something about a new album by a French noise-rock band

Biographic details on Salo, the noise-rock band responsible for this punchy new release, are hard to come by. But the album, From Melmac With Hate, makes a fine statement on its own.

The first of these 11 confrontational songs is “Guillotine,” which zigzags a trail of noise buoyed by a hairy bass guitar tone under crashing cymbals and a vocal that seeks abandon. Salo’s musicianship comes through especially on “Jay” and “Speed Missile,” two of the most energetic performances on the album. The tremolo effect on the guitar breaks through at 1:35 on “Jay”—the notes cut noise like the bent, serrated edge of the junk-drawer knife. And the swinging drumming style, accompanied by that hairy bass, propels a lot of this album. “Jay” and “Speed Missile” exude a punk-inspired sound that is confrontational, spiteful, and desperate for attention.

Salo is a trio based in Lyon, France. Funny how small bands can make such big sounds. Social media suggests Salo is about five years old. The band cites as influences The Fall, Thee Oh Sees, and METZ—the last band being the most directly comparable. Halfway through From Melmac With Hate comes “Bring Back Medieval Plague.” This song, with its provoked vocal and damaging low-end rhythm section, approaches a blend of The Jesus Lizard and Young Widows. It is a clawing scramble up a mountain.

Salo slow the pace later in the album with “Tasmanian Tiger (for Nikita).” The bass guitar remains imposing, but the drums, especially the hi-hat, become stilted and self-conscious, almost uncomfortable. Arpeggio-style guitar notes smolder. The measured cadence of the vocal sounds borrowed from the tune of some Scottish folk pub song. The tone on the opening and closing guitar figure is a change-up, too. It is a stadium-ready sound from a guitar that spends the rest of the album cutting through back alleys.

about tennis and a new piece in The New Yorker

The Australian Open men's final this year was awesome. The Russki, Daniil Medvedev, is a funny, quasi-villain and impending champion, and Rafa Nadal, in his mid-30s now, is the sport's older statesman—older even beyond his tennis years because his unrelenting hustle and highly physical style of play has worn down his body. But Medvedev had the harder journey to this final, and Nadal is still a champion. Here is how a piece from The New Yorker summarizes Nadal's winning tactics:

Nadal’s topspin forehand gets a ball to not only bounce up but penetrate deeper wherever it’s headed, and he sent Medvedev chasing angled shots that bounded beyond the sidelines. He moved Medvedev forward and back with short slices, followed by deep, out-of-reach groundstrokes.

And then here is the column denouement:

Nadal spoke before the tournament began about how majors are bigger than any one player, and how generations of players come and go but the game remains. He also talked about how tennis is, as he put it, “zero important” compared with the pandemic that has swept the world. This was his way of talking about Djokovic, whose arrival, unvaccinated, in Melbourne, and subsequent deportation dominated coverage of the sport in the week before the Australian Open began, and threatened to cloud it afterward. That it didn’t—that the tennis was just too good not to become what mattered—was due in great part to Nadal and to Barty. That’s what the greatest champions can do.

 

Note: The final was played on January 30, 2022.

 

something about great tennis

The New Yorker published "Without Fans, the Drama of the US Open Came from Within," a great piece, right after the 2020 US Open; the commentary includes this passage:

There were moments when I asked myself what this was all for. So much effort, and such high stakes, for what? The tournament was taking place against the backdrop of tremendous unrest in the United States—the unfathomable spread of a lethal disease, continuing protests against racial injustice, profound civic distrust, and soaring unemployment. What is the U.S. Open when it is sealed off from New York? What does a championship signify, if some of the top contenders don’t come? What does it mean if fans aren’t there to ratify it? What’s the value of sport right now?

Some of those questions are unanswerable, but not all. In most respects, the U.S. Open was a success. It happened safely. Two deserving champions were crowned. The quality of the play was, for the most part, remarkably good. And, by the end, something strange was happening, at least for me: the event seemed to become more meaningful, not less, for being so stripped away.

The New Yorker piece details the men's championship match—the final match of the tournament, the match perspective played the net and won.

I remember agreeing that this match became more meaningful for me than most previous US Open championships.

I had wondered, when the tournament decided to carry on without fans, whether the 2020 results would have an asterisk in people’s memory. Because of how it played out, it doesn't.

Tennis players are not supposed to get coaching or have any communication with the people in their player’s box; the player is out there alone, fighting himself and his opponent, often buoyed or rejected—especially in big matches on big stages—by the crowd. In this match, the isolation, the loneliness, was heightened to an extreme, and I really felt for them, felt the struggle, felt empathy.

Note: The Australian Open concluded today with an instant-classic match between Rafa Nadal and Daniil Medvedev.

 

something about a progressive post-hardcore album

Over Opiated in a Forest of Whispering Speakers, the new album from Seven Nines and Tens, introduces vocals to the Vancouver band’s blend of progressive post-hardcore and shoegaze. The vocals debut on album opener “Popular Delusions” and sound like a softer version of an Alice in Chains-style harmony over thick, cotton-sonic waves of thunder.

“Throwing Rocks at Mediocrity” again rolls out a controlled, tapered vocal harmony, but this time over picked-out single notes that sheen over a stuttering beat. Then a dramatic guitar and bass figure diverts the song into a confident strut that sets your head nodding yes. The song slows, expands, explores until it finds enough room to explode in slow motion.

I wondered if the vocals were too consistently restrained. But, with a little time, “Throwing Rocks at Mediocrity” turns its attention outward, then upward, reaching cruising altitude after 3:35. The drum work rounding out the song’s finale not only sounds great, it feels great.

The album’s promotional copy notes that, when writing the record, Seven Nines and Tens performed live with bands like Alcest and Pinkish Black. I can hear those bands’ influences, and I hear the influences of bands including Tool, Alice in Chains, and Black Sabbath.

The fourth song, “Let's Enjoy the Aimless Days While We Can,” starts softly, “You’re everywhere and nothing. Don’t tell me we can’t pull this off. It’s a far cry from a factory life. Permanence of the firmament.” These fever-dream lyrics lead to a churning riff overdriven with fuzz, a tentative, plodding bass and drum fall in behind, and the song labors, barely able to lift its lids. Heavy reverb blurs the edges of the vocal, which struggles under the subsea tones of the guitars. The song is a sailing stone.

But “Edutainment” offers a dramatic lift. The rhythm section engages with a syncopated beat and challenging bass line—together, they complement the even, chanting vocal harmony. The verse returns with guitars added to the arrangement. Then the song transforms, and by Jove, at 3:15, the album hits a second high, lifted by the surrender in the lyrics and vocal, “It’s going to end just like it started.”

Over Opiated in a Forest of Whispering Speakers was released January 7 and is the third album from Seven Nines and Tens. For this release, the band signed to metal label Willowtip Records.

 

something about Novak Djokovic and his 2022 Australian Open quest

The Australian Open starts next week. Heading into it, the big story is how Novak Djokovic's anti-vaccine stance is jeopardizing his Australian visa status. Djokovic is the top men's tennis player in the world now.

For a while, tennis had the Big Three—Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic, the youngest. But Djokovic, unlike Federer and Nadal, has never been a fan favorite (outside of Serbia, where he is loved, of course). Fans tend to root for Djokovic’s opponents.

Why he is disliked is sort of a mystery, and some sportswriters have explored the question. He actually seems to feed on the negativity during matches, though, and he will no doubt one day hold the record for winning the most Grand Slam tournaments. Over the last two years, with Federer and Nadal not playing as much, I noticed that fans seemed to finally start to come around to Djokovic. But right now, he is everywhere and for the wrong reasons, and he will be booed if he plays this tournament.

He won last year’s Australian Open, so he wants to defend his title. And if he won this tournament, it would be an incredible fuck you because he would win it in a country that did not want him there while pulling ahead of fan favorites and his rivals Nadal and Federer in the ranking for most Grand Slam tournaments won, thereby making him, effectively, the Greatest of All Time. Incredible.

His status is still in limbo, and he is running out of time to deliver maybe the biggest fuck you in sports history.

 

something about “Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation,” a nonfiction book by Jamie Thompson

Standoff counts down the minutes of July 7, 2016, the punishing summer night when a lone gunman waged war on police amid a Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Dallas. That night, protesters, moved by the recent murders by police of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, marched in cities across the nation to demand policing reforms and accountability. Dallas police were monitoring the city’s peaceful protest when a black, young man in a bulletproof vest, armed for battle, murdered five officers and wounded eleven other people.

A chaotic gun battle in the streets moved into a downtown community college, where police cornered the shooter. As a negotiator tried to talk down the gunman, whose cause was sick vengeance for racial injustice in America, the SWAT team armed a robot with a bomb, directed it to the gunman, and blew him to bits.

The author of Standoff, Jamie Thompson, cycles chapters through perspectives—on events and on the issues—from the officers, from family, protesters, a doctor, and the police chief and mayor—people whose lives changed that night.

Aside from the negotiator, who is black, the officers, in Thompson’s telling, all have the colorless view that police decisions should not be questioned—and the officers’ views are the ones most frequently expressed in Standoff. The officers are also portrayed as heroic or tragic. They were.

Note: Jamie Thompson won an Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in writing for her coverage of the gunman’s ambush of Dallas police in July 2016. Thompson originally covered the shooting for The Washington Post and later wrote about it for The Dallas Morning News. She has also contributed to D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and the Tampa Bay Times.

something about Beach House's "Superstar"

 

Beach House is releasing an album, Once Twice Melody, in "chapters." The four songs comprising the first chapter were released in November. One song was "Superstar."

"Superstar" offers sentimentality. Sentimental songs always have a chance with me. I like sentimentality. I like to remember good times from when I was younger because otherwise I just worry about everything that is happening now or might happen in the future. I like to think about the good times in past relationships.

    When you were mine
    We fell across the sky

 

Then the song (and I with it) turns maudlin for a moment.

    Something good
    Never meant to last

 

something about a couple of songs from Coilguns

Right after Thanksgiving, the Swiss noise-rock group, Coilguns, released two songs—the first installment of its new collection of 12-inch vinyl singles, the "Hummus 12-inch Maxi Collection," carried by guitarist Jona Nido's label, Hummus Records. Song one, “Shunners,” opens with thick, three-note progressions glaring down on tumbling drums. A high-strung vocal relives the anxieties of one asking himself how he will make it to the end of the year. The intensity builds as he loses his nerve amid the constant calls for vigilance—“Hold the line! Watch the line! Line the line! Watch the watch!” Approaching two minutes, the song shifts, then finally spasms out something like djent or groove metal, trying to stomp out anxieties that seem only to multiply. The lead guitar bends and loops through more anxious loops, getting nowhere. The song finally, after five minutes, falls apart, worn from worry.

Coilguns usually records live, and recent efforts have been entirely self-produced, like this EP. What is new is a bass guitar. Kevin Galland joined the band in March 2020 to play bass and help mix and master the audio. Song two, “Burrows,” shows off the new, gritty bass with a pummeling, forward-facing groove that knocks down what stands in the way.

This EP and the rest of the "Hummus 12-inch Maxi Collection" are pressed on transparent or transparent-colored vinyl and housed in a picture disc-style sleeve. Side A has the music, and side B has an original drawing from Noé Cauderay screen-printed in La Chaux-de-Fonds by Out of Gas.

Coilguns is not planning many shows for 2022, so the group, which started in 2011, will be producing its fourth studio album.

 

something about a Vandal X best-of

The band’s volume knob goes only one direction.

Vandal X’s noise-rock sound has moved over the last decade from angular punk and metal influences toward sludge and doom, away from bands like The Jesus Lizard and Helmet but still near to Unsane. Now the Belgian band, which formed around 1995, celebrates its career with a best-of album, XXV, accompanied by a compilation of rarities.

The band is a twosome of volume masochists dishing noise-rock fans all they can handle and more. Bart Timmermans is the original singer and guitarist, and Dave Schroyen took over the drum kit in 1999 after the original drummer, Jo Boes, left.

XXV starts with “Fuck ‘m All”—feedback feeds into riffs that punch through the wall. The scream-shout chorus “Fuck ‘em all!” burns through the mic connection. First songs are often statements, and this is a fine one. Drums on “Jacobs Wife” pop with syncopation as the guitar plays a guileless riff that turns out to be a great contrast to the song’s big bass-drum kicks.

On “All Lined Up,” the snare drum cracks out the bars and goes full bore into the chorus, where layered vocals seethe out “All lined up against the fuckin’ wall!” with the barking guitar’s tone buried in the low- and mid-range. XXV has 13 songs, and the last third or so sound more like sludge metal—maybe none more so than “Patient Zero.” The vocal is deeper, the guitar tone has a fuller, more present buzz, and the drums sound gauche. Next to the earlier, faster-paced songs, though, this final stretch drags.

The pandemic delayed the release of XXV, but the band has assured its audience that the best-of will finally come out December 10 (via 9000 Records). It will be offered in a limited-edition white vinyl (remixed and remastered) with a CD of previously unreleased demos, live recordings, and rarities from the band’s “archives.”

something about that dream-like moment between beginning and end

Her eyes tossed bouquets, and I chased after each one. Then, one day, sitting side-by-side on a cafeteria bench—“Okay, I’ll be your girlfriend.” She grew to fill my vision. We lay across the bench, and I felt so good my heart tumbled loose. But, in the very next moment, a centuries-traveled sense leaned in and cursed how her affection would not stay long for me. She was hardly real as it was. I tried to keep my signal-shattered smile a few more seconds.

something about “Falter” by Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben's was one of the first widely heard voices on the dangers of man-made climate change. His book, The End of Nature, cut through in 1989 with clear and urgent descriptions of the threat. McKibben has written maybe a dozen works since then, and in April 2019, he published Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, which follows up on his 1989 warning.

I had enough to worry about when I started reading this, and I grew even more depressed and anxious with each paragraph. The last section of the book aims to inspire a final, last-ditch hope—but what is the use now?

Here is a good review of this book:

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/its-not-too-late-to-stem-climate-change-but-we-have-no-more-time-to-waste/2019/04/26/8406aa64-525b-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html

 

Note: Today is the last day of the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow.

about Texas sunsets in October

The sunset in Texas in October brushes us familiarly. I feel a twist in my heart as the late afternoon's gold mixes with shadows that take more and more space—much more space now than what blocks the light. And then the last rays slip over me and run fingers through the treetops.

Note: What can you do but notice the beauty of it, even during the final minutes of the football game.

 

about some little thing on local news

I watched a local TV news story in Dallas about a hotel damaged a few weeks ago during the annual Red River Showdown between Texas and Oklahoma. Some fans evidently damaged property during their stay. The hotel owner was on the news footage pointing out the damage. The next news camera shot—I'm not sure what the prompt was, maybe a question about regrets for serving rowdy fans of the football tradition—but it was the owner (he was a rough old guy) just beaming a big smile and saying, "But it's fun! I've had drama all my life!"

something about "Ylem" by Sunless

When songs on Ylem offer an opportunity for resolution, Sunless always takes a pass. Instead of allowing for the emotional release of a headbanging breakdown or final minor-to-major chord change, this Minneapolis-based death metal trio always chooses yet another stutter-step to keep you off balance.

My favorite song, "Spiraling into the Unfathomable," starts strong with a chaotic onslaught. Then the song pulls through nimble riffs and irregular beats, throwing lots of elbows and fingers. Most of the album is like this—dense, dissonant, mathy metal. Guitars slice thin cuts of spoiled notes, the snare drum pops like popcorn, and a raspy vocal growls to this kaleidoscopic examination of the dark.

Passion is channeled into proficiency, and emotional connections wither during the endless pursuit of curiosities. Ylem, through intricacy and denial of resolution, sublimates violence more than a lot of other death metal albums.

Sunless will release Ylem, the band's sophomore album, on October 29 on Willowtip Records. The album is billed as part two of a trilogy that began with the band's debut, Urraca, from February 2017.

something about "The Heavenly Table" by Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock writes a twisted version of American Southern Gothic fiction, and The Heavenly Table twists the genre to the point of torture. This novel, caked in cruelty, depravity, and poverty, is a hell of a story. The events are set in 1917 and, consistent with Pollack's other novels, unfolds in territory around southern Ohio. The story revolves around the three Jewett brothers; their father's death sends the impoverished brothers out on the road, their appetite for adventure primed by the Western pulp-fiction novel they have read so much they have it memorized. Pollock introduces many other characters, and shuffles between them chapter by chapter. Everyone—each barkeep, school teacher, vagabond, and whore—comes with a story, no matter how minor the part. It's a bargain. The cruelty, depravity, and poverty that splatter every other page make some passages tough reading. But few of the characters are straight-up bad, and the tidy, focused storytelling and prose compel further reading.

 

about when alley driveway gates went up

Jeremy had his big driveway gate installed after someone broke into his car and stole his golf clubs. His wasn’t the first gate in the alley, but it was a little different because his family lived next door to mom and dad. Every time I was around, I would see their SUV pull in and out, the 8-foot fence open and close, grinding the same, coming or going.

The first time I saw a gate like that in the neighborhood was probably 10 years earlier—on one of the houses in the alley opposite the field belonging to the public elementary school. Is that the one that started it all? Today, those alley driveway gates are everywhere. Whatever neighbors value is stored away safely now, along with whatever value neighbors have.

 

something about a debut from a Dutch doom-noise trio

Each sate sullenly apart, gorging himself in gloom. – Lord Byron

Farer debuted last fall with Monad, four songs—exercises, really—of droning grinds of blistering, drilling bass; thunder-and-lightning drums; feedback; and throat-herniating, injurious shrieks that are more primal scream therapy than performance.

The doom-noise trio (two bass players and a drummer) started as Menhir in 2013 but changed the name to Farer in 2019 after recording this debut. The intensity in these four tracks carries on for 12 to 14 minutes at a time, and this prolonged length can recast the intensity as a drone effect.

This Dutch band is working out a sound. What they have so far is grim and brutal, all right. It's a difficult, hungering debut.

 
Monad was released in November 2020 through Aesthetic Death and Tartarus Records. (On September 24th, it will be available as a limited edition clear and black marbled-color double-LP housed in a heavy gatefold.)

a note about Talleen's new single and video, “Economics”

Last week, Montreal’s post-punk quintet, Talleen, put out a single, “Economics.” A pulsing bass drives the song while an insistent, anxious beat counters the woozy guitars. The combination produces a black cocktail of uppers and downers. The dominant sound, though, is the vocal—a mimic of ridicule and sneer. The song, accompanied by a video (by Alex Ortiz, the bass player and singer for We Are Wolves), gives a heavy-lidded glance at capitalism.

Talleen debuted with an EP, The Black Sea, in 2018. They sound a little like Killing Joke.