Wormphlegm - Tomb of the Ancient King

(Painiac Records, 2006)

If the slow, cold crawl of death-plated doom bores you, move on. Wormphlegm don’t make nuanced prog-blessed neo-black tech-jazz proto-folk metal, or whatever it is the hippies want to hear these days. Tomb of the Ancient King delivers a precise realization of its title, assuming that said tomb is an unlit, cathedral-sized cavern and that ancient king is a pissed-off Balrog flanked by shrieking, rotting terrors, and is seriously not dead.

The dark, one-note pounding on a piano key sets the stage for Tomb’s first half-hour (all one track). As razor chords tear through the shadows, they are paired with a trebly melody that stretches like Romero zombie flesh being ripped from the bone. The vocals also travel in pairs: piercing ghost howls dart always in the high chambers above the rumbling, unintelligible yeti roars. The gore-drenched din mostly follows unsurprising (though not unchanging) paths, with rhythms and riffs speeding up and turning left once in a while but never really finding their way deeper or closer to the edge of the song’s light-starved labyrinth. The monochrome production sets this work apart from these Finns' synth-stained other doom band, Tyranny (also worth checking out, though somewhat less engaging than Tomb).

After thirty minutes of “Epejumalat monet tesse muinen palveltin caucan ja lesse,” the title track and closer “Return of the Ice Age and the Tortyrant” seem bite-sized in comparison, at only 13 minutes and 17 ½ minutes respectively. They don’t stray far from the blueprint laid out in the first track, but mash similar ideas into new forms. Drum patterns in “Tomb of the Ancient King” become more varied and evocative, helping the band sound more like they’re playing a song rather than exploring a haunted mine. At one point, the torturous bellowing drops closer to Gozer snarls. “Return” distends and shrivels over its runtime with bent, decaying chords and wobbly rhythmic heaving. The track eventually gives out, with the album not so much finishing as exhausting itself after an hour of unrelenting punishment.

With all the variations on bleak doom cropping up in 21st century metal, some will say that Tomb is beating a dead horse. But when so much stinking, gleaming viscera erupts from an animal when it is beaten thus, I, and Wormphlegm, say: Why not?

Encoffination - Ritual Ascension Beyond Flesh

(Selfmadegod Records, 2010)

The Christians will tell you that faith in the Savior is sufficient to gain the reward of Heaven. Trust in the redeeming power of Jesus, they say, and He will save you from humanity’s default destiny: damnation. Well, most will say that. The Catholics seem to think a person should go out among the suffering and do good deeds, as well, instead of just grinningly gripping the robe-tails of the righteously bearded one. Leave it to those incense-huffing Pope-worshippers to turn God into some kind of force for good and human progress. And so the debate rages, probably until the Christ returns or the aging sun engulfs our planet and makes the whole conversation moot.

The question for Encoffination is similar: Is the triune dedication of faith, hope, and love for Disembowelment’s early 90's output enough to usher Ritual Ascension Beyond Flesh into the canon of metal rituals worth your time, soul, and shelf space? YES. Oh, sweet sepulcher, yes; if there are any Protestant equivalents in the Satanist camp, they’re right about this one. First of all, at only a couple EPs and a full-length, Disembowelment’s back cat wasn’t deep enough anyway. Second and most importantly, Ascension’s shifting rhythms and grotesque chord progressions grab your attention and never let go.

Encoffination keep all the buzzing riffs, cavernous vocals, and mid-to-lumbering drum crashes intact and shroud everything with a muted, distant production that heightens the atmosphere and allows for impressively loud listening without ruining the ears. The songs never settle into one mode for too long, but lurch often from grimy crawl to wicked gallop to something uncomfortably in between. The song lengths also aid listenability, with every track (excepting the slightly longer “Coffinpsalms”) wrapping in under six minutes. Less likely to be granted patience are the creepy film samples that tend to bookend the songs; they might have worked if their use was less predictable, but mostly they become tiresome by mid-album.

The pair of interlude tracks (“Procession” and… um, “Interlude”) and tuneless, Asunder-like singing in the final minute of the album prove these guys carry more up their sleeves than the one trick on display through most of Ascension. Heck, they also got together this year as Father Befouled for a more aggressive and equally filthy death metal album. Yeah, that one’s pretty great, too. The time for debating the band’s worthiness is over. For now, and forever, just listen.

Exist - In Mirrors EP

(self-released, 2010)

One of the highest compliments one can pay a young band is that comparisons don’t come easy. Sure, Exist highlight Meshuggah, Cynic, Tool, and King Crimson among their array of influences, and any informed listener can tease out those jazz-inflected prog-death elements without help. But from these influences, Exist build a distinctly personal identity, as any band worth some amp wattage should.

“Writhe” roars in with staccato riffs and aggressive, octopus-armed drum patterns. Singers Max and Weber have that rare discernible growl, all the more important because the transcendental lyrics speak to the core of the band’s musical vision. At the halfway point, the band trades in their swirling fever for a deep, mounting groove and a clean and curly guitar solo. This entirely instrumental section builds back toward earlier intensity but doesn’t quite reach it, setting the stage instead for the 3-part title track.

While there are few moments of real tension on the EP, “In Mirrors” contains all of them, beginning with a bassy rumble and a few instrumental teases before the head-nodding beat drops. Part One, “The Pine,” is dominated by spare guitar leads and relaxed, slightly anemic clean vocals; the listener has to wait for grander moments in Part Two for Max’s voice to swell to its powerful potential. When the second verse ends and the bass and guitar stake out their territories with driving beat and distorted Chewbacca moans respectively, the nod deepens toward serious half-bang. The whispered vocals throughout the song work perfectly – they are a harsh, chilling, and barely human touch added to the destruction wrought all around them. In fact, the growl-to-whisper switch at the 5:35 mark is hands-down my favorite moment here. “So We Are…” settles into a dreamy, synth-painted landscape where the guitar solo can wander slowly before attaching itself to a burly bass and drum attack. Final section “Equilibrium” gathers all the proggy promise of earlier moments and wraps them into a package of inventive guitar and bass solos, both chiming and melodic, before the whole piece finally quiets and comes to rest.

Certainly, some of the soloing tests this listener’s patience, and not all of the vocal choices are as engaging as they might be, but the band gets considerable points because this shit sounds so good. Far from the “intentional” murk so many unsigned bands labor under, Exist benefit from a mix where everything can be heard and all parts weave a focused and horns-worthy whole.

Stopgap Release II

This afternoon, while my daughter napped and my son spent some time with his grandmother, I listened to Blood of the Black Owl's A Feral Spirit and reread Decibel's May 2010 Burzum article. BotBO is amazing! J. Bennett is amazing! The witching-hour ice storm that kept me out of a full day of pointless meetings is amazing!

Then I listened to Alcest's Ecailles de Lune and read a Dillinger Escape Plan article from the same magazine issue. Both were slightly less extreme and amazing (but only slightly). Hooray for back issues and a short memory.

While Heaven Wept - Vast Oceans Lachrymose

(Cruz del Sur, 2009)

Books and their covers be damned! Witness how the expectations build: the band name suggests a slow sorrow so deep that an infinite plane of grace-endowed souls can’t hold back the tears; the album title evokes a globe-cracking rumble that should cause the forces of nature to wail and gnash their immaterial teeth; and the first track is sixteen goddamn minutes long! The soul-threatening growl and ultra-bassy reverb should be tingling my fingers before I can even get the last shred of cellophane off the jewel case.

But this is not doom. Is it prog metal? (Urgk…) Power metal? That long opener, “The Furthest Shore,” gallops in with a whole lot more energy than expected, and it only takes a few seconds to realize that the guitar tones are all wrong for the anticipated vibe. Still, it’s a promising, fist-pumping workout, even with the subtle keyboard mood enhancers. But after about 75 seconds, the song finally gives itself away with a triumphant clean guitar melody that leads right into a starry-eyed acoustic section. All of which, to these ears, could have been set right with a frontman’s (or woman’s) burly roar, blackened rasp, or even Dubin-esque screech (ok, maybe not that). The rock operatic vibrato that does join the fray, however, only clarifies this band’s intent to launch a pillar of light into that angel-filled city, dry those eyes and slap some victorious grins on those faces. Vocalist Rain Irving babbles something about being carried to his “watery grave,” but I don’t think he actually plans to go.

Subverted expectations, though, are hardly an appropriate basis for determining quality. The instrumental prowess on this release is evident, and if extreme climbers required riffs instead of oxygen, these guys would play every show atop Everest. Trevor Schrotz's percussion rarely drops below freight train speed, and then only for self-consciously pretty moments. Riding these muscular musical shoulders are effective (though hardly original) vocal melodies, occasionally attended by the obvious amount of choral oohs and aahs. On “Vessel,” Irving actually croons, “Tonight, will you sail away?” as if such a thing had never been crooned before. And the sporadic keyboard runs take me back to a time when… no, no I never listened to shit like this.

And I probably won’t ever again.

Stopgap Release I

Having found out yesterday that Evoken and Burzum are set to release new darkness into the world in the coming months, I took some time yesterday to listen to The Antithesis of Light and Belus. Solid work, both of them. I'll probably put myself through more Evoken this weekend. If the world's gonna end soon, I want it to sound like that.

More words about sounds when I have the time and inspiration. Embrace the emptiness until the light takes us.

John Zorn - Ipsissimus

(Tzadik, 2010)

My five-year-old son loves “Book of Los,” the second track off Tzadik’s latest Moonchild collaboration. I could lie and say it was for Marc Ribot’s lush guitar lead, the mid-song choral touches, Zorn’s cautious piano contributions, or even the blazing instrumental virtuoso second half. It’s not. My boy lights up when Mike Patton’s Fudd-in-an-electric-chair gibbering rips across the song’s ritual jazz-rock landscape. It’s perhaps not the best reason to be excited about occult improv, but it could be worse. He could prefer Bieber.

After four other recordings with similar focus, one might expect further work to be a stale retread, but on Ipsissimus, Zorn and company are still finding new ways to evolve their sound. Patton has injected lighter whispers and tonal singing into his performance, and Zorn’s sax rage in opener “Seven Sigils” also yields to smoother granddad-pleasing runs. Trevor Dunn’s bass growls in places, bubbles in others, sometimes laying foundation but just as often scratching out Masada-like melodies (as in “The Changeling”) that have been creeping into this music since Moonchild’s last outing, The Crucible. Joey Baron, likewise, is more than rhythm keeper; his drums sketch impish patterns around the others’ equally cheeky efforts. Further sonic surprises can be found in the chiming intro and tropical beach-to-beast transformations of “Warlock,” and in the guitar solos exhumed from some alternate universe’s Southern rock tradition in “Supplicant.”

Maybe it’s not so strange that, amidst all the bold magickal questing undertaken by these brave musicians, it’s Patton’s human voice, screwball utterances and all, that I find most memorable. Maybe there’s a giggling five-year-old in all of us.

The Dillinger Escape Plan - Option Paralysis

(Season of Mist, 2010)

For poignant band history, please refer to any Calculating-obsessed article still mesmerized by the musical shape-shifting between albums, as if regular and significant lineup changes should have resulted in a stagnant musical vision. If you didn’t listen before and know all that shit already, you won’t be listening to this, the band’s most complete and realized statement in said illustrious history. In Option Paralysis, they have balanced traditional beauty with violence and menace. Farewell, Mona Lisa, indeed.

As strong as much of Ire “Aphex is Totally Sweet” Works was, most of the superior songcraft skulked in the later moments of the album, surrendering the first half to full-bore ear fucks and “ain’t it cool” experimentation. Option Paralysis still offers full-bore ear fucks (“Good Neighbor” and “Endless Endings”), but now the experiments serve the songs by adding color and dimension to the severe emotional battery. The band wraps its ambitions into dense, multifaceted attacks, each screaming through its own complex arc. By all means, take in the album as a whole (it’s only about 40 minutes long), but enjoy each song as its own complete beating.

Puciato’s lyrics have always been gold. While they’ve often been roared into obscurity, they can draw blood when sung. Drum sounds shift from micro-tight to empty-warehouse booming (both in “Room Full of Eyes”). Wicked-fast guitar fireworks are still in attendance, but now they incorporate and support more melodic progression. For many, album centerpiece “Widower” will be the deal-maker/breaker, with its core piano and breathy singing. But detractors will fail to notice that no complexity has been sacrificed for the song, as the piano, drum, and eventually guitar parts weave a constricting, airless bag around the listener’s head.

Each version of the band has had to fight for its identity. Count DEP 2010 as a win.

The Aliens Are Here (and they're boring as shit...)

What the hell is wrong with TV writers? Are there laws against compelling storylines with intriguing characters who don't seek out cliched situations or utter the dullest possible one-liners? Is it impossible to develop a story with direction, focus, and uncontrived complexity all without losing its ability to be serialized? AM I ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE?

Scenario: A civilization of ultra-advanced humans in some distant future abducts thousands of people from the 20th century timeline, enhances them all in different and subtle ways, then drops them off early in the 21st century to effect broad changes to humanity's fate. Awesome, right? So why did the creators of The 4400 have to muck it up by turning it into a procedural cop drama with all the obvious and silly dilemmas offered by that genre? At least that show had Jordan Collier, an ambiguous goodie/baddie who alternately had humanity's benefit/destruction on his mind; his part added a complexity that the rest of the show couldn't provide.

This is all to say that The 4400 was a slightly more impressive venture than the reboot of V - an alien invasion story set in (who knew?!) NYC that has also been overloaded with cliched dialogue and relationships on top of being molested by bland cop show paranoia. I've honestly only watched the first four episodes of the new V, but I'm pretty sure I won't see any more. I like fantastic stories, I love genre trappings like time travel and other worlds, but stories require writers, not Dahl's Great Automatic Grammatizer machine that digests unoriginal thoughts and flattens the pulp into uninteresting blather. I mostly think zombie stories are pretty foolproof as far as generating greatness, but Fulci's Zombi makes enough gross errors in judgement to dissolve any interest in its ideas.

I've been saddened by the idiocy of Prison Break's later seasons (first one was bang-up; fell apart after that), the slavish genre devotion of Taken, and the more colorless characters on Dexter (which is in other ways fantastic). Lost was plagued with anemic writing, even when the mythology was rich and the plotlines heady. West Wing was a gold-plated leviathan of writing, acting, and production for four seasons, but lost boldness and character when Sorkin and company passed the baton to lesser creatures. Firefly flashed serious promise, but was cancelled near the climax of its story, and the promise was never fulfilled in the disappointing movie that followed.

Rescue Me is rough and hilarious. So is The Office. And (even while it flounders at times) Chuck. I don't even consider myself a particular fan of comedy - by all means, give me a dark story and make me believe even its most outlandish notions - but are these the only kinds of shows that will excite me anymore?

Sorry. No music today. Maybe next week.

Worm Ouroboros - s/t

(Profound Lore, 2010)

Sometime in the spring of 2010, I developed an interest in music-as-ritual, using rock instruments and unfettered song structures to tunnel into spirit realms and alternate consciousness. Worm Ouroboros was one of the projects that attracted my attention. Released by the genius ears at Profound Lore, which traffics mostly in reality-twisting extreme metal, Worm Ouroboros plays like a prayer to draw Gaia's will up from the earth, or an intense eulogy for the failing autumn sunlight.

Song after song, guitar melodies ring like chimes struck by an inspired wind, and vocals waft through like white clad dancers in a sun-dappled clearing. The image is certainly enhanced by the early chanting, "Rowan, ash, willow, oak..." Emotive bass lines, bearing deep melodies all their own, never allow the music to float off completely into the aether but keep treading the worn paths and untouched undergrowth of the forest floor. The sparse percussion adds classy, powerful accents, even becoming gorgeous in the case of the xylophone in "Brittle Heart."

Traditional heaviness rarely rises through the gauzy, layered haze; the distorted roar is stunning when it arrives, but so alluring are the sounds and images of each song that it is never missed when it's gone. The listener is swept ever forward by the stretched melodies, mysterious percussive touches, and spectral vocals as they promise wonderful new sights around every curve; such seduction as this needs no blustering to urge us on.

Late in the album, the singer suggests "we hardly see the darkness as it's setting in," and that applies to the listening experience as well. The delicate beckoning of these songs evoke the passing of a precise moment of an exact day in a specific season, an instant that is simultaneously fragile and fleeting as well as old, permanent, and ever-returning. The music seems invested with something sylvan, feral, and only sinister to whatever profane creature might try to interrupt it. So overwhelming is the spell that, with the folky picked guitar melody overlaying the final subterranean rumble of "A Death A Birth", I feel like I'm being summoned back to the material world from my own unmarked and overgrown grave.

And I just want to go back.

A Forest of Stars - Opportunistic Thieves of Spring

(Transcendental Creations, 2010)

Q: What do you do if you like wearing ruffles, lace, and pretension but you're not into power metal or Meatloaf? A: make a sprawling post-black opus trimmed with pretty instrumental flourishes and falsified 19th century origins.

Black metal is certainly a touchstone for Opportunistic Thieves of Spring - nothing else buzzes with overdriven chords, thuds with galloping double bass, and howls like a second coming of Silencer - but these six long tracks are not the blistering blasphemies of Gorgoroth or the lo-fi scourges of Burzum. A Forest of Stars weave themes both pastoral and destructive around each song's majestic emotional arc. "Summertide's Approach" opens with a quaint string 'n' keys dance routine before dropping into what sounds like a demon's interrogation chamber, and "Thunder's Cannonade" follows a procession of mournful violins for much of its runtime. Not that heaviness is an afterthought - there's some very satisfying chugging throughout "Sorrow's Impetus" and devastating drums on "Raven's Eye View" - but more often than not, flute or piano melodies build on top of the sawed-off chord progressions, while violins drone or lilt alongside. Then, as if all the quirks of earlier moments were never there at all, the expansive throb of "Starfire's Memory" and slow growth of "Delay's Progression" invite some serious meditation on darkness and depth.

Thieves does not endear nor reveal itself quickly or easily, and it is often a confusing piece of work. Maybe there are a few too many ideas engaged on this recording, or maybe I'm just too dumb to assimilate them all. Either way, Thieves should be sonically compelling enough to invite repeated listens by adventurous ears, and it should probably be passed over by those looking for undiluted demolition.

Salome - Terminal

(Profound Lore, 2010)

Indian burns leave your skin feeling raw. So does a belly-flop into a cold pool. So does being dragged behind a team of galloping horses face down over a poorly paved road for 10 miles before being cut loose so a black-cloaked bastard can flip you over and lash your oozing wounds with a cat-o-nine-(salt-crusted hot-metal cable)-tails. Real fucking raw. That is the kind of raw that Salome communicates with Terminal.

The doom trio conjures a riff-tastic racket on their second full-length. Terminal is truly tortured, and torturous, soul-burning stuff - not the torture remembered of YOB or Ahab, nor the torture foretold of Worship or Evoken, but the torture being endured RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Kat's vocals groan and squall like she's digging her way through three tons of earth toward some righteous and gory vengeance. The almost manic drums drive songs forward with more vigor than I expected from a doom record, but of course there's the signal-sodomizing "An Accident of History," whose only motion develops out of sonic cycles buried in the feedback roar and a couple (very) scattered chord crashes. Such a long track nestled right in the middle of the album screams centerpiece, a statement of intent very far from planet Doom, and only hinted at during the album's six shorter tracks. I'm left guessing at its purpose, and I can only think of one possibility.

Extra rawness.

Neurosis - Souls at Zero

(Alternative Tentacles, 1992)

Souls at Zero sounds a whole lot like the metal album I would want to make if I made a metal album. Its heart is all grim sludgy parts and barked end-times poetry, surrounded and supported by arpeggiated chords, haunting samples, sonic sweeteners like piano, flute, and violin, and sweet guitar leads soaring over all those grim sludgy parts at exactly the right moments. It stands as Neurosis' blistering and clear mission statement to break and to heal and never compromise their singular vision.

Souls also conveys all the sophistication (or its lack) of a first attempt at this kind of epic heaviness, which is why I think my attempt at a metal album might sound like this. Listeners might drown in adjectives trying to describe it, but "subtle" would not be one of the offending modifiers. Also, transitions are sometimes shaky and abrupt, as the boys shift between ideas and levels of reality without much attention to any connective tissue. Of course, Neurosis came up with this fantastic behemoth approximately two decades ago, which makes them at least 20 years and several mind-blowing records more awesome than me.

Souls at Zero is often an honorable mention in the (much deserved) praise of Through Silver in Blood and any of the band's later works (my love for The Eye of Every Storm would be as likely be shouted down as seconded by the Neurosis faithful), but taken on its own terms it is indeed a force and a fire under any current musician with ambitions both heady and heavy.

The Beginning and the End: New Year, Resolution

Blog posting is hard work. It means writing, and having something to say. I'm good at neither. Past posts have been vanity exercises. Future posts will have fuller content. This post... I got nothing.

The music I dove into today includes Asunder's A Clarion Call (gruelingly beautiful doom), Angel Eyes' Midwestern (not sure what I think yet), Agalloch's sprawling and gorgeous Marrow of the Spirit, and a series of nocturnes by Chopin.

Actual reviews to come.

May this year screw me over less than last year.