Fives on Friday, 2/23/2024
Into the Gorge
Happy Friday! Congratulations on making it to the end of the week. As you head into your weekend, here are five recommendations, five track reviews, and five album micro reviews. Access to these curated links and tunes will only cost you your time and five pieces of self-promotion. Maybe you’ll find something new to read, listen to, or do this weekend. See you next week!
» » » » » GET REC’D « « « « «
As a music fanatic, a writer, and a musician with album to promote, I unequivocally mourn the slow death of the contemporary album review. *Stephen A. Smith Voice* BUT! If I may speak honestly as a reader, I’m pretty content with the ready availability of retrospective criticism these days. Anniversary pieces have the benefit of hindsight and arrive late enough for the dust of discourse to settle, leaving clearer air for insight. This piece from Patrick Lyons about El-P’s Fantastic Damage is a great example. Lyons ties the record to a number of turning points in New York City history to argue that, despite his fondness for references to Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert novels, El-P is in fact a realist responding to the conditions of the city he grew up in.
I have yet to read any Wittgenstein myself, but after reading this essay about how his writing on the nature of language interacts with theories about quantum physics I am officially petitioning Christoper Nolan to do Wittgenstein next, you coward.
I spend so much time talking about the pros and cons of streaming that I worry that I’ve given the impression that the DSPs are the only games in town. They aren’t! There are, according to this Pitchfork article, still plenty of people following the time honored traditions of the recent past by maintaining a personal library of digital files. I don’t think I could ever be a flip-phone revivalist at this point, but I could absolutely picture myself going back to a personal collection that gives me more control over the metadata. I hear Swinsian might be cool? Digital collectors get at me.
Another thing that’s under-discussed in music: the importance of eye contact. While this article focuses on eye-contact specifically in classical ensembles, there’s a lot here that’s relevant in other genres too. I especially love the concept of “eating fingers”. Weird name for it, but I’ve definitely found it helpful to watch a bassist’s fingers to help my ears with a little hand-eye coordination.
The music isn’t really my thing, but I found this Bandcamp article about the niche community of producers making “Gorge music” fascinating. As far as I can tell the idea behind the music is to use electronic toms to recreate the feeling of traveling across rocky terrain. The genre’s tenets are both open-ending and hyper-specific, a combination that makes for fertile creative soil. It’s encouraging to learn about these small communities of musicians carving out new ideas from the endless well of possibilities afforded to us by digital production. As a drummer the first thought that crosses my mind listening to this stuff is whether it would be possible to make “IRL Gorge” using acoustic drums. What mountain would they stand in for?
# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #
Last weekend Bellows went upstate to record some drums, piano, and electric guitar for an upcoming album. All of us are psyched about how the tunes are coming out and even more psyched to bring some of them to you at the Knitting Factory on March 15th when we open for Frog. Tickets are going fast so get yours now!
Also joining us on the Bill on March 15th is Sister. Two of the members of Sister also run GUNK, a show-paper zine for NYC indie-ish gigs around the city. GUNK organized a compilation album to raise money for relief efforts in Palestine called, well, For Palestine. I’ve got a song on the comp, as do many other people from the local scene. Buy a copy today for a good cause!
I have news coming very soon (I mean it!) about the next Lamniformes album, but if you’d like to get a taste of what the vibe is before things start dropping for real, check out “Prayer of the Open Plain”, a single that I released last summer on my birthday. I wrote the song to remind myself to accept that not everyone that is in my life will be in it forever. The music was inspired by the experience of driving across the vast emptiness of the American West. I think it slaps!
By the time you read this newsletter, I will likely be working on the next entry of Drumming Upstream. This entry concerns the song “Moment of Truth” from the venerated Brooklyn-by-way-of-Boston rap duo Gang Starr. To receive this entry in your inbox, and for full access to the Drumming Upstream Archives, subscribe now for only $5 a month!
The great metalcore band Darkest Hour released their latest album Perpetual Terminal today. I was lucky enough to interview their guitarist Mike Schleibaum in 2021 when the band were starting to work on the record for my podcast Lamniformes Radio. If you, like me, are very excited to give Perpetual Terminal a spin, why not pair it with our conversation? We also cover the band’s experiments with crowd-funding, recording a live album during the pandemic, and more!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Listening Diary ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Here are five songs that I enjoyed listening to recently! You can find a playlist with all of this year’s tracks at the bottom of this section.
“The Sufi” by Hellix (Montage, 2023)
I have maybe a predictable preference for live drummers in heavy music, but there’s no denying that programmed drums do let riff-writers go a special kind of hog-wild. On “The Sufi” helix use the inhuman consistency of their programmed drums as a grid that the rest of the instruments fill like a polyrhythmic mosaic. Just when you think you’ve got all of the individual lines sorted out, a fusion groove busts through the walls to send the tiles flying across the room, leaving space for a disarmingly pretty piano solo to take center stage. This tracks reminds me a lot of Meshuggah’s thrash metal days in spirit if not exactly in sound.
“Something Wrong” by Algiers (Shook, 2023)
One of the best tracks from one of the best albums of 2023. Completely blurs the line between aesthetics and storytelling, every jarring musical choice serves an explicit narrative purpose and sounds cool as hell. There’s no other way that this song could exist other than the way it does, which is about as ringing an endorsement as I can give anything.
“Muddat” by Ali Sethi & Nicolas Jaar (Intiha, 2023)
I like a lot of Nicolas Jaar tunes, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t often feel like they were missing some unspecified something. Apparently Jaar and vocalist Ali Sethi agree, as this record uses Jaar’s Telas as a springboard for semi-improvised vocal performances that bring a whole new dimension to the music. Rave tracks for a club out of time and space.
“Hanami” by Danny Brown (Quaranta, 2023)
The first thing I knew about Danny Brown when I knew anything about him at all was that he was “old”. XXX, the album that broke him through to college-age blog readers like me back in 2011, put the fact that Brown was a decade older than most of his competition and audience front and center. Now I’m older than Brown was then and he’s (obviously) older still and still at it. This track, in which Brown reflects on ten years as working rapper, seems like a way of telling his past self that he still had a lot to learn. Weary and grateful in equal amounts, this is what adult rap actually sounds like.
“A Dieciocho Minutos del Sol” by Spinetta (A 18’ del Sol, 1977)
I’m going to keep saying this until I’m blue in the face, but any prog rock fan that ignores the abundant wealth of rad records from South America is doing themselves a criminal disservice. Heck, just the discography of Luis Alberto Spinetta alone puts many of the revered English bands to shame. Bother not with ELP young prog rocker, get a load of this instead! Though I’m still a novice when it comes to Spinetta, I love this light-footed instrumental fusion jam. Highly recommended to any fans of Weather Report, Return to Forever, and the like.
\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /
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.
HEADS UP: there are a few NSFW covers below.
In Glorious Times by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (2007) - Art Rock
I do not remember exactly how I heard about this band [Editor’s note: since I first wrote this review I’ve determined that it must have been a mix CD from Jonathan Edelstein] and I’ve never known much about them, in part to preserve the baffling feeling of listening to their music. Really out there prog rock (sorta?) with home-made instruments and a deeply unsettling compositional style. Dissonant, rhythmically off kilter, constantly surprising. It gets a bit circus clown town at times, but its creepy and creative enough to over come my aversion to that register. I am not sure how to describe what’s going on here, frankly.
Terraformer by Knut (2005) - Post-Hardcore
I bought this the first time I saw Isis1 live in 2006. They would always have a number of Hydra Head releases available at their merch table. I love this album art. The music is half sludgy post metal, half mathcore. I am less than enamored by Knut’s version of the latter. They sound stiff at faster tempos. The slow stuff is more compelling. Interesting use of samples, not entirely sure what they are getting at but it certainly sets a mood.
Blood Oath by Suffocation (2006) - Death Metal
I got really into Suffocation when I was 19 and pissed as hell. Death metal just hits different when you have no interest in leaving your room. This record isn’t held up as one of their best, but the cleaner production makes it an easier gateway into their sound than the cavernous 90s stuff. Even though they popularized “brutal death metal” (redundant, I know, metal subgenres are silly) what sticks out to me about Suffocation is their constant use of 3/4 time, which gives their music an oddly refined, waltzing pace. Like the satellite sequence from 2001 but in hell.
Snakes For The Divine by High on Fire (2010) - Heavy Metal
This album dropped during the stretch in the late 00s when High on Fire were part of what felt like every metal tour I attended2. By contrast to their massive live sound I thought this record was too compressed and flat. The songs still ripped though. The songs continue to rip to this day, although I’m more likely to reach for the albums that directly proceed and follow it. This band is incapable of dropping below league average. An endless good riff machine.
Prowler in the Yard by Pig Destroyer (2001) - Grind
The breakout, name-making release from the grind trio (now a quintet). Framed as a slasher short story from the perspective of a psycho ex. There are two Pig Destroyers: the one you listen to and the one that you read. The former is a master of forward momentum, where the lightning quick start of the record gradually breaks down to a slower and even uglier ending. The latter I think would go on to write better though no less fucked up poetry. In combination this is probably my second favorite of their releases. Top tier grind.