Monthly Archives: December 2015

EPs pt II: Kylver + Morass of Molasses

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Following on from EPs pt I where we saluted and celebrated the four-to-five track format, we now have the entirely expected follow-up: EPs pt II, a heavy prog and metallic grunge double-header from the north east and the south of England. The arteests? Kylver and Morass of Molasses respectively, so let’s crack on, shall we?

Kylver: The Mountain Ghost

With just four tracks spread over 38 minutes, and a concept about mountain spirits – not to mention a Prog Rock CD appearance earlier this year – The Mountain Ghost by Newcastle’s Kylver is stacked with all the vital prog statistics, but unlike most of the stuff that makes it onto that magazine’s CDs, this lot actually have some beef behind ’em, summat to satisfy those of us with metal roots. This is Muscular Prog, all tough riffage and thick keyboards, yet the usual weakness with such bands – The Concept – never gets in the way because the concept itself is completely unexplained, barring the song titles (The Mountain Ghost, The Feast of the Mountain Ghost, The Dance of the Mountain Ghost, The Death of the Mountain Ghost).

No vocals, see. No lyrics. And so, no concept. Which means you can just rock out to what’s really a 38-minute instrumental divvied up into sections linked by recurrent riffs and motifs. Prog mag’s Limelight feature in the October issue said they sound like Kyuss jamming with Yes, but I reckon there’s more of a Steven Wilson solo thing (non-ethereal Wilson, that is) mixed with Voivod’s detached sci-fi cool … check the double-kick drum at the end of Dance of…, then play Voivod’s version of Astronomy Domine. Similar beatiness, no? Find out about Kylver right here.

Morass of Molasses: So Flows Our Fate

Reading’s Morass of Molasses were part of an Oxford stormer this year when they supported Mother Corona at the Wheatsheaf and their debut EP, So Flows Our Fate, doesn’t let their live show down … but you knew that already. We wouldn’t wanna spread the word if it were shite, would we? 

Unlike Kylver, there are no conceptual pretensions here. MoM’s MO is to carve big ol’ riffs with metallic, psyche and stoner swagger in a mass of body-swinging grooves, and opening track Rotten Teeth does exactly that – for about 50 seconds. Then it melts into a mellow mini breakdown. Wrong footed or what? But the riff roars back, showing that that early shift is the move of a confident bunch of mofos who aren’t afraid to go where the mood takes. Elsewhere on this four-tracker we get wah solos (Ashtabula), doomed desert blues (Fear to Tread) and, best of all, Bear River‘s wasted heaviness, all of which points to a future album that could go in many directions. Fans of Wiseblood-era Corrosion, Down and the like should love this, but start your MoM discovery here and let’s hope for stacks more Molasses in the nearest of futures.

NEWS JUST IN: Lemmy passed away in the small hours and surely there is no-one in hard rock’s realm who cannot have been influenced in some way by Mr Kilmister and his road dogs. Sad sad news. May both he and Motorhead get the airtime and the tributes they deserve. BRING THE NOISE, BRING THE ROCK AND ROLL.

XMAS LISTS AND A 2015 REWIND

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REWIND DECEMBER: THE BIG AND THE BRAVE AND THE SUNN AND THE TOP AND A TEENYTINY LOOKBACK AT 2015

Festive salutations! How’s your end-of-year listmania? Drowning in the scale and volume of it all?

Me too, but more of that later when we get on to a super-slashed no-budget scrap of a list of twentyfifteen music highlights. First, a question:

What have ZZ Top got to do with Christmas?

On the face of it, beyond a pair of slowly whitening beards, nowt. No xmas tunes, no songs about ice or snow, nothin’. Sink a little deeper though and you find good-time vibes. Bar-room vibes. Infectious groove-time vibes and cheek-tongued naughties and, most crucial of all for the festive season’s softly softly low-light ambience … warmth. Not the warmth that comes from a Texas blue-sky beatdown – that would be horrific, this is CHRISTMAS fercrissake – but the warmth that comes from the fingers of a proper human person type being. We’re talking about the Un-Rivalled Guitar Tone of Billy Gibbons, pure as the last snowfall.

Yep, warmth is what we need at this time of year, or least it would be if it weren’t so maddeningly mild, but what the fork – we can’t let a little thing like temperature change our winter playlister habits, can we? So, along with the xmas tunes and the Scandi ice merchants and the vintage storytellers that keep us company on these long nights – Cave, Waits, Dylan, Young – we need some feelgood warmth and this year, it’s ZZ Top who are doing the job. Mebbe that’s just me ‘coz I’ve got a ZZ soft spot burned 30-years deep by a 7-inch Sharp Dressed Man and an Eliminator/Afterburner double dose, but even if you don’t have those Texan rocks buried deep from way-back at Woolies, you can do a lot worse than spin some Top this winter. Try Rhythmeen from 1996 and see where the Black Keys were getting ideas from. Thicker and phatter than those synth-edged ZZ blockbusters of the mid 80s, Rhythmeen’s blues-based robo riffs (see why Josh Homme’s a fan?) roll and flow as much as they rock, and the whole thing just makes you feel GOOD. Check the slow-bar crawl of Vincent Price Blues or Hummbucking Part 2‘s non-stop fills and see if they don’t put a guitar-loving grin on your frontal. Then have a(nother) drink. ’tis Christmas after all.

Right then: highlights of 2015?

Let’s have a little one that happened just a handful of hours ago on the December 23rd:

SunnO))) with Scott Walker were played on the radio just after midday.

MIDDAY SUNNO))), can you imagine? Was a great bit of listening and it came about because Mary Anne Hobbs had Stephen O’Malley guesting on 6 Music – well worth grabbing so you can hear his thoughtful reflection on the role of patience in the way we approach music. Also worth a visit, if it’s still available, is his Freakzone show from the other week. Top curating.

As for the records of 2015, were do you start? Catch up is the name’s game and there are tonnes of albums missed but if there are four that I’d want to share, it’s probably these:

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress. We all know what GY!BE are about but even by their standards, this is going some. Beefed up and warmer than previous outings but with zero loss of intensity, Asunder is an arthouse beast of a record.

Ryley Walker – Primrose Green. Acoustic songwriter in the Tim Buckley/John Martyn vein, blazing with a group of sharp-as-shit jazz musos who don’t smoothe the raw edges – check Sweet Satisfaction for evidence. Fiery folk, anyone?

Led Zeppelin – Coda (reissue). Always a much better collection than it’s given credit for – you can’t argue with We’re Gonna Groove, not ever – this 3-CD expansion is a gem, not just for the two Bombay Orchestra tracks but also the Bonham-does-Meters hard funk piledriver St Tristan’s Sword and the loping alt-Levee If It Keeps On Raining. 

Big|Brave – Au De La. Only just got this so I’m in no way familiar enough but it’s making a pretty colossal impression with its, what would you say, Feedbacker Boris meets Thee Silver Mt Zion  post/drone sprawls? Heavy and spacious, it’s on Southern Lord and was recorded by Efrim Manuel Menick so that probably tells you enough. Better go and play it some more

but not before some intoxicating late night ZZ.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS, MERRY NEW YEAR! Bowie Blackstar within sight now…

p.s. Old Man Lizard reviewed and profiled in this month’s Terrorizer, and Undersmile’s Anhedonia makes the Terrorizer Top 50 albums of the year. Not bad, eh?

EPs pt I: Earthmass + Old Man Lizard

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Es are good, sang the Shamen.

EPs are good, says we.

But they are though, aren’t they? Rare is the EP that goes on too long and rare is the EP that sucks the megabucks out of your wallet, all of which makes the EP a pretty good intro to a band you don’t know, ‘specially at a gig when said band has done enough on stage to commit you to the merch table. Take an EP-sized punt and you’ll feel either i) slight letdown coz it’s not as awesome as the gig, but no damage done because at least you weren’t fleeced for the privilege, or ii) well bloody chuffed coz the new tuneage is as good as what you just saw/heard AND you’ve supported a band who probably need it. Let’s face it, touring and gigging assorted holes round smalltown UK deserves some sort of reward. Or possibly compensation.

What we’re celebrating in EPs pt I is point ii), combining a couple of EPs picked up at gigs this year because, well, 2015 is fast running out and these things need to be shared. Today we just happen to have a south-east double bill – Earthmass and Old Man Lizard. First up it’s

Earthmass: Collision

Earthmass supported Undersmile at the Wheatsheaf back in May and they were fckn large. Nothing wildly new, granted, but if you’re a sucker for a slab of post-metal clang ‘n stretch – and who isn’t? – then their Collapse EP from 2014, barrelling out of that early unrefined Isis lineage, warrants a bit of ear time. First track Awake/Crisis is a lumbering barrage of mono-chord reps and storm-whipped vocals, a solid warmer for the rest of the EP. Next tracks Divergence and Weakling begin to add the expansions – space, tracked vocals, twin guitar mini breaks – that bring the colour, and that triumphant Hulk-ing surge at Weakling’s end is boner-fida Isis.

But it’s the 18-minute closer LOOM that’s the centrepiece here, and once you’ve heard it, you can see what the first three were building up to. Billed as a two-parter (i. Drowse, ii. Barren), it’s post-metal Pelican-ism from those Untitled pre-Australasia days and shows what Earthmass are REALLY all about – un-busy stretchouts, nearly-solos borne of a deeper Rock Love, Tool-esque quiet, and bang-on-cue finales. Precise, layered and deliberate but in no way polished or dirgesome, Earthmass move on and in their own time, and the slow-build sequencing of Collision is proof of that. Add some ‘mass to your collection right here

Old Man Lizard: Old Man Lizard

The second EP comes out of one of those gigs where you’re among 8 people watching a new band who, sadly, just aren’t cutting it. And you’re a bit too near the stage to make a discreet exit. And you don’t know the follow-up band. And at this point, it feels like a very long night ahead. And when the next band take the stage, they’re a three-piece with a Victorian handlebar ‘tache on drums and a flame-coloured mane up front. Frontmane wears a baseball cap with a big S-word on it:

SUFFOLK

Yep, all the way from the deep south-ish flatlands of ingerland we have Old Man Lizard, bellowing and hollering and primal heavy raging … saviours of the night. Thank stuck for the ficks, eh?

Blunt and shouty as they first seem, there’s more than by-numbers metal going on here … not jazz but the odd jazzy chord, not trad but the odd Celt-lick, not blues but of the blues. Hmmm. Young bucks with old-time sources, they’re definitely off-kilter enough to sit outside easy categorisation, and with lyrics that dwell in pits of myth, murder, witchery and duggery of the skull, there’s something out-of-time about them, something a bit mead ‘n moonshine. Miles away from the post-metal space vibe of Earthmass, OML are scratchy dry and rusting metallic, their spidery guitar runs bringing the jitters to that earthly-yet-fantastical storytelling. El Doctor is the bluesiest track and its stripped-back slowdown gives you a shot of the hefty bass that lurks behind, while Old Hag hints at rural prog from the back porch.

Right then, a little Old Man Lizard update. The Lone Wolf vs Brown Bear album is a bigger beast, recorded ‘in the heart of rural Suffolk’ and mastered by James Plotkin … there can only be one James Plotkin so it must be THAT one, right? Tracks like Rum Guts, Don’t Piss in the River and Wolves Wood show off more adventurous arrangements – definitely hear a bit of Ephel Duath in some of those chords, not to mention loose harmonica and hidden banjo – but be warned: the vocals are even more bellowin’.

But the plot ‘kin thickens when you go to the OML bandcamp site because the EP, which I downloaded after buying the Lone Wolf CD and seeing the gig, ain’t there anymore. But there IS a new album, and it looks like a reworking/fleshing out of the above EP but with a bit extra, so maybe the original 5-tracker was a demo …who knows? Either way, there’s plenny of stuff to check, and don’t forget their Essex neighbours Earthmass while you’re at it.

EPs pt II to follow soon.

FreakzO)))ne radio

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REWIND NOVEMBER

Although Audioscope 2015 is very much the November biggie for those of us in Oxford, life does go on (but now with Gazelle Twin’s UNFLESH stalking our lives) and so this Rewind is a radio special coz there’s been some proper fringe rock stuff on the 6Music Freakzone this past month. Dip into this lot on t’ iplayer, but check ’em quick – some have just one week left, some have up to three, all links are in there.

Electronic Math Rock – Boredoms, 65daysofstatic, Three Trapped Tigers, Dawn of Midi and Battles bring the restless propulsions and scattergun glitch. What more do you want?

Motorpsycho and Helge Sten – never actually heard Motorpsycho’s music before but prog-psych-jazz-and-more (ie everything) seems to be the thing for these Norwegian brainiacs.

Coil – half-hour history of Coil with the slow-talking John Doran from The Quietus.

Stephen O’Malley Freakzone – a WHOLE BLOODY TWO-HOURS curated by half of SunnO))) and it’s a first-rate show of avant heavy, prog weird and free jazz exhibits. This is the stuff that compilations are made of: Goatsnake, Magma, Julia Holter, Today is the Day, Annette Peacock, Virus, a track from the new Sunn O))) album, what more do you want etc etc.Available til Dec 20th ish.

Right then, there goes the radio rewind – tonnes of new discoveries, just in time for Xmas spends and Santa lists. Motorpsycho are on mine. 

Lastly, Philthy Animal Taylor passed on from this world on November 11…RIP. Dug out the old No Remorse double vinyl and played the start of side two – Bomber, Iron Fist. What a clatter that guy made. Overkill and We Are the Road Crew say it better than anything.

’til next time!