Shredification: Spring Metal Preview
March 15, 2010
Spring is wending its way towards San Francisco, and the improved weather will be accompanied by an array of exciting metal albums and the tours that follow in their wake. Bands both local and national will have new wares on display — here are a few of the choicest to anticipate.
Jucifer – Throned in Blood (April 6th, 2010, Nomadic Fortress Records)
No matter how many times I enumerate Jucifer’s essential details, they’re still completely captivating. To wit, Amber Valentine and Edgar Livengood are the world’s heaviest husband-and-wife team. As if that weren’t quirky-cool enough, they’re also officially nomadic, having no base of operations other than their rock and roll RV and a trailer full of amps — guitarist/singer Valentine plays the loudest, largest guitar rig I’ve ever experienced personally. When I saw them at Annie’s Social (RIP!) she had 11 cabs set up.
The music is an arresting blend of sludge, shoe-gaze, noise, stoner-metal, and thrash, and its played with an atavistic conviction that most bands can only dream about (In a recent interview, Valentine mentioned that her husband’s hands are frequently damaged, due to his habit of playing cymbals with his fists). Their previous release L’Autrichienne (Relapse, 2008) was a masterful concept album about the French Revolution, capturing the band at its versatile best. Judging from the cover art, the new LP has a similar historical bent; presumably they’ll play some of it live when they rumble Thee Parkside on March 18th.
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Shredification: Live and Undead
February 15, 2010
This coming Tuesday, the city of New Orleans will be subsumed under the boozy cloud of Mardi Gras. Those still recovering from the Saints’ feel-good Super Bowl win have just two more days to prepare themselves for a second helping of revelry and mayhem. Judging from the profusion of Saints-themed merchandise on their website, the members of Big Easy-based stoner metal supergroup Down are most likely part of this beleaguered, hangover-nursing group.
I became aware of the prevailing trends in Down swag while researching their forthcoming effort, a live CD/DVD (due 3/23) called Diary of a Mad Band (not to be confused with the Jodeci release of the same name). An incendiary live outfit, Down combines the sludgy heaviness endemic to their below-sea-level hometown with the limber, improvisatory tendencies gleaned from their southern rock influences. The 100 hours of live footage included are sure to be rife with amplified goodness, and at least 300 shots of drummer Jimmy Bower looking exactly like Animal on the Muppets.
Despite Down’s yeoman efforts, the live album is a curious commodity in today’s heavy music circles, more of a record label investiture than a labor of love. The well-known difficulties and risks involved in producing such recordings are well known, and bands tend to hew closely to a live-DVD format that features them recreating recorded material as closely as possible.
The profusion of these by-the-book cash-grabs is worrying, but counterbalanced by the small number of live releases in recent years that capture the urgency and creativity of a heavy band firing on all cylinders. Though by no means comprehensive, or in any particular order, the list below attempts to give credit to three bands whose live discs have done themselves and their fans justice.
Shredification: High on Fire promise sonic immolation with Snakes for the Divine
January 10, 2010
When you see Matt Pike play guitar — snaggle-teeth glinting, baby-beer-belly inching over belt buckle, sweat dripping across numerous just-better-than-jailhouse tattoos — you realize that he was put on the earth to be a fucking rock star. Even without hearing the inspired, arresting sounds emanating from his funky-looking, custom-made nine-string guitar, the fact is undeniable.
Once the mutton-chopped visage is audibly coupled to the hair-raising Motor-Sabbath destruction of Pike’s Bay Area power trio High on Fire, the slack-jawed showgoer becomes aware of something headbangingly transcendent transpiring before their very eyes. High on Fire first made waves with 2005’s Blessed Black Wings, which was produced by the legendary Steve Albini. Though the participation of the Chicagoan iconoclast served as a journalistic hook that landed the band, gills gasping, into the critical fishing boat, it was the relentlessly powerful riffs that kept music writers and ticket buyers interested when 2007’s Death is this Communion came around.
Momentum continued to build in the ensuing years, and the group’s incendiary live shows and the broad appeal of their fury saw them added to tours of increasingly high profile, culminating in a national run in support of Mastodon and Adult Swim cartoon-metallers Dethklok in late 2009. The stage is set for High on Fire’s forthcoming Snakes for the Divine (due in early February), which Pike promises will be extremely heavy (surprise, surprise), and replete with nods to classic influences like late-70’s Judas Priest. Bassist Jeff Matz (formerly of beloved hardcore outfit Zeke) is shouldering additional songwriting responsibilities this time around, which is sure to expand and abet the trio’s hard-charging sound.
Shredification: Best Metal Albums of 2009
December 13, 2009
Merry Rotting Christmas, ladies and gentleman, and welcome to the year-end installment of this column. Though other, more industrious writers have cast their vision back across the decade to craft comprehensive lists of goodness, spanning all ten years, this morsel of prose will focus solely on the dying year.
Some of 2009’s best offerings have already been profiled in my two previous columns, so spots are reserved in my top ten for Baroness’ Blue Album , Shrinebuilder’s self-titled release, and Gama Bomb’s Tales from the Grave in Space. The seven discs to follow round out a ten-spot of metal mastery.
Mastodon – Crack the Skye (Reprise Records)
These endlessly talented Atlanta-based progonauts show no sign of slowing down, and in 2009 they produced their most inventive and ambitious album yet while cementing their status as the country’s best heavy band. Crack the Skye features seven mind-expanding tracks, weaving together epic leads and inventive drumming with a newly perfected three-vocalist attack.
Ensiferum – From Afar (Spinefarm Records)
Five Finns who straddle the line between thrash, folk, death, and power metal, Ensiferum are the masters of the folk-inflected warrior anthem. Fearless songwriting, careful arrangements, and an arsenal of monster choruses make this the album that is sure to make the band a consistent headliner Stateside.
Saviours – Accelerated Living (Kemado Records)
The Bay Area native sons showed a newfound potency with this release, which features a solid stoner band transformed into a Motorhead-catalyzed NWOBHM monster with enough face-melting, toe-tapping riffs to fry 500 cabs. Winners of the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s yearly arts award (the Goldie – more about Saviours by yours truly here), the quartet will be poised on the brink of widespread acclaim if they keep kicking out such quality jams.
Shredification: Thrash Attack
November 8, 2009
The last column took on a bifurcated Death Metal/Stoner Metal focus, so I’m happy to return today with an update that concerns the Bay Area’s favorite kind of metal: Thrash! To bring the uninitiated up to speed, let us note the fact that these Nor-Cal shores were at the epicenter of a musical movement, at a time when bands like Exodus, Testament, Death Angel, and everyone’s favorite Napster-enemies were beginning still-extant careers amid an orgy of polka-beating violence.
In recent years, heavy music has witnessed an explosion of so-called “retro-thrashers,” all attempting to capture the glory and furious fecundity that the genre experienced in the middle eighties, when the Big Four (Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer) were at their peak and thrash outposts like Germany birthed classic bands like Sodom and Kreator. The results attained by these backwards-looking hair-farmers have been varied — sometimes ripping, sometimes mediocre, sometimes downright poseur-tastic — so allow me separate the ripe wheat from the corny, fecal chaff.
Gama Bomb
Ireland isn’t known as a metal hotbed, but the thrash masterpieces produced by Dublin natives Gama Bomb might just change that reputation. 2008’s Citizen Brain (Earache) was my favorite album of that year, combining impossibly fast razor-wire riffing with a tongue-in-cheek lyrical sensibility that name-checked video games, horror movies, and the band’s inexhaustible appetite for alcohol. The immaculate production and airtight drumming added further incentive to headbang unabashedly (headbash unabangedly?), but it was the group’s way with a heavy hook that made them stand out, with guitarists Luke Graham and Domo Dixon proving that you don’t have to sacrifice an ounce of frenetic mayhem to produce a riff with unrestrained earworming tendencies.
Gama Bomb is back this year with Tales from the Grave in Space , and their dedication to preaching the thrash gospel is made apparent by their decision to make the entire album available for free download on Earache’s website. The band’s picking hands and double bass feet seem undiminished by their heavy drinking, and the gleefully theatrical vocals, light-speed chugging (both guitar and booze), and machine-gun fills all return with a vengeance, replete with a pulpy sci-fi twist. Now if only they would fucking tour the U.S. already!
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Gama Bomb – Escape from Scarecrow Mountain
Skeletonwitch
This Athens, Ohio band wears the mantle of retro-thrash reluctantly, but their classic sensibilities, hair-raising tempos, and song titles (“Soul Thrashing Black Sorcery”) leave modern metal taxonomers little recourse. The quality of debut LP Beyond the Permafrost (Prosthetic) rocketed them into prominence, and they’ve toured with some of the best in the business, including the legendary performing midget Glenn Danzig (please don’t sue me!). The quintet stormed stores on October 13th with Breathing the Fire, which is sure to increase their renown by leaps and bounds.
Shredification: Something Old, Something New, Something Brutal, Something Blue
October 11, 2009
Hails, and welcome to the inaugural post of my metal column for the plenipotentiary Bay Bridged. Tune in the second Sunday of every month for commentary, reviews, and news — a scattershot attempt to update my loyal (and as-yet nonexistent) readers on the world of heavy metal, hardcore, and punk rock.
The Old:
Peter Tägtgren has been more active as a producer in the last decade or so, helming albums by Immortal, Dimmu Borgir and Children of Bodom. After the rise and undignified fall of the classic late-90’s Swedish Melodic Death Metal sound (I’m looking at you, In Flames), his original project Hypocrisy was pushed to the periphery of the metal world. 2005’s Virus (Nuclear Blast) was an under-appreciated effort, but the quality of A Taste of Extreme Divinity (Nuclear Blast), which hits stores November 3rd, will hopefully bring Tägtgren’s significant songwriting talents back into the bloodstained metal limelight. The Swede is one of the last practitioners of the classic, overdriven Sun Studios guitar sound, and A Taste… is laden with anthemic riffs and razor-wire harmonies, underscored by the unimpeachable drumming of Immortal skinsman Reidar “Horgh” Horghagen. Hypocrisy’s lyrical focus has historically been centered on alien abduction and little-green men — a sci-fi oddity in a genre laden with medieval fantasy — but the new disc features a more all-encompassing approach. Starting with the relentless thrash of opener “Valley of the Damned,” the new offering from an old warhorse gallops from start to finish.
The New
Shrinebuilder isn’t totally new, in the sense that its component parts have been on the scene for practically ever, but the first album from this stoner metal group hasn’t been released yet, so that makes them new enough for the purposes of my cheesy, bridal-themed title joke. Featuring doom legend Scott “Wino” Weinrich of The Obsessed, St. Vitus, and The Hidden Hand, Scott Kelly of Neurosis, Al Cisneros of Sleep/OM, and Dale Crover of The Melvins, it’s a lineup epic enough to get any of your friendly neighborhood stoner/doom fans foaming at the mouth. No release date has been set for the group’s self-titled opus (on Neurot Records), but there is a track available at that link above, so feel free to listen to it over and over again while you chew your nails in anticipation, like I am doing at the time of this writing. I actually talked to someone who had the chance to listen to the record, and he made much of how cool it is that Wino, Scott, and Al share vocal duties, before I killed him in a fit of jealous rage. A handful of shows have been planned for this fall — unfortunately, none West of the Rockies — but the fact that they’re finally gigging, coupled with the fact that they’ve finally released a song, means we might see the album sooner rather than later.
The Brutal
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