Five & Five on Friday, 8/11/23

Synth Redistribution, new bands, and old lectures

Happy Friday! Congratulations on making it to the end of the week. As you head into your weekend, here are five recommendations and then five micro reviews of albums from my high school CD collection. Maybe you’ll find something new to read, listen to, or do this weekend. See you next week!

1. My last few letters of recommendation have been heavy on New York happenings and themes. This one is for my SoCal readers. The Los Angeles Department of Synthesizer Redistribution (L.A.D.S.R.), a synthesizer rental library founded by Stephen Lee Clark (probably best known as the former bassist of Deafheaven), launched a Kickstarter to fund the opening of their first location. The aim is to make analog synthesizers, which are extremely pricy, available to a wider number of low income musicians, while also offering education classes on how to use this often intimidating gear. Sounds cool to me!

2. Bellows returns to the stage, this time with more than 24 hours of forewarning. On September 6th, we’re opening for Generifus and Bobbie Lovesong at Sundown Bar in Ridgewood, Queens. Since Frank “Friend of Music” Meadows is out of town that week, we’ll performing a rare set as a trio including some Bellows songs that have to my knowledge never been performed live before. Fun! You can grab tickets here.

3. I’ve spent a large part of this year joining new bands, and one of those bands has finally released our first demo. If you’re a fan of post-punk, shoegaze, or goth rock, you should check out Laughing Stock! Our first demo features two tunes, and we’ve got more where that came from. Stay tuned for more info on our first show soon…

4. Anyone with an interest in chart history needs to check out the latest playlist from This Side of Japan, highlighting imported songs that charted on Japanese radio during from 1968-1974. The results aren’t necessarily surprising (Simon & Garfunkel were popular pretty much everywhere) but they help establish context for what cultural ideas were being exchanged and reflected between Japan and the rest of the world in this time. I especially enjoyed Ryo’s observation about the influence of film scores on the popularity of certain tracks.

5. As I mentioned in the last entry of Drumming Upstream, I’ve been reading Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. Equal parts inspired and confounded by the book, I decided to fire up some lectures on Nietzsche by Rick Roderick, a Duke philosophy professor who passed away in 2002. In the early 90s Roderick filmed three multi-part lectures for The Teaching Company, and all three are currently on YouTube in their totality. I started with “Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition” and then went all the way down the rabbit hole to rewatch “The Self Under Siege” and “Philosophy and Human Values”. All three are invaluable resources. Roderick was a master of translating complex philosophical content into straight-forward West Texas talk, mixing in pop culture references and hilarious political digressions to make his point clear. The lectures are also a fascinating time capsule of the late 80s and early 90s, revealing that many of the “current” debates that we’re having about critical theory are in fact perennial conflicts between the right and left wing of academia.

Now, onto the five micro reviews. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.

The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues by Between the Buried and Me (2011) - Progressive Metal

At this point they had moved on entirely from their hardcore roots and into the prog zone. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but I did miss the gnarly breakdowns when I first bought this one. Of their purely prog records this is probably my favorite. The short length definitely helps. They sound focused, wringing everything they can out of a small number of motives instead of running through new ideas at warp speed.

Anthropocentric by The Ocean (2010) - Progressive Metal

This record was viewed at the time as a return to form after Heliocentric, which is weird because they aren’t appreciably different. I guess people just like these tunes more? To be fair, I like these tunes more too, especially “Roots & Locusts”. I admire the ambition of trying to adapt Dostoevsky into heavy metal.

Scarsick by Pain of Salvation (2007) - Nü Metal

I might do a full review of this one at some point because there is a lot going on here. Another Pain of Salvation that a lot of their fans hated at the time, mostly because of the nü metal affectations. Since I am an apologist for nü metal broadly, I was an apologist for this album specifically for a long time. A lot has not aged well, Gildenlow’s rapping in particular. Dude cannot catch the beat to save his life, and hearing an academic Swede try and roast 00s rap is cringe central. Same goes for the way-too-literal lyrics about reality TV. But, even though the delivery is clumsy, I’m still into the broader message about consumerism, media saturation and the decline of the American Empire. I just wish this album weren’t so smug about its intellectual stance. Oh well.

Pslam 69 by Ministry (1992) - Industrial Metal

This record really took me by surprise, since I had heard Ministry’s George W. Bush-era first and did not expect them to have went so hard in the 90s. A lot of these mixing techniques still feel relevant to the type of electronic integration you hear in modern bands. I worry that I am missing something by listening to this album on headphones, hearing it on club speakers might be a whole other story.

With Oden On Our Side by Amon Amarth (2006) - Death Metal

Is it just me or was there a big sword and sandal revival in the 00s? Spartans, vikings, pirates, that sort of stuff. This band predates that era, but it feels appropriate that they’d cross over in America in that moment. This is an album of direct, bombastic, aiming-for-the-cheap-seats metal. Amon Amarth capture the Iron Maiden magic both melodically and with their campy historical fiction tone.