mercifully about a musician

Solo artist Samtar indulges

Samtar is the alternative’s alternative one-man band. Alone, he indulges, producing burlesque sounds influenced by System of a Down's Serj Tankian and maybe some Frank Zappa and a little Mike Patton. On Shadow of the King’s Charade, Samtar's weird renaissance and fantasy vibe side-steps the parade of sixth-generation Rolling Stones and Black Sabbaths.

 

The drifting chorus on album opener “The Shadow From My Dreams” plays to Samtar’s stronger suits—his softer, more restrained vocals and capacity for vocal melody. Hear it at 55 seconds, then at 2:10, capitalized at 2:30. (A guitar solo at 2:50 dissolves the moment.) And Samtar demonstrates his competent falsetto on “Echoes From Across the Sea.”

 

Although Samtar is not to my taste, I enjoyed sampling it. That enjoyment peaked with “The Man”; a supple acoustic moves, tells an old story under an evocative vocal melody. His nice falsetto again turns to burlesque. The album's best vocal melody comes in the chorus of “You Bleed.” Here, Samtar’s controlled Serj Tankian-like affectation works in the song’s favor.

 

The production on the album limps, though. Especially the drums. Cymbals rinse away in the background while the drum heads all sound deadened.

Samtar wrote, recorded, and mixed it himself. Shadow of the King's Charade was released January 13.

about a scene from the Columbo episode, “Any Old Port in a Storm”

“Any Old Port in a Storm” aired October 7, 1973, and guest starred Donald Pleasence as Adrian Carsini, a wine connoisseur who murders his half-brother to prevent him from selling the family winery. Peter Falk is, of course, Lieutenant Columbo.

Adrian Carsini's anxiety grows with each encounter with the amiable detective. In the just-one-more-thing scene (a staple of every episode), Carsini is almost begging to be caught and relieved of the pressure when Columbo mentions the detail that first triggered his suspicion: the dead man's sports car—which Carsini staged at the beach where he dumped the body—was spotless even though it had supposedly been parked there in the rain. Columbo yells his apparent afterthought—turning the screw even more—from the end of the winery's long driveway:

Columbo: Oh, Mr. Carsini! Sir! I just remembered one of the reasons they’re not releasing your brother’s body. I forgot to tell you the other day. Well, you know your brother’s car? It stayed out on that cliff for a week. During that time, it rained, and then we had some sun. But when we saw the car the morning we found the body, it looked like it just came off a showroom floor.

Carsini: What’s your point?

Columbo: No water marks. Can you explain that?

Carsini: No, I can’t.

Columbo: Well, there must be a reason for it. There always is!

Carsini: When you find it, will you tell me!?

Columbo: Believe me, sir, you’ll be the first to know!

Pleasence makes an excellent wine snob. His half-brother is handsome, athletic, an adventurer. But Adrian—short and prissy—has only wine, and his vulnerability is that his world is so small. It makes him desperate.

 

Note: 

- Peter Falk was on Johnny Carson right before the episode aired and expressed his great admiration and appreciation of Pleasance. 

- Dana Elcar has a nice little role as Falcon, a sweet-natured wine enthusiast from Texas.

 

 

(posts) a Raymond Carver poem: "The Other Life"

 

The Other Life

Now for the other life. The one
without mistakes.
- LOU LIPSITZ

My wife is in the other half of this mobile home
making a case against me
I can hear her pen scratch, scratch.
Now and then she stops to weep,
then – scratch, scratch.

The frost is going out of the ground.
The man who owns the unit tells me,
Don’t leave your car here.
My wife goes on writing and weeping,
weeping and writing in our new kitchen.

copy for some third-generation band

The guitar player’s white SG Classic is not the only allusion to Sabbath

 

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs has posted a video for “Ultimate Hammer,” a single from the band’s upcoming album, Land of Sleeper.

The song kicks right into a jam with its chin up and chest out. This recalls a classic sound perfected decades ago by bands like Motörhead. The video shows the band mimicking a performance under stage lights flared by a filter on the camera lens. After 90 seconds, the song throttles back. The riff turns to sludge—brained—and the video shows bottles break across the band members’ heads. Then the song regroups and returns to the opening jam.

 

 

This is the second video and single released ahead of the album. A few months ago, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs shared a similarly styled video for “Terror’s Pillow.” The singles suggest Land of Sleeper, set for release on February 17th via Missing Piece Group Records, will be a heavy metal and sludge show.

 

The group is scheduled to begin touring in England soon and arrive in the U.S. in March, playing a show at SXSW March 16th.

 

something about Frederick Forsyth’s “The Day of the Jackal”

I watched “Carlos,” an excellent movie about the infamous international terrorist for hire, Carlos the Jackal. Carlos was a Venezuelan Marxist named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez; the recruiter in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine code-named Ramirez Sanchez "Carlos" because of his South American roots; then The Guardian began referring to him as Carlos the Jackal after one of its correspondents supposedly saw the fugitive with a copy of the novel, The Day of the Jackal.

So the movie led me to read that 1971 fictional thriller. The novel, written by English author and journalist Frederick Forsyth, is about a professional assassin contracted by a French dissident paramilitary organization to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France. The book covers the organization’s history of failed attempts; its subsequent activities and hiring of the assassin; the assassin’s meticulous planning and preparations; and the Government of France’s work to protect the President, foil the dissident organization, and identify and catch the assassin. Forsyth trusts his reader and includes a lot of wonderful details and characters. The result is an especially satisfying read.

Notes:

• Carlos the Jackal is now serving a life sentence in France. One of his most notorious crimes was his 1975 raid on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna; three people died during that attack and several OPEC oil ministers were kidnapped.
  

• The 2010 film “Carlos” has a good soundtrack and an excellent performance by Edgar Ramírez, who plays Carlos as a man whose reputation precedes and probably exceeds him.

something about working among the masses

She zipped from the leafy greens to the citrus, where she paused for 70 seconds to honor her device, then slipped from the citrus to the potatoes and onions, where again she bowed her head. Produce to dairy, back to produce; to soups and canned meats, back to dairy—on and on like this, squatting in prime Safeway real estate a minute at a time. The other Safeway shoppers sidestepped her or took detours. I found her cart blocking the tuna cans; as I reached for the StarKist, I read a sheet of paper in her cart: “Instacart Do Not Touch” written in Sharpie. She was working, and this was business. The rest of us were just running an errand.

 

about seeing a friend one last time

I had a lot of fun in grade school, like in fifth and sixth grade. But I often focus on the bad, so I thought I was miserable. I felt such a relief when summer came—fewer expectations on me, more possibilities.

 

Pretty soon, though, only one week of summer remained. Then evenings became precious. And sad. That is what our last few moments together were like.

 

(posts) a picture from a fireworks show

about missing

A dad will drink milk out of a carton with my face on it. I'm gonna make a really stupid face for this picture, too.

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.