It’s not a massive stretch, or even a tiny one, to imagine Captain Beefheart as a jester-like storyteller but, on his final three studio albums, an extra gothic tone streaks the magic. Tracks starring bats, crows, ghosts, mummies and witch doctors are ripe for Halloween IF they’ve got a gumbo bizarro groove and voodoo flow – and these three definitely add a little swampy sauce to the Hallows’ Eve jukebox.
With a hypnotic, trance-inducing beat that replicates windscreen-wiper motion, Bat Chain Puller (Shiny Beast) is smeared with abduction vibes. Let your imagine flow and it’ll soon soundtrack a ritualistic fire dance stumbled on by some hapless rural wanderer … who will never be allowed to leave. Sax blowouts amplify the carnival bizarre and time slows to a paralysing taunt from a conga train of freaks and face masks, primed to assimilate any accidental observer.
When I See Mommy I Feel Like a Mummy is the very next track on the same album and you couldn’t get a better follow-up if Santa fell into the wrong season and delivered it hiss-elf. Rhythmically, this track takes some beating – surely one of the band’s best. Everything is so locked in but so playfully loose as well. Don’t be taken in by Mommy Mummy’s immense catchiness, though – not today. It’s a trickster move. The oompah-ish rhythm signals jauntiness but when the sax and trombone squeal, like victims in your mangled mind’s eye, you know the lunatics have taken over. Cue a fade to black ending and a Wicker Man style fate. Doomed.
The final short arterial squeeze of this Beefheart triple is The Host, the Ghost, the Most Holy-O. Same sideshow, peoples. Try NOT imagining an incessant lurch of the undead. Impossible. A stuttering spiralling riff and whacked-out gang chorus are your captors while the Captain lords it up as the aloof MC.
Early Halloween greets! Ready for a seasonal resurrection from the metal crypt?
Good – because Celtic Frost‘s 1987 meisterwork Into the Pandemonium is a dead cert Halloween enhancer. Here’s why.
First, the artwork – that hellish extraction from Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch – is pure badass badness that lays out the goth factor before you even hit play, especially if you’re eyeing the cassette artwork where the zoomed-in crop brings more proximity to flames, falling bodies and all-round damnation.
Second, Celtic Frost always fits the ‘ween vibe and that’s a cold-bodied fact. But this album, when they went full tilt for orchestral strings, horns and operatic duets after To Mega Therion’s dabble, is a Halloween double-good. Avant garde was the descriptor of the day and whether or not that’s fully accurate, Pandemonium IS experimental and does smash genre orthodoxy and listener expectations so, for that, we salute. Art metal, progressive metal, experimental metal, maybe even death metal – as in, death hangs in its damp air – are all fair game, label-wise.
Looking at some reviews on Metal Archives though and we see that Into the Pandemonium isn’t universally loved. Lowest rating = 17%. Plenty of bile is hurled at One in Their Pride for its programmed beats, NASA samples and general non-metal spirit but it’s always sounded good to me, working like an oddball interlude where dashes of horror-suspense strings still manage to connect it to the rest of the record. Sure, it’s primitive tech-wise but this was 1987, FFS. What were electro-metal supremos Ministry doing back then?
Becoming Ministry, that’s what. They sure as shit weren’t doing Stigmata. Not yet.
Tom G Warrior’s voice draws plenty of criticism on the Archives – much bemoaning of the moaning. It’s almost a fair point but his style is essential to the Pandemonium mood and, surely, he’s gunning for an effect: the translucent nearly-dead. Hence the Halloween allure.
The first track is a cover of Mexican Radio (never checked the Wall of Voodoo original until today – decades of shameful oversight right there, it’s ace) and it rocks metally, but it’s the following Mesmerized that introduces the gothic undertones, un-thrash pace drag and wobbly spectrals that come to define Pandemonium’s tone. Claudia-Maria Mokri takes the backing vocals and Warrior’s guitar is, as ever, cloaked in mausoleum chill even when it flirts with 80s pop rock (anyone else getting a blinky flash of Steve Stevens’ pre-verse Rebel Yell riffing halfway through?). All the while, Martin Eric Ain’s rolling bass hollows the earthly life out of it.
Skipping past Inner Sanctum just for a sec, we get our first fully-fledged case of the non-metal avants. Tristesses de la Lune, all cold vapors and morose orchestration, is voiced entirely by Manu Moan and drips moonlit melancholy over dancing strings and buried buzzsaw grind.
But Rex Irae(Requiem) takes it further. This track, a full-on duet between Warrior and Mokri with an oddly groovesome meter, is the fullest realisation of orchestral haunt. String stabs, scrapes and accents alongside Warrior’s nearly-dead vox pitch into sweeping overtures that make it the goth standout of the album – and the first part of the Requiem triptych that took more than 30 years for Warrior to complete. If there’s one track to nab as a standalone Halloweener, this is it. Might as well add Oriental Masquerade while you’re at it, given that it shuts the album down with doomy ceremonial grandeur.
So, there’s no shortage of graveyard atmospherics on Into the Pandemonium … but that doesn’t mean it lacks blackened metallics either. Inner Sanctum predates thrash metal’s move towards the mainstream four years before the Black Album but with more diabolus in musica, and I Won’t Dance (the Elders’ Orient) fucking MOTORS with anthemic cool and unbreakable beats.
Really, for Halloween, you could pick pretty much any Tom G Warrior record and it’ll fit. Sticking with Celtic Frost, Monotheist‘s bleak pitch-black brutality and To Mega Therion‘s gothic thrash energy are both right up there. But for seasonal spook in sound and vision, Into the Pandemonium just about has the edge – more wayward, irrational, mercurial and over-reaching.
It’s just that bit more vamp, don’t you think?
Into hell, Into the Pandemonium
Cassette tracklist:
Mexican Radio Mesmerized Inner Sanctum Tristesses de la Lune Babylon Fell Caress Into Oblivion One in their Pride I Won’t Dance (the Elders’ Orient) Rex Irae (Requiem) Oriental Masquerade
(Sorrows of the Moon does not appear on the original tape but does appear on other formats. Tristesses de la Lune features Charles Baudelaire’s poem in French. Sorrows of the Moon is the English translation but has different music. Running orders vary depending on release and format. Confusing, I know…)
FEROCIOUS DISPLAY OF ULTRA PROG DEATH METAL AND SPACE TRIPPING PSYCHE
Last night, alt pop legend Edwyn Collins played Manchester’s Albert Hall – his last ever UK gig. In a few days, 90s indie stars Sleeper move through its arches. Sandwiched in between is Blood Incantation. The place is jammed.
It’s a magnificent venue: the former chapel brings a historic elegance that fully enhances the totemic props and cosmic-ancient energies central to Blood Incantation’s philosophical quests through their chosen medium of time-bending, mind-expanding death metal.
We get latest album Absolute Elsewhere in full from start to finish – The Stargate and The Message. We get The Giza Power Plant. We get Starspawn. Stunning, every last blast and beat. But what this whole gig really feels like is 75 minutes of death metal orchestra. We know from the albums that Blood Incantation are vast and expansive, but tonight delivers such a technical, visceral and telepathically locked-in performance of extreme metal and prog dynamics that you wonder if such intense heavy fusion can ever be repeated, never mind topped. Where can Blood Incantation possibly go from here? Has this path peaked?
When Paul Riedl introduces The Giza Power Plant as a track “…from our second album Hidden History of the Human Race“, you remember that they’ve only made four. The pace of the band’s development to this gig right now seems exponential, even though they started from Starspawn’s already high bar.
Writing here as someone who’s not really into death metal but who has gone for this band in a big way, this performance went beyond all expectations: a supreme mix of aggression, blast beats, DM churn, post-metal soar and speed metal hooks with Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream pushing through. Clear sound, crystal. Lasers and lights, a spectacle. It’s theatre without theatrics – a show where the body of music took centre stage as a massive, singular force.
Forgive the hyperventilating gush. Am still mesmerised, really. At their first ever Manchester gig, Blood Incantation damned near performed death metal levitation.
BERLIN BREAKBEATS, LONDON PROG, PHILADELPHIA SHOEGAZE – AND PULLED APART BY HORSES HIT BUXTON
Who’d have thought it? Pulled Apart By Horses, on stage, in Buxton.
Honestly, it’s a shock – but a welcome one. Being a Buxton newcomer (moved here just under a year ago), it was my understanding that noise-and-sweat-style rock gigs by name bands wouldn’t really be a fixture. So, Sheffield and Manchester have been beacons for riff-heavy fixes by the likes of the Melvins and Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs.
Then Pulled Apart By Horses posters started popping up around town. What???
And here we are at Buxton Trackside, gearing up for a Pulled Apart gig more than 10 years after seeing them rip it up in Oxford.
Having not followed the band since Tough Love, the line-up changes and recent albums escape me but, really, it’s the live Horses experience that’s the draw and one thing that time hasn’t dimmed is singer Tom Hudson’s willingness to get off the stage and into the crowd. This happens in the very first track and doesn’t stop all night. It sets the tone and ups the energy right off the bat.
The awesome V.E.N.O.M. gets cranked out early, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? catches everyone out and High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive pretty much shuts the set down before a final thrash through I Wanna Be Your Dog makes for a predictably raucous send-off. Job done. Very little has changed from all those years ago – whether that’s good or bad is up to you – but it feels great to be among some noise on a Buxton Friday and huge props to Buxton Trackside for making such an ace gig space. Let’s hope it becomes the venue for live action round here.
Right, what else has caught the ears this past month? New records by the godlike Robert Plant and in-shape Nine Inch Nails are the big specials but there’s always room for small curios. Here’s a just-heard new sound or three fished out from murkier waters.
THEY ARE GUTTING A BODY OF WATER – the chase
Lumbering guitar mass pounding, not a zillion miles away from Mogwai at their earliest unpolished, starts the chase. Then the clean breakdown and spoken storyteller narration. Then the return of the guitars, steamrollering everything. This – the oversized guitar fuzz and feedback – leapt right out of the radio the other night and set expectations of a band dealing in noise-heavy post-rock.
But their other tracks have undermined those expectations a little. Is there enough here to keep us hooked? Not sure yet. Curious, though. Next album LOTTO out soon and the chase is on it.
JASSS – It’s a Hole (feat James K and Alias Error)
Deep bass drives this dense, ultra shadowy soundscape by Berlin-based multimedia artist JASSS. Though not loud or showy, It’s a Hole is rich with information that slow-drowns you in disorienting intoxication … faint dread meets the hypnotic ebb of a dark Boards of Canada warping. Tense comforts.
THE ORCHESTRA (FOR NOW) – Hattrick
London prog, the band call it. Jazz-flamed rock with violin, cello and noise-prog ambition is a less pithy tag. Probably less usable, too. But you know how Maruja’s Look Down On Us climbs into a crescendo of communal euphoria that threatens to transcend? Hattrick kicks that kind of dust. Rage and beauty and loud and quiet and wild orchestral swings – and a drummer to drop jaws everywhere.
amplifier wordsmith 