Unthemed Weekly Music Roundup

So I've listened to a whole bunch of shit this week, and all of it seems worth commenting on, even if none of it really grabbed me enough in a good or bad way to write a full post about.

Ambient Noise Madness:
Black Boned Angel – Bliss And Void Inseparable
Vargr – Northern Black Supremacy

This week I also became reacquainted with Black Boned Angel, who I'd heard before and really liked but never acquired until now. Black Boned Angel is a solo project of one Campbell Kneale, a Wellingtonian, who also records as Birchfield Cat Motel. In the Black Boned Angel incarnation his music is dark, avant-garde ambient, a genre that I used to love but which I have neglected in recent years. Bliss And Void Inseparable is an hour long piece that lurches unnaturally from one moody, disturbing piece of creepy noise to another, and if you're into that sort of thing it's pretty good.

I stumbled across Bliss and Void Inseparable while purchasing Vargr's Nothern Black Supremacy, which bridges the gap between my old and new listening habits by taking ambient industrial and infusing it with a gritty dose of black metal. They do so by taking the BM genre trappings, gurgled vocals, tremolo guitar riffs and blast beat drums and cranking up the murkiness of the production, reducing it all into a distorted wash that blends in perfectly as a backdrop to the industrial noise. The two genre's really do make a surprisingly good match, not just because the sounds mould together so well, but also because they share a few aesthetic and philosophical principles, such as their charming fascination with fascist imagery.

1001 Albums:
The Beatles – A Hard Day's Night
Jacques Brel – Olympia 64

I quite liked With the Beatles which I listened to a month or so back. The songs were nothing special but they performed with a youthful vigour that surpassed any other similar album I've reached on this list so far and introduced the rawness and energy that characterises rock and roll in my mind and is lacking from the likes of say the Everly Brothers. A Hard Day's Night in comparison was a little bit of a disappointment. Perhaps it's just because I've been exposed to these songs literally since the day I was born, as an inescapable part of the pop cultural atmosphere, but the whole album just breezed right past my ears and left little impression.

Jacques Brel on the other hand is a total revelation. I've never heard of him before but in his native France (well, actually he's Belgian, but his musical career was based in France) he is considered an influential singer songwriter. I'm at a real loss as to how to describe his music. It certainly fits into no category I can think of, although iTunes has classified it as 'caberet', and that's as good a guess as any. Brel sings accompanied by a sprightly orchestra which includes plenty of accordion and piany (as opposed to piano!), giving it an definite French character. I guess superficially you might compare this album to those of Frank Sinatra, in that it's a single male vocalist backed by an orchestra which acts in a purely supporting role, but Brel's vocal quirks and dramatic, bitter delivery put me in mind of Mike Patton more than anyone. Brel is clearly a big influence on Patton, at least when he's in crooning mode. And I almost forgot to mention, this album is really good! I love it even though Brel's best quality is supposedly his lyrics and I can't understand a word of it, as it's all in French.

One other random chain of influence. British singer songwriter Scott Walker was heavily influenced by Brel, covering him often. Walker's 2006 album The Drift is one of the albums Mikael Akerfeldt has been citing as an influence on the latest Opeth album. Coming from such a far flung corner of the musical map I'm totally surprised (but also delighted) by just how relevant this guy is to the obscure corners of metaldom.

Sigur Rós - Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust

Sigur Rós are one of the few upbeat, happy bands to make serious inroads into my music collection, which in general resembles a grim nightmare world of hatred, despair and violence. I was a little disappointed with their b-sides album Hvarf/Heim that was released last year, but didn't think too much of it since their last two real albums (() and Takk) were so damn good. Sadly their new album with the nonstandard character filled title too long for me to be bothered typing out again disappoints in a similar way to Hvarf/Heim. At first I wondered (as I often do) if perhaps I haven't stuck my head so far out into the world of extreme metal that I've lost the ability to appreciate music without blast beats, vocals howled by a madman and lyrics about strangling people with their own intestines, so I made a point of listening to Ágætis Byrjun, one of their earlier albums, again and found that I still thought it rocked. By this highly scientific method I have proved that it is indeed Sigur Rós that have started to suck, not me.

Upon consideration I've decided that the thing that's changed about them is that their older albums had more flavour to their emotional landscape. While their main angle has always been prettiness, twinkling piano and uplift, on earlier albums it was leavened with moments of melancholy (and on () even heaviness) but they seem to have discarded these shades of subtlety in recent years. On this release the climactic, soaring conclusion to 'Ára bátur' (backed by the London Oratory School Choir) would on an earlier album have been the triumphant, redemptive centrepiece of an emotional journey that visited a variety of moods, but in this case is just the point where they crank things up from 'really really happy' to 'super extra fucking happy'.

On the other hand these guys are touring here next month, and I am still looking forward to it.

What I Did On My Weekend

PVC and Corsets Edition

I had no intention of making these posts a regular fixture on my blog but I keep doing things that I think are worth mentioning. I'm sure you'll forgive me a little livejournalness.

Saturday night wasn't that exciting. One group of friends is still holidaying in NZ, others were worn out from Friday night (more on that in a second) and the rest were either busy or boring so I was left on my own. I decided to head out to AbductionX because I hadn't been there in months, and it's comforting to see that nothing has changed. Everyone is drunk and there's a competent but generic thrash band playing. Anyway I got to see a few people I hadn't seen for a while so I'm glad I went, but next time I'll have to make sure I gather a bit of a posse because it can be a little dull on your own.

Friday night was a little more interesting. Once a month there's a fetish club held on Oxford Street called 'Hellfire', and I knew it well by reputation but I'd never been. Anyway my friend N. had gone last month and came back totally buzzed about how great it was and insisted that I come. I was a little skeptical but I decided to go around to his place for pre-drinks anyway. Upon arrival I had a real 'small world' moment when two of the people I met through the Death Metal Kindy Teacher were there. In a city the size of Sydney you wouldn't expect to run into people you know in unexpected places all the time the way you do in Christchurch but it still happens just as often. I guess even if the city is larger the social scenes remain the same size. As it happened there were a lot of people I knew there and they all talked me into coming along.

So once again I found myself in the Columbian, the least gay gay bar in Sydney, for more pre-drinks. It's a place where I have an unfortunate trend to get off my tits, but I restrained myself this time. We then went down the road to Hellfire, and as soon as I walked in the door I was glad I went.

It's not really a serious fetish club, more of what they refer to as an in-betweeners club, where genuine fetishists make up less than half of the attendees and the rest are merely curious onlookers who look just alternative enough to get in the door. It's worth going just to see the outfits and costumes, I suspect that for most attendees it's more about the fashion than any extreme sexual proclivities.

Mind you it must be noted that you'll still see some moderately crazy stuff there. People will just spontaneously start tying their partners up to conveniently placed scaffolds and start spanking or whipping them, or just engage in generally exhibitionist behaviour. The official entertainment involved rather more blood than I expected too. Still, it must be emphasised that it's not nearly as scary as it sounds, since it's a pretty mellow environment and kinky weird people generally tend to be easy going, friendly and approachable. I will probably go again and may even make a small effort to dress more appropriately.

As I write this it's a dirty grey Sunday afternoon and I'm trying to remember what we used to call all this wet stuff coming out of the sky back in NZ. More excitement next week...

People Will Be People

Battles – Mirrored

Imagine all the craziness of Dillinger Escape Plan, Don Caballero and free jazz and rhythm unfriendly hardcore in general combined with the mathematical esoterica of Meshuggah and shorn of any genre trappings and you'll be partway to conceiving of what Battles sound like. Heavily processed drums, guitars and vocals are accompanied by artificial synth noises culled from pop, R&B and less thinly disguised electronica, creating an almost completely abstract musical landscape, devoid of any kind of emotional or thematic grounding. Then they're arranged into mind melting rhythmic arrangements that are at least as insane as anything Meshuggah have ever produced while still remaining catchy and even danceable.

There are a few familiar names in the band's lineup. Guitarist Ian Williams used to be in Don Caballero, while the drummer is none other than John Stanier, most famous for being in Helmet at one time but whose special place in my heart comes from his work with Tomahawk.

Battles' peculiar warping of rhythm is an interesting and original one. As difficult as some of their songs are to follow a bit of close attention will reveal that most of them are composed in plain old 4/4 or 6/8, and their complexity comes from the inventive and unconventional application of syncopation and phrasing, an approach that I've never heard the likes of before and which is ingeniously executed by the band.

The first four tracks on the album are straight up classics which will have you scratching your head wondering what's going on at the same time as your foot is tapping to the infectious beat. Later on the album drags a little as the melodic hooks become more infrequent and the music sails further out into the realm of the completely abstract. The wonky math rock masturbation stays but they leave out the exuberant joy that manages to shine through the heavy, formal production on the first few tracks. For their originality and compositional talent alone this album is worth a listen, but don't feel too bad if you stop after a couple of songs.

Here's 'Atlas', the most approachable track on the album by a large degree:

Japanese People

Just when you think you've seen it all, they surprise you with even weirder sexual deviance.

Guys paying girls to photograph them dressed up as anime characters, complete with big head masks.

Sunday Night Satanic Head Fuck

Sunn O)))
Boris
Live in Sydney, May 6^th

I just came back from another mad weekend. At least this time I stayed within Sydney and it's immediate environs but I still ended up snatching only a few hours sleep on Friday and Saturday. This meant it was time to unenthusiastically shuffle along to another concert on the Sunday night, with a part of me wishing I was in bed but knowing that I would regret missing either of these bands.

The show was at the Factory Theatre in Enmore, which I'd never heard of before but turned out to be a very nice, spacious venue. The audience were generally an odd mix of metallers and hipsters, with black rimmed glasses and 'Trve Norwegian Black Metal' t-shirts combined comfortably in the same outfit.

You can't really tell from this picture but he's playing a double necked headless guitar, with one neck normal guitar and one neck bass guitar. Cool.

Boris were up first. I'm not that familiar with their stuff currently (although this will be remedied soon because they were fantastic) but I have been exposed to a fair amount of it via an old flatmate. These guys are a three piece from Japan and their music is pretty hard to categorise. The first half of their set comprised of a couple of long slow doom metal songs. Sparse vocals, moody melodies and long drawn out ambient build ups erupting into bursts of heaviness. After about half an hour of this stuff they suddenly launched into a set of high energy, upbeat numbers, which were punk in arrangement but retained a good dose of screechy electronic strangeness. In both modes they completely rocked my pants off. They're an absolutely brilliant live band in every respect (all three of them stunned me with their technical chops), with the drummer providing all the over the top stage antics expected of a Japanese band.

Cute petite Japanese girl played some seriously mean guitar. Awesome.

Also, it was nice to go to a metal gig with no moshing. Everyone was headbanging enthusiastically so there was a good vibe, but it was a pretty arty, geeky crowd and it was a welcome relief not to have to battle a thousand smelly meatheads just to hear some music.

Sunn O))) are named after a brand of amplifiers. Makes sense, they sure use a lot of them.

Next up were Sunn O))). These guys are an American drone metal band, and for this tour their line up featured the drummer from Boris on percussion and Attila Csihar (vocalist for Mayhem when they recorded De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas!). It was a very unique performance. Four of the musicians basically just stood there and let their guitars feed back for the whole hour, pausing only to occasionally twiddle knobs on their amps and effects decks, and very occasionally to play a note or two, while the percussionist rumbled away on a huge gong and Attila chanted ominous nonsense. To be honest while watching it I was pretty bored. It's a cool concept but there wasn't enough going on to keep the audience interested and in my worn out state I really just felt like going to sleep (it probably would have been better to have been seated for their set). Even just a couple of minutes into the set when only one member had appeared on stage and was just playing two bass notes over and over again I was tempted to turn around to my friend and sing 'Booooooooooooooringggggggggggg' along with the music. I didn't because I felt it would have been uncharitable that early on, but it did prove to be a fairly accurate prediction for the set ahead. There was one cool bit near the end when the drummer got to get up front and do a bit of screaming, posturing and crowd surfing, which injected some much needed dynamism into the act, but for the majority of the set it was much of the same.

Attila with the bass player. Like all good satanic monks they are dressed in spooky red robes.

On the other hand once you just let your brain switch off it became quite meditative. These guys like to play pretty fucking loud (although it wasn't as loud as I was expecting) and the constant drone of feedback is a pretty intense sort of sound (I could feel my trousers vibrating against my leg from the bass) so that the concert becomes as much a physical experience as a musical one. I have to admit my head is still ringing even now, and even though at the time it was a bit boring it's an experience that effects you on a subconscious level (I certainly had some interesting dreams about satanists dressed in red robes that night) and something about it has stayed with me in a way that Boris hasn't.

Time for a spot of ominous gong bashing.

Still for me (and from what I could tell for the rest of the audience too) Boris were the highlight. Those guys rocked out like motherfuckers and they're a contender for the best concert I've seen this year.