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.

Songs to end the world: Menace Ruine

Canada gets a pretty rough time of it, musically speaking.  One wit even went so far as to suggest that the USA needed to tighten up its border control to prevent the influx of Canadian bands and music.  Don't get me wrong: Canada has definitely earned something of a reputation for producing terrifyingly successful and overwhelmingly bland artists.  But I don't want to be negative here.  You see, there are a wealth of exceptionally talented musicians in Canada - challenging, intelligent artists producing works of very real merit, they just don't get the exposure that the dreck is awarded.  Well, in my own insignificant way I wish to take steps to redress that balance.  So, every once in a while I'll profile a Canadian band that I really dig.

And so it is to Menace Ruine.  They are a duo.  They hail from Montreal, Quebec.  The names they go by are Genevieve and S. de la Moth.  Their albums give no musical credits.  No instrument list.  No biographical detail.  As far as I am aware their photos have only appeared on the interior of their debut full-length: 'Cult of Ruins' and then their faces were shrouded in shadows, half-eaten by darkness.  They are startlingly prolific:  2008 and saw the release of not one but two full-length albums: 'The Die is Cast' being the latter.  They have then followed that by releasing an album every couple of years: 'Union of Irreconcilables' in 2010 and 'Alight in Ashes' in 2012.  They change labels fairly frequently, their most recent disc is released by the thoroughly awesome folks at Profound Lore records.

The band name.  The obfuscation.  The album titles.  You have to know that you're not in for an easy ride.

Together this duo sounds like the absolute end of the world.

Picture this: a vast ruined desert of blanched bone, worn by time and the elements down to the texture of dust.  Imagine a birdless sky, storm-choked and seething, the sun burnt down to a frozen cataract.  What few trees remain are scorched to their crooked spines and somewhere off in the distance the last vestiges of a city collapses into rot and ruin.  The air is thick with drifting ash and there is no life anywhere.  Every last vestige has been scythed away.
That is the world that this music conjures in my mind.  But next comes the tricky part: they make this entire vast emptiness - this howling abyss that is all that comes after - they make it seem glorious, seductive.  They make the monstrous beautiful.

Their debut disc - the wonderfully titled 'Cult of Ruins' - is black metal de-constructed down to the last shreds of itself and then reassembled by broken machines.  The hallmarks of the genre are there: the eerie tremolos, the insanely kinetic drumming, the rasping vocals.  But they've all been twisted and altered, shot through with avant-garde, experimental noise and industrial influences - the drums sound like a bone being rapped against the side of a battered pot, the vocals are suffocated in the mix and all the more terrifying for it, keyboards shriek and gibber like agitated baboons in an echo chamber.  And then there are the clean vocals...

But, a confession: I have never actually listened to that first disc in it's entirety - just fragments.  So I'll move along to the second disc and the one where things get really interesting.  For a start, the artwork on the rather modest digipak is a beautiful thing: rich dark hues and an almost holy-looking image - an angel bending over...what: a coin, a bowl, the fallen moon?  And a black-winged bird reflected in the surface below, inverted.  The back-cover depicts a many-eyed monster straight from a particularly feverish passage of Revelations.  All the interior text is printed in elaborate archaic font.  The whole things looks ancient and sacred.  And 'The Die is Cast' sounds like that too.

The overt black metal influences have been largely excised (though the disc still drips occult influences and that bleak and blasted vibe) and in their place are ominous drones, martial percussion and Genevieve's extraordinarily compelling voice.  The production is insane, cloaking everything in a layer of static and haze, making it impossible to discern what instruments are being played - sometimes you'll hear something that sounds like a church organ, other times it's clearly a muffled bass chord, occasionally something very like a hurdy-gurdy can be discerned but they all just briefly surface from the strange and blackened miasma, never really identifiable.  Listening to it, I'd half suspect that all the sounds were sampled from guitar and bass feedback - recorded and looped through a laptop setting, each one painstakingly reshaped, distorted, elongated, sculpted and layered into their final form.  The drumming is sublime: tribal, military, beating a rhythmic tattoo underneath the shifting chiaroscuro of the textural layers.

But imperative to all of this: Genevieve's voice is a rich, dark-hued contralto.  Her voice is unmodified, clean.  It is a crucial human element in this desolate mix.  She grounds the music.  Genevieve has the melancholy and icy detachment of German chanteuse Nico, but tempered with the more vulpine styling of Grace Slick.  The vocal melodies are always exquisite and often complex - even occasionally attaining a near-melodramatic, torch-song feel not entirely unlike Nancy Sinatra.  They seem to drift over the rhythmic drones, almost independently of them.  Genevieve doesn't so much sing as chant the lyrics.  These aren't songs, these are incantations: hymns to a degenerate God that long ago abandoned His dying Creation.

Follow-up 'The Union of Irreconcilables' expands their palette even further, reintroducing the black metal and noise influences and producing something far less accessible than 'The Die is Cast' (accessible being a very relative term in this context).  Again, the artwork prepares you for the experience.  It depicts impossibly conjoined male-female twins, their faces smudged and blurred like Munch's scream, a vast bird with black and burning wings towers over them: though whether it menaces or shelters them is unclear.  (Wait, I just checked that again - it's definitely menacing them).  The interior artwork shows what appears to be a medieval engraving of a lion devouring the sun.  The track titles are printed black-on-charcoal.

  The opening track '...collapse' is blistering and deformed black metal, cloaked in noise and grime, like the ghost of a black metal track.  The rasping is back, still choked deep inside the mix and unintelligible.  This gives way to 'The Upper Hand' perhaps the most immediate and overtly beautiful of the album's tracks.  A see-sawing and very heavily distorted guitar/bass riff  rolls back and forth over booming military-style drums and on top of all of this is a startlingly melodic vocal melody.  It is a wonderful, hypnotic track - strikingly Genevieve's vocal is even more boldly placed in the mix on this disc than on the one previous.  But then comes the epically-titled 'Not Just a Break in the Clouds but a Permanent Clearing of the Sky'.  It is 10:47 of roiling, blackened feedback, shot through with screeches and snarls of static.  The vocal appears only twice, and then fleetingly, all-to-quickly consumed by the dense swarming of the track.  It is a fascinating but staggeringly unlovely track.  I can hear the clouds, or perhaps those are locusts swarming, but of the clearing of the sky, there is nothing.  The first time I listened to it it damn near killed the album for me.  Not because what it was doing wasn't profoundly effective.  It was.  That was the problem.  It really is a track that you need to be braced for.  It is followed by the comparatively brief 'Corridor de Perdition' which is a surprisingly delicate filigree of pure static.  No vocals, yet oddly appealing.

Things get gob-smacking again with 'There Will Be Blood' - all haunted vocals and shuddering organ drones - and perhaps my favourite track on the disc: 'Nothing Above or Below'.

'Primal Waters Bed' (at a herculean 15:39) returns to the howling maelstrom experimentalism of 'Not Just...' but does so far more satisfyingly - to my ears at least.  Vocals play a consistent and prominent role throughout and the song slowly looms grander and more terrible until it finally consumes the last of the disc in an apocalyptic gale of sound.

I have not yet heard their latest - 'Alight in Ashes' - but early reports (and a little sound-byte I sampled) point at it being a return to the sound of 'The Die is Cast'.  Perhaps it will necessitate a post all of its own.

Further reading about the band reveals that their music is concerned with a sort of non-being, of unbecoming: the loss of the self.  This explains the lack of album credits, band photos.  They seek to withdraw their identities from the music, leaving it to exist in and of itself, almost independently.  They do not perform live often.  Fascinating.

Menace Ruine are truly a union of irreconcilables.  They take sheer, overwhelming dissonance and marry it to the most exquisite of harmonies.  They produce music that sounds utterly ancient and yet could not have been produced without cutting-edge modern technology.  Their work is simultaneously repulsive and utterly enticing.  They are the last song of a dead world.  If 'Current 93' and 'Unto Ashes' are Apocalyptic Folk, then Menace Ruine are Post-Apocalyptic Folk.  They are the aural equivalent of staring into Nietzsche's abyss.  They are a masterpiece painted in bone-dust and clotted blood.

They are also a really hard sell: too out-there for most metal fans, not consistently black-metally enough for the black metal fetishists, way too dissonant for the neo-folk crowd, too melodic for the hardcore noise freaks.
Perhaps it would appeal to adventurous doom- or post-metal fans...perhaps.

Either way, if you're ever in the market for a French Canadian/Vegan/Industrial/Black Metal/Avant Garde/Ritual Drone/Noise/Neofolk duo - boy, have I ever got a deal for you.

http://www.myspace.com/menaceruine
http://menaceruine.tumblr.com/