I Have Hit A New Low

Architects - The Here And Now

2011-02-26T00:22:00.007Z

Of all the types of review there are, none is more difficult than that of the "new sound album". It makes the review become less about the quality of the album and more about questions the listener must answer. What is more important, the quality of an album or the duty of fulfilling expectations? Is it right that an album be measured against its predecessors, or that quality, or lack thereof? Because believe me, your opinion of the new Architects release will depend entirely upon your expectations of it going in. There is, simply put, nothing of the band who wrote Ruin in this album. Even the decidedly more metalcore-influenced Hollow Crown was undoubtedly an Architects album. The Here and Now is not. Indeed, it’s very self-awarely so, the album title seeming to specifically reference the band’s desire to have it heard on its own merits, something that would be much easier were it not stuck in the canon of one of the UK’s best young bands.

Architects’ rise to fame has been a hard one. Despite early tours with fashion icons/sometimes-musicians Bring Me The Horizon, their acceptance by the emerging demographic of metal-aware scene kids was much slower than that of their compatriots, despite their exceptionally tight mathcore chops. The loss of original vocalist Matt Johnson and acquisition of the much more charismatic Sam Carter was just in time for the more accomplished Ruin, which introduced to their formula much more experimental territory, retaining the jagged complexity and backing it up with imaginative sensibilities reminiscent of Isis and Cult of Luna. The follow-up, Hollow Crown, had a much lighter feel to it, exploring both the melodic and ambient abilities of the musical section and Carter’s clean singing abilities. They’re particularly notable for each album being different, but up until now they’ve always been defined by a common Architects-ness, sharing common traits; the quick dissonant chords, the sludgy low end and the exemplary instrumental work, as well as some of the most innovative and interesting songwriting in modern metal. This is why it’s going to be very frustrating that this album seems to be such a dividing line in their career. None of those things are especially evident in this album, though they’re there in very small doses. This is an Architects album in name and personnel only, and let’s get one thing straight, I for one never listened to Architects for their smiles. I listened to them because something about their music resonated with me, and whether or not the new album has something of its own to offer, that Special Architects Something simply isn’t there in this album.

Right, shorn of those preconceptions, is The Here and Now good? To be honest, it’s entirely average. Standard. Utterly unable to stand out from all the other alternative albums out there. There’s nothing about it which grabs the listener, no recognizable reason to care about it in the slightest. Maybe this is them being nice to all the other young bands on the global metal scene by not putting out a record that the rest have to work their arses off catching up with. If it weren’t for the Architects name already being established, no-one would be talking about it. Every song is that frustrating okay, without any flair or drama, and the performances and songwriting are without any particular distinction. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s plain, unmemorable and ultimately without any of the gravitas which defined Follow The Water or You’ll Find Safety. For what it’s worth, it’s easily the worst thing Greg Puciato or Andrew Neufield have ever been involved with, poor sods that they are. I’ve repeatedly heard comparisons to Alexisonfire, for its straightforward, driving melodies and harsh vocal-clean vocal alternation, but that comparison is giving far too little credit to the complexity and intelligence that Alexisonfire display in their music. And, to give them credit, at least when Alexisonfire did a new sound album its failure as an Alexisonfire release was balanced out by its genuinely being a great album, justifying its lack of the band’s previous hallmarks with a host of equally well-executed new ideas. Architects now sound like the bands that popped up in the mid- 2000s which were trying so hard to be Alexisonfire, but just didn’t have the musical aptitude. Either way, I think they sound much more like a sub-par and mildly hardcore-influenced 36 Crazyfists, but that’s just me.

As an album, it’s vacuous and lacking impact, but as an Architects release, it stands within a canon of truly brilliant albums which The Here and Now seems to me to fail to live up to. With this established, what worries me is what happens next. This shift seems dramatic, but not prompted by anything other than where the musicians wanted to go, and that sucks because they’re unlikely to want to go back. And while that’s admirable, and something I have tremendous respect for, and fuck it, it’s not like the old albums are going anywhere, and yes, I’ll go to their shows and sing along to the songs I love, but I’m slightly sad that we’re not getting another album by the version of Architects that influenced me as much as they did as songwriters, and that I enjoyed so very much.

P.S. Holy shit, the new Radiohead is amazing, and I have no idea how much more I’ll appreciate it once I’ve had time to properly take it all in.

P.P.S.: The last three weeks or so's 1AAD, and I think a few others I've listened to, have been, in no particular order:
The Decemberists - The King is Dead (Folk-ish Indie)
Isis - In Absence of Truth (Post-Metal)
Dead Hearts - Bitter Verses (Hardcore)
The Middle East - The Recordings of the Middle East (Folk-ish Indie)
Have A Nice Life - Deathconsciousness (Devoted about four days to that one! One of my absolute favourite albums) (Shoegaze/Drone/Post-Punk)
Converge - Jane Doe (Mathcore)
Burial - Untrue (Really arty Dubstep)
Portishead - Dummy (Trip-Hop)
Russian Circles - Geneva (Post-Rock/Instrumental Progressive Rock)
Slayer - Reign In Blood (Thrash Metal)
Immolation - Close To A World Below (Death Metal)
Anaal Nathrakh - Eschaton (Blackened Grindcore)
More Than Life - Love Let Me Go (Hardcore)
Deathspell Omega - Paracletus (Experimental Black Metal)
Opeth - Blackwater Park (Progressive Death Metal)
Orchid - Dance Tonight! Revolution Tomorrow! (Screamo)
Alexisonfire - Watch Out! (Post-Hardcore)

1AAD Project - Pig Destroyer's Prowler In The Yard

2011-02-08T11:26:00.003Z

Okay, here's today's Album of the Day review. This was meant for yesterday, but I had work and got back to late to write anything:

Pig Destroyer - Prowler in the Yard

It puzzles me to this day how a genre as disparate and artistically inclined as grindcore could have such a unified, and such a dull, aesthetic. The colour is green, the lyrical theme is sociopolitical dissatisfaction, the point of reference is almost always Napalm Death. Pig Destroyer offers something different. An American band, perhaps free from the crust punk crutch which overtook the European scene, Pig Destroyer take influence from thrash, grindcore and sludge metal to create a rather more derranged beast.

This, their second album, allowed for Scott Hull (ex-Anal Cunt and central member of Agoraphobic Nosebleed) to really explore his songwriting abilities, and his genius shows through. Despite most tracks being under 2 minutes in length, Hull's sheer playing speed allowing him to pack in great riffs throughout. While not Pig Destroyer's most experimental release - Hull had yet to switch to an 8-string, and Blake Harrison had yet to join as an electronics player - it is probably their best album as far as sheer instrumental albility goes.

Of course, another thing to note is the vocals. J.R. Hayes remains in my eyes the quintessential crazy-person grind vocalist (Though Guy Kozowyk's not doing too badly for himself). His lyrics in particular are warped and Lynch-esque, and capture a prose-like quality with which it tells a fractured story of violence, obsession and insanity.

Easily my favourite grindcore album (Sorry, Exit), this warped and astonishingly well-realised work puts Pig Destroyer up there with Isis and Converge in the upper echelons of the art-metal scene.

Right, after two days of extreme metal, I'm going for something lighter. Next up is The Decemberists' new album The King Is Dead.

A New Project

2011-02-06T23:21:00.002Z

Well, it's been a while. I haven't posted in about half a year for a very simple reason - it was only ever any fun writing long diatribes about terrible albums, and I quickly came to find that I couldn't really keep that up without just repeating myself (notice that almost all the negatively reviewed albums were from -core bands). However, this evening I've just come up with a new project to use this blog for.

I don't listen to albums anymore. I don't have the time or the commitment. An 80 GB iPod and - at time of writing - 39.6 days of music wherever I go has left me uninvested in most of my music. Wondering why this is, I looked back to the days before I had the money to buy albums in batches, or the bandwidth to download. I must have spent a good few months appreciating Vol 3. (The Subliminal Verses) or Ascendancy. I listened to those albums all the way through, sometimes over and over, and I built up a relationship with them over time. Do I do that now? Do I fuck.

So I'm imposing a challenge of myself. Each morning, I'm going to pick an Album Of The Day. I have to listen to it twice before listening to any other music. The first time, it has to play from start to finish, missing no tracks, uninterrupted. The second time, I can skip around on the album and repeat songs, but I have to listen to the whole album. After that, I can listen to other music, but I have to have listened to the album one other time before the end of the day. Finally, if at all possible, I have to write a little something about the album by the end of the week. Not a long, drawn out piece like before - though I may do one if the mood strikes me - but something which encourages me to really pay attention to the album. I may add extra rules at a later date.

So here's today's album:

Akercocke - Antichrist.

So Akercocke sound like a band that could only exist as a hypothetical - "What if Opeth were Anaal Nathrakh?" - and certainly it's a hypothetical I would probably dream up. Their latest album (Well, I say latest, this was released in 2007) shows this off with gusto. The foundation of their sound is blackened death metal, but Akercocke pepper their music liberally with elements of progressive rock, electronic music, new wave and even jazz influences. Fortunately, they know what they're doing with both death metal and non-death metal, and this experimental approach leads to some utterly brilliant sections - the opening of Axiom, the telephone-processed bit of The Promise, and the haunting outro Epoch.

However, to talk too much of these sections would be to diminish the brilliance of their extreme metal sections. David Gray's blast beats reach Origin speeds, Matt Wilcock and frontman Jason Mendonca get many opportunities to show off their considerable shredding talents and the bass and electronics section integrate themselves with style and taste. The songwriting on display here is especially praiseworthy - where introducing all these experimental elements could make an album feel scatter-shot, uncommitted and unfulfilling (See: Iwrestledabearonce) here they all compliment each other with a degree of elegance and subtlety too rarely seen in extreme metal.

Despite the aforementioned vow of chastity, I can see this album getting a few more plays in the days and weeks to come.

Right, let's see how long this can keep going.

Regarding Mortal Kombat: Rebirth

2010-06-10T10:36:00.002+01:00

As every geek on the internet probably knows by now, Fame director Kevin Tancharoen has created a short proof-of-concept movie for an R-rated reboot of the Mortal Kombat movie franchise. Entitled Mortal Kombat: Rebirth, it supposedly was sent to Warner Brothers to test the water for his vision of what a Mortal Kombat movie should be. In a stroke of genius, it was then released onto the internet so as to allow the geek-o-sphere to pound Warner Brothers with demands that this shit gets made into a movie because it is exactly what we've been asking for this whole time.

Okay, so for those of you who don't know the history, the original Mortal Kombat movie was, for a long time, the best videogame adaptation Hollywood could muster, which is like saying that as far as industrial accidents go, losing a hand in an angle grinder isn't all that bad. It was a PG-13 version of a benchmark gory videogame, and it was still in every respect fucking horrible, but less so than, say, Super Mario Bros. Recently, the Prince of Persia movie ruined this by being, to all intents and purposes, pretty good actually, and apparently this proof of concept aims to match that standard.

It's what we wanted all along, and it looks good.

I mean this in relative terms, of course. It's not going to be The Dark Knight levels of geek-movie brilliance, but it could be a great action movie, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the director. He's a dancer and a dance movie director, so he obviously knows a thing or two about choreography, and he's obviously a fan, because he did this shit on his own buck. Look at the trailer. There's no Bourne shakycam shit. Every blow of a great, brutal, and entertaining fight scene is presented to us pristinely (admittedly with one or two blocking issues). The colour pallates are limited and dark, so as to avoid looking as much like a cartoon as the original Mortal Kombat movie did. As far as direction goes, Kevin Tancharoen seems to be a decent choice.

Secondly, it's dark. It's really fucking dark. It's brutal. And neccesarily so. This has been a bone of contention with many blog posts I've seen, and to be honest, I think it was a wise choice to make it more grounded. Can you imagine how jarring it would have been if, like the first Mortal Kombat movie, or the Street Fighter movie of the same period, it tried to replicate the look of the game, and then added the neccesary gore? It'd look unbearably cheesy, like some cosplayers had gotten some stage blood. This way, the context is more suited to the level of violence the series has always demanded.

Thirdly, it's not afraid to be its own thing. This is not a straight fitting of the game story into a movie, and a fucking good thing it isn't too. In case people forget, Videogames generally have bad writing. With obvious exceptions (I'm thinking The Path and anything Team Ico or Bioware have done), even the good ones are still only generally as good as bad summer blockbusters or bad B-movies. The stories the tell are not great stories - mostly they are just framing devices for the gameplay - and a lot of videogame movies have failed by trying to adapt this. This has taken the game Mortal Kombat, and made a move which takes its central premise - gory fights as a martial arts tournament between over-the top characters - and builds a film around that, making everythig in the movie justify that central premise.

Conversely, unlike, say, Super Mario Bros. or the works of Uwe Boll, it looks as though it's still going to stick to the premise and character designs to the point of recognisability - Baraka, for instance, looks fantastic (minus the dreads - it's not surprising that the actor wouldn't lose them for the sake of a favour job, but give him some money to shear them off and he'll look the part). And fundamentally, he's still Baraka, an animalistic, demonic psychopath with fuckin' blades coming out of his arm - the character straight out of Mortal Kombat II. That he's not actually a demon doesn't really concern me. The story seems like it's actually going to show the Mortal Kombat tournament and there's still space there to introduce the supernatural elements, should it be decided that they work.

The best thing? It's a decent-looking film of a game that wasn't like a film in the first place. As film critic Moviebob said of Prince of Persia, it's not hard to make a film of a game which cribs its notes from every Arabian Nights-style movie in history. Mortal Kombat was fundamentally game-like, with a cast of characters which could only be taken seriously in videogames or cartoons and a setting straight from a bad comic book - and given the geek culture context that videogames based themselves in, this worked for the game, but would not when not in that context - say, in a movie instead. Furthermore, its story was never good. Adapting THIS would have been a fucking disaster, and I'm glad that this director doesn't seem to want to. Instead, he's truly adapting the story - fitting it to a new medium by taking what works in videogames and replacing it with what works in a film.

So yes, I honestly hope that they end up making this movie, because it's as close to the Mortal Kombat movie I want as I'm ever going to get.

Just a quick one...

2010-05-19T17:34:00.001+01:00

First off, new stuff will be up shortly. I finally have a modicum of free time as of late, and have about three reviews on the go. I'll try and finish them.

Secondly, I know that for someone my age, who never really listened to his stuff, talking about the death of Ronnie James Dio would be horribly bandwagon-ish, so here's something I'm actually qualified to speak about. Today Isis announced their impending breakup. I guess the whole leaving-college-soon-to-go-to-uni thing has left me with a big thing about things I love ending, but I just wanted to put something down.

I've been listening to Isis for almost a year - give or take a few days. I got into them via the webcomic Questionable Content and, curious about the post-metal genre, I gave a listen to So Did We. I fell instantly in love with it, and it totally changed my understanding of what metal could do artistically.

I never really thought about Isis as one of my favourite bands, but the more I think about it, the higher they are in my estimation - I love them more than Slayer, Cannibal Corpse, Slipknot, Carcass...bands I've been listening to much longer, bands that are the foundation for my metal fandom. Honestly, I wouldn't be as upset if Slayer or Slipknot broke up. I love them, and they have these amazing legacies, but despite being two bands that my love of metal is based on, I don't have the emotional connection to the music those bands made that I do with Isis. What's more, by introducing me to post-rock, and from there, to many other genres, they have opened my eyes to more great music than I can think of. The greatest tragedy of all is that they were never recognised as the geniuses they are, except by a few people. They will be missed by anyone who loved their work. If you haven't listened to them, you owe it to yourself to do so.

That's all the whining I've got.

Videogame Review: Prince of Persia

2010-04-12T13:57:00.003+01:00

(Originally written for IGN)
Okay, I'm gonna get this out of the way first; this game is gorgeous. The cell-shaded wonderland that this game conjures is jaw-dropping from the moment you start playing until the moment you finish. The Assassin's Creed engine has shown once again how well it can create sensational graphics, and the art direction is probably the best I've seen all year. The animation is smooth and natural looking, even when performing the most outlandish feats. The soundtrack compliments this perfectly; epic orchestral deluges which create a magnificent atmosphere.

Shame about everything else.

I'm a huge fan of the previous generation of this franchise; the fast, fluid platforming and combat that allowed instant usability but much room for experimentation and the likeable, fleshed out characters. On top of this, the sands of time system allowed challenge in the puzzles themselves and allowed the game to be forgiving yet tense and reliant on skill; I often found myself grasping for the rewind button in games I played afterwards. This Prince of Persia has replaced all of these with idiotic, uninspired gameplay mechanics which actively detract from the game.

First off, the platforming, while the strongest point of the game, is flawed on a few very basic levels. Firstly, the nimbleness and speed of the original prince's freerunning is usurped by leaden wall-scrambling and repetitive tasks which become dull after not much time. The new prince's parkour stuff is controled solely by the jump button, and the lack of a freerun button grates; the game misinterprets your commands sometimes, which, while uncommon, can sour your opinion of it given the life-or-death situations this occurs in.

Well, I say "life-or-death", but that's a slight misstatement. You cannot die in this game. You see, at all times you're accompanied by Elika, an obligatorily busty mage/sidekick/annoyingly-forced-feeling love interest who saves you whenever you're in a potentially deadly situation and transports you back to the last safe place. An obvious attempt to recreate the brilliant sands of time rewind function of the original trilogy, this system couldn't have missed the point more if they'd actively tried. Whereas the rewind allowed you to correct mistakes as they happened, never breaking flow and allowing for quick resuming of gameplay should you misstep, the new system drags you back to the beginning of the section and forces you to do what you just did again. Considering that some sections can be very challenging to finish, relying on a painfully unforgiving game engine, that "again" often becomes "again and again and again and again and again". In a game where instant death is this close at all times, this means that the pace of the game remains sluggish and dull.

Speaking of sluggish and dull, remember when you first powered up the largely-underrated PoP: Warrior Within and found that the awkward combat of PoP: Sands of Time had been replaced with a slick, fun and at-all-times badass system which flatters the player's every button press with sheer awesomeness? Me too. Unfortunately Ubisoft don't, and have instead put in place a hugely frustrating mess of a combat system which never fails to infuriate. Fighting in this game is entirely based on duels. Or rather, on quick-time events. You see, the block button in this game seems to be less about defense and more about holding your sword differently if you think it looks cooler. All the enemies have unblockable moves which they use with gleeful frequency, relying on the kind of reflex test which punish the player whenever possible. And since you don't have a health bar, whether you are hit by a blockable attack or block it will still merely result in slight knock-back, all in all making you wonder why they bothered with blocking at all when they could have been dealing with the animation issues. The Prince is robbed of all his agility and speed during these fights, choosing instead to either plod around like a retarded tortoise or utilise an evading system which doesn't actually evade attacks.

To top it off, all enemies, including horribly overused bosses, initially use the same tactics and to an extent the same moves, resulting in total monotony. When one boss started to use a DIFFERENT TACTIC, where they'd go into a stance where only one type of attack is effective, I almost cheered. Then they all started using it. And it would have become dull too, until they changed the one-attack to the Elika attack. You see, Elika is also used in combat by lobbing her at the enemy, or at least can be. I never did if I could avoid it. The attack has a delay while she leaps onto your shoulders, and this should, for the sake of balance, be okay, were she a ranged weapon, as a launched attack bloody well should be. She's not; in fact despite being able to fly, she is incredibly fussy about how far away you have to be from the enemy to use her. This means that that delay, when used in a close-range attack, makes her damn near useless. To top it all off, she can be attacked while attacking, which disables her for a while (read: about fifteen seconds, more if you're too far away, and this feature retains the truly mystifying definition of "too far away"). In a boss fight where this is a compulsory attack, the term "dick move" feels somewhat inadequate.

And the motivation for enduring this crap should be the story. The generic, predictable story; evil force spreads across land, generic grizzled badass takes it upon himself to somehow stop it. Even the "twist" is about as unexpected as gravity. The characters are terrible; Elika in particular is utterly schizophrenic; bitchy (possibly meant to be seen as a strong female character, which reveals so much about Ubisoft's idea of independant women) at first, then without warning flirty and vulnerable is a way so shoehorned in for the sake of romance that it's painful. The prince himself is best described as an utter dick, without the redeeming qualities of the equally arrogant original prince. The bosses are the only ones with character, character which remains agonizingly unexplored. The voice acting is jarringly done by none-more-yank americans, something which blighted Assassin's Creed despite only one character possessing it; here they ALL do, which, when combined with the horrible performances and terrible writing, throws you out of the experience every time a character opens his or her mouth.

I appreciate that I've compared this too much to the old games - it's still bad on its own merits - but it is very obviously trying to be PoP: Sands of Time. The "corruption" takes the place of the Sands, the visuals try to be like it, and Elika is like a completely unlikeable Farah. They even give you unlockable skins to make the main characters resemble SoT Prince and Farah, which felt a little like demanding that a new girlfriend gets the same haircut and clothes as your ex. They're claiming to have moved away from the originals, but don't have the guts to follow through with it.

This is a bad game. Not really bad, but below average in a way that a big-budget game has no right to be.

Defeater - Lost Ground EP

2010-04-06T00:04:00.005+01:00

Christ, any hardcore reviews I post on here are going to be fucking predictable. Last December I posted how Dead Swans' last release is the best UK hardcore album ever, as well as how that's not much of a statement. You see, I can count the notable UK hardcore bands on fingers alone, and I'd be hard pushed to use more than one hand. Fuck, the only reason Public Disturbance are notable is because two of their members would go on to be in Lostprophets. The UK has practically no hardcore punk lineage - sure, bands like The Ruts provided inspiration to the liked of Black Flag and Minor Threat, but there's no real trace of the sound that would go on to define American punk for years. So let's make a bigger statement: the best US hardcore band of the last ten years is Defeater.

Now, given my long-standing love-in with This Is Hell, those words seem weird to me, but I've given it a lot of thought, and honestly, fuck This Is Hell. Fuck The Hope Conspiracy. Again, fucking blasphemy. It feels good. Let's do this again. Fuck Comeback Kid.

Wait. Stop.

No. Fuck Comeback Kid. Comeback Kid are great, but Defeater? Defeater are never going to be remembered as one of the great alternative bands ever, but they will be better than nine out of ten of them. Defeater don't have promise, because having promise implies that Defeater are not quite there yet. Well I fucking well hope they are, because the other bands in the USHC scene deserve at least a little bit of a chance to catch up.

The thing which sets Defeater apart are - and once again, I feel bad for bringing something as um-music-related up - the lyrics. You see, Defeater are storytellers. Their albums are concept albums, but not in the traditional '70s arena rock sense. Hardcore lyrics have always told stories - and make no mistake, the tales in Defeater's work may not be their stories, but they are someone's. Lost Ground tells of an African American man who, in memory of a mother who died at 42 and a father who was a soldier, joins up to the army to fight in World War II. He is wounded, and his friends all killed. Wracked with survivor's guilt, he returns hope to a world with no place for him. He becomes destitute and alcoholic, and dies alone. Every lyric is heartbreaking, every line is a tragedy in and of itself - the tale will stay with you. If any vocal mode was created to get across the anger, dejection, sorrow and injustice of such a tragic story, it's the roar of a hardcore vocalist.

And the emotion that this story lends the band shows. The real skill of the lyrics is in the details; the parallel drawn between the patriarchal machismo of traditional Americana and patriotism with the harsh reality of war that American culture tries so hard to hide is the order of the day for the first few songs, with the rest linking the contrast between the American military ideal - the soldier fighting heroically for his country - with the American military reality - lower-class young men wounded and traumatised or worse, crippled physically and emotionally for life, their lives ending destitute. Defeater's unique efforts in their lyric writing give their songs meaning beyond being mosh fodder, but make them the ones who tell the tales that need to be told, even if people don't want to hear them.

But beyond the vocals, Defeater excel equally. There are about four different drumbeats in hardcore which everyone uses, so listening to them can become wearing, but holy shit Defeater's drummer actually does new things with hardcore drums. The guitars, likewise, display musical range and dynamicism which far outstrips every one of Defeater's contemporaries. There is light and shade in their music, there are harsh, brutal pummelings that segue out of tense, muted and stunningly musically dynamic rest sections and back in again. The riffs constantly have a rough, vicious beauty to them, where the heartbreaking melodies of the guitars are born from violent, distorted riffing and the thunderous crashing drums. The bass is superlative, providing a grounded, central groove over which every other element of the music is overlaid. And what's more, the music tells the story too. The first track "The Red, White and Blues matches the protagonist's fear and inner tension with hyperactive hardcore at its best, and contrasts it with the simpler, more emotive sections which revolve around his memories of his mother and his idolisation of the father he has to hear about from his mom. on the final track, the story of the protagonist's last days of life spent busking on the streets, blues solos embelish the tale, evoking the frustration and sorrow of the African American community which drove them to create the genre, and a painful image of an old black beggar playing these solos on an ancient acoustic guitar on the streets of New York City. This is how you write music - and Defeater are operating on an entirely different intellectual level to their contemporaries.

Honestly, I don't think it's too late to call it. This is better than Anaal Nathrakh's In the Constellation of the Black Widow. This poky little EP from a band no-one's really heard of was and is the best record of 2009. This was and is the best hardcore record of the last ten years. Defeater are never going to get the praise they deserve, so they're going to have to settle for this; their Lost Ground EP is my favourite hardcore release ever.

Winds of Plague - Decimate The Weak

2010-04-06T00:01:00.007+01:00

I don't even know why I review metalcore and deathcore anymore. I'm probably never going to review Architects, so essentially anything else in metalcore is shadows and dust, signifying nothing except that Sturgeon's Law might finally be applicable to metal, but fuck it, there must be some bands out there who can do the genre right - As I Lay Dying's template defining, Between the Buried and Me's utter fucking lunacy, Devil Sold His Soul's damn-near-everything.

Deathcore, similarly, has some bands which actually stick by the very simple starting template and do it well, but they're all from the period where deathcore was only just starting, since every band made since consists almost entirely of creatively dead scene kids. You want a checklist of potentially good deathcore? Here we go. Did they form in 2006 or earlier? [ ] Do they routinely wear merch from "proper" death metal bands? [ ] Do they actually sound like they've been influenced by first-wave metalcore and death metal, as opposed to second-wave metalcore and other deathcore bands? [ ] Do they, god forbid, actually introduce an innovative element? [ ] And all of these boxes are ticked by Winds of Plague. Perhaps Decimate the Weak will interest me.

"Decimate" is one of those words which is very rarely used correctly, like "disinterested" (which means "unbiased" or "without vested interest") or "crescendo" (It's the BUILD UP PEOPLE, NOT THE CLIMAX ITSELF). It's like how people who want to seem more cultured than they are think that "star-crossed lovers" means something other than "utterly doomed, totally fucked-by-fate lovers". Basically everyone takes it to mean "Destroy", "maim" or "obliterate", but what it actually means - and I've only ever seen Doctor Who use it correctly - is "to destroy one tenth of something". This is ironic for me, because it was only during the first tenth of this album that I thought I might like it, because up to that point, it was actually pretty good. Forget deathcore, this is symphonic, epic metalcore. The prominent keyboards (handled MUCH better than Abigail Williams' keyboard sections) built a bombastic atmosphere counterbalanced by the midrange screams of...ugh...Johnny Plague. The guitars break from metalcore convention by actually having leads and solos. Take note metalcore kiddies; leads and solos are AWESOME. USE THEM. If you're not talented enough to do so, you're in the wrong game. The melodic work is great, with the instruments playing off of one another ease, working in perfectly locked harmony. And, my god, how refreshing is it to hear a metalcore band who doesn't sound exactly like At The Gates? The first proper song reaches the quarter mark, and the song softens, and then stops.

Then a pig-squeal adorned breakdown begins.

And we were doing so well.

If I remember correctly, when I first heard that bit I actually shouted "WHAT THE FUCK?" at my computer screen. Seriously, I've never heard such an out of place, unneeded breakdown EVER. I don't mind breakdowns, but I didn't want the song I liked to stop like that, let alone turn into the song it now was.

The rest of the album was soured for me. This band is superb when it's doing its power-metalcore thing, and its integration of keyboards into their sound is superb - and indeed, exactly how it should be done. It is, however, far too eager to jump at the opportunity to abandon that for the sake of doing what all their contemporaries are doing - dull breakdowns. Sometimes, and I have to stress sometimes, the keyboards save the breakdowns from utter monotony, which is a credit to how good they are, but they're the only thing doing anything interesting on this album.

That's not to say that the other elements are bad. The guitars are fantastic when they're not content to just chug, and have some superb riffs and leads in there. The opening riff of "Decimate the Weak" (the song) is almost Nile-esque. But they're dull! The drums are exemplary deathcore drumming, but that's part of the problem - they're an utterly standard example of deathcore drumming. They're dull! And the bass? I'm amazed they even have a bassist. I actually want to hear a remaster of this were the bass guitar is removed. I doubt anyone would ever be able to tell. I wish more people would have the guts Pig Destroyer do and just get rid of a bassist if you're not going to use one.

This is by no means terrible - I've heard worse deathcore. There are some REALLY good parts here, but their willingness to abandon those parts is just frustrating, and that frustration with them overshadows their good elements. Pick it up if you have the patience I don't and you could have a lot of fun with this album - but I can't do any more pig squeals and chugging.

Comic review: Phonogram/Suburban Glamour

2010-03-07T23:36:00.001Z

On with my journey to experiment with reviews of non-music mediums. It may not be more fun for you, but it is for me, so it's going to keep happening. Enjoy!

Okay, so something I've been getting back into these days is comics. I was never really out of the comic-buying habit, what with my warped and depraved love of Hellblazer and the fact that I re-read Watchmen every few months, but this wave of comic-love has brought my enjoyment of the medium up to an all-time high. I'm reading Batman from 1986 back up to present day, because if there's one thing I know about current writer Grant Morrison, it's that if I don't know every twist and turn the narrative has taken since the Crisis on Infinite Earths he'll bend my comprehension of the plot over a rail and show me just how welcome I am in his continuity porn kingdom. I've also gotten kind of into independent comics, which all started with the Scott Pilgrim series, the standard for indie comics. Long story short, it's utterly brilliant and it's led me up an avenue of non-traditional comics. And this had me end up with Phonogram.

Now, I run a blog in which I discuss videogames and horror movies and complain about music, so it's safe to say that I am inescapably awesome. However, this was not always the case. In my first few years of secondary school, my friends and I would hang out in the library, chatting, relaxing, and reading Official Playstation 2 Magazine, which - for some reason - the library had a subscription to. Pretty much the only thing that stuck with me of this magazine was the cartoons in the back, Save Point, which where brilliant. It was wonderfully written, illustrated in a style I always admired, and always containing at least one hot punk girl, which probably explains my long-running kink for alt-chicks. Fast-forward four or five years, and I've long since stopped buying OP2M, and though my friends and I still hang out in the library a lot, we're all infinitely prettier. My absolute writing hero is a man called Kieron Gillen, long time contributor to PC Gamer, creator of superb PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun and, it just so happens, sometimes crazy-talented comic book writer. As I got more into comics, I had a look at his.

One series stood out amongst his contributions to Marvel Comics which, as an avowed DC, I was never going to read. It was called Phonogram, published by Image Comics with an illustrator called Jamie McKelvie, based around the idea of music and magic being analogous - you can see why it would appeal to me. The first issue of the first volume is available online, and, curious, I had a read. It was sublime: wonderfully written, illustrated in a warmly familiar style and containing just the right amount of hot punk girls. I'd like to say that realisation slowly dawned upon me, but being kind of a slow fuck at times, I only realised having poked around Gillen's website and explicitly being told; this duo was the exact same one who made Save Point, the comic strip I remembered after all these years. I'd grown up with Phonogram. I just hadn't realised it.

An aside - Image Comics, for those of you not in the know (I'm assuming all of you) was formed in the early 90s by, amongst others, an illustrator called Todd MacFarlane. With its flagship title, Spawn, it spearheaded the grim 'n' gritty revolution of that decade, where the industry as a whole tried as hard as possible to appeal to teen boys. Everything was EXTREME and EDGY and TOTALLY RADICAL without even pretence to emotional or thematic depth. Fuck, DC even made a whole new imprint, Vertigo, just so people like Brian Azzarello, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman didn't get any intelligence in the SUPER AWESOME image the main imprint was working so hard to cultivate. This decade is the reason no-one buys comics anymore. Good stuff WAS made in this era - the Knightfall saga of the Batman mythos got me into comics, and of course most of The Sandman was made here, but for the most part, this was a hyping up and dumbing down of a medium which still hasn't commercially recovered, even though artistically it's pretty much back on par. Image Comics have been an in-joke amongst comic fans entirely for this era, synonymous with vacuous insubstantiality. So you see why it's weird to have such a smart, culturally aware series on here.

The first volume of Phonogram, Rue Britannia, introduces us to our first Phonomancer, David Kohl. A charismatic, commanding vagabond, he makes music his power, using it for whatever he wants. He's a phonomancer - a magician who draws power from songs. Put on a mission from the Feminine Principle, he discovers that events of the past are changing, altering the future, and it all revolves around the long-dead Britannia, the spirit of Britpop. The actual text itself is a sprawling, Hellblazer-esque journey through Britain's musical landscape, constantly writhing with allusion and metaphor, with Kohl trying to stop what is happening to Britannia before his musical identity, rooted in the life and death of Britpop, disappears completely, taking with it his phonomancy.

Of course, the more interesting element is the subtext - the function of every part of this magical side is analogous to the way music affects people. A "phantom" of a past era can be revisited by getting suited and booted in the style, turning on era-music, and tuning out, slipping into memories of the time. Musical revivals become literal revivals of dead genre deities, attempting to rewrite history to give old music new legs, allowing nostalgia to make people young again. This is music and magic as metaphysics, with the effects of music on the mind changing the world around it. Gillen writes in a manner that intertwines these two layers inextricably, creating a narrative which requires full comprehension of both. No other comic, no matter how sophisticated, has managed this synthesis quite this well. The constant referencing of real-life bands (to the point where a glossary is needed, and supplied with biting commentary from the creators themselves) creates a silent soundtrack for the comic, weaving constant strands of allusion through lyrical themes, contextual cues and recurring references. The idea of music-as-magic is explored on the magic side perfectly.

The second volume, The Singles Club, changes this tack entirely. Set over a single night at an indie club, we're introduced to a near-entirely new cast (David Kohl, his femme fatale friend, and his Chas Chandler copy, Kid-With-Knife, return) and the events of the evening examine them as characters, again, using music as an interface for strange goings on. The "magic" is more casual here - not even explicitly magical, even - but the point here is on the relationships between people and the music they love. Each issue tells the night's story from a different perspective, and this is utilised wonderfully. The best use of this? A single line, brutally cruel in the first issue, heartbreaking in the next. You’ll see what I mean.

The artwork is astonishing. The first volume is black and white, but the stunning art of Jamie McKelvie brings it to life nonetheless. It hangs out on the iconic corner of the Scott McCloud realistic-artistic-iconic triangle, and this suits it perfectly. The lack of painstaking detail allows the crisp, stripped-down art style to express astonishing emotion – Kieron Gillen may be the writer, but Jamie McKelvie can tell stories without a single word. The characters are so expressive and so alive with feeling and action that even in the second volume, where a character may only feature in two or three issues, they have such astonishingly deep characterisation that it's all the time they need. The character design is brilliant too, making each character unique while still making them seem like real people. The events of the night give insight into the workings of their minds which display a rich understanding of why people love music, and every element of the comics production, be it the writing, the art or the superlative colouring (only The Singles Club is in colour) converges on this point. Phonogram is a truly brilliant comic.

Once I had read this (I have still yet to read the final chapter of The Singles Club) I found that McKelvie had written and drawn his own comic, Suburban Glamour. Naturally, I had to give it a read. The verdict? Less brilliant. The story revolves around a seventeen year-old rock chick called Astrid, who's quickly outgrowing her midlands hometown. As her discontent with her hometown grows, her childhood friends reappear. They bring with them a supernatural world, and a conflict to which Astrid is connected. If anything, this comic is a stunningly well done insight into the teenage mind, which makes it slightly irrelevant to me, who, being a teenager, can do that by hanging out with my friends for a half hour, but it's brilliantly portrayed. Every character is relatable, every element of the "normal" situations is familiar, and the spirit of both modern teens and adolescence in general is captured perfectly.

Unfortunately, the supernatural side of it, and the "main" story this brings, is much less well-developed, vastly less intelligent than the rest of the story warrants, and a total injustice to the world it sets up. It fits the idea of the story, sure, but the when the subtext and the text aren't just interwoven, but are the same thing, something's gone wrong. The plot ends up ending without any real climax, but merely trundling along like a filler strip in a longer-running comic before simply stopping without actually having gone anywhere (only having 4 issues is no excuse considering that The Dark Knight Returns had the same amount of space and helped revolutionise comics). This may be intentional, given the subject matter, but the comic feels too small, like the seeds of something much bigger have been planted, but haven't grown, and end without any real revelation or point gotten across. The art and design of the comic is as gorgeous as ever, but it lacks the tight direction that Gillen's scripts gave Phonogram, and as such lacks much of the weight it carried before. All this said, it was okay purely for the bits in-between the main story arc, which will be both relatable to teens and insightful to adults. Also, Astrid is added to my list of alt-chick comic book crushes along with Death from The Sandman and Nico Minoru of Runaways. Go her.

Phonogram's intelligent, rich narrative and superlative presentation makes it possibly my favourite comic in recent years, and makes both volumes an essential read to any comic fans. Suburban Glamour was equally sharp in its appearance, but lacks both the substance and the simple fun to match up to it. Still, McKelvie can be forgiven seeing how awesome he is as an artist, and Gillen remains on the pedestal I've put him on over the years.

Annotations of an Autopsy - II: The Reign of Darkness

2010-02-17T00:35:00.006Z

If anyone asked me for advice on how to write reviews, my first action would be to ask them why the fucking hell they were asking me, a nobody with a free blog who peddles mostly self-depreciating jokes about his own misanthropy, but assuming they fanned my ego the necessary amount, I'd tell them "If you review something that you've already made your mind up on, your review is going to suck and stay sucky." This is why the vast majority of people who review on Encyclopaedia Metallum are such utter fuckscoffs - they knew what they were going to say about Parkway Burns The Prada-wearing Prom Queen or whatever other generic metalcore band, or about Frostbitten Grimkvlt and their black metal buddies before they started writing - something largely along the lines of "Booo, they're just like all the other metalcore bands I hate!" and "Yay, they're just like all the other black metal bands I love!" respectively.

This is why I don't review death metal. You see, I fucking love death metal, and the fact is that the template for mainstream death metal is so vividly refined that it's hard to make it sound anything other than good, though God only knows some bands have tried. I could write a review for the new Immolation and the new Nile, and they'd both read similarly - these are bands I already love, doing what they do best. There's no actual development here, and that's okay because what they do, they take pretty much to its inevitable conclusion. So lets see a death metal band that I DO have something new to talk about.

My favourite gig I ever went to was in a tiny venue in Brighton, attended by about 40 people, where me and a few of my friends saw three of the rising stars of British extreme metal - Viatrophy (R.I.P), Trigger the Bloodshed, and Annotations of an Autopsy. To call this gig "intimate" was an understatement - the front row of the crowd was ME. I actually ended up apologising to the bands on behalf of Sussex for such a shitty turnout because I felt kind of bad for them. However it did rule. The bands didn't half-ass it at all, and, upon meeting them, it turned out they were all lovely guys. I'm saying this as, I suppose, some kind of wierd full disclosure things, because I want you to know that I already liked Annotations of an Autopsy. A friend and I have matching t-shirts we got when we pre-ordered our copies of their debut. However, while what they were doing before - sludgy slam-influenced deathcore, which figured out that the only way to stop breakdowns interrupting the pace of the song was to keep the song at a low tempo anyway - was all very well and good, their sudden change in a traditional death metal direction shouldn't come as a surprise - not least because given that Job For A Cowboy, Trigger the Bloodshed, The Faceless and Through the Eyes of the Dead have all made the same move, you'd have to be pretty slow on the uptake not to at least weigh up the odds. One unfortunate symptom of this is the loss of their awesome ultra-distorted logo in favour of one that looks like it was potato-printed, and keep in mind that these motherfuckers brought this kind of logo back in. An upside is the involvement of ERIK FUCKING RUTAN as the mixer, who has quickly become the no. 1 name in death metal production, overtaking...well, Tue Masden or Colin Richardson, I guess, though there hasn't really been a decent big-name DM producer since Scott Burns quit, but whatever.

Anyway, the new sound is quite something. Considering the sludge influence they one had, it's not surprising that AoaA's tempos on this album, II: The Reign of Darkness, are very varied, and this is something that they're very good at - they can even keep tempo down while playing quickly, which is saying something. This is mostly thanks to superlative drummer Lyn Jeffs, who has buggered off to not-nearly-as-good slamcore band Ingested since this came out, whose drumming is the driving force behind AoaA's music. He keeps the pace of the songs reined in with force, and the whole CD hinges on his performance. Fortunately, he's awesome. Blasts are never overused, fills gel seamlessly with the standard rhythm-keeping beats, and his double-bass drumming is superb - damn near mechanical in its accuracy, though the drums themselves sound clicky enough to betray the use of triggers, which detracts from his man-points somewhat. This is a guy who knows exactly how his bands need his drumming to sound, and he pulls it off fantastically.

The guitars are also great. They're usually going fast, even during slow sections, and give a way a great deal of technical ability, especially during the tastefully used soloing sections. The riffs themselves have a superb sense of melody, never sinking to the death metal cop out of falling back on atonality. They always feel like they're developing, and changing the course of every song. There is a strong atmospheric feel to this album as well, which comes from the melodic elements and gives the album an intense character. It's the same doomy feel as their debut Before the Throne of Infection had, but without the obvious doom influence of that record, and it works very well. The breakdowns are much less metalcore-inspired this time round, but every so often falling back into the old reliance on the bass drop, which they still at least do better than a lot of bands. The vocals are higher and less gurgled than before, which is to say that they're now as low and gurgled as a regular death metal vocalist, and there's no trace of the unremarkable slam death rumble that vocalist Steve Regan adopted the first time round.

All this said, Annotations of an Autopsy never have a defining moment here, a particular riff or section which captures the imagination - there's not really a need, since their signature song, Sludge City, has more of this than most bands manage in a career. There is one thing to be said for deathcore that death metal finds much harder to do - memorable moments, like a decent chorus or breakdown. There are moments on this album which stand out, but nothing that grabs you and refuses to let go. For all its re-imagined sophistication, AoaA had, in their dramatic, slow riffs, unparalelled use of gang vocals and sludgy breakdowns, real punch-the-air moments which were unequivocably AoaA moments which defined them and placed them in the hearts of extreme metal fans. They come close - the solo in opener In Snakes I Bathe is the kind of solo they did so well on the last album's Years of Disgust. But no-one remembers the solo in Years of Disgust. They remember the big fuckoff breakdown after it, and I can't help but think that this album is lacking in that kind of memorability.

Nonetheless, while it won't set the world on fire, it is a great contemporary death metal release from a band who show a lot of promise when they're not aching with their desire to be another band. At times, that band takes the helm, and it's them you'll want to listen to.

The Agonist - Once Only Imagined

2010-01-30T23:09:00.002Z

Right, this is a big review for me. For too long, this has been easy - ripping new arseholes in bands that desparately need one to get rid of all the shit piling up in their albums or showering with praise anything which can make me call them "the Opeth of - ". Which is why this review is where everything before has been heading and everything after will come from. I'd call it my Crisis On Infinite Earths if I thought you were geeky enough to understand what they hell I was talking about. The question is simple: What happens when I WANT to like a crappy album?

First off, let me explain this dilema by saying some things about myself. I'm Alex. I live in Eastbourne, a town in the south of England. I'm seventeen. And I LOVE alt girls. Essentially I go for the "pretty" aesthetic in girls, but a sexy rock chick would make me trample cute geek girls by the dozen if they got in the way. You know, the type with dyed black hair and snakebite piercings and tattoo sleeves that finish on the chest. The kind of girl that Suicide Girls and Burning Angel practically subsidise the production of. And it's not like in metal we're left wanting for these lovely ladies - between Maria Brink and Marta Pedersen we're pretty much covered. However, a bunch of my friends and I were round my friend Sam's house flicking between all of the two rock tv stations the UK has to offer when we saw a music video featuring a distictly female singer. Having missed the first few seconds of the video, we didn't know who it was, and it was fairly badly lit, so we couldn't really see her, but fellow sad teen Joey and I fucking insisted on watching it through to the end because five words were going through our heads: "Google Image, safe search off". What followed was five or so minutes of distinctly average metalcore, at the end of which we found that the band was called The Agonist, though admittedly, the whining of everyone in the room who wasn't a straight male was compensated for by the fact that it just so happens that the singer of the band was literally my perfect woman. Her name is Alissa White-Gluz. LOOK AT HER.

LOOK

HER

Jesus fucking Christ, it doesn't even matter of you're a woman or a gay guy, there must be SOMETHING there that you can at least appreciate. I mean, seriously, I don't know any graceful or poetic way to put what I feel here, so I'm just going to tell you that the things I would do to this woman would get us both hanged in Idaho. And she's a pretty good vocalist too! Her growls are kind of a halfway point between Angela Gossow and the guy from Heaven Shall Burn and she has a genuinely good singing voice! She seems pretty smart too - her lyrics are socio-political stuff advocating animal rights and criticising the right wingers! And look at the back of her hand in the first picture! That's an X! She's straight-edge! So am I! Most of you will never have any idea how fucking sexy that makes her to the rest of us! It's a good thing I'm so fucking horrible with women, because I'm not sure that a real human could match this.

And yet the album, Once Only Imagined, is kind of lame.

I'll start at the beginning. There's an intro which I suspect they were cheap enough to just distort one of the pre-existing songs to make, before it goes into the first song, titled "Rise and Fall". Yes, this is metalcore so generic you've even heard the song titles before. The metalcore type of choice is American melodeath-inspired first-wave, and you can practically hear the disk straining to turn into an All That Remains album. They do some interesting things with time signatures, and then it goes into the most standard, drop-D verse-clean chorus-breakdown combo I've ever heard. You've heard this all before, people. It's less safe and overcommercialised than, say, The Devil Wears Prada or August Burns Red, and not as breakdown orientated as metalcore has become ever since the melodeath influence was scrapped in favour of chugging, but it's all stuff I've heard done as well before. Have you ever listened to As I Lay Dying or All That Remains? Well, add a heaping helping of Heaven Shall Burn and insert singing sections that, again, are actually pretty good, and you have this. Everything is ticked on the checklist, and in its correct place, with not an interesting new element added. But, hey, evolution is as good as revolution, so let's adjust our expectations and move on.

The vocals themselves are fairly standard. There's no doubt that Alissa can growl, but The Agonist is a real band and they do have a record contract, and she's their vocalist, so if that's a fucking achievement then the bar's dropped lower than I'd realised. Her singing itself is tuneful and quite nice, but it's very nasal and just a tad overused, so it isn't as much of a pleasant change when it is present. It seems to me to be more of an issue of songwriting than of the performance itself, but I'm not sure whether that's the case or that I'm just worried that actual criticism will destroy whatever chance I had of being invited to her birthday party.

The guitars display some good riffs and occasionally a trill or little flourish that promises a surprising degree of technical ability, but overall they're too content to languish in mediocrity, chugging away in palm-muted open chords or strumming powerchords to back Alissa's clean vocals. The drums are so mind-bogglingly perfuctory it's untrue. Seriously, well-done drums are something I really enjoy, and there was no moment on this album where they attracted my attention. It's just so frustrating to hear a band unable to take the songwriting risks they can obviously pull off for the sake of fear or laziness.

All that said, it's still well done. The whole package comes together as something hampered by inexperienced, unambitious and unimpressive songwriting, but the actual performances have value in and of themselves in that they actually have promise. As it is, this CD being their debut, it's still a worthy pick-up for metalcore fans.

Wait. Stop. No. It's happened. It's fucking happened. I actually described the premise for this review to a friend by asking "What's the one thing that can convice a teenage boy to abandon professionalism, journalistic integrity, personal safety...?" and he instantly replied "Boobs". That's what happened. Well I'm no longer going to pretend that this is functional as an album. Every fucking metalcore album released from Massachausets from 2000 to 2006 does this better. The harmonised leads, the breakdowns, the harsh-vocal-verse, clean-vocal-chorus structure, it's the same shit you've heard a thousand times unless you've been living under a rock or just have the attention span of a retarded goldfish. Listen to Shadows Fall while watching a Burning Angel porno and you've got everything this album could possibly offer you done pretty much as well.

p.s. It makes me laugh that this band is signed to Century Media who, judging from their signing of In This Moment, Iwresteledabearonce, Lacuna Coil, Arch Enemy and Winds of Plague, are trying to get as many female-containing metal bands as possible, probably so they can throw a party just so the members of Turisas can lose their virginities.

p.p.s Holy shit, The Agonist's follow up, Lullabies of a Dormant Mind is actually really good. It's experimental, adventurous and dramatic, and every performance has improved. It does new things with metalcore, combining it with jazz, classical, and symphonic metal, adding progressive elements and occasionally breaking out into wonderfully technical riffage. It's better written, it's better done, it's pretty much everything I hoped this album would be, though Alissa's warbling still needs to be reined in more. Nonetheless, it's high-quality enough that I have an excuse to watch their music videos over and over again in slow motion.

A film review - Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon

2010-01-20T23:16:00.001Z

I'm very, very glad that I'm too young to have been into horror movies during the 90's self-aware horror wave headed up by Scream and fortunately culled in the form of Freddy vs. Jason. The idea was pretty similar to the recent wave of pseudo-realistic zombie fiction a la The Zombie Survival Guide, where the humour comes from the assumption that we're in on all the in-jokes, without wanting any of the genuine enjoyment that the more sincere genre films inspire. They simply weren't pitching to horror fans, but to people who've read about horror tropes somewhere. They were pitching to those who like the ironic.

And let me get this straight - I FUCKING HATE THE USE OF IRONIC PSEUDO-PARODY. I genuinely like the main riff of Blur's Song #2, and the excessive, overdistorted heaviness, even though it's a pisstake of the grunge scene. Does that make me dumber than the people who listen to it just to feel better than people who actually own a Nirvana CD? Honestly, I couldn't care less, I'm having much more fun with that song than that Pitchfork-reading bastard is, so fuck him.

I mean, I get why a media property would do it's thing in that really self-aware way, because it means that if they fuck up they didn't really fail, it was all just part of the joke, but it also means that it can't really be genuinely enjoyed, because if you do you shouldn't have been watching it to start with. In something where the appeal is as embarassingly juvenile as in horror, this essentially makes your initial market the butt of the joke in hopes of winning over a periphery demographic of hipster fucks. Fortunately, Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon knows its market much better.

Initially billed as a mockumentary of an aspiring slasher villain's preparation for his big first-slaughter night, the film follows a student journalism team documenting the rise of everyday guy, magnificent bastard and wannabe serial killer Leslie Vernon - his home, his psychological mindgames with the lampshadingly generic virginal "survivor girl" and his prepataion for the upcomic killing spree. It's presented in the typical tongue-in-cheek mode we've seen since Spinal Tap, and it has a lot of fun, from certain laugh-out-loud one-liners to the knowing, head-nodding amusement of acknowledging of all the old cliches, like its on a big checklist. The fun a roomful of horror moguls will have with the first and second acts of this film is worth the price alone. There's even a superb line in Leslie explaining the behind-the-scenes action, and the tricks of the trade.

And in the third act, all this is traded in for a total change of pace that both subverts classic slasher features and plays them gleefully straight. This section is for the horror fans - those of us that want to laugh at the over-the-top gore, but still want over-the-top-gore, who want the sex scene to be let to go on a little bit longer than necessary, but also find the lampshade-hanging hilarious. It makes fun of all the slasher stuff, but it also revels in it; it repsects that yes, this stuff is absurd, but it's exploitation, it's enjoyable, it's just damn fun, like when Shaun of the Dead spent its last twenty minutes going totally for broke with absolute sincerity, or how Spinal Tap's songs are actually kind of cool, as well as being spot-on parodies of 70's rock. The movie section of this film rules in the same way that, for a split second, when Jason freezes that woman's head and smashes it on the work top, Jason X was actually worth watching because for a moment it replaced its smirk with a genuine grin of glee. There's even a twist I didn't see coming! (and yes, it's very depressing that that's a big deal when I'm seventeen)

Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon is not serious, but it's totally committed to being both so tongue-in-cheek as to give dental deformation and utterly committed to creating something totally, genuinely, fist-pumpingly awesome. It's not winking at everyone else in the cinema while you eke genuine fun out of what's on screen, it's slasher horror by numbers and, it fucking wallows in it, as opposed to Scream's merely dipping its toes in for the sake of inclusion, like in the end it would have met all its goals was the horror movie riffing replaced with, I dunno, "inspirational" sports movies. If you're a horror fan, and you know a whole bunch of other horror fans, the night in this movie will give you is worth the RRP, let alone the ridicuous mark-down that Amazon is currently asking for. BUY IT.

Bleed From Within - Humanity, and the UK metalcore scene

2010-01-11T19:57:00.001Z

Okay, before the review proper begins, I'd like to quickly shed the casual readers: this band sounds like The Black Dahlia Murder with Bring Me The Horizon breakdowns in it. Now, a certain percentage of you will be tasting vomit in the back of your throat and around the cracks in your teeth. You can go now. You're excused. From that one sentence, a certain subset of you now know you'll hate this album, and you don't need to know any more. Go listen to the new Dark Funeral, it's superb.

Right. Now I was going to make a giant end-of-2009 review blow-out of dozens of mini reviews - not, you understand, an "end of decade" list, though everyone's talking about this decade like it's about to end and as such, I've been being as utterly insufferable as possible in pointing out that since there was no Year 0, the decade finishes at the end of 2010 and the new one begins in 2011 (This also means you all celebrated the beginning of the 21st Century in the WRONG FUCKING YEAR, RETARDS) - containing a paragraph on every major release of the year and retrospectives on previous reviews. However, this is taking fucking ages, and while I may just finish it someday, probably by 2011, I realised around about the time I was grasping for an excuse to not finish it, that it was missing the point of this blog. I'm not one for just saying good things about the latest well known releases - let's be honest, you already know how you feel about Crack The Skye, so the last thing you need is my opinion taking up space in your empty little minds - but for ripping the shit out of bad albums you've heard of and praising great albums you probably should have heard of. The enormo-review may one day surface, but screw it, a new year just means a slightly different date, so out with the hysteria and on with some scene-setting.

If we have anything to thank metalcore and deathcore for - besides Winds of Plague bringing us all the exquisite Alana Potocnik, who continues the perpexing trend of every woman in metal being at least a "would-after-a-beer-or-two", to our attention - it's that it's gone a long way towards revitalising the UK metal scene. Let's be honest guys, the period of time between the creation of grindcore and the rise to prominence of Bullet For My Valentine was a fallow period for UK alternative music - the country that once birthed Iron Maiden, Carcass and - depressingly - Venom, had to sit and watch as America and Mainland Europe got thrash, death metal, black metal, melodeath and first-wave metalcore. Now, thanks to Bullet, Bring Me The Horizon and Architects, we're back competing on the world stage, and the underground is rife with young, hungry bands snapping at the heels of the American lot - at this point, the european scene might as well not exist in the world of modern metal - in the fields of metalcore and deathcore.

Of course, metalcore has yet to convince one half of the traditional metal community that it still is artistically relevant and the other that it ever was in the first place, and deathcore is still the unwanted child of the alternative music hick trailer, begging only for love as said community puts yet another cigarette out on it's face purely because it was closer than the ashtray, but in the UK, as far as the average young metal fan is concerned, metalcore was only invented four years ago, probably by Oli Sykes and those other guys that follow him around - yes, rest of world, whether we like it or not, Bring Me The Horizon are LITERALLY THAT VITAL TO THE CREATION OF THE NEW UK METAL SCENE - and as such, here, since we haven't had to put up with it for ten years like the US scene has, it's still fresh and interesting. Yes, there is something horribly wrong with a scene that champions Parkway Drive as fresh and interesting, but roll with it.

So of the up-and-coming bands that populate the UK scene, the majority are all coming from the same place - second-wave metalcore, as influenced by other second wave metalcore, so when Bleed from Within rose up in 2007 on the value of being excellently done...well...second-wave metalcore, it took...well...no-one by surprise.

That tale was much more inspiring in my head.

Anyway, what I loved about Bleed From Within was that they looked like a proper death metal band with a frontman who could be Mr. Sykes' twin, and brilliantly, this sums up the band perfectly. Singer Scott Kennedy gives high, back-of-throat howls and occasional full-throated roars. The guitars riff like every darkly melodic metal band since At The Gates, and the drums either blast or thud along at a thrash pace, occasionally stopping for the usual rent-a-breakdowns. You've heard this before, people, but the clincher is that it's not badly done at all. The innovation, complexity or quality of the riffs never really rise to a level which would earn them the kind of admiration that, say, Sylosis readily deserve, but the actual melody is fairly well composed and the influence of The Black Dahlia Murder actually helps them separate out from the crowd. And yes, in this case, "influence" is shorhand for "blind, pandering hero worship", but fuck it, when every other fucking band on your scene draws "influence" from a bunch of twatty As Blood Runs Black-aping fuckscoffs, drawing inspiration from a halfway decent band can be what gives a good band a great sound. Unfortunately, this still isn't a great album, or even a good one.

Okay, so considering "riffs written in the music classes of special schools" is the standard for guitar work in second-wave metalcore, BFW should probably be given some kind of medal for not just chugging through the entire album, but even so, beating a shitty standard has never been an impressive goal, doubly so when the last band in the British scene to play this kind of music and still manage this were, you guessed it, Bring Me The Horizon. The overarching musical pieces the songs represent are perfectly functional, but there's no real character here - the riffs are quickly-picked blocks of simple melody without inspiration, the drums just kind of happen. The instrumental performances don't really aspire to do more than the absolute minimum so, fittingly, they employ breakdowns by the bucketload. These are, admittedly, reasonably well done breakdowns, but as is the norm with the modern metal scene, they're overdone to the point of tedium, and for a musical section designed to inspire enthusiasm, this kind of misses the point. The songs themselves do the job, and don't really attempt more. I want to be able to say there's potential here, but honestly, I can't hear it. This is dull music at it's most dire.

There's a reason that Bring Me The Horizon have come up so many times in this review, and it's a reason we'd be remiss to forget - that prior to the avalanche of shite that was Suicide Season, they were really fucking good. Count Your Blessings can't be flawed for it's great riffs, varied vocals and reliable drums, and it's only real problem - the over-reliance on open-string breakdowns - is one that they at least did better than all the other bands for whom this is a problem. Humanity attempts to equal these elements, but it ultimately fails because whereas BMTH's musicianship is equaled by their passion, Bleed From Within simply play the kind of bland, uninspired metal of a band whose enthusiasm far outstrips their artistic vision.

Dead Swans - Sleepwalkers

2009-12-11T20:40:00.000Z

Thanks to my new metal mag of choice, Terrorizer, and I say "thanks" in the same way that a child says "thanks" to the grandma that made him a sweatshirt of industrial twine and razorblades for Christmas, I've become aware of the blog Metal Inquisition, which attempts to refine the medium of music snarkery to an art form, and at this point I'd like to say that I DEFINATELY HAD NEVER READ IT BEFORE THIS BLOG WAS STARTED. It's an entertaining read because beneath the complete contempt for justified opinions and constant gushing over obscure-to-unimportant '80s thrash, the entire blog is essentially a portrait of Sergeant D, the world's saddest man, his contempt for the world and triggered double kick drums a mere cover for his desire for people to value him. I have an image in my mind of a fat guy in a Devourment t-shirt hunched over his keyboard, tears streaming down his face as he types hatespeech with one hand, his other jammed down the front of his shorts as he sweatily masturbates to the MySpace photos of the fifteen year-old scene girls that fawn over BrokeNCYDE.

It suddenly occurred to me that this may well be me in twenty years time.

"No!" I said to myself, proudly holding my 50/50 good-bad ratio aloft like lion cubs in a Disney movie, "Cynicism has yet to take me! And also, no thanks, fifteen year-old girls!” I then spent a day in Brighton with a group of friends criticising everything they like, see and are. Maybe I was right the first time. Eventually one of them actually screamed at me, "Is there anything you like?!?" and confronted with the challenge that I am in fact incapable of feeling love, I actually had to think for a moment. I love webcomics, and gameboy music, and also my friends, I guess, but whatever. But yes, I'm a changed man, and I'd like to talk about something I love.

I have officially listened to "Thinking of You", the first track off Dead Swans' new album "Sleepwalkers" more times on my current iTunes library than any other song. I may well love it more than any other song on there. It is what Dead Swans are; a highly concentrated, utterly refined explosion of everything that makes hardcore great. Imagine the hyperactive hardcore punk offered up by This Is Hell combined with the intensity and brooding textural elements of The Hope Conspiracy. We're talking thoughtful, dissonant guitar soundscapes that burst into racing, soaring melody. We're talking vocals spat from the pit of the soul and roared at an imagined crowd screaming every word back. We're talking that crash-snare-crash-snare drum pattern that anywhere else would be oversimplified but in hardcore works because dammit the important thing is that they're hitting the drums really fucking hard because that means they care or something. Every hardcore trope they use, they play totally straight because if they didn't mean every second of it, it wouldn't be nearly as brilliant.

Anyway, if you could understand any part of that torrent of praise, it's that Dead Swans mean every note of the album, and considering that the last band I reviewed, I declared had no souls, this is an improvement. Yes, they just play very fast punk with a guy shouting over it, but how they do it is the sign of how superb they are. It helps that these guys have very personal lyrics, which lend the a huge amount of emotion to the performances - plus it's a great change from the usual hardcore thing of singing incessantly about HEART and PASSION and about how YOU'LL NEVER BRING US DOWN like they're hosting a fucking pep rally. Many years ago Ian MacKaye denounced the term "emotional hardcore" by pointing out that hardcore was always emotional. This was what he meant all along. Vocalist Nick Worthington possesses a superb hardcore shout packed with conviction and purpose, and the obligatory gang-vocal parts are natural and exhilarating, which is good because this album does what all the great hardcore albums do – it doesn’t prepare you for the live performance. This feels like a live performance. The captivating, energising power of this album carries the force of a real band, like the Brighton crew are actually trapped inside your speakers and that’s why they’re screaming. The guitars gracefully shift from sludgy ambient sections to fast, exhilarating riffs, and the dual guitar lines use dark, powerful harmonies to create a perfect atmosphere from start to finish. They also manage to avoid that weird obsession with oceanic and nautical imagery that most young UK bands are so into, which is nice.

"Sleepwalkers" is one of those albums that every genre has that doesn't do anything new, but does everything so well that it still seems like a novelty. It's certainly the best hardcore album any UK band has ever produced, but considering the UK hardcore scene is about three years old, that's not saying much, so let me make a bigger statement. Best hardcore release of the year. Oh, go on. Best hardcore release since This Is Hell's last one.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

P.S. I can also confirm, as of 18/12/09, that this band FUCKING RULES live. All the heart-wrenching emotion of the album is replaced with astonishing fury, and the impact of the crowd favourites whipped the crowd into a mad frenzy. A great show.

Abigail Williams - In The Shadow Of A Thousand Suns

2009-09-29T23:09:00.000+01:00

Looking back on my lack of regular output, my constant references to myself and other things you may or may not have heard me say, and the fact that the totality of my journalistic experience is a pokey little blog read by five people and taking up a perfectly good URL, I think it's safe to say that I'm not exactly professional. However, one must aim for higher standards, and I'd like to think that, at least, I'm more professional than to just give the following review:

Abigail Williams - In the Shadow of a Thousand Suns

KEYBOARDS! KEYBOARDS! MOTHERFUCKING KEYBOAAAAAAAAARRRRRDDDDDSSSSSS!

6/10

and call in an evening.

Abigail Williams started out as an interesting prospect - it was essentially a bunch of teen metalheads playing what they knew best; At-The-Gates-style melodeath, epic melodic black metal and the obligatory metalcore vibes. Indeed they did this pretty much to the point of farce; vocalist Ken Sorceron's vocals at the time of their "Legend" EP in particular sounded like they were recorded for a computer-generated imp in a children's fantasy film. However, they were actually rather good. They managed to, for a while, be all things to all men and sounded pretty damn original while doing so. However, personal strife broke the band up, and it looked like a very promising collective had been lost to the aether of intra-band wangst.

Perhaps predictably their breakup was more of a hiatus, but it did start the precedent for them shedding members like a snake sheds skin. They reformed with a new lineup, ditched them and went for another lineup for this album, and you can tell that almost every instrumentalist in the band who wrote "Legends" was gone, because it appears that when hiring new guys, rather than articulate what precisely it was that Abigail Williams did, Sorceron just said, "We play black metal", because that's what they do now. Abigail Williams have essentially become what Emperor would have been had they formed in a mall in Phoenix rather than in a village in Norway.

One returning member from the band's earliest incarnation was keyboardist, eye candy and lead singer's "just friend", Ashley Ellyllon - now of Cradle of Filth, who's membercidal tendancies appear to have inspired Abigail Williams even more than their music - and apparently Sorceron was still trying to work his way into her lacy goth thong, because I can't think of any reason other than that why her keyboards are so high up in the mix that they block out everything except the drums. This is a shame because the guitars are really good, more than capable of shredding out the creepy melodies of the songs with icy malevolence. I know this because I heard a pre-mixing version of the song VII Empyrean: Into the Cold Wastes, in which you could actually hear them. In the final release they are swamped by blobs of generic choir synths to the point in which you can't hear a thing of them. It would seem that the endless insertion of "symphonic" into "symphonic black metal" has overpowered the "black metal" part, because Abigail Williams the Second seem intent on trying to out Dimmu Borgir Dimmu Borgir in their overblown pomp-metal. However, they seem to have missed the point somewhat.

Don't get me wrong, this album is both epic and symphonic, but they miss the point like champs. This album has none of the bite that black metal should have. It's simply very safe. There's no real aggression here, which is actually quite a feat from a band with the full black metal regalia of blast beats, high screams and shreddy guitars. It's just very unchallenging, marketable black metal played with no anguish or rage, and with no real motive but to sound cool. And maybe I've been listening to too much Xasthur and Weakling, but to me, this is the sound of black metal played by kids from southwest America who don't have souls. I'm serious, anyone who can listen to bands like Burzum and Immortal and still make music this emotionless is probably dead inside, or possibly are just pricks.

The real shame is that this once original band is now simply trying to emulate the greats of the genre. Dimmu Borgir, Bal Sagoth and Chthonic are practically namechecked, but the most obvious source of inspiration is Emperor, to the point where it's almost funny. They actually got the Norwegian lot's drummer to play for them as a session skinsman on the album. There's influence and then there's this, my friends. The problem is that they're simply not as good as their idols, no matter how hard they try. Overall this album can be summed up with the phrase "They tried too hard to be something that other people are doing much better", which is a shame because the previous iteration of Abigail Williams did the exact opposite - whether what they were doing was as good as it could be or not was irrelevant, because they were so original that judgement didn't really matter. As it stands, they are a good band, but they're trying to compete with legendary bands. They're up against competition so stiff, and so much more capable of playing this style, that their being "reminiscent of" this competition makes them obsolete, and of no further significance. I'm all for pretending that they died in the initial breakup in 2007, and never returned, while they were still more than the footnote they will now be.

Job For A Cowboy - Ruination

2009-07-12T15:22:00.000+01:00

Job for a Cowboy's reception within the death metal scene since their last album, Genesis, is somewhat akin to Josef Mengele showing up at your local Hanukkah festivities wearing a skullcap; the overwhelming opinion is that not only are they representative of everything wrong with the world, but that their attempts to blend in only make it worse, resulting in an overriding consensus they if they so much as touch the latkes, they'll be beaten into the fucking ground.

This is a shame since Job For A Cowboy haven't really done anything wrong; they made one release that could only tentatively be labelled "deathcore" (I'm still not convinced), became internet sensations overnight, largely thanks to the fandom of fucking idiots, and despite extensive efforts to change their ways, they've never been able to break free from the perception that they're still in the fringes-and-skinny-jeans crowd, despite the fact that their music did a long time ago (Depressingly, The Faceless, another awesome death metal band, have suffered the same fate). I have no doubt that their fandom of, and desire to be, "pure" death metal is genuine, but their last album was not as far away from the anathemic Doom as it needed to be to shake the deriders. In fact, I suspect that they will never achieve acceptance from the death metal scene as a whole, purely because they represent a well-known figurehead onto which everything bad about deathcore can be projected, which is a shame, because unless Necrophagist and Decrepit Birth can pull something truly astonishing out of the bag, Job for a Cowboy's newest album, Ruination, is the best technical death metal album of the year.

Before the review begins, let me qualify that Job for a Cowboy (they really need a new name) is now technical death metal, because more than a few people are going to have a problem with this. Put on a good baseline for modern death metal, say, Homage for Satan by Deicide or Iesous by Bloodbath. Now play Unfurling a Darkened Gospel, the first track off of Ruination. The Job For A Cowboy album may not be as technical as those at all points, but the technicality is much more integrated into their new sound that it is in "traditional" death metal, while being no more chug-happy than Decapitated or Monstrosity. Nor by "best technical death metal" do I mean "most technical", I mean "highest quality release by a band who subscribe to the technical death metal genre".

It starts with a quick drum fill before the album proper erupts. In a day and age when technical death metal is jazzy and melodic - thanks a lot, Cynic - the ferocity and intensity of JFAC 3.0 really catches you off guard. Jon Rice's drumming is certainly dexterous - his fills might not be imaginative, but they certainly do the job, and his blasts are at times so fast they travel through time and scare your grandparents. John Davy's vocals have always drawn some derision, especially for the presence of "pig squeals", but here his performance is exemplary of death metal vocals at their finest - his lows have just enough distortion to always sound guttural and ferocious, and his highs are going to piss off self-styled "true" death metal fans, but they provide variety and contrast, and during the busier moments, they stop the vocals getting lost in the mix. THERE ARE NO PIG SQUEALS HERE PEOPLE.

The guitar duo of old hand Bobby Thompson and ex-Despised Icon guitarist Al Glassman provide a fantastic focal point for the music, creating elaborate and atmospheric riffs and consistently enjoyable shredding. They constantly try new things with expert precision, and never really fail to pull anything off. The song writing keeps up with the technical aspect, reigning in the guitar wankery with admirable authority and keeping the music focused as opposed to the meandering feel of a lot of tech death. The bass...well, you can't hear it, but I have no doubt that it's just lovely.

The album is also very well structured - the tracks are all good enough that you won't really want to skip any tracks in order to get to the meat and potatoes of the album - and one thing to say about Job for a Cowboy is that they achieve an atmosphere with startling efficiency. The feeling of impending doom is constant throughout, amplified by the superb slower sections which radiate ominous ambience.

Overall, Job for a Cowboy remains a suitable indicator of where modern death metal is, but for once in their career that may not be such a bad thing. Death metal as it originally was is dead, and this is probably a good thing - if it just stayed the same it'd just age and end up like metalcore, bland and monotonous. The bands have accepted this, old and new, but a disturbing contingent of the fandom is refusing to move on. The albums of your childhood are still great, people, and they're not going anywhere, but a genre stays alive when the new bands take the old bands' influences and do something new. Slayer and Kreator have always been popular, and that's been the key to death metal's longevity, but if the elitists get their way, the old bands would influence the new bands, and nothing would change. Death metal would stagnate and die, and no-one wants that. Job For A Cowboy's new direction represents an alternative; resolutely death metal, undoubtedly influenced by the Deicides and Cannibal Corpses of this world, but willing to forge their own musical identity. And if Ruination isn't just an anomaly, but indicative of their song writing ability, they're the perfect band to lead the new generation.

BrokeNCYDE - I'm Not A Fan...But The Kids Like It!

2009-06-30T21:44:00.000+01:00

One of the latest entries to the rather good web comic Questionable Content has one character describe his fascination with extreme internet fetish photography a la goatse.cx as "extreme anthropology", which I think sums up my attitude towards BrokeNCYDE. I've listened to them a few times before as they provide a fascinating snapshot of modern popular culture, or to be more precise, a snapshot of how a meteorite smashing into the earth's surface and extinguishing all life on the planet may not be such a bad thing. As a result, they've been a subject of morbid fascination for me for a while now. They play a form of hip-hop known as crunk, which you may have heard of if anyone you know is clinically retarded. Their selling point is that their rapper also does high Oli Sykes screams, which put them within my jurisdiction, and apparently this screeching is enough to completely ensnare the scene kid demographic. Anyway, they've made quite the splash on the ol' MySpace, and as their debut full album is out soon, I figure I'll let my voice be heard about now.

BrokeNCYDE's new album, I'm Not a Fan.. But the Kids Like It! is the worst album I've ever listened to.

Just take a moment to really experience that last sentence. In the seventeen years I have been listening to music, I have never heard an album of inferior quality. Insane Clown Posse, Limp Bizkit, AxCx, none of these bands have created such aural hate crimes as these musical criminals.

The album starts with...well with something that is supposed to be an intro, I think, but is actually just what sounds like a synthesizer making random noises, and already I'm reminded of my Waking the Cadaver review, so that's not good. Like the WTC album, it then goes into the album proper, and, like the WTC album, I wish it hadn't.

I have a fundamental problem with crunk as a genre; as a fusion of rap and groove-oriented electronica, the backing tracks are universally horrible, oversimplified and insubstantial, and this album is no exception; the same synthesiser riff and bass-clap-bass-clap for a song if you're lucky, the album if you aren't. It's supposed to be danceable, and I have no doubt that it works, but these guys are just so musically insipid that surely no-one with self respect COULD dance to them. They even have the same pan-pipes sound Lady Gaga overuses. It just feels sterile and dull, which is a problem I have with a lot of electronic music, but BrokeNCYDE completely fail to interest me even more than most with their musical aspect. On the plus side, it is catchy, but honestly all that does is make me want to kill myself every time I find myself humming it. Why is it that most of my negative reviews have “On the plus side, it is catchy”? It’s perhaps revealing about the kind of band who needs to rely on catchiness.

Then there are the vocals. The rather unimpressive clean singing is manipulated by computer to weird the pitch up, which is an alright effect (albeit one which Daft Punk did a lot better over a decade ago), but unfortunately it was beyond the abilities of modern technology to make the rapping anything other than abysmal. The tone of voice is snide and self-satisfied; a Latino rich kid rapping about a girl making his "peepee hard" has no right to sound smug. The screaming is actually depressing, that the difference this instils in a band from the rest of their genre justifies them claiming it as a whole new one. It's whiny, largely inhaled and completely pointless - screaming works in metal and hardcore as a tone-free way to do lyrics without overshadowing the instrumentals, and as a way to register anger, frustration or aggression. BrokeNCYDE have no backing music worth devoting much attention to, and there is no trace of the aforementioned emotions, or indeed, any human emotion, within BrokeNCYDE's music.

Then there are the lyrics. As some of you may have noticed, I rarely talk about lyrics, and it's even rarer that it factors into my overall opinion of the band. But this is essentially a hip-hop band, so the lyrics are supposed to be a focal point; they're supposed to be interesting, intelligent and varied. The lyrics here all explore one theme; being in a nightclub – that means sex, drugs and really bad jewellery. And they are terrible lyrics; uninteresting, badly written and at times embarrassing to listen to. Also, here we have more repetition; they talk about nothing else, and the crunk staple of lines being repeated ad verbatim is present and correct. As a result, there is almost no variation in this album. Here is the makeup of a BrokeNCYDE song:

Synth riff
Bad screaming and rapping over same synth riff, possibly expanded, and two-piece drum beat.
Computer manipulated singing over same synth riff, and two-piece drum beat.
Repeat until end of song.
Repeat until end of album

And at NO POINT is this deviated from, apart from a really bad skit involving a misdialled booty call.

And the lyrics are actually quite troubling too; in the world BrokeNCYDE populate, women are interchangeable cumbuckets who should be completely submissive to men, and exist only for sexual gratification. And date rape is fine, guys, just keep drugging her until she sucks you off (a strange preoccupation of this band). And guess what! Constant drug and alcohol abuse are great fun, and not something that'll fuck you up for life! All women should aspire to is being a booty call and all guys should aspire to is to nag their daddies into getting them grills and an SUV...actually, that sounds consistent with my generation.

But when it comes to the groups...bewildering appeal, I can't think of any way in which this music could be thought of as good - as rap it fails to inspire lyrically and as dance music it should by all rights embarrass those who hear it into stillness. But the most terrifying thing is that they're completely serious. They're not self-aware in their lack of quality, this is generally both the best music they could make, and representative of what they think awesome music is, both of which say a lot about them and their impressive 140,000 myspace friends - I suspect the government depopulation list contains many of these deviant minds in need of culling. And this completely serious band is liked on a completely serious level by a large number of people, people of my generation, people who will go on to become doctors, architects and politicians. And that fills me with terror, because if this is representative of club culture, and these fans of said culture are the next generation, then the only thing to do is nuke Ibiza from orbit and just take the depleted workforce, because at least then we won't be seeing judges with big neon t-shirts that say "SKEET SKEET" in balloon writing.

P.S. Here're some of the things that much wittier people than myself have said about the album, or the ensuing music video “Freaxxx” (the “Warren” mentioned a few times is Warren Ellis of Transmetropolitan fame, who posted the video on his blog along with...disparaging comments):

"This is simply abysmal. If this video had a face, I would punch it in the balls." - Justin McSheene

"If my kids ever listened to this music I would beat the living shit out of them. I seriously cannot believe this is a real song." - "street shark"

"What exactly were they thinking? Combining screamo bullshit with faggot rap is like setting up an international play starring Hitler and Oprah. It just doesn't and should never happen for so many reasons. This could possibly be the apocalypse." - Ben Stein

"what. the. fucking. fuck. warren.

Promise us now you will never hurt us like this again.

h.o.r.r.i.b.l.e.

ratfucked.

e.vi.l.

hate myself now for being the same species.

why." - Henchbot

"These people must not breed. Surely there must be something we can do?" - James Lillis

"The Spartans used to leave the malformed, brain damaged, or generally useless babies on a hilltop to be eaten by wolves. I now think this is a cracking good idea. Thanks, Warren." - Chris Noble

"Are… are we sure they’re not some elaborate spoof band? I mean… there’s a dancing pig. In the video. A real band would not do that. Right? It’s a very detailed parody. I need to believe this, or I have no reason to continue living." - "Christine"

"I am not a violent man. In fact, I was educated in Quaker schools for most of my childhood and spend my summers volunteering with an international peace program. That said, I can’t ever recall wanting to hit a musician in the face quite so much as I do now." - Toby S.

"I’ve never wanted anyone to have cancer before.

but there is a first time for everything" - Nezar

"...even if I caught Prince Harry and Gary Glitter adorned in Nazi regalia defecating through my grandmother’s letterbox I would still consider making them listen to this album too severe a punishment. And she’s just had new carpets put in. BrokeNCYDE – a crunk/gangsta/screamo/R&B hybrid – should be respected and feared in the same way that Captain Kirk respects and fears the Klingons, which is why I’m firing intergalactic blue nuclear death straight at their fat fucking faces. It’s like having an Auto-Tuned, crack-addled Cher with a hard-on bearing down on you singing, “Let’s get freaky”. - NME

“There is absolutely no substance whatsoever in their songs and no passion in anything they do. It is the musical equivalent of a snow cone” - SENSES FAIL’s Buddy Nielsen

"It really is one of those "fall of Western culture" moments. It’s a near-perfect snapshot of everything that’s shit about this point in the culture.

It is, however, going to be one of those great Litmus tests. If you meet someone who likes this? Even if they profess to like it in an "ironic," knowing, media-aware kind of way? Then they’re a turd with a haircut." - WARREN ELLIS.

“If you share any similarity with a band like brokeNCYDE you’re almost guaranteed to have me not like your band” - STEVE FUCKING ALBINI

PPS. Kathrine Katz is probably the hottest member of Agoraphobic Nosebleed. I also wish Scott Hull was my dad.

Two Weird, Brilliant CDs

2009-05-30T22:17:00.000+01:00

Right, a double review today.

Isis - Wavering Radiant

The thing I like most about alternative music is it's aversion to orthodoxy; unoriginality is condemned and innovation is championed in equal measure. As a result, my favourite bands in any given genre will usually be those who strive for something greater than what their compatriots are doing; one of the most notable bands to be doing this is Isis. Ten years ago, the former sludge metal band broke away from the mould set by Down, Crowbar and Eyehategod and attempted to follow in the footsteps of the superlative Neurosis by making progressive, meandering atmospheric metal focused on walls of distorted, yet delicate, sound crashing like waves in a storm and soft, sparse guitars reminiscent of gentle tides. The product was the classic Oceanic. With this one album, both indie rock lovers and metalheads had an art-metal standard to wave above their heads victoriously. Everything that has followed within the post-metal canon has followed this template with admirable determination - Cult Of Luna, Pelican, The Ocean Collective and more owe their success to the popularisation of their genre that Aaron Turner et all managed to achieve. However, as of late there has been a rather sludgy rate of progress in the genre of progressive sludge, which it would seem has apparently not gone unnoticed. Isis have once again swooped in and altered their style; whether it's an improvement, however, is questionable.

The most noticeable thing is the complete change of the mix; the atmosphere of post-metal was always helped be the production and the sound as much as the music. Whereas before Aaron Turner's voice had been buried in the mix, here it has been lifted with to the forefront; it was similar with their last release, In the Absence of Truth, but here it's taken to a far greater extent. And while this may seem like a good thing to someone who hasn't listened to them, the atmospheric value of a lone howl amongst crashing guitars was one of their great assets - indeed, it was this which first made me like them at the beginning of their song So Did We. Without this, the instruments seem less expansive than they were before, and this is a BIG problem; sound so all-consuming that it even blots out the vocals in one of Isis' defining features. However, the problems with the production, no matter how jarring to older fans, can't hide the fact that, as ever, the songwriting is brilliant.

One of the best comments I heard about this album was that Isis' motivation for their music is to make such intelligent, arty metal that it undoes the damage caused by Limp Bizkit's attracting all the frat boys; this album continues the trend of being both arty and intelligent. Imagine a fusion of Opeth's soft parts and Mastodon's heavy parts, and inject a whole load of wistful melancholy and you've got this album down. An exercise in taste, elegance and power, Isis have this extraordinary ability to write songs that are long and meandering and still be interesting. They still maintain their minimalist writing style of the same riff played over and over again, changing and evolving, before suddenly morphing into something entirely new. Every song, and with one exception, the shortest is 7:05, progresses naturally and in a mesmerising fashion. Isis have utilised a more accessible sound to really re-approach their signature sound, and they've done alright. It's no Oceanic or Panopticon, but it's good.

Wolves in the Throne Room - Black Cascade

I mentioned earlier how I prize imagination in music; this has kept me interested in no genre more than black metal. Yes, those familiar with the kvlt image peddled by most of the Norwegian lot are often far too willing to forget the experimental side of the genre, but since the beginning, we've had bands like Ulver or Shining messing with the genre to their own ends. Indeed, the modern scene is one as branched as can be seen in metal; nowhere is this more explored than the vibrant US black metal scene. Here, we have the prevalence of the Ambient Black Metal scene. Largely cribbing from the notes of Burzum and Shining, even this subgenre of black metal has it's own subgenres; Xasthur, Niflheim and Leviathan cover the Depressive Black Metal genre, that I've mentioned I'm a fan of, and Atmospheric Black Metal, which borrows from the post-metal and folk genres to devastating effect; played by bands such as Velvet Cacoon and Summoning. And the best of this genre is the almighty Wolves in the Throne Room.

The story of Wolves in the Throne Room is far-fetched even by black metal standards; and in a genre with the recluse Malefic or the gay woodsman Gaahl, that's saying something. Two brothers and a friend, the whole band live on a self-sufficient commune with their respective families. The only exposure to electricity they get is when they're playing music; the only time they eat food they didn't grow themselves is when they're on tour. They're like the Amish only awesome. Their previous two albums, in particular their sophomore effort Two Hunters (my favourite black metal album) are some of the best things black metal has produced to date. A new album from them is a big deal.

This is one occasion where "more of the same" is no bad thing. Every element of the creation of the album - music, performance, vocals, tempo, production, mixing - is perfectly done to encapsulate the synthesis of Burzum-inspired black metal, gorgeous post-metal and atmospheric folk that WITTR do better than anyone. Slow, echoing and mournful, the music on this album achieves what every great piece of great black metal does; it created intense beauty out of raw, complex music. Each song essentially uses the same components, but approaches them in different ways. The great thing about this band is the dynamic nature of their music; it's constantly changing and evolving, becoming more brilliant each second a track is playing. It's a testament to the amazing writing ability of WITTR that their style is so much more original and fascinating than it should be; these wonderful pieces of music undoubtedly draw on Burzum and Isis, but it's still unique and unmistakably within the style that the band has created. A great album from the best band in black metal.

P.S. I've promised myself that I won't review the same band twice unless it's notable, but I'd just like to say that the new Sunn is awesome, and continues the band's efforts to utterly destroy people's preconceptions of music with even greater reaches of experimentation, a continued trend for superb guest contributions (Atilla Csihar and superb soprano Jessika Kinney, as well as the efforts of avant-garde composer Eyvind Kang, and legend that is Dylan Carlson) and that special Sunn O))) ability to utterly overwhelm the listener with sheer sonic power. Go experimental drone doom!

Iwrestledabearonce - Self-titled EP

2009-05-09T22:37:00.001+01:00

Right, I have returned, after my brief foray into rather elitist video game journalism. Sorry to the, like, four of you who read this blog, but I've been feeling a little bored of writing reviews as of late. I like writing either very positive reviews or bone crushingly negative reviews, and I've just flung praise wildly at Devil Sold His Soul, so I need a stinker to go a little nuts on. Unfortunately, it's been a while since I heard an album which was bad enough to warrant a review; I was gonna do Architects "Hollow Crown", but it's much better than I thought it was at first listening, then I was gonna wait until The Boy Will Drown's debut and rail on that, but I have a horrible suspicion that it'll actually be rather good. Fortunately I've found a suitable punching bag.

One of the things that is honestly, genuinely wrong with this generation of metal kids is that practically no-one actually knows what grindcore is. Most of them have never heard of Napalm Death, Nasum, Pig Destroyer, Rotten Sound and the rest, and have instead used the term to refer to a very particular brand of metalcore. A kind of crossover of mathcore and deathcore, this new genre, which I like to refer to as "spazzcore" (alternately " 'tardcore), consists of genero-breakdowns, spastic flailing on guitars, pretensions of "atmospheric" parts and a vocalist who alternates between pig-brees and the kind of high scream that resembles the shop security whistles used to ward off teens. See You Next Tuesday, early The Boy Will Drown and War From A Harlot's Mouth all qualify for this, but perhaps the epitome is the "hilarious" Iwrestledabearonce.

Formed of what appear to be the participants for "World's Reddest Necks" disqualified because that much inbreeding counts as cheating even in Louisiana, they're the kind of band who think that the best thing a band can be is ironic. As such, I can only assume that most of their fans only listen to them ironically, because someone who can genuinely milk enjoyment from this probably escaped from special school halfway through an impromptu lobotomy. Here's a list of some of the "fun" or "experimental" things they do in their songs:

The aforementioned guitar wankery which appears to have never actually heard something with musical structure, but perhaps read about the idea once. Just because you CAN play a million notes a second doesn't mean you SHOULD. Fast playing is there to embelish melody with depth and variety, not to make a tuneless blur of notes.
Over forced ambient sections which just come across as trying to better War From A Harlot's Mouth's rather good random jazz interludes. On the other hand, at least uninteresting electronica sections provide a break from the one-note main sections.
They rip off Enter fucking Shikari. If a self-proclaimed "grindcore" band are taking inspiration from Enter shitcunting Shikari, well then, everything has truly gone to pot.
Randomly inserting the Inspector Gadget theme is neither big nor clever. Using it as a breakdown is actually a cardinal sin, just above being the guy who writes the puns for newspaper headlines.

Now imagine the aforementioned quirks are pasted inbetween repetitive blast beat-filled parts which couldn't inspire headbanging in a jack-in-the-box and dull, thoughtless breakdowns, and repeated ad infinitum. That is the totality of the EP. How they're going to stretch this shit to a full length is beyond me, but I suspect they'll stick with the winning formula they convulsed out on this EP.

At risk of being as repetitive as that which I'm criticizing, two things I mentioned in previous reviews suddenly seem relevant. In my Waking The Cadaver review I mentioned that I resented a track of them doing weed because they were obviously having more fun than I did listening to the album. Every misplaced transition from one section to another, every "hey, try this" moment, every over-shredded breakdown makes me feel like that. They're obviously enjoying themselves, but it's a shame I'm not. Secondly, in my Sunn O))) review I mentioned that if an experimental band is serious about abandoning musical conventions, they must have a solid idea of what they're replacing it with. Every other section Iwrestledabearonce come up with is some half-formed turd of an impulse, and it feels like they're just throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. And when it does stick, expect to hear it again, and again, and again.

However, criticizing this album is kind of a hollow victory, because I get the impression this band might as well just be one big joke. So much is played for laughs (without being genuinely funny, like, say, Beneath The Buried and Me's line-dancing sections, or HORSE the band's general brilliance) that my criticism is like insulting someone's mum based on a comment they made that may or may not have been them insulting their mum.

But then I remember that the "irony" defence is logic armour on par with the "It was just a social experiment" defence. Whether you're genuinely retarded or knowingly, self-awarely retarded, you'll still be required to wear a bib when you're eating. Just because certain parts of this EP are deliberately bad doesn't excuse them for being so.

And they're not grindcore.

My random thoughts; life-changing video games you probably won't play.

2009-04-09T15:42:00.001+01:00

First off, there's a review coming later - later today, hopefully. But right now I'd like to talk about the state of gaming at the moment, in that it is slowly but surely dying on its arse. The home consoles are dominated by either pre-school-shooting gun-nut teens or the kind of retard who honestly thinks of a MIDI synthesizer powered by waving your arms around as revolutionary gaming. The handhelds have occasionally realised potential, but the home console spazz brigade are steadily enroaching on that with their casual gaming shit. The PC stands tall, proud and aloof as it always has, despite constant bawwwing from the consoles that they're in some way superior, but the pirating community has - shock-horror! - proved to not actually be a good thing for gaming, and the developers are refusing to work on PC titles.

There are steps which could be taken to get away from the end of great gaming. Largely they are unworkable; such steps include Microsoft abandoning all home console activities and using its connections to power forward the PC. The PS3 would have to pick up the slack; it's not like Sony has a lack of experience dominating the video game market. And, of course there would need to be more games like Bioshock.

Bioshock came out in 2007, having been developed over the course of over four years by Irrational Games (or 2K Boston as they are now known). Written by Ken Levine, writer of sister title System Shock 2, it was a first person shooter with elements of puzzle games and RPGs (though the RPG influence was minimal in practice). It revolved around the shooting of enemies with pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers etc. and a pretty standard array of magic attacks or "plasmids" (fire, ice, lightning and - peculiarly - bees). There was also a boss at the end, and a recurring mini-boss throughout.

And here we have why gameplay alone is not all that can make a game great.

The game is set in the broken ruins of a objectivist dystopia overrun by the great and the good's desires and abilities when the boundaries were removed. The enemies were "splicers", citizens driven to madness in their desparate search for plasmids, a cure-all to all life's problems, and ADAM, the powering factor to make it happen. The environments were beautiful and terrifying; stately art-deco and almost-tacky prosperity cracked with age and overrun with constant-flowing water, reflecting the themes of perfection and corruption. The Little Sister system provides the only instance in a game I've played where "moral choice" moments actually inspired an emotional response. And there is one twist - the crux of the story - which deserves to go down in history as one of the greatest moments in gaming; a stunning evaluation of our place as gamers within games, all summed up in three perfect words.

This was an art game with a budget behind it. And it sold; it was after all a very pretty first person shooter. I've never heard comparatively casual gamers discuss the themes and ideas of a game in a way that Bioshock inspired. It was a breakthrough; the equivalent of Shadow of the Collosus succeeding. But it revealed a problem with the current generation. Namely, that it is going to be next to impossible to make a commercially competitive art game in this day and age.

If you can remember it, think of the excruciatingly PS2 gem Okami. Unique, gorgeous, charming and immensely fun to play, it nonetheless sold about as well as if it was sold dripping with cold urine. The same goes for Ico and the brilliant Psychonauts. Risky games don't sell. They are by their nature indulgences, and the demand for high-end graphics and other such costly ventures leaves such indulgences out of the question. Ergo, there will be no games released which will be interesting QED.

Well, actually no.

I'd like to talk about some art games which are being made, or have been made, which you should play.

Fez

Whenever I see the trailer tot his game I want to stark bouncing up and down in my seat, clapping and giggling hysterically. WHen I say that this game has a charming aesthetic, I don't mean in the CUTE-written-in-80-foot-high-letters way that LittleBigPlanet has a charming aesthetic. I mean that it's the visual equivalent of the phrase "omnomnom". The animation, the character design, the stage composition is endearing as anything I've ever seen; all day glo and big pixels and sheer cuteness. The gameplay is...well to call it a 2D platformer is misleading; the game is set in a 3D world which you can only interact with in a 2D way, with puzzles requiring you to turn the game world in order to solve some of the most ingenious levels and puzzles in videogames. I want this game more than words can describe.

Passage

This game is free. This game is out. This game takes five minutes to play. This game, in five minutes, can reduce you to tears. Made by Jason Rohrer, a man whose family of four live on less than $10,000 a year so that he can make the gaming equivalent of poetry, this is a game of life. You have no excuse not to play it.

The Path

Little Red Riding Hood as imagined by Tim Burton if he was a european arthouse film director. The most graphically impressive game on this list, it's, like Passage, not a game concerned with fun. It's about telling a story, a dark, grim story. My writing hero, Kieron Gillen, called it "probably art", but "...profoundly disturb[ing in] its portrayal of teenage years as doomed fatalists" in his typically superb review, which you should read right now to save me writing more.

It's £7.25 on Steam and will fuck you up.

Synaesthete

A student product, a rhythm-based shooter which reminds me of the superb Rez. No-one played that, so instead, I'll call it Guitar Hero meets any isometric shooter you've ever played. It's brilliant.

And finally, you should probably look at anything on here.

Jason Rohrer's Homepage (where you can download Passage and all his other games)

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/

Fez Trailer

http://vimeo.com/3841540

Tale of Tales' Homepage

http://tale-of-tales.com/

Devil Sold His Soul - A Fragile Hope

2009-03-30T23:28:00.000+01:00

Sturgeon's law is a perjorative adge which details that "90% of everything is crap". This in mind, I'm quite pleased to see that I've managed to maintain a 1:2 ratio of wheat to chaff. I like to think of myself as an optimist, albiet one who regularly uses threats of violence as descriptive writing in a review. As such, I'd like to redress the balance by recommending to you an album which is, let's not mince words, fucking sweet.

Devil Sold His Soul are a band formed from the remenants of a super-influential UK hardcore band who literally no-one has ever heard of, but who mixed hardcore with my personal favourite genre of the moment, post-metal (A highly atmospheric take on doom/sludge metal - listen to Isis "Oceanic" for the quintessential post-metal experience) which is a combination akin to peanut butter and strawberry jam, but less overdone. Indeed, the impact of metalcore may seem a rather uncomfortable juxtaposition to the meandering, artistic depth of post-metal, but apparently this worked for "Muhamodo" (yes, that was their name) so well that they've continued refining the formula to almost weaponised form (I like to think for use against Parkway Drive) in their latest project, Devil Sold His Soul.

Indeed, "A Fragile Hope", their debut LP, is not for the ninja-pitting instant gratification crowd, not for the over-pretentious types who don't want any -core in their post-rock, and certainly not for the kind of person who looked upon my Bring Me The Horizon paddling session as anything less than totally deserved. This is for those of us who still have that little bit of hope for metalcore, that one day Converge, Between The Buried and Me and Bury Your Dead will ride in on white stallions and cast anyone who thinks new Architects is better than "Ruin" era into the firey abyss to be eternally damned. Indeed, this album reminds me of a song I got on a Metal Hammer CD which was a sole piece of clear sky in the heavens of a metalcore genre more than ready to rain all over my "Metal is art" parade; "Inheritor" by a Norwegian band called Benea Reach. I've never been able to track down a copy of the album, but I have no doubt that this is better than that album could ever be. Intense, crackling ambience gathering and building, rising and falling before fulminating into scarring metalcore storms or heartfelt clean singing. The ambient moments are perfectly pitched; simplistic drums and bass accompanied by a sparse vista of guitar music, perfectly textured and written as well as anything I've ever heard, and the hardcore/metalcore moments give a feeling of rare vulnerability that can only come from genuine emotional release. Every note has taste, meaning and necessity, every section would lessen the overall song with it's exclusion. Each moment brings an atmosphere of tragedy, sorrow and frustration, utterly ferocious and yet so beautiful in it's raw emotion that it overwhelms. It's unbelievable that such a young band could capture the gorgeousness of Isis and the heartfelt viciousness of Converge, and not just mimic it, but completely understand why it's being done.

The only problem I can think of is that I'm not sure precisely when I'm going to listen to this. If I want really pretty atmospheric sludge why am I not listening to Isis? If I want really counterintuitively pretty metalcore why am I not listening to Architects? Devil Sold His Soul aren't a halfway point I'm entirely convinced are neccesary. That said, I'm halfway to thinking that I'll listen to this twice as much as I'll listen to either of those bands; certainly these guys are dramatically better than Architects.

Indeed, "A Fragile Hope" is an album that doesn't just dabble in either metalcore or post-metal, it makes both genres work together wonderfully, while creating a unique sound which gives the best of both these genres serious competition. I can only give this album the highest possible recommendation.

Bring Me The Horizon - Suicide Season

2009-03-30T19:07:00.000+01:00

Right, to provide context, I'm one of the few guys within the tr00 metal fraternity who gave BMTH's debut a good review (I'm also one of the few who finds it acceptable to replace letters with numbers; I suspect there's overlap). Count Your Blessings was an album that gave metalcore fangs; it didn't care about clean vocal choruses or dual harmonies to ease the tension, it cared about blast beats, guitars that sound like pitch-shifted chainsaws and the infamous Oli Sykes giving a vocal performance which must have stripped the lining from his throat. It was a near-unrelenting mass of churning riffs and the kind of crunching breakdowns which must have absolutely killed live (Of course, there's a school of thought which says that breakdowns actively detract from metal since they're from hardcore, but these people forget that they weren't so snippy about hardcore influence giving us metalheads thrash metal, so I let such self-indulgent nonces go fuck themselves). Plus those who criticise their aesthetic forget that when they started, emo was the big thing and everyone expected them to start crooning, so to hear brutal metalcore was a musical oxymoron unparalleled since Helmet; they were a band who you could not read by it's cover. Except now you can. Through the process of extensive calming-the-fuck-down, this album sounds exactly like how you'd expect a popular modern metal band to. One huge chunk of their charm is gone right from the start, and it doesn't end there.

Right, let's start at the top. Bring Me The Horizon have been touring extensively with Brighton hardcore mob Architects, and it seems to have rubbed off because Oli's new main vocal style is a weedy hardcore yelp not entirely dissimilar to Sam Carter's new vocal style (which has also mellowed from a more abrasive, and thus better, style, but that's a review for another time). This unfortunately makes the saccharine b-grade emo lyrics a hell of a lot harder to digest than when he sounded like he was trying to project his own blood onto the listener. Sure it's more accessible but one of the great points about this band was that they were unexpectedly inaccessible. Likewise, the superb guitar tone of CYB is absent, and filling in is a guitar tone which sounds like a synthesiser. Seriously, these guitars, combined with a new-found love of sampling and electronica, makes this sound like if Pendulum tried to make modern hardcore and failed miserably; the riffs' weight is GONE, the breakdowns' weight is GONE. Indeed, the riffs are gone; the guitars do nothing interesting throughout the entire album except try pathetically hard to mimic Bury Your Dead. That the drumming is equally insipid shows through one of the album's main flaws; Frederik Nordstrom has done an uncharacteristically horrible production job, particularly regarding the thin, baseless mixing (and that annoying problem with crash cymbals that sounds like you're listening to them through a cardboard tube).

However, maybe we need to adjust our expectations; even the band acknowledges that this is not a continuation of what they were doing before they smelt the wafting scent of faux-disaffected teens' money and vaginal juices. Maybe we should evaluate the album's purpose; if CYB was about screaming every bit of hurt back in the face of your ex and then punching her until all movement stopped, this is about making the alternative music equivalent of dance music. This is not deathcore; indeed, it was never ment to be. This is music purpose-built for stick-thin, immaculately groomed teens to ninja-pit to, and as such it's scarily effective. Though the horrible mix doesn't help, the songs are catchy as fuck, and every riff could pass enough for dance music that it achieves that metal's near constant failing of being genuinely danceable. On top of this, and I say this with bitter resentment, it grows on you like poison ivy, in my case about as welcomely as the analogy suggests (there's nothing more annoying to a snob such as myself as when something patently rubbish becomes enjoyable). It's made to entertain BMTH's target audience to the maximum degree, and bends over backwards to please the listeners. And that's where it fails more than anything.

You see, alternative music is there to fulfil the artist. All the great metal bands played the music that they wanted to hear, not what they thought other people wanted to hear. That's the difference between art and entertainment, and if you want to make musical entertainment, MAKE POP MUSIC. This CD was made to please the fans and as such feels distinctly lacking in the passion and energy of the debut. CYB have the impression that the band were hurling themselves round the recording space, whereas Suicide Season, in all its consummate professionalism, sounds like a band who aren't giving anything of themselves to the album. Bring Me The Horizon have become the elitist-perpetuated stereotype of themselves - a musical mess with the gaps usually containing conviction and passion filled with breakdowns and hairspray - and in doing so have both endeared the scenesters and alienated the more metal-orientated listeners who stuck to a derided but genuinely good metal band. The horrible - and uniquely genuine - mainstream-pandering that this album offers makes it the only time I've ever considered using the term "mallcore"; this is indeed both no longer metal and unabashedly commercially aimed. There's not the ignitive spark, the tangible fury of the debut, but even on it's own merits, it comes across as lifeless. Indeed, the best track is the suitably vicious "No Need for Introductions, I've Read About Girls Like You on the Backs of Toilet Doors", a grindcore-length burst of brutality which was purpose built as an outlet for Oli (concerning recent assault allegations), like they didn't want such feeling in their other songs. Maybe if this kind of explosive passion was still there, they could have made a much better album.

Sunn O))) - Black One

2009-03-17T20:02:00.000Z

Okay; first of all, if you don't have an open mind with music then I can guarantee that you will hate Sunn O))); hell, I listen to all kinds of shit and still assumed right off the bat that I wouldn't get the point of this album. Sunn O))) have a reputation for being as impenetrable as a T-90 heavy tank and about as capable of making the ground shake; their weapons of choice are minimalist composition (read "the same bass rhythm for 12 minutes"), droning bass and electronic noises, faint black metal riffs and growling feedback. However, their "White" series are considered avant-garde opuses and the "Black One" features both Wrest, of Leviathan, Lurker of Chalice and Twilight and Malefic, the misanthropic mastermind of black metal night-terrors Xasthur, as guest vocalists (I heartily recommend all the aforementioned bands), so I thought I'd give it a go.

The presentation of the disk is very nice, if coming across as clinging to the coat-tails of the left-field black metal scene; the cover art is as ominous as it is nonsensical, but could easily be made for Blut Aus Nord, or Leviathan, or Krallice, or anyone else for that matter. A quick peek at the lyrics follow the same trend; I almost hope Wrest and Malefic wrote the lyrics themselves as I was kind of hoping such a strange band would be less generic.

Having never experienced them before, I had no idea going into the experience whether this was their experimental album - Wikipedia seems to define all their albums as such - but the slow, murky trickle of ambient noise instantly unnerved me. Distorted drum beats and what sounds like low groaning opens the album's intro, "Sin Nanna" are probably how I should be describing the sounds produced but I can guarantee that what you're imagining is not what this sounds like; Gregory Anderson and Stephen O'Malley have created something unlike certainly anything I've ever heard before. This aural collage goes on for about two minutes before the first proper track starts; slow black metal guitars layered over the most intense bass I've ever come across in music; one long, droning sequence played again and again, hypnotically rhythmic and high enough in the mix that even with my bass speaker turned down I could feel the air around me pulsing. Wrest's vocal performance is nothing less than extraordinary, as can be expected from the leader of underground US black metal. The track is surprisingly easy to listen to thanks to the prominence of the guitars giving a recognisable focal point; indeed, it seems like drumless, slowed down black metal, which is not a bad thing.

Following track "Cursed Realms (Of the Winterdemons)", a cover of the notorious Immortal takes this idea and runs with it, becoming almost farcically "kvlt". Malefic's on vocals this time round, at first screeching amidst literal arctic winds (they actually sent a crew to Antarctica to get the recording, though sadly they did NOT make Malefic himself howl away there) before bass and industrial distortion takes over again. To reiterate, they have Malefic, who is black metal incarnate, howling Immortal lyrics amid ACTUAL ARCTIC FUCKING WINDS. Soon the track becomes a more "normal" Sunn O))) track, complete with thundering bass and guitars. And oh! the guitars in this album. An approach which in unique in my experience, Sunn O))) play guitar not for the note, but for the sound of it fading and feeding back into a shrill whine. The effect achieved is nothing less than superb, fading in and out of thick distortion and culminating in simple, yet consumingly atmospheric riffs. Eventually the static of the track overwhelms the speakers and the track ends.

The rest of the tracks are largely "typical" Sunn O))), with ominous doom riffs at least half as slow as they should be and the usual intense bass. But there is one more highlight; closer "Bathory Erzsebet", named after both notorious cannibal/faux vampire Elizabeth Bathory and black metal band Bathory (this song is in fact a reimagining of the aforementioned band's "A Fine Day To Die"). Until 7:03 this song is just computer- manipulated bass but it suddenly erupts into the unusually dissonant guitars and the centrepiece of the album; the claustrophobic Malefic, locked inside a coffin for recording, delivering vocals that are part black metal screech and part terrified cries - a microphone inside the coffin even lets us hear his panicked breathing. This pure, distilled terror makes for one of the most uncomfortable vocal performances ever recorded - the man deserves a Grammy (that'll be taken by some posing musical harlot whose "genuine" musical performance will net millions while one man performing enraptured in true, utter horror goes unappreciated).

Then, the album ends, and at this point if you'd asked me my opinion I wouldn't be able to give you one. About a minute after my first listen I just kind of continued browsing the internet, before suddenly feeling perplexed; if only for the feel of having the air around me vibrate, the music on Black One created a truly astonishing ambience. The utter coldness of ambience no black metal record has ever properly achieved, the stunning vocal performances and the bass that fills the room effortlessly, the wonderful production that makes for a perfectly defined wall of sound and the sheer, unparalleled uniqueness of it. I tried listening to other music but Black One's being designed for a heavy bass speaker means that despite overpowering bass the production holds, leaving everything else sounding tinny and unsatisfying (you know something wrong when Isis just doesn't sound deep enough). This album isn't like other avant-garde music because this band isn't just rebelling against the musical rulebook; they have every intention that their aural collages will replace it. Their vision of what they want their music to be is completely formed, and it couldn't sound any better.

A lot of people won't like this; in fact, the vast, vast, VAST majority won't. I loved it. Find a good audio system, (with a good subwoofer) give it a try, and if you get it, it will be an addition to your collection unlike any you'll ever hear, and more satisfying than almost anything.

Waking the Cadaver - Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler

2009-03-15T16:12:00.000Z

Firstly, I'm going to get some facts straight. I like deathcore. I like appropriately used breakdowns (if it's good enough for Aborted, Suffocation and Dying Fetus, it’s good enough for me). I even tolerate (again, appropriately used) pig squeals. And yet I cannot bring myself to listen to this album again. Its pathetic ineptness is altogether embarrassing, both for them and for whoever actually spent money on this. This is the most pathetic death metal release I've heard in a very long time. Fortunately, it's just the kind of thing for a good old fashioned diatribe.

Firstly, let's talk initial impressions. I borrowed this from a friend out of a kind of morbid curiosity at whether or not they would have improved since the EP, so my priorities may be different from someone buying it commercially, but I saw the cover art and groaned. It's not what you'd call subtle. The track titles are similar; the kind of thing stoned teens giggle about between eating and becoming greasier with each passing moment.

The disk is in, and fuck knows what the common-or-garden ambient intro was actually of, because after multiple listens I still had no goddamn clue. It leaks through into first proper track "Always Unprotected" which, after the remnants of the intro have disappeared, launches off into the kind of blastbeat-riddled UBER BR00T4L section that they still fail to pull off. That said, the attempt is less pathetic that that of the EP, partially thanks to the drummer actually having the common decency to, y'know, be halfway competent this time round, rather than losing the beat every fuckmothering five seconds, which is always a nice thought.

Unfortunately, the singer still has severe psychological and emotional issues, or at least that's the only justification I can think of for his ego allowing him to actually sing like that on record. He still sounds like a toad with throat cancer, and possesses all the vocal range of Stephen fucking Hawking. If anything, he's regressed past the standard he set in the EP, which is like saying Jorge "Hurley" Garcia has regressed past his standard he set in Lost Season 1 for sex appeal. I mean it, at least in the EP he had a repertoire of burping, pig squeeeeeeeel and a weedy mix of hardcore shout and death growl, whereas here the latter is "sadly" excluded in favour of more burps. Even then, Devourment-style full-lunged floor-shakers are out, weedy back-of-throat grumbles are in, and the piggies deserve credit for how much they actually sound like a piglet squealing, which, someone has neglected to tell WTC, is not a good thing. The Whitechapel/Misericordiam-style vocal walls of noise that piggies are supposed to be are best found elsewhere.

But what is a WTC song actually made up of? Well, breakdowns mostly, and for a lot of bands, an inventive, blood-stirring 30-second breakdown within the context of a 3-4 minute song can make a song great, especially live. However WTC don't include breakdowns within the song structure. Breakdowns ARE the song structure, occasionally punctuated with the kind of faster sections mentioned above, afterthoughts at best, and are almost deliberately dull.

Now for the interesting part. How does it compare to the EP? I'd like to take a moment to compare the two versions of "Chased through the Woods by a Rapist", a song infamous for it's astonishing ability to reduce nearby listeners and small children into fits of laughter, not least because of some truly heroic lyrical interpretations (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCBSX0XDSVI). The documentary intro is gone, probably because on a full-length there's no need for shameless space-padding. This is a track that suffers from the deeper vocals, although the mildly better drumming invokes less unintentional hilarity on the fast part. The guitars can still charitably be called boring and uncharitably called execrable, but fortunately due to the 90% breakdowns structure of the song, they're only playing half the time.

The lowest point is the inventively titled "Interlude", which is a sound bite of the band smoking cannabis; it's like they're laughing at me for having been stupid enough to endure the album by making me listen to them having more fun than I did at any point throughout the entire CD.

However, there is a slight upside that stops it being a failure unlike any other; something must have gone right during the song writing process because these songs are catchy, albeit in the same sense that leprosy is catchy. As much as I hate it, this is evidence that it doesn't fail on all accounts.

However, this is still a terrible, TERRIBLE album. Everything that's good about death metal and deathcore is either horribly abused or missing entirely; I'd complain about the lack of solos, experimentation or variation but the album is over a lot quicker with them. It’s the kind of album that can only be attractive to horribly misinformed people with a gore fetish and no knowledge of the death metal scene. Maybe it’s for the kind of person who watches YouTube videos of pigs eating other pigs as porn, or who’s really creepily into meat tenderising; those are certainly the kind of person who make up this band. We don’t understand them, but hell, perhaps they don’t understand why we don’t enjoy rubbing raw mince on our genitals.

What this blog is going to be.

2009-03-15T15:52:00.002Z

Hey,

I've created this blog as a place to put the music reviews I do from time to time, which have previously only been available on my Myspace. Nothing serious, just some writing practice. But the reviews will largely be about metal or hardcore releases, since that's pretty much all I listen to.

Enjoy,

Alex