The All-Seeing Hand 'Mechatronics' Review

When I was a kid the city was an adventure.
You see, we lived (my family and I) in Golden Bay - a huddle of green-scrubbed hills and beaches of grainy golden (hence the name) sand, at the very top of the South Island of New Zealand. An earlier name for the place had been Murderer's Bay, which has a far less romantic vibe to it and was taken from the various pioneer-era skirmishes that had soaked those golden-sanded beaches in blood. It is a tiny place, largely rural, with a strong bohemian culture - those that wash up there are mostly artists, painters, ageing hippies and alternative life-stylers; people for whom the rest of the world is too loud, too grimy and too fast. It is a lovely place, caught in its own little pocket of time like an insect forever drowning in amber. It is a great place to grow up, I reckon. To have a childhood.

But the city...
By the city I mostly mean Christchurch, although even the odd day trip to Nelson was something to be looked forward to for weeks. The noise of it, the bustle of it; the shops, the people, the grey streets under grey skies. Weirdly the thing I remember most clearly is the motel rooms we would stay in - or the smell of those rooms; the cold smell of dead cigarettes, etched into every furnishing and piece of fabric, beneath the stronger odour of industrial-quantity cleaning products. And in each and all of those motel rooms my sister and I would tune the radio to whatever big-city station we could find. In Christchurch we mostly wanted RDU (the radio station run out of the University of Canterbury, where many years later I would go to study).

Picture us then, loading our cheap and cheerful bulk-bought cassettes into that radio and poised for something good to come over those airways - always cloaked in a hiss of faint white noise. We got us some stuff, man. A lot of what we heard was made right here in NZ. A lot of it was absolutely mental. The clank-and-squalor noise rock of Lung, 147 Swordfish, Canis, the seething chaos-melodic whorls of The Dead C, the guttural death-metal and grindcore bastardry of Human, the Antipodean black metal of Demoniac, the rioting, spazzed-out playfulness of The Conventional Toasters, and a myriad of names I can't even remember or perhaps never even knew.
Heck, back then even Head Like a Hole were at the lunatic fringe - controversial for their mud-caked nudity in the album booklet (and in live performances); and setting themes from Sesame Street to gurning funk-based metal (the track '13' off their debut).
Good times, man.

These were bands who got their stuff out quick and rough; cutting it fast-and-ugly in limited studio time. Releasing it with printed-at-home covers. Selling it at gigs. This stuff was never in print for very long. But hell, some of these bands are still working the scene, even today - ghosting around the fringes. That sound hit me in my formative years, man, and I still carry it inside me whenever I think of NZ music, whenever I try to define that thing that really needs no defining. Oh sure, I dug the fuzzed-out pop and krautrock rhythms of the Dunedin scene. But I was never huge on Bailter Space and those of their breed. Never much loved the other NZ stuff either - Straitjacket Fits and whatnot. I do dig me some early Headless Chickens though, but not 'Cruise Control' - could never stand that goddamn song.

By the way, I loathe pretty much anything with the name 'Finn' attached to it - bland music, like boiled milk. And Dobbyn sends me into an apoplexy of rage. All seem to me to be the musical equivalent of a medical waiting room; all tepid, trapped air, sterility and dull, dog-eared magazines that are ten years out of date.
Okay, I won't lie to you - that simile kind of got away from me.

Today the NZ music scene is dominated by internationally successful pop acts with alt. bite (Lorde, the Naked and Famous, Kimbra, Gin Wigmore, Ladyhawke, Ladi6) and don't get me wrong - I dig their music.
Heck, I love Wigmore's sophomore album 'Gravel & Wine' - I think that album is hugely underrated in this country - I love the swampy, bayou blues and brassy soul strut of it; and her crooning, taunting, versatile rasp of a voice is a stunning thing to my ears. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

But I dig me a bit of the underground scenesters to. And nowhere in this country seems to have a better handle on pulsing, experimental oddness than Wellington. Oh forget the diet-version of reggae-lite that seems to be sold here as 'roots' music.
Full disclosure; I don't particularly like reggae. So I have no tolerance for the diluted, lukewarm version of the same that is nigh-on inescapable here in Wellington. If that's your bag, though - well, more power to you. Oddly, I am rather a big fan of dub.

But for me, the true sound of Wellington is bands who are more like the red waiting room in David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks': the yellow-and-black zig-zagged floor, curtains of oozing red velvet and a sinister backwards-talking dwarf.
Okay. I'll stop. No more 'waiting room' parables

Wellington is for the weird.

To my ears, The All-Seeing Hand are one of the finest examples of a contemporary band driven by that same DIY, screw-genre-conventions impulse of those earlier NZ acts that I fondly recall - they are the proud bearers of that long-standing tradition of crazy-eyed, ambitious music produced by bands grown lean and hungry and clever... very damn clever.

Now, I'm not saying that their sound is 'the true NZ sound' as alleging such a thing of any band is a waste of time and typing. And how would that prove them a better band anyway?
What The All-Seeing Hand are is a brilliant band - courageous, transcendent, unique and very, very cool. And their second album 'Mechatronics' proves that point and scorches that statement into stone, man.

Previously on 'Dances for Architecture'...

The All-Seeing Hand are an outfit I simply had to investigate. With a line-up comprised of a drummer; a keyboardist/turntablist; and a vocalist trained in the technique of Mongolian throat-singing, you know they're going to be something special, profound and utterly different. Their style could perhaps be described as electro-doom metal/avant jazz...erm, experimental. It is intense, densely rhythmic and driving - a swirling mist of samples, electronic effects and seemingly-impossible vocalizations, propelled forward by percussion - both from the drums and the altered vocals themselves. It is also oddly, perversely catchy. And it is a challenge to the norm - a gauntlet thrown in the face of mediocrity and blandness.

Jonny Marks - throat; Alphabethead - turntables/keyboards/samples; B. Michael Knight - drums.
There are other instrumentalists and vocalists as well, guests players - a sliver here and there of guitar. The disc comes packaged in a handsome eco-pack; the disc sleeve itself lined in black cloth. A single vast eye stares out of a series of overlaid and incorporated images - images of conception, clockwork cogs and celestial bodies. Space, birth and the machine.

The sound is a riotous and shifting blend of glitched-out Aphex Twin spookiness, industrial rhythms, death metal malevolence, malfunctioning android bleeps, and math-rock dynamics. Sampled, sketched and scribbled across it all are the eerie whistling and basso undulations (very like the bone-deep cadence of a didgeridoo at points) of Mongolian throat singing. It is a sound that hits you in the meat and marrow of you - music you feel in your guts and viscera. But it is not all violence and tribal pounding - there are myriad moments of swirling and swooning calm amid the intensity (not least of all on closing track 'Cadentia').

At times Marks subjects his throat to the vocal acrobatics of 'NunSexMonkRock'-era Nina Hagen (his delivery eerily recalls Hagen's rasped and guttural contralto). Other times he screeches and hollers, chants and wails, occasionally dropping his voice into the bowel-scraping bellows of death metal.
As with all things of this nature, Mike Patton deserves a name check - this title would sit comfortably on his Ipecac roster.

For all its variation the sound on this album is tight, man - lean and consistent across the board - never uneven or cluttered; just as dense and complex as it needs to be. And the drumming, dude... Knight plays fast and precise - his drumming so accurate and focused as to sound almost inhuman - a clattering mechanical beat driving the music endlessly forward. But no machine or programmed track could keep up these shifting and intricate tempos. Alphabethead paints finger-smudges of instrumental texture across the beats. Chopping and splicing in snippets of found, sampled, tweaked and re-constructed sound: the sting of cellos; a slice of what sounds like the hum of an overloaded speaker; the crackle of worn vinyl; white-noise hiss; a slamming gate; and sci-fi audio effects. Elsewhere Alphabethead seems to be sampling Marks himself, stretching and elongated his throat-singing into the instrumental web of the track itself, making another instrument of it.

'Empty Road' rides a galloping doom-metal drum rhythm, the spaces between beats filled in with sustained keyboard drones - what, in fact, sounds like looped snatches of Marks' throat-singing - and string samples. Glitched-out electronic flickers pulse over the instrumental layers. Over it all Marks unleashes a series of chanted, hollered, and strangely uplifting wordless vocals. It sounds epic - a galloping track hurtling across scorched land and back to the wilderness.

'Maximum Capacity' boasts bright, cheap and cheerful electronic effects over a hammering industrial dance beat - sounding like nothing so much as a metal drummer jamming with one of those maddening Eighties arcade games. All this before the same track drops into a loose jazzy rhythm graced with weirdly percussive throat-whistles. It is a playful, oddly joyous track.

Spasmodic delirium, frequently bordering on absurdity: 'Lying Dead With a Bar of Soap' is the album's hookiest and most immediate track. It calls to mind early Head Like a Hole at their most wild-eyed and feral. Catchy, pummeling bass/drum riffery gives way to a wide-screen panorama of tribal percussion and atmospheric whistling before the riff comes clattering back complete with a delightfully deranged and very committed vocal performance (nigh-on audible lyrics!), basso chanting and enthusiastic whooping. It is immensely entertaining and utterly thrilling.

'Clot' incorporates slurred keyboard fills and intricate treble drum-work with bursts of grindcore pummeling and interludes of sweeping quietude and grandeur. The vocals switch between guttural babble, mountain-deep chanting and that seemingly-inhuman piping effect. For all its multitudinous parts the track remains cohesive, tightly-structured.

'The Claw' opens with the sound of crackling and popping vinyl before an intricate and mechanical drum pattern comes in - evoking some impossible and unthinkable factory assembly-line; weird oscillating swirls of distorted and backwards-effected samples fill in the negative space before the track abruptly switches into a pounding metal-worthy drumbeat over which Marks unleashes a blood-blackening banshee howl before adopting his Hagen-esque vocal (lyrics in German?).

'Geronimo II' features perhaps Marks' most gleefully unhinged vocal performance - a dual-pronged, multi-tracked marvel in which he shrieks like Mike Patton at his most lunatic over his own didgeridoo-pitched chants all underscored by deft, jazzy drum fills and melodic, B-Grade SciFi keys.

Fittingly, the brief track 'Grab and Smash' employs a drumbeat that pounds - three hard blows in quick succession: bam-bam-bam; the fist on your door at 3am, bringing only bad news. Over this intrusion Marks shouts, chants and shrieks while Alphabethead fills in the blanks with the distorted hum of crossed wires. Okay, this track with its Zorn-esque flourishes - yeah, this is definitely in PattonLand.

But for the most part the Patton comparison is reductive throughout 'Mechatronics' - there's no sense of imitation or emulation - The All-Seeing Hand are doing their own damn thing, man. It's just when you have a sufficient degree of skronking and vocal experimentation, well comparisons can be drawn and familiarity with that legend-of-the-field's work will serve as a fitting entry-point to the precise and intricately constructed madness here.

'Mechatronics' is an aural extravaganza; sideshow and carnival in one - melodic, hypnotic, rhythmic, deranged and yet so painstakingly constructed that it remains cohesive and intelligible throughout. It never clutters its own landscape with excessive embellishments or ornamentation  - it is experimental without ever becoming less-than accessible.

Also, that artwork has to look frigging amazing in the vinyl release of this title.
By the by, a friend assures me they are quite the experience live; so if you get the chance, take it. But wear earplugs, he cautions. They play really loud.

Go here for a taste...

Death Ray, CD Stores and Fragments of Me

If not for the loping graffiti-art snarling across the door frame and the small sign of printed-paper, lacquer and wood you'd probably miss it - the tiny record store half hidden down a Newtown side-street.

Death Ray Records.
Posters hang in the windows: psyched-out B-movie homage and gig posters, just starting to yellow at the edges. The store must have opened only recently. Their hours seem pretty casual. There is a lot of '-ish' printed on their handwritten sign. They were closed when I first arrived at the door - despite it being just after 2pm. The guy who mans the counter (and probably owns the joint) had presumably popped out for a bite to eat or to run some errand. They'd never need more than one staff member on...probably.

I stood over the road to get out of the screaming brilliance of the mid-afternoon sunshine - uncharacteristically bright for a day that was choked with mist at both dawn and dusk.
The wall opposite the shop was painted over and over with the message: 'Before I die I want to...' with spaces left for members of the public to fill in with their hopes, aspirations, and curios from their own personal bucket lists. But this is Newtown, most of the spaces were filled in with chalk-scrawled tags, obscenities and unintelligible scribbles that probably were never intended to be words. Oddly, no one had drawn a great big picture of a cock. Maybe that'll come later. There were a couple of folks taking it seriously - and a bit of anti-government ranting (to my relief).
I'm not sure what I want to do before I die. That's a whole other blog post waiting to happen.

Newtown.
If you've ever lived in Wellington, New Zealand you'll have heard of it. It's a large suburb lying not far from the heart of the city. The population is mostly made up of students (although fewer than in Te Aro as the rent is much more expensive), recent immigrants and the psychologically vulnerable (due to the proximity to Wellington hospital). It has probably the finest range of restaurants and eateries in any of Wellington's suburbs. It is sprawling, grimy and wonderful - clustered in along one side by thinly forested hills and adorned with rickety wooden houses; it is boisterous and exuberant and frequently a little awful. For a while you could buy a T-shirt bearing the message "Newtown, it's a bit shit".
There is a slight gang presence and a lot of visible mental illness.

In Newtown, I have been threatened and had obscenities snarled at me by a dude almost too drunk to stand on one occasion. He seemed to want my groceries. He had very ugly teeth. On another occasion a gentleman informed me that I had a very fine jacket and that I could either sell it to him or he and his friend would take it off me, presumably by force. The jacket in question used to belong to my father - it's an old corduroy number in a rusted, autumnal shade and I am very fond of it. I declined. He grinned and told me "fair enough". Then he assured me that it was a cool jacket and left me to it.

Newtown streets frequently smell of the raw saltiness of fish; the rich scents of cumin and coriander; and hash smoke. The odd empty shop window has been converted into a mini-gallery for artistic installations. I've worked in the area for a long time now. It's a great suburb.
But I live somewhere else.

Anyway, what the hell was I talking about?
Oh, yeah. A few minutes later the guy re-opened Death Ray and I poured in, ducking around the streamers of garbage bag that hang in the doorway. The store is one of those very NZ joints. Disheveled chic. Furniture sourced from junk sales, op-shops and hell, possibly even skips. Every piece mismatched and worn. A glass case along one wall looks to be filled with old slides or some such bric-a-brac. Every purchase must be written carefully in an exercise book - for record keeping. Posters crawl up the walls. The small room is crowded with wooden racks full of vinyl - divided into humorous genre classifications; some of the jackets scuffed and dog-eared, others brand-new and plastic-sealed. Canvases painted with bright scrawls of graffiti-art hang along one wall. Music plays loud, a rough beat.
It is a goddamn cool place; like the living room of every flat you secretly wished you lived in when you were a teenager. Or perhaps that's just me.

The scrambled student aesthetic makes me think of Java - a café that existed a frigging millennia ago in Christchurch - it was gone, I think, even before the earthquake turned the whole block into a churned heap of shattered masonry.
Man, I loved that place. Lots of memories, I guess. We used to hang there - my Christchurch friends and I - I'd buy whatever I could afford (which usually amounted to maybe one beverage). The whole place was decked out in unmatching and unmatchable furniture; a papier mache fish with a human face swung from one of the light fittings; a re-used and re-shaped bicycle had been turned into the staff-only gate. The drinks came in the kind of heavy, old glass jars that everybody's grandparents used for stewing fruit. Java also had the goddamn rickety-est stairs of any place I've ever encountered - every step would have them trembling and shuddering under your feet.
They basically pioneered the classic look that most folks associate with cafes in NZ today - though it has to be said, for most joints it's probably more a budgetary decision than an aesthetic one.

Anyway, standing in Death Ray surrounded by all that old vinyl and student loucheness, well, it brought it all back. That warm golden buzz of recollection - all those memories (good, bad, indifferent; it doesn't matter when it's all sepia-toned and autumn-hazed; bathed in the golden, magic light of a thirty-something guy's nostalgia). I dug through one of the vinyl racks, not sure why. It's a pointless act for me - I don't own a record player.

One of the categories was labeled 'Bogan Rock'. Nice.
In it I found a vinyl press of Ozzy Osbourne's 'The Ultimate Sin'. That was either the second or third album I ever bought (on cassette, no less). That cover, man - Ozzy's face on a looming demonic body rising from a pool of magma, wreathed in flames. A mushroom cloud scorches the sky. Before him stands a woman; her hair writhing blackly, her eyes red and huge. I bought my copy from a little shop in Golden Bay (where I lived at the time).
I think it was a video store - though they'd extended their ambitions to a small rack of audio stuff. Back then, if you wanted to sample something before you bought it you had to ask at the counter real nice. Maybe then they'd look into your child eyes and figure that you'd probably saved up a lot of lawn-mowing money to be able to afford this but you needed a taste first, so they'd slap it onto the cassette deck they had set up behind the counter and anyone who was in the store at the time would be treated to a few minutes of whatever the hell it was (and in my slightly later, harder metal years that might mean Sepultura's 'Arise' or Obituary - real ugly, death metal shit, man). I remember being phased at first by 'The Ultimate Sin' tape. Ozzy's voice sounded freaking odd - that strained, fractured tenor - but all the more compelling for its oddness. 'The Ultimate Sin' is primarily about the horror of nuclear war, I think. I should see if that bad boy is still in print.

Incidentally, the very first album I ever bought was Twisted Sister's 'Stay Hungry'; it was eight bucks from the World Record Music Club (or whatever it was called). With them, the deal was every couple of months they'd post out an updated catalogue. You'd go through and look at the artists and album titles, weigh up the prices. Then you'd carefully fill out the little order form in the back and beg, emotionally-blackmail or otherwise negotiate with your parents to write you a cheque. You'd post all that paperwork away and in about a month or so your cassette would arrive in a cardboard mailer sleeve. And this would make you very happy.
Kids, this is the way the world worked before there was the internet.

The possibly-second album I ever bought was Alice Cooper 'Raise Your Fist and Yell' - ten bucks from an appliance store in Motueka.
Man, I was such a junior bogan.

There's very few CD stores left in Wellington now. Actually there's none since the independently-run, niche-market stores emphasize the vinyl aspect of their trade (Rough Peel Music...and another one whose name I forget). There used to be plenty: Marbecks, The CD & DVD Store, ECM, Sounds, Real Groovy. Independent and chain alike. Now only Slow Boat remains - that long-hallowed bastion of independent music sales in Wellington, with it's faded cutouts and record sleeves in the window display. Its interior heavy with the smell of dust and rotting paper.

The market shifted, internet sales soared (and by 'internet sales' I guess I mostly mean downloads). Brick-and-mortar enterprises no longer held quite the same allure for the majority of the populace - the vinyl obsessives, of course, remained faithful. Then JB HiFi opened a branch here and devoured what remained of the market. Now you probably expect me to rend my clothes and smear my face with ashes - wailing and gnashing about the whole raw deal.
But...
But...
See, I effing love JB HiFI.
And, with that same passion inverted: I loathed all the stores it supplanted.
All of them.
They were over-priced: thirty-five bucks for a wide-release Australian-press CD - I don't frigging think so; we're not talking limited-release, special edition, bonus disc territory here. Their selections frankly sucked. And if you tried to import anything through them it would take weeks to arrive and then stood a good chance of setting you back fifty bucks or so.

Then there's the small matter of disc storage and security in NZ. Instead of installing a security sensor on the door and tagging all the CDs in stock, the majority of these stores would remove the discs from their cases (y'know, the ones whose sole purpose is to protect the disc in the first place), slip said disc into a paper wallet and file it away with all the others in a big metal filing cabinet behind the counter. This meant your brand-new CD would most likely be badly scratched, fingerprinted, grimy and covered in surface dust before you bought it. There was also the possibility that the person at the counter might be unable to locate the disc as someone else had filed it incorrectly. And that was just how things were. The longer the store had the disc in stock, the worse its condition would be. Some wound up just goddamn filthy.
If you've read my 'Anxiety Always' post, you'll know this is kind of a deal-breaker for me.

There was also something relentlessly depressing about those stores: the digipaks would be battered and worn, the jewel cases so scratched that the plastic appeared milky; opaque as a cataract-blinded eye. Witnessing the slow death of Real Groovy was unpleasant and perhaps inevitable: its shelves hollowing out, sale after sale announced (and they were still mostly overpriced).

And then JB HiFi came along, with its wonderfully soulless efficiency, its security guards and sensors, its plastic-sealed everything. Mint condition CDs: a vaster selection than any other store had ever offered and at a significantly lower cost per item. Oh sure, there's no sense of community; no random aficionado at the counter to recommend some new indie band that they really think you might dig. Everything is polite, perfect and slightly impersonal - bathed in fluorescent light.
Everything is exactly how I like it.

But, I'm still thrilled to find Death Ray Records - a little store that mostly sells something I'm not going to buy (second-hand records; useless to me on two levels).There is one other thing though...

Death Ray Records stock a small assortment of brand-new CDs. Independent NZ releases - the kind of stuff that JB HiFi doesn't carry. Death Ray also leave the CDs in their original packaging where they belong. And they charge $20-$25 per title. They had a title I was particularly keen on finding:
'Mechatronics', the latest release from Wellington-based experimental trio The All-Seeing Hand.

The All-Seeing Hand are an outfit I simply had to investigate. With a line-up comprised of a drummer; a keyboardist/turntablist; and a vocalist trained in the technique of Mongolian throat-singing, you know they're going to be something special, profound and utterly different. Their style could perhaps be described as electro-doom metal/avant jazz...erm, experimental. It is intense, densely rhythmic and driving - a swirling mist of samples, electronic effects and seemingly-impossible vocalizations, propelled forward by percussion - both from the drums and the altered vocals themselves. It is also oddly, perversely catchy. And it is a challenge to the norm - a gauntlet thrown in the face of mediocrity and blandness.

But this isn't going to be a review (that is something I'll have to come back to later); although if you're keen: Simon Sweetman's review on his Off the Tracks blog is worth reading (I've no love for Sweetman - see my post on Lorde's album 'Pure Heroine' - but in his review of 'Mechatronics' he speaks the truth, and speaks it well). Needless to say, The All-Seeing Hand are another worthy entry into the pantheon of surprisingly challenging, engaging and compelling bands based in Wellington, alongside such names as Beastwars, Porcelaintoy, the Nudge and Orchestra of Spheres. Also, the artwork on 'Mechatronics' is superb; it really captures the mesmeric and synapse-scorching landscape within which the trio operate.

So thank you Death Ray Records, mostly just for existing at all.

The Ritual.

'The Ritual' is a novel by English author Adam Nevill, first published in 2011 - in the UK.
It was featured in a recent list of the fifty most terrifying novels ever written.
Challenge accepted.

(A brief note: this post contains spoilers, but I'll try to limit it to stuff that will not detract from the experience of the novel).

Four friends. Hutch, Phil, Luke & Dom. Many years ago they shared a flat. Those days are now immortalized in gauzy, golden hues in their memories. But they were a very long time ago. They haven't seen each other for years. They have grown distant, the gulf between them widening.
They meet up again for a hike through the lavish Scandinavian wilderness. It is to be a reunion of sorts, a way of putting the outside world at bay for a while and losing themselves once again in that haze of friendship.

But early on it becomes clear that Phil and Dom are not up to the task. They have grown fat and sluggish and are ill-prepared for the raw land beneath their feet. After a brief negotiation with Luke, Hutch decides that they should take a detour - a shortcut - that will slice a couple of days off the trek and might save their friends some additional pain and exhaustion. This detour will take them from the clear-cut tourist tracks and through the sparsest edge of a spread of largely-virgin forest.
Bad idea.

Into the scowling umbra of the woods they go. But the tracks they sought to follow among those trees are barely-there, worn away and swallowed by the bracken perhaps centuries ago.  They rapidly become lost - clutched in the lightless grip of the bush. Close to nightfall they come upon a house; beaten-down and scarred by the elements. It appears boarded up and abandoned. Eager for shelter, with what little strangled daylight had previously found its way among the foliage fading now, they break into the house.
Bad, bad idea.

Inside they find dust-grimed floors, the skitter-scrape of mice, walls hung with crudely fashioned crosses (some inverted), and a myriad of bleached and blackened animal skulls hung on nails. Upstairs they find something a great deal worse. They find proof that there was madness in these woods: madness, ritual and terrible deeds done in darkness and worship. Their sleep that night is haunted by vivid (and horribly similar) dreams, by sleep-walking and hysteria. By dawn they are exhausted, their skin blanched and their eyes shattered. They push on: desperate to be rid of the house, the forest, each other.

But in the deepest of the shadows something watches them - something that barks and gibbers and yelps. It is creature older than human civilization; a towering, stilt-legged, goat-snouted shape crowned in horns. It is sinuous and quick, hungry and eternal. And it is eager for fresh sacrifice.
In the woods and in the darkness, these four men will be hunted. Their suffering will be long and cruel and death when it comes will be slower still.

But this is not just a story of monsters, madness and survival. It is also a tale of thirty-something ennui. Of lives that have worn too thin and friendships that have become threadbare with time. It is the story of four old friends trying, and failing, to reconnect with each other.

Luke rapidly emerges as our protagonist. At first he is a difficult character to love. He is single and only sporadically-employed. Trivialized, marginalized and beaten down by the world. He nurses a constant, simmering rage that has recently begun to erupt into outright violence. He is a man disappointed; by himself, by the world, and by the friends with whom he has so very little left in common. Oddly, as the narrative progresses - we (the readers, obviously) come closer to him, drawn in by his brokenness and frustration. He is damaged and vulnerable, his existence fleeting and fragile. He is uncomfortably and utterly human, deeply flawed and self-loathing. This makes him seem more real to us, more convincing.

I won't lie to you, I felt immediately drawn to this character; although I know nothing of Luke's anger and little enough of his loneliness. As a single guy in my thirties myself this does seem very age-appropriate reading for me and the author's portrayal of that melancholy strikes a resonant chord. In a world where everyone becomes their own personal PR campaign - marketing the absolute-best / fantasy version of themselves via social media and networking platforms...well, the hardest thing to admit can be that everything is not going according to the plan. And this is the reality that Luke struggles with - the gulf between the truth of us and the mythology we have created.
But, anyway...

Luke is not alone in carrying a sack of woe upon his back. Of the four, only Hutch seems truly happy - he is recently married and still in excellent physical shape. Dom and Phil carry their own frustrations and disappointments; though both have families (and in Phil's case, considerable wealth). As the narrative progresses it becomes apparent that these seeming triumphs are illusory things too, and that both men have something they're keeping from their friends and perhaps even from themselves.

From the creeping dread of the earlier scenes - the discovery of the house in the woods, the stalking menace of the half-glimpsed something - the novel soon falls into the beats of the survival horror genre. Little-by-little the men are robbed of their humanity and driven against one another. The relentless grind of dripping trees and congealing darkness becomes exhausting to read - as the characters succumb to hunger and desperation, reduced to little more than shivering, starving animals crawling through mud and dead leaves, too weary even to speak.
In this, 'The Ritual' recalls 'The Ruins' by American author Scott Smith (brilliant and relentless novel; terrible goddamn movie). Although Nevill's novel is grander and laced with rich, occult mythology.

Then just as it seems that this narrative has been driven to its absolute limit (and with a solid chunk of novel yet to unfold) it abruptly changes course. It becomes what I can only describe as 'The Wicker Man' meets 'Antichrist' (yes, the infamous - and astonishing - film by Danish madman Lars von Trier) by way of the Norwegian black metal scene.
Nope, I'm not kidding about the black metal thing.

Again, Nevill proves himself very savvy in his choices (and meticulous in his research). The whole idea of metal musicians as genuinely evil lunatics who want to commit terrible atrocities against their fellow humankind is a z-movie concept - lazy and hackneyed. It just doesn't wash - for all that they were labeled a 'satanic band' Black Sabbath's main lyricist - Geezer Butler - is a lifelong Catholic (very explicit in the lyrics to 'After Forever'), Alice Cooper is devoutly Christian, Cradle of Filth are really just a bunch of clever, theatrical dudes who have watched way too many horror flicks. Of all the occult-metallers only King Diamond actually walked the talk - for a time he was a follower of Anton LaVey (author of the Satanic bible) - although Diamond treated this as more of a philosophy than a religion and in his later years has renounced religion in any form and declared himself an atheist.

But...

The Norwegian Black Metal scene is a different breed of beast, and one possessed of a history that is profoundly disturbing. Think of Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grishnackh) - the scowling vocalist/founder of black metal outfit Burzum. He is name-checked in 'The Ritual'. Vikernes is a white supremacist, a convicted murderer and now a suspected terrorist (also a JRR Tolkein fan presumably, given the name Burzum).
In 1993 he was jailed for the murder of Mayhem guitarist Oystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth. His music and work is considered a founding influence on the appalling genre that has come to be referred to as National Socialist Black Metal, though the Wikipedia entry on Vikernes reports that he never used Burzum to promote his own prejudiced beliefs.
Either way I can never listen to his music for the same reason that I can no longer watch a Roman Polanski film or listen to a Chris Brown song - okay, with Brown there's a whole bunch of other reasons for this avoidance.

There was a spate of church burnings across Norway; committed largely by fans of this music and inspired by the same philosophies that Nevill has a character articulate in the novel. Christianity came late to Norway and it came brutally, in a wash of blood and persecution; supplanting the pagan and pre-Christian worship of the people of that country. There is a long history of rage there.

All of which provides a context and makes it apparent why Nevill elected to set 'The Ritual' in Scandinavia - Sweden, to be precise. The Norwegian black metal kids in this novel are pathetic and contemptible - clowns in corpsepaint rather than greasepaint. They're idiots; arrogant, privileged and obsessed with the mythology of themselves...but that is a large part of what makes them so believable and genuinely frightening. In typing this I recall that the novel also reminded me, in part, of the superb and harrowing horror film 'Eden Lake' (a film that still stands as one of the most frightening things I've ever watched).

But there are supernatural monsters in 'The Ritual' too; from the beast-God in the woods, to the twitching and mummified dead in their shrine.
And there are rituals to be practiced and sacrifices to be made.
It is a world where mercy is a luxury and survival means sacrificing your humanity.

'The Ritual' is a cruel novel; an almost relentlessly grim tale. When it opens things are bad enough already and they only get worse as the narrative progresses. Shards of humour glint here and there but it is a cruel kind of mirth and offers little respite from the bleakness. The handful of almost-tender and forgiving moments are all-too-quickly consumed. Adam Nevill's literary voice is hugely compelling. His use of language is rich and evocative - appealing to all five senses (something of a rarity as I've always felt many writers neglect describing scents and odours). It is bleak and beautiful and the pace is relentless: the novel opens with the discovery of a gutted animal hung in the trees, thirty pages in and the four guys are at the house. You feel every wound the protagonists sustain and you understand their rage and despair. It is grand, contemporary myth-making.

I also appreciated the way Nevill captures the banal, brutal farce of violence; rifle butts jam against door frames, characters stumble and lurch clumsily from one punch to the next, one character tries - and fails - to fire a gun multiple times before realizing the safety is on. The reader never once feels that these are anything less (or more) than real people - undone by exhaustion and the horrible reality of what they're doing. It never feels staged or Hollywood-esque. I admired that.

I also note that Nevill lived for a time in New Zealand. I like to believe that this serves as an influence on the novel (for all that it is set in Sweden, and needs to be - for the mythology of the novel requires a long history; far longer than NZ has). The bush in this country is a dangerous thing - every few years a tramper underestimates it and strays from the beaten-down hiking paths. But the trees grow dense and dark and there is a predatory aspect. People disappear. Sometimes their bones are found later, blanched and brown shards among the leaf-rot. Sometimes they are never found at all. The term 'virgin' forest suggests a kind of innocence, a purity (Nevill has a character echo these sentiments in his novel) but that is a false impression. The bush eats the unwary.

But it is not a perfect novel. There is a rotten whiff of misogyny carried in the subtext. I'm not sure whether this reflects the author's personal prejudices or whether it is meant to be indicative of our flawed protagonist Luke (from whose perspective the tale is told). I'll assume the latter, but it still makes me uncomfortable - and not in the way one wants from a horror novel.

Nonetheless, this is a small misgiving. And 'The Ritual' by Adam Nevill is a complex and challenging work; one of those glorious novels that smuggles a literary aspect into a genre format. Nevill is a writer that I look forward to investigating further.

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.

Here in the Throat

The oldest musical instrument; the strangest, the most powerful, beautiful and versatile?

I have something of an obsession with musical instruments; to the extent that one of the first things I do when flicking through a CD booklet is turn to the credits page to see what fascinations await me. The more exotic, esoteric and arcane the better. And there are so many available now - to add brightness, decadence, drama and texture to the musical platter.

I adore authentic period instruments; I want harpsichord, violin, viola, cello, oboe; the dull echoing thunder of a timpani. Then there are more unexpected beasts - the marimba, glockenspiel, flugelhorn and clavinet. From North Africa and Greece we have the saz, the oud, the ney flute, the bouzouki and so many other instruments bowed and plucked and piped. The sitar whose ringing notes evoke both Indian classical and psychedelica. The exquisite hurdy-gurdy - an astonishingly beautiful instrument often carved with the heads of women and which summons a drone somewhere between a violin and a bagpipe. The keening, lamenting erhu, the rain-picked pipa.

Vintage organs and synthesizers - the Moog, the Rhodes piano, the Hammond and farfisa. The mellotron - an early synthesizer-styled organ that utilizes looped audio samples to (well, theoretically) replicate the sounds of an orchestra; it is an instrument much beloved of prog bands. Then, stranger things - the theremin and ondes martenot - both instruments played without physical touch - instead by manipulating electronic fields.

There will always be room in my CD collection for Tibetan singing bowls and ritual flutes fashioned from the thigh-bones of monks.

Now the rise in electronic instrumentation has birthed a new realm of sounds and possibilities. Laptops, samples and synthesizers have become so advanced that they can perfectly conjure the sound of a hundred-piece orchestra (with substantial brass and woodwind section) - and a choir to go along with it. But they can replicate stranger things too - the sound of brittle light winking off ice, of glaciers collapsing, tectonic plates shifting. Bjork's most recent album 'Biophilia' features newly-created instruments that seem to owe more to high-level theories of physics than musicology - the anti-gravity harp, the sharpsichord, the gameleste.

Even commonly maligned musical instruments can delight. A skillfully-played accordion can sound fiery and fierce, passionate and playful, anguished and ominous. A recorder at the lips and fingertips of a baroque classical musician can achieve delicate trills not unlike a flute, but far earthier and richer. I dig bagpipes, man. Though I generally think they should be heard only from a distance as they are a damn loud instrument.

But.

But.

But, for myself, the most extraordinary, bewildering and versatile of all musical instruments is to be found in the throat, the vocal chords, the chest and the lungs. It is reflected and reshaped across the meat of the soft palate, manipulated by the muscle of the tongue and echoed against the line of the teeth.

It has to be the oldest instrument. As old as language, certainly. I like to believe that it is older still; the line that divides us from so many of our genetic ancestors. Humankind: the ape that sings.

In every culture, in every country, there is song. There are a multitude of different techniques - developed over centuries, intended to aid projection or to reach notes that should be beyond possibility. And this, above all other things in music, is what fascinates me.

Oh sure, I can dig on a bit of fully instrumental music, but only in small doses and for me there is always a slight disconnect. I need the human voice - however mutilated or manipulated or altered, to link to the music. It draws me in. I'm not talking about words here, lyrics aren't that big of a deal to me. Wordless singing is often exceptional and compelling. Besides, a substantial portion of my collection is sung in languages that I cannot speak.

I have always been draw to artists whose voices startle, compel, bewilder and beguile. I love people who push their vocal ranges and abilities into stranger realms.

The river gravel bellow of Tom Waits. The bat-like shrieks and stygian contralto of Diamanda Galas. Nina Hagen with her rasping, theatrical thunder-roll of a voice. And of course, Mike Patton. Always Mike Patton; a man whose voice seems to shift effortlessly between lush, lounge-lizard baritone; rich, full-voiced tenor; and ghostly falsetto. Not to mention the menagerie of gibberings, screeches, snarls, slaverings and other inhuman utterances.

In the realm of metal there is seemingly no end of vocal experimentation and contrast. From the eerie, damned falsetto of King Diamond; to the stentorian bass-baritone of the late, lamented Peter Steele (Type O Negative). I swear the latter even plumbs the depths of basso profondo on occasion (such is the lowest octave reachable with human vocal chords, and then only by chanting Tibetan monks). There we also have the anguished, soul-scraping baritone of Aaron Stainthorpe (My Dying Bride - from whose song the title of this post is taken) and the vivid delivery and dynamic operatics of tenor Thomas Vikstrom (Therion, ex-Candlemass).

And in metal we have the extreme vocalists too. While all too commonly dismissed as 'Cookie Monster' growling, grunting and other such silliness; extreme death and black metal vocal performances actually utilize a full range of voicing and projection techniques closely linked to Classical, operatic method. From the bowel-deep basso roars of death metal to the harsh, sibilant tenor screeches of black metal - these are vocals that require a great deal of skill, practice and understanding of the way the human voice works. To attempt these sounds without such learning... well... you'll end up shredding the hell out of your throat. This, I figure, is why a great many proficient extreme metal vocalists later reveal themselves to have well-developed and startlingly melodic 'clean' voices.

Speaking of Opera. In the purely Classical field, I am drawn again to the more unusual and unexpected voices. I am endlessly fascinated by countertenors; the phenomenal control they have over their head voices; and the purity and downright oddness of their vocal range. I love Philippe Jaroussky's bright, fluting tones. He sounds startlingly like a true soprano. Thus, in his performance of Monteverdi's sublime 'Pur Ti Miro' he and soprano Nurial Ria sound almost identical - the song shifting seamlessly between male and female, as closely twined as is appropriate for such a tender duet. And then there are the darker, richer and more honeyed tones of Max Emanuel Cencic - who sounds every bit as startlingly like a true mezzo-soprano. His voice is endlessly dexterous and full of subtle shadings and exquisite nuances (something countertenors are often criticized for lacking).

Among the women I seem most smitten with mezzo-sopranos. The wild drama and astonishing breath control of Cecilia Bartoli; whose pyrotechnic bursts of coloratura are jaw-dropping but who also excels in sensitive moments and whose voice is lithe, supple and gilded despite being startlingly deep at times. Then there is the softer, subtler lushness of Magdalena Kozena; she possesses an achingly lovely trill and clever, quiet nuances of voice. Her performances are delicate, lightly-shaded and heartbreakingly beautiful.

But anyway...
Of the newer artists I love the grim opulence of electronic artist Zola Jesus; whose dark, pulsing industrial-Gothic arrangements underscore her booming, soul-ache of a voice (a voice that recalls both Siouxsie Sioux and Florence Welch). Which brings me to...um, Florence Welch: her glittering gospel and utterly committed delivery. Hers is a thrilling and powerful voice; a huge voice that sounds simultaneously youthful and far older than her years. Then there is Lana Del Rey's bruised and melancholy vocal. She seems to shift between breathlessly girlish and wounded, wine-soaked contralto, all over lavish backdrops of orchestral-pop-gone-hip-hop. And thus to the sultry Bond-theme-meets-gleaming-soul-and-grandiose-rhythm-and-blues of Janelle Monae. Her delivery shifts between brassy, swaggering, dramatic, vulnerable and pop-inflected.

Then there are those even stranger few. Like Bolton-to-Berlin maverick Janine Rostron (a.k.a PlanningToRock) whose multi-layered, pitch-shifted and digitally reconfigured vocalisations form a kaleidoscopic choir over her acoustic-meets-electronic instrumental tapestry. Shorn of digital manipulation Rostron's voice has an appealing huskiness reminiscent of Janis Joplin. Saxophones and strings melt into a sea of synth-pads. Glockenspiels dance with drum machines to hip-hop, pop, carnival, electro, dance, classical and rock rhythms. She wants to bite ya.

And lastly but a long way from leastly - I can't harp on about experimental vocal techniques without at least mentioning throat singing. Tanya Gillies (a.k.a. Tagaq) is a self-taught Inuit throat-singer. She has performed with Kronos Quartet, Bjork and Mike Patton (odd how certain names keep popping up - though I like to believe that whenever an album gets sufficiently vocally-experimental Mike Patton just spontaneously manifests). Her style of throat singing is all guttural panting, sighing, moaning and gasping, the vocal rhythms are percussive and playful. It is astonishingly visceral, even carnal (her delivery is quite often sexual, orgasmic). Hers is a song to the bones and flesh of us, music that you feel in your gut. Her second album - 'Auk [Blood]' - sees her performing with a couple of string musicians (accompanying her on violin, viola and cello); a beat-boxer; rapper Buck 65 (if he is the Canadian equivalent of Fiddy Cent, their exchange rate is worse than I thought) and...yup, Mike Patton. The latter contributes an astonishing performance to one track - in which he variously recalls a muppet version of Joplin and a traditional Middle Eastern singer in a wind tunnel. Apparently, even in a song featuring a freaking Inuit throat singer you will still find yourself asking "what the hell is Mike Patton doing?"
The rough-edged strings echo the vocal percussions of Tagaq beautifully, and occasionally adopt a wailing, Asiatic quality as well. It is a fascinating (and occasionally infuriating) disc which I feel would be best classified as modern classical.

Seemingly a world away is the rough, thrilling and utterly beautiful Mongolian folk-meets-indie-blues/jazz-rock of Hanggai. Their work matches the unusual trilling (occasionally birdlike, jewel-like and boiling-kettle-like) style of Mongolian throat singing to dense and propulsive rock rhythms. A sound fleshed out with the plaintive keening of horse-hair violin and - on their superb release 'He Who Travels Far' - a guest spot from avant-guitar virtuoso Marc Ribot.

So there you are. I have written enough. Hell, too much even. This it totally into 'TL;DR' territory. And yet I have only scraped the surface. Song is ancient, timeless and universal. It will always be of immense interest to me, and it will always surprise me.

Into the Lightless Dark

In the interests of pandering shamelessly for more hits...

Look, I'm a vampire!
Kids are into vampires nowadays aren't they?  Aren't they?
Wait, what?...sparkling? Really? No. Just no.

Okay, in all honesty I look way more queasy, washed-up rock star than vampire in that picture anyway.

Besides, everyone knows that the mainstream love of vampires is most often demonstrated in a context of financial and social excess - with the carnally-fixated bloodsuckers becoming more popular during times of prosperity, decadence and liberalism. Odd considering the origin of the vampire myth stems from fears about the transmission of disease and ignorance of the biological changes that occur in a human body post-mortem. 

So...in a shattered, post-Global Financial Crisis world people feel helpless; manipulated by the government that they elected; powerless in the face of forces greater than themselves. They fear being dehumanized, stripped of the attributes that make them something more than a shuffling, unthinking automaton acting mindlessly on primal impulses.

...so, zombies. We're talking about zombies.
Makes sense; after all zombies are just people robbed of all the things that made them people in the first place - they're reduced to a level less than animal. Zombies are chiefly frightening because of their emptiness; their lack of any form of intelligence and thought. Also, there's always masses of them. Who hasn't looked at a great heaving crowd of people pushing together (at a concert, in a crowded bar, in a mosh-pit, whatever) and seen not individuals but some huge, faceless, unthinking mass. Loads of people crowded too close together are scary, man. You could get crushed in those kind of situations. Folks have been killed.
Oh, and the biting; no one likes the biting.

Okay. I can do zombies.

Look, I'm a zombie!

Oh, screw it. I'm just going to blog about music.
And here we go, Ladies and Gentlemen; now for something truly, properly Gothic...

      
                                                                      (...)


I'm not sure what it is about the French. The artistic output of that country seems to be a series of opposites - light and dark, bright and bleak - with very few intermediate stages. There is the matter of their Operas. French Baroque is gilded, perfumed, opulent and decadent; dripping vibrancy and flamboyance - it conjures images of powdered wigs and rosebud lips, flittering eyelashes and fragranced, voluminous cleavage. But other French composers put forth pieces that storm and rage - rife with thunderous orchestral surges - the kind of music that people topple off cliffs to in silent movies. I'm mostly thinking of Massenet here, Gounod has his moments too. Hell, these pieces rival the Germans for sheer focused intensity.

And on the subject of movies. If you want a frivolous farce or a frothy sex romp - the French are your best bet. If you want something dense and artistic, stylish and cynical - you'll find French flicks that scratch that itch. And if you want a churning, relentless horror film; smeared with blood and steeped in a bleak, voyeuristic atmosphere - yup, The French deliver it.

So there is that odd juxtaposition, almost an oxymoron; effervescent or ominous. Glittering or grinding. Giddy with perfume or smothered in ash.

I have always been drawn to dark ideas. This is why I exposed myself to 'Martyrs'; a French horror film that explored the transcendent nature of suffering. It was a savage experience and revealed Eli Roth and the rest of the Gore-nography crowd for the shallow adolescents they are. It was not an enjoyable film - I witnessed it rather than watched it - and I doubt I will ever repeat the viewing.
Anyway, it was dark, man, is what I'm saying.

And so to this French dark-wave/neo-Classical band:

 Elend 'Lecons de Tenebres' (Holy Records, 1994)

This was their debut album - at the time they were a trio; with all three contributing vocals. I came in much later, checking out the  Orphika re-issue (2008) of their darkest and most intimidating album: 'The Umbersun' (originally released in 1998 by Music for Nations). That latter disc was a black-souled maelstrom, an abyss of an album - it was the closest I've come to witnessing pure darkness in a musical medium. The only reference point I can figure for it is if one were to take Dead Can Dance at their absolute darkest, combine that with the score from 'The Omen' ('Ave Satani' in particular, obviously) and then blend that with the music that plays every time the obelisk manifests in '2001: A Space Odyssey', you would still only have a vague idea of what 'The Umbersun' sounds like.

That disc used choirs extensively but deliberately had the different vocal parts combine in a jarring, dis-harmonic way (and often lapsing into outright screams, albeit note-perfect ones), this coupled with the swirling and surging orchestral arrangements (which would often fall back to a delicate whisper only to suddenly stab forwards in a rushing knife-blade of sound) created a profoundly unsettling and immersive atmosphere. And then there were the extreme vocals... This wasn't the more common grunting or shrieking of death- or black metal bands, this was something else entirely. These vocals were soul-ravaging howls - full of anguish and intensity, startlingly unhinged. I'd never heard that replicated in any metal band until I stumbled upon 'A Forest of Stars' - their vocalist, Mr Curse, employs a very similar technique; presumably the result of listening to Elend.

'The Umbersun' was the final part of a trilogy depicting Lucifer's rebellion and fall. In 'The Umbersun' the Light-Bringer takes his throne in Hell. 'Lecons de Tenebres' is the first installment.
It cannot match 'The Umbersun' for sheer intensity and its presumably small recording budget is somewhat evident. It is, nonetheless, a challenging and fascinating release.

There is a single soprano on this album; Eve-Gabrielle Siskind - one of the trio. Her voice is a fleeting and fragile thing; youthful to the point of sounding childlike, naïve. She is Julee Cruise bathed in blue light, standing before wine-red curtains. Her voice is used to gild the music rather than carry it and she dances upon the seething electronic orchestrations. The bulk of the vocal duties goes to the two male vocalists; Alexandre Iskander Hasnaoui and Renaud Tschirner. One favours dark, ominous mumbling and a thick, bone-numbing baritone that recalls DCD's Brendan Perry. The other howls and shrieks, gibbers and roars. The music is almost entirely synthesized - lush, deep piano chords marking a path through a swirling fog of synths. Here and there the scraping and keening of an electric violin is utilized. Most of the songs begin quietly, hushed, before the shadows swarm in once again. Many tracks veer from delicate, melancholy melody to writhing atonal dissonance.
This is orchestral Black Metal (sans guitars, sans bass, mostly sans drums - there are some timpani-style patches employed late in the album). It is music made to communicate fear. And grandeur.

Unfortunately, the synth-pads date the album slightly - the production mix is somewhat unforgiving and those electronics sometimes sound a little cheap. On later releases - specifically the 'Winds' trilogy ('Winds Devouring Men', 'Sunwar the Dead' and 'a World in Their Screams') - Elend were able to utilize a full orchestra and choir; though the budget demands of this vision proved crippling and Elend ended their sonic experiment altogether after 'A World...' (said trilogy was originally intended to be a five-album series).

'Lecons de Tenebres' is a stunning release - ambitious beyond what any other artists were doing at the time.  It is singularly, utterly Gothic - and not in the PVC-pouting-and-eyeliner kind of way either. It is gorgeous, haunting and bleakly beautiful (and, if you can get past the shrieking, markedly more accessible than some of their other releases). There is a shortage of other bands to whom comparisons can be made; Daargard and Die Verbannten Kinder Evas spring to mind but I find Elend somewhat more successful in their ambitions than those other bands (well, 'duos' actually). Though they too, are well worth checking out, if that's your bag.

If you always thought Cradle of Filth's atmospheric, orchestral interludes were among their finest moments (yup, I did), or if you loved My Dying Bride for their mellower, more lavish numbers like 'Black God' or 'For My Fallen Angel'; Elend will definitely hold a great deal of appeal. As an aside, what Elend succeed at so stunningly is clearly what MDB were aiming for with their special release 'Evinta' (an album I am extremely fond of but which suffers from too much negative space in each track).

I would definitely recommend anyone interested in grand, orchestral darkness to check out Elend; though be aware, their albums utilize dissonance as much as melody - in truth, probably a little more. This isn't the music of the spheres - this is the music of the void.

Nostalgic for the Nineties?

I call it 'A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man Wearing a Cat'. Yup, that's me, like a hundred years ago. I look like a frigging chipmunk with those cheeks. That was back when I was planning my first band - a duo with my sister. We'd borrowed a Casio-tone keyboard from the school's music room and worked out how to work the pre-programmed drumbeat on it. We were both quite into metal then and had selected the 'heaviest' beat and then jacked the tempo up as high as it would go. I didn't have either a bass or a guitar but I figured if I blew onto a piece of wax paper wrapped around an old comb I could make a sound that roughly approximated an electric guitar. I figured wrong - what that sounds like is a kazoo. We quickly abandoned the idea - thus denying the world it's first and only brother/sister kazoo & Casio-keyboard metal duo. Society's loss, I guess.

The cat's name was Comet. He was the biggest, sweetest, most chilled cat I've ever known. He was not, however, terribly bright. My father once allegedly referred to him as an amiable boof-head.
I loved that cat.

But all that is years before the content of this blog takes place, so onwards...


                                                                          (...)


The faded plaid, the jeans with the knees worn out to ragged tangles. The hair rendered into unnatural colours with cheap dyes and then left to grow out, always darker for a full inch at the root. Combat boots and summer dresses bought from some op shop or other. Laces dragging and tattered. Hair hanging across unsmiling faces. The slacker chic. The carefully-crafted cynicism masking a kind of frail naiveté. Weird rambling films about dis-spirited kids working in fast food joints or convenience stores; drifting abstractedly through the world. 'So fucking what?' becoming a catch-phrase. I loved the flick 'Heathers' man. I adored Winona Ryder's brittle assertivness. I totally longed for Christian Slater's coat and world-weary humour. With lines like: 'Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a body-count'. Jeez, that stuff is legendary.
And okay, I'm aware that 'Heathers' was actually released in 1988. I just forever associate it with the very early Nineties - when I first saw it myself.
The Nineties had grunge; they had that old perennial favourite androgyny; they had a bitter laugh and a slightly knowing wink.

Man, I miss that shit.

That Nineties-specific nihilism seems almost innocent now: like kids play-acting the end of the world. Now we've got sexts and rampant narcissism. A different, shallower kind of hopelessness. This era feels vacuous, hyper-materialistic, vapid. The Nineties had a whiff of that too, but every generation pushes that vibe deeper. God, am I ever sounding old and cranky.

Still at least we've got hipsters now. I adore hipsters.
I didn't really work the grunge aesthetic. I mean, I wore the knees out of every pair of jeans I owned but that wasn't deliberate, wasn't some kind of statement - I just have really bony knees and that's hard on fabric. I had a hint of plaid, though. And then, as now, I was always in need of a haircut. But I did as pretty much every other kid my age did - I went to school, I watched 'Friends'.
Then in the last year of highschool I started working the Goth shtick a little harder.

None of the albums that really changed my world during the Nineties were grunge. I had the required copy of Nirvana's Nevermind (on cassette no less), sure. But I can't say it really impacted.

So here's a scrawled list of the discs (or cassettes, dubbed tapes with photocopied covers, or whatever) that meant something to me then. These are the albums that linger with me still even though I haven't listened to any of them in well over a decade. Forgive me then, for these will only be fragments - broken shards of memory. They will only be what those albums meant to me, or the traces of them that linger with me still. Doubtless, all of them deserve more than that but they are almost all lost to me now - packed away in boxes, left in other cities, given away (or in the cases of the tapes - simply rotted down to white noise).
So here goes...

PJ Harvey 'To Bring You My Love'.
Hell, I loved this album. The primal, almost feral urgency in her voice. The percussion - sometimes delicate, sometimes near-tribal, the heavy mood of the guitars. The open-hearted need there, something almost carnal. I still fondly think of the desperately whispered playground chant - taunting: 'little fish, big fish, swimming in the water.' She is an amazing artist - is Polly Jean Harvey. A damn fine songwriter and musician, blessed with a thick, powerful voice. Her shamanic delivery - a punk poetess and a fitting heir to the throne of Patti Smith. Not that Smith is herself ready to secede that throne just yet.

Throwing Muses 'University'.
A tape copy of this. Bought quick and cheap from a record shop. Back when there were record shops. I loved her voice - Kristin Hersh. The naked vulnerability of it, the wounded energy. This album was all hooks. Rich, fat walls of guitar. Melodic as anything. I didn't think I knew any of the songs until I put the thing on. Bam...I'd heard damn near every one on RDU: the student-run radio station. I just never knew what they were. This album was less of a taster for Throwing Muses for me than it was a gateway drug to...

Kristin Hersh 'Hips and Makers'.
A solo album in the truest sense of the word. For the most part it was just her aching, bee-sting voice and her own acoustic guitar accompaniment. Every now and again there was a sighing of cello -  courtesy of Jane Scarpantoni, if I recall. This album was so fragile and so brave, strong in its own delicate way. The songs hung around inside of me for days, weeks, months afterwards. There was such courage on display here. To listen felt almost voyeuristic. The lyrics were impenetrable: 'never was a Baritone till you walked in', 'we have hips and makers, we have a good time'. But it felt like they spoke of things too personal, locked too deeply within Hersh herself that you couldn't hope to understand them without first living inside her head. The album sparkled and glimmered; a thousand beautiful, broken shards winking in the sunlight.

Cop Shoot Cop 'Release'.
A five-dollar used CD bought from a store that always smelt of feet and stale cheese, old glue. The disc was all beat-up; fingerprints and scratches. Someone had listened the hell out of it before me. It had a freaking anvil on the cover. This was the album that snatched me away from metal and opened up a whole knew world of possibilities to me. Without this disc I would never have fallen for the music of Nick Cave or Tom Waits. Frontman Tod A had a cynical swagger of a voice. The music was all dissonant no-wave, noise rock shot through with primal jazz and blues DNA. Dissonant frigging horns, man. The lyrics were exquisite - bitter, bruised and perfect.
'Well it's 4:30 in the morning and the vacuum sucks you in. The tell-tale trace of lies upon you face; the sidewalk feels just like your skin.' CSC are gone now. Disbanded, all the back catalogue out of print. Tod Ashley is still rolling though, man; got himself another gig, been running it for many years now. Called Firewater - they play wild Circus/World Music/Klezmer/Surf/Garage/Punk. They're something special.

Mazzy Star 'Among My Swan'.
Those hazy sun-shattered guitars, rolling out like the way the air shimmers over a heated road. The aching drawl of Hope Sandoval's voice. They sounded like a dream on a sweating afternoon. If David Lynch had set Twin Peaks in warmer climes it should have been these guys on the soundtrack in place of Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. There was always a darkness beneath the melody here. They'd draw you away from the everyday, but there'd be an unspoken threat. Underneath.

Portishead 'Portishead'
Though I adored the crisp drums, Isaac Hayes samples and dark matter of the debut - it seemed almost too graceful, too penetrable. I preferred the sneering guitar rolls here; on the sophomore album. The half-choked drumbeats - booming and echoing but buried deeply, weirdly muffled. Hip hop at half the speed - crawling endlessly forward. I loved the biting black wall of brass; the Morricone influences; the fact that on a couple of tracks Beth Gibbons seemed to be channeling an evil Shirley Bassey. It sounded like the soundtrack to an infinitely darker, more dangerous and deviant Bond flick. I heard once that the strings and brass sections were recorded separately for this one - pressed onto vinyl and then sampled back into the final mix - so that they could be scratched and chopped into place, just like on the debut. I heard they blew out their studio budget. 'Half-Day Closing' sounds like a psychedelic rock band dissolving into the ocean. 'Cowboys' looms up full of swagger, bitterness and very sharp teeth. 'Only You' will break your heart with its yearning and devotion.

Mercury Rev 'Deserter's Songs'.
The bruised heart of New Weird Americana. This album was written while locked away in a cabin, despairing that they'd never break though, never shift enough units to become a viable act (they'd hung their hopes on the divine 'See You on the Other Side' and it'd sank without a trace). This album is beyond sublime. It's a lavish disc - so densely layered it's positively orchestral. It soars, it sweeps, it burns its way into your heart. Jonathan Donahue's voice is a fragile tenor, peculiar and achingly beautiful (like a choirboy Neil Young). I had a bit of a crush on him for a while there (but y'know; in a totally masculine, heterosexual way). It introduced me to mellotron and the idea that music can create this vast rippling panorama. 'Holes' sounds like flying. As a song it simply yearns. 'The Funny Bird' is a hurricane in an abyss - the My Bloody Valentine-style waves of melodic feedback, the treated vocals - full of desperation and hope.  This album was pastoral and wistful, full of joy and sorrow...and beneath it all, a woozy, tripped-out darkness. It sounds deeply odd. Queasy and surreal; a 3am phone-call of an album. And again, positively Lynchian.

Tricky 'Angels With Dirty Faces'

This album suffocates, it strangles, it chokes and unsettles. From the cover onwards it confronts you, unblinking and unrelenting. Tricky's hash-fogged rasp playing a ghoulish call-and-response with the achingly sweet yet utterly mournful tones of Martina Topley-Bird. She sounds like the ghost of Billie Holliday singing 'God Bless the Child' from a locked room while Tricky's shadow of a voice haunts the corners. 'Broken Homes' is crippled gospel. PJ Harvey lends her voice to that one and it is a magnificent performance but this is Tricky's show and he leans crookedly into every dark place. The beats skitter and warp, spurring the album forwards but never resolving into anything as cohesive as a hook. Dissonant blues guitar tangles across a bunch of the tracks; Marc Ribot within the void. Most of the songs seem to develop in spirals, in whirlpools. This album is full of smoke and whispers - it is thick and pungent and psychedelic. It's a smoked-out hip-hop headtrip, man. And it doesn't want you for a friend.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 'Let Love In'.
This almost feels the male counterpoint to PJ Harvey's 'To Bring You My Love'. It's occasionally raw, powerful, even savage and snarling. Other times it has a dark, mythical swagger - Cave as the black-hearted preacher-man with a red right hand and a heart full of dark and terrible things. This album is all about the legend of Cave - the performance, the act. I never cared for his later honesty; I have no real love for 'The Boatman's Call'. I wanted Nick Cave the actor; the tall, looming figure cut out of shadows and crooked lines. Still other times it's almost crushingly beautiful, rich with need and urgency. 'Do You Love Me Part II' remains one of the most hauntingly lovely and utterly disturbing songs I've ever been a witness to.

Bjork 'Homogenic'.
The break-up album. Or something. Full of dark, bone-trembling bass and beats; dense, almost Russian-sounding Classical influences. At other points it's achingly lovely and exquisitely ripe with a sense of awe and hope. 'Bachelorette' remains one of the most extraordinary songs ever written. The rhythm is so urgent, so powerful, so infectious. Bjork's voice is always an astonishment: from childlike wonderment to flirtatious coo; from vulnerable verismo to snarling barely-restrained hostility; and ultimately, to banshee howl. Hers is a passionate, full-bodied delivery - utterly emotive, devoid of any of the clinically-detached ennui of most electronica artists. The lyrics are still a delight (even the odd bit about killer whales). 'I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl'. Her finest album, probably, from a lifetime of stunning releases. It has a strength, a quality that her previous releases were a little light on: for all the ground it breaks it remains a deeply cohesive album. There is a narrative logic to the structure - a coherence. It is an immersive experience. In this dude's opinion at least.

Tori Amos 'From the Choirgirl Hotel'
A voice as rich and sultry as sun-baked earth, as the steam rising from that scorched dirt. Petrichor. I always loved the way Amos' voice had a slightly fractured hoarseness to it, like it was scalded just below the surface. This is a huge album. Denser and more lavish than her others. Amos treats us to her trademark Bosendorfer here - working the lower notes, the ones that hit you in the meat and marrow. But there are other instrumental layers aplenty (very little sparseness here); rich keyboard swathes, marimbas, strings, and (in a possible first for her) blood-stirring dance beats. 'Raspberry Swirl' rides a propulsive rhythm. Infectious and urgent; panting, hungry and powerful - all quite appropriate given the subject matter. There's a darkness to it too - almost a witchy Goth-club vibe. 'Playboy Mommy' seems lightweight, playful in a melancholy way, a jazzy strut. Until you realise it depicts a miscarriage. Elsewhere Amos bewitches and beguiles. I've flirted with her other releases; but this album won my heart from the very first listen.

Acid Bath 'When the Kite String Pops'.
Sludge. Stoner Doom. Psychedelic Blues Metal. Shit, call it whatever you want. All I know is this deranged, drug-influenced band from Louisiana had hit upon something complex and strange and maddeningly addictive. The lyrics are a stream-of-consciousness nightmare - all terrifying imagery about insects and planets and oceans and death. Frontman Dax Riggs delivered them all in either a ravaged, throat-scraping bellow or a smoke-glazed and weirdly melodic voice. Oh, he could be beautiful when he needed to be and one only had to witness the delicate semi-classical acoustic guitar interplay of 'The Bones of Baby Dolls' or the finger-painted scrawl that was 'Scream of the Butterfly' (it was years before I got the Jim Morrison reference) to know that this was a band of rare and corrupt majesty. Man, look at those titles - where do you think I got my writing style from?

Marilyn Manson 'Antichrist Superstar'
Oh, he may seem like a worn-out joke now - for all that his most recent album was a fierce beast indeed. But nothing changes the sense of awe and amazement that washed over me when I first heard 'Sweet Dreams'. I'd never heard acoustic guitar creepy-crawl like that before. This album was like that times a-hundred. It was caustic, poignant, vicious, triumphant and had such a sense of weirdly-joyous anarchy to it. The grinding bass; the bleeding electronic loops and sniggers; the thin, oddly buzzing guitars; and Manson's fractured baritone howl. He could sound so furious at one instant and so wounded, even oddly emotive the next. It was a massive album that made you want to fling up your fist and shout along. 'I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.' They just don't make rage sound that infectiously thrilling any more. 'Man That You Fear' haunts me still - poisonous and sour-sweet with its calliopes and its lurching rhythm; a funhouse mirror of a song.

Mr Bungle.
This album changed the world for me. Just a little bit. There was a DJ that worked the late-night shift on Mondays at RDU; called herself Mighty Mouse. Every time she was on she would throw down a track from this album. It was deranged, wild, a freefall on a rollercoaster ride. Mike Patton's first band - improbably signed to a major label (Warner Bros!) after the success of Faith No More. The songs leapt from ska to funk to punk to metal to jazz to dub to circus music. Often within the same track - sometimes within the same verse. Patton sounded snotty and self-possessed, spitting and sneering and smirking his way through the mire of their lyrics. Those lyrics were skatalogical, pornographic, hilarious and disturbing. Explosions of brass and seasick organs drove most of the tracks. It was madness sculpted into music. It pushed the limits of what a band was capable of. Years later they eclipsed even their debut with the phenomenal, exotica-tinged 'California'.

Massive Attack 'Mezzanine'
Their first two albums - which still sound to me like critically-acclaimed muzak for cocktail parties - served only to introduce me to the sublime, hash-scorched rasp of Tricky (by 'Mezzanine' he was gone). But this disc is a very different beast altogether, and for me this remains one of the most glorious and opulently dark releases of the Nineties. 'Mezzanine' saw their sound roughen, deepen - the crawling hip-hop beats and dub rumblings now cloaked in squalls and shivers of hefty post-rock guitar & bass. Here the urgent whispers of 3D and the deep, threatening interjections of Daddy G combine exquisitely with Horace Andy's rich, reggae-soaked voice and the gossamer-glitter of ex-Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. Each track feels carefully and intricately constructed - layer laid upon layer; complex enough that each listen reveals new elements - yet the listener is instantly drawn in, thrilled, seduced... and intimidated. It is an essential album.

Type O Negative 'Bloody Kisses'
The late and lamented Peter Steele - 6'9" tall and apparently hewn entirely from muscle and cheekbones. Possessed of arguably the deepest 'clean' voice in metal. There was the striking image of him wearing a freaking double bass slung on a chain across his shoulders, gripped as one would a guitar. Type O Negative's sound spliced the blues swagger & doom-laden crush of Black Sabbath with a Beatles-esque sense of melody and the gossamer keyboard-and-reverb fog of the Cocteau Twins. All graced with the stentorian bass-baritone chants of Mr Steele (and the more traditional metal rasps of Kenny Hickey). 'Bloody Kisses' was the album that introduced me to them, to their grim and gleeful vision of the world, and to this day I cannot pick a weak track on it (I dig the supposed 'filler' and instrumental tracks too). It is an immense album - intense, grand, beautiful and heavy as all goddamn. This is Gothic metal delivered with a knowing wink and a thick Brooklyn accent.

So that's my patchwork of memories - fragment stitched to fragment. It's been said that what you're drawn to between the ages of thirteen and nineteen (in terms of film, music, art, books etc) will shape your taste for the rest of your life - you will carry those with you forever and you will always be looking for echoes of what you loved then.
This is what shaped the world inside my head.

That doesn't mean that those are the only truly great albums that I recall from the Nineties - there are others that mean a lot to me; but I either didn't discover them until outside of that decade, or they didn't mean the same thing to me then that they do now. There are a couple of other bands that meant the world to me then but that I have grown to dislike or openly loathe in the years since (*cough* Radiohead *cough*). They too, have been omitted.

Music has changed a great deal since then - now it seems as if the musical world is a great, heaving mass - too vast and teeming to keep track of. Genres have spawned sub-genre after sub-genre. Televised 'talent' shows have drowned the pop music world in a wash of oversung, easy-listening effluent and it has all become so...complicated. In the days of Elvis Presley the sneakiest production trick they had was 'fattening' the voice; a process by which multiple identical copies of the vocal track were laid over one another to make the voice sound fuller and richer in the mix. Nowadays it takes up to sixty separate audio tracks and as many as forty different (synthesized) musical instruments to create a single Justin Bieber song - and after all that effort, production and unrelenting precision all you're left with is a Justin Bieber song.

It's not all bad though. There's just so much more of it, more of everything. Now you have to sift through the wreckage to find the treasures; but it's so freaking accessible now - everything is there and waiting at the end of a high speed internet connection. Waiting for the click of your mouse. But you have to be savvy and careful. You have to do the research.

But back to that list... Back to the meaning of that list.
Ultimately what these songs are is a key that unlocks our past. It is the soundtrack to our memories - to the whirling din of fragments that makes up a perfectly ordinary life. There are things for which there are no words, that is why we have always needed (and will always need) music.