WAVVES – Wavves/Wavvves (2008/2009)

I’m gonna try my best to not repeat myself here. No, really. I gave a pretty good rant regarding my feelings with some of the more recently trumpeted lo-fi acts in my review of the debut of The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, so I don’t need to go into any more detail there, save for the fact that after listening to two albums, I can now add Wavves to the list of new lo-fi acts receiving acclaim that I feel is undeserved.

To give credit where credit is due, Wavves are quite dedicated to their lo-fi aesthetics; much of their music sounds as if was recorded with broken/sporadically functional equipment in a bomb shelter, or some other cramped and sonically unforgiving space. And unlike No Age, who’s total lack of consistency (coupled with halfhearted arrangements) left me underwhelmed, it should be said that Wavves are remarkably consistent. It’s just too bad that they’re consistent at being aimless. Now that’s a shame, and it’s a shame that carries across both of their albums.

The first of these, the self-titled Wavves (with two v’s, released on cassette last September), breaks down rather simply. It’s a steady mix of uninteresting garage-rock (Lover, Teenage Super Party), one-dimensional texture-fucks (Yoked, Space Raider) and two (count ‘em!) good songs (Vermin and Beach Goth, which succeed because they suggest that there might, in fact, be something to them other than a wall of inconsequential noise).

The second album, the similarly-titled Wavvves (with three v’s, released this week), fares a bit better because the production is a touch (read: a touch) cleaner when it’s beneficial for it to be cleaner (the crisp drums on Wavvves stand out, even when everything else still sounds like hell), but the album is in many ways even less impressive than the double-v debut. The irresolute filler-to-actual song ratio is still too high, and there are even fewer notable songs to mention here (of the twelve songs on the album, only Get In The Sun is worth returning to).

Having processed both of these albums together was an immensely disappointing experience; afterward, I turned on Merzbow’s Pulse Demon, and immediately felt both at peace and alive. You see, this is the issue I take with this new crop of lo-fi acts; they’re being heralded as raucous and aurally powerful, but all they’re really doing is taking some very ordinary songs and roughing them up around the edges. You can call it lo-fi, you can call it noise pop, you can call it “experimental”, but nothing you call it hides the fact these bands are being lauded not for their music, but for their noisy approach to it. No. I’m sorry, but that’s fucking bullshit. And that’s why I can’t get behind bands like Wavves – because their approach is both musically disingenuous and emotionally ineffective.

STEVEN WILSON – Insurgentes (2008)

Steven Wilson announced Insurgentes last July (although we weren’t exactly sure what it was when he did), and released it in October…well, sort of. With a limited number of copies available (3,000 CD and 1,000 vinyl), the album quickly sold out and became unavailable to most (myself included) almost as suddenly as it had arrived. Thankfully, KScope stepped up and re-released it this past Tuesday, so now anyone with $15 can get their hands on a copy.

The most important thing Insurgentes needs to do is somewhat metaphysical: it needs to justify its own existence. This is, after all, Steven Wilson’s first solo album, and when last I checked, he not only is the prog titan Porcupine Tree, but also half of No-Man, Continuum and Blackfield, as well as (presumably) most of Bass Communion and Incredible Expanding Mindfuck. Does he really need a solo album, or is Insurgentes just the guy from Porcupine Tree playing what are essentially the same songs under yet another moniker? The answer to that last question is a resounding “no.” Insurgentes (all two discs and 80 minutes of it) is dark and aurally hazy; as far as Wilson’s other works go, it bears the most resemblance to early Porcupine Tree albums like Up The Downstair, assuming they were first crossbred with Antimatter and early King Crimson.

So yes, Insurgentes is self-validating, so as a solo album, that automatically makes it a success. But there’s more to it than that. The album also serves to illustrate that Steven Wilson may in fact be that rarest of all musical beasts: one who is as talented as he is prolific.

NINE INCH NAILS – Ghosts I-IV and The Slip (2008)

Trent Reznor, now free from the shackles of commercial distribution, is dropping new albums on us all over the place (perhaps to make up for the 5-6 year gap us NIN fans had become accustomed to). The first of these albums is Ghosts I-IV, a four disc collage dark and minimal ambience. It’s a bit of an experiment for Mr. Reznor, whose previous work usually incorporates sounds like these as well as sonic turbulence of the highest magnitude on the same album (and often in the same song). It’s only partially successful. At times, it’s engrossing, but too much of the time, it feels like the aural equivalent of watching paint dry.

The Slip, on the other hand, is a proper NIN release, and a damn good one at that. It feels sort of like With Teeth’s older, more mature brother. Now, I’ve got nothing against With Teeth, but after 6 years, I was ready to accept anything that Trent was going to give us with open arms and no complaints. But a few years have given me some distance, and I now can admit what I didn’t (or perhaps, couldn’t) back then: the five middle tracks of With Teeth, are, well, pretty terrible (with Only being the worst offender).

The Slip, conversely, suffers no such lulls. It’s just one groovy industrial rampage after another. The album effortlessly blends the texturization of NIN’s later work with the dark power of their earlier work, and it does without any of the With Teeth casualties. This may prove to be the best NIN work since 1999’s criminally underrated The Fragile.

Both albums were released online. Ghosts I-IV had a variety of pricing and package options, while The Slip was offered up to the masses as a gift (a physical release is planned for later this year). Ever since Radiohead shocked the music world last year by dropping In Rainbows on the populace for whatever they wanted to pay, the digital release idea has grown in popularity. The newest album by Saul Williams The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! (which was produced by Trent) was released in a similar manner. Elsewhere, Gregg Gillis of Girl Talk is following suit with his newest release, Feed The Animals, which is available from Illegal Art for the price of…whatever.

WOLF PARADE – At Mt. Zoomer (2008)

For a band who were formed more out of necessity than anything else (Wikipedia informs me that Spencer Krug, former member of Frog Eyes, was offered a support slot for an early Arcade Fire tour; he hit up Dan Boeckner, formerly of Atlas Strategic, and thus the band was born), Wolf Parade have ascended into pantheon of revered indie rock idols startlingly quick. Their debut album, 2005’s Apologies To The Queen Mary was an extraordinarily tight collection of pop songs that were wound up like toys and marched off into the pleasure lobes of the brain, where they stayed, and stayed forever.

It’s taken the band three years to get the time to get a sophomore album together, and given the number of other projects the band members are/were involved in (Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, Fifths of Seven, Handsome Furs, Johnny and the Moon, etc.), it’s kind of miraculous it only took that long. The band could have offered us a great many things with At Mt. Zoomer, including simply more of the same (which, given the quality of Apologies, I’d gladly accept), but the band have spun their sound into something different here. Rather than go straight for the neural-pop pleasure center with laserlike precision, Wolf Parade give the songs on At Mt. Zoomer some room to move around in, and the result is an album that’s every bit as addicting and enjoyable as Apologies, but for entirely different reasons.

The biggest difference in the band’s sound is the increased presence (and altered role) of the keyboard. On older tracks like Grounds For Divorce, for example, the keyboard was strictly wound into the inner mechanics of the song; it functioned perfectly there as a cog of a well-oiled and magnificent machine, working together to keep the song going forward. Whereas on At Mt. Zoomer, the keyboard is given room to glide and dive inside the songs, sometimes pulling, sometimes pushing, but still functioning essentially as a momentum device. You can hear this everywhere on the album: in California Dreamer, in Call It A Ritual, in Fine Young Cannibals, and most notably in the opening track, Soldier’s Grin (which, if ever there is an indie carousel built, this would be the perfect song to loop while the riders circle endlessly).

While the band’s sound may be a bit different, the songs on At Mt. Zoomer are still incredibly infectious. The album’s first single, Call It A Ritual, might seem like an unlikely candidate to promote the album. It’s a thick song, filled with patches of hazy guitar and vocals that have nearly been drowned in reverb. The whole thing is punctuated endlessly by a serious, unbreaking piano. There’s nothing really too accessible about the track, but there’s something about it, some unnamed quality that instills the urge to keep returning to it. I think that the band opting to put forth Call It A Ritual says a lot about where the band are going with At Mt. Zoomer; in a way, the track is most indicative of the stylistic turn the band have taken here.

The album’s best song, the eleven minute closer Kissing The Beehive, blends the musical ideals of Apologies and At Mt. Zoomer into one song (with two distinctive halves). The first half of it is perhaps represents the culmination of the Mt. Zoomer sound. It’s bold, almost frightening at times. The second half of the song sees the band returning the no-holds-barred focus that was everywhere on Apologies. The swinging guitars, the lockstep drum and keyboard lines, even the vocal delivery, it’s all very reminiscent of tracks like Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts. The dual vocals here of Boeckner and Spencer Krug are breathtaking, as are the lyrics, which trade off optimism and monumental disappointments, one after another. I suppose I shouldn’t have doubted the band, but I must confess that I didn’t think (or know) Wolf Parade had it in them to make a song as huge and as intricate as Kissing The Beehive. But I’m glad they could. And I’m certainly glad that they did.

I think I’m in the minority with At Mt. Zoomer in believing that it’s every it as good as Apologies is. The general critical consensus with the album thus far seems to be that while it’s a good album, it’s ultimately missing something. I disagree. I think Wolf Parade are still too young of a band for us to start limiting what their sound is or isn’t, what they’re capable of and what they’re not. At Mt. Zoomer feels to me more like a revelation than anything else. It’s the sound of a band peeling back one more layer of themselves. And in the end, it’s an album that left me both satisfied emotionally, while also wondering what else the band might be capable of.

HD RATING: 9.5/10

LEVIATHAN – Massive Conspiracy Against All Life (2008)

I have a love/hate relationship with Wrest, the sole member of Leviathan, and I somehow doubt that my use of the word “love” in this review would garner approval from the man, so let me elaborate: I have not enjoyed Wrest’s solo output as much as I’ve enjoyed his collaborative work. The two previous Leviathan full-lengths did not terrorize me as much as Xasthur or Blut Aus Nord consistently did, but Wrest’s bone-rattling wails were one of the high points of Sunn O)))’s Black One, and the lone Twilight album (in which Wrest contributed guitar, bass, drums and synthesizers) delighted me with its wickedness.

I suppose the biggest thing that continually irks me about black metal as a whole is the tired insistence of using conceits to establish a cold and frightening atmosphere. Black metal, perhaps more than any other metal genre, is all about atmosphere, and seeing as how the traditional characteristics of black metal are, shall we say, rather finite, the same stagnant, unfriendly sound keeps resurfacing over and over, ad nauseum. So the bands from the genre that I tend to gravitate to are bands that, more often than not, bend or occasionally break these constraints (the act of which is typically frowned upon by the black metal underground for not being true/grim/necro enough, or any combination thereof). A summation: I don’t think it’s necessary to keep writing and recording music in the style of Transilvanian Hunger anymore (and looking back, I’m not sure it was such a great idea the first time). To me, these were what the early Leviathan albums felt like more than anything else – heirs to the (Dark)throne.

Not so with Massive Conspiracy Against All Life, an album that is both violent, raw, and – this is crucial – audible. There’s no recorded-in-a-forest-at-midnight bullshit going on here. Wrest’s demonic atmosphere sounds all the more nightmarish because there’s a certain amount of plausibility to it. This hell could be real. The album’s opening track,Vesture Dipped in the Blood of Morning, pulls no punches in making us realize this. While black metal classicists may be cursing the pagan gods over the album’s (relatively) clean production (and its balanced mix), their prayers are more than likely falling upon deaf ears. The song is devastating, particularly the middle sections, which sound like some sort of infernal coronation for the condemned. The following song, Merging With Sword, Onto Them is equally potent in its aural misanthropy, merging a hazy guitar-laden wall with Wrest’s impeccable drumming (it’s worth noting that although Leviathan is a one-man project, the drums are Wrest’s bread and butter) and his ever shifting vocals (which here are a mix of cold wailing and distorted grunts and screams).

There’s no denying that the black metal flows freely on Massive Conspiracy – songs like Made As The Stale Wine of Wrath and Receive The World are going to be among the best the genre has to offer this year – but it’s Wrest’s ability to punctuate these onslaughts with more abstract musical ideas that makes the album as grand as it is. Consider how captivating the juxtaposition of the quivering guitars against the misty synths at the end of Receive The World are, or how the ambience in the middle of VI-XI-VI sounds a lot like a murkier (and even sparser) Stars of the Lid. There’s the twitchy, jagged guitars at the beginning of Vulgar Asceticism, who struggle initially to find their footing, before the song explodes, and the pulsing guitar white noise that closes the song out (calling to mind the third movement of Agalloch’s Our Fortress Is Burning). And in between all this is black metal so fierce that it sounds like a veritable battering ram smashing against the gates of Heaven.

The album comes to a close with Noisome Ash Crown, a song which boasts some of Massive Conspiracy’s best (and most abrasive) moments. The opening, with its steady low noise and pounding war drums, sound like what Abruptum might have been, were they ever tuned fully into the human frequency. The song spends much of its time in an intricate miasma, one as sunless as it is intense. It ends after some densely layered noise piles up to nigh unbearable levels, before the song drops off abruptly into nothingness. It’s a hell of an unorthodox way to end such a nightmarish album, but it’s especially fitting.

Wrest has an undeniable ear for crafting complex and nerve-frying material, material that’s as classically devout as it is evocative, material that’s not only full of hell-bound bombast, but also eerily rich atmospheres and yes, dare I say, even some occasional surprises (imagine my shock discovering that the very last instrument you hear in Made As Stale As The Wine of Wrath is – gasp! – a crystal-clear bass guitar!). Massive Conspiracy is one of the few black metal albums that might manage to convert a few those who consistently avoid the genre for one reason or another. It’s not a pleasant album, but then again, it’s hardly supposed to be; there’s no room in Wrest’s demonic vision for serenity. And if the album penetrates into your inner-being, there might not be any for you, either.

HD RATING: 8.5/10

MAYBESHEWILL – Not For Want of Trying (2008)

With only one EP under their belt (2006’s Japanese Spy Transcript), maybeshewill have proven that they’ve got a knack for writing deft, intriguing instrumental music. It’s easy to lump the band into post-rock category, but unlike Explosions In The Sky or Russian Circles, maybeshewill’s music is primarily riff-driven, having more in common with metal than with post-rock (the band’s closest relative in the latter genre would be fellow Brits 65daysofstatic – both bands have an affinity for mixing electronics into their sound, as well as for writing their monikers without spaces). Not For Want of Trying is the band’s first full-length album, and while it’s not as taut as the Japanese Spy Transcript, it still exhibits some stirring moments of beauty.

Most of these moments occur near the close of the album, which is by far the strongest part of it. The final three songs in particular – He Films The Clouds Part 2, the title track, Not For Want of Trying and album closer Takosubo – form a dynamic triad of simplistic, raw and passionate energy. He Films The Clouds Part 2 (Part 1 was on Spy Transcript) takes a simple piano line and methodically piles on the ecstasies until it all gives way to the song’s lone lyric: “now we’re apart, though not through choice/do we stay mute, or raise or voice?” The lyric repeats again, this time by a choir (lifted up by the piano, which gleefully jumps octaves, as if everything depended upon it actually reaching the clouds). The simplicity of it all belies the beauty of it, and as the song winds down, the feeling of peace – of serenity – is strong. maybeshewill cleverly opt to shatter this feeling with Not For Want of Trying, a hurricane of a song whose anchor is in a sample from the Network, Sidney Lumet’s 1976 satirical masterpiece of the television era.

The speech is Howard Beale’s famous “Mad As Hell” diatribe; it’s arguably the most perfect monologue in all of cinema, and there’s absolutely nothing peaceful about. maybeshewill allow it to speak for itself, slightly changing their tone, mirroring every time Beale does, and when he asks for everyone to get mad, the band respond explosively. Considering how harrowing Not For Want of Trying is, it seems fitting that Takosubo acts as sort of a denouement for the whole album. So while the song consists of little more than sparse piano, the band are hardly going out with a whimper. Takosubo is merely the ash and smoke from the fires of the title track – and there’s nothing to indicate that that fire has gone out. It’s just a shame the band took as long as they did to get it started.

The beginning of the album is nowhere near as strong as the end; the songs all seem to blend together. Opener Ixnay On The Autoplay is almost like an electronically muddled twin of Takosubo; both songs share a similar (but inverse) purpose. Whereas Takosubo bleeds out of Not For Want of Trying, Ixnay On The Autoplay bleeds into Seraphim and Cherubim, a riff-driven song with a catchy piano hook. This song is followed by The Paris Hilton Sex Tape (a re-recorded version from the band’s EP). The song is…well, riff-driven, with a catchy piano hook. So is I’m In Awe, Amadeus!. The songs are so similar, in the riffs they use, and the piano lines that weave through them (which all have a minimalist, Phillip Glass feel to them), that hearing them all back-to-back is tiresome (even though each individual song has merit on its own). Ultimately, the songs lack identity, and I wish that maybeshewill would’ve injected these songs with more intent, as they did on the latter tracks of the album.

When the band step out of their mold and attempt something different, the results are somewhat sketchy. Heartflusters, the only song on the album with proper lyrics, feels out of place, especially when when crammed right into the center of the album. The dual male/female vocals in the track reminded me of From Autumn To Ashes, for whatever reason; they’re not bad, but the music here is the biggest issue – it’s too rigid and indifferent, and when compared to the other tracks on the album, it’s also completely lacking in impact.

Not For Want of Trying shows us, again, that the band have a promising future ahead of them; they just need to hone their songwriting skills a bit. Listening to the final three songs of the album, without interruption, is an absolutely joyous experience; it makes you wish that they band had
composed the songs to flow together more, as opposed to having them move around in circles as much as they did. Still, if you’re into emotive instrumental music, post-hardcore or post-rock, the album is definitely worth checking out. And try not to dwell on the flaws too much. The band have proven that they’ve got the potential for better albums, albums that are still unrealized by them. I’m confident that we’ll hear them someday. And next time, maybewewill.

HD RATING: 7/10

OPETH – Watershed (2008)

To say that Opeth had it all, and then abandoned it would be a tad melodramatic, but realistically, it’s impossible to deny that the band’s glory days are now behind them. This saddens me, as no one in the metal world did what Opeth did and continued to do up until 2001’s Blackwater Park. Their sound was indescribably elegant: intricate and fierce passages were entwined together with quiet, baroque motifs. Everything about the band’s sound progressed in this manner, right down to lead singer Mikael Åkerfeldt’s transformation from Angel of Death to choir boy at the appropriate time. The result of all of this was intoxicating. Here was a band that made music that was (at times) maddeningly aggressive, while at the same time being sophisticated and graceful.

The band began to falter a bit with Deliverance and Damnation, an experiment in which the band separated the two vastly different facets of their sound into albums of their own (with mixed results). They faltered some more with 2005’s Ghost Reveries (the band’s first album for Roadrunner Records, the premiere leader of U.S. playground metal). Ghost Reveries was an extremely disappointing release, wherein the band cheapened their rich sound by stripping it of all its baroque richness, standardizing their unorthodox brand of death metal and over-indulging 70’s prog oddities (weird keyboard lines, empty interludes, etc.).

Watershed is most definitely an improvement of Ghost Reveries; at least here, the band don’t sound like they’re imitating themselves anymore. They’ve made some changes to their sound (a lot of which I could do without), but it’s not all bad. Their sound is a mix of modern Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree and heavily diluted, Deliverance-era Opeth. The biggest problem with it all is that I’m not sure what benefit is served by Opeth sounding so deliberately little like themselves. Coil, the first song on the album, is a prime example. It’s not that it’s a bad song, it’s that it’s, essentially, a Porcupine Tree one. Everything about the track screams Porcupine Tree, from the instrumentation, to the production techniques, to the structure. The issue I take with this is somewhat metaphysical: while listening to it, I’m aware that I have access to a slew of Porcupine Tree albums, and I’m puzzled as to why I’m listening to Coil.

While the album opener might cry “Porcupine Tree!”, the album’s first single, Porcelain Heart, cries “Dream Theater!”. This is especially apparent in the guitar work of the song – the main riff (which is embellished with the often-ostentatious work of new drummer Martin Axenrot) and the galloping middle section in particular seem as though they would be right at home on Octavarium. But while the parts of the song may have their obvious influences, Porcelain Heart does indeed feel like an Opeth track (which is more than could be said for The Grand Conjuration, the first single off of Ghost Reveries).

My two biggest complaints with album lie in the vocal delivery of Åkerfeldt, and the structure of the songs. As mentioned previously, the fierce dual-nature of Åkerfeldt’s voice is unparalleled in the metal realm. On previous albums, he would spend most of the time growling, terrorizing your nightmares, while every so often transforming into a wayward lost soul to haunt your waking moments. On Watershed, that balance has been reversed, and Åkerfeldt spends most of his time singing clean. Every once in a while he’ll growl (most notably on Hessian Peel and Heir Apparent), but Watershed is an album with primarily clean vocals.

This is probably a direct consequence of my second (and biggest) complaint with the album. The structure of the songs have been simplified enormously, with the amount of acoustic or semi-acoustic material  greatly increased. While the band have always established, revisited and expanded upon motifs in their earlier works, you always got the sense when listening to these songs that they were always going somewhere new. But the songs on Watershed all have a more “verse-chorus” feel to them, even if they don’t all fall precisely within that framework. This is somewhat of a counter-intuitive thing to come to terms with, as the band have a broadened instrumentation on Watershed, (mostly due to the addition of keyboards provided by Per Wiberg, a full-time member of the band since Ghost Reveries). So while songs like Heir Apparent and Hex Omega are more diverse musically than the band’s past work, these songs actually wind up covering less ground (proving that the Opeth of old really did do less with more).

Watershed has the distinction of being Opeth’s most experimental release. The band expand upon a lot of their different influences here (and occasionally unveil new ones): prog (both new and old), jazz, even modern rock at times. The fact that it’s as hit-or-miss as it is was, perhaps, inevitable. But my outlook on the band now is far more hopeful than it was after hearing Ghost Reveries. Who knows, perhaps Opeth will hit upon some new magic as a result of this experimentation. Maybe then the band will recapture the power that the once had, the power that they’ve willingly forsaken in choosing to pursue this new path.

HD RATING: 5.5/10

NO AGE – Nouns (2008)

Let’s talk about noise for a moment. No, really, let’s. I’ve got something to say about it, I promise. See, I like listening to noisy music. Sometimes. And when I do, I’ve got a few standbys that I’ll reach for; if I want to hear a raucous, energetic mess, I’ll listen to one of the three Lightning Bolt albums I’ve got hanging around. And I’ll be delighted. Conversely, if I want something a little more extreme, I’ll put on Merzbow’s Pulse Demon, and have my senses obliterated for about 70 minutes or so.

So when it comes to noise, I’ve got options. And frankly, I’m not about to revise any of them to make way for No Age, a band who look far more interesting on paper than they actually are. Their 2007 compilation Weirdo Rippers earned them a great deal of acclaim, but the album left me unimpressed. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t noteworthy. So while I failed to write the band off, I had hoped that with their next release, they’d deliver something better. Unfortunately, Nouns (the band’s proper debut, and their first release for Sub Pop), sees the band furthering the same ineffective style exhibited on Weirdo Rippers.

Miner begins the album with a promise, albeit an ambiguous one. The track, which is a little under two minutes, is unclear as to whether or not the album is going to be a noisy soundscape, pushed forward by punk, or vice versa. The mix here is curious; the vocals are soft – very, very soft – and you’d expect this to occur because everything else is smothering them. But that’s not the case. The whole song is thin sounding, like the old worn fuzzy blanket kicking around your basement that you’ll one day either throw out or sell at a yard sale. It’s charming, but worthless. That’s how the overall sound of this album strikes me, and that’s one of the biggest things working against it. But I should point out that at least at this point, there’s something on the table.

The second song, Eraser, tinkers with the sound a bit by tossing in some light acoustic guitar over the fuzz-laden backdrop. The vocals are slightly more audible here, but they’re still too buried to be fully comprehended. By now, I’m bewildered as to what the band are trying accomplish: the juxtaposition of the heavily-distorted guitars and breezy, light melodies is certainly a worthwhile thing to experiment with, but the way No Age pair and assemble them together is seriously unattractive (only on Sleeper Hold does it ever gel together).

Everything on Nouns is too rigid and unadventurous. The drums don’t step outside the box at all, sticking almost exclusively to the same pattern for the duration of whatever song is playing (the beginning of Errand Boy is a notable exception, although the drums compensate for their newfound vigor by dropping out completely after the one minute mark). The melodies are totally wooden. And those blankets of guitar fuzz (when it’s there) drift on and on and on, (still charming and still worthless) and whatever changes it may make are ultimately negligible.

The few, fleeting moments where No Age stop trying to shove atmosphere into their haggard brand of punk fare much better (although they’re certainly no more memorable). Here Should Be My Home is actually a pretty decent punk song, with a genuine worn-around-the-edges feel to it. But it’s easy to forget about, especially considering that the band choose to follow it with Impossible Bouquet, a two minute instrumental which fails to accomplish anything in it’s relatively short length – songs like this need time to evolve and establish things, and the band don’t give it enough time to make its mark.

In its defense, Nouns isn’t a one-trick pony. No Age try many things here, and wind up doing only one of them (straight-up punk) well. There’s tracks like Things I Did When I Was Dead, which sounds like it could’ve been an Animal Collective b-side, if it weren’t so comatose, and Brain Burner, a half-decent garage rock song that doesn’t realize that anyone can make a half-decent garage rock song. Then there are the interludes like Keechie, and the aformentioned Impossible Bouquet, songs which are so empty and out-of-place that, in the end, I’m grateful that’s there’s only two on the album. Nouns isn’t a total failure, but it’s certainly a casualty, one that arises from trying to pair the sonically devastating and avantgarde (like Swans, or Merzbow) with the high energy of noisy punk/garage rock (think The Black Lips or Be Your Own Pet), and then expecting them to play nice.

HD RATING: 3.5/10

ARSIS – We Are The Nightmare (2008)

It’s hard to get excited about the melodic death metal scene right now; so many of the pioneers of the genre are trading in their old sounds for new sounds, and typically speaking, the new sounds are like the old sounds, but not as good. They’re…friendlier. And friendly doesn’t mix well with death metal of any sort. Enter Arsis, who just four years earlier gave the declining genre a much needed kick in the ass with A Celebration of Guilt. This album had everything that melodic death metal album needed to have: blistering guitar work, with a perfect balance of technical skill (read: not vaunting) on display, inspired solos, hyper-taut drumming, and wonderfully enunciated (but still menacing) vocals. It is almost impossible to overestimate the depths to which each of these components achieve, and the band have continued deliver with each release. And the newest of these is We Are The Nightmare.

I’ll admit it. I initially balked upon hearing a song from the new album on the band’s myspace page awhile ago, before the album was released. It wasn’t bad, but I remember it didn’t strike me the way Arsis normally does. Fortunately, these fears were laid to rest when I heard the rest of the album. Revised impression: yup, they’ve done it again. They begin more subtly here than they have in the past: a quiet, clean guitar gradually emerges from nothingness on the album’s title track, before being carried away by a mixed barrage of technical death metal and neo-thrash. Overall, it’s quite effective, even if the song is a bit slow in the tempo department. But the melodies and the structure of everything is so refined, it’s hard to gripe about the tempo.

As in past albums, one of the biggest highlights of We Are The Nightmare is listening to the drums (on this album, it’s Darren Cesca, who has recently been replaced by Alex Tomlin) weave their magic from track to track. It’s so much more intricate and varied than most death metal fare, a good portion of which is simply devoted to blastbeats, alternating between lightning fast and even faster. Brain Drill are a prime example of a band who do this (and let it be known that they do it better than most); it makes for a fun listen, but ultimately, it doesn’t help the songs don’t add up to much more beyond their individual parts. Thankfully, that’s not the case here.

The blend of technique and melody that Arsis utilize in their guitar compositions often times results in getting the listener caught up in melodies that are (if sometimes only momentarily) difficult to discern. Sometimes, it’s the drum work going against the melody that cause this to happen, as in Servants To The Night, and sometimes, it’s simply the sound itself (and the way it’s layered), as in A Feast For The Liar’s Tongue. And while we’re talking about guitars, it should be stated that the solos on We Are The Nightmare are just as good as anything they’ve done thus far. The clear standout for me is the solo that launches out of the middle of Falling Winds of Hopeless Greed; it’s particularly fascinating in the way it locks in and out of a major key, taunting the listener with brightness, only to plunge them back into the dark.

The album closes on a bookend of sorts with Failure’s Conquest. It begins in much the same manner as the title track did, but rather it balances itself with a more mid-tempo style of metalcore, as opposed to thrash. It works, especially when the band slip into a slower breakdown section towards the end of the song. If you’ve ever wished that As I Lay Dying had called it quits after Frail Words Collapse, the ending of Failure’s Conquest will only help to make that all the more apparent.

I’ve been kind of hard with the Nuclear Blast roster on this blog so far (with the exception of Eluveitie), but now I can also add Arsis to the list (who’ve recently moved from Willowtip). Soilwork, Meshuggah, Children of Bodom, In Flames (especially you, In Flames – you’re permanently on notice) have all been critically misrepresenting themselves as of late. But Arsis, from their beginning, have seemed destined for greater things than merely excelling at the genre – they could re-validate it. And We Are The Nightmare is one more step for them down that road, the road that fewer and fewer melodic death metal bands are treading.

HD RATING: 9/10

THE PINEAPPLE THIEF – Tightly Unwound (2008)

With each new release, The Pineapple Thief have moved closer and closer to recapturing the pop/prog perfection that they displayed on 137 and Variations on a Dream. It’s not that the band have ever taken a step backwards in the quality department – 2006’s Little Man was a dense flurry of abstract pop, veiled with the same electronic manipulation that made Radiohead a household name. And 2007’s What We Have Sown called the bluff that 25+ minute prog songs were a dead medium, and that Dream Theater and the InsideOut B-List had killed them.

Tightly Unwound doesn’t have any 25+ minute prog songs like the title track of What We Have Sown, although it does have Too Much To Lose, the 16 minute track which close out the album, and which is, in its own way, every bit as breathtaking – it opens like a strung-out ballad, culled from a forlorn alleyway. Suddenly, the ballad pulls itself up, as if realizing it’s got business to attend to, and heads off to some dark place, obscured by tight drum work and reverb-soaked samples. It’s a harrowing experience, and by the time it closes (with singer Bruce Soord singing “No, I don’t want to hurt you” against a thunderous backdrop), you’re left feeling like you’ve been watching a gritty film noir serial, cut from nightmares and pieced together in a storm.

It’d be hard to gauge where Tightly Unwound ends up based upon how it starts; My Debt To You is a soft, mostly-acoustic song where the focus is on Soord’s voice, and little else. From a purely musical standpoint, Soord’s voice is intriguing; it’s like a mix of Thom Yorke and Steven Wilson, and when he harmonizes himself (as he does in the chorus: “here’s my debt to you”), it’s extraordinarily catchy, regardless of the weight of the song (he harmonizes himself again in Shoot First, a much more upbeat song, and the result is the same).

Overall, there’s a little more of a rock influence on much of Tightly Unwound: there’s nothing really “prog” about some songs, like Sinners, which at times displays an arena-rock level of energy. Then there’s songs like My Bleeding Hand, which sounds like what Muse could’ve been capable of on Black Holes and Revelations if they would’ve been more focused. But as great as both these songs are, some of the best material on Tightly Unwound comes as a complete surprise.

Like The Sorry State, a song that begins similarly to some of the others on the album but quickly differentiates itself through its use of flamenco guitar in the verses. It’s carried off later by a raw, yet controlled guitar solo, a solo that collides into another flamenco verse; at this point, everything in the song is blossoming, and it’s hard not to be captivated by it. And So Say All of you is another such song; it’s sandwiched between the two longest songs on the album, but it’s just as emotionally effective at a third of the runtime. It’s mostly low-key, almost a ballad, and then it picks up at the end, but only to come back down again. It’s not as beautiful as The Answers from 10 Stories Down, but then again, it doesn’t need to be. There’s an indescribable sadness that lingers in it, and to hear such a succinct display of emotion between such a mountain of it is only further proof of the band’s prowess.

If Too Much To Lose is the most progressive song on the album, it seems fitting that Different World, the second longest song (at 11 minutes), is its rival. While both songs share similar runtimes, the emotions they evoke could not be more different; Too Much To Lose is an incredibly dark and foreboding song, while Different World is lighter and more contemplative. What’s remarkable about it is how easily it moves from one section to the next. The string section in the middle gradually turns into a soft pop revelation, which fades away while only the piano lingers, before bringing the song back around again to a reprise of an earlier section. Before you know it, the song has gradually faded to nothing, and the solemn opening of And So Say All of You has begun.

The Pineapple Thief are one of the greatest treasures in the current underground music scene. They’re the kind of band that could potentially appeal to all kinds of music fans. Prog fans will like them for their detailed epics, while pop fans will rejoice at their sense of melody and harmony. People with more abstract tastes will admire their use of texture and structure, while still others will simply love the album for what is: a boundlessly enjoyable experience.

HD RATING: 10/10