Pyramids with Nadja – “Pyramids with Nadja” (2009)

Pyramids with Nadja, Pyramids with Nadja (2009)

Peace like a river

Released fairly late last-year on the frequently-excellent Hydra Head Records, this album is a collaborative effort that I never would have predicted, but which makes a good deal of sense now that it’s happened.  Most of the reviews that I’ve read of this album have come to the material with a lot of background in Nadja, but basically none in Pyramids; my experience is essentially the opposite.

To put it bluntly, I’ve always found Nadja to be rather alienating.  I feel like I really started to hear a lot about them around the time Body Cage came out, and I remember enjoying that album a fair amount, but the sheer volume of material this experimental drone/shoegaze duo have released since then is astounding.  Seems like a churlish thing to complain about, but they’re one of those bands that I can’t help but think is in desperate need of an editor.  You know the ones I’m talking about: Hellveto, Xasthur, Striborg, I’m looking at you.  I really enjoy all of those bands, in fact, but the overwhelming quantity of their music makes the task of differentiating them based on their quality a challenge that I typically don’t care enough to confront.

Pyramids, on the other hand, are a young band, with just their 2008 self-titled album released thus far.  That album, which included a second disc of remixed tracks from the impressive likes of Blut Aus Nord (a key touchstone, as I’ll explain in a bit), Justin Broadrick, and James Plotkin, among others, was absolutely astounding.  The most astonishing thing about their ghostly, unsettling, and otherwordly sound was just how fully formed it seemed, particularly for a debut album.

Incorporating bits of post-rock, ambient, electronic musics, and black metal into their swirling vision, the best way I’ve come up with for describing the sound of Pyramids is as basically the polar opposite of Blut Aus Nord’s excellent MoRT album.  That is, where MoRT took the accumulated traditions of black metal and shoved them through a pitch-black prism, Pyramids’ debut album takes those same traditions, grafts onto it a heap of other inspirations, and refracts the whole mess through a prism of shimmering light.

This collaboration with Nadja, then, stretches out their given format (most of the songs on the debut album only hit around the three-minute mark or so), and encases their weirdnesses in swaths of ambience, warm, shoegaze-y drones, and slowly shifting, highly textured feedback patterns.  The track “Another War,” in fact, was more reminiscent of post-rock scions A Silver Mt. Zion than anything in the world of metal; specifically, the echoing vocals and distant, treated piano recall A Silver Mt. Zion’s Pretty Little Lightning Paw EP, with that quintessential Pyramids drum treatment running in the background.  The album, as a whole, continuously flirts with all varieties of the ambient/post-rock/found sound scene, at times even dipping into glorious washes of noise more akin to Tim Hecker’s recent work (particularly Harmony in Ultraviolet).

“Sound of Ice and Grass” gets pretty metal, as these things go, bringing in some Sunn O)))-esque droning riffs about midway through, but these molten lava riffs are overlaid with jangly drone-leads on top, sounding very much inspired by (but not quite like) Blut Aus Nord.  As far as collaborative records go, this one is quite impressive for combining aspects of both bands into a whole which comes across as generally new, rather than sounding like “Oh, this track is a Nadja-penned track, and that one over there’s the Pyramids’ shtick,” etc (*cough* Kingdom of Sorrow *cough*).

Most impressive, to my ears, about what (I imagine) Pyramids brought to the show is a sense of some of heavy metal’s classic signifiers turned around and deconstructed.  For example, where there are drums on this record (even when they are programmed drums blast-beating away), they rarely function as drums, by which I mean providing a rhythmic backbone for whatever else is going on.  Instead, the drums, as was the case on Pyramids’ debut, are presented as simply another textural element in the overall sound-collage.

The closing track, “An Angel Was Heard to Cry over the City of Rome,” is probably the standout here.  It is both uplifting and weighty, in the best Jesu tradition.  But actually, more than Jesu (which is a bit of a too-easy comparison here), this song recalls “As Fire Swept Clean the Earth” from Enslaved’s Below the Lights album, in the way the listener’s focus is glued to the ongoing tension between the driving pulsations of harsh noise and blastbeats, on the one hand, and a soaring, searingly melodic guitar figure on the other hand.

If it were up to me, these folks could ride out that blissful groove for hours, but the song ends at just a shade over the ten-minute mark, meaning that it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and leaves the listener craving more of this very unique, highly textured collaboration.  I suppose it seems doubtful that we’ll see another full-length collaboration between these two groups, but the evidence on offer here suggests that there must have been some real lightning bursts of cooperative songwriting the first go-around.

It ought to go without saying that open-minded metalheads only need apply, but anyone with more than a passing interest in the various avant-garde strains of electronic, ambient, and post-rock musics would certainly find a lot in which to revel.  Plug in and drone out.

Overall rating: 84%.  The best part is, you can’t really tell if this is a drone-ier Pyramids, or a janglier Nadja.

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What I’ve Been Listening To Today

I haven’t yet figured out if there’s a good way to avoid this, but I’m quite certain that I’m far from the only one out there who follows a whole mess of music rather closely, and begins to feel more than a little overwhelmed.  Of course I can’t really speak for the faceless masses of internet blips and pixels, but I imagine that many of you have your own little accounting systems, or organizational schemes for dealing with new music.

Maybe you anticipate upcoming releases by keeping little lists of noteworthy titles on the horizon; or by following a blog or a dozen that tend to report news from the genres you follow; or maybe you download hundreds of gigabytes of music from all the errant spaces of the world and then feel slowly gnawed away by guilt, not because of any qualms over copyright infringement or any such square nonsense, but because there’s just so much of it, and you’ll never ever listen to it all, and so eventually it shuttles its way between a download folder and that much-used twin, the recycle bin; or, better yet, maybe you’re not completely neurotic like I am, and you just listen to some music that you like and have already stopped reading this shiftless bourgeois tripe.  Good for you.

All of this, really, is just by way of prelude to saying that, sometimes it’s liberating to just sit down in front of the ol’ music collection (or ol’ computer, really) and listen to whatever seems to be calling out to you; no real agenda, no obligation, just, y’know, whatever feels right.  Weird, isn’t it, that as a listening culture we (or at least some of ‘we’) have found ourselves in such a predicament?  I guess, actually, it’s probably not that different from finding yourself at the grocery store, trying to pick out a box of cereal but oh, what’s that, decision-making-part-of-my-brain?, I can’t quite hear you over the sound of 17,000 brands of dried crunchy things with sugar.

The petty tyranny of choice meets an over-saturated consumer culture.

Playing the role of desktop Napoleon today, then, here is what I’ve been putting in my ear holes…ere I saw Elba:

Ghost, Snuffbox Immanence

This Japanese folk/rock/psych group can kick out some pretty hot jams, but unlike their countrymen in the Acid Mothers Temple & Melting Whatever Freak-Outs, I actually prefer it when they stick to the mellower side of the rock and roll continuum.  Which they do, on this release, with consummate ease.  Check out Hypnotic Underworld and In Stormy Nights for even better distillations of this magic, which seems more easily wrought over a longer running-time.

Keep of Kalessin, Reptilian

Finally gave this record the first listen today.  Although, to be fair, I only bought my copy last week, meaning I’ve been experiencing far less of the aforementioned gnawing guilt as with, say, the new Nightbringer which I’ve yet to play, or the new Watain, which I’ve only run through once (though, in my defense, goddamn is that thing loooong).  Anyway, something about their last one, Kolossus, never quite sat entirely right with me.  Armada was a massive beast of a record, and Kolossus‘ main fault, I think, is that it sounded more or less like Armada Redux; so, while it was a reasonably satisfying blast of ultra-classy, shined-up melodic black(-ish) metal, it didn’t have any real standout tracks like “The Black Uncharted” or “Crown of the Kings” from Armada.  First listen to this dragon-obsessed follow-up, then, is an improvement on that front, inasmuch as there is definitely a marked change from both Armada and Kolossus; yet to be determined, however, is whether this is a good or bad change.  In my only casual perusals of the metallic corners of the internet, I have seen nothing but scorn heaped upon early single (and Eurovision entry!) “The Dragontower,” and while that track’s first impression was definitely much more that of a pop song grafted onto a web of heavy metal signifiers, honestly folks, it wasn’t that bad, and it’s not as though Keep Of Kalessin have been, until now, your uncompromising bulwark of everything that is true and kvlt in metal.  In other words, ‘Norsk Arisk Black Metal’ they ain’t.

Pink Floyd, Meddle

Truth be told, I think I’ll always prefer Wish You Were Here, even though I know for many Meddle is the connoisseur’s Floyd album.  Granted, the second side of Meddle, taken up entirely by “Echoes,” completely owns early 1970s progressive rock, and the album’s first track has that great spooky, driving momentum that I could listen to all day.  “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” still edges out “Echoes” by a hair, though, for long-winded, multi-part prog odyssies, and the rest of the more straight-ahead rock songs on Wish You Were Here are a bit more memorable (hello, “Welcome to the Machine”) than those on Meddle (although the jaunty “San Tropez” is fun).

I think the reason I had it in my head to listen to Meddle today was because I had been listening to the new Nachtmystium album, which, I know, I know, is probably coming one album too late for getting in on the psych/freak-y Nachtmystium; seems like for this second volume (which is excellent, in case my snark is confusing the issue), they ought to have called it Black Unknown Pleasures or some such thing, but I digress.

Clutch, Blast Tyrant

Most anything Clutch does is worth your time, but their latter-day records are where I spend most of my time.  Sure, the self-titled album and Pure Rock Fury are pretty much all class, but Blast Tyrant, Robot Hive/Exodus, Beale St, and Strange Cousins are the friggin’ shit.  This album, especially, is just a wonderful combination of seriously muscular blues, some of Neil Fallon’s most bad-ass stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and a bunch of completely fucking righteous RIFFS.

On the subject of those lyrics, see:

“Genesis and Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers /
Gideon is knocking in your hotel while you slumber”

OR, in honor of Dio’s recent passing:

“Holy diver, where you at?
There’s a woman on the hill in a wide-brimmed hat /
With a shotgun, .44 /
And a big bloodhound in the back of a jacked-up Ford”

I mean, GODDAMN if that isn’t some FUNK.

Negura Bunget, Om

As long as we’re cataloging my recent music-related shames, I ought to let it out that despite receiving my copy in the mail a far while back, I still haven’t listened to the new post-breakup Negura Bunget album (the title of which, since I am too lazy to pull up the accurate spelling, is something approximating Virstele Pamintului; or anyway, that’s my closest guess).

I’ve pretty much tried to avoid following any of the acrimony surrounding the split of the core members, with some of them (maybe only one?) continuing on with the name, and others forming a new group, whose similarly Romanian name also escapes me at the moment.  Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like this ever reached the sublimely ridiculous heights (or lows, depending on your perspective) of the Gorgoroth Affair, so when I do get around to listening to the new one, I’m hoping to do so without much contextual baggage.

Still, whenever I do listen to it, and as I’m sure everyone else and their grandmother has noted, it’s going to have some mighty big shoes to fill.  Om is an absolute monster of a record: expertly paced and sequenced, loud and brash when it needs to be, meditative and melodic whenever it wants to be.  I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but something about listening to Om seems incredibly intuitive, like it doesn’t require a long apprenticeship in the dungeons of heavy metal lore to understand this music on a visceral level.

Looking over this list, I was also struck by just how masculine-dominated most of these rock genres are.  Of course, to really do that topic justice would require several tortuous essays and much hand-wringing, so instead I just reminded myself that I was also listening to Arch Enemy’s Wages of Sin (their first record to feature current growler Angela Gossow) earlier today, and that I’ve got a recently-acquired copy of Gillian Welch’s Hell Among the Yearlings in the docket.

But ah, there’s that damnable docket again, and it’s brought its friends, Guilt and Obligation…

Still, hopefully up soon:
– Reviews of the Pyramids & Nadja collaboration and Devin Townsend’s Physicist
– A rant about stoner metal, and all its spurious accusations against my listening faculties
– A brief essay on the furniture department of Macy’s

Cheers, &c.,
d

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Random Thought Of The Day

I have neither listened to The Smiths recently, nor have I read much poetry lately, but for some inexplicable reason I’ve had in my head for a while the notion that Morrissey & co. (sorry, Johnny Marr, to lump you in under ‘…& co’) were channeling good old T.S. Eliot on The Queen is Dead.  More specifically, every time I listen to the title track to said (marvelous) album, I take it as almost self-evident that the mope-rockers intended to reference Eliot’s landmark poem “The Hollow Men.”

Thus goes a fair chunk of the final section of “The Hollow Men”:

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
…

Anyway, I’ll stop it there, which is right before the end, with the banging, and the whimpering.  I’ve just about had enough of this poem being misused to talk about this being either quiet or noisy, so instead I’ll use it to talk about indie rock.  Yes?  Yes.

Right, so the title track of The Smiths’ album fades out (sort of) with Morrissey singing:

Life is very long /
When you’re lonely

Now, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that I’m being completely ridiculous.  It’s just four words in the song (“life is very long”) that I’m taking as some kind of incontrovertible proof that this band, in that song, is making a sly nudge towards that poem.  Granted, this isn’t outside the realm of possibility; it’s obviously a quite famous poem, and The Smiths’ version of rainy day indie rock was always highly literate.  Still, I can’t now shake the nagging feeling that I’m just casting around inside my head for some tenuous connection, or at least trying to reverse engineer a justificatory link for whatever trivia-corrupted nonsense my brain spews up.

I suppose the moral of the story is: Read more poetry, and type fewer words.  It’s probably all for the best; The Smiths seem more like the J. Alfred Prufrock types, anyhow.

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At Warre with the English Language

So, the other day I was trying to type the word ‘repentantly’, but kept spelling it incorrectly, apparently, because those beastly red squiggles kept dancing underneath my text.  Turns out I had been typing ‘repentently’, with an extra ‘e’ where there is supposed to be an ‘a’.  But the thing is, I kept staring at the damn thing for the longest time, not, for the life of me, able to figure out my spelling error.  This, of course, pissed me right off, and once I gave in (AKA, allowed Microsoft to provide me with its most bestest suggestions), I started thinking, “Hey, goddamnit, English language, I think I know why you’ve bamboozled me so!”

To wit: It seemed to me that the word ‘repentant’ should end with the -ent suffix, rather than the -ant suffix, because, in my mind, it must be etymologically related to the word ‘penitent’, which, lo and behold, ends with the -ent suffix.  Now, I’m no philologist, nor even a humble linguist, so I don’t actually have any proof of where either of these words comes from, and I don’t particularly feel like consulting ye olde OED for verification.  It may, in fact, be the case that these two words, though somewhat similar in meaning, arrive in our English language-box (you fancier folks out there might say ‘lexicon’, but I’m quite pleased with my choice) via completely different chains of etymological filiation.*  The point is, however, that every now and again, I’m struck by some complete absurdity in this mongrel language of ours.  Part of me wants to sit and revel in that absurdity, but another part – the same part, I suspect, which absolutely MUST have books and other things on his desk at 90-degree angles at all times – is sufficiently unsettled and enraged as to lead to this here mini-rant to which your eyes are currently affixed.

I’m sure that if I sat here long enough, I could think of a multitude of other examples; for now, however, the only other I wish to recall is the word ‘decimate’.  I feel as though I have a vague recollection of either arguing with someone or complaining about this word elsewhere recently, but no matter.  The word makes perfect etymological sense, of course, and it is easy to recognize the Latinate root ‘deci-‘ snuggled cozily in its first half.  But here’s the thing: The word ‘decimate’ means, based on my researches (which, by the way, is a really fun word to pluralize, rather like ‘maths’), “to reduce something by one-tenth its original strength or amount.”  It may even have its roots in an old Roman practice of killing one out of every ten soldiers in a defeated army, which, apart from its general barbarism, is all well and good, and, if words were superheroes, would make for a pretty neat origin story.

My issue with the word, and the reason why I stew in my own English-language-absurdity-despising juices every now and then upon encountering it, is that I WANT it to mean essential the reverse mathematical action (or, perhaps not reverse, but complementary?).  That is, I think that in the general sense we have of the word ‘decimate’, it indicates a very serious diminution, potentially even an evisceration of the strength of a mass or force.  Or, in other words, if I say that something has been ‘decimated’, I’m not fucking around; shit has gotten real.  Because we (or at least the collective ‘we’ of English speakers to whom I am attributing my own personal linguistic idiosyncrasies) imbue the word with such heft, then, I WANT the word ‘decimate’ to mean “to reduce something to one-tenth its original strength.”  To, not by (a nice little argument, by the by, for the power of the humble preposition).  Clearly, reducing something from 100% to 10% is a lot more impressive than reducing something from 100% to 90%.  Plus, I think if the word ‘decimate’ meant “to reduce to…” rather than “to reduce by…”, it would finally match up with the impressive connotation that I think the word actually has in our language-box.

Now, I know, I know, it shouldn’t really be up to me to dictate to a language spoken by millions (actually, probably into the billion range by now, don’t you think?) what its words, its own little language babies, should mean.  But goddamnit, The English Language, can’t you help a brother out?

Any of you out there have similarly irrational outbursts of rage towards your native tongue which you’d like to get off your chest?

*NOTE: As I typed this, those accursed red squiggles appeared once more to leer and mock; but I know ‘filiation’ is a word, and I know I’ve spelled it properly, so whichever entity is responsible for the spell-checking ’round these parts of the internet can fuck right along.

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The (Hor)Crux Of The Matter

The title of this post really ought to read, “Harry Potter Metal, or On the Use and Abuse of Irony for Music (apologies, as are so frequently due, to F.W. Nietzsche).”

Now, I’m sure that I’m a few years late to this particular party, but after a couple of Blind Guardian tracks just kicked out of my stereo, I suddenly remembered reading a while back about some Harry Potter-themed bands.  Obviously, with such a friggin’ enormous cultural phenomenon as the Harry Potter books (& movies, & video games, & tea cozies, & chewing tobacco, &, if the television’s carpet-bombing campaign of commercials is to be believed, theme parks, &c., &c.), one ought to expect its influence to spread far and wide.  A quick bit of internet research (well, if typing and clicking are admissible under the banner of ‘research’ these days, at least) jogged my memory of an indie rock-type band called Harry & The Potters, by two brothers from Massachusetts.  Pretty cutesy, I guess, and even better when I find out that the proceeds of what they’ve done are going to various literary nonprofits.  Good on ’em, although the Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club (no, I’m not fucking joking) makes me gag more than a little.

Now, however, a bit more research on trusty ol’ M-A reveals this band from Norway, the aptly-named Voldemort.  They’ve got two self-released EPs out, which feature some winningly-titled tunes as “Mayhem at the Ministry,” “The Dark Mark in the Sky,” and “Cradle of Filch” (okay, I’ll admit to getting a decent chuckle out of that last one).  The band members have also adopted Potter-themed pseudonyms, including Count Draco Horcrux (…the fuck?) and Muggleslayer.  Okay, so this is already a whole lot of strikes against these folks, but it’s not totally outside the realm of possibility that they could write some decent tunes, yeah?  Well, check out their Myspace yourself, and see if you can make it any further than 1:24 into “Mayhem at the Ministry,” because  I sure as all damn hell could not.  It’s not that I take any great pleasure (well, maybe a little) in tearing down the work of others, but seriously?  This sounds basically like a third- or fourth-rate thrash tune slowed down to 1/2 time, with what sound like (but I think are not actually) synthesized distorted guitars and drums, with an irony-laden vocal ripoff of Cronos from Venom, with occasional King Diamond shrieks thrown atop the last word in a line for “emphasis.”  Which is to say, awful, awful stuff.

Awesome

Not nearly so awesome

The real point of this post, since I should be getting on with it, is that I can’t quite figure out exactly why it is that I can take perfectly seriously many of the metal bands that have incorporated various fantasy literature into their names, themes, artwork, and very music itself, whereas this Harry Potter-themed heavy metal of Voldemort seems like utter fucking bollocks and nonsense.  I think in this case, it’s a pretty clear case of a straight-up gimmick band.  In the interest of full disclosure, I ought to point out that your humble scribe is a pretty giant Harry Potter nerd, so it’s entirely possible that my near dry-heaving upon stumbling across that Myspace page is a knee-jerk response meant to defend Ms. Rowlings’ canon; more likely, though, is that this is a knee-jerk response to the ongoing hipsterization of heavy metal, about which I am, all things considered, an even gianter (that’s right, it’s not a word, but fuck you internet, I’m using it anyway) nerd.

J.R.R. Tolkien, of course, has a long and illustrious pedigree of being used and abused in the world of heavy metal.  Thing is, I’m pretty much perfectly cool with that, and my being perfectly cool with it is kind of bugging me, now that I’m thinking about this Harry Potter music bullshit.  Of course, some of the most obvious examples of Tolkien metal are Germany’s Blind Guardian and Austria’s Summoning, but even the most casual fan of underground heavy metal has stumbled across easily a few dozen bands whose names are drawn from Tolkien.  Gorgoroth, Amon Amarth, Cirith Ungol, Isengard (featuring Fenriz of Darkthrone), Nazgul, Uruk-Hai (early version of Burzum), Cirith Gorgor, and Ephel Duath are only a few examples (not to mention probably at least a half-dozen bands each taking the name Sauron or Morgoth).

Now, in all fairness, Gorgoroth haven’t spent much time actually singing about Tolkien, in the same manner as Blind Guardian (whose landmark Nightfall in Middle-Earth takes on one of Tolkien’s more difficult works, The Silmarillion) and Summoning (whose last full-length album, Oath Bound, included a track ostensibly sung in one of Tolkien’s made-up languages, the Black Speech of Mordor), nor have most of these other bands.  But even with Blind Guardian and Summoning, I don’t find it particularly difficult to take them (more or less) seriously.  And of course Tolkien is far from being the only literary/fantasy inspiration in heavy metal; H.P. Lovecraft likely plays a close second (check out the bizarre thrash band Mekong Delta, or look for basically any band ever utilizing the word Cthulu), but there are also bands like The Gates of Slumber using Robert E. Howard for inspiration (in this case, his tales of Conan the Barbarian).  This is not to say, by the way, that Harry Potter metal is the only type of fantasy heavy metal that reeks of the ridiculous; Italy’s long-running cheese-mongers Rhapsody (lately Rhapsody Of Fire), for example, have invented their own world of dragons and wizards to sing about.  It’s almost like someone should tap them on the shoulder and remind them politely that they’re not German.  Something I haven’t looked into, but might be interesting to investigate, is whether any metal band has tried to tackle Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.  I’ve got a hunch that someone, somewhere, must have given it a go.

Something tells me this is not an issue I’ll be able to resolve, inasmuch as it probably requires delving much more deeply into heavy metal’s penchant for the theatrical, the mystical, the occult, and so forth.  Maybe the fact that Tolkien’s books have been a part of the world’s collective literary consciousness for quite some time now, whereas Harry Potter remains a currently evolving phenomenon, plays some role in my different reactions to Potter metal and Tolkien metal; that is, maybe fifty years from now, Harry Potter metal will be just as widely accepted.  Maybe it simply has to do with the fact that this Norwegian band Voldemort sounds rather like a dog retching, whereas Blind Guardian sound completely fucking bad-ass; in that case, maybe all it will take is for a band to come along and make some really neck-wrecking Harry Potter-themed metal.

Until then, I’ll have to be satisfied with my Harry Potter-brand garbage disposal and jogging shorts.

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Anathema Kicks Your Ass…With Feelings

Alright, you heartless metal bastards, this morning I’m asking you to please take five minutes out of your otherwise busy schedule of chortling at this here ridiculously awkward photo op (courtesy of MetalSucks) from thrash’s Big Four or suffering quick-onset carpal tunnel from trying to learn your favorite Necrophagist tune to watch this live video of England’s own Anathema performing the magnificent song “Everything” from their latest album, the long-awaited (and much-delayed) We’re Here Because We’re Here:

If you’ve got even the littlest sliver of a soul, I expect after you’ve finished dabbing your eyes that you’ll march straight off to order your very own copy of this wonderfully emotive record.  I expect I’ll have a right proper review of the album posted here eventually, but suffice it to say, it’s fucking epic and completely beautiful.  How’s about a US tour one of these days, lads (and lady)?

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Trying Not To Piss Myself With Excitement

One of the upcoming releases into the metal-verse that has got me all a-twitter (no, not that kind of twitter) is the new Unearthly Trance record.  I remember reading that they were planning to put out a new album sometime this year way back around January or February, in Terrorizer magazine’s 2010 forecasting guide, but I hadn’t heard any more details since then.  I’d casually checked out their page on M-A a few times, but there’s still no 2010 album listed.  Anyway, thanks to the immortal efforts of one Blabbermouth.net, I finally have slightly more tangible proof that our ears will be blessed/cursed with another slab of righteously depraved metal this year.  Apart from the fact that the album’s title, V, is pretty fucking weak-sauce, I couldn’t be more pleased about the announcement of a late September release date.

Here, then, is the pleasingly bad-ass cover art for Unearthly Trance’s V:

Anyone hungry for some goat cheese hors d'oeuvres?

I mean, sure, if you tilt your head to the side and squint your eyes a bit, it may as well be the cover of the new Watain album, Lawless Darkness, done up in bluescale, but who gives a shit?  (Also, are those Nine Inch Nails I spy in three of the four corners there?  I know Reznor’s off destroying angels lately, but c’mon, not quite gone and forgotten…)  I, for one, am more than happy to offer up my earnest listening soul to Monsieur Lipynsky et al for a sound drubbing.  All of Thralldom’s records were twisted brilliance, the last two Unearthly Trance records (but especially Electrocution, their last, and its face-gnashing monster of a stompfest, “God is a Beast) kicked my ass, and Ryan Lipynsky’s other band The Howling Wind put out one of 2010’s best black metal albums thus far with Into the Cryosphere.

So, anyway, moral of the story is, two over-eager thumbs up for the new Unearthly Trance.  Be here now (with all due apologies to the Gallagher Bros.  Holy shit, Nintendo, can you get on that?  Instead of Italian plumbers, let’s have ourselves a video game franchise featuring two vaguely man-shaped English receptacles for whiskey and cusses.  NOW, PLS.)

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IN WHICH MY ENTIRE BODY FLAILS INDEPENDENTLY OF MY MIND

BLLLLLUUUUAARRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

FOR ALL THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING THAT IS SWEET AND HOLY IN HEAVY METAL, iTUNES REALLY OUGHT TO WARN ONE BEFORE SPITTING OUT  ***JUDAS MOTHERFUCKING PRIEST’S PAIN MOTHERFUCKING KILLER***

BECAUSE SON OF A BITCH AND GODDAMN IT I WILL PAY THE INTERNET TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS IF IT CAN PROVIDE CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE OF ANY OTHER SONG WHICH WILL LEAD TO SUCH INVOLUNTARY HEAVY METAL SPASMS ON THE PART OF THE LISTENER.

This Tuesday morning update brought to you by a bunch of English miscreants and inadvertent, neck-wrecking self-harm.

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Iron Maiden Releases Single, Artwork, and Track List for “The Final Frontier”

So, I’m two days or so late with this update, but presumably you are all just as giddy with anticipation as I for Iron Maiden’s new album, titled The Final Frontier.  Official news has final broken on an August 16th release date (which I can only assume/hope will translate into an August 17th release date here in the States), along with this frankly bitching cover art:

In space, no one can hear you headbang

This August release date, unfortunately, is well beyond the end of Maiden’s summer US tour (currently under way, and to be attended by yours truly in mid-July), but the band has put the album’s first single, “El Dorado,” up on their website for free download, so I would recommend dropping pretty much whatever puny thing it is you may be doing and directing yourself directly to this press release on their website for directions on downloading the single.  Frankly, if you don’t have at least seven minutes to devote to heavy metal today, I don’t even know what you think you’re doing around here.  Plus, the single download comes with this exclusive comic-art-inspired image:

"Fuck yes," is the basic conclusion you must reach

Looks a little bit Dr.-Manhattan-on-Mars-in-Watchmen, and a little bit Lord-Weird-Slough-Feg’s-Hardworlder, but also looks one hundred per cent bad-ass.  QED.

Anyway, go check out the track for yourself.  It’s not the snappiest single ever, but it seems like it will probably make for a really solid album track, and it’s got a really tight solo-trading section.  Plus, it comes in and ends on a totally heavy metal free-fill section, so it seems perfectly crafted for dropping seamlessly into their current live set.

Up the fuckin’ irons, folks.

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Altar Of Plagues – “Tides” EP (2010)

Altar Of Plagues, Tides (2010)

What are the Irish always so fucked off about, I wonder?

Following fairly hotly on the heels of last year’s excellent debut album White Tomb comes this hefty (36 minutes) EP from the Irish black metal band Altar Of Plagues.  Another of the almost uniformly-excellent bands on Profound Lore’s current roster, Altar Of Plagues wields a meditative, dense fusion of elemental black metal and the drawn-out song structures of insert-your-favorite-variety-of-“post-“-influenced-metal-here.  This EP, which I seem to recall reading was written on the road (the band thanks the Roadburn Festival in the liner notes), is a nice little teaser for future efforts, and thus is not quite up to the high standard set by White Tomb, but doesn’t quite seem as though it was intended to be.  To put it another way, I think that this band’s style is generally better-suited to the album-length statement, but these two tracks certainly show no precipitous drop in quality.

Of the two lengthy songs on offer here, I think opener “Atlantic Light” comes off slightly better, in large part due to its meatier feel.  (Somewhat ironic, innit, that the track “Atlantic Light” comes off as all-around heavier than the slightly more spacious “The Weight Of All”?)  The track kicks off with a nearly depressive black metal-styled plod, which eventually locks into that stretched-out, black metal/post-rock groove the band lived in so comfortably on previous releases.  The comparison is probably a bit played-out by now, but these guys probably sound closer than anyone else to the pissed-off progeny of Wolves In The Throne Room and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.  “Atlantic Light” is also notable in the vocal department for throwing in some sludgey/noisecore-styled bellowing, which very nicely complements the more traditional post-BM rasping.  These touches, though slight, might even give the band a bit of crossover appeal to fans of the somewhat spacier cast of the sludge/doom/hardcore/post-fucking-whatever spectrum (particularly Minsk, Rosetta, or Mouth of the Architect).

“The Weight Of All” touches on a somewhat wider palette of the band’s sonic and textural repertoire, perhaps unsurprisingly given its nearly 20-minute running time.  Some of the nicest songwriting touches crop up towards the end, where the band goes from washes of ambient/noise drones, into a carefully-paced section of blasting, and then finally into a great momentum-gathering final push of double bass-led gravity.  This is a band which really takes its time developing its ideas, which may require a bit of patience from the listener, but offers a fine contrast to the current glut of tech/death blast-athons.  While we’re on the subject of blasting, the sections of blast-beating are generally few and far-between on this release, but when they crop up, especially in the penultimate  movement of “The Weight Of All,” they have a pleasantly organic, loose, and almost shambolic quality, perhaps attributable to the exceptionally rattle-y snare drum.  Where this slightly off-kilter blasting might sound sloppy if attached to your more garden-variety Satan-and-frostbitten-nipples black metal, I find it carries the the suspended, droning melody of these songs rather nicely.

The production on this EP is quite a bit muddier than on White Tomb, but for some reason it really works well with the songwriting.  The crisp, clear production of the full-length worked well for the band’s sound as well, so I don’t know if the slightly dirtier tone here works only because of the few touches of sludge vocals thrown in, or maybe just because this whole release has the feel of a really promising young band out on the road, impatient to get some new ideas thrown down to tape before the moment passes; regardless, this sounds much more live, and really puts the listener in direct conversation with the mournful hue of these patient, well-crafted songs.  All in all, though I’d much rather hear another full-length from this Irish band, these two songs whet the appetite nicely until the crepuscular, creaking world they apparently inhabit inspires them to further feats of sorrowful, avant-garde bleakness.

Overall rating: 75%, light & weight.

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