A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS - EXPLODING HEAD

Album: Exploding Head
Artist: A Place To Bury Strangers
Year: 2009
Nation: USA (Brooklyn, NY)
Label: Mute (9420-1)
Sounds like: The color of television tuned to a dead channel.
Goes best with: strobe lights, tinnitus, that scene from Scanners (you know the one)
Highlights: "In Your Heart," "Ego Death," "I Lived My Life..."
Recommended if you're a fan of: The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, The Cure
Get it: download | vinyl

By 1991, a mere two years into its lifespan, shoegaze was all but dead. My Bloody Valentine's phenomenal effort Loveless had killed it, flayed the body, cremated the bones, scattered the ashes to the winds, built the coffin, put the final nails in, dug the six-foot hole, and buried it for what most thought would be for good. And that was MBV's second album. Knowing they had a snowball's chance in Hell of topping that masterpiece, the rest of the genre's banner-bearers abandoned it or disintegrated soon after - Lush went britpop, Slowdive went country, and Ride just got boring (naaaah just kidding Ride was always boring). A hodgepodge of lesser bands attempted a revival over the years, but they all sounded like a weak and milquetoast imitation of Slowdive's Souvlaki. And then, when all seemed lost for 'gazers, there was Skywave. 1999's Echodrone was just another juvenile imitation of those that had come before them, mostly consisting of simplistic lo-fi throwbacks to The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy with neither the sound nor the fury of those now-legendary Scottish brothers to be found. It seemed as though this Fredericksburg, Virginia-based trio would disappear amongst the bargain bin wreckage of failed 'gazers before them, but this was not to be their fate. Synthstatic came in 2004, and it was just what shoegaze needed. Skywave mixed the magnificent songwriting of classic goth rock and post-punk with the monstrous distortion and swirling guitars that had become the shoegaze standard, creating an album full of catchy pop tunes mixed in with enough fierce noise to keep them interesting to dark and tortured metal-craving souls like me. The New Order and Cure-styled hooks came courtesy of guitarist Paul Baker and drummer John Fedowitz, and the noise was from bassist Oliver Ackermann's custom pedal company, Death By Audio, featuring such products as "Supersonic Fuzz Gun," "Interstellar Overdriver," and "Total Sonic Annihilation." Paired together, these two elements were nothing short of unstoppable. You can call it a zombie resurrection or a Messianic return, but Synthstatic spearheaded a new wave of shoegaze revival that continues to this day. Skywave broke up amicably, and while Baker and Fedowitz stayed in Fredericksburg to continue refining their pop-craft in Ceremony, Ackermann relocated to Brooklyn and began to dive headfirst into terrible, awful, blistering, mind-warping, wonderful noise in his new outfit A Place To Bury Strangers (henceforth referred to as Strangers because no way am i typing all that out).

Strangers are the unofficial and self-proclaimed loudest band in New York, and they can certainly get away with saying that. Oliver brings in the Skywave strategy of sound-checking at half volume, then cranking everything up to ten once the actual performance starts. Bassist Jono MOFO (best surname ever) and human drum machine Jay Space are almost indistinguishable in style from the classic Joy Division rhythm section of Peter Hook and Stephen Morris (respectively) and provide a solid post-punky proto-dance grounding for Ackermann's sheets of decibel-topping nightmare chords. The best example of this is lead single "In Your Heart," the most accurate to date glimpse at what could have been if Ian Curtis were still alive and Joy Division had never turned into New Order. In between the infliction of grievous hearing damages on his audience, Oliver sings breakup- and hallucinogen-inspired lyrics with a resigned indifference worthy of Lou Reed, the undisputed king of not giving a fuck. All throughout, Ackermann keeps his eyes constantly on his pedal board, the real star of the show. The noises that he's able to hot-wire together are absolutely frightening things, and the guitar hasn't sounded this exciting since Loveless. I'd like to believe that instead of sending interested parties a catalog, Death By Audio probably just mails them a copy of Exploding Head. And it seems to be working, too; his pedal business caters to such supreme clientele as Nine Inch Nails, U2, Wilco, Elvis Costello, and Lightning Bolt. Death By Audio is also the name of the Williamsburg warehouse where he and Strangers live, work, practice, build crazy pedals, and sometimes rent the first floor out for gigs and art shows. With so much on his plate, it's impressive that Oliver's been able to record a full album, let alone one that's actually good.

The songs on Exploding Head are hardly complex. By Ackermann's own admission, most of the melodies are influenced by 50s girl groups, 60s bubblegum pop, and the ineffable Ramones. Some songs are just plain simplistic - "Deadbeat" sounds exactly like a riff I could swear I came up with in the fourth grade. But bands like the aforementioned Ramones and their legions of devotees have taught us ages ago that music doesn't need to be complicated to be good (neckbearded Dream Theater fanatics please take note!). The melodic simplicity of the songs serves as a foundation for the rest of the Death By Audio wizardry, an essential grounding for the panoply of intergalactic brain-frying guitar effects. Songs like "Everything Always Goes Wrong" are straight-up JAMC-circa-Psychocandy worship, but the replacement of glass-cutting feedback with the Death By Audio arsenal makes the songs a lot less derivative-sounding, and far more arresting. The formula does fall flat in a few places, notably on the tepid title track, paradoxically the least cranial-detonation-inducing of all on the album. Additionally, I liked the second album single "Keep Slipping Away" a lot more when The Cure did it back in '85. Other than these two exceptions, however, the album is astoundingly solid and a tremendous step forward for modern shoegaze, with tracks like "Ego Death" (working title: "Gimme Acid") bringing the genre that much closer to fist-pumping heavy metal noise. And that's what a lot of people have been neglecting in the twee-plagued indie scene of the last decade: rock music is supposed to be LOUD.

I was fortunate enough to catch Strangers last fall, when they were opening for shoegaze paragons Chapterhouse and stole the show straight out from under their noses. Their entire set was a deafening strobe-laden hour of blistering sonic mayhem, next to which the peaceful 'gaze of Chapterhouse seemed limp and uninspired. What absolutely sealed the deal was their closing performance of the cumbersomely-named "I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart," a thundering pop song that broke down into a steady stream of unsettling noise, as Oliver looked out from beneath his hair and made eye contact with every single member of the audience, right before the stage exploded. Once he and MOFO had had enough of the aural panic they had created, they began smashing their guitars and violently ripping the strings off the fretboards, swinging the wounded instruments around with a tight grip on their entrails as they swung the guitars into the walls and the audience looked on in a state of shock and trauma. No ears were spared. The studio treatment of Strangers' assault is a woefully inadequate substitute for their live show, but make no mistake: after listening to this record, you should probably have a mop on hand to get the brains off the wall.

BUY OR DIE.
<3 sam

GODFLESH - STREETCLEANER

Album: Streetcleaner
Artist: Godflesh
Year: 1989
Nation: UK (Birmingham, England)
Label: Earache (MOSH15)
Sounds like: A boot stamping on a human face, forever.
Goes best with: Decaying industrial landscapes, Skynet becoming self-aware, being crushed to death by a collapsing skyscraper
Highlights: "Like Rats," "Head Dirt," "Streetcleaner"
Recommended if you're a fan of: Swans, Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle, Big Black, Whitehouse
Get it: download | vinyl

As much as I adore George Orwell's undisputed masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, here's what I usually think of when I listen to this album. As a nerd growing up in a small suburb, I had a single close friend that I could always depend upon to have the latest in video game technology. The Video Game Kid tended to smell a bit funny and lack social skills, but that doesn't really matter that much when you're over at his house and have the option of playing on the PlayStation or the Nintendo 64. One pre-sleepover night when we were taken to Blockbuster, that beloved relic of the 90s, I got to pick a game off the shelves. My choice was called MDK, short for Murder Death Kill (oh, to be ten years old again!). Despite the asinine title, it had a fairly unique premise for a video game of the 1990s. You were pitted against a race of aliens called Minecrawlers, extra-terrestrial fortress cities designed to indiscriminately strip-mine planets bare. Upon their arrival on Earth, the major metropolises of our planet were laid to waste along with our forests, mountains, and just about everything else. Resistance against the Minecrawlers in any form was crushed - both figuratively and literally - without even a second thought from the massive machines. We were just another resource to be harvested. Humanity was completely beneath their contempt. We could fight against The Machine all we wanted, but it wouldn't even notice our cries as it ground us into oblivion. On a good day, only 2.5 million people would die.

Godflesh is the best musical expression of The Machine, in all its world-consuming and soul-crushing glory, that I have ever heard. This is the only industrial album that I feel even comes close to the core brutality that the genre demands. Industrial metal is an entirely different beast from the other genres, as animalistic fury and human emotion give way to cold, metallic certainty. There's no Reznorian human empathy behind the mechanical facade or Ministry-trademarked tongue-in-cheek madness to be found here, only a churning behemoth of nihilistic resentment. Justin Broadrick doesn't so much play his guitar as he does attack it, unleashing torturous metallic keenings from the instrument that are made that much more grating by his gold-plated guitar picks. G.C. Green's bass is heavily detuned and played more percussively than melodically, and each note hits like a freight train to the gut. Paul Neville adds even more claustrophobic guitar textures on side 2 of the album, making Godflesh's sound even more colossal. But the real highlight of the album is the drumming, an entirely mechanical dirge-speed march programmed with no attempt to mask its artificiality. Broadrick roars ferociously over the band's lockstep chaos, with the end result being nothing less than pure, grade-A high octane nightmare fuel. More than twenty years have passed since the release of Streetcleaner, and the world still isn't ready for the anti-musical hell that Godflesh has created.

Justin Broadrick certainly knows a bit about hell, both musical and otherwise. He grew up in an English hippie commune in the wake of the 1960s, when all the free-lovers had moved on to harder drugs. His biological father was literally running out of veins to shoot heroin into, and tried to kill Justin on numerous occasions. This was obviously not the best environment for a small child to grow up in, and by his own self-admission Justin has often been wracked by paranoia and fear on many levels for most of his life. So, naturally, he turned to extreme music as an outlet - this is a man who listened to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, an album universally agreed to be unlistenable, repeatedly. At the age of 8. Fuckin' hardcore, man. Along with drumming for industrial rock progenitors Head of David for a stint, Broadrick has helped to invent grindcore itself with Napalm Death on their groundbreaking 1982 debut Scum, transformed hip-hop and dub into something nightmarishly abrasive with Kevin Martin in Techno Animal, and more than successfully merged sludge metal with the ethereal peace of shoegaze in the guise of Jesu. Ever since he first began rocking out on his own with a guitar and a faithful drum machine at the age of 13 in the dilapidated post-industrial wasteland of Birmingham, England (the very cradle of metal itself!), Broadrick has always endeavored to push the envelope of his favorite genres of music, and in turn stretch the limits of what's considered music in the first place. Godflesh's initial incarnation, Fall of Because, was named after a song by proto-industrial legends Killing Joke and inspired by the unrelenting brutality of the early Swans recordings, which are probably the closest that humanity will ever get to successfully replicating the sounds of Hell itself. Godflesh, however, distilled and refined the vitriolic sonic assault of Swans by adding riffs and some semblance of musical structure to the point where you'd actually want to keep listening to it. But by the end of Streetcleaner, it won't make a difference. The Machine will have ground you into the dirt all the same.

The opener "Like Rats" sets the pace, with pulverizing mechanized drumbeats and monstrous riffage, punctuated by the single greatest chorus industrial metal has ever given rise to: "You breed/Like rats." We've all heard the "entire human race is a worthless planet-raping virus headed closer to inevitable self-induced collapse every day" schtick hundreds of times before in heavy metal music, but Godflesh makes it believable - and frighteningly so. This track sounds like the end of the world, and the rest of the album never lets up once. "Christbait Rising" is hailed by many fans as the heaviest track on the album, with good reason, but it's fun to note that Broadrick programmed the drumbeat as an emulation of Eric B. & Rakim's "Microphone Fiend." This makes "Christbait Rising" the only successful merger of metal and hip-hop in history (if you still listen to limp bizkit please kill yourself thanks in advance!!). The jackhammer snares of "Pulp" and the lurching nihilism of "Dream Long Dead" give way to the monstrous "Head Dirt" - at Broadrick's call of "Now feel THIS!", the song collapses under its own immense weight and subsides into a monolithic and punishing guitar drone. This is what it sounds like when you give up all hope. Side 2 picks up with "Devastator," introduced by an anguished Broadrick growl and leading into the climax of the sociopathic "Mighty Trust Krusher" with an escalating intensity freely flourished with samples of spousal abuse and street riots. "Life Is Easy" lets us know that our lives are "money," "profit," "death," and "expendable." "What do you care?" The title track, the highlight of the album and the closer on the vinyl release, is introduced with samples of a serial killer's testimony - yeah, we're not talking about street sweepers here. It crescendos into a hellish maelstrom of mechanical beats, grinding bass, and guitar feedback as Broadrick roars out "THIS FEELS RIGHT." People who think that bands like Slayer are earnestly scary are just those fortunate souls who haven't experienced the sheer terror of Godflesh yet - and for their sake, I hope they never do!

Twenty years later, one needs only to look at the massive tribe of bands swimming in the wake of Godflesh to understand their immense influence on extreme music. The emotional tumult of Neurosis, the epic sprawl of Isis, and the blissed-out drones of Nadja are just a few of the great groups that owe Broadrick, Green, and Neville (and their trusty Alesis-16) a debt they can never repay. Streetcleaner is terrifying, unbearable, horrific, panic-inducing, and completely necessary. Broadrick's vision is one frought with fear and paranoia, along with the mission of bringing that ultimate fear to others - this is a man who watched Alien and sympathized with the extraterrestrial horror. "Sometimes I'm scared of my own thoughts, the things I fantasize about doing," Justin admitted in a 1992 interview after the release of Godflesh's second LP, Pure. "Thank God I'm not killing people for therapy."

BUY OR DIE.
<3 sam

PS: You can still buy MDK on Steam. It's only $10 and the gameplay's still loads of fun.

ELECTRIC WIZARD - DOPETHRONE

Album: Dopethrone
Artist: Electric Wizard
Year: 2000
Nation: UK (Dorset, England)
Label: Rise Above (RISELP52)
Sounds like: Black Sabbath playing on strings made of lead at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Oh right, and the Pacific ocean's made of bong water now.
Goes best with: '70s horror movies, misanthropy, weed
Highlights: "Funeralopolis," "We Hate You," "Dopethrone"
Recommended if you're a fan of: Black Sabbath, Eyehategod, Acid Bath, Sleep, Goatsnake
Get it: download | vinyl

If there's another album that can stand unquestioned next to the landmark first releases of the immortal Black Sabbath catalog, I have yet to hear it. Electric Wizard set the bar for the new millennium's doom and stoner metal bands, and those behind them can only hope to brush it for a mere millisecond with the edge of their fingertips while straining in vain to leap at its lofty heights. This masterpiece has become the de facto iconic album of the stoner/doom scene (and with an album cover like that, how could it not be?). While it claims influences from the manic death-blues of Acid Bath, the tortured bayou sludge of Eyehategod, and the perpetually smoked-out Sleep, no other album in the genre has yet equaled the mighty Dopethrone.

Electric Wizard started out as a fairly standard stoner metal three-piece in their early days. Their self-titled debut was mostly forgettable, with basic Sabbath worship riffs and goofy Cathedral-inspired lyrics about wizards riding dragons down from the sky and gifting unsuspecting stoners with wild rides upon said dragons into the cosmos - whether this is a metaphor for something far more illicit is up to the listener. But in between their first release and the fateful day when their second LP Come, My Fanatics... hit the shelves was where they first chugged down the "winning" cocktail of sexual frustration, long-term unemployment, and excessive drug abuse. This is where their flawless fusion of stoner and doom metal was born. Jus Oborn's guitars aurally pulverize the listener, alternating between massive detuned pillars of riffage and maddened caterwauling through depressive blues solos. Under this, the colossal rhythmic stomp of Tim Bagshaw and Mark Greening (bass and drums, respectively) set the languid pace, never moving faster than "plodding" but crushing all foolish enough to remain in their path. The production is nihilistic and oppressive enough, but the lyrics are where a true transformation from benign and careless stoners to brooding hate-filled basement-dwellers can be heard. Consider the priceless couplet: "I hope this fuckin' world fuckin' burns away/And I'd kill you all if I had my way. This was a whole new Wizard - louder, angrier, and more in tune with the true darkness of metal, but it would take three more years until they reached their peak with Dopethrone.

As the blues taught us all so many years ago, the best music is always born from pain and anguish, and Dopethrone is no exception. The three years in between the two releases were a trying time for the band. Jus Oborn not only severed his fingertip in a DIY accident, but also suffered a collapsed eardrum during a concert, while Mark Greening broke his collarbone while motorcycling. To make matters worse, all three members had altercations with the law and were arrested - Bagshaw for robbery, Greening for assaulting a police officer, and Oborn for (wait for it) cannabis possession. On top of all this, they were spending all their time in the back-end of rural England with no way out. If you're into metal, it takes a surprising amount of effort to live in a place where the elderly relocate to wait out their final years. I've heard Dorset described as a trip back in time to when England was far less socially liberal. From secondhand accounts, the inhabitants are mostly conservative farmers and retirees with Victorian-at-best and Medieval-at-worst views on how the world should be run. Dorset is a place where there's little else to be found but empty green fields, ancient farmhouses, and churches on every street corner. And to top it all off, a population primarily consisting of the elderly means that it's really hard to get laid. If you're a heavy metal misfit and convicted criminal in a town where your closest neighbors are fanatical Christian geriatrics who are almost Southern Baptist in their zealotry, what else can you do but hide in your basement, watch old cult horror movies, and smoke as much weed as you possibly can to blow off sexual frustration and offset your intense and brooding hatred for the world around you? Why else would the band put the extolment to "LEGALISE DRUGS AND MURDER" in the liner notes? I'm just thankful they learned to take out all their anger on their instruments instead of other people, mostly because it gave rise to the greatest metal release of the last decade. Yeah, I said it.

To put it simply, Dopethrone obliterates. The sound is similar to Come, My Fanatics... in every sense of playing style, but everything in the mix is heavier and even more crushing, with ample doses of fuzzy analog distortion. The sounds on this album are glimpsed through a thick haze of smoke clouds, with rounded edges and extreme heaviness - if you're not high already, you'll feel like you are. Greening's drums take titanic strides across desolate wastes, Bagshaw's bass lays down a bedrock foundation with a low-end fuzz unequaled in any record since, and Oborn's guitars paint bleak landscapes of riffage across the skies while his vocals cry out from the wilderness, like some tormented victim of the Elder Gods of Lovecraft. The short "Vinum Sabbathi" kicks you in the face straight off and sets the slow, head-nodding pace, only to be immediately eclipsed by the mammoth "Funeralopolis" in an expert one-two punch. The second track lays claim to the heaviest riffs played since Black Sabbath's metal landmark Master of Reality, with a lyrical continuation of the previous releases' misanthropic themes. The song picks up to breakneck speed and is barely sustained there while Oborn repeatedly screams a fan-favorite chorus: "Nuclear warheads ready to strike/This world is so fucked, let's end it tonight!" The horror continues into the three-part Lovecraftian nightmare suite of "Weird Tales," where the limping dirge gives way to an oppressively mesmerizing and unbelievably heavy synth texture, which continues into the awesome "Barbarian" - an ode to Conan, beloved for years by lithe and meek-mannered nerds the world over with power fantasies of crushing their enemies, seeing them driven before their might, and hearing the lamentations of their women - "You think you're civilized, but you'll never understand." "We Hate You" is one of the band's anthemic spite-filled classics, mixing in imagery (and film samples) from The Dunwich Horror with riffs and lyrics born of pure, unfiltered hostility ("I'll take my father's gun and walk out to the street/I'll have my vengeance now with everyone I meet, yeah!"), but it's hardly the scariest song on the album. That honor goes to "I, The Witchfinder." This terrifying ten-minute monstrosity ramps up the tension, with the song comprising a mere two riffs and lyrics written from the perspective of an inquisitor of the Church. Remember, these were men with the unchallenged power to take any woman they wanted into their custody and do whatever they wished to them, in God's name. The song's tension slithers and coils at every turn, with sexual frustration and deviant fantasies running rampant. Sandwiched between the two lies the short instrumental interlude "The Hills Have Eyes," which lasts less than a minute. "We could just have a spacy jam session if we wanted to," they seem to say, "but what's the point?" The titanic closing title track is the perfect capstone to an already-perfect release, a glorious stoned-out anthemic ode to that most wonderful of smokeable substances. "Vision through THC/Three wizards crowned with weed/Feedback will set you free."

This record came to define the genres of stoner, sludge, doom, drone, and countless other "slow" metal acts for this millennium. Not only is Dopethrone the crowning achievement of stoner metal thus far, it's also an excellent example of how heavy metal lyrics are used as masks for something far more personal to the singer. What, you think we actually sing that passionately about dragons all the time? "Funeralopolis" is more about pessimistic misanthropy than the tomb worlds of the grim and dark future of the 41st millennium, "We Hate You" and "Barbarian" are barely-veiled expressions of the Wizard's repressed desires to slaughter everyone who looks at them funny, and "I, The Witchfinder" is more of an indulgence in sadistic objectification fantasies than historical tales of Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder Generall. There's far more going on in this release than is immediately apparent. It's an unmistakable product of pent-up frustration and anguish at the entire world, bottled up for three years of pain and finally unleashed upon the globe in a fuzzed-out, THC-addled claim to the crown of Black Sabbath themselves. Now that the dust has settled eleven years later, it's pretty clear that they've earned it.

BUY OR DIE.
<3 sam

introduction

My name's Sam. I love music.

You shouldn't care about who I am. That's not important. The focus of this blog isn't the insignificant and trivial occurrences of my day-to-day life (i have a twitter for that), it's the music I adore.

It's mostly going to be metal, with a few surprises.

Stay tuned.