A Review of Sorts, and a Hello

Hi folks.

It's been a while. And no, not the Staind song. You fucking idiot.

I apologize on behalf of myself and Dave for being so lethargic with respect to this, our lovely blogspot. Our little piece of the internets golf course. This would obviously then be the rough on 13. Full of raccoons and birds fucking.

Anyway, this is for a while ago, however try to enjoy my naïvete.

A lot of new music has hit those lonesome none-too-often visited shelves over the past few weeks and months, most of which has been impressive and absolutely needs to be yelled and screamed about. These include the following new releases:

Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire - Songs of Ill Hope and Desperation
Cruel Hand - Lock & Key
Nachtmystium - Addicts: Black Meddle, Pt. II
Melvins - The Bride Screamed Murder
Alcest - Écailles de Lune
Ceremony - Rohnert Park LP
Rosetta - A Determinism of Morality
Watain - Lawless Darkness
Whitechapel - A New Era of Corruption
This Is Hell - Weight of the World

In fact, this doesn't exhaust the list, not nearly. I didn't even include the new Circa Survive, which is not only stunning, but overshadows what so far has been a year not nearly as exciting as 2009. But that being said, I might as well just wait until I make my top 20 listing at the end of the year to talk about that. Instead I'd like to take a look at a few of these records, review them, and hopefully tie them into a larger moral. I've already been thinking a lot about what I feel ought to be considered better than its peers so far this year, and it seems a trend is forming, a trend that I can't say I find surprising.

But of course, that's just me. Let us begin here:

This Is Hell - Weight of the World

I've always really liked This Is Hell. They have a fresh, heavy understanding of the typical hardcore technology, except they tend to wrap it in vocals that are passionate and tired (as if struggling for air; I don't mean that badly), and they don't make music that determinably seems hardcore for hardcore's sake. That is, unlike so many bands I've heard that sound or want to sound a lot like This Is Hell, none seem to pull it off quite as naturally as TIH themselves; it is as if these dudes just picked up their instruments and started playing and hardcore came out. This is the same feeling I get about Minor Threat.

That is very high praise, and I feel it is accurate, if it is coherent. But unfortunately, Weight of the World is not only passive, but a macabre misattempt to do exactly what felt so right on Misfortunes. The vain attempt at guitar solos are hackneyed and disruptive. The songs lack all sort of groove. But moreover, the passion is lost. The songs are forgettable, and if they begin well (as in "The Death of World Class" or "Out Come the Bastards"), they with almost scientific precision seem to end miserably, or at least by the hook, I'm bored, and thinking instead about food or Aristotle. "Bloodlines" sounds like it was composed in the span of a half an hour fiddling around with mosh parts and chugs. I'm not asking for melodicism. I'm only asking for what I ask of any hardcore punk group: write memorable, passionate music. This Is Hell has always I feel had trouble writing music that was catchy, or in less controversial terms, really committed itself to memory. Even technical death metal bands nowadays can manage to do that (cf. The Faceless, Necrophagist, Obscura), and that's technical death metal.

I now realize that, in hindsight, I'm not sure why I felt the way I did about them. I expected quite a lot due to these now soon to be over-the-top characterizations of them, and they let those down utterly. If your music gets kids at shows to hardcore dance, I guess that means you can be successful in hardcore nowadays, which is unfortunate; but I'm not even sure if it'll do even that.

Moreover, TIH can now be seen to be a perfect example of what a label like Rise Records will do to you. I can't say I enjoy anything they have ever put out for longer than 5 seconds. In fact, most of it is horridly uninspired emocore, like Of Mice and Men, or even worse, Attack Attack!, whose popularity is an insult to genuine and honest musicians. The only expection would Emarosa, who's lead singer Jonny Craig, though he be the largest douche in the history of vaginal discharge (I mean, we're talking thousands of years), is an amazing singer, and the rest of the band writes some cool shit. I feel like they are trying to be Circa Survive musically; and that can't be too bad, although if I wanted to hear Circa Survive...

Anyway, I hope you all disagree with me and can find a way to defend This Is Hell, because I don't feel they are anything like Attack Attack! when it comes to work ethic or musicianship. I dig the attempt at solos, at a more rock and roll mentality, and riffs that are plain but solid. But it failed. I hope they can understand this, and put both Grabelle and Rise behind them, and try and move to a home where they can be produced honestly and have their high musical awareness nurtured.

Overall: 3/10; Notable Tracks: Out Come the Bastards.

Whitechapel - A New Era of Corruption

Like This Is Hell, Whitechapel has always had a soft spot in my heart, albeit at times I can't help but feel it a guilty pleasure. When I was first getting into metal, I heard The Somatic Defilement LP, which I felt was musical drivel and putrid. "Having breakdowns is one thing, sounding like a giant breakdown-fart machine is another," was probably something like what I thought upon listening to it. So when This Is Exile, its follow-up, came out, I couldn't help but feel that listening to it at all would be like engaging in musical treachery. But to my surprise, I loved This Is Exile, and only recently, but still eventually, I began to appreciate The Somatic Defilement also. At the very least, it is brutal as fuck.

This Is Exile takes the musical ideas of The Somatic Defilement, and both shuts them up, cleans them up, and altogether makes everything a lot catchier, for better or worse depending on your outlook. I still find myself spinning Whitechapel a lot, and I can only attribute that to their innate talent at writing brutal, catchy songs. If that's a bad thing, then fuck me, I guess.

A New Era of Corruption lives up to neither record, unfortunately, but at least you can tell they were thinking about something specific when they wrote this record. They obviously wanted to stretch out from the confines of their rather limited soundscape-word bank onto new sonic territory, while not giving up on the jing-jing-jing style brutalizations they seem to love so much. That would have been awesome, but if I'm right, they missed the mark. To miss the mark though, you'd either have to cling too firmly to your old ways, or stray so far into uncharted Northwest Territories that you end up sounding like a rip off of [insert technical death/core band here]. The former is much more tolerable, and what they in fact did: it seems they wanted to display some firmer writing chops, but just didn't find the balance enough to keep their songs fun and groovy.

My favorite example from the record of this is the song "Breeding Violence" (though other examples may be "A Future Corrupt", and "Murder Sermon"). This song is digitized beyond belief, evidenced by the first few sounds you even hear, and full of fruitless and altogether unclever attempts to symphonize and harmonize. Turning up the reverb and hoping for the best is not exactly what I feel bands ought to be doing if they want to accomplish more by way of songwriting, and I can't help but feel that's all you seem to get out of a song like "Breeding Violence". "Murder Sermon" just sucks. The Acacia Strain need to stop ruining everything: Vincent's vocals have only gotten more intolerable, his lyrics dumber, and their riffs writable in minutes, and thoughtless. In fact, the new Acacia Strain is the worst metal release I've ever heard. I'd rather listen to the shittiest of 90s Megadeth. It is beyond comment further. Okay one more. It makes me want to remove my organs and die.

All of that being said, I still really like this record. The song featuring Chino from the Deftones ("Reprogrammed to Hate") is classic Whitechapel, as are the last two songs on the album, "Necromechanical" and "Dehumanization". Most of the other tunes are not stand-outs but still quite good. The writing aside, Phil's vocals are just as amazing if not better, and although I just knocked the shit out of their writing skills on this record, they do try more practically to utilize the triple-guitar attack with more versatility and poise on this release, which has less to do with writing then with mixing.

This record is not bad, and tons of kids will (and by evidence of their high 43rd placement on the Bilboard 200 chart, definitely do) love this LP. But I think Whitechapel needs to focus either on what they do best, or need to push it just a little further. I must say, as a writer myself, I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I were in this band. It seems like a difficult task to account for 3 guitars and still say, "okay, let's go write better". What does that even mean? Harmonize more? More solos? Have one guitar do X while the other two do Y? Who fucking cares about that really? It's a balance Whitechapel will need to achieve soon if they plan to stay relevant, but I don't doubt that an EP within the next year or two couldn't give them the focus to make an enormous musical change. Want to show us you are all good writers? Then don't go into it narrow-mindedly, and don't be afraid to write stuff that is going to undoubtably piss off your 15-year-old spin-kicking fan base. Or, take a step back, realize that since The Somatic Defilement the music has gotten less and less brutal, and just brutalize the fuck out of yourselves. It should be clear which of these routes I'd prefer, but either ought to be in mind for the composers in this band (exactly who that is, I'm not sure actually).

Overall: 6/10; Notable Tracks: Nercomechanical, Reprogrammed to Hate.


Ceremony - Rohnert Park LP

This record is amazing. There, I came early...I'm sorry.

But it's being amazing is not an immediately, readily derived conclusion. The first song for example, "Sick", is an angry, practically unmusical abhorrent protest of...everything, the lyrics consisting only of lonely distorted shouts of the form "I'm sick of X...sick of Y...sick of Z...". The tempo of the song is barely a dirge compared to their older material, which is fucked-upedly fast, obviously brushing up ever so un-gently with hardcore's more lonely, more masturbatory, second cousins powerviolence and grindcore. This is especially obvious on their 2006 release Violence Violence, though honestly all of their older material is better characterizable as powerviolence. But Rohnert Park is different, and I can't help but think that all of their more religious fans will find Rohnert Park a tragedy, as sad beep-boop, an accident in an otherwise mean and disgusting discography.

But I was never really such a religious fan of Ceremony. I discovered them maybe 6 months ago, and really enjoyed all of their material, especially Violence Violence (which has always seemed so much powerviolencer than their other notable releases), but I listen to way too many bands already, and so they quite unfortunately became lost in the unending earthy soup that is my neatly organized though horribly over-crowded iPod.

However, Rohnert Park has pushed them to the foreground of this retarded overflowing juicebox of an mp3 player. And not simply because Rohnert Park itself is so good (which it is...I'm getting there), but also because with their discography in mind, it is clear that this band is truly committed to this genre, to hardcore, to music that tries to mean something, and flout all boundaries and otherwise predetermined musical normatives, and in general to avant-garde expression, which is by its nature in perpetual suffering from lack of mass attention. Rohnert Park is a hardcore record, in a very old school sense, which yet a very modern understanding. I'm normally quite against doing things that have already been done musically (if I want to hear Miles Davis play over rhythm changes, I own Birth of the Cool, you don't need to imitate his every finger movement for my enjoyment...), but this is not quite a revisiting of a more Black Flag kind of hardcore. For the Ceremony fans, this is still a Ceremony record. "M.C.D.F." or "Moving Principle" are perfect examples. These songs don't seem so un-Ceremony after some reflection, although it is patently obvious that they probably could have been written in the 80s, stylistically-speaking. The guitars are loud, the clang of the bass a heartbeat (albeit a much slower one), the drums beaten to their death (albeit blast beat-less). Vocalist Ross Barrar with practically the same timbre as always, menacingly spitting caustic and frightening shouts, displaying the same sort of emotionality I'm familiar with from their early stuff. Style is not necessarily mutually dependent upon sound.