Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: punk

Showing posts with label punk. Show all posts

Thursday, 18 May 2023

The Damned - Darkadelic (2023)

The Damned are one of those iconic bands who have been around forever and may well have done everything. Their early days, starting in 1976, including releasing the first British punk single, New Rose, and the first British punk album, Damned Damned Damned. A decade later, they moved into goth and, eventually, into a more psychedelic take on both punk and goth. They're an idiosyncratic band, partly because of that unique blend of styles and partly because it all sits behind the iconic smooth voice of Dave Vanian, the band's mainstay since their inception.

Vanian has kept the band alive ever since, through they've never been particularly prolific. This is their twelfth studio album in a career that's now closing in on half a century, their first since Evil Spirits in 2018. It's a varied affair, as you might expect, veering from punk to goth and back again, with psychedelic sections here and there and a surprising dip into what sounds to me like fifties pop.

I've read that they aimed for the seventies here a lot, but You're Gonna Realise and Beware of the Clown both sound older to me, like they're fifties songs shifted into a goth punk style, almost as if these are covers of songs that didn't exist until now. Western Promise is the most fifties, because it's a ballad at heart, with Vanian's croon at the fore and a smoky use of brass late on. In between the fifties sound I'm hearing here and the seventies sound they aimed at, there are songs such as Follow Me that have a sixties garage rock drive to them, in addition to the seventies punk that saw that as an influence.

Perhaps surprisingly, I tend to dig the more extreme songs here. I've been struggling for a couple of weeks with illness, my energy levels sapped, so I've been listening to this album for much longer than I'd normally allocate a new release and it's become something of an old friend. It's telling to say in that context that I haven't tired of any of these songs, though some are clearly better than others. While I didn't have the energy to write it up sooner, it wouldn't have been difficult to turn it off and I simply didn't want to. It's a strong album that doesn't get old.

But it's the songs at the extremes that have stayed with me most. Western Promise is the softest piece here, so probably the least likely to engage me but it's a firm favourite. At the other end of the spectrum, The Invisible Man and Motorcycle Man stand out as rockers. The former is a strong opener, a punky goth rock song that ramps up halfway and gets even more interesting. While the back end's going rockabilly, the front end's getting mystical. Motorcycle Man changes too, from a truly emphatic opening with a riff so punk that it's almost metal—no, it's not the Saxon song—to eventually become a laid back sort of beach song.

They're far from all that's going on here though. Bad Weather Girl ratchets down the tempo after the opener and adds a spooky keyboard backing. It's dark carnival music with an old school guitar solo right out of psychedelic rock. Walk the Dead is very seventies, trawling in a prog atmosphere remiscent of Pink Floyd and occasionally Genesis. Apparently Captain Sensible, on his third stint in the band, learned that fans were having Damned songs played at funerals, so decided to write one specifically for that purpose. Overall, it's as pure goth as this album gets.

Roderick closes out the album in fascinating style, as unusual as Leader of the Gang isn't a couple of songs before it. The latter is all about the meteoric rise and fall of the un-late and un-lamented Gary Glitter and feels as seventies as it should. The former, though, opens up as spoken word with accompaniment. It's a dramatic horror performance that becomes a song, Vanian's voice backed by a solo piano, only to transform into a ritual chant in Latin. Then it builds substantially to strings, with ebow guitar from producer Thomas Mitchener and more trumpet from Chris Coull, as enticing here as on Western Promise. And, with all that said, it's often rather like an unconventional James Bond theme. There's a lot here.

Now I have energy back again, it's going to feel odd moving on from this new old friend to listen to something else, but I'm a few weeks behind on my reviews and need to at least attempt to catch up a little and get back on track. I've always liked the Damned but I've never really dug properly into their work, merely enjoyed it when I've noticed it. Clearly, I should be paying more attention. The joyous jam in the second half of Girl I'll Stop at Nothing is worth the cost of the album all on its own, and that doesn't scratch the surface of what it has to offer.

Friday, 6 January 2023

Iggy Pop - Every Loser (2023)

Iggy Pop is one of music's great survivors and he's been having a blast lately experimenting with a whole slew of styles, to mixed success. I wasn't particularly fond of his 2019 album Free, because it only contained six songs proper, the rest of a short running time filled with spoken word poetry of little repeat play value. This one's hardly generous at thirty-seven minutes, but nine of the eleven tracks are songs and even where they're built with the spoken word, they're worth repeating. Only the second interlude is inherently skippable.

What's more, it marks a firm return to the punk and rock that Pop is known for, with a set of stellar guest musicians, led by multi-instrumentalists Andrew Watt and Josh Klinghoffer. There are clear comparisons to be made with Ozzy Osbourne's latest album, Patient Number 9, another return to form, because it also benefitted from Watt's production and instrumental talents, along with a string of guests, many of whom are the same musicians, like Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Duff McKagan of Guns n' Roses. Smith played on every track on Ozzy's album and seven of the eleven here, while McKagan played on two and three respectively.

Both of them are on the glorious opener, Frenzy, which is an in your face punk song in the Stooges vein. I remember when he used to do this sort of thing and clearly so does he, because he's having an obvious blast with filters off, middle finger extended and that recognisable sneer in full effect. So much for moving away from the trappings of rock music. Welcome back, Iggy. He doesn't stay in this mode throughout, but he's there for Modern Day Rip Off too and other songs have righteous anger in them too, especially the more downplayed closer, The Regency, and the pop punk blast of Neo-Punk, which offers a great contrast between trendier verses, with Blink-182's Travis Barker on drums, and a more hardcore Bad Brains-esque chorus.

When Pop drops back down into pop mode, he's still interesting, especially on Strung Out Johnny, a far more controlled post-punk song. This is Pop doing pop but keeping it interesting in a way that many wouldn't. All the Way Down is a solid rock song, with some searing solos from Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam, and it feels like an epic at only four and a half minutes. Remember that there are no fewer than eleven tracks taking up only thirty-seven minutes. Some of these are very short. Only The Regency is longer and I found myself disappointed with that one, even with Chris Chaney and Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction on board, along with the late Taylor Hawkins. It feels long rather than epic.

The less interesting material once again is the spoken word pieces, but they are at least far more interesting on this album than the last one. The best of them is probably The News for Andy, which is done and dusted in under a minute, but New Atlantis is good too. Pop always had a strong sense of intonation and that's particularly notable on this one, even if he sounds like Johnny Cash on the chorus. It's there on Modern Day Rip Off too, which benefits massively from textbook rhyming and intonation. Morning Show is a mood piece with his voice deep and rich and it's not hard to wait out on the way to more overt songs.

And so, once again, this is a mixed bag, but it's a much better mixed bag than Free. It's longer and more substantial. It's agreeably varied and rarely loses its power, even when shifting between. It's also outstanding at points, Modern Day Rip Off and Frenzy the standouts with Strung Out Johnny and All the Way Down on their heels. Iggy's at his uncompromising best on these tracks and he's a solid iconic presence through everything, even down to the forgettable My Animus Interlude, only a minute long but still inherently skippable. And he's having fun, right down to his rolling Rs at the end of Modern Day Rip Off and his pixie-like laugh after Neo-Punk. Life is good for Iggy, it seems, and it's good for us too when he's in this sort of mood.

Tuesday, 4 October 2022

Gogol Bordello - Solidaritine (2022)

Here's something a little different: a highly international gypsy punk band from Manhattan. They have been a favourite of mine for a long time, with a number of songs on 2007's Super Taranta! on my internal playlist that I sing along to when I walk. Technically, they count as an American band, a product of the wild diversity that is New York City, but their sound is rooted in the Romani culture of eastern Europe and tends to be described as gypsy punk, because of its sheer energy and use of instruments like violin and accordion.

This is their ninth studio album and it's an important one because of its timing. The band's leader is Eugene Hütz, he of the wild lead vocals, acoustic guitar and occasional percussion, and he hails from Ukraine, which wasn't at war when the prior Gogol Bordello album, Seekers and Finders, was released in 2017. However, a couple of other key members—violinist Sergey Ryabtsev, who's been part of Gogol Bordello longer than anyone else except Hütz, and guitarist Boris Pelekh—are both Russian. They're therefore a perfect example of how the two countries can get along fine and put something new and vibrant into their shared culture. Reality isn't following suit.

And so it should surprise to find that this comments on the war. The cover art is white on black but for the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, colours you'll also see as the backdrop if you visit the Gogol Bordello site on Bandcamp. There's also a reworking of Forces of Victory here, a song from Super Taranta! with guest performers, that was released as a single before this album came out. I should note that the singers helping out Hütz are Oleksandra Zaritska from Kazka, an electro-folk band, and Serhiy Zhadan, who isn't a singer at all but a writer, who collaborates with the ska band Zhadan i Sobaky. Both of course are Ukrainian and the lyrics are translated into that language.

I don't believe Solidaritine is a real word in any language. Here it's what Hütz calls an "imaginary substance that unlocks our empathy and our full human potential, which is supposed to unite us in overcoming our common problems." To me, it sounds like Gogol Bordello and it's a great way for a wartime album to kick off, even if I much prefer the next song, Focus Coin, about something as odd as cryptocurrency.

It does something that I adore Gogol Bordello for doing, which is to meld different genres into an impressive new sound. It's got all the energy that their usual gypsy punk has and it's impossible to listen without moving with the rhythm and tapping it out with your toes. It's a mix of ska and punk with an up tempo beat, some teasing ZZ Top guitar in the second half and and even soulful backing vocals reminiscent of Joss Stone. It would be my favourite song here if Fire on Ice Floe didn't show up much later on.

Focus Coin is more immediate, the sort of song that has you partying even on a first listen, but Fire on Ice Floe kept on getting under my skin with every time through until it was impossible to ignore how much it had got to me. It's subtle as it begins, quiet but for Hütz's vocal and wonderful work from new fishes Korey Kingston on drums and Gill Alexandre on bass, both new to the band in the past couple of years. The verses are chill in a way that only this band can be chill but the hook is an absolute peach and it just keeps building as other instruments join the fray. I picture it like a quiet dancefloor that ends up joyously packed.

After those two classics, there's a bit of a gap. My Imaginary Son really nails its grooves, both the hardcore sections and the ones with plucked strings, while I'm Coming Out is agreeably odd, with quirky lyrics referencing Zombie Lifestyle magazine, which I ought to check out, just in case is isn't a product of his imagination. Oleksandra Zariska returns on Take Only What You Can Carry, while H.R. from Bad Brains steps in to help out on The Era of the End of Eras, adding his characterful and personal touch to the song. Blueprint is a Fugazi cover, one that they play live often and righly so, because it has such a Gogol Bordello drive to it, all the way to the brass that dominates the end.

The beauty of what Gogol Bordello do is that their sound is such a vibrant patchwork of styles that my choices for standouts may well not be yours and that's fine. Their potent energy infuses every song but the particular recipes that each song uses for flavour are highly personal and will speak to different people in different ways, depending on what you and I and anyone else bring with us. I'm not going to catch them in Tempe at the end of the month, but seeing them live is certainly on my bucket list and I'll get there at some point. In the meantime, this.

Tuesday, 15 March 2022

Napalm Death - Resentment is Always Seismic: A Final Throw of Throes (2022)

It still feels strange to realise that Napalm Death are forty years into their career and they have a lucky thirteen studio albums to their name, the most recent of which made a whole slew of end of year charts in 2020 and got an 8/10 from me here at Apocalypse Later. This isn't number fourteen; it's a mini album made up of material that didn't make it onto that album, and it's as inconsistent as that might make it seem, but some of it is powerful stuff indeed, like the blistering two minute punk onslaught that is By Proxy. It isn't the grindcore of their debut album, which was really a pair of mini albums packaged together, but it hearkens back to even earlier anarcho-punk material, as did some of the material on that thirteenth album, Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism.

If that's the best song, there's a whole gradient of material behind it. Narcissus is a strong opener that fits very well with the best of the two covers on the album, Don't Need It, a Bad Brains track from their self-titled debut album back in 1982. It's a frantic but very true take on that original, a more appropriate cover here than the song I remember best from that album, Pay to Cum. Also of note are the two songs that play as a consistent double bill in between the covers. I'd have to give the edge to Man Bites Dogged, a chugger rather than a blisterer with its roots in thrash metal but Slaver Through a Repeat Performance is pretty close.

So far, that's all fairly expected for a band who have morphed over the decades from anarcho-punk to grindcore to death metal. Even when they shift into punk or flirt with thrash, they're immensely recognisable as Napalm Death. That starts to change when they shift into more unusual territory, something that they did on A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen, the closer to Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism and a song that almost felt out of place there. It feels like it has a lot more in common with the various tracks here that also delve deep into industrial.

The best of these, to my ears, is Resentment Always Simmers, a slower song in between Narcissus and the vicious assault of By Proxy, but a heavy one nonetheless. It plays well to me and tells me in no uncertain terms that the Napalms doing industrial can work within the confines of my personal taste, which dabbles in but has never dived into that genre. However, it doesn't work for me on the other cover here, which is of a 1988 single called People Pie by Slab!, a British industrial band. It's easily my least favourite piece of music here, which means that the closer is above it.

I've left that for last not because it's the closer or because I particularly like it, but it's interesting in ways that People Pie isn't. It's called Resentment is Always Seismic (Dark Sky Burial Dirge) and I guess that makes it the surprising title track. It's absolutely the dirge that its name suggests and I was immediately reminded of how Celtic Frost dabbled in industrial way back in the day, but taken to the degree of heaviness they reached much later with Monotheist. I remember mentioning the Frosties in my review of Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism too and it really shouldn't surprise to see them as an influence on Napalm Death. I wonder if they ever delved further back down that path.

So this is a mixed bag, as such collections of extra tracks tend to be, but it's an interesting one. The best songs here are easily worthy of sitting on a regular album and the worst are still unusual enough to be worth a listen, even if they wouldn't remotely fit on a regular release.

Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Seremonia - Neonlusifer (2022)

Country: Finland
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 4 Feb 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

This is Seremonia's fifth album of fuzzy and doomladen Finnish psychedelic rock but it's my debut encounter with them and it surprised me. Never mind the garage stereotype, this is so lo-fi that it could have been recorded in a closet. Like garage rock, it's also massively urgent, as if most songs want to be finished ten seconds sooner than the previous take. And the vocals are fantastic, because they're hardly typical for the genre and Noora Federley doesn't sound like a typical lead singer, unless it's for a punk band in London in 1977. She has very little range and it really doesn't matter. I like this combination of styles as much as I wasn't expecting it.

And, talking of not expecting it, let's talk about Raskasta Vettä. This is the first epic of the album at almost nine minutes—the closer, Maailmanlopun Aamuna, is just under seven—and it's as slow and moody as the three songs before it were fast and frantic. It shifts gears completely, taking an interesting garage/post-punk approach to the extended psychedelia jams of the Doors. This is not the end, my friend, but it's an interesting take on it, its initial Hallowe'en vibe made creepier and more atmospheric by the presence of a prominent flute, courtesy of drummer Erno Taipale.

The rest of the album plays with those two approaches in different ways: the frantic garage band with a wildly fuzzy guitar and a dash of psychedelia being the first and the stoned psych band on a long slow trip being the other. My favourite from the first angle is easily the title track, with some strong bouncy riffs, an ever-active bass and some neat vocals that seem cut off for effect. There's also a swirl of keyboards that gets more overt as the song runs on and ends up bringing quite the Hawkwind vibe into proceedings.

Perhaps the most interesting song for me, though, is the one after it, Naamiot, which Google tells me means Masks, because of the balance of those two approaches. It feels like it wants to blister but something holds it back for the most part and so it falls more into the psychedelic trip mould. The result is short but sweet, clocking in at only two and a half minutes, but it stamps itself on our brains and stays there, even during the nine trippy minutes of Raskasta Vettä, as something with its feet firmly in DIY post-punk but just as firmly in psychedelia. However the other songs grew or evolved on me, I kept coming back to Naamiot.

Having not heard Seremonia's first four albums, I'm sure I'm way off base, but it feels like this one is the key to the band, or at least the band as it is right now. I ended up thinking of its balance as being a tantalising one between the psychedelia of the Doors, the hallucinatory groove of Hawkwind, the garage rock of the Sonics and the punk of early Siouxsie and the Banshees or maybe Penetration. When they speed up, they amp up the stoner rock fuzz and add some early Discharge urgency, but, as much as I tend to gravitate towards speed whenever I listen to angry music, it remains the more patient Naamiot and Maailmanlopun Aamuna that speak to me most.

This certainly isn't going to be for everyone, especially because of the production—or the lack of it. If you find yourself wondering what that weird combination of sounds is going to be like, I think you're already a fan of Seremonia and now you just need to hit play to confirm it. If not, then this album is never going to convert you and you probably shouldn't even try.

Tuesday, 26 October 2021

Loose Sutures - A Gash with Sharp Teeth and Other Tales (2021)

Country: Italy
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Oct 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Here's something interesting from Sardinia, a second album by a band who describe themselves as a "blend of hard-stoner rock with a pinch of garage spirit and modern punk attitude." That's not unfair but it misses out a retro mindset towards psychedelia. While the instrumental opener, White Vulture, is very much stoner/hard rock with fuzzy guitar and subdued pace, that's not everything in this band's arsenal and Stupid Boy promptly highlights that.

It ditches both the subdued pace and the instrumental approach in favour of something untamed and frantic. The idiosyncratic vocals are truly wild, a lofi holler that combines Screaming Jay Hawkins with Fred Schneider of the B-52s, delivered through a Rudy Vallee megaphone. The guitar is as rhythmic as the drums and its tone hints at an electronic pulse that isn't otherwise here. There are sound effects at odd moments as well, such as a breaking glass. The end result is as close to a psychobilly outfit like Demented are Go as it is to a heavy stoner group like Monster Magnet and it makes for a fascinating mixture.

They haven't betrayed all of their influences yet and the eight remaining tracks continue to highlight other facets of their sound. Sunny Cola adds the Doors and Black Sabbath at once, especially during the heavy psych midsection with its guest solo by from Marco Nieddu, the founder of Electric Valley Records, home to Cancervo. There's more Sabbath on Last Cry too, but a different Sabbath, this one aiming at simple but effective riffs rather than slow doomy heaviness. But Sabbath are a gimme of an influence. The second half of the song adds some Hawkwind bass and space vibes to underline the fact that texture is as important to Loose Sutures as anything else.

This is an album to listen to, of course, but it's also an album to feel. I enjoyed this as a piece of music, closing my eyes to listen to, say, the instrumental midsection in Mephisto Rising, which barrels along as effortlessly and as characteristically as the underrated instrumental midsections in songs like War Pigs. But I felt it too. This album is made up as much of dry dust in your eyes and the smell of gasoline and the sweat hanging in the air of a bar after the gig is over and everyone's gone home as it is beats riffs and hooks.

As you might imagine from that, this is a dirty album that almost has to start out used and abused. It would be weird to walk into a record store and walk out with this album in pristine condition. It ought to be something you discover like buried treasure in a dusty crate underneath a market stall in a city it had no right to have ever visited, like a souk in Marrakech. Sure, the cover had been folded at some point and it's bumped around the edges and there's dried blood on the inner sleeve, but it tells you in no uncertain terms that you have to buy it and you never regret that spur of the moment decision.

I just wish I could figure out all the influences. I can recognise a lot of the classic rock in here, even if I can't identify which specific song Last Cry reminds me of—I was almost singing along on my first time through but couldn't quite find the wrong words. I'm still learning about stoner rock, which is clearly the primary influence here. But there's rockabilly and punk and garage and even a bit of psychedelic pop here too and I'm just not well versed enough in these genres to pull out who Loose Sutures grew up on. I just know that I'd love to see a list to turn into a sonic rabbit hole.

I've mentioned most of my favourite songs thus far—Sunny Cola and Mephisto Rising—but there's one more that I haven't got to yet because it wraps up the album. It's Death Valley II, the longest piece on offer at six and a half minutes (ironically making it as long as the shortest track on yesterday's Dream Theater album), and it's as wide open as everything else here isn't.

The garage angle to this album means that we're agreeably trapped with the band inside a cramped venue with the sound and sweat and charisma dripping off the walls. Death Valley II is more a desert rock piece in that it feels like we're outside in the middle of nowhere, the band jamming on a stage a long way away even though the sound carries to us perfectly in the wind. Oddly enough, Death Valley I doesn't feel like that, but Death Valley II is a great way to leave us because we're already halfway out of there as it's playing, even if we hear every note and it all stays with us for the rest of our journey, however long that takes. I like that.

Tuesday, 27 April 2021

Gynoid - The Hunger Artist Show (2021)

Country: Greece
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's something interesting from Greece. How many times have I said that over the last few years? I should thank Gynoid guitarist/vocalist Sypros Tsalouchidis as much for underlining once more just how vibrant the scene in Greece seems to be at the moment as for sending over his band's debut album for review, but I'm thankful for both. They describe what they do as both noise rock and sludge metal and that seems fair, even if it sometimes seems like the two genres are battling each other for supremacy in the Gynoid sound, albeit never to the death.

The Collar, which is the opening track proper, shows their commitment to metal, with strong riffs that are inspired, almost inevitably, by the Black Sabbath playbook. These musicians can definitely be tight when they want to be, which they are in the metal sections of The Collar and especially in Scissorman, which feels like a garage punk band covering Voivod. It's intricate and tricky and it's very tight except when it doesn't want to be tight at all. Sometimes Gynoid want to be really loose.

This is epitomised in breakdowns that sound like everything might fall apart but never does, because the band always know where they're going next and they're just keeping us on the hook. Usually these points are pause moments in songs when my imagination tells me the mobile musicians are prowling around, stirring up the pit by almost creating one themselves on stage. This works really well, but it's less effective when it's a whole song, like Garbageman (Apeman). In the briefer pauses, we know this is the calm before the storm and, sure enough, that storm promptly arrives all the more effective for the buildup. It never arrives on Garbageman.

The loose aspect is also epitomised in the vocals, which couldn't be any further from *insert favourite Sabbath vocalist here*. They're equal parts Serj Tankian, Jello Biafra and Fred Schneider of the B-52's, with perhaps a side of Blaine from the Accüsed, which boils down to very alternative and very punk. It fascinated me to see how the tight metal aspect found a way to co-exist here with the loose punk one, and I have to say it that way around because the punk side of this band's sound clearly couldn't give a monkey's about the metal side in the slightest. It drives Gynoid wherever the hell it wants, leaving the metal side to figure out ways to support it.

Sometimes they're so loose that the sound goes to very strange places indeed. My Mirror, My Master wraps up the album in a way that sometimes feels like that same garage punk band who was covering Voivod earlier is now taking on Crimson Glory but ending up more in Jandek territory instead, which is not remotely what I expect when I throw on a sludge metal album. I'm not sure if I like this song or not but Gynoid are never conventional or predictable and I know that I like that.

While it wasn't hard for me to identify favourite songs—Scissorman and Mannequin are my highlights with My Pet Worms and The Collar not too far behind—it was a heck of a lot harder to figure out what I liked about them most.

I like the fact that they're a trio, because it makes for a sparse sound with an incredibly obvious bass playing an important role, occasionally taking the lead. Panos Dedis often reminded me of Tony Sales, who was the utterly reliable bassist behind Iggy Pop when that singer was at his most unpredictable. I like the guitars on My Pet Worms a lot but I love the parts where the bass takes the lead. I like when Tsalouchidis riffs. I like the more unusual rhythms that Nikos Dimitriou finds on The Collar. But that's me.

In the end, I think whether you'll like this band or not will come down to whether you like the vocals. I can't say which are Tsalouchidis and which are Dimitriou, but they're wild and they're unrestrained. If you like the idea of sludge metal played by a punk trio with vocals that could go absolutely anywhere at all at the drop of a hat, so keeping you totally on the hop, then Gynoid might be the favourite band you haven't heard of yet.

Thursday, 15 April 2021

The Limit - Caveman Logic (2021)

Country: USA/Portugal
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Here's a new band full of musicians who aren't at all new and I have no idea how to categorise them. I labelled this hard rock as a very vague catchall, and that's one obvious ingredient, but you do need to know a lot more than that. There's a lot of punk in here, some psych, some blues, some garage, some psychobilly, some post-punk. If Lemmy was looking over my shoulder, he'd just call it rock 'n' roll. What it isn't is a metal album, even with sixty per cent of the band known for their work in a couple of metal bands. And, before I rabbit on any longer, I should really introduce those musicians.

Handling vocal duties is Bobby Liebling, who's fronted American doom metal pioneers Pentagram for half a century, since they were founded in 1971. Also from the world of doom metal are two members of a Portuguese band called Dawnrider. That's Hugo Conim on guitar, which he's played in Dawnrider since that band was founded in 2004, and Joao Pedro on drums, his responsibility there since 2014. The other guitarist is Sonny Vincent, a prolific solo artist who was in an early New York City punk band by the name of the Testors; he also spent nine years on the road with Moe Tucker and Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground. That leaves Jimmy Recca on bass, best known for being an early member of the Stooges.

There's a lot to note here. For one this has serious garage rock sensibilities. It's lo-fi, but it's also well produced. They didn't just show up, plug in and press record, but the album maintains that live in the studio feel, even though the sound engineer clearly worked hard to get everything just right and the producer knew exactly how to tweak things. It's one of the most immediate and urgent recordings I've heard in a long time and that's aided by a deliberate lack of frills. Nobody's messing around ao clever things in the studio. They're just playing the hell out of their instruments.

For another, the sound is punk but the mindset feels more hard rock. This follows the rules instead of breaking them, at least for the most part. It's clean and riff driven, with guitar solos everywhere. If a song isn't specifically doing something else, Vincent is slipping in a quick solo because he can. He's all over Kitty Gone like a rash. And this makes for a fascinating mixture of two related but very different styles, both of which require this to be played loud.

The most obvious influence may be the Stooges, even though Liebling doesn't always sound like Iggy. That's certainly there at points and he finds the right snarl when he needs to, but he's not channeling any single voice. He sings his own way and only hints at another voice when the song suggests it. He's Glenn Danzig on Over Rover, which is a bizarre take on the Misfits with a doomy riff that reminded me of Atomic Rooster. There's even a spoken word section over a creeping bass and weird guitar noises.

This play with genres is fascinating. There's some Adam and the Ants in Over Rover too and it's overt at the beginning of Fleeting Thoughts, one of the snarling songs for Liebling, which he delivers with a real relish. Human vs. Nature is quintessential garage rock but it has lots of psychobilly in there too, like the band overdosed on the Tommy Gunn Theme. Enough's Enough is straight up Cream, a bluesy performance from Vincent and a dense heavy blues rock sound. Death of My Soul takes the Doors into doom rock.

I liked this a lot, even though some of these songs are predictably short, down to Life's Last Night at a mere minute and a half, even though it features my favourite line: "Lots of rope and not much hope." Six others fail to reach three minutes and only one makes it past four. There's just not much intention for anything to do more than the core of what it's supposed to do. Nobody's indulgent, even in a solo-rich song like Kitty Gone, and nobody wants to spin out choruses ad infinitum, like the Eagles and the thoughts they had about limits. I think there's only one intro here that goes beyond a foreshadowing riff and that's six seconds long.

I have no idea what audience this will reach in 2021, but it deserves to find one. It seems very much to me that they should support Alice Cooper on his next tour. It might seem odd to suggest the godfather of theatrical rock should sign up a band who I can't believe have a stage show, but they fit nicely in his recent dabblings with garage rock. The Limit could easily cover Go Man Go without it seeming out of place amidst their own songs. Of course, I have no idea at all if they're planning to tour or even record again. I hope so.

Monday, 15 March 2021

Eyehategod - A History of Nomadic Behavior (2021)

I knew Eyehategod had been around a while, but I was surprised to find that they were founded all the way back in 1988. They've also had a pretty stable line-up, with two of the four members in place since their demo days; I'm sure drummer Joey LaCaze would still be there too had he not passed in 2014. It's only their release schedule that's fighting them. For a band formed the same year as Cannibal Corpse, Paradise Lost and Nine Inch Nails, it's surprising to realise that this is only their sixth studio album, given the healthy double digit output of those other examples.

I'm not sure I've ever heard Eyehategod before and I certainly can't say that this is my favourite style of all time, but they do what they do very well. Generally, they're regarded as sludge metal and there are certainly some huge riffs here, but there are few songs that really live or die on those. They have a confrontational style that's epitomised in the hardcore punk vocals of Mike Williams that sound very sarcastic indeed. He's not just singing with his audience, he's arguing with them and he has the mike.

That's only one reason why they sound very punk to me. There's a stop/start mindset to the music that makes their often already short songs feel even shorter. The Outer Banks, for example, with a creeping riff, only runs two and a half minutes but a big pause and tempo shift halfway makes it sound like two songs of a minute plus rather than one at double that. They often made me think of the Accüsed but with a serious pace drop. Even in the faster second half of that song, Eyehategod sound like an Accüsed EP played at 33rpm instead of 45rpm.

The other punk angle is that this is a deliberately rough around the edges recording, as if it's not the actual album but we've been made privy to an early rehearsal tape that would normally be polished in many ways before release. Nobody in this band cares about tidying up loose endings, presumably of a shared mindset that feedback is a crucial part of their sound. It works to my mind in Three Black Eyes, which is one of the most agreeably loose songs here, but not on Current Situation, which may actually feature more feedback than notes. Some of these three minute recordings are two minutes of song and another of plugging in instruments and checking that the guy in the booth is awake.

But, like I said, they do this well. I actually don't mind Mike Williams's vocals, because they really fit this sound. Jimmy Bower's riffs are as crushing as anything this loose can be and I liked the prowling bass of Garry Mader a lot. He's always plugging away as a reliable backdrop even when the rest of the band gives up on songs like Current Situation and The Day Felt Wrong to experiment with feedback. Sure, there's Discharge and Black Flag here, but there's some Swans too.

The last time I was this unenthused by an album that I actually reviewed (holy crap, there are plenty I don't review because there's way too much good stuff out there for me to haul the hatchet man critic persona out) was the Hum album from 2020 that did so well in the end of year lists. The big difference between the two is that, while this isn't my thing, I can easily get why it might be yours. I couldn't get why anyone would listen to, let alone like, that Hum album, but this is clearly good stuff and many of my punk friends would dig it.

Eyehategod are heavy and angry, but they're playful and inventive too. Even I got into songs like The Day Felt Wrong—"Who do you trust? Who do you trust?"—or Smoker's Piece, with its sleazy vibe and even sleazier bass, and this isn't my scene. If it's yours, then I recommend this even if I'm not likely to ever haul it out again. Well, you never know.

Monday, 11 January 2021

Boris - NO (2020)

Boris have been around for a long while and they've released a lot of music across a much wider set of genres than most bands even listen to, but this one garnered more praise in 2020 than anything they have released since Pink in 2005. While much of their work is experimental, including collaborations with Merzbow and Sunn O))), this is much more accessible, though still notably varied. The final track feels like it's on a completely different album to everything else but this is a band who veer between dream pop and drone metal, via pretty much everything in between.

My favourite track may be the first one, Genesis, which is a slow and heavy sludge metal instrumental, as controlled as most of the rest of the album isn't. It could easily have been intensely boring but it's full of feedback that's ridden like a bucking bronco and refuses to let my attention wander. Anti-Gone starts out that way but soon ramps up into a punk onslaught and is over in three minutes. I've seen a lot of descriptions of this album as hardcore and I'm not seeing it, because the vocals aren't shouts. A punk sound doesn't have to mean hardcore.

In fact, with all three members of the band now contributing their voices as well as their instruments, the vocals encompass a number of styles, as is very obvious on Non Blood Lore. Mostly the vocals are clean on this one with a neat echo that I presume is a second simultaneous voice, but there are angry vocals too and some wilder stuff during a slower but impatient section. I like this one too, because of how the guitars threaten to be wall of sound but the bass can still almost solo over them. Everything here works, from the energy to the tone, via the solos.

So far, so good but I don't like everything here. My least favourite song is Zerkalo, which slows down a vast amount from the Misfits-esque blitzkrieg of Temple of Hatred to find sludge metal territory with the drums stubbornly slow and the vocals as raw as anything else here. I'm not very fond of HxCxHxC Parforation Line, which eventually feels like the band are performing on a runway as a convoy of jets land behind them.

It really is an odd combination of songs, but then this is a Boris album and we shouldn't expect them to care about consistency, especially on an album written relatively quickly and recorded in isolation during lockdown for COVID-19. One minute there's a frantic cover of nineties Japanese band Gudon's Fundamental Error, which is a blast, especially when it drops into punk pop melodies but without any pandering to commerciality at all. The next there's Interlude, a strange title for the final song on any album but appropriate here given that it's a shoegazy post-rock song with clean and whispery female vocals.

It's almost a love letter to American punk, ripping its way through the various genres, some extreme but others conventional. For every Temple of Hatred, easily the loosest song here and one that wraps a while before its two minutes are up, there's a Kiki no Ue, a fascinating piece that starts drum heavy but eventually lets the bass take over and define it. I like a lot of this, but I don't like all of it and, as energetic and fun as it gets, it just feels like a good and varied album, and one that's more accessible than the double album they released with Merzbow in December.

However, it doesn't feel like best of year list material, even though it made five of those I'm tracking thus far, including two top tens and a top five, which was a third place in Treble Zine's list right after the Oranssi Pazuzu album that blew me away. I'd just call it a generally enjoyable release that's more appropriate as an entry point to Boris's discography than pretty much anything they've released in a decade and a half. If you want to find out what all the fuss is about, this is as good a choice as any.

Monday, 10 August 2020

Cro-Mags - In the Beginning (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Crossover
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Jun 2020
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website

So many bands have emerged out of the shadows over the last couple of years, if not from completely out of the blue, but I shouldn't be too surprised to see the Cro-Mags among them, given how often they've split up over the years and how often they've got back together again, in one form or another. They have something of a reputation for internecine feuds, as if all the clichéd New York gang movies are somehow true to life.

This, however, marks an official shift of the band away from its incarnation under John Joseph Bloodclot, who led the Cro-Mags for the last decade in his fifth stint in the band, and to the band's founder, Harley Flanagan, who is now on his fourth. It was Flanagan who sang on Revenge, the band's previous album, which was released only three weeks into the year 2000. They've been gone from the studio, if not the stage, for a long time.

While some of the folk in Joseph's new incarnation of the band, Cro-Mags JM, have decades of service in it, everyone in the current line-up has time with the Cro-Mags dating back at least three stints going back to the nineties. I see Rocky George from Suicidal Tendencies on guitar; he was on that previous Cro-Mags album too. With Flanagan on bass as well as vocal duty, that leaves Gabby Abularach on the other guitar and Garry Sullivan on drums.

I first heard the Cro-Mags in 1986 when my favourite band had changed from Iron Maiden to Nuclear Assault and I'd become fascinated by the new merger of thrash metal with American punk. I'd dug deep into thrash but knew almost nothing about punk at that point. What I quickly discovered was that I was a metalhead not a punk but I did like a lot of the pioneering crossover bands, including the Cro-Mags, D.R.I. and Bad Brains.

In the Beginning is more of a metal album than The Age of Quarrel was back in 1986, with Flanagan's vocals deeper, more controlled and far more mature, and the two guitarists providing a real crunch. The punk side of the band is more obvious in the rhythm section. Just check out the energetic bass intro to No One's Coming, which is possibly the best song on the album and surely the most important too.

For instance, it's at that point that we realise that we haven't even been listening for ten minutes yet, but we're already onto track five. The band simply blister through the first four songs, none of which make it past the three minute mark and one of which only just sneaks past half that. Over the album as a whole, fully half a dozen songs wrap up in fewer than two and a half minutes. The entire run of thirteen is done and dusted in under forty.

It also shows some real imagination. Not only does it last long enough for a guitar solo in the middle, which doesn't remotely slow the blitzkrieg riffs and bludgeoning drums that drive the song forward, but it adds another sound later on. We start to hear more beats than G-Man ought to be able to provide and we realise that they're not his. It sounds like the band are rocking out in an underground garage and the audience is joining in by banging whatever they can find against the wall. As it wraps up, we realise that this is all in effective ethnic rhythms.

There is one longer song and that's also interesting, because it ditches the vocals. It's Between Wars and it's entirely instrumental for its almost six minutes. It's not really rooted in thrash at all and it's the drums that are most obvious, shining far brighter than the guitars, G-Man doing a glorious job as the apparent octopus behind the kit.

So that's two highlight songs that I've praised the drums in. I should point out that the guitars are generally everywhere here, providing ever-reliable crunch and riffage. The more we focus on them, the more we realise just how tight this band is. PTSD is absolutely textbook crossover—no nonsense, balls to the wall, bludgeoning energy—and so is The Final Test, with its fantastic speed up at the halfway mark; only its vocals do somewhere different, being surprisingly subdued for a not remotely subdued genre. I like.

The most punk song is probably Two Hours, which is vehemently up front and threatening. It's less a song and more an angry musical punch in the face, the lyrics preached rather than sung or shouted and the music slower as if it's background texture to something visual than the backing to a song. Is there a video to this one? If there isn't, there ought to be.

Not everything holds up to the best songs here, but nothing lets the album done. It's a powerful statement of intent for a band who haven't released a studio album in twenty years. Welcome back, folks.

Thursday, 11 June 2020

Clavicule - Garage is Dead (2020)

Country: France
Style: Psychedelic Garage Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

Garage is dead, say Clavicule, releasing what is really a psychedelic garage rock album. The results tell me that garage is far from dead and nobody has even nailed it to the perch. It's clearly alive and well in Rennes, up there in the northwest of France, where Clavicule have mixed it with an intriguing array of sounds. There's Hawkwind in here but Danzig too and Dick Dale and, quite frankly, I never expected to write those names in the same sentence.

This looks like their debut album, though it features the three tracks made previously available on a self-titled EP last year, including the opener, a sensitive little ditty entitled Asshole. This starts out with some surf rock in the guitar but restrained surf against a lofi garage rock backdrop. As it hits full stride and the vocals come in, they're punky in the vein of Glenn Danzig. That's an odd mix but it works really well and it hooked me.

There's no Danzig in the second song, Special Trip, because there's a layer on top of the vocals that gives it a spacy effect. With the vibe generated a hallucinogenic one and the beat an emphatic one, it's not difficult to hear some old school Hawkwind in the song and hey, that works really well too. It shows some neat versatility in the band, even though the two songs aren't as far away from each other sonically as I may have suggested.

Today feels more like garage pop, just as emphatic and just as raw but with a slower Beatles vibe in the construction. There's indie rock in here too, a genre I don't know well enough to highlight comparisons to, but that's where garage rock usually fits so it shouldn't be too surprising. The rhythm is an emphatic old school dance rhythm and the middle eastern sounds in the solos help it to sound almost flamenco.

If that's a wide set of influences, it's a tasty one and Clavicule mix them up over the rest of the album. My Time might start out like an Adam Ant demo but, when it speeds up, it does so with a wild garage flamenco transition. I live for moments like that one. CAB has a flamenco rhythm too, but goes deep into the surf sound three minutes in, which becomes neatly intense, and that sound gets even more delightful when the riffs shift over to keyboards. I'm a big fan of the bass too when the song breaks down towards the end.

Garage bands don't tend to play long songs, but there are two here, with CAB being the first. At 7:19, it's double the average length of the rest, but it never outstays its welcome because it's constructed in phases. Strangely, if CAB is one of my highlights here, my least favourite song is the other long song on offer, Jericho, which closes out the album with an uncharacteristic patience for 6:25. It's the only piece of music here that doesn't take me anywhere, except during its ethnic sections.

I know next to nothing about the band, though Facebook tells me that they're a four piece, with two guitars. Marius plays one and also takes care of the vocals, while Kamil plays the other. Ian handles an occasionally funky bass and Alexis brings an often punky vibe to the drums, or more appropriately in French, the batterie. I have no idea who's responsible for the castanets in the second half of Vertigo, when everything goes garage flamenco again.

While my favourite songs, like My Time and CAB, can be found at the heart of the album, moments like the beginning and end of Vertigo are also highlights and there are plenty more of those. The Race has a particularly epic ending, while The Monkey starts out like Mark Knopfler has stepped in on guitar. I'd given up by that point on any expectation that Clavicule wouldn't just keep on surprising me. I don't think their styles work as well on a ballad, but I won't complain, especially given that The Monkey goes suitably nuts to close.

I really dug this, because it sounds both accessible and highly inventive, a mixture of styles I hadn't heard before that suddenly sound natural together and ought to be mixed more often. Now I really want to hear Clavicule live, maybe alongside a band like The Villainz. That would make for a particularly wild night, hopefully in a tiny but utterly packed club, especially if they join forces at the end of the evening to jam.

Monday, 28 October 2019

Double Crush Syndrome - Death to Pop (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Oct 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

There's a lot of irony in the title of this album, a punky glam rock platter from Germany's Double Crush Syndrome, because this band are clearly trying, with a reasonable amount of success too, to craft the perfect pop song. Then again, the pop scene has shifted from Marc Bolan to Adam Ant to Prince to, cough, Kanye West and, if the band's point is that that really isn't a good progression, then I'm totally on board.

The oddest thing about this album, though, is that it sounds kind of like a compilation, even though, as far as I know, every track is performed by the same three musicians. The main man is Andy Brings, who sings the lead vocals and plays lead guitar; he's quite obviously a David Bowie fan and perhaps it led him to merge genres the way he does, these songs all being combinations of pop, rock and punk.

Now, Brings used to be in Sodom, one of the Teutonic big four, and Powergod after that, but there's nothing here like those bands. Only a couple of the eleven songs here could even be described as metal: Whore and We Cannot Be Ruled. The former includes a recognisable Iron Maiden riff halfway through, while the latter sounds like Bowie singing for the Ramones. There's quite a lot of Twisted Sister here too, on songs like Souls to Sell, and Tonight is able to successfully find a Hanoi Rocks vibe, so there's definitely rock in the band's arsenal.

I should add that Tonight is also the only song to exceed four minutes and it reaches five and a half, so it clearly has special meaning to the band. It's a simple song, with repetitive punk chords stuck while Brings preaches the band's manifesto: "We're the freaks who really don't care what all the other people think." It really works and, late on, it kicks so outrageously into high gear that it ought to send audiences wild at gigs.

Most of what's here is rooted in old school punk, though, as song lengths of two and a half to four minutes might suggest. Cocaine Lips may be the best song here and it's the Ramones through and through. The one German language track, Die berühmten drei Worte, is like a punk jigsaw puzzle, with the Sex Pistols morphing into Blondie via the ever-present Ramones. While I had to translate the title on Google (it means The Famous Three Words), I do know enough German to understand which three that means. Sure enough, they show up.

Those punk influences are varied enough for songs like I'm in Love with You to remain punk even when they're more delicate pop rock; this one's kind of like a Cheap Trick song with a very catchy hook. With Me is straightforward glam rock as David Bowie might have sung it before he turned into the Thin White Duke. Refuse to Kiss Ass couldn't have been anything except punk just from its title alone and it doesn't disappoint.

The oddest song is Mistakes We Love to Make, which is enticingly different to me and I'm really interested in the influences in play. It starts out as Tigertailz might if they ever covered the Sisters of Mercy, a combination I never thought I'd write down, but it ends up with an Adam Ant chorus, Bowie singing backup. Yeah, that's a heady mix but it's a tasty one. It's easily one of my favourite tracks here and I have a bunch of those.

Sadly, I'm living in the US where the only punk bands who get major airplay are Green Day and their type. Double Crush Syndrome kick their ass without even having to try and they deserve that level of success, even though punk traditionally expects lines like, "Money is good, fame is better" to never be anything except ironic. I hope that both come their way but, if neither show up, I hope that they keep on kicking ass in the underground for a long time. Death to Pop, ich liebe dich.

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