Napalm Death - Utilitarian

I'm not going to break any records, but I own a decent number of Napalm Death albums. I used to buy everything I could find, despite not having much legitimate interest in some of the EPs or compilations. Most of it is pretty enjoyable, but for their last 5 albums they've been on a streak of consistency bordering on the predictable. So in 2011, for the first time since I became a fan, I didn't even bother to check out their new album, Utilitarian.

Part of that decision was based on the advanced track I heard, "Analysis Paralysis". In retrospect it's one of the less exciting, and I don't know why they chose it. Luckily I came across a youtube link of another song - "The Wolf I Feed". Within an hour I had downloaded the album, and within two more I had ordered it from Amazon.

Utilitarian isn't a radical departure from the last couple albums, but to my ears it's the most inspired they've been in years, and there are just enough surprises to keep things fresh. "The Wolf I Feed" remains one of my favorite tracks, containing a Fear Factory esque chorus and some manic vocals from Mitch (who also appears on "Orders of Magnitude", not coincidentally, another of my favorites). Another highlight is John Zorn lending a couple squealing sax solos to "Everyday Pox".

I wouldn't say Napalm Death is pushing any boundaries here, but everyone is on top of their game, the production sounds great, and the songwriting is as strong as it's been since the early days of the band. It's kind of heartwarming seeing these guys blast so hard into their 30th year as a band.

I will make one qualifying statement: in preparation for this album, I spent a few days getting reacquainted with 2009's Time Waits for No Slave. It turns out it's pretty damn solid as well. So maybe I'm going to feel equally indifferent by the time 2013 or 2014 rolls around and another ND album is on the way.

Anyway, as it stands right now I would put this on the shortlist of essential albums spanning Napalm's career:

Scum

Utopia Banished

Fear Emptiness Despair

Utilitarian

I'm sure it's blasphemy to leave Harmony Corruption off, but Utopia Banished covers their short-lived pure death metal phase well enough, and I've always preferred it.

John Cage - In a Landscape

(This post has been a draft for a couple months. I thought I had posted it already and I was assuming that context for the Stockhausen blog.)

Aside from the occasional reference to 4'33", John Cage first came into my consciousness a couple years ago through this video. I really liked the ideas he was talking about. Enough, anyway, to mention the video to several people - although not enough to actually listen to any of his music. But it was bound to happen eventually. And, as the dedicated scientist that I am, the impetus to finally take the plunge came during my recent trip to the Materials Research Society conference in Boston. I was "at the conference" for a few days, and naturally a few hours of that were spent in the Newbury Comics a block away, trying to ward off all the powerpoint presentations with an impulse purchase. Thankfully I had a lot of time to kill, because I don't think John Cage came into my head until I had aimlessly flipped through the rock and jazz sections, twice.

 

I ended up with a collection of keyboard works entitled In a Landscape. Among them are works for acoustic and electronic piano, toy piano, and "prepared piano" - Cage's innovation of sticking things like bolts and insulating foam against the strings inside the instrument.

The music is a lot less glaringly avante-garde than I was expecting, although I'm sure part of this is my lack of reference point for what was going on in the 40's. But even the prepared piano used in these pieces sounds largely like a normal piano, with a bit of rattling or a complete lack of resonance on certain keys.


What is striking about this music is Cage's bold presentation of childlike, almost amateur sounding melodies. Naked in their simplicity, often repetitious. Cage famously said "if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. It still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all". I don't agree with the letter of that, but it certainly illuminates some of the pieces here.


Cynically, to hear "Suite for Toy Piano" is to heat an average person play an awkward and rudimentary piece on a toy instrument, and pass it off to others with a highly inflated notion of its quality. Indeed, I spent the first few listens wondering whether to think of Cage as the emperor with no clothes; an opportunist with a gimmick.


But then I couldn't stop listening to this, and I started to really like it. So what if a melody or musical idea is simple? Cage's music can be dissonant or jarring here, and I'm no stranger to that in general. What I am a stranger to is the presentation of jarring ideas against a minimalist background. It takes a visionary to present us with a collection of sounds, and stubbornly demand that we reexamine them. Or maybe it takes a delusional eccentric, but in either case I'm glad somebody did.


Check out the thundering synthesizer tone of "Souvenir", followed by a ditty that sounds straight out of Ocarina of Time. It's ripe for the perennial criticism of the abstract art world - "anyone could have written that". But they didn't, and it sounds great to me.


Interestingly enough, the closest point of reference I have for some of this stuff in my CD collection is Burzum. The repetition of unabashedly simple melodies, and the way it encourages the listener to sonically reinterpret and listen for emergent structure in the resonances and distortion. Who knew black metal was just what I needed to start appreciating Cage?


I'll stress the "start" in that last sentence, since I briefly listened to Music of Changes and it makes this sound like The Beatles.

(Now I realize the reason I thought I posted this - because I apparently summarized it in the Hate Eternal post. Guess I'm just comparing John Cage to every metal band on here.)

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Helikopter-Streichquartett

Everyone's heard of Stockhausen but my impetus to start listening came from a sort of strange event. I have Amazon Prime which my family loves to use for free shipping, to the point where my Dad was buying my own Christmas presents using my account. You know I can see that, right? Granted it was mainly CD's from a list which I had previously furnished - with the exception of one collection of Stockhausen pieces that I saw had been placed into my cart and later removed.

Well, Christmas came and went and no one had any recollection of even considering purchasing that album for me. My suspicion is that my Dad made a wrong turn in the series of tubes. I took it as a sign from the fates that I needed to start listening to Stockhausen, so I bought that collection. It's full of pieces like Zykus (unstructured random sounding percussion), Spiral (unstructured short wave radio signals and obscure electronic synthesizer), Wach (unstructured piece whose only score is a bit of text along the lines of "penetrate into the other players' notes. Let them penetrate your note"), and In Freundschaft (a collection of short fragmented melodies for solo trumpet).

It was all pretty confounding. Kind of interesting to listen to in the right mood. I ultimately determined that if I picked a couple more of his better known pieces, maybe I would start to get an idea of what the "big picture" was.

The upshot of all that: I soon became the proud owner of Helikopter-Streichquartett. I won't try to do the concept justice here, but essentially it's a piece which consists of a string quartet, each member of which flies in a separate helicopter while the sounds of the four rotors are mixed in with the music and piped to an audience down below. Seemed like a no-brainer addition to my CD collection.

Listening to this now, it's roughly what you might expect. The helicopter noises mix innocuously enough with the strings. The actual music is a sort of abstract meandering piece where the strings try to imitate the cadences and sonorities of a helicopter rotor, or something. 

I guess it's safe to say I haven't been blown away by this CD. I haven't spent much time listening to it after the initial week when I bought it 6 months ago. Sonically, the mixture of strings and mechanical noises isn't too radical. Lots of experimental or industrial artists outside of classical might have some conventional instrumentation layered with some samples or found sound. In those contexts (or even just sitting in my lab) it's relatively easy for me to focus on the subtleties of mechanical noises and get some enjoyment out of it. The thing that's different about Helikopter-Streichquartett is that the rotors are SO familiar from everyday life. It's very hard to listen to it and try to perceive an interaction with the strings. Your brain says "I know what a helicopter sounds like" and overwhelmingly perceives it as some string music with helicopters in the background.

To try to experience this piece as if you never heard the sound of a helicopter before requires a lot of effort and is kind of a nice exercise. After all, the sound of the rotors is fairly dynamic and the interaction with the strings should logically give rise to a lot of interesting sound combinations. Nonetheless I don't readily hear anything other than background noise in the helicopters. If this piece eventually got me to penetrate some mental block that I've developed over years of hearing helicopters fly by, it seems like that would valuable for the further emancipation of my ears.

Successful or not in practice, as a concept the whole thing sets pretty well with me - until you get to sections of the piece in which the performers count audibly together in German(?), in very silly voices. I'm sure there's a high-art justification for Stockhausen's choice here, but it's in stark opposition to the perspective from which I'm attempting to engage with the piece: where the helicopter loses its familiarity and functions as a disembodied source of complex sounds. The human voices do the opposite - violently return you to the reality of the performers sitting in the helicopters, and whatever prestige, pretention, intellect, and spectacle comes along with that. 

Interestingly, while I would attempt to experience this piece in a vacuum, most listeners apparently agree that the concept very much IS the piece. In fact there was a lot of criticism of this recording because it's not a document of one of the performances - it's a studio recording mixed with some canned helicopters. From my perspective, that doesn't matter at all. You wouldn't be able to tell that this was the case unless someone told you, so how can it possibly influence your enjoyment? It's like morons who won't eat hot dogs.

Ultimately I think I'm approaching this whole thing from a philosophy akin to that other emperor, John Cage.  I'm still not sure what to think about Stockhausen. Hearing this hasn't helped me connect any further with any of his other pieces. Then again, several years ago I was listening to Today is the Day and Sunn 0))) and feeling curious but not really getting anything out of it. Now those are two of my favorite bands. So I'm patient about letting Stockhausen's music sit with me over time.

It's kind of conflicting when you're walking around outside listening to this and another aircraft flies overheard. Is that supposed to enhance the piece? John Cage would probably say yes. What would Stockhausen think?

  

Hate Eternal - Fury and Flames

My first exposure to Hate Eternal came during the first half of high school. Me and my friend Jimmy were exchanging death metal CD's for Christmas - I gave him Deicide's Legion and he got me Suffocation's Effigy of the Forgotten. I think I gave him a second CD as well. I had also planned to give him the newest release by Hate Eternal, King of All Kings. But once I realized that the exchange would be uneven, I jettisoned the Christmas spirit and kept it for myself. Despite only sort of liking the album, when I, Monarch came out I impulsively bought it as well. Although I thought that the guitar work was relatively interesting, the constant blast beats throughout both CD's eventually convinced me that it was boring one-dimensional music, and I sold them off a few years back.

In retrospect, I think my previous opposition to the blasting style of the albums was a little dogmatic. For sure, it's not the type of thing you want to listen to all the time. But in my high school frame of mind, the adoption of blastbeats throughout an entire album was an indication that the band lacked creativity. These days I'm a lot more sympathetic to singularity of vision.

It may seem like a strange comparison to make, but I'm reminded of my first exposure to John Cage's music, which came in the form of the piano collection "In a Landscape" which I bought last fall. Much of the album consists of repetitive piano lines which are simplistic to the point of sounding amateurish or childlike. At first it was easy to see Cage as a cynical opportunist in an "Emperor's New Clothes" scenario, but I soon came to appreciate the stubborn commitment to simple, elemental melodies. To force the listener to reevaluate musical dictums, It takes a musician with a single-minded focus and a willingness to offend our sensibilities.

I guess that's a really pretentious way to say that I love blastbeats and I can listen to them for 40 minutes straight.

In all seriousness, the adoption of the blastbeat as the primary rhythmic backbone is a natural progression for extreme metal, and it's something that happened a lot sooner in black metal because of the de-emphasis on rhythm and the ability to treat the blasting drums as an atmospheric element. But in death metal, I don't think there's anyone who competently explored the idea until Erik Rutan. Revisiting I, Monarch with this perspective, I can finally appreciate the layering of Derek Roddy's steady blasting with delicate cymbal work as a musical subversion of positive and negative space.

That said, on Fury and Flames, newcomer Jade Simonetto's playing is somewhat more varied than Roddy's anyway. But along with the dense layering of three or more guitar tracks at once, the album becomes nothing short of a wall of sound. Apparently it has received criticism in the metal world for that very reason, but in my view such an aesthetic is completely in keeping with the tenants of death metal. Close listening reveals rich compositions with polyphonic guitar and bass lines, and an ear for melody and dissonance which has always characterized Rutan's work.  But on the whole it's aggressive and nearly impenetrable by design.  

The relentless technicality, oppressive atmosphere, and general disdain for subtlety and restraint make Hate Eternal unquestionably a band of the 2000's. Particularly in the drumming category, the music-as-athletics approach simply didn't exist in the old school days. But despite all of this, Rutan's playing and writing style retains a connection to traditional death metal that many modern bands don't. I think the thrash leanings of Rutan's early career in Ripping Corpse are still with the band to an extent. While percussive rhythms and intentionally amelodic note choice dominate much of the material from bands like Origin and Nile, Rutan's riffs seem largely informed by his unique melodic inclinations.

On a more aesthetic level, I'm a huge fan of the sound on this album. For one thing, Fury and Flames has one of the most prominent bass sounds I've heard on a death metal album. Although it apparently goes against common practice, sacrificing a little bulk in the guitar tone to give more presence to the bass adds a whole level of sonic depth in my view. That's a big part of a reason why I'm such a big fan of the early Cryptopsy albums. In addition, the guitar tone may not be as sharp and punchy as is typical, but it gives an almost doomy flavor to a lot of the low register, backing guitar lines.

For such an unrelentingly dense album, the songs are impressively diverse. There's the melodic thrashing of "Whom Gods May Destroy:", the dissonant trudging of "Fury Within", or the staccato rhythms of "Thus Salvation". The emotionally tinged playing of "Tombeau (Le Tombeau de la Fureur et des Flammes)" is particularly noteworthy - Rutan's tribute to a deceased bandmate and friend displays a vulnerability rarely heard in this genre.

In short, I'm completely blown away by this album and it's driven me to re-purchase those two Hate Eternal albums that I discarded a few years back. I was always attracted to Rutan's guitar work, but I've finally warmed up to his challenging and dense take on the genre as a whole. It's risky to make broad statements after owning an album for a week, but I feel fairly certain that Fury and Flames has joined the ranks of my favorite post-2000 metal albums.

Wu-Tang Clan - Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

As 2011 came to a close, I felt happy that the year had brought a significant expansion to my musical taste; a newfound appreciation of jazz.  So just before the new year I was asking myself what type of music I should try to get into for 2012. I was thinking about classical or electronic music. It goes to show how stupid it is to try to plan these things out, because within a couple weeks I had gotten onto a hip hop binge that has lasted for a month and a half by now. I certainly wasn't anticipating that at all.


Truthfully, my foray into hip hop wasn't completely unprecedented - a year or two ago I was listening to Aesop Rock's Labor Days and a couple others, and got kind of into it, but not enough to buy any albums. I actually tried to get into 36 Chambers at the time, since I knew it was considered a classic. I couldn't get past the first couple songs though. The first track, aptly named "Bring da Ruckus," contains the chorus "Bring da mother, bring da motherfuckin ruckus, bring da motherfuckin ruckus", which seemed kind of tacky. The second track, "Shame on a Nigga", succeeded in offending my cultural sensibilities with its gratuitous use of a word which I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to type without an asterisk.


Well, last month I got curious about hip hop again. In my continuing quest for behavioral consistency, I reminded myself that I already listen to horrifically offensive albums (like Cannibal Corpse's Butchered at Birth), horrifically stupid albums (pick something by Rhapsody), and albums by people who I'm - hopefully - just as culturally removed from as inner city blacks from the early 90's (pick something by Burzum).


The other psychological stumbling block was the general idea of being a white male listening to hip hop. But that can't possibly be worse than being an affluent and well educated white male listening to Kind of Blue while in possession of a french press, and I already went there. These realizations were basically all it took to rid me of my squeamishness so I could dive into one of the most infectious and visceral albums I've heard in a long time.


In retrospect, it's hard to understand how I could have listened to the opening track of this album and registered little more than the chorus. In a way, it has all the makings of a song I would love - aggressive, almost sinister tone, intricate layers of sound, musical complexity on the small scale without sacrificing an overall coherence and simplicity to the song itself.


This album seems particularly suited for a newcomer to the genre since it's evenly split between 7 rappers (there are 9 in the group but a couple of them don't do much on this album). The variation keeps things interesting at first, and for me it was kind of an activity to try to figure out whose verse was whose. 


Ol' Dirty Bastard is the most immediately recognizable of the bunch, and his inclusion of assorted grunts and wails initially attracted me. His style works well in the context of the album, but as time goes on I feel less interested in listening to his solo stuff (which I haven't heard yet). Method Man and Ghostface Killah are the next most distinctive of the bunch, so it's probably not surprising that theirs are the most well known names. But the stuff from Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, GZA and RZA (who also does all the production) is equally good if not better. GZA is definitely my favorite, but I'm a little biased because his stellar Liquid Swords is the only solo album I've listened to so far.


Right now it's a little hard for me to judge how I'm going to feel about the album after time passes. There hasn't been an album in a very long time which I've listened to this many times within the first few weeks of hearing it. That surely says something about it's quality, but when I was listening to this last night the appeal wasn't as strong. It's mostly that I'm burnt out on the album at the moment, but I've also gotten into several more hip hop albums in the last few weeks. In comparison, this seems a little bit more like a party album. Liquid Swords contains almost the exact same line up, but the tone of the album is largely dark and brooding, and the rappers alter their delivery to suit it. 


Overall, it's easy to see why 36 Chambers gets the "classic" tag, and it did a good job of intiating me into the world of hip hop. In a way I surprised myself with this development, but I guess it's a lot less surprising than if I were to suddenly get into country. And even that seems more likely than a sudden embrace of indie. I've come to realize that there is great music in virtually every genre, and it's just a matter of seeking it out and being mentally ready to hear what it has to offer. In that sense it seems necessarily true that the progression of my taste is dictated by extra-musical factors. At times like this I wonder why I had to think so hard to arrive at such an obvious conclusion.

Nurse with Wound - Rock 'n Roll Station

At various points during my music-listening career, I have gotten quasi-obsessed with the idea of a certain band or artist without having developed any deep affection for a particular album or work. John Zorn and Merzbow come to mind. Thankfully I only got two Zorn albums before losing interest, but I nearly ended up with a massive box set of his avante-garde and potentially unlistenable "Game Pieces" - I went so far as bidding on it on Ebay. With Merzbow I downloaded a couple albums and really liked it, and then bought 3 albums in close succession (and nearly a fourth as well; its out-of-print nature a temptation). Since then I haven't found one occasion to listen to Merzbow for longer than 5 minutes.

When I started this blog I was just getting into Nurse with Wound. I was intrigued by what I had heard, and even more so what I had read about their vast discography. Concurrently, I discovered Amazon's (awesome) textbook buyback program, and traded in a stack of books with the intention of immediately spending a sizable chunk of my $225 haul on NWW releases, including the 3-CD ambient box Soliloquy for Lilith. In the weeks between mailing the books and receiving the money, my enthusiasm cooled a bit and I didn't follow through. For several months after, I regarded that as another very-close-call with impulsive purchases of experimental music dust-collectors.

In the last few months I've rediscovered the NWW albums I had, and been surprised to find that they are legitimately becoming one of my favorite "bands" (scare quotes since NWW is basically just Steven Stapleton and whomever he brings along) . If Zorn was the person responsible for making me think experimental music was nothing but pretentious BS for several years, Stapleton is the one responsible for showing me that it can be fun.

The latest addition to my NWW collection is Rock 'n Roll Station. Whereas most NWW falls somewhere between ambience and sound collages, the songs on Rock 'n Roll Station actually have a beat. While the action of each song still lies in subtly shifting atmospherics with punctuated bursts of found-sound and assorted instruments, each is accompanied by a stubbornly repetitive - yet nearly danceable - layer of electronic drums.

I'm told that this uncharacteristic inclusion caused some fans to decry the album as being more "accessible".    

The title track opens the album, and grabbed me as soon as I first heard it. It's a sort of spoken-word poem backed by a catchy beat and various other sounds which skillfully interplay with the vocals. Like all NWW songs containing words, these are absurd, impenetrable, and in my estimation, awesome. The track is responsible for me walking around all week with phrases in my head like "Jack's bicycle is music to my ears" and "Rock 'n roll session is a second pirate session of a strange wax".

Words take a less prominent role on the rest of the tracks, but each finds its own way to be distinctive - from the didgeridoo jam on "Two Golden Microphones" (probably the only example in my collection) to the jangly, fractured guitar riffing of "R+B Through Collis Browne".

With the first couple NWW albums I listened to, I felt intrigued but didn't really understand what the band was all about. Homotopy to Marie and most of Spiral Insana gave me the idea that they were practitioners of purely abstract sound manipulation, but then I was confounded by the appearance of scattered sections of conventionally melodic piano. Then I listened to An Awkward Pause and was confronted by "Two Shaves and a Shine", an unabashed rock-guitar based jam session. Eventually I've come to terms with the fact that NWW isn't really about anything - there's seemingly no limit to what you might be greeted with on one of their albums. The only thing you can count on is a meticulous attention to detail and a tongue-in-cheek attitude that keeps the invariably obscure proceedings grounded and entertaining. Well, relative to Zorn anyway.

  

Obituary - Cause of Death

As far as I can remember, Obituary's Cause of Death is the only album in my collection that I intentionally got rid of, and then bought again.  Their World Demise album was one of my very first death metal albums and it was something of a revelation at the time.  The fuzzy guitars, the vocals that sounded like a cross between growling and vomiting.  I remember getting into it in middle school and coming in to tell my friend excitedly.  His response was simple: "I didn't see that one coming".  I think it was obvious that I was heading down the path of brutality.

I eventually picked up this album, since it was without question the most revered Obituary release, and supposedly a death metal classic.  It didn't do much for me though.  In the time between my purchase of World Demise and Cause of Death, I had become a more educated metal fan.  I had discovered Opeth, late period Death, and Meshuggah.  Obituary just seemed totally boring and simplistic.  I think my general sentiment was this: Obituary has one of the greatest vocalists in death metal.  Too bad it's wasted on such boring music.

Flash forward 9 years and I now consider this album one of the essential death metal releases, at least to the point of buying another copy.  In some ways my perception of Cause of Death hasn't really changed that much.  I still think the vocals are the most noteworthy thing about the sound, and I still think the music is fairly standard.  It's just that my values have completely changed.  

For a good six years, the crux of my musical taste evolved according to the notion that metal was a genre that could be just as respectable, artistic, and proficient as any other style of music.  I made forays into other "adventurous" genres of music; I made parallels to other visceral styles.  And somewhere in there I think that the pure feeling of glee at hearing a grown man puke into a microphone was beaten down.

In the last couple years I have apparently come full circle.  In my current estimation, the immediacy of the drumming, the jagged distortion of the guitar, the primal screaming - these things define value in death metal far more than the intricate and analytical progressions of an album like Individual Thought Patterns.  And in that regard Cause of Death has gained considerable ground.  In a phase of life where I wanted metal to withstand the scrutiny of (popular) critical opinion, the vocals could hold no greater status than a superfluous, if amusing, ornament.  But in the sense that death metal's value is derived from its raw intensity, what could be more crucial than throat ripping vocals?  

It's not that I no longer believe in the capability of death metal to be ambitious in scope and musicality.  But to downplay the aesthetic aspect of the music is to ignore the most blatant point of all: nobody listens to this stuff if they don't enjoy, on some level, the sound of musical chaos and aggression.

It’s a natural tendency to want others to respect your musical taste, and I wonder to what extent that drives many people to “grow out” of metal when the capacity to enjoy it never really left.  But maybe what I’m talking about is really just the self-imposed repression of being an adult.  My friend Vinay used to talk about this a lot.   Most people never stop liking many of the things that kids enjoy, like running around outside.  Adults only run around after assigning the behavior a constructive purpose and putting on clothes which signify that the behavior is non-threatening.  How very un-metal.

That was off-topic, but the point is that I think I had to come to terms with the fact that my musical taste is completely unjustifiable to the majority of reasonable adults before I could fully re-immerse myself in the world of unapologetic, zero-crossover appeal death and black metal.  And it’s significant because I truly believe that that’s the form of metal which has the most artistic significance (despite most critics thinking the opposite).  As I’ve alluded to before in this blog, if the value of a work of metal is derived from its crossover elements, then the entire genre becomes the musical equivalent of the WWF – a soap opera with just enough gleaming muscle to achieve male legitimacy.

In retrospect, I think the point when I stopped caring about justifying my musical taste to others coincided pretty closely with the point when I began identifying myself much more with my work.  In the first couple years of college, I know of at least one instance when I verbally referred to myself as a “metalhead who did engineering”.  Needless to say I would never think that way now.

To summarize, Cause of Death is pretty good.