Fuck me, there is a LOT of music out in the world.
You ever think about how words are really weird? Right now, for example, you are reading Volume Five of this odyssey of idiocy, this citadel of shittiness, this arena of a-holes, this pile of bile known as Fritos & Fun-Dip Present: Fuck You Friday. But, like… five? Where did that goddamn word come from?
Big shoutout to the Germans and their schnitzel-ing fünf, because otherwise the English silly-walking five sure looks lonely out here with the Spanish olé-ing cinco and the French ennui-ing cinq and the Italians spicy-a meatballing cinque and don’t even get me started on the old Romans with their fiddling quinque and the feta-ing Greeks with their pente.
The important etymological point here is, this is volume five so we are featuring eight bands. Go f[ive]king fi[ve]gure.
Fuck you, why not go listen to some of THIS music?
Dragoncorpse – The Drakketh Saga
In the pantheon of “weirdest faces you could make during sex,” I think the face you make when hearing something so absolutely preposterous that you can’t help but laugh and then do a weird snort-guffaw that you also sort of choke on is probably at least in the top 10.
By the by, have you heard Dragoncorpse? The Drakketh Saga is this international band’s debut EP and of course I mean this in the kindest way possible but I have no idea what in the absolute FUCK is happening here. Dragoncorpse’s music includes power metal, symphonic death metal, slamming deathcore, hypermodern metalcore/melodic death metal, and, I don’t know, probably even some cumbia or something that I missed because there’s so much going on.
If you asked, “Are there interludes?” I can say: There are interludes! Also: they are terrible! But there are also five songs which are NOT interludes and they are uniformly batshit fucking crazy. In a good way, I’m pretty sure! “Blood and Stones” sounds like Rhapsody of Fire force-fed through a deathcore meat grinder, which yes, definitely makes a spicy-a meatball. Other parts here sound like Between the Buried and Me’s The Silent Circus played by Job for a Cowboy but also Fleshgod Apocalypse? And hell, “From the Sky” starts with a speedy power metal sheen that could belong to Unleash the Archers or Helion Prime but then it diverts into an ass-shaking, chugging breakdown but which also has some unmistakable Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia energy thrown in?
After listening to this 25-minute EP I feel a little bit like somebody turned a disco ball into a grenade and shoved it up my nostrils. Dragoncorpse, in that respect, is a little bit like the Turducken: a thing that nature never intended and that nobody particularly requested but which radiates a weird, alluring energy from which you can’t turn away and after all, you may as well eat because your grandmother went to a LOT of trouble, young lady.
Altered States – Survival
I have not met and do not know Ryan Lipynsky, but given the number of bands he is in I am beginning to suspect that the whole thing might somehow be a tax scam. According to ye olde Metal-Archives (which is, after all, the IRS of the heavy metal internet), Lipysnky is currently in 14 bands, which puts him just 400,986 shy of 401k. If he wants to make it a round 15, I would suggest a doo-wop band called Velvet Shine & the W-9s.
Anyway, fuck you and please stop distracting me with tax puns. Named after a song from a 2020 EP by Green Dragon (yet another band featuring Lipynsky and bassist Zack Kurland), Altered States plays a bruising yet concise style of doom that leans more on psychedelic than stoner tropes but dabbles in both. The riff is the primary focus here, with Kurland’s bass and Chris Daly’s drums walloping and chastening the beat.
The vocals tilt from disaffected holler to gruesome croon, sometimes coming across like a snarlier John Garcia, and the overall picture tends to straddle an imaginary midground between Kyuss and High on Fire. Survival boasts synths and abstruse noise elements, but the effect is not nearly as much in the “hellish lingering comedown from a really bad trip” vibe as Unearthly Trance. The extended guitar solo and jam on “A Murder of Crows” is the real business, and with due respect to Lipynsky’s Serpentine Path project, “Mycelium” is where the TRUE serpentine energy lives, with that wildly sinuous main riff and patiently stalking synth overtones.
Altered States: come for the riffs, leave if they try to offer you tax preparation advice.
Dead Luck – Suerte Muerta
Do you suppose anyone has ever read the instructions “Lather, Rinse, Repeat” on a shampoo bottle too literally and then become trapped in the shower for all eternity, the sands of time slipping through their fingers like so many fragrant suds? I agree that it is unlikely but I do NOT feel supported when you criticize me.
The thing is, Mexico’s Dead Luck may as well have misread the dang Head & Shoulders as “Crust, Grind, Repeat,” and you should be thankful they did, because their album Suerte Muerta (that’s Spanish for “it means the same goddamn thing, asshole”) is a careening blast of powerful, blown-out, habitually aggrieved crust.
This four-piece leans towards the more metallic side of crust, so although the tempos race and the drums often slip into a tight d-beat, the vocals are a hoarse deathly roar and the guitar makes space for squealing solos and rock and roll excess. You could think of Disfear or you could think of Skitsystem but after that you will need to think of your own damn comparisons because I will be too busy listening to Suerte Muerta at unrecommended volumes and throwing school buses at grizzly bears to do your work for you.
Bethexuhl Anxalthan – Bethexuhl Anxalthan
I keep laughing because these made-up words both sound like prescription medications.
“Anxalthan is not for everyone. Side effects may include vomiting, nausea, headache, fatigue, fire ass, dancing fingernails, the faint but lingering conviction that your toaster is plotting to murder you…”
“Ask your doctor about prescription Bethexuhl, and get back to what you love: gnawing clamorously at the frayed edges of reality.”
“Fuck you!” those of you who work in the pharmaceutical industry are surely yelling. Okay, then how about some lo-fi black metal instead. The Swiss/French/German trio’s debut album is undeniably raw, but it’s hardly the washed-out, all-treble blur of so much raw black metal. The guitar tone in particular, while still in the red, is broad and has deep, scuzzy roots. The overall atmosphere is dank but aggressive, riffy and sometimes melancholy. Surely the LLN vibe is intentional, both in the riffing styles as well as the meticulously decrepit atmosphere, but the vocals and oppressive murk are sometimes reminiscent of Wrest’s early Leviathan albums, and “KWQIB” sounds a little like someone left a De Mysteriis dom Sathanas LP on top of a hot radiator.
More to the point, though, the song titles are all nonsensical combinations of letters, which means that Bethexuhl Anxalthan is either extremely committed to cheating at Scrabble, or that the titles are actually complicated acrostics. “RSFAQ,” for example, could mean “Reuben Sandwiches For All Queens,” which is a wholesome message for all ages. “SGFMNP,” on the other hand, clearly stands for “Sickly Giraffes Find Many New Problems,” while “TCWJUK” is a little hard not to take personally: Terrible Crackpot Writes Junk, U Know?
Toadvine – Neon and Chrome
[The band is Toadvine, which is also the name of a character from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The demo title is Neon and Chrome, which is also part of a lyric from the song “Out Tonight” from the musical Rent. The path forward is clear.]
The Kid sat at the edge of the fire’s leaping radius. He spat, wiped the back of his hand to his mouth and then to his leg in atavistic recitation of some ancient and god-forsook ritual.
Five hundred and twenty five thousands, give or take six hundred minutes, he said.
Five songs from Toadvine ambled out of a dust-coated boombox but whether the shambling livewire production came from the machine or from the degenerate intention of the musicians therein he did not know and could not say. A rumor of thunder skirted the foothills and lightning tendrils like jagged teeth chewed the horizon.
Hell, the Kid spat again. The sound rattled like black/thrash dragged over hot crust punk coals and “Diesel (Fuck)” rang out like an especially paranoid outtake from Darkthrone’s Panzerfaust. Sentinel of an unrepentant miscreance.
Can’t sleep, he spoke to the nothing in which he sat and from which his bones had once arisen and to whence all life would someday return, in the city of neon and chrome.
Cuando los bebés españoles lloran.
Did the Kid know why the demo’s intro and outro both dabbled in lo-fi outsider twang. He well and truly did not but he entreated the sky and the naked earth to embrace entropy and enjoy the tunes. Music is insensate chaos and Toadvine quivered like a lone filament struck by a hammer vibration from deep athwart the earth, formlessness in only temporary abeyance.
The music stopped. The Kid walked on, a mirage unto no eyes that human thought has reckoned.
Seurat – Lahota
It is by sheer coincidence that this edition of Fancy Friends and Fuck You Friday features a band by the name of Seurat after having waxed idiotical about the French painter a few columns back in the course of discussing Misandristic Mutilation. L’État, c’est fuck you.
Pointillism or non, Seurat’s Lahota is a short, sharp shock of furious Finnish hardcore, beautifully recorded and featuring an impassioned banshee vocal performance. The bass tone and playing is so good that I would like to take it out for a nice Italian dinner, Lady and the Tramp-style. And yet, sadness prevails.
There’s a darkly emotional edge to these songs, like a gothy punk-pop dredged in a viscous hardcore swamp, but then – zut alors! – “Lahota II” waltzes in like a lost cut from Hammers of Misfortune’s 17th Street so do you even know what is happening I do not know what is happening I’m not here this can’t be happening.
Ladies and gentlejerks of the jury, in closing allow me to say that while I thought maybe the song title “Maailman Tuhkat” meant something cute and whimsical like “The Mailman Took a Hat,” apparently it means “The Ashes of the World.” Shit.
Pozo – Ambivalencia Preprogramada
Did you know that some French people call a corndog “le pogo”?
Hello and – as always – cordially fuck you, the point here is about Colombia’s Pozo, whose Ambivalencia Preprogramada sounds very little at all like a corndog. Instead, this delightful band plays a seething, post-punk style of rattling hardcore with furious, snotty, disaffected vocals from a woman who sounds like she has had just about enough of your shit.
Pozo’s guitars are a heavily phased wash, and the bass hits a bouncy post-punk stride against the d-beat-leaning drums. In a way, the whole package feels like a darkly glittering punk dance club playing early Killing Joke, New Model Army, or Siouxsie and the Banshees by way of Discharge. “Kytate” and “Carencias” are the most compositionally interesting pieces, but the EP gets in, yells in your ear, and gets out.
What are the chances that some French knucklehead right at this very moment is listening to Pozo and trying to come up with some wisecracks about perros de maíz?
JakkaL – At Etiam
It is by yet another sheer coincidence that this installment of French Fries, Futons, and Fuck You Friday features two different albums with songs called “Mycelium”… or IS IT? (It is.) But if you’re sitting out there thinking, “Man, what a fungi he is!” then… you’re right! I am a lot of fun. But I am probably both less and fewer fun than JakkaL’s At Etiam, which is the whole gosh darn thing about why we’re here so please stop making me blush.
JakkaL is an instrumental duo from London, and on their debut album At Etiam they have made a heavy, synth-forward post-rock album that verges close enough to metal (and adjacent) acts like Red Sparowes, Russian Circles, or REZN, because yes, fuck you, I know this site is supposed to be only for all the metal fit to hit ‘Print’ for. In fact, At Etiam makes a compelling counterpart to REZN’s recently released Solace. Like that album, At Etiam is spacious and warm yet unafraid to get heavy, and both albums manage a wide universe of sound and texture into a mercifully concise package.
So, from the cover art to the samples used to the overall space-y yet cozy atmosphere, JakkaL might just be, with its optimism and futurism, the musical equivalent of mid-century modern design that you never knew you needed. At Etiam is a beautiful album, and although the worst lemon-suckers of you out there might be acting like a heavyweight boxer shelled your walnuts with a sucker punch to the crotch because there are no blast beats or gang vocals or brutal slams or irresponsibly fast shredding or whatever, may I remind you that there are ALSO no dungeon synths? Blessed be.
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TIL lo-fi early Darkthrone worship is the most appropriate musical accompaniment to reading Blood Meridian. Toadvine you son of a bitch, he said. Thanks, Dan. This absolutely made my day.