MahaKali

The Great Kali. Multi-limbed and eternal. Her skin the colour of charred wood. Lips painted with spilled blood; tongue forever lolling out - hungry, fierce, sexual (no, no, NO to any Miley Cyrus references). Around her throat a necklace of severed heads, beneath her dancing feet the body of a trampled god. Kali; mother of death, disaster and destruction. Goddess of chaos. The fire that consumes the earth. But more than that - she is the one who scythes the world clean and bare so that from that devastation something new may grow.
She is one of the vast pantheon of Hindu gods. She is definitely one of the most referenced and well-known.

There are very few artists capable of invoking this complex and terrible god, of paying her the due homage. I can really only think of one...

Jarboe, her name forever pursued by the suffix: '(formerly of Swans)'. Sometimes enigmatically referred to as The Living Jarboe. Raised in New Orleans. A classically-trained singer. Background in gospel and jazz. She joined Swans early on - her rich, honeyed mezzo-to-contralto a counterpoint to the grave-deep basso of Michael Gira. She credits Gira with transforming her into a rock vocalist; of teaching her to bite the words until they bleed between her teeth. Between her vocals and keyboards she added a layer of melodicism to the roiling, industrial clamour of that legendary band. Since then she has released a multitude of discs on a variety of labels, some independently. She has been part of more collaborations than Kali has limbs.

She is a fearless and restless vocalist. Her 'clean' singing voice is deep, lavish and nuanced; poignant and with subtle vibrato. But to that voice she adds a litany of others, so much so that she has been deemed 'the woman of a thousand voices'. She can variously sound like a child, a ghost, a siren, a seducer, a predator, a raging harpy, a ravening ghoul, an angel, or the victim of demonic possession. She whispers, growls, pants, hisses, shrieks, gibbers, moans and cackles.

Her music is equally varied. From the earliest of her solo discs onwards there has been evidence of a range of genres and styles - ghostly folk, gospel, sprawling southern blues, heaving industrial grime, avant-garde pop, choral electronics, and spindly dance rhythms. From the skewed exotica and psychedelia of 'Beautiful People Ltd' with multi-instrumentalist Lary Seven (an album that features a wonderful reworking of 'I Feel Pretty' - a boisterous, joyous pop ditty that seems forever at risk of collapsing into a whirlpool of dissonance) to the layered synths, repeating vocal mantras and grinding guitars of 'J2', her collaboration with Justin K. Broadrick (of Jesu and Godflesh) - an album that burns and hisses like the filament of a light-bulb (okay, so maybe I'm just linking the sound to the album cover, but to hell with it). Her music can be melancholy, hopeful, hypnotic, playful, introspective, macabre, and hymnal. It can also, on occasion, be very dark indeed.

One album looms large in her discography, its ghost haunting the sonic worlds of her later releases: her collaboration with legendary post-metallers Neurosis. This disc is succinctly titled: 'Neurosis & Jarboe' (Neurot Records). Just in case you didn't know - post-metal is an experimental genre heavily influenced by doom metal. The music tends to be extremely dense and thickly-layered, the songs building in slow intervals - smouldering away until they climactically erupt in a cathartic conflagration of guitar/bass/keys/percussion squalls. Neurosis are one of the leading lights in the genre - others include Isis, Battle of Mice and Red Sparrowes. Seething is an apt description of the music.

'Neurosis & Jarboe' is an immense, monolithic work. It towers: black, bleak and unknowable, the musical equivalent of the obelisk in '2001; A Space Odyssey'. I personally will forever be haunted by 'Within' - song that subverts religious certainty by juxtaposing it with an epically-creepy nursery-rhyme about an abductor and Recovered Memory Syndrome. Jarboe makes it seem that the God the narrator waits upon will be a vengeful and monstrous one indeed. "I tell ya, if God wants to take me, he will" she intones in her commanding speaking voice, her Southern accent very apparent. Before following with the chilling, whispered "He's coming..." while beneath her vocals writhing, smoke-choked layers of synth and bass shift like the plates under the earth. This sure as hell isn't the cuddly, benevolent God of the New Testament. It may not even be the scowling, testing God of the Old Testament. This is God reinvented as the monster under the bed, as the bogeyman.

There are echoes of this album to be heard in 'MahaKali' (particularly the post-metal influence and the use of slow, simmering builds), but it is a very different beast. Again, Jarboe is joined by some striking collaborators. Here we find Attila Csihar - a survivor of infamous, black-metal miscreants Mayhem (pretty much every disturbing, horrifying thing you've ever heard about the Norwegian black metal scene is down to this band and its ever-shifting line-up) and occasional Sunn O))) conspirator (my favourite tale about this latter band is that the first time they performed live - a thirty minute set with the band concealed behind an immense speaker system - the audience assumed they were roadies performing a sound-check). We also have Phil Anselmo formerly of Southern metallers Pantera and...erm...Southern doomsters Down. They are joined by cellist Kris Force of experimental neo-classical group Amber Asylum. 

Now, I'm wary of concept albums at the best of times, and dammit if I don't have cause to be. Primarily concept albums seem the domain of widdly, wank-handlers with their ludicrously technical prog-style musicianship and towering sense of self-importance.  But consider also the brace of eighties fantasy-styled 'Metal Opera' discs - where the narrative plays out like the 'Lord of the Rings' rip-off that weird, sullen kid was always writing back in High School -  the story full of derivative plot twists, dark lords, magical weapons and alarming sexual violence. Either that or they're wildly incoherent - think of Queensryche's 'Operation Mindcrime' saga, or Marilyn Manson's incomprehensible 'Holywood Triptych'. Then there's the relentlessly depressing ones - Nine Inch Nails 'The Downward Spiral' (young man struggles with depression, tries to lose himself in drugs, sex and religion...finally kills himself, possibly by overdose or gunshot "so much blood for such a little hole" - I think, please correct me if I'm wrong). Or the maddeningly pretentious (Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'). Too often the shoddy, crayon-scribbled narrative derails the flow of the album - forcing the artist to have all kinds of weird interludes and filler instrumentals that only serve to advance a story you have no desire to follow anyway. Janelle Monae's 'Android Suites' are probably the best of the lot (although pretty damn near impossible to comprehend) considering their mix of forbidden love, android revolutions, mental illness, time travel and a futuristic dystopia inspired by Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis'. But even then, I buy the albums for the songs...not the tale.

However, 'MahaKali' is thematic rather than conceptual; there is no overarching narrative, there are no characters. It is a song cycle that invokes that ash-skinned and sky-eating goddess; a series of hymns in her name...each track seeking to capture some aspect of her complex and contradictory nature. As such it passes from seething darkness (depicting destruction, annihilation, the all-consuming fire) into gentler, lighter territory (the world reborn: raw-boned and vulnerable).

'MahaKali, of Terrifying Countenance' opens the album. It begins with the swirl and swoon of atmospheric keys, the creep-crawl of distorted guitars, piano chords tumbling darkly down through infinite space. Suddenly Jarboe's voice enters at full, exalted howl - an overdubbed and multi-tracked choir of wordless ululations. The song erupts, shifts from melancholy towards wildness.

'House of Void (Visceral Mix)' sees a roiling sea of stressed-out guitars and bass over a rhythmic, tribal beat. Riding the seething mass is Jarboe's voice; achingly lovely and exquisitely pure - her cadence is odd, striking, faintly inhuman (as ever) - rendingly melodic as it crests the dissonance below.

'Transmogrification' is all blackened doom riffing and distressed electronics. Jarboe shifts her voice from eerily childlike, to rapturous choral, to stentorian spoken word, and finally to hungry, animalistic panting.

Album highpoint - for me at least - 'The Soul Continues' opens with basso throat-singing; like monks chanting from a lightless stone temple. Attila Csihar enters first, over feedback snarls and snaggers. He bellows a mantra in full death-style baritone. Floor toms surface from the murk - a thundering pulse that drives the song relentlessly forward - lending it a tribal, world music vibe. A thick fugue of church organ drones take over the melody and the music transforms into a ritual piece - an inverted hymn to a terrible god. Jarboe's voice flows over Csihar's guttural mantra - golden-hued and rich with vibrato - sweeping and swooping across the rhythm of the track. It's an intense, powerful and hypnotic performance from all involved.

'A Sea of Blood and Hollow Screaming' (man, these song titles...) is black metal deconstructed down to layers of atmospheric drones and scraped cellos; a beat-less, slithering miasma. Blackened, Neo-Classical Drone Doom? Jarboe pushes her vocal well beyond conventional use with this one; gurgling, rasping and snarling. Disconcertingly, she sounds at times like a child singing through a mouthful of blood.

 Now, I've never thought much of Philip H. Anselmo as a vocalist but on 'Overthrown' he inspires me to completely reevaluate his talents. He takes the lead here - his voice split across the three speaker channels, playing call-and-response with itself. Jarboe lends ghostly atmospherics - her vocal fluttering and evanescing in the background. Over ragged acoustic guitar - playing a Southern blues-style riff - Anselmo alternates his sandpaper howl with fragments spoken in his strikingly deep and compelling natural range. He sounds frigging amazing here -  his visceral, bluesy wail recalling Chris Cornell in his prime.

Later Jarboe reprises this piece herself - taking the lead vocal and repeating the mantra in an oddly enunciated fashion - to dizzying effect. In place of the slithering blues guitar she employs a skittering dance pulse and trembling synth-pads. It is a surprisingly upbeat number, danceable if you've the limbs for it, an effect utterly subverted when the song collapses into a disturbing choir of screams and wails.

'Bornless' finds her adopting a creeped-out cutesy voice, squeaking over gurgling bass/guitar textures and scraps of found sound, all pinned in place by a circular, loping drum beat. Here, juxtaposed against the queasy roil of the instrumental arrangement her 'child' voice is unnerving ...and delightful.

'Mouth of Flames' is a rich, folk-influenced piece; lovely, delicate and spacious. An acoustic guitar pattern plucked over and over, fingers squeaking and hushing across the strings, Jarboe's voice is ripe and sweet as dripping honey; warm, melodic and deep, as instantly recognizable as ever.

Tension mounts again in 'Ascend' over a low-slung steel-string guitar riff and a driving drum groove. Jarboe drops her voice into a sharp-toothed whisper - feral, urgent, almost sexual and threatening ...it compels.

'Violence' is an instrumental - all chittering, sparking electronic effects (recalling Brian Eno's work with Nico). It sounds like a collapsing void full of flames and the beating of terrible wings. 'Empty Mouth' closes the album - reprising the main lyric from 'Mouth of Flames' - here spoken over silence, her voice is deep, commanding. And so it ends; the track counter running empty, the disc hissing to a halt. The ritual is complete; the goddess Kali invoked and exorcised.

Both the mix and production on this album are expertly-judged - clear enough to preserve the nuances and textural detail of the music, while raw and grimy enough to deliver some serious heaviness. It is a dark, challenging and difficult album. Fascinating and strikingly weird; it is one hell of a head-trip, man.

Swans fans would be well-advised to check this beauty out. Hell, by the standards of that fearless band, this disc is actually pretty accessible (closer to 'The Great Annihilator' than 'Soundtracks for the Blind').

Note, all that has gone before refers to the European release of 'MahaKali' (on the Season of Mist label). There is a North American version (via The End Records), with a slightly different track-list. I think the above applies pretty well to both releases, in spite of these variations.

To be filed under...erm: ritual neo-classical, apocalyptic folk, tribal, world music, drone, dark ambient, experimental electronica, blues, choral, post-metal. Enjoy.

Pure Heroine

This isn't going to be a review. Not really. This is going to be a goddamn rant. But, if you're tolerant of my ramblings, there probably will be a hint of review in there.

It seems, based on all the reviews and opinion pieces that I've encountered, that I cannot write about Lorde - the NZ-based duo currently making some kind of history over in the US; whose debut album seems to occupy every free wall and display area within the JB Hifi here in Wellington (that bold white font screaming out from the blackness of the artwork - text only, no images) - without first mentioning two things.

One: her name - the young woman with the direct, challenging stare and explosion of thick, brunette hair - is Ella Yelich-O'Connor.  This (using her name) feels like a cynical move - an implication of false familiarity. The other half of the duo - the shadow half who handles the instrumental aspects of the music - is Joel Little (ex of Goodnight Nurse and Kids of '88). All the music is written between the two of them, with Yelich-O'Connor handling the lyrics herself. Truth be told, there is so little of either of Little's previous two projects to be heard in Lorde that it must be assumed that Yelich-O'Connor is the dominant force behind the project. The album lists no other input beyond the two - no session musicians, no get-appearances by established names in NZ music... For a major-label pop release this is a startlingly intimate and small-scale arrangement; hermetically-sealed.

Two: she's sixteen. You'll find this noted every-goddamn-where. As if this is the most profound and engaging thing about her - the total sum of her accomplishment. As if this is all that makes her exceptional.
Okay, so it is impressive.

Just to give some sense of proportion - here's what I was doing at that age:

Ladies, please form an orderly queue.
And when I wasn't apparently auditioning for men's fashion catalogues - this would sometimes happen.

 

 

Yup, brooding while wearing an ensemble made entirely out of denim.

Sixteen is a strange age - at least for me it was. I was drifting - uncertain of myself, of who I even was. I was new to the city, new to the school and I didn't feel like I fit anywhere inside my own life. Over the next year or so I would try on different sub-cultures, keeping the pieces that I liked and discarding the rest: hippie, bogan, goth, bohemian. I grew my hair long. I met the right kind of people for a guy like me. Little by little I became more of a person, more of a fully fleshed-out character in the narrative of my life. But sixteen, man, that was a transitional stage.

I can't imagine Ella Yelich-O'Connor going through the same uncertainty. She knows who she damn well is. She has become Lorde.
From now on I'm just going to call her that. When I type 'Lorde', I mean Yelich-O'Connor, same as everyone else.

I first encountered her before the hype hit, without knowing anything of the backstory or the mythology. I didn't even know she was a New Zealander. It was just a single clip, posted as being popular on Youtube. I was drawn in by the name, by the single-frame shot, and by the title of the song - 'Tennis Court' - which triggered a memory of the excellent short film 'Advantage, Satan' by the director of Australian horror/black comedy flick "The Loved Ones". I watched the clip. I was intrigued: by her pallid, neo-Gothic look; by the way the clip was just her - head and shoulders - framed by blackness and the slow flicker of studio lamps; by the tilt of her head - at once cat-like and slightly predatory; by the way her eyes narrowed and her purple lips twisted around the only word in the song she lip-synched to - 'Yeah'.

As for the song itself, I thought immediately of Lana Del Rey - perhaps an unavoidable comparison as both are young women with surprisingly deep, ageless voices; singing melancholy, minor-key melodies over the tick-tock of slo-mo hip-hop rhythms. But whereas Del Rey's songs ache with lavish arrangements of melodramatic Nancy Sinatra-esque strings and the twang of 50s B-movie guitars, Lorde's arrangements are sparser, purely electronic and her songs are not about doomed love and dangerous men. The world Del Rey portrays is a fantasy (and one with more than a whiff of David Lynch surrealism to it) - she plays the role of a privileged, hip-hop Lolita for a cynical age - swooning for a tattooed boy with a killer's eyes. And it is a compelling and decadent fantasy, but an illusory thing nonetheless. Lorde offers something else - something that might even be the truth. Her voice is more direct, warmer, somehow more human. This is bullshit-free pop, man.

And it doesn't fit right - whenever I hear 'Tennis Court', or the big, game-changing hit 'Royals', on the radio they seem to sit uneasily next to, say Katy Perry's 'Roar' or that most-popular of pop dreck Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines - a song that seems to celebrate non-consenting sex, I might add.

The pop music world today is a factory-line of hyper-compressed, multi-tracked, auto-tuned, airless and over-produced recordings - songs served up like slabs of cut and processed meat, sealed in cling-film and polystyrene ready for easy consumption. In such a world Lorde's music jars and surprises. Not since Lykke Li's stunning debut 'Youth Novels' have I heard a pop album with as much space in it as 'Pure Heroine'. These songs breathe, man.

Here we have little more than a shifting gauze of synthesized minor chords over the narcotized pulse of drum machines and digitalized hand-claps, with only the odd electronic squeal, flicker or...whale-song?...for texture. And her voice: rich, very strong within its middle register and faintly husky. A voice far older than sixteen. Nothing else on the album is quite as minimalist as 'Royals'. But everything is mid-tempo, melancholy and quietly storm-laden. Beyond that one track, there are no obvious singles, despite the hooks and the choruses.

And it is lazy to write it off as simply another artist following in the wake of Lana Del Rey. There are far stranger vibes to be picked up here. The pitch-shifted vocals that open 'Team' suggest a familiarity with the work of Fever Ray. Elsewhere there is a whisper of the sparkling, haunted electro-indie of fellow country-mates The Naked and Famous. But perhaps most alarmingly, on the first two tracks - 'Tennis Court' and '400 Lux' in particular, I can hear a slight similarity with the short-lived and seemingly forgotten sub-genre Witch House: the doomy synths creep-crawling around the boom-and-echo of electronic drums, the downward chord shifts, the digitally-altered 'Yeah' sounding oddly perverse and challenging - and strongly recalling the queasy, half-speed raps on SALEM's singular album 'King Night'. 

For those who don't know or can't recall, Witch House was a genre borne in the wake of The Knife's seminal 'Silent Shout'. In principle it was darkwave and Gothic musical styles adopted and transformed by kids raised on hip-hop and indie. Dense, druggy and depressive; 'King Night' was the defining work of the genre. It had hip-hop beats, vocals smudged and buried within layers of soaring and descending synths, ghostly choral arrangements (like the Cocteau Twins lost in the spaces between stars) and the afore-mentioned sluggish rapping. Of all the dark and disturbing discs within my collection (and given my fondness for black ambient, that's quite a few) 'King Night' is the only one that I feared might actually be doing me some kind of psychological harm. It is something beautiful created from illness, apathy and drug-abuse. But it feels kind of too-real, man...too close. Last I heard one of the guys from SALEM was collaborating with Kanye West (ahem, kollaborating). So he must've done okay.

Now, I'm not saying that Lorde is a secret Witch House fan, the vibe is invariably mere coincidence - the result of draping cold synth layers and minor chords over those beats. Although Witch House fans were something of a hard drug crowd (the Youtube posts beneath SALEM clips are all like "Dude, I did so much blow listening to this album...") so the title 'Pure Heroine' would probably amuse them. I'm just saying that it's damn weird to hear something on the radio that reminds me of this utterly un-media friendly genre.

But back on topic.
Lorde is not at all sexualized in her marketing (despite what Dominion Post critic Simon Sweetman rather creepily and misguidedly asserted in his online review of 'The Love Club EP') - not in her videos (in 'Royals' she barely appears; and then mainly in a confronting, tight close-up that makes the most of her very direct stare) or her promotional photos. Instead she is being marketed on her otherness: the apparent novelty that someone so young could be so assertive, intelligent, and motivated. She is outspoken (I wish she hadn't been forced to retract her Taylor Swift quote; she was right), cusses frequently and writes extremely well. Yet, despite her evident wit and wisdom, that same youthfulness - and the fact that she is a woman - sadly leaves her vulnerable to those same tired criticisms (typically from male media critics and commentators): accusations and assumptions that she is a record label puppet - a propaganda tool, cleverly constructed and marketed (Simon Sweetman again).

I think the reason for her success is simpler than that, and a good deal less cynical. In her music we find subverted hip-hop braggadocio; teenage ennui viewed from a distance and through a glaze of weariness and detachment; a ballsy attitude and a willingness to warp existing forms. We have an album that is undeniably a very tidy pop album (for all that it is a little one-tempo throughout) that offers more than just that - something smarter and savvier and more self-aware. 'Pure Heroine' isn't unique or strikingly original. But it is clever and compelling and articulate. It isn't vapid or disposable. It is something else. And it speaks to a different kind of audience...

I can't know what it is like to be part of the millennial generation (although upon learning that everyone with a birthdate from 1980 up to 2000 or so qualifies, I am near-as-dammit one of their number, seriously - I'm not that old). I can only look at an entire generation raised to believe that they would all be rock-stars and princesses only to instead inherit a world where they are constantly judged - in research papers and media reports - and be told that they are all lazy, narcissistic sociopaths.

Millennials are quite probably the smartest generation ever. This isn't hyperbole, but rather the result of our secret evolution. As our society becomes increasingly complex, inter-connected and technologically-advanced the human brain is hyper-stimulated and responds by developing faster and more efficient neural pathways. Every generation or so, IQ tests have to be scaled up - so as to continue reflecting the current norm. Humans are simply getting smarter.

They're certainly the most educated and inter-connected generation. Their personal lives are played out across message boards and twitter feeds - intimate details sketched out in status updates, exposed and converted into an eternal, digital medium. Yet for all of this, various research papers indicate that they are the loneliest generation, plagued by the far-too whimsical-sounding FOMO (fear of missing out). Psychological reports indicate that we are unhappier with our own lives the more we compare them to others. Well, this generation exists in a constant state of comparison and competition. And they text too damn much.

In Lorde they have found a kind of figurehead - a vicarious voice. She speaks to the yawning gulf between the world they have been taught to aspire to (from the posturing of Kanye West; to the lavish, romantic touchstones of Lana Del Rey; to drug-fueled rock star lunacy "trashing the hotel room"; all the way back to the trappings of success as evidenced in Brian de Palma's film 'Scarface' - which everyone seems to forget, plays out like a Shakespearean tragedy), where success equals fame and excess; and the world that now lies before them. She speaks to a generation well-versed in celebrity meltdowns; to an audience who've grown accustomed to seeing their idols fellate sledgehammers (I couldn't let this slip past without a Miley Cyrus reference now, could I?), piss in buckets and grow up awkward and strange - their adult faces fitting them oddly, like Halloween-mask versions of their former selves.

Ultimately, the Millennials have a pretty shitty deal: they've inherited a world of mass-shootings, un-ending wars, global financial crises, housing shortages, high unemployment and environmental collapse. And still they are the most analyzed, scrutinized and criticized of all the generations. Lorde is one of their number and she has the ability and opportunity to articulate how that feels.

Lorde is intelligent, articulate and self-aware. A gifted and introverted teenager. She's proudly feminist and she knows exactly what that means, unlike so many folks who fall into the lazy assumption that all feminists hate men (total bullshit: feminists like men just fine - they just rightfully expect equality with them and demand to be treated as more than just an object of the male gaze and opinion).

Lorde is simply the right artist at the right time.
Also, 'Pure Heroine' is a fine album and 'Royals' is a singularly catchy song. Hell, that in itself is probably enough.