Church of Misery - Thy Kingdom Scum

Yeah, Swang it baby.

No, really, just do it. This album falls into a special category: Albums by contemporary doom bands that undermine Black Sabbath's relevance in 2013.

This is how you doom. No compromises, giant riffs, time changes, gutsy solos all in the mode of minor pentatonic.

Sounds like it should be boring. Sounds like it has been done.

Well it's not. And it hasn't, not like this.

Production is splendid the album sounding like it was smashed out by dudes in a room. Fidelity goes far but crashes before it sounds too clean, too processed. This is some seriously heroic Twenty-First Century doom - go away pretenders, Church of Misery have released the best album of their career.

Dandelions, Jasmine and Wisteria

Away from my own. I borrow. Soil. Wisteria disappears too quickly at summer's strange start and the dandelions seem too few. Portent? Pattern? Jasmine stands with gentle clouds and warm grass, sweet reminder of different dirt.

Ghost Rider 2099 and the mysterious phenomena of pre-TOR, pre-2chan undernets.

Way back in 1994, before I even knew there was such a thing as the internet, I got sucked in by the metallic cover of issue one of Spiderman 2099. A country boy in a country town, I had never seen such an exciting use of colour. The bold, exaggerated and irresponsible style of Rick Leonardi forced my hand: I simply had to have it.

Over the next few months, I spotted a number of titles in Marvel’s 2099 series. None of them resonated with me in the same way as Spider-man. I preferred (and still do, Peter David’s “Mr Fixit” run was superb) the then trash talking, mafia affiliated, moon-phase grey Hulk to his sci-fi re-boot. The Punisher felt so much cooler and grittier in a noir version of the present. Fantastic Four were never particularly interesting to me and I simply could not muster the enough interest to wave in the general direction of another “X” related title.

One title, however, advertised within the comics but not available locally was Len Kaminski’s Ghost Rider 2099. I have always had a bit of a thing for horror, skulls and the occult (Just writing that sentence makes me realize just how custom built I am as the audience for Electric Wizard). First, a derive.

Before the 2099 series was launched I frequented a used book store across from the salon where I had my ear pierced as a child and where my mother cut her hair in an arcade in a small rural town. Like many of its kind at the time it traded books for in store currency. Thanks to that store I was introduced to a world of monochrome pulp horror at twenty cents a pop. The stories were so deviant and spooky to me that I eventually traded them back for other more mainstream comics. Nevertheless, they had a profound impact on me. Ghost Rider 2099 checked all the right boxes, it rode the rising tide of Gibson-esque cyberpunk, virtual reality and the infant state internet, it had flaming skulls and motorcycles and more importantly it was dark.

The problem is that I never got to read it. Until I started earlier this month. The 2099 series, like many of my favorite things never really got the recognition it deserved and suffered an abrupt, unsatisfying end. Unlikely to ever experience a reboot the one thing it has in its favour is an incomplete mythology. A mass of loose ends.

What sparked this article was a very minor part in the story around issues nine and ten where the Ghost Rider is mulling over otaku and the mischief they make on a seamy underweb. As I read this I thought, “wow, this sounds like 2chan, Kaminski was really had a finger on the pulse.” A few minutes later, it occurred to me to check the timeline and ask a few questions: just when was 2chan born and where does Ghost Rider 2099 fit into this? So you need not do the leg work, I will tell you: Ghost Rider 2099 was first published in 1994. 2chan was born in 1999. An underground internet is not a particularly exclusive idea, nor is the borrowing of the word otaku to describe. Yet the coalescence of both and the future they point toward was perfectly realized. What piques my curiosity is the extent to which Kaminski was or was not familiar with Japan at the time. After all, more than ten years had passed since William Gibson’s genre making Neuromancer was published, time enough for its images of Japan to be absorbed by the Japanese, internalized and reconstituted, recreated and redeployed. During this postmodern paradise many of the standard tropes of cyberpunk from dense urbanization to fully wired societies were set. Just as Japanese writers and artists had re-imagined cyberpunk so too had artists in the west re-imagined cyberpunk Japan. Was it the case that Kaminski had first hand experience or was he simply using what was current at the time?

The final curiosity relating to Kaminski and his book is that this is a man who has written high tech, cyberpunk comics (including a long run on Iron Man) but remains virtually anonymous on the internet. He has no wikipedia page and his Marvel wiki page is bare to say the least.

As for the comic itself? Ghost Rider 2099 is positively archaic in its ability to imagine the future yet paradoxically not far off the mark. Caught up in the cyberpunk zeitgeist of the times its language sounds by today’s standards rather dated and reeks of trying-too-hard. However, when regarded from a distance, the substitution of certain profanities with tech based words (shock, glitch) and the ability of Kaminski to turn zeitgeist jargon into meaningful strings of communication is nothing short of great. This language works well with subdued colours and Leonardi’s confusing, flowing drawing style. And I have a major soft spot for the character name “Warewolf”. Why has this not been put to use yet outside of 2099? Like Mindfunk, Only Living Witness and Tumbleweed an abrupt end ensures enough open ends and a sense of irresolvable pain for the reader making this truly a lost gem.

Self Medication Blues: Opiate Aesthetics

Ministry

Back in 1999 Ministry's Dark Side of the Spoon made me so angry. Not angry in the way that Pantera or Lamb of God make you angry. It was an anger born of betrayal. I loved Filth Pig, in fact, I still do. That album is such a defiance of expectations yet is coherent and paradoxically satisfying as well as making you want more. Spoon on the other hand to me simply sounded like shit. Like a few guys in a studio with too many drugs enjoying a few too many in-jokes that had nothing to do with me.

Then a few months ago I finally got around to watching the Ministry documentary, FIX. I now feel like I understand something about Ministry that I never really grasped as a teen: Al Jourgensen is/was a straight up junkie. I mean, songs on Psalm 69 such as "Just on Fix", the accompanying video and embedded samples are not exactly opaque opiate references. I watched scene after scene of a rapidly diminishing (body mass, hair) Jourgensen shoot up, rant and rave was a fantastic disillusioning event. It was obvious, Spoon was made by a drug fucked junkie. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

I recently re-visited Spoon and while it sounded exactly as it did fourteen years earlier, post-FIX I noticed that it was much easier to hear the heroin. The strung out melodies, slumbering vocal performances and jarring instrumentation (banjos, saxophone) all evoke a drug fueled cognitive fog, total pleasure and willful absurdity. Underneath is a coherent neurosis, paranoia and claustrophobia so out there on the fringe as to make one wonder just how this album even got released, let alone on a major label (Warner). Hats of to Jourgensen for getting this malformed ugly little baby out into the world. While it still sounds the same, does it still make me angry? Is it as bad as I had originally thought?

It is not. In fact it is actually quite good. In a way it is the perfect execution of Jourgensen's muse, it is the point where he had given himself to the drug. Opiates had underpinned Ministry for a long time but it was not until Spoon that they came to dominate. The sense of physical and psychological decay is immense and a perfect explication of what had always been obvious yet implicit.

Alice in Chains

I have written elsewhere (perhaps that was an earlier version of this blog?) about Alice in Chains' Dirt. My opinion has long been: as an album, Dirt is less grunge and more metal and doom than its zeitgeist fans and critics positioned it. Rarely moving beyond a gentle gallop, the guitars are thick and the vocal style morose and eerie. It also happens to be a perfectly produced suite of love songs to heroin. However, where Dirt is essentially still in the infatuation phase, the follow up Alice in Chains (the self-titled with the three legged dog cover) is the saga of a man stuck in a vortex of codependence where non-opiate reality is steadily dissolving. With Dirt, Layne Staley was still in control, on Alice in Chains he was out (of it).

How far, indeed how bad did things get before Staley's death by overdose in 2002? Numerous people have pointed to the MTV unplugged set where Staley sat almost motionless in longsleeves (to cover up needle marks, scars) and sunglasses. If it was the case that he was virtually crippled by smack at that point then it was truly an amazing performance. He would have had to have dug deep. Or just be jonesing, dopesick for another fix with his eye on the prize to get it. This is not praise but neither is it condemnation.

Post-Staley Alice in Chains is to me a disappointment. While I am quite a fan of Jerry Cantrell's solo work, especially Degradation Trip (it maintains a twisted soul darkness carried over from the former band), Black Gives Way to Blue while a perfectly fine alt-rock record holds very little interest for me. Ultimately and most distubingly, what made Alice in Chains such a compelling listen for me was the opiate stained and scarred defiance and desperation of Layne Staley.

Nachtmystium

Now we come to the reason why this article was written. Blake Judd's Nachtmystium are/were one of the main reasons I was drawn to black metal several years ago. The nihilism and spite was tempered by a musical progressiveness, incorporating psychedelia, electronics and atmospherics. Furthermore, where most black metal tends to be (anti)religious, Nachtmystium is entirely urban, modern and bleak. Opening the sleeve of the Addicts vinyl reveals a young woman shooting up. The monochromatic picture is stark, she might as well be naked.

Earlier this month metal news sites all over the internet apparently misconstrued information about Nachtmytium, claiming the band were over. Delving into the comments of these articles revealed that many people held rather negative opinions of Judd. Particularly common was the experience of claiming to have been "ripped off"by him in mercantile transactions. The man seems to have a severe shortage of friends in his native Chicago. The reason for all of this supposedly being heroin.

Judd brings a third perspective to this riff on dope. Jourgensen in addition to being somewhat smart, was on a major label for a long time and had a reliable entourage of friends and folk with money invested in him to keep him in check even as he ran off the rails. Jourgensen had vision and was also an addict. And is also a survivor (and still an addict?). Staley was a straight up dope fiend, an artistic type with a personality perfectly configured to the drug. Perhaps lacking the determination of Jourgensen, he was burned alive by his addiction. Judd, meanwhile seems to be a mixture of the two. Here is a businessman coloured by opium. His product, his method, his execution are less entwined with dope as born from it. This makes his method somewhat dependent on it too. Yet like Jourgensen, here is a junkie with a will to survive, he keeps pushing through even as he burns those around him. How far can it go? The man is clearly inspired and smart but somewhat too cunning for his own good. With as many enemies as he supposedly adds, could he be a puncture wounded dead body in an alleyway?

So where does it all end? Inevitable overdoses? Prison terms? Rehabs and finding Jesus? There have yet to be significant numbers of successful careers founded on opiates. However, when combined with the traditional user/self-medicator, the rise and spread of the peculiarly American pharmaceutical company facilitated opiate addiction industry, who can say just where this will lead? I think I will just consult my oracle for answers...

Walks away and puts on Eyehategod's Self Medication Blues and wonders is smack was the primary reason for the utter suffocating nihilism of Pantera's Great Southern Trendkill.

Fields of Elysium - Capax Universi (Review)

I am ever so glad that blogs such as No Clean Singing exist. NCS manages to find the right balance between contemporary metal zeitgeist and the underground and presents it all with an editorial angle that suggests real interest and real love for the more extreme side of metal.

In a new series, blog author Austin Weber has started promoting a variety of high quality unsigned/independent/band camp releases. One that caught my ear was Fields of Elysium's Capax Universi.

Imagine if Rings of Saturn were less concerned with speed and "tech-for-tech's-sake" and instead focused on letting eerie harmonies breathe. Even the explicitly "brutal" death metal sections on this album have a lumbering, dangerously swinging feel to them before giving way to jazz jams that slow things down and take the same ideas in different directions. This is jazz and metal done right: it is so nice to see a band moving away from the grind/noise paradigm of blast beat+white noise snare+treble heavy dissonance = metal jazz (it worked for John Zorn... back in 1989, what year is it now?).

At times Capax  has a vibe not unlike Mr Bungle. I do not mean gonzo, nut-ball stuff but rather a kind of consciousness about what-is-what in the two genres and how to blend them.

Fields of Elysium are hot stuff and I can only hope they release more and soon.

Jazz for Metal 3: Stanton Moore

Photo used from press kit found on Stanton Moore's home page.

The early days of hard rock, the sixties and seventies were an interesting, chaotic primordial sludge that only hinted at where the genres would go in the future. Loudness, bombast, distortion and excess were the defining characteristics of the nascent genre. Harmonically, still grounded by the blues yet rhythmically and melodically taking flight, electrified, white boy blues, hard rock and heavy metal were just starting to take shape. Guitarists along with singers stood at the forefront, Hendrix and Jimmy Page encouraged virtuosity, mad genius.

So what about the rhythm section?

Drummers and bassists still played like they were in jazz bands, only louder. Where bassists would later break out of their traditional role thanks to imminent funk, soul and fusion revolutions (James Jamerson, Bootsy Collins, Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke), they were still boxed in by walking lines, poor amplification and hifi setups not yet capable of reproducing their representation (the excellent work of Jack Bruce notwithstanding)..

Drummers meanwhile would experience a remarkable simplification after birth. Listen to John Bonham, Mitch Mitchell and Bill Ward, in addition to playing hard they boogie, swing and play in what sounds at times like an undefined cyclone on top of, around and underneath the guitars. Time has seen a transformation in the concept of time, contemporary drummers, hemmed in by the urge to create "perfect" recordings have become far more linear, precise and deliberate. This is not inherently negative, after all even today, Fear Factory's Demanufacture still holds a powerful robotic, metronomic thrill and the crystal clear drum sounds on Behemoth's Evangelion are equally moving. Then there is Stanton Moore.

New Orleans native Stanton Moore better known for his hip hop groove and jazzy swing had a famous encounter with metal via Corrosion of Conformity's In the Arms of God. Do not be mistaken, Reed Mullin is more than a competent drummer, he has served the band well for two decades. Mullin is frequently inventive, groovy and knows how to hold the pocket. However, Moore in the same situation is a revelation on how things could be in metal if that is we want.

Moore's snare work alone is outstanding, he caresses, bashes and shakes that single drum in so many directions as to render obsolete the concept of ghost notes. Where many drummers wanting to fill would get tom happy-heavy, Moore summons up squalls of snare white noise. His hat and cymbal work is simple and unadorned yet unmistakably jazzy and where most drummers in the present tend toward double kick excess, Moore's work is an exercise in syncopated, push-pull restraint. When the guitars gallop forward Moore ducks, dips and bobs.  When he goes nuts it sounds like the drum kit is about to start falling over.

Moore is an exemplary rock, jazz, groove drummer and renowned for his ability to lay back and let others shine, yet when dropped into a hard rocking doom context he managed to recall a time, spirit and approach seldom seen today. I for one could stand to hear far mo(o)re jazzy drumming by jazz drummers in metal. Or at least more of Mr Moore in metal.

Death Metal and Horror

 Death metal and horror are closely related. In the past I have explored concepts such as the grotesque and extremity and their relationship to the genre. This time I want to unpack horror in death metal. Before proceeding, however, it is worthwhile to define, to clarify just what I mean by death metal and horror.

Death Metal

Death metal, simply defined, is one of the genre offshoots of heavy metal known as extreme metal. Extreme metal includes but is not limited to: black metal, grindcore, sludge and certain types of doom and ambient metal. There are many sub genres of death metal including old-school, Swedish, technical, melodic and brutal. Furthermore there are more distant, third generation relations such as deathcore which occupy a contested space within the genre (more on this below).

The defining musicological elements of death metal are: fast tempos, disorienting time changes, low tunings, chromaticism and what are known as guttural (low, grunted, shrieked, shouted) vocals. While these elements may be similarly found in other genres within metal what makes death metal distinct as a genre is its conceptual focus on violence, horror and the grotesque.

Death metal represents an extreme expression of the nihilism integral to punk and later thrash. When these genres failed to produce legitimate shock value, death metal went for the conceptual jugular. In a world of constant shocking visual news via first broadcast television and later the infinite repetition of the internet there is very little that disturbs the modern citizen for more than enough time it takes to change the channel. Death metal ramps up the abject to absurd levels taking horror to extremes. It creates a sonic and conceptual hurricane of the grotesque and invites the listener to take part.

In my opinion death metal has long ago exceeded its capacity to shock. Infinite repetition, duration, appropriation and imitation have lessened its impact. Furthermore, its innovators continue to age and either leave the “scene” or stay on, continuing to compose and perform with varying levels of success. However, newer groups, especially those within the subgenre known as technical death metal have found new ways of expanding on musical complexity by combining it with conceptual complexity.

Groups such as Obscura, Decrepit Birth and the Faceless take a speculative, science fiction based approach finding horror in the unknown infinity of space and physics. Gorguts famously plumbed the depths of the psyche, laying bare the total and utter despair of depression to a cacophony of dissonance and non-standard noise. Spawn of Possession encapsulate whole horror tropes within single compositions exploring themes such as occult apocalypse, maniacal murderers and child abuse.

To say that death metal is without nuance or subtlety belies the understandable ignorance of a novice listener. That said, the number of albums featuring covers and songs about violating, molesting and abusing women tend to outnumber the more intelligent articulations by a significant factor. The same can said though of hip hop and if we were to take a cheeky leap, the horror of most contemporary pop music and its insistence on status quo is as equally disturbing.

Horror

To me there are two primary definitions of horror: emotional and the genre as it exists within the creative arts. Better and more complete definitions exist all over the internet, so I will instead focus on a personal interpretation. Etymologically, the experience of horror is dread, veneration and religious awe. Over time it comes to be associated with fear generally as well as a bodily trembling. Horror is an emotion of which we have little to no control. It seizes and releases us on its whim. Horror even while sharing similar properties to shock is far more extreme in both intensity and duration. Shock requires exposition, demonstration. Horror meanwhile can be communicated through implication, indefinitely. Let me demonstrate via personal experience.

As a child I felt the constant horror of my father’s mental illness. While certain actions of his were shocking in the sense that they seemed instantaneous and irrational (tying his left hand behind his back because it was “evil”, torching his car, destroying all the furniture in the family home with one hand) it was the lingering threat of his illness that carried the most weight for me long after his institutionalization and so-called rehabilitation. For years I was afraid, to the point of dread and trembling that he would suddenly appear on a street corner or at the front door late at night for an encore. As a young adult I continued to feel this horror as it mutated into a general feeling of disease and low level fear whenever in public. It was not until many years later, living in Japan away from that whole context that I realized I had lived with his horror for such a long time.

Perhaps this experience was what drew me to horror as a genre in the first place, a sort of organic, internal homeopathic “treat like with like”. Horror had a resonance for me, it was one of the few modes of artistic expression where I saw myself accurately reflected. As I watched and read the accounts of others in horror, being horrified and horrifying I slowly started to build the emotional and psychological strategies required for decoupling the continued daily horror in my life.

But now, post-personal-horror, what keeps me affixed on the genre? Is it familiarity, nostalgia? As I have said elsewhere one of the key attributes of horror as a mode of artistic expression is that it is able to go to abject corporeal and moral extremity without apology. Total destruction, annihilation is permitted and to me this kind of active breaking down of concepts is a valuable intellectual and emotional exercise. In this way it is not unlike S&M, it is a consensual excursion into extremity and intensity not normally sanctioned in typical social contexts. We all feel intensely about certain things, for some people it is their preferences in whatever field they operate (friends, behaviours, foods, animals), some people achieve this intensity through courtship, sex and friendship as well as bullying, animosity and anger. Whatever the case, as I have written elsewhere, extremity and intensity are integral aspects of human existence and to me horror offers a productive space for the exploration of extremity from fear to liberation.

The connection

Death metal has long played with horror. Its obsession with nihilism and the abject means it shares many of the same tropes. Artwork frequently makes use of sexualized, dismembered corpses evoking both mass media representations of serial killers and the existing repertoire of horror. Lyrics read like movie scripts and are horrifyingly descriptive at times disgusting and offensive. Early death metal was especially successful in conveying a horror aesthetic due to the limited distribution of hard core horror and its relative lack of availability. Its locrian melodies, reverb and blast beats evoked horrors that we all knew of but had never experienced. Vocalists sounded like demons, beasts, people possessed.

However, over time access to legendary horror texts and the ability to create video and mass distribute it have significantly dulled the implied imaginary horror of death metal. Furthermore, infinite repetition and imitation have seen once original and terrifying ideas reduced to genre tropes readily available for re-assembly. One expression of this is the genre offshoot known as deathcore. Taking the low tunings and vocal techniques of death metal and utilizing typical horror imagery combined with the emotional intensity and musical simplicity of hardcore, deathcore willingly decontextualises and appropriates the aforementioned tropes. Marketed toward a younger audience the capacity of death metal to horrify is further disrupted.

By and large, death metal no longer has the same gut level capacity to horrify. But this is where the technical death metallers mentioned above begin to assert their authority and start exploring horror in more literary, intellectual ways, drawing on the traditions of horror as a rich and complex genre with a function greater than simply shock. Musically, however, is it possible for death metal to horrify anymore? I believe so. Possibility is found in the 2009-10 resurgence of old school death metal (sometimes known as “wind tunnel death metal”) in the vein of Teitanblood, Vulvark and Nocturnal Blood. These bands rearticulated the horror and terror of death metal’s earliest incarnation in a way that was more personally and psychologically risky and less fashionable combined with a less defined production aesthetic. The overabundance of reverb, buzzy guitars and rumbling drums make it sound like some sort of undead horror creature killing mercilessly in the next room. Then there is Portal.

Perhaps the greatest single encapsulation of horror and death metal aesthetics I have experienced is Portal’s Seepia. By taking production and compositional techniques to lateral extremes, this Australian death metal band is able to open a portal of horror. Rhythmic and melodic phrases twist and double back on themselves, emerge from and disappear into a sonic maelstrom. From beginning to end the whole experience is disorienting, bewildering and disturbing. And strangely, fascinating. There are few opportunities for us to consensually enter into horror-scapes without denouement, happy endings or plot twists. However, the unblinking relentlessness of Portal is quite different to that found in voyeuristic animal cruelty documentaries, snuff flicks and security camera footage. What makes Portal’s music such a perfect articulation of horror is that it relies on the imagination and interpretive capacity of the listener, there are few traditional hooks or melodic anchors for orientation.

Visually, conceptually and sonically death metal and horror have a tight interrelationship. I contend that the capacity for death metal as defined along traditional musicological-genre lines to horrify as significantly diminished as a result of the information explosion provided by the internet. However, I also argue that death metal has the full capacity to horrify in the original etymological sense of awe by combining musical complexity with speculative fiction style conceptual sophistication. This type of horror is about unraveling the artificial stasis of everyday perception and causes awe through unsettling preconceptions around identity and the physical universe. Finally, it is also my argument that death metal as practiced only by a minority such as Portal retains the capacity to be musicologically horrifying even as the genre as a whole becomes increasingly sanitized. Death metal has yet to give up the ghost and I am sure that even when it does it will likely fuck the ghost with a knife (or be fucked with a ghost knife).