Musical surprises come in various forms and sometimes even within the most cliched tropes, bands manage to escape mimicking their peers with creativity and the will to truly express themselves through pre-defined methods. Here we look at three songs outside the metal universe that attempt such concepts with varying degrees of success.
4 CommentsTags: 2019, Bizarre Curiosities, math rock, Post-Punk, rock
Amidst the soulless mediocrity of the Nowadays era labeled by some as “modernity”, there exist certain currents of contemporary music which hearken to a perennial spirit, evoking reminiscences of an ancient and timeless existence of a more vibrant, numinous nature – ultimately putting the listener in contact with a deep intimation of the greater Reality of which they are a part. It is assumed that many readers of this site intuitively recognize that the best of Metal exemplifies this. Many fans and musicians of Metal also tend to recognise similar expressions as they emerge in other styles of music, whether it be Classical, Electronic, Prog, Punk, Folk, Industrial, Goth, or whatever. One enduring group which especially stands out to the sensitively attuned is, of course, the eternal Dead Can Dance.
Tags: 2018, Anastasis, Australia, Brendan Perry, darkwave, Dead Can Dance, Goth rock, Into the Labyrinth, ireland, Lisa Gerrard, New Age, Post-Punk, Spiritchaser, Spleen and Ideal, UK, Within the Realm of A Dying Sun, World Music
Tau Cross regress from playing Motorhead and Killing Joke influenced crust punk and heavy metal on Pillar of Fire to mainstream 1990s alternative rock similar to Amebix‘s Sonic Mass swansong. Boredom awaits.
(more…)
Tags: alternative rock, crustcore, dumbing-down, hard rock, pillar of fire, Post-Punk, relapse, relapse records, review, rob miller, tau cross
Tau Cross premiered a new properly seizure-inducing music video on Youtube this week to promote their upcoming second album, Pillar of Fire, which comes out July 21st on Relapse Records . “Killing the King” shows the group’s anti-authoritarian bent which Relapse is trying to turn political to appeal to their scenester sludge rock and metalcore audience’s hatred of everything Donald Trump despite the band’s obvious intent and medievalisms in the published lyrics.
No CommentsTags: arthurian legend, crust, Heavy Metal, king arthur, lyrics, mainstream metal, Medieval, medieval metal, medievalism, Middle Ages, music video, new track, Post-Punk, procopius, relapse, relapse records, rob miller, Speed Metal, t.s. elliot, tau cross, upcoming album, upcoming release
Before the hybridization of different genres such as metal and industrial became something of a holy grail for underground musicians, an intermediate genre known as post-punk turned toward an eclectic and more contemplative mode of expression.
22 CommentsTags: hard rock, heavy rock, hypnotic, Industrial, jaz coleman, killing joke, metal, Post-Punk, psychedelic, punk, trance
It taunted me with its existence – for nearly half a month, working on DMU meant being privvy to our eventual stream of the upcoming Kosmoskampf. Blliigghhtted is for all purposes another star in the Merdümgiriz constellation (read: label), most notably sharing several members with the AxCx flavored Viranesir. As a result of this, there are some musical similarities, but at least going by the the lyrical content, Blliigghhtted is oriented a bit more towards the occult end of the shock rock spectrum, possibly making it easier for laypeople to digest. It’s still an especially challenging listen. While Kosmoskampf is marketed as a sort of black metal, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had instead been sold as some sort of extreme post-punk recording. Overlap and common ancestors aside, Blliigghhtted’s lengthy, dissonant songs make for easier comparisons to an act like Swans. It just so happens to be the complete antithesis of what I look for in music!
At this point, the reviewer took a break to wallow in his own unfamiliarity with the subgenres on display.
Kosmoskampf is a complete mess, but as far as I can tell, it’s an intentional mess. I remember seeing the term “critic-proof” somewhere while doing my perfunctory research for this review, and to put it bluntly, it’s the perfect description. Each of the songs is a 10-11 minute cesspit of whatever technique thrown together without much in the way of coherent organization. The constantly shifting tempos and repeated periods of pure dissonance don’t exactly tie things together, although the instrumentation stays fairly consistent. So far, I’ve been able to dredge up the occasional guitar phrase reminiscent of a melodic black metal recording, the occasional moaned vocals drenched in reverb, and so forth; in general there are some musical elements I can latch onto, and I can say with some confidence that the album isn’t complete noise. Beyond that, all bets are off. Performing such music must be interesting on a ritual level, but outside perhaps a live experience, a great deal of potential energy (or at least concert debauchery) goes missing.
Despite my attempts not to, I find Kosmoskampf‘s efforts endearing, perhaps influenced as I am by the performers’ antics outside the album. I still would not be surprised if few shared my admittedly nebulous opinions.
3 CommentsTags: 2015, Black Metal, Blliigghhtted, Kosmoskampf, Post-Punk
Control looks into the life of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who committed suicide in 1980, through the eyes of his wife Deborah who wrote a book of her experience, Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division upon which the movie is based.
Joy Division remain important for the world of music because most of 1980s indie aggregated Joy Division post-punk guitar technique into bouncy pop-punk and formed of it the post-rock which also influenced the chaotic post-hardcore that is the basis for metalcore and modern metal. Where the newer bands were totally circular, Joy Division created more of an unsettling atmosphere of unsystematic and dissymetric music.
The film pitches the idea that Curtis suicided because his diagnosis with epilepsy condemned him to the side-effects of the drugs he took for the condition, and the tendency of seizures to hit at moments of high emotion made him fear the things that ultimately fulfilled him, like band, family and friends. As a result he became increasingly isolated at the same time his symptoms increased, with the exception of his remora of a Euro-girlfriend, Annik Honore.
It’s an interesting thesis, but suicides are too often blamed on medical conditions instead of an honest perception of the utter misery of life. Control shows us the more innocent and purposeful world in which Joy Division arose, the strong bond between the men in the band, and the left field attack of fame and seductive power. Without being a Joy Division historian, it is hard to say how accurate its perspective is, and it may be 100% true, but Deborah Curtis gets shown in a kind light. To its credit, the film does not extensively vilify others, except perhaps the extramarital affair (I’m told these are now called “side bitches”) which is portrayed as parasitic in this and other sources.
What makes Control worth watching is that it portrays artistic force as the utterly incoherent thing that it is; musicians have no idea how to articulate what they are doing, and yet they do it and often incorporate a good deal of thinking into the end result despite being unable to explain it. If anything, the movie could have done with more band scenes — the actors practiced together and became a Joy Division cover band for the purpose of the movie, with actor Sam Riley’s interpretation of the songs as a more Morrisonian Joy Division sometimes giving them new power — and less of the family drama behind it, but it is good to see that included, as it is to see the environment in which this band arose. Joy Division remains provocative and adored to this day, joining a long line of controversial rock vocalists who self-destructed upon seeing the ruin that is modernity. Perhaps this movie would have been stronger if it, like The Doors, incorporated more of that vision, but as it is it makes for an interesting introduction to Joy Division and post-punk.
20 CommentsTags: deathcore, joy division, metalcore, modern metal, new order, Post-Punk, sam riley
This band is the origin of all emo music. Starting in the mid-1980s, post-Minor Threat musicians tried to re-invent music and ended up with sensitive guy indie rock/post-hardcore hybrid. All post-2000 “metal” originates in what Fugazi did, except Fugazi was musically better. However, its attitude was totally corrupt and self-pitying. As a result, it attracted the type of person who now becomes a hipster: the self-pitying, defensive, self-obsessed, reality-denying narcissistic life dropout.
Fugazi’s label, Dischord Records, launched a digital archive of the band’s live …shows this fall. Twenty-five new shows are being added each month, including over 800 songs that have never been released.
5 Comments
Coming from the anarcho-punk school of musical and ideological tradition, and finally releasing this, their debut full length in 1985, Amebix had already released a series of excellent EP’s in the early half of the decade. The unique character of their music was a sound that fused the violent hardcore punk of Discharge with the circulative, repetitious song structures that were a staple of post-punk acts such as Killing Joke and Public Image Ltd. Escaping the social-activist themes that were a staple of hardcore, and transcending the melancholia and fatalism that was a common theme of post-punk, Amebix took on board the musical apparatus of both substyles and turned towards a contemplative, naturalistic direction that subverted the generalisation of how we associate themes with forms. Inspiration comes additionally from the NWOBHM of early Motorhead and Judas Priest in the crunching, percussive guitar playing that made itself a staple of speed metal and subsequently death metal. Drums batter clearly as if to stadium anthems, and boom with an echo one would clearly associate with said decade. Droning riffs make an appearance and have a harmonic depth to them that evoke the archaic and the dystopian much like Burzum and Godflesh simultaneously would do in their most prominent work. Whereas the metal subgenres of the 1980′s slowly influenced one anothers musical language, Amebix single handedly introduced new themes and formats that would become the structural basis of future acts to come, and alongside their compilation album No Sanctuary, this important work deserves it’s applause.
-Pearson-
No CommentsTags: amebix, arise, Black Metal, Crossover, Crust Punk, Hardcore, Hardcore Punk, Influential Work, Post-Punk, thrash metal
