Mente Errante

Sorry for the recent dearth of postings, I've just been a little uninspired to write lately. But I seem to have regained the urge, so here I am. I'm halfway through a massive musicological appreciation of the superlative* reissue of Sleep's Dopesmoker - you can hear what notes Al's playing! it doesn't sound like slurry anymore!! - still, for my money, the benchmark against which all Doom/Sludge/Thingy should be measured and by an accident of fate, was reissued in the same week as my birthday, a coincidence which slipped me by but was pointed out as very appropriate by a number of my good friends. I'm quite sure I have no idea what they mean... Fuck me it's good tho'.

One reason I haven't written much is music. After the smoking demise of my old (hi-fi) amp, it's replacement** proved to be so fucking amazing that every time I've sat down to write, I've been dragged back to the sofa by the music, so clear and beautiful is the sound, unable to concentrate on anything else, and then found myself completely unable to remember what the fuck it was I was going to write. Well, at least I've got a good soundtrack as Europe sails inexorably towards the economic event horizon lurking somewhere in the near future...

Eleh's Radiant Intervals is filling the room at the moment. One advantage of the place I live in now, is that it's fucking old, proper brick shithouse military architecture. I mean, the place was originally part of the Royal Artillery and is located in the parkland the army used to train people to lug and fire massive battefield artillery pieces, so unless you throw open every window, there's almost no leakiness at all, and that means I can listen to Eleh at the correct volume level. In other words, stupidly fucking loud. I love Eleh's music, ultra-minimal, like a sub bass obsessed cross between Elaine Radigue and Alvin Lucier, and the way it works as much on a physical level as a sonic one, absolutely filling the listening space with palpable density, seemingly giving the air that it's moving weight and substance, a thick, gooey sonic treacle permeating every corner of the room, making the whole place thrum as the high end oscillations tickle yr eardrums like starlight twinkling through the atmosphere. You can almost see and taste the waveforms. And (Dopesmoker has this effect too) when it ends, it feels like the pressure in the room has actually lowered, like the molecules of the air itself have been allowed to fly loose again, the sensation that a huge, unseen presence has left the building. It's akin to the delicious way the air feels after a massive thunderstorm, uncanny and wonderful and unusual.

The other thing I admire about Eleh is their? her? his? insistence on, and ability to maintain, absolute anonymity in this multiply-connected world of ours. Eleh have been around for 13 years, put out a fair amount of records, and still no one seems to have a clue who's behind it all. No websites, no interviews, no photos, no names, no nothing except the music itself. I like that.

Also, did you know that if you watch four Resident Evil films in one sitting, yr intelligence level slips lower and lower by the minute. I had to ring someone to find out how to work the fucking kettle after the third film...

Anyway, enough of this rambling foolishness, I've just got the first series of Archer on blu ray and I feel like laughing until my lungs fall out.

And one last thing, Dr C, tak for de lægemidler og solbriller, du kender mig for godt.

*Not a word I bandy about with great frequency, and certainly not towards Southern Lord, whose shit to good release ratio clocks in at around 10:1 (and growing) these days. They did this right though.

**It's a Rega Mira3, in case you were nerdy enough to be wondering. I won't have any other make of stereo gear in the house (speakers excluded - it's Tannoy all the way for that side of things).

La Locura Italiano

I've completely lost my fucking voice. All that comes out is this weird bassy rasp which sounds more like a broken EDP Wasp than a human voice, accompanied by a sensation akin to some fucker forcing a cheese grater down my gullet. Still, laryngitis aside, I'm actually in a damn good mood, and not just 'cos my throat-soother of choice, Isle Of Jura Elixir*, is so fucking delicious...

One of the reasons I'm in a good mood is because one of my favourite bunch of doom-mongers**, mad Italian space cadets Ufomammut, have got their act together again after a couple of disappointingly Isis-esque (or fucking boring, if you prefer, as far as I'm concerned the two terms are perfectly interchangeable) albums*** and remembered what they're fucking good at, namely riffs that sound like the Sun collapsing, incomprehensible cosmic bellowing, and huge swathes of wibbling analogue synths. Colossally dumb space doom of the highest fucking order, and essential listening for connoisseurs of heavy and stupid. Oh yeah, it's called Oro - Opus Primum and it's on Supernatural Cat, in case you were wondering.

Also on Supernatural Cat are another bunch of marvellous loons who go by the names Lin, Len and Lan, and are collectively known as Morkobot. They may be Ufomammut under another name, they may not, I have no idea, mainly because they have metal cubes for heads, as you can see...

A bass, drums and synth trio, they specialise in angular, convoluted space/noiserock and vaguely remind me of an instrumental Supernova-era Today Is The Day, albiet without the gun fetish and raging misanthropy, and their latest, Morbo, sounds (a bit) like a King Crimson loving spider jamming jazz-rock hardcore with Tar§. In other words, very bendy and very good. Goddammit, they even chuck in lashings of slide bass, and apart from Mark Sandman and me, there really aren't many practitioners of that dark art around. And Mark Sandman's been dead for years, so if you crave the injured elephant call of bottleneck bass you know where to go. They're also so tight it fucking hurts, chucking odd time signatures around like it ain't no thang and they never, ever veer into the dread zone of prog toss. If you like NoMeansNo, you'll fucking shit yrself over this lot. Fucking brilliant.





Right. More later, but the painkillers are kicking in and my brain wants to take a power nap.

*12yo, sweet, fruity and honeyed. Get thee to a Sainsbury's and grab a bottle. You can't buy it anywhere else as far as I know.

**With the emphasis on the mong.

***Eve and Idolum. Really fucking boring. Unlike the preceding three LPs, Godlike Snake, Snailking and Lucifer Songs which are simply fucking sublime.

§Another brilliant AmRep band no one seems to remember any more.

La Cavidad

Riff. Singularities. Excellent meth reference. And a lyric demonstrating an understanding of the implications of General Relativity. That'll fucking do for me.

I do like me some Cavity. Insert yr own joke here.

Condenado

The last few weeks have been bloody hard work, for the usual (and a few unusual) reasons. But instead of moaning at great length, I'm going to watch this fantastic early Sabbath gig for about the 86th time. You should too, as not only is this probably the fucking finest Sabbath gig I've ever seen or heard, and, and this is important, it sounds a damn sight fucking better than their records of the same era*, and, all you Sabbath geeks, quite a few of the tracks from Paranoid have vastly different (and considerably nastier) lyrics compared to their studio counterparts.



*I love Paranoid to death, but it does have one of the shittiest drum sounds in the history of recorded music. Bill probably wasn't wearing his lucky pyjamas when they recorded it...

Procede El Weedian

I spent most of last week asleep, and then spent the whole weekend awake*. Now that I'm once more functioning on something approaching a human circadian rhythm and my pupils no longer look like piss-holes in the snow, there will be posts aplenty once more...

The other reason I haven't posted much is because I (huge shock coming here) bought a new guitar, a Gretsch Baritone Jet to be precise, which is actually a 6-string bass which thinks it's a guitar and can be seen modelled by (a somewhat dishevelled) yrs truly in the blurry photo below...

It's a shame the photo's so blurry, because you can't really see the outrageously sparkly black and metal flake finish, or the fake abalone** pickguard, which look sorta like the materials the toilets in a over-fussy middle-eastern restaurant would be made of, but the person who took the photo was frankly having trouble focusing their eyes, let alone a fucking camera. But I digress. It's fucking awesome, looks like the epitome of 60s trash, sounds like the bastard offspring of a Gretsch guitar and a Rickenbacker bass, and with that Bigsby tremolo and a bottleneck, has opened up a whole new vista of low-end wrong in my never-ceasing quest for the most outrageous, disgusting guitar sounds known to man, and every time I've meant to come online and blog something, I've ended up playing the fucker and forgetting what it was I was going to bang on about.

And I'm truly sorry to any of my neighbours who have been disturbed by my playing along to Sleep's Holy Mountain, but it was inevitable as soon as I realised I could get the patented Al Cisneros sproing sound, heard to best effect of course on Dragonaut. Which gives me the perfect excuse to post this again (it was on the old blog, now it's here too, don't tell me y're surprised)...



Fuck, I love that song so much. Sleep had a loping, lazy magic to their music which I've just never really heard in another doom band, plus they gave the world Matt Pike, who would now like to explain to you exactly what the fuck heavy means...



And believe me, he knows that of which he speaks. And that, of course, is an excuse to post this, the finest piece of metal (in any subgenre) ever fucking recorded. I speak of course of Devilution, by High On Fire, wherein Mr Pike demonstrates his theory of heavy to somewhat devastating effect.



So yeah, that's why I haven't posted lately. Sorry if this post is a load of rambling bollocks, but it's quite hard to think when y're listening to Dopesmoker and have been getting into the spirit of the track so I'll bugger off now and stop wasting your time and I'll write something that actually has some kind of purpose to it in a day or two...

*I do realise that these statements probably require some clarification...

**Mmmmm. Abalone...

El Horror...

We're back. Again. It seems our notoriety has increased in our absence, and our nation's scrumpy reserves have finally reached a level able to sustain the space-rockin' beast that is Thor's Helmet once more. I've dusted down and oiled the 7-string. The Book Of Ylem has been opened for the third time and it's forbidden knowledge will once again seep into the world's unconscious. Get ready, because things are gonna get messy.

All Hail Malachandria!

Apparently, God Is Good. Shame About The Fucking Music Though

Anyone who knows me knows I fucking love everything Om had done up to and including Pilgrimage. I wasn't particularly impressed with the Gebel Barkal 7"*, but I thought ok, new drummer (Emil Amos) , needs a little time to settle in, he's a bit stiff but he's got some serious shoes to fill and coming from a band (Grails) whose music is far denser in both arrangement and instrumentation than Om's stripped to the bone minimalist doom probably isn't used to his playing being so exposed, and is possibly over-compensating for this by playing too damn much**. I also thought (hoped, prayed), that the clicky 90s drum sound was just down to the circumstances of the recording. Essentially, I'd heard a dodgy track by one of my favourite bands and was trying to convince myself that this was a temporary aberration, a brief lapse caused by a major upheaval in personnel.

It wasn't. At least not if the new Om album is anything to go by. It sucks balls. Badly. Almost everything that made Om beautiful seems absent. It's half-arsed, badly mixed and stinks of patchouli. Whereas the Om of old could weave magic from just a bass, a drumkit and the most ridiculous lyrics in rock history delivered in a monotone chant, creating an nonsensical occult otherworld of devotional doom, the new Om pile on the extra instruments like a hippy hot for enlightenment, trying out every guru in town in search of The Way. There's a fucking unspeakably shit flute solo at one point that sounds like it was played by the worst kind of classically trained twat trying to be "spiritual" (seriously, it's fucking horrible), and it's prissy funklessness sums up one of this album's three main faults; (what feels like) a lack of confidence in their material, buried under a mound of sitars and tambouras, bongos and tablas, guitar and piano in an attempt to cover up the fact that there are no new ideas on this record whatsoever.

Seriously, whereas Al's chant used to be unbroken throughout the verse, sounding like the meter of the words had been arrived at through a combination of the length of a breath and the rhythm the words rode on, now it's just sung like any other song, and the basslines that the songs would be carried by are buried in the mix, probably to disguise the fact that most of them are not just reminiscent of, but plainly identical to, the basslines on Conference Of The Birds*** with one note raised a semitone here or there. I've got nothing against repeating yrself, or reprising or quoting an earlier tune, but only if the new version adds something, lifts it into something higher or recontextualises it into something utterly new, all of which this record utterly fails to do. Al's weird quavering baritone is mixed far too high, draws too much attention to itself, sits on top of the mix instead of inhabiting it as an instrument, and he's just not got the voice for that sort of presentation. The vocals were always as much texture as anything else on the previous LPs, but here they're in sharp focus and it just don't work. Al Cisneros (somewhat disingenuously in my opinion) has always been at pains to point out the essential meaningless of his lyrics previous to this point, his ransacking of the world's sacred texts for words and quotes meant to evoke, not to preach, meant to evoke a flight from this plane to another, hence the huge number of allegories and metaphors for death, flight and rebirth that litter his lyrics, and when they were on equal footing with the music, it worked, conveyed a sense of the transcendent, the immaterial, a glimpse of the other, but upfront and leading the way they have the opposite effect. They become the focal point, no longer part of the holistic weave of the music, and it relegates everything else to background or ornamentation.

Coming back to the added instruments, what bothers me is so many of them sound like afterthoughts, the piano and guitar especially. The guitar playing is appalling. Stilted, souless, pointless. Amazingly, the piano is worse. It sounds like they were in the studio and someone noticed one of the rooms had a piano in it and said "oooh, let's put that on it" just because they could - I was a studio engineer for years, and this would happen all the time with instruments in the studio, but pianos, especially grands, seem to have a weird effect on some musicians, they had to have the big piano on the record even if they could barely play the fucking thing - it sounds like an afterthought, it's clunky and ham-fisted, ruins any atmosphere that was there before it's entrance (same with the guitar) and the way it's mixed completely fails to integrate the piano into the soundscape. Which brings me to the second huge problem wth this record: The mix.

It sounds like it was mixed by an idiot with no ears. And recorded by one, which is odd, because it was recorded by Steve Albini, who also did Pilgrimage, which sounded like the walls of Jericho falling in very slow motion, whereas this sounds like a revolting cross between Pink Floyd and Current 93. The drum sound, and this is one area I normally expect Albini to shine****, is just horrible, a halfway house between Scott Burns' patented clicky early Death Metal sound and Phil Collins' gated 80s horror. Now knowing Albini, he's probably just recorded the drum sound the way Emil wanted it recorded, but it's lifeless, cold and undynamic, and at points, sounds suspiciously like it's been brickwalled, a practice that's way too prevalent these days, possibly because these days there's less and less of us who actually understand the art of recording shit properly. As I've previously noted, the bass is often much lower in the mix than before, and for a band that (ignoring overdubs) is at it's heart a bass and drums duo that smacks of a lack of confidence, and it also robs the bass of it's overarching harmonic contribution to the sound which has previously been utterly essential, god fucking damn it, if someone is playing a beautiful old Rickenbacker bass, I want to hear that it's a Rick, that gorgeous combination of thrum and clank that only a horseshoe pickup equipped instrument can put out. But it just ain't there, the bass sound is anonymous and ignorable and that's a fucking sin. All the overdubs just sort of sit there, floating on the top like scum on a stagnant lake, starving the music of oxygen. It all just sounds so careless, like a couple of hopeless stoners***** sharing a pair of headphones mixed the fucker at home in about the time it takes to listen to after a couple of massive chillums.

The worst thing though? The really big problem? You've got the wrong fucking drummer Al. I've seen people describing Emil Amos as more jazzy, more complex than Chris Hakius. Please. The Hakius is (yes, we've been here before, many times) the jazziest drummer in Doom. Too many people confuse technicality with 'jazziness' (stupid fucking word). The beauty of the old Om was their ability to play the same thing in so many different ways without ever losing that rolling, loping groove that held it all down, and the sound of a beautifully resonant down tuned kit interacting with the bass, but with Emil's higher pitched kit, that sonic interaction is lost. Sure they play pretty well together, but it doesn't lock in, doesn't sound like one four armed beast. Listen to some early 70s electric Jazz; Old Om is like Michael Henderson and Al Foster in Miles' '75 group, new Om is more Rick Laird and Billy Cobham in Mahavishnu Orchestra - more complex, but sound and fury signifying nothing as opposed to an organic evolving rhymthic octopus. When others describe Emil's drumming as jazzier that just suggests to me that whoever wrote that doesn't know fucking shit about jazz. Most of his fills sound like slowed down thrash fills, all parade ground flams and paradiddles, and he just can't fucking lock into Al's groove. And for me that's the absolute crux of the problem, this Om has no flow, it's stiff, boring and desperate to overcompensate for those shortcomings.

And don't even get me started on the hippy christian clapping circle bit. David Tibet meets Iron John. No one needs that in their lives.

Rant ends.

*Sneaked out on the Sub Pop Singles Club because it sounds like a shoddy demo. Don't even get me started on the b-side 'Version'. Dub does not mean adding a crap melodica solo and rubbish echo, I know they're American, but please...

**Common drummer ailment, symptoms normally allevaited by beer, weed or being shouted at.

***Amazingly, this album isn't as bad as Live Conference - The new Om playing the old Om's finest moment and fucking it up royally. Don't go there.

****Albini can be a little lacksidasical with guitars and other stuff occasionally, but normally the drums sound a). like a drum kit - which is fairly unusual in itself, go and listen to someone playing a drum kit, then listen to almost any record from the last 30 years, there's not much resemblence - and b). wonderful; resonant, woody and clear. Go and have a listen to Rid Of Me by PJ Harvey for a record where the drums and vocals sound like heaven and the bass and guitars just.. lack something.

*****I may be a complete fucking pothead, but I never, ever mix battered. It's not worth it, you just have to mix again the day after when y're vaguely sober.