Opening with 30 seconds of unintelligible rumbling, it would be easy to believe you were listening to the sounds of the ocean; a strange experience for a live album.
Recorded live at Spectrum on April 30th of 2016, Behind The Red Door casts the listener forever in a sea of strange melancholia. The sounds of papers shuffling, room tone, and occasional rustling may, on paper, seem like the unfortunate consequences of recording live, but in the case of Behind The Red Door, every sound is perfectly in place. Violins, viola and cello are focal nearly throughout, though are briefly departed midway through for tracks Counting 1 & 2 before being reunited with the listener soon after. Concetta Abbate’s ability to to transition complete instrument substitutions with ease serves the album well, and keeps the listener in a state of wonderment.
The ebb and flow of the sweet and the eerie guide the listener with comforting force through the occasional vignette of near-gleeful tracks such as Dust, which retires itself to the melancholy from which it came.
Give yourself the gift of intimate listening, and take time to sit down to Concetta Abbate’s Behind The Red Door.
A creepy voice pronounces the word “prologue” in a way I’ve never quite heard it pronounced before. Maybe it’s British, maybe they’re born with it. No time for such sociolinguistical mysteries! Suddenly we’re off under waves of heavy but simple organ. Suddenly there it is again. A voice not entirely unlike Noel Fielding as the goth Richmond Avenal on sitcom The IT Crowd.
At times goofy, there is a level of showmanship that shouldn’t go unappreciated. A few motifs make up the entire work, differentiated by various keyboard settings. But even with the goofy lyrical speech of tracks such as Wormsong and National Ændthem (the latter of which being an intensely melodramatic reworking of The Star-Spangled Banner), Funeral The Musical is a genuinely spooky and haunting adventure in grief and death.
Funeral The Musical may not be such foreign territory for those in puppetry and carnival/freak show revivalist circles, but to those who haven’t lived in one of the hundreds of cities with a ‘Keep ____ Weird’ sticker, well, it may actually be pretty ground breaking stuff.
For fans of: Nurse With Wound, Cornbugs, the videos of David Firth
Sick of Living/Unwilling to Die is a not so subtle ode to the Zodiac Killer, a serial killer whose larger than life self-PR department helped fuel terror and intrigue throughout the 1960s/70s. A one-trick pony of face-value misogyny, Black Magnum’s inability to offer any type of substantial narrative, played ad nauseam, crosses into territory of uncreative fixation. Given its emotional weight, one would hope violence as artistic subject matter would be utilized better than a ‘dead baby nailed to 10 trees’-type joke.
It isn’t that violence can’t be used in this manner and work well. Bands like Ted Bundy’s Volkswagon and Theatre of Ice have used depictions and speculation of real life violence as a backdrop for topics such as the human condition, isolation, life and loss.
So what does Black Magnum have to offer us? Unfortunately not much. While opening track Oh Well offers heavy grunge riffs, sloppy fun drumming, and intriguing sample usage, Sick of Living/Unwilling to Die fails to deliver anything other than mundane songwriting and moronic lyrics.
As an American, liking Art Brut in 2009 was about as simultaneously nerdy and hipster as being into British shows like Spaced or Louis Theroux documentaries. Remind you, this is pre-Sherlock phenom. Actors like Matt Berry weren’t being given full weekly articles just because we can.
Looking back twelve years, Art Brut vs. Satan holds up incredibly well. Unfortunately for Art Brut being timeless in an age of nostalgia and hyper-pastiche doesn’t work to their advantage. The songwriting is straight forward and stripped down. Vocal metres are occasionally emphasized by syncopated stabs, unifying the band’s effort throughout the album. The band’s unification lends itself perfectly to building emotional potency, especially over the course of Art Brut’s long build ups. The Replacements (a song about The Replacements) ends with a stacking of Gregorian-esque backing vocals under singer Eddie Argos hysterics over choosing between cheaper secondhand CDs or reissue CDs (extra tracks, mind you).
Vs. Satan is closed off with the lengthy Mysterious Bruises, a relatively funky and lonely song about a lost night out. Its on-and-off soft choruses and punchier verses is reminiscent of The Pixies, which is appropriate as the album was produced by Pixies frontman Black Francis.
“Our songs are true stories and I wanted to do them once or twice and record them because you’ll lose that sincerity if you do that again and again and again. After we realized we wanted to do that we asked ‘who is the expert at doing that?’ and came up with Frank Black because that’s how he did all of the (Frank Black and the) Catholics’ albums. And also, he’s cool and we wanted to hang out with him. ‘What excuse could we use to hire Frank Black?’ And then he said that he liked us, so we signed him up.” – Eddie Argos in an interview with Three Imaginary Girls blog. You can read an archived version of the interview here.
Argo’s spoken delivery is often compared to the late Mark E Smith, but is distinguished by a greater sense of emotional urgency. On vs. Satan, Argos delivers lines of daily mediocrity, yet sells the listener on existential joys and cultural ponderings. Nothing embodies the antithesis of rock behemoths Led Zeppelin and Kiss more than Art Brut, and what’s more punk than that?
In many ways, the music culture gripes expressed throughout Art Brut vs. Satan got me thinking about music in the way I do now. This album was released right before I entered highschool. I was at my peak interest in Primus, Gwar, and dime-a-dozen rockabilly bands. So on midway track Demons Out! when Argos begs “how can you sleep at night when nobody likes the music we like?” Well, it felt like he was speaking directly to my angry middle-schooler self.
They’re not on Bandcamp yet, but maybe one day they will be. Till then, you can buy the album on iTunes or search for it on Spotify.
Somewhere between Portishead’s Dummy and Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See belongs Stop Suffering, the 2015 minimal darkwave EP by Camella Lobo’s solo project Tropic of Cancer. Opening track and album namesake Stop Suffering moves with such elegance as to make a ‘liquid’ analogy tedious. Given the gift of synthetic sounds, this album is able to rival the airy attributes of Art Blakey’s Drum Thunder Suite. Tropic of Cancer managers to smother any desire the listener may have for things to be faster. Like fractal patterns in nature, everything is set just-so.
I Woke Up And The Storm Was Over begins to take things slower. The album itself is sparse for percussion. Light drum machine kicks cloaked in reverb, machine cowbell and toms lightly blip in and out. Lobo manipulates the airspace with a distanced Morricone-styled guitar, acting more as a slipstream in the cold, windy climate cast upon the listener.
Peers of Tropic of Cancer tend to fall short by checking out of the artistic process mid-way through, almost as if they decided there was nothing more they could do with the long swaths of time between notes. Crafting and tailoring each note’s placement and timbre, Lobo is able to flood the space with intense emotion. Fortified, the album carries the listener from take off to landing without ever dropping us.
While many musicians treat it as the confines of genre, choosing tempo is an important step in sculpting the work you wish to create. Much like types of wood or stone, what attributes does it bring? What caveats come with it? What is enhanced and what is more likely to be overlooked? Some don’t consider the importance of their decisions, instead leaving it to the guiding hand of the universe. When tempo, timbre, and the like are treated as inconsequential genre conventions, a musician rolls the dice with every release they put out.
Stop Suffering is a cultural payoff of the mental and artistic labor that we all benefit from.
Screeching tension starts before you even know it. High-ended guitar comes across loud and, well, loud while drums and bass stab and punctuate underneath. Suddenly all stops as a lone note drones from the guitar. Then it happens, and before you know it opening track Chester Lampwick is over.
Over the course of the next 6 minutes, ENTS rarely repeats a chorus. They’re self defined as “flower violence,” a mix of emo and power violence, with traces of hardcore and screamo acts like Orchid, but like their power violence roots suggest, are incredibly raw and unpolished. Their entire discography, last added to with Live at The A-FRAME – 2/17/12, doesn’t fill 30 minutes, and it doesn’t need to. Much like their songs, nothing is ever around for long. Appreciate it while it’s there, and go grab the free download of Demo from their Bandcamp page.
For fans of: Orchid, Pageninetynine, Human Remains
While listening to False Figure, ‘a promised end’ to this mundane EP was quite reassuring.
I’m fairly certain I’ve heard this record before. Actually many times before. There is nothing distinguishing this album from the many others that are nearly identical to it, many also released under the flags of two-word alliterated band names. All parts of this album are interchangeable with the parts of other songs on the album.
False Figure’s look and sound scream a Gene Belcher “this is ME now” level of vapid personality. Actually, the band name does seem quite fitting now that I think of it. Death rock is the new gentrified neighborhood. Disneyfied ad nauseam, bands bring to their work the ingenuity and artistic truth of an NBC sitcom. Detached from its subcultural roots while continuing to profit off of it, the faux-goth wave of recent years wears the sardonic mask necessary to keep selling children black leather tchotchkes.
Stunted by inconsistent leveling, clipping and mixing, Rave Shit 2 functions more as a mixtape or sketchbook of ideas. Yet Mom$ delivers more than sonic sketches. RS2 is a showcase of simple yet fully fledged ideas from beginning to end. Its choppy nature and bass heavy presence lends itself to the hip-hop and dance tracks it samples while simultaneously giving each track a level of raw edge.
Mom$’ presentation is textbook E-kid; retro interpretation of the internet’s early years, digital trash glitching and anime cyberpunk iconography. Korg synth swells and kicks that sound like they’re coming through the wall sandwich the 90s-styled triplet stabs and filtered samples. Ultimately, Mom$’ style of techno and house is interchangeable with many other records out there in a flooded electronic music market. So while it may not be a particularly distinguished record, RS2 is great fun and I encourage anyone interested to give it a listen.
A tale as old as time. Two women talk about coleslaw. One voice confirms they need more mayonnaise, and with a “roger roger” all things suddenly burst into a pounding industrial assembly line groove called LFK. This is plunderphonics. More specifically, this is Barbed’s 1994 self-titled debut album, known to fans and the internet alike as ‘Symbols’.
Barbed was recorded meticulously between 1988 and 1993 by bandmates Alex Burrow and Alex McKechnie. Released in 1994 on the experimental music label These Records out of London, ‘Symbols’ gathered some favorable press before fading into obscurity.
User “alexbarbed” of the (terribly named) Muffwigglers forum website, writing as an unspecified member of the band, opened up about the creative process.
“If what we made sounded anything like something we’d heard before, we threw it out. That meant that (with the exception of King of Rock, which we sort of compromised on) there were actually no ‘samples’ on that record. There were tiny fragments of sound that we used as instruments, but no chunks of other people’s work. And there were no concessions to any genre or audience. Looking back though, I guess we wanted to be like an electronic instrumental version of Captain Beefheart.”
While it may now sit comfortably within the often humorous plunderphonics genre, Barbed achieved something many peers didn’t. While the basis of nearly all other forms of music, beat oriented tracks like King of Rock, LFK, and How About Some Butterflies subvert the sound collage propensity for purposefully difficult listening, while allowing for the listener to just have fun. Yet another groundbreaking development from the experimental music scene.
While former member Alex McKechnie’s solo work is available on Bandcamp, the collective effort of McKechnie and Burrow remain elusive. You can stream the full album here or buy the CD from sellers on Discogs.
The album in its entirety was uploaded to Youtube on March 26th, 2016 by user Howard Jacques.
For fans of: John Oswald, Meat Beat Manifesto, The Residents
Geisha Girls puts their contemporaries to shame with accessible high intensity alternative rock tinged with death rock sensibilities. Pounding tom percussion, use of 16th note hi-hats, and angular power-chord-shy guitar work may feel familiar to any Rikk Agnew/Rozz Williams era Christian Death fans. But with dry production and Hot Hot Heat styled vocals, Disappearing Act is as distinctively 2000s alternative rock as it is anything else.
The bass bounces, nearly plodding along with angsty disregard. That is until Retaining Water. With walking bass lines and a stripped down section where the bassist shines, Geisha Girls skirt the repetitive nature that current death rock bands accept as the boundaries of the genre.
In other ways, Disappearing Act is what Arctic Monkeys fans thought they were into. Tonal similarities wouldn’t be lost on a listener of both bands, but Geisha Girls don’t let the listener off as easy. Songs like This is Novelty, Finding Peers, and Skinny Wrists use dizzying compositional structures with puncturing frenetic drumming.
If you enjoy alternative rock, and are looking to get into something a little bit harder, you need to hear this album.
For fans of: Phantom Planet, Art Brut, Christian Death
The Resident Sound 