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golikehellmachine · 1 year

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thanksgiving playlist extravaganza, pt. 1

i got busy last week with work and with life, and didn’t get around to putting together a friday playlist, which bothers no one other than myself, and doesn’t bother me that much, either.

but, since thanksgiving is coming up this week in the united states, and i’ll be spending a lot of time in the kitchen, i thought it might be fun to make a larger list to keep you company while you mash your potatoes or stuff your turkey or just stock up on wine and order takeout.

this is part 1 — tumblr limits you to ten bandcamp links per post, which seems reasonable, so i’ve broken it up into three lists with the occasional youtube link when bandcamp fails me. next edition on tuesday, final edition on thursday.

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charlie megira | tower of tongues

CHARLIE MEGIRA has always seemed a little tragic to me; he was always a man out of step and out of time. he’s hard to pin down, genre-wise, because he jumped around a lot, which wouldn’t have been a problem today, but in the pre-streaming era, could make it tough for people to discover and stick with you. this particular song is from his post-punk era, and until listening to this record for the first time in months, i did not realize how much of modern post-punk (e.g., soft kill) you can hear in this.

creature party | digital addiction

CREATURE PARTY are locals here in portland who we caught the other night, playing in the basement of the shanghai tunnel bar, which may (or, as it turns out, mostly like may not) have been the site of countless abductions, a gateway to a dangerous and unpleasant life of servitude at sea. in reality, most men who were sold into servitude were just drugged and then defrauded.

i don’t have a good transition here, i just wanted to clear up a common misconception.

creature party were a delightful riot live. sound-wise, they’re very definitely a pacific northwest band, and you can hear the usual indie influences there (sleater-kinney is probably the easiest and laziest reference i can think of), but there’s plenty more to like here, because there’s just as much weirdo, lo-fi, fuzzy B-52s in this sound as there is pacific northwestern indie.

laura jane grace | lolo 13

approximately 5,700 years ago, i lived next door to AGAINST ME! in a triplex across the street from gainesville punk greats BITCHIN’ and caddy corner from former floridian lumberjack and all-around man of bellows, CHUCK RAGAN. the late 90s were a pretty wild time to live in gainesville, florida. i would not have predicted LAURA JANE GRACE would’ve become who she’s become at that time, but i’m not sure i would’ve predicted anyone from that time would be doing anything they’re doing now — caroline from BITCHIN’ was in RUSSIAN DOLL!

i haven’t really kept up with LJG in recent years because i’m just not huge into acoustic folk-punk anymore, but this record has a lot more depth than i thought it was going to, and i consider myself corrected and reminded to stop writing things off just because i think i know what they’ll sound like.

surface to air missive | rosy

these folks (or, well, this folk) is new to me, but i really enjoy SURFACE TO AIR MISSIVE. there are plenty of influences you can hear here, and plenty of influence-influences you can hear, as well — not only can you hear some of THE SMITHS or even NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL here, you can hear the bands who influenced them. i don’t know much more about this band beyond knowing that it’s a one-man show, which is impressive. normally, one-person bands tend to fall apart when it comes to drums, but these are solid throughout.

katie morey | trial by fire

i bought this record earlier this year, and keep coming back to it as a recommendation, even though i have a hard time pinning down exactly what i like about it. it’s got a specific sound which i nonetheless can’t quite put my finger on, but it definitely comes from the early 1970s. lots of heavy reverb, electric piano and quietly competent drumming. it’s a fantastic sunday morning record all the way through, which i can’t recommend enough, even while being unable to explain what, specifically it is that grabs me.

kid congo powers | peanuts

KID CONGO POWERS is a legend who has played with so many underground greats and who it’s nice to see is finally beginning to get a little more recognition. he just released a book, which is on my christmas list, documenting his time through THE GUN CLUB, THE CRAMPS, NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS and more, and anyone who comes out alive on the other side of a history like that is definitely worth listening to. further, kid congo’s got a unique perspective as a gay man who was out and proud from very early on, even when the punk and underground scenes were nowhere near as tolerant as they’d eventually become. you can definitely hear his CRAMPS years in this track, but kid congo’s got his own thing going on that’s worth considering on it’s own.

sea power | be gone (demo)

SEA POWER (formerly british sea power) have picked up a lot of new fans in recent years because of their score for disco elysium, which is undeniably great, but, for me, open season is always going to be the record to beat. the original release is pretty unassailable, but, as is their way, sea power also tends to release their demo and early versions, and they’re always a delight to pick through. this version of be gone has the lovely melody of the original, but is quieter and doesn’t have the same bombastic, big sound that the initial release did. if you like listening to how songs can evolve for a band from when they’re written to when they’re recorded, this one’s a great example.

lee fields | i should have let you be

LEE FIELDS IS BACK! LEE FIELDS IS BACK!

of course, he didn’t go anywhere, but we’ve lost so many soul and R&B greats in recent years that it’s always a relief to see one continuing to put out great work. fields got back together with daptone records this year to release this, and the whole record is fantastic. this song has his signature sound with a really interesting, almost beatles-esque bridge right in the middle of it. the whole record’s fantastic and a well-welcomed return and i can’t recommend it enough.

reigning sound | falling rain

i’ll never not be bummed out that cartwright called an end to the REIGNING SOUND before i got the chance to catch them live, though cartwright’s an industrious and restless guy who’ll have something new and exciting to check out soon enough. this one comes from shattered, which wasn’t my favorite record when it came out, but has really, really grown on me. i mean, i recommend literally every single one of their records, but if you’ve got to start somewhere, shattered isn’t a bad place to start.

murder by death | my evergreen

given that it’s a thanksgiving playlist, a few christmas songs are bound to find their way in, and, well, would you look at that, here’s one of them! MURDER BY DEATH are one of my all-time favorites, and it’s entirely in character that they’d put together a christmas record. all of it is fun, but this cover of the SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS my evergreen manages to take what was, originally, a good-enough christmas effort and elevate to something profoundly nostalgic, bittersweet, and lovely. my partner and i have a hard rule about not playing this one until after thanksgiving, but i feel like we’re close enough that you should get to start working it into your holiday playlists now.

that’s it for this list; i’ll have another one up on tuesday to continue the thurday cooking extravaganza.

#charlie-megira #laura-jane-grace #surface-to-air-missive #katie-morey #kid-congo-powers #sea-power #lee-fields #reigning-sound #murder-by-death #thanksgiving #playlist #Bandcamp

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somervillesongwriters · 1 year

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Interview with upcoming artist (April): Adam Rothberg

Your songs span many topics and even styles; how does a song tend to start for you?

I wish I could say there was a tried and true path. I often let myself ruminate on lyrical and sometimes unwieldy thematic ideas for months before chucking them all in the trash, just to be surprised by inspiration that pops up after listening to a random song I've known for years, and deciding I want to do something like that. There are so many great songwriters out there. Perhaps that is why my own songs, as you point out, 'span so many topics and styles'.

You play about a gazillion different instruments; how did you learn to play? What was your first instrument? What's your favorite?

I grew up in a very musical family, where there was always music around me. My father loved classical and film music and he played flute and trumpet in college. My mother plays guitar and piano, and my step father plays guitar, autoharp, and mandolin. And then there was our massive record collection including folk, rock, funk, classical, ragtime, bluegrass, you name it. And as a kid I was dragged along to concerts, festivals, jams, song-swaps, and music parties that would last long into the night. We also had an enormous hard cover book filled with musical instruments of the world. I loved that book! All of which is just to say I was absolutely steeped in music.

The first instrument I studied was piano. I didn't get very far with traditional lessons though. My teacher wasn't very interested in encouraging my love of the Beatles' music. And I had little patience for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Next came 4th grade, and a year of screechy violin lessons.

Guitars and pianos are instruments of instant gratification for me: pluck a string or depress a key and you're off. They are really great songwriting tools for that reason. So I have a lot of affection for them. But I love musical instruments: organs and synthesizers, drums and percussion of all kinds, sitars, mandolins, saxophones, trumpets, coronets, clarinets, oboes, bass, banjos, accordions. There are so many amazing instruments.

Among your skills and jobs is audio engineering. What's your favorite aspect of engineering/producing? How did the pandemic affect that work?

The art of the album is really what draws me to production and engineering. I'm interested in telling a story, in painting a picture, in finding the texture, composition, and dynamic songs are calling for. Each instrument is a character. Each song is movement or an act in that story. And the order of it all will make sense in the end. I deeply enjoy working with other songwriters to bring to life and flesh out their songs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a state changer for me, and I know I'm not alone in that regard. It is a complex topic for sure. I still haven't figured out exactly how to exist comfortably in this new norm. Before the pandemic I was touring mid-size clubs and small theaters around the east coast and midwest, with a Linda Ronstadt tribute band, in which I played keyboards, acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin, and sang harmonies. Musically, it was fantastic. But COVID-19 has robbed me and so many other musicians of any sense of safety we had in that kind of lifestyle and career. I am much less willing to perform in a room full of people. That said, the recording studio offers a much more controlled environment.

Adam will be playing on Saturday, April 1st, 7:30 p.m., in the Somerville Songwriter Sessions, along with Phil Berman of Phil and the Flying Leap and host Sam Bayer at the Somerville Armory Cafe, 191 Highland Ave, Somerville MA. (Great music, great food, free parking.) $15 suggested donation. Questions? [email protected]

#songwriting #somerville #livemusic #somervillearmory #songwriters #songwriter #somervillema #somervillesongwriters #music #somervillesongwritersessions

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nyastyaraspurrtina · 17 hours

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Question for youuuuu

Hi! I have never actually listened to the mechanisms, but I’m a big tma fan and really like the very slight aus where it’s like the mechanisms were the archivists college band things, so I’ve read a lot of fanfic that basically references them with not a lot of context yk?

Also. Because I have watched some rusty quill stream vods on YouTube, I’m now getting like 9 second mechanisms clips recommended to me.

And. Last little thing. I am a big alt folk person, and last night I remembered this band I love that I basically totally forgot about and hadn’t been listening to for a bit, and went and just shuffled their songs and it was great. (Robert hallow and the holy men! If you were curious)

But. I was like scrolling through the similar artists, and the mechanisms showed up again.

So now partly because I just keep seeing them come up and partly because of curiosity. I’m tempted to actually check them out.

But I’m really bad with new music, just kind of in general I like my comfortable and familiar songs. And I know really nothing about them besides like. Some of their names and the whole like immortal space pirate thing. But like musically? I have like no info.

So basically uh.

What should I expect? What like. Kind of music would I be getting into? Is it worth it?

I’m asking mostly because I’m looking for someone to be enthusiastic so I have a reason to push my hesitancy against new things aside btw.

Sorry this is so long lmao, and thank you :)

OH MY GOD????? IM FUCKING HONORED THANK YOU

Okay so to start out with, they have 4 main albums. Once Upon A Time In Space, The Bifrost Incident, High Noon Over Camelot, and Ulysses Dies At Dawn. They tend to vary in terms of what their music sounds like, but they always have the same instruments, more or less. (Glockenspiel, flute, drums, sometimes Jonny on the harmonica, bass, guitar that I honestly cannot tell if it's electric or acoustic, viola, violin, Jessica Law's amazing vocals, and I think that's it but I'm probably forgetting something else). High Noon Over Camelot has a lot of Western influence, and is very folk-leaning-country, is the best way I can describe it?

You said you listen to TMA, so here's a couple people to know - Frank Voss and Jessica Law. Frank Voss plays Ashes O'Reilly, an arsonist who burned down their home planet and joined up with the Mechs. Here's the song with their backstory. It's very much like jazz, I think. In TMA, Frank Voss plays Basira Hussain. Jessica Law plays the Toy Soldier, a sentient wooden man (or, according to a tweet she made, a metal man that just looks wooden?) It essentially pretends to be alive, and will obey any order given to it. It pretended to be a rich lady's husband for a while, and then fell in love with an Angel - when it wasn't reciprocated, it ripped out the Angel's voice box. Not sure if it uses it as its own voice box, I forgot. No backstory song for TS sadly :(((. In TMA, Jessica Law plays Nikola Orsinov! And then there's Jonny Dville, first mate, killed his dad for money, killed the guy who paid him to kill his dad, burnt down the guy's casino, and joined up with the Mechs. Here's the song with his backstory. Not quite sure what genre that song falls under, sorry! Jonny D'ville is played by Jonny Sims, who is Jonathan Sims. Don't worry, it's really easy to remember /j.

Anyways, I'm gonna assume you're not very familiar with their whole shtick from what you said - basically, each of their albums tells a story, except for Tales To Be Told Vol 1 and 2. In those, all of the individual songs tell individual stories. There is Death To The Mechanisms, but I'd listen to that last. You can listen to the other albums in any order, though! There are some songs that are entirely narration, no singing. If that's not your thing, TheVoidSings on YouTube, who is an absolute SAINT, has a playlist of all the tracks that do NOT have that narration.

Now, the music type. WARNING FOR GUNSHOT NOISES IN ALMOST ALL THE ALBUMS. Not sure if that bothers you, but they do often have gunshot sound effects. If you like, I can compile a list of songs that have the gunshot effect so you can avoid it, if it would make it a no go for you. High Noon Over Camelot - Western. Heavy folk & country. Once Upon A Time In Space....not sure what to class it as. It's a mixture of things. It can be very loud and fast-paced, but sometimes slow? There's some songs that are like a waltz. Some are very fast and loud. The Bifrost Incident - the best thing I can class it as is "train". Very loud, fast-paced, but melodic in a way. Ulysses Dies At Dawn is heavy blues influence, kinda jazz? idk I don't really listen to jazz sorry :(. And while I am biased, it is ABSOLUTELY worth getting into. Like I said, if a whole album at once seems too intimidating, Tales To Be Told vols 1 and 2 have individual songs that each tell a story. Their music as a whole is always pretty loud and fast paced, so don't go into it expecting waltz, classical, slow and soft stuff.

I'm sorry this took me so long to answer 😭😭😭 I hope this is OK please let me know if you have any more questions!!!!!!

#mechsposting #long post

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themidnightcircusshow · 2 years

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I was probably going to do a long post breaking down Devil anyway, but I’ve seen a lot of people getting confused about certain elements and the like so I thought it would be fun to do a really deep look into how Devil works within genre conventions. I’m both very much and absolutely not who this song was made for. Because really. What are the odds. What are the chances. How could there be anyone out there who has both been a card carrying Cassie for half her life who also did her masters on Southern Gothic--

What is Southern Gothic?

Musically, I’d call SG a folk genre, not because it’s a genre of folk (though it is) but because there isn’t really an actual genre of music that is marketed and branded as Southern Gothic. Rather, it’s a genre that’s largely been cultivated by outsiders. In spite of this, you can easily pick out the exact sound and influences of a Southern Gothic song. Southern Gothic is a genre that has essentially been built on the traditions of Folk, Blues, Rock, Spirituals, Gospel, and Country (hence why it is sometimes called Dark Country). Not every Southern Gothic song has each element, but they usually have at least an acoustic guitar, a piano, and a very strong drum beat of a stomp-clap persuasion (sometimes literally, but usually made by a combination of a kick drum and some other percussion like the snare, a tambourine, or sometimes actual chains). The melody tends to be based on a very simple refrain repeated throughout the song-- these are songs that are meant to be sung while you work, or to pass down a story, so something that sticks in your head and can be sung with is ideal. This does not mean the melodies are simple: most of the time, SG builds on these simple melodies either in the instrumentation or main vocal line.

Devil

Devil is in the vein of vocally driven SG, The opening acapella refrain is the basic repeated melody (essentially, the call and response), and the instrumental is built in a way to highlight the vocal line. See the chorus, where every note of the instrumentation is in conjunction with the vocals rather than distracting from them. These kinds of vocal led songs are an incredibly good opportunity to just let your singer go ham on the mic, in the way a gospel singer would. In terms of vocal performance, where it starts soft, quiet, and deep in the singer’s register, with a choir singing in the background to provide the call and response, while the singer gradually builds in power, intensity, and just belting out notes, I’d definitely compare this to Delta Rae’s Bottom of the River.

Instrumentally, Devil is a very basic SG song. You have the backing vocals, piano, acoustic guitar, fuzz guitar, and of course that stomp clap beat. I of course would have loved a solo, even if just from the guitar, but I understand why they didn’t-- again, vocal led, though there are vocal led SG songs that also go hard with the instrumentation. See Heavy Rock Heathens’ cover of House of the Rising Sun, which is just everyone going all out at different points and then together, giving it a truly epic sound, which is why it’s my favourite version of the song in spite of how horribly wrong they get the lyrics. (Though if we got a fiddle or banjo solo in a Changmin song truly all ills in the world would have been righted. Or made worse by the sheer bombast of such a thing happening). Honestly this could mostly be explained by the fact that this isn’t coming from a band or someone whose instrument is just as important as their voice.

Lyrically, again we’re deep in Southern Gothic territory. SG lyrics vary widely, but they tend to fit into one of the following: we’re all sinners (Tymnisky’s Southern Gothic, Blues Saraceno’s Judgment Day, all of The Graveyard Train’s output), The Revenge Song (Delta Rae’s I Will Never Die, Mieka Pauley’s Marked Man), and good ol’ narrative songs (The Devil Went Down to Georgia), These songs tend to involve religion but not necessarily in a way you’d expect: the singer tends to have beef with God (either they’re angry at what God has put them through, or God has gone Revelations on them for their past actions), and the Devil is often almost seen as a figure of good, or at least a twisted refuge. Unsurprising considering how often Southern Gothic songs are about murder (and often the victim deserved it), there is a lot of “I will face God and walks backwards into hell” which then tends to lean into the Devil maybe not being that bad. I’ve seen some talk about Devil being a corruption song, or a villain song, but the Devil is not really played as a malicious figure in Southern Gothic. The lyrics about struggling through hard times and only the Devil coming to comfort you very much fit the traditions of the Devil not necessarily being a figure for good but hey, we’re all sinners anyway. Then the lyrics about being filled with regret, breaking down and praying (but to who?), and finding courage when faced with a soul shaking reckoning are all very Southern Gothic, including the ambiguity.

Structurally is where Devil kind of loses me, and I very much have to adjust my thinking of it from a Southern Gothic song to a pop song. It’s not totally unheard of for Southern Gothic to have a standard pop song structure (Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus)-- Barns Courtney songs tend to be this structure with some variations-- but it is rare. Most Southern Gothics are very much about the building tension, the feeling like you’re on a journey. Devil largely fits with that-- start acapella, bring in the instruments, more intense vocals, etc until the end. The problem is that the first chorus is too much too fast. It’s why a lot of Southern Gothic songs have a couple of verses before the chorus, or have the first chorus be lower energy than the other choruses, etc. The first chorus in Devil feels like it comes from nowhere because it’s too many layers up in the building of tension, so instead of a steady build you feel like you’ve opened the arc of the Covenant. It threw me way, way out the first time I heard it and while it’s grown on me, I do think it’s the one time where it’s clear this is a pop song first and foremost and it works just a bit to the song’s detriment.

Overall, I’d say this song reminds me most of LP’s Muddy Waters, Bishop Brigg’s River (which similarly because of her pop roots has the going too fast too hard issue, but less so because it doesn't have as much of a build), and as previously stated, Delta Rae’s Bottom of the River. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but it’s sill a solid Southern Gothic song albeit with some pop conventions.

So the song is very Southern Gothic in a way that I think everyone involved has heard at least one Southern Gothic song. Can’t say the same for the music video. Southern Gothic music videos are a true testament to how much you can get done on a budget. They are weird, creative, and most importantly can be genuinely creepy and I doubt any of them have the budget of an SM intern’s afternoon wages. Devil somehow manages to look cheaper than all of them. The woods set, with the lighting and cinematography looks amazing, no qualms there. It’s the light set and the bunker type room that do not fit at all. They both are so sparse and clinical, and I wouldn’t be over the moon about them in any mv, but Southern Gothic is all about nature and decay. I get what they were going for with the crumbling rock, and the way that it looked like they were underwater, but I have an almost visceral dislike for it. Again, it’s where the k-pop really comes out to drag things down a bit, because it’s dancing in a set rather than doing anything genuinely cool or daring. I just think it’s a bit of a letdown after Maniac.

Overall: As a k-pop song 8.5, as a Southern Gothic song a 6.5

#TVXQ #Shim Changmin #Southern Gothic #The first chorus has definitely grown on me in a way that means it doesn't ruin the song #But it's off-genre in a way I just will never like #Doesn't change that it's /Changmin/ doing /Southern Gothic/

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thatbanjobusiness · 3 years

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Bluegrass Basics #1

WHAT IS BLUEGRASS?

I realize that, what with this being a bluegrass blog and all, I should probably start by explaining... this.

If you’ve hung out with me in the last year and a half, then you’ve been subjected (probably against your will, kicking and screaming) to a Haddock Talks About Bluegrass conversation. Within seconds, you may be bombarded to an inescapable wall of sound as I shriek about G runs, five-strings, and dudes wearing hats named weird stuff like Lester, Burkett, Arthel, Dorris, Junebug, Haskel, and Chi Chi. Understandably, to cope and survive, your mind might have blocked out the worst of the memories... leaving you now with the question, “Well, what is bluegrass? And why does Haddock find it so cool?”

At its simplest, bluegrass is a folk-inspired genre of music originating from the Southern United States that utilizes a core group of acoustic string instruments: guitar, banjo, string bass, mandolin, fiddle, and dobro. However, bluegrass is not a direct preservation of old folk music. Its biggest influences are Scots-Irish fiddle tunes, African-American blues, and gospel music, and in that you can hear a lot of "old" sounds. But bluegrass also began within a commercial setting. Most people date it to the mid-1940s—yes, it's that new!—and it not only integrated new compositions and contemporary songs, but it brought about innovative instrumental techniques that most audiences had never heard before. Since its inception, bluegrass has been a music of unique juxtaposition; it's simultaneously homespun and commercial, simple and technically complex, straddling tradition with truly progressive innovation.

Also. Unlike almost every other genre that exist out there ever, bluegrass can be traced back to and centralized around a *SINGLE* human being. Yeah. That’s right. ONE dude essentially started his own motherfucking genre.

Enter: the Father of Bluegrass. Mr. Bill Monroe (1911-1996).

This guy.

1. HOW THIS SHIT GOT STARTED

Bill Monroe’s music at the time was considered hillbilly music. (“Hillbilly” was the name of the genre before we changed it to “country”). He was a radio star starting in the 1930s, and by the late 1930s, Bill and his band had become members of a popular, wide-reaching hillbilly music program, the Grand Ole Opry, whose radio signal stretched across the American South. Bill’s music wove together several influences: in particular, he combined the sound of old Scots-Irish fiddle tunes with the pitch bends, syncopation, and blue notes of African-American blues. For good measure, he chucked in four-part gospel songs, threw his singing into the high tenor stratosphere, and pushed the music forward with an urgent drive.

And the name of his act? Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys.

Hmhm... something sounds familiar here... something to do with “blue” and “grass,” maybe.

Bill’s music underwent changes, different personnel, different instruments. Every musician’s contribution is important and worth noting, but regrettably my post would be too long if I talked about them here. I will, however, mention what’s often considered the last piece of the puzzle. On December 8, 1945, Bill introduced a new musician he had just hired, a twenty-one year old banjo picker whose style of playing was so unexpected to audiences that you could barely hear the music above the amazed cheers and shouts from the live crowd. People who heard it on the radio talked about the banjo picker all week; some blokes debated about whether one person was playing or several, or if it was even a banjo at all. I know peeps today don’t tend to think of banjos as “cool” and all, but he was shredding up the instrument like some banjo Jimi Hendrix, as far as they were concerned. It was so exciting. Bill was already a popular performer; under this ensemble he had between then and 1948, he was launched to even more popularity.

I’m not trying to focus just on the banjo, but my point here is to emphasize how bluegrass did invoke monumentally new ideas.

That 1946-1948 group is what we usually consider the first-ever bluegrass band. They created the initial blueprint by which a unique band style emerged. Now, some standard musical features of the genre got locked in during the 1950s after several seminal Blue Grass Boys bandmates left and formed their own band. But this original group’s sound started A Movement™ that trickled down over the decades. New-budding musicians began imitating Bill’s sound in their bands. And also, Bill’s band had constant turnover, meaning that a ton of people went into the Blue Grass Boys, got influenced by Bill, then left to form their own ensembles, carrying with them the musical ideas they’d learned from Monroe.

(And by “constant turnover,” I mean—no joke—Bill had something like 200 official band members over the course of his career.)

^^^ The “Classic Band” of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, c. 1947. From left to right: Bill Monroe (mandolin), Chubby Wise (fiddle), Birch Monroe (bass), Lester Flatt (guitar), and Earl Scruggs (banjo). When talking about the classic band, the bassist usually listed is Cedric Rainwater, but here (and legitimately part of the band at the time) is Bill’s older brother Birch.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, mainstream country music had to find a way to compete with the new and oh-so-frustratingly-popular rock-and-roll. Mainstream country music strayed away from scratchy fiddles and banjers and moved to smooth, pop-inspired, electric guitars and background orchestration. And if you didn’t sound like that, you probably weren’t going to be played on mainstream country radio. But there was a notable cluster of acoustic string band musicians who had been left behind... those people and groups who had branched straight off Bill Monroe. By this point, they were distinct enough that their music began to be regularly referred to as... yeah, you guessed it... bluegrass music.

Having been ignored by radio, bluegrass continued through other means, such as festivals that began in the late 60s and 70s. Many musicians brought their own instruments to jam, and to this day, bluegrass is a genre in which it’s common to both pick tunes with friends and family as a social event and go out to see professional performers.

As new generations have entered bluegrass, new ideas and sounds have funneled into it. However, I feel like the theme of combining tradition with innovation remains. For instance, in the 1960s with the Folk Revival, second generation bluegrass musicians simultaneously inserted more several-centuries-old folk songs into the bluegrass repertoire (ex: Fox on the Run), and brought in contemporary rock and pop elements to their bands’s sounds. And while today you may meet bluegrass purists who want to stick with what they heard in the 40s and 50s, you’ll see just as many if not more musicians continue to innovate and expand the genre.

And expand it they will.

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2. WHAT MAKES BLUEGRASS MUSIC BLUEGRASS?

As I’ve said before, bluegrass is a somewhat progressive amalgamation and reformulation of older music styles combined with contemporary music. Bluegrass might have been based in part on ideas from British Isles fiddle tunes and African-American blues, but it’s certainly not regurgitating how people played in decades past. Familiar, old elements combine with new, creative, and original concepts. You keep a healthy dose of both old and new.

It’s because of bluegrass that the banjo was completely reformulated as an instrument: changed from a comedic prop that was strummed into an intensely-picked solo instrument. Within bluegrass, banjo performance technique has continued to evolve, new ideas and styles building on top of one another. And let’s not forget the other instruments! The first dobro in a bluegrass band went in extremely unique directions compared to what was heard at the time, taking influences from everything down to banjo technique. At the same time, bluegrass has provided the space for styles like the old-time hoedown fiddle in periods of music where fiddle was ignored.

But....... as you’ve probably been wondering this entire post.... what does this genre sound like?

^^^ The typical instrument set-up for a bluegrass band. In the back is a string bass. In front, left to right, is a banjo, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, and dobro. If you’re not familiar with how to distinguish instruments: basses are plucked and low pitch; banjos sound twangy and play short note values; mandolins are a high-pitched instrument with a mellower sound that often employ tremolo (quickly undulating notes by strumming the strings up and down rapidly); fiddle is... I mean, it’s a violin; guitar is a mellower acoustic instrument that blends sonically with everything; and the dobro (maybe you’ve heard it referred to as a “steel guitar” or “Hawaiian guitar”) has a... uhhh... it’s a unique hound dog tone I have difficulties describing but is very distinct to hear.

A typical ensemble consists of mandolin, guitar, banjo, fiddle, string bass, and sometimes dobro. On rarer occasions, you may see other instruments like autoharp or harmonica (drums are usually considered horrible, forbidden things, even though... for the record... some high-profile bluegrass bands have used them). You’ll notice bluegrass is a distinctly acoustic string band sound.

There are also, of course, vocals, and in bluegrass, there is notable emphasis on tight two-, three-, and four-part harmony. However, what’s interesting about bluegrass as versus, say, other strains of country, is that for bluegrass, it’s about the full band and not just the lead singer. It’s as important to pay attention to the technically-driven solos (“breaks”) that the instruments play between sung verses. Many bluegrass pieces are straight out instrumentals, too.

Every instrument has a role or roles it fulfills in a bluegrass band. In the background, instruments may play rhythm or fills. Rhythm keeps the basic beat. Fills are unobtrusive melodic-sounding fragments that hide behind the vocalist(s) singing the main melody. And when there’s no singing, instruments take turns in the spotlight playing breaks. You can hear any instrument play a break. It’s to note that breaks are often improvised or semi-improvised, which is half of the fun and skill of watching the musicians perform. Ergo, even if the song itself may or may not have simple chord structures and lyrics, it’s also technically advanced with an expectation that every musician can perform fast-paced solos they improvise on the fly.

There’s different types of guitar styles I’ve seen in bluegrass. I’m not a guitarist, so I don’t want to elaborate too far and share incorrect information. However, it’s fair to say that guitar can be anything from a backup rhythm chord strummer to a flat-picked, fast-paced, melodic soloist. There is a VERY distinct guitar fill that happens at the end of lines, phrases, or sections called the G run you’ll hear everywhere. Fiddle I’ve also heard a wide variety of styles. On the dobro side, the dobro tends not to be the “Hawaiian” sound you may be familiar with on a steel guitar, but more geared toward quick, technical, bluesy stuff. Bluegrass banjo has several styles, but the most prototypical is the Scruggs style, where the banjo does rapid-fire, ornamented, three-fingered picking in which a melody line is pulled out at the same time you’re also picking background chord notes.

To describe bluegrass vocals, you’ll sometimes hear the phrase “high lonesome” thrown around. I don’t hear anywhere as much high lonesome sound in contemporary bands as I do first generation, but the high lonesome sound is a description of piercing, high-range vocals. Bill Monroe would even take songs that were usually played in the key of G and pitch them higher into A or B, pushing his and the ensemble’s vocals into a higher range. I remember listening to Monroe and thinking to myself, “Even though it’s male vocals, why is it so easy for me to sing to?” Because I’m a fucking mezzosoprano, and there’s times Monroe hits and holds notes that are at the top of my range. Hot damn.

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Rhythmically, bluegrass tends to be a driving genre of music. A term that gets thrown around a bit is “drive.” Even on the slow songs, you may hear the instruments push or strain forward. Beat-wise, bluegrass tends to emphasize both a strong downbeat and hit heavy offbeats in a boom-chick style. That last sentence might not have made sense to non-musicians, so I’ll explain...

When we listen to music, we can clap to it. We can also count along to any song as we clap. Music has an innate structure where, when we count, the sound seems organized in groups of two, three, or four. So, when we count to music, we’ll count repetitively. One song may be groups of two (you’ll count “One two, one two, one two”), groups of three (“One two three, one two three”), or groups of four. Every time you hit the “one,” it sounds bigger. It’s more emphasized. It’s restarting the pattern or unit of counting that’s inherent to the rhythmic structure of music.

Now, you can subdivide those numbers between your claps. That means you’d count “One (and) two (and), one (and) two (and),” where the “ands” tend to feel smaller and less-emphasized. Those “ands” are called offbeats. In bluegrass, you’ll hear both the numbers and the “ands” clearly hit. The string bass will play the one’s and two’s, while perhaps the mandolin and banjo are emphatically hitting the “ands” in the background.

There are subgenres within bluegrass. You may hear people refer to newgrass, progressive bluegrass, jamgrass, punkgrass, etc. Put a word in front of it, add the word “grass,” and it probably exists. Jewgrass exists and it’s awesome. There’s fusions, too. The Native Howl is a band that combines thrash metal and bluegrass. Gangstagrass is a band that combines bluegrass with hip hop. It’s also to note that bluegrass has long since become international, and there are notable communities and bands of bluegrass from everywhere to Japan to the Czech Republic.

3. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR GETTING STARTED?

Ummhmhmhm I honestly need a separate post to begin sharing videos, bands, periods of bluegrass, and more. It’s diverse and I love everything from the music coming out in 2020 to the stuff heard in 1947.

I realize that this post skews more toward first generation bluegrass and the starting bands in Ye Olde Days. Because of that, I’ll say this much: the Big Three bands of the early years were Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, and the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys. Bill Monroe’s music is “the original” and is based, at least in his mind, the most on the fiddle tunes he grew up with. Flatt & Scruggs skew somewhat more toward a popular culture sound with smoother vocals and instruments like the dobro that other early bluegrass bands did not use. The Stanley Brothers lean the most to mountain old-time music. Every band is wonderful in their own way and I love listening to all.

I’ll leave this post with what was my gateway song into bluegrass. This was the first song I listened to with the intent of experiencing bluegrass, not expecting to like it, but being pleasantly surprised. I fell in love with the song and... well... as you’ve seen... I’m a year and a half into the genre and still charging strong.

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I look forward to continuing to learn about bluegrass, refine my understanding of it, and share those discoveries with y’all in my future posts.

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impossibletruths · 4 years

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So What Does Lan Wangji’s and Wei Wuxian’s Music Sound Like Anyway?

...is a question I’ve gotten from a couple people re: WGTFOM and I figured, hey, why not share my inspiration(s) for all the music happening in this band AU. These are mostly loose associations that took root in the back of my mind, so while these lists are incomplete, they’re a good touchpoint for how this fic sounds in my head.

Lan Wangji

LWJ leans in the classic rock direction—big, bright sounds; guitar-forward; long solos; a solid blues foundation if you’re listening for it. A fair portion of his material isn’t his own—he’s heavily managed by Gusu Records, especially on tour; his studio work is a little more varied, though not by much—and that stuff tends to skew louder and flashier. The songs he writes (i.e. wuji/wangxian) tend to be more stripped back, subtler, and lean into the blues/folk side of things, with some truly impressive vocals. He makes a point of engaging with the history of his music (i.e. the blues/jazz/gospel foundations of rock as a genre) and is a hyper-competent technical guitarist in general. He’s billed as a solo show under the stage name Hanguang-jun, but he tours with a backing band to fill out his sound.

Real World Insp: Eric Clapton, Hozier, Yvette Young

Guitar(s): Gibson Les Paul Custom in white, an acoustic for songwriting

Wei Wuxian (and the Prides)

The Prides feature Wei Wuxian on lead guitar/lead vocals, Jiang Cheng on bass/guitar/vocals, & Wen Qing on drums/backing vocals (and sometimes Jiang Yanli on keys/synth). Collectively the band lives in the alt rock/pop punk sphere. They tend to swing more alt/indie or punk depending on the songwriter (all three of them write—wrote, anyway—all their material, unlike Hanguang-jun). The band started when Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng asked Nie Huaisang if he wanted to join their punk rock garage band and NHS said “lmao no but I’ll be your manager.” Wei Wuxian’s songwriting in particular is notable for his crazy clever lyrics (which he tends to forget or flub when he’s performing live, but it’s part of his schtick) and the way he pulls from different genres and makes stuff that shouldn’t work together work really well. In general they’re high-energy, big-sound, and their gigs are just plain fun.

Real World Insp: early days P!atD, The 1975, Fallout Boy, Colin Meloy

Guitar(s): Gibson 50s LG-2 Sunburst, a Stratocaster

The Coffin Singers

The Coffin Singers out of Yi City feature Xiao Xingchen on keys/vocals, Song Zichen on guitar/vocals/other, and Xiao Qing on cello/bass/vocals. Heavy folk/indie leanings, and entirely self-produced—they refuse to sign with a label, though they’re in the process of putting their own together. They’re friends of Lan Wangji and are often invited to open for Hanguang-jun. Lan Wangji admires their sound, their commitment to their music, and their freedom to play whatever the fuck they want.

Real World Insp: Darlingside, The Ballroom Thieves

Nie Mingjue (Chifeng-zun)

Old school rock-n-roll. Loud, lots of lights, roughly a billion albums. Backing band is led by Nie Zonghui.

Real World Insp: AC/DC or like Kings of Leon idk

#see unfortunately my music tastes are ''listen to the same band for six weeks straight and then move on to the next one''#so while this is not quite as detailed as I'd like I did have some vague notions and I thought I would share!#also I did an obscene amount of research on their guitars and have VERY specific reasons for choosing those and wanted to talk about it #wgtfom #fic extras #(if you want to know the actual backing track(s) for this film it was the Decemberists. it was lots and lots of the Decemberists)

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Dust, Volume 6, Number 10

The Slugs

September seemed to be the month when all the records on endless delay finally got kicked out the door, COVID or no, ready or not here we come. We’re deluged with music, some recorded before the world changed, some clearly cooked up mid-pandemic. There are a lot of covers EPs, lots of solo material, lots of home-made lo-fi, lots of benefit comps, and who are we to complain? Better, instead, to reach for the headphones, load up the hard drive, pile on the LPs and do some listening. Here’s some of the stuff that caught our attention, as usual ranging all over the continuum, from traditional to edgy and experimental, from silly pop punk to enraged death metal to bookish electro-acoustic improvisation. Contributors this time out included Jonathan Shaw, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Derek Taylor, Ray Garraty, Tim Clarke and Andrew Forell. Happy fall.

Amputation — Slaughtered in the Arms of God (Nuclear War Now!)

Slaughtered in the Arms of God by Amputation

Given the degree of smugness that accompanies utterances of the phrase “Old School Death Metal,” it’s frequently instructive to listen to some. Right on time, the misanthropic bunch at Nuclear War Now! has delivered some seriously Old School sounds to our digital doorstep. This new compilation LP gathers both of the demos of Norwegian knuckle-draggers Amputation, along with a contemporaneous rehearsal recording. Likely the resulting record will be of principal interest to fans of Immortal, the long-running, on-again-off-again Norwegian black metal band that Amputation would morph into in 1991. The songs collected on Slaughtered in the Arms of God have some additional musicological significance, as they document the sounds of 1989 and 1990, transformational years in Norway’s metal scene. Mayhem and Darkthrone tend to get most of the attention, for reasons both good and bad; and like Darkthrone, Amputation made death metal before transitioning to blacker, more brittle sounds. The music on Slaughtered in the Arms of God is muddy, thudding and thick. Perhaps that’s the result of the primitive recording tech the band used, likely of necessity. But through the murk (and to some degree because of it), you can hear the influence of Stockholm’s fecund death metal scene, especially Dismember’s earliest stuff. Scandinavia’s metal currents run deep and dark. Whether that means that Old School Death Metal is intrinsically a good thing is a different matter.

Jonathan Shaw

Anz — Loose in Twos (NRG) 12” (Hessle Audio)

Loos In Twos (NRG) by Anz

I love the idea of listening to DJ mixes of original or all-new material; it’s probably why I still value, say, Ricardo Villalobos’ Fabric 36 so much. Manchester’s Anna Marie-Odubote, aka Anz, has been doing just such a thing annually since 2015 and really went wild with spring/summer dubs 2020, which compiled 74 tracks into nearly an hour and a half of new music. That would’ve been more than enough amid all of this (imagine me gesturing around vaguely), but “Loos in Twos (NRG)” on the venerable Hessle Audio imprint is an equally formidable, decidedly tighter release I played a lot at the start of September. Three club-ready tracks here break down acid, jungle and footwork, and while all three are heady breaks, the looped vocals and bongo of “Stepper” make it the one for me. Get those feet moving digitally now so they’re comfortable once the vinyl arrives in early October.

Patrick Masterson

Ashes and Afterglow — Everybody Wants a Revolution (Postlude Paradox)

Ashes and Afterglow drops pop punk melodies into deep buckets of fuzz, lets them bubble and bob to the surface before shoving them under again. The band is mainly the output of one Luke Daniel, who appears to have been in other band called Sea of Orchids, but neither outfit has left much of an internet trail. And sure, this is the kind of thing that could easily get shuffled under; it breaks no moulds. And yet shuffling “To Take a Look at the World,” has a heart-worn resonance, Daniel’s voice echoing in reverbed hollow-ness against surging tides of guitar noise. “My Yesterday Girl” churns a little harder, with a bright, pop-leaning sort of hopefulness hedged in by seething feedback. It’s not bad, but it never hits a melodic vein the way that similarly inclined artists like Ted Leo or Ovlov or Tony Molina do, and it never pushes the noise over the top, either. Neither pop nor punk but somewhere in middle.

Jennifer Kelly

Ballister — Znachki Stilyag (Aerophonic)

Znachki Stilyag by Ballister

A cake is still a cake, whether you put chocolate frosting and strawberries or white icing and a fondant roses on top. And while they don’t all taste or look exactly the same, a Ballister album is still a Ballister album, and the first Ballister album in three years does not mess with the recipe. Dave Rempis (alto and tenor saxophones), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello and electronics), and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums and percussion) still trade in a particularly hard-hitting form of total improvisation. The changes are ones of emphasis — Lonberg-Holm sounds like he’s using a wah-wah pedal and deploys some especially slashing feedback tones, there’s a bit more space in Nilssen-Love’s intricate beat configurations, and Rempis left his baritone sax at home — and of location. Znachki Stilyag was recorded during the fall of 2019 in Moscow, Russia, which may explain why the big horn stayed at home. But the ones you hear still cut and thrust with broadsword force and rapier precision. This is a cake you can trust.

Bill Meyer

Vincent Chancey — The Spell: The Vincent Chancey Trio Live, 1987 (No Business)

Vincent Chancey likely isn’t alone amongst his peers in feeling exasperated by folks singling out his instrument as uncommon or unusual to jazz. It’s a form of damning through faint praise and one that feel

s even more lackadaisical with any time spent with his music. Chancey plays the French horn and he’s plied it in settings as diverse as Sun Ra Arkestra, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra as well as gigs supporting Aretha Franklin and Elvis Costello. It’s unclear whether the trio documented on The Spell was a working concern, but that hardly matters given how well bassist Wilbur Morris and percussionist Warren Smith gel with their convener. Spread across two sides of an LP, the concert recorded at a New York City art gallery covers four pieces, two by Morris bookending one apiece from Smith and the leader that stitch together very much like cohesive suite. An unadvertised surprise comes with Smith’s ample application of marimba alongside a regular drum kit. Recording quality isn’t optimal, but Chancey’s rich, rounded, phrases gain extra gravitas through the sometimes-grainy acoustics. Woefully underrepresented in the driver’s seat discographically, his acumen as both improviser and composer is easily vindicated by this limited edition (300 copies) release.

Derek Taylor

Che Chen — Tokyo 17.II.2012 (self-released)

Tokyo 17.II.2012 by Che Chen

Nowadays Che Chen has earned a measure renown as the guitar-playing half of 75 Dollar Bill, and all the praise is earned. But before that, he played a roomful of instruments in the True Primes, Heresy of the Free Spirit and duos with Robbie Lee, Tetuzi Akiyama and Chie Mukai. The through-lines to all these efforts is a willingness not to play things the way their supposed to be played, and a gift for supplying the right resonance in any setting. Since 75 Dollar Bill is a New York-based band made for social occasions, the COVID-19 lay-off has been especially hard — so there’s no better time to see what’s in those hard drives in the closet, right? Chen has released this solo concert from 2012 via Bandcamp. In Tokyo for a brief layover, he played amplified violin at a party held in the basement of someone’s apartment building. The amplified part is important; dips and swells of feedback count as much as in this 25-minute performance as the fiddle’s bright, plucked notes and rough, bowed tones. Chen moves purposefully from one mode to next, taking time along the way to savor the room’s lively acoustics.

Bill Meyer

Jeff Cosgrove/ John Medeski/ Jeff Lederer — History Gets Ahead of the Story (Grizzley Music)

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Odds are that even the estimable William Parker would be surprised by the prospect of a William Parker cover album. But that’s essentially what History Gets Ahead of the Story is as organized and realized by drummer Jeff Cosgrove. That the project is the province of an organ trio only adds to the potential consternation quotient. John Medeski officiates the Hammond B-3 console and saxophonist Jeff Lederer, doubling on flute, completes the combo convened by Cosgrove. The latter’s connections to Parker stem from a trio he was part of with the bassist/composer and pianist Matthew Shipp that disbanded in 2015 after fruitful collaboration. Parker’s personage and music left an indelible mark and the seeds for the present album were sown. Collective creative license doesn’t get in the way of soulful, energizing renderings of such staples as “O’Neal’s Porch,” “Corn Meal Dance” and “Wood Flute Songs,” but troika also cedes time for a triptych of strong originals that align aurally with their dedicatee’s inclusive tone world sensibilities.

Derek Taylor

Derelenismo Occulere — Inexorable Revelación (Le Legione Projets)

Inexorable Revelacion (FULL LENGHT 2020) by Derelenismo Occulere

This sounds like a rehearsal gone wrong. In the time of the COVID pandemic, Neo Apolion, a guy responsible for the music in this Ecuadorean duo, recorded a demo and sent it to the band’s vocalist Malduchryst with a message to do with it whatever he wants. Malduchryst took his band partner’s words all too literally. With complete disregard to the music he began vomiting a noisy, messy mass of screams to a microphone (has he never heard of a black metal with no vocals?). If it sounds totally batshit, you can rest assured that it is. This is what makes Inexorable Revelación actually great black metal. When a lot of metal bands these days are just Backstreet Boys with leather jackets on and with guitars, Derelenismo Occulere care about only fury and mayhem. Their Argentinean mix man Ignacio only adds more chaos to the album. The only flaw this tape has is that it is 15 minutes too long.

Ray Garraty

Whit Dickey — Morph (ESP-Disk)

Morph by Whit Dickey

Drummer Whit Dickey and pianist Matthew Shipp have been recurrent partners since the early 1990s, when they were both members of the David S. Ware Quartet. It’s fair to say that each man is a known quantity to the other, and that one of the things they know about each other is that they might still be surprised by the other’s playing. Dickey’s retreated from time to time in order to revise his approach, and while Shipp has often threatened to quit recording over the years, he has never stopped working or evolving. This double disc combines one duo CD and another that adds trumpeter Nate Wooley to the pair. Wooley’s done a number of dates with Shipp in recent times, but he and Dickey were musical strangers before they entered Park West Studios in March 2019. Without Wooley, Shipp and Dickey seem very free and trusting of each other, transitioning with dreamlike ease from abstracted gospel to sideways swing to restless co-rumination this the ease. The trio seems more considered. The trumpeter dips quite sparingly into his extended technique bag, favoring instead linear statements that instigate fleet perambulations from the pianist and more supportive, less overtly dialogic contributions from the drummer. Both sessions work, and their differences complement each other quite handily.

Bill Meyer

Dropdead — S/T (Armageddon)

Dropdead 2020 by Dropdead

Yep, it’s that Dropdead, the Providence-based powerviolence band that hasn’t released a proper LP since 1998 and was on a long hiatus through much of the 21st century. Since 2011, Dropdead has put out a string of splits, with heavyweights like Converge and Brainoil. But a whole record? Maybe the unrelentingly shitty condition of our political and economic conjuncture motivated the four guys in the band (three of whom have been affiliated with Dropdead since 1991) to write the 23 burners, rants and breakdown-heavy hardcore tunes you’ll hear across Dropdead’s 25 minutes. It’s a welcome addition. Bob Otis’s voice doesn’t have the shredding quality of days of yore — but that ends up being useful. You can hear the lyrics, and they’re drenched in venom and righteousness. The rest of the band hasn’t lost a step. Pretty impressive for a bunch of guys with that much grey in their beards. That said, they don’t pull any intergenerational, “we’re-older-and-wiser” moves. This is still music that wants to collapse boundaries, between stage and mosh pit, between races and genders, between species, even. Not so much class positions: “Warfare State,” “United States of Corruption,” “Will You Fight?” Late capitalism’s depredations still bear the principal brunt of the band’s anger. Things have gotten worse, and Dropdead respond in kind. They may be a lot older, but they’re even more pissed off.

Jonathan Shaw

Fake Laugh — Waltz (State 51 Conspiracy)

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Earlier this year, Kamran Khan released his second Fake Laugh album, the charming, playful Dining Alone, which made its way into Dusted’s mid-year round-up of favorites released in the first half of 2020. Khan’s third album, Waltz, is a very different beast, featuring just piano, vocals and the odd keyboard texture, casting his songwriting in sharp relief. Undoubtedly created in this stripped-down way out of lockdown necessity, it’s hard to listen to these wistful, melancholic songs without imagining where Khan’s knack for colorful arrangements might take them, given the chance. (As a tease, closing song “Amhurst” offers up a shimmering electronic melody and some sighing synth chords.) There’s no doubting Khan’s way with a tune, and his naked vocal, though occasionally showing strain, suits the mood. It’s understated and undeniably lovely, yet Waltz feels like a minor release for this talented artist.

Tim Clarke

David Grubbs / Taku Unami — Comet Meta (Blue Chopsticks)

Comet Meta by David Grubbs & Taku Unami

In the 23 years since Gastr Del Sol fell apart, David Grubbs has done many things that don’t sound much like his old band with Jim O’Rourke. And Taku Unami has worked in such varied settings and ways that the most persistent quality of his engagement with sound is its ability to induce question marks and ellipses in any train of thought intending to decode it. So, it’s both remarkable and delightful that this record, the duo’s second collaboration, sounds rather like parts of Gastr Del Sol’s Upgrade & Afterlife. The foundation rests upon the way two guys who can and do play intricate guitar duets make subtle use of other elements — creeping acoustic piano, humming synthesizer, urban field recordings — to make music that thickens atmosphere and accumulates mystery with such subtlety that you don’t notice it until you’re in it.

Bill Meyer

Guided by Voices — Mirrored Aztec (Guided by Voices Inc.)

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I know, I know, it’s another Guided by Voices record, the fifth since 2019, but hear me out. Pollard is still tapped into the fuzzy, rackety, melodic sap of the rock and roll universe, and he has only to knock his hammer a few times against the gnarled tree of life to extract more of what sustains us. Shorter version: he can do this all day, every day, without any noticeable let-up in quality. So, let us celebrate another batch of Who-like power chords, of rumbling drums and monumental bass thuds, of melodies that curve out delicately like spring’s first vines, then thicken into thundering climaxes and triumphant refrains. Let us give thanks again for inscrutable lyrics that drift off into poetry then pull back in the most ordinary artifacts of the spoken word. “I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It,” crows Pollard in a voice that has been blasted by time but come out more or less intact, and yes, Bob, you still do.

Jennifer Kelly

Edu Haubensak & Tomas Korber — Works for Guitar & Percussion (Ezz-thetics)

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The celebrated Wandelweiser aesthetic serves as a loose overarching impetus for the four interpretations of compositions by Edu Haubensak and Tomas Korber that comprise Works for Guitar & Percussion. Classical guitarist Christian Buck and improvising percussionist Christian Wolfarth ply their instruments through pairing and isolation. Essayist Andy Hamilton describes context by delineating a distinction between music (based in the language of tones) and soundart (which is non-tonal) and placing the duo’s interpretations in the opaque border between these realms. Repetition and timbral disparity frame Haubensak’s “On” while Korber’s “Aufhebung” applies scrutiny to microtonal diversity and temporal impermanence. Wolfarth fields Korber’s “Weniger Weiss” from behind snare drum, trading recurring stick rolls with varying segments of silence that compel ears accustomed to Western musical structures to consciously fill in the blanks. Haubensak’s solo “Refugium” finds Buck bending two closely tuned strings in an extrapolation of an Arabic maqam that feels tenuously connected to the form, at best.

Derek Taylor

Inseclude — Inseclude (Inseclude)

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Brad MacAllister of CTRL and Blue Images and Benjamin Londa of Exit have been working in the darkwave and chillwave scenes for several years and their first album as Inseclude is a long distance collaboration that mines the darker side of 1980s alternative and electronic rock. From Pennsylvania, MacAllister sent musical ideas to Londa in Texas who added guitars, lyrics and vocals to produce a set of songs that are well made and enjoyable if largely unmemorable. There are a number of contemporary bands doing similar things — Hamilton’s Capitol and Manchester’s Ist spring immediately to mind — taking the Cure, New Order, Sisters of Mercy template and why not? Unfortunately, the passage of time and the law of diminishing returns have led to overfamiliarity with this style of music that makes for easy and perhaps unfair comparisons. When they stretch themselves, Inseclude’s songs do hit. “Sondera” and “Failing To The Pulse” carry some real menace with the juxtaposition of wide-angle synths and paranoid vocals but elsewhere the pair seem held back by a restraint and lack of bottom end that diminish the impact of some pretty decent songs.

Andrew Forell

Kvalia — Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines (Old Boring Russia)

Схоластические Грёзы Силовых Машин by Квалиа

Krasnoyarsk sits on the banks of the Yenisei river in southern Siberia and is known both for the natural beauty of its surrounding landscape and for its primacy as an aluminum producer. Local musicians Aleksander Maznichenko and Aleksey Danilenko reflect the latter on their new five track EP Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines, an icy, metallic collection of post-industrial clang pitched somewhere between Einstürzende Neubauten and early Clock DVA. Their machines are forceful but cranky, rusted, near obsolete. Maznichenko keeps the thrum of turbines is steady but the drum machines lurch and thump, the keyboards whine and scream, the Russian vocals protest their obstreperous charges. Danilenko’s bass is post-punk elastic skipping amongst the raining sparks hinting at a will to dance with his mutant riffs. They sound like they mean it and the result is a terrific EP full of fire, fumes, steam and sweat.

Andrew Forell

Mezzanine Swimmers — Kneelin’ on a Knife (Already Dead)

Kneelin' on a Knife by Mezzanine Swimmers

These songs circle around noise-crusted, repetitive beats, the drumming stiff and mechanical, the riffs chopped to short bursts, the vocals woozy and distended. “Sexy Apology” reiterates a three-note keyboard lick ad infinitum, as main Swimmer Mike Smith drawls the title phrase, similarly on repeat. Yet within this unchanging structure, chaos erupts in detuned keyboards, miasmic feedback and corrosive noise. It’s hard to say whether these songs are too tightly organized or too loose, a bit of both really, and yet, get past the headachy thud and there’s an unhinged psychotropic transport. No one ever said that kneeling on knives would be comfortable.

Jennifer Kelly

Mosca — The Optics (Rent)

Mosca · The Optics [RENT001]

Part of the initial wave of neon-infused dubstep hedonism surrounding the Night Slugs camp at the turn of the last decade, Mosca’s Tom Reid has since survived on the strength of a regular slot behind the decks at NTS and sparingly deployed releases on such renowned labels as Numbers, Rinse, Hypercolour and Livity Sound. “The Optics” debuts his new Rent imprint, conceived as a way to get out music that doesn’t fit in elsewhere. (Originally, this was to be an a-side for a coming AD93 release, but as he says, “There's only so long you can keep a track with a baby crying in it back from the masses.”) Supposedly inspired by the Under the Skin beach scene, the five-minute track immediately throws you off with a dub-heavy shuffle and metallic, alien sounds that zoom around the mix. The main thrust of the melody arrives around a minute in, and gradually the sounds close in on you. There’s bells, birds, a baby crying and then, just when you’re feeling completely stressed out, it all falls away; a driving jungle rhythm carries you the rest of the way. Deeply satisfying dance from a head who hasn’t lost his way.

Patrick Masterson

Prana Crafter/ragenap — No Ear to Hear (Centripetal Force Studio/Cardinal Fuzz)

No Ear to Hear by Prana Crafter / ragenap

When Robert Hunter, the poet who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star,” “Ripple,” “Truckin’,” “Terrapin Station” and many other songs, died in late 2019, long form psych musicians Prana Crafter (William Sol) and ragenap (Joel Berk) mourned separately but simultaneously. The night he died, both took solace in improvised music, which didn’t so much evoke or represent Hunter, but captured some of their feelings about his work and their loss. When they talked, soon after, they found that both had made lengthy open-ended meditations on the same person. Those two extended pieces make up No Ear to Hear. Prana Crafter’s entry, “Beggar’s Tomb,” is weighted and slow moving, building gradually from simmering drones into towering edifices of feedback and dissonance. Although performed largely on guitar, the sound is filtered through gleaming effects and layers into astral strangeness, a mystic’s trip through mental interiors. ragenap’s “Nightfall” also takes shape slowly out of looming sustained notes and black velvet quiet and sounds that scratch and vibrate at the edges. A solitary acoustic guitar takes up space at the forefront finally, carving a hesitant melody across the hum. The tune turns fuller and more agitated as it progresses, adding layers of feedback and distortion. Neither of these pieces sounds much like the Grateful Dead, and of course, neither has any sort of lyrics. I doubt that anyone, hearing this album for the first time would say, “Oh yeah, Robert Hunter.” And yet inspiration works in strange and, in this case, fruitful ways. You can enjoy this even if you don’t like the Dead.

Jennifer Kelly

Raven Throne — Viartannie (Chroniki Źmiainaj Ciemry) (self-released)

Viartannie (Chroniki Źmiainaj Ciemry) /The Return (The Chronicles of the Serpent Darkness) by RAVEN THRONE

These Belorussian black metal veterans are true materialists. On their seventh album, they show that nature is a social construct, not something given. And boy, their nature is not a loving mother. Unlike many metal bands convey nature via field recordings, Raven Throne craft their ferocious sounds with guitars and drums. Aren’t these as natural instruments as stone and wooden sticks? The atmospheric black metal subgenre has been contaminated by pop and folksy metal so that it’s hard to maintain a truly evil sound, while still bringing the atmospheric elements into it. Raven Throne pull it off. This is how darkness should sound.

Ray Garraty

The Slugs — Don’t Touch Me I’m Too Slimy (2214099 Records DK)

Don't Touch Me, I'm Too Slimy by The Slugs

The Slugs are an exuberantly lo-fi punk pop duo out of London who bash and thump and shout short, acidic ditties about being female, in a band, under assault and under the weather. Liberty Hodes, who is also one half of the comedy duo A Comedy Night that Passes the Bechdel Test, plays a jangling, forceful electric guitar, while her Phoebe Dighton-Brown bangs away in brutal simplicity on the drums. Both sing, sometimes in unison, sometimes in rough harmonies, occasionally in slashing counterparts. (One chants “Feel sick/can’t be sick” while the other rolls out mellifluous “ah-ah-ah-ahs” in “Feel Sick.”) There is a charming, unstudied quality to their music, which is a bit too smart and biting to be primitive, but nonetheless eschews frills. It’s hard to pick favorites—the whole EP is over in five tracks and 11 minutes—but “Pest” is giddy fun, with its slouching, battering guitar-drum motif and slacker choruses. The shout along chorus of “Don’t touch me! I’m too slimy!” is the best thing on the record, hitting a rebellious, unwashed spot of resonance in the work-from-home era. Second best, the gleeful tirade about sleazy male promoters in “Girly Gang” (“Give you all the gigs if you touch my wang”), which builds in round-singing euphorias until it ends suddenly and a la Jane Austen in matrimony (“Married in a dress by Vera Wang”). People are comparing the Slugs to the Shaggs, but that’s just short-hand for banging away anyway without all the training. The Slugs are smarter, slyer and more autonomous, and if they sound a little rough, that’s exactly how they meant to sound.

Jennifer Kelly

Tobin Sprout — Empty Horses (Fire)

Empty Horses by Tobin Sprout

Blessed with one of the finest names in music (alongside dEUS’s Klaas Janzoons), Tobin Sprout is best known for being part of the Guided by Voices line-up that created classic albums such as Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes in the 1990s. Though Sprout’s subsequent solo output has been a steady stream compared to Robert Pollard’s deluge, Empty Horses is his eighth solo album. In it, the now-65-year-old ruminates faith, mortality and American history atop a spare, country-tinged backing. There’s a deep ache to many of these songs, the kind of emotional weight that manifests in pointedly low tempos, sparse drum parts that hang behind the beat and vocal performances that are almost uncomfortably intimate. Running to a succinct half-hour, with many of the songs clocking in at just a couple of minutes each, Empty Horses confronts demons seemingly too pernicious to overcome. Yet, when the music becomes more expansive — such as the graceful pedal steel of “Breaking Down,” the woozy modulation of “Antietam,” or the biting fuzztone of “All In My Sleep” — Sprout sounds like he may be on the verge of making a much-needed breakthrough.

Tim Clarke

Son Lux — Tomorrows I (City Slang)

Tomorrows I by Son Lux

Son Lux’s songs embed unsettling sounds in deep wells of silence, finding disturbing textures in string sounds, electronics, percussion and the fluttering soul falsetto of founder Ryan Lott. Tomorrows I, reportedly the first of three related albums, has a quietly dystopian vibe and a moist, echoing unease that might remind of you Burial’s classic Untrue. A brief, looped, keening violin motif punctures the opening cut, “Plans We Made” with all the threat of Bernhard Hermann’s shower music for the film Psycho, while Lott trills haunted phrases about being afraid to let go. “Undertow,” near the end, brings in a whole string quartet to swoon dissonantly, as a knocking beat (drummer Ian Chang) sounds like a body being dragged across the floor. “Just waiting for the undertow,” sings Lott in the dread empty spaces between, in arias of muted desolation. Minimalist and menacing and mesmerizing.

Jennifer Kelly

Ulaan Janthina — Ulaan Janthina (Part 1) (Worstward)

Ulaan Janthina (Part I) by Ulaan Janthina

Steven R. Smith contains multitudes, and Ulaan Janthina is the latest manifestation of his mutating musical self. This release exemplifies three aspects of Smith’s practice. First, he likes to make beautiful things. Hard copies of this tape come in a custom-oriented box that contains tinted photos, shells and printed communications as well as the cassette. And he’s project-oriented. While other iterations have been devoted to an Eastern European vibe, or guitar noise or a virtual ensemble sound, Ulaan Janthina results from a decision to work primarily with the keyboards in his house. It’s a winning strategy, since his synthesizers, organ and harmonium all benefit from the grittiness of Smith’s recording methodology, and his spare playing style makes his melodies stand out quite starkly from the background atmosphere. Like the name says, this is part one of the Janthina (named for a genus of sea snail that makes its own floating platform — not a bad metaphor for the survival-oriented independent musician) venture; a second, similarly packaged cassette is pending from Smith’s Worstward imprint soon, and a future release is already planned by Soft Abuse records.

Bill Meyer

Various Artists — Spr Blk: Liberation Jazz and Soul From the '70s and Beyond (Paxico)

Liberation Jazz and Soul by Marcus J. Moore

Author Marcus J. Moore (late of The Nation but also found everywhere from Pitchfork to WaPo) has a book on the way in October, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America. In advance of its release via cassette devotees Paxico, Moore cobbled together “rare and somewhat familiar” Black music from his own crates. “These are the kinds of songs I play when walking through New York City or driving through Maryland,” he says in the release. What that means for you is a two-sided mix that burns slower on the A and gets more percussion-heavy on the B. Leading off with Doug Carn’s fittingly titled “Swell Like a Ghost” and featuring jams from Willie Dale, Milton Wright, Ronald Snijders and other lesser jazz, soul and funk lights, it’s a revealing mix that will no doubt pair well with that fall reading you’re about to get going on.

Patrick Masterson

Vatican Shadow — Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era (20 Buck Spin)

Persian Pillars Of The Gasoline Era by Vatican Shadow

Dominick Fernow is hugely prolific, and most folks with ears tuned to the densely churning worlds of noise and industrial music will be familiar with his abrasive, unsettling output under the Prurient moniker. Fernow’s releases as Vatican Shadow are fewer in number, and more attuned to ambient, even melodic movements and textures. That’s sort of odd, given that the Vatican Shadow records thematize and explore Fernow’s obsession with the history of the Middle East, especially post-9/11 collisions of Western military force, Islamic traditions of resistance and the tactics of terror used by both sides. Relaxing stuff, that ain’t. Consistent with the larger project’s tendencies, Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era claims an interest in the CIA-coordinated Iranian coup (MI6 helped out, too, those imperial scamps) that deposed Mohammed Mossadeq, installed the Shah Reza Pahlavi and inaugurated some of the principal tensions that have shaped the last half-century of world history. It’s unclear how Fernow’s pulsing, shimmering, sometimes juddering synth sounds are meant to represent or otherwise engage that history. For sure, record art and song titles summon all the right semiotics, sometimes with an interesting edge. But “Taxi Journey through the Teeming Slums of Tehran” sounds more like a malfunctioning MP3 player than a taxi or a “teeming slum” (can we all be done with that phrase now?), and “Moving Secret Money” is pleasantly trance-inducing, rather than insidiously evil. Musically, it’s quite good. The packaging seems to want strike other notes. Maybe that’s the point — too many folks are too busy consuming quietist pop to bother with the grind of the political. But is this the intervention we need?

Jonathan Shaw

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disinvited-guest · 4 years

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3/6/2020 Chicago

I got to hang out with a whole bunch of awesome people before this show, both people I knew and ones I just met that day. It almost made it worth the freezing temperatures to meet them all. Once we got in to the much warmer venue, I got a spot to the left of the keyboard, with folks to talk to on both sides.

Fresh outdid himself in the fashion department at this show. As he was setting up, he proudly displayed jagged-striped pink-and-green neon socks, a yellow sweatshirt with Simba printed all over it, and a headband with a print I didn’t catch all the details of, but included the word “Krap!” and bull horns.

Note: I am shortening the recap for the first set, since it was a copy of the one from the night before, except that they didn’t play the forward version of Sapphire Bullets. This show didn’t have much banter in the first set regardless, but I’ll share what there was. The second set recap will be the regular length

During the first block of songs, Dan had to switch to his backup electric briefly, which sounded louder than the other, but switched back by the next song. Danny had a band-aid with him when they went onstage. He unwrapped it and put it on his thumb during the first few songs, then spent the rest of the set rewrapping it as it kept peeling off.

After the first block of songs, Flans asked Linnell how it was going. Linnell told him to hold on because “I have to check.” After a pause, he decided “I think it’s going pretty good.”

Flans said he had a good day and that he had taken an afternoon nap. He had also worked on some of the songs he had messed up the day before because “There is no off-switch on this okay button.”

Linnell replied that “Buttons with switches on them are tricky,” and then changed the subject, introducing us all to his new keyboard stand. “I did get a new keyboard stand and I can’t stop talking about it.”

Flans told him that talking a lot about the keyboard stand was okay because of “how much you have to listen to us talk about guitar amps.”

Linnell gave us some more details on the keyboard stand. According to him, the stand has wells in the front because it is based on his old keyboard stand, which was designed by Brian Dewan “who’s greatest wish was to design a school desk.” “I keep my math homework over there, and over here I carved the Aerosmith logo” He then told us that the new stand has a drawer, which the old one didn’t. Linnell wanted to open the drawer to show us, but it wasn’t facing anyone, so he told Flans that they should post a video of what it looks like online.

When Linnell brought up that Minimum Wage has a whip crack in it on the album, he suggested that the audience could do it here. Flans replied that the audience would have to, since they didn’t finish sound production on the song.

Before Stilloob, Flans called it the “Playing a Song From Flood Backwards Challenge.” While explaining what they would do, he told us that for this part of the show “I don’t want to say there is no audience enjoyment, but the amount of audience enjoyment is finite.” At the next stopping point after the song Flans announced “We are challenging all other They Might Be Giants like bands. WE KNOW who they are,” to complete the ‘challenge’. During the next song, Lucky Ball and Chain, Flans pulled what I presume was the lyric sheet for Stilloob off of his stand, crumpled it up, and threw it upstage behind Curt’s riser.

Flans told the balcony that they couldn’t rock out too much, and that the venue last night had been “like playing in a coliseum.”

Later, Flans decided the show was going too fast, and he had to slow it down. He told us to get out our phones, demanding “What are you? At work?” when we were slow to do so. Then he had the whole band come up to pose for photos. We were told to post the photos and tag them @hodgeman. I wonder if any confused fans actually did.

In between sets, Fresh had to fight with a lady standing a few people to my left, who kept putting her jacket and purse on the carpet for Marty’s electronic drum kit, even after he had asked her to remove them. Saul, making sure the lights for the Quiet Storm were adjusted properly, bent his legs while checking at Linnell’s mic so that he could check how the lights were at Linnell’s height, which was a hilarious necessity I hadn’t considered before.

When the intro music for the second set began, Flans stuck onstage by going around behind the risers for some reason. Once he made it to his mic with his guitar, I realised he didn’t have his glasses on.

Once again, 2082 was the first song of the set, despite the setlist, which had 2018 written instead. Linnell’s mic was off for the first line and a half of the song, so it was a strange start, although the rest of the song was unaffected by it.

Because I was right by the electronic drum kit, the whole Quiet Storm was a bit strange, as the actual sound of the mallets hitting sounded as clear as the electronic sounds those hits generated. It was a bit disorienting at first! I also could see little pieces of fluff falling off of the mallets and floating away as he played.

After 2082, they played Music Jail, which once again blew me away. I realized that a big part of its ability to be so rocking was that the electronic drums allowed Marty to take over a larger part of the song.

Once Music Jail was finished, John Brunette slipped onstage to give Flans his glasses. Flans stepped back to grab them and even way off mic, it was easy to hear his cry of “Oh, thank god” Stepping quickly back to the mic and placing his glasses on his face, he introduced Linnell as on on the keyboards for the next song.

“Nothing makes our short, unsatisfying unplugged set better than electronic drums and a keyboard,” he announced.

“It’s acoustic!” Linnell promised us, “Except for the drums and the keyboard.”

Moving on, Flans introduced the next song. “This song is about what makes New England so special, which might not mean much here.” This led, of course, into Wicked Little Critta, and then they all left us with the Underwater Woman Video once again while the crew cleaned up.

As the song was finishing, they all returned to the stage. Linnell, watching the video as he came on, mouthed along to a few of the words, basically singing along to himself.

Rather than start back into the music right away, Flans came up to the mic and told us all “We talk a lot about healthcare in the band. Now it's time to talk about some music.” He told us the next song was off of My Murdered Remains “a name no one in our management was happy with” and mentioned that it was not available for streaming.

Linnell chimed in to say that this was a new strategy, calling it an ‘inreach’ program instead of outreach. “If you think you can help,” Flans said to the crowd “We’re okay!” Then they started into The Communists Have the Music.

From there, they played Wearing a Raincoat, and then Damn Good Times, which was their first deviation from the setlist of the night before! I had honestly grown a bit tired of this song in 2018, but clearly all I had needed was some time away, because I was overjoyed to hear it again! Dan was, of course, particularly amazing during this song, and especially smiley during the remainder of the set.

They paused only briefly after DGT to announce that the next song was about a near eastern rock band, then played The Mesopotamians, followed immediately by Spy. Linnell had a different sample this time around, a woman singing “very-very” which I couldn’t place, and he also yelled high and low opposite the band playing. Flans had a bit more luck directing the crowd than he did in Milwaukee, and also engaged in playing his guitar while pressing his mic stand to the strings.

They played Ana Ng, which is always fun live, and then Let Me Tell You About My Operation, with Flans calling out “Paging Doctor Beller!” before that absolutely epic drum part in the instrumental part of the song.

After that run of songs, everyone on stage looked a bit breathless. Linnell must have been feeling it, since he decided they needed to “take this high energy and slow it down by talking about something boring.”

Flans agreed with him and said that the show was going by too fast. “It’s like it’s still the first set. It’s like we still care!”

Linnell, who had just taken a sip from his coffee cup, mentioned that his new keyboard stand had no drink holder but “I guess school desks don’t have drink holders”

“You do have a rearview mirror,” Flans pointed out.

“I do!” He turned it around briefly so that we all could see. “It’s so Marty can keep an eye on me. So he can see if I’m making faces.”

“Marty has ways of keeping an eye on everybody,” Flans added. “Now that it’s the third act of Behind the Music all the secrets everyone already knew can come out.”

Linnell started to respond, then broke off “Danny is pressuring me to start the song, isn’t he?” Danny was waiting attentively, but patiently behind the keyboard. When Linnell asked about him, I looked over and he met my eyes. I smiled at him, and shook my head. He wasn’t pressuring Linnell at all! He smiled back at me, and walked over to stand in front of Marty’s riser. Linnell, meanwhile, had turned to look for Danny asking “Where is he?” Finding Danny’s new spot, Linnell told him “Okay Danny, we can start the song.”

This led into Museum of Idiots. Danny does seem to get a bit nervous about starting this song, which makes sense because it’s him all by himself for the first few measures. I also think that the Johns tend to intentionally go off on tangents before this song just to tease him about it, but that’s only speculation.

Istanbul was very similar to the previous night (which means it was great). I realized that Dan is playing both his acoustic and his electric guitar during the course of this song, which is awesome!

They finished out the set with Theme from Flood, but were back on soon for their first encore. This started out with New York City. Most of the time, their live version of this song starts off with an almost lullaby-esque quality to the first verse, before being kicked up into a super high-energy song from the second verse onward. During this performance though, that transition never happened, meaning that the whole song was performed in that softer tone, with Flans sweetly singing and the gentle xylophone tones on Linnell’s keyboard. It was absolutely beautiful, but perhaps not entirely intentional. I saw some of the guys exchanging ‘wtf’ looks during and after the song, and as soon as the song was over, Linnell told us all he was a bit confused.

They played Doctor Worm next, with Linnell changing the settings on the keyboard for Dan once again. Once it was over, as they were leaving the stage again, Marty smacked his head straight into a mic as he was walking offstage. I guess he wasn’t looking where he was going, but he shook it off and seemed fine.

The second encore started with She’s An Angel, the version that starts with just Linnell singing so wonderfully. They finished out their evening by playing The Guitar, with Curt and Linnell giving us the Future of Sound. During FoS Marty, who was keeping time on his kick drum, had his hands above his head, and was moving them slightly as if he might clap, then jerking them back apart, which was beautifully bizarre. Finishing the Guitar, Flans thanked us all for coming out and they left the stage for the night.

After the show, Marty and Danny were back on to give things out, Danny with a huge pile of stickers that he began passing out right away. After a few moments, he broke off to give out setlists. After giving one to me, he said “Goodnight, sweetie,” and touched my shoulder. I left the venue feeling lighter than air.

#tmbg #recap

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happymetalgirl · 5 years

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Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

Opeth's fan base still seems to be reeling from Åkerfeldt and company's stylistic departure from the very progressive death metal they helped pioneer and build a huge reputation on and to the growl-less retro-prog they pivoted so sharply to on 2011's Heritage and onward. I mean, Damnation and the softer gothic acoustic folk rock ballads sprinkled throughout their catalog should have at least cushioned some of shock to Opeth fans, but it still caused one of metal’s more prominent uproars of this decade and there seemed to be hopes for Åkerfeldt's growls and the death metal elements to return in some degree on the two albums that followed, and it seems to me at least that Opeth's fan base has only now come to accept that this cleaner prog rock retrocelebration is the band's solidified direction in this later stage of their career.

While I, like many other Opeth fans, revere and prefer the band's brilliant balance of death metal and prog rock on their pre-Heritage work, the band have certainly more than earned their opportunity (if you’re of the mindset that a band has to earn it), and fans' patience, to try out something new for them. Like most fans though, I have felt that this new direction has only halfway played to Opeth's strengths, and often come off as indulgent 70's prog worship rather than a fresh Opeth-unique take on it, which was most evident on the band’s most recent “observation” before this one. While it started off really well with its title track and "The Wilde Flowers", the band's 2016 effort, Sorceress, was a painfully unignorable exhibition of this lapse in songwriting to prop up this old-soul prog aesthetic and probably my least favorite Opeth album to date. I mentioned Opeth earning our patience earlier though, and this album is why.

While it was a trilogy, Pale Communion was my favorite of Opeth's prog-rock-era albums, but In Cauda Venenum has finally found them putting a more expressive and intriguing spin on this growl-free progressive rock sound they've been cultivating and is definitely the best album they've released in this style. While the past three albums, even in their better moments, have been rather laid-back and content to mimic prog legends, Opeth finally get back some of that grandiose instrumental ambition that lit up momentous and often conceptual albums like Blackwater Park, Still Life, Ghost Reveries, and My Arms, Your Hearse. The dual release of the album in Swedish and English editions makes the band’s larger artistic investment quite apparent just on the surface, as Opeth’s contextual gesturing often tends to be, but the band do follow through in the meat of the project too.

Once again, In Cauda Venenum plays with the growls and death metal on the bench (not fully retired for this analogy since they still stay true to their older songs’ original style at live shows) and with Åkerfeldt’s smooth clean singing and Joakim Svalberg’s synth playing taking more of the spotlight in their place, as the drumming avoids excessive double-bass and blast beats and the guitars rely not on on/off distortion to drive the loud/soft dynamic of the band’s more tempered prog rock sound. Opeth's quieter songs and their prog rock albums have highlighted their gothic flair, but this album takes it to a more exuberant level that I am glad to hear getting the spotlight again. The opening song, “Livets trädgård” (“Garden of Earthly Delights”), dims the lights for the album’s show through a smooth build of synth-orchestral ambiance before the pre-released single, “Svekets prins” (“Dignity”), breaks through the silence with bombastic, Devin Townsend-esque choral gusto and into a dynamic and deliciously riffed gothic prog ballad. The little touches like the chimes and the synth strings in the back do a lot for the song's various sections soft and loud, and the sludgy drums help give the harder sections this monolithic feel, while Åkerfeldt's hums give the softer sections their extra haunting edge. The album's lead single, “Hjärtat vet vad handen gör” (“Heart in Hand”), follows along a more traditionally heavy progressive rock/metal pattern, but with similar instrumental grandeur; the chugging riff underlying Åkerfeldt's soaring vocals and the faster, flashier guitar playing across the rather consistently turned-up, yet still adventurous, instrumental work (until the honey-sweet acoustic outro) show how even in this style, Opeth are not just reliant on loud/soft dynamics to drive their prog.

The song “De närmast sörjande” (“Next of Kin”) sways through a roller coaster of smooth rock fusion and explosive synth symphonics and guitar dazzling that give the song such a cinematic feeling to it, like it belongs in the climax of a Tim Burton movie. The somber piano balladry during the verses of “Minnets yta” (“Lovelorn Crime”) really turns up the drama in a way that Opeth don't often go for, and, while I wish it carried over to the more instrumentally enhanced sections, I'm loving it here. The strings that come in later to boost the heartfelt sorrow of the song and Mikael Åkerfeldt's harmonized vocals are absolutely gorgeous here. I kind of wish the band put the prog on hold just for this song and stuck to the somber gothic balladry they were playing with so beautifully, but the song still is a highlight for the album as it is.

The song “Charlatan”, for me, is another particular highlight because it captures a mesmerizing Meshuggah-esque groove in its prog-rock, something even djent-focused imitators can't seem to capture the essence of very often, if at all, even with 8-strings. Yet Opeth have done it here with your regular bass guitar and a little distortion. But aside from that, the dissonant synth work is a cool bit of flair for the track, and the band do well again to play excitingly with relatively heavy instrumentation all throughout the song's main portion before its hymnal outro.

“Ingen sanning är allas” (“Universal Truth”) finds the band kind of back in old habits with the acoustic prog worship again, though the swelling strings shine again through the relatively meager composition the band comes through with this time around. Despite showing off some high range, Åkerfeldt's mostly monotonous vocal melody feels more at home with Sorceress than the lush orchestration that carries this song. The creepily slinking bass-range piano melody of “Banemannen” (“The Garroter”) brings the album a sense of welcome darkness and tension akin to being followed through the woods. The woodwinds and the fluttering guitar embellishments sprinkled atop the lighter strings help give the song a sense of enveloping atmosphere, but it's the constantly shifting keys that give the song its attention-holding uneasiness as it shifts back and forth from paranoia to self-assuredness.

The 12-string acoustics and the prominent woodwind melody of “Kontinuerlig drift” (“Continuum”) are probably the only real differentiating elements on the track as the band find themselves slipping back into Sorceress mode again for a bit. I do like the more bombastic solo section in the song's middle, but Åkerfeldt sounds pretty tuned out by this point unfortunately, and the song could have used a bit more of the fantastical imagination that the previous tracks are so strengthened by. The closing song, “Allting tar slut” (“All Things Shall Pass”), fortunately ends the album on a theatrical and conceptual note with huge bursts of orchestral instrumentation and cymbal crashes backing thematic calls back to "Minnets yta" ("Lovelorn Crime") as Åkerfeldt's passionate vocal delivery guides the climactic and lush arrangement toward a fulfilling conclusion.

If they needed to, Opeth have certainly justified their shift away from death metal and into more bona fide progressive rock for the past eight years with this record, and it's because they finally stopped focusing so much on emulating their prog idols and trusted their own prog rock instincts and chemistry to bring out a unique and vibrant form of progressive rock. They've always been about going big and putting a lot into their music, and the massive orchestral instrumentation here helps fill the void the growls and blast beats left behind. And in a way, it feels very much like an old-school Opeth album just without any death metal involved. It's a heady, super-moody prog-fest with all sorts of twists and turns that feels like they have purpose and build toward a wonderfully fulfilling experience. Only time will tell, but I hope that this album serves as a breakthrough for the band, an artistic oasis after years of wandering through the desert of 70's prog imitation. I hope this guides them going forward as a blueprint for success in the absence of death metal. I hesitate to say they should have been doing this for the past three albums, but I don't know if they necessarily had to go through Heritage and Sorceress to get here, as this album builds on much of the signature dynamic from their classic albums with a sonic pallet far more expansive than anything explored on the past three albums. Regardless, I sure hope this is the album they chart their course with, as it is undoubtedly the more advanced form of their prog rock evolution.

Heritage's deliverence/10

#Opeth #In Cauda Venenum #progressive rock #progressive metal #new music #metal #new album #heavy metal #album review

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moviestorian · 5 years

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Queen Albums Review: Jazz (1978)

Title review: It’s fine, I guess? I don’t really know what else to say, though :/ 6/10

Cover review: I’m not gonna lie: think it’s one of the ugliest front covers Queen ever decided to put on their albums. It’s very grim, plain and hurts my eyes a bit, but then I read that it was inspired by something Roger saw on the Berlin Wall, and I kinda came to appreciate it more (as a person from the former Eastern block :P). Also, it’s an optical illusion! 5,5/10

Mustapha: Now, that’s a way to open the album! This is such a powerful song on so many layers. Not only it’s a great bop and fun to listen to, but also all the Arabic/Middle East vibes? Words and phrases from different languages? Foreign references? I’m not really a dancer, but whenever I listen to it I want to just flow with the rhytm or start some crazy shit, like bellydancing in front of everyone. This song is magical, appealing and hypnotizing. It definitely hypnotizes me! 9/10

Fat Bottomed Girls: This song also makes the rocking world go around! Really cool one, stays in my head for long and is such a fun to listen to. 8,5/10

Jealousy: One of the most beautiful ballads Freddie ever created. It’s also really universal, I think it’s generally easy to relate to the lyrics. I love the harmony between acoustic guitar and the piano. Everything in this song just adds up perfectly and sounds fantastic. 9/10

Bicycle Race: I know this song is very popular among the fans but I...don’t share the enthusiasm. I just don’t really like this one. Objectively speaking I know it’s musically pretty complex and inventive etc., but for me it’s quite irritating (mostly the “biiii-cycle, biiiicycle” part, but also the repetitive “I want to ride my bicycle”). I quite like the “bicycle sounds” and some of the instrumental parts. I really want to acknowledge the track’s complexity and the smooth and well done transitions between the specific parts, moods, and rhytm. In short: I definitely appreciate it, but I personally don’t like it as much and skip 85% of the time. 7/10

If you Can’t Beat Them: It’s pleasant and pretty cool to listen to, but I tend to forget about its existence. I don’t really care about the riff, too. 6,5/10

Let Me Entertain You: Cool one! I like the beginning in particular, and bonus points for some interdisciplinary references. But, in my opinion, it’s not the best of Freddie’s hard rock numbers ever. 7/10

Dead On Time: It’s so fast! I’m really impressed with Freddie’s fast singing, I certainly couldn’t do that (not even mentioning that I can’t sing). A good hard rock, but again - not something I’d listen to with a passion. 7/10

In Only Seven Days: The friendlier, softer sound of Queen, once again provided by our Disco Deaky! It may be a little bit monotonous, but it has this end of summer/sweet vibe that I really like. 7,5/10

Dreamer’s Ball: Queen meets Elvis, part 1! A really, really pleasant jazz-like track. Splendid use of 3 different guitars. Freddie’s voice is smooth and dreamy and the backing vocals soothing and sweet. I’d definitely go to that dreamer’s ball. 8,5/10

Fun It: Hm. It’s not an easy one to rate. I don’t know why, but the sound of drums sounds very reminiscening to the one in AOBTD. Firstly, I really like the Roger-Freddie singing duo - they should record more songs together, imo! I also kinda feel it’s like a precedessor of the synth era. My problem with this song is that although I like it, it doesn’t do anything to me, one way or another, which is a shame since Roger’s vocals are soon to become a bigger rarity, and he can certainly do better in terms of composing/songwriting. 6,5/10

Leaving Home Ain’t Easy: I enjoy this one a lot. Brian was really good at folk ballads! I like how they experimented with his vocals and sped it up to make him sound like a woman. I find some of the lyrics pretty relatable. 7,5/10

Don’t Stop Me Now: No matter how many times I listen to it, I’d never skip this song. It’s incredible, catchy, vocally impressive, fast and timeless. I’d totally sing along and dance. Divine guitar solo. Although it’s a pretty cheerful song, I don’t know why but the outro makes me kinda sad. 10/10

More of That Jazz: I like this one a lot! I know that Roger was pretty critical about his own compositions on “Jazz”, but I personally don’t think they are bad. Maybe the song itself isn’t super extraordinary, but Rog’s impressive vocals make it 1000 times better. Also, it’s one of the last opportunities to hear his splendid falsettos, right? I feel like he was trying to be experimental and some of his deliberate choices make it a bit difficult to genuinely “like” (if that makes sense?). Oh, and I think decision to put excerpts of some other songs in the outro montage was interesting! 7/10

Average score: 7,5(overall), 7,76(songs only)

#wera talks queen #queenalbumsreviews #jazz

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laramccullough1-blog · 5 years

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Pop Music In America

Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell feels that the present music scene is ailing and believes that his band's first new album in sixteen years could also be just what the doctor ordered. But for all the different ways black culture is flexing its affect within the trendy pop sphere, as ever, pop's utilitarian center remains caucasian. The singles that make their way into historically white spaces still mostly relegate black artists to a featured credit in the event that they're included in any respect. Notice that Put up Malone, G-Eazy, and Machine Gun Kelly have labored their means into heavy rotation as lead artists while Quavo, SZA, and 21 Savage solely cross over as friends on songs that tend to gentrify black stylistic parts into snowblind oblivion. The week HUMBLE." hit #1 on the Sizzling one hundred, it did not even crack Billboard's Mainstream Prime 40 chart , which tracks high-forty radio airplay. The identical scenario occurred with Unhealthy And Boujee" — you couldn't escape it, besides by tuning to a pop radio station. Khuri sees the disappearance of dissent in music from a singular position. His Palestine-American upbringing (his mother and father are Palestinian refugees who emigrated to the United States from Lebanon) informs the band's lyrics. However Khuri also has an academic's understanding of politics. He graduated from Harvard's Kennedy School of Authorities with a master's, and his wife worked within the Obama White House as a speechwriter. But within the final couple of years, this framework has been nearly fully dismantled, owing in large part to the widespread adoption of streaming. What have been once regarded merely as pop subgenres — Okay-pop, Latin lure, melodic hip-hop and extra — have grow to be the center of the dialog.

In music of this type we discover not solely essentially the most good show of technic, however an ever growing feeling for musical beauty. Allied to this was a rudimentary taste for real looking results, taking form in an attempt to echo the sounds of nature and of human life, at first purely imitative, as in Gombert's musical imitation of hen calls and Jannequin's well-known Bataille de Marignan," and afterward extra inventive, as in Luca Marenzio's lovely madrigal, Scaldava il sol," with its chirping grasshoppers, or his still more beautiful Strider faceva," with its imitation of shepherd's pipes, or the quite a few cuckoo" items by English composers, in which the chicken's cry is used as a particular musical motive with admirable impact. Listeners love a superb Pop song and radio loves to play them. Whether you want to pitch your songs to established artists in the Pop discipline or sing them yourself, writing a modern Pop Music, business Pop song with hit-single appeal means writing a song that listeners can determine with and radio will want to play. Media and TELEVISION reveals like Star Search are partly guilty for brainwashing the general public to overvalue superficial elements (for instance, a performer's seems to be and operatic vocals) somewhat than high quality of music. I can't see them signing a younger Cat Stevens or Joni Mitchell in the present day and giving such an artist an investment in money and time. They appear to be targeted on finding the subsequent Taylor Swift or Justin Beiber. I used to be born in 1997 so I can't converse solely to pop music from before my time, however I am able to take heed to it. And I do assume that pop music, while nonetheless basically the same in the 70s and 80s, was objectively higher again then than it is at present. I believe it is extra natural and less studio pushed, although studios have been undoubtedly a serious part of the music industry for the reason that 1950s actually. I also think listening to people play music and principally writing their own songs is much more genuine than listening to adolescent models sing the identical four chords to a music they did not write that has been edited drastically. Expertise has driven numerous music to be extra generic and formulaic. Nevertheless it's also performed a number of good for the business by opening up tons of latest potentialities. In an unguarded interview with New York Magazine , Jones, eighty four, known as The Beatles "no-playing motherfers", accused Jackson of plagiarism, and stated trendy pop music producers were "lazy and grasping". Within the late Fifties, a new blues type emerged on Chicago's West Facet pioneered by Magic Sam , Buddy Man and Otis Rush on Cobra Information 99 The "West Side sound" had robust rhythmic help from a rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drums and as perfected by Guy, Freddie King , Magic Slim and Luther Allison was dominated by amplified electrical lead guitar. 100 one zero one Expressive guitar solos were a key function of this music. So you simply discovered that your favorite pop act does not share your politics, or that they've stated something hateful a couple of marginalized group of individuals, or that they've a historical past of sexual misconduct, or that they've a history of bodily abuse, or that they've a historical past of each, or all the above. The genre that put New York Metropolis on the map. For every Moldy Peaches, there were 1,000,000 Elefants, The Fevers, and stellastarrs. Briefly the musicians of New York Metropolis felt the anticipatory ecstasy of residing in Seattle in the 90s. Then we went again to tending bar. Because the bands on this genre turned an increasing number of fashionable, the time period eventually widened to additionally embody every main-label rock group it was OK to not actively hate. Music of the 1950's reflected the beginnings of major social adjustments on the earth and within the US, particularly. Rock 'n' Roll, R&B, and traditional pop dominated the charts while radio and tv connected the nation in our musical tastes and exposed the nation to a better variety of artists and styles. Some of the first major superstars of music emerged from this decade with individuals like Elvis Presley dominating the airwaves and the minds of younger ladies. For those who play acoustic rhythm guitar, take heed to guitar-pushed hits by John Mayer, The Script, or Phillip Phillips. Play together with the recording till you can comfortably play the rhythm by yourself, then write to it. Or check out the current Top 20 Pop hits or High 20 Adult Contemporary hits for grooves you possibly can recreate on guitar or keyboard.

Hadiq Kiani made her debut in Adnan Sami& Zeba Bakhtiar starrer "Sargam" in 1995 which became an exceptional hit and the music album of the movie was a chartbuster in Lollywood High 10 (PTV), Yeh Hai Filmi Dunya (NTM) and FM channels. However Hadiqa continued her music profession extra as a pop artist as a substitute of a play again. Her albums "Raaz, Rung and Roshni" offered thousands and thousands and made her an ultimate feminine pop star after Nazia Hassan. In 1997, Hadiqa grew to become the second worldwide female singer on the earth to be signed by Pepsi Pakistan. A lot of the experience listening to music — gospel and in any other case — is feeling it, catching the spirit. Earlier than Franklin starts the title track, the Rev. James Cleveland asks for a witness. Then Franklin takes over. It is simply her voice, the reverend on piano and a testomony to the extraordinary: I used to be blind, and now I see. The experience of its overwhelming you occurs whether or not a survey of music folks deems it canonical. But when canons are being shaped and published, why not embody this one alongside the standard suspects — your Sgt. Pepper's" and Rubber Soul" and Freeway 61 Revisited" and Pet Sounds"? Wonderful Grace" is a landmark, too. You do not want a listing to inform you that. God knows. But that is not fairly enough.

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thatswhenyourefrom · 5 years

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Cotton teeth - the snake the cross the crown

My freshman year of high school was a highly formative time in finding music. I completely understood what a record label did. Less on day-to-day business type of way and on more of a curation level. I understood that record labels exist as touchstone for a scene or a style of music. You could regularly find new artists by simply going to the website for the record label of a band that you currently like, look at the roster, and bam, you’re full up on new music. Hit one of those band names into Limewire or PureVolume, and you’re rolling. This is exactly the method I used to stumble upon The Snake, The Cross, The Crown.

It was kind of undeniable that in the mid-2000’s, there was a scene that existed that was all about screaming and teens with bangs in their face. [Call it emo, screamo, i don’t care. It’s hyper timely and that scene as a whole is long out of style. But that’s okay. If you like it, enjoy it. It rocks it’s exciting.] Plenty of these bands landed on the same few record labels like Victory and Equal Vision, to name a few. I would scroll through websites and just listen and try to find something that spoke to me. Every once in a while, I’d find something that I liked, but usually it would be more of the same. I was sitting in an echo chamber of the scene. Occasionally there would be a weird signing that would be vastly different than everything else on the label. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. When I got to the S’s on the Equal Vision page, I found the band with the long name and their song “Empires”. And I was captured.

The song is twangy and dark. I thought it a good skateboarding song for some reason. (I made a skate video for a high school video project and this was the song. Also looking back, this is not at all a good skate song.) The song offered a perfect bridge into the folk music I would learn to like. The singer croons over a guitar that is slow, but carries momentum. Not sad or desperate; just sentimental. (I wish I could speak on this lyrics in the song, but even after a decade of knowing this song, I have no clue what they are or what they are about.)

For a year or two, I kept this single song on my MP3 players (not always iPods in my day). This was another band I was afraid to venture into in the event that the rest of their music was not very good. I was afraid of shattering my perception of something I held so true to myself. This song lasted as such for a long time, until one night I realized i was a glutton for punishment. I went to the band’s PureVolume page and found another song on the page; “The Sun Tells the Moon”. I genuinely stared at the computer screen for minutes contemplating clicking play or not. Finally, i decided to tempt fate, convincing myself that if it was something I didn’t like I would call myself a glutton for punishment. I clicked play and a kick drum started a tempo, and when the singer rolls in with a high pitch, pulled back wail, I knew I had another song to add to my list.

I was in love. “The Sun Tells the Moon” is a much bigger aggressive song than “Empires” but still not angry like one would expect from mid-2000’s Equal Vision band. At this point, I knew I needed more. I’m two for two. Let’s go. So I found more. I tried two songs that are the two most folky songs from the album, “A Brief Intermission” and “On The Threshold of Eternity.” These two songs clicked with me.

“On The Threshold of Eternity” is a great song with Beatles-esque vocals. Constant acoustic guitar strums keep the song going. The song I take to be about standing in the front of existence trying to make sense of “why am I here”. (Personal interpretation) This is a huge concept to bring into a little folk song. “A Brief Intermission” is a much more folky, storytelling song, but a sorrowful one of a family splintering and a son (child) not really understanding what is going on. Beautiful songs that kept me hooked for years.

It’s not a big secret that I am a fan of The Early November and thus, the lead singer Ace Enders. Once upon a time, he went on tour with The Color Fred (Fred mascharino of Taking Back Sunday) and Craig Owns (Chiodos, Cinematic Sunrise, a million other bands). Mike and I went to go to this show at The Pike Room in Pontiac to see Ace Enders and no one else really, but what we did not know was that Enders dropped off the tour right before hitting Michigan. We go to the show, he’s not there, we are bummed. Trying to find th best in a bad situations, the best part of the night was actually that a local band called The Silent Years opening the show, but that’s another story for another time. After the show, broken hearted, we tried to get as much cheap merch as possible. I bought a Color Fred EP on CD and got an Equal Vision sampler from Craig’s table. You know how car rides home from shows go; you look for something to listen to on the way home, so you grab your new merch and put in the sampler. I saw that there was a TSTCTC song on this sampler that I have never heard. A new song. This song changed my life.

In the rough of young people expelling feelings about girls and being a teen, there’s a gem of a folk song on this sampler that starts off with a deep folky voice that goes “Well if both of these horses just lay up and die…” It starts off with voice and an acoustic guitar. It tells you a story. It’s a father. A song about a dying man (possibly from war) who, as he realized death is upon him, is sharing an ethereal experience with this loves and family in understanding his own passing (personal interpretation). The song walks you through this story and is peppered with explosions of full band performance. After the first explosion, we ease back into more story from dad. It heaves and ho’s until it ho’s on a story beat about everyone coming to terms with the passing and then builds into death catching up to the man. At this point, the song crascendoes into a partial repeat of the first verse and a brand new verse crossing and complementing each other in a loud, open, cohesive mass of music. The song is a masterpiece.

There are more to come.

I believed this song fully. I didn’t change any paths to go get this cd, but I always looked for it when I went cd shopping. Not long after hearing that song, I was at FYE at Great Lakes Crossing, back when it was large enough to cut through the middle of the mall. [Side note, this was a heaven. Such a beautiful place for media. Second and Charles is a spiritual successor.] While flipping through the S’s, i saw a whole divider for The Snake The Cross The Crown. This blew my mind enough. Seeing the new CD, “Cotton Teeth”, blew what was left. Literally the only Equal Vision release with that comes with a sticker on the front to tell you to listen if you’re a fan of The Band. Could anyone ever imagine that? Incredible. I remember telling my dad this is the CD i wanted and he looked that the recommendations sticker, and gave out a little chuckle. He is a fan of The Band. (We are a fan of The Band.) I bought the CD and was so excited to listen to it. Pop it in and guess what: all folk.

“Cakewalk” starts the album with some slow guitar plucking and the singer letting out a direct song about wanting to play music forever (keep this in your pocket). “I want to live on a stage. I want to play the guitar. And I wanna get paid.” All of the lyrics. So simple beautiful. The song starts lonesome and grows into a full band performance with a great drum pattern that includes the whole band. This song is to sing along to. The next song “The Great American Smokeout” reminds me of a campfire song. It sings along in such a fun foot-tapping way, but also has it’s own personal progression. Throughout the song, it sets up patterns and changes them up to keep the song exciting. It would still be fulfilling even it just played through, but the dynamics are so enjoyable. Track three, “Gypsy Melodies” is the usual one you show people when you introduce this band. Again, feels like a campfire song or a road song. Take your pick. I heard the song on a rainy day. I was at Mike’s house once and I showed him this song on a rainy day where we were inside playing cards and when I heard the song I thought “this is it; this is how this song is meant to be experience.” The title track continues the folk tradition set by the last songs. Songs about or at least from the perspective of families. This song is much more involved from the full band. Slide guitars and bass right from the beginning of the song, all the way into the finale with guitar solos and the whole lot. An amazing continuation. “Electronic Dream Plant” is not a song I was prepared for.

Track five is a seven minute epic that lands every beat it tries. It starts off with a piano. The singer comes in and softly calls over the keys. Drums and harmonies build the song more. By the second verse, guitars, bass and drums are singing along with the singer. After the second verse, you know this song is going to get huge. A reverb laden guitar solo, cooling you down with the melody of the verse three. The rest of the song builds on what is established and tells the love “I don’t want to go without you so I just wanna go with piece of mind.” Then tells them “Save your sorrow.” The song plays out and gets larger and bigger and maintains beauty. Never abrasive. A masterpiece in my own opinion. (There’s some “na-na-na’s” at the end that tend to remind the listener of The Band’s “The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down.”)

Track six is the aforementioned “Behold the River”. Name another album that has two massive masterpieces in a row. We then go to “Hey Jim”; a darker, guitar rock song. I have no interpretation on what the song is about, but it feels like a night drive through the south. There’s these beautiful glowing keyboard sections. After the first verse, they emanate sound. As per usual, they know how to crescendo. This band knows how to write an amazing melody to repeat and keep on. If this crescendo doesn’t get stuck in your head, you don’t have a head. “Floating In And Out” sounds like it comes from the progressive era of Mander Salis, but also tends to transcend that this album. The song has this incredible section where it stops and starts a new drum pattern that the singer sings over. “Maps” is a fan favorite. This song epitomizes the entire album. Family perspective. Growth into a crescendo. No matter how you look at this song, it’s powerful. This song sounds like less of a story though. It feels like it’s personal. And it cuts the same way. The last song is a song that still dumbfounds me but I never skip it. “Back to the Helicopter” is a noisy experimental finale. But it still feels like the band. It’s like they sucked out all of the beauty and story from the first nine tracks and were left with this Eraserhead-like fetus that was birthed of the band. It has power. Aggression. But it’s a bastard of everything from “Cotton Teeth”. Oddly beautiful.

I bought this CD in 2008. I still hold this CD very close to my heart a decade later. It is one of the few CD’s that stays in my car. The real shame of this album is that it doesn’t know where it belongs. Certainly not with Equal Vision. It belongs with me. But everyone I’ve shared this album with doesn’t feel a thing. I have an intense connection with this entity and I want the world to know but they ignore it. Imagine if it were a person. I am annoyed.

I gave up trying to share it years ago, but instead let it be my friend. I sing with it in the car. I lay down with it. I spend time with it. It’s my imaginary friend.

The band would continue to have one more release in 2009, but not a standard album. A documentary.

In 2009, the band was the subject of a documentary called “On A Carousel of Sound, We Go ‘Round”. The film documents the band on tour (if I recall with mewithoutyou and Manchester Orchestra; an insane tour), playing live songs in different places, and an set of entirely new songs which comprise the album of the same name. [You can see this release as a doc with a soundtrack or a new album with a documentary.] In the documentary the band plays these songs with such emotion and power in such an intimate way. Once you know the songs, you need to see the documentary. The band also speaks out on being where they are in life without ever really making it (again maybe because of the market) and how difficult it is to be touring. I ‘m really left with the sense that there was a bit of defeat from this group. And I do not blame them. I have tried to vouch for them.

Since the release of “On A Carousel of Sound….” the band has gone quiet. They have not released a lick of music or any update since then. They have disappeared. They are ghosts. But what they have left me is a brother. If it is a ghost, they still haunt me and always will. “Cotton Teeth” is baked into me. Without it, I would never have found the love for The Band, Songs: Ohia,Right Away! Great Captain, Townes Van Zant, and many others that I can call folk. I will celebrate this album forever, even if it is only ever me and him celebrating.

#by luke #r

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emmaruthrundlesh · 6 years

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Dispelling Genres with Emma Ruth Rundle // Addicted Mag

(Via Addicted Magazine) Following Emma Ruth Rundle’s stunning set at Sneaky Dee’s in Toronto, we sat down (in this case, stood under an ATM security light) and discussed her new album, her new home and uh, music.

The review of her show can be found here.

Let’s start from the beginning.

I grew up in L.A. Both my parents are musicians. My mom plays harpsichord. My dad’s a pianist, my stepmom is a bass player. They met in a band. I just grew up around a lot of music.

Did you grow up listening to folk music?

It was all kinds of music. And I think the folk music thing really took hold when I started to hang out at the McCabe’s Guitar Store when I was a little girl, taking Celtic harp lessons. Then went on to work there for 13 years. So I think that’s where the folk influence originated. I think it was just from being so steeped in every element of what that multifaceted establishment was. It was about the concerts, the lessons, the repair and retail.

What was the first album that you bought with your own money?

Probably In Utero, to be honest, it was Nirvana.

About your songwriting process, you start on acoustic guitar. Do you come up with ideas in standard tuning and then work out your chord voicings?

No. I Inherited the open tunings also from the guitar store. If you handed me a guitar in standard tuning, I would have a hard time with it. I mean, at some point, I started tuning the guitar in a way that made more sense to me. I heard somebody else start changing a string and then I thought well if you can do it to one string, why can’t you do all this to all the strings, just rearrange it all. So for me, mostly my voicings , the root is usually on the fifth or sixth string. Using those open strings a lot in the chords, its makes them more of a modal thing.

You give yourself a lot of work.

I actually think it’s so much easier to play guitar like that. What’s hard about what I’m doing now, on this tour. To have a guitar in all the tunings, I’d have to have all of Kevin Shields’ guitars. If I was really wealthy and had a dedicated guitar roadie. That would be amazing. But it’s not the case. What I use is a combination of two guitars, sometimes it’s three and then capoing around. it’s been difficult actually to relearn the patterns of the songs in those different positions on the fretboard, it’s throwing me off a little. Not feeling super comfortable with it yet. I have tried to learn standard. I did take some classical guitar lessons a couple of years ago. It’s like. I do want to learn standard, be more proficient.

The genre that you tend to be put into, seems to be called gothic folk or dark folk

I don’t think this is folk music at all.

And yet in my research, I keep seeing it called folk music.

It’s because somebody said something and then everyone else just repeated it. I think that there are folky moments on the records, especially on Some Heavy Ocean, but I don’t think it’s folk music.

Maybe because it’s hard to pin down, if someone needs to classify your music…

I think Americana would make a little more sense in the mix with some other things. There’s a grunge influence. There’s a shoegaze influence, there’s post rock. There is, maybe, a touch of some country songs. And there’s a lot of 90s music. You know, I’m surprised people aren’t like “this is the drop tune Cranberries”.

That brings me to a point because as I’ve been listening to the new album, On Dark Horses, there are elements in these songs that lead me to think ‘that could be a pop song’. Play it in a standard tuning, throw in a little piano and a soft beat…Let’s get to the new album. I think it’s fantastic.

Thank you.

(Producer) Kevin Ratterman is credited with doing pretty much everything behind the board including engineering, mixing and mastering.

Yeah, he even played some keyboards and some guitar. He’d be like “I’m going to mix the song” and you’d come back and he’d say “I just added this little moment here”. He’s a very colourful creator. He’s got that creative fire. He’s a very special person. He moved to L.A. sadly. Kevin will come back. I was attracted to working with Kevin because of the Young Widows album, In and Out of Youth and Lightness, which is my favourite Young Widows album. That’s another reason why I fell in love with Louisville and Evan. I did a tour with them 10 years ago. I became enamoured with Evan’s guitar playing immediately and then listened to all their albums and that record has this wonderful theme in its sound and that’s Kevin and I think he did that for this record. He captured this sonic palette. It just has a colour and it’s Kevin. Once you know him and you’re around him, you see that he’s so in the records that he’s made.

On Dark Horses seems like the kind of album that you can continually listen to and still pick up new little pieces in the background.

He’s hidden a lot of little things. I love what he did with the bridge in Darkhorse where he did this panning so drums become the horses running around you. It’s very cool.

It’s good to have a producer thinking creatively like that.

Exactly, and Todd (Cook, bassist) and Evan and Dylan. Having them as well really changed it for me too.

Do you have a favourite off the album?

Darkhorse and Control are my two favourites

You Don’t Have To Cry is the song that I listened to again and again

I think a lot of people love that song and it’s our encore. I wrote it for my friend, Blake.

You write a lot in what I think of as vignettes or abstractions. There isn’t really a narrative in your songs.

It’s all about my life, my music and my lyrics…

Your lyrics can be interpreted in different ways. I think that’s the kind of music that people grasp onto. They can make it about themselves as well.

I think that that is perfect. And that’s one reason why I don’t want to talk too much about my things, because some of is explicit in nature and I don’t want to really directly divulge those things. But it is meaningful enough and I think that some of it is charged in that way. That’s what music did for me when I was younger. That was the ultimate thing, when music could do that.

Of course. When someone says a song saved their life, it’s never a pop country song about tequila and trucks.

Yeah, It’s hard to find it now.

Which is why people grab on tight when they do find it.

I’m definitely like that. I have certain albums and I just listen to over and over and have for years.

What’s the one that you still gravitate to?

Well, for the last few years,. I would say 40 Watt Sun. The Inside Room. I listen to it almost every day. But that’s not like a nostalgic classic record from my childhood. It’s a discovery in my adult life. It did that cathartic thing for me that’s just so rare. That’s some serious soul music from my perspective

Why did you move from LA to Louisville?

It’s a fantastic place for artists. There’s a tight little scene of people. I think the great thing about it is that it’s very affordable and there’s a good quality of life. People are down to earth and we have a nice little situation there. Sometimes I start to feel like I’m trapped in the Beetlejuice town a little bit. And I do miss LA a lot but we get to tour. (Pause). I couldn’t go back. It’s kind of what Dead Set Eyes is about, leaving LA. Louisville is a great place. These fine people are from there (pointing to Jaye Jayle as they load out). Like my family. It’s kind of a long story. I was on tour, Jaye Jayle and ERR released the split record (The Time Between Us) last year, those were b-sides from Marked For Death and from their album, House Cricks. And the packaging, we just made it like this weird country romance. So we had this wild idea, since I was got asked to play Roadburn and do a little tour in Europe. Because I had very little funds, the idea was to combine the bands, have them learn my music and they would open for me. Then they would back me up as my band. That was Cathy’s wild idea (Cathy Pellow, founder of Sargent House) and she’s full of wild ideas. And I came off the Deafheaven tour and had split up with a partner. At some point earlier in the year, I was just kind of like gypsying around. I went back to Denver with Dylan (Nadon), that’s my drummer and Jaye Jayle were on tour with Oathbreaker. So the plan was they were going to finish their Oathbreaker tour and we were going to rehearse for four days in Louisville. I would go to Louisville and then we would all together fly to Europe and play Roadburn and do this tour. And I just thought, they were playing in Denver the next day and thought why don’t I just get in the van with you. I’ll sell your merch for the next two weeks and then I don’t have to fly to Louisville. I’ll just get a free ride, we’ll all have a wild time and I’ll help you out. And I got in that van and I just never got out. And now I’m married to Evan, So it’s a pretty good deal.

Talk about collaborating with Evan (Patterson, husband, Young Widows/Jaye Jayle songwriter and singer) .

Light Song is a love song. And so, he’s the answer, you know. I sang on their album. We did that record right after we came back from Europe. I had to cancel a bunch of shows because I was physically destroyed. I just went to the studio to recover and he had written that song (Marry Us). It was so weird. Like a sort of strange magic. He wrote that song before I got in the van. I sang on it. We had been singing together on tour. We were singing Run Forever when we played that song live. Those two songs, Marry Us andLight Song are like secret partner songs. So, if you’re a fan that’s paying attention, it’s kind of a cute thing. That there’s these matching love songs on the records that we both sing on together. I think it’s cute.

I do too! Thanks for talking to us, congrats on the new album. Have a great tour.

Photo by Geert Braekers

#Emma Ruth Rundle #Addicted Magazine #On Dark Horses

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sinceileftyoublog · 3 years

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Snares of Sixes Interview: What If The Moon Was Alive?

Photo by Cody Keto

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Since the dissolution of folk metal legends Agalloch in 2016, multi-instrumentalist Jason Walton has kept busy, forming and disbanding KHôRADA and reforming experimental metal band Sculptured, among his many other groups. Then there’s Snares of Sixes, the collective unlike any other. It started as a MIDI-focused project with a debut EP in 2017 called Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass, literally about kombucha, and featuring many of his past collaborators from Agalloch, Sculptured, Dolven, and Self Spiller. Today, Walton finally reveals the follow-up, this time expanding the project to its fuller potential with MoonBladder (Nefarious Industries/Transcending Records), a single 30-minute track. Recorded globally with some familiar Snares of Sixes faces--Agalloch’s Don Anderson, Sculptured’s Marius Sjøli--and some new ones--Kayo Dot’s Toby Driver and Ron Varod--but driven, arranged, and constructed by Walton, MoonBladder combines electronic and acoustic elements to create a more wondrous world. It starts with pulsating synths, expected enough considering its predecessor, before electric guitars follow the synth melody, one of a few metal-adjacent callbacks on the record. Skittering electronic beats and ghostly, faint vocals--samples of number stations as well as recorded voices--trade in and out, as do beautiful guitar and piano. At one point, there’s even some jazz drums, one of many out-of-the-ordinary items that appear momentarily and disappear without notice.

Earlier this week, Decibel Magazine premiered a video for the record made by Walton’s publicist Dave Brenner, a mix of natural footage and studio recordings submitted by many of the record’s musicians, with various color hues superimposed over the imagery. I spoke with Walton over the phone last month about the making of the album and the video. Read the interview below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: How would you say MoonBladder is unique as compared to Yeast Mother?

Jason Walton: [laughs] It’s a night and day difference in a lot of ways. It’s hard for me to really put my finger on it because I’m so close to the material. It was written in the same way; the way I write is kind of strange. But the output is completely different. The first record is very schizophrenic, tons of MIDI, layers upon layers of trying to make a cross between Mr. Bungle and The Locust. I’ve always wanted to make something kind of like that, but completely electronic. In retrospect, I’m pretty happy with the record, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted in the end. It never really is--you’re never 100% happy with a record.

This one is much more organic sounding. I think this one is better on every single level. MoonBladder is a much more mature record, not nearly as schizophrenic, for better or for worse. I took a lot more care with the sounds. The first one is a lot of plugins...and weird synths. This one, I took care to have some acoustic elements, some actual guitars. There’s a lot of MIDI, but actual analog synths and field recordings. I was trying to mix acoustic and electronic elements to give it a bigger sound. It’s mixed a lot better. The performance is a lot better. I think it’s a way more engaging album, and so far, the response has been 100% positive, whereas the first record, Yeast Mother, was a hard pill for people to swallow. There are parts of that record I’m really proud of. I think “Retroperistalsis”, the last track on it, is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. But still, its intent was to be grating. MoonBladder, that’s not the intent. With MoonBladder, I feel like I melded a few different things the way I had never done before. It’s got ambient to it, but it’s also like this mid-period Ulver-esque electronic thing. It’s a lot of different themes that are melded a lot better than the first record. That’s probably the biggest difference. The first record, Yeast Mother, was me trying to get my feet wet, trying to figure out what I’m trying to do with this project. With MoonBladder, I think I finally figured out what I’m trying to do.

SILY: At first, were you trying to make MoonBladder, too, sound like “tons of MIDI?”

JW: Usually, the creative process for me is very convoluted, and I never know what I’m doing or what I’m looking for. I really like to just toy with ideas and see what happens. After Yeast Mother, I thought it would be fun to do a cover and put it up on Bandcamp as a fun exercise. I was searching online for MIDI files I could just download and manipulate, and I came across Rush’s “Red Barchetta” file and downloaded it. MoonBladder started out as a 25-minute doom metal version of a Rush song. I started working on it, and it was really cool, and I started to layer instruments, but then I thought, “This is stupid, I don’t want to spend my time on this! I don’t want to do a cover, I want to write something new.” MoonBladder started as a cover, but I ended up putting so much stuff on top of each layer, and then I’d delete the foundational layer, and put more stuff on top of that, and delete those foundational layers. It just morphed and evolved. Hundreds and hundreds of tracks later, I had MoonBladder.

I tend to do that a lot. I’m doing something for fun, think, “Why am I wasting my time on this stupid thing, I should be doing something more important and more serious?” I kept one little piece of “Red Barchetta” in there. You can hear one little synth line. [Peter Lee] from Lawnmower Deth, if you listen really closely, you can hear him reciting the lyrics. The funny thing is I don’t even really like Rush, honestly. I like Hemispheres and a couple tracks here and there, and I definitely respect and admire them a lot, but they’re not a band I listen to. It was a silly idea that I made into way more of a silly idea.

SILY: With the acoustic and electric guitars, it’s almost like there are some metal-adjacent sounds. You could think those elements are a callback to the projects you’ve been involved in over the years.

JW: I definitely know what you mean. That wasn’t intentional. Don Anderson is my best friend. When I’m working on a record, I send him something and say, “Add some guitar.” It’s gonna be kind of metal-ish and there will be elements that evoke Agalloch or something similar. But it wasn’t a conscious decision to put things in there evocative of previous things, or any metal elements. I asked Don to put guitar in there, and that’s what he did. There are moments that are kind of metally. At first, when he’d send me these tracks, I thought, “This is not what I was going for.” It took me a minute to become comfortable with it. I was able to listen with open ears and accept it. Don does a few different guitar parts on there. He’ll always be a part of every music I do in one form or the other. It harkens back to the older material because of what we’ve been influenced by and created over the years.

SILY: I like how the voices on the record start out very faint. When I first listened to it, I was wondering whether it was actually a voice or an instrument. It became more and more clear by the end that these were voices.

JW: For more ambient sections, I really like to have the human voice on there, but I really love when you can’t really hear it, when it’s kind of mumbling in the background. I find it somewhat unsettling when you can tell somebody’s speaking but you can’t understand what they’re saying. Towards the beginning of the record, you have Pete reciting lyrics to “Red Barchetta”. Towards the middle of the record, you have my good friend Ramin Hosseinabad sharing an Iranian poem that was a favorite of his growing up in Iran. Three-quarters through the record I have some samples from different number stations. At the very end, you have Marius and Toby Driver from Kayo Dot singing at the end. I wanted to build how the vocals come in, starting with these very audible whispers and mumblings to very focused singing at the end.

SILY: There are little moments of things that within the context of the record are out of the ordinary and end pretty quickly, like that tiny section of jazz drumming.

JW: There’s an interesting story behind that. That section I pulled from the new Sculptured record. It was actually Martti Hill, the drummer from Sculptured, and Billy Anderson and I in the studio recording drums for Sculptured. We were getting weird tones and sounds, and Martti was drumming, and Billy decided to grab a couple of microphones and swing them around his head by the cord while Martti was drumming, and record that. We didn’t use it on the Sculptured record, so I imported it into MoonBladder. I just took a little tiny section of it because I wanted to get some more acoustic instrumentation in there. It’s a nod to the first Secret Chiefs 3 record because we did a lot of weird percussion things like that that went nowhere and stopped. I don’t think Don even knows that. I like to incorporate little things like that. That one was a little out of left field even for me. It was hard for me to listen to and didn’t sit quite right. When I asked Don to record guitar he added this little jazz lick over the top of it, and that was just way too much for me. I deleted his jazz lick and was like, “Okay, it sounds good now. I’m gonna leave it as is.” It’s a little abrasive. There are a couple hits that are a bit louder than they should be, and it brings you out of your comfort zone a little bit but it lulls you back in afterwards. That was a weird section to deal with, for sure.

SILY: Are the three of you jazz fans?

JW: Yeah. I would say I am but it’s not a focus for me. There are albums I like a lot. I’m a huge Herbie Hancock nerd. Don listens to a lot of jazz, on a daily basis while doing whatever. That’s not me, but we all definitely appreciate jazz to different levels and degrees.

SILY: It sounds natural in the record even though it’s out of the blue.

JW: Yeah, I’ve gotten used to it. The record wouldn’t be quite the same without it.

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SILY: How much input did you have in the video Dave Brenner created for MoonBladder?

JW: That was cool. The hard part about releasing a record that’s only one song is nobody wants to premiere a section of a song. We were brainstorming ways to handle this. Dave is my PR agent and friend and videographer. As a PR agent, he was like, “We need to deal with this; let’s brainstorm.” As a videographer, he was like, “I can just make you a 30-minute video for the whole damn thing.” When I work with people, whether Don or Marius or Robert [Hunter of Occulted Sound] or whoever, I want to give them a blank slate and then guide them. Snares of Sixes is definitely the vehicle I drive, and I know in the end what it should be, but I try to give people free reign.

In this case, after Dave and I decided to do the video, I thought it would be great to get video from all the different people involved in this record and Dave could assemble it and make it all fucked up and weird. A lot of the footage is from Dave over in New York, footage from me, inside my studio, mostly, and footage in the woods in Norway, outside of Oslo, from Marius, and also him playing keyboards in certain parts, and then Don playing guitar. My friend Cody is not on the record, but he’s my video and photo friend who gave me a bunch of drone footage he’s taken on the Oregon coast. I gave all that shit to Dave and he was able to meld it together and effect it. The video was mostly Dave’s creation--I just guided him here and there--because I wanted to give him as much free reign as possible. I had seen his work before so I knew what he wanted to do would be perfect for how I wanted to represent MoonBladder. Some of the scenes in there are absolutely perfect.

SILY: Watching the video and not knowing exactly how it was put together, I wanted to decipher whether there might have been a relationship between certain color hues and sounds, or imagery and sounds. Is that something you or Dave were trying to establish?

JW: No, but I wish! Maybe Dave was. Visuals are really hard for me. It’s not something that makes sense to me. I’m not a visual person. I know what I like, but I can’t express it. I kind of know what I want, but I can’t express that either. I told Dave the feelings and emotions and concepts I was going for. I gave him some stuff to work with and said, “Just make it unsettling and uncomfortable.” The scenes that were the drone footage of the Oregon coast, he turned it this weird crimson red color. That was perfect. I’m trying to illustrate this link between the moon and the earth and how this affects people. I don’t know whether he had any inkling or concept other than “let’s just fuck this shit up,” because that’s what I told him to do.

SILY: When did you first become interested in the concept behind this record, our relationship with the moon?

JW: I had this weird fascination that I delved into a little bit with Yeast Mother, which is all about kombucha and the process of how it’s made. It got me down the thought process--since in kombucha you have the mother, the scobee--what if a human body turned into a scoby, this life source for kombucha. It got me towards this body horror--celestial bodies theme. I had this shirt made for Yeast Mother that was different body parts around this planet. That was 5 or 6 years ago. With MoonBladder, I went further down that path. Everybody has a relationship with the moon in one way or another in a much more powerful way than everything else in the sky other than the sun. It affects the tides. Some people say it affects people’s moods. It can affect all these things, but people don’t really think about it that much. Then I thought about the nature of relationships: What if it was like your relationship with a pet? What if the moon had body parts and was alive? What if we discovered one day that the moon has internal organs and was a creature at some time? These things sound really ridiculous and silly, but I got really into these thoughts about the moon being alive at one point and now this corpse floating in the sky. Just these weird things that occupy my brain. Now, I’m writing a companion piece to MoonBladder that’s in the early stages, but by the time it gets done it could be something completely different. I tend to do that a lot.

SILY: The idea is not that ludicrous. There’s the idea of the man on the moon, or the film A Trip To The Moon, which is kind of a gnarly movie.

JW: I guess it’s more feasible than the moon being made out of cheese. My whole life, I’ve really wanted something to happen that completely rocked the world, like discovering that dinosaurs didn’t exist, or proving the existence of God, that would completely revolutionize the way people thought on a daily basis. That would be fascinating! Or if we absolutely, 100% prove that aliens exist. It kind of goes with that same concept. It would be absolutely incredible if they found this decaying heart in the middle of the moon. It’s one of those concepts. When I have something like that in my head, it helps guide me as part of the writing and visual process. The cover was painted by my friend Bridget [Bellavia]; I told her, “I need some celestial moon thing--do your thing!” That’s how I work best. I’ll probably move on from that concept eventually, but it’s what I was thinking.

SILY: Are you a sci-fi fan?

JW: Strangely enough, no. I love Star Wars, or at least the first few movies the most. But I’m really not a sci-fi fan. Growing up, I was more into it, but now I just have no interest in it. I honestly have very little interest in fiction these days. I’m sure some of that has informed what I was thinking about here, though, and I did read some Ray Bradbury very recently I liked a lot. But it’s not something I pursue.

SILY: Is there any way you’d perform this material live?

JW: No. It would be amazing and I’d love it, but I don’t know how it would be feasible. We could use a ton of backing tracks, but logistically, it’s hard. I would never do a Snares performance without Marius, and he lives in Oslo, for fucks sake. We’re spread out all over the world. It would be awesome, and I won’t say never, but I’ve thought about it in the past, and it would be really, really hard. What I could see happening is doing a Snares show but not performing the material from the records, something else more suited for a live performance. Performing MoonBladder would be really hard. There are 13 people on this record. We wouldn’t need all of them, but it would still be too cumbersome to pull off.

SILY: What else are you working on in the short and long-term future?

JW: This is what I always do with Snares: I tell people “I’m writing an EP.” Right now, I’ve got three songs underway I’m thinking I’ll be a companion piece. We just released the new Sculptured record on BMG, first in 13 years. I have a new band: I was asked by Andy Whale of Bolt Thrower to play bass in his new death metal band. We’re recording an EP starting the end of this month. I grew up with Bolt Thrower, so I’m blown away I might get to work with Andy Whale. We have a new Dolven record coming out in the fall. I’m really happy about that. I have a couple other projects, one with Joy Von Spain of Eye Of Nix called Poisoning Wave. Another band called Sleep Chains that’s kind of an electronic Godflesh thing. Lots and lots of music. We’re already writing a new Sculptured record. I also have my podcast and t-shirt company. I have a lot of stuff on my plate.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, reading, or watching that’s caught your attention?

JW: I’m currently reading the USBM book that Decibel put out. It’s always been a dream of mine to be included in a book like that, and it’s really cool that Agalloch got 14 pages in it. It’s one of those milestones you have in a career. It’s a well-written book, and it’s really fun to read about these bands you’ve been a fan of or people you know. A lot of my good friends are in there, too. I just started watching that show Travel Man a couple days ago, with Richard Ayoade. It’s a cool, comedy-based travel show. I love travel shows. High on the Hog on Netflix, about how African culture and cuisine has informed American culture and cuisine. Musically, I’ve been on a death metal kick. I’ve been listening to the new Cannibal Corpse record, which I’m really excited about. Having Erik Rutan on the record just put new life in it. Cannibal’s always been solid, but this is leagues beyond what they’ve done for quite a while. The new Thief record on Prophecy is album of the year. That shit’s amazing. I love that band so much. The new Kayo Dot on Prophecy is also phenomenal. The new Billie Eilish--I really love her. She definitely has some moments here and there that are maybe a plateau and not my thing and a little boring, but overall, when she nails it, she does things that are really revolutionary, inventive, engaging, challenging. I think she’s the best thing to come out of the pop world in forever. Oh, and the new Carcass, too. If you go into it knowing it’s not going to be as good as Necroticism, it’s a fun listen. Bill [Steer]’s doing his deep guttural growls on there. There are hints of old Carcass. It’s a good listen. It’s not gonna blow you away, but it’s fun. The artwork’s awesome. I’m stoked on it.

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