1. Cobalt- Gin
In most cases, rock music—and metal in particular—is all about posturing. Slayer may harangue fans to sacrifice their virgin sisters to the goat-headed lord of all filth, but Tom Araya has two kids, lives on a farm, and goes to church on Sunday. Amon Amarth might be actual Norsemen who drink actual mead, but they still don’t dragon-ship their way to Ireland for actual plunder and rapine very often. Bolt Thrower don’t drive tanks to their desk jobs, Carcass have never performed an autopsy, and so on.
Cobalt, on the other hand, do not posture. When vocalist Phil McSorley talks about playing ‘war metal,’ it’s not because he thinks it sounds cool. The man is a professional killer.
McSorley is an infantryman in the U.S. Army and spends most of his days in Baghdad. He claims to love his job, and the nature of that job makes McSorley a decidedly unsettling figure. Gin’s lyrics center around the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway (whose imposing likeness graces the album’s cover), but McSorley’s contributions are most disquieting when they reflect his daily life. When he repeatedly howls “burn me down/shoot me in the chest” on “Arsonry,” one realizes with a jolt that in his line of work, being lit aflame or shot is a genuine concern.
But frankly, the metal press’s focus on McSorley is misplaced. He’s a capable screamer, but his minimal face time and his decision not to include his lyrics in Gin’s packaging means that his role is necessarily limited. Erik Wunder, the band’s polymath instrumentalist, drives Cobalt’s sound, and it’s his stark, barbaric compositions that make this band so special.
Much has been made of Gin’s progressive slant, and Wunder certainly grafts more droning textures, quiet interlude tracks and funky time signatures onto the band’s blackened-thrash skeleton than he did on Eater of Birds. The shift has drawn tons of Tool comparisons, and at times they seem apt. “Dry Body” creeps along at a more restrained pace than anything in Cobalt’s catalog; Wunder contributes some eerie moans over clean guitars and very Danny Carey-ish polyrhythmic drumming until the song builds into a pounding, off-time crescendo. “Pregnant Insect,” meanwhile, tears at your throat with rust-coated punk aggression before rolling into one of Cobalt’s signature apocalyptic grooves. Things take a turn for the weird when experimental-rock queen Jarboe provides an occult chant that leads into a weirdly melodic coda.
But even at their gentlest, Cobalt never mirror Tool’s hippie-dippy aesthetic—this music comes from an atavistic, ugly part of the human psyche. Hard chargers like “Arsonry” and the title track are mean-spirited black metal, dumping buckets of rancid guitar filth all over your head with sadistic glee (great guitar tone here, as an aside). But, as ever, Cobalt are at their best when they indulge their capacity for building monstrous instrumental climaxes. The repetitive, thunderous crescendos that conclude “Stomach,” “Pregnant Insect” and “Two-Thumbed Fist” bear an unspeakably evil, ritualistic quality that I can only compare to Neurosis. Rarely, if ever, have I heard a band rooted in black metal get so heavy or so cathartic.
If Gin has a weakness, it’s that it ends with more of a whimper than a bang—“A Starved Horror” pales in comparison to many of its predecessors, and the weirdo vocal-chant hidden track hardly makes for a crushing conclusion. That said, I can’t think of a whole hell of a lot else to complain about here. Some might be put off by the slightly less aggressive tone and pacing of this album relative to Cobalt’s catalog, but I’m honestly glad they didn’t try to make Eater Of Birds II. Gin is a distinctive, powerful, and very sincere album delivered with exquisite attention to detail by two very intense men. As of this moment, Cobalt deserve a place next to Leviathan, Nachtmystium, Averse Sefira, and Wolves in the Throne Room at the forefront of modern American black metal.
2. Kreng - L’autopsie phénoménale de Dieu
L’autopsie phénoménale de Dieu, the debut record by Kreng, is a set of surrealistic pieces that wrenches comfort sounds from their contexts to show the compatibility of a multitude of styles, primarily melancholy chamber pieces, operatic vocals, and subdued jazz gestures. By virtue of careful placement within dark jazz atmospherics, these sounds thrive on sonic interchangeability and evoke a powerful, dynamic nostalgia.
The sheer density of gorgeous samples, and the inventive way in which they’re presented, is the defining characteristic of L’autopsie. Kreng’s experience providing musical content for the Belgian theater company Abattoir Fermé undoubtedly refined his ability to locate essential sonic elements and string them together for dramatic effect. For example, at the outset of the album, Kreng sets the mood with a spare piano bracketed by a Residents-like march circa Eskimo. Toys with hostile intentions give way to an adeptly blended mix of shrill, thin violin scrapes and distant background vocals to form a compelling, threatening groove.
Kreng is not content simply to pair gorgeous violin work and jazz drumming. His conceptual intent is instead to illustrate the malleability of sound, in a sense unwinding one sound to present another. In one moment the overtones of the vibraphone and the texture of ascendant brass and strings fuse in such a way as to form a stream that bears an uncanny resemblance to the piercing vocals that are eventually made the primary focus. Later, a tentative violin duo’s asymmetric melodies spiral upward before being engulfed by a grainy backdrop; the brittle violin melodies are transformed into a Xela-like dirge, replete with snippets of distant vocals churning alongside a bass amidst a murky dark ambience.
The steady, morose intonation of a piano is L’autopsie’s motif. Time and again, the piano grounds the music, lending the pieces an essential familiarity, a central referent that promotes compositional coherence for the listener. Kreng’s choice of dark jazz piano work, with that style’s foundation in both rote structure and half-time spontaneity, symbolizes the same character he distills from his samples. Such interplay between elements runs parallel to the interplay of the traditional instruments within L’autopsie. Kreng not only samples piano, but he incorporates an ever-so-slight trumpet and a sparing amount of drum brushwork. These disparate samples complement one another perfectly, in essence forming a conventional-sounding dark jazz trio. Kreng’s seamless placement of this trio within these pieces provides for effective transitions between the various elements, as well as a measure of organic-sounding balance to the frequently otherworldly samples.
Rhythm is incorporated in unusual ways throughout the album. Aside from the aforementioned brushwork, Kreng utilizes small sounds to subtly keep time. A child’s voice singing a simple melody, for example, is turned percussive by emphasizing certain syllables and juxtaposing those syllables against transparent background vocals. Elsewhere, a violin is played pizzicato, and its low end is accentuated to create a less invasive substitute rhythmic texture. Throughout the album, dirty vinyl pops just so, each imperfection looped and molded to draw attention to its choppy, percussive qualities.
This latter effect highlights the brilliance of L’autopsie. Each process gives rise to a satisfying stylistic result. One of Kreng’s methods is sampling, but Kreng’s sampling gives rise to a meta-layer--his sampling process also captures the physical act of sampling: the dirt on the vinyl that contains the source material. Instead of simply retaining the pops as sonic happenstance, Kreng takes the opportunity to transform crackles into microtonal percussion. L’autopsie’s surrealism is the byproduct of Kreng’s willingness to liberally conflate process and source material, by constantly collapsing one odd pairing into the next – suspended voices merge into instruments, only to be consumed by steel brushes.
Nostalgia is the most immediate emotional response to this record. Just as all sounds can move into one another, their infinite combinations giving rise to a singular feeling, so too, perhaps, do all experiences coalesce into a singular insight. L’autopsie phénoménale de Dieu is a complete work; one of shocking depth and complexity, yet its structure, each element, and its emotional thrust all are consistent. The album feels mysterious and artful, yet is comprised from simple, common components. Kreng’s dramatic presentation, his constructive virtuosity, is wholly dependent upon the singularity of sound, and it is this singularity of sound that points to something greater: the power of imagination to transcend and unify anything and everything into something beautiful.
3. Emeralds - The Overlook
Recorded from December 2008 – January 2009 in Cleveland, Ohio, The Overlook was a cassette limited to 75 copies and sold during the band’s recent European tour. Both sides of the tape are untitled. The Emeralds sound is synth-heavy, guitar-littered, minimalist ambient tunes. These are some seriously beautiful, excellently-textured drones. You would be wise to turn off all the lights, pop some pills and enjoy this sonic goodness.
4. Nero's Day at Disneyland - From Rotting Fantasylands
Nero’s Day At Disneyland is a triumphant and bombastic project orchestrated by Brock Bousfield from Oakland, California. Blending haunted 15th century sacred music and a tangled mess of burnt out electronic noise with a crushingly huge sense of scope, Nero’s Day At Disneyland seems to cram together the entire musical history of the last 2000 years. This particular album is a ludicrous carnival organ intent on killing everyone who hears it.
5. Nadja - When I See The Sun It Always Shines On TV
This album just goes to show that no matter how much material Nadja puts out, they're still chock full of original thoughts. Who thinks to make a drone doom metal cover album? More than that, who pulls it off superbly?! It pulls you right in from the get-go with the extremely recognizable riff from the start of Loveless, detuned, fuzzed out and slowed right down and keeps you somewhere between thinking how ridiculous this is and how awesome it is. The best combination of sort of insulted and amused.
6. Prurient + Wilt - The Complete Kingdom Recordings
Let me tell you a bit about this album. It's four cassette tapes, comes with a black candle and a 28-page hand-bound pamphlet, all housed and a printed wooden box, wrapped in black plastic and red duct tape to make a red cross on the front. Three of the four cassettes are a collaboration between noise artists Prurient and Wilt. It clocks in at just under three hours and is utterly terrifying. There's something about religious inference that just makes things so scary. It's not harsh noise (mostly) nor power-electronics, it's just noise. There are some vocal samples but it's largely ambient, sometimes droney, always frightening. The 4th cassette is taken from a books-on-tape edition of the Bible, and will be different in each copy.
7. Ryuichi Sakamoto - Playing The Piano 2009 Japan Self Selected
There's something about one man playing piano that I just love. It has a timeless feel to it. It's so clean and pure. Just a man, his instrument, and his mind. If you're interested in modern classical piano work, I strongly recommend this album. Ryuichi Sakamoto spent much of his youth a pop music artist and it shows. He doesn't try to imitate those who came before him. He creates classical music that fits squarely into the moderm music scene. This is a great jumping off point for the rest of his work.
8. Converge - Axe To Fall
Axe To Fall is a technical marvel. As a mathcore album, it always feels to me as though there is a battle going on between the rage and the construction of the music. The first four tracks on this album tread that fine line so well that is difficult to understand given the bands fury. They're short, to the point, and they blister. It gets a little over the top sometimes but it's generally very well balanced.
9. Comfort Fit - Polyshufflez
Comfort Fit is back with an array of electronic styles matched only in eccentricity by his guest vocalists. Detroit techno, jazz, broken beats, and dance music coalesce under an unbrella of abstract hip-hop. It's groovy, it's clever and it's fun.
10. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
There's something to be said for excellent vocal harmonies. For me, that's what this album is all about. It's melodramatic and too sweet. It doesn't really go anywhere or mean anything. But it sounds really nice and sometimes that's all that matters.
Disclaimer: the first two reviews aren't my words but I choose to use them because they are so much more eloquent than anything I could write.
