Some Thoughts on Metal, Distribution and Culture

One of the things I've noticed about my music listening habits is that I don't listen to very much metal at all anymore, and scantly any from this current decade-I doubt that I have more than 5 albums from the last 2 years in my entire collection. Considering how rapacious I used to be about listening to as much metal as I possibly could from all its myriad scenes and subgenres, that's saying quite a bit. I think there might be a couple of reasons for this, and both of them are  directly related to cost and competition. 

First of all, I simply don't have as much money as I used to. I recently moved to Brooklyn (hence the dearth of updates) and I'm living on my own without a steady cache of money I can go to to purchase new albums for the first time in my life(which is not to say that I mooched off my parents, but having a job while living at home leaves one with a fair amount of disposable income). For those of you asking "why should that be any obstacle?" you should know that my stance on free downloading is that I only find it permissible when the artist has given their explicit permission or the release has been out of print/will remain out of print for a considerable length of time. Also, it may sound strange to hear for those of you not familiar with both areas, but there isn't a record store anywhere in New York that I've been able to find that has both the breadth of selection and price range that Amoeba, my go-to record store back in California, used to have. The result is that even when I do manage to make it into one I usually can't find any metal, or if I can it's of the Converge/Isis/Agalloch variety, and more often than not at full retail price. Not that there's anything wrong with so-called "thinking-man's metal," as I count albums from all of the above bands as some of my very favorites, but by God a man needs his meat and potatoes every once and a while and I'll be damned if I've seen nary an Immolation or even a Megadeth CD the entire time I've been here.

The second reason is closely tied to the first, and that is that, as stated, I don't have very much money anymore, and other genres of music-namely hip-hop and electronic-are particularly tuned to the interests of budget-minded, college-age students these days, with some fantastic new mixtape being released every week and a slew of MP3s coming out every single day. They're both genres that, by nature, foster a sense that music should be not only readily available to, but creatable by, the average man and so to some degree it makes sense that they would be able to so easily eclipse their contemporaries in terms of available, cost-effective music. 

That stated, it's not so much that I don't have the time for metal anymore as much as the resources. I'd certainly be devoting as much time to it as I do to hip-hop and electronic music if metal had some sort of equivalent to the mixtape or the gratis single, but for whatever reason-maybe due to the effort needed to create it, maybe due to its status as an already niche, generally unpopular genre of music-metal doesn't lend itself as easily to being cheap and easily attainable as the previously mentioned other genres. Sites like MetalSucks and Decibel will occasionally offer a free album stream but good Lord, I don't want to listen to metal while sitting in front of my computer. I listen to it when I'm walking around, exercising, bringing things to bear in the dead of night. Even the greatest metal album isn't going to inspire what it should while wafting out of my laptop speakers at 128kbps. 

It may seem unfair to ask a genre, particularly one that needs as much support from its fans as it does to thrive, to essentially give me something for nothing, but as a ravenous consumer of music of all different genres, metal's relative lack of availability in the 2010s has or more or less knocked my attention away from it. The sad truth is that today's listener needs music placed in front of them in a way that much of the metal industry and creative community has been unwilling or unable to do. Maybe it's a situation that has more to do with my individual listening habits than any kind of seriously widespread problem, but for someone with as wide a palate as mine, more and more I find my appetite being sated elsewhere. I believe that metal has the ability to not only keep up with but elevate music culture from an artistic position; whether it'll be able to do so from a distribution position remains dubious and, to my mind, worrying.

-CJ

Movie Monday! #4: Making-This-Quick-Because-I'm-Packing-For-New-York Edition

I'm moving to Brooklyn and don't really have the time to write a bunch of movie reviews right now because I'm packing. Please enjoy the severely underrated kung-fu gem and Wu-Tang Clan inspiration Eight Diagram Pole Fighter in its entirety, in lieu of my musings this week. The kills at the end are some of the best in movie history.

-CJ

Oh no Animal Collective oh my God what have you done

Jesus Christ in heaven this is some impossibly horrible album art. Good God I can't even believe a human being created this and put it on the cover of something. I can sort of believe that Animal Collective would approve it since they seem like the kind of people who would be like "this is horrible which is why I like it," but that doesn't excuse whoever made this thing. Nothing can excuse that person. That person poured acid in a child's eyes, from a beaker, so you know that they didn't just trip while holding a box of acid. You know it wasn't an accident, that which caused that little girl's tortured shrieks. They wanted that child's eyes to melt and seep down her chubby little cheeks in puddles of searing ocular fluid and they should go to jail.

I guess that's the long and short of it, is that whoever drew this should go to jail. Maybe not for a very long time, maybe even just a low-security prison. I'm not even saying this should be taken off the stands because your right as an American is to make any stupid and horrible thing you want to as long as it doesn't cause any direct harm to a person. Although even that is debatable because I might have to kill myself after acknowledging that this is an image that could belong on a CD cover. Is that murder? It should be considered murder. Forget what I said before, I'm going to kill myself and the person who made this is responsible and they should be put on death row. Lethal injection. You made the cover for Centipede Hz and you need to die for it. It is the only correct action available to us, in this world that was previously painted in shades of grey. No longer. Centipede Hz is wrong and its creator should be punished under a just society.

I can't even get over this a little bit. Do you ever look at Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday? This is what a Goon would make if the subject was, like, "Deakin is insanely cranky about being left off of Merriweather Post Pavilion and takes his awful revenge." Did Deakin do this? That would make sense, he always seemed like he might do something like this. I mean, I think we all knew this was a possibility, that an indie group would come up with sleeve art that would make even the most egregious Pog blush with discomfort, the same way the men who worked on the Manhattan Project were aware of what an atom bomb would do to a human body, but nobody...nobody could have prepared themselves for this. This is what it must be like to have your arm torn off on a roller coaster. Deep in the back of your mind you always knew that there was the vaguest chance that it could happen, but the pain is as sudden as it is unbearable and in an instant all probabilities disintegrate and reform as moaning ghosts to weave the fabric of horror that your life has turned into and "vaguest chance" becomes "inescapable nightmare." The cover of Centipede Hz is an inescapable nightmare, is the point I'm trying to get across.

You know how sometimes you'll be talking to someone at work that you thought was an alright guy, and then he says something like "I think reverse-racism is the real problem in America today" and you just suddenly want him to lose his job? Not even that so much but to take his job from him, somehow? I want Animal Collective's careers after seeing this album art. I want their children to go hungry, I want the heads of their fathers hung low in shame. I want a formal apology: "We, the men of Animal Collective, apologize for making you look at this for even a second. We had the power to make sure not a lot of people looked at this and we did the opposite by making you look at it, and we can never undo the damage caused by that decision, but we can offer our most sincere condolences for the mental trauma that acknowledging the reality of the cover of Centipede Hz has undoubtedly caused you."

In conclusion, this is the worst image imaginable and I am a worse person for having looked at it, as are you all. Fuck you, Animal Collective. Fuck you for what you have turned us into.

-CJ


(when not humorously overblowing the mental consequences of terrible album art, I also write the webcomic Boys and Girls in America)

Movie Monday #3: All Prometheus Edition (SPOILERS)

Prometheus


2012; Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba; directed by Ridley Scott


So the numbers are in and not a whole hell of a lot of you took too kindly to Prometheus, relatively speaking. #2 two weekends in a row isn't the kind of success rate that a major blockbuster wants, certainly not one tied to one of the most beloved science fiction films in history. It's a difficult thing for me to parse out, personally, since I thought it was the most important sci-fi movie to come out this decade, but I think it might have a lot to do with expectations. That's not exactly a novel observation where this movie is concerned, but let me explain.


I went to Prometheus with my brother and his assessment of it was that it was fair-to-middling. His reasoning behind this mostly concerned some lazy scripting errors: How the crew of the Prometheus doesn't check the camera feed to see what might have happened to two of their crewmates still stuck down in the ruins, how those same crewmates seem to conveniently forget that they have a map with them that they can use to get out of the ruins, how...well, this Penny Arcade comic does the best job of explaining this one. And so on and so forth. All valid complaints, all notable gaffes that in some way detract from the movie. And with almost any other film, I would have agreed with him that such bungling would make for significant marks against the movie.

Where I think Prometheus skews away from most other sci-fi films in this regard is that it has much, much more going on underneath the surface, to the point that most of the philosophy that one would refer to as being subtextual can probably just go ahead and be referred to as textual. There's already been so much discussed about the themes of childbirth and parricide, how the movie exists as a kind of metaphor for filial aggression. I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about predators.

There is, to my mind, one message of the movie that comes through even ahead of the stuff about killing your parents and killing your children. Near the end of the film, David quips "Sometimes in order to create, you must first destroy." I think the point of the movie is something a little bit different: We create in order to destroy. Every character in the movie exists to die, or to become an agent of death. The crew of the Prometheus arrives seeking answers, only to awaken long-sleeping weapons of mass destruction. Was this the intention of the Engineers, the purpose outlined for humanity shown on the cave paintings at the beginning of the movie? We don't know; the creature attempts to kill David and the rest of the crew before shambling off to deliver his cache of horror to Earth.

Answers are, at every turn, denied. What did the paintings mean? What were the Aliens created to do, specifically? Was the planet really a military institution, or something even more significant? How did the one Engineer manage to survive when the rest of his colleagues were killed? Why was man made in the first place?

"Why do you hate us so much?"

   

"Hate" is, of course, not entirely accurate. They have to kill the humans because killing is what you do to things you create. You raise animals to feed upon them. You make bombs to detonate them. You drive a car until you don't, and then you turn it into scrap. They made us and now it's time for us to go away, because that's the kind of decision you get to make when you build something. And it's worth noting that the rule works for the humans too: Elizabeth gives birth to a monster and she, ultimately, gets to use the monster to her own ends, much how despite all his resentment and attempts at sabotage, David is still, by movie's end, a thing to be used. It's a film with about the bleakest mindset I've seen in a major film in years: It posits that man, regardless of their ambitions, is not free from the driving principle of the universe, which is that one lives only and specifically to die.

People went into Prometheus expecting a sci-fi horror movie and instead they got a philosophical treatise about the cosmic, unstoppable death march that is the human experience. You went in being told that you should look to the left while everything of note was going on to the right. Divorced from its hype and marketing, Prometheus may come to be regarded as a truly important movie and, possibly, among the most vital of Ridley Scott's handful of masterpieces. Some movies will be honest with you; very few will tell you to be honest with yourself.

One final note.

Right before the credits, we see the emergence of what is presumably the first Alien to exist. My mom and brother wrote that final scene off as being something the studio stuck in to concretely tie the movie to the Alien franchise. That's probably what it was in practical terms, but I saw it as something more. I don't think it was an accident that we are introduced to the cosmos' greatest killer directly after Elizabeth narrates "My name is Elizabeth, and I'm still searching." We are not only being shown what she has left behind; we are being shown what her travels will always, eventually, lead her to.

Death will come for you until it doesn't have to anymore, and it will get better at what it does until it doesn't have to anymore. All paths, all journeys, lead to the maw of an ultimate predator, one that is without empathy and, most tellingly, without sight. For death, like justice, is blind.

-CJ


(Besides thinking about movies a lot of people didn't particularly enjoy, CJ also writes the webcomic Boys and Girls in America)

No.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No.

Here's a picture of a person.

This guy is dead. He played guitar really well, he irrevocably changed the course of popular music from now 'til doomsday, he was a prolific lover and by all accounts a really sweet guy, and forty two years ago he took too many pills and drank too much wine and died. He's not on earth anymore and he's never going to be here again, because that's what it means to be dead. It means you're not alive anymore and you can't be alive anymore.

Here's a picture of another person.

This guy is dead. He sang in a way that inspired a lot of vocalists that came after him, he defined a lot of the poetic attributes that have come to be associated with psychedelia, he was sort of a strange fellow that never really seemed comfortable even as he reached the peak of his success, and forty one years ago something happened that nobody is quite sure of, and he died. He can't breathe anymore and he can't walk anymore and he certainly can't sing anymore. That's what happens when life leaves your body.

We, and by we I mean people, have a big problem with letting things go, and we also have a big problem with assigning dollar worth to intangibles. Technology has developed in such a way that the music industry has been able to create a new avenue of exploiting both of these flaws, by computer engineering a method of putting a gas tank in a corpse and throwing Christmas lights on top of it for purposes of a stage performance. You couldn't have asked Philip K. Dick himself to paint a bleaker, more cynical future of the entertainment industry.

A man approaches you and says that if you give him some money, he'll let you see your dead father again. If you talk to him he won't talk back to you, you can't touch him, but the thing that you're looking at will move like him and sound like him and if you're lucky, for a minute, you might feel like you're spending a moment with the man who raised you. You're not-he's dead and he can't come back-but this thing may lead you to imbibe a moment of connection because, on the surface, it's similar to something you're familiar with and something that means a lot to you.

A man approaches you and says that if you give him some money, he'll let you see your favorite performer. There will be no lungs in his form to sing from and if you throw something at him it will pass through the image that your eyes have trained you to register as a human body, but the thing you're looking at will move like him and sound like him and if you're lucky, for a minute, you might feel like you're in the presence of the artist who has most inspired you. You're not-he's dead and he can't come back-but this thing you're looking at may lead you to imbibe a moment of awe because, on the surface, it's similar to something you're familiar with and something that means a lot to you.

A thing, by any conceivable standard, is not a person. Jimi Hendrix can go on stage and play the guitar and preform for you. A hologram of Jimi Hendrix may be able to present a reasonably convincing facsimile of such but it is at best an afterglow of a person who has not been alive for almost half of a century and at worst a mockery of one of the most important musicians of the 20th century. And it is a mockery because buying a ticket to see a hologram of Jimi Hendrix is a signal that you care about what he represented more than what he was, that the idea of him is more important than who he was as a human being. And it makes you forget that he was a person at all, that the sounds heard on Are You Experienced? or Band of Gypsies did not spring fully-formed from a mystical sonic womb but were composed and created and preformed by men like you and me, with fingers and throats and minds to guide them. And that's exactly what they want; the companies can sell you the music but they can't sell you the man himself. Or at least, they didn't used to be able to.

This is happening. We didn't really know it was happening when they produced a synthetic Tupac Shakur and paraded him through the desert; some of us were able to fool ourselves into believing that it would be a vulgar one-time stunt with no hope for marketable longevity. But what we have told the record companies, in overwhelming numbers, is that a person's visage matters more than their material, as long as it is a man that we have some fond connection towards. We have said that the content of an action matters so much less than the representation of such. We have told them that we are fine with memories of things that never happened, and that nostalgia is as good or better than the experience that inspired it in the first place.

We have embraced the dreams, and forsaken the dreamers.

-CJ

Movie Monday! #2

The Long Good Friday


1980; Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Derek Thompson, Bryan Marshall, Eddie Constantine; directed by John Mackenzie 


This is an interesting one in that it's one of those seemingly pretty rare films that's a very good movie just by virtue of being a very good movie. You know what I mean? Like, the story is engaging, the script is well written, the characters are interesting, the performances are top notch, it's well shot...just basic things that you need from a story-driven film to be able to consider it good. Ambition is always desired, but sometimes you need a movie like this, one that doesn't technically do anything special except to execute the story it's telling to the best of its ability, to remind you that sometimes nothing necessarily needs to be "pulled off" in order for a film to be worth watching or memorable.

One Touch of Venus


1948; Robert Walker, Ava Gardener, Dick Haymes, Olga San Juan, Eve Arden, Tom Conway; directed by William A. Seiter


An avatar of the goddess Aphrodite is kissed on the lips and falls madly in love with a man who is, if not mentally retarded, indistinguishable from such for about 70% of his time on-screen. It's the kind of movie nobody would have any degree of tolerance for if made in 2012, but because it came out in the '40s you have a protagonist whose job is to straighten curtains at a mall (???) and a villain with a tiny mustache who rolls his rs. It sucks by any measurable standard except the standard of "I want to watch something with songs and don't have a lot of time or thought to invest" and the standard of "Ava Gardener in a toga," so what I'm saying is, maybe watch this movie? Probably don't? Elia Kazan's name popped up somewhere in the credits, which I found incredibly unsettling for reasons I'm not able to put my finger on.

Sin Nombre


2009; Paulina Gaitan, Edgar Flores, Kristyan Ferrer, Tenoch Huerta Mejia; directed by Cary Fukunaga


I seem to be the only person who had this problem with it, but there's a moment in the last third that was so preposterously stupid and unbelievable as to completely destroy practically any dramatic payoff, which sucks, because oh my God was there a lot of drama to account for. It doesn't "wreck" the movie by any means, because so much of it-the "uno, dos, tres" sequence, Smiley's first kill, the confrontation on the train that any other movie would have used as the denouement-is impossible to ruin. It's absolutely worth watching, but it's also one of those movies that's fantastic right up until it isn't, and it's the kind of flawed gem that sometimes makes you appreciate a movie like The Long Good Friday even more, because there's almost nothing worse in art than having to compromise your enjoyment of something that should have, by all rights, completely blown you away.

Sawdust and Tinsel


1953; Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ake Gronberg, Hasse Ekman, Anders Ek; directed by Ingmar Bergman


This movie has a reputation as being more worth watching as an important film in Bergman's growth as a director than on its own merits as a film, which is a damn shame considering it's every bit as vital and disarming as his later films. Much like Bergman's other movies, it's about selfishness and failure, but brought to more of a public eye-these characters are career fools, but that doesn't save them, it certainly doesn't redeem any of them. It's hard to write about Bergman's films if you don't have any kind of film schooling because so much of why these movies are as amazing as they are has to do with technique, but so much of what registers is pure gut impact, and either way I have a hard time putting the appeal of these films into words, except to say that you will be cut down to size, beautifully, and completely. This, I guarantee.

Return of the One-Armed Swordsman


1969; Jimmy Wang Yu, Lisa Chiao Chiao, Essie Lin Chia, Chen Lui; directed by Chang Cheh


Possibly the greatest action movie ever made? There are very, very few who get everything this right-the violence, the pacing, the motivation and the payoff. Kill Bill, Death Race 2000 and Die Hard are the only ones springing to mind and none of them come close to carrying the level of venom this film stores in its fangs. I've never seen a movie that was ostensibly about giving the viewer a good time at the movies so heartbroken at the stratospheric bodycount that is achieved by the end. Evil is defeated, but it's pretty hard to claim that anyone comes out the other side not defeated. It's a movie that understands what happens when you've killed everyone there is to kill, and what happens is nothing at all, because reaching your goal carries with it the implication that the means change the significance of the end. One could almost see this as an anti-Vietnam tale if one were so inclined, but the world has never had any shortage of sons cutting their throats for the sake of their fathers. As good or better than any canonical classic that game out of the decade.

Higher Ground


2011; Vera Farmiga, Molly Hawkey, Dagmara Dominczyk, Joshua Leonard; directed by Vera Farmiga


This movie tries to pull an interesting trick-it tries to portray Evangelical Christians as actual human beings as opposed to loutish caricatures, and for a good part of the movie it pulls it off.  The problem is that it seems to be nearly impossible to approach this corner of society without at least a drop of condescension, so you get parts where people just stop behaving like people right in the middle of what are for the most part extremely human portrayals of people who aren't...normal, exactly, but who have patterns and hopes and fears just like anyone else you know. It breaks you out of the moment even more in that way, because that isn't an intentional choice to portray these people as a bunch of clowns, that's a slip-no director wants you to lessen your understanding of the cast in movies like this. It's at least good that somebody tried.

Kirikou and the Sorceress 


1998; Theodore Sibusiso Sibeko, Antoinette Kellerman, Fezele Mpeka; directed by Michael Ocelot


Wild stuff-a lot of this is like Rene Laloux for children. Slightly dumb in the way that a lot of children's movies are, where the screenwriters sometimes forget they're writing for kids and not morons, there's more than enough compelling imagery to make up for it, with bedazzling, dreamy West African art aesthetics coupled with a "proud to be hand-drawn" ethos that almost dares you to say it's a bad thing that this is clearly a bunch of sequenced sheets of paper. I don't think I've ever seen a kid's movie that has an origin story that's clearly a metaphor for both rape and colonialism, and I'm not sure if it's something that should even be in many kid's movies, but here it works. As a rule, nothing with nudity this unappealing tends to be a bad thing.

-CJ

"No Homo" Epilogue: Action Bronson is a Cockwad of Ungainly Proportions

This is a pretty straightforward story:  Queens rapper and much touted next-big-thing Action Bronson was caught being a complete shithead to a drunk transgendered woman a couple of days ago, and when he posted a gloating picture of the occurrence on Instagram the Go Fuck Yourself was so overwhelming that he was forced to delete his account. Like all big stupid babies who decide to NOT TAKE IT ANYMORE in as ineffectual a manner as possible, he took his pissy tirade to Twitter, alternating between insulting his followers for being so sensitive and inquiring as to the status and location of his post-naptime juice box.

This is pretty much always the way it goes: it's always the loudest, most "outrageous" speakers who are the first to shit when you tell them to quit being such an asshole. It's a pussified, PC society until suddenly you're the one getting picked on, and then before you know it the Whaaaaaaaaambulance is barreling down the boulevard, racing to the aid of a man whose feelings you hurt by pointing out what an absolute dick he was acting like. Can't anyone see that the people who stand up against bullies are the real bullies here?!?

If anyone thought the things I brought up in that essay weren't still a problem in this day and age? They're still a big fucking problem in this day and age. He'll doubtless have learned nothing from the whole thing and it's unlikely to do any damage to his career, but a few more people have seen the true colors of a fresh critical darling who could previously do no wrong, and maybe a few more people will really start to think about how fucked the rap community's stance towards LGBTQ people is.

-CJ

No Homo

"Faggot soundmen, they be sabotagin' shit!"-Method Man, "What the Blood Clot"

The other day I was reading a review of a documentary called Bully; the film as a whole seems to present the issue of bullying and psychological victimization with a striking level of clarity, but one scene in particular stood out in that regard. One of the kids that the film follows is bullied so frequently, and by so many people, that he starts mistaking physical abuse for regular joshing and playing around. His mother tells him not to hang out with people who beat him up, and his reply is heartbreaking: “What friends does that leave me with?”

I think there’s a similar sentiment present in wider media, in that there are certain messages that are so ubiquitous that we think it’s impossible to cut them out of our cultural diet, lest we miss out on pretty much everything we want to watch or listen to or read. We don’t let Sergio Leone’s fixation with female degradation interfere with our awe at those incredible shots he manages to get, we don’t let H.P. Lovecraft’s horrific racial views distract us from his once-in-a-lifetime expressiveness of imagination, and if you listen to hip-hop, you tend to brush aside the ever-prevalent, near-deafening homophobia that infests the genre in order to better focus on the lyricism and production.

"These faggots hit like teddy bears."-EL-P, "Delorean"

This is something I have been doing, and am doing, and will probably continue to do, much to my own distaste. The reason I do it is because I don’t want to stop listening to things I like, and I like hip-hop, even though so much of it will at least reference in passing beating up gay people or emasculating an opponent by questioning his sexuality. And I do mean so much of it, because it’s everywhere. It’s inescapable. From thugs like Ghostface Killah to freakshows like Danny Brown to nerdy “nice guy” rappers like XV, it seems like pretty much everyone has to get their shots in. And sometimes I have to question my principles when I listen to this stuff, which sucks, because aside from the rare not-just-unoffensive-but-actively-socially-positive group like BBU, there are pretty much no alternatives.

People tend to have kind of an all-or-nothing attitude when it comes to issues like this in hip-hop. As in, you either accept the whole package as presented or reject it entirely. Whenever you try to discuss the ethical problems with the genre it's thrown in your face that you either don’t know what you’re talking about (“it’s all pimps and hos and crack and murder, what happened to the Rolling Stones, why don’t comics cost a nickel, etc. etc.”) or, if you do have legitimate concerns to raise, you’re told it’s not your place to bring them up since you’re not part of the culture. I think that’s kind of a bullshit response, though, since I’m not a part of skinhead culture either, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to be appalled by the existence of things like Stormfront.

"Ayo, I'm quick to lick the mag twice/And cold take a fag's life."-Big L, "8 iz Enuff"

Obviously, very few hip-hop acts are quite so militant in their hatred or dismissal of LGBTQ culture. That doesn’t mean it’s not a completely shitty aspect of the genre, or that it’s in any way excusable. If rap’s opponents can’t use the “poor and ignorant” card to dismiss the music, that means that, in turn, its advocates can’t use it as a defense. When I’m listening to Action Bronson, and I stumble on a lyric like “I’m a man motherfucker, you’re half a fag,” it not only takes me out of the song, it fills me with disgust. It makes me instinctively push the skip button on my iPod. There's no rationalization I can come up with that will deaden the feeling that that absolutely revolting lyric gives me in my core, and frankly I don't think you should be able to contextualize away the chilling significance of lines like that.  Does it say something about me that I didn’t have that same gut reaction to the songs on the very same tape that mention beating up hookers? Probably, yeah, it does.

The thing is, at the end of the day, you can’t really control what you are and are not comfortable with in the media you consume.  I can’t outline the exact reasons why some kinds of violent lyrics bother me and others don’t, except to say that as someone who identifies as bisexual, those sentiments can't help but instill in me the impression that I am not welcome as part of the listening audience. More importantly, though, it gives me the impression that these men do not believe that we share the same common ground as human beings. 

That’s a weird thing to say, coming from a white suburban twentysomething (how many umpteenth million times have you read that qualifier when reading a blog post about hip-hop?) so I’ll give an example.

"You're on the side of faggots and cock blockers/I'm on the side of bad-ass kids and the top-notchers." Tyler, The Creator, "Nightmare"

One of my favorite albums of the past few years has been XV’s Zero Heroes. It wasn’t a concept album per se, but a lot of it dealt with how XV grew up in a small town, without a father and with few friends, and became dependent on comics and music to help make it through the most difficult times in his life. That describes my adolescence to a tee, and it was revelatory to hear someone rap about things I could relate to on such a personal basis-escaping into the variety of personas that music could afford you, feeling your jaw drop when you meet a pretty girl who’s into the same weird stuff as you...99.9% of that album is an honest, utterly relatable story that’s near impossible to find in any other kind of music. It’s the sort of personal, confessional storytelling that hip-hop does as well or better than any other kind of art there is.

And then there is one, almost unnoticeable line near the end of the last song on the album where XV says he’s “iller than a nigga on the DL.” For those not familiar with the term, “on the DL” usually means “in secret,” but it also refers to gay black men who haven’t come out of the closet. In context, there really aren’t a whole lot of things that line can mean: XV, mere feet from the finish line, made a “gay people have AIDS” reference. And so now I've got this notion hovering around in my head that this dude, who I’ve been listening to, who I’ve been relating to, who I’ve been bonding with in that way that can only be facilitated by great music, probably thinks my sexual orientation means I've got AIDS (because hey, bi basically means gay and I'm just too scared to commit to the label, right?). And that illusion of personable friendliness that had been built up over the course of fifty some-odd minutes reveals itself to me as just that: an illusion.

And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of having to treat the music I listen to like it’s a fucking minefield, sick of everyone making excuses for this hideous specter that no one can seem to exorcise, sick of having to steel myself when I listen to a song with a phenomenal beat and great lyrics, bracing for that horrific slur casually slid in like a razorblade in a scoop of ice cream. How do I reconcile what I like with who I am? What are the options here? Where’s my out? Do I tell them to stop? Do I just quit listening to things I love?

"Call me homophobic but you know it and I know it/You're filthy and funny to the utmost exponent."-A Tribe Called Quest feat. Brand Nubian, "Georgie Porgie"

“What friends does that leave me with?”

-CJ

Harmonium-Si on avait besoin d'une cinquième saison

1975; Polygram(defunct)

(Hey folks-it's been a while since I've reviewed something-2011 hasn't been blowing me away and I haven't talked about progressive rock in a while-so I decided to put up this review of one of my favorite prog albums from back in the day. This appeared slightly earlier on progarchives.com, and while I don't think anyone who reads this blog visits that site, I felt it was best to tell you just so you don't think somebody else ganked this if you ever wander across it on Google or something. Also, this one might be changed slightly for language and grammar and whatnot. Enjoy!)

Si On Avait Besoin D'une Cinquieme Saison, besides having one of the hardest-to-type titles of all time for non-native French speakers, is the rare album that deserves its lofty reputation and more, a work that is all at once grand, sweeping, warm and intimate. Virtually unknown outside of its native country of Quebec and hardcore prog circles, it is without question one of the most overlooked albums of the '70s and a triumph for folk music as well as of progressive rock.

Harmonium takes the folk elements of a group like Simon and Garfunkel and distills the weepiness from it, adding shades of jazz as well as symphonic elements that are fittingly august but tasteful and nuanced, leaving music that is emotionally charged but never overwrought or pitiful. Saison is a record that is truly joyful in places, with a coat of melancholy that keeps the experience layered.

More than that, it is an album that feels strangely private, like the band is putting on a special concert just for you. The vocals are often borderline whispered and even at its most grand the lack of percussion leaves the album feeling oddly compressed, as though it were composed in an open field but preformed in a small room. It leaves the music with a wistful quality that's hard to describe: The music feels like it was made to be bigger than the album that contains it, so instead of merely bursting to get out it scales itself back and translates all of its drama and glory into a form that's more easily expressed for recorded musical purposes. The effect is often nothing short of magical.

Speaking of magical, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the album's centerpiece, and Harmonium's magnum opus as a band, the side-length "Histoires Sans Paroles," or "History Without Words." It's an apt title as the song proves to be a mesmerizing instrumental work, immaculately composed and lushly preformed, something akin to Pink Floyd's "Echoes" as played by Nick Drake. Cosmic yet pastoral, harrowing and somehow comforting at the same time, the song is one of contemporary music's most overlooked epics and the quickest 17 minutes of your entire life.

In a pair of genres rife with unambitious groups who are content to ceaselessly mimic their inspirations, Saison is the rare progressive rock album that is as beloved by diehards as it is by the casual listeners who stumble upon it; it's a testament to the creativity and innovation that can inhabit both the progressive and folk genres simultaneously, an olive branch between complexity and emotional resonance, and a heartwarming work that quiets troubled souls and puts worries at ease even as it supplies a stage for its own enthralling emotional ride. It's the musical equivalent of a soft kiss and it's an album that nobody who desires a balanced music collection can afford to miss out on.

-CJ

Quick Thoughts on Amy Winehouse's Death and the Vultures of the Rock Canon

It's hard for me to know how to feel about this.

On the one hand, I didn't care for Amy Winehouse's music particularly(she didn't drive me up the wall or anything, though) and I have no real connection with her work but it's always sad, for me at least, to see an artist die. Fewer voices in the world is never a good thing and it's always difficult to see someone spiral out of control with such finality, even if the writing had been on the wall for some time.

But my God are lazy rock journalists going to have a fucking field day with this. You know what's going to happen now, right? Back to Black is going to be lionized as a record for the ages, and dollars to donuts somebody at Rolling Stone is going to call her "this generation's Janis Joplin" or some other nonsense like that within the next year, and once that goes to print you're going to hear it parroted from coast to coast. A woman who had spent most of her career as a walking tabloid punchline is going to be a rock icon because she died at the same age Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain did.

I know this is going to happen, because I know that codger-rock journalists thrive on nothing if not comparisons, and even the flimsiest ties to their boyhood idols(let's face it, most of these people are dudes) helps them settle into their own tastes more comfortably, serves as a way of reviving the mysticism they perceived their generation's music had, and what they believe is absent from ours. It's not that I have a problem with this because I have some notion that she doesn't "deserve" to be placed at the same table as other music icons who died at the same age; rather, I'm disgusted at the hypocrisy of music journalism as a whole, and that such a table has so much power to give credence to one's career. In a lot of ways I think that's more disrespectful to her memory than any smarmy joke about her crack habit; it's like saying she wasn't worth being valued before she died at the same age "proper" rock icons did, therefore making her a "proper" rock icon herself. Nobody gave a Texas shit about her drug addiction before she kicked the bucket, except maybe to laugh at it, and now that she's dead we've all gotta trade in our chuckles for thoughtful grimaces, now that we've got some of that old-school rock 'n roll mystique to wallow in. If rock mythology has taught us anything it's that there's no type of self-destructive behavior we can't glamorize, once we don't have to feel responsible for it anymore.

I think if you cared about her and want to honor her memory, or even if you don't but just have the slightest sense of decency, cut the 27 Club bullshit and let the woman's work live and die by its own merits. Quit trying to turn a tragedy into a championship. If it takes someone's death to bring that classic rock radio magic back into your life then there is something seriously fucking wrong with the way you listen to music. There's a disconnect between who Amy Winehouse was when she was alive and who she is, and is going to be, now that she's dead, that I find extraordinarily unsettling. Why are our idols only worth showing some humanity towards once we see them as corpses?

-CJ

New Music From Zac Bentz!

Sorry I haven't been around too much these last few months, folks; work and other writing obligations totally got in the way of my amateurish list-making and petty ramblings, along with the fact that more or less nothing in 2011 is really interesting me so far. I'll have a pretty neat essay for you to read up soon, I promise.

Meanwhile, check out some new music from quintessential Styrofoam Boots darling Zac Bentz. One is a 40 minute remix of a Zoe Keating song(and frankly I can't think of two artists that would go together better than Zoe Keating and Zac Bentz) and the other is an ambient/drone reinterpretation of five songs from Portal 2. We love this guy over here at SB and these two new releases are completely free, so check them both out and give a relatively unknown but sure-to-be-rising talent some love.

-CJ

Bibio-Mind Bokeh

Whenever I listen to a Bibio album I always imagine that I must be experiencing something similar to raising a child: I'm constantly being let down, and I never know if it's my problem or his. On Ambivalence Avenue every polished, enjoyable electropop ditty was followed by a minute or more of sub-Eno ambient nonsense, with catchy dubstep ragers sandwiching unbearably precious folk excursions that made Moldy Peaches sound like Napalm Death. It was like a Crackerjack box that came with a toy whistle as well as a free scorpion: Equal parts delightful, useless and baffling. Mind Bokeh tightens things up a bit, and while its individual moments don't stand up with Bibio's best, none of it made me want to call Stephen Wilkinson and ask him what the hell he was thinking, which I suppose is a step up.

Be advised, there are still a handful of actively bad choices here. "Pretentious" wastes a solid minute of your time with a Roxy Music-ish saxophone solo tacked on at the end and "Excuses" begins with 1:30 of bass-y ambient warbling. You'd be forgiven for thinking that Wilkinson was up to his old shit just based off the first two tracks, and in truth the more annoying elements of his music never leave entirely. But things pick up with "Anything New", which is sort of like what you would imagine Passion Pit to sound like if somebody controlled those dudes' sugar intake, and "Wake Up!" has a grooving, psychedelic vibe that carries Mind Bokeh's relatively mellow vibes to the end. It's a largely conventional electropop album throughout that pleases at most every turn but never manages to excite or even really raise the listener's interest above passivity.

While consistent, standout moments are few and far between-"K is For Kelson" is the closest this album has to a breakout hit, and "Artists' Valley" starts out in a far more interesting place than it ends up-it doesn't devolve into total idiocy like "Haiku(When She Laughs)" did on Ambivalence Avenue, but one can't help but feel that Wilkinson wasted something with this song. "Take Off Your Shirt" is memorable, in that stupid-but-inoffensive way that a lot of indie pop is these days, and the rest of Mind Bokeh strolls to the album's 52 minute end time without leaving much of an impression at all. One gets the feeling that Wilkinson wanted to make a breakout pop hit, but he also wanted to keep a lot of his trademark bullshit in an attempt to remain true to his own artistic values, misguided as they may be. What you end up with is an indie pop album that forgot to shave mixed with an "experimental" album that doesn't seem like it wants to be there at all. It's an album that can't decide what to do and as such simply chooses to do nothing, and while that's less infuriating than an album that takes insane chances and misses about 1 in 3 of them, it's also far, far less interesting and doesn't serve as much beyond background music.

Wilkinson, at this point, needs to shit or get off the pot. He can be the next Phoenix and grab a comfy spot at the next Outside Lands festival or he can keep playing with his folk/ambient/funk toys and keep the core audience of weirdos who appreciate that horseradish, but he clearly, clearly can't do both. His Pop sensibilities preclude his Everything Else sensibilities, and vice versa, and that makes Mind Bokeh a consistently vague record with little of interest to offer any part of his potential, or even established, fanbase. Electronica is a crowded house right now, and if Bibio wants to stay on the radar he's going to have to pick a strength to play or fade into the mass. As a music listener, it's already hard enough to make up your mind on what to listen to; why waste time on an artist who can't even make up his own?

-CJ

Free Stuff: Enslaved-The Sleeping Gods EP

Here's a nice surprise: Scion is distributing Enslaved's latest EP, The Sleeping Gods, for free! Trve Kvltists will have hot, messy tears defiling their corpsepaint makeup at the idea of one of black metal's most revered acts releasing an album through a major corporation, while non-idiots will get to enjoy 29 minutes of black metal meeting Krautrock (with just a taste of new wave if you listen hard enough) at absolutely no cost. Frankly, this is some of the best stuff I've heard from this band and you'd be a fool to miss out if you have even the slightest interest in black metal, or progressive metal in general. Enjoy!

(People have been reporting problems downloading the album from Scion's site, but you can also get it here with very little fuss)

-CJ

R&B Double Shot: Frank Ocean-Nostalgia/Ultra, The Weeknd-House of Balloons

If you had told me at the end of 2010 that 2011 would be an amazing year for R&B mixtapes, I would've responded, "Maybe, but I don't listen to R&B, so that doesn't really affect me one way or the other". Well, it turns out that I would've been wrong, had that prediction been posited to me to begin with, because I do listen to R&B now and it's largely because "free" and "excellent" are two amazing incentives when it comes to giving a genre a shot.

Frank Ocean's Nostalgia/Ultra came first, so it gets the first review. Best known as the only member of OFWGKTA to not be completely hyped on rape, Ocean's disinterest in sexual assault automatically positions him as the best member of the group to make a pleasant, catchy and sweet if occasionally dark collection of infectious pop tunes. Luckily, there are higher bars than "not a rapist" to be considered when crafting good R&B, and Ocean manages to hit mostly all of them.

There's a pervasive wit to Frank Ocean's debut that helps transition some of the lewder moments in the album into coming off less crass and pompous and more like a natural extension of Ocean's sardonic personality(a verse about how filming a porno makes him feel like Stanley Kubrick, capped with the line "This is some visionary shit"). Indeed, while the production can sometimes seem like it's not filling out the song as well as it could be, the mellow sparsity gives Ocean's songwriting a chance to shine as he shifts from juvenile comedy to buttery seduction and even occasionally unmistakable sorrow with the ease of an artist twice his age. Whether you're chuckling at "Rolling around like I'm driving to a funa, roll" or becoming genuinely uncomfortable at "Can't let these boys see me crying/'Cause they ain't had no fathers neither, and they ain't crying", most every song has a line that's going to stick in your head. Ocean is a true lyrical craftsman, painting the Casanova lifestyle as being as glamorous as it is soul-crushing while never painting himself as a rake or a crybaby.

The Weeknd's House of Balloons, then, exists on the absolute opposite of the spectrum. Lyrics aren't the important thing here-production is, and oh my dear God is this album's production a thing of beauty. As opposed to Ocean's warmth and pervasive humanity, The Weeknd is a sex machine from beyond the stars, seducing not with sweet nothings but cosmic rituals that draw you in and flatten you with their otherworldly strength. The opening track's assurance that "You'll wanna be high for this" turns out to be one of the greatest instances of truth in advertising in the entire year of 2011.

If Krautrock were ever to be played in a club, it would probably sound something like House of Balloons. Project mastermind Abel Tesfaye's throbbing, eerie synthesizer production makes one consider Tangerine Dream as produced by Timbaland(or, if you like, Massive Attack producing Chris Brown) and the spacey autotune settings only compound the sense that The Weeknd's love is a cold, subtle, violent thing. Dreamy space rock and dream pop aesthetics combine snarling bass and club-ready beats to create an experience entirely removed from all of its influences, and the raw libido of Tesfaye's lyrics combined with the sterilized intensity of his production create an alienating experience for the listener, bringing you into a world where sex seems as passionate as it does robotic. Frankly put, from a purely sonic standpoint, I've never heard anything like it, not to this degree.

It's fitting, then, that with Nostalgia/Ultra's focus on songwriting and House of Balloons' focus on production, that they would both have the flaws you would expect of them: Uninteresting beats in the former and stupid lyrics in the latter. Neither crop up terribly often, but they're both persistent enough to lower the quality of their respective albums.

Occasionally, The Weeknd will mention "bitches" and "real niggas", and while that's expected, even appropriate, for rappers with a streetwise image, when you're the Jon Anderson of your respective genre you might wish to consider dropping the tough guy act and just focus on getting laid. Unfortunately, it crops up often enough to be distracting from the magnificent aural aesthetics, and occasionally Tesfaye will drop the ball in ways that defy the imagination. I played "Wicked Games" for my boss and when, in a passionate falsetto, he belts out "Let me seeeeeee that aaaassssssss" as though all the world hinged on his request, neither of us could resist cracking up right then and there. (Which is a shame, because otherwise it's by far the best song on the album)

At least The Weeknd is distinctly doing his own thing, though. Near the end of Nostalgia/Ultra, Frank Ocean displays a spectacular degree of laziness that threatens to derail the entire work upon first listen. "American Wedding" is, simply put, Frank Ocean singing over "Hotel California". He changes the lyrics, but he intones every line nearly exactly the same as the original song and doesn't make any alterations whatsoever to the backing track- it's hard to keep your jaw from dropping as he lets the entire song run from start to finish, with no changes, even down to the guitar solo, which he doesn't sing over. No shit, when he does the exact same thing with MGMT's "Electric Feel" for the closing track you're less awed at his contempt for anything resembling production ingenuity in these final moments than you are just glad that the song doesn't have an instrumental interlude that Ocean will allow to wail on totally without input.

Don't let the fact that I've spent the last couple of paragraphs detailing the relative flaws of these two albums sour you on them, however. They're both spectacular works otherwise, and I have a feeling they're both going to be on my top 10 for 2011 by the time the year wraps up. With Nostalgia/Ultra's captivating lyricism and House of Balloons' incomparable production, they're both strong testaments to the respective strengths of their genre and are well worth having in the collection of anyone looking for smart, memorable, creative music in an otherwise rather dire year. As long as you're not expecting total perfection-and you really never should when you go out looking for music-you'll find a truly worthwhile pair of albums in Frank Ocean and The Weeknd's respective debuts, and all it'll cost you is space on your hard drive.

Download Nostalgia/Ultra here.

Download House of Balloons here.

-CJ

Bandcamp Roundup: Cheap/Free Doom Metal

With the recent releases of Indian's Guiltless and Witch Mountain's South of Salem I thought this would be a good time to give you the scoop on some of the free doom(or at least, doom-y) metal I've been downloading from Bandcamp. As you may know, Bandcamp is an incredible resource for wasting time and a surprising amount of unsigned bands that use the site are very talented. So without further ado, here's a list of doom bands/albums that you can scoop up with no damage to either your wallet or your conscience.

Dirty Knobs-Field Recordings From the Edge of Hell

Would you consider yourself a fan of avant-garde music? Maybe one who enjoys music that's somewhat intense, a bit off the beaten path? Well check this shit out, dude: Field Recordings From the Edge of Hell is Sunn O))) meets Arnold Schonberg meets My Bloody Valentine meets Skinny Puppy meets Nurse With Wound in an instrumental wall of sound that's as psychedelic and horrifying as it is beautiful. And how long is it, might you ask?

Eight hours.

This is men-from-the-boys material, folks, and if you think you're up to it the baseline price is only one dollar. Grab your nuts and pony up a buck for one of the most singular musical experiences you'll ever hear. It's a more-than-fair cost to hear evolution in the making.

Download Field Recordings From the Edge of Hell here.

Arms of Ra-Arms of Ra

Now this is the kind of thing I was really looking for when I first set out on my doomquest. Arms of Ra have made an E.P. that's as intense as it is sonically interesting, mixing the fury and at times even the technical elements of the Dilinger Escape Plan with the bold, sweeping riffs of early Isis. The guitarwork is as sharp as a knife and the rhythm section, though layered, slow and sludgy, betray a captivating complexity upon multiple listenings. Arms of Ra is a promising young band with the potential to uproot most of their contemporaries with the threat of a full length release. Most excellent.

Download Arms of Ra here.

KOLOSS-END OF THE CHAYOT

END OF THE CHAYOT (and yes, the album and band name is in all-caps) makes a pretty compelling case for why some people don't like post-metal. If you've heard a Neurosis album, or even a Mouth of the Architect album, you've heard more captivating versions of the songs KOLOSS attempts to carbon-copy. Some vaguely interesting guitar work can't make up for the fact that this band adds nothing to a scene that in many ways is rightfully accused of borrowing too much from itself. Weak.

Download END OF THE CHAYOT here.

Wizard Eye-Orbital Rites

Wizard Eye makes the exact type of music you'd expect a band called Wizard Eye to make, by which I mean it's extremely goofy and pretty kickass. The vocals sound way too close to Phil Ansemlo for comfort and in truth there's not much here you haven't heard before if you have even a casual relationship with stoner doom, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't fuckin' kick on several occasions and that it wasn't a pretty fun listen. Don't expect to have your mind blown and you might come out the end of this album having had a pretty swell time.

Download Orbital Rites here.

Cleansing the Damned-Cleansing the Damned

A little bit industrial, a little bit doom and a lot okay, Cleansing the Damned is an album that often comes out a bit cornier than it does despairing or scary. The growled vocals have absolutely no heft and the lyrics aren't so much tortured as they are wimpy. The best parts of this release are the total left turns, like the song "Stimuli", which is more or less a spoken-word piece set over a gnarly riff and a drum loop, and the closing, eleven minute instrumental. The mechanical parts work better than the death parts, and I think if this guy (as this is a one-man operation) focuses more on his industrial stuff his future releases will turn out a lot better. He's a good technician but can't pull off the emotional highs needed to drag us into his world.

Download Cleansing the Damned here.

Tempest-Passages

Agalloch is listed on Wikipedia as being "doom", and while I find that patently absurd I guess that if Agalloch can be considered to have doom elements Tempest can too. Passages is an intriguing mix of black metal vocals and huge, swirling riffs that come roaring out the gates with refreshing intensity. This is a band that was born to make a 15-minute opus, but the crust punk trappings on some of the songs, while great for energy, hold Tempest back from being the epic endeavor they should be. For a debut E.P., though? Pretty frickin' great.

Download Passages here.

Are you an artist who uses Bandcamp? Do you release your stuff for cheap, free or Name Your Price? No matter the genre, send me an email and I'll do my best to give you a review worthy of the time you spent making and distributing your work for little cost. If you're a Bandcamp artist who'd like to see your music reviewed on Styrofoam Boots, hit me up at chrismichaeljones@gmail.com and I'll give your stuff a listen.

-CJ

Patsy Cline-Sweet Dreams: Her Complete Decca Masters(1960-1963)

This was something I had originally purchased for my mom as a birthday present. I had previously had some interest in Patsy Cline, based on the meager 29-minute run length of a greatest hits collection lying around the house, and thought this would be an excellent way for me to jump in head first and see what was so enchanting.

I was expecting songs about drinking, cheating, breakups, etc., and I got all that. What I was not expecting was a typhoon of agony and woe that would make Morrisey himself look up from his trapper-keeper and marvel at the level of emotional self-flagellation that one can pack into two hours of music.

Listening to this two-CD set, one would think that Patsy had never in her life been in a relationship that amounted to anything less than total misery. One doesn't expect good vibes from the Nashville Sound, and certainly not from an artist that kicks off her collection with a single called "I Fall to Pieces", but the heartache here is relentless in a way that defies the surliest of early emo and would make the most ardent Fall-Out Boy fan shuffle uncomfortably and cast their gaze to the floor. Fifty one songs, and Patsy only seems happy in maybe four or five of them, and even then it's a happiness radiating from a ruthless desperation, not one that comes from any center of self-worth or achievement.

Hers is a bleak existence, and Patsy Cline sells it with such pathos as to make you think that her torments were your own. There's no filter here, nothing to separate audience from artist. "She's Got You" has got to be the greatest example of this phenomena. A song about being left with the physical remnants of a long and powerful love now broken to pieces, Patsy puts you in the room with her. She tilts your head to look at that signed portrait, she lets you run your fingers over that record she used to play with her boyfriend, and when she squeezes out "I've got your memory, or has it got me?", what reads like the pithy drivel of a lovelorn schoolgirl feels like a gun barrel in the mouth. Her voice has a similar effect as Matt Berringer's, in that sense: Her rich tone makes it seem like she's putting on a cloak of knowing sophistication in order to stave off an anxiety attack that's only going to hit that much harder once it arrives.

The absolute saddest track on the collection, though, has to be "When You Need a Laugh", a song about how Patsy's love for a man who cannot reciprocate it is so powerful that she will allow him to mock her foolishness in loving him just to see him smile. I have wracked my brain for days and for the life of me cannot think of a more emotionally crippling sentiment I've heard in a song than "At least I'm on your mind when you're laughing".

That is not paraphrasing. That is a lyric from the song.

I cannot think of another music artist who has been so brutalized by love, so debased by the human heart and so abused by their own emotions. There is no hope in the music of Patsy Cline. Not for happiness, certainly not for fulfillment of any kind. It's just forlorn memory after intolerable disgrace after unendurable emotional strife and it doesn't stop, ever. Not for Patsy.

And it stays with you, oh my does it stay with you, but not in the way you would think. All of this suffering and agony is delivered by a voice that, luscious and melancholy as it is, might just as easily be singing about the bounties of true love for all she seems troubled, supported by backup singers who wouldn't be out of place in a Max Fleischer cartoon from the '30s. The music itself doesn't seem to understand what it is, and that makes every song easier to digest, easier to absorb, until you're hearing Patsy's lamentations as Gospel truth. It slips in as banal vocal pop and then unsheathes its talons the minute you let it roost. It's dangerous for the sunny disposition, but right after a breakup or dead in the middle of another lonely night you'll have found your new best friend.

The music of Patsy Cline, for me, draws easier comparison to a band like Alice in Chains or Black Flag than the Johnny Cashes and Willie Nelsons of the world. It's music to crawl under the covers and flip off the world to, songs of loss and rage and frustration and incurable despair. It's theatrical in a way that is not to be mocked(well, for the most part: It's hard to stifle a guffaw during the vaguely ridiculous "Tra Le La Le La Triangle", as though you couldn't tell by the title) and in the way it plumbs the depths of the broken, beaten parts of the human spirit, raises them out of the body and in their absurd extremity makes them devastatingly understandable. This is music that you will relate to immediately, much to your own dismay. Anything less wouldn't be strong enough to break through.

-CJ

Free Stuff: Metalswim Comp

This is rad, and I've been meaning to bring it up for a while: Adult Swim has come out with a free comp package of rare or upcoming tracks by awesome metal bands. And I do mean awesome: Skeletonwitch(!), Isis(!!), Kylesa(!!!) and Boris(!!!!!!!!!) all have tracks featured on this collection and they're all pretty damn great. I personally even found a few bands I hadn't known about before, like Red Fang and Witch Mountain. There's basically no reason not to download this if you're even slightly into modern metal.

Enjoy.

Alexi Murdoch-Towards the Sun

Occasionally, you will get an artist who sounds exactly like another artist. Even more occasionally than that, this will not be a hindrance to enjoying the music. That said, I'm just gonna put it out there: Alexi Murdoch sounds like Nick Drake. He takes everything from the timbre of his voice to the wistfulness of his lyrics from the tragic folk singer, but he manages to differentiate himself from Drake in enough ways to make Towards the Sun a wonderfully inviting album.

Though he's an Englishman, you can hear quite a bit of American rustic tradition running through Murdoch's compositions, at times even sounding like a less bombastic Edward Sharpe. Murdoch and his finger picking are the main attraction here, certainly, and attentive ears will pick up a shade of pastoral fluidity that recalls John Fahey at his most relaxed, but he knows when to add a short piano riff or some banjo to give his songs a fuller sound. It does what soft music should do, which is engage without being overbearing.

If there's one word that I would use to describe this album, it's "comfortable", in both the way Murdoch sinks into his songs and in the way it makes the listener feel. Though he may sound like Nick Drake, this is no tribute or ripoff: Murdoch means every word he says, and make no mistake, they are his words. When he uses words like "wherefore" in his lyrics, it sounds as much like something that was used as the best word to compliment the melody as it does like something Murdoch would say in casual conversation. It's due to this entirely natural delivery that he can sing lyrics like "Mother, you are a bird" and not sound completely ridiculous(trust me-you have to hear it to believe that he pulls it off).

Still, there is a darkness to this album that doesn't register immediately, and it's a subtlety that rewards repeated listenings. "Slow Revolution" is the most immediate example of this. You notice the last line, "And all of this matter soon won't matter much anymore", and then you realize that while you were engaged with the pleasant tone of the song you didn't notice that many of the lyrics were downright apocalyptic. Towards the Sun has a running theme of sudden ends and uncertain beginnings, of being pulled in different directions and walking where your heart tells you, simply because your brain doesn't have any better ideas. The swirling isolation mixes with the general warmth of the music to create an atmosphere that is at once peaceful, charming and desolate.

In a year that has been generally underwhelming, Towards the Sun has been my first completely satisfying listening experience, not because of its trendsetting ambition but due to being a smart, passionate reinterpretation of familiar themes. Alexi Murdoch's previous album, Time Without Consequence, came out in 2006. If his next release doesn't come out until 2016 it'll be a loss for us all. Murdoch is the sort of artist that you want others to take notes from, until you remember that there's a reason that he seems to be the only person who can make this kind of music work these days. Nobody else is so willing to sound like somebody else if that's what it takes to make entirely unique music.

-CJ

Why Sunn O))) Just Doesn't Work For Me

As time has worn on, I’ve found myself gravitating more and more towards the doom end of the metal spectrum, to the point where I’m willing to proclaim it my favorite subgenre in said spectrum. The louder, heavier, slower and longer the better(that’s what she said!). There’s very little in this little burg of extreme music that I won’t listen to-from the hard rock leanings of The Sword and Red Fang to the petrifying death attack of My Dying Bride and Ramesses to the just generally brain numbing stupidity of Bongzilla, it’s rare that I’ll find something that doesn’t appeal to me in some fashion or another.

More recently, I’ve found myself becoming drawn towards that most challenging of subterranean scenes, drone doom. Earth’s Special Low Frequency Version was the originator of the genre and has rocketed into my top 100 with startling speed. Likewise, Boris has plopped out a few masterpieces in this regard, and from what I’ve heard of them, Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine sounds exactly my speed. It seems that there’s just one last gate I have yet to crash through in fully understanding what is arguably one of the most intimidating types of music that is, and that gate is Sunn O))). Unfortunately, it’s a barrier that I don’t think will come down anytime soon.

I’ve been trying to figure out precisely what it is that pushes me away from Sunn O))), besides the obvious reason of having to type out that fucking name every time I bring them up. Interestingly, the guitarist for the group, Stephen O’Malley, plays for several other done bands that I’ve very much enjoyed, but time after time Sunn O)))’s appeal eludes me. There are two reasons I’ve come up with as to why they don’t work for me, and both are reasons that make the band somewhat antithetical to the ethos of drone as I personally understand it.

The first reason is that Sunn O))) play all of their songs in chunks. They are long chunks, mind you, generally no shorter than ten minutes but no longer than twenty five. Complaining that not-quite-half-an-hour is too short is something that only a total crazy person would do, and yet here I sit in my tinfoil hat, trying to get the moon on speed-dial. One of the ways I view drone doom is as the warped, demented twin brother of Romantic classical music. Both aim to be awe-inspiring in their scope and ambition, but where classical is technically intricate and ornate, drone is stagnant and repetitious. Whereas this era of classical attempts to achieve intensity through majesty, drone attempts the same feat through monolithic singularity. It attempts to drown the listener with a subtly morphing unity of Cyclopean ambition. In order to achieve this, drone doom is best delivered as a single song, generally 45 minutes or longer. If the listener is more willing to commit themselves for a long duration of time, the music has a greater chance of solidifying itself as a Goliath that demands total attention. Anything shorter and the song loses its power: a titanic epic simply turns into a man playing the same riff for far too long to be interesting and not long enough to have any sense of grandeur.

The second important reason why I think Sunn O))) is second to its contemporaries is because they don’t fully embrace the total minimalism that the genre needs to make itself so alien and captivating. Since Flight of the Behemoth, Sunn O))) has introduced elements such as classical orchestrations and intricate vocal arrangements to pile on top of their gigantic riffs. You might think that such flourishes would help keep the music from growing stale, but on the contrary, I think it strips away what makes the genre so appealing: That breathtaking, inescapable sense of immersion in utterly foreign and beguiling musical territory evaporates the moment I have something else to compare it to. For the same effect that Monoliths and Dimensions is aiming for, I could listen to the orchestral works of Krzysztof Penderecki. For the total horror of Black One I could get similar satisfaction from a Nurse With Wound album. If I want to hear the overwhelming, ear shattering guitar intensity that Earth’s Special Low Frequency Version offers, however, I don’t have any other alternatives. And if the sweeping buildup and haunting crescendo of Boris’ Flood were reliant on anything but three people squeezing every last drop of heavy out of their instruments, I wouldn’t have much reason to listen to that, either.

My point, overall, is this: I don’t dislike Sunn O))). But that said, I have no reason to listen to them. As a drone band, their contemporaries match them with a far greater level of commitment to the form. As ambient horror, many avant-garde classical and industrial groups have already beaten them to the punch at perfecting that sickening feeling of dread which is so necessary to making their music worthwhile. I don’t need both delivered at the same time, especially when they have the effect of watering each other down.

Do you disagree? Of course you do. Tell me why I’m a big fat idiot and Sunn O))) is the raddest.

-CJ

Another Stupid List: Kurt Cobain Cares About Your Childhood

"Man like remember when the music was real and shit, right after those gaywads from hair metal ruined everything and right before those gaywads from indie ruined everything and like people could actually play their guitars and still did like fuckin' solos and shit even if they didn't do them that well but like that's the whole point that like it's all from the fuckin' soul, man, the fuckin' soul because straight up record companies didn't exist back in the early '90s and everything was real and nothing was terrible and you had your first beer, do you remember your first beer? Fuckin' A man, they don't make 'em like that anymore."

If this is a thing you've ever found yourself thinking, you probably still read Rolling Stone Magazine, and you're probably one of the people who voted in their dumbass reader poll of the best albums of the '90s. Congratulations! You're terrible. Your prize is that you're terrible.

So, yeah, you know the drill. Here are ten albums that I, personally, would substitute in place of this foolishness. Waste your time! Waste my time! Be excited!

The Lonesome Crowded West-Modest Mouse

Modest Mouse Fanboy Picks Modest Mouse Album First, Surprises Nobody. If you needed a headline for a newspaper about little-read music blogs that would be a damn fine one, but I won't hear that this album hasn't earned its place as one of the giants of indie-rock. This is without question Modest Mouse's most expansive effort, careening from guitar epic "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine" to tinges of IDM in "Heart Cooks Brain", through the blistering hard rock attack of "Doin' the Cockroach" and over the southern-rock style jam "Trucker's Atlas" and (almost) ending up at melancholy folk number "Bankrupt on Selling", there's a song here for every mood and situation. If it isn't Modest Mouse's masterpiece, it's a close runner-up and arguably their most re-listenable effort.

The Low End Theory-A Tribe Called Quest

As a white person, I'm required by law to love this album. But these laws exist for a reason! It feels downright foolish to try and describe why what many have described as the best hip hop album of all time is phenomenal, but The Low End Theory has very likely the best beat production of any album ever made, letting a stand up bass and kick drum fuel the rhythms with mellow-yet-booming minimalism. When you add in Phife and Q-Tip's distinct wit and verbal agility you have a cocktail that proves relaxing, intense and thought-provoking aren't mutually exclusive concepts. The ethos behind Quest's masterpiece would go on to fuel the ambitions of hundreds of future artists.

f#a#(infinity)-Godspeed You Black Emperor!

"The sun has fallen down, and the billboards are all leering, and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles." There's a reason their music was used in 28 Days Later: Godspeed You Black Emperor! is the soundtrack to a stroll through the barren wastes of Armageddon, and f#a#(infinity) is their most intense and challenging album. This is closer to classical music than rock in every respect-their commitment to majestic despair is so powerful as to require a small orchestra to convey as images of blotted landscapes and urban decay pass on the strings of violins and subtle guitar arrangements. Desolation never sounded so beautiful.

The Battle of Los Angeles-Rage Against the Machine

Where their self-titled debut ran on immensely captivating, if unfocused, fury, and Evil Empire was marred by bad production and poor songwriting, The Battle of Los Angeles emerges as Rage's magnum opus, a collection of battle-ready anthems that steamroll a thousand other comparably "heavy" bands. Tom Morello crafts electrifying riff after electrifying riff and Zach de la Rocha belts out the most piercing lyrics of his career as the rhythm section anchors the whole thing with grooves that would make you feel like dancing, if you weren't already throwing a Molotov cocktail through a store window. Prepackaged rebellion was huge in the music of the '90s, but for about half a second you could feel like breaking a cop's jaw might be a justifiable assault, and we have Rage Against the Machine to thank for that.

Slaughter of the Soul-At The Gates

Slaughter of the Soul forced heavy metal to up its game in a way that no album since Ride the Lightning had managed. It showed that you could be sad without being whiny, furious without being petulant, that your instrumentation could be brutal and bloodthirsty and technically magnificent without being dull and convoluted. Frankly, though, no explanation is necessary: All you need to do is crank up the title track to max volume and in the bat of an eye, you'll find the rest of your metal collection-shit, the rest of your music collection-hopelessly mundane. Slaughter of the Soul is a benchmark in extreme metal that has yet to be met or surpassed.

Angel Dust-Faith No More

Straddling the line between mainstream radio metal and avant-garde insanity, Angel Dust is one of the mos curiously inscrutable albums of the early '90s. It takes a few listens to notice everything about this album: the neurotic-bordering-on-depraved lyrics, Billy Gould's funk from hell basslines, the lush keyboards, the way in which an easy to spot hit can morph into a psychotic monster of a song almost without you noticing. In truth, even once you find yourself appreciating Angel Dust, its appeal will still be difficult to explain. Maybe that's the key, though. It's easy to dismiss, difficult to understand, yet with time it'll hold such mysterious power of you that you'll wonder how nobody else seems to recognize what a work of genius it is.

Rust in Peace-Megadeth

"Holy Wars...The Punishment Due".

That is all.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea-Neutral Milk Hotel

To say that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was ahead of its time would be an overstatement akin to saying that the Vietnam war was pretty lame, or that Keith Moon was a good drummer. Every indie, folk, and indie/folk album that came out in the past decade owes this album a debt that they can never possibly repay. Jeff Mangum's lyrics have a sinister, sexual, whimsical bent that would make William Butler Yeats nod in approval, and the melodies are so lush and heart wrenching that you might not have even noticed the words if Mangum's voice weren't impossible to ignore. It could be called psychedelic, but In the Aeroplane Over the Sea doesn't choose to explore the vastness of the cosmos; rather, it plucks out the strangeness of the soul. I have a feeling that even at this stage we're not through seeing the influence of this album spread, but if even one artist manages to capture weirdness and beauty of this masterpiece, that'll be one more artist than I was expecting to do so.

Repeater-Fugazi

It's a shame that one of punk's defining albums would come at the tail end of the genre's widespread relevance. Still, Repeater is the album that should've redefined and carried punk forward in the wake of grunge. One thing that's immediately noticeable is that Fugazi doesn't sacrifice technicality for raw emotion: Every instrument is expertly played and, in particular, some of the basslines defy belief. That doesn't mean a single ounce of fury and frustration is left out, though, as Guy Piccioto blends noise and prog influences into his scathingly fast riffs and Ian MacKaye howls like a bus fell on his leg. Despite the quizzical lyrics and deft musicianship, Repeater is an album that's impossible to sit still to, combining everything amazing about punk and cutting the fat while blending outside influences with unmatched skill. An indispensable part of any music lover's discography.

Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star

This may be yet another entry in the "Rap White People Love" pantheon, but there's a solid reason that people of all walks of life are still pissed at Mos Def and Talbi Kweli for not making a Black Star 2, and that reason is that this album fucking rules. Def and Kweli spend the majority of the album mocking the rise of gangsta rap and attempting to both dispel stereotypes and defend their sovereignty as black men. It would be horribly condescending if any other group tried to pull it off, but luckily the pair has the chops to pull it off, spitting rhymes with unmatched flow and producing minimal beats in the A Tribe Called Quest tradition while adding a verve and youthful energy that's distinctly their own. Like Slaughter of the Soul did for metal, Black Star became, and remains, the alt. rap album to beat, leaving a wrecked trail of Digable Planets and Arrested Developments in their wake.

...Man, one of these days I'm going to have to do something other than shit out a list. I won't let you down, readers!

-CJ