Tag Archives: metal

The Darling Duds

by in Album Art, Music and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What is a Darling Dud? It’s my name for a band that meets two simple criteria: 1) I like them (hence “darling”); 2) they aren’t as well-known as I think they should be (hence “dud”). I based the name on…

The Darling Buds

A Welsh female-fronted jingle-jangle indie band who are, for me, the archetypal darling duds. I like them a lot and I think they should have been much more successful. But if they had been, I might not enjoy their melodic music as much.

• The Darling Buds at Bandcamp

The Primitives

An English female-fronted jingle-jangle indie band who I like a lot and who I think should have been much more successful. The Guardian said of them: “The Primitives is a great, great name for a group, and barely a day goes by when I don’t lament the fact that it was wasted on brittle little one-hit indie wonders from Coventry with a fifth-rate Debbie Harry wannabe for a singer. There oughta be a law against it.” As so often, the Guardian gets it badly wrong. In fact, Tracy of the Primitives was a third-rate Debbie Harry wannabe. But she was more attractive than Debbie Harry, which perhaps explains the vituperation in the Guardian.

• The Primitives

Compulsion

Kinda punk, but with much more musical subtlety and lyrical intelligence than that label usually suggests. Why weren’t they more successful? I don’t know, but two things occur to me. They’re obtrusively loud on record in a way that I think detracts from that subtlety and intelligence. And they looked old in their publicity photos. With less volume and fresher faces, they might have done better.

Compulsion in shades (Wikipedia)

• Compulsion

David Tyrrell

Perhaps the most undeservingly unsuccessful of the lot, because you’ve never heard of him and he’s much better than lots of people you have heard of. Which is not to say he’s an undiscovered musical genius, but I like his 2008 album Substance a lot. I think it was self-released. I know it should have done much better. It’s catchy like Compulsion, but quieter and Tyrrell does something unusual in popular music. He sings clearly, so you can understand the lyrics.

• David Tyrrell song at Youtube

Morbid Saint

Here’s a heretical thought. I don’t think Slayer are the real Slayer. I think the real Slayer – the real kings of crushing, red-in-tooth-and-claw ’80s metal – are Morbid Saint. They sound more brutal and more evil than Slayer. They play thrash metal and make it rage like death metal. So why didn’t they get the success they deserved? The delayed release of Spectrum of Death (1989) can’t have helped. Nor can the ludicrous cover. And yes, they’re obviously and heavily influenced by Kreator. But still: they deserved a lot more than they got.

• Morbid Saint

Beach Riot

“Fuzz pop” they called their music. It was loud and bouncy, with alternating male-female vocals, and was a lot of fun. But after releasing a few singles and an EP, they disappeared. Shame. Also a shame is that some of their songs come in two versions: a version with energy and a version without.

Stop-Press: No, Beach Riot haven’t disappeared and have released their first album. Or something.

• Beach Riot

Obiat

One way of translating the Polish word Obiat is “funeral feast.” And one way of describing Obiat’s music is “stoner-doom.” But translation and description fail to capture the full meaning and the full music. Obiat can be very heavy, but they can also be very quirky. In short, expect the unexpected. Trying to define Obiat’s music is like trying to herd cats. So it’s appropriate that one of their songs has guest vocals from a cat. And look at the cover for Accidentally Making Enemies (2002). What does it mean? Why choose a sunken speed-boat? I don’t know, but I like the cover and I like Obiat.

• Obiat

Feline

Female-fronted rock from the 1990s with a good name, because there’s mystery and elegance in the music on their first album, Save Your Face (1997). Melancholy too. And menace. Velvet paws + razor claws. But they were never very successful. Grog, the female fronter of Feline, has soldiered on with Die So Fluid, whose music I also like. But it’s more metal and doesn’t have everything that Feline’s had, particularly not the mystery and the melancholy.

• Feline / Die So Fluid

Split Enz

The nucleus of Crowded House. Split Enz were big in New Zealand, moderately successful overseas. I prefer them to Crowded House because their music is simultaneously more varied and, in a good way, more insular. New Zealand is an island nation, after all. The catchiness and melodies were there from the start, though.

• Split Enz

The Chills

Another New Zealand band. They were like Split Enz, but more so: fairly big at home, moderately successful overseas. They had melodies and catchiness too, but they were more musically unusual than Split Enz. The late Martin Phillips was the mainstay and the motor of that. He was self-taught and his music had an alien, outsider edge to it, as though he’d taught himself by listening to fuzzy, fifth-generation pirate tapes of the Byrds, Velvet Underground and XTC whilst living in a hut deep in the rain-forests of the South Island. Or even in an oxygen-tent on Mars.

• The Chills

The Heartbreaks

English indie-rockers who rose like a rocket with their debut, Funtimes (2012), and fell like the stick with the follow-up, We May Yet Stand a Chance (2014). Some invoke the curse of Morrissey, which dooms bands that Morrissey praises or takes on tour, but in fact no supernatural explanations are needed. Funtimes had some very good songs and We May Yet Stand a Chance had no good songs at all.

Afterword: Or so I thought when I first heard the two albums. I’m coming round to We May Yet Stand a Chance much more now, but a slow-burning second album would explain their fall too. Funtimes is immediately catchy indie rock. I thought: The Smiths. We May Yet Stand a Chance is trying to be sophisticated. I thought: Sinatra. Which wasn’t good. And the cover was a hostage to fortune too.

• The Heartbreaks at Youtube

Anna Pingina

A Russian singer singing in Russian, which explains some of why I don’t think she’s been as successful as I think she should have been. She isn’t experimental or unusual in any way, but she can write attractive melodies and she sounds folky without sounding fey or feeble.

• Anna Pingina

Necros Christos

I thoughtlessly assumed from their name that Necros Christos were Greek when I first heard them. So I rated their music higher than I did when I subsequently learned they were in fact German. That’s because it seemed competent, power-packed and intelligent in a way I don’t associate with Greek bands but do associate with German bands (which is naughty of me). Perhaps other people think the same way and N.C. would have been more successful if they’d been Greek. It’s hard to explain their relative unsuccess otherwise, because they had a distinctive sound, apparently sincere occult obsessions, and were, as I said, competent, power-packed and intelligent.

• Necros Christos

Nubes en mi Casa

Years ago I downloaded a lot of free MP3s, listened to them, deleted the ones I didn’t like, then listened on-and-off to the rest. “Mareo” by Nubes en mi Casa was one of the ones I liked and kept. But I didn’t notice the sweetly surreal name of the band (“Clouds in my House”) or the true quality of the music until I was listening to a load of MP3s on random play one day. Then the power of contrast came to its rescue. After a lot of stuff I recognized at once and more or less enjoyed, “Mareo” started playing. I thought: “Hold on, what’s this? It’s good!” You could describe it as wistful indie. You could also describe it as wet indie. But I like it a lot and I hunted down more by Nubes en mi Casa, who were a female-fronted Argentinian band with Spanish lyrics. That explains at least part of their unsuccess.

• Nubes en mi Casa

Chant of the Goddess

Brazilian stoner-doom metallers whose first album is an excellent illustration (audistration?) of a simple fact of auditory psychology: loud is louder when it’s mixed with soft. Chant of the Goddess go from quiet to cacophonic in a compelling way. Or they do that on their first album, at least. Their second album doesn’t grab me in the same way.

• Chant of the Goddess

Red Eye

Spanish stoner-doomers who quote Lovecraft, use Old English, and play music that’s both powerful and intelligent. So why hasn’t that music had all the success I think it deserves? I see one obvious reason: “Red Eye” is a bad name. To 21st-century Anglophones it goes most naturally with jet-travel, not gigantic sounds. Were they translating Ojo Rojo? That means the same thing in Spanish and would have been better. In fact, they could have gone with rOjO as a logo. I don’t like their album covers either. But I do like their music.

• Red Eye

16Volt

Kind of a cross between industrial metal, emo and indie. Nine Inch Nails territory. But I don’t like NiN and I do like 16Volt. I don’t like everything they’ve done or even most of what they’ve done, but what I like, I like. My first listen made me wish I were a teenager in sunny California in the 1980s or ’90s, which is not something that’s ever happened to me before. Onomastic psychology explains some or all of their unsuccess, I’d say. “16Volt” just sounds feeble. 16 is not just too small a number but too easily divisible into even smaller numbers: 16 → 8 → 4 → 2 → 1. Using a prime would have been better: “23Volt” or “37Volt”.

• 16Volt

Owlcrusher

A three-piece from Northern Ireland who really whip up a storm with their take on blackened doom. That’s black metal + doom metal. So they crush genres together in the way that their name crushes concepts together.

• Owlcrusher

Akelei

Dutch doomsters centered on the ever-present Misha Nuis. They play meandering melancholy music that’s often very loud and sometimes very gentle. Perhaps the gentleness explains some of their unsuccess, but two obvious things come before that: their name and their lyrics. They sing exclusively in Dutch and their Dutch name means nothing to Anglophones. It’s actually the name of a flower, columbine or aquilegium, which is a quirky choice. And I like it. Singing in Dutch is a quixotic choice. And I also like it:

De reis gaat door met lenig hart
En zonder verwachtingen
Wij raakten allengs ver van huis
Alles is anders nu
Oud licht helpt ons aan nieuw inzicht
Onthult al wat komt hierna

Akelei’s “Dwaaluur” (Wandering-Hour)

The journey goes on with a shifting heart
And without expectations
We slowly drifted far from home
Everything is other now
Old light helps us to new insights
Reveals all that comes next

Akelei want to go their own way, not chase popularity. And their meandering melancholy reminds me of more depressive art from the Low Countries. It’s a book of 1892 by the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach (1855-98). It’s called Bruges-la-Morte or Bruges the Dead City, it’s illustrated in melancholy monochrome, and it too wanders and westers and woes:

Le jour déclinait, assombrissant les corridors de la grande demeure silencieuse, mettant des écrans de crêpe aux vitres. Hugues Viane se disposa à sortir, comme il en avait l’habitude quotidienne à la fin des après-midi. Inoccupé, solitaire, il passait toute la journée dans sa chambre, une vaste pièce au premier étage, dont les fenêtres donnaient sur le quai du Rosaire, au long duquel s’alignait sa maison, mirée dans l’eau. Il lisait un peu : des revues, de vieux livres; fumait beaucoup; rêvassait à la croisée ouverte par les temps gris, perdu dans ses souvenirs. Voilà cinq ans qu’il vivait ainsi, depuis qu’il était venu se fixer à Bruges, au lendemain de la mort de sa femme. Cinq ans déjà ! Et il se répétait à lui-même : « Veuf! Être veuf! Je suis le veuf! » Mot irrémédiable et bref! d’une seule syllabe, sans écho. Mot impair et qui désigne bien l’être dépareillé.

Some melancholy monochrome from Bruges-la-Morte (1892)

The day was fading, darkening the corridors of the large, silent house, laying screens of crepe on the windows. Hugues Viane readied to go out, as was his daily habit as the afternoon faded. Idle, solitary, he spent all day in his room, a vast room on the first floor whose windows overlooked the Quai du Rosaire, along which his house lay, reflected in the water. He read a little: magazines, old books; smoked a lot; daydreamed at the window open on to gray weather, lost in his memories. He had been living like this for five years, ever since he came to settle in Bruges, the day after his wife’s death. Five years already! And he repeated to himself: “Veuf! Widower! To be a widower! Je suis le veuf!” An irremediable word, so brief! A single syllable, without echo. An odd word, and one that well captures this mismatched creature.

• Akelei

Loose the Juce

by in Music, Photography and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gazelle Amber Valentine of Jucifer live on stage

Pre-Post-Previously Post-Pre-Posted

• Decibelle — Amber Valentine with her amplifiers

Post-Performative Post-Scriptum

Well, it’s your actual double entendre, innit.

Guitardämmerung

by in Civilization, Music, Music reviews, Politics and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Cover of Nation of Ashes by Man Will Destroy HimselfMan Will Destroy Himself, Nation of Ashes (2007)

I’ve enjoyed this album a lot. It’s short, sharp and psycho-sonically stimulating. It could be called sonic-ironic too. Hardcore, in the guitar sense, is an accelerated and intensified form of punk that first appeared in the late 1980s. It was then an extreme, bleeding-edge – and bleeding-ear – form of music. But now it has three decades of tradition behind it. One of the men who first championed it, the BBC D.J. John Peel (1939-2004), would be seventy-four if he were still alive today. This is from Peel’s auto/biography, Margrave of the Marshes (2004), which was begun by him but completed by his wife Sheila after he died of a heart-attack in Peru:

William [one of Peel’s sons] and I [his wife writes] went regularly with John to gigs that Extreme Noise Terror and Napalm Death played together at the Caribbean Centre in Ipswich. They were grimy, chaotic affairs attended largely by crusties wearing layers of shredded denim and dreadlocks thick as rope. The moshpit was like an initiation ritual – if you could make it out of there in one piece, you knew you could survive anything life had to throw at you. People would stagger out with nosebleeds, clutching their heads, complaining of double vision, drenched in sweat. And yet a good-natured atmosphere prevailed somehow. William, who was around thirteen at the time, took one look at these crusties, who mostly shunned bathing or showering, and decided that this was the musical sub-genre to which he wanted to pledge undying allegiance. His karate teacher attended the reggae nights upstairs at the Caribbean Centre, and would say to William on the way out, “What are you doing listening to that?” (Op. cit., pg. 387-8)

That extract sums up the music well: hardcore is adolescent and part of its early appeal was its ability to shock your parents and conventional society. Okay, the adolescent William Peel was attending Extreme Noise Terror gigs actually with his parents, but then John Peel was a permanent adolescent and the music didn’t appeal to the karate teacher. Before long, William Peel probably did something his father never did, namely begin to grow up. He would then have lost interest in hardcore. Or grindcore, as Sheila Peel calls it. I don’t think E.N.T. were grindcore (and neither do they, apparently) and I don’t think Napalm Death belong with E.N.T. or with Man Will Destroy Himself. For one thing, Napalm Death are crap. For another, they are, or became, much more metal and lost the grimy authenticity of E.N.T. and M.W.D.H.

Grime is authentic, after all: you’re closer to reality when you’re dirty and smelly and living in a squat, far from the nine-to-five conformity of deluded mainstream society. Or are you? In fact, the crusties – named from the crustiness of their unwashed skin and hair – could not have existed without the generous benefit-systems of Western Europe. Crusties sneered at straights – and lived off the taxes of straights. They bemoaned the brutal military-industrial complex – and were kept safe by it from a communist system that would not have tolerated their rebellion for a second. And, of course, they were using electricity to create and record their music. Not to mention benefitting from the transport network for food, the sewage network for hygiene, and the generally law-abiding, relatively uncorrupt societies that surrounded them and without which their “lifestyle” would have been impossible or unsustainable. If crusty political ideas had been realized – or are realized, because they’re alive and well in the Occupy movement – even crusties might begin to see that Western society was rather more complex and benign than they recognized.

But recognizing the complexity and benignity would get in the way of the self-righteousness that is another and essential part of hardcore’s adolescent appeal. You have to strip down your music to get the exciting speed and you have to strip down your ideas to get the exciting sneer. The first track on this album, “Subdivide”, begins with a sample from the end of the film Planet of the Apes (1968), when Charlton Heston learns, in a particularly dramatic and memorable way, where he has been all the time and what man has done with his super-sized brain. “Goddamn you all to Hell!” he cries – and the music swells up and screams off in that exciting, but by now very familiar, hardcore way. It’s an effective opening, but it reminds me of the term used of art by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1931): “emotional engineering”. The sample relies for its power on listeners’ previous knowledge of the film. Man has indeed destroyed himself – but in a science-fiction universe. The sample is effective, but insincere. Heston is acting and so, I feel, are M.W.D.H. The theme of nuclear armageddon was very well-trodden well before the ’noughties, when this album was released: Planet of the Apes appeared in 1968 and is based on a book published in 1963. Extreme Noise Terror were railing against the arms-trade from the beginning and E.N.T. have been assaulting ears, offending noses, and straining their throats for a long time now. Which is sonic-ironic: M.W.D.H. could never shock E.N.T. with their music, even though E.N.T. are probably old enough to be their dads.

Global warming, the apocalyptic theme now occupying the progressive community, isn’t so much fun to scream about: it’s slower and less obviously an act of malevolent free-will. But what about the much bigger threats posed not by man but by Mother Nature, with things like asteroid-strikes and mega-volcanoes? Well, hardcore bands have never worked themselves into self-righteous frenzies about those. How can you be self-righteous about billions of people dying if no human agency is involved? If we’re wiped out by an asteroid or a mega-volcano, it will be, at worst, a sin of omission. We could have spent more money researching the threat and inventing ways to prevent or avoid it. We’ve not been wiped out like that yet, but the threats remain and I think we should spend more money watching the skies, for example. But it’s difficult to get emotional about it: there are no self-righteous thrills to be found in nearby asteroids. Nuclear arsenals are different: men made those and men may use them. So you can get emotional about the threat. The strong sensations of hardcore aren’t supplied by just the speed and volume: the self-righteousness and sanctimony are important too. That’s why M.W.D.H. use that sample from Planet of the Apes and put nuclear missiles on the front cover of this album.

I don’t know whether they scream about global warming too, because I can’t understand the lyrics and haven’t found them on the web yet. The final track, “M.O.A.B.”, is presumably about the mega-munition called the “Mother Of All Bombs” by the U.S. military. Whether or not that bomb is the subject, it’s surprising how quickly you reach “M.O.A.B.”: this album whirls by and can seem even shorter than its actual running-time of twenty minutes. Hardcore is headlong, like sheets and shards of metal being blown along by a hurricane. And metal is a word that comes to mind a lot as you listen to this album. The sounds are metallic in an almost literal sense: strong but flexible, meaty but malleable. Nation of Ashes sounds like a sonic factory taking the raw ore of volume and hammering, twisting, and rolling it into shape. That’s appropriate for a form of music that depends on an advanced technological civilization, though it’s sonic-ironic because the music is being used to criticize that civilization. But Nation of Ashes also sounds metallic in a more strictly musical sense. As I’ve said, M.W.D.H. and E.N.T. aren’t metal bands like Napalm Death, but heavy metal does influence the sound of hardcore. There are throbbing, thundering passages between the headlong charges on this album, but that variety increases the power of the music. And has been doing so on hundreds of albums for thousands of days. So, as M.W.D.H.’s music pounds, listeners can ponder things like authenticity and originality.

I’ve certainly pondered my own originality while writing this review. I’m pleased with the title of the review – “Guitardämmerung” – but I’ve found from a web-search that it’s been used before. Other minds have worked like mine, noting the similarity between “guitar” and Götter. The point of a pun is to distort language and create a new sensation from something familiar. That’s also what punk did to rock music, and what hardcore did to punk: they were distortions for new sensations. Sometimes musical distortion is inadvertent: new forms of music, like new forms of life, can arise when there’s a mistake in copying. Or when the technology of the art does undesigned and originally unwanted things, like causing feedback. An accidental thing like that can then become something pursued and valued in its own right. Hardcore is about distortion in lots of ways: it uses distorted guitars and voices to protest about the distortion of society and justice. But this album isn’t distorted in one way: it adheres faithfully to the hardcore recipe first laid down in the late 1980s. So that’s sonic-ironic again.

“Guitardämmerung” also blends ideas in the way that hardcore blends punk and heavy metal. Götterdämmerung means “Twilight of the Gods” and refers to the cataclysmic end of the world in Norse mythology. Man Will Destroy Himself use electric guitars to create music about cataclysm and apocalypse, but are we now in the final stages of guitar-based music? Will hardcore, heavy metal, and other forms of rock exist much longer? I don’t think they will. There are cataclysms of various kinds ahead: political, social, scientific, and technological. The political and social cataclysms probably won’t be those foreseen by the self-righteous and sanctimonious crusty community (crummunity?). And that community may realize that it’s been working for political and social cataclysm in a lot of ways, rather than against it. The scientific and technological cataclysms will be more powerful and long-lasting in their effects – assuming science and technology survive what is ahead in politics and sociology. I don’t think the Deus Ex Machina, the electronically enhanced superhuman now in preparation, will be interested in loud guitars. But I’m not superhuman, or properly grown-up, and I am still interested in loud guitars. Although the music is quite different, this album makes me nostalgic – or prostalgic – in a similar way to the mediaeval ballads on Music of the Crusades. That music was traditional, and so, sonic-ironically, is hardcore, three decades after it first appeared. Hardcore expresses ugly emotions in an ugly way, but it’s still human. And Man is indeed about to be Destroyed.

Nation of Ashes is available for free at Last.fm

Elsewhere other-engageable:

• Musings on Music