Deafheaven: "Sunbather"

The house mottoes of Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire make excellent micro-reviews: House Stark’s “Winter is coming,” for example, nicely sums up Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit and the Lannisters’ “Hear me roar” tells you what you need to know about what Caro Tanghe is doing on Oathbreaker’s Eros/Anteros. Deafheaven’s Sunbather, then, is House Waxley’s “Light in Darkness.”

The opposites of light and darkness immediately find an analogy in the contrast between the album’s decidedly “un-metal” artwork and the onslaught of blast beats and black metal screams that sets in 47 seconds into the first song. That Sunbather will polarize listeners probably fits this duality. There has been quite some hype about this album and I’m sure it will not only show up in a lot of best-of-the-year lists in December, but also in some most-overrated/overhyped lists. I’d put it in the first category, though. Sunbather is a genre bender between black metal, post-rock, and field recordings that mixes Wolves in the Throne Room, Envy, and Mogwai and that is as uplifting as it is devastating.

The discussions of genre and genre rules provoked by the album are not only intensified by interviews like this one, in which guitarist Kerry McCoy jokingly refers to themselves as “the Hugh Grant in Notting Hill of metal,” but also by the fact that singer George Clarke looks like Bayern Munich’s midfielder Toni Kroos: potential son-in-law rather than corpse paint. Now don’t let that fool you: there is not much playing nice in the lyrics or in the mood of Sunbather.  The guiding motif for the album is the image of a sunbathing girl in a wealthy suburb who triggers all kinds of dark, regretful, and destructive thoughts and emotions in the observer: “I watched you lay on a towel in grass that exceeded the height of your legs. I gazed into reflective light. I cried against an ocean of light.” The lyrics and their delivery as unintelligible shrieks are both gut-wrenching and very intense. That a sunbathing girl leads someone to recording these kinds of screams will probably be considered fucking insane by the majority of mainstream listeners, but it confronts us with the true amount of pain experienced by the narrator: “In the room full of family, but couldn’t find one. In the hallways lit up brightly, but couldn’t find myself. I laid drunk on the concrete on the day of your birth in celebration of all you were worth. I am my father’s son. I am no one. I cannot love. It’s in my blood,” Clarke screams in “The Pecan Tree” and I’m reminded of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 movie Festen (The Celebration). Watch that movie, and you’ll look into a similar abyss.

The music is, non-surprisingly, also full of contrasts. Contemplative and quite beautiful instrumental passages collide with blast beats, tremolo picking, and shrieks that will make your hairs stand up. At times, this is absolutely exhilarating: what happens between minutes four and five in “Vertigo” may just be the best thing I’ve heard all year. The way it changes from solemn postrock into a Coheed-and-Cambria-style guitar solo only to lead into blast beats and black metal shrieking is nothing short of amazing. Once the drums shift down a gear, the song changes to a part where George Clarke’s wails sound like a demon trapped in your bathroom (a demon who’s been raising hell in there for hours and who’s getting a little exhausted now). The song ends with wall-of-sound guitars accompanied by Clarke’s screams – a combination that sounds like he is carrying the weight of the world. The pain and loneliness becomes almost palpable here. It’s super epic and done masterfully.

What I find most interesting about this is how it plays with our expectations and what it has to teach us about our preconceptions. It makes us take a step back and think about the connection between images and music. How the cover design, band photos, logo, etc. influence our reading or listening. Perhaps it even makes us question why we listen to certain kinds of music. By taking a genre that is very much determined by genre conventions – musically and image-wise – and dissolving it into something entirely different, Deafheaven is quite iconoclastic. Sunbather thus may remind us of the inherent contradiction of iconoclastic genres developing their own orthodoxy: when genres that oppose tradition (political, religious, musical, etc.) create their own rules and traditions that then have to be followed. Sunbather is music detached from ideology – and that’s pretty refreshing. It’s not often that albums like that come along.


Here's a video of the recording process.
Their Facebook page.
Deafheaven on Bandcamp.

The Ocean: "Pelagial"

Ambitious as always, German-Swiss prog-/post-metal band The Ocean’s new album Pelagial is published simultaneously as an instrumental and a non-instrumental version.  Musically and conceptually, The Ocean stick to what they have been doing:  dense concept albums whose song titles, general idea, and artwork form an artistic whole that speaks equally to the brain and the guts: giving you something to think about while repeatedly punching you in the stomach. The main idea of Pelagial is a journey from the surface of the ocean to its bottom, a musical trip that gets darker, slower, and more oppressive as we descend through the various oceanic layers. Originally, the album was meant to be recorded without vocals, but the recovery of singer Loic Rossetti from vocal cord problems or something led to his return/addition to the recording process, so that now we have two versions of the album.

The instrumental version lets listeners focus much more on the details: the samples of underwater sounds, the quieter parts with piano, violin, or cello, and the different layers of instrumentation, rhythms, and moods. It's quite impressive – and immediately recognizable as The Ocean, which shows that guitarist Robin Stapp, who led the band from the rather loose collective of various musicians to the fixed line-up they've had since 2010, has always had a clear vision of what his band should sound like. Take your time when you listen to this, there is a lot to discover – the increase in pressure signaled by the relentless drumming of “Bathyalpelagic III: Disequilibrated,” for example, the cold and lonely guitar in “Abyssopelagic II: Signals of Anxiety” that turns into something triumphant as the song progresses, or the sense of Otherness in the lead guitar melodies in “Bathyalpelagic III: Disequilibrated” and “Demersal: Cognitive Dissonance.”

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of listening to the vocal version first, so my first few encounters with the instrumental one felt like listening to a Karaoke CD. Once I got over that and tried to follow the descending-into-the-depth theme, I had another issue. I couldn’t help but think about a thing we did in my Italian class not too long ago: our teacher gave us several sentences that we had to put in order so they’d get increasingly rude (to prepare us for real life in Italy, I guess). We did this with a couple of situations (someone parked stupidly so you couldn’t leave with your car, you’ve been waiting for your pizza for an hour, etc.) and usually I got it all wrong. Apparently my sense of rudeness is different from our teacher’s. I also have the suspicion that my sense of “dark/oppressive/heavy” is different from The Ocean’s – because I’m pretty sure that doing a similar excercise with Pelagial – playing the songs in random order and trying to arrange them in a way I think they portray the journey into the deep – would lead to the same result: my oceanic layers would be all over the place. Try it with your friends and see what happens.

I recommend listening to the instrumental version first and then see what Rosetti does with the songs. The vocals not only add another metaphoric dimension to Pelagial (a journey into the depths of the human psyche), but also make this an entirely different album. It’s interesting how the presence of a singer makes us listen to music in a different way. The songs become more distinct from each other, the build-ups in the songs seem even more epic, and there is an additional point of reference that adds to the emotional range of the songs. Just listen to the two versions of “Mesopelagic: Into the Uncanny”: while the crescendo in the instrumental version is already great, the vocals definitely give it a new urgency. The fact that “down” (in the line “From this point on there is only one direction: down”) is the first screamed word on the album is a very nice touch and makes for an awesome moment. Equally awesome is the juxtaposition of piano and screaming in “Demersal: Cognitive Dissonance” (with guest vocals by Thomas Hallbom of Breach). With Rossetti, who ranges from clean singing to an all-out Aaron-Turner-style roar, the band has become a bit more digestible – even at his most intense screaming he doesn’t sound quite as brutal as the more guttural vocalists on Fluxion, Aeolian, and Precambrian – which adds, I think, to the quality of the songs.

Compared to its immediate predecessors Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, Pelagial seems more homogenous and focused, although it doesn’t really offer any surprises. I wonder if the songs might have been different if they had been written with a vocal track in mind from the get-go. However, the bottom line for me is that – no matter if you buy that whole journey-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean thing or not – it’s still very fascinating. Concept aside, Pelagial is an album that is ambitious, cerebral, complex, and earth-shattering all at the same time. There is enough on both the instrumental and the vocal version to stand on their own, but it’s great to be able to go back and forth between both. Depending on your mood, you may immerse yourself in multi-layered instrumental metal, listen to more traditional band-with-a-singer songs, or ruin your vocal cords with some serious Karaoke.


Check out their website
The Ocean on Facebook
The Ocean's YouTube Page

Chris Wollard and the Ship Thieves: "Canyons"

Imagine the following situation: you went out last night, talked to some old friends, got a little too drunk and a little too nostalgic. You said some stupid things that pissed off your girlfriend and wake up the next day with a mixture of residual nostalgia and regret but also that elated feeling of knowing that you had an absolute blast last night. It’s too early to get up but the sun’s out and you have the day off. You step outside to take a walk and let the morning breeze clear your mind. You’ll meet your friends later. Life is good. 

Listen to “Never have time” on Canyons – and you’ll have the perfect soundtrack. The music, the lyrics, and Chris Wollard’s voice all carry the mixture of melancholia, regret, and optimism that comes with days like the one above. It’s what I like about his songs in Hot Water Music (his main band in which he shares singing and songwriting duties with Chuck Ragan) and it’s what shines through in the best songs on Canyons.

Initially, I was turned off by the same thing that turned me off of some Chris’s songs on Exister, Hot Water Music’s most recent album: “Poison Friends” and “Sick sick love” – like “Boy, you’re gonna hurt someone” on Exister – are kind of repetitive both lyrically and musically. Especially “Sick sick love” feels like it started off as a jam during practice sessions and ended up with some last-minute vocals to put it on the album. Once you make it past these setbacks, though, you’ll find an album that sounds more like band effort than their previous CD (which was, I guess, more or less a solo album) and that is distinctly different not only from Hot Water Music but also from the many many punkrocker-gone-acoustic releases that pop up everywhere.

While there are some melodies that are recycled from Hot Water Music (“Heavy Rolling Thunder,” for example, sounds a lot like “Seein’ Diamonds”) and some typical Chris-Wollard-chord-sequences, this is all in all quite different from HWM. Whereas HWM have always been progressive in their sound and approach, the Ship Thieves are retrospective. You’ll hear a little bit of Neil Young, some Dylan, and many other influences. Their music is nothing new, but that’s exactly the point. Compared to Hot Water Music, they are more of a bar band – with more room for solos and jamming, here to rock while you have a good time and a couple of beers.  The opener, “Dream in my head,” for example, is the kind of Southern punk’n’roll you’d hear at, well, Egan’s in Tuscaloosa, AL on a Friday night.

I am glad that he is neither over-countrifying his songs or going down the acoustic path that Chuck Ragan and countless others have followed. There is only one dude-with-an-acoustic-guitar song on Canyons:  “Lonely Days,” which starts with handclaps and turns into a raspy-voiced melancholy folk song that could also appear on Ben Nichols’s “The Last Pale Light in the West” EP. Actually, forget what I just said: I wouldn’t mind a whole Chris Wollard acoustic album if the songs are that good. Two other standout tracks for me are the two album closers, “Never have time” and “Modern Faith”: they are not really HWM material and might otherwise have gone unpublished, so I am really glad that Chris Wollard found an additional outlet with the Ship Thieves. Although it suffers from a couple of somewhat unexciting songs, Canyons shows Chris Wollard’s knack for writing unpretentious and honest songs that are melancholy and uplifting at the same time: songs about regret, about getting lost, about not finding the time to do what we really want – but at the same time about the redeeming power of love and friendship.


Chris Wollard and the Ship Thieves on Facebook
Chris Wollard on No Idea Records

Mono: "For My Parents"

I saw Mono in Nuremberg a couple of weeks ago and it was awesome. Although the songs got a little repetitive after a while, it was very impressive to see them build their walls of sound and losing themselves in their music – especially their guitarist Taka. A girl standing next to me was so moved she cried during their first song. The Japanese instrumental band has always been leaning a bit more towards pathos than comparable bands such as Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor – and with the new album entitled For My Parents and songs like “Nostalgia” or “Dream Odyssey” it’s pretty clear that their music is still meant to evoke certain emotions. Unfortunately, my emotional response to their new CD is comparable to when I saw Episode I for the first time.

I love the old Star Wars movies and had very high hopes for Episode I. When I finally got to see it, I didn’t know what to say. I liked some stuff, but there were also a whole lot of things that I didn’t like (questionable plot and character decisions, fart jokes, etc.). I tried to explain to myself what was good about it, I defended it in discussions with friends, I watched it again to see if I would like it better. I really, really wanted to like it … but it wouldn’t quite let me. 

With the new Mono CD, there was probably the same feeling of really wanting to like it. After my first listen, I didn’t know what to say. I tried to explain to myself what was good about it, I defended it in discussions with friends, I listened to it again and again to see if I would like it better. Yes, there are some classic Mono elements on For My Parents – but, unfortunately, there is also a lot of stuff that just doesn’t feel right

For example: the use of strings, which has grown over the past few albums to a full-blown orchestra on this one (like on their 2010 live album with the Wordless Music Orchestra). While it used to organically blend in, it is just too much now. Quite often the band disappears behind the orchestra or the strings ruin a part that would otherwise have been nice. Even more than before, their music sounds like the soundtrack to a movie – a movie that consists entirely of important, emotional, fateful scenes. A movie in which there is nothing subtle or unimportant – everything is big, tragic, triumphant, and in-your-face epic. Some of For My Parents is so overblown, bombastic, and sugarcoated, I imagine it would make John Williams blush.

Also: after a while the songs start sounding the same. Melodies in the songs on the second half sound strangely familiar and the fact that they always use the same strategy becomes painfully obvious: quiet guitar melody, crescendo, guitar tremolo when it gets louder. And while that worked very well on previous albums, on this one it’s too repetitive, too sweet, and the melodies don’t really touch me.

Admittedly, it’s not all bad. There are still elements that remind me of why I like their previous CDs so much. Under the layers of over-orchestration, there are some nice melodies and hidden gems. In the best moments, their music has a calming and otherworldly feel (some parts of the first two songs remind me of the soundtrack to Fable, which I like a lot) and a song title like “Dream Odyssey” describes quite well where Mono’s music can take you if you let it.

It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that the new Star Wars movies will never mean the same to me as the old ones. I guess it was a learning experience. I’m not going to defend something just because I liked it in the past. So… I don’t really like this CD. The bottom line is that I feel like I have to explain to myself why I like it. It’s not the kind of CD that requires some effort to get to know or appreciate (like when you listen to Converge for the first time) – it’s too much surface for that. Without the orchestra, it would have been much better, although still weaker than their previous output. Let’s hope they will take a step back again. I don’t want the next one to remind me of Episode II.


Mono's Website
Mono on Facebook
Their bandcamp page

Neurosis: "Honor Found in Decay"

One of my first musical memories is my dad telling me about how Dire Straits were used to test speakers because of the contrast of quiet and loud in their songs. Like most of the things he told me, I wholeheartedly believed it – and the juxtaposition of quiet and loud in a song became a deciding criterion in my judgment of a band’s quality. My pre-teen catalogue of criteria has widened a bit since then, but the fascination with contrasts in volume has survived. For that reason, I still have to think of my dad’s speaker testing story whenever I listen to Neurosis – a band that has perfected the quiet-loud thing …although I would probably have been scared of them as a kid.

Quiet and loud is, of course, also a central characteristic of their new album Honor Found in Decay. There are plenty of moments when I turned up the volume, naively going “Wait. What? What is he whispering? What is that quiet little melody?” – only to frantically turn it down again when the guitars go BOOM! out of nowhere causing me to curse myself for having fallen for it again. I think, though, that this is not so much about quiet/loud but rather about ugly/beautiful (much like my former roommate Elliot's photo exhibit “Beautiful/decay” – and I don't think that I was only making that connection because of the word decay in both titles. Although Elliot juxtaposed the beauty of nature with the destructive influence of man, I think that he also found a certain beauty in decay, which also characterizes my listening experience of this CD). This juxtaposition applies not only to the music, but also to the lyrics, whose portentous tone reminds me of the narrator’s voice in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which has a similar biblical, ominous quality. That book, by the way, also plays with extremes: while it contains some of the most violent stuff I have read, it’s also beautifully written.

Unlike the path Neurosis had taken with The Eye of Every Storm, with its overall trippy and actually quite beautiful sound that’s occasionally interrupted by some aggressive parts, Honor Found in Decay follows its predecessor Given to the Rising in emphasizing ugliness and interspersing it with a few moments of relief. Whether they are crushingly loud or slow and destructive like lava, their apocalyptic blues is quite unnerving in its relentlessness and the light moments become much needed breathers. My favorite songs are “At the Well” and “Raise the Dawn.” From the violent and multilayered culmination of the first into repeated screams of “in the shadow world” to the latter’s subtle outro with a lamenting violin – Neurosis are still monumental, ugly, and, well, beautiful all at the same time. These songs are reminders that in their best moments, Neurosis are in a league of their own. All we can do is stand in awe and be aware that we are witnessing something great.

On the other hand, there are parts on Honor Found in Decay when my attention starts to wander. To say that I get bored is not quite true – and even if I was, Neurosis somehow manage to make me look for blame not in them but in myself: if I get bored, it’s probably because I don’t understand. In these moments of wandering attention, I ask myself why I am listening to that kind of stuff. Or think about when is really the right moment to listen to music like that. The fact that these questions come up is perhaps already a kind of answer. This is music that asks such questions, music that demands something from the listener. There is something very cathartic in listening to Neurosis.  I think a line in the album’s opener could neatly be transposed to what they might be considered as: “deafening redeemers.” I am listening to Neurosis because their crushing noise, relentless ugliness, and relieving beauty make every new album an event and listening to them an intense and cathartic experience – and Honor found in Decay is no exception. Now I’m ready for something a little lighter, though…

Baroness: Yellow & Green

I’m always super disappointed when bands that used to be loud and edgy mellow out and get boring. Of course, mellowing out (or maturing) doesn’t automatically have to be unexciting – I really like Snapcase’s End Transmission, for example, but for every Snapcase I could probably name ten Small Brown Bikes. Luckily, the Yellow & Green album by Baroness falls into the End Transmission category: they have matured, gotten slower, tried new things …and it’s great. They significantly expanded their sound, substituted most of the screaming with singing, and apparently had enough material to put it on two CDs. It was a brave step but I think it paid off.

“Eula,” the last song  on the Yellow side of the album, is representative of the whole thing: it starts off slowly with an acoustic guitar and plaintive vocals, builds towards a great key change, and then hits you with a Rage-Against-the-Machine-style guitar solo that comes out of nowhere. This kind of change can also be found in “Little Things” or in the melodies that “Back Where I Belong” or “Mtns. (The Crown and Anchor)” develop into. There is always something happening in the songs.

That you could play a lot of this to your girlfriend who hates metal, shows how far this is removed from their previous stuff. There are actually some really beautiful parts on there: just listen to the beginning of “Mtns.,” the underwater feel of “Collapse,” or “Twinkler,” which makes me wish that the dwarves will sing a Baroness song in the next Hobbit movie. In “Little Things” and “Cocainium,” you get some Baroness dance beats and “Stretchmarker” could also appear on Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero soundtrack (I’m serious. But I mean that as a compliment) – definitely something I never thought I’d say about a Baroness song. Except for the Foo-Fighters-like “The Line Between,” the Green album moves even further beyond their previous CDs – it’s slower, more melancholy, and there is hardly any room for playing air guitar.

Old Baroness always remind me of Jack Black doing the metal sign and yelling “let’s fucking ROCK!” And while this impulse was definitely much more prominent on the old Baroness CDs, it’s still there on Yellow & Green. There is a series of YouTube clips the band posted, in which they discuss the recording process of the CD. In one of them, the guitarist talks about the solos on the CD:  that they don’t just start off but come in guns blazing …and fucking rock. And he’s absolutely right.  Nonetheless, Baroness are not just there to fucking rock anymore. They leave more room for the actual song and there is more focus on different layers, sounds, and experimenting with new elements. Of course, it has also its flaws. I’m not really into the second song on the Green album and think that “If I forget thee, lowcountry” is just too anticlimactic as the closer. And rhyming “thing” with “everything” in “Little Things” kind of ruins the chorus for me. All in all, though, they have managed to write songs that are absolutely timeless and quite epic at the same time. While a lot of bands end up going in directions where I don’t want to follow them, Baroness have moved into a direction where I really want to follow and I am very excited to see what’s next.


Check out their website
Baroness on Facebook

Hi!

Back when people still made mixtapes, I put together a series of cassettes that I called the car tapes. Each tape had a different theme or style but they all had the same basic idea behind it. Side A was the pre-party, getting pumped-up side for driving to wherever my friends and I were going, and Side B was the slower, more relaxed side for the way home.

I haven’t listened to them in years and it’s been a while that I spent that much time thinking about song lengths, transitions, and musical stories to tell, but I still love music just as much as when I made those tapes. I always feel like I never really get to listen to as much music as I’d want to, so I’m glad that I’ve had to go to work by car for a couple of months now. I know for sure that every morning and every afternoon there is some time for music – cranking it up, singing along, driving too fast.

So, here are some impressions of things I listen to while driving: the car tapes.