June Metal Gleanings

A quick rundown of what I've been churning through recently during my prime listening hours:

• Keep of Kalessin - Reptilian. This album has completely lived up to its promise, becoming the disc with the sounds so infectious I have to limit myself to listening once a day. "The Awakening," with its bridge hook that begs to be shouted through one of those Swiss Alpine horns into a gale (seriously, go to 3:03 in this clip and check it out) has replaced early favorite "The Dragontower" as the song of choice, but the whole thing is an easy sell because it's brutal and catchy all at the same time.
  
  
• Nachtmystium - Addicts: Black Meddle Pt II. Between this album and the Twilight disc I had a whole Blake Judd bloc yesterday afternoon, which was pretty fantastic. My first feelings after hearing the sequel to Assassins were of awe at Nachtmystium's ability to switch gears so easily from track to track. The overall aesthetic is still that fuzzy Nachtmystium we know and love, but an album that includes everything from a very poppy chorus in "Then Fires" to old school industrial touches in "Blood Trance Fusion" to a heavy dose of EBM in "Every Last Drop" offers a lot to explore. I'm psyched to be seeing these guys again tomorrow.
  
  
• Odem Arcarum - Outrageous Reverie Above the Erosion of Barren Earth. As I've mentioned in the past, this album owes a great deal to Emperor's later work; there's a good bit of 1349, too, especially in the vocals. A bit derivative, perhaps, but these guys offer up so many textures in their 10 minute epics that there's still plenty to enjoy. Definitely take the whole album as one dose, though.
  
  
• Nevermore - The Obsidian Conspiracy. Just got this one a few days ago, so I'm still forming impressions, but thus far the band's seventh album is in keeping with expectations: impressive musicianship, ear-bending vocal lines, and a broad mix of lyrical topics. "Your Poison Throne" seems like the most traditionally Nevermore track thus far, while "And the Maiden Spoke" stands out with a particularly challenging chorus.
  

Again We Rise: Nachtmystium - Worldfall EP

True to Iron Maiden's promise at Madison Square Garden in 2000, the decade that followed has seen a resurgence of metal that not only obliterated the specter of death staking the genre in the 1990s, but makes previous heydays seem puny in comparison. Metal in the 2000s was all about proliferation: new styles emerged, old ones regenerated, and - thanks to the Internet - exposure spread like a virus. To highlight all of that success , we're launching Again We Rise, an occasional feature that will celebrate the releases that rose above the voluminous crowd to become classics. Today, Nachtmystium's Worldfall EP.

At some point in the past few years, black metal had a bit of a renaissance in the US: metal became big enough that it started spilling outside its previous listening circles, indie rockers latched onto black metal's lo-fi aesthetic, Mastodon demonstrated that it was possible for guys playing mix noisy metal with 70s rock to make a splash with the kids, and suddenly it was a big deal to be in band playing music that floated in one of metal's grayer areas. By choice or by accident, Nachtmystium put themselves in this camp over the course of the decade, and while Assassins Part 1: Black Meddle is the better known example of their black metal/70s rock cross, it was Wordfall, the 5 song release they put out in 2007, that caught my ear first.

My favorite track - and to my mind, one of the band's best songs - is the title track, which leads off the EP: seven minutes of bleak tied together by the dingy, gritty distortion on the guitars, rolling on and on without getting muddy or tiresome. It's the sort of riff that will stick in your head for hours, and it's an even more effective hook for the simplicity of the sounds floating above it: most of the lyrics are Blake Judd whispering, "worldfall...oblivion," over and over again. At one point, the song feels like it's trying to shake off its decent into madness and goes into a frenetic solo, but by the end, the sonic despair ultimately takes hold once and for all.



Things get a little more psychedelic on "Depravity," which intersperses a heavily-phased interlude halfway between a skillful execution of some standard black metal idioms, but really kick into high gear on "Solitary Voyage": droning guitars provide texture, but it's the spacey keyboard-sounding lead and anguished, echoey vocals that create the atmosphere. If ever there were a soundtrack for a doomed solo space voyage, it's this song, particularly at the end, when everything breaks into haunting arpeggios that seem to channel absolute emptiness.

The Fourth Wave of Extreme Metal

I was listening to Blut Aus Nord's newest release - which is fantastic, by the way - earlier today and got to thinking about the differences between the current waves of extreme metal in Europe and the United States. While there are some points of commonality - perhaps enough to call this some sort of wave (like the Fourth Wave name that I arbitrarily stuck in the title) - here, bands like Nachtmystium, edit: Baroness, Krallice, and Wolves in the Throne Room are making sounds that are not only more or less recognizable as extreme metal (you might call some of them metalgaze; Seth, who loves the concept as a crossover point between the indie and metal portions of his musical soul, prefers "not metal") but also seem to use nihilism as a creative focal point: think Nachtmystium's Blake Judd screaming "We came from nothing/and are nothing" during "Assassins."

Meanwhile, over in Europe, while the aesthetic remains basically the same - and here I'm thinking of bands like Keep of Kalessin, Moonsorrow, and Blut Aus Nord - the focal point is more the enormity of external forces that shape our lives (or, as I put it recently, making me want to live in a hut in the wilderness) than the emptiness of existence. Frankly, I find the later concept more appealing; maybe I just like the idea of struggling fruitlessly against something more than I like the idea of struggling fruitlessly against nothing. Or I've just seen The Big Lebowski one too many times.

Hot Fucking Lanta

The best ad for Scion since Frisky Dingo, the Scion rock fest is rolling into Atlanta on 2/28.

Although my geographically challenged mind decided Atlanta must only be about 6 hours away, not 16, the BB&B crew may roll down for this. It is every band I like!

Hopefully Andre 3000 will have a stripper pole up by the stage so my fantasy of watching hos from the dirty souf shake their booty to Boris can finally be fulfilled. Sexxy.

THE SCION ROCK FEST Lineup:
Mastodon
Neurosis
High on Fire
Boris
1349
Cryptopsy
Torche
Nachtmystium
Wolves in the Throne Room
Baroness
Harvey Milk
Kylesa
Zoroaster
Withered
Krallice
Toxic Holocaust
Skeletonwitch
Rwake
A Storm of Light
Warbringer
Salome
Suidakra
Tyr
Alestorm
Converge
Pig Destroyer
Septic Flesh
Coalesce
Trash Talk
Evil Army
US Christmas
Gaylord
Apocalyptic Visions

Opeth at the Nokia Theatre

Via MetalSucks: Nachtmystium announced that they've left the Opeth/High On Fire tour due to "issues beyond [their] control." I suspect those issues were due to label support, or at least to the need to fire their merch agents: I went to pick up a copy of Assassins in between sets, only to find that the only copy left was a Japanese import with an extra track (for $10 more than the American edition). A friend of mine also scoped out their stock of t-shirts and found that while they had a bunch of cool designs, they had almost no stock whatsoever.

Musically, on a scale of leave the room or rock me out, both openers scored a "stay and stand in judgment." I had spent some quality time with Nachtmystium's Worldfall EP (but not, it should be noted, Assassins), so I was expecting something...bigger. The crowd didn't get the band at all (which, in retrospect, doesn't come as so much of a surprise) and the band didn't have the wherewithwal to generate their own energy in the face of so much emptiness, so they just seemed flat. They'll get another chance from me, though.

I saw High on Fire on Gigantour III earlier this year. While they didn't make enough of an impression on me to garner an inclusion in my review, I didn't remember disliking what they did. This time around, I found myself forming some very definite negative opinions, which eventually resolved themselves into one judgment: I like High on Fire better when they're imitating Motorhead than when they're imitating Black Sabbath, but either way their songs are consistently two or three minutes too long.

Opeth was everything that I had hoped for, right down to the stage banter: Mikael telling a story about trying to blow Morbid Angel off the stage in the late 90s while touring Morningrise, describing the album as froufy minstrel metal trying to compete with the brutality Domination, or spending several minutes during the encore introducing the band by pointing at them and demanding solos. Thinking about it, it seems like Opeth's tagline could be, "Come for the music, stay for the antics of the world's funniest black metal band," because somehow they make both parts of their set work in equal measure. I had the requisite bangover the next day as tribute to the band's musical energy, but I needed the doses of odd, funny Swedish frontman just as much as I needed the music to make the night complete.