Fuck me, there is a LOT of music out in the world.
(For any eagle-eyed ear-sores out there, you may have spotted that today’s Fuck You Friday is not, in fact, happening on a Friday. But because Fuck You Friday is purely a state of mind, welcome to Why Don’t You Go Fuck Yourself Wednesday. We are glad you are here.)
Our latest installment of Fart Yoga (look it up, it’s…not a thing) and Fuck You Friday is brought to you by the letter ‘P’, for Poor Planning Produces Poor Poetry.
Specifically, I had been toying with the (terrible) idea of writing each of the below blurbs in a different poetic form (haiku, sonnet, sestina, etc). Terrible ideas are our stock in trade, after all. Better judgment (or, more likely, laziness) intervened, however, so instead you are left only with this introductory acrostic:
From the beginning, the purpose was not to highlight
Unusual music, but to
Cackle and spit in the face of my natural writing tendencies, which
Keep trending towards the verbose and belabored.
You understand, though, that profanity and feigned
Outrage are convenient fronts for my otherwise
Unassuming personality. I rarely yell
“Fuck you” at anyone, but it’s fun to try on different
Roles, which is why
I will close by yelling, “Fuck you and the
Dick you rode in on. I hope you enjoy some goddamned music,
Asshole, and if
You don’t, I hope you have a splendidly fucktastic day anyway.”
Fuck you, why not go listen to some of THIS music?
Fishlizard – Dissected Alive
It’s just like the young piano student’s favorite mnemonic had it: Every Good Boy Deserves Fishlizard. Dissected Alive is this young Aussie band’s first EP, and across 17 minutes of tight, blazing death/thrash it does exactly what (I assume) your piano teacher always told you not to do: behaves rudely and has a lot of fun.
“But surely,” you are asking, “couldn’t there be other vaguely rhyming band name options?” Fuck you, I am on it. Wishgizzard. Dishblizzard. Phishwizard. Trish, scissored. (You do you, Trish.) [Sean Connery voice]: Mish Moneypizzard. Roosterfish. The options are… well, not endless, because that’s the end.
Fishlizard’s style is sometimes like a cleaned-up version of early death metal like Autopsy, Scream Bloody Gore, or Possessed, but they also have a little of the bouncing crunch of modern Kreator. The EP’s most boisterous (moisterous?) element is its cracklingly tight, punchy drum sound, and on a tune like “Manufactured Habitat,” Fishlizard whips up enough sass ‘n tuff that it could almost be a lost outtake from Entombed’s Morning Star.
Quit being toadally lame and listen to Fishlizard, you shit.
Modoki – Atom Sphere
Every now and then in this format of foolishness, this enfilade of infamy, this je ne sais quoi of bleh bluh blay blah, the “fuck you” is hard to find. But in Atom Sphere, Mitsuru Tabata’s Modoki trio puts the “fuck you” front and center with a 34-minute suite of sweat-hot freakout jams. Tabata is a guitarist with a long, varied pedigree in the Japanese psychedelic rock scene, most notably as a former member of both Boredoms and Acid Mothers Temple.
Atom Sphere puts the spotlight squarely on Tabata’s free-form psych improv guitar, which wails and squeals and layers and tweaks like slow-motion Hendrix against a pulpy, humid rhythm backing from Mike Vest on bass and Dave Sneddon on drums. Vest’s bass also gets up to some funky psych business low-down in the mix, but Sneddon keeps the train on the tracks. Tabata also sits in on organ for some quieter numbers, but his inquisitive voice is the same. On the ballsier, garage band in space numbers, the trio lands a little like Acid King without vocals, but on a song like the closer, “Transmigration of Souls,” the scene is a Krautrocky drift into Ghost pastoralisms.
Truth be told, there is so much ambient fuzz in this album that you’ll be cleaning out your dryer’s lint trap for weeks. Do you hate your neighbors? Play this loud. Love your neighbors? Play it louder.
Harmacist – II
I could surely tell you a lot of things that Harmacist sounds like, but one thing they do not sound like is Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity being mauled by a rabid wooly mammoth. And yet, and yet…
First of all, if you’re going to try and tell me that wooly mammoths didn’t live during the supremacy of Relapse Records’ late-’90s mathcore blitz, then I suppose you’re also going to try and tell me that Jesus didn’t ride a stegosaurus to his job at the Fuck You Factory. More to the point, though, Harmacist makes a thick, smeary, dangerously belligerent sort of grindy, powerviolence-leaning hardcore with mathy shards buried in the blown-out mix.
If you believe Bandcamp (and, fuck you, why not), Harmacist is a band from Mississippi comprised of “3 guitars, 1 bass, 1 drums, 1 vomit,” and that is the kind of no-nonsense mission statement I can get behind. “Let’s Have a Talk” sounds a little like early Coalesce getting shivved in an alley by Unsane, but you could really dip your toes into any moment of these 13 songs/18 minutes and find yourself pummeled upside the head with a brick wrapped in barbed wire. That’s… a good thing!
Harmacist also has another album released in February. So why did I pick this one? Well, it’s the second one and I heard it first and also mind your goddamned business, we are not a codfish.
Lyrre – Not All Who Dream Are Asleep
If you try to ping my misfiring neurons about what in the heck a hurdy-gurdy is, I am at least 50% confident that it is the instrument featured in “Low Man’s Lyric” from Metallica’s Reload AND that it is what the Swedish Chef from the Muppets says when he climaxes. Fuck you, there are a lot of musical instruments out there.
The fine folks in Poland’s Lyrre are here, apparently, to make further mockery of our collectively vanishing gray matter, because their dark, folk-tinged gothic metal does not feature a lyre but rather a hurdy-gurdy. At least we can rest easy that they did not name their guileless debut album Hey Everyone We Totally Swear We Made These Sounds With Only A Trombone.
While we’re at it, though, Michalina Malisz’s hurdy-gurdy playing across this delightful, elegant album adds fascinating textures and timbres to the otherwise crunchy, modern folk metal. It sounds alternately like an oud, some kind of bagpipe, an accordion, and a bassoon. Her singing also occasionally reminds this particular ham-fisted mope-head of Anneke van Giersbergen (the Gathering vibes are maybe strongest on the triumphant “Chariot of Sun”).
I really don’t know who you are out there, but it seems like it would take a particularly sour, puckered-ass ding-dong to cop a bad attitude about this lovely music. Try it – or don’t! I don’t think Yoda ever visited Poland.
FemurSnap – Apothecarial Rite of a Blasphemous Wake
Socrates, at least in Plato’s representation, was a real fuckin’ wise-ass. If you can read ancient Greek, I am terribly sorry about your persistent virginity BUT at least you can probably say with more accuracy whatever the hell Socrates is supposed to have said. The basic idea is he said, about some supposed wise person, that “he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know.” Like I said, a fuckin’ wise-ass.
I will follow that particular Socratic wisdom here, though, in telling you that, friends, I do not fucking know what is going on in this FemurSnap album. A snapped femur sounds painful, but maybe a FemurSnap™ is a helpful device to repair fractured bone? But man… Australia, huh? If you happened to investigate Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd (Ed. see Fuck You Friday, Volume 3) and thought, “Well, this is the peak of nightmare music,” THEN FUCK YOU AND THINK AGAIN.
Here are some things I do not know about FemurSnap. I do not know if it is a single person or a large band or a malignant algorithm. I do not know what many of these sounds are. I do not know if the songs have been generated by AI. I do not know that I enjoy listening to it, but it is absolutely enthralling. It sounds a little bit like the Axis of Perdition after baking in the desert sun, or like the abstract death metal renderings of Portal or Grave Upheaval reconstructing the DNA of early grindcore. Or, honestly, it sounds almost as often like pure ambient noise, washes of hostile intent and busted drum programming and guitars or synth patches or what the shit else being sucked down a concrete vortex.
Provocation and antagonism for their own sake are generally some weak-sauce bullshittery, but FemurSnap is one of the only times in recent memory that I can recall thinking, “Is this music… actually music?” and not being enraged. It’s great!
Crimson Dawn – It Came From the Stars
If I was some kind of asshole, I might look at the cover art here and throw some shade at the unlikely coloration of the water spilling from that busted old well. But – fuck you, surprise! – I’m too jazzed on this Italian band’s music. That’s why we’re here! Music is good and for sharing, so please stop yawning, Mom.
Enn ee wheyy (I’m not Welsh, just a jackass), Crimson Dawn plays a dark, doomed heavy metal with epic aspirations. With Claudio Cesari’s soaring vocals and Emanuele Laghi’s busy keyboards, though, the music just as often lends itself to power metal heroism. “Solace in Death” and “Fade Away” are stormy trad metal strides, while album closer “The Colour Out of Space” is, shall we say, on dicey plagiarist grounds vis a vis Iron Maiden when the riff finally stomps in. Cesari’s voice, in fact, sometimes lands in a magical midpoint between Messiah Marcolin and latter-day Bruce Dickinson. (Scream for me, Long Bewitched.)
Do you think you’re allergic to power metal? How delightfully unique and not at all boring! Power metal is great and you sound like a chump. Crimson Dawn don’t expect you front-row for Blind Guardian, but I would like you to have a little self-respect. Crimson Dawn just might be the three cups of leafy greens your diet needs. Slow power metal? Chardly know ‘er. Heavy/doom? I’m getting hot under the collard. Epic metal? Kale yeah!
