Samael - Ceremony of Opposites

I've had Ceremony of Opposites for a long time.  This is a relic of the good old days when I would walk to the mall with friends and buy any album I could find by a metal band I had vaguely heard of.  Most of those albums have been sold on ebay by now, but a few turned out to be pretty good.  And nearly 10 years later, when I finally got into black metal, this one turned out to be one of the best.

Most of my blog posts are about albums which I've only recently heard.  But this post was inspired by a particular memory of my middle school life.  As soon as I put this album on, I am brought back to the guest bedroom at my grandmother's house.  It was one particular time, I was staying there and listening to this album.  It just stuck with me unexplicably.  That happens occasionally - I also have a memory of one particular Napalm Death cd which I was listening to at one particular intersection in Maine.  Weird how that works.

It seems pretty ridiculous that I own an album which depicts Jesus bleeding from his skull, and I associate it with sleeping at my grandmother's house.  Clearly this is the album responsible for my atheism.  Actually, at the time that I bought this, I was still heavily influenced by my Catholic upbringing.  One of the last songs had the lyrics "I spit at your god's face, I piss on the cross, I vomit on the holy bible, I shit on the blessed whore and her bastard son".  I was legitimately traumatized.  I think it turned me off of the album for a while.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here.  I've been drinking a little bit and I don't feel like writing this anymore.  The album fucking owns.  Ben and Antonia should listen to it.  The end.

Agalloch - Marrow of the Spirit

A letter from John to the Beninthians:

Before hearing this, the idea of a new Agalloch CD held a similar status in my mind to a new Katatonia CD.  I expected it to be a proficient example of modern, melodic, arguably overproduced metal.  Something that I would get a lot of enjoyment out of listening to for the first several spins, but which I would ultimately view as little more than the metal version of a pop album.  As much as I enjoy Ashes Against the Grain or Night is the New Day every time I listen to either of them, I don't sense much ambition in the music beyond being metallic ear-porn.  So I wasn't even in a hurry to download Marrow of the Spirit when it first leaked, and the decidedly mixed reactions I read online only supported my prejudice.

Luckily I was wrong about this thing.

From the opening drum roll of "Into the Painted Grey", this album took me by surprise.  If there was one word that came to mind to describe that opening, it was the word "awkward".  The timing seemed just plain wrong - and in a completely superficial way, I loved it.  Like every other crossover death or black metal band to use clean vocals and acoustic guitars in the last 10 years, Agalloch has garnered their share of Opeth comparisons.  But the unapologetic stream of blastbeats that followed had me thinking more about Darkthrone.  And that's the last thing I thought would happen.

Regardless of its role in the unfolding of metal history in 2010, I think I would find Marrow of the Spirit to be an enjoyable album.  Yet I've noticed an unintentional running theme of Opeth bashing in my blog, and my one reader may have noticed it as well.  In the same way that Opeth is coming to symbolize the destruction of extreme metal in my narrative, Marrow is the Messiah.  In the early 90's, they were working alongside my other favorites like Dark Tranquillity and Amorphis to take the death metal template and expand it into something that could transcend the genre, while retaining its original spirit.  And we were graced with classics like My Arms, Your Hearse, The Gallery, and Tales from the Thousand Lakes.  But for nearly 10 years now, all of these bands have been churning out increasingly streamlined, proficient, and perhaps worst of all, critically acclaimed albums.

The problem with critical acclaim is that, while these bands have (to varying degrees) ostensibly brought some legitimacy to the genre, they sacrifice the immediacy and aggression that were initially its hallmark.  I remember one significant moment when I played Immortal's Battles in the North for an indie-listening friend.  He seemed shocked to hear the unapologetic, sloppy fury coming out of my speakers.  A (no doubt well intentioned) metal-listening friend had convinced him that metal was essentially beautiful music, but distorted.

Isn't that what all of these recent Opeth albums are about after all?  Beautiful music, distorted?  That's fine in its place, but it's worrying to think that this could be the only form of metal with any lasting critical or popular recognition.  A style of music which is just like "normal", but with distortion, seems like the definition of a superficial and useless style.  If extreme metal has any significance at all, it's because its fundamental rejection of popular notions of taste, melody, and structure are philosophically sound - not simple stylistic trappings to be shed away with maturity.  Or as Napalm Death said on the most commercial album of their career, Words from the Exit Wound:  "If maturity wipes the slate carefree, keep me infantile".

So, the point of that long-winded, self-indulgent blog post is that Agalloch has taken their position as critical-darlings of post-metal, and used it to affirm a lot of the things that I love about black metal.  A drummer that uses exhausting, tasteless blast sessions and awkwardly jagged fills as a stylistic device to preserve the immediacy of the music while displaying just enough proficiency to signify that he's doing it on purpose.  An organic production that celebrates natural distortion and noise instead of compressing everything into a synthetic, lifeless block.   

To me, Marrow of the Spirit is easily the most dynamic thing that Agalloch has done, and hopefully it will convince some people that metal is more than just normal music, mandated by testosterone to sound like cookie monster.

Annwn Revisited

This blog started with my attempt to discuss Ocrilim's Annwn, but I realized in the process that I wasn't going to even start to understand the album by just letting it play while creating the blog.  Since that time, I've played it 4 or 5 times while working in the lab.  A decent amount of the time, my lab activities don't require much of my attention - I'll set up the experiment, and then have periods of 5 minutes while I wait for the system to take the data, then make a small adjustment and do it again.  Also, there is a lot of low frequency noise from the equipment.  The bulk of the action on this album is in the higher registers, but of course that makes it an incomplete listening experience.  In this environment, Annwn works pretty well.  The activity keeps the music from ever getting monotonous, but when I do focus on it, it's complexity makes it very interesting and keeps me from getting bored during the tedious parts of my work.  So I guess I could describe Annwn as great background music...for the demented.

Today was the first time I ever sat down and listened to the album in its entirety.  That's 80 minutes of nothing but 7 tracks of distorted guitar and bass playing abstract compositions.  According to the CD case, there are two bass tracks, 2 lead guitar, and 3 main guitar tracks.  Most of the time the music is so complicated that I can't pick out the individual lines, and even when it slows down everything seems to just blur into one pulsating wall of sound.  I could definitely pick out 1 bass and 3 guitar lines at various points, but I certainly could never differentiate more than that.  I don't think it's necessary or even desirable for the listener to be able to do this, but it makes it all the more unfathomable that Mick Barr can compose this stuff.

For the first couple tracks, I was flying through this without a problem.  Part 1 is my favorite track on the album at this point (and also the one I know the best), and Part 2 had me in awe of the brilliance of Mick's playing.  But each track seemed to over stay its welcome a bit after the 10 minute mark, and by the time Part 3 rolled up, the introspection kicked in.  Why do I listen to stuff like this?  There's still an hour left.  Can I survive that?  Thankfully it was only a momentary weakness, because by Part 4 my strength was largely back.  There was only one point when my mind wandered to something completely different, and that was the end of Part 6.  So I guess I survived.

Part 1 exemplifies what I like most about this album.  It starts with each instrument repeating a single note at the same speed, but each instrument is picking the note rapidly so the sound kind of pulses, and it's a really interesting noise.  There are various points throughout the album where a certain sound is sustained like that, but Part 1 is the only track that builds the entire piece around it.  The sound seems to swell at times.  I don't know if it's the strings bending or what, but it's great.  This sustained sound has a kind of ambience, and it is periodically interrupted by bouts of Mick's traditional Orthrelm-style shredding.  The shredding reappear more and more frequently as the song progresses, until it completely takes over.  This interplay is one of the only times in the album where it's pretty easy to see the structure of the song.  For some reason, though, there is a point after this where it sounds like the track should logically end, but it continues in a seemingly unrelated way.  Maybe Barr just couldn't stand to make such a linear track.  Or maybe I haven't listened to it enough to see the connection.

A number of tracks on the album have sections where everything slows down and the music becomes more ambient, and those are the parts that grab me the most.  For one thing, they always act as a release since Barr's shredding can really numb your mind after a while.  But I also just think it's interesting that he's able to create ambience by layering all these heavily distorted electric guitars over one another.  It's hard to hear exactly what he's doing that's creating the effect.  

I think it was really helpful that I had let the album wash over me several times before trying to focus on it for 80 minutes, because most of the songs have what I'll loosely call a hook which, if you recognize them, help provide some sort of reference in the general cacophony.  Occasional riffs even seem to have an emotional arc to them, similar to some of the catchy yet undeniably-Barr riffs in Krallice songs.  The funny thing is, these riffs don't seem to occupy any preferential position in the songs.  It's as if it's only by chance that they are less mechanical and alien than the other guitar lines.  And that kind of sums up the question that the listener has during the bulk of the album.  Does any of this mean anything?  Is this a purely experimental exercise meant to inform Barr's future playing, or is it intended to be an actual listening experience?  Barr has said in an interview that he wouldn't care about his music if he wasn't the one playing it.  Sure, that may be nothing but self-deprecation, but I also wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't really pay any attention to how a listener would experience this record.

The only thing that changed this perception was Part 7.  I was fully expecting the album to end completely uneventfully, in the same way the previous 75 minutes had progressed, as if to say "I didn't tell you to sit through this".  But that's not what happens.  Part 7 is by far the most accessible and melodic song on the album.  As I result, I actually think it's one of the less interesting, but it sends an important message from Barr.  "I know that this album hasn't been the easiest to sit through.  But yes, I really do know what I'm doing.  Come back for more".

I think I will be.

Disillusion - Back to Times of Splendor

Back to Times of Splendor was the debut album from the German band Disillusion.  It was released back in 2004, but I only finally picked it up this year after hearing great things about it.  The timing worked out well, because I needed a good "progressive metal" fix after the massive disappointment of the new Orphaned Land disc (2004's Mabool being probably the best progressive metal album ever as far as I'm concerned).

The progressive metal label is kind of a misnomer a lot of the time.  I'm willing to bet that for 90% of metal fans, the first band that comes to mind is Opeth, and the general sentiment would be that their later discs are the most progressive of all.   But the term "progressive" was initially applied in the late 60's or early 70's to describe bands who took the basic instrumentation and stylistic devices of rock and brought them into a different context with the intention of creating something greater.  To me, that's what defines progressive music - working from the template of one genre, but reinterpreting the style to create something new.  In that sense, the ultimate progressive metal would be something like Gorguts' From Wisdom to Hate.  It's not avant-garde, despite what people may say - structurally, the songs are not far removed from conventional metal.  But it is undeniably progressive; there isn't a single element that is uncommon in metal, but the end result is something unique.  Yet I'm not holding my breathe for Gorguts to come up in a discussion of progressive metal anytime soon.  

So what's so progressive about Opeth anyway?  They combine metal with some other influences, but it tends to be in alternating passages.  With the exception of a few isolated instances, during the metal passages things stay fairly conventional.  Incorporating a few different styles into your sound is all well and good, but does nothing to progress the metal genre itself.  The problem, of course, is that "progressive rock" became a genre with just as many stylistic cliches as any other, and then the progressive adjective became used in reference to the cliches instead of the original intent of the music.  

What this long-winded discussion is leading to, of course, is the question of whether Back to Times of Splendor is actually progressive.  I'm voting yes, because of the bands ability to incorporate riffing from disparate metal styles, turning something that you thought was completely annoying into something very effective.  Take for example the pre-chorus riff in "And the Mirror Cracked".  It's a textbook example of this terribly overused melodic death/metalcore riffing style which usually makes me scream in pain, yet in this context it works perfectly.  Or in the second track, when the guitarist rocks on the harmonic - I thought only nu-metal guitarists did that?  Disillusion seems to disregard metal stylistic boundaries altogether - you'll hear straight up thrash metal beats or even blast beats in certain areas.  Yet somehow the whole thing retains a cohesive sound.

But forget all of that, because the songs are just damn catchy in the first place.  There's so much going on that you keep hearing new things even on the 8th listen, but at the same time there are enough vocal hooks to draw you in on the first listen.  Although I'll admit, on first listen I wasn't quite sold on the vocal delivery, or what I still consider to be a slightly awkward transition to the chorus on the first track - the only part of the album that I could even remotely complain about.  But now that I'm used to it, it honestly doesn't detract from the song.

I feel slightly bad for crapping on Opeth so much, because I do like the band, but basically everything Opeth does that I hate, Disillusion does the opposite.  Sure, Mikael Akerfeldt is a better singer than Disillusion's Vurtox (hey, I don't make this stuff up), but he certainly doesn't let you forget it either.  Ok, I got the message on Still Life; you've got the pipes of an angel.  Now do something interesting already.  The vocal delivery on Back to Times of Splendor couldn't be more varied short of some King Diamond-style wailing.  And then the other thing.  Everything on the last 5 or so Opeth albums sounds so damn perfect that I just wish they would take a risk or make a mistake.  And every second is so self-consciously proficient.  The playing on Back to Times of Splendor is unbelievable across the board, but it never sounds like they're playing a clinic.  The production probably helps with this - everything comes across clearly and sounds great, but it's not overly processed, which is something I really can't stand about a lot of prog-metal.

I mentioned the disappointment of the new Orphaned Land.  Basically everything I hate about Opeth, Orphaned Land decided to do.  Go figure it was produced by Steven Wilson.  He got bitten by the Opeth bug a few years ago, and now he's messing with Orphaned Land.  Where will it end?

Apparently Disillusion released a follow up to this album entitled Gloria, but it's in a completely different style.  I'm excited to check that one out as well.  I'm sure it will be interesting if nothing else. 

Disembowelment - Transcendence into the Peripheral

Transcendence into the Peripheral is one of those albums that I've been hearing about for years and periodically picked up and thought about buying whenever I was in a store.  It was released in 1993, basically the golden year of death metal, and came out on Relapse back when virtually everything they released was cool (as opposed to now, where it's all trendy sludge metal with the token generic deathgrind band).  I've always heard it described as a classic.  Disembowelment is one of these bands who are popular enough that most people know of them, but obscure enough that you get some points if you name drop it.  Basically I was positive that this album would be awesome.

Well, listening to this I think I can see why it has some cult status, but I can also see why it wasn't legitimately popular.  Disembowelment was a band that seemed to have a fair amount of creativity and obviously had a good idea of the general sound and atmosphere they wanted to create.  The music is mostly crushingly slow, doomy death metal with the occasional grinding section thrown in.  This is interspersed with melodic, effects laden guitar lines giving the whole doomy affair a transcendent quality (OK, I went there).  

This can be kind of a challenging listen since a good portion of the album is painfully slow (particularly "A Burial at Ornans"), and because of that I still don't know if something about the music will click as I keep listening to it.  But as of now, I can say that while the band has a fairly distinct and deliciously heavy old-school sound, some of the execution seems a bit lacking.  For one thing, the actual death and doom riffs are fairly generic.  The clean guitar work seems to make the songs more interesting, but when you listen to what's actually being played, it's generally a simple melodic line repeated over and over.  

As for the drumming, none of it sounds particularly proficient either.  However, I happen to be a firm believer in the idea that a bit of slop in the drumming can be beneficial for certain more visceral types of death or black metal.  Take the most doomy sections of Transcendence.  The drumming sounds positively lethargic, which is exactly what the music requires.  I wonder if a highly trained drummer would even be capable of playing such parts.  It seems like the temptation to throw in something technical or musically interesting would be too great.  And if Disembowelment succeeds at cultivating any sort of atmosphere with their music, it's one that would be destroyed by a jazzy fill.

At the end of the day, I like the sound these guys create, but it can't completely hold my interest.  I know I complained about the simplicity of some of the guitar lines, but I think if the overall package was drawing me in I could easily ignore these things - it's not as if simplicity is bad in and of itself.  It just may be that I'm not enough of a doom fan to fully appreciate this at the moment.  Time will tell.

Neurosis - Given to the Rising

Neurosis often gets categorized as post metal, which I've always kind of objected to.  In my eyes, post metal is about taking the basic instrumentation of metal, and creating atmospheric music that brings the listener into a peaceful and almost meditative state as the music ebbs and flows.  Basically, turning metal into something largely inoffensive.  That was the Isis model, and as much as people say Isis were a Neurosis rip off, the intent of the music was totally different.  Neurosis was not about making metal pretty, they were about tension.  That is, up until 2004's The Eye of Every Storm. 

Even though I already owned a copy of Through Silver in Blood, The Eye of Every Storm was the first Neurosis album I truly got into.  It's easy to see why - it's by far the most accessible of their works.  Sure, they had experimented with a mellower sound on A Sun that Never Sets, but that was a challenging listen in its own way.  The climax of "From the Hill" or the release of tension in "Crawl Back In" required time to appreciate.  So in that sense, The Eye of Every Storm was the first album of theirs that could rightfully be called post-metal, if it could be called metal at all.  But even if it was an easier listening experience for the fan, at least it was a new direction for Neurosis.  Every album they release adds new elements to their sound and new dynamics to their writing, and The Eye of Every Storm was no exception.

Which leads me to Given to the Rising.  It's not a bad album by any means, but it's the first album the band has made that seems more like a recap than a step forward.  To my ears, the album takes the songwriting and dynamics of The Eye of Every Storm, applies an aesthetic most similar to Times of Grace, and accents the whole affair with the industrial-sounding samples and effects that peppered Through Silver in Blood.  

Maybe taking the songwriting and dynamics of The Eye of Every Storm and adapting it into a metal context is not as trivial of a step forward as I'm implying.  Somehow I just worry that Neurosis have reached a point where there won't be any big surprises.  It's probably paranoia.

Anyway, none of this has a major bearing on the immediate impact of the music.  What does matter is the overall structure of the songs.  A few tracks on here (Given to the Rising, Fear and Sickness, Water is Not Enough) seem to be the most riff-based that the band has ever done.  Sure, a song like "The Doorway" has a really recognizable riff, but I feel like the abrasive sound and the way it was mercilessly repeated was more the focus than the riff itself.  These three songs seem to be less layered and immersive than a lot of Neurosis's work.  I will say this about the title track though: it's a great display of just how expressive Scott Kelly's vocals have become.  The vocals have to be one of the highlights of the album in general - not least because of the absolutely epic screams at the end of "To the Wind".  I really want to know if he can pull those off live.  The song isn't on Live at Roadburn so I don't think I'll be finding out anytime soon.

Pilgrimage to Amoeba

This weekend I made my second trip to the San Francisco Amoeba Music since moving out here.  The first time I went there, I was basically just combing the entire metal section looking for nothing in particular, and ended up with a pretty nice haul.  It was Satyricon - Dark Medieval Times, Phlebotomized - Immense, Intense, Suspense and Mitochondrion - Archaeaeon.  I was mainly excited about Phlebotomized, since it's pretty hard to come by and I found it for about 5 bucks.  Yet here it is a few months later, and I haven't listened to any of the three all that much.  This always seems to happen to me when I just go to browse.  I really want to stop buying music so I can catch up, but it's probably hopeless.  I'm pretty sure that the Mitochondrion and Phlebotomized albums will be cool once I get around to listening to them properly.  The Satyricon seems kind of generic though.


There was one gem that I bought that day though; Einsturzende Neubauten's Halber Mensch.  I had downloaded it and found it somewhat interesting but it was a new style of music for me and I wasn't totally sold. Good choice I guess, because it's easily one of the best albums I've bought in 2010, and lead to me buying Funf auf der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala, Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T., and Alles Wieder Offen in the couple months since then.  I'm pretty sure I'll have all their full lengths by this time next year, because I love all four of those.  A lot.


This Amoeba trip, I headed straight to the experimental section to feed my current Merzbow and Nurse with Wound fascination.  There was a lot of agonizing to follow, because I found a big stack of albums from both artists.  For Nurse with Wound I ended up with An Awkward Pause.  For Merzbow I got Merzbear and Fukurou: 13 Japanese Birds Pt. 2.  I also got the Venetian Snares album Doll Doll Doll.


There must have been 7 other Merzbow albums that I could have chosen, for about $7 each, and the decision ended up weighing fairly heavily on the condition of the case since a lot of them were cardboard digipaks.


Along with Kokuchou: 13 Japanese Birds Pt. 8, this means I've bought 3 Merzbow albums in the span of about 10 days.  I have this irrational attraction to his stuff right now - I'm already tempted to buy a cheap copy of Venereology on Amazon even though I haven't even come close to absorbing the three I have.  All of it sounds good to me aesthetically, but the fact is that I'm completely ignorant of noise music.  I doubt I could even tell a bad Merzbow album from a good one at this point, which is kind of the risk of getting so much of it in a short time.  Well, I never claimed my buying habits were rational...

Sigh - Scenes from Hell

I'm notoriously bad at keeping up with new music these days.  Most of what I've bought this year has been out for a while.  In fact I've been keeping track - the average release date of albums that I've bought in 2010 is 1990.91.  (For reference, the average release date of my entire physical collection is 1997.09 - I've realized relatively recently that a lot of older music is better).

I picked up Scenes from Hell a few months ago since I wanted to hear something that was released this year, and I've been hearing people sing the praises of Sigh for years now.  Except for hearing a couple songs from Imaginary Sonicscapes once or twice, I'm totally new to the band.

Sigh seems to be one of these bands who are self-consciously eclectic.  I tend not to like that trait in music.  Particularly in metal, it seems that eclecticism can be the "easy" alternative to developing a unique yet cohesive sound.  I'm not saying that that's the case with Sigh, but it's certainly a bias on my part that colors how I hear the album.

Instrumentally, there are a lot of interesting ideas on this album.  I'm not going to go through and single things out, but there's no lack of creativity.  So far though, I can't say any it has connected with me on any emotional or deep level.

The main issue I have with this album is the inclusion, on most tracks, of an ultra-catchy, melodic chorus.  Sigh tends to be described as an avante-garde or experimental metal band, but in a way the structure of the compositions is conventional.  The vibe I get when listening to the catchy melody that pops up several times in "The Red Funeral", for example, is not so dissimilar to the happy-go-lucky metal of Finntroll or Rhapsody.  I like listening to both of those bands in the right mood, but I think of them more as entertainment than as art.  I guess what I'm really asking is whether all the so-called experimentalism is nothing but an aesthetic icing on a cake of catchy metal.

This gets back to what I was saying about eclecticism in metal.  I'm not sure that there's anything truly experimental or avant garde about this album.  If it's just supposed to be a catchy, fun album, then that's fine.  But it seems like it's supposed to be more.

It occurs to me as I'm writing this that I almost seem to be arguing from a viewpoint where art and fun are mutually exclusive.  Clearly I need to go back to listening to Under a Funeral Moon.

Overanalyzing

Now that I've started this blog, I was looking through my collection today thinking about what albums I might want to write about.  Since I'm a compulsive CD buyer, I have a lot of albums that I still haven't fully listened to or formed an opinion on.  I thought I would make a point to listen to some of these and then write about them on the blog.  That was always one of the main benefits I saw to keeping something like this; the added impetus to listen to music that I've been meaning to spend more time with.

There's just one problem with that.  It seems to me that the intention of writing a blog post or a music review acts as a lens through which you perceive the music.  At the moment I'm listening to Sigh's Scenes from Hell, and I have a fear that I'm listening more analytically than I otherwise would.  It's subtle, but my desire to write down my opinion seems like it may cause me to listen with a more judgmental ear.  The opinion, which must necessarily be described in words, takes precedence over the emotional or visceral reaction, which often cannot be.

This is actually somewhat of a general concern I have about the way people listen to music in the age of rapidshare downloads and iTunes libraries.  With virtually any album available at the click of a mouse and "free of charge", I feel like people amass huge collections of music that they can't possibly absorb, and then end up going through it superficially so that they have an opinion they can give and appear to be knowledgeable about a vast amount of music.

I should admit that I have NO evidence for this fear.  In all likelihood I'm just a luddite.

Anyway, up next, a superficial discussion of Scenes from Hell.

Nurse with Wound - Spiral Insana

This probably should have been the first post, because Nurse with Wound is the band that inspired me to create a blog.  And unlike Annwn, I actually have things to say about Spiral Insana.  

I've just recently started exploring NWW, and after a few listens to Homotopy to Marie, decided to pick up this album.  It was really between this and Chance Meeting since those were the only ones that I recognized at Rasputin (basically my home now).  I've heard that Chance Meeting is amazing, but I've also heard that it's nothing but a few kids messing around in a studio, so I went with this.  So far it's been a great choice.

Comparing this to Homotopy to Marie, I guess I'm really surprised that Homotopy is always mentioned as the album to check out for newcomers.  I like it, but Spiral Insana seems a whole lot more accessible if nothing else.  There are still parts of Homotopy that I'm not quite sold on, whereas Spiral easily keeps my interest the whole way through.

One of the things that makes this album so accessible at first is this motif that keeps cropping up at irregular intervals throughout.  Kind of a pulsating low rumble.  I perceive it as this separate entity from the rest of the piece, sometimes coexisting peacefully and sometimes antagonistic.  (I don't think I've anthropomorphized music this much since Peter and the Wolf, but here we are.  And yeah, I had to use google to figure out how to spell that).

Anyway, listening for that motif really gives you an anchor point the first couple times through, just waiting to hear how and when it comes back.  There are certain sounds that precede it early in the peace, and then when the sound comes back I expect that motif to follow.  The anticipation gives the motif a life of its own, and in a way even distracts me from whatever else is going on.  At a point I almost wished it wasn't there at all, but then I wondered, what would Spiral Insana be without it?  Would the "artistic statement" be different?  Do I even care?

Another thing that stands out about this album is this one simple piano ditty that crops up a couple times.  For lack of a better description, it's an excerpt of "normal" music on conventional instruments.  Towards the end of "The Schmurz" on Homotopy there is a similar thing, and in both cases it seems like a musical non-sequitur.  Part of me wonders if it's gimmicky in some way; eclecticism for its own sake.  In the "The Schmurz" it arguably serves the purpose of breaking the tension of the preceding 24 minutes, but at the same time, does that trivialize whatever point the piece was supposed to be making?  On Spiral Insana, I guess I like the inclusion of the piano tune a bit more since the way the ambience builds up behind it is interesting.

I don't know why I'm so trigger happy to call certain aspects of NWW "gimmicky", but I suppose I just feel like I don't totally understand what they do.  I have the sense that their back catalogue is even more eclectic than these two albums, so once I hear it maybe the context will help.

Next on my list to listen to:  A Sucked Orange and Thunder Perfect Mind.  I downloaded both and they sound great so far.  Why do these albums have to be out of print?

Ocrilim - Annwn (2008)

I bought this album about a year and a half ago, during a time when I was buying pretty much anything I could find from Mick Barr.  I immediately liked the aesthetic, but I was intimidated by the 80 minute run time and I don't even think I ever made it through the whole thing in one sitting.  I decided that tonight was the night to spend some time with it.  It accompanied me through cleaning dishes, doing laundry, and setting up this blog.  I guess at this point it's been playing for about 2 hours, and in a strange way, it's almost soothing.


The first release I heard from Barr was Orthrelm's Ov, and it remains my favorite.  At first I listened to it solely as an endurance test, but once I got used to the sound I started really appreciating the minimalism.  The repetition of a lightning speed guitar riff for minutes on end seems to really bring out the noise of the pick on the strings until it becomes the focus.  I can hear variations in the way the pick hits the strings and I wonder if it is intentional or simply a reflection of the fact that Barr's technique isn't perfect.  Whether he intended it or not, the effect is the same.  After hearing that, I always listen for pick noise as a hallmark of Barr's playing.  There are certain parts of Krallice songs where the pick noise dominates and I really love it in that context.


That's not the only thing I like about Ov, and maybe not even the main thing, but it's the easiest to put into words.


Back to Annwn.  Like I said, it's been on for the past two hours, and I think I finally got sick of listening to it. I'm actually not going to talk about the album.  I'll just be blunt.  That's the way this blog is going to be.   Posts about one album that talk about another.  Posts that don't provide any insight into the album at hand, or even much of an opinion.  Fact is that I don't have that much to say about Annwn just yet, but I didn't want to call the post Ov because I haven't actually listened to that for a year.


I don't hear any arguments from my nonexistent readers, so I'm just going to go with it.

Time Zero

Welcome to my blog, where I will write about whatever music I am currently obsessing over.  Invariably the posts will be boring to everyone but me, which is why I told myself that the blog would be like a diary.  Yet somehow, not four sentences in, I'm already thinking about my legions of readers.  Gotta keep you guys entertained.

This is almost as bad as that time I realized I was trying to think of a clever way to phrase my desire for a new vacuum cleaner, so I could make it a facebook status.  Thanks internet, for making me that much more self-important and superficial.