Altar of Plagues - Teethed Glory & Injury

One of my favorite compliments to pay a rock or metal band is to comment on their mastery of musical texture - those elements that reside in parallel to structure and motion, and create an immersive soundscape. The first band to awaken me to the concept and its possibilities were Neurosis, and they remain as good a touchstone as any. Yet, while no slight to Neurosis, quite often an emphasis on texture is found in bands whose success exists on a plane entirely distinct from the archetypical, riff-centric heavy metal paradigm.

Enter Altar of Plagues. The exquisite and fully integrated textures of Teethed Glory & Injury are vital to its success. But within the guitar riffs, the drums, the vocals lie the makings of a visceral and effective metal album in its own right. Whether delivered in a whisper or a snarl, the vocals convey a humanity occasionally absent in the bands who cohabit the cerebral corners of extreme metal. The guitar lines effortlessly glide between driving rhythmic passages and suspended melodic contours before descending into self-effacing swaths of feedback and sustain. Yet while each musician turns in a performance worthy of individual consideration, at no point during the album do these elements appear as anything other than vehicles for atmosphere, momentum, and compositional assertions.

The structure of the album is unique. With each song bleeding into the next, Teethed Glory & Injury is cohesive and monolithic. And its success demands such continuity, as the tracks themselves unfold as linear segments; propulsive in their development yet rarely retracing their steps. Nevertheless, each comes off as a pointed statement rather than a fragment.

The songs are willfully abstract, yet each evokes a distinct imagery. This tendency is brilliantly embodied by the visuals of the album (see the video for "God Alone", below). The synthesis of this music with interpretative dance is beautiful, and shockingly natural. On Teethed Glory & Injury, Altar of Plagues have brought into relief the impressionism of black metal.

An outstanding work on many levels.

I recommend the video in full screen.

The Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer

Perhaps more than any other band, The Dillinger Escape Plan is responsible for the style of "mathcore" - a subgenre of heavy music which makes a virtue out of constructing the most convoluted rhythmic passages possible, and eviscerating any melodic theme which might attempt to emerge. Yet Dillinger has an instinct for something that many of their imitators fail to grasp - complete unpredictability lacks the capacity to surprise the listener. Where Dillinger distinguishes themselves is in their uncanny ability to set up an expectation, and then thwart it - sometimes in the coarse of mere seconds. You don't need to get past the first 10 minutes of One of Us is the Killer to have this experience time and time again, and the results can be mind boggling. It's exhilerating, and even if DEP's approach started and ended with this trick, it would be enough to have me coming back for each new album they release. Admittedly, this style of composition has a niche audience.

Within extreme metal and hardcore, DEP has few competitors from the standpoint of being a prototypical "musician's band" - Meshuggah being an obvious example. For me, contrasting the two groups gives insight into the divergence of the respective ethos of metal and hardcore. Meshuggah has spent a career cultivating an immersive and idiosyncratic musical landscape, and constrained their musical developments to the thorough exploration of its possibilities. To make the point more plainly, they've created a signature atmosphere. I would argue that this is one of the hallmarks of heavy metal (and often classical), as opposed to hardcore (and often jazz) - the attempt to make the listener forget that they are listening to a group of people playing instruments in a room.  Listening to DEP, the awareness of the band-as-musicians is never really absent. If I might naively borrow a theatrical concept that I know little about in order to frame my over-simplification: heavy metal leaves the fourth wall intact; hardcore never had one.

The upshot of that slightly abstruse excursion is that, stylistically, DEP seems content to throw anything and everything into the mix on their albums. This makes for a very interesting listen, but the impact of each song for a particular listener is likely to be something of a crapshoot. To take this discussion completely back to earth, when DEP aims for a mid-tempo track coupled with Greg Puciato's screaming/melodic hybrid vocals, I just don't think the results always sound particularly good.

Blah blah, here's a great track from One of Us is the Killer:

9/7/12: Katatonia/Devin Townsend Project/Paradise Lost at Great American Music Hall

I've been going to a lot more shows lately, and it looks like it won't be letting up any time soon with 5 more between now and November 17th which I will either definitely or probably go to. The surge is due to a combination of finally knowing about most (all?) of the relevant venues in the area, and finally getting a decent pair of earplugs...

Paradise Lost

I've heard about Paradise Lost for years now. They were one of the bands to start infusing melody with death metal in the early 90's and, following the typical format, shifted outside the genre just a couple years later. As such, I put them in a category with such fantastic bands as Katatonia, Amorphis, Tiamat and Dark Tranquillity and I have always been optimistic about both their early death metal classic Gothic and their later material.

The band doesn't play anything remotely death metal anymore so I can't say whether Gothic would appeal to me - but after seeing them live I'm not particularly inclined to explore the rest of their catalogue any further. I had expected this to be melodic in an expansive, layered sort of way - on the contrary it strikes me as borderline hard rock with rudimentary melodic guitar lines sprinkled in at predictable times, extremely simple, boring rhythms and a vocalist who apparently molds himself after James Hetfield. Probably one of the worst styles of metal vocals in my book.

Devin Townsend Project

I have one Strapping Young Lad album (SYL) and have heard snippets of Devin Townsend's other work here and there, but for the most part I'm not familiar and I thought I had sort of grown away from SYL. Devin Townsend is well known for his zany/silly shtick, and it started during the changeover as the soundcheck was accompanied by a extended video of Ziltoid doing things like singing songs about mangos and dancing around. If you're not familiar with Ziltoid, he's the main character of Townsend's concept album - a alien who demands Earth's ultimate cup of coffee and attacks when he finds it sub-par. I have pretty low tolerance for self-conscious humor in music, and the combination of this with other clips of interent memes primed me to perceive Devin Townsend's set as a series of quasi-progressive metal tunes without much ambition other than to mindlessly entertain. The band's proficiency was lightyears beyond the well-meaning trod of Paradise Lost, but it seemed more or less like textbook modern metal riffs coated with a thick layer of unremarkable keyboard noodling.

Later in the weekend I listened to some of DTP's stuff online, and that's when I realized that my relationship with green foam earplugs has probably ruined more concert experiences than I will ever know. It actually sounded like really great, creative music. Driving home from Swans a couple days later, I nearly headbanged myself unconscious to SYL. I actually fucking love that album - who knew that thinking Devin Townsend sucked live would get me back into Strapping Young Lad in a big way?

Katatonia

Katatonia was good, and it was nice to see them headline so they could play a bit longer than they did when I saw them last year with Opeth. But in retrospect all I can think about is how much better it would have sounded without my stupid earplugs. I could barely hear the guitars - just vocals, drums, and the bass which was distorted to the point of sounding vaguely like a fart. My only complaint with Katatonia is that they consistently pack their setlist with "hits" and ready-made crowd favorites like "My Twin" - probably my most hated Katatonia track - and "Leaders" and "Forsaken" - both decent songs, but it seems so obvious that these token tracks are thrown in to appease the crowd's primitive need to headbang to a couple staccato metal riffs. Give me "Rusted" or "Increase" for once. I often forget just how good most of The Great Cold Distance is due to my mixed emotions about a few of its tracks.

On the plus side, the band did choose some "deep cuts" from Viva Emptiness like "Walking By a Wire" and a couple others and this was definitely the highlight of the set for me. Despite LFDGD being contender for my favorite Katatonia album, "Teargas" was kind of a miss - "We Must Bury You" and "Chrome" were much better choices when I saw them last, with the former being surprisingly effective live, and the latter being one of my personal favorites from the band.

Krallice - Years Past Matter

If there’s anything about Krallice that fits squarely with black metal tradition, it’s the tendency of their music to be overshadowed by the lore surrounding them. Maybe Colin Marston never stabbed anybody, but you’d be forgiven for thinking as much in light of the controversy surrounding the band’s black and tech metal hybrid.

In truth, the debate about the band is neither surprising nor unwarranted. They garnered rapid and emphatic praise from journalists who were rightfully excited about Krallice’s musical concept and instrumental role in an unfolding paradigm. But some could argue that this praise slightly outpaced the band’s compositional ability; a perspective highly dependent on the listener’s context in black metal, tech metal, even death metal. And black metal purists tended to be less impressed by the supposed innovations that Krallice represented. In much the same way that Napalm Death didn’t really invent grind, the purists are usually right. But they’re never vindicated, so it sucks to be one.

Great music never lives in the middle of the road, and wisely Krallice has responded to any deficiencies in their songs by dispensing with conventional attempts to write them. On Years Past Matter you will find no song titles and no lyrics – this is Krallice at their most organic, meandering, and abstract. Previous attempts at verse-chorus formats and vocal hooks on Diotima served only to drive home how ill-at-ease the band was with the format, and the segmented, riff based structures of their previous work often stifled the otherwise brilliant musical interplay by compartmentalizing it into discrete chunks.

It may seem almost paradoxical that Krallice has achieved their most memorable and succinct set of songs by making their music more free flowing and extended. But metal has never been a genre that’s harmed by 10-20 minute epics – it’s the introduction of too many ideas that makes a song seem longwinded. On Years Past Matter, every transition is so seamless that for the first time in their career, Krallice’s songs seem shorter than they are.

Possibly a byproduct of the organic approach to composition, Years Past Matter is also Krallice at their most dynamic. There’s the infectious grooves of track 3, the gentle acoustic theme of 4 devolving into a gorgeous alien soundscape straight out of Ocrilim, the droning noise of 5 and the technical explosion of the progressive closing track. These sonic landmarks do wonders for the flow of the album, and sustain the interspersed tremolo-picking flurries which have always been a trademark of the band. My first thought on hearing all this was that the band had largely dropped the pretense of being a black metal band. But after listening further, I have found that sections of the album strike me as the closest to black metal the band has ever sounded. Even though these sections still aren’t that intense and still aren’t that grim, the musical impact derives from the contrast.

Musically, the band sounds better than they ever have. Marston and Barr’s fretwork has never been in question, but here Weinstein and McMaster really come into their own. If there was one weakness to the band before, it was a slight identity crisis between the black metal and technical parts of their sound. No one is more integral to reconciling that divide than Weinstein, since an underperforming drummer can be the Achilles' heel of a technical metal band, but drone and black metal influences demand a more restrained performance. This time around, Weinstein knows exactly when to play a minimalist blast or double bass groove, and exactly when to ratchet up to a more hyperactive attack. As for McMaster, he continues to develop as a strong third voice in the arrangements, dexterously supplying everything from fuzzy rumbling lines, to dynamic technical runs, to subtle and surprising harmonizations.

A couple other nice touches to this album:

For one, the album layout and artwork is fantastic. It mirrors the music perfectly: reminiscent of the spirit of black metal in certain ways, but modern, abstract, and full of color.

Secondly, on the album there are no song titles at all, but online they are titled with a string of I’s of sufficient number that it’s impossible to tell which song is which unless they are all listed in order. At first I thought this was some obnoxious attempt to be kvlt, but now I’m interpreting it as a statement about listening to the album as a whole. If a song comes up on your music player, it’s effectively impossible to tell which track it is – only that it’s from Years Past Matter. Like the artwork, this titling convention mirrors the music: each song requires the context of the others.

Often the darlings of Pitchfork, often the scorn of Metal Archives, Krallice has responded to all the petty dogmatic outrage and the brainless trendy followers in the best possible way – by eliminating virtually all text from their album and letting the music speak. And speak it does.

Katatonia - Dead End Kings

My relationship with Dead End Kings has evolved almost exactly as I expected it to beforehand. In other words, it's deja vu from 2009 and Night is the New Day. On the first couple listens I thought it sounded good but not particularly remarkable. I was disappointed that the band had continued in such a similar vien as the last couple albums, but not surprised. By now I've probably listened to the album 15 times, and I am fully infatuated with it. 

Putting aside their early death metal work, Viva Emptiness was Katatonia at their most aggressive. The heavier parts of the album displayed jagged, splintered rhythms and claustrophobic walls of noise. The Great Cold Distance kept many of the polyrhythmic tendencies and metallic guitars of Viva Emptiness, but incorporated them into a disarmingly listenable framework.

Night is the New Day was in many ways a continuation of the same evolution. The songs became more expansive; even cinematic. Despite my sense that albums like Last Fair Deal Gone Down contained more raw emotional power, beneath the polished and concise songs lay a level of sophistication unmatched in the band's career. To cheapen it with categorization, it was the most exquisite pop for prog-metal fans. I eventually forgave the lack of overt musical progression because the album was just damn good.

As much as I love every song on Night is the New Day, it could get a little tiring halfway through the album. While Departer, Forsaker, Idle Blood, Inheritance and Nephilim were distinctive, the rest of the tracks had a tendency to blend together. Not to say they weren't memorable; but the emotional arc of the songs and the verse/chorus structure were similar.

In that respect, Dead End Kings holds up a lot better.  Looking through the lyrics to Night is the New Day, I realize just how rigidly the verse/pre-chorus/chorus structure is followed. That's probably why, when listening to opening track "The Parting", I was expecting it to either repeat itself or end. Instead the track moves into a beautiful bridge section which is a highlight of the song. A subtle progression to be sure, but a meaningful one for the flow of the album. A song like "Ambitions" goes farther - it still contains the verse/pre-chorus/chorus structure, but there are multiple additional sections, one of which is revisited in a couple different contexts. Despite the general added complexity of the songs, they still feel just as concise and economical, which is a testament to the writing.

The music is a bit more varied between tracks as well. The album has a few stylistic outliers like the jagged metal of "Buildings", the sprawling prog leanings of "Dead Letters" or the subdued "The Racing Heart". But the rest still have some musical trait to distinguish them - like the keyboard driven "Leech" or the energetic and dynamic "Lethean", which must be the only Katatonia track with a genuine guitar solo. In general, while the keyboards and guitars are present throughout, they are more likely to play dynamic lines and trade off, with one or the other acting as the lead voice. The swelling keyboard textures of Night is the New Day aren't gone, they're just used more sparingly.

The more I think about it, the integration of keyboards as a full instrument rather than a kind of added flavor is probably the biggest improvement the band has made. I doubt it's a coincidence that the keyboards are now credited to main songwriters Renkse and Nystrom, where they were performed by someone outside the band previously.

At first glance, Dead End Kings seemed to be another step in the same progression that lead to Night is the New Day. Aesthetically, it's even more accessible to the non-metal fan. It's rich with keyboard backdrops and subtle guitar or percussion embellishments. But on further examination it seems that the band is reaching back towards the winding song structures and dynamic spirit of Viva Emptiness while retaining the pristine control of texture and space that they've gained in the meantime.

Once again my initial disappointment with the band's refusal to leave their comfort zone melted away with repeated listens. Anders Nystrom alluded to their musical continuity in a recent interview, saying that Night is the New Day still feels like the "new" album and that everything since The Great Cold Distance still feels up to date.  It's important to remember that there's nothing inherently wrong with a band continuing to write in a similar style - it's only the fact that this typically indicates a lack of inspiration. Katatonia has clearly not exhausted their inspiration for this style of music.

Sitting on the floor drinking tea

Katatonia – Dance of December Souls

I was revisiting all my Katatonia albums leading up to the release of Dead End Kings and their concert in San Francisco. I’ve never managed to get into the band's early death metal material. The couple songs I’ve heard from Brave Murder Day sound good, but listening to Mikael Akerfeldt fronting a different band is kind of like watching Kiefer Sutherland in The Sentinel. I'm sure he still saves the world. As for Dance of December Souls, it’s just never grabbed me one way or the other. Seems about time to figure out whether it’s any good.

Last night I was walking around outside listening to it a little drunk and decided that it just wasn’t interesting and I should give up continually trying to get into it. But then today it seemed kind of promising. So the jury is still out for now. I’m a little jaded towards some of the melodies and acoustic noodling that’s scattered about. But all my old melodic death metal albums remain favorites year after year, so maybe it's my attitude that's the problem.

Today is the Day – Pain is a Warning

Although I’ve still never heard the first 3 Today is The Day albums (which are supposed to be some of their best), I’m a pretty massive fan of the ones I do have. Pain is a Warning was a huge departure from their previous albums, which were twisted and complex – both musically and structurally. Then Steve Austin decided to do a 180 and release a stripped down, nearly minimalist work which feels a lot like a rock and roll album, albeit one that’s been charred over an open flame.

I felt like I was being really creative with that description until I realized there is a big flame on the album cover…

As much as I love (and may even prefer) albums like Kiss the Pig or Temple of the Morning Star, economical writing and conceptual simplicity goes a long way towards making an album feel cohesive. This is the one Today is the Day album which always holds me until the end, even when I didn’t plan to listen to the whole thing. The aggressive parts of the album are broken up by more restrained songs where Steve Austin actually let’s loose some tortured crooning. Never saw that coming, but it really works. These songs (title track, Remember to Forget, This is You) are a few of my favorites. The other clear highlight is “Slave to Serenity”. I think there’s a total of two riffs, with one of them making up 80% of the song. But I literally can’t get enough. Epic.

Strapping Young Lad

I saw The Devin Townsend Project with Katatonia the other night, and I didn’t like it very much at all. A major feature of the performance was a backdrop video of Ziltoid, the omniscient alien who demands Earth’s greatest cup of coffee and attacks when it fails to meet his expectations. During the soundcheck he was singing songs about mangos and interviewing people.  Couple this with the rest of Devin Townsend’s crazy/weird/ironic shtick, and I just wasn’t taking it very seriously. It didn’t sound very impressive – but in retrospect I think this was partially the bits of foam stuck in my ears because to be fair, I wasn’t picking up the subtleties of Katatonia’s compositions either. I just happen to already know what those are.

I listened to some of Devin Townsend’s stuff yesterday and I actually thought it seemed pretty decent, so I was inspired to revisit Strapping Young Lad which I previously thought I had grown out of (after a very short affair with it  some 8 years ago). Well, it’s actually not bad at all! I ended up listening to most of the album. Funny that thinking the concert sucked is the thing that's getting me to listen to Devin Townsend again.

Incantation – Onward to Golgotha

Not much to say about this one – it’s one of the all time classics of death metal. It’s the music that I most associate with my year studying at Cambridge, along with Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans. Yes seems like a slightly more conventional association. But what can I say? Nothing spells Onward to Golgotha like walking by this all the time:

I’m kidding, relax. I’m not going to go all Varg next time I’m there. Wood stave churches are a lot easier to deal with anyway.

Enslaved – Vikingligr Veldi

I kind of like the progressive-black metal thing Enslaved does these days (I have Isa and Vertabrae). Haven’t listened to this very much, and it didn’t score itself any extra points today. Like Katatonia, Enslaved is yet another in the list of black metal and melodic death metal bands who went onto broader things, but whose early work is raved about on Metal Archives. I can’t tell if it’s just the elitism and tunnel vision of death and black metal purists, or if there really is some genius in these albums which I find relatively inaccessible or superficially uninteresting.

Dark Tranquillity – Haven

If there’s anything the keyboard work on Dead End Kings reminds me of, it’s late period Dark Tranquillity. I think Katatonia does it more tastefully – as proficient and enjoyable as albums like Fiction and We are the Void are, they’re always served with a touch too much cheese.

Haven was their first album to fully integrate keyboards, and it’s more midpaced than everything that came later. I’ve always liked it but never felt the magic. I have a feeling it may have more to offer – and now that I’m revisiting it I hear some subtleties I hadn’t previously noticed. It’s possible that I haven’t heard this since I started using decent headphones a few years ago.

Incantation – Primordial Domination

I know I was kind of dismissive about this album in a recent post, but I keep wanting to listen to it so obviously it can’t be that bad. I do think John McEntee's vocals were better on Decimate Christendom. A lot of people wish Craig Pillard was back so they probably like his deeper tone on this album, but I find them less expressive this way. Otherwise, I just wish the guitar tone wasn’t so clean and that the bass was more prominent. Diabolical Conquest was the album that made me love this band, and a big part of the reason was because of the prominent, popping bass tone which to my ears adds a lot of color to the sonic palette. I feel like I'm always walking this fine line between being descriptive and sounding like a douchebag. 

Anyway, I’m not a fan of the homogenous thick wall of bass and guitar that most bands use – sure, it’s “heavier” but it’s also less interesting. I’ve revisited a number of death metal albums that I love and eventually realized that the distinct sonic presence of the bass was unconsciously playing a huge role. Cryptopsy’s None So Vile comes to mind. I always thought the album sounded awesomely chaotic and it's not just the slightly sloppy drumming that does it.

Anyway, just to harp on the point a little more, in retrospect Diabolical Conquest might even be the single album most responsible for bringing my focus in death metal away from the riffs themselves and towards a more holistic view.

Incantation has a new album coming out this winter - Vanquish in Vengeance. I just came across this track they released last year as part of a split that I didn't know about. I actually think it sounds awesome so hopefully that's a good sign for their next one.

Mayhem – Live in Leipzig

This is the only Mayhem release to feature the vocals of the infamous Dead, and I won’t deny that I bought it for that reason. Apparently he would do things like bury his clothes and then dig them up to wear on stage, and carry around a plastic bag with a dead bird in it and smell it so he could sing with the “stench of death in his nostrils”.

Obviously I was hopeful that this would be the pinnacle of black metal vocals, but if I’m honest they seem kind of run of the mill.

I used to buy every live album by bands I liked as a completist, but I never listened to them much. I always looked at them as collections of tracks from other albums, but I try to approach them as standalone musical statements now. Live in Leipzig is a good one for that considering it’s a lineup that never recorded in the studio. It’s a pretty messy and lo-fi affair, but in a different way from how second wave black metal studio albums are lo-fi. The aesthetic is slowly growing on me.

Vader – Live in Japan

Live in Japan seems competent but I don’t see a real reason to listen to it over the studio albums. But even as I’m typing this I realize I’m not following my own dictum about how I should approach live albums. I don’t know that I’ve ever listened to this without comparing it to the studio recordings. To be fair, most death metal bands just go up there and parrot their albums. On the other hand, contrary to popular opinion I think successful death metal is just as reliant on atmosphere and aesthetics as black metal is. Basically I just need to listen to this a bunch of times before judging it. I’ve owned it for long enough, it’s about time. It's not as bad as Neurosis’ Live in Stockholm though…I don’t know if I’ve heard the complete album once. I used to be such a moron about buying CD’s.

Nights before Years Past Matter

Krallice's self titled album was kind of a revelation when I first heard it, being as interested as I was in Mick Barr's playing style. His work with Orthrelm and his solo projects is challenging to say the least - so hearing his trademark shrill, geometrical, pick heavy shredding in a more accessible setting was a welcome change. But even though many of the songs had a sort of "big payoff" in the form of a sweepingly epic torrent of melodic shards, much of the album consisted of a hazy onslaught of tremolo picking and blasts which failed to leave much impression. In short, it was just plain hard to remember the individual songs.

With Dimensonal Bleedthrough, the effect was only amplified with ever more complex rhythms and three-voice polyphony (if not more). While the rhythm section had certainly improved, the token accessible riffs seemed to have been phased out. It was kind of a wash, and I ended up treating the album as a replacement rather than a new installment in their discography.

With two albums already being more than I could chew, the logical thing to do would have been to pass over Diotima until I eventually digested the previous work (if ever). But my inexplicably enduring attraction to this band prevailed, and I ended up getting in over my head even further.

......

Krallice is a pretty polarizing band. On one hand you have a good portion of the black metal scene who think the band is musically unremarkable, compositionally forgettable, and overrated by "hipsters" who don't actually understand black metal. On the other hand you have music critics and a large number of non-traditional metal fans who rave about the band to no end, claiming that the black metal purists are set in their ways.

More than most people, I can relate to both sides of this debate. Clearly I have had trouble remembering and distinguishing between the mass of tracks that Krallice seems to add to by the year. On the other hand, I've always felt something intriguing and progressive about their dense layers of tremolo picking, bubbling bass tones, droning feedback and sustained chords.

So here we are in 2012 and Krallice IV has arrived: Years Past Matter. Driven by my inability to keep the last two albums straight, I was pretty apathetic about hearing this. Then again, the album cover was sweet. And maybe this would finally be the time that everything just clicked for me with one of their albums.

As I'm twiddling my thumbs waiting for my copy to arrive, I have to admit that I simply haven't invested the necessary time into the last couple albums. Surely I should be able to recognize and describe the differences between Dimensional Bleedthrough and Diotima, if nothing else.

All this has raised an interesting question for me: in music, how much effort should be expected or required from the listener? Clearly from the standpoint of popularity and success, the listener should not be expected to invest anything substantial. But from an artistic standpoint, is there an "appropriate" amount?

In the case of Krallice it seems to me that the diverging opinions of your Deathspell Omega and Nightbringer fan from your Pitchfork-reading Liturgy dweeb might really be a question of how much time was invested. Technical music could be likened to staring at clouds in the sky: if you focus, you often see something unexpected and downright impressive.

Luckily for my musings, Mick Barr has provided the perfect case study: Orthrelm's Asristir Vieldriox. It consists of 99 songs over the course of 13 minutes, where each "song" is a fleeting burst of guitar shred accompanied by some hyperactive drumming. It seems like an exercise in permutations. And while I've certainly listened to it more times than any reasonable person, it won't be a shocking admission that I can't tell you anything about track 34.

I've actually toyed with the idea of painstakingly studying the album: listening for the subtle differences between tracks, coming up with some rough categories to divide them into, cataloging them until I can consciously differentiate each one. It would be pretty nauseatingly nerdy. I don't know whether I'll ever do it. But the interesting thing is, my ability to perform this exercise is completely independent of how much forethought went into the "compositions". Even if Mick Barr recorded 99 tidbits of guitar at random, I could get a lot of value out of the exercise of categorizing them - if I should care enough to do so.

I don't think there are many people out there who are going to find Years Past Matter to be an easy album to digest. For the most part, the ones who rave about it will be the ones who went into it with an expectation of depth and value. They'll be spot on about the album's complex structures and sonorities. The ones who call it another overhyped salad of directionless riffs and unmemorable songs will likely also be right on the money. By the time the fanboys have listened to it 30 times in a row, they may have a hard time acknowledging that superficial reality.

So what makes us care enough to invest effort in music? Allmusic reviews of albums from 1968 may seem far removed enough to possess a sort of objectivity. But here in the present, it can be uncomfortable to admit the influence of critics and popular opinion. It might be the nod from the New Yorker or the mumblings of fans at a metal club. Choosing to invest something of yourself in an album is the most critical step to enjoying it - and we never make that choice in a vacuum.

No matter who you ask, no one really contests that Krallice is a band of formidable skill who can paint in rich sonic colors. But are the obscure, labyrinthian structures a sign of the band's failure to create a viable, engaging narrative in their songs? Or are they a call to the listener to rise to the challenge?

I don't know how I came to the decision. But this time I'm going to give Years Past Matter my most rapt attention.