a bit of the old wit

When someone tells me how smart their dog is, I think of how dumb the person must be.

 

about a hard rock/metal band's debut (with a decent music video)

This band sounds like it will steal your tools

The band photo shows three guys wearing ugly masks, studded arm bracers, and chain mail as they pose, let's say, in the side yard of someone’s wood-shingled duplex in Nassau County, New York. With those costumes, you’d be forgiven for lowering your expectations. But Rotgut’s debut, “24 oz Cantrip,” features five songs of excellent, heavy rock n’ roll amped up with death metal, black metal, and thrash influences.

Opening song “Bonemelter” is fine—thick guitars with hot leads, bass and drums tight as hell, and good momentum.

But I took interest in the EP when I heard “The Hunger.” Rollicking from the first, the song’s fast thrash riffs burn amphetamine energy. This sounds like driving with your eyes closed, racing down the freeway shoulder, sending cars spinning in all directions.

“24 oz Cantrip” isn’t beer-bash partier thrash. Rotgut trends darker. The single, posted below, is “Return of the Dead Without Eyes.” Just get passed the group-shout chorus and focus instead on the splashy cymbals after 1:25 and thereafter as the song revels in black-metal-influenced passages. It wraps with beautiful patience at about 3:20 with an inspired payoff led by the vocals, “Blood of the maiden, blood of the priest, blood of the mason, blood of the thief / A beggar to Caesar, a flame to the cloth, sixes in triplicate, salt to the north / A clarion call to the dead without eyes to lead us to darkness and swallow the skies!”

I love the agile bass on this album. It's always on the offensive. It looms and lifts the whole composition.

The album goes by fast. The songs, each 3 or 4 minutes long, make for a loud and enjoyably intense listen. The music sounds a little like The Crown, Midnight, and, at a vast distance, Converge. The Seattle-based band self-released “24 oz Cantrip” on streaming platforms June 20th, 2025.

Those costumes are a fun, cheap way to get your attention. But this band’s sound deserves to hold it.

 

 

notes on relitigating the p(odc)ast

The Smashing Pumpkins hit mainstream success during the early 1990s grunge/alternative rock era. The rock band Bush came soon after.

Breakout bands and artists, especially when they offer something fresh, are soon followed by similar-sounding bands and artists. Bush, one could say, came in the slipstream of The Smashing Pumpkins and the first wave of grunge and alternative rock.

Billy Corgan of the The Smashing Pumpkins recently interviewed his counterpart, Gavin Rossdale of Bush, on Corgan's podcast.

 

I enjoyed the 90s look-back.

Corgan tried hard to sound admiring, tried to make a point of his respect for Rossdale. I thought he tried too hard.

During the interview, Rossdale said he wished the widely admired recording engineer and producer Steve Albini would have given him more direction on the songs while recording the second Bush album, "Razorblade Suitcase," instead of just engineering the sound.

I also learned that people think Bush's debut sounds like Nirvana's "Nevermind" and that the follow-up sounds like Nirvana's follow-up, "In Utero," which Albini also worked on before the label and Kurt Cobain pushed him out. This clearly led to insinuations at the time that Bush was aping the hot bands.

Throughout the interview, Rossdale seemed thoughtful and very normal. A family guy. And as they compared their lives as parents, Corgan admitted being selfish and disconnected.

Note:

- Breakout bands and artists being followed by similar-sounding bands and artists is the music and entertainment business. Look at all the country-themed albums coming out. Ridiculous.

- Rossdale still has Cobain's haircut. Bush was seen as sort of a mashup of Nirvana and Pumpkins.

- My memory is grunge predates "alternative rock" as a genre label.

 

fictional note A47

I walk around town and observe homeless activity. The city deploys staff to calculate my next movements. I confronted one staffer and said, "This is gonna be rough if you want to follow me over here and see this for yourself. I am the one having to go into these situations." He did not say anything, but we shared an understanding.

 

(posts) an excerpt about a glimmer of hope

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

 

a quick review of a crossover punk band from Salt Lake City

Deathblow’s new EP offers more tall-guzzling thrash metal

I reviewed Deathblow’s three-song EP “Rotten Trajectory” in 2023. Those denim-and-high-tops songs sounded mosh-ready. The new EP, “Open Season,” tries to pick up where they left off.

The title track starts with some head-nodding hardcore, then steps into a fast punk-rock chord progression 40 seconds in. A textbook sound.

My favorite song is “Tormentor.” It attacks from the get-go with a rapid-picking riff. The song has a little of the old, nourishing energy heard in much of their 2023 release. And thrown in for the bargain is a hot little lead after the first verse.

But, man, the singer falls on his face trying to hit a high note at 50 seconds. I’d hate to hear the vocal tracks that didn’t make the cut.

The good news is “Open Season” includes some tidy thrash and punk compositions.

But the effort overall lacks inspiration. The music too often sounds rote.

The Salt Lake City band released the EP June 16, 2025, on Sewer Mouth Records.

about Linkin v Dillinger

In my freshman year, I went to a guy's dorm to play guitars. I was pretty good. I played Slayer and Ozzy. A few years later he asked if I wanted to start a band. He wanted to sound like Linkin Park, but I was into The Dillinger Escape Plan by then.

He had never heard Dillinger, so I played "Calculating Infinity" on my car stereo for him. He didn't like it: "Who wants to listen to this?"

I asked the same question about Linkin Park: trend-chasing commercial music for idiots, I thought.

Since then, I shed some snobbery and learned to see his side of it. It's fine if you care whether people like your music. Like, when I listen to music, I usually decide within two minutes minutes, asking, "Where is the bite? What's in this for me?"

But on the merits of sounding like Linkin Park versus The Dillinger Escape Plan: Dillinger was an admirable success for over 15 years. Its audience was loyal, and the band's influence continues. Linkin Park changed nothing and shed fans rapidly after a few years. The lead singer killed himself in 2017.

Note:
- Success in the music industry is the Holy Grail, anyway.
- Funny, all the little details of these two moments.

a review of a Thirdface album

A second listen reveals the pleasures of this rush of raw, invigorating hardcore, noise rock, and metal from late 2024

I listened to this album last winter and decided to pass. Big mistake!

Thirdface’s “Ministerial Cafeteria” is beautiful savagery—slam-dance energy courses through body-blow rhythms and face-raking vocals.

I rescued my download of this album from the recycle bin after “Sour” played on some playlist. The song offers so much.

It’s the most measured and spacious song on the album. The bass guitar steps up, and a patient but hard-hitting beat stalks menacingly amid a claustrophobic guitar. The effect is a gross, dangerous tension.

But urgency and abundance power most of the songs. The exemplar is the groove-chewing “Pure Touch.” This fucker is exciting—a nearly perfect song with its ferocity and change-ups. A coiling guitar riff sounds like rock n’ roll under spittle-fly vocals. The song is part Dillinger, part Jesus Lizard. I also love the spastic, syncopated “Bankroll.” The song runs into a few danceable grooves, including a great harmonic-driven riff near the 1:20 mark.

The Nashville hardcore-punk quartet released “Ministerial Cafeteria,” its second full-length, on November 1, 2024, via Exploding in Sound.

I mean, don't most of us wish we were back in November 1, 2024?