As I sit here reflecting on the good and bad, fortunate and unfortunate happenings 2013 has presented to me, I have a lot to be thankful for. Life is pretty bitchin', as a whole. However, I have to say that overall, the music I've listened to has been VERY hit or miss. A lot of artists I had high expectations for let me down. Metallica didn't release Ride The Lightning II and instead played a show in Antarctica while a buncha penguins blew eachother. Pig Destroyer is still the laziest touring band in history. Converge played/recorded a live gig in Belgium or something. Integrity's album sounded like every other thing they've ever done. No one has broken into Celine Dion's house yet, tortured her frail, useless Canadian body, sold her organs on the black market, and set her worldly possessions on fire. However, for all of the letdowns from powerhouses I expected more of, there were just as many total surprises. A band, Deafheaven, who I've never bothered to listen to literally MOVED me with their release. This is the first album to give me chills from beginning to end since Terrifyer. I expected a mediocre-at-best release from Dillinger Escape Plan, but this is by far their best material to date. Defeater, another band who was never really on my radar, drops an album that I've listened to at least two dozen times and told countless people to give it a spin. 2013's music was strange for me, to say the least, but immersive, fun and full of discovery and exploration. Like a college cheerleader's sex life. But for your ears. With less yeast infections. Or more. Whichever.
20. Modern Life Is War - Fever Hunting
19. Terror - Live By The Code
18. Portal - Vexovoid
17. Carcass - Surgical Steel
16. Nails - Abandon All Life
15. Noisem - Agony Defined
14. World Of Pain - Improvise And Survive
13. Mammoth Grinder - Underworlds
12. Liferuiner - Future Revisionists
11. Serpent Crown - Serpent Crown
10. Boy Sets Fire - While A Nation Sleeps
9. Dillinger Escape Plan - One Of Us Is The Killer
8. Anciients - Heart Of Oak
7. Rivers Of Nihil - The Conscious Seed Of Light
6. Left For Dead - Devoid Of Everything
5. Doomriders - Grand Blood
4. Coffins - The Fleshland
3. Skeletonwitch - Serpents Unleashed
2. Deafheaven - Sunbather
1. Defeater - Letters Home
Honorable mention to Earthless. Didn't make the list because it's not my proverbial cup of tea, but those guys shred the fuck outta some guitars. There you have it. Hopefully someone was interested enough to read this and check out some tunes you might've missed this year because you were too busy trying to convince yourself that your elitist indie friends are right and that Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend "are total musical breakthroughs with a lot to say."
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Saturday, December 21, 2013
ZWB's Top 20 of 2013
Alas, since neither Converge nor Baroness released a new record in 2013, Decibel didn't know what to do with themselves. As much as I love both of those bands - the former slightly approximately 1000x times more than the latter - this year still proved to be an astounding little sonic adventure. I enjoyed much more than I can fit into twenty line items, and even given my self-imposed restrictions to metal for these purposes, I will be leaving albums out that I nonetheless listened to furiously. One aspect of this year I wish to highlight, and I hope my list highlights, is what I'll call "doom/black-revival": the return to mass popularity, even to the hipster paradiso of Pitchfork, of doom and black metal acts that are shunning norms about song lengths, lyrical content, and - to put it directly - "scene". I've included numerous such acts in my previous lists on this blog, but never to the extent that I'm about to. Same goes for hardcore. Call me a Decibel-sellout, but metal is evolving, which is what makes it so beautiful. Noise is in; chugs are out. Pig Destroyers and Cattle Decapitations over Lambs of God and Mastodons. This is as it should be, given the strikingly low quality coming from the latter of these groups nowadays. We all yearn - myself less so than others - for another Ashes of the Wake or Leviathan, but it is not clearly in the cards. Until then, we shall - and I argue, should - revel in the splendor of the modern era. Please enjoy the following list (or don't, I don't fucking care):
Dat List
20. Deeds of Flesh - Portals to Canaan
19. The Ocean - Pelagial
18. Castevet - Obsian
17. Noisem - Agony Defined
16. Anciients - Heart of Oak
15. Cult of Luna - Vertikal
14. Defeated Sanity - Passages Into Deformity
13. Altar of Plagues - Teethed Glory and Injury
12. The Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us Is the Killer
11. Inter Arma - Sky Burial
10. Portal - Vexovoid
9. Rivers of Nihil - The Conscious Seed of Light
8. Ulcerate - Vermis
7. Coliseum - Sister Faith
6. Intronaut - Habitual Levitations
5. Title Fight - Spring Songs EP
4. Skeletonwitch - Serpents Unleashed
3. Nails - Abandon All Hope
2. Gorguts - Colored Sands
1. Deafheaven - Sunbather
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Welcome to the Official Dillinger Escape Plan New Album Review, Brought to You By Underwear and Fresh Strawberries
The Dillinger Escape Plan is perhaps as well-known for their live performances - which are, at least in Philly, an enthralled, collective hyper-mania by which you immediately and unknowingly find yourself utterly transfixed - as they are their unique mix of schizophrenic math-metal and melodramatic pop-rock. Full disclosure: I'm a long-term fan of DEP and do not plan to hide my incessant fawning and infatuation with their music (and style - something perhaps as equally important to DEP). Without being too impetuous, I think I'm prepared to justify the assertion that DEP's newest release One of Us Is the Killer is their best recording, represents a relieving culmination of various moves in their recent musical history, and perhaps sends Dillinger off into uncharted waters going forward. What makes the record so good is subtle and took me a few diligent listens to fully appreciate. If you're like me and are usually too impatient for most of anything, allow me to help you along. I'll probably fail. It's OK, fuck you.
The most striking difference between this record and the rest of the post-Miss Machine catalog (which I tend to regard as a musical unit) is the new, almost pervasive sense of theatricality. This record is the opera of hardcore. Almost every song - perhaps excluding "Prancer", which feels like it was written for Option Paralysis - includes at least a hook, a riff, or a vocal styling that makes you feel like you're visiting the aural equivalent of a circus. The spoken vocal section in "When I Lost My Bet". The post-chorus ambiance of "One of Us Is the Killer". The 5-second, sing-song-like breaks you hear between chaotic sections of chunks in "Hero of the Soviet Union". The guitar noise in "Understanding Decay" that sounds like a borderline trumpet. Pretty much all of "The Threat Posed...". While this isn't exactly a new sonic idiom for Dillinger - you can hear hints of this sense of theater throughout their catalog - but it has never featured as such an integral element of an entire record as it does on OOUITK. Overall, the album leverages a bit more of their pop-rock tendencies, even within songs for which you immediately expect, judging from the opening riff, a single stream of unintelligible mathy-ness. This see-saw aesthetic of the record - the more nimble shifts from otherworldly polyrhythms to their rock and roll, Nine Inch Nails-like persona - makes you feel a delightful bit of vertigo once you catch on. Unlike Option Paralysis in particular, OOUITK is their most unified musical adventure - Ire Works perhaps a close second - and the glue here is this overwhelming freshness their more capricious songwriting gives to the whole piece. It's relative shortness, at ~40 minutes, with songs practically all approximately equal in length, makes it easily digestible in one sitting and gives the impression, emphasized acutely by the last four songs as an obvious "final movement", that you're listening to one long piece. (I feel the last four songs, "CH 375 268 277 ARS" through "The Threat Posed...", could have been an EP - in exactly the order they appear on the record - which alone would have turned heads.)
All of that said, a Dillinger record would be a disappointment without some barrier-breaking in terms of rhythmic complexity. The king of the crop in this department is undeniably "Understanding Decay". The feeling of listening to this song - you can feel the song in your body - is one of constant hesitation, anticipation, and release, the latter of which quickly snatched away from you in the matter of an eighth note or so. It's not a comfortable song. Even their prior attempts at completely shitting on past musical norms in metal have not nearly reached the level of "Understanding Decay". It is arguably the crown jewel of the record - if you're more the type you prefers the more aggressive face of the Janus that is DEP. I am. For those on the other side of the fence, you probably have a lot more to sink your teeth into on OOUITK than you ever have. But you don't have as triumphal a hymn as "Understanding Decay".
A few come close though: the title track, a silky, ultra-melodic downtempo arrangement, features Greg's pleasant falsetto and brusque hints at both ambient Calculating Infinity-era guitar flirtations and something you rarely hear from DEP: simple, meaty power chords, done not distastefully. "Paranoia Shields" incorporates Greg's tight-mouthed, talk-whispered verses broken occasionally by a surprisingly operatic hook. Overall, Greg takes what feels like the lead on these pieces. Like the unappreciative bastards we all tend to be, we quickly forget whilst sucking Ben's dick 24/7 that Greg has an incredible rhythmic intuition, singing and screaming range along multiple style dimensions, and incredibly precise timing. (Listen to "Paranoia Shields" and tell me it doesn't feel like he couldn't be conducting the band with his word placement as his metaphorical baton.)
All together, One of Us Is the Killer is almost pristine - it showcases the songwriting, musicianship, and performance talent of an incredible group. If Metal as a genre had a seat at the United Nations of Music, DEP would be a fitting representative. (They would probably sit next to Nicki Minaj and collectively take a fiery shit on her face.) But it's not perfect. The music has slowly been losing its hardcore edginess ever since Calculating Infinity, and I still miss it deeply - I know I'm not alone here. OOUITK sees Dillinger doubling down on forever closing the door on their pre-Miss Machine music. (And I think that's just fine from a certain perspective.) I find some of the riffs a little too dinky and delicate - the best example by far is "Hero of the Soviet Union": instead of achieving this aggressive break from the moodiness of the title track, you get a short stint followed by a quick relapse into clownery that I didn't find convincingly "Dillinger". All of that said - and I'll admit that these quibbles are particularly subjective - this is their best record. Listening to it reminds me that metal deserves the kind of outward awe and respect earned by some of the most stereotypically "high-minded" genres, let alone the commercial success of everyday, boilerplate pop.
What does this record mean for the future of the Dillinger Escape Plan? Lacking basic fortune-telling abilities, I can only speculate. My intuition is that DEP will become a more "challenging" listening experience as time goes on. They are becoming more "heady", deep, difficult, mentally stimulating. Listening to OOUITK is more of an intellectual exercise than Option Paralysis. In my opinion, this can unfortunately be rocky territory for otherwise successful metal outfits. Between the Buried and Me are now borderline progressive rock in the ilk of Dream Theater, their music becoming ironically less "them" as they've struggled to write longer opuses, longer and complicated transitions, more involved lyrical content, and more dynamic instrumentation. The Faceless' newest record was frankly saddening for similar reasons. The newest Baroness, while explicitly not an attempt at more technical music, was nonetheless an attempt at a new sound, and results were, to put it mildly, mixed. These were premier disappointments for me, all borne out of this underlying (and common among musicians who actually give a fuck) need to innovate, evolve, and continue to be surprise to listeners. This is a high-risk/high-reward proposition, and recent events point to the serious effects of "losing your sound" - why people even loved you in the first place - for the cause of development simply for developing's sake. Music is a fairly undifferentiated genre - the nature of the music is such that it is tough to "find a sound". Trying to achieve this is one of the most rewarding challenges of creating heavy music. But DEP won that game long ago, and perhaps, like BTBAM, are bound to get bored with the spoils of their victory. DEP is showing us their hand on On of Us Is the Killer: they are attempting a similar maneuver towards change. But my judgment is that DEP may pull it off. So far, so good.
The most striking difference between this record and the rest of the post-Miss Machine catalog (which I tend to regard as a musical unit) is the new, almost pervasive sense of theatricality. This record is the opera of hardcore. Almost every song - perhaps excluding "Prancer", which feels like it was written for Option Paralysis - includes at least a hook, a riff, or a vocal styling that makes you feel like you're visiting the aural equivalent of a circus. The spoken vocal section in "When I Lost My Bet". The post-chorus ambiance of "One of Us Is the Killer". The 5-second, sing-song-like breaks you hear between chaotic sections of chunks in "Hero of the Soviet Union". The guitar noise in "Understanding Decay" that sounds like a borderline trumpet. Pretty much all of "The Threat Posed...". While this isn't exactly a new sonic idiom for Dillinger - you can hear hints of this sense of theater throughout their catalog - but it has never featured as such an integral element of an entire record as it does on OOUITK. Overall, the album leverages a bit more of their pop-rock tendencies, even within songs for which you immediately expect, judging from the opening riff, a single stream of unintelligible mathy-ness. This see-saw aesthetic of the record - the more nimble shifts from otherworldly polyrhythms to their rock and roll, Nine Inch Nails-like persona - makes you feel a delightful bit of vertigo once you catch on. Unlike Option Paralysis in particular, OOUITK is their most unified musical adventure - Ire Works perhaps a close second - and the glue here is this overwhelming freshness their more capricious songwriting gives to the whole piece. It's relative shortness, at ~40 minutes, with songs practically all approximately equal in length, makes it easily digestible in one sitting and gives the impression, emphasized acutely by the last four songs as an obvious "final movement", that you're listening to one long piece. (I feel the last four songs, "CH 375 268 277 ARS" through "The Threat Posed...", could have been an EP - in exactly the order they appear on the record - which alone would have turned heads.)
All of that said, a Dillinger record would be a disappointment without some barrier-breaking in terms of rhythmic complexity. The king of the crop in this department is undeniably "Understanding Decay". The feeling of listening to this song - you can feel the song in your body - is one of constant hesitation, anticipation, and release, the latter of which quickly snatched away from you in the matter of an eighth note or so. It's not a comfortable song. Even their prior attempts at completely shitting on past musical norms in metal have not nearly reached the level of "Understanding Decay". It is arguably the crown jewel of the record - if you're more the type you prefers the more aggressive face of the Janus that is DEP. I am. For those on the other side of the fence, you probably have a lot more to sink your teeth into on OOUITK than you ever have. But you don't have as triumphal a hymn as "Understanding Decay".
A few come close though: the title track, a silky, ultra-melodic downtempo arrangement, features Greg's pleasant falsetto and brusque hints at both ambient Calculating Infinity-era guitar flirtations and something you rarely hear from DEP: simple, meaty power chords, done not distastefully. "Paranoia Shields" incorporates Greg's tight-mouthed, talk-whispered verses broken occasionally by a surprisingly operatic hook. Overall, Greg takes what feels like the lead on these pieces. Like the unappreciative bastards we all tend to be, we quickly forget whilst sucking Ben's dick 24/7 that Greg has an incredible rhythmic intuition, singing and screaming range along multiple style dimensions, and incredibly precise timing. (Listen to "Paranoia Shields" and tell me it doesn't feel like he couldn't be conducting the band with his word placement as his metaphorical baton.)
All together, One of Us Is the Killer is almost pristine - it showcases the songwriting, musicianship, and performance talent of an incredible group. If Metal as a genre had a seat at the United Nations of Music, DEP would be a fitting representative. (They would probably sit next to Nicki Minaj and collectively take a fiery shit on her face.) But it's not perfect. The music has slowly been losing its hardcore edginess ever since Calculating Infinity, and I still miss it deeply - I know I'm not alone here. OOUITK sees Dillinger doubling down on forever closing the door on their pre-Miss Machine music. (And I think that's just fine from a certain perspective.) I find some of the riffs a little too dinky and delicate - the best example by far is "Hero of the Soviet Union": instead of achieving this aggressive break from the moodiness of the title track, you get a short stint followed by a quick relapse into clownery that I didn't find convincingly "Dillinger". All of that said - and I'll admit that these quibbles are particularly subjective - this is their best record. Listening to it reminds me that metal deserves the kind of outward awe and respect earned by some of the most stereotypically "high-minded" genres, let alone the commercial success of everyday, boilerplate pop.
What does this record mean for the future of the Dillinger Escape Plan? Lacking basic fortune-telling abilities, I can only speculate. My intuition is that DEP will become a more "challenging" listening experience as time goes on. They are becoming more "heady", deep, difficult, mentally stimulating. Listening to OOUITK is more of an intellectual exercise than Option Paralysis. In my opinion, this can unfortunately be rocky territory for otherwise successful metal outfits. Between the Buried and Me are now borderline progressive rock in the ilk of Dream Theater, their music becoming ironically less "them" as they've struggled to write longer opuses, longer and complicated transitions, more involved lyrical content, and more dynamic instrumentation. The Faceless' newest record was frankly saddening for similar reasons. The newest Baroness, while explicitly not an attempt at more technical music, was nonetheless an attempt at a new sound, and results were, to put it mildly, mixed. These were premier disappointments for me, all borne out of this underlying (and common among musicians who actually give a fuck) need to innovate, evolve, and continue to be surprise to listeners. This is a high-risk/high-reward proposition, and recent events point to the serious effects of "losing your sound" - why people even loved you in the first place - for the cause of development simply for developing's sake. Music is a fairly undifferentiated genre - the nature of the music is such that it is tough to "find a sound". Trying to achieve this is one of the most rewarding challenges of creating heavy music. But DEP won that game long ago, and perhaps, like BTBAM, are bound to get bored with the spoils of their victory. DEP is showing us their hand on On of Us Is the Killer: they are attempting a similar maneuver towards change. But my judgment is that DEP may pull it off. So far, so good.
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