Don't Try #10

Spending a few weeks back in the Bay Area at the end of the year, I managed to make it on New Years Eve to Slims in San Francisco to see the Melvins. First up that night was Triclops! the newish Bay Area band featuring MRR’s John No on vocals. The band is getting ready to release an LP on Alternative Tentacles (full disclosure, I work there) and the crowd was still largely filing in as they began. They played a killer set of technically proficient prog-punk weirdness with John getting in people’s faces and writhing around on the ground as he’s prone to do. Great fucking band.

Comets On Fire, the San Francisco by way of Santa Cruz group whose last two Sub Pop released albums have made them darlings of the hipster crowd played next. The fact is, Comets On Fire play a spot on mash up of Blue Cheer style amp worship and more psyched out jams that can be hit or miss live, but on this night, hit dead on. It’d been about three years since I last saw them play and in that time the band have toured all over and have become rock solid while maintaining their raw and gritty style. Guitarists Ethan Miller and Ben Chasny seem to have an unspoken dialogue with their playing and drummer Utrillo makes a lot of noise with a kit smaller than the average punk band’s.

But the main reason everyone came out is for the Melvins. The Melvins have been doing their thing for a very long time and have outlived trends and fads ten times over. Their albums have sometimes missed, but they’ve always done something interesting, different and challenging and continue to do so presently. On New Years Eve, they played in their latest four-piece incarnation, which fuses Buzz and Dale with the dudes from Big Business, Coady Willis (ex Murder City Devils) and Jared Anderson (ex Karp, Tight Bros.).

With this lineup the set consisted largely of songs from the one album released by this lineup, 2006’s (A) Senile Animal. The songs make good use of the two drummer lineup and also utilize Jared’s interesting vocal range to contrast with Buzz’s. Watching Coady and Dale play together is a thing of beauty, something for Kylesa to aspire to with their (also great) two drummer lineup perhaps. The band paused momentarily for Jared to lead the countdown to 2008, and then quickly resumed. They ended their set with an a capella rendering of the Star Spangled Banner, followed by Jared leading a chorus of Glory Glory Hallelujah! It’s been said before but I’ll say it again in agreement, the Melvins are the best rock band alive.

The end of the year and the beginning of a new one is typically a somewhat slow period for new records. Being away from my mailbox for several weeks now, and not having the money to buy new records this month, I’m going to skip on new releases altogether and do a sort of expanded version of the way I’ve been ending this column in recent months, by revisiting older albums that I think are great. The point of this is not to cover something like Morbid Angel’s Altars Of Madness, an album that everybody acknowledges is classic, but records that have not necessarily ever been called that, and in fact may not even be considered a bands best album, but are worthy of your attention. So with that in mind, here we go…

We’ll start with America since these looking back scenarios often find us in Scandinavia, where this column will inevitably lead. Absu have the distinction of being one of the first second-wave black metal bands from the US, forming in the early 1990s in Texas of all places. Originally a badly corpse-painted full on black metal band their sound took on a steady evolution under the leadership of master drummer Proscriptor McGovern, a dude with such skill on the skins that he was one of the finalists in Slayer’s drummer search during one of their open periods. They moved on from satanic themes of evil and took on a lyrical and thematic approach centering around magick and mysticism and celtic occultism. Absu’s 2001 album Tara, the last in a trilogy of similarly themed releases, is a blistering assault of combined influences that makes for excellent repeated listening, and I continue to pull this one out regularly many years after its release on Osmose.

The title track, “Tara”, opens the record, a 2-minute bagpipe intro that paints a picture of vast Irish shores and then launches into “Pillars Of Mercy” a lightning fast blackthrasher evoking thoughts of Aura Noir and old Dodheimsgard with hints of Hell Awaits era Slayer. Those who find solace in Dave Lombardo’s machine gun rhythms will find much to like in Proscriptors drumming and Shaftiel’s surgically precise mile a minute guitar playing is its perfect compliment. The repetitive Mesopotamian riffing on “She Cries The Quiet Lake” would sound as if it had been lifted from Melechesh’s massive Emissaries LP, if it hadn’t been released more than five years earlier.

Absu called it quits after the release of Tara but apparently reformed in 2007 though only Proscriptor remains from the long running main lineup that included he, Shaftiel and Equitant on bass (who also plays in Goreaphobia). Tara is an album well worth your time as are some of the earlier Absu recordings.

The early 90s brought several prominent and long running Peaceville doom bands onto the scene. Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride are typically the two that are discussed the most. Paradise Lost’s Gothic LP stands as a monument in this pantheon and many fans of this early incarnation of the group think it heretical to vouch for anything after it. Nonethless subsequent LPs like Shades Of God, Icon and Draconian Times are frequently spun at Don’t Try headquarters, particularly the criminally underrated Shades Of God LP. As for My Dying Bride, the first LP, As The Flower Withers is revered among fans of early doom/death and the band went on to make a string of quality albums, sometimes missing but more often than not keeping things heavy as shit as the backbone to their flirtations with evolution. To this day My Dying Bride are still making completely listenable heavy records.

But one Peaceville band completely lost the scent early in the game and that band is Anathema. In 1993 the UK band released its debut LP, Serenades. By 1993, when Anathema began to rise to the prominence they had hinted at with the prior Crestfallen EP, Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride were already scene kings and black metal was beginning to take hold of the underground from the stagnating death metal scene.

Serenades came in with a doom/death sound that was oppressively heavy yet dare I say (and I cringe as I type it) romantic in its application. Songs you might play at some sort of tragic wedding ceremony. A sense of utter sadness and defeat, rather than anger. Complete loss of hope. They didn’t sound much at all like Paradise Lost or My Dying Bride.

Tunes like “Lovelorn Rhapsody”, “Sweet Tears” and “Sleep In Sanity” exhibit a crushing guitar sound and vocalist Darren White set the standard for what vocals in this doom style should sound like, low, pained and on the verge of a crying fit. The totally acoustic track “J’ai Fait Une Promesse” has sweet female vocals sung in French, a sort of time out from the heavy tunes, and yet it fits perfectly. The musical motifs in each song combined with the hopeless lyrics paint an impressionist picture of complete despair. If any one band provided a blueprint for Oakland’s Asunder, it was Anathema.

Unfortunately not long after Crestfallen, Anathema’s style took a pretty drastic turn toward an atmospheric rock sound as they did their best to emulate Pink Floyd. I lost interest in the band at that point as it was pretty disappointing after the Serenades masterpiece. The CD version of Serenades available these days also has the Crestfallen tracks as bonus.

A band that could be said to only be on the fringes of the metal world was the mighty UK beast GOD. God certainly had elements of Godflesh in its sound and Justin Broadrick was involved in GOD as a guitar player and producer, but the driving force behind GOD was Broadrick’s partner in crime in Techno Animal, Kevin Martin.

On its 1994 release Anatomy Of Addiction GOD explored a sonic terrain existing in a fucked up wasteland where industrial, metal, experimental, free jazz, ambient dub and even hip-hop collide in a big bang of destruction. Perhaps not unlike places Mick Harris has explored with his Scorn project or John Zorn’s Naked City. But the Godflesh style metal guitars and percussive backbone hold things together so it never fully descends into a complete mess. It’s a lot like Godflesh but with way more going on musically; indeed the full God lineup consisted of no less than 11 players including two bassists, two drummers and two saxophonists. Again this is really avant garde shit (at least compared to the normal fare in this column), like Swans colliding with Peter Brotzmann and Bill Laswell, but in its own way, heavy and frightening as hell. This was released by Big Cat Records in the UK and several other GOD albums are worth checking into as well.

Back to Texas again, Solitude Aeternus is one of the best doom bands of all-time playing in the vein of Candlemass, ie. soaring vocals, brick heavy guitars playing slow, memorable riffs with trad metal leads and Rob Lowe’s killer vocals. Rob Lowe (not the movie guy) is actually now the vocalist in Candlemass, which shows just how close the two are related and I’d wager to say that Solitude at their best are equally as good.

Solitude Aeternus’ first two killers were released through Roadrunner in the early 90s, back when that label actually still released decent records. But the album we’re concerned with here is 1994’s Through The Darkest Hour, released by the Pavement label, a traditional doom ripper if ever there was one.

It kicks off with what’s probably the best song on the album, a song worthy of release as a single, called simply “Falling”. A great lead riff, equal parts “stoner” and traditional doom, that eventually leads to the anthemic chorus chant of “Move, You Fall And We Die!” Total metal mastery.

From there on the album continues straight through with no frills trad doom metal genius like the 7 minute “Pain” and the dirge-like “Eternal (Dreams Part II)”. The production is crisp and clean without feeling stale and lets all the instruments shine, and Lowe’s vocals are mixed at just the right level.

If I recall, the album wasn’t immediately recognized by many at the time, including myself, as traditional doom had taken a back seat to death and black metal in a big way, and in some ways seemed a sort of relic of the past. Yet listening to Through The Darkest Hour now, it holds up a lot better nearly 14 years later then many of those same records I thought were so great in 94 (when I was only 17 so obviously my tastes could be questionable at that point).

Finally we go up to Finland to visit the band Sentenced and one of my favorite records. Most people would expect to read about their album North From Here, a great death metal album for sure, but the album I present for your consideration is its quite different follow-up, the oddly titled Amok LP.

Take Lee Dorrian circa 1992, and stick him into the lead role in the 1985 version of Queensryche and you’re starting to get the picture. Sound like shit? Quite the opposite actually. This record rips all the way through. There’s a ton of amazing, melodic and just complex enough guitar playing to excite tech dorks, but all the riffs kill and they never lose sight of writing awesome songs. There’s definitely a Maiden element to a lot of these tunes.

Lots of great hard rock riffs on this one like on “Phoenix” which utilizes some well-placed female vocal flourishes. “Forever Lost” is another anthem. My favorite track was sort of an odd man out type song called “Funeral Spring”. It starts with some funeral bells, and leads into a fucked bass riff that’s got the wah pedal on overdrive and then busts into some brilliant fucking lead playing that sort of follows together with the bassline. It’s laid back groove is practically doom and coupled with Taneli Jarva’s gruff man trying to sing like Lee Dorrian vocals it’s total ear candy. And again, the leads on this track are some of my favorites – they’re just blues based leads, not overly thought out, but fit perfectly. I used to play this track on my radio show all the time back in high school.

The second half of the album is as good as the first with more anthems like “Nepenthe” and the killer chorus in “Dance On The Grave (lil Siztah)”.

A lot of people labeled this melodic death metal but it had almost nothing in common with bands usually tagged with that label; horrible shit like In Flames and Dark Tranquillity. Sentenced were way more rock based and not nearly as fast and obsessed with guitar wankery.

I never did understand why people didn’t get into this record. Maybe it was too much of a departure from their old sound. After this album, Taneli Jarva quit the band to concentrate more on Impaled Nazarene and eventually formed the kind of shitty The Black League. And it turned out to be fatal for the band, as although they recorded many more albums and got kind of big biting the Sisters Of Mercy, for me they lost it after Amok. Check this shit out though and see if I’m right or I just have shitty taste.

I’m gonna call it quits on this column for the month. Hopefully some of you will find something to like in one of these records, or more. If you do check them out and dig them, or if I made you waste your money (or bandwidth as the case may be), let me know, I’m curious to hear what people think. I’ll be back next time with some new shit to let you in on. No life til leather…