Deathblow throws a shoulder into the mosh pit with an early-1980s hardcore punk sound on “Rotten Trajectory,” the opening and titular track of the band’s new EP. This song re-energizes the sounds of Minor Threat and Circle Jerks with truly deft playing, especially the drums.
“Pounder” swaps punk for thrash, which is really Deathblow’s department. The song charges ahead. “Pounder” and “In Plain Sight,” the third and final song, follow the traditions of '80s thrash bands like D.R.I., Overkill, and even Slayer.
For 10 years, Salt Lake City’s Deathblow has thrown down a very denim and high-tops sound—raw and amped-up '80s hardcore traditions cherry-topped by some burning guitar solos. The new EP arrived September 29th via Sewer Mouth Records and is advertised as an “appetizer for the full metal meal coming in the near future!”
She said, “They remember you. They
can’t have you around.”
“Am I in their mind? Are they
screaming?”
Quantum memory attacks by throwing weapons
or weapons-generated debris or explosions but memory is now entirely a machine-based
phenomenon. Virus-aligned implants man the machine weapon.
I opened the door with force. “Did you
know I was in here?,” she asked.
“I knew someone was. I hoped it was
you.”
My legs started moving but it was too late. Purple shrapnel tears apart
my body, and tearing righteously even once is me physically throwing power
away. This sentence recreates an act of absolute public murder. So close to dead
but not close enough—or too dead to me now to go on. But a man shape, still.
In her mind she was three different serial killers, one of
which is still nameless, famous, and free.
Evan is a strapping but slightly dull young man; he lacks confidence, discipline, and ambition. At 24, he already has a failed marriage behind him. His father, Charles, a retired army officer, feels unfulfilled, having missed his chance to shine in the fighting of World War I and married to a long-suffering, self-isolating alcoholic.
Evan remarries, this time to Rachel, a nice young woman who lives with her mother, Gloria, a nervous divorcee and compulsive talker, and Phil, Rachel's cynical 15-year-old brother. Cold Spring Harbor, the final novel by the stellar American author Richard Yates, handles the tepid, incongruous relationships between the two small families and the constellation of characters that orbit them.
Yates' characters grow quietly desperate as they stumble down any path that might lead them to what's missing. They are stung by resentment and disappointment, seemingly doomed to forever reckon with the disconnect between reality and the life they had imagined. Sexist and patriarchal norms blossom in the foreground of this novel, which was published in 1986.
Here are two of my favorite passages. First, after the Army rejects him because of his perforated eardrums, Evan begins to worry about his social standing as America prepares to enter World War II:
Well, but still, other men were saying goodbye to their wives all over the world. Other men were caught up in a profoundly hazardous adventure now, unable to guess how long it might last and not even caring. None of them were ready to die but they all knew their death was entirely possible; that was what would invigorate every waking moment of their lives.
And when they came back, these other men—or when most of them did they would all have a decided advantage over Evan Shephard. They might look at him as if he were scarcely worth bothering with, the way the cops had looked at him the night he was booked for disorderly conduct. If they talked to him at all it would be in tones of condescension, rarely waiting to hear his replies. And whatever elaborate peaceful structures they might manage to build in the world, after the war, would always seem to be there for no other purpose than to shut him out.
One thing, therefore, was clear; they had better not find him like this. Evan Shephard was damned if they'd find him punching a factory time clock, fondling his thermos bottle of coffee and his little brown paper bag of lunch, doing mindless, underling things all day then driving home in an absurdly cheap old car to this absurdly expensive place.
And, later in the novel, Evan and his brother-in-law, Phil, set out on a driving lesson. It is a chance to bond; Evan has always loved driving, and Phil is a lonely teenager eager to mature. But the lesson fizzles out in frustration.
That was how the lesson went until darkness began to fall—nothing
really taught, nothing really learned—and when Evan drove them silently
home he appeared to be sulking, as though he'd been offended by the
afternoon. It was clear now that there would be no further driving
lessons unless Rachel could find some agreeable way of encouraging them;
it seemed too, from the set of Evan's handsome profile, that he might
now be thinking of ways to let her know, tonight, what a hopeless
fucking idiot her brother was.
And Phil knew there might not be
much profit or future in hating your brother-in-law, but that didn't
mean you couldn't figure him out and see him plain. This dumb bastard
would never get into college. This ignorant, inarticulate, car-driving
son of a bitch would never even be promoted to a halfway decent job. This
asshole was going to spend the rest of his life on the factory floor
with all the other slobs, and it would serve him right. Fuck him.
Phil also imagined how his approaching chance to enter the service and the war would give him the advantage over blue-collar Evan.
Phil Drake might not be much bigger or heavier at eighteen, but he'd be stronger and smarter and hardly ever silly any more. Except for a few widely scattered Irving School boys there would be nobody to remember what a jerk he'd been, and so the army might be the making of him; it might be the time of his life. Just before going overseas he would come home on furlough, wearing a uniform that could only make Evan Shepard weak with envy, and he'd say "Well, how're things going at the plant, Evan?"
Or, to be fair, Evan might have found his way into some second-rate engineering school by then, years older than any of his classmates, with Rachel at some menial daily work to make ends meet. But even a line like "How's college, Evan?" would be good enough, coming from a soldier in wartime. It would take care of the situation; it would do the job.
I first read this book in May 2021 and then reread it in May 2022. It was even better the second time.
French hardcore band Cleaver wreaks havoc on debut
The chaotic and crude-sounding "No More Must
Crawl" debuts the hard-shove hardcore of Cleaver. Songs grind and scrape
by in an Adderall-fueled turn, switching impatiently between sludge, choppy
heavy metal, dissonant sidesteps, and chord-rolling hardcore.
The sound is a spasming relapse of American hardcore
from the late 90s, like Botch and maybe early Converge at a time when Converge's epic album "Jane
Doe" floated still on the hazy horizon.
The title track of "No
More Must Crawl" echoes the eponymous closer of "Jane Doe." I
liked “The Plight,” which opens with loud, dissonant detonations amid chunky
power chords before slowing to a bleary slog. And the album’s eruptions of
grindcore, like on “Thudding Stares” and “Kyg,” add vitality to these hastily
stitched-together episodes of frustrated sonic violence.
Cleaver formed in France in 2018 and consists of
Franck Fortina (bass and vocals) and brothers Mathis Garelli (guitar and
vocals) and Léo-Paul Garelli (drums). The music shows a lot of promise amid
the debut’s rough edges.
On my plane, I sat next to guy who looked like a small Ed Harris. Five-four, five-five, bald head. But with a Roman nose leading his narrow face. He spent most of the flight with his head resting against the seat back in front of him. Half the time while wearing eyeglasses.
Wild Beyond bargains with a lying, writhing serpent of thrashy black metal. The band pursues chaos and finds itself in a lovely mess on its self-titled debut.
The opener, “In the Footsteps of Mars,” is exemplary: the guitar crashes ahead and the cymbal stands teeter as the bass shakes the burning ground under your feet. Everything in a frenzy, everything in constant motion.
The Goddamn thing is reckless.
“Detonation of Secret Works” shows the same disregard for safety. I found its manic, climbing riffs inventive and colorful. The vocal crawls between growls, snarls, and wretches, leaning more toward black metal than death.
Songs do relent, but only between all the dungeon-defiling cutting and squealing.
And the band will explore. “Frenzied at the Skull” almost recalls classic British metal. On "Antichrist Coronation," the maniacal drumming momentarily loses touch with the guitars, losing each other in the dark they create.
The album remains dynamic through its eight songs. Some moments lack inspiration, and some songs perhaps go too long. But what beeswax can long withstand the heat of the sun?
This Philadelphia trio took shape amid peak 2020 covid. "Wild Beyond" was released April 14, 2023, on Gates of Hell Records.
George Plimpton was an American journalist and writer. Paper Lion describes his experience in 1963 joining the training camp of the Detroit Lions, a National Football League team. Plimpton, 36 years old at the time and not an athlete, tried out to be the team's third-string quarterback. Paper Lion expands on a two-part piece Plimpton wrote for Sports Illustrated in September 1964.
The book, published in 1966, is a widely read example of Plimpton's "participatory journalism." It followed up on a similar project, Out of My League, in which Plimpton participated in an American professional baseball all-star exhibition game. These books attempt to ask, How would the average man do in competition with professional athletes?
What comes off to me, though, is one guy who, for reasons probably having a lot to do with class, spends a lot of time among people he cannot relate to. And the prose is a language time capsule.
Overall, Paper Lion was fine. But I think the book would have worked just as well at half the length.
Note: Plimpton is the tall guy in the photo. Paper Lion was made into a movie, released in 1968 as a sports comedy, starring Alan Alda as Plimpton. Have not seen it.
Hazing Over sounds fantastic on "Tunnel Vision," the band’s new EP. Hardcore, mathcore, grindcore, metalcore—all those cores fly like musical shrapnel.
“Gushing Wound” intends next-level wreckage beginning at the 30-second mark with the vocal “Corrosive connection, it wore me down.” Then a writhing riff at 1:30 folds melting beams into a mechanized monster—one of the most devastating sequences to hit ears in a while.
“Disavowed” razes in melody. The track with its clean vocals is an outlier in the young band’s small catalog. I hope the band tries more of it. The melodic turn starts 45 seconds in with the lyric, “Gutted prey swallow rain in neglect," the vocal melody summoned somehow from a gory parade of inspired hardcore. At 1:25, the song transitions into some weight-throwing chords and the lyrics, "Strangers in motion see through on their own the changes that no one seems to undergo / Disavowed, they wait it out / It weighs us down!" What a song.
"Tunnel Vision" was released July 7, 2023, via 1126 Records. All six songs run under 3 minutes. “Pestilence,” the first EP from the Pittsburgh-based five-piece, was released in early 2021.
Note: I started writing music reviews in June 2006. The first site I wrote for was taken down by the owner after years and years.
On Sunday, July 16, 20-year-old Carlos "Carlito" Alcaraz defeated the dominant Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon men's final.
Seven of Djokovic's all-time record 23 Grand Slam tournament wins are at Wimbledon. This was Alcaraz's first time winning the tournament.
Tennis has buzzed about Alcaraz for almost two years now. He is the latest young talent believed capable of ending Djokovic's reign.
Nevertheless, I, like most tennis fans, believed Djokovic was still too great too consistently to lose this match. But he did, and Alcaraz is the top-ranked player in men's tennis now.
The fans cheered on Alcaraz, celebrating not only every winner he smashed across court, but also every Djokovic error. It could have been Alcaraz playing, it could have been Kim Jong Un—the crowd always roots against Djokovic. I wrote a little about this before.
Why do people root against him?
I think the first reason is timing: Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal came first, and fans fell in love. Djokovic emerged after fans built relationships with them, and then he was beating tennis fans' heroes.
Second, people are shallow. Federer and Nadal are handsome and look like heroes. Djokovic does not look like a hero. He looks like the villain. Maybe part of that is because, in Western culture, villainsare often Eastern Europeans.
Third—my armchair psychologist's opinion—Djokovic, 36, leans into conflict because he grew up in Serbia in the 1990s. Maybe that plays into the complicated Djokovic-crowd dynamic.
Finally, Djokovic really cares whether the crowd likes him, and that is unforgivable. Roger Federer never had to worry about it. Rafael Nadal never seemed to worry. And neither does Alcaraz.
Alcaraz's win was the big. Tennis does feel different now. How will fans respond to Djokovic if he falls?
Whether this outcome represented a changing of the guard—the vanquishing, finally, of a generation that has ruled men’s tennis since Alcaraz was a toddler—remains to be seen. Djokovic appeared far from finished. What the final showed for sure is that, when it is all on the line, Alcaraz will decide to play his game and be himself, and that what he can bring in those moments is the stuff of greatness.
Notes:
When the match began, most people,
including commentators John and Patrick McEnroe, believed Djokovic would
win. But an IBM modeler—supposed AI—predicted Alcaraz, 55-45.
The sunrise set alight the purring strip of river reaching across
to me from the far banks. I felt as though I had for the first time in years
the patient attention of some beautiful stranger. But the orange was, I knew,
mistaken about me and very soon to pass, and the next week would resume
in the bright blur of faces on sidewalks and the dark reluctance of the few fading
hours of breathing room inside at night.
The weapon is hand-held and fires with applied force. The round will run backward and forward, execute a sequence of programs and multiply, expand in mass and weight and enter hyper-velocity. It will stretch to follow you home and explode directly. I will not turn it off. Who builds an automaton armed with this weapon? An evil person. One is by force of will an evil person. That cannot be disputed.
New music from former members of Every Time I Die and The Dillinger Escape Plan
Whoa! Here is an EP by Better Lovers, a group combining former Every Time I Die members Jordan Buckley, Steve Micciche, and Clayton “Goose” Holyoak with former The Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato, plus producer and member of Fit for an Autopsy and END, Will Putney.
The four-song EP, "God Made Me an Animal," opens with “Sacrificial Participant,” and immediately Puciato’s manic, veiny-neck vocal fills the room. At 1:10, the song spins melodic with a fretboard-tapping, cymbal-riding passage under Puciato’s rubbery and subtly R&B-influenced vocal, "You got manipulated, told lies behind my back / I’m not the one you hated, you’re just looking to unpack.”
At 2:13, the song downshifts, freeing reverb-heavy notes and splashy cymbals to run with the falsetto—“You’re losing time to move, outcomes keep you second guessing / entombed still inside the womb, and I’m not sure you’ll get the message.”
Every Time I Die and Dillinger toured together years ago, but in 2022 Buckley saw Puciato performing in Las Vegas, and one thing led to another. Puciato says, “We’ve all hung out, gotten to know each other, and it’s all fire now. Everyone has already been through shit. You know yourself better. Your ego isn’t as big as it used to be. You can share your opinions. It’s a cool dynamic.”
Buckley says likewise: “This is my life’s work. I learned all of my lessons, passed all of the tests, and took all of the right turns and the wrong turns. It turns out what I thought were wrong turns got me here, and that’s all that matters. I have no regrets. I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
It shows lots of Puciato’s nose in your face, but the video looks good. The dark background and red and warm-white lights burn and reflect off instruments and faces, all stars in a dying galaxy.
“For some reason, this song got me,” says Puciato. “Once that happens, you have the toe of the dinosaur skeleton in the dirt. You start brushing it away, and soon you have a fucking T-Rex.”
Drums hop ahead as the guitar and bass move with wild agility on the EP’s title track, “God Made Me an Animal.” At 1:25, the song hits fault-line-grooving riffs. At 2 minutes, a melodic muted-metal sequence jets, the vocal crooning, "Deny your skin and bone, pretend the flesh hides stone / I’m sitting here, we’re talking, but we know we have to go / and I’m afraid there’s nothing that can make this clearer / I wish that we could be nearer / anything to get you here or closer—anything to get you closer, anything to get us closer, anything to get us closer!"
Puciato describes the project: “Better Lovers definitely feels like its own thing. I’m in so many lanes right now, so it was important that one lane didn’t step on another. However, nothing I’m doing is this vicious. This is full-on scathing. It’s been really fun. I forgot how much I liked that.” Buckley also comments on what the project means to him: “Greg and Will rejuvenated me and made me even more confident.”
Putney mixed and mastered the EP; it sounds crisp and clean. "God Made Me an Animal" was released July 7, 2023. Better Lovers are about to tour, sometimes headlining, sometimes backing.
Calypso
is one of many David Sedaris books I read last year. The first books I read were assembled
essays and maintained a kind of consistency. But Calypso might have been the most thematic collection. The 21 essays trend toward Sedaris’s family and aging. The book was published in May 2018, and
Sedaris has now reached his 60s.
The
prose, as always, is fresh and funny. Sedaris tells stories (all semi-autobiographical),
and he masterfully balances his thorny wit and criticisms with bits of cottony poignancy.
One
of my favorite parts is in “The Silent Treatment.” Sedaris is telling a story
about how, at some point in his pre-teen years, he supposedly started flushing empty
toilet paper rolls just to be a lil' bastard. His dad, not knowing David was
the cause, would then have to plunge or, failing that, pull the toilet and unclog
the drainpipe by hand. But dad eventually realizes David is the culprit.
“You
are going to reach down into this pipe and pick out that cardboard roll,” my father
said. “Then you are never going to flush anything but toilet paper down this
toilet again.”
As
I backed away, he pounced.Then he
wrestled me to the floor, grabbed my hand, and forced it deep into what
amounted to my family’s asshole.
And
there it was been ever since, sorting through our various shit. It’s like I
froze in that moment: with the same interests as that eleven-year-old boy, the
same maturity level, the same haircut. The same glasses, even.
“Why
Aren’t You Laughing” also hits as Sedaris writes about his mother, who died of cancer in her 60s, and her drinking.
Maybe
ours wasn’t the house I’d have chosen had I been in charge of things. It wasn’t
as clean as I’d have liked. From the outside, it wasn’t remarkable. We had no
view, but still it was the place I held in mind, and proudly, when I thought,
Home. It had been a living organism, but by the time I hit my late twenties, it
was rotting, a dead tooth in a row of seemingly healthy ones. When I was eleven,
my father planted a line of olive bushes in front of the house. They were
waist-high and formed a kind of fence. By the mid-eighties they were so
overgrown that pedestrians had to quit the sidewalk and take to the street
instead. People with trash to drop waited until they reached our yard to drop
it, figuring the high grass would cover whatever beer can or plastic bag of dog
shit they needed to discard. It was like the Adams Family house, which
would have been fine had it still been merry, but it wasn’t anymore. Our mother
became the living ghost that haunted it, gaunt now and rattling ice cubes
instead of chains.
And
then Sedaris writes about his dad, a widower, looking back on his wife’s condition.
“Do
you think it was my fault that she drank?” my father asked not long ago. It’s
the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic
and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It’s
almost laughable, this insistence on reason. I think my mother was lonely
without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.
I
think I was a little stunned by the parts related to his sister Tiffany’s suicide
in 2013.
Note:
Most of these essays were previously published in magazines.
The Strokes balanced great melodies and tight,
energetic performances with the cleverly aloof and slightly unpredictable vocal
of frontman Julian Casablancas. The band’s raw, swaggering debut, Is This It,
followed the example of The Stooges and Velvet Underground.
The Projectors may be more reminiscent of Herman’s
Hermits than The Stooges, but the band does have some pretty good songs on this
newly released self-titled album. The singer, Dylan Rysstad, acknowledged the
influence of The Strokes when he described writing these songs: “With the first
couple songs, ’When the Lights Came Up’ and ‘Golden Age’, I really embraced
certain influences and didn’t try to obscure or hide the fact that it was
starting to sound like someone else. The songs I’ve been writing for this
project are what I want to be playing and listening to, and somewhat
ironically, I feel like it’s the most me, if that makes sense.”
It does make sense—influences are not hard to
understand. The “someone else” is The Strokes, and though Rysstad seems to be
defending himself here, everyone knows musicians connect with other music just
like the rest of us.
More importantly, The Projectors are not straight
ripping off The Strokes the way, say, Ed Sheeran ripped off Marvin Gaye. The
Projectors are just not able to rip off The Strokes.
The band lacks qualities that made The Strokes debut
so good—the energy, the rawness, the swagger. But the music has other well-done
elements common to songs by The Strokes—songs like “You Can Only Wait,” “Golden
Age,” and “Lost in Spaces” feature a choppy, jangly rhythm guitar, a lead
guitar playing simple melody throughlines, and a solid, pulsing bass. This is a
warm and sunny sound led by an easygoing, agreeable vocalist.
The Projectors are based in Victoria, British
Columbia. The songs on this album were originally released in April 2022, but
they have been remastered and now re-released as the band works toward bigger
things.
I had a decent review of “Other Voices, Other Rooms” by Truman Capote, but stupid Blogger lost it when I pressed Ctrl+z.
I think I talked about how The New York Times review was somewhat negative, and then I probably agreed with it. In any case, I remember reading this book and thinking that the
richness of detail was overwhelming, and that it must be almost
unbearable to be someone like Capote—someone so sensitive to one's surroundings, for so much of
life to fall into your attention.
Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.
He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock. Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says sticker earrings look too fake.
Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a boy’s only a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs, battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping off tracks into the tub.
Then tell me it’s fine—really—maybe even a good thing—a boy who’s got some girl to him, and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in the park.
Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means— this way or that—but for the way facets set off prisms and prisms spin up everywhere and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows—made every shining true color.
Now try to tell me—man or woman—your heart was ever once that brave.
Note: Using smaller font to preserve more of the poet's own line breaks.
Doomy shoegaze band Lanayah set to release new album
Reverb and echo flood "I’m Picking Lights in a
Field...," an album of obfuscated doomy shoegaze. Lanayah’s cooling lava flow of
sounds try to muster some shape, some force, some proximate of artistry.
“Insects in Their Immersion” loudly blasts melodic
doom, a vocal barking into the wind, sucked up into a warming atmosphere of
futility before being suddenly cut off for the next track. The best song is
“Nameless Fluttering”—breathy vocals echo down halls of smooth bass guitar. The
good part ends and, after a pause, a coda tries to recover a moment nobody
remembers anymore. The album goes like this. A thick bass stands out amid a
wash of noise. Songs stray and dissolve into decadence. You wake to find an arm
dead asleep.
Lanayah is based in Santa Barbara, California, and
Seattle, Washington. The experimental group released its first album, North
Pinion, in 2016. Forever in May followed in 2019. The new album, I’m Picking
Lights in a Field..., will be released June 16, 2023.
