V.'s List of Problems With Lists 2013

This year, something I probably should have figured out a long time ago about lists finally clicked. It's not really the "best album," sure, and it's not just a bunch of personal-incompetence-to-judge issues. It's been obvious for a long time (even in my own posts) that putting an album out in maybe October is the best way to get on a year-end list, sure. The new obvious? People are just listing shit they WISH belonged on the list that didn't fail so horrendously they could ignore it.
Suddenly, I'm really glad The Inarguable has dropped mostly out of the generic list game so I can actually have something to say you haven't read 20 times in the last week. So, here's a list of complaints that DON'T include stuff like "Fleshgod Apocalypse because I don't like it" and "Deafheaven because it's pink and also I don't care." Other people like other stuff. This stuff just factually doesn't belong on best of 2013 lists.


Things That Shouldn't Be On "Best of 2013" Lists

Gorguts - Colored Sands
Yes, it's fucking Gorguts. I love Gorguts. If I were making an "essential metal albums" list, Obscura would be one of the first things I scribbled down. It's glorious.
And Colored Sands is pretty good, too. The soundtrack-romanticism of "The Battle of Chamdo" isn't what I would have expected the Luc Lemay of 15 years ago to do with a string quintet, but it's nice and I hope someone pays Luc to write a soundtrack for their obscure film as a result.
It's not one of the best bloody albums of 2013, though. It's (particularly in terms of overall sound) more like Colin Marston invited Longstreth, Lemay, and Hufnagel to put together a full-band Indricothere (unfamiliar?) album than like a new Gorguts album. I enjoy Indricothere but . . . anyway, Colored Sands is nice and because it's Gorguts and isn't Luc's Lulu Radikult, it's dominating all the lists.

The Body - Master, We Perish
[see my review here]
Okay, this hasn't been on THAT many lists, but it's been on too many. I've hardly seen Christs, Redeemers on any lists so far (maybe one?) and Christs, Redeemers is the crushing work that we were waiting for Chip and Lee to put out so we could forget the 5-song CD-R and mostly neglect Master, We Perish. It's RIDICULOUSLY GOOD. If this were a top-ten list, it'd be a very strong contender for #1. Where is it on the lists? WHERE. And Master, We Perish is pretty decent/good, but I'd only list it if Christs, Redeemers hadn't happened and I'd debate including it. Did nobody listen to Christs, Redeemers? What's going on?

Inquisition - Obscure Verses for the Multiverse
Inquisition is and has always been boring. They're not QUITE the ideal example of why I hated most black metal for the first several years of my exposure to it, but they've got most of that going on. All the clichés, chords instead of riffs, boring drum beats, bleating uninterested vocals? Check. And they don't have bass. I mean, for a black metal band, they didn't make their sound as unpleasantly thin as they might have, and this album's a step up in sound, but some token distorted ratty boring basslines that sometimes cut out would've added some interest.
For quite some time (well, most of 2008), I gave them the benefit of the doubt based on repeated assurances that they were "intense" live. I don't know why everyone uses "intense" to describe them. It's possible that the sheepherd is merely bleating/believing what other sheep said. Then I saw them. And I nearly fell asleep despite being well-rested. I've had BATHROOM VISITS more intense. Thumbs down.
P.S. Obscure Verses even has chord progressions that sound like poorly-constructed pop ballads.

Black Sabbath - 13

It doesn't matter. It's not particularly interesting or great or anything. If it were a new band, nobody would care (they'd turn it down for that Uncle Acid album). I didn't want to listen to metal before Sabbath, but . . . it's a whole album of the bonus new studio tracks from Reunion. Yay? Whatever.

Vhöl - Vhöl
It's a weak mix of mostly 30-year-old riffs and melody+blasts. "Melodic" gets specified in subgenres for a reason--it's a warning to get the fuck away. Feel the need to include one of Mike Scheidt's random supergroups? Go check out Lumbar, which is heavy and solid and actually a desirable listen. I don't give a damn who's playing sloppy d-beats on your album. Vhöl is just okay and moderately annoying to listen to.








Things That Should Have Been On "Best of 2013" Lists, But Mostly Weren't

The Body - Christs, Redeemers

Seriously. Do I need to continue this? It's everything that made The Body suddenly popular with All The Waters of the Earth Shall Turn to Blood, made better and fresher and heavier and more enveloping. It has all the satisfying songwriting that Master, We Perish and even moreso the 5-song CD-R didn't really manage to deliver with the perfected version of the sound development they worked on through those two releases. The title looks very hand-sharpie'd, but it's a glorious record. Glorious.

Wormed - Exodromos
This is a pretty clear-cut case of "too early in the year." I guess nobody can remember as far back as March. It's Wormed. It's everything it's supposed to be, not a dismal attempt that isn't quite dismal enough to pass up. It should be on lists Gorguts/Sabbath style at least (for being a Wormed album that doesn't completely blow), but it actually deserves to be on lists because it's good.









Defeated Sanity - Passages Into Deformity

This one's kind of a margin case--it's more accurate to say it was missing from all the lists made by journalists. For some reason, it doesn't seem to be having any problem showing up on lists that journalism-outlets wrangle out of musicians. I wonder why. Maybe it's really good or something. MAYBE. Maybe it's one of the best death metal albums of the year, certainly outperforming Portal's "Vexovoid" (which I have nothing against, though I know Jon would probably put it first on his hate list this year), which seems to be on every list ever. Wait, Exodromos and Passages are both on Willowtip. Is there a conspiracy against Willowtip? Are they doing a shit job of promotion despite having amazing albums? Is it completely The Inarguable's fault for completely failing somehow to review albums we love? Hmm.




Love,
V. who hates everything

In no particular order, more of the best albums I personally failed to review this year (which is assuredly missing many more):
Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet - "Circuitous" (Driff Records)
The Ames Room - "In St. Johann" (Gaffer Records)
Suzuki Junzo - "Portrait of Medeleine Elster" (Utech Records)
Colin Webster - "Antennae" (Gaffer Records)
Tim Daisy Trio - "A Fine Day in Berlin" (Relay Recordings)
Brötzmann/Drake - "Solid and Spirit" (Nero's Neptune)
Wooley/Yeh/Chen/Carter - "NCAT" (Monotype Records)
Trumpets & Drums - "Live in Ljubljana" (Clean Feed)
Minton/Chen - "By the Stream" (Sub Rosa)
Olivia Block - "Karren" (Sedimental)

And more of the best albums The Inarguable failed to review this year:
Common Eider, King Eider - "Taaleg Uksur" (Caribou People) and "Earth Liver" (Black Horizons)
Kinit Her - "Hyperion" (Pesanta Urfolk) and "Cavern Stanzas" (Reue Um Reue)
Low - "The Invisible Way" (Sub Pop)
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - "Bonnie 'Prince' Billy" (Palace Records)
Castevet - "Obsian" (Profound Lore)
Ulcerate - "Vermis" (Relapse Records)
Ulver & Tromsø Chamber Orchestra - "Messe I.X-VI.X" (Neuropa/Jester Records)
Kayo Dot - "Hubardo" (Ice Level Music)

P.S. - Bear in mind that we covered so little stuff this year that most of it (Burning Tree, Trees, Gris, Devotion, Kinit Her, Merkstave, Cara Neir, etc. etc.) is among our favorite stuff of the year. This has been a glorious year for new releases.

Bonus: Pop Music That Shouldn't Be On Lists
. . . my day job keeps me informed.
Justin Timberlake - 20/20 blah blah and "Mirrors"
Robin Thicke et al - "Blurred Lines"
Katy Perry - "Roar"
Music video or no, "offensive" (I really hope the metal kids reading this weren't offended by this) performances or no, Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball" is a great song, performed well. And there's a bunch more reasonable pop stuff--we can count Lana Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness" because the remix has made it popular this year, and there's a bunch of other stuff that was pretty okay. Even some great bass grooves (Bruno Mars' "Treasure") are preferable to some of the sleazy and/or boring crap that's getting more recognition.

Ricart/Millevoi Quartet - "Haitian Rail" (2013) [Gaffer Records/New Atlantis Records]

I've for years discounted the value of guitar and electric bass in jazz. I'm taking a step back and rethinking now--but then again, Ricart and Millevoi don't exactly just play "jazz." They incorporate a world of New Music and instinctive catharsis into their works, and "Haitian Rail" is surely more than nine worlds in six tracks.

Nick Millevoi has a history rich in the ways of Tzadik--not only did his ensemble Many Arms release a crushing album on Tzadik last year (really, go listen to that. The review will still be here when you come back.), he's always delved unrestricted into the (frequently insane) music that suits him, never stopping to worry about "genres" and "traditions." He adroitly utilizes guitar fire from across jazz, avant-rock and shred, and the ultramodern to create a hesitation-free tapestry of sound. In 2011, he (uniquely) wrestled his fire from an electric 12-string for his solo work "Black Figure of a Bird."

It really shouldn't be surprising that he's found a welcome spot with Dead Neanderthals on a European tour September-October 2013--I'm waiting eagerly to hear the madness that spews from that.

Ed Ricart is something of the perfect co-leader for Millevoi. His textures (rumbling, frayed, thundering) suit Millevoi's electric fire, but the real key is his consistency in emitting coherent expressions no matter how he delves into techniques I don't know how to identify. On "Haitian Rail," he freely draws both from the heavy poundings of his noise rock work in Hyrrokkin and the looser flow and textures of Matta Gawa.

From New York ensemble Little Women's mind-devouring enigmas (again, the review will still be here) comes tenor saxophonist Travis Laplante. His work, especially solo (see his album "Heart Protector") is an outgrowth of his dedication to the spiritual immersion of his life. Through the help of circular breathing, he releases ceaseless transformations of wide-interval and timbre-only trills, sometimes bursting with multiphonics, in a way that reflects shamanic approaches to music through didgeridoo and throat singing, given new life in the world of New Music.

Ches Smith's drums are familiar to many as what makes Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog awesome. His heavy tom-centered syncopations shine even more with the greater flexibility and freedom of what is still essentially a improvisational group for Haitian Rail, and his sense of groove underlines Ricart's growling patterns with power and finesse.

Want to hear every combination, texture, tempo, and stylistic reference these four could masterfully put to tape? Go get the album, then listen to it a whole bunch of times. I have yet to reach the end without feeling the need to go back and explore the beginning again. Reap the rewards of these labors.

Devotion - "In Love We Stand Alone" (2013) [Brave Mysteries]

We don't normally have much trouble distributing reviews around here. I only got the honor by virtue of having been the first of us to order it--we ALL ordered it.



So yeah, Devotion is the work of Brave Mysteries veterans and more-or-less newlyweds Troy and Dani Schafer, also known for work in ensembles like Kinit Her, Wreathes, and Wormsblood. In Love We Stand Alone is absolutely among our favorites of their work (which is a muddled mess of "wait but this album is priceless too") and features all of the slight strangenesses, originality, and beautiful sense of melody we've come to expect from their other projects--with an emphasis on the beautiful and enrapturing. Troy and Dani embrace us with the kinds of tunes that stick in the mind and yet continually receive a welcome.

Like Kinit Her's nearly simultaneous album The Poet and the Blue Flower (from which we premiered a tune here), In Love We Stand Alone heavily features harmonic masses of violin work, here mixed with more of Troy's acoustic guitar strumming and lush horn arrangements. Featuring Dani more prominently as the main voice helps Devotion find a place as the "beautiful" one of the twins, but extended violin technique and occasional forays into microtonality mean the engaging songwriting also holds on to the adventurous. Nathaniel Ritter of Kinit Her appears in the final track, working under his Circulation of Light name to bring huge keys and organ in a fitting ode from a close friend to the pair's marriage.

It's one thing to know people who are as beautiful human beings as Troy and Dani Schafer; it's a world of blessing that they're capable of putting that into their music and sharing it with the world.

Burning Tree - "Lammergyer" (2013) [Utech Records]

It's probably abundantly clear at this point that Utech is one of my favorite labels. Keith constantly puts out a variety of quality ambient, noise, and free jazz records. Lammergyer is the destructive new record from Burning Tree, a duo of Tape Rape veterans drummer Dag Erik Knedal Andersen and saxophonist Dag Stiberg, the former known for a number of collaborations with various members of the Scandinavian free improv underground and the latter known for his particularly abrasive saxophone sounds and frequent use of distortion and the like. Stiberg's approach in the past has most often amounted to harsh noise created with saxophone as a sound source--and far more artistically than most who attempt that approach.


Andersen's Tape Rape background (the um, evocatively named Cunt Rash duo with guitarist Daniel Meyer Grønvold of the Norwegian Noise Orchestra) also hints at the work he does in Burning Tree. Anderson's drums on Lammergyer are based in the violence and chaos of noise's meetings between the metal and free jazz scenes. Whereas a free jazz drummer (even Andersen himself in other contexts) often unleashes a sort of syncopated chaos, the practitioners who come from a metal/noise background (often one and the same) tend to work around a complex "grid" with sounds directly on the lines.

Stiberg, meanwhile, working completely without effects for the Burning Tree project, unleashes sounds surprisingly reminiscent of the bursts of feedback and beat-heavy wave interactions noise folks make with pedal loops and contact microphones. His playing is relentlessly harsh, with some impressively destructive multiphonics and more wild delving into altissimo than one hears even in most of the more pain-fueled free jazz records.

As Utech says, Dag & Dag follow a long duo tradition on this album of an A side of shorter, "digestible" cuts and a B side of one extended improvisation. The B side, "No Return," is where Burning Tree's sound really shines: they integrate all of the elements they displayed on the A side into a performance long and powerful enough to satisfy. It's a distinctly new take on the sax/drums duo concept despite being strongly rooted in the feelings and sounds of sheer wrath and energetic chaos that draw many (myself included) to free improvisation in the first place.

This is a perfect gateway record for noise fans. Do it.


-V.

Gulaggh - "Vorkuta" (2013) [Crucial Blast]

Technically, Vorkuta was Gulaggh's first album after their shift from the Stalaggh project in 2009. I'm sure, however, that I'm far from the only person who missed out on the mad din while the album promptly sold out from New Era Productions. Crucial Blast's new re-release is simple and classy: only silver ink on a solid black digipack.

There's not nearly so much distortion here as there was back in the Stalaggh days, but this is still the sort of psychotic thing that makes the cat leave the room. Instead of the noise, the Dutch asylum artists have moved their chaos of screaming (which they credit to recordings from patients in a mental hospital, though that's of course unverifiable and, oddly, the "sane" are more likely to scream in chorus for extended periods) to the context of untutored and chaotic use of an assortment of traditional European "orchestral" instruments. Violins croak and squeak with the characteristic bounces and open arpeggios of a novice attempting to divulge the inner workings of madness, a bass drum calls out a funeral tone, and muddied brass and winds lurch along in a mad parody of a march.

Gulaggh really hit the nail on the head here with the heavy inclusion of higher voices screaming. "Vorkuta" is definitely the most solid instance of "composition based on a flowing structure around the sampled speech of a relentless foreign tongue, a chorus of the damned, and naive improvisation on an assortment of traditional instruments" I've yet heard. Valuable enough just because this album is the only instance of its genre.

Antique Soviet torture doom. Our ethically-challenged public servants really need to step up their aural torture game from crappy rock music.

-V.

The Body - "Master, We Perish" (2013) [At A Loss]

We don't make a HUGE deal out of it, but pretty much the entirety of the core staff at The Inarguable loves The Body. For a couple of us, our first experience was mindlessly following Jon to a show he'd booked for them in Chicago in 2010.

We didn't really know what to expect, but with the opening chords of "Ruiner" we thought "If nothing else, this will be heavy." We weren't ready.

Then Chip switched on the other two thirds of his cabinets. I don't think I've ever seen jaws genuinely drop before, but my god if that wasn't the heaviest thing. What we didn't get from their show was what we enjoyed on record later: The Body's trademark strange samplenoise and remixperimentation.

In an interview with Mike Simpson of Invisible Oranges, Chip summed up what has to be the core of The Body's recorded sound: "You can’t get a record loud enough to shake your stomach, which is what we do live." "Master, We Perish" is another installment in a series of attempts to make it happen anyway: right there in the production is the carefully-sculpted sound of speakers about to rip themselves apart that I've only rarely even heard in the HNW cults that are supposed to be that and nothing else. Even when Lee's distinctive drums are alone, they're in a blur of stomach-shaking clipping.

"Master, We Perish" is basically a whirlwind of hate. Even in 18 minutes of the heavy-repetition, limited-development songs The Body specializes in, there's everything from fast, crushing almost-d-beats, distorted shrieks, oddly guitarless ultra-heavy ultra-doom, heavy guitar ultra-doom, and Neurosis tom beats recreated in heaviness Neurosis can't touch to Assembly of Light Choir over painfully hanging chords. I just wish they'd wait a little longer and give us 40 or 50 minutes to revel in.

Go get your ears blown out. Just remember they've only given us three songs and you'll need one of the full-lengths to finish you off.

-V.

Masayoshi Urabe - "Kampanerura" (2012) [Utech]

Masayoshi Urabe, though generally known as a free jazz alto saxophonist, and a beautiful one at that, is something closer to a performance artist in many ways. As a member of the the performance art movement that grew up around noise music in Japan in the 1980's and 90's, Urabe's performances (often in collaboration with members of C.C.C.C., Hijokaidan, and the like) frequently evoke the Happenings of Black Mountain and the Fluxus movement, made new and strange by their echo in a different sociological world. He can be found perched in high places playing reed instruments all the way to the accordion (I dare not ask what the "Wonder Reed" mentioned in Kampanerura's liner notes is) while collaborators on the floor shriek horribly at length (Junko of Hijokaidan) or perform strange rituals in a Pierrot costume (Kei Kato).

Kampanerura is perhaps best understood from this vantage. Kampanerura (or "Campanella" in English translations) is the name of a strange boy in Kenji Miyazawa's beloved (in Japan) 1927 children's novel "Night on the Galactic Railroad." In the novel, Kampanerura appears as a symbolic figure: the young protagonist's apparently drowned friend who vanishes after the pair promise to stay together always on an allegorical train journey. Urabe has crafted his own text (thankfully translated by Japanese avant-garde expert Alan Cummings) for the album, one which seems to use Kampanerura's half-illusory image as a jumping-off point for Urabe's own poetic/polemic visions of daily life in the modern world and the interface of individual and society.

Kampanerura begins, disorientingly, away from obvious reeds and cut off from recognizable acoustic sound sources. Temporally disjunct impacts, buzzes, and screeches set an urban-technological tone borne out further as Urabe manages to turn familiar rock guitar sounds into an alienating smattering of metrically disrupted extracultural gasps.

The whole of the album is more direct in a beautifully indirect way; like Urabe's prose in the album itself, the music is Urabe's voice flowing through the alto as poetry. His gradual arcs and bursts find the poetry of every infinitesimal bit of reverberation and silence between. Echoing the shapes of the city (nailed to a board warped by the sun) is the softly restrained drumming of Aural Fit's (improvized rock destruction group) Teruhisa Nanbu and Urabe's own performances on assorted less-vocal instruments.

" . . . that old painter woman with the screechy voice fron Nakano . . . If there's someone you want to kill, stop working out how you're going to do it and just do it. . . . If you want to demolish, then raze it to the ground."
-Masayoshi Urabe

-V.

Pan Gu - "Primeval Man Born of the Cosmic Egg" (2013) [Utech]

This is rather a different experience for me than the last Utech review I posted, Dead Neanderthals' "Polaris." Instead of being confused because of my familiarity with the artist, I formed 90% of my opinions while still not having a clue what or who Pan Gu was.

The record itself immediately dispelled the first bit of information I had: "pretty fuckin jazzy." [source anonymized to protect the embarrassed!] Pan Gu is something, but it sure ain't jazz. Those first sounds were a mixture of very noise-oriented electronics and lovely triadic harmonies built around a static ambient drone. Really tasteful, extremely pleasing, especially in the dark.

The first impression continues through the album; "Primeval Man" is an organically crafted work of art pieced together from soft beautiful sounds and noise that never stagnates or becomes hateful or destructive. Couldn't ask for a better attempt. I'm really impressed.

I became slightly less impressed when my research finally bore fruit and I determined that the noise was Lasse Marhaug. Well, of course it's tasteful and well-done. It's Lasse Marhaug. For those not familiar, if you're still reading this review after I said "noise," go fix that. He's worked with Merzbow, Government Alpha, Kevin Drumm, Frode Gjerstad (wait, is that a useful name to drop?) . . . it goes on and on. He's basically the younger, balder, Norwegian Merzbow.

His collaborator in Pan Gu was a new name for me. Leslie Low is apparently the frontman of Singapore indie bands Humpback Oak and The Observatory. His work in Pan Gu is every bit as beautifully sentimental as his vocal-centred works, and betrays the experience of The Observatory's soundscapes and experimentation.

This is one of those records you wouldn't expect to exist, but, thankfully, it does. And if you don't mind, I think I'll take advantage of that and turn off the lights.

Devourment - "Conceived in Sewage" (2012) [Relapse]

This is my least favorite Devourment album.

I want to make this clear, since those of you who read "writer" tags around here may have noticed that I'm in love with the avant-garde, I've been gurgling about pregnant sluts and whores for most of my "adult" life. [Dear god, I hope my mother doesn't read this. -V.]

Devourment has been a long-term influence on my musical choices, sending me through hordes of other slam bands looking for sustained sickening gurgles to match Wayne Knupp's and the slamming grooves that reach down and grab your hips. Grab them. But while fueling my car during one of my recent very-repeated listenings of "Conceived in Sewage," I had to make my own gurgly rhythms and hip-shaking grooves.

Really, it's a solid entry in the field of moderately nondescript death metal albums, with reasonably appealing gurgles (Majewski, if you're responsible for the bursts of comprehensible English on this album, I will have my revenge), heavy blasts of chugging chords, and fairly technical drums--which aren't a surprise after 2009's "Unleash the Carnivores." But it's not 1.3.8, no matter how much better the production (Erik Rutan) has gotten. And I honestly miss the messy pingy snare chaos.

Like Majewski said in the press bio, "Conceived in Sewage" is "a bit of a throwback to old school brutal bands." But that's not what makes Devourment legendary in a way that most of those nameless bands can't touch, and they didn't touch the glory of old Suffocation. I won't leave when I hear these songs live, but I won't be throwing myself around quite the same way.

Dead Neanderthals - "Polaris" (2013) [Utech]

Well, this is different.

Dead Neanderthals is an unusual group in the world of "avant garde" and "free" jazz: billing themselves as the "New Wave of Dutch Heavy Jazz" (the metalheads here will get the reference), Dead Neanderthals have in the past been something of a less contrived Shining (Norway) with more of a Darkthrone feel to it. If you've noticed that I'm sitting here and talking about metal bands, you're getting an idea of what's going on here.

For a sax/drums duo, Dead Neanderthals have no shame about their love for metal. Hell, in one of the baffling brief clips of the recording of Polaris (cough cough--and incidentally, the clips identified the album title as "The Ace of Spades"), "R"--the drummer--can be seen sporting the classic Bathory shirt. The A side of their last 10", Jazzhammer, is built around ten minutes of blast beats. The caveman drums from 2010's eponymous recording through to Jazzhammer/Stomanngalskap create a brutally punk/metal space for layered, effected saxophone.

So when I put on my lovely preview of "Polaris," I was astounded to find something only ever-so-slightly more punk than, say, the Frank Wright/Muhammed Ali duo or the David S. Ware/Rashied Ali duo I listened to today (what? I'm on a kick). The blasts are only slightly more direct (one tempo, one dynamic) than any-album-Sunny-Murray-played-on, and "O" (tenor saxophone this time) has dropped the ZU/Shining-esque sound fields for the sort of fluid, rough bursts I expect from, well, a free jazz player.

Is this what they wanted to do all along and just now matured to? Did they feel they'd accomplished their goal and it was time to move on? Is this a whim? Did Lasse Marhaug (mastering) and/or Keith Utech somehow talk them into this? I don't know. It's refreshing, certainly, and it's a solid sax/drums duo record created by a well-bonded pair. It does not sound like the first outing of some kids with Bathory shirts and a saxophone, nor is it a half-step from hardcore punk like the delightful "V-Shaped Position" of 2011.

So, it's an instance I like of one of my favorite musical formats. I still haven't adjusted enough to listen to it without my mind filling with questions, but I fully intend to keep trying.

V. - Best Performances of 2012

Trying for a retrospective description of briefly existing occurrences is absurd. Be prepared for vague reminiscences of events from months ago.

Murmur at the Ultra Lounge
Sure, they were opening for Aluk Todolo, whose "Occult Rock" album has made them minor media darlings this year, but it's very rare that extended krautrock jams do anything other than put me to sleep. Aluk Todolo, for me, was always about that horrid blown-to-hell recorded sound and broken fragments of eerie near-silence, and that's not something they even attempted to achieve live. But I digress.

I'd really like to be adding "The brilliant new Murmur full-length" to this list, but while the album is I understand fully recorded, the time between "done" and "mixed, mastered, and pressed" is rather extensive.
Murmur's extant discography centers on Matthias Vogels' toothsome paean to heroin, "Mainlining the Lugubrious" from 2010. And that album is really good, really it is, but it remains sickeningly opiated black metal--pride of Chicago and W.S. Burroughs. The songs they played that night, though, betrayed the now-established inclusion of Shane Prendiville and Charlie Werber, some of the mad geniuses behind Guzzlemug.
New Murmur is chaotically technical, full of prime meters, strange pitch collections, battering drumming, and bursts of singing. Fuck that was good.


Protest Heaven Festival
I hadn't been down to Wicker Park for a while, and I'll be damned if Hipster Central hadn't gone a step or two further into gentrification--it's all muscles, Affliction shirts, and high heels soaked in awful beer and oddly-colored cocktails. Old mainstays of the local artsy community are slowly fading out; The Enemy, established noise venue/apartment, hosted their last show in July. Upstairs, though, the rather odd Heaven Gallery, with its large collection of vintage clothing, is still hosting live gatherings of members of Chicago's free improvisation scene, occasionally including old Enemy mainstays like Jason Soliday.

In September, we visited Heaven Gallery for an event they described as the Protest Heaven Festival. This took the form of something I'd like to see all the time: 11 musicians appeared and went through a cycle of different combinations from duos to quartets. Katherine Young displayed the glorious sounds of upper-register heavy bassoon with amplification highlighting unpitched breaths and key clicks, Frank Rosaly made a small jazz kit and assorted percussion into a heaven of soft to exhilarating sounds, Guillermo Gregorio turned a clarinet into a slicing, virtuosic weapon. Jim Baker improvised on the beauties of atonality with truly effective piano (please keep in mind that I more often than not hate the inclusion of piano in free jazz), Daniel Fandino spewed dissonant bursts of guitar, Shane Perlowin gave his a more gentle touch, Jason Roebke caressed and combated his bass in turns, Dave Rempis shrieked and croaked through his saxophones . . .

If anyone had any question that group improvisation is the home of a myriad new, inspired, powerful performances, this show was the antidote. I'd see this again and again and drag you all to it given the chance.


Anatomy of Habit at the Cobra Lounge
Holy hell.

During out-of-town-together bonding with our compatriots Sun Splitter, the lot of us agreed that Anatomy of Habit was the best extant band in Chicago. This wasn't something that took a drawn-out debate on the various merits of a bunch of favorites, which we certainly all have. All it took was one person putting on an Anatomy of Habit record at two in the morning. We all already agreed.

Even the best shows rarely engulf us in the cult of humanity, something Anatomy of Habit builds itself around. Every last song is a tribute to the internal/external dysfunction of the human being, its loves, rages, and fears for the future. Add to that the wonder of a group full of musicians taking their instruments and songcraft to a new place that forms a union, rather than a contrast, and you have a hint of the hypnotic power that most of the reviews miss with allusions to "post-punk" and "doom metal."

There's a night that ends with screaming chants and broken glass.

Burial Hex/Kinit Her at The Frequency
I've been a fan of Burial Hex and Kinit Her since Burial Hex and Wormsblood appeared at the Matchitehew Assembly in 2009. Someone referred me to Kinit Her's outsider-ritual take on neofolk through common members of Wormsblood, I found a few sounds online, and was hooked.

The opportunity to finally see Kinit Her live, alongside one of the final live appearances of the Burial Hex project, was not up for debate. Having seen Burial Hex the previous night in Milwaukee, again with post-human pounding of Sun Splitter (there's an interesting common theme here), we took off for Madison and a day spent around the Bartok violin/horn-and-shofar edges of a Kinit Her rehearsal.

The show, when it finally came around, left me short only of another few hours of Kinit Her live. The strangely twisted vocals, dark moor atmosphere, and addictive songcraft (mixed with a perfect cover of Death In June's "Hail the White Grain") could have gone on most of the night before I became sated.

Burial Hex, aside from the dark-room burning-Palo Santo occultism, manifested as noise-wrapped baroque rage. Clay Ruby is sometimes a piece of human installation art, wrapped in bursts of keyboard toccata, screaming anger, reverb tanks, and flame. Sorry, you guys who have missed out permanently. We'll see what he does next.

Moloch/Closure "Split" (2012) [Feast of Tentacles/King of the Monsters]

This, as you can see from the title, is a sort of double-split; not only does it feature heavy Moloch sludge (it's the Leicester Moloch, not one of the other dozen bands hailing the child-eater) and UK Closure's pounding powerviolence, it's a split release between Moloch's Feast of Tentacles label and the long-running, carefully limited King of the Monsters.

Moloch and Closure differentiate themselves from most of King of the Monsters' catalog in that, like their names, neither band is a unique crawl into some strange part of the psyche and sound. They are, however, goddamned good at what they do. Closure hits the middle of the gut-smashing glory that is the repetition-honored powerviolence sound--the perfect mix of blasting chaos and pounding, darkly righteous power. Every chord and beat is exactly the right thing that needs to be there to destroy everything.

Moloch are veterans of that heart-rushing, powerful end of sludge that might as well be a powerviolence band that never quite got around to blasting through a fast section. It's all of the fulfillment of wrath and revenge done with careful planning.

If these guys aren't local bands for you, know that they'd be the ones you go to see every time they play. Good, surging hatred. Go ahead and get this split. You'll repeat its 11 minutes until you feel like you've been at a show.

-V.

Winterfylleth - The Threnody of Triumph (2012) [Candlelight]

Well.

I haven't bothered to track down and listen to any Winterfylleth since their self-released demo ("Rising of the Winter Full Moon," 2007)--I'd jumped on board for that because of the publicized "English Heritage" aspect, not that I'm cough nationalist in any way cough. I liked it well enough. The demo was enjoyable, and I hadn't yet been exposed to the Wolves in the Throne Room-spawned foulness that was shortly to creep over everything I loved.

Art does not exist in a vacuum; each work has connections made significant by its place in time and culture. In 2012, "The Threnody of Triumph" is over an hour of reasonably polished Cascadia--nothing deviates from the most overused patterns of the Threnos-imitation crowd, and other members of the crowd make it more interesting than this. The only reprieve from the midpaced blasts and rock beats with double bass with nice, if untutored harmony is the occasional lapse into instrumental neofolk or mediocre-at-best wordless choir neofolk. Literally the only other drum beat on the album is a lone Velnias-styled tom rhythm in "The Swart Raven," which immediately follows the aforementioned ill-advised attempt at choral performance.

Stop imitating Americans. It was obnoxious when the whole American scene was trying to be Scandinavia 1.1; it's obnoxious now that Winterfylleth and Altar of Plagues are turning it around. I'd hate and ignore me in your shoes, but please. Try to outdo, not repeat.

-V.

Cryptopsy - "Cryptopsy" (2012) [Defen Society]

Cryptopsy's new eponymous album (am I the only one who thinks that's an odd choice for a seventh album?) is hitting me a bit like "Once Was Not"--for the most part, the music is good enough for me to put up with the damned vocals.

Jon Levasseur is back. Cryptopsy's self-titled record, thank God, actually sounds a bit like Cryptopsy, for the first time in twelve years. And Matt McGachy honestly isn't as annoying as he was on the last album; this effected "guttural" deathcore style is less awful than the straightforward metalcore screaming he threw all over the album whose name shall remain unspoken. Christian Donaldson is, however, still in the band, and he's still the guitarist from Mythosis.

This is what "Cryptopsy" is: it's Cryptopsy with a deathcore singer (why) and a second guitarist with nothing resembling taste (why). It's chock full of great examples of the riffs that made Cryptopsy something special and important in the first place. If you own any deathcore albums; if you call Job for a Cowboy a "death metal band;" get this, because it's pretty glorious at that level. You'll be disappointed that there are only maybe two breakdowns on the whole album.

If you loved Cryptopsy 5 years ago, give it a shot. You'll be glad it's not that other album, and those trem-picked 7/8 angular melodies will make you smile.

If this were a debut album, I'd never listen to the band or buy any of their work.

De Magia Veterum - "The Deification" (2012) [Transcendental Creations]

Yes, I've known for quite some time that Maurice de Jong is broken in a special, personal way. Initially, though, I briefly listened to De Magia Veterum and decided it might as well be Gnaw Their Tongues (his more popular project), and stuck to the latter.

Something happened in the meantime. De Magia Veterum is now much more recognizably guitars and drum-machine; not to say that it doesn't divert into the kind of active, twisted dark ambient that M specializes in, but The Deification is manifestly an impenetrably insane black metal album. Like the kind that has to be a studio project not so much because it only has one member as because it will likely take me a few months to even hum a scrap of tune here or there; remembering enough of this material to do a brief set would be the full-time work of a year or more.

I've seen a number of journalists use terms like "swirling chaos" in reviews; it's more apt for "The Deification" than any other metal work I've ever heard. And I seek out that sort of thing.

I just reviewed the new Ehnahre album, which seemed extremely short at 37 minutes. The place that Maurice's mind has reached in 30 minutes makes me feel like I've spent a day being beaten with a hammer.

WHAT DID YOU DO.

love,
-V.

P.S. - I want a large canvas print of that album artwork.

Ehnahre - "Old Earth" (2012) [Crucial Blast]

So one of the best modern art-metal bands in existence gives us a 37-minute, four-movement setting of Samuel Beckett. Goddamned glorious, right? Well, yes.

Old Earth covers a lot of ground, even by Ehnahre standards; a long, soft concrète buildup into sparse hints of modernized black metal into waves of atonal black-doomness hating and collapsing and hating again. And it's a perfect hate; it's not unlike seeing yourself as a limp body, slamming and breaking into bodies of soot-stained concrete on an endless fall. Yes. Really. And that's just the first track.

The second part shows off Ryan McGuire writing and performing in a solo contrabass format (yes, precious arco) before the perfectly-balanced appearanced of John Carchia's soft, atonally-regretful guitar. I couldn't ask for a much better conjunction of the two; and they both come across as voices, not as rote communication. Then Greg Kelley comes in. If you've never heard Greg Kelley play trumpet, it's because I'm a terrible person and haven't forced you to listen. Greg Kelley is my favorite trumpet player, speaking as someone who abandoned the instrument years ago in despair.

Then, of course, Graham and Donoso join the fray and create some of the most beautifully grey-black-shining group improvisation I've yet heard.

Then, III. Five compressed minutes of horrifically aimed, hive-minded chaos. This is where to start in the indoctrination of the neophyte; this is the ten-horned thing and the essence of the end.

Then ends the bone-breaking rhythmic and harmonic interplay, momentarily; IV is a hymn, the hymn of the broken-minded, the dispairing, the ended hearts.

I'll take another cup of that black illness.

-V.

DOUBLE REVIEW: Frank Rosaly

This is something of a long-awaited celebration for me; after years of not finding any active free jazz and free improvisation musicians outside of Scandinavia and Ken Vandermark, who himself is connected to the Scandinavian scene at the hip, Utech this year (aside from giving me some top-notch Scandinavian work) shoved my face into the continuously active Chicago scene, right at my doorstep.

Best face-shoving ever.

We'll take a shot at these records in chronological order; though now that I've tapped into the stream (which only takes a few moments at Frank Rosaly's blog and a visit to Heaven Gallery on a Saturday), there will be more coming.

Frank Rosaly and Dave Rempis - "Cyrillic" (2010) [482 Records]

I'm a sucker for saxophone and drums duos, which I'm sure has nothing to do with me playing both. They're both wildly flexible instruments, and Rosaly and Rempis here add a solid hour to the infinite spectrum of what the combination is capable without even deviating from a common reference point enough to unbalance the record's coherence.

"Cyrillic" is a fitting addition to the free jazz library; Rempis flows everywhere from sentimental flowing melodies that would make Ornette proud ("Thief of Sleep"), through motif-driven spurts, to the kind of screaming, agile chaos that is the hallmark of saxophone in the "New Music" ("How to Cross When Bridges Are Out"). Rosaly, meanwhile, works everywhere from a drummer-friendly progressive polyrhythmic groove ("Antiphonos"), old-school post-bop drumming ("In Plain Sight"), and constantly births wild rhythmic and timbral inventiveness--unusual metallic ringing, rolling chaos, scattered bursts--everything.

Frank Rosaly - "Centering and Displacement" (2012) [Utech Records]

"Centering and Displacement" is another creature altogether. Rosaly here is working as a percussionist only secondarily; the primary artwork is the concrete result of composition with recorded percussion. More in keeping with Utech's patterns of releases, "Centering and Displacement" is a distinctive work that creates its own style.

Rosaly worked in this case based on chance arrangements (an appropriate next step for improvised material), organizing spatial and time organization as well as electronic manipulation. The result is hypnotic and constantly enlightening, perhaps closest to Haptic's "Scilens" that found anchor among my favorite works of 2011. This is the sort of thing that appeals to fans of contemporary music and ritual music alike; complexity and difference combining to create an intense atmosphere.

Two more records for the "go out and buy this" list. New tab, rosaly cyrillic, new tab, rosaly utech, paypal, buy. Shoo.

Sutcliffe Jugend - "Blue Rabbit" (2012) [Crucial Blast]

I'll freely admit, I haven't really kept up on Sutcliffe Jugend's output. My initial exposure was mp3 versions of the "We Spit on Their Graves" 10-cassette box (which you can buy on Amazon, as strange as that is), and I never really felt the need for more. Ten cassettes worth of destructive harsh noise is more than I'll ever hear from most performers, and it was damned good stuff

Somewhere in the intervening 30 years, though, Tomkins/Taylor transitioned from destroying anything Whitehouse did to something I wouldn't put past a modern electroacoustic composer who happened also to be a torture killer on the side.

I made a horrible mistake when I opened the digipack. I did not simply take the CD out and put it on. Nooo. I chose to read the lovely little short story printed inside; the text of the title track. It's a children's story, for parents who want to come home to the self-mutilated corpses of their children. Tomkins tells the story calmly, his voice wrapped in unsettling shifting synthesized drones.

Each, ah, song on Sutcliffe Jugend's new record is a distinct play on this approach; instead of traditional angry, harsh power electronics, each is a work of unease, dread, and horror. I give the artists full credit for managing to make concrete and recorded the feeling of the worst nightmares, but the stories here are not for humans with a desire to function. I have to shut off memories of this album when I'm not listening to it, and I forget the stories the same way I do nightmares. Not pleasant.

Yami Kurae - "La Sposa Della Stagno" (2011) [Crucial Blast]

Yami Kurae is an electro-acoustic project that leans most heavily on the "acoustic" side of that, but continues to embrace sounds for themselves as sounds; their works, despite using an array of notes that many woulod reject as "not notes" or "not in tune" across star-patterned rhythmic structures, show clear and effective structuring and development.

If that sounds dry, zoom in for a moment. Star-patterned. Try staring some night at the stars; bring your violin and a close friend. Play the stars to each other; repeat their words, and when you can, begin a conversation in the tongue of their night-time glimmers. That, on a small scale, is a touch of the vision that Yami Kurae reflected in this release.

Yami Kurae also bend the star-tongue to primal humanity and the heartbeat-rituals that people find without language. They use more instruments--whether prepared strings or assorted percussion and tape, I couldn't say--but La Sposa Della Stagno (the Bride of the Pond) is a retelling of an ancient fairytale created with instruments, voices, tape, and the narration that the constellations speak, with thirty-some pages of beautiful, developing artwork.

They've been criminally neglected, so there's a chance you might be able to find one of the copies of this release.

-V.

Sangre de Muerdago - "Sangre de Muerdago" (2012) [Brave Mysteries]

It's a little strange to discuss a neofolk album in an unfamiliar tongue. Fortunately, Sangre de Muerdago happen to be a group of not only talented but skilled musicians. Think of Neun Welten and In Gowan Ring: intricate melodies and constant motion. Now take a touch of Portugal, but remember primarily that Sangre de Muerdagos are a group of loving friends, not an occult loner or two (hail the occult loners). Sangre de Muerdago's Brave Mysteries tape, inside and out, is voices of joy reveling in the group life that is harmony and freedom beyond what most even see in our contemporary concrete age.

I hardly know what Portugal is like, but California's wilderness is the perfect place for this type of music; not only the straight-treed forest, but the shining sun and the wild breadth of the west coast. Sangre de Muerdago lived in what Brave Mysteries describes as a "traveling caravan" in California while recording this cassette, and it reeks of woodsmoke and the never-ending new wonder and life of long roads and fraternal/sororal love.

I'm fairly certain some of those reading this are attending Stella Natura this September; you and I both know that the musicians filling that air are some of the best you could ask for. If Sangre de Muerdago is new to you, take warning that you'll be taking some of their music home. For those of us who are merely wishing we could attend, I strongly recommend picking up this cassette for a glimpse at what we're missing.

In the meantime, leave your computer behind for a bit. ". . . run through the woods, jump the gap get wet . . ." and give Sangre de Muerdago the respect of living life.

-V.