Monthly Archives: October 2015

HALLOWEEN: sound tracks and lost highs

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It started with a wolf, howlin’. Evil (Is Going On) was on BBC 6Music in all its electric-version glory as part of a ‘ween spesh, and it was soon followed by I Put a Spell On You. Classy sassy stuff (thanks Cerys Matthews). Got me thinking: instead of a bleak-o heavioso metallic horror soundtrack for halloween this year, why not go for some killer (yes!) atmos? The creep not the scream, the shadows not the gallows. Tension over bludgeon.

Henry Mancini.

Now, your man Cini might not be in thrall to demons and satan and Marshall stacks, but what is Shot in the Dark if not a tip-toed creepabout? Ditto The Pink Panther Theme and double ditto the perfectly titled Experiment in Terror, its sticky harpsichord adding enough gothic suspense for Fantomas to wind it through their avant mangle on The Director’s Cut (mentioned this album a couple of halloweens ago, insane and essential is what it is).

But if we’re on the prowl for a killer soundtrack that’s literal, we need a killer, so let’s call on the guy who always gets the shit end of the stick – the big fella, the head-clean-off guy, the in-all-this-excitement guy: Harry Callahan. Lalo Schifrin’s Dirty Harry seedy funkjazz score dwells in permashadow and night-time neon, and in No More Lies, Girl we even get a mention of halloween. It’s too jaunty a track for tonight though so for max creep you gotta go to Prologue/The Swimming Pool, Scorpio’s View, The Cross, Floodlights and School Bus (and you’ll not hear a filthier bass this side of November than Scorpio’s View and School Bus, promise).

From Dirty Harry we take a cinematic sidestep to Harry’s namesake …. Dirty Barry. Sounds dodgy already, like a cross between Pulp’s Seductive Barry and Mark and Lard’s Fat Barry White, but it’s by the guy who’s almost got the Addams Family name, one Barry Adamson. Check Oedipus Schmoedipus and there it is, track six, but skip back a few and you also land on Something Wicked This Way Comes.

See where we’re going now? Down the unfound road to a Lynch-ing with the nails of nine inches for bad company, aka Lost Highway, David Lynch’s unfathomable 1997 trip that’s tracked by as good a collection of goth-tinged electronic rock as you’re gonna get. Pulled together by Trent Reznor, it’s heavy on Angelo Badalamenti and B-Adamson scores and haunts, but there’s axe as well as strings. The Perfect Drug is perfect NIN – menace plus hook plus destruction plus ambience – Smashing Pumpkins get their pre-Adore electronic spook on with Eye, and David Bowie … well, he claims I’m Deranged from the never-bettered Outside.

Finally, for an axe-heavy non-Highway finale of monstrous bloody heft, dig up the bones of Another Body Murdered by Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E from Judgment Night soundtrack. Not a bunch of guys you’d want on your doorstep demanding sweeties.

Happy helloweeeeeen ….

GY!BE: live review

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GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR
Warwick Arts Centre, Oct 22nd 2015

Louder, heavier, noisier, DRONIER … if those words go some way to describing how Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress compares to previous GY!BE records then those same words go all the way to describing Asunder live v Asunder studio: on stage, GY!BE 2015 are an electrified maelstrom.

At the start of the set, hope flickers. Literally. It’s the first word of the night but it’s unspoken, projected instead onto the film-shorts backdrop while the band file onstage one-by-one and take to their instruments – a violin two-bass two-drum three-guitar ensemble – to build that b.i.g. drone opener. This all happens without fanfare or salutations, like a choreographed rehearsal between long-term friends… if the crowd were absent, it would not matter.

Post HOPE, where do Godspeed take us? Far away from The Everyday Normal, that’s where. Asunder gets aired – Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’ and Piss Crowns Are Trebled are both heavier and hairier than you dare imagine – as does the madfuck spiral that is Mladic. And while there are moments of calm and light, as you’d expect, those moments are Flee Ting and Power Less in the face of the night’s amplifier overload. Strands of Sunn O))), Metal Machine Trio and Earth all push through in the drones and the noise, and though it’s pretty tough going at times, the reward – typified by Piss Crowns’ stupendous fuck-off-and-cry climax – are those surging crescendos and brink-of-collapse payoffs that Godspeed make their own.

So yeah, it’s an experience more than a gig, and if you want fanboy precision about tracks played then this review ain’t the place. All I wanna do, as a Godspeed-live first-timer, is somehow convey the thrill of the show: it IS heavy, it IS noisy, it IS intense, and it IS vast – the orchestral enormity conjured by just eight people defies belief.

When the whole thing ends – band members departing one by one, instruments left and locked in feedback harmony – there’s much to reflect on, not least the massive, near-physical power of music (when it’s in the right hands) and the transient chatter that passes for much of our day-to-day. Sometimes you need a break from life to get yourself realigned. Two hours of Godspeed will do that.

Seismic rock, visceral beauty. Nothing less.

No repent from Slayer

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REWIND SEPTEMBER: SLAYER RETURN

There’s something very, very right about listening to Slayer in September. Cool air becoming cold, days light but pulling up short, winter the next turn … yeah, September is Slayer time, and when there’s a fresh Slayer bloodflow – Repentless – it’s even better. A new rekkid is always summat to get stoked by, but this one – with Hanneman and Lombardo gone – seems more pivotal than most. Can they cut it? It’s way too early to get a proper perspective but the first impression sez fuuuuuuuckyeah. Araya and King have got a grade-A groove on, Holt shreds with melody and Bostaph … well, we already know he’s got Slayer-approved chops but his precise, punishingly physical performance on Repentless – in contrast to Lombardo’s tight-but-loose thrash flair – is exactly what Slayer needs right now: an anchor. Some of that God Hates Us All certainty.

Elsewhere in September rambles:

Is prog a four-letter word? That was the question put to Steven Wilson by Stuart Maconie on the Freakzone the other week (the tardiness of this Rewind means it’s probably just slipped off the iplayer now), and while Maconie would never feature any classic metal on his zone, you gotta wonder where the difference is. Take Iron Maiden – none more classic a metal band, right? Yet their new Book of Souls double album is home to the Irons’ longest-ever track Empire of the Clouds, a widescreen Bruce-athon which stops the clock at a Yes-bothering 18 minutes. Given their output since Brave New World, are latter-day Maiden prog?

And if so, is Steven Wilson Iron Maiden?

Ach, we’ll save the prog discourse for the time when Tales from Topographic Oceans finally hits the runout groove on side four, but if Pink Floyd are coming to be seen as prog, as Wilson posits, then we’re seeing a slow rehab of the p word. And a lot of what characterises P-rock – instrumentals, time and tempo shifts, length – applies to any number of spacepostavantmath types which bust out beyond the four-minute 4/4. SEMANTICS ROCK(s).

And that’s that for now, except to say there are a couple o’ good gigs coming up in Ox, including the ever-mighty Killing Joke the night before Halloween.

’til next time!