Fuck me, there is a LOT of music out in the world.
Here at Hi, Hello, How Are You and We’re Sorry We Said ‘Fuck You’ So Much Fridays, we are pleased to report that we are not angry anymore. The sky is blue, the breath is calm; we have run out of bile.
[Ron Howard Arrested Development voice]: They hadn’t.
We no longer have that “fuck you” energy in surplus.
[Ron Howard]: They do.
We will be conducting ourselves to the highest standard of calm, respect, and politeness.
[Ron Howard]: They will not.
We have converted this recurring feature into a space for sharing gardening tips, yoga positions for beginners, and ways to pretend to laugh at terrible New Yorker cartoons while sipping tea.
[Ron Howard]: They have not. They will continue to yell for no reason about music they have heard according to no particular schema or schedule.
Fuck you, Ron Howard, why not go listen to some of THIS music?
Tentacult – Lacerating Pattern
Tentacult’s tentacular debut album Lacerating Pattern proves that when it comes to playing weirdo death metal, it’s like the saying goes: there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
[Cats: Say what now, motherfucker?]
Apropos of almost literally nothing, Tentacult are from Sacramento. Also known as Sactown. ‘Mento. The ‘Cram’. And because of disputed claims to being the almond capital of the world, presumably also The Big Nut Sac. Maybe right now you are yelling at your computer screen, though, so fuck you, please calm down. The point from before is: Tentacult plays weirdo death metal, but the exact way they skin the weirdo death metal cat is by inhabiting weird rather than acting weird.
[Cats: Keep talking, asshole. You know we’re basically like pocket-sized tigers, right?]
Lacerating Pattern is just the kind of death metal to toast your tender marshmallow bits if you daydream about Japan’s Coffins playing a bunch of Voivod songs, or if you have ever gone on a peyote trip through the gardens of your mind only to find Demilich and Gorguts challenging a pool of molasses to a shuffleboard tournament aboard a ghost cruise ship. Yes, of course the shrimp are all-you-can-eat but when you fall asleep they crawl out your nostrils and eat you. Circle of life, bitch.
Tentacult’s death metal often goes slow and loose but also swerves when you’re not expecting it. [Cats: Just like you won’t expect us to launch ourselves at you out of a laundry basket full of towels.] “Seismic Assault” moves with a booty-shaking shimmy. “Into Astral Crypt” has woozy clean vocals and also a punishing staccato conclusion. The vocals sometimes sound like Chris Reifert having a particularly gruesome day. The bass? It churns. It tumbles. Where is it going when it wanders thus? Down the street for a pack of smokes? A quick jaunt into an alternate, shadow universe for a pack of… space smokes? You might also think about other fellow death metal weirdnesses like Blood Incantation or Cryptic Shift, and while the jittery drums and bouncing guitars on the title track might provoke involuntarily scratching at your arms, the doomy outro with little synth tweaks moves on a parallel track to the most recent Darkthr-.
Oh, sorry, please hold; my cat is halfway through carving L A C E R A T I N G P A T T E R N into my forehead.
Mansion – Second Death
[Me, thinking out loud]: Cults, man. Right? I don’t get it. What’s so hard about, just… NOT joining one?
[Me, thinking to myself]: Okay but what if somebody started a cult where the religion is just based around hanging out with curvy women and watching Star Trek?
[Me, to you]: Fuck you, okay? One can dream.
Hi, hello! Mansion! Mansion is the thing here. Try to pay attention. Mansion’s music is inspired by a small, obscure Christian cult from early to mid-20th century Finland, but if you are thinking you need to read an invisible ink bible or wear special underpants to listen to Mansion you are WRONG and I wish you would stop EMBARRASSING YOURSELF.
The whole vibe here is, well, extremely witchy and culty, so it may not surprise you to hear that the music operates in a doomy occult rock style in the same sauna-park as Messa, Sabbath Assembly, or the Devil’s Blood, with hints of Electric Wizard or Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats. The songs are mostly slow and low, with rich, detailed production and a profusion of different vocals (male, female, overlapping, whispered, crooning, threatening, choirs) that gives the album a liturgical feel. And the thing is, if you really sink into these songs, you’ll see that Mansion does better than just about any other band in this style at evoking both the menace and seduction of a cult. The lyrics are equal parts fantasy of belonging and secret knowledge and fantasy of escaping the stranglehold of charismatic leaders and zealous followers.
[Bob Newhart listening to Finnish heavy metal band voice:] But do they have great songs, you ask? Oh, you didn’t ask? Well fuck you, they have great songs anyway.
“Sword of God” swings and falls back in imitation of its own violent impulse (“Sword of God / will cut you down”). “The Court of the Sorrowless” (maybe the best song here) really gets cooking in the galloping midsection. “Second Death” is bleakest, descanting the expulsion of betrayers. The album is bold, dramatic, unsettling, and riveting. Fuckin’ cults, man – what’s the deal?
But, uh, if any of you ever get wind of a secretive sect of Callipygian Kirk-Watchers, or Big Booty Borg Yellers-At, or Voluptuous Vedek-Despisers, or Giant-Assed Janeway’s-Coffee Drinkers… well, shave my head and fit me for some goddamned robes already.
Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd – Deafening Supercells of Thunder and Death
You know the scene in The Boiling Seas of Mercury where James Cromwell finally emerges from underground, looks out over the cracked and ruined landscape, and says, “We’re gonna need a bigger ice bucket”? If you said yes, take a hike, because that’s not a real movie. Please, that’ll do.
Fuck you, there IS a connection here. Over the course of three swiftly appearing releases in 2022, Australia’s Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd have proven disquietingly adept at conjuring hellish soundscapes embodying the cris de coeur of our planet choking on the ashes of its heat death. Really hilarious stuff!
The band’s newest EP, Deafening Supercells of Thunder and Death, is another triumph of their ferocious atmospheric black metal. Hey, when I said atmospheric black metal did you think I meant some sad dweebs playing black metal karaoke to Explosions in the Sky songs? WRONG. Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd’s black metal is a dense, punishing maelstrom that feels much closer to Darkspace or even Axis of Perdition. The mechanical blasting of the drums against the frantic writhing of the guitar, the muffled banshee vocals struggling to emerge from the constant undercurrent of harsh noise and synth ambience: everything works together in unflinching defiance to paint a mental scene that is stark, beautiful, and terrifying.
It’s just like the prescient (and oddly specific) lyrics of Tom Waits’s “Time”:
“Well the smart money’s on [climate change] and the [sun-bleached bones of millions are] in the street
And the [Kryatjurrs] are breaking all the [eardrums].
And you’re east of east [Australia] and the [synth noise] is making speeches
And the [unrelenting torrent of guitar riffs] sounds like a round of applause.”
Misandristic Mutilation – Epoch of Matriarchal Mass Extermination
The Georges Seurat painting that inspired the music and lyrics to Stephen Sondheim’s acclaimed Sunday in the Park with George has very little to do with the debut EP from a North Carolina-based project called Misandristic Mutilation, except to say that if it had been called “Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Rapid Penile Embludgeonment” it probably would have won the goddamned Nobel Prize.
As the band name, song titles, cover art, and samples all suggest, the angle here is to flip the script on the violent misogyny that animates a lot of brutal death metal, which is all well and good so long as it still delivers the goods. And hey, guess what fuck you! Epoch of Matriarchal Mass Extermination is 15 minutes of rather satisfyingly rude sounds. The music spends most of its time barreling straight ahead, with snare-heavy drums shadowing the tightly coiled riffs. The vocals sound like they could be a woman, but on the other hand they also sound like they could be an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner tank-treading its way over several asthmatic cats.
The slam quotient is relatively small, but that just means that the piledriving pummel of the grinding death metal riffs severs the ol’ testicular vein approximately two hundred times in rapid succession before a sassy slam whips it out to twang back like a fleshly boomerang. Gross. Do you get the point(illism)? Spend a Sunday in the park with gross. Did you know Abraham Lincoln only used 272 words in the Gettysburg Address? Well these are gross sounds of the gross people, by the gross people, for the gross people. 273, asshole.
Polterwytch & Balberskult – Hexenwerk am Appenberg
I do not recommend trying to crawl inside my brain to live here with me. If you do, could you at least take off your shoes first so as to not track mud all over the damn carpet callosum? Anyway, this old brain has been thinking about Polterwytch and Balberskult (tbh not a great name for a buddy cop movie) but also about Amy Winehouse, so sing it with me:
“They tried to make me [make a dungeon synth]; / I said, ‘No, no, no.
‘Yes, I been [almost making a dungeon synth] but when I [make this much better thing instead] you’ll know, know, know.”
Helllllllllo and fuck you, this album/EP/demo/whatever is a split between two bands that say they are from Germany so we should probably believe them. It’s NOT dungeon synth and also PLEASE stop making dungeon synth there is TOO MUCH dungeon synth and anyway I ALREADY have Født til å herske so just fucking KNOCK IT OFF already.
This, erm, bewytching split is 22 minutes of so much fun that you might involuntarily reach for a cigarette afterward. The name of the game is, more or less, horror sleaze rock goosed along by organ and punky black metal rawness. I don’t know why you can’t just leave it at that, but if you insist, I guess it’s sort of like Malokarpatan after grinding up a mountain of early 1980s horror VHS tapes and snorting them like several hundreds of lines of cocaine. “Obacht!” sounds like Darkthrone playing “The Monster Mash.” If you squint at it, maybe you’ll see Type O Negative’s October Rust as played by Black Flag. Man, fuck if I know what the hell you do.
We’re of course in the business of splitting hairs, so yes of course Polterwytch is black metal-tinged punk whereas Balberskult is punk-tinged black metal, but what if you just stuffed all those idiot words into a dumpster and remembered how much goddamned fun you can have listening to mean ol’ rock and roll like the Stooges or the Misfits or the Murder City Devils or Rocket from the Crypt or w h a t e v e r.
Fuck you, this shit rules. You shit, fuck this rules. Fuck shit, this rules you.
