The art of flail

So Alex decided to make this blogging thing into a classic game of one-upsmanship last time out. How should a man respond? Should he synthesize his post and his friend's by directing people towards Celtic Frost's amazing cover of "Mexican Radio"? No, that'd be too calculated (but seriously, check that shit if you haven't). Should he wade through countless HOINH-plagued threads on Side-Line in an effort to find a new cut even goofier than "Run Your Body"? A tall order, indeed. Should he write another twenty-page MLA-styled essay with numerous secondary sources on Why I Refuse To Spend Money On Boyd Rice Projects? No, he's got more than enough stuff distracting him from his thesis as is. Should he stop writing in the third person and just quickly troll through my mp3 drive in another Smuckles-inspired flail, and come up with another "cover in another style" track in the form of Thou Shalt Not's Richard Cheese-influenced rendition of "Headhunter", which I used to spin from time to time? Sure, that'll do. Hell, if I'm gonna respond to a track which jacks "That Total Age", I might as well do so with a track which jacks the only EBM club album more overplayed than that one.

Thou Shalt Not, "Headhunter"


Yeah! What now, Alex? You think you're all that just cuz you can drop the ball while blogging every once in a while? Pft. I once went for a full year without posting anything on LJ apart from "Which member of the Bay City Rollers are you?" survey results. I've been cat-blogging since 2000 and I don't even have a cat.

UCNX, "Run Your Body"

Did you read B's engaging and informative post about US Black Metal on Tuesday? You find me another fucking blog that drops that kind of science, on the real, on the regular. Go ahead, find me one. I'll just wait here.

All big upping aside, that was some good blog. There are two ways I respond to one of my colleagues spitting game like that. I can either take it as a cue to step my posting game up, come up with some next level shit that deserves to share digital turf with the aforementioned freshness. Or to paraphrase Ray Smuckles (patron saint of DiJ), I can choke with the kind of focus and intensity you usually see in successes and come up with some last minute bullshit just to get a post up before the week is out.

That said, the track I’m posting today is pretty damn great. A medley/mash-up of Nitzer Ebb’s “Let Your Body Learn” and Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” by Jersey-Philly EBM players UCNX, straight out the Side-Line forums. It seems kind of obvious now that I think about it. The CD single also features a bangin' instrumental K-Nitrate remix and a UCNX remix of an Idiot Stare track, holy fuck, mid-nineties US Coldwave stand the fuck up! So yeah, suck on that Bruce!

UCNX, "Run Your Body"

American Black Metal: A Beginner's Guide

It's been nearly two decades since a rash of church burnings and the murder of Euronymous fanned the flames of black metal's infamy to reaches far beyond the Norwegian woods of its birth. Fifteen years after the influence of progenitors like Venom, Bathory and Hellhammer crystallized in the form of Emperor's genre defining "In The Nightshade Eclipse", Norwegian black metal remains an inimitable source of inspiration and controversy for both metal fans worldwide as well as those more interested in pop culture at large. There can be no denying that mainstream attention has forced Norwegian black metal into a constant state of agitated self-reflection. Not that I can blame it - a coffee table book dedicated to any genre's aesthetic couldn't help but stir the pot. Pity the modern day Norweigian black metal band which, along with more classical problems like ridding Norway of Judeo-Christian influence, now has to deal with its kvlt status being constantly endangered by mp3 blogs.

While no one will ever deny Norway as black metal's permanent ancestral and spiritual home, issues like those outlined above, not to mention the sheer amount of time that's passed since the genre's inception have helped other countries forge their own particular brand of black metal. I keep hearing about the strength of the black metal scene in Pakistan, and I'll be honest: I'm dying to know what that shit sounds like. Oddly enough, though, for my money the black metal that's been springing up closer to my door, just south of the border in the US, is what's been pushing the boundaries of the genre in the most rewarding dimensions. Here's a quick run-down of some USBM that's been weighing heavily on my winter-shrouded, cosmically-damned soul.

Xasthur
One-man outfit Xasthur could be said to be emblematic of USBM, especially its healthy respect for yet distance from its Norwegian ancestry. Taking Burzum as a starting template, Xasthur's Malefic jettisoned both Vikernes' NSBM bullshit (huzzah) along with his folklore obsession. Rather than paganism or racial myths, depression and suicide, those standbys of American youth culture, begin to emerge as dominant themes (although the corpse paint remains). It's a strictly low-fi affair with no frilly guitar or keyboard wankery, making Xasthur a formative influence on the ambient black metal and depressive (no, that's not a typo - it's "ive", not "ing" - don't ask me) black metal sub genres, which have flourished in the US.
Xasthur, "Black Imperial Blood"


Leviathan/Lurker of Chalice
Another solo group, Leviathan's Wrest has a history as a prog metal drummer. While he shares Malefic's love of lo-fi monotone, Wrest's rhythm sections are slightly more dynamic than Xasthur's, even if they're hardly flashy. Leviathan also unleashes a tad more traditional black metal brutality, but Wrest's side project, the puzzlingly named Lurker of Chalice, goes off the reservation in some provocative ways. Shoegaze harmonics and distortion are applied to black metal compositional structures, with the odd hint of melody to boot.
Lurker of Chalice, "Granite"


Velvet Cacoon
A Portland group shrouded in mystery, it still remains unclear if Velvet Cacoon are a "legitimate" band or an elaborate prank upon the black metal scene's insatiable desire for ever more extreme and outlandish band mythologies. Stories of drummers falling off of forest cliffs in drunken stupors, connections with the E.L.F. and the "dieselharp" (a guitar amplified through an aquarium full of wine and blood) have been discredited, but a small clutch of releases (not to mention "fake" demos of other bands' material deliberately released by VC to confuse fans) still exist. Velvet Cacoon embody the paradox of low-fi: by not giving a fig about production quality, they draw the listener ever further into their recordings' textures. Black metal's ambient possibilities become apparent through sheer repetition rather than ever softening itself.
Velvet Cacoon, "Avalon Polo"


Twilight
Ah, the great American tradition of the supergroup. Malefic, Wrest, and a handful of the US' other darkest lights worked on a single LP by correspondence. Who'd have thunk that solo black metal dudes wouldn't play nice with others? In any case, the tracks range from the grey skies of Xasthur and Leviathan to the rawness of Twilight's other members' pedigrees in Nachtmystium, N.I.L. and Isis.
Twilight, "White Fire Under Black Text"


Wolves In The Throne Room
Another environmentally-minded outfit from the Pacific Northwest ("If you listen to Black Metal, but you don't know what phase the moon is in, or what wild flowers are blooming then you have failed.") bereft of Norwegian aesthetic and thematic concerns, Wolves In The Throne Room are poised to become the defining band of USBM. Welding psychedelic and ethereal influences to black metal, Wolves' releases seem effortlessly free of any of the pigeonholing to which black metal is too often subject. They've adopted black metal as a means to an intensely personal end and owe no fealty to anything which doesn't take their music where it needs to go. My personal favourite of all of these bands, Wolves In The Throne Room could do to USBM what Ulver did to Norwegian black metal: completely redefine it by leaving it all behind.
Wolves In The Throne Room, "Cleansing"

Slept On: Lowlife

In this and further Slept On installments, we'll be shouting out bands past and present (but mostly the former) who never received their due.

I was stunned when I first heard about Lowlife. It wasn't that I was surprised to learn that there was another excellent, gloomy dream-pop band from Scotland I'd never heard of - it was the fact that this particular band featured none other than Will Heggie, architect of the stark, echoing basslines which dominated the Cocteau Twins' early releases which knocked me on my back. Rather daftly, I'd assumed that Heggie had simply faded into the woodwork after leaving Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser to develop the glorious, chiming mellifluousness that became their signature sound. In actuality, it turns out that Heggie signed on with a rockabilly band to fill in on bass for some tour dates and recording sessions, then afterwards opted to forge onward with them in an entirely different direction, more in keeping with his previous tenure. Ignorance aside, I couldn't help but have high expectations when I snagged Godhead, Lowlife's third full-length from 1989. Undiscovered (by me) Cocteaus-related work? This had better be good.

I needn't have worried. Lowlife's discography quickly rose above my expectations, and became a hypnotic, multi-faceted jewel in my record collection.

After Rain, a solid EP of galloping post-punk (somewhere between U2 and Skeletal Family), shit got darkly dreamy with debut LP Permanent Sleep. The band's similarity with the Cocteaus is, perhaps expectedly, most noticeable on this early work. The swishy rhythms of tracks like "Mother Tongue" quickly call Heggie's earlier work on tracks like "But I'm Not" and "Shallow Then Halo" from the Cocteau's Garlands. Permanent Sleep is a generally dour affair, with very little light ever penetrating the waves of melancholy which roll over the album with a weary tempo. Sophomore full-length "Dimminuendo" brims with confidence, even if that confidence manifests as wistful contemplation. It's here that comparisons with Echo could be made, but singer Craig Lorentson's voice is of an entirely different cast than Ian McCulloch's. A deep baritone, Lorentson's voice was often mixed to the forefront of Lowlife's records, giving just about everything set to tape a magisterial, if mournful feel.

While there's some critical consensus holding up "Dimminuendo" as Lowlife's best work, I opt for their subsequent album, "Godhead". It is an aching, glowing thing of beauty. When I was in my early teens I bought records rather rarely (compared to my current collecting), and those which I did often turned out to foundational life-changers: "Disintegration", "Substance" (both of them), "The Queen Is Dead". Those records demanded to be listened to ad nauseum, no note or detail going unnoticed or unabsorbed, each lyric striking a chord if only for verbalizing sentiments I'd only just discovered. "Godhead" hearkens back to those days, and reminds me of a time when there was much less music around me, but that which there was mattered so much more. It's a strange thing to encounter music like that in the almost curatorial process of mining through the also-rans and never-weres of a genre one's achieved a pedestrian familiarity with. Lowlife make me feel as though I'm hearing this sort of music - sad, expressive dream pop - for the first time again.

A fourth album, "San Antorium", added some brighter sparkles to the formula. A reissue campaign has brought Lowlife's first four LPs, bolstered with "Rain" and plenty of singles, remixes and session tracks back into circulation, along with a nineteen-track "introduction to" CD. Extensive liner notes by Brian Guthrie, the band's manager (and, yes, Robin's brother) add to the reissues' strength. No info on whether the band's final album, "Gush", will be getting the same treatment. There's also an excellent archival website with plenty of info for the newcomer to boot.

This is gorgeous stuff, people. Don't let it pass you by.

Lowlife, "Hollow Gut"


Lowlife, "Bittersweet"

Seabound, "Scorch the Ground (Forma Tadre remix)"

I've always quite liked Seabound, their style of synthpop has always seemed more thoughtful and emotive then many of their contemporaries for lack of a better description. They've also always maintained a pretty high degree of quality in their releases. The band has just released a b-sides and rarities comp When Black Beats Blue which is a bit disappointing, coming as it does on the heels of a live record, but does have a few gems for those folks who are waiting on the next album length platter of original music. Of specific note are a version of their club classic "Hooked" with a distinctly different vocal and a nice live version of "Watching Over You" that Reagan Jones of Iris lends his vocals to. The real exciting bit for me though is a Forma Tadre remix of "Scorch the Ground", leveraging as it does DiJ's general FT stannery and specifically my love of his remixes (especially the ones for Assemblage 23's "Document" and haujobb's "Penetration".)

On a side note, I would very much have liked to see Seabound's "Day of the Century" make the cut for the disk, due it being a b-side that is in serious contention for the group's best song. I guess since Metropolis decided to tack it on to their rerelease of No Sleep Demon that it didn't need to appear again. But hey, at least that gives me a reason to mention that that record along with most of Metro's catalogue has been uploaded to eMusic, my own personal favorite digital music retailer.


Seabound, "Scorch the Ground (Forma Tadre remix)"

Zentriert ins Antlitz

I dashed into the DJ booth, demanded to know what was playing, scribbled the name down and hit up Google as soon as I got home. The cause of this flurry of activity? Zentriert ins Antlitz, a dark electro band heavy on the ambient side.

If "Frames"/"Solutions For A Small Planet" era Haujobb floats yr boat then you need to check this stuff out. Thankfully, they've made that painfully simple by offering up their 2007 full-length, "Diametral", for download under a Creative Commons license, as well as assorted EPs and side project releases. Their actual CD releases often include access to entire discs' worth of remixes and bonus tracks. In short, they're on top of getting the goods to you quickly and with panache.

I haven't become so quickly obsessed with tracking down all of a dark electro band's releases in years. Sometimes it takes hearing true innovation and complexity to make you realise how lacking so much of the other material in a genre is. ZiA's music is a transmission from a wondrous alternate universe in which the 90s expeditions made by Haujobb into the coldest reaches of electro (as well as Forma Tadre's symphonic work, Klinik's dalliances with psy-trance, and Mentallo & The Fixer's sheer sonic overload) were acknowledged as the great leaps forward that they were and embraced, rather than being shunned for the sake of stale arpeggios and safe-as-houses club mixes.

-Zentriert ins Antlitz, "Der Zorn des Lammes"
-Zentriert ins Antlitz, "Jahr Fuer Jahr"

Reductio ad Hitlerum

Hey there, loyal DIJ reader! Have you, like us, been roundly disappointed by just about everything Apoptygma Berzerk has put out since 2000's "Welcome To Earth" (their Kim Wilde cover being a notable exception)? Would you say that yr disappoinment has been rooted not so much in the band's desire to explore new territory (believe me when I say that I want EBM bands to succeed when they branch out) but by the sheer mediocrity of the limp ballads and uninspired rockers that the outfit churned out on "You And Me Against The World"? Have you ever made those thoughts public? Are you getting tired of me shoving words in yr mouth?

If the answer to the above questions is "yes", then congratulations: Stephen Groth just called you a Nazi. Yep, that's right: in an interview with Side-Line, El Grotho tries to set the record straight on Apop's stylistic shifts, but ends up whinging about how harsh fans of Apop's earlier material have been in their critiques of the band's newer efforts, a hardship which Groth equates with Nazi censorship:

I get this kind of nazi war feeling when reading some of them. It's just like the Nazi's 'Berufsverbot', Jews, artists, thinkers and politicians were not allowed to do what they were doing because they had different opinions on things. The Nazi's decided what was good music, good books and good art, and then burned the rest. They burned everything that they didn't like, remember the Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass in Nazi Germany. If you can not enjoy and accept that people think different and have other views, then thats really sad. Reading some of these comments does gives me that very bad taste in my mouth...

Y'know what leaves a bad taste in my mouth, Steve-o? Punks who wanna play Big Rock Star and then act as though they don't understand the plot of "Ziggy Stardust". I accept that people have different views: you think the last nine years of Apop material are great, I think they're trite pablum - no need to drag Hitler into the debate, dick. If your ego is so big that it can be wounded by a bunch of online rivetheads who call your bid for mainstream success as they see it to the point that you feel the need to not only violate Godwin's Law but compare yourself to victims of the Nazis, then you haven't just failed at Using The Internet 101, you've also failed at being a rock star. The pretty boy guitar hero that you've fancied yrself for some time should be above such petty grievances. Shit like this just goes to show those of us who've slagged you in the past that not only do you lack musical chops, Groth, but that you lack the promotional skills to succeed in the big league you've been striving in vain to make a mark in for nearly ten years now.

Oh yeah: Groth also goes on some weird tangents about how "some" media coverage of the moon landing may have been faked, that while he's not a 9/11 Truther, "the official explanation of 9/11 is bullshit", and may or may not favourably compared Apop to The Beatles. Draw yr own conclusions.