(no subject)
Another music post....
LURKER OF CHALICE - Self-Titled (Southern Lord)
This is a solitary recording project done by a guy named Jeff Whitehead (aka Wrest). I guess he decided to give himself that name because he plays black metal and Wrest sounds way more evil than Jeff. My friend Bryan recommended this to me because I’m a fan of Wrest’s other one-man black metal band, Leviathan, and this is sort of like a more doomy, atmospheric variation of that stuff. Truth be told, after listening to this on headphones alone in my apartment at around 11 pm, some of it creeped the living shit out of me. I started getting this heavy sense of anxiety and paranoia that reminded me of what used to happen when I’d smoke too much weed or something. Like, for instance, I imagined this huge, lumbering maniac was outside my bedroom door, rummaging around my apartment with a broadsword, just waiting for me to emerge so he could slice me up into human bacon strips for his three-headed, shaggy hellhound. I couldn’t hear what was going on, though, because my ears were filled with locust-swarm guitars and blastbeats interspersed with this crazy shit that sounded like vultures eating away at a corpse, or the priest from Exorcist III. So yeah…it was intense. This album is awesome, though, just because Wrest is obviously using this Lurker of Chalice moniker as a vehicle to explore musical ideas that he’d probably be burned in effigy for if he ever applied them to Leviathan. Some of it has that slow, industrial grind of early Godflesh, and some of it is very layered and ethereal like My Bloody Valentine, except with vocals that sound like the re-animated corpse of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.. Pretty rad.
BLACK FLAG - In My Head/Loose Nut (SST)
So everyone knows that whenever you find yourself in a conversation about Black Flag, the go-to “one up” move is to say that you don’t really dig anything post-Damaged, and that when Rollins joined the band shit just went downhill. Right. No offense to any past Black Flag vocalists (because I dig them all for different reasons), but can you honestly say that a dude like Chavo or Dez Cadena (fuck it…I’ll even commit punk heresy right now and include Keith Morris in this list as well) was a better frontman than Henry fucking Rollins? Stop reading this right now, go to YouTube and check out video footage of him fronting Flag in 1981. Seriously…dude was a fucking monster. He intimidated the shit out of people. Plus, although I cannot deny the absolute brute force of Black Flag’s 1978-1981 material, I don’t think they really got interesting musically until Damaged anyhow. But this has nothing to do with Hank. Greg Ginn just started progressively smoking more pot, growing his hair even longer, and listening to even more Hawkwind and John Coltrane records until Black Flag eventually ended up as this weird sort of genre-defying mess of a rock band that played an amalgamation of hardcore, metal, classic rock and free-form jazz, culminating with the release of the In My Head and Loose Nut LPs in 1985. Both of these albums are so fucking awesome. I like Loose Nut a bit more just because it doesn’t tend to lag as much, but you really can’t go wrong with either of them. At the time, they were critical and commercial failures, but since then they have gone on to influence and help along the development of genres like math rock, stoner metal, etc, and they seem to finally be getting their due. Ginn’s guitar work on these albums is brilliant, too - it just sounds so broken and awkward and wrong. It’s like a musical pipeline straight into my brain. Every time I listen to these songs I get stoked thinking about how bummed out all those brainless, mohawked assholes in the crowd must have been, waiting with baited breath to hear “Nervous Breakdown” or “Rise Above”, but receiving a fifteen-minute jam out of “Annihilate This Week” instead. The moment when these guys stopped pandering to their intellectually stunted fanbase and began immersing themselves in their art is when they became legendary, in my opinion, and these two albums are perfect representations of that. Also, I always get an extra kick out of listening to the anti-DUI anthem “Drinking and Driving”, knowing that the dude singing those words once (allegedly) nearly drove the band’s van off a cliff in the Swiss Alps with a head full of strong acid. Oh, Hank…
JAY REATARD - Blood Visions (In The Red)
I missed Jay Reatard the last time he came to Toronto, and I’m not sure whether this bums me out or not. Apparently the oversold and over-enthused (wow….can’t believe I’m using this word to describe a show in Toronto) crowd started climbing on stage and fucking with his gear. Jay didn’t like it, so he punched some kid in the head, packed up his shit and left amid flying beer pitchers, loogies and fists. I think he had only played about three songs. I wasn’t there, though, so my story might be slightly off. Anyhow, he’s playing in Toronto again in October, and I hope a lot of people come see him because I think this dude is absolutely brilliant. Blood Visions is his debut LP as a solo artist, and it pretty much floored me as soon as I heard it. I guess musically its best comparable to something like Richard Hell or The Vibrators fed through a greasy Detroit garage until it emerges as a perfect, shiny nugget of fuzzy, neurotic brilliance. Just damn-near flawless songwriting. I mean it. Dude has a real gift for producing the most infectious, catchy hooks ever. This stuff will stay in your brain for years and years. I’m sure that if I live to be an old man and die in a hospital (which, considering my rampant jaywalking and alcohol abuse, is rather unlikely), I will probably be singing the chorus to “Fading All Away” in my head as my robo-nurse unplugs me and sends me spiraling towards that sweet, black, beckoning void. It’s that good. Just don't unplug his guitar this time, please.
LURKER OF CHALICE - Self-Titled (Southern Lord)
This is a solitary recording project done by a guy named Jeff Whitehead (aka Wrest). I guess he decided to give himself that name because he plays black metal and Wrest sounds way more evil than Jeff. My friend Bryan recommended this to me because I’m a fan of Wrest’s other one-man black metal band, Leviathan, and this is sort of like a more doomy, atmospheric variation of that stuff. Truth be told, after listening to this on headphones alone in my apartment at around 11 pm, some of it creeped the living shit out of me. I started getting this heavy sense of anxiety and paranoia that reminded me of what used to happen when I’d smoke too much weed or something. Like, for instance, I imagined this huge, lumbering maniac was outside my bedroom door, rummaging around my apartment with a broadsword, just waiting for me to emerge so he could slice me up into human bacon strips for his three-headed, shaggy hellhound. I couldn’t hear what was going on, though, because my ears were filled with locust-swarm guitars and blastbeats interspersed with this crazy shit that sounded like vultures eating away at a corpse, or the priest from Exorcist III. So yeah…it was intense. This album is awesome, though, just because Wrest is obviously using this Lurker of Chalice moniker as a vehicle to explore musical ideas that he’d probably be burned in effigy for if he ever applied them to Leviathan. Some of it has that slow, industrial grind of early Godflesh, and some of it is very layered and ethereal like My Bloody Valentine, except with vocals that sound like the re-animated corpse of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.. Pretty rad.
BLACK FLAG - In My Head/Loose Nut (SST)
So everyone knows that whenever you find yourself in a conversation about Black Flag, the go-to “one up” move is to say that you don’t really dig anything post-Damaged, and that when Rollins joined the band shit just went downhill. Right. No offense to any past Black Flag vocalists (because I dig them all for different reasons), but can you honestly say that a dude like Chavo or Dez Cadena (fuck it…I’ll even commit punk heresy right now and include Keith Morris in this list as well) was a better frontman than Henry fucking Rollins? Stop reading this right now, go to YouTube and check out video footage of him fronting Flag in 1981. Seriously…dude was a fucking monster. He intimidated the shit out of people. Plus, although I cannot deny the absolute brute force of Black Flag’s 1978-1981 material, I don’t think they really got interesting musically until Damaged anyhow. But this has nothing to do with Hank. Greg Ginn just started progressively smoking more pot, growing his hair even longer, and listening to even more Hawkwind and John Coltrane records until Black Flag eventually ended up as this weird sort of genre-defying mess of a rock band that played an amalgamation of hardcore, metal, classic rock and free-form jazz, culminating with the release of the In My Head and Loose Nut LPs in 1985. Both of these albums are so fucking awesome. I like Loose Nut a bit more just because it doesn’t tend to lag as much, but you really can’t go wrong with either of them. At the time, they were critical and commercial failures, but since then they have gone on to influence and help along the development of genres like math rock, stoner metal, etc, and they seem to finally be getting their due. Ginn’s guitar work on these albums is brilliant, too - it just sounds so broken and awkward and wrong. It’s like a musical pipeline straight into my brain. Every time I listen to these songs I get stoked thinking about how bummed out all those brainless, mohawked assholes in the crowd must have been, waiting with baited breath to hear “Nervous Breakdown” or “Rise Above”, but receiving a fifteen-minute jam out of “Annihilate This Week” instead. The moment when these guys stopped pandering to their intellectually stunted fanbase and began immersing themselves in their art is when they became legendary, in my opinion, and these two albums are perfect representations of that. Also, I always get an extra kick out of listening to the anti-DUI anthem “Drinking and Driving”, knowing that the dude singing those words once (allegedly) nearly drove the band’s van off a cliff in the Swiss Alps with a head full of strong acid. Oh, Hank…
JAY REATARD - Blood Visions (In The Red)
I missed Jay Reatard the last time he came to Toronto, and I’m not sure whether this bums me out or not. Apparently the oversold and over-enthused (wow….can’t believe I’m using this word to describe a show in Toronto) crowd started climbing on stage and fucking with his gear. Jay didn’t like it, so he punched some kid in the head, packed up his shit and left amid flying beer pitchers, loogies and fists. I think he had only played about three songs. I wasn’t there, though, so my story might be slightly off. Anyhow, he’s playing in Toronto again in October, and I hope a lot of people come see him because I think this dude is absolutely brilliant. Blood Visions is his debut LP as a solo artist, and it pretty much floored me as soon as I heard it. I guess musically its best comparable to something like Richard Hell or The Vibrators fed through a greasy Detroit garage until it emerges as a perfect, shiny nugget of fuzzy, neurotic brilliance. Just damn-near flawless songwriting. I mean it. Dude has a real gift for producing the most infectious, catchy hooks ever. This stuff will stay in your brain for years and years. I’m sure that if I live to be an old man and die in a hospital (which, considering my rampant jaywalking and alcohol abuse, is rather unlikely), I will probably be singing the chorus to “Fading All Away” in my head as my robo-nurse unplugs me and sends me spiraling towards that sweet, black, beckoning void. It’s that good. Just don't unplug his guitar this time, please.