Iwrestledabearonce - It's All Happening

Am I behind the times? Do I live under a rock? No, scratch that. Do I live on a planet a light year away and just heard about these guys Iwrestledabearonce a few months ago, and it is actually 2010 as I write this? Seeing as I've already reviewed Aesthethica and Proliferation Of Disaster, I guess that no, it's 2011 all right. Yet here I am right now, reviewing Iwrestledabearonce's first album, with the intent of giving it a rating higher than -27 out of 5. Am I out of my mind? Do I not know the surefire reasons to hate them that you can revert back to once you're out of options? I do know, actually. They're trendy, PBR drinking, sweater-clad, huge-rimmed-glasses boasting, vintage camera collecting, vinyl supporting, hobo-like, ironic, pretentious, filthy hipsters, and therefore, logically, all that they ever might come up with is the most hateful and outrageous pap ever created. It's not like they even do the tiniest bit of effort to hide their identity. They even made a dubstep EP before dubstep was cool. So what is there, really, not to despise about this collective? Well for one thing, you have the music.

I don't mean that it is outstanding. Far from it. They aren't even all that imaginative, unless you consider playing more than one genre an astounding skill. I don't even mean that it is good. It's All Happening is riddled with problems and can get rather annoying. But it's not bad either. It's acceptable. What Iwrestledabearonce present us with is 10 songs. Each song appears to consist of bits and pieces off various unreleased Iwrestledabearonce songs, and these bits and pieces are connected together either by nothing, or, in some particularly rare cases, absolutely nothing. This means two things: First, that, as a whole, the songs' dynamics are as meditated upon and planned as a play where all the actors suffer from Tourette's; and second, you better get ready to hear lots of unnecessary sudden changes.

All in all, the album is kinda like the musical equivalent of a season of some second-rate sketch comedy. It might have its moments, it might even have some high points, but in the end you feel indifferent about it. A great example of this is the song “White Water in the Morning”. It goes perfectly well for the first two minutes, with masterful deathcore and a fantastic progression, but then the whole song, as well as my interest, is destroyed by a riff that comes out of nowhere and fails epically to change the direction the song was going in. The track limps around aimlessly for about a minute, and then settles for an unengaging riff to make an illogical fade out with. I don't think there was even a single song that I liked all the way through. There was always the out-of-place riff, lack of album flow, or even just downright boring material to partially ruin each of them.

I understand that Iwrestledabearonce are supposed to be a joke and all, I get that. But I still think that they should have worked on their strengths, rather than meticulously arranging the most random salad possible. Because they do have strengths. In fact, I believe they have all it takes to make music that is interesting. They have a knack for writing great, catchy melodies. Not to mention their proficiency in writing fantastic breakdowns, groovy and riddled with delicious subtleties. Besides, the members appear to be good behind their respective instruments.

The band only has itself to blame for all the hate it gets, though. Because if they were joking it means that they repeated the same joke 9 times too many. And if they weren't, then they simply disregarded the “songwriting” part of writing a song, named it their thing rather than a mistake, and got what they deserved.  Still, I try not to care about the meaning behind music. I try to give all the of importance to the actual music. And looking at It's All Happening that way, you have a nice, kind of fun album.

Standout tracks:

You Ain't No Family
Tastes Like Kevin Bacon
Eli Cash Vs. The Godless Savages
See You In Shell

Purulent Jacuzzi - Vanished In The Cosmic Futility

If potable water doesn't become a commodity in the future, free time will. In this age where the vicious cycle of debt and hopelessness that is getting a college degree is the most basic necessity for any job in existence, and retirement is but a quickly waning fad, the only thing that actually lies in the future for most of us is working as a means of survival. Forever. And ever. Until coronary and then “The End”. And, well, work is just getting more ruthless by the week. I haven't even left high school yet and I already find myself running from room to room, developing less time-consuming ways of gulping down food and concocting an all-week schedule that includes every detail from how much I sleep to exactly when I take a shit, all so that I can manage to savor some precious moments of relaxation, occasionally.

I really envy the people who decide to see a movie and then see it within the same week. I've given up on books and video games ages ago, and now I don't even have the time to listen to music anymore. I don't have the time to create music anymore. Fuck, I don't even have the time to sleep anymore! Succeeding is all about developing this balance between work and social life, meanwhile dying inside the whole time. And it amounts to fuck all. The only reason I allow myself to get all worked up here right now is because no one ever reads this shit anyway!

Alright, sorry about that. I guess that if you've read this far you do want an actual review. Well, my point with that wall of text was that, to me, albums such as Vanished In The Cosmic Futility are like a godsend. Why listen to Geogaddi, The Wall, or The Galilean Satellites for over an hour, when I can take in as much information from under 14 minutes of Purulent Jacuzzi's mindrape? And I mean this without a hint of sarcasm. This does rape the mind and I do love it.

What we have here is a very catchy, refined and natural-sounding mix of slam death metal with assorted grindcorisms, the occasional flourish of technicality, and a very original riffing style to boot. The musicians are excellently precise and very proficient, and the production joins it all together like no other. If those two sentences right now didn't convince you to give this a listen, I don't know what will. I guess I might try exploring a bit more detail.

The first thing that pops out when listening to Vanished In The Cosmic Futility is just how perfect the sound is. It's raw, screechy, punchy and gives you a rush. I have never before heard a BDM album with such a fitting sound. The vocalist also deserves a mention for doing right everything that the one from Waking the Cadaver did wrong, and to great effect. Everyone else is not far behind, providing instrumentation that is easy to follow despite its creativity. Structure-wise, there's not much of interest for the most part, but you get some very nice subtleties here and there. For the most part it's the grindcore style of linear “Riff1, then Riff2, then Riff3, then Riffx” endeavor, only with the “awesome per second” gauge too far up. And the riffs are something worth talking about. Every single one of them appears to have been crafted to perfection to create a style simultaneously very abstract and groovy. And then you get moments of guitar orgasms while the drums follow accordingly, and these moments are incredible.

The only actual problem I have with this album, a problem which is minuscule in comparison to the positive aspects, is the same that appears to plague every BDM album, and that is a cheesy intro and  uncompelling outro. Admittedly, without them the whole experience would have been under a quarter of an hour long, but I don't really mind. This is an album of unbridled intensity teaming up with creativity and attention to quality, and the two bookends are rendered rather insignificant by the constant magnificence of the rest. I'm not saying that Vanished In The Cosmic Futility has helped me find meaning in my life or spare time, but it is a perfect soundtrack for while I'm looking for it, and after.

Standout tracks:

Last Phase Of Leptospiriosis
Quadriplegia
Spastic Disphonia
Vortex Of The Inanity
Contagious Dementia
Rapture Of The Venous Vessels (New Version)
Pulsatory

Meatus - Inner Demons

Here's something I've come to notice: If I spend more time thinking of an album than listening to it, it'll usually mean that I like it way more than what's considered socially acceptable. For instance, I have this ritual of pulling out the Worlds Beyond the Veil CD and staring at it for a while, and then putting it back in with the rest of the CDs, all the while having a disturbingly happy expression. For the record, last time I listened to Worlds Beyond the Veil from first track to last was in June. The music within the release is so valuable to me that I avoid using it for its original intent, out of fear of having it ruined forever. Also, I prefer not listening to it because I don't like feeling disappointed. Yes, I am implying that it's about time I found a new favorite album ever.

Which brings us to Meatus's Inner Demons twofold. First, because this is not going to be my new all time favorite album, and second, because of how I know that. Without even getting into the musical aspect of the album yet, I'll mention the thing about knowing if I really love an album again. Like I said, if I spend more time thinking about an album than hearing it, it's usually because I adore it. And I stress the word “usually”, because there is one exception, and that being when an album is absolutely terrible. Inner Demons fits into this second category like a glove: ever since I first listened to it, I have thought about it daily, and then proceeded to have variable amounts of success at suppressing a need to burst out laughing. In fact, it fits so well into this latter category that it just so happens to be the new worst album I've ever listened to. Needless to say, I'm practically jumping with joy.

You see, being outrageously terrible is more challenging than being pretty-bad-to-okayish. You need to have some sort of idea of the rules to follow to make an acceptable release, and then you need to have the guts to consciously disregard them. I'm not saying that Anal Cunt are more talented than Nouvelle Vague, but, then again, I totally am. And Meatus know they're mildly talented. They know it so well that they use every opportunity they can to show off their uncanny ability of playing more than one genre. In the mean time, they only sacrifice a few unimportant things, such as sense of progression, dynamics, and being listenable. The result of this attempt at ultra-originality is a mix of some of the least interesting riffs in the history of death metal with a wad of the worst characteristics of every genre to have emerged in the last 40 years or so, all carefully arranged together by a tornado.

To give you a quick example, I'll describe the intro on the first track, which goes by the name of “Slave – Do It, End It All Now”. Oh, and have I mentioned the names of the songs here? They range from things like “Yeast – Societies Outcast”, to “G.H.B. - Sex Drugs Rock-n-Roll-n-Humility”, to the particularly clever “Spoken – ConfusionCONFUSIONnoisufnoc???”, but I digress. The opening song starts with (*gasp*) a piano sample playing (*GASP*) an arpeggio. Then, after a few repetitions, (*massive heart attack*) a clean guitar begins following the piano very badly while there's a sample of an e-mail about taking care of kids and hating the guts out of another person speaking on top. Randomly, the guitarist hits the distortion and begins to make some guitary noises. This whole sequence prolongs for the whole length of the e-mail about going to scouts with your son, giving guitar lessons, dance , and checking the daughter's FUCKING homework, before the whole thing settles down, leaving only the piano to play a few melancholic notes before being cut out mid-phrase, as a way to introduce the listener to the mega-dramatic death-metally / boring-beyond-comprehension introductory riff. And that's when the album begins to show off its extreme intensity and skull-crushing power by segueing into a post rock interlude for no apparent reason other than taking up space. Just as you start noticing how good Meatus are with post rock, the song cuts to a hip hop sample of someone saying “You don't like how I'm living, well, fuck you”, and we're back at the very uninteresting death metal. It takes one more introductory riff to actually get to the main theme, and all this amounts to an intro that in total takes up 3:30 minutes of the 7:56 minute song, and is completely unfulfilled.

All in all, the detours that are taken along the way eventually begin to sound like the band is making fun of you, and you wish they would stop doing them. But when the detours are not taken, the band has more of a chance to let shine through their complete inability to make a consistently engaging riff progression. A good example of this is “Ribo – Drugs Can't Erase The Memories”, which starts out relatively tolerable, until you realize that every single riff is a random combination of power chords an 11-year old could come up with by having a coughing fit, and that the order at which they're presented only makes them more torturous. The song is rendered even more terrible by the fact that every song prior and after that one is pretty much the same in that aspect. I think the fault here is of the guitars. They're so uninspired that they drag everyone else down to their level. The vocalist is quite skillful, the bass sometimes makes some cool chops and the drummer should have been looking for a better band in the first place, but the guitars are just lame! I think there are only about three worthwhile guitar parts in the whole album, and one of them sounds like the Batman theme.

I guess these guys were trying to out-weird and out-experimental everything else in existence and decided to do so in the cheapest, easiest and most gimmicky way possible. And I have to say that, in their own way, they have succeeded. Inner Demons IS absolutely bizarre. Its production is some of the most subtly perplexing I've heard yet, and the premise itself is a recipe for something of at least mild interest, meanwhile in execution it's even more tedious than James LaBrie's Elements of Persuasion. It really makes you stop and think, the way that something so chock-full of surprises and unexplained twists can sum up to something more boring than silence itself. How does that even work?! With this, my conclusion is the following: don't let my rating discourage you. Find this album and listen to it. If you have ever stopped to stare at a car accident, or considered doing so, this ought to spark your interest.



Standout tracks:

Spoken – ConfusionCONFUSIONnoisufnoc???

Tides - Resurface

Yes, I'm back. I trust that you won't ask me what caused this interval because you don't exist, but if you are curious, the answer is much more boring than you think.

More and more am I starting to despise post-metal, and through no fault of the music itself. You know how annoying Tool fans tend to ruin Tool for everyone else? Well, it's worse than that. The genre has been given this status as being “the new classical music”, “the thinking man's Metal”. It has been declared deep and intelligent, as opposed to other Metal, which is just pointless noise and yelling. And enjoying it will make you automatically superior to anyone who doesn't. All in all, post-metal is, supposedly, intellectuals' music. The reality, though, is that calling it intellectuals' music is similar to someone stating that they are a doctor because they watch a lot of House M.D.

One of the main things that is supposed to set post-metal apart is the consistent use of dynamics and contrasts, and even that it doesn't do well. It tends to suffer from the same problem that post-rock does, in that the songs will emphasize so much on being quiet and then being loud and then being quiet again and then being very loud that they fall completely apart once a change is called for. The dynamics are generally entirely superficial and will amount to virtually nothing. And that is a theme that seems to spread among all of post-metal's characteristics. It is superficial, and amounts to virtually nothing.

Of course, I'm not saying this to imply that the entire genre is crap. It does have its fair share of genuinely challenging and well thought out material, rather than stuff that pretends to be. Resurface, for instance, pretends to be challenging and well thought out, but it pretends so well that you can hardly distinguish it from the real thing. It's one of those releases that doesn't try to hide its true nature: It's all about atmospheric candy, nice soundscapes, pleasant melodies, pleasing buildups, and overall just massaging the eardrums. It's pretty up front about all that. But beneath this layer, there is also an evident attention to structure, album flow, progression, and to making sure that the music is not too predictable. The riffs are your usual post-metal ones, maybe with a little more emphasis on cohesion than usual. Nothing truly remarkable, but nothing bad either. They're definitely playing safe, but they pull it off well enough.

For the first half of Resurface, you could even be led to believe that we have here an incredible album! The songs segue into each other in a very satisfying manner, with some tasteful sharp contrasts letting the album keep moving forward. But eventually you encounter some problems. Tides's timing is just a tiny bit off, which damages the listening experience far more than it should. They don't experiment at all with the contrasting dynamics thing either. My biggest beef with this release, though, is the lack of stuff in it. It's not that it's too short, it's just that it doesn't have enough to sink your teeth into. They have found their own sound within the genre, but they also made it so pointlessly specific that a great part of what they do sounds like filler. And while they definitely show the intention of covering a lot of ground, the end result is still rather samey. I would go so far as to say that the opening track is the only one that doesn't sound like it was mostly churned out in a particularly successful jam session, for example. And I wouldn't be too shocked if I found out that all the even numbered tracks were, in fact, particularly successful jam sessions.

Fortunately, the effect of all these shortcomings is hindered by just how pleasant the sounds in this album are. Think of it as a dish of some of the most beautiful food you have ever seen, and the only problem with it is that it's actually wax. You can just enjoy staring at the sculpture all day, no one asks you to actually eat it.


Standout tracks:

Resurface
Aurora
Sirens Fade

Malignancy - Inhuman Grotesqueries

There have been simpler times. Don't take that statement as me being nostalgic and contradicting a previous review, though. I'm merely stating that, some time in the past, there was an interval of time when things were less complex than they are in the present. Take, for example, the Cambrian period: back then all you had to do was swim around and evolve extremely slowly. No worries about global economy, taxes, jobs and such. Also, if someone had played an ultra-technical solo back then, they would have been praised like gods, and subsequently eaten. Save for the being eaten part, I always get the impression that the rest of the previous sentence also applies to mostly any time until about since a decade ago. Ever since then, showing technical prowess appears to have become something close to “masturbating at Starbucks” in the Frowned-Upon-o-Meter.

I'm not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing. I hate wading through 3 minute solos for something to happen as much as the other guy, but I don't believe that those instances alone are enough to justify dismissing anything fast and shreddy and confusing as “wankery”. The worst part of this is that people seem to ignore a more refined style of overly technical music, that employs technicality not to destroy fingers, but to challenge minds. Enter Inhuman Grotesqueries, where being as mind-annihilatingly unfollowable as possible takes as much of a backing role as it takes the center role. At face value, this is even more of a pure wankfest than Inhuman Rampage, what with the drummer going berserk at random moments, and the pinch harmonics that are present for about half the album length, and the vocalist mostly saying variations of “HORRR”. But after repeated listens and after analyzing the album time and again, it becomes apparent that this umpteen-notes-per-second music is more of an exercise in controlled unpredictability, rather than a self-indulgent orgy.

Look at the guy on the cover. That's pretty much what the music is like. Malignancy seem to have learned a characteristic way to pick up normal brutal death metal songs and then warp them to the point of unrecognizability. They have many tools to do this, such as the mid-riff spasms of technicality, random speeding up and speeding down, and ingenious bridges that turn out to be riffs, to name a few. Mix that with an unusual  but obvious style of rhythmically challenging riffing and you have yourself enough ingredients to perfect a half-hour of very strong material. Really, they don't change the formula much, if at all. Just to get an idea of what I mean, the only track with something even remotely reminiscent of dynamics and melody is the song “Xenotransplantation”. Listen to “Xenotransplantation” and tell me if it's very dynamic or melodic. Not that this matters much, though. Because of how intricately tailored the music is, with nice details to pick up every now and all the freaking time, there's no reason for any more elements to be present.

One way or another, though, it's up to you, the listener, to make sense of Inhuman Grotesqueries. And your situation is not so good. You'll find yourself relistening song sections to understand where you are almost constantly, and you better get ready for a lot of frustration if you're going to venture into trying to make sense of the chaos. I do recommend that you do, though, because when you do, you actually begin to realize how well written the material here really is. Believe me, the songs do make at least a little bit of sense once they're dissected deep enough. This album is kinda like a jar of chocolate chip cookies, if the cookies were mixed with sushi, beef stroganoff, lutefisk and a slight hint of smoked owl. It's a level above the regular stuff, and it's the sort of thing you ingest calmly and with an open mind, enjoy it for what it is and have to learn to appreciate. Even after having proven myself worthy, though, after the eighth Aberration Cookie I just want a regular one.

Standout tracks:

Indigenous Pathogen
Predicated Malformations
Embryological Teratomas
Benign Reabsorption
Xenotransplantation

Liturgy - Aesthethica

….eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh  eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh eeeeh....

You know what? People are always on the lookout for new things to hate, so, without a new Radiohead or Metallica album in sight, other things have to fill in the void. One option is to find something completely cliché and incompetent, hand it over to Victory Records and call it Design The Skyline, while another is to find something inventive and competent in ways that will piss as many people off as humanly possible. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix alone could probably make a forest go up in flames just for existing, but he also wrote the infamous manifesto on transcendental black metal that he seems particularly proud of, and found three more guys to form a band to play transcendental black metal with. Oh, and they're hipsters. So yeah, Liturgy could be the definition of awful right from the start. That is, hadn't they written any music.

Now, I'm not one who knows his way around Black Metal, but when I like something, I can tell, and I really liked their debut Renihilation. It had this unusual atmosphere, with guitars weaving in and out of melodies and drums pulsating and vocals incomprehensibling. It was inconsistent and incoherent, but somehow that helped. I was expecting more of the same here, but this time around they have decided to experiment. Not only have they made an album over an hour long, as they have also fused their sound with everything that sticks out like a sore thumb in it. You have math rock passages, stoner-like passages, long songs where nothing happens, huge passages where nothing happens, a huge passage where literally nothing happens, an ear-piercing synth sound, amateurish singing... you name it. As if that weren't enough, they also decided to organize the tracks in the most lopsided way this side of their previous album.

The album is arranged into two halves and into four parts, so you have the three more direct and better constructed tracks to start with, then progress into experimental but nevertheless rewarding territory for the next four, then Liturgy give you a chance to wonder why they're being so boring and repetitive all of a sudden, and then pick things up again with the two final tracks, meanwhile having everything stop completely at the middle. They also seem to have put quite a lot of effort into improving their original sound, and that definitely shows on songs such as “High Gold” and “Sun Of Light”, and that is primarily what saves this album from being an absolute mess. I mean that there are better ways of incorporating experimentation than bashing it into place and hoping no one will notice, but these guys don't seem to have received that memo. For the most part, they seem to be more focused on ruining everything rather than writing good music.

Some of the experiments are actually quite interesting on their own, such as the way underrated “Glass Earth” or the way overrated “Generation”, but there's no denying that they're mostly filler and that they ruin the flow of the album with their too-long-for-their-own-goodity. All that I really wanted to hear was given away in the first three tracks: impressively structured and impressively written songs with a knack for atmosphere. Those three songs are probably some of the most inspired I've heard yet. A perfect balance between all the elements put in play on Aesthethica and on Liturgy's career so far in general. But then the rest of it sounds like something went wrong, like they're desperately trying to get that balance back without repeating themselves, and consistently fail. Still, it's a failure that is undoubtedly pleasant to hear, for the most part. It's just that the album is divided into fantastic and okay that gets me.

PS: The lyrics are unintelligible for a reason. DO NOT read them under any circumstance. They're that bad.

Standout tracks:
High Gold
Returner
Sun Of Light
Glass Earth
Harmonia

Linkin Park - A Thousand Suns

I'm in a good mood today, so let's talk about dead people. More specifically, dead assholes. And I don't mean the  assholes who spray “cunt” on your car unprovoked and then go on to die in a freak tanning bed accident. I'm referring to people who would feed innocents to lions for fun, would torture people for three months before beheading them, and would make people call them a god, all of which Caligula apparently did at some point. I take it that most people will agree with me that those considered evil are considered so with good reason. I mean, most people go through their lives not murdering masses without a hitch, and I find it a pretty good thing that social conventions dictate that that remains the case. But what if we look at it from the evil person's side of the story? What if there's a rational explanation for the necessity of performing such an action? What if, the way they saw it, they were doing humanity a favor? That probably doesn't apply to Caligula, dude was just insane, but take Hitler, for instance. His actions defied all morals and his logic was beyond flawed, and now I'm terrified of racists, but it's hard to deny that he did virtually the same thing as the Crusaders centuries back, and in his point of view he probably was, in fact, creating the perfect race or whatever. That being the case, Linkin Park are worse than Hitler.

There is no way that they could have listened to “Waiting For The End” and have thought “Yes, this song is perfect. We're not changing anything. This is the final version.”, and I just can't imagine a group of serious musicians saying “Yes, we do need two intros. The first intro introduces the actual intro. Works flawlessly.”, or  even “Yes, every single one of the interludes is absolutely essential. In fact, we'll even throw in interludes into  some of the songs, because there doesn't seem to be enough of them.”, and I haven't even mentioned how cheesy it is yet. The way I see it, A Thousand Suns was just Linkin Park fucking around. Because the other option is to believe that there is a collective of people who worked day and night to lovingly craft one of the worst  pieces of garbage ever and not even once noticed that something was not quite right.

If there is a point to any of it, I would assume that it was to make something epic and grandiose, and they pull it off pretty well at the beginning. No, seriously, the first 58 seconds are incredible! A masterful build-up in tension. But it's quick to slip into tasteless and cheesy territory, and very few times does A Thousand Suns resurface. I guess they tried their luck with a pre-apocalyptic vibe and I don't have a problem with that, but didn't they notice along the way that employing rapping and turntables into such an atmosphere does not work out? While we're on that topic, what are cheerful pop songs doing in a pre-apocalytic album? Why is there no dynamic development between songs? Why are two thirds of the album filler? Why is the songwriting both illogical and formulaic? How is that last one even possible? Why do the vocals make me want to pour microscopic knives into my ears? WHO THE HELL THOUGHT ANY OF THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?!

And then, it's time for “The Catalyst”, and everything changes. Within a river of shit, we finally find a speck of gold. One song in which all that makes this album terrible only makes cameo appearances and doesn't affect what is by far the best song I've ever heard by Linkin Park. A song that puts cheese aside in the name of creativity and reveals a surprising maturity. And it makes me hate the album even more. You see, that's where they show just how evil they really are. It proves they didn't make A Thousand Suns terrible by mistake. They never thought the album was good. They knew what they were doing all along. And this last song is like a final insult after the torture that was.... oh, wait, it's not the last song. There's “The Messenger” after it, and it is one fucking terrible ballad. I guess you wonder why I even gave this release a chance. Well, the thing is that I was fooled into thinking it was great, and I was fooled into thinking that by “The Catalyst”.

Standout tracks:

Robot Boy
Blackout
The Catalyst

Cranial Incisored - Lipan's Kinetic

Last time I checked, I wasn’t crazy, and I’m not that much of an idiot either, so I’m not particularly adept of Sadist’s Lego. They switched to nu-metal and failed at it. And let me stress the “failed at it” part, rather than the “They switched to nu-metal” part. I really don’t have a problem with bands changing style from one album to the other. I couldn’t care less if Deathspell Omega started playing dubstep as long as it were good. I do have to admit that it would have been quite a shock if Deathspell Omega had switched to dubstep just like that, but I know people who would hate them simply for the fact that they changed. But I suppose those people will avoid Cranial Incisored like the RIAA anyway, so I don’t really know why I mentioned them. I mean, it’s not like their style on Rebuild:The Unfinished Interpretation Of Irrational Behavior was that easy to put your finger on to begin with, unless you could call “AAAARRRRGGHHHH WHATTHEHELLISGOINGON???!!! with a hint of Jazz” a style. They were called Death Metal, and we went by with that definition.

This time around, well... let me just say that if Death Metal were found dead in an alleyway with its pants down, Cranial Incisored would have been the lead suspect. Lipan’s Kinetic is what you get when System Of A Down and The Dillinger Escape Plan have a baby and it’s born inside out and is then left in a saxophone for too long. After a rather soothing 30 seconds, the listener is assaulted by an onslaught of jazzy, mathy, brutal, confusing whatthefuckery. The concept of genres doesn’t really apply to these guys’ music, but it’s still recognizable as Cranial Incisored, much like a serial killer leaves a signature on their victim. To be honest, I’ll have to say that this album actually affirms Cranial Incisored’s style instead of changing it, but it’s still quite a shock on the listener’s part finding out that these guys were as Death Metal as a bald person is a Segway all along.

The original unusual style of extremely memorable wankery presented on the debut is now fused with everything that would fit in, which turns out to be quite a lot, all topped off by the  always welcome yapping of the vocalist. And all the ground explored on Lipan’s Kinetic means that this time it’s easy to tell the songs apart. Sort of. And I might risk saying that this is one of those cases when you have a very weird album that is easy to listen to. You don’t need to concentrate all the time to know what’s going on and actually get some enjoyment out of the experience. In fact, most of the time that I spent listening to this sophomore I didn’t know what was going on, but enjoyed the music anyway. I must say, though, that what saves this album is that it is really fun and enjoyable, because song-wise the tracks only make sense to one’s neck.

Lipan’s Kinetic wouldn’t be a completely crazy endeavor if the craziness weren’t evenly spread through all aspects of it, so it is evenly spread. Some of the only lyrics I could distinguish were from the song “It’s~”, and they were “Why, where’s your car? Why, where’s my car? Where is our car?”. And the songs themselves are in a very strange order: The album begins to show more jazz and folk influences as it progresses and then all of a sudden it turns into a trilogy of noise remixes that seem like an appropriate musical depiction of one’s brain after listening through the 20-something minutes of material. That is one thing I didn’t like about the album, that it was very short. Sure, I’m already used to 20-something minute releases being called full-lengths and all, but this one is just tiny. I really wouldn’t mind having my mind raped for another 5 minutes or so. Also, like I said, the tracks don’t really make much sense in terms of structure. There are dynamics in here, but they don’t seem like the real thing. There are changes in dynamics, but there isn’t all that much movement. The guys go from one thing to the other without any kind of explanation to how they got there. There are sometimes a few subtle hints, but they don’t really seem enough. All in all though, Lipan’s Kinetic is like the best seizure you’ll ever have.


Standout tracks:

Paradox Of Paradoxical Paradigm
Slossosynthesis
Friday I’m In Love (the Cure cover)
Double Talking Jive

Letlive - Fake History

You know those people on Facebook who like their own chain statuses and have thousands of photos of themselves in the bathroom holding up their mobile phone, in an album going by the innocuous name of “meee  =^-^=”? That’s what generic -core sounds to me. Everything from the dumbed down riffs to the frustratingly standard drumming to the insulting solos to the painfully illogical and reckless song structures and the even more torturous mandatory “clean vocal” choruses, all arranged at random in an overproduced package labeled “Please listen to me...”, just scream of attention-whoredom. It’s not so much an insult to one’s intelligence as it assumes one doesn’t have any. Much like most extreme metal, it has pissed on subtlety’s grave, but much unlike most extreme metal, it hasn’t done so as part of a ritual to ressurect subtlety. And it’s not even worth listening to for shits and giggles! It’s about as entertaining as a person trying to be entertaining.

That being said, Letlive’s Fake History doesn’t inject generic -core with new life as such, and more tries to go at it from another angle. The “let us entertain you, pretty please” attitude is still present, but now it’s buried ankle deep in good musicianship and a production worthy of a temple and goat sacrifices. Actually, it’s not that simple. It’s like these guys put as much work here as on any other  generic -core album, but gave a lot more attention to certain parts. So you’ll have absolute killer material such as “Homeless Jazz” sharing run-time with absolute duds like “H. Ledger”, or, more frequently, have songs with really good ideas ruined by what the fuck is that doing there. Just as you are half-way through “The Sick, Sick 6.8 Billion”, the song abruptly stops and decides to head in a completely different direction before inexplicably going back to where it had started, and that’s just a warning of what’s to come further along. Throughout the album, Letlive walk a fine line between making sense and the complete opposite of that: sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, they regularly even go as far as destroying a perfectly good song, as “We, The Pros Of Con” can testify.

And the playing is just as rickety as the song structures it is supported on. The guitars will frequently hit some amazing riffs and then just forget them and blurt out a couple of terrible ones to compensate. The drumming is a weird blend of maturity and Lars Ulrich: one moment it will be controlled and intricate, and the other it will follow the pattern of “HIT ALL THE THINGS”. Meanwhile, the vocals will usually range from incredible to appalling, and when they don’t range from incredible to appalling, it’s probably because they’re being both at the same time. And the production? It is worthy of a temple and all the goat blood it can get its hands on, but I think the same of Skittles, and even I just want to die after a packet of ‘em delicious bastards. And speaking of Skittles, I’m okay with recycling the almighty verse and chorus for a couple of tracks here and there, but an entire full-length album is overkill.

So, what has Fake History got to warrant even a measly three stars? I mean, I think I’ve criticized everything about it without going into the limbo of lyrics and album artwork. What warrants it three stars is that when Letlive gets its act together for long enough, a person dodges a falling piano. When they put effort into perfecting a song, it shows. The result will still be encompassed within the spectrum of genericness, but it will be good enough to show wannabe bands how it’s done. They have all that it takes to be brilliant, but their lack of focus and difficulty mastering even the most basic song structure really upsets me.


Standout tracks:

Renegade 86’
Muther
Homeless Jazz
Day 54

Boris - Amplifier Worship

Is it possible to be completely impartial? Theoretically it is within human capability to do so, but in practise I assume that Arcade Fire are overrated despite never having heard anything by them. That also effectively explains my grudge against anime. Two of my favorite movies are Snatch and The Departed because of all the things they don’t have in common with anime, and one of the things that makes these movies inviting is that they aren’t mentioned all the time and don’t have whole sections of the Internet and Google Images dedicated to them. Also, the way the Earth seems to be divided into USA!!!11, everything else and JAPAN!!!111 makes me tend to root for everything else.

I must say, though, that I’m glad I let my skepticism slide from time to time. After all, Boris is like The Beatles if The Beatles didn’t give a fuck, thus making it the coolest band in existence. They are group of fantastic musicians who know how to churn out something good, and when they want to, they churn out stuff that is almost life-changing, but they prefer sticking to being merely good. It’s like they practise making incredible music just so that they can not record it afterwards. That being so, what makes or breaks a Boris album are the instances when they accidentally make something awesome, and Amplifier Worship has a lot of those. The way the album is written makes it sound like it was initially a lot better, and had to be worsened so that people wouldn’t die from overexposure to magnificence. It is consistently promising, but only delivers whenever, and ends up kind of disappointing. Nevertheless, understand that I don’t mean that it doesn’t leave an impression, because leaving an impression is Boris’s middle name, or... uh... might have been.

Amplifier Worship has a rather slow start with the comparatively unimpressive “Huge”, moving on to the chunky and powerful “Ganbow-Ki”, with its crushing beginning and mesmerizing ending, followed by the ultra-aggressive “Hama”; “Kuruimizu” comes afterwards and takes the aggression of the previous song to its limit, but has a rather misplaced post-rockish ending, and “Vomitself” closes the album with some very hypnotic and trippy pure drone. In a nutshell, this release is badass. I can almost feel my beard grow when I listen to it. Meanwhile, the combination of and excellent sound and a fleet of rhythmic intricacies means that it’s very rare for the music to become boring, despite being a mixture of some of the slowest and most boredom-prone genres in history. Not only that, but when the music mellows down, it doesn’t just turn mellow, it becomes as beautiful as the likes of Explosions In The Sky or Sigur Rós. When Boris decide to do something, they do it better than the pros.

Yet, I feel disappointed. It feels like Amplifier Worship is not complete. It gives you a taste of everything, but it doesn’t really give much more than a taste, and it never sticks to anything long enough to actually achieve its full potential. I wish it were mindblowing, and all the elements to make it so are there, but it’s not mindblowing. It’s just promising. It’s only very good. It’s amazing how these guys manage to always keep one interested without actually giving much of interest. I don’t think they would have even gotten much recognition had they come from some other country, but the recognition they get, they certainly deserve.


Standout tracks:
Ganbow-Ki
Hama
Kuruimizu

Deathspell Omega - Paracletus

My dad told me something that shocked me the other day. He told me that it's stupid to hate things just because other people like them. I try not show it, but I'm pretty sensitive to that kind of comments, so I felt a little insulted, and, goddammit, I have very good reasons to hate The Dark Side of the Moon! It's insipid, boring, agonizingly predictable and sounds like Pink Floyd pulled most of the songs out of their ass. I would go so far as saying that Pink Floyd were the masters of pulling stuff out of their asses. Otherwise, how can you explain stuff like the song “A Saucerful of Secrets”, the song “Bike” or, well, most of Atom Heart Mother? It's not like I hate them or anything. They simply rarely impress me. With The Wall, though, they have. There they picked a format where cheesiness and failure lurk at every corner, and pulled it off. Wait, scratch that, they didn't just pull it off, they goddamn nailed it. They made overproduced prog rock opera their bitch.

So, what does Deathspell Omega's Paracletus have to do with any of this? Well, I once saw a person wearing a Deathspell Omega tee at a small gig once, and in my book, that means they're huge. I haven't heard any of their older material, but if it is in any way similar to this newest work, then their status is perfectly justified. This masterpiece has a promising and dramatic start with “Epiklesis I”, and from that point on, it delivers and surpasses already impossibly high expectations. The riffing is at the same time very melancholic, intense, powerful and carries a very theatrical mood. The production is one of the best I've heard yet. The vocals are at the same time monstrous and very human and emotive, in other words, incredible. But I could say that about quite a lot of great but not a-freaking-mazing albums. What really makes Paracletus so good is how well planned it is.

The album is a bit longer than 40 minutes, and it seems like every single one of the minutes is part of something bigger. Much like The Wall, listening to this album feels like an event. The songs manage to perfectly stand on their own, but together, they're as good as... uh... fuck it, I don't know what to compare them to. And, as far as I can tell, it all boils down to timing. Everything just comes in precisely when it should in order to be pleasant. It's like this release had connected with the listener and complied with their every wish. There's this balance between dissonance, absolute chaos, “bigness”, tension, humanity, inhumanity, and emotion that is kept throughout and is never broken. Just as one gets tired of a certain mood, it switches to the most appropriate next mood, while managing to simultaneously never border predictability. Despite this, the songs themselves still somehow sound like actual songs. You can easily tell any two of them apart, and that's not something that can be said about quite a batch of extreme music. And it doesn't even sound like Deathspell Omega have even presented their full range here. It leaves you still wanting more, like if they had a lot more to show, but decided not to. All in all, imagine Stanley Kubrick deciding to make an Avant-Garde Black Metal album. Actually, don't imagine that. Just listen to this one.

Standout tracks:

Wings of Predation
Abscission
Malconfort
Have You Beheld The Fevers?
Devouring Famine

Element - The Energy

I cringe when people talk of “the good old days”. They appear to believe in this mythical time when everything was simple and everything made sense and the world was a sunny, happy place, and that it corresponds exactly to the first two decades or so of their lives. And, from what I gather, it was actually better in every single way than whatever faggy bullshit we have these days, apparently. I'm glad there was a time in these people's lives when they were too naïve to know that stuff was kind of fucked up, but it doesn't mean that trying to return to that time is a very good idea. Everything evolves, and in evolution the only way is forward, because otherwise we're talking about regression. (And this is the moment I say what has probably become my catchphrase by now:) And that applies to music as well.

Take, for example, Death Metal. There was this time in the early nineties when Death Metal seemed to have reached its pinnacle. The genre had morphed into something that was at the same time very accessible and very mature, whilst not leaving behind its roots as being a more silly version of Thrash Metal. But by 1996 or so it seemed to have transformed into something different entirely, and, with time, the focus turned more to creating challenging compositions, and the elements of the genre were used for completely different purposes. There is still the occasional release that goes back to the olden days, but generally that will only work in favor when some kind of modern reinvention is applied. That is what Element have done with The Energy. Here they pick up the spacey, Prog-tinged Death Metal of Cynic and the like, and fuses that with the more modern aesthetics of acts such as... uh... Children of Bodom?

Well, admittedly, Element have improved upon most of the aspects that needed improving upon on Aeons Past: they got a far better production job this time around, much better vocals and they have improved the fuck out of the interludes. I'm not kidding, if it weren't for the awful sounding programmed drums, this album would have been up there with Bring Me the Horizon's 2010 album (no, I'm not writing that stupid name) in terms of sound. Oh, yeah. The drums are programmed now, because the album was recorded entirely by one person. And that isn't the only thing that has changed about Element. This time around, instead of making rather generic but good Technical Death Metal, this one man band is playing a kind of original but bad Prog tinged mixture of Death Metal and Mall Metal. Now, I'm not saying this is a bad release because the style changed. I'm saying it is bad because it is boring.

There are many ways, all varying in difficulty, to attract one's attention to music. One can opt for providing an interesting yet difficult listen, while another can go with engaging dynamics, while a third can choose really memorable parts of songs, and a fourth can simply provide very interesting song structures. While the best is to try and create a balance between all of the above, Element here chooses to go for most of the album length with none of those. In short, The Energy lacks energy. Also, I really disliked the way the more progressive influences were employed. They were used like duct tape. The songs will be going in one direction and then they'll just stop and try to go in a completely different one for no apparent reason, sometimes more than once per song.

And what's worse, you actually get a preview of how great the album could have been within the same album! “A Gesture From November” is fantastic and “Everchanging” is not much worse. It just makes me wonder what the hell went wrong with everything else. These tracks are like what Element wanted to do with the album done right. Yes, they are still kind of generic, but I can't deny that they are epic, that they are atmospheric, that they are progressive and that they make sense. Why couldn't the whole album be like that? Why couldn't this be another early nineties classic from the noughties?

Standout tracks:

A Gesture From November
Everchanging
Dreaming Forever

Element - Aeons Past

You know what I hate? People who make out at the cinema, that's what. 'Cause no matter how loud the movie is at any given moment, you can always just sort of distinguish the noise they make, and frankly it's pretty distracting. And is there any better way to show complete apathy towards another group of people's work? It would be understandable if the movie were some stupid time-waster, but there was almost an entire row of people making out when I went to see Inception. Then there are the irritating people on the other end of the spectrum. Those who gasp and go “Oh my god!” or “Did you see that?” when watching a movie. Not only are they irritating and inappropriately amusing, but they also seem to have never learned the unwritten rule that overenthusiasm about anything will make anyone look like a tool, or a mom. And the fact that overenthusiasm and apathy are both annoying means that I get slightly pissed whenever someone loses their shit over some completely unremarkable piece of music, and that the other person gets slightly pissed whenever I don't lose my shit over the completely incredible work of art they are unveiling. Well, I dare even the most Disturbed-iest metal noob to lose their shit over Aeons Past.

Element's debut takes quite a lot of time to grab one's attention because, well, there really isn't anything in it that would grab one's attention. It's not so bad as to be dismissed entirely, but it's also not so good as to warrant another listen. Sadly, once you forget about it, you'll never get to realize what a mistake you had made by not concentrating on it enough. Aeons Past is like that kid everyone thought was boring and then ended up being Isaac Newton. Once you reach beyond the uninteresting outer shell, you find someone brilliant, but who needs other people's help to put his clothes on. The songs are mostly comprised of boring tech death guitars, backed by boring tech death drumming and with rather bad vocals on top, and the only thing that seems to break the dullness is the occasional heavier part. A casual listen will also make it close to impossible to tell any of the songs apart, and the production sounds like Lego.

But if one is to listen to the album with some previous knowledge of the songs, it quickly becomes apparent how well constructed and unpredictable they really are. The songwriting here is some of the most convoluted I've heard yet, but you simply can't deny that it makes sense. The way the songs go in and out of riffs, going back and forth between themes in an eclectic yet logical fashion. It's like if every song were a Rube Goldberg machine on that rare occasion that the ball falls exactly in the right place, and the washing machine motor is turned on at the right moment for the paper boat to hit the button and everything works. And as a bonus, there is the occasional badass riff and the drumming sometimes has the power to astonish.

One thing that an album like this obviously couldn't go without were the samples and keyboards here and there for the listener to catch their breath, but they only left me thinking that they could have been so much better. It's a very considerate thing to add a breather here and there, but even breathers are not supposed to suck. I blame the production for this. The crunchy, plastic and sterile sound is tolerable, and may I even say, slightly enjoyable on the actual songs, but the interludes really ought to be more spacious,  give a feel of the surroundings created by the album. What most suffered from this, though, was “Within Singularity”, which could have been a fantastic, fantastically simple little piece to serve as an epilogue to Aeons Past, but, as it is presented, I just wonder what the hell it's doing there. And, well, the vocals are just silly.

Also, I've talked about how the riffs are occasionally badass. That's mainly because I think I might be able to count on my fingers the times they were actually awesome. So make no mistake, there's no way you can look at this release in which it is not generic Technical Death Metal. It's generic Technical Death Metal with an interesting twist, but still generic. But, then again, we are talking about a band with a discography of only two full-lengths, and they already managed to use up the words “Element”, “Aeons” and “Energy” with only two album covers, so it's not like they were making people expect them to be very original in the first place. And you know what? They are good at what they do.

Standout tracks:

Kronor VII
Sentiment Dissolve
Dying Sund Descend
Aeons Past

Waking The Cadaver - Perverse Recollections Of A Necromangler

If there is one thing that is more paradoxical than hipsters, that would be the notion of being a “true” metalhead. If you are considered a “poser” and don't enjoy that, you can try to make changes so as to fit better within the “trueness” criteria. Change that Slipknot to Slayer, change that Evanescence to Epica, switch from Roadrunner Records to Relapse Records. Declare jihad on rap music, despise the “breakdown” and the gay “pig squeals”, and adore the almighty SOLO. In case you're afraid you may have missed a few steps, there are handy “How to be a metalhead” guides all over the internet that will say everything you need to know about what bands to listen to, what classical composers to bring up in the middle of a conversation and what bands to detest with all your molecules.

To me, though, it seems like a nuclear war between your ego and your musical taste which always ends with everyone dying in the nuclear winter. Right off the bat, if you sacrifice your whole identity just to be considered part of something, it makes you a poser. Just the fact that you're searching for “trueness”  automatically makes you as “untrue” as one can be. And what's worse, it harms music. It means some truly awful music gets lauded, and some not so awful music is hated like if it were an RIAA lawsuit. Well, Perverse Recollections Of A Necromangler has been received like an RIAA lawsuit with a trollface and saying “Problem?” at the end.

So, this debut presents a sound that fuses Deathcore with Slam Death Metal, meaning that a fair amount of people already detested the album before they had even heard it. Their argument goes somewhat like this: “Deathcore and Slam use breakdowns, and breakdowns suck balls, right? There you have it, I already dismissed the album as absolute shit and haven't even heard it yet. Hooray for me!”. A quick listen would not only prove them right about the breakdowns being omnipresent on Waking The Cadaver's music, but it would also make them notice the constant pig-squeals and the lack of almost anything else. So yeah, the album consists entirely of stuff people tend to hold a grudge against for no particular reason. And it only gets worse when you read the incomprehensible lyrics. And did I mention just how mindless it all sounds together? Yeah, this sounds stupid.

Now, I would like you to put two and two together. The band calls their genre “Slamming Gore Groove”, and it is a mixture of Deathcore and Slam Death Metal. The album is called Perverse Recollections Of A Necromangler, and the songs have names like “Raped, Pillaged and Gutted”, “Pigtails Are For Face Fucking” and “Interlude”. It's funny how quite a lot of people seem to have missed the dead giveaways that this release is not trying to compete with their beloved Megadeth or even their beloved Machine Head. This is an album that does not challenge your intelligence in any way and makes it fairly obvious that it isn't even trying to. As a result, if you feel insulted by it, the joke's on you.

I agree that the music is really stupid, structurally uninteresting, lacking in atmosphere and otherwise anything respectable, and that the riffs suck, if they exist at all. But the end result is fun. It's unintelligent, unengaging, unadulterated fun. I rarely headbang when I listen to music, but that didn't keep me from doing so while I listened to the chug-a-lug guitars and barely present bass, all accompanied by some of the dumbest and most anticlimactic vocals I've ever heard. And you know what? The vocals are awesome! And the breakdowns are cool! And behind all the layers upon layers of stupidity, there are some hints here and there of some actual skill, which makes an album that would otherwise be worth only a handful of listens now be worth a handful of listens and another two or three more.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that this album is good. It's not even close to good. But it definitely isn't absolute garbage. It's okay, and very entertaining. It won't change your life or anything like that, but it won't make you regret having listened to it. So, drop your “true metal” bullshit and give this a listen. Or don't. Like I fucking care...

Standout tracks:

Connoisseurs Of Death
Type A Secretor
Blood Splattered Satisfaction
Pig Tails Are For Face Fucking

Mindly Rotten - Proliferation Of Disaster

Brutal Death Metal is one tough fucker to get into. It's like if music was taken to every single limit possible for the result to still be musical. And that is not only what makes it interesting, but also makes it quite a hit-or-miss affair. There definitely is a formula to it, but it's so specific that one has to disfigure it completely so as to have music that is interesting. Which means that, while there might be some household names in the genre, such as Suffocation or Nile, the best that most bands might hope for is one fantastic album, where all the elements just come together, and a batch of unremarkable releases. And, right off the bat, everything about Proliferation of Disaster seemed to scream that Mindly Rotten had taken the wrongest turn among a large array of wrong turns somewhere along the way.

First of all, their debut, The Most Exquisite Agonies, was among the best albums of the genre because of the way it twisted it into a unique, conceptual listen, and making anything in a similar vein would be pointless. Second, this sophomore is from 2011, meaning that it took a suspicious 6 years to release, usually not a very good sign in Death Metal. Third, the band moved from their original headquarters in Colombia to Armenia, to sign to Russian label Coyote. Fourth, the new logo is more easily readable, and the album cover seems more fitting for a generic Deathcore album, unlike the badly drawn yet ominous one from their former record. Top that off with an intro consisting of unspectacular movie samples and you've got yourself a recipe for losing everyone's interest in the album. A shame really, since the "music" part of the album is pretty phenomenal.

This time around, Mindly Rotten have made the somewhat unorthodox move of leaving behind the "incomprehensibility" factor and worked on the "songwriting" and the "riffs" aspect, meanwhile leaving their personal touch to them. And the result is strange, to say the least. The songs here rely strongly on the use of huge contrasts, to create a form of Brutal Death Metal that is at the same time confusing and ultra-technical, but incredibly catchy as well. And what's more, they've managed to make some of the most violent music imaginable with the use of riffs cheerful enough to feature in DragonForce songs. And despite the chaotic nature of the songs, with some patience, one can easily capture the intricate dynamics present in each song. One obvious example of this is "Death's Fatal Flow", which also has the characteristic of coming to a climactic riff halfway through the song and becoming even more intense after that.

Proliferation Of Disaster starts out more restrained and logical, and becomes progressively more erratic and insane, intensifying itself until "Catastrophic Hecatomb (Collosal Destruction)". "Abysmal Delirium (Instrumental Reverie)" follows, with an evidently cheerful and congratulatory undertone, which is a perfectly satisfying ending to an album that leaves you feeling like you had just wrestled a missile-breathing gorillasaurus and won. The album ends with a new version of a song from their previous one, like as though the band wanted you to know how much they have evolved. And I have to say that it is quite a lot. This release may not be as textural or atmospheric or subtle as the debut, but it's definitely weirder, better written, and, well, better. They have improved on the unimprovable. You know those albums that every other album within a genre seems to be compared to? Well, this may one day become one of those.

Standout tracks:

Reign of Confussion (Unpredictable Perturbation)
Outside Forces (Shall Fragmented Beings)
Death's Fatal Flow
Engmatic Hallucinations (At the Edge of Chaos)

Amon Amarth - Twilight Of The Thunder God

I guess we all have a love-hate relationship with money. Yeah, there is the saying that money is the root of all evil, and probably if it weren't for the lust for money, Mr.Burns-in-human-form wouldn't have sued you for 250K€ that time he broke your window with a brick and got cut by a piece of glass. But on the other hand, holding some cash can apparently relieve pain, and it helps people convince other people to do things for them. Also, there are things that just work better if you throw a bunch of money at them, including some types of music. There seem to be these particular kinds of music that are, in essence, sort of okay-ish, really nothing special. They'll usually be easy to digest and catchy, sort of enjoyable, sort of unremarkable. But then you make all the instruments have an incredibly perfect sound, and the vanilla music becomes majestically incredible. Still easy to digest and catchy, but now every note seems like it is gently caressing your limbic system whilst offering it cookies, and everything just seems awesome and original and perfectly fitting.

And I have nothing against that way of making music. After all, I do like listening to things that are enjoyable. The approach may at times end up sounding like a bit of an insult to one's intelligence, but it's one of those insults that you awkwardly laugh at and pretend not to notice. Twilight of The Thunder God, though, takes this approach to its very limits. This being the only Amon Amarth album I have ever listened to, I cannot know for sure, but I take that these guys have found a winning formula and stuck to it. The 10 songs all blatantly use some variation of the classic/tired "Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Interlude-Chorus" structure that has consistently attacked music, and inspiration is rationed throughout them like if there were a global shortage of it. As for the sound itself, it's simple, no-bullshit, balls-to-the-wall, poppy Melodic Death Metal with the slightest tinge of atmosphere. To my surprise, it works. The simple and pretty standard guitar melodies are much more powerful than they are cheesy, and somehow I had no problems with the inbredly simplistic drumming or any of the sillier vocal passages (except maybe the outro on "The Hero". We got it, you're an evil man, now shut up.). And unlike most music I enjoy, I didn't need a lie down and something to stop the headache once I finished the album. In fact, I listened to it twice in a row without a hitch.

I wonder, though, if TotTG would have received the acclaim it has were it by some other band. I mean, it's an album that has no reason to exist, other than to include nicely written music magically turned awesome through the power of sound engineering. Other than the fact that it's fun and nice to listen to, it has no real redeeming features. It's easy to distinguish the songs, but none of them try to stand out in any way. The sound throughout this release does progress ever so slightly, but even that seems to fit safely within the template of "first bunch is heavier, second bunch is more introspective, last bunch is more epic and begins to be boring". I usually can't understand the people who rate albums track by track (okay, I did it ONCE, goddammit), but it seems pretty appropriate on this one.

There are so many things that you can do that don't include listening to Twilight of the Thunder God, like playing frisbee, eating a yogurt, reading a book, listening to inventive music... But then again, you can also listen to Twilight of the Thunder God. It's pretty good for what it is.

Standout tracks:

Twilight of the Thunder God
Where Is Your God?
Varyags of Miklagaard
Embrace of the Endless Ocean

Battles - Mirrored

(See post date)

Not too long ago, I noticed that the “indie” movement had suddenly exploded. Without warning, everyone, no matter what sex, chose to start looking like Gordon Freeman in a sweater and decided to start using the camera their grandma had thrown away, because it was too rusty and depressing, to make “warm” photos to post on Facebook. Everyone was selling their iPod to buy Beatles LPs, and everywhere people only talked of Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire whilst making romanticist posts on Tumblr that managed to simultaneously sound insightful and naive. Grass went from poisonous green to unhealthy greenish-yellow. Skin went from spray-tanned orange to “radioactive meltdown” dirty-yellow. Glasses and facial hair expanded and lo-fi became all the rage. I think I ought to mention smoking pipe somewhere as well...

I myself didn't follow the movement much, and that applied to the indie music accordingly, as I furiously, relentlessly and tirelessly didn't follow the movement much, meaning that I know as much about it as Pluto knows about still being considered a planet (it probably never knew anyway, as planets tend to be pretty dumb, but I digress). Still, from what I do know about it, and I cannot stress enough that it's very little, the music seems to defend the notion of sounding very pleasant and pretty much ignoring most other things. Battles, on the other hand, fuse this notion with the intricacy and rhythmic candy of jazz and math rock as well as some experimental leanings to create a form of music that I can relate to much better than to any of those genres alone.

The tracks usually revolve around a few core ideas, adding and subtracting layers as they trod through their track length, and these layers are one of the main things Battles have going for them on this debut. The layers make some of the most fun and captivating arrangements I've heard yet, simultaneously spastic and restrained, bombarding you with information without ever becoming confusing, every musician providing space for the others to be creative but without ever turning into a mess. And on top of that, the occasional and incredible vocals, which make the second main thing Battles have going for them on this debut. The way the vocals are alternately controlling and being controlled of/by the surrounding music. And the sound of the vocals themselves is nothing short of brilliant. Their unstable nature, the way they randomly change in pitch, like if Tyondai Braxton had a Helium canister and a valve inside his lungs.

As for progression, the songs are constructed in a "building blocks" fashion, and that begins to really hurt the album toward the latter half. I'm not saying, though, that the material presented on the second half is in any way worse than the material on the first in terms of quality. It's just that the lack of dynamics that originates from the songwriting approach means that there is too little flow, meaning that as the songs become more introspective (yeah, right) and less energetic, the album becomes more tiring and seems to start falling apart. The core ideas are still there, though, and some of these will definitely stay with the listener forever, such as the last 3 minutes of "Rainbow", or the gigantic yet compressed soundscape on "Race : Out", and, like I said, they are what makes the album great.

The same things that could have ended up ruining Mirrored are what make me leave indie music as a last resort. The albums of the style that I have so far listened to are musical, but lacked anything that would make the music interesting on an intellectual level. It's like instead of containing songs, they contain "musical experiences", something to consume and discard and reconsume. For some moments in the album length it really seemed like Battles were falling into that trap too, but they have managed to escape the temptation, and the resulting work is a must hear for anyone who hasn't heard it yet.

Standout tracks:

Atlas
Ddiamondd
Leyendecker
Rainbow
Race : Out

Cranial Incisored - Rebuild:The Unfinished Interpretation Of Irrational Behavior

(09 Jul 2011)

It's really irritating from time to time to mainly enjoy experimental, extreme music, whilst having a small army of fucks that I don't give about more mainstream music. It was to be expected that as I listen to more music, talking about the topic would become easier over time. Unfortunately, it seems to be the other way around. I end up feeling like an asshole whenever I have to include bands like Mindly Rotten or Crimson Massacre just to get a point across and people start saying "yeah" in a "What the hell are you talking about?" kind of way. A simple solution would obviously be to develop a taste for Amon Amarth and Lamb of God, to start going crazy over everything Sumerian Records ever craps out and, of course, start giving a shit about Metal Hammer. On the other hand, though, I can continue to drown my suffering with awesome music instead. As long as stuff like Rebuild:The Unfinished Interpretation of Irrational Behavior is made, I'll stick to the latter option.

Until after a bunch of listens, this debut sounds very amateurish. There is nothing to remember after a casual listen and what is immediately noticeable sounds pretty tasteless and out of place at first. It's just so everywhere at the same time and incoherent and confusing that while one has to appreciate the musicianship, it's like they're shoving all that musicianship at once up your left nostril. Actually, this brings up a very common aspect among the less accessible music, which is the way that what keeps a listener away from the music at first is what makes the listener come back for more afterwards.

For some reason, the listener will go back to be ear-raped again, and again, and again, and this insistence will pay off. The songs will start making sense (sort of), the memorable parts will start to be audible, and one will start to be able to understand what each part is supposed to be. The samples and interludes will still sound dated, but when compared to the timelessness of the sonic assault these guys make, they just had to sound that way for one not to lose their sanity. As for the general sound Cranial Incisored present here, if you like Behold... the Arctopus but wish they were a little less coherent and think they need a yelping dog with throat cancer doing vocals (which makes it practically perfect for me), this is for you.

I could say that I wish Rebuild:The Unfinished Interpretation of Irrational Behavior were more well-known, or that it's massively underrated, but I believe I would be lying. This is the kind of music where enjoyment comes from understanding and learning, and not from the experience itself. The listener has to cooperate. It requires patience and perseverance, rendering it unfit for the casual audiophile or the unprepared. The album holds such a fragile balance of experimentation and quality that it's easy for one to not even notice the "quality" part. Therefore, this is a release that should be best kept obscure for the bold music explorer to discover and enjoy.

Standout tracks

Artificial Intelligence
Nervousness
Psychoanalysis Therapy of Sybil Isabel Dorsett
Unexplored Mind Content
Experimental Thoughts As Shocker Therapy