The Fading Voice Of The Old Era Speaks To Us, But Where Are The Ears Left To Hear It?

...And The Earth Swarmed With Them - The Fading Voice Of The Old Era Speaks To Us, But Where Are The Ears Left To Hear It?
[Post-rock/experimental/shoegaze]



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Core members Mitchell Johns and Kat Stanbridge may not exactly be household names quite yet, but the fact that they've roped in Ted Parsons (Swans, Jesu, Godflesh) to play drums and Justin Broadrick to mix the thing certainly says something.

Admittedly, ...And The Earth Swarmed With Them sounds nothing like the help they've roped in (okay, aside from the Jesu-y intro) but instead go for the murkier, darker end of post-rock: no triumphant, cathartic crescendos, but instead brooding, slow-burning cascades, like the moody-as-hell opener "Everyone Will Fade" or the apocalyptic "The Slow Decay Had Already Begun". And not to underrate the rest of the EP - it's incredibly atmospheric and solid throughout - but it's the closing "Slow Decay..." that really elevates the album. It feels like the whole record was building to this moment, slowly introducing the tones and colours and voices for the first 15 minutes and then dragging it all together for the last 6. The incredibly smooth bass/violin interplay in the intro is cool enough, but the frankly earth-shattering full-band eruption - complete with wailing, chill-inducing female guest vocals - is astounding.

Really, the band is setting itself up for success: a free EP, with an all-star supporting cast and stellar artwork, all backed up with a unique sound and hints at even greater creativity. And don't doubt them because of the tags here: it's post-rock, but it's not formulaic; it's heavy shoegaze, but it's not Jesu-worship; and yeah, it's experimental, but it's far from pointless self-indulgence. Truly music from - or maybe causing - the end of the world.

Sick Twisted Fuck

Not music related, but if you're into gory, horrific, violent, misogynistic, misanthropic, disturbing films - the kind that only Japan seems to deliver good and proper - check out Sick Twisted Fuck. I'm a fan of his Youtube videos (under the moniker Sculpting Fragments), so its nice to get more reviews, and with added stills and (hopefully) clips and such.

I'm sorry, this number is no longer in service

It's no understatement to say that Robotic Empire played a big role in my musical development, way back in the early aughts when HXCMP3 was a thing and Robotic Empire and their artists gave away MP3s with reckless abandon. They had tons tons tons of exactly the sort of thing I was looking for at the time: mean, obscure, distinctive hardcore/metalcore/screamo/grind/whatever. Circle Takes the Square, pg. 99, Circle of Dead Children and Pig Destroyer are probably the most relevant names on the [huge] list, but I ate it all up, and there were tons of under appreciated gems in the mix - Transistor Transistor, Hassan I Sabbah, Pink Razors, Stop It!!, etc. (Side note: furthermore, for some completely inexplicable reason, Robotic Empire also gave me my first songs from Isis (huh?) and, erm, Opeth. Yeah, they put out an Opeth record. Back in my day...) But today is all about Employer, Employee. Finally.



For the uninitiated - and that seems to be far too many - Employer, Employee played, uh, metalcore, sort of. But with none of the windmilling, breakdown-ing, bass dropping, chug-chugging bro-core genre tropes that have come to define that sort of music as of late. Employer, Employee play an honest-to-god fusion of metal and hardcore, taking the heavy grind of the former and slapping it across the face with spastic bursts of the latter, all the while with some borderline-mathy chops to back it all up. Some of their most adventurous material came after their full length sic[sic], on the Mother Spain & the Wayfaring Myth 7" where the opening track contains this entirely epic string quartet interlude and if your primal instinct to tear shit up is not triggered the instance that the vicious "YOU'RE GONNA DIE" scream unleashes a fucking savage every-core assault in your face, then seriously reconsider your life and how you've lived it up until this point.

Their discography LP was released yesterday after literally years in the making (I checked out their Last.fm page out of curiosity, and saw my own post from January 2007 expressing my excitement for their undoubtedly soon to be released collection) and boy was it done up in style. For $12.99 you get a clear 12" record limited to 300 copies with a pin, a patch, an insert, and a free digital copy. Seriously. I got the 7" for $5 and have never been able to find the way out of print CD, so $13 for a beautifully made piece of vinyl with tons of free bonuses is an absolute steal. Snatch that up before Robotic Empire realizes how insane this price point is.

SERIOUSLY, GO BUY THIS RECORD.

Employer, Employee - Nil or the Nile
Employer, Employee - One Count of Mutiny

Carnival

Sleep In - Steady
Sleep In - Amorous
Sleep In - January

I really want to hate Sleep In. Not because I don't like the music - I do - and not because Hamish Duncan is a jerk - he isn't, at least, in my experience - but because he has accomplished so much with his music despite being only 19, thus making me look like a lazy, untalented jerk for also not putting out 4 full-length albums of shoegazey psychedelic meandering. Well, shoot.


And really, the whole discography is pretty grand. Incredibly solid. Unprecedentedly solid. It's a whole mess (in a good way) of genre-hopping/defying denies your (read: my) best attempts at pidgeonholing. It's noisy, it's trippy, it's vaguely catchy, it's expansive when it's not being minimal, it's straightforward when it's not being obtuse, and its the sort of thing that will take more than one listen to grasp (which is my excuse for not posting this much, much sooner after I said I would). From my experience, the whole Sleep In project is just a vast outpouring of ideas, the sort of project that really couldn't have existed, say, 10, even 5 years ago. Truly a product of the digital age, and certainly a musician who understands what it takes to be a musician in this era and, furthermore, knows how to take advantage of it. You can grab Sleep In albums for $1.75 from his own label, Nightgull Records (oh, yeah, he runs a record label, too. At this rate, the next Sleep In release is going to be "the cure for cancer") or get a digital double-album from Enemies List Home Recordings for $5. I literally spent more on bus fare this morning.

I've posted some tracks from Carnival - available with Pyramid from Enemies List - to give you the best 'snapshot' of the Sleep In M.O. From the spacey, wintery jams of "January" to the straight-ahead psych-rocker "Steady" (Magic Lantern would be proud (and also look for a disarmingly spot-on Thurston Moore impression), it's incredibly diverse but smartly unified. You know, they way they used to make albums.

All To-more-oh's Pah-tees

Woah, it's that time again already? The hell, man. All Tomorrow's Parties 2010 came outta nowhere. Partially because I hadn't planned it 4 months in advance, partially because the line-up was a smidgen weaker than last year, but all that aside, it was a stellar weekend as always.

Brief note from the editor: I kind of struggle with the idea of a festival review because all in all, it's a bit pointless. Concert reviews as a whole are also of limited use, and this is especially true of concert reviews in the blogosphere wherein the writing is more or less there to convey a sense of I was there and you were not, sucker. Plus, more often than not, it seems to slip into "my god, this was absolutely [pick one: life-changing/-affirming, transcendental, the show of a lifetime, an "experience"]" and general fanboyism turning from review into, y'know, fanboyism. Besides, of how much practical use is a live review? An album is a singular experience, more or less the same for everyone outside of personal set/settings. A concert, however, is subject to a million different x-factors: your state of mind that day, your physical condition, the conditions of the venue, technical issues, et al. The best I can do for you now is tell you "yeah, this show was very good, you should uh... have been there, because it will never, ever happen again".

The Scientists playing was apparently a Big Deal, and I wish I could've cared more, but honestly, by 6pm Friday night I was toast after working all day Thursday and then taking an overnight bus to NYC (and then another 2 hours on the bus to get to Monticello). I was asleep on my feet for most of their set. I also don't care about Mudhoney at all. Yeah, we're off to a good start here.

But hey, goddamn, were The Stooges a wake-up call or what. Iggy Pop is still one of the greatest frontmen ever, even now that he bears a striking resemblance to an actual mummified corpse. Pits were moshed, claps were clapped, choruses were sung along, you wouldn't really know that this material was some 35+ years old. Phenomenal set, spot on.

But really, just look around and look at the black tshirts and overgrown neckbeards: it's Sleep that are the band of the night. And boy do they ever uphold their reputation as metal's most blunted, with a solid 2:1 ratio of amplifiers to band members, moody green lighting and a background projection that looks like the most stoned glacier you've ever seen. Hell, even the attempted-but-failed classical guitar interlude was probably conceived in a pre-show session. Snafus aside, it was pretty flawless stoner doom, with resin-thick guitar tones and pitch-perfect raspy bellows. An absolute marathon of a set, too, clocking it at over two hours.

Beak> were a surprise highlight for me, having never heard them before and only knowing they, uh, had some connection to Portishead and Portishead is great. Really atmospheric electronic-based sort of stuff, kind of like Hail to the Thief-era Radiohead. Perfect balance of creepy moments with danceable bass grooves.

Apse had one hell of a light show, that much is certain. I only caught a bit of their set but it was pretty bizarre post-everything that probably warrants a closer listening than I gave 'em.

Everyone seemed to be all shaken as to how loud Fuck Buttons were, so maybe my hearing is just deadened at this point, but it didn't seem all that unbearable. I wouldn't expect anything less, really, because this brand of body-movin', uh, - power-drone? progressive post-techno? - demands volume.

Text of Light should've been really cool - Lee Ranaldo deflowering his guitar to avant-garde 70's film - but came off as too hyper-artsy for its own sake. There's a big deal made about the projections and such, but they're just there for aesthetics, really, because whatever unholy noise was being torn from those amps had little-to-no correlation to the visuals. And I reckon the "little" correlations were coincidental.

Another band outta left-field was Fursaxa, with her (their?) fantastically pretty-sounding folk based around drones, harp and cello. Sort of a toned-down Natural Snow Buildings-vibe, minus the viciousness that band sometimes finds itself in.

Now, when Tortoise are good, they're really damn good, but when Tortoise are mediocre, well, they're really average. Tortoise here were pretty average. Flawless musicianship, sure, but it's not exactly a thrilling live show. Maybe I'm missing something, because everyone else was super jazzed (ba-dum) about their performances.

Shellac was fucking Shellac. Shellac ruled. It was Shellac. Damn.

The Breeders were five kinds of fun. Not the Pixies, and they never will be the Pixies, but once I got past that it was solid pop. And hey, it was super neat to see 90's alt-rock staple "Cannonball".

Explosions in the Sky were every bit as cathartic as they are on record. Yeah, I could pan them a bit for being one-dimensional, but when it's as powerful as this, who cares? Even I think I'm a pretentious douche for bringing that up.

Sonic Youth aptly made up for their Eternal-heavy set from last time I saw them by busting out a setlist I only could've dreamed up. "Candle", "Hey Joni", "'Cross the Breeze", "Eric's Trip", "Cross the Breeze", "Stereo Sanctity", "Catholic Block", "Expressway to Yr Skull", "Death Valley -69", and more but you get the idea, this was perfect. Screaming fields of Sonic Love indeed.

NOW, BUILD YOUR OWN SUNN O))) & BORIS REVIEW:
Opening:

• "I had always heard that Sunn O))) were best experienced live..."
• "The lights dimmed, smoke filled the stage, and the Hooded Ones began to..."
• "BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW"

Overwritten metaphor/quasi-genrefication:

• "Searing tarpit sludge assault"
• "Pangaea tearing itself apart"
• "Cosmic funeral dirge"
• "BRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIWWWWWWWWWWWW"

Conclusion:

• "Transcendental; a truly euphoric performance"
• "Merely describing it as a 'concert' doesn't do the band justice..."
• "GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNN"

I know you've read about Sunn O))) before. Yeah, it might have actually been a few of those things, but goddamn does the fetishization of this band in music criticism get a bit long in the tooth.

So yeah, all in all, 10/10. Great show. Check it out. You should've been there.

"CHAOS... REIGNS..."

I'VE BEEN BUSY, OK?

But with like, actual things, not the nonethings that tend to keep me away. Most noteworthy of which was attending All Tomorrow's Parties, which was fantastic and might warrant a write-up. Also, that whole Antichrist movie, I dunno what to make of it. I want to like it, what with all the incredibly moody atmospheric touches and bizarre torture (which may have trumped August Underground in my books for "most disturbing genital mutilation"), but at other times it borders on ridiculous and awkwardly "artsy". Worth a watch, though.


Something to check out right now: Silber is putting out a wicked cool webzine called QRD, which is basically the guitar nerd equivalent of "Dear Penthouse..." as some of the more innovative musicians out there (folks from Melt-Banana, Master Musicians of Bukkake, Tera Melos, etc) talk about their techniques, tricks, and, most importantly, their gear. Hop on it.

Things in the pipeline: Sleep In, America Addio, Kissing Club, etc.