Fives on Friday, 2/9/2024
The smooth to crunchy continuum
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 « « « « «
I enjoyed Gary Suarez’s review of the latest EP by rap duo They Hate Change for his newsletter Cabbages. Not only did the review introduce me to some rad tunes (more on that in a future Listening Diary) I also found Suarez’s grappling with the over-use of the term “experimental” in rap criticism thought-provoking. Every variety of critic has descriptions and tags that they lean on to make their word counts. God knows that I have mine own collection of linguistic crutches (point out your favs in the comments lmao), but the case of “experimental” is particularly interesting. To me, describing a piece of music as experimental implies more about its process than its end results. A song can be written experimentally (what if I combined genre x with genre y, what happens if I restrict myself to just a select group of chords, etc) and still end up with a result that scans as conventional. “Experimental” doesn’t work as a genre tag because it works backwards from our experience of the music to an assumed understanding of the music’s creation.
There was, apparently, some recent discourse around the merits of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” in the jazz & classical spheres of the internet. I missed this entirely, but I did come across Michelle Mercer’s response which interrogates the jazz symphony as a form and the various technical and institutional hurdles that composers have to deal with in order to make it work. I hardly know anything about jazz symphonies, I like my peanut butter and jelly separate so to speak, so this was quite educational!
Speaking of education, did you know that the person that designed the logos for PBS, Chase, Mobil and other big name brands also designed a bunch of album covers? And did you know that those covers slap unreasonably hard? Well, I sure didn’t until The Art of Cover Art gave me the low-down.
I recently started working through my Chrome ‘Reading List’ in chronological order instead of just perpetually skimming off the top, which is how I re-discovered this lengthy essay from Adam Fales that uses Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Haunting of the Seven Gables to tackle the metaphor of the haunted house in the American consciousness. The essay spirals out from this straightforward starting point to encompass everyone from Shirley Jackson to Karl Marx. This is the kind of writing that makes me want to buckle down and pump out my own too-long-for-their-own-good media crit essays. Highly recommended!
My friend, former roommate, and occasional Lamniformes collaborator, Seth Engel just launched his own Substack to share the latest news about his multitude of musical projects. Seth is outrageously talented and extremely busy as both a musician and an audio engineer, so this newsletter is a must read if you want to keep up. Give him a follow and let him know I sent ya!
# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #
Speaking of Seth Engel, if you’d like to hear me speak to Seth Engel for an uninterrupted hour about his background, teaching music to kids, and his primary project Options, you can do just that by listening to this old episode of Lamniformes Radio. How convenient!
As long as I’m busting out old Lamniformes Radio episodes, check out my interview with Gary Suarez about his thoughts on the state of music journalism in the 2020s, why he launched Cabbages, and his surprising background as a noise rock frontman.
Bellows, the indie rock band led by Oliver Kalb that I play drums in, is returning to the stage on March 15th to open for FROG at The Knitting Factory. I just learned that the new Knitting Factory location is in the old Pyramid Club. Weird! I went there a bunch before COVID in what now feels like a completely different version of my life. Anyway, Sister are also playing, which is very exciting! You can get tickets here.
Speaking of Sister, Hanna and Ceci also run GUNK, and organized a benefit compilation, For Palestine, which features the most recently released Lamniformes tune along with a number of exclusive tracks from much cooler artists. The comp has raised over $2000 last I heard, let’s go for three stacks!!
What happens when the king of dad rock turns against dad? Find out in Drumming Upstream #42, in which I cover Bruce Springsteen’s biblical blues rocker “Adam Raised A Cain” from 1978’s Darkness On The Edge of Town. If you’re starting to get a little sick of one man hogging up nearly 10% of the air-time in this series, good. This one is all about hating the big guy. To receive this entry in your inbox on Monday (hopefully!), and to gain access to the rest of the Drumming Upstream Archives, subscribe now for $5 a month.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 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.
“鏡” by betcover!! (Uma, 2023)
betcover!! have achieved what peanut butter companies have long believed impossible: the ability to make something both crunchy and smooth simultaneously. The heart of this tune is a laid back, melancholic lament, the kind you’d listen to while wearing something expensive and smoking a cigarette on a balcony. However, the track is framed by an absolutely nasty riff that layers flute over distorted bass and a Helmet-sized drum groove.
“Rote Mimesis” by Baring Teeth (The Path Narrows, 2023)
Here on the other hand, is something extra, extra crunchy. I’ll have the chance to get into Baring Teeth’s whole deal in an eventual entry of Drumming Upstream, don’t expect it anytime soon though because that song is hard, but the long and the short of it is that this Texas trio has been one of the most intriguing death metal bands in America for the last 15 years. They don’t release many albums, but each one is so dense with challenging ideas that you’d have to work real hard to get impatient with them. I’m going to be chewing on “Rote Mimesis” for a while. Of particular interest: the delirious chromatic pattern that opens and closes the song.
“Your Control” by Year of the Knife (No Love Lost, 2023)
Last I wrote about Year of the Knife they were taking part in the bizarre spectacle of Code Orange’s 2020 remote concert film Back Inside The Glass. I didn’t have much to say about them at the time. Well, second impressions can do wonders. I do not remember their double bass parts being this sturdy and exciting the last time back in 2020. Year of the Knife aren’t reinventing the wheel here, if you keep an ear open to the intersection of metal and hardcore little will surprise you about “Your Control”, but boy do they grease the hell out of it.
“Reina Mora” by Marina Herlop (Nekkuja, 2023)
Sound design in 7/8. “Reina Mora” is like a pop song chopped up and redistributed so that each instrument plays the other’s parts. Vocals as percussion, bass that becomes the lead, and a piano part that hovers on the edge of reality until it rockets straight up into synthetic abstraction. Utter chaos on the first listen, but cleverly organized on each successive playthrough. The extended middle section where the piano gets to sound like itself is beautiful, especially against the squiggly inhuman bass part.
“The Natural” by Marnie Stern (The Comeback Kid, 2023)
I’m going to try real hard not to spend this whole blurb complaining about how much better indie rock used to be, because hey, this is an album that came out only last year and thus is literally what indie rock can and does sound like in the present. But the facts are the facts, and when I listen to “The Natural” I remember an era where bands in New York didn’t have to choose between writing catchy songs and shredding until their fretboards caught on fire. More importantly, this tune strikes the perfect balance between being presumably very fun to play and very fun to listen to. Big fan of the way the drums suggest a compound meter before cutting the measures off into 4/4. Fuck Indie Sleeze, let’s bring back whatever this is.
\ \ \ \ \ 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.
Addicted by Devin Townsend (2009) - Progressive Metal
The second in the Devin Townsend Project series. This is the “pop” record of the bunch, featuring a ton of vocals from Anneke van Giersbergen. This one was in constant rotation for my college prog band during post-practice hangs. Brings back fond memories. A great example of how to make hooky, song-focused heavy music. Probably the album I’d recommend to anyone unfamiliar but interested in Townsend.
Deconstruction by Devin Townsend (2011) - Progressive Metal
The third in the original DTP quadrilogy, the “heavy” one featuring members of Gojira, Cynic, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Opeth, BTBAM and more. A meta-texual, batshit insane heavy metal roller coaster that deliberately undermines the very concept of concept albums. There’s a LOT going on here, too much for most I’d bet, but its a masterpiece. Underneath the mayhem this album is about finding balance between devotion to art and taking care of your family. Heartfelt and sincere, really. A necessary act of myth demolition.
Ghost by Devin Townsend (2011) - Ambient
Part four of the DTP quadrilogy, the soothing come down after Deconstruction. Chill vibes only. Lots of flute and long reverb tails. I remember listening to this a lot while in Mannheim, Germany walking along the river in the early morning to my music classes. This is easy to write off as some woo woo new age nonsense, but if you get over yourself I think there’s a lot very pretty music on this. Maybe a bit long, but taken in context of the four album project it is a good balance to the chaos that preceded it.
Angel Dust by Faith No More (1992) - Alternative Metal
I bought this used after getting into Fantômas and developing an interest in Mike Patton’s work in general. This is, from what I understand, the band’s most acclaimed record. Then and now, something about this album is not connecting with me. The rhythm section is killer and there are some interesting choices in terms of keys and sound design, but I feel like I’m missing something. I’ll have to mull on it more.
Violence Violence by Ceremony (2006) - Hardcore
Another Deathwish Inc clearance sale pick up. From what I gather, by the time I heard this the band had already changed their sound completely. Confession time, I still don’t quite understand what distinguishes power violence as a genre from very fast hardcore punk. What am I missing here, folks? [Editor’s Note: after posing this question on Instagram I received a bunch of well intentioned answers that did not, I’m afraid, clear this issue up.] In either case this is a fun listen that’s practically over by the time you think to check which track you’re on.