And now we're coming to the part of the year where I talk about artists and albums I might have otherwise missed throughout the course of the year and just never got the chance to really discuss. The biggest reason why these reviews tend to be as late as they are is fairly simple: they've either slipped the net, fallen off my schedule, or have such lengthy, complicated discographies that it makes talking about them at length a real endeavor. And that's before we get to a band like Liars, a LA band that has only two consistent elements: a dark, menacing, groove-driven sound, and the fact that they'll keep evolving and pushing said sound in weird directions. They're a band that's infamous for making left turns, and thus expecting any sort of consistency from them was doomed the second they dropped They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and alienated a massive chunk of their fanbase. From there, they got noisier, darker, and heavier with their krautrock-inspired Drum's Not Dead, the more spacious and brutish self-titled album, or the warped, more gothic side of Sisterworld. They then followed it with WIXIW in 2012... which I didn't really love. The choice to go for more stiff, brittle electronic-inspired rhythms just wasn't to my taste, and while it is a subtle record, the songwriting didn't really grip me either. It was also a record that eschewed some of the darkness of earlier work, which for me was a slight misstep - I like Liars when they get surreal and creepy and ominous, and while there was that brand of feeling coming from WIXIW, it was muted to the album's detriment. So when I heard about Mess, I was intrigued, not just by the critical acclaim but by the fact that the recording was apparently very different, a lot more confident and strident. And given that Liars can make some genuinely thrilling music, I was definitely interested - what did we get here?
I'm actually pretty damn proud of how this video turned out. Probably one of the more difficult reviews to articulate that I've written, and it looks pretty solid. Okay, next up is Mariah. Stay tuned!
There are certain rock bands that if you mention them in polite conversation, you'll have pegged yourself as a hardcore music nerd. Bands that critics love but who have never scored a hit on any chart of which you've ever heard - or you know, maybe just the one song, but it's a song that the fans will swear isn't representative of the band at all. Bands that have vast discographies of albums critics and hardcore fans will talk about for hours while everyone else in the room shrugs and goes back to their beer. And as a newer critic who's always hunting for more music, it's always been a difficult and yet vastly rewarding challenge to go through these discographies. Last year for me was Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and Push The Sky Away ended up on my list of favourite albums of that year. And this year, the challenge looked even greater, as I was now tackling a band with a monstrous reputation in a genre up to a few years ago I wouldn't have even called music. The band was called Swans, originating the early 80s as an act in the no-wave scene, focused less on cohesive melodies and lyrical songs than crushing percussion, musical textures, and guttural phrases repeated into a mantra. It was a musical philosophy that flew in the face of what I liked in music... and yet by the time I got to Children of God, they had won me over wholesale. Perhaps it was the moment they opted for a slightly more melodic approach, but Swans' brand of punishing viscera was effective beyond that, primal, emotionally gripping, and genuinely unsettling, but also nuanced and frequently beautiful and outside of a brief moment on a major label with The Burning World, some of the most inspired compositions I'd heard in a while, with the biggest highlights for me being the thought-provoking Children Of God and the damn near inspired The Great Annihilator. And thus I can only imagine how it felt for Swans fans in the late 90s when the band broke up after Soundtracks for the Blind. And yet in 2010, the band reformed with a new lineup and released My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, which was a decent return but not quite up to the standards of their truly amazing material, just feeling a little underweight. Thankfully, Swans kicked things into harsher gears with The Seer in 2012, and now they're back with their newest album To Be Kind, which is so far one of the most critically acclaimed records of the year. So with that in mind, how did it go?
I think I'm obliged to say this as a professional: the majority of music that is designed to be 'scary' and 'intimidating' fucking sucks. This is another incident where the fact that I am a music critic and have heard a ton of music speaks to a disconnect with the average music listener, but I think part of it comes down to my growth of musical knowledge. As I've said before, I jumped pretty much from boy bands and Eminem straight to power/symphonic metal, thus skipping the rap rock/rap metal/thrash period that most young teenage guys go through. But really, the more I think about that, the more I'm grateful I avoided those trends, because any retrospective examination into those genres has just filled me with contempt, disgust, and revulsion. And as someone who can get back into the teenage mindset enough to tolerate even the occasional Simple Plan song, there's no goddamn excuse for the dearth of quality in this genre. So yeah, I'll come out and say it outright: acts like Hollywood Undead and Killswitch Engage and Atreyu and Underoath and Bring Me The Horizon just plain suck. Musically, they aren't within spitting distance of quality metal and content-wise, they just bore me. Too much of this material is wrapped up in unfortunate sadomasochistic tendencies (you know, always talking about the BLOOD and the PAIN and the SUFFERING and all that nonsense), and it's very rare that any of it is all that compelling. On top of that, it's hard for me to consider any of these acts remotely 'scary' or even all that intimidating, particularly recent entries in the genre. I think most of my issues with these acts comes back to similar issues that I have with the American horror film industry, namely that there is no subtlety or pacing. In the pursuit of over-the-top 'gorn', too many acts come across as way too ridiculous to take seriously, the music of immature white boys who don't have the sophistication or patience to take in something better. The slightly better side of the genre features acts that aren't taking themselves all that seriously but are still trying to come across as 'scary', and this tends to remind me of the trashy, too-hip-for-the-room schlock otherwise known as 90s horror films. But either way, it's not scary to me. The obsession with gore and tits in some of this material is exploitative, but it's not compelling exploitation and it has nothing to say. I'll make an exception for some of Marilyn Manson's material because he has occasionally made some interesting albums, but even that stuff relies too much on shock imagery and the musical equivalent of a jump scare. And sure, that can be startling or revolting, but that doesn't horrify me or even come across as particularly memorable. I think some of it is desensitization, but really, outside of the occasional political polemic Marilyn Manson includes (which you tend to see more of in the industrial punk/metal scene), there's just not much there. I think the other big problem with my retrospective examination of these genres is that I'm a fan of Eminem, who is probably the only artist I can think of who balanced being scary with being listenable. That's another issue I have with most of the modern metalcore or horrorcore acts: the overproduction stands out, making the songs appear too polished to really get under my skin. Hell, this even happened a bit with Eminem's Relapse (although I'd argue that overproduction choice was part of the point of that album, showing just how heinous and simultaneously pathetic Slim Shady really was). But let's ask the question why The Marshall Mathers LP, arguably the best horrorcore album ever made, works and actually does come across as genuinely scary to me, even to this day. Well, there are a number of elements that contribute here: Dr. Dre's minimalistic, grimy beats, the bleak production, the tone of menace present even on the lighter tracks, or the fact that Eminem always brings an intensity that feels genuine (one of my recurring problems with horrorcore rapper Cage, by the way). But what I think made the album work the best was the grounding of it all in real, human places. Songs like 'The Way I Am', 'Kill You', 'Stan', 'Marshall Mathers', and especially 'Kim' are creepy and unnerving not just because of the instrumentation and subject matter, but the fact that they feel like they're grounded in human emotion and come from a very real, very dark place. Eminem isn't trying to ingratiate himself to you or come across like a decent human being, he's intentionally exposing his very worst impulses to the microphone and daring you to listen. This purposeful alienation really adds an interesting concept to the rest of his career, particularly on subsequent albums, and some could read that alienation and subsequent loneliness and disillusionment with fame as founding factors for his next three albums. But I'm getting off-track, because what the ultimate point I'm trying to make is that even today, Eminem managed to nail the elements that make music genuinely scary for me, stuff that can send a shiver down my spine. And really, no other artist who has followed him has really managed to capture that same fear. Until now. Because The Flaming Lips, the experimental rock act known for some of the strangest and psychedelic experiments in music have just released their thirteenth studio album The Terror - and it scared the shit out of me.
Let's talk about barriers of entry in music. Because believe me, they exist. For those of you who only listen to mainstream music, there are a whole collection of off-beat oddities that have made tons of great music and yet never have gotten a single major airplay hit. Most of the time this is because the music is weird and inaccessible, or contains disturbing subject matter, or is just so goddamn insane that there's no way that sort of music would ever get airplay. The average music listener won't know about these bands, and odds are, they won't care. But say you've heard lots of buzz about this band, or they did get that one airplay hit and you're intrigued enough to go on Wikipedia and find out more - only to discover this act has been around for decades and have about seven or eight more albums of material. It's incredibly overwhelming to look at the thick discographies of acts like Radiohead (which is really the most commercial of my examples) or Frank Zappa or The Flaming Lips or Chumbawamba or Porcupine Tree and feel hopelessly lost. It gets even worse when you realize the act has live cuts that are apparently better than the studio albums because of poor production or incorrect mixing or acts that have periods in their discography where they made a fair amount of crap or acts that rely on concept albums that are layered and intricate and need to listened to all in one piece to be understood as an album statement (every prog-rock band EVER). And at that point, most casual music listeners unwilling to make the deep dive will just throw up their hands and say 'Fuck it' and go back to listening to the radio. And really, you can't exactly blame them. Digging into complex discographies requires a time investment that most people just don't have. People just don't have the time or patience these days, in the days of shuffling and playlists, to wade through albums to find the songs they might like. Now I admit I'm something of a traditionalist here - I like album statements and concept albums, I like it when artists go for that overarching theme in their work that makes all the songs resonate all the stronger - but, once again, not everyone has the luxury of a long subway commute on which to listen to music. And even with that, I was intimidated when I first considered tackling this project. I mean, fifteen albums worth of material (seventeen if you include the Grinderman project, which I did), and all the type of dense, complicated material that Pitchfork slobbers over? I knew precisely two songs from Nick Cave before tackling this - one from a collaboration with the Flaming Lips (an act that is famously inaccessible, at one point making an album called Zaireeka that I had to remix myself because it was designed to be played simultaneously on four different stereos), and his signature song 'The Mercy Seat'. That song I found on a collection of underground material from the 80s, buried between a Cameleons UK track (that's actually pretty awesome, btw) and a song from The Rain Parade (not quite as good), and while I loved 'The Mercy Seat' (and I still do, it's fucking glorious), I was still uneasy about the challenge ahead of me. It didn't make things easier when I discovered that nearly everyone had a different 'entry point' for Nick Cave's material, and labelled different albums as overrated or crap. So I threw up my hands and just started at the beginning with the first album Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds made called From Here To Eternity, the album he made after leaving his punk band Birthday Party. And as much as I like post-punk, I was prepared for an onslaught of dreary, infuriatingly inaccessible garbage. It's great to be proven wrong. Because Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are fucking awesome.
Short version: it's incredibly weird and the mix of the psychedelic and avant-garde will throw some people off, but in terms of beautifully coherent and powerful art, you're not going to find a better album this year. Highly recommended. Have you ever contemplated the end of the world? It may seem like a vague, strange, almost-silly question, drenched in unfortunate implications and terrible pop culture (particularly in this year), but it's something that's fascinated the thinkers, great and small, throughout time. Everyone wonders what the end of the world would be like, what will happen to this tiny planet suspended in the galactic cosmos. Less often is the question of what one would do at the end of the world, and outside of Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World, a Steve Carrell/Keira Knightley movie that's currently one of my most anticipated movies of the summer, most people don't have good answers to the question. Why? Well, perhaps because the question is loaded, because you're not only forced to contemplate your death in the question, but the chance that everything around you, everything you've ever cherished and loved, will be gone with you. No memories left behind, no fond recollections, no legacy, no... nothing. It was what Melancholia tried (and arguably failed) to capture - the possibility that everything you've ever done will amount to precisely nothing as everything you define as existence collapses and vanishes around you - ultimately, what does everything mean then? The closest I've ever heard to capturing this vision was the prog/space metal epic from Ayreon 01011001, but that album's themes were more linked to the greater questions of human existence and the significance of life, lacking the necessary focus to truly contemplate this question in any significant detail. I'd also argue the album, while very strong, didn't quite nail down the necessary emotions to truly encapsulate what makes this question so significant. That album, loaded with bombast and intensity, didn't quite capture the little emotions, the quiet thoughts that were necessary to make the question truly resonate. Because, like it or not, not all of us have the courage or force of will to stare straight into the apocalypse with open arms. The Flaming Lips have the courage, and with their newest album, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, they probably do the most thorough and deep exploration of the question that I've ever heard, with collaborators on every track to lend additional facets to the digression. And it's glorious.
