HALLOWEEN: PARANOID AND NEGATIVE

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TYPE O NEGATIVE SLOW DOWN A SABBATH CLASSIC

Of all the seminal heavyweight scare-alls you could choose for a Halloween soundtrack, you’d be hard pushed to choose chillier than Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath from Black Sabbath – not just the slowest, most-ominous anti-groove put to tape at that point in heavy rock’s short history, but a track that’s got the imagery to match: the Hammer-horror dread that Ozzy conjures in your shitting-it mind and, of course, the spectral Presence on the album’s cover.

But despite all that, we’re not picking Black Sabbath the track for a Halloween playlist, not this year. 2014 belongs to PARANOID.

I’ve never much liked it.

Easily the least essential of Iommi and co’s anthems, it stands supremely un-tall against Sabba-manna like Wheels of Confusion, Fairies Wear Boots, Hole in the Sky and the like. No-one, surely no-one, would pick Paranoid’s pop-metal bounce ahead of any of those.

But what if it was slower – like, a LOT slower?

Or blacker – like, none-more-Tap blacker?

Or deader – like, graveyard undeader?

Cue Type O Negative.

If ever a band embodied the Halloween aesthetic and staked it with wry gallows’ humour, Type O are it. Halloween in Heaven, Black No.1, Bloody Kisses and All Hallows Eve are literal enough links but really, any track of theirs from Bloody Kisses onwards that’s not thrash-fast is pretty much game – Suspended in Dusk, Everyone I Love is Dead, Haunted, The Profit of Doom, take your pick. You get the gist.

But it’s the realm of the cover version that pulls everything together today. The band have got form in this area, lending the Negative touch to Neil Young, the Beatles, Hendrix and – most perversely/brilliantly – to 70s harmony-pop smash Summer Breeze, dragging the Seals and Crofts/Isley Brothers classic from sunshine floater to a slow-low-lower hot sticky trudge.

And so it is with Paranoid, stuck on the end of the faux-live pisstake Origin of the Feces.

Hypnosis-slow, lavishly arranged and knowingly soaked in trademark vampiric goth, Brooklyn’s least celebrated give Sabbath’s 3-minute chugger a makeover so total and so Type O that they absolutely own it: seven luxuriant minutes of pure Para-satisfaction, making it feel like the first time all over again.

Sneak a bit of Iron Man’s downward bender of a riff into the mid-section and you’ve not just got a top Sabbath tribute and a ‘ween classic for the rest of time.

You’ve got one of the best metal cover versions EVER.

*recorded in 1994, it’s 20 years cold!!!! Dig it out from post-94 issues of Origin of the Feces.

**for a few more soundtracks from the dark side, have a quick look at last year’s Halloween list

MONSTER MAGNET – Last Patrol

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I’ll admit that, before Last Patrol appeared last year, Monolithic Baby! was my last encounter with Wyndorf and co back in 2003. Good album, no question – Slut Machine, On the Verge and Radiation Day are proof enough of MM’s hard-rocking creds and quality – but by riding the Powertrip/God Says No slipstream again, its heavily anthemic bent feels like a further shift away from the psychedelic superhighs of Spine of God, Superjudge, Dopes to Infinity and, of course, the well-strung munt that is Tab 25*.

We’re missing a bit of out-there.

So, we (I) skip a couple of albums. Before you know it, 2013 rolls around with a new album on the Napalm Records label and somehow, the time feels right to revisit Planet Magnet. What’s different?

First, there’s the cover art: the bullgod is BACK.

Not the reductive bullgods of the past few albums but the shapeshifting cosmic fucking overlord bullgod, the big dude tipping an interstellar third-eye nod to those early 90s meisterworks. It’s an artwork, not a logo. Things are looking good.

And when I Live Behind the Clouds – Wyndorfian title or what? – opens the show, they sound even better. Lean and unhurried, it’s devoid of Monolithic’s leather-kecked arena-sized swagger, drawing instead from low-key wells like Zodiac Lung and Nod Scene’s quieter bits. Promising stuff, and track two – the title track – confirms it: we have an official Return to Form. Last Patrol (the track) is space-bound psyche done the Magnet way, its off-planet swirl and astral solos stretching out over 9 minutes of impending meltdown. Classic, vintage – and again, lean. Monolithic’s beefed production has been ditched in favour of those Stooges/Hawkwind roots, shot through with a real late 60s analogue vibe.

Last Patrol strikes me as the sound of a band at one with themselves. Not striving to be anything, not pandering to some caricature of what they should be, they just ARE. And they’re confident with it. Whether that’s down to long-term axe fella Ed Mundell’s exit, or some new level of personal insight opened up by Dave Wyndorf’s Mastermind-era health probs, who knows, but there’s a refinement and a sense of pacing here that makes Last Patrol work as a proper album, a real start-to-finish listening job. Stay Tuned, a sparse electro-acoustic brooder, closes the album like a cinematic fadeout – a space for actors to exit – and Three Kingfishers does cross-cultural fusion as though George Harrison just got back from India for the first time. Guitar-west meets sitar-east, shades of Electric Prunes hymnal psyche circa Mass in F Minor – yep, it’s THAT 60s. Then again, Kingfishers is a Donovan cover so whaddya expect? Either way, it’s Patrol perfect.

And all the while, you’re reminded of just how good a hard rock voice Dave Wyndorf actually has, his biker-outlaw charisma and friendly motherfuckercool lifted with a sky’s eye insight:

‘Brother, can you help me now

I feel my mind is drifting

Lost between the sacred grains of sand forever shifting’

– Mindless Ones, Last Patrol

Yep, I think we can say that the spirit of Monster Magnet has been revived – and about time. Last Patrol is a class act, so much so that it’s even got me round to plugging those 4-Way Diablo and Mastermind-sized holes in the collection. Welcome back guys, you’ve been missed.

STOP PRESS!!! I’ve just found out that Milking the Stars: a Re-imagining of Last Patrol is coming out in November. Good timing or what?

*a review I posted on Head Heritage a few years back

Mind the gap

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Mind the gap???? That’ll be the gap between posts … yeah, it hasn’t been the most productive of times amplifier-wise in the past couple of months, but I’m hoping to sort that in the autumn-to-winter weeks.

Maybe a short-and-dirty monthly round-up of some new listening/discoveries, plus back catalogue reviews of forgotten or revisited records from the 90s/00s.

And of course, a gig or two as and when they turn up.

In the meantime, how about a bit of Monster Magnet?

AUDIOSCOPE – Music for a Good Home 3

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When you go to the Audioscope all-dayer and your eyes wander across the posters advertising Audioscope’s past, they soon snap into sharp focus at the names who’ve taken the closing slot over the years – names like:

Califone, Damo Suzuki (twice), Karma to Burn, Wire, Don Cabarello, Clinic, Deerhoof, Four Tet, Six By Seven.

Impressive, no? And that’s before you scan down to the other bands on those bills such as Arbouretum, Explosions in the Sky, Grumbling Fur, Nought and so on and on and on.

So while you marvel at that rock procession, you kick yourself for what you might have missed over the years. My big miss was NOT seeing Damo Suzuki in 2012, opting instead for an Oxford gig of ‘avant metal and free jazz, Black Sabbath meets Sun Ra’.

It wasn’t though. It was fucking earache. Attended by about 9 people. Worst of all, we couldn’t even leave because the venue was too small for a discreet exit: we were trapped. Trapped by metallic free jazz. By the set’s end, even the drummer sensed our escapist longing and rejected the band’s suggestion of an encore. SENSE PREVAILED. But he was overruled … and the band played on.

But let’s get back to the beauty of Audioscope. Once you get rid of the flashbacks and look around the event – now tucked upstairs at the Jericho Tavern – you again try and square it with the names on those posters.

How can an event that’s this unassuming, this low key, manage to bag bands of that stature year after year?

And yet, somehow, it does. That’s the magic. Punching well above its weight, Audioscope is surely the Bruce Lee of one-day festivals.

Now we have the latest Audioscope album, Music for a Good Home 3, and it’s an even bigger version of those live line-ups. A website link is on its way but first, check this for an opening one-two from the album:

Amon Tobin. John Parish.

Shit me, is that alone worth the price of entry or what??? Tobin’s cooling, gothic downbeats Twin-Peaking into Parish’s sliding Americana is as sublime a start as you could want, and it all ends 29 tracks later – yep, 31 tracks for a bargain 7 quid – with a ragged, 18-minute grope towards lo-fi salvation by Magik Markers, the spirit of Crazy Horse and Brain Donor infusing their tech-free reps.

Elsewhere on the record there’s a stack of goodness to digest. Grumbling Fur, Arbouretum’s David Heumann, Wolf People and Six by Seven count among the higher-profile bands, yet the pleasure of this expansive comp is unearthing the stuff you don’t know or haven’t heard. Karhide’s explosive chase/attack, Dirty Beaches’ beat-less drones and Barn Owl’s intense immersive swell are just a few new discoveries, for me at least, but that’s just the beginning. What about Danny Paul Grody’s timeless acoustic fingerpickings? Or Chrome Hoof’s eccentric precision metal?

Time to send you on your way, methinks – get the full listing for Audioscope: Music for a Good Home 3 right here and download the album. You’ll enrich your life and do your bit to help others too, because Audioscope’s proceeds go towards Shelter.

Then spread the word and tell your friends to buy it, ‘coz compilations this good really shouldn’t go unheard.

See Audioscope reviews for 2013, 2014 and 2015

Drudes, freaks and wolves

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The Arch Drude is back in the news – the book news. Fiction news, to be exact, coz he’s only gone and put out his new (and first) novel, One Three One, on Faber and Faber. He nipped in to Stuart Maconie’s Freakzone for a wee chat about it so go check the July 6th episode for a short interview and snatches of music from Neon Sardinia and Dayglo Maradona, just two of the book’s fictional-bands-real-music backstory.

And as if an interview wasn’t enough reason to tune in, check these amplifier-friendly arteests on that same show’s playlist:

  • Jex Thoth
  • Poino
  • Yes (new single!)
  • Brain Donor (a righteous My Pagan Ass, no less)
  • The Safety Fire (right-now prog)

Anything else to report and reveal from this surge of rock radio activity?

Only the promise of a Freakzone interview with Southern Lord’s WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM on Sunday

AND a 30-minute Cope mix on the Freakier Zone on Saturday.

Who needs the World Cup???

 

 

 

Glastonbury Saturday: Metallica

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Still got doubts?

Sure. Lee. Not.

Metallica headlined Glastonbury and did exactly what they had to do – pulled it off with a festival-friendly yet thrash-infected set drawing heavily on the Ride/Black albums, and at least one cut from every record bar Load (surprisingly) and St Anger (not at all surprisingly).

So we got Fade, Nothing, One, Sad But True, Roam, Cyanide, Master, Nothing Else Mutters, Unforgotten and tonnes more biggies. Highlights included Memory Remains, its croaking Marianne steamrollered by mass na-na-nana, and Whisky in the Jar … ‘COZ IT’S WHISKY IN THE JAR-O, innit? Those tunes don’t get as much of a look-in these days, now that Metallica have plumped for the Metal more than the Rock in their live outings, and this was the place to revive a couple of those looser jams. Even the too-familiar Enter Sandbags sounded fresh again – every fecker in the field knows it so when that choked intro finally frees the monster hook that broke the band and sold a million (or 30) black albums, the release was huge.

Seek and Destroy brings the show to an end and it’s a show which, for all of its faux controversial (but undeniably fun) talking points, entertained. Striding that stage with total confidence, Metallica grabbed the moment, worked it hard and got a win-win out of it, or so it seemed from the TV. And while there won’t be a metal slot every time – maybe a hard-rock flourish for a year or two? – the time was right and Metallica were definitely the right band to do it. AC/DC next year?

Robert Plant

Ahead of the night’s novelty-value shake-up, however, the man who brought the class and the Glastonbury spirit to Saturday’s Pyramid stage was – as ever – the peerless Robert Plant.

Mining a seam of west African swirl ‘n trance mixed with those deep-set rock and roll sensibilities, Plant and his Sensational Space Shifters put on a show beyond reproach. Dreamland and Mighty Rearranger tracks get aired, as do a couple of newies (check the Perry Farrell-meets-Afro Celt Sound System air of Little Maggie), as do Zep classics – reworked, of course. Black Dog, now in its third incarnation following Plant-Krauss’s spooky two-step swing, is a beguiling prospect as its dusty psychedelia morphs into desert rave. Fresh as the first time you heard it. So is Funny in My Mind, its street-tough rockabilly makeover far removed from Dreamland’s take on it. Superlative stuff.

And this is what sets Plant and his band(s) apart. The explorer, the music fan as music maker, it’s these reworkings that keep the songs not just alive but LIVING – they’re timeless and increasingly formless, shapeshifting their way into whichever space and spirit is called for. Jimmy Page might be the curator of Zeppelin’s material, but Plant’s the one giving it new life in a global sense. In his hands, Zeppelin music becomes the trad arr of the modern day, ready for reinterpretation by whomever.

Which I guess is where Zep and Plant started anyway. Bring on the new Space Shifters record, it’s surely gonna be a bit special.

Metallica v Glastonbury

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We’re 48 hours from Metallica’s Glastonbury headliner slot. CANNOT WAIT. It’s like those good old bad old days when you’d scrabble around for hard rock morsels on TOTP or the Chart Show and feel joyously stuffed by even the tiniest scrap of six-string riff action. Glastonbury has a big-time metal headliner for the first time and that has thrust a playful, us-versus-them underdog thing into the festival hype.

How are they gonna play it, though? I reckon they should cast off the speedier stuff they’ve been playing the past few years and show some Glasto-sized balls by turning out a kick-arse crowd-pleasing setlist. Be a festival band. Play the hits, pull a few groovers out of the Load/Reload bag, nail some Battery-like blitz to the masts and do a couple of classic home-crowd covers.

Yep, covers. How could that not work on Saturday night? Play the heritage card and win / kill ‘em all – Sabbath, Motorhead, Queen, Thin Lizzy, they’ve all made it onto Metallica records and any one of them would go down like cold scrumpy in a hundred-degree hell-hole.

As would Free Speech for the Dumb, come to think of it. What an opener THAT would be (thanks to Garage Inc., on the stereo right now, for the reminder). And for a wildcard cover idea, how about a sneaky quid on Smoke on the Water? Not only has it got mass singalong potential for any number of drunks and wasteds in Worthy Farm, but it’s a well-placed nod to Deep Purple’s influence on Metallica’s earliest roots too. Just a thought. What’s your wildcard bet?

Anyway, it’s nearly show time and, whatever happens, Metallica’s appointment has brought a bit of extra fizz to the top-slot debate (though if you want to read a less enthusiastic view, from a metalhead no less, check Dom Lawson’s bummer-mood piece ‘Another half-baked vanity project’ from the Guardian the other week – an astonishingly churlish, self-regarding glob of journalism. Have a look here).

I hope Metallica storm it on Saturday. And if they don’t … well, so fckn WHAT.

PULLED APART BY HORSES: live, Art Bar Oxford, April 2014

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Short, fast, sweaty and screamy. Four words that could mean anything (keep it to yourselves though, eh?) but here, in Oxford’s Art Bar, they mean only one thing – Pulled Apart By Horses are on stage and they’re scorching it.

‘Was that you? Did you just catch him? Good one. That’s the only reason we do this, you know … to watch you lot. I mean, we really like playing but we love watching you lot.’

So says guitarist James Brown after yet another bit of spectacular/drunken moshgymnastics takes the band’s pre-tour pledge ‘to get sweaty with you guys’ to new levels of body-slamming bonhomie. That’s what Pulled Apart By Horses do, see. Stoke the heat with their punk-edged multi-riff attack, flick a match and set the whole thing off. By the time V.E.N.O.M. sears the room three tracks in, it’s game over: PABH have won the night, somehow making everyone feel like they’re mates with the band. How? Is it the grounded banter? Or the jagged anthems and ferocious pace? Or the fact that the band are enjoying this every bit as much as we are, inviting the Art Bar mob to hang out and do some drinking after the gig?

It’s all of that. Pulled Apart By Horses sound viciously sharp on record but even then, you sense they can rip it up EVEN MORE when they nab a stage and have a few bodies to bounce off, and tonight proves it – they’re one of those bands you’ve just got to go and see live, simple as that. High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive is nuts, and when I Wanna Be Your Dog gets the Horses makeover ahead of a crowd-surfing ceiling-hanging finale from singer Tom Hudson, you can’t help thinking that Iggy himself would give ‘em the nod.

Riotous good fun and – most definitely – a real cool time.

MUTATION: Error 500

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EXTREME ATTENTION–DEFICIT METAL

Someone puts a CD on – summat loud, brutish, fast. He or she is trying to find a track which they’ll recognise the second they hear it, but YOU know different because of their chronic SMS (shit memory syndrome). Play is pressed and you get a few seconds of metallic battery. Not it. FF flick to the next track. Another blast. Not it. Skip again. More noise. Nope, skip. Half a riff, NO. Skip. Maybe it was the first one after all? Skip back. No. ffs. FF again.

Jarred by this rapido assault of unconnected riffs, your senses are mashed. You don’t know what’s next or what went before coz you’ve been denied the time to process any of it. There’s no pattern to snag, not even a rhythm to follow, and your brain can’t keep up.

This is what Error 500 feels like – 9 tracks of mutant-bastard billion-guitar chaos, pinballing not so much between styles but between riffs, tempos and strobe-light madness to create a monstrous pile-up WITHIN every track. Disorienting stuff for sure, but who’s responsible for this barrage of ADD metal? What is MUTation?

MUTation is a Ginger (Wildhearts)-led project and this record is part two of a rumoured three-album lifespan. Napalm Death’s Shane Embury is in it, Cardiacs’ Jon Poole is in it, as are many others. Merzbow pops up. More bizarrely, Mark E Smith – yes, that one (is there any other?) – shambles in for two stagger-on cameos, shouting about shoelaces like a daylight drunk.

Does any of this give a sense of where Error 500 is going?

If not, the disjointed assembly of opening track Bracken surely does, a well-heavy/insane mash of what sounds like 5 different tracks in the first minute. Utopia Syndrome carries on the cut-and-paste attack. By the time White Leg flings a carousel spin in there, your ears begin to whisper for a lie down … not because of volume or extremity in itself, we love all that, but because of over-stimulus and the pace of change. Error 500 is a twisted hybrid of Napalm Death, Devin Townsend and Battles body parts, stitched together with Zappa thread and sparked to life by a Meshuggah defibrillator.

Little wonder, then, that it finds a home on Ipecac.

Unlike collaborations such as Shrinebuilder, where the very-brilliant sum is clearly derived from its Om/Neurosis/St Vitus component parts, or even labelmates Palms who evolve the Isis blueprint into celestial realms, MUTation is more in the Patton/Fantomas/Bungle mould – a total annihilation of the familiar and the expected. It’s a combustion. Highlights are impossible to list because the whole thing – as a statement – is a deranged highlight, though the Napalm-heavy channel-flicking Protein is a fave of mine. Over to you to pick your own bits.

Anything goes in MUTation world, and though it’s nothing like the Wildhearts, it’s everything like their spirit: technicolour, exuberant, volatile, smiling and rammed with fuck-it attitude … a gloriously demented racket. BRING THE NOISE.

Mutation: Error 500 (Ipecac, 2013)

 

 

 

OLD MAN GLOOM – live@the Scala, London, April 2014

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In some ways, there’s not much to say about Old Man Gloom tonight.

They’ve put out some stupendous albums – especially Seminar II (here’s a review I put on Head Heritage a few years back), Seminar III: Zozobra and Christmas – and their pedigree is first class so what can you demand of a rare-as-feck appearance in Blighty beyond, well, just showing up?

Nothing more than volume, reverberation and gut-blowing intensity – and that’s exactly what we get. OMG hit it for an hour at the Scala and they hit it HARD, starting with the opener of all openers – The Gift’s multi-part slow-build – and blasting through new and back-catalogue extractions like Branch Breaker, Regain/Rejoin, Sleeping with Snakes and Common Species. Aaron Turner, wildman unkempt, is animated far beyond the close-cropped intensity of Isis and maybe that’s because OMG trade in the primal and the primordial rather than the celestial. OMG are a seismic force.

Then the biggie. Zozobra is fired up 20 minutes from showtime’s end … Zozobra. Yes. NO WAY. No bloody way.  Seminar III: Zozobra is exalted ground, the mother of all OMG, and hearing those opening strands on this already-special UK outing is an omg OMG moment in itself.

It takes its time, we know this. Intro becomes build becomes pummel becomes squall becomes … a different track.

Whaaaaaaat?????? NO. WAY. The climactic guitar payoff, the extended post-fury euphoria, the colossal big ender, is choked off pre gush. Shit.  It’s a momentary downer in an otherwise triumphant bruiser of a set.

Now, a quick word about the supports: Bossk surge and swell with hypnotic Cult of Luna dynamics, and Finland’s Circle … well, I’ve no idea what they are on. What do you do with a band who sport dayglo gym shirts and ham up the rock theatrics with heroic metal poses, guitars held aloft and onstage duels? Circle look like Spinal Tap doing an Olivia Newton-John video.

Musically … again, no idea. Speed. Top-of-the-range metal vocals. Progressive musical chops and song structures. Catchy hooks and riffs. If Helloween grew up on post black metal as well as the trad power of Maiden, and chewed on the brains of Yes, Zappa and Devin Townsend, then … I dunno. After a short interlude they emerge sans fitness togs but each now clad in the cheapest, lowest-budget metal threads, like an 8 year olds’ primary school of rock – a single studded armband, a ripped T-shirt, a pair of black leather kecks bursting under a hefty belly  – and continue their avant metal. THAT’S entertainment.