another generous review—this time for some atmospheric black metal band from Siberia

Melodies—buoyant and boreal, layered and lofty—ring out on this diverse black metal album

ULTAR’s latest album, At the Gates of Dusk, often stays near the moonlit path worn by the second-wave black metal pioneers. Songs like “Midnight Walk and Reminiscences of Necromancy” and “My Rope” feature the genre conventions—blast beats and rasping gauged-eye screams. Rhythms on these songs trend toward the furious and unyielding while the drums, not the guitars, dazzle.

But ULTAR plays atmospheric black metal that leans at times toward post-metal and even shoegaze. This album, which features higher production value than the pioneer and modern purist recordings, features more accessible melodies even while retaining a lot of the older back metal stylings. The melodies—buoyant and boreal, layered and lofty—ring out in their simplicity within the harrowed arrangement’s peduncular hallucinosis.

Some of the most obvious post-metal/shoegaze sounds arrive with the slower-paced “Antiques”—a trotting Elk of a song, its antlered head dipping as it climbs the rise of red hills. The guitars are fuzzed and jangle more than they vomit distortion. Likewise, “Rats in the Walls” opens with a delicate construction of guitar harmonics, reverb, and fuzz. Then comes the distortion and the screaming, the splashing cymbals, and then the onslaught alongside a simple melody. This is perhaps the album’s most dramatic song; although the promotional materials claim the album is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, during this song I think of Mary Shelley and picture the monster Frankenstein crashing through the Arctic in a stolen dog sled, his creator, Victor, closing in as the ice begins to crack.

ULTAR is a five-piece band from Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. At the Gates of Dusk, released November 20, 2022, follows the albums PANTHEON MMXIX (2019) and Kadath (2016). The band has opened for Behemoth, Cradle of Filth, Myrkur, Suffocation, Vltimas, Hate, Wiegedood, Alcest, Swallow the Sun, Harakiri for the Sky, and The Ocean.

a review of a heavy metal band from The Netherlands

Heavy, melodic post-metal—the music of mechanical advantage

On The Burden, Throwing Bricks compose leaden post-metal grooves. Opener “Bricks of Grace” introduces the album’s thick sound—a sound that looms across hemispheres. The vocal goes at a full roar, and higher-end guitars layer on top. Then, at 4 minutes, the distortion drops and a reverb-laden guitar strums a few chords. The band often creates dynamics in songs by shifting into these atmospheric, quieter parts. A bass guitar enters and creates a flow, lending some substance to this little indulgence, followed by lighter drumming, then a pillow-muffled roar. Then at 6:10, everything kicks back in at full volume.

The songs “Clearly Awake” and “Hall of Mirrors” hammer out a bit of a sharper-edged sound than the album-opening song and fold more melody into the heaviness. Similarly, “Doubt,” after a few perfunctory strums on a reverb-darkened guitar, blasts into the washing surge of melodic heaviness.

This 5-piece band from Utrecht, The Netherlands, aim for an epic sound rather than a dazzling show of guitar and vocal histrionics and rhythmic acrobatics. The fuller, more melodic chords on the album seem introspective even while the sound expands out always in volume. The sound engineering and recording might be the album’s main feature; it was recorded and produced at Much Luv Studios by Tim de Gieter and mastered at The Atomic Garden by Jack Shirley.

The Burden is the band’s second full-length and was released October 28th on Tartarus Records. Some bands that have been mentioned as reference points for Throwing Bricks include MØL, Oathbreaker, Amenra, Ultha, and Fall of Efrafa. But on The Burden, Throwing Bricks reminds me of Envy but with more chugging guitar parts—loud parts smeared with sludge-oil filled with the metal shavings of heavy machinery.

something about “Working,” a book by Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel (1912–2008) was an American historian, broadcaster, and writer; in 1974, he published Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, a nonfiction book that—true to its title—catalogs many, many people of various walks of life talking about their work. During his lifetime, Terkel produced a few works based on his wonderings about the lives of the strangers you pass every day.

This is probably an okay or even fine book, but I grew annoyed by the too-on-the-nose “regular guy” voices. It was like, “I’m what you call a [job title]. Our system isn’t perfect. But we make do. The other day, we were cranking the [name of something]. I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe this. What are we doing over here?’ Then I get $50, which made me feel great! So that’s the deal.” Five hundred pages of this.

Note: For reasons I do not understand and have not bothered to look into, I associate Terkel with Chicago baseball.

 

a review of a noise rock/mathcore band

Lower Automation’s newest album, Strobe Light Shadow Play, is an experimental, dissonant mishmash of noise rock, hardcore, and mathcore. The music has such a sense of motion, of nervous energy, sounds can seem like randomness overtaking the system. The band tests and tries things, and the noise is barely contained—but it is not chaos. “It’s the most experimental and noisiest release we’ve ever put out, but also probably the most melodic,” the band says.

Among my favorite songs is “Information Entrepreneurs and Their Lipsynching Choirs,” which opens with a piercing, shaky, manic vocal. At 15 seconds, the buzzy bass buzzes into a punchy dance beat while the distorted echo- and reverb-tweaked guitar bounces off the walls. Drums fritter and snap out.

“Acolytic” opens with little discordant riff that features a subtle lift at the end of each series of strokes. The bass rumbles and yawns, and the drums motion frantically and then pause and punctuate a desperately prayerful vocal. The energy grows, but then, at 1:25, the band pulls back into a bad-attitude bass riff, the drum marking time more evenly while the guitar still noisily sparks off around the room. The album captures some very good moments, and this song is a great example.

Another exciting moment is the what-the-hell-is this? opening to “End Scene”–a fast-picking classical guitar with softer emotive singing. This gives way to noisy, raw hardcore—the guitar is nuts. At 1 minute, cello strings sift from behind bass-drum hits before the song dives back into the fray.

The songs are short, hovering around 2 minutes each, and sound a little like The Locust with bits of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Botch, and At the Drive-in. Strobe Light Shadow Play will be released November 22nd via Zegema Beach Records. Lower Automation, a trio from Chicago, has two previous releases—an EP titled Maps from 2016 and a self-titled full-length from 2021.

about this Thanksgiving

I am looking forward to Thanksgiving. I like the turkey in a bag, the mashed potatoes, green beans, pie and whipped cream, and the Cowboys. I am looking forward to eating and watching the game together. It never matters to me if the game is exciting or if the turkey is juicy. I just want to smell the food cooking in the house and know that you are right there.

 

a quick blurb about some noise rock band

 

Pulpy belligerence on noise rock band Mal’s swirling debut

Sounds from the far end of a bender

Mal play experimental prog-ish noise rock. The addition of a bad-tempered saxophone differentiates this soup of sound—a sound that adds metal, free jazz, and art rock—from a lot of other noise rock bands. Mal formed in late 2019 and on October 21, 2022, released its debut, Malbum, on Ordovician Records.

This versatile 4-piece band from Minneapolis cites Sleepytime Gorilla Museum as an RIYL. And the boozy sax can add the noirish sound of blurry neon over black and white—ahistorical scenes built on shaky metal scaffolding.

about a recently published obituary

The Wednesday, November 9 edition of The Dallas Morning News included an obituary that was written by the deceased. It is rather long; here is a link (which might expire) and four screenshots to try to catch it all.

 

https://www.restlandfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Richard-Shlakman/#!/Obituary

I enjoyed reading this, but it also reminded me of a scene from Young Hearts Crying, a Richard Yates novel. In the scene, a writer is working on a short biographical statement to go with his photo in his soon-to-be-published debut book; he gives the draft bio to his wife.

And this was the finished copy he brought out for Lucy's approval:

Michael Davenport was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1924. He served in the Army Air Force during the war, attended Harvard, lost early in the Golden Gloves, and now lives in Larchmont, New York, with his wife and their daughter.

"I don't get the part about the Golden Gloves," she said.

"Oh, honey, there's nothing to 'get.' You know I did that. I did it in Boston, the year before I met you; I've told you about it a hundred times. And I did lose early. Shit, I never even got beyond the third—"

"I don't like it."

"Look," he said. "It's good if you can work a light, self-deprecating touch into something like this. Otherwise, it's—"

"But this isn't light and it isn't self-deprecating," she told him. "It's painfully self-conscious, that's all it is. It's as though you're afraid Harvard may sound sort of prissy, so you want to counteract it right away with this two-fisted nonsense about prizefighting. Listen: You know these writers who've spent their whole lives in college? With their advanced degrees and their teaching appointments and their steady rise to full professorship? Well, a lot of them are scared to put that stuff on their book jackets, so they get themselves photographed in work shirts and they fall back on all the dumb little summer jobs they had when they were kids: 'William So-and-so has been a cowhand, a truck driver, a wheat harvester, and a merchant seaman.' Don't you see how ludicrous that is?"

and posts an interview with some hardcore band

Brass guitarist talks lyrics, inspiration, and Canada.

 

BRASS released a new EP, Look on the Bright Side, on October 21st. The sound reflects the band’s influences—The Bronx, Alexisonfire, At the Drive-In, IDLES, and Refused. Sounds range from hard-charging hardcore to moody and dynamic post-hardcore. Last week, guitar player Tristan Milne took a moment to respond to a few questions.

 

Damon: I just heard the new album. The song “Milestone” sticks out for me. I liked the sense of tension, the dynamics, and, of course, the breakdown at around the 2-minute mark. The song lyrics include the line, “The ground moves right out from under me now / Does anybody else in here feel that?” I like this lyric and the phrasing. Was there a time in your life when an event suddenly seemed to change everything?

 

Tristan Milne: No. When we look back at the dynamic changes in our lives, the thread of what stayed the same is what becomes important. The milestone markers happen, but the crucial aspect is staying on the road.

 

D: What non-musical works or forms of art and media influence you and the band’s music?

 

TM: Painting and photography seem to be the two that we refer to the most when constructing songs. The combination of the immediacy of the recording process, which is like a snapshot of time, while creating on a canvas that has no ties to the physical reality of life is part of what makes music so fun.

 

D: The band comes from East Vancouver. “Bad Neighbours” is presumably about the U.S.A. Tell me a little about Vancouver and East Vancouver from your perspective. And talk a little about British Columbia and Canada. In your view, how does Canada’s proximity to and relationship with the U.S.A. affect Canada?

 

TM: While the band formed in East Van, we all came from different parts of Western Canada. East Van is great because it's been a melting pot that for decades has housed a lot of creatives and progressives. Canada still has its share of backward idiots, so the U.S. scenario isn't surprising to us. Devon has lines in that song about the States, but you can call someone out without denying your own faults, which I think he does effectively.

 

D: What makes you feel good?

 

TM: Sunsets, live drums, great headphones, good weed.

 

The EP, Look on the Bright Side, was released October 21st by Early Onset Records. The band lineup changed a little going into these recordings. Previous albums by BRASS are No Soap Radio (2015) and For Everyone (2018).

something about Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"

Johnny Got His Gun, a well-known anti-war novel by American writer Dalton Trumbo, chronicles a soldier's waking nightmare. The protagonist is Joe Bonham, a young American whose service in World War I costs him his arms, legs, vision, hearing, and mouth. Bonham, disoriented and displaced, regains consciousness in what turns out to be a hospital bed and gradually realizes the nightmare: that his mind is doomed to live on as the prisoner of a helpless, unidentified, and incommunicable torso on a hospital bed.

Bonham’s reckoning with his fate, his reasons for going to war, and the horror of it all comes amid rushes of pre-war memories. He also uses what remains of his senses to interpret his environment, and he grows determined to communicate with the hospital staff that keep him alive against his will.

Bonham’s extended memory flashbacks did not often connect with me, but some passages set in the present moved me in their intensity of anxiety and outrage.

Notes:

• Johnny Got His Gun was written in 1938 and published in 1939.
• Trumbo was blacklisted by Hollywood but continued working under pseudonyms. The influence of the blacklist soon waned, and he resumed getting credit for his accomplishments during his remarkable career.
• Trumbo directed the 1971 film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun.
• Hearing Metallica’s single, “One,” around 1992, was my introduction to Johnny Got His Gun. The music video uses clips from the film.

another overly generous review—this time of an Italian death metal band's debut

The influences are classic, but new life runs through these veins

 

Miscreance debut a heavily and colorfully barbed wire of sound on Convergence. The opener “Flame of Consciousness” represents the album well—pointy riffs, deft musicianship, roaring vocals, impatient songwriting, slips of atmospheric interludes, and wildly smooth guitar solos.

 

Forty-two seconds into the second song, “Fall Apart,” a studded few moments of rapid double-bass drumming carry a ready-fire riff. Ten seconds later, the riff changes, and the throat opens up, roaring verbal warfare. And at 3 minutes the mood falls into the young dawn with a guitar solo rising in gorgeous tone.

 

“My Internment” opens with a staircase-climbing dual-guitar riff over a hokey and fun deep voice-over, but from atop the stairs come some of the album’s best vocals—raw, animalistic—enough to terrorize the neighborhood. And at 3:00, Miscreance finally finds a riff that can move you, and the band plays out the song.

 

The young Italians' white-high-top metal recalls genre pioneers Death. Miscreance also cites Atheist and Sadus as influences. But this young band is fresh. The only issue with Convergence is that, over and again on the album, the fun stops as quickly as it starts, and at times it seems no riff is too small.

 

The band issued a demo called From Awareness to Creation in 2018 and put three tracks on a split with Australia’s Vile Creation last November. Convergence was released September 19, 2022, in three formats via Unspeakable Axe Records, Danex Records, and Desert Wastelands Productions. The band plans to tour Europe with Chilean band Ripper in 2023.

 

(posts) a poem, "Lift Your Right Arm"

Lift Your Right Arm

    Lift your right arm, she said.
    I lifted my right arm.
    Lift your left arm, she said.
    I lifted my left arm. Both of my arms were up.
    Put down your right arm, she said.
    I put it down.
    Put down your left arm, she said.
    I did.
    Lift your right arm, she said.
    I obeyed.
    Put down your right arm.
    I did.
    Lift your left arm.
    I lifted it.
    Put down your left arm.
    I did.
    Silence. I stood there, both arms down, waiting for her next
command. After a while I got impatient and said, what next.
    Now it's your turn to give the orders, she said.
    All right, I said. Tell me to lift my right arm.

—Peter Cherches

 

something about “In a Narrow Grave” by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was an American novelist and screenwriter who wrote mostly about the West. He was born in Archer City, Texas, about 25 miles from Wichita Falls. In a Narrow Grave, published in 1968, is a collection of Texas-related essays on cowboys, literature, sex, movies, and the life and people in small towns and big cities.

I read a 2018 edition with a new preface in which McMurtry suggests he has grown “weary” of his own prose. He also says, “The essays were a sort of bridge: behind me lay the mystic plain, ahead the metropolis of the muses. I wanted to cross; I hope I have.”

The early essays discuss the making of "Hud," which was shot in the Texas Panhandle and is based on Horseman, Pass By. McMurtry writes: "Hud, a twentieth century Westerner, is a gunfighter who lacks both guns and opponents. The land itself is the same—just as powerful and just as imprisoning—but the social context has changed so radically that Hud’s impulse to violence is turned inward, on himself and his family.” He adds that “His Cadillac is his gun.” McMurtry goes on to say that most of the remaining cowboys are middle-class.

I enjoyed all this.

In later essays on Texas’s big cities, McMurtry writes about Conservatism in Dallas and that “Wealth, violence, and poverty are common throughout Texas, and why the combination should be scarier in Dallas than elsewhere I don’t know. But it is: no place in Texas is quite so tense and so tight.”

McMurtry’s most popular works include Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), Terms of Endearment (1975), Lonesome Dove (1985), and Brokeback Mountain (2005). Amazing how much great stuff he wrote.

Note: "Hud," released in 1963, is an excellent movie starring legend Paul Newman as Hud Bannon, rebellious son of rancher Homer Bannon, who is played by the great Melvyn Douglas. Newman and Douglas spar, but the tension between Newman and the ruggedly honest Patricia Neal as Alma Brown, the Bannons' housekeeper, is ripe. Patricia Neal, one of my favorites.

 

a generous note about a Swedish hardcore punk band's EP

If you can’t win by reason

With an earth auger of a sound, “Mental Taxation” kicks off the new galloping seven-minute streak of an EP by Industrial Puke. The opening song’s thick, compressed production and deft chord changes represent the band’s best and only method.

Industrial Puke at times tries a regulated rhythm but cannot long resist the siren of speed. The one break from the forcible run comes at about a minute and a half into “Constant Pressure” with a slamming progression of chords—each chord stands out once from the blur. Then guitars harmonize and the song resumes its inevitable flameout.

The music bullies you, goes straight-ahead with insolent consistency—Industrial Puke happily suffers the hobgoblin of little minds. The band comes from where volume is power, volume overcomes weakness. Sound waves knock through the ear canal and shoulder into the tympanic membrane, like it or not.

The Swedish hardcore punk band started about 5 years ago. Time settling on a lineup and writing songs led us here, to Where Life Crisis Starts. The band put out its debut single and video, “Mental Taxation,” in June 2022, is partnering with Suicide Records to release this EP on September 16th, and plans to issue the full album Born into the Twisting Rope in spring of 2023.

something about dynasties and Great Men

A few months ago, former President George W. Bush delivered a speech during an elbow-rubber’s wine-and-cheese event held at his presidential library in Dallas. The occasion should have gone by unnoticed, but W's remarks drew unexpected attention because of a Freudian slip. Intending to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, W instead decried "a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq." In 2003, of course, W invaded Iraq on the claim that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction and was pursuing a nuclear weapon. The claim proved untrue.

But the part of W's remarks that got me came just before that nauseating gaffe, when W noted that “the Ukrainian people elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with whom I Zoomed the other day, by the way—cool little guy—the Churchill of the 21st century."

President George W. Bush gave people nicknames and made little jokes that sometimes, like this “cool little guy” quip, showed how removed rather than how normal W was. After all, he was a Bush, and a Bush is not like other people. To W, Zelensky, a little man with broken English from a strange land, is just another amusing accident of history. Not like a Bush.

Note: Would a Bush have stayed in Kyiv while most of the world was saying the Russians would conquer in a few days?