Shredification: Sleep at the Regency Ballroom 9/12, 9/13
September 10, 2010
I always thought Sleep was one of those bands that I would just never get to see, like Zeppelin, or the real Guns ‘n’ Roses. The members disbanded in 1995, fed up with the intractability of their label, London Records, which refused to release Dopesmoker, the band’s hour-long stoner metal odyssey of an album — the sort of artistic endeavor that the phrase “magnum opus” was invented to describe.
The members moved on to other projects — guitarist Matt Pike to High on Fire; bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Haikus to Om. For fans of the doom genre, even for those who had the opportunity to see the band in its heyday, Sleep entered the realm of myth, its progress hastened by a brief lifespan and the mind-bending, uncompromising nature of its final creative act. Exerting a powerful influence from beyond the grave, its specter hung benevolently over future fuzzed-out efforts like a particularly tenacious bong hit. Acolytes were initiated into the cult, their ignorance of the band’s seminal work greeted with innumerable half-exasperated, half-excited shouts of “Duuuuuude!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkFs9_kytAg
Sleep began in the garages of Silicon Valley, lurching out of San Jose with two albums (Volume One and Volume Two) that pre-dated their classic trio line-up. 1992′s Holy Mountain was a triumph of demented Sabbath-worship and St. Vitus-style madness, establishing the band’s burgeoning renown and greasing the wheels for their ultimately unsuccessful deal with London. Combining Pike’s explosive riffing, Cisneros’ hypnotic bass lines and incantatory vocals, and Haikus behind-the-beat stomp, the album was praised to the rafters. A cover of “Snowblind” for an Earache Records Sabbath tribute album won opprobrium from the Prince of Fuckin’ Darkness himself.
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Sade Sundays: Leggo My Eggo, Season Three.
August 29, 2010
Part One: Joshua Rampage
Mike “In Case You Didn’t Know I’m The Big King Over Here” Tapscott managed to leave work early (read: his 4-Square round-robby was cancelled) so we could play miniature golf and savor the remaining pockets of heat in the Bay Area. After an aberration of abbreviated warmth, things are back to 55F and foggy in SF, just the way nature designed this coastal town in Northern California.
Herein lies my boggle: the mind recalls with vivid detail the island adventure I just returned from, the very trip that inspired this Sade Sunday’s latest musical undertaking – Monster Rally. But now everything is terribly distorted: jackets, long pants and shoes trump the tanned skin, cut-offs and bare feet of my mind’s isle, creating a paradox within this report. Where is the rum and warm water when you need them?
As we drove south, I regaled Mike with tales of oceanic escapades in an attempt to distract his growling belly from hunger, but no. His blank face held eyes that fixed on the road, staring miles ahead to the Recreational Family Food Fun that awaited us at Malibu Castle. Upon our arrival, he said he’d “get us straightened out” at the food court while I dispensed 3 PBRs into his water bottle for consumption during mini golf.
Everything was going as planned until the bottle overflowed and beer spilled all over the crotch of my jeans. The situation became touchy when I asked a Malibu Castle staff member where the bathrooms were located. I put on my best “it’s not what it looks like” face and walked bravely into the Family Fun.
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Shredification: Floating Goat Double Up
August 15, 2010
Local outfit Floating Goat is bobbing up and down in the metal ocean, somewhere in the vicinity of its tenth anniversary. Usually a fixture of San Francisco’s sweat-stained stages, their raucous jams and distinctive, steer-horned drumset have been absent lately, but with good reason – time not spent onstage has been spent in dark lairs around the Bay, crafting Spawn of Poseidon/Suburban Anxiety, an ambitious new double LP.
The ten-year milestone can be a dubious distinction, especially when a long shelf-life leads to frustration or musical calcification. For Floating Goat, the opposite is true: the songs on the new album represent strides forward in technique, songwriting, and furor, all of which abet the album’s epic scope.
As its title suggests, Spawn of Poseidon falls more fully in the headbanger wheelhouse, hinging on references to metaphysical spooks and an arsenal of snarling, pissed-off riffs. Opener “Get Out of the Way” features vocals that veer surprisingly close to strident hardcore for a band with such well-established stoner rock pedigrees. This iconoclastic ability to blend subgenres in the name of speed surfaces throughout the record.
Next up is the title track, whose thundering tribal toms evoke the ocean god’s tidal fury with traditionalist aplomb, before revving up into a screaming solo. Ominous, vaguely Middle Eastern melodies kick off “Smoke Rising” before giving way into a classic fuzzy shuffle groove. Guitarist Chris Corona’s playing, honed no doubt by a busy schedule (he is also a member of Orb of Confusion and Hazzard’s Cure, among other local projects) sounds better than ever. While he can be justifiably proud of his leadwork, the way he settles into the churning triplets on “Smoke Rising” is particularly satisfying.
Floating Goat – “Spawn of Poseidon”
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Sade Sundays: America First! Isolationist Prose Chapters I and II
August 1, 2010
Part One: Michael Tapscott
I’ve come to realize that I love America. Perhaps it is reading Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, a Jewish nightmare novel that imagines Charles Lindbergh defeating Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, sealing an Icelandic deal with Hitler and beginning frazzled out Semitic programs of his own. Viewing one’s country ripped apart instills a sort of swarthy patriotism in me and I am trying my hardest not to scrutinize things through a nostalgic lens, but I miss Bo Jackson and I miss trail mix with M&M’s in it.
To think of the suburban American male’s first taste of true darkness I must think of the Doors. A joke of a band, but between the lines in that we as lovers of Americana have one critical testament to our youth in Jim Morrison’s posthumously cobbled An American Prayer. A spoken word record with music taken from Doors outtakes, live recording, regular recordings and new recordings of funky porn music, the album is pure bait for Morrison hatred. To regard this record as a joke is to be incredulous at best and tedious at worst.
This suburban boy feels no nostalgia, he thinks and feels only new thoughts, and his new thought laying back in 70s style reverie and decadence (which means leather couch – wakka chikka) is this is fantastic. Morrison is very funny and epically elliptical at the same time, and though I make no claims at being a poetry expert and would expect that his would be scoffed at by true literary torch carriers, I find the imagery and meter a solid perk of the experience. The production is immaculate, winkingly highlighting Morrison’s words with stupid guitar licks and vocal effect trickery, and any music that uses nature sound effects is a-ok in my book.
If I look into this for some greater point about life, I must worry that Joshua and I have to make yet another point about aging. He, taut with dysentery, and I, thoughtlessly transgressing 1) the morals which our parents taught us, and 2) roads that lead nowhere except to wax idiotically, painfully, droning on and . . . And here I must admit that I am lost . . .
When I began I thought of a line I once read in Wire about Ian Curtis, in which the writer suggested that even though Curtis had been dead for 30 years and stayed the same age he seemed to continuously get older. I feel this too is true of Morrison. I do not see this experiment in the metaphysics of the Doors as a nostalgia trip in which Joshua and I come to terms with the embarrassing cultural taste of our youth. I am now thinking about how I am older than Morrison ever was and wondering if he would have been making records like this in the seventies but more Leonard Cohen and Windham Hill, further and further down this road. Would it have been good? Or would the brittle American money machine be too tempting for a washed up whale man?
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Shredification: Saviours Two-song EP in the Bag?
July 19, 2010
Local lushes The Saviours have been gone all summer, conquering Europe like some sort of tatted-up, four-headed George Patton. The band are a remarkable feel-good story for these Ke$haful times, surmounting each successive challenge with enviable ease. Hard to believe it’s been 5 years since Warship (Level Plane Records) first slid out of the drydock.
After a full slate of massive outdoor festivals in the Old World and a late-summer junket on Ozzfest, the hesher quartet will return to the Bay, ten steps closer to being a headbanger household name. An Ozzfest off-date at Slim’s August 10th clashes tragicomically with one of the best metal tickets of all time: the epic Animosity-era Corrosion of Conformity/Goatsnake show at DNA Lounge the same night. 11th st. will be transformed into a whirlpool of leather, hair, beer, and weed.
Most groups would be content to bask in the rewards (chemical or otherwise) of such a jam-packed touring schedule, but Saviours had a different plan: they settled down in Den Haag with producer and psychedelic maven Guy Tavares, steward of the cult Motorwolf label. The band has long espoused a love for old-school recording techniques, and Tavares was able to give them the “16 track, 1″ tape, no punch-ins, edits or automation” experience they craved. Their official blog promises a two-track EP, featuring two versions of the same song — a normal version, and a 21-minute psychedelic alternate freakout fever dream version, which might well hearken back to the doomier sound of the earliest Saviours records. Expect it to accelerate your living.
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Sade Sundays: Adrift In the Sea of Perdition XXVIII
June 20, 2010
Part One: Michael Tapscott
I was a loaded pistol or at least a loaded squirt gun this past Wednesday night. I felt like I’d let you, the reader, down in recent months. Sade Sundays had been taking time off for no good reason, being sort of half way here with you when we were here at all. Suggesting random tunes and Randy Newman videos, and perhaps the worst came when I offered a two sentence review of the new CocoRosie record last month.
I’m here to apologize, and if this article doesn’t seem as a grand apology full of witticism and tremendous recommendations of the best records you’ll ever hear, know at least that it started with an apology.
The idea was undemanding, Joshua and I would sit in his overstuffed room in the Mission and listen to the new Dolphins into the Future record, The Music of Belief (Release the Bats), and see where this happening took us. Josh had recently awoken to the world of mysticism in ambient  music, which I have been a long and gaudy proponent of. I’ve spoke to you at least twice in the past of this Belgian master of the ultramodern tome poem, most recently earlier this year with the baffling great A Horseback Ride to the Temple of Montu cassette he released under the moniker of Duncan Cameron.
The new album is long, over an hour, but the range of emotion in a seemingly uncomplicated and palpable sound was shocking. There was an urgency Josh noted audibly and I noted physically as he mentioned, “once you’re already under water any more movement and you’re just wasting oxygen.†We were drowning. Hard and heavy is life and after both taking trips back to our Midwestern homelands recently the failure of us as “normal†people had become quite obvious.
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Shredification: Washington State of Affairs
June 14, 2010
Music writers are suckers for geography. Tying up groups of bands in neat little localized bows makes for easy copy, with the added benefit that once you pigeonhole a bunch of quasi-related groups — the “Seattle Sound,” say — you have that touchstone to deploy next time you feel like phoning in some cheap comparisons.
Seattle bands are the order of the day today, though the comparisons will hopefully be hewn from finer stuff. Specifically, two Seattle bands that have recently released new records: The Melvins, and Black Breath.
Black Breath – “Children of the Horn”
The traditional route here would be to slap these two groups down side by side and make a bunch of comparisons — to bands they both sound like, or to the way the weather in Seattle (rainy, natch) informs their interpollinated styles. In this case, that’s totally impossible. Though they both fall under the general aegis of metal, and play music that is down-tuned, loud, and heavy, the similarities end there. When you put Black Breath and The Melvins side-by-side, all you see is contrasts.
For one thing, The Melvins are roughly six times older. Formed in the early 80′s, the band is now something of a hard rock institution, weathering a generation of music and still out-rocking many of the bands they influenced. A pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain famously auditioned on guitar, but botched it — a bad case of nerves made him temporarily forget all the songs. Though generally a trio, in 2006 the band absorbed both members of the cult metal duo Big Business, taking the stage with two drummers (right- and left-handed) and a bolstered vocal attack.
Though the music is still built around muscular, inventive drumming and guitarist Buzz Osbourne’s bottom-heavy riffs, the band’s maturation has seen them become increasingly digressive. More and more, they flex their musical muscle during wild excursions into the bizarre and sometimes borderline self-indulgent outer reaches. New release The Bride Screamed Murder features some plutonium-heavy sections that recall the band’s classic material, along with the ever-listenable percussion prowess of drummers Dale Crover and Jared Coady, but it’s hard to wrap your mind around the drill sergeant chanting in “The Water Glass,” the squeaky balloon solo at the end of “Hospital Up,” or the impressionistic “My Generation” cover.
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Sade Sundays: Girl, It’s a Photoshoot Part IV.
May 23, 2010
Part 1
By: Joshua Rampage
As we approach mid-2010, the situation can be described as languid at best; adventures have been put on hold while I pace slowly up and down this long hallway, stirring up dust bunnies. Snoozy weather and sinus infections have the weird ability to cull the right kind of music for the moment, and I’ve been submerged in hazy ambiance ever since Die Antwoord depleted all of the serotonin in my brain with their impeccable taste. I’ve since grown comfortable within these walls of soft interiors. Set adrift in the haunted depths of The Caretaker, I’ve made myself at home in room 237. (YouTube video features the art of Andrei Polushkin).
Mike doesn’t care for rhythm-based music any more than I give a shit about the genre Americana. He says “BE A PATRIOT” and bangs the steering wheel like a dictator would his fist against a podium. I say, “I’m moving to Switzerland to go skiing and eat chocolate.”
I suggested that Flying Lotus is picking up where a long-forgotten DJ Shadow left off. The sampled textures are even dustier and the layers of poly-rhythms make me think of elephants dancing with their trunks, swaying in a way that makes people want to bounce their shoulders. Flying Lotus’Â new album, Cosmogramma, hurtles into an electronic oblivion, creating new constellations with its staggered production.
Flying Lotus – “Do the Astral Plane”
Part 2
By: Michael Tapscott
The album art is ridiculous, the “found” sounds are the same as they were six years ago, and perhaps the joke is still on us. CocoRosie, congratulations: you made another good album.
As I become re-acquainted with the long, lost friend that Josh scared me off of years ago (it’s a plant, dude), I only see myself as a fly on the wall, or better yet, like GOD in the sky. And what does GOD the bug see? He sees Michael repeatedly watching Randy Newman YouTube videos of a concert with the Rotterdam Philharmonic from 1979.
See, it’s not that the two of us can’t have fun anymore Joshua, but it’s all so serious now. These decisions that we make have lasting impressions on the quality of our shriveled 70 year old bodies. You should be tired friend, you should be listening to ambient music. What daily use do you find for Flying Lotus anyway?
Men as brilliant as us should not have been expected to take an uncomplicated path. Next month, more drinks, more pictures, no other obligations. Deal?
As evidenced below, we took some pictures to commemorate this opaque portion of the season: [More...]
