The engine is flooded with death metal and thrash, and
because of that you can smell Violence Beyond All Reason. The new
album from Besieged burns from track one with blink-and-you-miss-it atonal
solos, spitfire chord changes, barking vocals and guitars, and hyper-driven
drums.
“Paragons Of Brutality” opens with drum fills that
fall into a groove before slam-dancing from riff to riff. This sound is part of
the legacy of the classic Florida-based band, Death. The old way’s piss-stain
spread shows darker on “Path to Defy,” where the band tries to piece together
pit-bull bites. And drums first lead the attack and then hold back on “Descent
into Despotism.”
Powder-flecked riffs spill from pockets and socks, and
left turns blur into oncoming traffic.
Besieged started around 2010 in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Twelve years somehow passed between the band’s debut, Victims Beyond All
Help, and now. The sound is a mix of progenitor Death and Bay-area
thrash. The songs sometimes lack flow, and the drums can sound canned as the
mix buries the bass and cymbals, but the guitar is a self-cutter and this album
is wild.
Unspeakable Axe Records releases Violence Beyond
All Reason June 6, 2022.
The woman opened the package—the Ukraine flag
had arrived from Amazon. She remembered ordering it on Saturday or Sunday and
was grateful that she had not picked the big one, having chosen instead the tasteful
18"x27". She still had to find a place for it outside.
The blue and
yellow colors were pure and signaled to neighbors that she is informed and feels
passionately about the issues—that she, too, stood with the people of Ukraine.
Some weeks later, returning from her walk, the
woman paused and counted three other Ukraine flags on her block. How long, she
wondered, do we keep these up?
American author Richard Yates gives voice to friends of loneliness. He made an extraordinarydebut in 1961 with Revolutionary Road. The novel’s aching pulse beats loudly, softens, then redoubles louder than before. Characters struggle to make sense of the feeling that they will never live the life they imagined. Yates once said, "If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy."
Revolutionary Road plays out in East Coast suburbia, 1955. Frank and April Wheeler think they are in a rut. Frank, a charismatic intellectual in his college years, no longer finds ironic amusement in the nine-to-five workaday office life; April, an attractive, artistically inclined woman, is home with the kids and a growing sense of desperation. April persuades Frank to relocate their young family to Paris, where the promise of real life now awaits. This promise of change gives new spark to their relationship—but the spark dissolves in a thread of smoke.
One dampening force is the neighbor’s adult son, whose borderline personality and candidly delivered, jaded insight depicts the Wheeler's problems plainly. Then April discovers she is pregnant, conceiving reckonings. The desperation buried in the Wheeler’s unsatisfied lives surfaces for air, and change comes.
Yates once described Revolutionary Road’s subtext:
I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the fifties, there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.
This quote surprises me in a way, though, because Yates sounds like he is criticizing people like Frank Wheeler because he could not leave the security of the suburban life and office job; but in reading Revolutionary Road, I thought Yates was criticizing Frank because he thought he deserved anything else.
Notes:
Quotes from Boston Review, October 1999, and Ploughshares, Winter 1972.
Revolutionary Road, the 2008 movie directed by Sam Mendes, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, but Michael Shannon owns it, of course, with his performance.
The French band finally releases its long-awaited, highly anticipated debut.
Off the rails and whipping toward you, its headlight beaming the anger
of God, Anna Sage’s new self-titled album is a thrill. The rapid-fire
opening snare on “The Holy Mice” battles a staccato, off-time guitar
riff. And the guitar tone is live; the amplifier practically hums in
front of you. Feedback sometimes fills voids when the guitars break,
like on “Sinner Ablaze.” Thirty seconds in, the song hits a groove, and
bass guitar notes slide around the key as the six-string pours out a
blurry, dissonant drone. Then comes “The Deadly Mess of a Dying Head,”
where the atonal scream-shout vocal rages in cadence—"The wall in their
eyes / they fall from their skies / hear ‘em antagonize!"
Anna Sage, a four-piece band from Paris, has issued at least two EPs in
the band’s 10 years, but this self-titled album, released April 15,
2022, is the band’s proper debut. You can instantly hear the influence
of Jane Doe-era Converge—the caustic
intensity, the volume and passion, the mix of straight-ahead rhythms
with frequent, chaotic tempo changes. Other hardcore and metal
influences include Botch, Will Haven, Trap Them, and Gaza.
“Loveless” includes an oft-repeated sound on the album—dissonant
high- or mid-range two-note chords that knead over crashing drums while
the vocal smears its shredded personality onto the aggressively mordant
sound. “Double Bind” begins much like a Jane Doe
song, too, chaos pounding on all the doors and windows. Then around 50
seconds in, the song stabilizes and the guitar jams on a simple riff
while the drums ratchet up the tension by slipping in fills and playing
just off the beat.
On Anna Sage, the guitar riffs can be
thrilling, taking the listener around blind corners and through dark
doorways. The drums alternate between imposing order and creating high
drama by stopping and starting; the guitars will repeat a riff, but the
drums play differently the second time through. One thing I notice,
though, is that the album has no big moments, no single part I would
play for someone to say this is how good this band can sound. I
think this just underscores how consistent this album is and how
important the audio engineering and production are to making Anna Sage sound so good.
The
delicate sound of beautifully engineered death metal.
Finland’s
Corpsessed wheel out a new maggot-filled slab of 90s death metal on April 22nd.
On Succumb to Rot, the band adds to its catalog eight more songs
of the writhing dead. Hear the guitar picks flick up and down mightily;
register the restless-leg syndrome of the drummer thumping down the seconds
that lead you closer to the grave. But what registers for me most is the
intestinal vocal, belching sequences of words that are more reminders than
thought. What do they remind you of? Death. And metal.
I enjoy the
production and guitar tone on this album. Succumb to Rot comes
out via Dark Descent Records, and the band anticipates releasing a vinyl
edition later in the year. Vladimir “Smerdulak” Chebakov created the
artwork—the cover depicts a vaguely human abomination meeting his gruesome
demise on the tar sand wasteland. And that reminds you to have a little fun.
First thing every morning—but especially Monday
morning—I hear the bus flatulate to a stop 30 feet outside my bedroom, and I
know the world is back at it. And through my window I watch garbage trucks
collect piled trash behind the restaurants and bars and dump glass bottles,
sucked empty, into breakage. The workers use bins, bags, and boxes to
gavage-feed the truck until it pulls away, stuffed stupid, the engine howling
hollow wind.
Listening to the brilliant album What Life
makes me feel alive—like I want to catch every bus and all the garbage is a
celebration. Club Night released What Life in April 2019, but I
heard it only recently. The music often sounds high-spirited but contains
multitudes. The songs convey spontaneity, as if Club Night is experimenting
with changes and rhythms, but the band’s idiosyncrasies are masterful and the
musical sum captures a contagious, noisy energy of hooks and melody.
What Life
opens with “Path”—the drummer counts off 16 beats as the bass guitar insists on
the note, then the drum rolls through fills while the guitar strings pull off
and hammer on, wheedling notes, and the vocal—charged and high—cries out to all
and sundry. The lack of inhibition speaks volumes. The music sweeps through
emotions—joy, restlessness, righteousness, desperation. Even the quieter
moments carry energy.
Club Night takes all the noise of daily life and
filters it into music. What Life feels a little like the
perspective grief can give you.
“Cough” opens with a brief mellow passage, then the
restless drumming and guitar figure in. The song segues into a faster
heartbeat. The vocal swallows water, as if drowning under reverb and the mix,
but its expressiveness and pitched cry allow it to pierce the bonds of the
surface.
The bass guitar starts “Cherry” with a head-nodding
pulse. Then guitar harmonics ping a melody. Tumbling drum fills hold the
momentum, and the volume grows, the rhythm quickens, the angles sharpen until
the song drops into a nice and easy playout.
Club Night’s blend of fragility and ferocious
animation reaches near-perfection on “Trance.” Take just the moment of one
lyric: “I let out a howl so unspeakable.” Josh Bertram’s vocal starts as a
hoarse, tortured scream, then slides into his melodical caterwaul. The song has
incarnations, taking on different rhythms and paces. The vocal pierces, the
guitar phases, the drums roll to a bass alive with inspiration. At 3:00, the
song hits a triumphant coda.
And within an album full of highlights, the best among
them is the last song, “Thousands.” I probably will play this song from time to
time the rest of my life. I love it for the crescendo at 3:30—the snare drum
starts cracking, the feedback sings, synthesized skies whistle as they fall—and
then it all resolves with the lyrics, “What if we wanted more? Not waking up to
the taste of bad news again. I dare not ever ask though I bawl at the
splintered sunlight alone… What if we wanted more? Are you happy with the life
that you chose?”
Club Night’s frontman, Josh Bertram, was previously in
Our Brother the Native. What Life, and Club Night’s previous EP,
Hell Ya, are far less experimental than Our Brother the Native and sound more
like early Animal Collective and maybe Mae Shi. What Life
captures something—a time, a storm of influences and events, maybe. But what if
we wanted more?
Roger Ebert was a talented, Pulitzer Prize-winning
film critic and writer who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death
in 2013. In 1975, he and Gene Siskel, film critic for rival paper Chicago Tribune,
began co-hosting a weekly movie review show in Chicago. The
no-frills program was picked up for national syndication and eventually moved to commercial network
television. The odd couple—plump, mop-haired Roger wearing glasses next to tall, thin Gene—having tense, insightful arguments and giving thumbs-up/thumbs-down
movie reviews became
a pop-culture phenomenon in the 1980s and 90s. After 53-year-old Siskel died in 1999, Ebert continued the show format with other critics.
Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands in
2002, and his treatment and surgeries later led to the removal of his lower jaw.
Ebert, disfigured and no longer able to speak, continued to write, and his blog attracted a loyal audience. He reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and was on
TV for 31. Ebert was 70 when he died.
His patient, careful autobiography, Life Itself, is traditional and lovely. Ebert describes his
parents, his childhood (including Catholic school), his career, his alcoholism
(and then his pain-killer addition during cancer treatments),
and his relationships, including the close, competitive relationship he had
with Siskel. Ebert's writing about his disfigurement and condition is touching.
I also enjoyed reading his views on the evolution of film promotion over the years
and his descriptions of his interviewing habits.
And one passage early in the autobiography sneaks in this gut-punch.
The optometrist had me read the charts and slowly straightened up. "Has
Roger ever worn glasses?" he asked my mother. "No. He hasn't needed
them." The doctor said: "He's probably always needed them. He's very
shortsighted." He wrote me out a prescription. "Wasn't he ever
tested?" It had never occurred to anyone. My parents and my aunt Martha
the nurse monitored my health, which was good; I was in the hospital only
twice, to have my tonsils and appendix removed, and had monthly radiation
treatments for ear infections (they were probably responsible for the salivary cancer
I developed in my sixties.) I'd never complained about eyesight, and no one
noticed any problems.
