Oh Lord, No More Swastikas

Welcome back.

I'm not sure about strings...the invisible ones that bind people. You know. Those. Things we all have in common, and yet those things are the most transient and mutable. Things change so quickly that it's almost a blur. Since I've been involved in listen to music my tastes have taken two drastic changes. One when I was 14, and heard Charles Mingus' Fables of Faubus, and knew I'd never stop loving jazz. And again when I was 17, and heard Mastodon's Blood and Thunder, and probably thought, "why the fuck does this vocalist sound like a dying orangutan reciting the Declaration of Independence?" But eventually I saw the beauty of it and that was all I needed. I was hooked. The strings had been strung, and punches thrown, the anchors away.

I find that if I don't take some time out of my day to listen to something musical, something with melody, something with no foreseeable melodic qualities at all (so basically all grind and The Acacia Strain), something that dies, something that breathes and yet is still dead, something alive but barely breathing (but nothing alive in the fullest sense), I might go mad. I need it. Hard.

People are quick to call a lot of different sorts of music "emo." Nobody even knows what that means. I'm emo. I am. And if you're not, I don't know why the fuck you listen to music at all, or you at least listen to JUST Lil Wayne or something equally soulless.

Let's reveal what the fuck it is I'm rambling about this time.

Emo stands for emotional. This much I want to make clear.

The first "emo" bands were basically hardcore bands from around the mid to late 80s early 90s (when rock was starting to merge with hardcore with bands like Fugazi and Quicksand). Why these bands were emo is simply because of the intensity of their live shows. It had more or less nothing to do with the music. There were and are emotional hardcore bands (the first one arguably being Rites of Spring), which was a genre name given based on lyrics, though (early on at least) I doubt most of them considered themselves more than just a hardcore band.

Emo today is different. Emo today means bands like Cute Is What We Aim For, or something whatever the fuck it is. Four Letter Lie, A Skylit Drive, or something. Fuck. It's just all very bad music, but I don't hate it for the singers, like most. Although A Skylit Drive is pretty gay singer-wise. I mean, c'mon dude. But mostly it's the LACK of emotion in these bands that strikes me. What the fuck is it their even singing about most of the time? Why name a song with a sentence? Moreover, a sentence that has absolutely nothing to do with the lyrics. Or the music, if that makes sense. And just generally, the music isn't very pleasing.

Why it's called emo anyway is because people don't think hard enough about music. Genres and what to appropriately call something is so vitally important. It just is. You need to know what to call something. And calling most of that poo poo emo is a shame really. But at this point, the word "emo" has been so slaughtered due to it's usual reference that applying correctly to anything non-"emo" would cause an uproar from everybody.

Ever listen to Coltrane's Meditations? Ravel's Pavane? ANYTHING EVER from Converge? These is emotional, beautiful, haunting, necessary music. No one would call this stuff emo, due to the obvious confusion with Cute Is What We Aim For (of course, wouldn't want that).

But using my (correct) definition of emo, I'm certainly the biggest emo-bitch ever.

But that's what this new sort of music is about to me. I've only discovered metal and hardcore music a few years ago but it's literally all I listen to nowadays. I just, I just can't get enough. I don't know, it's scary. Fuck. I just crave the emotionality, as it were. If I go more than 3 or 4 hours with hearing someone scream about something I go nuts. And for so long, I had no idea I would like this sort of music, although there were plenty of cues. Before I liked jazz my favorite bands were 311, Deftones, Tool, Thursday and the like. At least the latter three have inspired TONS of amazing metal and hardcore today (Thursday more something called "post-hardcore", but I won't go into that...wiki it). 311 inspires surfers and bros to smoke weed. As much as I still have a soft spot for it, I can't identify with it like I used to.

So maybe I was destined to love it, but whatever the reason, it makes my blood warm. It makes my skin yearn. My tongue taste. My thirst quench.

If you don't have a palate for the heaviness, the screaming (a common complaint), the dissonance, whatever, I understand all that. It takes time to like some of this stuff, even for me, being the biggest whore for it ever. But know that it is some of the most powerful stuff you'll ever hear. Even if it's about necrophagia or something. Necrophagist...brutal.

I'll end this with something I plan to do every few posts or so, give a short list of some new stuff that I'm finding particularly lovely lately.

And Hell Followed With - A deathcore/grind band that released a whole LP on their own wallets pushing themselves and their music at local shows for the longest time, and now finally got themselves onto Earache. Can't wait to hear more of this band. It's brutal, not breakdown-raping, and even has some of that hardcore punk/grind influence (instead of just having loads of stupid breakdowns). It's ear bruising to say the least. Their first LP Domain is online, and I think nowhere else unless you know them personally. Seed it!

Dead Swans - their new (first?) LP Sleepwalkers is what I listened to as I wrote this, and it's absolutely amazing. A hardcore band from the UK (which is a bit odd), they combine the standard straight edgey sound of bands like Death Before Dishonor, but (like Have Heart, another AMAZING band) introduce the melodic qualities seen in modern post-hardcore/indie. This combination is one of favorites, and I hope to see more bands explore it, because these guys and Have Heart just kill me every time they massage my eardrums.

Reign Supreme - not much to say here, a good standard hardcore release with Testing the Limits of Infinite. Check this, and everything else from Deathwish Inc, out. Deathwish hardcore is almost always a clear indication of quality.

Goatwhore - METAL. This (probably Satanic) blackened death metal band released Carving Out the Eyes of God at some point earlier this year, and sadly I missed it, because it's brilliant. It's got a thrash/hardcore (dare I say) infusion going on that I just can't resist, and still manages to be so ridiculously heavy and overpowering.

That is all lovers. Make me proud. Grow. Don't undo, don't go blindly, just grow. Bye now.