Fuck me, there is a LOT of music out in the world.
So, what happens is, I listen to music, and a lot of it I figure out that I like, and I also sometimes have a brain that makes words appear even when I didn’t ask it to, and if there wasn’t a place like this where I could stick some of those words they might start blurting themselves out during other conversations and I could find myself, yet again, with a certain amount of explaining to do.
Which means, if you ever wondered whether the periodic irritation of this column is mostly an internal monologue that started dribbling externally and that nobody found the kill switch for yet, welcome and congratulations and I’m sorry that you might just butter the same side of your toast as me. But hey, it’s a weird world out there, so why bother trying to keep our own extra weird stuff stuffed inside?
Fuck you, why not go listen to some of THIS music?
Hallow’s Victim – False Magick Propaganda
A true science fact for you is that if a band spells the word “magick” with the vestigial ‘k’ then you KNOW they are not joking around anymore, thnk y v mch. To be doubly sure about the not joking around, Hallow’s Victim also made themselves be from Chile, the country so skinny there just isn’t enough ROOM for joking around. You ever sat in the middle seat on an airplane between a very large person (sorry, Argentina) and a very large body of water? That’s Chile, all the time.
Anyway, tierra del fueck you if you thought this was only a geography lesson today. Today’s lesson is all about Hallow’s Victim’s oppressively bluesy doom and the way their cracklingly live sound might have been drunk straight from the marrow of a busted-open Sabbath bone with a little Electric Wizard grime sprinkled on top. “A Thousand Bad Trips” hangs its droning hum in the air like a hot, fanless night, while “The Hex” kicks out a l’il extra boogie energy.
These are fat sounds from a thin country and I bet if you asked the band they would prefer that we focus on the sinuous shimmy of the guitar leads on “Midnight Sorcerer” instead of the shape of their country but it must be acknowledged that we are not entirely in control of where sound takes us.
Coffin Mulch – Spectral Intercession
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was taking all of the hip-thrusting, lemon-squeezing lust of rock and roll and vanishing it from so much heavy metal. Seriously, how many sad-shit black metal albums or blast-happy death metal albums or gauzy, fussed-over modern metal albums have you heard that are just played by rote, stiff, utterly sexless mooks who look like the only time they’ve seen a dancefloor is when they skulked away from Aunt Ida’s wedding reception to huff glue and think about baseball cards in their Celica in the parking lot?
Hi, hello, how are you? How’s the family? No, I haven’t been to Scotland either, but- Well, yes, probably they’ve heard of Bob Newhart. Sure. No, I don’t know how a people that supposedly speaks English gets from ‘Glasgow’ to ‘Glaswegian’ either. Maybe they really like a wedge salad? Anyway, fuck you, of course I am neglecting to tell you that the reason you should listen to Coffin Mulch’s debut album of cantankerous hollering and loud instrument noises is that, unlike the wedding buzzkills that litter so many scenes, Spectral Intercession is overflowing with danceable rhythm.
Please don’t misunderstand: this is entirely putrid, classic-styled old-school death metal, all the way down to the HM-2 buzzsaw tone and vocalist Al, who sounds like a walrus impersonating Martin van Drunen with a really bad toothache. But these haggis-humpers know their way around movement, so each riff-obsessed song on this punkily belligerent album is stuffed with boogieing, shimmying, high-stepping, and soft-shoeing. It is fun as shit and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Behold… the Arctopus – Interstellar Overtrove
Every now and then here at Friendly Yahtzee Frigates and Fuck You Fridays, we have to stretch the ol’ grey matter a little more than usual to find a respectable reason to drop “fuck you” in the text of these write-ups. On Behold… the Arctopus’s latest (arct)opus, though, the chittering, needling, dribbling sounds themselves all but scream FUCK YOU at the idea of making crowd-pleasing music, or maybe even at the idea of making music.
You know how Primus is terrible music made by incredible musicians? Why do I ask, you say? Oh, no reason. Interstellar Overtrove is one of the more baffling experiences you are likely to have in music this year, since it features – ostensibly – aggressively skronky and avant-garde progressive metal songwriting played without distortion, amplification, or drums. The instrumentation is primarily guitar synth and v drums with some difficult to identify percussion, and so on the whole the impact is soft, tick-tacky, and nearly ambient in effect.
For literally no reason whatsoever, the opening to “Hot for Emotions” replicates the opening drums to Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher,” and although “Def Lepton” does not sound at all like Def Leppard, parts of it sound like “Flight of the Bumblebee,” so… rimsky-korsofcourse this is musical anarchy of a truly alienating order. “Echoes of Deletion” has more in common with left-field modular synth music and industrial than anything else, but perhaps the most frustrating thing of all is that the whole album, as you settle into it, becomes rather beautiful and almost… soothing.
But fuck you, yes, the whole thing still sounds like a mid-80s smooth jazz fusion album a la David Sanborn or Lee Ritenour, except made by a Chuck E. Cheese robot band absolutely coked out of their gourds. It’s basically awesome.
Koreltsak – Ascending Path to the Abyss
If you’re ever feeling rude and cheeky, a fair burn to lob in the direction of raw black metal is that if it wasn’t so raw it would be easier to hear how bad it was. And if we’re being honest? My word is there ever a lot of single-mindedly shitty raw black metal out there. The one-person project Koreltsak, apparently based in Los Angeles, has certainly got the raw part nailed down. On the project’s third demo, Ascending Path to the Abyss, decrepit dungeon synth-y interludes butt up against thoroughly in-the-red sonics, with the drums in particular often sounding like a helicopter attempting to land on top of a child’s tape recorder.
But the (absolutely un)important thing here is that Koreltsak’s Bandcamp page claims that the music is inspired by samurai, so buddy, if you think I am not going to make some absolutely unwarranted parallels to the Wu-Tang Clan, fuck you and your absolutely unprotected neck. It is almost sort of true that the weedly layers of high guitar leads otherwise buried in the thick whirlwind of general blackened moves might be described as “liquid swords,” but those would be pretty basic instructions before leafing herbs. At around the seven-minute mark of the second of two long-form tunes here, something like maybe cello or violin pokes its head in to the mix just to say what’s up, but more like a suavely sarcastic Method Man what’s up than a crackhead Tourette’s ODB what’s up. Too much reverb ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.
I feel like there is literally nothing else I can tell you here. Either you want to listen to well-constructed and splatteringly chaotic raw black metal that made some random idiot from this website think about the Wu-Tang Clan or you don’t. Chumps Ruin Everything Around Me.
Night Verses – Every Sound Has a Color in the Valley of Night: Part One
I’m not usually one to care much about lyrics in music, but when I first sat down with Night Verses I was pretty astonished to learn that Every Sound Has a Color in the Valley of Night: Part One is actually a concept album based on putting the plot of the Star Trek: The Next Generation fourth season episode “Night Terrors” into iambic pentameter. Pretty specific, I know, but check out these excerpts:
When Troi in sleep sought those whose ship was stuck
In space, she floated with a ponytail.
And Crusher found herself alone and scared
When bodies dead sat up and, silent, stared.
I get that everybody loves ol’ Bill Shakespeare, but some of these vocals are just too much:
Two spaceships, both alike in dignity;
In Federation space, we lay our scene.
From lack of sleep break to near mutiny
Where Guinan’s guns make Guinan’s chums stay clean.
Friend, fuck you and then some, of course this is not what’s happening here. Night Verses are an instrumental trio from Los Angeles, and on this engrossing, cinematic album, they play a chunky, proggy style of heavy math rock with a pronouncedly dreamy shoegaze edge.
Their style is a bit like a less techy Animals as Leaders, so it lands somewhere in the neighborhood of Cloudkicker via Red Sparowes. The drumming in particular, though, often breaks out into surprisingly brutal sections of flailing, and the climax of “Arrival” sounds like Deftones via Meshuggah. In the battle of you versus Night Verses, you lose.
Mortual – Evil Incarnation
Costa Rica’s Mortual have supposedly named themselves after a portmanteau of ‘death’ and ‘ritual’, sure, but are we certain there aren’t other options lurking in the letters? Could it actually be short for “Mortgage Casual” (for nebbish bankers’ dress codes)? What about “Mortar-Sexual” (for horny bricklayers)? Or maybe “Mortadella: Conceptual” (for irritatingly experimental Italian chefs)?
Fuck you, even though it’s not unusual to be punned by anyone this is hardly what I set out to do. Mortual specializes in exactly the kind of death metal you would play for someone who thought that maybe death metal wasn’t very heavy. I mean, I don’t know what kind of silly geese you hang out with, but if they are that specific kind of silly goose you can say to them, “Hello, silly goose, listen to Mortual, please.”
This demo, though it is clear and perfectly precise, is almost offensively heavy. In this year’s death metal stakes, only Negative Vortex really makes a play for being sonically heavier, but to land that kind of comparison – not to mention plenty of Morbid Angel, Atomic Aggressor, and maybe a bit of Krisiun – is nothing to sneeze at. Did you hear me? Please stop sneezing! I bet that even the pope would stop sneezing when that rumbling midsection in “Dimensional Chaos” pulls back the curtains and lets in a couple of sneaky guitar solos. He would stop sneezing and he would say, “Ay papi, yo soy the pope and these riffs are so greasy it’s like a Lenten fish fry up in here and that’s no papal bull!”
Just… fucking listen to it already, yes?
