emperor. Together they've both played as Esmerine with Beckie Foon of Silver Mt. Zion, and without her, the duo has released their first album as Triple Burner.
Their debut album sounds more like one continuous performance: like a concert in various movements. It starts quiet—very, very quiet—and from the first real full song, "The Wherewithal," it seems as if this duo is going to head down a more languid Esmerine-like path: with Cawdron bowing the marimba to the serene notes of Newman's guitar. Things are still calm by the start of "Roundabout" but they build in volume, intensity, and pace, with Cawdron fully engaged in the hand and malleted percussion. By the song's end the duo are blazing at a lightning pace, and the energy is maintained more or less throughout the rest of the disc.
I don't know if Bruce is playing the plastic spoons at the beginning of "Bride of Bad Attitude" but this song is a distinct turning point in styles for Harris. Whereas before the guitar playing was more in line with the sort of new folk sounds coming out of people's guitars like James Blackshaw or Ben Chasny, "Bride" looks south of the Mason-Dixon line, with a Kentucky Bluegrass tinge, and by the next song, "Wall Socket Protector," the train-like snare drumming from Cawdron matches the piercing slide guitar in a very Mississippi Blues manner.
Although the serenity returns for the most of the nearly 14 minute "The Pulse of Parc Ex," it sounds as if Bruce has built his drum set up, piece by piece, with either cymbals or cymbal-sound producers (you can never tell with this guy). The song naturally progresses between the quiet and more moderately paced playing, never quite getting out of hand, leading naturally into the closer "Regresso," which echoes "Wall Socket Protector" with a much more complete drumset in the hands of Bruce.
Newman and Cawdron are excellent players but they clearly work well for each other: Newman's playing is fantastic but a guitarist needs something more to make the sound a little more full without becoming a complete distraction. With the flood of new folksters it's becoming hard to keep up but thankfully Newman doesn't look like he's planning on getting lost in the shuffle. It's a perfect time now to catch up with Esmerine and Newman's solo releases (see Strange Attractors) and those lucky enough to live in the Northeast US and Canada can catch them on the road in the next few weeks.
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