Rolling Metal Thread 2009

i'll tell you one thing about nadja's slayer cover, it's long.

It might be long, but it's far from tedious.

"forest-dwelling hipsters absolutely fucking brutalize the Slayer classic"

There is something very wrong with this sentence. Please tell me "absolutely brutalize" doesn't mean marimba and a flute solo.

I meant brutalize in the positive sense.

It's a boring version of my absolute least favorite Slayer song (and yes, that includes the stuff on Undisputed Attitude). Nadja are now and forever in my "I don't get it" pile.

I thought it was great, probably the best thing on the album going on initial spin

I think they make the song a lot creepier and heavier than the original. And I've always liked Slayer's version. No question, going in, you know exactly what Nadja's going to do with these cover songs, just draw them out as long as possible, but with these songs especially, the shtick works really well.

i don't agree. but i love you anyway.

i mean, it's not creepier and it's not heavier. it's just not. and i think it is a little tedious. and putting stuff through the nadja machine can probably work fine in some instances, but i don't think it does the trick in this case. different strokes and all that.

and i got no problem with shtick either. speaking as someone who loved all the songs that mark k. put through the red house painters machine to make them red house painters songs. (post-RHP though, i don't have a lot of time for john denver and modest mouse covers.)

I get the impression listening to Nadja's cover of Dead Skin Mask, that if you were in the same room with them while they were recording the track, you would barely hear them playing. It doesn't sound to me like they are playing their instruments vigorously at all.

I would bet good money that their whole process with the exception of their vocals (and maybe drums on certain records) are all internal using VST distortion on guitars and synths (to create that fake feedback/drone sound they bury all of their songs with). It's a sound I used to find really compelling, but now that I've had six or seven of their samey albums to deconstruct their sound, it sounds kind of dull and flat and doesn't really fit my personal definition of metal at all.

Oh no! False Metal Alert!

What will people who like it ever do?

Discuss them on the indie rock thread. (I kid)

You take Mastadon into some sort of prog hell thread and I'll take Nadja off too. I kid, only kinda.

You won't catch me talking about Mastodon on any thread, so it's a deal.

Cool.

So, uh...

Amoseurs? Or does the Joy Division & Swans influence make them verboten too?

Amesoeurs will definitely have some of the purists hollering 'false!', but the new album's not without some vicious moments, including one track of full-on, stripped down black metal.

There was some pretty traditional black metal stuff on the EP, IIRC. Really excited about the upcoming full length. Have they set a hard date yet, or still just sometime this spring?

i thought this dude's version of slayer's reign in blood album was really great and quite lovely, by the way:

http://cdbaby.com/cd/erikhinds3/

I have new Static-X! Uh...

There was some pretty traditional black metal stuff on the EP, IIRC. Really excited about the upcoming full length. Have they set a hard date yet, or still just sometime this spring?

Yeah, 90% of the album follows where the last track on the Ruines Humaines EP left off. So much so, that the raw BM track kind of sticks out...it's still a good track though. There's a European date, I just don't know when it is. March something? For North America, yeah, it's apparently April-ish.

Thanks Adrien.

What do you guys think of Impending Doom?

What do you guys think of Impending Doom?

Well, I try to have a generally positive outlook and not dwell on it too much.

Seriously, though, I'm not too familiar.

No idea, but Monstrosity's Imperial Doom was a load of fun, as I recall it. I kinda miss brutal death metal, no one really seems to do it properly anymore. Everyone who might have it in them are putting on their dad's shoes and playing at techdeath now, it seems.
Hell, has anyone got any tips on good recent death metal in the Suffocation vein?

Amoseurs? Or does the Joy Division & Swans influence make them verboten too?

It's not that it makes them verboten. It's that it makes them boring. We already have four four-band bills a week of metal bands who wanna make sure you know how much they dig Joy Division and how they're not meatheads at all. UOIP (use other influences please). Trying to remember which Albini essay or interview it was that said "how come nobody wants to be influenced by MX-80 Sound?" or something along those lines - i.e., yeah, everybody knows Joy Division was great and we already had a Joy Division so it's actually more interesting to reject that sound/mood, try to consider it off limits, work within restrictions. Which is what makes great black metal bands in my opinion, an acceptance that restriction is actually liberation - that the "we do what sounds good, we're not interested in labels" philosophy of music-making just renders everything faceless.

screw JD & Swans (ptui!). use an Ubu/PiL (w/Wobble) template instead, metalheadz!

YES, THAT! ravenstines for all.

and a Crocus Behemoth or two wouldn't hurt neither.

I agree that working within constraints is a generally productive artistic tactic, but I spend a lot of time listening to new metal bands, too, and I don't actually feel oppressed by the number who sound like Joy Division, or even the number whose failure to abide by genre boundaries render them faceless. Whereas I hear a lot of bands who sound to me like they've spent so little effort pushing their genre's boundaries that maybe they don't even know that there's anything beyond them. At which point they're not productive constraints, they're just failures of imagination. And I guess I'd rather hear failures of discipline than failures of imagination.

Liked the Amesoeurs EP, looking forward the album.

Ditto what Glenn said better than I could. Glenn - are you going to hit Paganfest in Worcester this year? Korpiklaani, Eluveitie, Primordial, Moonsorrow, Blackguard, and Swashbuckle is a heckuva lineup.

Glenn OTM

Of that lineup I admit that I only really like Eluveitie. But it's my daughter's birthday that day, so maybe I'll call and see if the Palladium does birthday packages for two-year-old girls. Metal, applesauce, some balloons? How hard could that be? Aren't Elmo and Cookie Monster related, anyway?

i am so so down with this years paganfest

We already have four four-band bills a week of metal bands who wanna make sure you know how much they dig Joy Division and how they're not meatheads at all.

Yeah, I (not surprisingly) don't remotely understand why this would by definition be more boring than four-bill bands who wanna make sure you know how much they dig Slayer, or Napalm Death, or [fill in whatever more currently hip and fashionable and ugly and unlistenable extreme metal template you want]. Though obviously I agree that metal bands inspired by MX-80 or Ubu (or Tin Huey!) would be a way better idea. (They might even get me to leave the house.)

the "we do what sounds good, we're not interested in labels" philosophy of music-making just renders everything faceless.

So wait, John, are you saying the JD-inspired quasi-metal bands have this philosophy, or the black metal purists you prefer do? (What bands don't claim to just play what they think sounds good?)

Also should be noted that not much goth/dark/pagan -metal actually does sound like Joy Division (or the Swans, or Enigma, or Kate Bush, or Cocteau Twins, or Fairport Convention, or the Pogues, etc.) (In fact, a metal band that actually sounded like Joy Division might be refreshing in its own right!) A lot of it probably tries to sound like Joy Division and fails, though; I can hear that. And too many such bands do sound alike, sure. But plenty of such bands sound different than each other, too. And by definition, those differences take a lot less work to grasp than differences between bands working within a much more prescribed template. (I say this, though, as somebody who loved a lot of goth/dark metal seven or eight years ago, but who's been pretty burned out on it for the past several years. So I'm hardly an apologist for the stuff. Just not getting how "purer" stuff is any better.)

yeah well of course, no argument here, it doesn't actually 'sound like' JD etc, it just borrows tropes/poses/mojo - I mean, the bands we cite as points of influence became touchstones because they themselves were either original or drawing on then-uncommon touchstones (Hawkwind for JD, uhhh who for Swans? always hard to say, I think Suicide & a lotta downtown tough-guy art-punk but I have to give Gira & co. much credit for sounding, as of Cop, like pretty much nobody else). The examples you cite (except Kate Bush, to whom I will never give even momentary props) are all boundary-breaking nobody's-making-music-like-this-so-we'll-do-it-ourselves bands. But to answer:

So wait, John, are you saying the JD-inspired quasi-metal bands have this philosophy, or the black metal purists you prefer do?

quasi-metal art bands. black metal purist bands like Blasphemophager or Morbosidad or Deiphago will tell you straight up that if they sound like Sarcofago, that's just fine. Which I like. I mean: the best bands are gonna be the ones that push the envelope. For sure. But the stuff that's attracting all the indie kids (i.e. people who look like me only thinner, LOL) isn't new or original or very interesting to me - fuck man, Godflesh's Hymns gave me a lifetime supply of what half these bands are pushing, and if it hadn't, the first Jesu album took care of the balance. So, even though the best bands are gonna be the innovators, in the absence of something as way-out-there new-thing-in-the-world as Celtic Frost's eighties stuff or Coroner or Transilvanian Hunger (which became a template), I'd rather hear people working within old established confines than "what if I combined metal with...My Bloody Valentine and all the bands I really like?" for the 1,000,000th time. I should say though that between that stuff & by-the-numbers black metal it's a tossup and you can throw them all to the wolves for all I care at this point, I think the scene is stagnant almost everywhere & the worst offenders are the ones who think they're doing something new.

Short version I don't think people who like Loveless should be allowed to make metal, and I say this as a guy who likes Loveless just fine.

Yeah, I agree with what Glenn said, I'm constantly looking for bands that push the proverbial envelope. That's just me, I especially love it these days when black metal is used as the jumping-off point for something even bolder. I find it just goes so well, the JD/Cure/MBV/Swans influence with the metal genre it's rooted in.

That said, there's a lot of truth to what John says ("an acceptance that restriction is actually liberation"). Goes both ways.

examples you cite (except Kate Bush, to whom I will never give even momentary props

I like her best-of CD okay, myself. (Which means a few more songs that I like than by Cocteau Twins or MBV -- who yeah, are another obvious inspiration on this kinda stuff, whether I care about them or not.)

I wouldn't be surprised if Voivod know who were MX-80 Sound were, btw (may have even read something to that effect once.) (And hell, I wish more metal bands sounded "like Voivod" now. Though who I do hear random tracks now and then that do okay at it.)

Eluveitie just pulled out of Paganfest...I like all the other bands a ton, but Eluveitie is just so durn good live.

as far as this purity debate goes, i'll say what i always say: it depends.

katatonia are my favorite modern rock group, and i know for a fact that i benefited from their cure, red house painters, and shoegaze fandom (they can have jeff buckley).

some people are so good that they can pull anything off. some people just look clumsy. or a day late and a dollar short.

i loved that last album by Empire Auriga. they combined all kinds of things with their metal (fuzzy guitars, test department martial maneuvers, general industrial clanking) and really made it work for me.

http://www.myspace.com/empireauriga

and it goes without saying that my fave israeli band grave in the sky combine all kinds of non-metal industrial stuff to their mix, but they rule cuz they do it SO FUCKING GOOD:

www.myspace.com/graveinthesky

love how specific they are too (!!):

Influences Darkthrone, OM, Black Sabbath, Khanate, Godflesh, Sunn O))), Burzum, Jesus Lizard,Swans, Immortal, Neurosis, Ulver, Electric Wizard, Grief, Choronzon, Axis of Perdition, Laughing Hyneas, Discharge, Cromagnon, Big Black, Wolf Eyes, Sightings, Carcass, OLD, Bastard Noise, Maurizio Bianchi, Lustmord, Earth, Thorns, Treponem Pal.
Sounds Like GGFH, Xasthur, Double Leopards, Mouthus, Gravitar, HALO, Skin Chamber, Bunkur, Barbara, Entombed, The Lack, Head of David, Doom, Weedeater, Samus, White Mice, Ramleh, Monarch, Negative Reaction, Unearthly Trance, Burmese, Toaldliquor, Sourvein, Cable, Flux Information Sciences, Asva, Caspar Brotzmann Massaker, King Carcass, Harvey Milk, Conspiracy of Noise, Terminal Cheesecake, Teeth of the Lions Rule the Divine, Boris.

Actually, that reminds me, though I'm not sure if anybody here will know what I'm talking about: Does anything on Mastodon's reportedly progged out Crack The Skye actually sound like one of my favorite prog-metal bands ever, Crack the Sky??Because if so, I may actually have to listen to it...

these guys?

Crack the Sky [Lifesong, 1975]
After too many legends of Atlantis and concept albums about the last cowboy, I was impressed to come upon John Palumbo, who can end one of his existentialist fables "Being is my . . . life" and make it sound like an aperçu. But in the end the words ("Robots for Ronnie," "A Sea Epic") are brittle, while Palumbo's dense modal structures (and Rick Witkowski's guitar inventions) have real tensile strength. Mannered, sure--so's Big Star. Slick, sure--hmm. B-

Animal Notes [Lifesong, 1976]
"We Want Mine," a jarring little rocker about Third World deprivation, and "Animal Skins," which quotes George Harrison as it salvages every religious leader who's ever lived, convinced me for a while that the rest of this systematically disjoint music flowed and crackled appropriately. But for the most part the melodies of these art-pop set pieces don't live up to the harmonies; their premeditated shifts recall late Beatles when they work and middle Uriah Heep when they don't. I still prefer songs about Mounties to songs about centaurs. But I also prefer Mountie songs that keep galloping when the lyrical conceit gets boring, which it does. B

Ha, that's too obscure for me, sorry.

I did finally get to listen to Crack the Skye all the way through, and it's a strong album, though I do still prefer the last three. "The Last Baron" is cool...complex, but doesn't fly completely off the handle like the Mars Volta so often does. "The Czar" continues to blow me away.

i don't think i've ever heard them. but from what i gather from the top review, Bob doesn't like them 'cause they're slick?

xp

Eluveitie pulled out of Paganfest? I really only wanted to see them and Korpiklaani; maybe the few hours drive to and from Worcester isn't going to happen for me either. Bummer.

Huge x-post.

xp If you can call Blue Oyster Cult crossed with Steely Dan in small-town Maryland on a pre-punk-era indie label slick, I guess. When I interviewed Kix in the late '80s, they told me they were big Crack The Sky fans -- called them "fish music, because it's all over the place." George says they worked up a decent live following up and down the upper East Coast in the '70s; even got a bit of AOR play. Here's Jasper and Oliver in 1983's immortal International Encyclopedia Of Heavy Metal: "weird and wacky hard rock -- twisting, turning, and creating wonderful moods for Palumbo's stunning lyrics. At times they appear light and jazzy but then they crush you with stunning guitar work."

Uh, too tired and still processing the above conversation to contribute to that debate. I will say, though, that if Alestorm come through your town, do not miss them. It is one of the most entertaining shows that did not involve pyro that I've seen in a long time.