Whitechapel - This is Exile

Tuesday 02 September 2008 at 07:21 am Whitechapel - This is Exile



I had a flashback to the early days of 1993. Death metal had just about peaked, and many people were looking for the next big thing -- in terms of style. Brutality was the catchphrase, and since millions of American kids had just rediscovered early Napalm Death thanks to a desperate search for the roots of underground metal, new bands were popping up that promised to be more brutal than before, usually by playing much faster and eliminating all melody. This flashback was prompted by hearing the hype about Whitechapel in one ear, and the reality played in the other.

Cycles repeat because there are usually relatively few different options in life, but infinite ways to pull off the winning option. After death metal croaked and black metal blew itself out, the usual retro cycle came in, where the remnants of the last decade are swept into a dustpan, recombined, and out comes the "new" solution. What has happened in the merging of metal and emo, pop punk, alternative and new hardcore is a lot like what happened in 1983 when the first thrash bands formed: metal riffs in punk song structures. But punk has grown up, gotten more technical, and in order to justify its dystopian nature, has taken the aesthetic from 1960s protest songs -- jarring, slightly dissonant, poignant bittersweet, etc -- and blended it with technicality, creating what I refer to as The Cinema of Discontinuous Image. Much of this is the influence of MTV, which specialized in videos in which rapid cutaways from radically different imagery were seen as desirable; these later influenced how Hollywood films dialogue, so it's not inconceivable they influenced metal. The new hardcore is technical, melodic, and like carnival music in that it moves between ludicrous extremes without building continuity, because being deconstructive is its political fashion.

Whitechapel isn't alone in being part of this new genre -- let's call it metalcore -- that embraces many variants, some as "death metal" as the recent Behemoth CDs, and others as punk as Fugazi but obviously more mile-a-minute. Do people ever get tired of hearing the next most extreme thing? They should, since this stuff isn't extreme; it's sped up, and not in any meaningful way from the first Morbid Angel album. It's like shredders showing off without knowing how to write songs, and since its basic concept of being protest deconstructive is fundamentally opposed to the ideas of songwriting anyway, this music ends up being a random pile of stuff that's hard to play mixed in with stuff that, like Meshuggah, sounds hard to play until you realize it's rhythm noodling on a chord. Whitechapel lives by this variation, where fast scalar single note playing is followed by five-position power chord shred riffs, and then the song collapses into some percussive geometries from the E chord, then repeats with keyboards added, this time. Songs build up to a peak frenzy, and then just end. Nothing is learned, nothing is created, but it has political authenticity -- comrade Stalin is pleased! -- because it is deconstructive protest music that emphasizes the following tenets: life is terrible, there's nothing we can do, give up now, wail and whine instead of doing anything, it's not my fault, it's not your fault.

The synthesized faux death vocals don't help either. I can see how this CD would impress someone new to the genre because it tries to "break barriers," but these are all stylistic. It has nothing to say except perhaps to add on to The Brat Manifesto, which is a giant scroll containing all of the justifications created by the human species for doing nothing about its problems, personal or collective. Whitechapel screams out a kind of fetishism with child abuse, poverty, self-destruction and failure, because these excuse the heavy weight of having to take on life. Hint to Whitechapel: all of the great bands became great because they took on that heavy weight like a charging bull and found a way to convert it into positive enemy, like inverse aikido where the attack ends up converting his own momentum into a throw of his hapless prey. You, on the other hand, have run from it, and that is why you are this season's trend and tomorrow's ash on the wind.

Lord Wind - Atlantean Monument

Monday 25 August 2008 at 8:38 pm Lord Wind - Atlantean Monument



Probably the best work from Eastclan group since 1998, this release culminates the pagan dreamlike melodies that have been appearing in Graveland and Lord Wind releases. Over an hour long, it represents the best music currently available for those who long for the society of honor that ruled long ago, before dualistic religions, technology and finance took over our lives.

Read the review: Lord Wind - Atlantean Monument

Trash Talk

Thursday 21 August 2008 at 12:23 pm Trash Talk - S/T
Trash Talk Collective, 2008



When music runs out of ideas, it recycles old genres. When that happens, smart music fans look for the exceptions that give both style and substance some tweaks to make them compatible with the current time and its challenges. Where the retro-thrash movement has produced some imitators of no substance, Trash Talk comes crashing in with a punk-inspired, thrash-influenced offering that invokes elements of the underground that developed while music festered in nu-metal and metalcore. Although the band compares themselves to Cryptic Slaughter, and comparisons could easily be drawn to Municipal Waste, what fuels this mania is more akin to the suffocated rage and dissident misanthropy that made Eyehategod and Acid Bath favorites of the late 1990s. Songs are sludgy rants that explode into frenetic activity, then smash it all down again, like a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. It is as if Trash Talk enjoy beating on their audience, lulling them into a false sense of security such as they might enjoy from media, religious or government leaders, and then detonating the result in a searing diatribe. While people will compare this record to works from Discharge or DRI, it's more like Eyehategod meets Crass with Neurosis in the wings. It's fortunate to see punk hardcore given another chance with this acerbic testament to the enduring powers of resistance through surliness.

Trash Talk - Dig MP3
Trash Talk Homepage

Jesu - Why Are We Not Perfect

Monday 18 August 2008 at 6:48 pm Jesu - Why Are We Not Perfect
Hydra Head, 2008

Justin Broadrick demonstrated through his early works a desire for that moment of unitivity when the conscious mind and emotions synchronized. Through Godflesh, and later Techno Animal and Final, he showed a passion for bringing colossal structures to bear on moments of quiet contemplation. With Jesu, he resurrects his music outside the ghetto that extremist offerings can be, and melds into post-rock disparate influences from industrial, shoegaze, noisepop, and so forth. Jesu, protean as all Broadrick projects are, in turn twisted from more radiantly noisy to its current softer state. On "Why Are We Not Perfect" Jesu moves the slider closest to shoegaze and pop, losing much of the more complicated structuring and sound that made earlier Jesu challenging. This gambit may prove risky: many in the post-rock fanclub would like to leave behind what so rigidly defines rock and brings the moths to its one-size-fits-all dose, and "Why Are Not Perfect" drapes its nearly ecclesiastical encompassing layered sound over the exuberant shuffle beats of rock/pop. Song structures are not linear but follow a verse chorus pattern culminating in a serenity like the moment after a surf crashes on the beach when water lapses into absorbent, silent sand. Less jagged distortion and cleaner, plaintive emo vocals guide each song and sounds elide smoothly from abrasive feedback to silken, reminiscent of shoegaze classics like Medicine and My Bloody Valentine. While this EP satisfies as a taste, and an exploration, this reviewer hopes Broadrick abandons the past -- and doesn't relapse into his influences -- so he can keep exploring the seemingly erratic, intense jigsaw song structures he served up on the self-titled Jesu debut.

Austin, TX

Monday 18 August 2008 at 09:55 am When I write about metal, I often distinguish works -- which I consider to, at their best, be art -- by how honest they are. It's fairly easy to tell, although most people find that unnerving. An honest work tries to communicate with you; a dishonest work tries to game you by convincing you it's something it's not, so that you do x, or y or z that benefits those who made it. It's a virus, in other words.

Dishonest works are generally the product of The Hipster, which is any person who tries to be hip for the sake of their own ego, instead of having a useful function of any kind. Hipsters are parasites on the social scene in that they want attention for being unexceptional, and since they can't succeed at life by being exceptional -- including making good music, being people we'd like to know, etc -- they become dramatic and draw attention to themselves with increasingly radical styles of dress and behavior. If you ever find someone doing something humiliating, stupid, freakish, or pointless while slyly watching you out of the corner of their eye, you've found the same psychology.

It's not much different from parasitic religions that convince people to fail at life so they can succeed at the board game called "What God Likes." I'm not saying life is about success, or material success, just that if you want to have a good life, you need to have some function and challenge yourself to do it well. Hipsters don't do that. They want the reward without the work.

We have a hipster core here in Texas. It's called Austin. Hipsters are fond of one of many modern illusions, a socialized liberalism -- a well-intentioned emotion channeled into a fashion that pretends to be an ideology, but never achieves its goals, despite making a hash of things on its path -- that like drugs makes us feel better, but doesn't solve any problems, and strengthens rather than weakens its ostensible enemy, the total state. Hipsters are useful because they beat liberalism out of people who are still able to think.

When I went to Austin, I was all about tolerance. I was still clueless as to the problems of the world, mainly because I spent most of my time working.



When I saw the liberal paradise that is Austin, I realized that liberalism is basically parasitism. "If someone has x, and I don't, I deserve it, and I'll force them to share with social guilt"; after seeing that, and the complete social havoc -- where good people were not only ignored but socially persecuted, and vapid whores predominated and suffocated art and culture with their lies -- I left Austin and liberalism behind.

(There may be an honest liberalism. To me, when I was a liberal, it meant not allowing big pointless entities to rule over people in destructive ways. I'm thinking about all the people who got dicked over by their stupid jobs, all the toxic waste dumped into rivers, all the junk products that just ended up in landfills, all the overdeveloped areas where forests were sacrificed, etc. For me, liberalism meant restraining humanity's appetite with common sense. I soon learned that if you oppose power, however, you soon get people who oppose power for power's sake because they're powerless. They have no power in life and no control over their own appetites, so they hate anything that resembles power, but since they're weak, they don't attack directly but through whining. I was a classical liberal, which meant treat people fairly. That philosophy however decays un-gracefully into revenge for the underdog, hatred of excellence, and desire to turn the world into one uniform Safe(tm) place. I realized quickly how this plays into the hands of our leaders. It distracts our best people and sends them off to defend those who have failed at life, and then the activists in turn fail at life, so they spent their time fighting for the right to fail. It's a sick cycle but easily avoidable if you think it through: the problem isn't power, but people in power without a clue, and they're in power because all the failed people want pleasant illusions instead of reality. So if you're an honest liberal, don't take this column as a personal attack, or a political statement. I'm pointing out how liberalism commonly decays into self-importance, hipsterism and other problems, not trying to assault the emotional or psychological impetus behind liberal thinking.)

Austin is the hipster capital of the world, in many ways. I've been to Seattle and to San Francisco, to L.A. (Silver Lake) and to Mizzoula, MT, all of which are hipster-havens. But Austin hipsters have the city locked down. Under the guise of fighting the man, you're supposed to be weird and freaky and do whatever the man doesn't expect. But you go back to work the next day, having learned nothing. It's a good town to work food service until you're 42 and then become a regular, bitter writer on Alternet.org.

Austin suffocates every quality band who tries to set up shop there. Metal bands in particular suffer because, unless you infiltrate the social network and start behaving like a hipster, no one will attend your shows. People are too afraid of being un-hip to go see an unknown, unless that "unknown" is secretly an underground favorite. As a result, the best Austin bands are the ones that have nothing to do with the "seen" (Scene) there.

Emos, hipsters, modern primitives, trend whores, carnies, defiant minorities and lesbians, drug use theorists, mantra-chanting New Agers, feminists, body modification fetishists, coprophages, "witches," faux artists of all variety, embittered defiant hippies, foreskin collectors, and other failures of all sorts cluster in Austin. They have failed at making something of their lives, so they are using cognitive dissonance, and making themselves a Big Deal in social/moral/hip circles.

When I seize power, it will be very unwise for anyone to spend time in Austin. The B-52 carries 27 tons of high explosive and, if unleashed on a city block, literally landscapes it into a moon surface of ceramicized dirt covered in the dust of charred, vaporized plants, animals, and buildings -- this is a consequence of the TNT/HE mix used in modern bombs. The explosions are so loud that people up to a mile away will lose hearing for the next two days. Some of the fireballs approximate a quarter mile in size, and can be seen from nearby cities. A flight of B-52s, properly targetted, can erase a city so thoroughly that from space it resembles a desert, and this is without use of nuclear weapons.

That form of horror, visited upon Austin, will not cost the human race any geniuses. Nor will it diminish its artistic or social potential. Instead, it will increase our potential by removing the false and giving space to something new, like weeding a garden and dropping in seeds for non-parasitic plants. Don't cry for Austin, because that entire town is one giant emo hipster cognitive dissonance passive aggression parasite. Its death in flaming vapor will be a great step forward for taste and beauty.

Metal music, like nature, is not about fashion. It's not about being nice to everyone so they can feel good for being exceptional. It's about results. About making civilizations that make people inhale sharply whenever they see their ruins for the next 10,000 years. About getting art, science, culture, etc. right. About doing things that matter because they're not the same humdrum. Forging new spaces, destroying emptiness, making life interesting and giving us something to live for. Like nature, in metal life is struggle, but struggle for beauty and not the bloated, ugly, self-importance of an ego. Metal is anti-hipster, and anti-Austin.

Dismemberment is metal

Monday 18 August 2008 at 07:48 am
(click for larger image)

Police on Thursday accused a Brazilian man of killing and dismembering his 17-year-old British girlfriend, taking pictures of her body parts with his cell phone and stuffing her torso in a suitcase.

One photo appeared to have been taken in a bathroom shower stall, showing Burke's severed head placed on the chest of her torso along with a bloody butcher knife.
Man accused of killing, dismembering girlfriend

So she was dating a cocaine fueled maniac, probably oblivious, and he dismembered her and got a good laugh out of it. Life is nature, folks. There are predators everywhere. Watch your step, but don't forget the lulz when you accidentally cut up a corpse and post cell phone pics.

al-Qaeda translator releases metal album

Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 07:16 am

Raised and homeschooled through high school by his parents on an isolated farm in Southern California, Adam played Little League baseball and participated in Christian homeschool support groups. As an adolescent he became very involved in the underground Death metal community. In 1993, he formed his own one-man band called Aphasia, releasing a few limited self-releaesed tapes.

This is one such tape, originally titled "DELIRIUM: 7 Hallucinatory Interludes, Op.2" A melange of experimental sounds and ambient passages, fused with occassional guitar interludes and drum machines bringing us into the adolescent mind of this future propagandist. Perhaps the final words of the last track, "Insanity," summarize the character of this esoteric individual when he closes the album with the words: "I'm mad!"

Adam Gadahn - Aphasia Op. 2

DARK TRANQUILLITY (Not Quite)

Wednesday 06 August 2008 at 6:31 pm For whatever reason, a lot of Swedish death metal seems to be created by the inordinately young, and often, the inordinately skilled for their age. Even before ENTOMBED released Clandestine, and at the same time that AT THE GATES was gelling its impulses, the members of DARK TRANQUILLITY, only 15 and 16 themselves, were putting together high-intensity death metal that was more melodic than the common offerings of the time, but whose stylistic bent would be adopted by hordes younger replacements within a matter of years.

The now-classics that emerged from Stockholm managed to channel their youthfulness into solid composition without succumbing to it as such. Unfortunately for DARK TRANQUILLITY, the band's compositions of the period bear the weight of their ambitious minds rather poorly; seemingly decent ideas are too-far fractured to be remembered long, and what remains are riffs -- often well-written riffs -- but only that, parsed through series of confusing time signature changes and strange juxtapositions of melody. As demo material it is probably suitable, but its broader importance was over-inflated by the incestuous Swedish scene, as well as the playful dress-up of simpler ideas that became more conspicuously pursued by the band itself as time moved on.

This is just one tale among many of bands who were almost there, damned by any number of circumstances or peculiarities. It is interesting to reflect on them in the context of better things.

Averse Sefira: Trees don't pay taxes

Monday 04 August 2008 at 12:06 pm

One of the more lucid metal interviews:


Click to Play

Neuraxis - The Thin Line Between

Tuesday 22 July 2008 at 11:19 am

Neuraxis civilize metalcore by infusing it with heavy doses of progressive metal and technical death metal. Metalcore -- known for its rapid changes between seemingly irrelevant parts equally borrowed from metal, nu-metal, emo and hardcore -- grew out of the MTV culture where images on a screen tell an unfolding story, and each scene is mirrored by changes in the music. Neuraxis give the metalcore as developed by bands like Behemoth or Necrophagist a good run for its money by massaging a more listenable and more musical instrumentalism into it, creating a work that will stick with the listener longer than its genremates of lesser dimensionality.

This CD has more in common with Cynic or Gordian Knot in the way it is composed. Taking a page from the jazz-metal book, it loosely ties itself together with a clearly defined harmonic pattern, and then riffs on that, using rhythm and harmony to hold together lead riffs that are more harmony than melody but have a "melodic" effect. Its ability to turn a good riff and work within harmony should appeal to fans of Opeth. Vocals remind me of Dying Fetus or Behemoth; the death metal parts can be attributed to Immolation as processed through Deeds of Flesh, with plenty of quick short melodies played in power chords funneled past hard-stop barrages; solos are classic progressive metal and extremely well executed, and the only nu-metal influence is the tendency to periodically bounce -- but this is limited more than elsewhere in this genre.

Neuraxis can grow by giving in fully to their progressive tendencies, and escaping metalcore's tendency to write roundrobin songs that cycle around a harmonic pattern without developing it because they are too busy mashing together disparate elements. What defines this CD are the rhythm tracks which fall between leads and repetitive riffs, letting the songs grow organically at the same time they batter the listener into submission. I hope this band continue developing in this style and go beyond the conventions of metalcore to bring out in their music what is most promising, which is what has always made metal rise above the horde of noise: ripping riffs which also have some musical depth, combined in such a way as to make the listener wake up out of a daily stupor and wonder how to fit his or her brain around the flow of relentless sound.

Neuraxis - The Thin Line Between - Dreaming the End mp3 sample (45 seconds)