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upfront 8
metal muthas The Grindmutha
12 live preview:
maryland deathfest xviii An overdose of death
12 low culture Looking forward to skipping your show 13 no corporate beer You can’t beat the heat
features 14 nite New Wave of Blackened Heavy Metal 16 gggolddd Tttheee nnnewww nnnoiseee 18 the spirit The camel’s back 20 drug church Good clean fun 22 devil master Night shift
24 undeath Big riffers 26 eucharist Back in black 28 vio-lence Goodbye, Cleveland
reviews 34 q&a: dark funeral Sole original member Lord Ahriman keeps an open mind and a blackened heart 38 the decibel
30 falls of rauros Hope against hope 32 cult of luna The great northern buzzkill
hall of fame USBM pillars Wolves in the Throne Room prop up America’s black metal identity while trying to tear down modern society with Two Hunters
63 lead review Will underappreciated USBM warriors Vanum live up to the title of their latest melodic opus, Legend? 64 album reviews Records from bands that are hoping to be released before the world ends, including the Hellacopters, Satan and Watain 80 damage ink Spectrum voice
Lifting Weights COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY HRISTO SHINDOV
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artists without money and people with money looking to make even more money on art from those artists, there have been accusations of “selling out.” And for as long as people have been passionate about heavy metal, there have been fans not really understanding what selling out actually means. So, let’s take a moment and define it as compromising one’s values and/or artistic vision for profit. Seems simple enough to identify, right? Well, that aforementioned passion—which often breeds quasiownership over fans’ favorite artists—frequently elicits roaring condemnations towards bands who make bold creative leaps like, um, altering their logos. So, yeah, extreme metalheads have a storied history of accidentally clouding this narrative. When, say, a young death metal band on the ascent drops an ambient, instrumental release—a departure that they warned for months was coming—as their debut for a larger label, the “sellout” chirps ring incredibly hollow. Pretty much anyone who has worked at a metal label can tell you that instrumental records don’t really, you know, sell. There’s no compromise for money. If anything, it’s no compromise for virtually no money. You are welcome to think the actual music is totally fucking boring, an artistic blunder or a complete waste of time better spent on recording a new death metal album, but that’s much a different argument. Selling out is rarely attempted in the genre, and when an artist does indulge such suspect desires—see Cold Lake—it inevitably backfires and fails spectacularly. I’m not sure it’s even possible to sell out in extreme metal. There is simply not enough real estate between the floor and ceiling. Actual selling out is much different. Like when you sell your indie company to a multi-billion-dollar company that is 40 percent owned by another multi-billion-dollar company that is registered in the Cayman Islands. Perhaps the early skepticism about one previously artist- and user-friendly digital music platform’s ability to maintain that level of integrity after being gobbled up is alarmist. Maybe their values, which rightly made them heroes in a streaming world, won’t be compromised by a parent company that is largely indifferent to the music industry, let alone the merits of Timewave Zero. Yeah, sure, and maybe “Dance Sleazy” is a grower, too.
READER OF THE
MONTH Cave In are on the cover of this issue. Wolves in the Throne Room are in the Hall of Fame and the Hellacopters are on the flexi disc. Which of those diverse acts best exemplifies your personal taste?
No disrespect to any of the bands mentioned, but I am a death metal fan with an appetite for grind and a Ph.D. in the golden era of hip-hop (1989-1994). So, I’ll take the frontman of the Hellacopters’ former band for $500, Alex? Also, if these three bands were on a bill, I would go if 200 Stab Wounds was opening.
Brandon Holthaus Pana, IL
You are located in Pana, IL. What besides Brandon Holthaus is actually located in Pana, IL?
You described yourself as a “completist” in a recent email to us. What’s the one record missing from your collection that drives you the craziest?
My beautiful wife and four dogs and, as an asbestos remover by trade, my work is based here. Born here and someday scatter my ashes here. Pana is a town you drive an hour from. Half of the town mysteriously burned down so a gas station/truck stop could be built. Pana was known as the City of Roses. Before my time, there were giant green houses where they were grown. Unfortunately, Pana has the feel of a town named for something that hasn’t been around for 60 years. I am 90 minutes from St. Louis, where I have been traveling to see shows for the last 20-plus years.
In reference to being a completist, I get itchy when the newest Decibel and flexi disc are delayed. My apologies to Customer Service guru Patty Moran for the frantic calls. I do remember in the early 2000s trying to order Sleep Dopesmoker through the Relapse Resound catalog and being let down via mail that it was out of stock. One recent release that got away was the limited variant of Gatecreeper’s An Unexpected Reality EP because my credit card company flagged it as fraudulent. I was still able to get it; just had to get back in line after a quick call. I grew up in the ’90s; this Luddite buys the CD version first.
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I am a death metal fan with an appetite for grind and a Ph.D. in the golden era of hip-hop (1989-1994). We’re not even two months into 2022 as I’m typing this, but what is the best album you have heard this year?
It’s Time… to Rise From the Grave. Undeath. Period. Remember when Lamb of God was on Prosthetic? Impeccable taste—must be Decibel subscribers! I will not miss Undeath again when they come back to St. Louis with Dying Fetus in May. Put these guys on cover!
Chuck BB is the illustrator of the graphic novels Black Metal, Vol. 1, 2 and 3 . For more info and art, head over to chuckbb.com
NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month? Well, here are the records that we spun most while we patiently waited for Big Tech to come knocking with an offer.
Because not all of us were spawned in the darkest recesses of hell
This Month's Mutha: Angéle Johnson Mutha of Richard Johnson of Drugs of Faith
Tell us a little about yourself.
I was born in Qamishli, Syria. I came in 1957 on a tourist visa and then changed it to a student visa. And then I studied; I got my high school diploma, two years’ associate’s degree. I graduated from a junior college, and then I transferred to a fouryear college to get my bachelor of arts, and I met my husband in that college. And we moved to Boston for him to study to get his master’s degree. And I enrolled in Boston University and got my degree from that university. If I go through everything, it will be a lot. I got married and had two children: a daughter and a son. Your son has pictures of you meeting Metallica and System of a Down. Explain!
I went with my son to all the concerts [when he was growing up], and I met Metallica twice. I saw many other hard metal groups. System of a Down we met at the Congressional office in Washington, D.C., because the main singer [Serj Tankian] was involved in working to make Turkey recognize the Armenian genocide. I bought his CD. The best time I had was going with [Richard] to those concerts. 8 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
In addition to being a respected musician in the extreme music realm, Richard is also a talented photographer. Did he exhibit an interest in that growing up?
Well, he was always interested in taking pictures, but I think he was more interested in drawing. What do you think about Richard’s nickname, “The Grindfather”?
I think it’s great. I love it. He deserves it. Between Drugs of Faith, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Enemy Soil and Triac, do you have a favorite project that he’s worked on?
My favorite is Enemy Soil. That’s when I was able to come and see what he was doing and meet all of his friends. What’s something most people don’t know about your son?
He is very smart, very talented, and he is always willing and ready to help other people. —ANDREW BONAZELLI
Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f Vanum, Legend Cave In, Heavy Pendulum Satan, Earth Infernal Dinosaur Jr., Farm Watain, The Agony & Ecstasy of Watain ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e Fu Manchu, In Search of… Acrimony, Bong On - Live Long! L7, Bricks Are Heavy Adolescents, Adolescents Screaming Trees, Sweet Oblivion ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s The Crown, Royal Destroyer Wolves in the Throne Room, Two Hunters Midnight, Let There Be Witchery Undeath, It’s Time... to Rise From the Grave Falls of Rauros, Key to a Vanishing Future ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r Hulder, Godslastering: Hymns of a Forlorn Peasantry Dance With the Dead, Driven to Madness Cavernlight, As I Cast Ruin Upon the Lens That Reveals My Every Flaw Jesus Wept, Psychedelic Degeneracy Khemmis, Deceiver ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s Deathevokation, The Chalice of Ages Fulci, Exhumed Information Blood Spore, Fungal Warfare Upon All Life Cerebral Rot, Excretion of Mortality The Locust, Safety Second, Body Last
GUEST SLAYER
---------------------------------Kirk Windstein : c r o w b a r / d o w n Judas Priest, Firepower Sick of It All, Just Look Around Plasmatics, Coup D'etat Motörhead, Orgasmatron UFO, Strangers In the Night
PHOTO BY JUSTIN REICH
MARYLAND DEATHFEST
BOOK OF THE DEAD After over two years of frustrating postponements,
Maryland Deathfest
aryland Deathfest co-promoter Ryan Taylor is cautiously basking in the glow of the completed California Deathfest, which saw 22 bands convene in Los Angeles for three days this past January, including performers from Sweden, Germany, the U.K., Chile and Austria. CDF was the first of four fests that Taylor and his longtime partner-incrime, Evan Harting, have planned for 2022, and one that crossed the finish line with no casualties and few snags. ¶ “It was our first event in 27 months, and it was nice to have something finally transpire,” Taylor says. “We were surprised at how many foreign bands we got into the country. It’s an optimistic sign moving forward, especially because with MDF there are far more foreign bands scheduled who have to deal with this whole new added layer of crap.” This includes the requirement for U.S.-bound travelers—bands and fans, mind you—to provide an often-pricey negative PCR test within 24 hours of departure (even if you’re fully vaccinated), in addition to the already labyrinthine visa process and immigration/customs requirements, not to mention the usual logistics of flight arrivals and departures. But give three cheers to Taylor and Harting for not only reigniting the engine as soon as 1 0 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
possible following two years of postponements, but going whole hog in bringing back the outdoor stages at the Edison Street parking lot to complement shows at longstanding indoor venues Rams Head Live and Baltimore Soundstage. “This year’s lineup is the 2020 lineup, plus a lot more,” Taylor enthuses. “We salvaged over 90 percent of the bands we booked for 2020, and sometime after the 2021 cancellation, we decided to bring back the Edison Lot. Because we
had more space, that allowed us to expand the lineup and not hold back in bringing in more marquee headliners.” With a lineup set to include Carcass, Dismember, the Cavalera Brothers playing classic Sepultura, Demilich, Mortician, Bloodbath, Sacramentum playing Far Away From the Sun, Deicide performing Legion, Tom Warrior doing double duty with Triptykon and Triumph of Death (performing Hellhammer material), Coroner, Vio-lence and over 80 more, ticket holders old and new are set to reap a pretty fucking sweet reward—anyone who bought a Rams Head pass before the Edison Lot was added/ announced will have access to those stages at no extra cost. This enables fans to witness what Taylor describes as, “Probably one of the most legendary gathering of bands, as far as death metal goes, in one place I’ve ever seen. It’s definitely got that element of, ‘Holy shit, how are all these bands playing in one place?!’ Plus, it’s a good way for us to say thanks to the fans for sticking by our side through the past three years.” —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO
PHOTO BY JOSH SISK
rewards fans with the ultimate death metal lineup
Y ISEMAN
TNE BY COUR
Ambient Post-Neofolk (But Not That Type of Neofolk) Blackened Core ver the last weekend, my friend
Ralph stopped through Richmond. I’ve known him since we were children, and this was the first time I’d seen him in five years. I’ve become a bit of a hermit due to a myriad of boring shit, and only started heading back into the real world last fall. We were both in a death metal band close to 30 years ago called Abominus, which you won’t find any real info on save a Metal Archives page complete with a picture from our drummer’s high school graduation. We picked up right where we left off and talked a lot about where we were and where we are as people, with some pit stops along the way to catch up about folks who have come and gone in our lives. At the end of the day, he went off to catch Immolation and I stayed in to give my daughter a bath and put her to bed. That last sentence really puts where life has taken me into perspective, and while others might lean towards discontent at that kind of shift, I’m actually pretty pleased with how things have turned out thus far. Ask me again in a few years—who knows what catastrophe will have occurred. I’d place a safe bet that it was somehow self-inflicted, but that’s for later. The last show I saw before the pandemic was Integrity at a warehouse in a shitty part of the city. It was around the time my girlfriend was going through chemo, and I felt a mixture of guilt and relief in getting out that night and watching one of my favorite bands. That was two years ago, but I can still remember conversations I had that night like it was yesterday. Strange how time works, especially when you get older. I haven’t really missed shows or social interaction since 1 2 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
then, which I guess is also strange depending on your predilection. I’ve grown more into enjoying conversation where you can actually hear each other, and no drunk shithead is spilling into you. That said, I’ve definitely missed the option of being able to wade into that kind of social soup, and I’ve certainly felt for those who either make their living by it or use it to hold onto that one shred of relief from the cosmic joke of existence, so I’m glad to see live music’s return. Doesn’t mean I’m going to come out to your show; it’s far easier to ignore emails with links to shitty demos than ignore the schmuck who’s made the fucking thing when they’re breathing at you. Walking around Richmond with Ralph and going over the changes in both of our lives since we’d last seen each other face-to-face filled me with a certain sense of gratitude that I’ve gotten to know some truly interesting and wonderful people over my life—some of which even tolerate my propensity for dramatics. I’ve come to understand how selfish I can be—how selfish we all can be—and I wish I would’ve learned that lesson before 43, but it’s better late than never. We do get to exist in a time where we are surrounded by amazing art, music and literature from hundreds upon hundreds of years of humanity—so much so that if all art were to stop right now, we would need an infinite number of lifetimes to consume even just what we find interesting. There’s a gravity in that because you realize you’ll never make it through even a sliver of it. You also have an end date. This isn’t as depressing as it sounds if you take a moment, unpack your bullshit, stop forcing everything that isn’t ready to come and, above all, be grateful for those close to you. I promise there will be jokes next month.
Brewers Get Spicy Beer Right With Mexican Chocolate Stouts
S
picy beer is tricky. Go too far with the heat and the beer becomes undrinkable. Plus, nailing a) the right amount of spice, b) a good spice flavor, and c) a balance of that spice with the beer’s other elements is not for the faint of heart. Done right, spicy beer is a revelation. It demonstrates how complex beer can be, its power to hold a bevy of contrasting notes and do so with some harmony. Quite frankly, it feels like the most badass substyle. Heat-seekers and hop-seekers unite: Spicy beer is no wallflower, relegated to plain ol’ thirst-quenching. It demands full attention with every sip. Unfortunately, too many spicy beers don’t live up to such storied status. The heat barely registers. Or it overwhelms every other note in the beer. This often goes hand-in-hand with a thinness to the beer—the beer can’t support the spice, and it tastes like fizzy, fiery water. One of the best-known spicy beers is Ballast Point’s Habanero Sculpin IPA, but personally, I’ve always found this to be a lackluster, thin version of the Sculpin IPA, with heat tacked onto the end. A recent micro-trend, though, seems to offer a channel to more reliably positive results—to fullness, good balance and flavor
Gimme fuel, gimme fire Stone Brewing’s Xocoveza and Cigar City Hunahpu know how to spice up your beer game
that kicks you in the teeth, but in a good way. Mexican chocolate stouts aren’t new: Stone Brewing’s Xocoveza debuted back in 2014. It features coffee, pasilla peppers, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and chocolate, and boasts a big fan base. Cigar City’s Mayan-named Hunahpu, an 11%-er brewed with cacao nibs, Madagascar vanilla, cinnamon and two different peppers, has its own festival for its release every March. Lately, though, some take on Mexican hot chocolate or Mexican chocolate cake seems like the go-to stout interpretation for a whole crowd of breweries. We’ve come to expect five or six out of 10 tap handles dedicated to various IPAs in any given taproom; as of fall 2021, it’s no surprise to see the stout slot occupied by some combination of chocolate and heat, often achieved through nods to Mexican cuisine, from drinking cocoa to baked goods to mole sauce. It’s no wonder this substyle is experiencing a little burst of ubiquity. Taking inspiration from different chocolate-plus-pepper iterations comes with a built-in bouquet of flavors and aromas. Plus, the richness of the chocolate and the fullness of a stout provides a nice backbone for the spice, making a real argument that stouts may be the best-suited style for adding heat to beer.
In Brooklyn, TALEA Beer Co. brewed the Spicy Hot Chocolate Stout, “the perfect fireside stout inspired by Mexican hot chocolate.” Cacao, cinnamon, vanilla, coffee, lactose and three types of peppers complete the profile. Connecticut’s New England Brewing Co. has the Mexican Chocolate Cake Imperial Stout Trooper, chocolate and vanilla sweetness spiced up by cinnamon and set ablaze by ancho and habanero peppers. Not too far away, Bright Ideas Brewing in Massachusetts has the Aztec Winter Stout with cinnamon, cocoa nibs and ancho chiles. Pennsylvania’s Warwick Farm Brewing Molé Stout and Colorado’s Copper Kettle Brewing Company Mexican Chocolate Stout both suit with chocolate, cinnamon and different chile peppers. Notable exceptions like Cigar City’s Hunahpu aside, there’s often a pattern: Spicy chocolate stouts proliferate in colder climates. What will cozy up your insides faster and more satisfyingly than a rich, velvety stout with some literal heat? These stouts know how to layer, too—the spice in the aroma, then the chocolatey sweetness upon that first sip, giving way to spice flavor, and rounding out with lingering heat. If breweries want to present a spicy beer well, especially where the weather chills, this is the way to go.
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NITE
NITE
Blackened heavy metallers are more neon nights than funeral moons
S
an francisco’s nite strike denim and leather differently in heavy metal’s near-ageless roar. More the fantastical world of Somewhere in Time-era Maiden than the neon-lit gloss of Turbo-era Priest. But there’s more to NITE than unornamented homage. The brainchild of Van Labrakis, the quartet—featuring Dawnbringer guitarist Scott Hoffman, Serpents of Dawn drummer Patrick Crawford and Wild Hunt guitarist Avinash Mittur—brazenly append black metal vocals to their soaring, open-world gallop. Much in the same way Abbath and Demonaz summoned epicness through I’s sole long-player Between Two Worlds or Tribulation exotically harnessed the bombast of Brave New World, NITE also folds the two disparate styles into a singularly distinctive sound. ¶ “We want to remind people what heavy metal was about when we were growing up,” says Labrakis, recalling the sunlit dust from NWOBHM’s halcyon days. “I think we might have forgotten something. That starts with me. Why did I like heavy metal when I was 12? What was it that made it special to me?
1 4 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
We’re trying to answer those questions with NITE. Heavy metal can be a lot of things—not just horror and gore—to a lot of people. It’s a beautiful genre of music. There are a lot of amazing worlds out there. We want to be part of that creation process—to create a world that people can find solace in.” Labrakis is consciously steering NITE away from heavy metal’s gruesome tropes into a sci-fi/fantasy realm built on real-world (personal) and historical (mythology) archetypes. In that regard, new album Voices of the Kronian Moon (Season of Mist) hard-pivots from debut Darkness Silence Mirror Flame. Musically, NITE have also grown more formidable. Based on a trio of singles—“Kronian Moon,” “Acheron” and “Edge of the Night”—the group’s winged, blackened heavy metal is congenial upfront and restorative over repeat visits. NITE’s strong melodic sense can
also be heard on “Heliopolis,” “The Trident” and “Edge of the Night,” with its alluring ’70s inflection. “To me, melody on guitar is similar to a human voice,” says Labrakis. “It’s most effective when it’s simple. Every song on the new album has a very simple melodic message. We’re going for a sound that is very approachable, yet is still heavy. I think simplicity is lost in a lot of heavy metal. It’s easier for the audience to connect to simplicity—like what Ghost are doing. I wouldn’t say we’re trying to write songs for stadiums, but we are going for a simpler-is-better approach. That’s why the melodies are the way they are.” Voices of the Kronian Moon may be unconventional in its wild-eyed theorem, but it’s rare outliers like this that have the inertia to push us collectively forward. NITE have crafted a modern-day classic. Guitar cognoscenti, take heed! —CHRIS DICK
GGGOLDDD
GGGOLDDD
C
hange has been a matter of course for Dutch band GGGOLDDD since their first EP and album were released a decade ago. Their discography is a swirling kaleidoscope of pop, post-punk and obtuse rock music. Vocalist Milena Eva’s confrontational singing and tar-black sense of humor tie the disparate threads together. ¶ The changes are even more severe on their fifth full-length, This Shame Should Not Be Mine. For starters, the band retooled their name with extra G’s and D’s, making them easier to find online (try searching “Gold Band” on Google and let the jewelry ads wash over you). Also, their instrumentation has embraced electronica while their lyrics have taken a turn for the cathartic. ¶ “Thomas and I had already started experimenting with electronics,” Eva writes, explaining their highly synthetic newest songs. “We wanted to change things up, and we decided to start writing music in a more primitive and naive way by using instruments we didn’t really use before.” The Thomas she refers to is Thomas Sciarone, her songwriting partner and former member of occult rockers and Decibel Tour alumni the Devil’s Blood. 1 6 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
“Normally, we would write the foundation of a song on guitar and vocals,” Eva explains. “With this album, we started with a beat or a bass synth and we would record it straight away. Adding layers of melodies and other electronics on top of it.” The results sound more like something you might find on a trip-hop record from the mid-’90s than diabolical rock ‘n’ roll. That said, Eva cites black metal, hip-hop and contemporary electronica like Arca as influences on their “posteverything” approach. This Shame Should Not Be Mine moves past genre musically just as it tries to reconcile past traumas lyrically. The album’s theme explores Eva’s personal experience with sexual assault. “I had been living my life like there was no time to waste,” she notes. “Always working on something. When, all of a sudden, I had all the time in the world because of the pandemic, there
was no way for me to run or hide anymore. My mind filled up with this horror story I lived through. It was there all the time.” According to Eva, writing This Shame Should Not Be Mine allowed her to process her assault: “I tried to write new songs and all these words came out; they helped me understand what I experienced. In its entirety, it’s about being vulnerable and telling what it meant for me to be going through such a trauma— it’s really important to me that I show all these layers to the trauma.” Eva’s trademark dark humor and wit are still there, but these are her most emotionally forthright songs yet. She hopes that they can offer succor to her fellow survivors. “It could’ve helped me back then when it just happened to me if somebody would’ve told me I wasn’t the only one,” she offers. “I hope it can bring comfort to others.” —JOSEPH SCHAFER
PHOTO BY SZILVESZTER MAKO
Post-everything Dutch duo rename, reinvent and regain
THE SPIRIT
Melodic black/death duo’s vast array of influences is galaxy-wide
OF
clarity and galactic structures, the third black/ death culmination for the Spirit, storms an existential Teutonic clatter. The German now duo executes a spot-on spasm of progressive curse and headbang: clean, sharp, complex. 2018 introduction Sounds From the Vortex and 2020 follow-up Cosmic Terror belch a blackened, dieselburning necrosis decrying mankind’s pettiness, but the band’s latest cosmic caw rides a gleaming marvel of German engineering. ¶ “German engineering, that’s a genius description,” laughs singer/guitarist/bassist Matthias Trautes, who pilots the Spirit alongside drummer Manuel Steitz. “We worked on this album a lot in terms of different time signatures compared to the previous albums, and that had a big effect on how I write songs. That enriched our overall sound and gave the music more depth.” ¶ Particularly sleek, the frontman’s symphony of strings—bonesaw riffs, doom harmonies, ’70s guitar god solos—chime at every interval like Trautes ringing the proverbial bell. ¶ “I would start with Ritchie Blackmore,” 1 8 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
he ventures when asked about axe influenza. “I was 15 when I watched on television the Come Hell or High Water show from Deep Purple. I was so impressed—and especially with Blackmore—that I started learning guitar. Second one I have to mention is Andrew Latimer of Camel. He has the most wonderful tone, and it’s incredible how much feeling and emotion he puts in every note. I got to see them live a couple of years ago—one of the best concerts of my life. Believe it or not, every Spirit album so far contains a tribute to Camel.” Guitar/drum pulls “Repression” and “Arcane Wanderer” populate infinite replays crowned by closing instrumental “Laniakea,” whose Tangerine Dream inlay ends Of Clarity and Galactic Structures inhabiting its title. “I was reading about the Laniakea Supercluster and tried transforming the pictures in my mind into music,” reveals our
correspondent. “I’m a huge fan of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, so I thought a sequencer would be perfect to create a meditative outer space feeling. Credit the drums on this song. Manuel grooves with so much feeling, always gentle in the background, but that gives the song its charm.” Spanning “Cosmic Fear” on Sounds From the Vortex to Cosmic Terror itself, the Spirit didn’t need a pandemic to blacken their worldview. “It didn’t have a positive effect on my position towards people in general, that’s for sure,” concludes Trautes. “But with or without [the] pandemic, with every year that I’m getting older, I feel more and more alienated by humankind. The amount of stupidity and ignorance in the world brings to mind something Einstein allegedly said: ‘Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, but I’m not sure about the universe.’” —RAOUL HERNANDEZ
PHOTO BY ANNE C. SWALLOW
THE SPIRIT
DRUG CHURCH
DRUG CHURCH Come on down and get saved by alt-rocking post-hardcore pummelers
P
atrick kindlon, frontman for Drug Church, is worried he’s only got a few more years to convincingly deliver the visceral live shows he’s known for. And he kept that in mind during the writing of the band’s fourth full-length. ¶ “I wanted a really aggressive record before I look stupid performing it,” he says. “But that’s not what I got.” ¶ In fact, this “highly melodic” album pulled the hardcore kidturned-hardcore adult even farther from his comfort zone. But melodies don’t exactly mean easy listening on Hygiene. ¶ From the opening of “Fun’s Over,” the album mixes gut-punch post-hardcore with the addictive hooks of ’90s alternative, a perfect vehicle for Kindlon’s abrasive ranting and antihero anthems. And these songs continue his bizarre and impressive method of listening to a track five times in the studio, then immediately writing the lyrics and recording them, a creative blitz that gives me anxiety even just typing about it. 2 0 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
“It’s the only way I can do it,” he says. “I think it’s the knowing that I’m wasting money. And I do appreciate that we have bigger budgets, so if it takes two hours to figure something out, it’s not the worst thing that ever happened. When we were a younger band, I’d have to write the lyrics and record a song in 40 minutes.” Kindlon has a very simple focus on what he sees as a prerequisite to calling yourself a musician: “Your job is to record music and then perform it.” The past couple years did a good job fucking up those plans, but the band is still releasing this album less than a year since their EP Tawny. “We recorded more than most bands during the pandemic,” Kindlon says, “and we held off on releasing music when we couldn’t tour. Now it probably seems like
there’s been more than half a year of singles being dripped out and promotion. But as long as people aren’t sick of us, what’s the harm?” So, now that Drug Church are cautiously optimistic they can hit the road and perform the songs off Hygiene live, Kindlon admits he’s happy with how the record came out. And if it brings in a bunch of new fans who don’t know who Sick of It All are, he won’t mind. “Trying to control who loves you is something I’ve done at various points in my life, regarding an audience,” he admits. “I’ve always wanted to relate to them. But I was wrong to want that. The audience relates to my work and I don’t get to know them. They come to a show because they like what I create. And I think you have to be grateful that anyone loves you at all.” —SHANE MEHLING
DEVIL MASTER
DEVIL MASTER
Philadelphia black metal vampunks weather the plague to emerge with their strongest spell yet
P
hilly-based black metal/punk band Devil Master first emerged in 2016 with a self-titled demo tape that conjured a singular sound from the likes of Japanese D-beat, death rock and first-wave black metal. For all their devilish charm and their undeniable chops—plus their ghoulish live presence and the copious amounts of cobwebs that ensconced their performances—Devil Master had sincerely stumbled upon a recipe for success. By the time the pandemic brought their and everyone else’s world to a screeching halt, the group had released their debut album on Relapse and were poised for total underworld domination. ¶ “We’ve crossed the fiery plane as a band and endured to make this record happen,” writes rhythm guitarist and founding member Infernal Moonlight Apparition, the record in question being long-awaited sophomore album Ecstasies of Never Ending Night. Recently trimmed to a quartet, Devil Master vocalist Disembody has taken up handling the bass as well, and a new drummer
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who’s replacing their keyboardist has also joined the fold. According to Infernal Moonlight Apparition, “A fair number have moved on to other endeavors, while we have grown to include the services of new spirits. Taking over for drum and keyboard duties is Festering Terror in Deepest Catacomb. For those who know, his pedigree in music speaks for itself…” They may have lost some members, but Devil Master are decidedly tighter and more powerful than ever. The sheer existence of this new album can attest to that. As Infernal Moonlight Apparition explains, “This time around, we employed the expertise of Pete DeBoer for all recording and engineering duties. We have always been huge fans of Pete’s work and his reverence for the old ways is unparalleled. We recorded the entire album analog to tape in MilkBoy Studios here in Philadelphia. This was
a huge leap for us as a band, as you know the amount of time and dedication it takes to record anything analog is intense.” As for the record itself, Infernal Moonlight Apparition tells us, “We like to think of [Ecstasies of Never Ending Night] as the natural progression of our sound. A lot of the material on this new record is stuff we started creating as early as our demo era. We have tried to be as thoughtful as possible in mapping out the trajectory of our music even from the beginning. Given the time put into it and [the] influence of our new lineup, it’s a culmination of our newfound experiences and honing of abilities. Rather than think about what we could do differently than our debut, we wanted to see what we could do more of. Ecstasies is musical decadence incarnate! It’s the next level for us as a band.” —DUTCH PEARCE
NO GRAVE D E TE R R E D BY
Death metal embalmers
UNDEATH
continue their whirlwind ascent with big, bludgeoning choruses sto ry by
MPAY BIEBLE L 24 : A R I 2L022022:1 D: EDCEI C
SEAN FRASIER •
photo by
ERRICK EASTERDAY
W
hen you get signed, that’s when the real work begins.” ¶ Prosthetic
Records U.S. Label Manager Steve Joh uttered those wise words on a congratulatory call to the newest death metal project reeking up their roster, Undeath. On the other end of the line, Undeath growler Alexander Jones understood the lesson doubled as a clarification of expectations. ¶ “Once you sign the dotted line, you can’t sit back and rest on your laurels and feel your problems have been solved,” Jones says. “Now more eyes are on you and you need to keep grinding.” ¶ Signing with Prosthetic after their Sentient Autolysis demo ignited an explosive ascent for Undeath. In 2018 they were a new trio calling Rochester, NY home. From the start, band mastermind Kyle Beam wanted to keep the project simple. No micro-genres, no riding the coattails of underground fads. Then and now, Corpsegrinder-era Cannibal Corpse remains the band’s North Star.
Since that phone call, Undeath rushed to finalize their 2020 debut, Lesions of a Different Kind. It was greeted with acclaim, luring fans already chomping into the OSDM revival of bands like Necrot and Gatecreeper. They expanded to a fivepiece. Undeath completed the longest tour of any of their lives as month-long support for the Black Dahlia Murder. After all that, Mr. Joh’s words still ring clear and especially loud. “All five of us come from DIY punk, hardcore and indie rock backgrounds,” Jones shares. “We’ve always had a mentality where nobody will work harder for you than yourself. You have to pound the pavement and not care about the money. We have all made music nobody cared about, but we felt compelled to release. We’re always going to work hard as fuck.” That hard work carried into the studio as Undeath returned to work with engineer Scoops Dardaris at Headroom Philadelphia. Deadlines necessitated speeding through recording for Lesions. But they literally camped at the studio for two weeks for their new record, It’s Time… to Rise From the Grave. They tracked the entirety of each day, worming their way through the songs. Jones lubricated his throat with cheap Wild Turkey whiskey and belted out his vocal tracks. Then each night they crawled into their sleeping bags right on the studio floor. That might sound like roughing it, but it beats cramming recording into a stressful long weekend. “Having more time in the studio is just insanely helpful,” adds guitarist/lyricist Beam. “It gives you way more wiggle room on things like trying a few different tones and mic placements for each instrument before settling. And you aren’t so pressured to be doing non-stop takes for 12 hours just to meet the deadline. Next
session I’d love to have even more time so more spontaneous ideas can happen.” It’s Time… to Rise From the Grave shuns spontaneity and improv by design. It’s lean and mean—a polished killing machine. If you got decapitated by Lesions and loved every second of it, this album is for you. “Fiend for Corpses” grins through the splatter with lyrics that literally spell out D-E-A-D like a (Meat)Hooked on Phonics call and response. “Head Splattered in Seven Ways” isn’t just a song about desecrating noggins. It’s a reminder that Undeath revel in death metal’s barbarity with a purity that embraces gory escapism without treating the genre like a winking joke. They keep it simple and familiar on purpose. “I feel like we didn’t really want to get cute with the sophomore record, where we start adding synthesizers and 15-minute-long songs and shit like that,” stresses Jones. “We’ve always had a modus operandi to make death metal songs we would like listening to as death metal fans. We really enjoyed what we did on Lesions, and we wanted to continue that with big hooks, big choruses and big riffs.
“It’s all about getting to the point as fast as possible,” Jones continues. “I think of all my favorite Autopsy, Cannibal Corpse and Bolt Thrower songs. They get into the chorus within a minute and a half. We don’t want to cocktease people. We know you want the big riff. And we want to play it as much as you want to hear it.” “To me, the best death metal is something like the fusion of high and low art,” offers Beam. “Or academia and beer-crushing jams. Metric modulations and songs about killing people, if you will.” Undeath are unapologetically themselves: self-described greasy, degenerate, drunk upstate New York gamers with a love for death metal that permeates every minute of this interview. There’s no tough-guy posturing, and no fears about how their balance of heaviness and pop song structures might be perceived. When death metal bands first flirted with relative approachability, fan disapproval was vicious. But nearly 30 years later, there’s the benefit of extra perspective. Death metal didn’t die when Morbid Angel released Domination, and it ain’t dying now because Undeath’s song structures are more digestible. Just ask Jones, who was instructed by a scene vet not to listen past Necroticism in the Carcass discography when he was a teen. “Then in college someone played me Heartwork and it was amazing,” Jones laughs. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, what else have I been missing all these years?’ I’ve noticed that in metal the idea that bands are selling out isn’t as pervasive now. Fans don’t care when bands go for it as much, as long as it’s not an egregious radio rock single. There’s nothing wrong with a band honing their songcraft and songwriting ability and trying to do more with the tools that they have.”
We don’t want to
COCK-TEASE PEOPLE.
We know you want the big riff. And we want to play it as much as you want to hear it. Alexander Jones
D EDCEI C BIEBLE :L A: PMRAY IL 2021 2 : 25
BODY BLOOD and
Nearly 25 years after their last supper, Markus Johnsson reinvents melodic death metal cult faves
EUCHARIST as a black metal powerhouse story by SARAH KITTERINGHAM MPAY BIEBLE L 26 : A R I 2L022022:1 D: EDCEI C
E
ucharist could have easily sunk beneath the waves of obscurity. Formed in 1989 in the municipality of Veddige, Sweden, the on-again/off-again act seemed destined to disappear; yet against all odds, Eucharist are back. Guitarist, vocalist and now lyricist Markus Johnsson is the only remaining original member. Their sound, defined by its unusually progressive and mesmerizing melodic death metal edge, is now conclusively black metal. Their third studio album—the first in 25 years—is titled I Am the Void and spans a walloping 77 minutes. It follows in the same exploratory tradition of 1993’s A Velvet Creation and 1997’s Mirrorworlds, and sustains Eucharist’s legendary status in unusual ways. But really, what could be more fitting for such a distinctive band?
“The album was recorded after only about six have done differently—I didn’t even play the months of hard work,” begins Johnsson, who guitar on A Velvet Creation! Not many people know started I Am the Void in 2016 alongside drumthis. I had sworn never to enter the studio with mer, lyricist and longtime Arch Enemy member Einarsson again. So, I taught Einarsson all my Daniel Erlandsson. The duo formed the band guitar parts before the guys entered the studio in 1989 and both members took part in a 2016 in 1993, and then he recorded all my stuff except reunion show in Varberg, Sweden; it was there for my solos, the acoustic guitars and the vocals, they decided to record the third studio album. which I came to the studio for. Einarsson had “We were in agreement of one thing—if we a very stiff and mechanic[al] playing style, were to create another album, it was to be darker which is partly why the Velvet album sounds and with a more sinister atmosphere. Partly so dull and… stiff. because we’ve never done it, but mainly because “Of course it is often difficult when it comes we both grew up on black metal and, despite the to agreeing on certain areas when [your band fact that we chose to play a melodic kind of prohas] several musicians, but we used to get very gressive death metal with harmonies, we always well on in the past lineup, except for me and listened to and had black metal in our lives.” Einarsson; mine and Daniel’s relation was So, writing commenced… and abruptly came always very intense and fruitful, and there was to a halt. definitely a dynamic to the group in the past “Daniel suddenly called to me and simply lineups,” continues Johnsson, who ruminates dropped the bomb by telling me that he wanted on how that magnetism not only resulted in out just like that,” Johnsson recalls. “After a Eucharist’s dynamic sound, but strongly contribmoment of silence, I asked him why, and he uted to his anxiety over releasing I Am the Void shortly replied, ‘It wasn’t fun any longer,’ sans Erlandsson. and he ‘didn’t find any “Daniel mainly wrote joy in rehearsing the the lyrics in the past, material.’ We hung up but the two of us were so and I never really found alike in character—or out his real intentions at least I felt that way— behind this decision. that when I sung his “When he decided to lyrics, or created music to leave, I stood there with them, I felt as if it were the pieces of this album my own words and expein my hands and I didn’t riences,” the bandleader know which way to go explains. “We were very from there,” Johnsson close in the past. Daniel’s continues. “Time began lyrics are very poetic and to pass by, and I thought beautiful, like you say, about the album a lot, and he chose nature, just and I felt it was difficult as I do myself, as a tool to to simply bury it, which describe certain mental MARKUS JOHNSSON I was in the process of processes and experiences doing… I couldn’t imagine that take place within or another drummer, so why around ourselves.” bother with it, I thought. But the more time that It is a strength of will that resulted in I passed, I strongly felt that this album was too Am the Void finally seeing the light of day. good to be forgotten.” Surprising in its power and consistency, the Per Gyllenbäck of Regain Records helped record is hypnotic and melodic, with layers of reinvigorate the process. Today, Eucharist is distortion and delay giving tracks like “Goddess composed of drummer Simon “Bloodhammer” of Filth (Tlazolteotl)” an utterly unusual vibe. Schilling (Marduk) and bassist Joel Johnsson, (As a side note, play that track and “The Womb” Markus’ nephew. It’s a far cry from the tumulby Horrendous side by side and prepare for your tuous days of debut album A Velvet Creation jaw to drop). Of course, it evokes the glory days (1993), which, while rightfully revered, was of Gothenburg metal, but also abruptly pushes recorded by 14- to 16-year-old boys experiencing, the band to the head of that since-stagnated in real time, the peak of the Gothenburg meloscene and into a shiny new future. It’s an death scene unfolding around them. Indeed, utterly fitting continuation of a band whose Eucharist members were trading demo tapes debut and follow-up albums already sound so with Dissection and privy to the rehearsal room distinct from one another. shenanigans At the Gates experienced during “When it comes to the departure of Daniel, The Red in the Sky Is Ours. of course it is sad and affected me, but I decided “Concerning the band’s instability, I can say to move on anyway—it was that or nothing. that my own and Thomas Einarsson’s personaliI’ve made most of the material for Eucharist in ties didn’t click too well,” Johnsson admits. “We the past, so I figured that I alone should have often argued loudly in the rehearsal room and, enough of what it takes to carry the flag onto in fact—and this has to do with what I would the next station.”
The more time that passed, I strongly felt that this album was
TOO GOOD TO BE FORGOTTEN.
NOCTE OBDUCTA Irrlicht
German black metal. With their 13th album „Irrlicht“, Nocte Obducta continue where „Nektar“ left off but in an unpolished yet expected highly lyrical manner. Honest and incomparably more ruthless than in the past, they lose hope maybe once too often. NOW AVAILABLE IN THE US!
ROTTEN CASKET First Nail in the Casket
Ultra old school death metal mixed with crust. With members from ASPHYX, SODOM, DISABUSED. Martin van Drunen on Vocals! Now available as handnumbered digi, CD and LP!
V/HAZE MIASMA Nebula
Progressive metal with an appealing mix of genres. For fans of Sólstafir, Emperor, Ihsahn, Cult of Luna... EP only available as numbered digipak. When sold out it is sould out!
IMPERIUM DEKADENZ Procella Vadens / Meadows of Nostalgia
Beautiful and heavy double vinyl releases of these two great black metal albums! „Procella Vadens“ for the first time on vinyl distributed by
promoted and distributed by
supreme chaos records ∞ passion for unique music supremechaos.de
D EDCEI C BIEBLE :L A: PMRAY IL 2021 2 : 27
Nothing to
Lose NEARLY 30 YEARS AFTER THEIR LAST LP, BAY AREA THRASH HEROES
Vio-lence STILL FEEL THE FIRE
IN
STORY BY KEVIN STEWART-PANKO addition to authoring one—if not two—of the Greatest Thrash Albums
of all Time™ in 1988’s Eternal Nightmare and 1990’s Oppressing the Masses, Vio-lence have also pushed boundaries in the areas of teasing and anticipation with loose reunion talk going back as far as 2001. First, it was when 4/5 of the original lineup convened for Thrash of the Titans in support of the Chucks—Billy and Schuldiner—both of whom had then-recently gone public with cancer diagnoses. That configuration, featuring Attitude Adjustment’s Ray Vegas replacing original guitarist Robb Flynn, lasted until 2003. The issuing of the behemoth Blood and Dirt DVD in 2006 and the original lineup uniting to buy back the rights to Eternal Nightmare around the same time had the hopeful hoping something more was in the works. But with guitarist Phil Demmel busy slinging strings in Machine Head from 2003-’18 and MH leader Flynn’s insistence that everyone’s focus be 100 percent on the band at hand, Vio-lence got pushed to the back burner. ¶ “In 2001, we destroyed at that benefit, did some other successful shows and there was a huge demand for us to get back together,” says Demmel. “The intent was to get together and do a record, but once I got the Machine Head position, I had to abandon Vio-lence.” 28 : M A PAY R I 2L022022:1 D: EDCEI C BIEBLE L
Another health crisis—vocalist Sean Killian being diagnosed with stage four liver cirrhosis in the summer of 2017 and undergoing a life-saving transplant the following spring—brought the original members under one roof for Killian on Command: An Evening of Vio-lence. at which various Bay Area luminaries joined the band to play the hits in support of the frontman’s medical expenses. Despite Killian watching from the wings, not well enough to offer up his unprecedented timbre and definitive style, the spark was lit. It was the vocalist who wanted to cobble together a version of Vio-lence for a gig as a gesture of appreciation for the support. And with Demmel having just walked away from Machine Head, the idea was set in motion, even if the guitarist had his own doubts about his friend and bandmate. “A month after I quit Machine Head, Sean texted me saying, ‘Hey, let’s do some shows and have some fun.’ I couldn’t believe it when he
SEAN [KILLIAN]’S GOING TO BE 58 THIS YEAR, I’M GOING TO BE 55, SO WE’RE NOT PILING INTO A VAN TO PLAY
Des Moines, Santa Fe or El Paso on a Sunday night. PHIL DEMMEL
messaged me. He was in such poor health that I didn’t even think he was talking about doing Vio-lence shows. He’d had his surgery and complications afterwards, but he healed and fought through it. You can’t do Vio-lence without Sean, and after I first saw him and the condition he was in, I didn’t know what to think. Plus, I didn’t know about dredging all that up; those bands were for that time, and I was OK with the closure I had with Vio-lence that I didn’t have to bring it up. But this was mostly his idea and it’s pretty amazing.” It wasn’t until 2019 and a weekend of soldout shows in Oakland, their first overseas appearance at Belgium’s Alcatraz Festival and another weekend of sold-out “jeans, T-shirts and half-stacks with no backdrops and people flying everywhere” shows with Sacred Reich that the idea of writing new material was put into motion. The result is Let the World Burn, a fivesong, Metal Blade-released EP of the first new music since 1993’s grunge-tinged Nothing to Gain,
and the logical successor to the incendiary furor of the band’s classic era. It barrels along with precise and incisive razor-sharp riffing as purveyed by Demmel and hired-hand guitarist Bobby Gustafson (ex-Overkill) and bassist Christian Olde Wolbers (ex-Fear Factory), not to mention iconoclastic vocal phrasing and battle cry choruses from Killian’s gullet. “I didn’t want to do a full record,” asserts Demmel. “I wanted a handful of songs—which is all anyone has the attention span for these days anyway—that rabbit-punch people in the face, get the fuck out and leave people wondering what just happened. Me and [drummer] Perry [Strickland] just got in the room and started hammering out songs. He hadn’t played seriously in a while and it took him time to learn my language, when I’m throwing things out there and how to retain them. He’s so high-energy and ADHD! He’s like the Tasmanian Devil and Animal; his attention is everywhere, and [he’s]
the type of drummer who reacts to the song instead of knowing the map and when the turn is coming up instead of swinging into a turn at the last minute. It took a lot of time. This record is basically me and him in a room learning how to count, walk and drive again together.” With three major hurdles traversed—getting back together, releasing new music and coming out the back end of a pandemic intact—Vio-lence are set on enjoying the fruits of their patient labor. And part of that is not saddling themselves with lofty goals or aspirations. “I don’t know if we ever had any set goals,” Demmel muses. “I know we want to play cool shows, festivals, one-offs and do short runs along the coasts. Sean’s going to be 58 this year, I’m going to be 55, so we’re not piling into a van to play Des Moines, Santa Fe or El Paso on a Sunday night, and there’s no need to. We want to do all the fun stuff we want to and enjoy being in the twilight of our musical careers.” D EDCEI C BIEBLE :L A: PMRAY IL 2021 2 : 29
Unbroken Hope N O RTH E A ST BL ACK M ETALLERS
Falls of Rauros
L E T TH E R E B E ( A LI T TLE) M ORE LI GH T story by BRAD SANDERS • photo by RAY CAPIZZO
MPAY BIEBLE L 30 : A R I 2L022022:1 D: EDCEI C
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very Falls of Rauros album has tweaked the template of the one
that came before it, but Key to a Vanishing Future feels like a particularly bold evolution beyond the sweeping atmospheric black metal of 2019’s Patterns in Mythology. ¶ “It was exciting for us to break some restrictions we had on ourselves,” vocalist and guitarist Aaron Charles says. “We always know what the boundary is for what one of our songs or riffs can be, and we kind of expanded that boundary. So, that’s exciting. It’s also a little unnerving. You don’t really know if you’re going to drop the ball, if it’s too far out of our wheelhouse.” ¶ Rest assured, Key to a Vanishing Future is not too far out of the Falls of Rauros wheelhouse. Black metal is still the beating heart of the Mainers’ sound, but they’ve augmented it here with fearless excursions into prog and alt-rock, as well as a few well-placed nods to the folk music that has so often served as a guiding light for the band. Some of the most thrilling moments on the album come when those stylistic detours interact in surprising ways.
“In folk music, the amount of repetitions of the chord progression will just be written to fit the amount of words,” guitarist Jordan Guerette explains, citing the work of Pete Seeger as an example. “In that style of music, there’s odd time signatures because the message matters more than the song structure. So, at least at one point, we were like, ‘If the melody means that we’re going to do something a little weirder, then that’s where we’re going to take it.’ Maybe with this record, we were like, ‘Let’s go further with that,’ so that’s the prog vibe.” Another thing that stands out about Key to a Vanishing Future is the relative brevity of its songs. Every Falls of Rauros album prior to this one has at least one track that crosses the 10-minute mark, but Key’s longest tune is the eight-minute mini-epic “Daggers in Floodlight.” That was fully intentional, the result of a self-imposed (and sometimes painful) restriction on song lengths. “The last song on the record had a whole section that we cut, and I was internally distraught about it for a little while,” Guerette says of “Poverty Hymn,” a stirring, poignant anthem that ended up being the shortest track on the record. It’s also one of the best songs the band has ever written, and a compelling case for the rigorous self-editing they put themselves through. Bassist Evan Lovely posits that the focus on succinctness may have even led to some of the album’s proggy twists and turns. “A longer [song] length gives you a lot of options to do a lot of things with the riffs,” he says. “If it’s shorter, you end up playing a little bit more with the structure, I think, because you have less time with the song, and you need to do more, more quickly. So, I think it stands out a little bit more because we’re a little more rushed to get to the next part.” Key’s odd time signatures, tangled arrangements and dexterous performances don’t stand in the way of the thing that lives at the center of every Falls of Rauros song—a powerful and
immediate sense of emotionality. That comes through most strongly in the conversational, almost Floydian lead guitar passages and in Charles’ expressive howl, but it’s present in everything the band does. “We have talked about it throughout the years, that [the emotion] is the most important thing,” Guerette says. “I don’t know if we had many conversations about it when we were writing this record, but at this point it’s one of the ground rules. There’s a certain emotional depth that I think none of us express in any other part of our lives, so this is the place for it. Whether we’re like [mimes furious, chugging guitar part] or not, we still want that emotion to be the focal point.” Lyrically, Key to a Vanishing Future is a meditation on the way we inherit our world from the generations that came before us—environmentally, culturally, biologically. As you might suspect, Charles’ prognosis is negative. Key was written and recorded in total isolation at the peak of the pandemic, and some of its world-weariness can be attributed to that fact. Charles also cites the overall political climate (and actual climate) as contributing factors. His melancholic—albeit abstract—lyrics betray his ultimate pessimism, but he’s not completely without hope. If he was, would he bother improving his craft? Would he spend his limited time on this earth making music and putting it out into the world? “There is some element of hope throughout, some vague idea that things could improve, but it’s always kind of buried beneath a blanket level of defeated-ness,” Charles says. “But I think coming from all of us who are huge music fans, we’ve all experienced how profoundly music can affect you and your relationship with the world and just how you feel about life. It’s huge.” “It helps me feel connected to the world when we’re intensely isolated,” Guerette echoes. “And then, when we’re actually touring and stuff, that community is really important. That sense of belonging. We’re lucky to get that in our band.” D EDCEI C BIEBLE :L A: PMRAY IL 2021 2 : 31
THE
LONG WINDING ROAD AND
E CULT of LUNA Swedish post-metal luminaries find inspiration both far away from and close to home story by JEFF TREPPEL
MPAY BIEBLE L 32 : A R I 2L022022:1 D: EDCEI C
ver since we started writing after [the 2016 collaboration with Julie Christmas] Mariner and decided to take another approach to the writing process, we set off some kind of creative tsunami, and we are still riding on that wave,” Johannes Persson enthuses. ¶ Back in 2018, Cult of Luna decamped to Ocean Sound Recording in Norway, a studio located on the tip of a tiny island on the western edge of the country. Thanks to the picture windows lining the building, musicians find themselves surrounded by a panoramic view of the tranquil Scandinavian coastline—a stark contrast to the usual dark, dim rooms of your average recording studio. Those fertile sessions provided the Swedish post-metal sextet with the material that formed the basis for 2019’s A Dawn to Fear, 2021’s The Raging River EP, and now their ninth full-length, The Long Road North.
It might sound depressing, but you realize that
YOU ARE GETTING OLDER, YOUR PARENTS ARE GOING TO DIE, so family and closeness to family starts to mean much, much more. JOHANNES PERSSON
“We have so much material,” the vocalist/guitarist continues. “After the first recording session in Norway, we got out of there with two and half hours of music. I’m not saying all that was the best quality—some of it we just threw away because it didn’t have the enormous quality that we want—but there are definitely some ideas that we kept. In fact, some of those ideas and even some of those recordings are both on the EP and this album, too. And we’ve been writing ever since. We are blessed to have not only me as songwriter, but a lot of people in the band who can contribute with ideas both when it comes to writing and arranging stuff. There are still a lot of things that haven’t been realized yet.” As befits its origins, The Long Road North feels less claustrophobic than some of Cult of Luna’s previous releases—especially the Vertikal full-length and EP that immediately preceded Mariner, records inspired by both the film Metropolis and Persson’s growing disillusionment with urban living. Those records were designed around the theme. This time, the band went the opposite direction: “After 15 years of an approach to writing albums where we started off with a narrative, a story, and then we kind of adapted everything around that narrative, when we started writing after Mariner, we took this more intuitive approach—we let the music decide the narrative.” This particular narrative revolves around ideas of journeys, nature and returning home.
Songs like “Full Moon” have a folksy western twang to them, evoking more rural pastures. Even the big, crushing centerpieces like “Cold Burn” and the title track contain an expansiveness that comes from more than just the song length. In fact, Persson says he was determined to get the title track on this record since it was one of the first songs they wrote as part of the “creative tsunami,” and thus the start of their current journey. It’s not a big stretch to say that this more evocative subject matter was inspired by Persson’s move back to his native Umeå, a town up the E4 from his previous digs in Stockholm—in other words, he literally took a long road north. “I realized that I gradually changed what I valued in life,” he explains. “It happened so slowly. I didn’t wake up one day and realize, ‘Fuck Stockholm.’ I didn’t [suddenly] realize that I didn’t feel at home here. It was a gradual process. It’s going to sound so cheesy and cliché, but becoming a father, for example, that changes a lot of things; it changes what you prioritize in life and what you value in life. “It might sound depressing, but you realize that you are getting older, your parents are going to die, so family and closeness to family starts to mean much, much more. After a while, it became unbearable. I wasn’t depressed; it just became, I need to get out of here. And that put its stamp on the music and, even more than that, the lyrics.”
Everything in the album cycle reflects that—from North Kingdom Greenhouse’s video for “Cold Burn,” which features a labyrinthine flight through nature (and will soon be a playable video game) to former guitarist Erik Olofsson’s unusual cover art, the search for which neatly encapsulates Persson’s own recent existential struggles. “Naturally, it’s very close to the last two albums when it comes to the subject matter that I write about,” he says. “So, I talked to Erik, and since I still struggle and deal with the search for where I literally felt like I had my environment geographically as well as emotionally—it’s hard to find the word, even in Swedish. Anyway, I spoke to Erik about the subject matter I was writing about, and he also struggled quite a bit with how to translate it into something visual. But since this search for a geographical home actually made me move away from Stockholm after 12 years back to Umeå, after a long while he came up with an idea—he found these pictures of old wallpaper from the 18th century from old rural farms and had them scanned in high-res from the museum in our county, and manipulated them, and mixed that together with pictures from our part of the country to get this geographical connection to where we are from—most of the guys at least. “That’s a long way of saying it’s a piece of wallpaper,” he laughs. D EDCEI C BIEBLE :L A: PMRAY IL 2021 2 : 33
interview by
QA j. bennett
LORD AHRIMAN WI T H
DARK FUNERAL’s trusty ringleader on vampires, corpsepaint soap and black metal’s early days
3 4 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
AS
OGs of black metal’s crucial second wave, Dark Funeral
don’t often get the recognition they deserve. Maybe it’s because they’re from Sweden instead of Norway; maybe it’s because they didn’t release a proper album until 1996. Or maybe it’s just because they didn’t burn any churches or kill anyone—or themselves. But when you consider that they made their live debut in 1994 at an Oslo pub on a bill that also happened to be Gorgoroth’s live debut and Marduk’s first show outside of Sweden, perspective crystallizes quickly: These dudes have been around. ¶ Fast forward to right about now, and Dark Funeral have just released their seventh full-length, We Are the Apocalypse. The band’s founding guitarist and sole remaining original member Jan Michael “Lord Ahriman” Svanberg is—as always—at the helm. Second guitarist Chaq Mol has been in the fold for nearly 20 years now. Vocalist Heljarmadr joined in time to appear on Dark Funeral’s 2016 album, Where Shadows Forever Reign. Meanwhile, bassist Adra-Melek and drummer Jalomaah make their first studio appearances with Dark Funeral on We Are the Apocalypse. ¶ “Both of them are experienced and professional musicians, so it was really not a problem to get them to feel the vibe for the recording,” our man tells us. “But me and Heljarmadr built a deeper and closer relationship on this record, which gave a bigger impact [to] the songs. As we were writing, we felt like we were going to a different level because we went deeper into ourselves.” How did you decide on the album title We Are the Apocalypse?
Of course, Heljarmadr has his own personal ideas based on the lyrics he wrote, but we always try to see if there’s a song title that can represent the record as a unit. That’s quite normal, I guess. So, we went through all the lyrics and titles and of course, “We Are the Apocalypse” are big words with a huge meaning. We all have the same feeling about the new record—it’s a very big feeling, very cinematic—so the title felt like a perfect match. You’ve said that lead single “Let the Devil In” is about “becoming one with your inner devil.” Can you elaborate?
That’s not really a new approach to how we feel about certain things. We have quite a lot of songs about this theme—to work with your inner devil rather than pushing it away, bringing forth the beast inside of you and being at peace with that. We have already “Ineffable King of Darkness” on the Vobiscum Satanas album, and “Diabolis Interium,” which also has the same meaning as the new song. We feel this is something that has always represented Dark Funeral, but Heljarmadr wanted to bring it into something more personal—a deeper story than perhaps before. I think he did a really good job with the song. His lyrics fit the vibe really well. PHOTO BY BARTOSZ SZ YDLOWSKI
You made a pretty gruesome and effective video for the song, which you shot in Poland with Grupa13. What was the shoot like?
The video is based on the lyric and follows it quite well. Of course, you can’t put everything from the lyrics into the song—well, you can, but everything costs money. You’re always limited budget-wise, but we always try to do the best we can with what we have to work with. We planned everything with Grupa before we came in, but before we met, we didn’t really know how they work and they didn’t really know how we work. But even after the first day, I told them it was the first time I didn’t really mind having a camera in my face because the whole vibe felt so natural. They’re so professional, you don’t think about the camera. Which was a new experience for me, because usually I’m annoyed having cameras around. It was long shooting days at the end of November in Poland, so it was cold, but it still worked out so easy and so good. You’re all spewing fake blood onscreen. What did it taste like?
It tasted like blood. [Laughs] I wish we had more. We ran out. Otherwise, we would’ve went even more crazy. There’s a song on the new album called “Nosferatu.” Obviously, there have been so many rock and metal songs about vampires over
the decades. How do you take a very familiar character like that and do something new?
Not really new—what you do is go back to the original movie and check the whole vibe and atmosphere and build it up from there. And that’s what happened. Heljarmadr had been rewatching the original movie from 1922 and he told me he had many ideas. At first, I was a little bit skeptical, to be honest. But he said he didn’t want to do a modern vampire story—he wanted to go back to the original and bring back the old, cold, dark feeling from that. Then he sent over some lyrics and a vocal line, and it didn’t take long before I found a good arrangement. I got a feeling that I never got before when I’ve arranged vocals. The feeling was like the original Nightmare on Elm Street movie, when Freddy Krueger enters dreams. Mix that with a kind of lullaby feeling and it becomes a nightmare that you want to enter. Everything is fucking dark, death, cold and disgusting, but you want to be there. You want to dive into that world. That was the kind of feeling I got from that song. It opened up a whole movie for me in my head. You started Dark Funeral in 1993. There have been many members in and out of the band, but you’ve been the consistent driving force. Do you ever feel like the last man standing?
Not really. It’s been like this since the beginning. The only difference is that I was maybe not too public back then—but I’ve always been running things behind the scenes. I always felt like I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do, no matter what happens around me. Whoever loses their passion for the music or whatever happens in their life, it can’t affect me to call it a day. I gotta let things happen around me—that’s part of life—but I’ve gotta stay on course. I don’t wanna force anyone to follow me. It’s gotta be free will. With the current lineup, we’ve all been in the game for a long time. We all know the basic things that don’t work in a band. But we try to be open and honest about things—and focus on what’s important. Do you ever miss the early days of black metal?
I’m not the kind of guy that looks back too much. What’s done is done, and I gotta look forward. But of course there are certain people who are not around anymore that I miss. At the same time, all the chaos that went on back then… I’m kind of done with the chaotic lifestyle. I like more controlled chaos, if you will, so that part I don’t miss. But I prefer to look into the future and find new inspiration instead of looking back. D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 2 : 3 5
Orange is the new black The classics never go out of style for Lord Ahriman (r) and Dark Funeral, but the future remains as black as ever
I’m not too fond of everything that’s going on, but I don’t want to be one of those older guys I hated when I was younger. They didn’t like anything, and I don’t want to fall into the same trap. I’ve always had an interest in the dark side of mankind and Satan and stuff like that. I started my first band called Satan’s Disciples in the north part of Sweden where I grew up, and there were no other bands like that around where I lived. Even though at that time we liked thrash and speed metal, we wanted to go darker philosophically and also music-wise. When I came to Stockholm, I realized the scene was more alive and things were happening here, even though most of the bands were playing death metal. When people heard I was looking for members for a black metal band, I got some strange faces at first from the musicians in the death metal bands, like, “What the fuck’s wrong with that guy?” [Laughs] But it was never anything that bothered me because I was so determined. And I still have the same attitude. Anyone who’s known me for a long time knows that you can’t convince me to do anything else. People have been trying over the years, but this is who I am. I’m not changing for anybody. Sweden has a long history of extreme metal going all the way back to Bathory. Do you see Dark Funeral as part of a tradition in that sense?
I don’t know. I just kept doing what my generation started, and there’s not too many bands 3 6 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
from that time around today. But there’s so many new bands that have come into the scene, and they have their own approach to what black metal is for them—philosophically and musically. I just stick to what I feel like I need to do. Are there any newer black metal bands that you enjoy?
If someone presents a new band to me, I try to give it a chance. But I always tend to go back to the bands that I listened to in the ’80s. Some of them are still around and some are not, but that’s where my heart is. And that’s not black metal. Does black metal mean something different to you today than it did in the ’90s? Do you see new possibilities?
For the last 30 years, the scene has changed so much with the internet and the business side of things, but I guess that’s part of any music scene that grows. I’m not too fond of everything that’s going on, but I don’t want to be one of those older guys I hated when I was younger. They didn’t like anything, and I don’t want to fall into the same trap. So, I try to stay with my rules, but I’m not afraid to try new things in life. Sometimes I fail and fuck up, but for me it’s not the end of the day. Then I learn something
and move on. That’s what you’ve got to do if you want to be creative. If you’re afraid of trying, what kind of life is that? Last but not least, I have to ask about the Lord Ahriman corpsepaint soap you have for sale in your web shop. What inspired it?
[Laughs] That was not my own idea. It’s this Finnish girl who contacted me maybe two or three years ago. She was studying Scandinavian design, and she was interested in beauty products and stuff, but she’s a big metalhead as well. When she first told me she wanted to put my corpsepaint on soap, I thought the same as everybody else: This is kinda crazy. But then I saw how passionate she was about it, and I thought if she wants to try it, I’m not going to stand in her way. At the same time, our best Dark Funeral merch ideas come from when I think, “Fuck, I need one of those…” Like when I started going to the gym many years ago and I was looking for a tank top and shorts. I go to the sport shop and everything is pink or purple or green— fucking horrible. I knew I had to make my own. So, we did a limited line, like 50 copies, and they ended up being quite popular. It’s the same with soap. Instead of having stupid pink soap in my bathroom, I’d rather have cool black metal soap. But that’s me.
PHOTO BY BARTOSZ SZYDLOWSKI
What do you think drew you to black metal in the first place?
the
definitive stories
behind extreme music’s
definitive albums
by
joseph schafer
In the Heart of the Woods the making of Wolves in the Throne Room’s Two Hunters
T
he scent of cedar and oil smoke. Mist hangs in the air. The faint glow of lamps is the
only illumination, and the meditative drone of soft synthesizers is the only sound. All of a sudden, two beams of light pierce the fog, and a volley of tremolo-picked riffs and double-bass drumming strikes like a storm coming in from the ocean. That’s what it was like seeing Olympia, WA black metal trio Wolves in the Throne Room play after the release of their sophomore album Two Hunters in 2007. Composed of brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver—drummer and guitarist/vocalist, respectively—and guitarist Rick Dahlen, Wolves in the Throne Room laid out a distinct vision for what American black metal could be on their debut album, Diadem of 12 Stars. Where their Norwegian forebears were maleficent and furious as a blizzard, Wolves were meditative and introspective, using blinding rhythms and symphonic guitars to evoke the temperate and rain-soaked pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. And where their inspirations preached hatred and burned churches, the no-less reclusive Wolves obliquely gestured to radical environmentalism long smoldering in the crust punk scene that birthed them. Those themes and ideas came to a head on Two Hunters. Recorded with Sunn 0))) producer Randall Dunn in nearby Seattle, the album captures some of their most evocative melodies with a thick, rich sound befitting the mythic scope of their ambition. From the ambient introduction of “Dea Artio” to the expansive near 20-minute climax of “I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots,” it’s an immersive listen by turns DBHOF209 fast and slow, loud and soft, bitter and hopeful. The crystallization of the band’s vision makes it the quintessential album among the often-contentious “Cascadian black metal” canon (alongside Agalloch’s The Mantle), which helped whet America’s appetite for bands like Deafheaven and, by extension, almost every atmospheric black metal album clogging up Bandcamp’s top metal releases page. Two Hunters S OUT HERN LORD While Two Hunters marked a victory for Wolves in the Throne S EPT EMBER 27, 2007 Room, it also ushered in the end of an era for the group. Dahlen left the band not long after its release—this is his first interview Howl of Fame as a member of the group. Now a college professor, he hasn’t released an album since. Vastness and sorrow, indeed.
WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM
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WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM two hunters
Starlight, star bright Rick Dahlen live with Diadem-era Wolves in the Throne Room, circa 2005
What was your relation at that time to the “Cascadian black metal” sound—if you buy into such a thing—as it existed then?
I don’t think anyone necessarily used the phrase “Cascadian black metal,” but we and all of our contemporaries were very conscious of the fact that we were coming from the Cascadian perspective. That was at the [forefront] of everyone’s mind. The most important thing about the music was the location; because for us and for some of the other people in Olympia who were working in a similar genre with similar energies, it was all about the elements. It’s a very specific rain that we live with, and the spirits of the plants and the animals—especially the mountains and the rivers here—they have a voice, a personhood and a story to tell. It’s specifically Cascadian in nature; it has everything to do with the mountain ranges to the east and west of us, and the land in between, and not very much else. I think all music soaks up its place. If you listen to Nas, it sounds like New York City. He was representing New York City; that was the vibe and the energy he had. We were also trying to do that explicitly and as the primary motivation. N. WEAVER: I think that term has been taken out of context over the years. “Cascadian” doesn’t describe a musical style. It refers to our geographic region, just like the label Norwegian black metal refers to bands from Norway. We used the term Cascadian black metal because we live in the Pacific Northwest. There was also a Cascadian identity that existed in many facets of our local underground culture at the time. For the most part, we have stopped using this term. We noticed after our first couple of records that it just wasn’t translating to people outside of our area. There were bands from Europe calling themselves Cascadian black metal, and most people thought it was describing a specific style of metal. So, we decided to stop using that label. I don’t have any issue with people referring to WITTR as Cascadian black metal. All that being said, in my opinion, there was a definite “sound” in the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s. This was long enough ago that certain regions had their own signature sound and vibe, more so than in our current time with our modern access to all music all of the time. This all-access reality that we now live in has created less geographic artistic identity, in my opinion. Many bands back then, no matter what the genre, oftentimes had this dark, rain-soaked sound to their music similar to how the original grunge bands from our area had that dreary dark sound. Back then, musicians were influenced by the local bands they’d see growing up in underground venues and house shows just as much as listening to albums at home. So, there was this sort of sonic lineage happening on the West Coast at the time with heavy music because so many bands toured up and down the West Coast or did small tours of the Pacific A. WEAVER:
What was it like in the world of Wolves in the Throne Room after the release of Diadem of 12 Stars, which seemed like a breakout at the time?
When Wolves started out, I had no idea that anyone would give a shit. Our area was so dominated by punk in the early 2000s— metal just wasn’t accepted like it is now. A lot of people in the various local music scenes actively hated metal in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and there just wasn’t a lot of crossover like you see now. The Bay Area had a solid metal scene with bands like Ludicra, Hammers of Misfortune and Asunder, but up north where we lived, there was so much punk. I saw quite a bit of punk vs. metal type rivalry happening back then. I thought this was a small-minded attitude and was due to a lot of people new to metal just not knowing much about the genre. There was a small underground metal scene in our area, but it was way more isolated compared to now—or at least that’s how I remember it. So, because of this musical climate, I was surprised when Diadem of 12 Stars did well in the underground with a broader audience. And I was even more surprised when death, black and doom metal started to become more and more popular in the States after that. RICK DAHLEN: I’d been playing for a long time in different bands. You do your best, and things work out somewhat in some cases and not so much in others. Diadem was the first album where I was in a band and the response—the shows, everything—was uniformly good. So, we kind of had a feeling that things were exciting and hopeful. It was a lot of work. We were really into what we were doing, and it was pretty all-consuming. That was pretty much our lives at the time— writing, writing, writing, band, band, band. NATHAN WEAVER:
How did the band come to sign with Southern Lord? AARON WEAVER: We got hooked up with Southern Lord via Dave Brenner at Earsplit PR. He was always such a huge supporter of the band. He’s always been there for us; he’s been a great friend since the very beginning. He gave a copy of Diadem to [Southern Lord label owner] Greg Anderson. It was a little rocky at first: We were coming out of this very underground worldview, and we had kind of a rough time with the guy who put out Diadem. We came from a very crust punk background and didn’t know anything beyond the honor of the DIY community. That’s just how things were done, with personal relationships and trust, because the commitment was to the art and to the underground and the people in that scene. Two Hunters was the first time we were stepping out of that insular world, and we were a little suspicious of it. But it worked out, and Greg was a good person to work with because he’s an opinionated guy and had such a strong vision for Southern Lord. We were there with a bunch of other great bands at that time. It was a beautiful creative flowering. Maybe most importantly, he hooked us up with Randall Dunn, who produced Two Hunters, Black Cascade and Celestial Lineage. DAHLEN: I don’t remember too much detail. Somehow Greg Anderson from Southern Lord got Diadem. Nathan handled most of the business and management parts. From my perspective, one day we heard Greg from Sunn 0))) and his label was interested. Holy shit, I was excited. It worked out well, but we were just excited to move from an independent label to the support of a proper label and all that comes with that. M AY 2 0 2 2 : 4 0 : D E C I B E L
As I Cast Ruin Upon The Lens That Reveals My Every Flaw The complete aural presence that is Oshkosh, WI’s CAVERNLIGHT returns with “As I Cast Ruin Upon The Lens That Reveals My Every Flaw”. This all-encompassing journey could very well be one of the best post-metal/sludge releases of the last 5 years.
Vinyl/Digital
After numerous releases, COME TO GRIEF (featuring members of the legendary GRIEF) present their highly anticipated debut full length record “When The World Dies”! Recorded and mixed at Godcity Studios by Kurt Ballou (Converge, Nails) and featuring the amazing artwork of Paolo Girardi (Power Trip, Vastum, Chthe’ilist, Lycus). “When The World Dies” captures seven tracks of crushing sludge and doom from the godfathers of the genre! Features guest appearance by Jacob Bannon (Converge, Wear Your Wounds).
OUT MAY 20th V I N Y L/ CD / DIGITA L
“You Are Nowhere” is the epic collaborative effort between hardcore stalwart frontman extraordinaire Rob Fusco (One King Down, Most Precious Blood, Recon) and Rafe Holmes (Insvrgence)! Take Life focuses decades of metal/hardcore songwriting experience with unbridled expression. Vibing the frenetic musical energy of bands like Kiss It Goodbye and Burnt By The Sun.
OUT JULY 8TH V I N Y L / D I G I TA L
ALSO AVAILABLE:
The stunning debut full length "A Most Bitter Season" from Philadelphia’s legendary metallic hardcore hybrid ALL ELSE FAILED, available on vinyl for the first time! Remastered for vinyl by Brad Boatright / Audiosiege.
out june 24th
ALL ELSE FAILED THIS NEVER HAPPENED V IN Y L / DIGI TA L
VINYL/DIGITAL
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DBHOF209
WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM two hunters What were the writing sessions for Two Hunters like?
Even though we lived in a pretty rural locale, the kick drum can travel for miles on the wind, and if some dickhead nearby decides they want to call the sheriff, they will. So, we were looking for a place to record. We had a friend in Olympia who is kind of a local legend—they call him the Dark Dentist. He’s a dark side psychedelic guy. He comes from the South, and he’s from the ’90s gothic industrial scene. He’s an occultist, and a dentist, and an allaround real estate wizard and magician. Nathan ran an all-ages venue in a space that he owned.
A. WEAVER:
Northwest. WITTR was inspired by Norwegian and Swedish metal, but we were also into West Coast U.S. bands like Neurosis and Melvins, which we saw in small venues growing up. DAHLEN: I think that was much later. I was much less aware than either Nathan or Aaron about what was happening concurrently, and I had less experience with the scene and the greater catalog of black metal. I don’t think any of us saw it as a scene that we were a part of or something that we were trying to position ourselves in relation to. My memory is that the bands that were playing live a lot in the metal and West Coast extreme music scene were Ludicra and Asunder—that is what we were a part of. That scene wouldn’t fit the Cascadian sound, so to speak. Wolves in the Throne Room’s sound at the time blended black metal with folk, doom, atmospheric electronica and other genres. What were you listening to at the time that might have inspired this blend?
We didn’t feel influenced by any of the other bands. There was a lot of collaboration, and we were all being very careful not to be influenced by other local bands and to do our own special and unique thing. We worked with other people, but kept our own vessel very clean. I know when we get in the zone of writing and recording, I don’t really listen to anything. N. WEAVER: When Aaron and I started the band in 2002-’03, as far as metal, I was probably listening to a lot of Morbid Angel, Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Deicide, Death, Amorphis, Immortal, Emperor, At the Gates, Dissection, Drudkh, etc. But I also loved American bands like Weakling, Ludricra, His Hero Is Gone and Neurosis. Our first guitar player, Nick Paul, introduced me to a lot of goth and death rock bands that I had not heard, like Swans and Fields of the Nephilim, which tied into my love of the Cure and Depeche Mode. This goth influence, along with the American metal and crust-type bands, found its way into our sound as well. DAHLEN: You could reasonably look at my life musically in two parts: before Weakling and after. When I first practiced with Wolves, Nathan made me a mixtape with Emperor, Ulver and some other stuff. I liked all of it, but Weakling jumped out, and I was listening to them a lot for years and years, through the demos, Diadem and Two Hunters. Weakling is the black metal that I listen to the most. I listened to the Fucking Champs repeatedly. I listen to them all the time still, and they were a big part of what I was listening to back then. I listened to Asunder, Graves at Sea, any albums from people we were playing with. I would also listen to solo piano—Glenn Gould in particular. Classical like Bach. Classic rock also, stuff like ZZ Top. A. WEAVER:
“We were looking for a place to record. We had a friend in Olympia who is kind of a local legend— they call him the Dark Dentist. He’s a dark side psychedelic guy. He comes from the South, and he’s from the ’90s gothic industrial scene. He’s an occultist, and a dentist, and an all-around real estate wizard and magician.”
AA RO N WEAVE R So, we rented the space upstairs in this bizarre loft that had super low ceilings. You had to climb up a rickety staircase to get in, and it had black mirrors everywhere and was upholstered with red velvet, fitted with red light bulbs. That was our main rehearsal space. A few songs I put together by myself, working out the chord progressions from beginning to end; others were more Rick and Nathan collaborating. They would both come with riffs and jam, drink beer and play guitar. Once we had a structure, we would play together and work out the drum parts and develop them in the practice space. We also played a lot of those songs live at house shows in Seattle or Portland. When we recorded, it was all M AY 2 0 2 2 : 4 2 : D E C I B E L
in one take, just the three of us together, which gives things a cohesion and vibe. N. WEAVER: Our practice space was above a warehouse venue in downtown Olympia. I remember it being brutally hot in there when we were writing Two Hunters during the summer. It doesn’t usually get very hot where we live, but we were in the middle of a heatwave. There were no windows, insulation or air flow, so we had to take regular air breaks, which we referred to as “Air Hole.” We demoed the material on a really shitty boom box because that was all we had at the time, and sent some of these “rehearsal tapes” to Randall Dunn so he could get an idea of the material. I listened to one of these tapes years later, and it sounded like an explosion of static. I couldn’t recognize the songs at all! If I remember correctly, these writing sessions were fueled by whiskey and the brutal heat in that space. I suppose this type of suffering helped create the music. DAHLEN: It was an attic space. My wife and I lived there, but I can’t remember if that was before or after those writing sessions. There were no windows and it was poorly insulated, so in the summer we had to go outside a lot. Aaron had the concept for the album and all the lyrics. I didn’t really play metal before I started playing with Nathan and Aaron, but I took to it and really enjoyed it. The writing that we did—the demos, also Diadem—were all working toward the best riffs. I was pretty driven—and they were as well—to develop the sound. Personally, I don’t know that I really reached that goal of what we could have done as a band on Two Hunters, but that record definitely got us a long way toward that. Two Hunters flows very well as a continuous piece of music, and its lyrics tell a cohesive story. Was it intended to be a narrative or concept album?
It has a narrative structure, a beginning, middle and end, and we were aware of that when we were recording and writing it. It was always clear that we wanted all of our records to be mythic in scope and presentation and always meant to be listened to in one piece. Even now, it’s hard for me to imagine someone listening to one song on the record. It only works in my mind as a whole. R. DAHLEN: We had conversations regarding the lyrics being a sort of mythical tale of opposing forces, but I can’t say for sure what the meaning of it is. Aaron is the one to describe that. As far as the writing for the music and arrangement, it was important. I see Diadem and Two Hunters in the same way—it’s nice to pull songs out and listen to them a la carte, but the best way to experience them is as a unit. We were trying to get better at that process on Two Hunters, for there to be more thought in the crafting of it, that it would be one whole big piece rather than a collection of songs. A. WEAVER:
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Diadem of 12 Stars and especially Two Hunters were popular with MP3 pirates upon release and were seeded widely via torrenting services and MP3 download blogs. How did illegal internet distribution affect the band, from your perspective?
I never got into the world of MP3 trading. I was never aware of it, I was never connected with anyone who utilized that, and I think maybe that’s because we came up in a community and a scene where there was just a lot of music. We were never musically isolated. We had peers and contemporaries who didn’t necessarily play the same kind of music, but were definitely underground artists, so it was for us to connect with musicians in Olympia or Seattle, and we never had to seek out the MP3 message boards of the day. N. WEAVER: I personally did not like that our band was forming around the beginning of the rise of the internet, mainly because we wanted to present our music and artwork in a specific way, as do most bands. This became very difficult to do as the internet started to take over, and music was uploaded in horrible MP3 sound quality for anyone to access. I remember one of the first times I ever looked at YouTube, I saw that someone had uploaded a video from one of our live shows. The audio was terrible, and the video quality was even worse. But there it was, uploaded for all to see without our permission, and I realized then that more people would probably see this terribly recorded video than would see the actual show, which looked and sounded pretty good in comparison. I did not like this reality, and it was a very extreme change in the music and art world from what we were all used to in the ’90s. Up until this point, the only way you could see a band play live is by going to the show, buying an official live VHS video, or maybe buying one of a small number of bootleg videos. This gave the musicians and labels far more artistic control over their art, which is something I really appreciate about the bands I grew up listening to. I realize I sound like a grandpa right now. [Laughs] All that being said, I realize that WITTR might not have become as successful of a band without the internet, so I suppose it’s a doubleedged sword. And this is just how it is now; times change. And looking back, I am happy with how our musical vision has been presented despite this change in technology and reality. It just took a lot of effort on our part to maintain the vision we wanted to present. I’m also sure that the bands from the ’80s and ’90s had their own challenging factors, like crooked record labels and managers taking advantage of them, which became harder to do to underground bands in the 2000s. A. WEAVER:
Some people saw Wolves in the Throne Room as “radical” environmentalists at this time— how did that come about, and did the band do anything to foster that image?
That was very much the culture that we came out of. None of us were involved with any forest defense. None of us ever burned down a certain building. None of us ever did anything like that. But that’s what our friends were doing. And that was the culture we came out of. It was just a big part of the culture of the time, and we were steeped in the philosophy of these more radical actions. N. WEAVER: In the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was a lot of forest activism happening in the Pacific Northwest. This was a time and place that I don’t think most people can really understand unless they were there. I’ve heard some people who weren’t there try and describe the climate as “left-wing” or “liberal,” which, from what I saw, is really missing the mark. Most people I knew wanted society to be destroyed and revert back to a more primitive world. Others wanted all of humanity to be destroyed. I think the misanthropy that existed in these activist scenes back then was the connection to black metal for a lot of people. So, yeah, I think there were some black-clad creatures listening to WITTR and Emperor while living out in the woods doing hallucinogenic mushrooms and spiking trees… So, our music became associated with these kinds of activities. I don’t think we did anything to foster an image of “eco-terrorism.” The PNW was just kind of a crazy place back then. DAHLEN: It certainly wasn’t true of me then. More so now. The best way to answer it is, when I met the Weaver brothers, they had already taken a hard look at what modern society says our relationship with the land and nature should be, and were critical of it. They made some real commitments in their lifestyle to do something else. I think the band’s focus on nature and the importance of environmental issues was personal for them, and it was part of their lifestyle. It’s not true that we were living in huts practicing by candlelight, but neither is it true that we were sitting around eating fast food and chugging Mountain Dew. I think people just got excited and extended that into myth through a game of telephone. I think Nathan struggles with this, too: If you’re explicit with what’s going on, that answers the question and can maybe stop a conversation, but if you leave things ambiguous, then the audience can answer things for themselves. A. WEAVER:
What was recording like at London Bridge?
The recording was a little nervewracking because we hadn’t been in that kind of a recording situation where you have a larger label releasing your record with a decent budget. We recorded all the basic tracks at London Bridge in Seattle, which felt like a very “big time”
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studio to us, as we were used to recording in basements. I remember walking in and seeing an Alice in Chains Dirt gold record hanging on the wall, and it blowing my mind. I still love Alice in Chains. The three of us recorded the basic tracks live, so we had to practice non-stop in preparation. We also didn’t do any punch-ins, which I didn’t even know was an option back then. But despite all of that, I’m happy with how we played. We actually rocked very hard, like it was a show in the main hall when tracking the songs. Between that and the long tracks, I’m shocked to this day that our guitars didn’t go out of tune, because we were playing on old Les Pauls. You can hear in “Vastness and Sorrow” that on the very last chord, I hit the strings extra hard, and my guitar goes way out of tune. But it didn’t matter because it was the end of the song. And it sounded sick, so we left it in. DAHLEN: My recording experience was limited, but London Bridge was pretty mind-blowing, being in a proper studio with all the albums that had been recorded there on the wall. We would just set up in the studio and play the parts. We got a good part of the tracks recorded at London Bridge, then went to Randall’s. The recording process can be very different from approaching the band from a live perspective, learning to play the songs well together versus breaking the parts down and putting them back together. Do any Two Hunters songs stand out to you as particularly interesting or satisfying to play? Please wait to talk about “I Will Lay Down My Bones” because we’ll get to that shortly.
I listened to Two Hunters two days ago, and “Dea Artio” stuck out to me as a pretty fucking strong way to begin the record—with this extremely slow, ambient dream. I kind of wonder what we were thinking, rather than just blasting right in with some shredding metal. I guess maybe it’s because we never think about just one song on its own; it’s always a part of a record. It felt appropriate to have this gentle, long introduction to let the listener drop into the same magical dream world that we were in, and we’re still there. We haven’t really left that space. That song is super magical to me. It’s a conjuring, really. It conjures a goddess of the forest. N. WEAVER: I’m very proud of the song “Vastness and Sorrow.” You can tell on the recording that we’re playing hard as a band, and that Aaron is beating the fuck out of his drums. I also love the synths string sound on that song. It was an old Korg Triton, which I sold a few years later and have regretted selling ever since! I actually just found another one locally and purchased it. So, that’s going to be on the next record for sure. DAHLEN: I like them all. I hadn’t listened to the album in 10 years, no exaggeration, but I came back and listened to it preparing for this interview and thought, “This is great!” Listening again, the things that excited me were the A. WEAVER:
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parts where Nathan and I were doing single-note stuff and when the riffs are very driving. I noticed on a few riffs where I was doing some of the complicated low-end stuff can come across as a wall, at first, but if you listen closely, you can pull apart what’s going on. “Vastness and Sorrow” I like very much on its own as a single. But they’re all good songs. “I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots” is special. It’s the song that Wolves has played live the most often, and is your normal set closer. How was that track written, and in your opinion, what makes it unique?
Roots radical A corpsepainted Nathan Weaver stands in as the album’s cover model
I’ll take a moment to credit Rick on a lot of that song. He wrote the chorus, which has a very evocative and powerful energy to it. That song is really long, but listening to it, it does not feel like an 18-minute song. That’s something I’ve always noticed about our records. Maybe it’s just as mysterious to me as it is to someone else; it almost seems like time doesn’t exist in the same way within the record. It feels both infinitely long and also takes no time at all in a way I’ve always noticed. I have no idea why it is that way or what it means, but it’s definitely something that I’m aware of. I love the lyrics and the way it ends, because it ends with a very hopeful note. It’s very peaceful, and it does feel like a quintessential release. There’s a lot of suffering, rage and madness to a certain degree in the music. We’re mindful of the power of what music can bring forth in physical realities, and it’s our intention to bring forth the spirit that you hear at the end of that song, which is a peaceful one, one that is brimming with love for the music and for the fans. It’s always going to be there for us. DAHLEN: Using that song as the end of a set to tie it all together seems like a very good choice. It’s got all the elements. There’s loud and quiet, fast and slow. The way the vocals come in and out is pretty powerful. It’s got a kind of swingfor-the-fences anthemic quality. My opinion is biased, but on that album, I think that it comes the closest to actualizing all that we wanted to do. It’s very representative of the band at the time, doing just what we wanted to do. That was the art we wanted to make. I think we really nailed it with that song. That song is also a fucking blast to play. When you’re writing, you go through the struggle where it’s not quite right. You chisel away the rock, and then there’s A. WEAVER:
the sculpture—it was always in there. “I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots” was like that. What’s the story behind the photograph that is the Two Hunters artwork?
We were just hoping to evoke some different spirits that we pay homage to on the record. The figure in the roots on the cover is Nathan in corpsepaint, and the funny thing is that someone else was meant to play that role of this archetypal wild man who appears in the lyrics a few times. He’s a friend who has these very black-rimmed, sunken-in eyes and a very ghoulish countenance. He was going to be the emaciated forest-dwelling freak. But he couldn’t make it for some reason, and so Nathan was pressed into service as the wild man, which of course was a blessing because it’s him on the cover and not some random person; but Nathan lifts weights and is a pretty hearty guy, so we like to make the joke that the guy on the cover is a well-fed and well-rested wild man.
A. WEAVER:
I remember things really starting to happen directly after the album was released. We did our first tour of Europe and played the 2008 Roadburn Festival in Holland. That was an amazing experience because we were able to see European metal venues, squats and metal culture firsthand, which we hadn’t been exposed to up until that point. DAHLEN: It was received well. Any feedback that I got personally from people who had heard it was uniformly positive. We started playing bigger shows and more and more people started to come. It was a very positive experience. It’s been pressed more than once, but I just recently pulled out my original copy, and I think it was really done well in terms of an art object that you hold in your hand. N. WEAVER:
You took a memorable stage show with you on the road—covering the stage with pine branches, lighting oil lamps, using a great deal of fog and affixing bright LED lights to each guitar. How did you decide on this presentation?
We’ve always been really into the atmosphere of the shows. It’s really fun to bring those elements. We might even still have some of those branches and stumps that we’ve brought out onto the road over the years. There’s some good energy soaked up into those chunks of wood. DAHLEN: Before playing with Wolves, I had a really utilitarian approach to playing shows. Credit to Nathan for understanding that there was an opportunity for an enhanced experience; not just playing the music, but realizing that we could transform the space and asking what we could do to give the audience the experience of what we were trying to do on a broader level. I think Nathan has more things to say about A. WEAVER:
How was Two Hunters received when it was released?
Universal acclaim, to be honest. It really kind of blew the band up. All of a sudden, it was “a thing.” Touring was really easy for us, and from the beginning, there were dedicated fans at the shows. I’ve never really cared one way or another about any sort of media attention or reviews. My heart of hearts really doesn’t care, but I did notice that people really did connect with it and really did understand what we were saying. They understood where we were coming from and what we were trying to convey.
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“I’ve heard some people who weren’t there try and describe the climate as ‘left-wing’ or ‘liberal,’ which, from what I saw, is really missing the mark. Most people I knew wanted society to be destroyed and revert back to a more primitive world. Others wanted all of humanity to be destroyed.”
N AT HA N WEAVE R the choice of the elements, the branches, the oil lamps and candles. A thing that I really liked and was great about playing that music was that when playing it, it’s really intense for a long stretch of time. It had a trance effect to a certain degree. Making the choices to have things burning for the smell, the candlelight, the LEDs and the smoke made it like we were all taking a trip. The lights go down, we all hop on a train and everyone goes on a journey. Two Hunters is the last Wolves album with the original recording lineup. How did Rick come to leave the band after such an obvious and unexpected triumph?
Yes, this was indeed an end of an era because Rick left the band after Two Hunters. Rick crafted some of the best WITTR riffs and brought a lot to the table when writing our songs, as he was a naturally talented songwriter. The other big shift is that WITTR was no longer an unknown band in the metal world after Two Hunters was released. There is something I liked about being unknown. Anonymity is comfortable and easier in a lot of ways. But I have no regrets!
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DAHLEN: It came down to timing and imagination on my part. It’s weird being in a band with tight brothers, first off. They would fight, of course, but it was a different thing for them because they’re bound for life. Not to say that there was inequitable treatment. Normal band shit would come up, this or that. Nothing insurmountable, just being stuck in a van too long and getting on one another’s nerves. The main thing was my wife got pregnant pretty soon after Two Hunters was released. We were on the road a lot for the first six months that my son was around, and it was hard. I had to be out, and my wife was at home with an infant. At the time, I didn’t really see a solution where I could be home and take care of stuff the way I needed to and make the same commitment to the band. It was a life-changing time. I was always partying hardest in the band. While touring, I was drinking way more than was healthy, and it got to where I had to make some choices about what I wanted to do. Being on the road wasn’t healthy for me. Looking back at it now, it’s weird to put myself in that spot again and second-guess the decision, but that’s clearly what it was: getting M AY 2 0 2 2 : 4 8 : D E C I B E L
a little out of hand personally and having a human that needed me to be there for them. Looking back, is there anything you would change about Two Hunters?
No way. I listened to it, like I said, a few days ago, just checking in on it, and I was like, “Man, this is fucking good.” I wouldn’t change it at all. I’m just grateful we had the opportunity to do it. N. WEAVER: Honestly, I don’t think I’d change a thing. The album is very raw and unrefined, but that’s something I like about it. At the time, there were plenty of things I didn’t like about the recording, but as time has gone by, all of the things I didn’t like are the things I like the most now. DAHLEN: It’s a good record. Could we have written better riffs? Maybe, but no. For what it was at the time, it was a pretty excellent representation of what we were trying to do. I feel like we were really successful in what we were trying to do with the record. The recording was weird sometimes, but it was really successful with the sound we were trying to create and the message we were trying to put out at the time. A. WEAVER:
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50 : NOVEMBER 2021 : DECIBEL
STO RY BY
ANDREW BONAZELLI
P H OTO S BY
HRISTO SHINDOV
THE METRONOME IS RIGHT AGAIN Four years removed from unspeakable tragedy,
CAVE IN keep on ticking with the triumphant Heavy Pendulum
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S
unday, June 1, 1997. Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Utah
Jazz and the defending champion Chicago Bulls. Tie game, 9.2 seconds to go. Future Hall of Fame power forward Karl “The Mailman” Malone steps to the free throw line with a chance to give the underdog Jazz a late lead on the road and flip the power dynamic. Big-time hero moment… until future Hall of Fame small forward Scottie Pippen strolls by and casually whispers in Malone’s ear, “The Mailman doesn’t deliver on Sundays.” Two bricks and some vintage Michael Jordan magic later, the Bulls were well on their way to their fifth ring in seven years. ¶ It’s unclear whether Caleb Scofield gave a rat’s ass about sportsball, but you can’t deny the man had some Pippen in him. “The last show Old Man Gloom played in Toronto—Caleb was such a fucking prick [laughs]—we were getting ready to play ‘Hot Salvation,’” remembers OMG guitarist/Cave In bassist Nate Newton. “We had just played a bunch of songs in one of Aaron Turner’s weird guitar tunings that don’t make any sense. So, I’m tuning my guitar—I start that song off—and I feel a presence right behind my ear. I hear Caleb go, ‘I think you’re gonna fuck this up.’ And he turns around and walks away. I was like, What the fuck? Next song, boom, I start the riff… completely in the wrong tuning. I had to stop the song and [yelled], ‘FUCK!’ And he was laughing at me the whole time.”
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OK, maybe the stakes weren’t quite as high as securing the second title in a second threepeat, but Newton’s anecdote wasn’t an isolated incident. Cave In guitarist Adam McGrath tells us about the time Nomad Stones, his side project with CI drummer John-Robert “J-R” Conners, opened for D.C. hardcore punk legends Scream: “[Caleb] didn’t even tell me he was coming. He showed up and was standing in front of me while we were playing. I’m like, ‘I didn’t know you were coming down from New Hampshire [to see us]!’ He shook his head, [like] ‘No,’ [laughs] and he just left. Didn’t say a fucking word.” “There was that camping trip we took to Pillsbury [State Park in New Hampshire]; we would do this at the beginning of October,” chimes in Cave In frontman Stephen Brodsky. “It’s the first night and we’re all getting lit, drinking beers and having a good time. [Caleb] disappears and comes back a minute later with this crazy-looking Halloween mask on… and then just fires up the grill and starts cooking burgers. [Laughs] We were just so high and drunk and surprised. He was always good for a surprise, just fucking with you.” You surely noticed our trusty style guide designation “[laughs]” peppering the last three paragraphs. Huddled in Brodsky’s new pad
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on a frigid mid-January weeknight (“the land of Massholes called me back” after 11 years in NYC), Cave In could crack themselves up all night swapping Scofield stories. And they probably have. That’s just the kind of guy he was. This is no newsflash. Our readers were treated to equally hilarious and peculiar stories not just in J. Bennett’s excellent July 2019 [#177] cover story, but any Scofield remembrance—online or in print. Again, that’s the kind of guy he was. That and the guy who, at just 19, adroitly navigated Brodsky’s “riff soup” when he was hired to man bass on 1998’s game-changing metallic hardcore juggernaut Until Your Heart Stops. And the guy whose corrosive bellow elevated the likes of “Moral Eclipse,” “Big Riff” and “Trepanning” into spine-chilling, can’t-look-away purgation onstage. And the guy who refused to get his “STRAIGHTEDGE” back piece covered up because, as Bennett quoted him, “I was stupid enough to get it, so now I have to live with it.” And, by far most importantly, the guy who was a devoted husband and father of two. All of which made him exactly the kind of guy who’s taken from this world in the most violent and stupid way possible, before the many who loved him could even celebrate his 40th birthday. The kind of guy nobody seems to have shit memories of, not because it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, but because he was just that cool. So, sorry not sorry, dear Decibel reader: We’d be remiss not to lead with more Caleb vignettes. This is the guy Cave In had to move on without. It can’t be said enough. Despite the nimble genre parkour the Methuen, MA-born four-piece has practiced over the last quarter-century-plus—thrash, space rock, prog, folk, grunge, Americana… pretty much everything but SoundCloud rap— things have never come easy for Cave In. They alienated god knows how many fans simply by embracing clean vocals and interstellar melodies on 2000’s Jupiter, this publication’s second favorite album of that decade; they flirted with the majors like so many precocious talents before them, only to be swiftly annulled and disposed of; they suffered extended hiatuses in what should have been their prime due to devastating physical injury and creative burnout. Nobody in their right mind would have blamed them if Scofield’s fatal freak accident on March 28, 2018 was the final straw. (They unintentionally implied as much by titling their 2019 collection of his remaining recorded performances as Final Transmission.) But here they are, emerging from the long Omicron winter with not only their most focused, inspired and crushing music since Jupiter, but a bona fide (double) album of the year contender in Heavy Pendulum. To butcher an old Brodsky-ism (and full-circle that lede), the reality check is in the mail eight ways to Sunday: Cave In are back and bitchin’ as ever.
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How the hell did that happen? That’s what we’re here to report, and we’re going to do it in the spirit of dB Hall of Famer Until Your Heart Stops: with a couple (non-instrumental) “segues” sprinkled in to make the medicine go down even weirder.
GRANITE STATE OF SHOCK
It all started with the benefit shows. In June and October of 2018, the remaining members of Cave In played Boston and Los Angeles, respectively, backed by an all-star squad of trusted collaborators and lifelong friends (the Cancer Conspiracy, Converge and Old Man Gloom at the former; 27, Pelican, OMG and the temporarily reformed Isis playing under the moniker Celestial at the latter). Caleb’s brother Kyle played bass for roughly half of Cave In’s Boston set before Converge/OMG mainstay Newton took over. (Asked about Kyle’s musical tastes, Newton helpfully quips, “Caleb played down here [pantomimes bass at hips], Kyle plays up here [pantomimes bass nipple-high].”) Between those gigs and the Caleb Scofield Memorial Fund GoFundMe, over $100k was raised for the Scofield family from over 2,200 contributors. McGrath last saw Scofield’s wife Jen in the spring of 2021, and reports that she, son Desmond and daughter Sydney are “happy and healthy and moving on with their lives. It’s beautiful to see.” The band even put a kit together for Desmond thanks to contributions from various drummers in the Cave In circle; Jen recently sent them a video of the young man pounding along to “We Will Rock You.” The focus soon shifted to commemorating the bassist’s musical legacy via the aforementioned Final Transmission: nine Scofield-centric demos alchemized by producer Andrew Schneider, with “Shake My Blood” being the surviving three members’ first attempt to address the whirlwind of trauma in musical form. “Music. Heals,” Brodsky growled in his Frontman Voice at the Boston benefit, and that sentiment isn’t just for show. “At the time, we were so wrapped up in doing what we thought was the right thing, which was supporting the Scofields,” he says. “I think we found in the process of doing that, it brought us a lot closer and put the wheels back on Cave In.” “From an outsider’s perspective, at least at the time … it seemed like they didn’t know if the band was a band anymore,” Newton volunteers. “It seemed like a fucking tragedy that these guys—not only people that I love, but people that I see as being immensely talented, just fitting together so perfectly—might not do that anymore. I was like, ‘No, that can’t happen. These people belong together.’” It wasn’t the first time that Cave In’s moniker almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Flying high after the critical plaudits heaped upon Jupiter, Hydra Head’s top prospects went pro in
the spring of 2001, signing to RCA and issuing the polarizing, poppy Antenna two years later. Mixed fan reaction notwithstanding, major label membership has its privileges: The band scored not only direct support for a European Foo Fighters tour, but a second-stage stint on Lollapalooza “opening” for a very different kind of legacy artist. “The last five to 10 minutes of our set, the crowd would double,” Brodsky says, “[with people] waiting for a good spot to watch Steve-O put avocados up his ass.” “When we got offered that tour, I remember being so pumped,” McGrath reflects. “Troy [Van Leeuwen] from Failure did a Failure song with us [‘Magnified,’ which Cave In covered on 1999 EP Creative Eclipses]. I remember being able to watch Queens of the Stone Age every day … at the time, I loved that band. Seeing Mark Lanegan sing every day was awesome.” But nonstop touring took all the tolls that nonstop touring tends to take, and the many corporate cooks invading Cave In’s kitchen had little interest in the demos for what would become 2006’s Perfect Pitch Black, an angry, misunderstood, rather novel Frankensteining of UHYS and Jupiter that at least enjoyed a soft landing back on Hydra Head. Making matters worse, Conners had to be replaced for the PPB touring cycle by Converge drummer Ben Koller. It seems that two years earlier, our man dinged his right hand skateboarding a week before a run with Converge and Between the Buried and Me. Seemed like no biggie at the time; Conners played through what he thought was a sprain, came home and prepped for an already-planned move from the Bay State to sunny Los Angeles. “Caleb and I drove out there nonstop in a record 48.5 hours,” the drummer recalls. “After getting somewhat settled, I decided then that I might want to get my hand checked out since it was still causing trouble. I found out that one of the little bones in my wrist was broken, and it had already started to heal incorrectly due to what I had just put it through.” Stuck in a cast and shit out of luck insurancewise, Conners moved to Berlin with his thenfiancée, where he was told that he may never be able to play again. Luckily, after going under the knife overseas and tackling intensive physical therapy, he beat the odds, returned to the States in early 2006 and quickly teamed up with Newton in his newish sludge project Doomriders. McGrath would go on to launch Clouds, Scofield followed suit with Zozobra and Brodsky even kept busy as a MBTA-licensed busker. (“Man, that was some humbling shit,” the latter recollects. “Right on the front lines, no separation between myself and the ‘crowd,’ who didn’t ask me to be there in the first place. People interrupting to demand that I hand them my guitar so they can play it, and others wearing headphones, blissfully oblivious to the outside world.”)
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D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 2 : 5 5
WHO INSPIRES YOU?
‘Ebola,’ I really enjoyed playing again. I really enjoyed playing ‘The End of Our Rope Is a Noose’ again. But there’s some songs where I was like,
‘OH GOD, I REALLY DON’T NEED TO PLAY THIS AGAIN AFTER TONIGHT.’ ADAM McGRATH
Nobody will say that Cave In were formally broken up in the very quiet period between Perfect Pitch Black and 2010’s White Silence, but McGrath admits, “I’m sure it was considered individually among the four of us. We always had a good time hanging out together. We spent a lot of formative years together growing up and playing in this band. A couple years without each other was necessary to spread our wings and try different stuff. But I think it was fun also, because we were friends, to go camping and things like that, go skiing, go snowboarding, whatever. We still do this stuff. I guess what I’m saying is you don’t need to have music in the dynamic all the time.” “Both Caleb and I started families, and all of that stuff takes a lot of time away from playing music,” Conners points out. “And then on top of that, you start side projects, so you keep busy… but sometimes your busy is half as much as it used to be because you have family life to consider. So, I think that’s a lot of time away from what we could’ve been doing.” “It’s been a weird 10 or 15 years for Cave In,” Brodsky can only shrug. “Recovering from the weirdness of the RCA experience, it took more than just a minute for us to get our footing. White Silence was sort of the beginning of us really having dusted ourselves off, starting over again, feeling like, Okay, this is a direction we can take things. And it really had to do with Caleb writing a lot of music on that record. That was shortly after he
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moved from L.A. back to the East Coast. He was the catalyst for Cave In getting back together.”
AWAY YOU GO, OFF TO METHUEN
SEGUE 1:
Converge are from Salem, which is about as notorious as an American city can get. Can you tell us anything that’s interesting or unique about your hometown?
Methuen has a strange organ hall on Broadway; it’s just sitting there. It’s this giant crazy organ hall that some rich guy built in the mid-1800s [with] a big pipe organ. I’d actually love Cave In to play there someday. That’s the only interesting thing in Methuen. CONNERS: It’s right next to the man-made watahfalls. NEWTON: Don’t go chasin’. McGRATH: When I go back, I can see why I left. BRODSKY: At one point, Methuen had the world’s largest Burger King. It was built inside of what used to house a used car dealership, so there were two floors, a mini golf course, they had waterfalls, a greenhouse. This thing was like Burger King utopia. NEWTON: Dude, imagine if that existed now with Impossible Whoppers. I would be there every fucking day. BRODSKY: For the first four or five months it was open, it was jam-packed. It was, like, the place to go. And then people quickly figured out, Well, it’s just Burger King. McGRATH:
Late last year, Cave In played a week’s worth of East Coast dates to warm up for their December 11 headlining slot at Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest L.A., where they defibrillated Until Your Heart Stops, delivering the classic in sequence for the first time ever. Newton did the same with Converge’s Jane Doe the night before (just the second occasion in North America, the first being at dBMBF Philly in September), hence was best equipped to impart advice to Brodsky, McGrath and Conners, who had never played any Cave In record all the way through live: “Unmarry yourself from the idea of a set that flows. The way you would normally pace a set, you would block songs together in the same tuning, but in this case you can’t do that, so you mentally have to be like, ‘All right, we’re stopping after the first song.’ [Laughs] That’s how it’s gotta be.” Conners says he felt up to the task because his technique has improved so much over the last 23 years (it had to after surgery, natch), and McGrath concurs. “It wasn’t so much playing the songs and playing the riffs,” the guitarist reasons. “It’s remembering the order of the riffs. There’s some songs, like ‘Ebola,’ that I really enjoyed playing again. I really enjoyed playing ‘The End of Our Rope Is a Noose’ again. But there’s some songs where I was like, ‘Oh god, I really don’t need to play this again after tonight.’” Having attended the Philly warm-up gig at Underground Arts and being among the lucky few to hear Heavy Pendulum in advance, this writer must admit a little disappointment that the only new song Cave In previewed that night was “Blinded by a Blaze.” Not because “Blinded”—a simmering, hypnotic, almostdoomy slow-build that is a perfect coda to the record’s rollicking first half—is bad in the slightest. More because if leadoff track and first single “New Reality” has dropped by the time you’re reading this, you know that fucker would have kept the pit banging alongside the choice UHYS cuts. (“I think [we picked ‘Blinded’] because it was easy?” confesses McGrath with a chuckle. “It’s so easy to lose yourself in it, too,” Brodsky adds. “Which is a nice contrast from all the riff soup and the very intense thinking process, at least for Cave In, having to revisit Until Your Heart Stops.”) Here’s another connective thread in the full circle: For the first time since Until Your Heart Stops, Converge axeman Kurt Ballou is behind the board for a Cave In LP. Although the producer/engineer extraordinaire downplays the reunited-and-it-feels-so-good angle. “I worked with the band on occasion doing demos and other odds and ends [post-UHYS], plus recording many of their other projects,” he writes from deep within the bowels of GodCity, “but we never seriously talked about me doing another Cave In album until now.”
D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 2 : 5 7
I say this as a fan:
I LOVE EVERY CAVE IN RECORD.
But this is the Cave In record that I’ve wanted Cave In to make for so long. NATE NEWTON Unsurprisingly, Ballou is modest about his contributions, which include backup vocals on “Amaranthine,” not only the first proper Cave In song with a Newton writing credit (“Nate is also great at streamlining arrangements, and his contribution to the record can’t be understated”), but very likely the last to feature Scofield’s acerbic turns of phrase, as his wife Jen graciously lent Newton his lyric notebook to strip-mine. As to where Heavy Pendulum sits in the formidable Cave In power rankings, “tough to say,” Ballou demurs. “I think we’re all just happy that we get to keep making music together that feels as vital as it did when we all started.” Well, we say everyone in and around this band is too goddamn modest. We’re quite sure our Heavy Pendulum review will second this emotion (if not, that staffer has to rebuild Decibot and feed themselves to it), but this record is bursting with bangers. The one-two-three opening salvo of “New Reality,” “Blood Spiller” and “Floating Skulls” approaches early-Mastodon-caliber bluntforce primitivism. The ensuing title track is a mid-paced, introspective Bic-flicker, hold the cheese. A cheese that’s slathered all over the synthy, wah-like strut of side B’s “Waiting for Love” in the tastiest possible way. “[My first band with J-R] was called New Breed back in 1993,” Brodsky explains. “I thought I was the coolest kid in the neighborhood rocking that DOD Envelope Filter [pedal], playing this fuckin’ pseudo-grunge shit with my friend.” Indeed, Conners was delighted at the Envelope Filter’s triumphant return (“When you pulled it back out for these songs, I was
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like, ‘Oh, you got the New Breed pedal out!’”), but not nearly as much as Newton, who tells Brodsky, “That was another one where you sent the demo and I was like, ‘HOLY SHIT, IT’S LIKE FUCKING VAN HALEN GRUNGE!’” Not that the entirety—or even the majority—of Heavy Pendulum parties like it’s 1984. 1984 the book, on the other hand? To an extent. Brodsky doesn’t tend to write with a political bent, favoring colorful whacked-out imagery and clever puns. While he and Newton in particular have plenty to say about the end of the world as we know it, they ask that most of their thoughts remain off the record. We can only confirm that the couplet “You’re dropping a bombshell / You wish each other well” in “Searchers of Hell” is a direct reference to a certain kind of dogwhistle. “I will say that, as far as the Trump era or pandemic or the combination of those two things [goes],” Brodsky elaborates, “it forced me to want to pay attention more to politics and learn about how things operate in the underbelly of that world, seeing past the headlines a little bit, understanding the mechanics of what brought us to where we are. I don’t think I’ve ever paid attention to politics, generally speaking, more than I have in the last four years. I don’t know if it’s just getting older, more of my friends having kids [or] just being more aware of where things are headed, but the song ‘Searchers of Hell’ is straight-up a reaction to some of the crazy shit going on.” Clearly, Cave In had a lot to say this time around, which is natural given the 12-year gap between Heavy Pendulum and their last “proper” album, White Silence. So, for Brodsky, asking, “Why
a double album?” is tantamount to Zoolander asking, “Why male models?” “Seems like a fairly common thing for musicians to consider making a double album when they find themselves on a roll with writing,” he suggests. “It’s a great feeling to have, wanting to share the bulk of your work. On the other hand, editing is just as powerful as creating. I could listen all the way through both Use Your Illusion albums as a kid, but now it’s pretty obvious to me that only a single album’s worth of material has truly aged well.” Good thing in lieu of “My World,” this double dip closes with 12 of Cave In’s most emotionally staggering minutes in the form of “Wavering Angel.” Fragile introductory strums are augmented by a more vulnerable Brodsky than fans have ever heard (“Have you ever loved somebody too much / killed ’em with kindness, crushed ’em with a touch”), and the song takes its sweet-ass time—in a good way—hatching into a righteous, Everest-ascending power ballad driven by McGrath and Brodsky’s “dueling-banjo Eagles guitars.” “I remember when you sent that demo to me, first off, I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is good.’” Newton tells Brodsky. “But also I was like, ‘Jesus, man, I feel like I’m reading his fucking diary right now and I shouldn’t be.’ That was among that first batch of songs you sent me where I was like, ‘Oh fuck, there’s a record here.’” “I had [‘Wavering Angel’] kicking around for a little while, and it’s gone through some different versions, different mutations,” Brodsky answers. “The core verse lyric, the very beginning of the song has always been the same; more or less the same melody, too. It just kept getting longer!” [Laughs] “That’s what makes a great song great,” Newton opines. “It can have awesome guitar riffs, a great fucking groove that makes me want to bang my head or whatever, but you know, lyrics that you’re like, ‘I know this feeling, and someone else felt it, too’—that’s really what kind of makes a song speak to people.” “When we finished that one, I was like, ‘Oh my god, we pulled this fucking 12-minute song off,’” McGrath says. “It felt like an accomplishment, it really did. A moment for the four of us. Look at how far we brought this. Holy shit. You know?” “All of us were surprised,” Newton deadpans. “We made a good record!”
SEGUE 2:
TESTICULAR CAVE IN
Everybody in this band but Nate has known each other since sixth or seventh grade. What were you guys like as kids? CONNERS: I met Adam first, at the end of sixth grade. We started kinda fucking with each other. He started making fun of me and I was like, “This kid’s cool.” So, we started hanging out, then I met Steve in seventh grade. BRODSKY: [to McGrath] What was the nickname you had for him?
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D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 2 : 5 9
It’s been a weird
10 OR 15 YEARS for Cave In.
STEPHEN BRODSKY CONNERS: McGRATH:
He would call me Ducky. He called me Butterball. As in the
fat kid. We’d fuck with each other, you know? We got into music together. I think J-R and I’s first music conversation together was about “Tom Sawyer.” BRODSKY: Didn’t you kick J-R in the balls once? McGRATH: I did kick him really hard in the balls once in sixth grade. It was a bad scene. CONNERS: I would fuck with him all the time and give him a ton of shit. And then one day walking out of recess, thinking I’m badass, he just walks up to me and nails me right in the nuts. McGRATH: Best friends ever since! CONNERS:
McGRATH:
NOTHING IS SLOWING ME DOWN
Not counting that brief dalliance with RCA, Heavy
Pendulum will be the first Cave In full-length not released on Hydra Head, Aaron Turner’s longstanding art-metal sanctuary. Given the boys’ history of underground heroics, it’s no surprise that Relapse was on the spot to snap up album number seven. Global head of sales Pip Soret was particularly instrumental in steering Final Transmission to the finish line. “Towards the end of Hydra Head’s existence, Relapse got involved with handling the basic logistics of being a label for Hydra Head: marketing, production, administration and sales,” Soret explains. “I oversaw Relapse’s end of that partnership, and so I was in charge of working with both Cave In and various sales channels and distribution partners to maximize availability and exposure for Final Transmission.” Soret was understandably wary about approaching Cave In about next steps; after all,
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he was as in the dark as anyone about whether they were planning to continue under the moniker without Scofield. But once Brodsky mentioned that the band was writing with Newton, Soret was all in without hearing “a single note of new material.” “I don’t think any of us knew what to expect outside of a great record, which they delivered in spades,” Soret trumpets. “Heavy Pendulum nods towards every era of the band while sounding fresh and bold; I think the album stands among the very best of the Cave In discography. Very few bands are able to deliver one of their best records 20-plus years into their career, but Cave In have done just that, especially after all that they have been through. Their grit, perseverance, and unrelenting and unrestrained creativity is truly something to behold.” And jumping labels isn’t the only change. With a few exceptions, Turner’s singular designs have graced the majority of Cave In’s album and EP covers. Heavy Pendulum, however, presented a rare opportunity to pick up (and repurpose) the pieces of one of many projects nearly wiped out by the pandemic. In 2020, the band commissioned Welsh illustrator Richey Beckett (Sabbath, Metallica, QOTSA, Nine Inch Nails) for poster art promoting a series of shows at Brooklyn extreme music stronghold Saint Vitus—shows that were postponed due to COVID, but eventually played in the aforementioned lead-up to Metal & Beer Fest L.A. Luckily, even as pen-and-ink linework, Beckett’s half-finished piece was arresting enough to justify modification from poster to album art via colored inks, digital watercolors and even metallics intended as a direct callback to 2002’s Tides of Tomorrow EP.
“The concept was inspired by an image I saw from an old book from the early 1900s, [which] stated that Saturn was the lightest planet in proportion to its size, and would actually float in water if there was an ocean large enough to carry it,” Beckett divulges. “It felt perfect for Cave In, not just because of the obvious cosmic themes of their aesthetic, but I loved the idea of something that appears to be so gargantuan and heavy actually being relatively light and able to float. [I thought] of that as a representation of the band, who were born of heavy music and live in that world, perceived that way, but who also create such beauty and melody and consistently divert from those expectations.” With most of Heavy Pendulum’s ancillary pieces in place before the ball even dropped on 2022 (except for a video, which, amazingly, would be their first since the Antenna era), Cave In have been playing the waiting game for a minute now. But few musicians are better equipped to do so. Brodsky teamed up with his new bassist and a host of others just last November to blow minds on Converge’s Bloodmoon: I, and that collaboration appears to be just getting started. Both Old Man Gloom (Newton and Brodsky) and Mutoid Man (Brodsky) were already in the process of hammering out new music at the time of this writing, Doomriders isn’t dead yet, and neither is the Jake Bannon-fronted supergroup Wear Your Wounds, which features McGrath’s contributions. Maybe McGrath can even get Newton and Conners involved in the low-key acoustic sets he occasionally plays with Brodsky to kill time and showcase material to audiences not entirely comprised of dudes howling, “ER AH, ‘JUGGANAUT!’” “We started that setup of acoustic and an electric guitar during the Antenna era when we were asked to do on-air radio interviews and they wanted an in-studio unplugged or quiet performance,” McGrath says. “It’s a fun and dynamic way to play new versions of songs and also throw in whatever covers we’re feeling at that particular time. It’s definitely a different experience than playing loud, and is a great exercise being able to sing and play without ear protection. Playing at a low volume also enables you to play unique places instead of your standard rock club setting.” There have been innumerable side quests in this odyssey for decades, and there surely always will be. Today is different. Today, it’s time for all eyes on Cave In. And their biggest stan, who just happens to be in the band, can hardly contain himself. “I say this as a fan: I love every Cave In record,” Newton stresses. “But this is the Cave In record that I’ve wanted Cave In to make for so long. Fuck me, who cares that I’m involved in it? I wish that it was Caleb. I wish he was here to be a part of it. Surely, everything I was a part of would have been 10 times more savage if Caleb was part of it. But I’m just so fucking happy to see this record come together and see things happening for Cave In that I’ve wanted to see happen for so long.”
D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 2 : 6 1
INSIDE ≥
64 BILLYBIO Punishment for all my ears 66 DARKNESS EVERYWHERE Forever burn
ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS
68 THE HELLACOPTERS Full of hella 70 JESUS WEPT Heart-rework 70 STABBING WESTWARD Save yourself. Seriously
Thy Mighty Abstract
MAY
15 11
Drunken late-night Discogs purchases Drunken late-night eBay purchases
3
Drunken late-night Decibel store purchases (refunded)
0
Regrets
USBM spirit warriors VANUM build their own legend with help from black metal’s iconic past
V
anum’s previous record, Ageless Fire, should’ve featured on our oft-celebrated, much-cited Top 40 Albums of the Year list in 2019. It was that good. Alas, history can’t be changed. Certainly, fans of Blood Fire Death-era Bathory and VANUM Triarchy of the Lost Lovers-era Rotting Christ have, by now, found Legend solace in Vanum’s atmospheric lays. They’ve had not one, but two P R O FO U N D LO R E full-lengths in which to immerse heavily. For the accustomed, Legend ups the ante considerably. Previous albums had that nascent potential “feel,” but Vanum’s newest perfects the Nordic/Hellenic admix, where fits of aggression are stitched with carefully woven strands of melancholy/contemplation. Think the American version of, say, Moonsorrow’s Viides Luku – Hävitetty or Negura Bunget’s ‘N Crugu Bradului, but without the fussy Hobbitry. ¶ Opening track “Adversary ” timpanies and solos into absolute epicness. There are bits of near-Viking Quorthon ethos, the timeless marble thinking of Necromayhem and the simplicity that made Satyricon’s Dark Medieval Times revelatory. Vanum’s vocals have a grizzled, battle-scarred air to them.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]
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Vestiges of Thomas Wahlström (Excretion) and Markus Johnsson (Eucharist) are but part of the aesthetic and sonic profile. This can be heard throughout Legend, but particularly on followup track “The Gateway and the Key,” where Vanum’s throat calls into the far beyond for answers against a backdrop of scenic guitars and songwriting sleights of hand. Ulf Theodor Schwadorf’s Sun of the Sleepless evoked similar vistas on his excellent To the Elements full-length. “Frozen in Vile Illumination” might be the mystery outfit’s most accomplished track, however. The forlorn build into the staccato mid-paced riff is expert-level. Gears go forward, then return back to the main motif throughout, with the song’s middle offering slight repose. When that trem riff comes in near the end with the double bass, it’s an immediate time warp into pre-internet black metal. That it ends with a dreamy, firmament-questioning coda is pure snowfall. The title track pivots on repetition for much of the intro before heading into that highhat/ride cymbal combo (rhythm/cadence) made popular by Norwegians many epochs ago. Not for nothing, there’s also Legend’s most impressive (emotional value) soloing here. The final track, “Beneath the Pillars of Earth and Air,” is oldEnslaved-long. At 14 minutes, it traverses a lot of the same territory as its on-record brethren, except that its belly elongates into a future-primitive vibe that’s cinematically ceremonious. Vanum have made an album that’s right for our times. It’s nostalgic, but doesn’t feel overburdened. It’s heavy, but isn’t cumbersome. The melodic choices are distressed and majestic, but don’t cast too much of a shadow over Legend’s signature. Sure, this isn’t groundbreaking, but what it lacks in invention, it makes up for with conviction and unadulterated emotional heft; and that is definitely what made the foundations—all the stuff cited here—of Legend so captivating. Look for Vanum’s Legend in the Top 40 of 2022. Calling it here now. —CHRIS DICK
BILLYBIO
5
Leaders and Liars AFM
Judgment midday
There’s an amazing moment on the 2006 reality show Supergroup in which Biohazard bassist Evan Seinfeld tries to sell a cover of his band’s “very ominous and demonic” track “Punishment” to a smirking Ted Nugent. “I just want to get the fuck out of here,” the Nuge grouses, “but I’ll try to keep an open mind.” I recount this not to dunk on Biohazard—the “best” Nugent record 6 4 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
has about as much chance against Urban Discipline and State of the World Address as a doe beneath the Motor City Madman’s blind—but, rather, to note that the most immediate, visceral art is often, creatively speaking, also the most elusive. Take Leaders and Liars, the sophomore solo album from Biohazard guitarist/vocalist Billy Graziade. Sure, when I see the BillyBackup includes musicians from Powerflo, Death by Stereo, Zebrahead and Korn… well, I just want to get the fuck out of here, but I’ll keep an open mind. And so should you, because—as Graziadei himself avers in press materials— BillyBio is “an evolution built from a strong muthafucking foundation.” Regarding the latter, Graziadei remains an iconoclastic master of the volcanic buzzsaw verse, the primal-yet-melodic roar, the tectonic breakdown—all of which is heard, to one degree or another, in each of these 15(!) songs. The “evolution,” alas, is where mileage will vary. Think a sheen reminiscent of mid-aughtsy modern alt-rock choruses. Is that mix more nuanced, diverse and multilayered than the average Biohazard jam? Yup. I’d still rather have “Shades of Grey” than shades of grey, though, you know? —SHAWN MACOMBER
BLACK DEATH CULT 8 Diaspora
P R O FO U N D LO R E
Worship the unnameable
Boy, do these Canadians need to step up their name game. Not in the song department, necessarily— titles like “Bloodworms,” “The Fractal Conspiracy” and the weirdly wonderful “Inverse Moon” hardly disappoint—but no band this interesting should be stuck with so bland a moniker as Black Death Cult. That name should belong to some trio of financially comfortable dullards who rip their entire sound from the late ’90s Greek scene and call it “homage.” This fertile quintet should call themselves… I don’t know, maybe Knights of the Headless Order (another evocative song title on Diaspora) or something equally unhinged. Their diabolically devastating music deserves to fly a banner with a bit more panache. What makes Diaspora so tasty is its rich, rancid bed of doomy death metal, out of which grow all manner of evil oddities that never give up the heaviness at their core. The corroded trudge of “Neon Cross” glitters with electronic accents, pukes forth a strangled-Muppet vocal performance that sounds for all the world like Nattramn from the beloved/maligned Silencer, then trades away intensity for a grumpy
bass-forward midsection before ramping back into a cacophony of delicious synth-splashed guitar wizardry. “River of Death” screams despairingly into existence and clutches at bowels for its entire nine-minute runtime, gilding its riffs with a bracing organ line that nudges the whole atmosphere sideways. The blend of death metal gallop and clean (if heavily effected) vocal melodies on “Inverse Moon” and “The Fractal Conspiracy” make Diaspora reminiscent of the avant-death chaos of Philadelphia’s Cleric and other projects that were championed by Trey Spruance’s Web of Mimicry label over the past couple decades. Lots of modern metal meets expectations; Diaspora masterfully exceeds them. —DANIEL LAKE
CRISIX
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Full HD LISTENABLE
What the fuck is that fucking noise?
Metal is such a global entity at this point that bands can have entire careers and listeners elsewhere on the planet won’t know about them. Case in point: Crisix from Barcelona. They’ve released five albums, not to mention The Pizza EP, since 2011. (Is this somehow a throwback to Adrenalin O.D.’s song “Pizza and Beer”?) Crisix are so big in Spain that they released a licensed fucking pizza to 20 pizzerias in late 2021. MegaDave might have branded beer, but last we checked, there isn’t a Hangar 18 deep dish pie. But what about the thing that gets you to the rodeo in the first place, the music? Full HD— which sounds more like something sold at Best Buy than an album—is recklessly energetic. Thrash needs a lot of energy, and you could connect cables to the band members’ ears and jump-start a car. It’s abundantly clear they are having a blast, and that energy is necessary to thrash well. Crisix have studied at the Billy Milano school of mosh: There are crazed falsetto screams, vignettes, divebomb solos and more. Metal has a lot of dumb fun these days, like Alestorm. We need more of this kind of fun. The downside here? While the execution is good, it isn’t exemplary. Originality isn’t required with thrash, but the energy here doesn’t equate to memorable songs. This is not an album that listeners will return to routinely. That said, Crisix have also worked on a mini-movie, video game and band-written cookbook; their band/brand will be around for a while longer. Maybe it’s time to jump in and do the “Macarena Mosh” with everyone else. —JUSTIN M. NORTON
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DARKHER
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The Buried Storm PROPHECY PRODUCTIONS
Neofolk implosion
Gothic folk—or “neofolk” in some circles—and metal have become inextricably intertwined. Though coming from different backgrounds, neofolk’s unplugged presence has made its way into metal quite effectively (looking at you, Agalloch), to the point where it’s almost a metallic item in its own right in 2022. That isn’t to say that English artist Darkher has… anything to do with metal, but I’m sure you're wondering just why I’m discussing an album like The Buried Storm in the hallowed halls of a metal mag. What makes this album so particularly interesting to cover here is just how not metallic it is. Jayn Maiven’s mysterious, mystical music is heavy, fine, but not in the “crush your skull” type of way; instead, Maiven builds massive textures and atmospheres from minimal means, making each new movement a small cataclysm in its own right. Her second album as Darkher (following 2016’s Realms), The Buried Storm displays a more sophisticated sense of acoustic guitar-forward songwriting and electric worldbuilding, with each new song a microcosm all its own. The strange places Darkher takes the listener—a different plane between consciousness and unconsciousness—are surprising, if even breathtaking, thanks to the small army of musicians Maiven has at her disposal. I know I used the term neofolk a little loosely in the introduction, but I feel it does music like this a disservice. Maiven works well outside the means of what is usually a very strict style. There are no white masks nor flak jackets here; instead a Gothic look at pagan peasant life. Featuring instead a grayscale photo of Maiven on a pre-storm coastline, Darkher’s pastoral music looks beyond genre trappings in favor of new discovery. —JON ROSENTHAL
DARKNESS EVERYWHERE
7
The Seventh Circle C R E AT O R - D E S T R U C T O R
Blinded by fear of a whoracle in the mind’s eye
If ’80s action movies, Nazi Germany, totalitarian dictatorships and living in Canada have taught me anything, it’s that there are tunnels, escape routes and urban expanses in underground locations that one might not imagine or suspect. To that end, somewhere below terra firma, there’s a transcontinental underpass originating from beneath Gothenburg’s canals and boulevards, connecting melodic death metal’s original locus 6 6 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
of focus to America (yeah, yeah, aviation exists; just play along, won’t ya?). Initially dug by worryingly tall blonde dudes with surnames like Stanne, Sundin, Björler and Svensson back in the mid-’90s, cobwebs have been steadily collecting at the entrances/ exits since around the time Decibel got rid of the backwards E. But seeing as in metal no subgenre ever completely goes away, no matter how much it gets made fun of, it would appear vocalist/guitarist/drummer Ben Murray has taken it upon himself to reestablish the connection between the Bay Area and said tunnel so that Darkness Everywhere could breathe life into their homage to The Jester Race and Slaughter of the Soul. The Light This City mastermind has shifted his masterminding focus, joined up with bassist/producer extraordinaire Zach Ohren and Crepuscle guitarist Cameron Stucky to deliver this velvety gut punch. The Seventh Circle doesn’t break new ground; its inspirations and aspirations are obviously NWOMSDM. However, it’s the monocle’d barbarity with which the trio attack the familiar staccato riffing, sweeping vocal holler and ascending/descending/jumping chord progressions that makes their debut EP worth a spin. That, and how everything is corralled into a tight ‘n’ tidy, sub-20 minutes that makes its point in as much time as it takes the reverberations of a dude in a trucker hat saying, “Go!” to travel the subterranean causeway between melodic death metal’s two favorite nations. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO
DEAD HEAD
8
Slave Driver HAMMERHEART
In bondage… to riffage
As the current glorious death metal renaissance stretches into its second decade and a worrisome positive revaluation of nü-metal gains steam, a near-perfect death-infused dark thrash romp like Dead Head’s Slave Driver down the middle is an extremely welcome sucker-punch. But don’t break out your “neo-” qualifier quite yet, cowboy. This Dutch quartet has been constructing an ornate bridge between Kreator, early Cancer, Massacre and Slayer since… nineteen-eighty-fucking-nine. And one need not be an NSA-level internet sleuth to uncover a trail of killer material from six previous full-lengths released between 1991 and 2017, either. We slept on some serious chug ‘n’ churn, friends. Dead Head may just be one of extreme metal’s best kept secrets. Yet, though the roots go deep, Dead Head— much like the aforementioned “legacy” death metal bands—seems to be drawing lifeforce from this moment of global societal chaos and
decay. Which is to say, a Jesus’ crucifixion age into its existence, the band has improbably released what is by far its best record. From blurring speed to groove to possibly the most skankworthy breaks since Anthrax and Sacred Reich released Among the Living and Ignorance back in ’87, Dead Head are putting the kibosh on this “Glory days, they’ll pass you by” conventional wisdom. That the band has continued to exist, evolve and strive toward this improbable 2022 achievement while toiling in relative obscurity (and without the benefit of audience nostalgia as motivation) only makes Slave Driver all the more impressive. It is, in the improvised words of Bill Murray in Caddyshack, a real Cinderella story—and absolutely worthy of your attention. —SHAWN MACOMBER
E-L-R
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Vexier PROPHECY PRODUCTIONS
The beginning and the middle
Had Swiss post-metallers E-L-R released Vexier during the mid-2000s, the trio would have been critically heralded, much like the “NeurIsis” (remember that near-derogatory term?) disciples in Mouth of the Architect or Rosetta. This developing band, now on their second full-length, appear to place Isis’ Oceanic on the looming pedestal of worship it deserves. And whether you’ll have interest in such a release heavy on the crescendo/collapse tropes synonymous with post-metal will entirely depend on how burnt out you still are following the subgenre’s oversaturation and creative decline. Saying that, Vexier’s intricacies may intrigue even the most jaded of ears, as E-L-R do succeed in embellishing their slowly winding, ebbing and flowing compositions with brief moments of welcome outside-the-box thinking that work to enhance cyclic doom-derived riffs that have, quite frankly, been heard elsewhere before. For instance, the ghostly female vocals that generally pass through arching soundscapes act almost like a synth in their airy movements. While specifically, the blast beat surges on “Three Winds” and “Fleurs of Decay” have the desired impact and bring to mind Oathbreaker (albeit in a less rabid guise), and the spoken word underpinned by tribal rhythms on closer “Forêt” creates ample tension… before the band loses the run of how to release it in a direct, meaningful way. Should they move on from using Isis’ “Weight” as a base template and instead focus on making their transitions more powerful and payoffs more distinctive (while utilizing the spectral vocals more as a sonic centerpiece), E-L-R could potentially create a nice niche of their own. —DEAN BROWN
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EXTINCTION A.D.
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Culture of Violence UNIQUE LEADER
Violent by nature
At their heart, Extinction A.D. are crossover. But with a pedigree that goes back to the days when you could tell cops from criminals by who had shitty mustaches and who had neck tattoos, these Long Island marauders have taken steps to elevate their style above the customary and pale. They’ve made tremendous advancements since 2018’s Decimation Treaty, transforming from run-of-the-mill, powerfully irate metallic hardcore with flashy leads to a unit with the ability to turn coal into diamonds. The tropes of everything considered hardcore since Cause for Alarm, Life of Dreams and Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire rewrote the rules have been augmented with enough Slayer-inspired tritone abuse, “Criminally Insane” drum patterns, Exodus’ knack for catchy choruses and bedazzled soloing from Pantera’s Cowboys From Hell-era. “Dominion” and “Star Strangled Banner” see the band polishing the bright lights of the Bay Area with anthemic melodies as vocalist/ guitarist Rick Jimenez summons his favorite Chuck Billy and Hetfield moments. “Thirteen” puts razor-sharp grit under Dimebag’s wah-wah pedal, and if the mainstream had any amount of testicular bravery/ovarian fortitude, “Behind the Times” would be a runaway hit between faceoffs, through the seventh inning stretch and during TV timeouts. Tasteful, well-placed and dynamic double-kick accents catapult the intensity upward on “Praise the Fraud,” brief bursts of sleazy soloing and drag race rock do the same on “1992,” and, like any good crossover thrash/metallic hardcore album should, there’s plenty of the palm-muted crunch that makes you want to punch your boss and burn down corporate HQs in “Mastic” and the title track. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO
THE HELLACOPTERS 7 Eyes of Oblivion NUCLEAR BLAST
Houston, we have liftoff
Stockholm’s singular whirlybirds manifested their moniker from the inaugural flip of the ignition back in the musically/culturally inverted “If 6 Was 9” revolution of the ’90s, lifting and thrusting classic garage rock as convincingly as Coppola’s steel valkyries in Apocalypse Now. Better still, until dissipating in 2008, the Swedes etched a TCB-leaning lightning bolt logo into metal legend, beginning in the bowels of Man’s Ruin debut Supershitty to the Max. That the Hellacopters managed to bottle said raw sonic riot on turn-of6 8 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
the-century efforts Payin’ the Dues, High Visibility and By the Grace of God synced thrillingly with the group’s incendiary live fly-bys. As such, original co-captains Nicke Andersson, Andreas Svensson and Robert Eriksson, now completed by pianist Anders Lindström and bassthrowing Datsuns frontman Dolf DeBorst, acted more as rocket than a helicopter, and eighth studio LP Eyes of Oblivion slots proudly into their collector’s wet dream discography. Produced by Chips Kisbye of High Visibility, By the Grace of God and 2005’s Rock & Roll Is Dead, the Hellacopters’ return can’t quite sustain the incandescence of the teaming’s first two pilot lights, but this clutch of 10 tunes will age as gracefully as an Apollo mission. Blitzkrieg axe clusters atop Klaus Meine ESL (“Reap a Hurricane”), Keith Moon fills and KISS-meets-Skynyrd thrills (the ripping title track), gutbucket ballads (“So Sorry I Could Die”)—Oblivion fries. “Tin Foil Soldier” veers Poison, but backend highlights “Beguiled” and “Try Me Tonight” soar pure Hellacopters. The former huffs back alley jet propulsion, while the closing corker channels a demonic guitar pull: Keith Richards, Izzy and Slash, Rossington/Collins/King and Ron Asheton. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ
HELPLESS
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Caged in Gold CHURCH ROAD
Discordance nexus
Caged in Gold, the sophomore full-length from (vulgar display of) power trio Helpless, checks a lot of boxes—nearly all of them awesome. There’s loads of Nails-esque modern grindcore. Deft nods to His Hero Is Gone/Tragedy, fast and slow. An appreciation for the noisier, punkier Converge tracks circa You Fail Me/No Heroes. Dark, twisty hardcore that taps the Cursed and Pulling Teeth veins. And if every last member of this band doesn’t own every last Trap Them record, there’s some weird version of heavy metal immaculate conception at play. The vibe is really more extremely extreme sonic gold Cuisinart than a cage. The South West, U.K.-based band slices, chops, dices and liquifies its influences, then puts the heat to it. You’ve also got to respect a young band that takes five years to record a follow-up to its debut and demonstrates the discernment and maturity to still let its 10 songs clock in at less than 30 minutes. Is Caged in Gold perfect? As the “nearly” qualifier above foreshadowed… no. (What? Like you are?!) Some of the random chug-chug growls, for example, take me out of the moment rather than draw me further in. And there are times when chaotic verses or squeal-laden doom bridges make it difficult to differentiate between songs. Still, these are
quibbles in the overall context of a jugular-fixated album that takes a lot of chances that do work. A wild, incandescent collection this generous with its vitriol and riffs is easy to forgive for some occasional under-seasoning. —SHAWN MACOMBER
IN APHELION
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Moribund
EDGED CIRCLE
I brought my pencil…
I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I shell out 250 bucks for Metallica to teach me how to “be in a band,” but if that MasterClass racket brought in Sebastian Ramstedt to demonstrate the finer points of melodic black/death metal songwriting, I might be persuaded to dig out the ol’ credit card. The dude’s credentials are undeniable— not only has he spent the last two-plus decades leading the creative charge for Swedish legends Necrophobic, but he now has a brand-new lane of auditory punishment to explore with the recently birthed In Aphelion. Lars could never. Fans of mid-era/modern Necrophobic will certainly be familiar with debut LP Moribund’s general spirit, but there are plenty of sonic qualities that differentiate the two projects. Most notably, Ramstedt is handling vocal duties on top of shredding melodic lines with fellow guitarist Johan Bergebäck, and his solo work throughout the album leans more toward the rambunctious swagger of traditional heavy metal than the frosty patois of his main gig. In terms of dynamics, Moribund leaves a bit to be desired—a shortcoming made all the more frustrating by the incredible leadoff track, “World Serpent (Devourer of Dreams),” which introduces a sinister ’80s horror movie synth theme that flawlessly morphs into a blackened riff barrage that’s been stuck in my head for no less than four days. Subsequent rippers like “Luciferian Age” and “The Origin,” while loaded with their own strongly defined guitar themes, never quite reach the dynamic potential shown in the record’s opening six minutes. —MATT SOLIS
INCANDESCENCE
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Le Coeur de L’Homme P R O FO U N D LO R E
Sadness will prevail
With the landslide of black metal records that continue to come out, it can be pretty tough to rise above the tenebrous masses. You can’t just put out standard stuff and expect it to make an impression. But then you occasionally can, and that is what Incandescence have done on their fourth LP, Le Coeur de L’Homme.
P L AY I T. W E A R I T. L I V E I T.
F O L L O W O U R K V LT
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This duo is one guy doing vocals and the other guy doing everything else. That other guy, Philippe Boucher of Beyond Creation and Chthe’ilist (which I refuse to learn to pronounce), also happens to be a great multi-instrumentalist, with impressive, interesting guitar, drums and even bass playing. But what makes this really work is, simply, the riffs: the sad bastard, melancholy hellfire riffs. These songs are on the shorter side for black metal, and contain plenty of old-school blasting, but they always find room for a couple sections that make you want to strap on some gauntlets and tearfully call your mom. And along with the traditional tortured vocals, they do this without ever having to venture outside of the genre. And maybe that is something to grouse about? The band’s talents are good enough that they could probably amble into other territories without losing the fundamentals that make this such an absorbing listen. But wondering about a hypothetical better record from Incandescence is pretty dumb when such a good one is already here. Le Coeur de L’Homme doesn’t change the face of black metal; it shows what it’s capable of instead. —SHANE MEHLING
JESUS WEPT
8
Psychedelic Degeneracy
REDEFINING DARKNESS
Corporal jigsore forgery
I always struggle when reviewing derivative music. My instinct is to temper whatever accolades I may be inclined to confer by admonishing the listener that they’ll be receiving no new information via the work in question. I feel like it’s my duty. But truthfully, do we need every record to be as groundbreaking as Dimension Hätross or Kid A? No, we certainly do not. Sometimes you don’t really crave molecular gastronomy. Sometimes all you want is a little Shake ’n Bake. Cue Jesus Wept. (Nah, not the Jesus Wept from PA, or the one from Oklahoma, or that other one from Jersey, dummy. This one’s from Detroit.) And I’m talking derivative from the drop. I mean, the cover art and song titles positively reek of putrefaction. The creepy medical-practitioner voice-over intro cements your worst suspicions, and when that first guacamole gun riff glops against the old tympanic membrane, it’s half past time to wake up and smell the Carcass—specifically Tools of the Trade through Heartwork. We have ourselves a derivative product here. But Jesus Wept are just too damn good for my snobby cynicism to hold its ground. Sure, these are basically golden oldies, but every track on 7 0 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
Some people use machines to make music. Some use them to make Soylent Green. I prefer the former. —JEFF TREPPEL
T
he middle chapter of CARPENTER BRUT’s “Leather Teeth” trilogy, Leather Terror [ UN IVER SA L ] features some guests very familiar to readers of this magazine: Kristoffer Rygg (Ulver), Greg Puciato (Dillinger Escape Plan), Ben Koller (Converge), Johannes Andersson (Tribulation), Kathrine Shepard (Sylvaine). Despite the total lack of guitars, it’s pretty fucking metal. The French darksynth producer’s latest brings the heavy that its predecessor lacked—especially on the blackened industrial grind of the title track. That said, his strength remains his deadly dance floor anthems, whether it’s the murderous Moroder-isms of “Day Stalker” and “Night Prowler” or “Lipstick Masquerade”’s brutalo disco. SoCal shredwave duo DANCE WITH THE DEAD summoned the Master of Horror himself, John Carpenter, to introduce Driven to Madness [ SEL F- R EL EA SED] . Despite some obvious influence from the legendary composer, their seventh full-length features more of a rock-heavy production that foregrounds the guitars for maximum terror. They handle intense slashers like “Wyrm of Doom” equally as well as the dangerous discotheque grooves of “Kiss of the Creature.” ADULT.’s moniker serves as both a band name and a content warning. Becoming Undone [ DA IS] is hardly the first EBM-adjacent work to venture into the BDSM underground, but it certainly finds its own unique ways to disturb the listener. EBDSM? I don’t know whether the Sadako-like figure on the cover is crawling towards the viewer to escape Hell or to drag them into it. Either way could describe this Detroit duo’s music—and they make both possibilities seem strangely sexy. STABBING WESTWARD obviously predated the whole darksynth thing, but it’s not like Albert is going to feature their first album in 20 years, Chasing Ghosts [ C O P INTERN ATIO N A L ] , anywhere else in the magazine. It’s surprisingly good! They were always kind of the Winger of ’90s industrial rock, which means it’s pretty cheesy, but still catchy as hell. If the long-threatened reboot of The Crow ever happens, “I Am Nothing” and “Cold” would soundtrack some bitchin’ montages of Eric Draven seeking gothy revenge.
this EP is as tight as your Nonnie’s pickle jar (and believe me, I should know). The key is sheer, unyielding prowess. It’s like early-’90s Carcass buffed to the Crown’s blinding mirror sheen. Every detail feels meticulously insinuated; the hooks are abundant, but they don’t remotely defang the tunes; in fact, Psychedelic Degeneracy is revenge porn-level vicious. If they can maintain this level of airspeed velocity over the course of a full-length, they’ll have our collective bow ties spinning. Regardless, you need to check this’n out. Every now and again, the familiar is a revelation. —FORREST PITTS
LUNAR BLOOD
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Twilight Insurgency P U LV E R I S E D
Wake up, you little shit, you got company
What do Pet Semetary, Werner Herzog, Angel Heart and, er, Chicken Run have in common? Well, given the samples littering Lunar Blood’s first full-length, all of those pop-culture references inhabit the band’s gristle-filled, crusty, HM-2-powered collective hippocampus. These film buffs are also clearly fans of death metal’s old school, plus grindcore and hardcore, and they ply these styles in an
often-ramshackle manner that gives this debut the clearly desired unhinged feel. Some might prefer if the wretched vocals on the likes of “Purified Rot” and the grinding, Dismember-heavy “The Hammer” were more audible in the mix for added impact, and such an argument is justified. But this is just another stylistic decision, and there are other, more pressing issues that need improving first. As highlighted by “Gastrointestinal Industrial Complex” and “Wrath March,” these guys can craft rampaging riffs that rival Trap Them, but with added underground DM bite. Yet save for the Clandestine-d “God of the Trainwreck,” unfortunately this record is front-loaded. Too often the serrated riffs buzz past in stock chugging patterns; the chosen soundbites (some of which have been used by metal bands in the past) dampen energy levels; the doom-laden “Gnawed” needs mid-song defibrillation because it flatlines hard; and closer “Pig Hunter” is fit for the abattoir. If Lunar Blood work on sharpening their songwriting, lean less heavily on genre tropes, write more riffs with individualistic merit and work on making the vocals a forefront concern rather than just a rhythmic club to the neck, there’s potential for this band to stand out in a highly competitive scene. —DEAN BROWN
MENTAL DEVASTATION
8
The Delusional Mystery of The Self (Part I) B LO O D H A R V E S T
Better artistry by moving air, not ink
In addition to the past decade spent treading the boards under the Mental Devastation banner, the four members of this Chilean battalion have oodles of past and concurrent experience playing in bands with thrash-friendly monikers like Blood Fiction, Critical Defiance and the Aggressor. And encouragingly, all that wisdom has been funneled into this second offering of brains and brawn. However, some of the obvious songwriting smarts at play here needs to be redirected towards logo creativity, as each band of Nicolas Pastene (drums), Alejandro Lagos (vocals/fretless bass), and guitarists Matias Morales and Felipe Espinoza’s past and present makes ridiculous use of “C-division thrash metal font,” apparently in a dumbest-looking logo competition. Where Mental Devastation lose the visual arts plot, they more than make up for it with thrash that tempers south-of-the-Equator fire and Murder in the Front Row youthfulness via the early fury of Sunshine State rabble-rousers 7 2 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
Atheist, Raped Ape, Hellwitch, Solstice, Death and Cynic. This is filtered through 30-plus years of technique, instrument and technology upgrades, as well as a complex theme rooted in the social sciences, psychology and self-examination. Combining explosive release and drawing board intricacy powered by riffs, riffs and more riffs is where this band excels. That riffing avalanche gets chiseled into energetic odes like the technically slinky “Labyrinth,” the progressive and epic “Reflections Over the Veils of Death” and the bludgeoning ode to Rust in Peace and Eternal Nightmare that is “Ascension.” Fat could/should have been trimmed from the unnecessarily bulbous intros and interludes, but otherwise this album is a force to be reckoned with, as it spits out dynamics and erudition from behind a veil of unhinged violence. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO
NIGHT DEMON
8
Year of the Demon CENTURY MEDIA
Not your average stopgap release
Always an industrious little band, Night Demon weren’t going to let the start of the pandemic ruin their 2020, releasing a swanky series of five seven-inch singles composed of new tracks backed by cover tunes. The idea was a hit with fans, as the pressings sold out immediately, and because Jarvis Leatherby and his Los Angeles buds are such good guys, they’ve decided to compile those singles on the aptly titled Year of the Demon for those who missed out on the vinyl two years ago. For the last decade, Night Demon have excelled at replicating the melodic, NWOBHM sounds of Angel Witch and Tygers of Pan Tang, forging their own distinct identity in the process. The new material on Year of the Demon ranks among the best stuff the trio has ever done, starting with the speed-riddled “Empires Fall” and the eerily COVIDian “Vysteria.” The impassioned “Kill the Pain” addresses suicide with compassion, while “Are You Out There” is a huge surprise, Leatherby singing his own personal love letter to Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott as guitarist Armand Anthony does a splendid job capturing the essence of Lizzy’s twin harmonies. The covers are a total blast, from the live performances of Maiden’s “Wasted Years” and Scorpions’ “In Trance” to the rampaging rendition of Cirith Ungol’s “100 MPH.” The most pleasant surprise, however, is a clever reading of “The Sun Goes Down,” one of Thin Lizzy’s most underrated tracks, which offsets Lynott’s melancholy with Night Demon’s explosive energy. Bring on the new full-length. —ADRIEN BEGRAND
PESTILENGTH
8
Basom Gryphos NUCLEAR WINTER/ SENTIENT RUIN/ G O AT T H R O N E
Boiling over with sickness
Pestilength formed back in 2018, and by the time they released their debut full-length in 2020, the Basque duo could already claim a demo, several EPs and critical acclaim galore. Now, there’s hype and then there’s getting signed to release your second album on Nuclear Winter, owned by Anastasis Valtsanis, frontman of Greek death metal gods Dead Congregation. That seal should be enough to yank any death metal fan’s attention immediately toward Basom Gryphos, the sophomore full-length from these obscure black bilemongers. On Basom Gryphos, N., the drummer, and M., the everything-elsist, slither right into your ear with a sound at once slick and bristling with spiny scales. Like the mysterious and presumably defunct Swarþ, Pestilength trade cavernous, cold, arid atmospheres for a suffocating, sweltering and diseased sensation. At times driving and murderous, but mostly horrifying and creeping, tracks like “Entglant Suhb” and “Thelegm” in particular show Pestilength to be a restrained and disciplined outfit that would rather let the sickness incubate, the gangrene run its course, the blasting erode into crawling doom. Which makes these eight tracks and the entire experience all the more memorable. Each piece is provided its own berth in which to writhe and moan and transmogrify into something truly impressive. Inheriting the subliminal/subterranean pandemonium of Portal, the alien angularity of Howls of Ebb and the maddening bile of Qrixkuor—to say nothing of the countless novel and unnameable traits that contribute to this tentacular and undulating monster—Basom Gryphos earns all the acclaim it’s sure to get. It’s not often something so strange appears in our midst, and if only for your own safety, it’s time to wake up on Pestilength. —DUTCH PEARCE
PYRITHE
7
Monuments to Impermanence GILEAD MEDIA
Collapsed new buildings
Word around the water cooler is that these pulchritudinous Pittsburghians were signed on the strength of their ability to blow back the flappy earlobes of Gilead’s Adam Bartlett at a past edition of Migration Fest. ’Tis a feat for which the band deserves credit: fishhooking the attention of a probably-more-thansomewhat-jaded label guy as he works and maintains the room at a fest he co-curates.
M
M
X
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Ritual Earth’s debut LP “MMXX” reverberates the electronic radiation of all things Doom, Space, and Psychedelia. Heavy, Slow, Atmospheric and Dark. Seven charged, dystopian transmissions set to the pulse of the dying universe to come.
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW | IODINERECORDS.COM
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Pyrithe are home to rough edges that most post-metal has refined (and the more looseygoosey side of sludge) while they seek a guitar tone that’ll rip your heart out through your face. Still, bipolar tone and tempo swings pull them from Torche-like thunder alt-rock and Imperial Triumphant off-beat swing (“In Praise of the Enochian Trickster”) to Cult of Luna class and Rwake’s scuzzy swamp-ass (“Luminous”). There are multiple stops along the way in which hitchhikers from the worlds of Krautrock (“Heaving Roots II”), the Midwest’s melodic abrasion (“Ekphrastik”), Baroness and Hawkwind bonding over blackened doom (“Earthen Anchors”) and latter-day Isis (“Ekphrastik II - Gifts of Impermanence”) are absorbed into the fray for the better. If there’s a fault line over which Pyrithe trip, it’s how the production tends to the side of stripped-bone rawness, pummeling with both towering distortion and skronky guitar dances, when a bit more warmth and nuance would have gone further. Seeing this material performed live in the flesh must be another thing altogether: sweat dripping, blood pooling, limbs being pushed to elation, and limits being snapped as impermanent objects make violent beelines for the heads that do not bang. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO
RITUAL EARTH
8
MMXX IODINE
The black night sighs
A lot of the bands we cover in these pages attempt to recreate that old Black Sabbath magic, but a very specific subset devotes themselves to exploring “Planet Caravan” from every possible angle. Something about the weird, spacey vibe of that song resonates over the decades. Which is cool— God knows enough acts emulate the generals gathered in their masses. Ritual Earth consist mostly of members of Philly sludge excavators Chimpgrinder, and it feels like a natural evolution. It’s just strange that the missing piece that got them moving in that more atmospheric direction was the addition of a former hardcore dude as their singer. In the long tradition of former hardcore vocalists who join doom bands, George Chamberlin goes for more of a stoner yowl, which complements the rest of the band’s groove-oriented interplay. This thing is all about sending the listener sailing through endless skies. The band finds a nice variety within the space doom niche. While some of the longer excursions like “Reprisal/Nebulas Diabolos” and “Ascension Dimension” would feel at home with The Eye of Every Storm-era Neurosis, something like “Free From My Vessel” would fit right in on Small Stone’s roster of post-Kyuss heavies, and “Escape 74 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
Velocity” feels like later-period Nebula (when they actually went to the stars). 2020 was a shit year, but thankfully MMXX isn’t a shit album. —JEFF TREPPEL
SANHEDRIN
8
Lights On
M E TA L B L A D E
Big city, big city lights
On this third album, Brooklyn old-school metal outfit Sanhedrin deftly toe the line between the arenasized ambitions of their forebears and the occult underground grit of their peers. It’s a trick they’ve accomplished twice before. Their first two albums, A Funeral for the World and The Poisoner, also successfully channeled Scorpions and Saxon with contemporary sneer, not to mention rock-solid songcraft. The power trio’s success is commensurate with the pedigree of its members. Bassist/vocalist Erica Stoltz, formerly of Hammers of Misfortune, has a compelling voice perfectly suited to delivering her memorable and well-observed lyrics. Guitarist Jeremy Sosville, also of blackened hardcore outfit Black Anvil, knows his way around road-ready riffs as well as expressive solos. His backup vocals are the band’s most potent secret weapon, and they’re deployed often in Sanhedrin’s unashamedly catchy choruses. But Lights On boasts some improvements to the formula. Namely, a more immersive atmosphere than its predecessors. Sanhedrin never go full Floyd, but songs like “Heroes End” and “Death Is a Door” make great use of clean guitar and unusual percussion on intros and bridges. They make a great climax for a vividly imagined suite of songs. The only thing missing is one stupendous single. The band has written indelible, perfect songs before—listen to “The Getaway” from The Poisoner; it’s “Angel Witch” good. Lights On spreads its hooks out more uniformly, and sometimes wants for oomph because of it. Then again, maybe these eight songs shine more brightly together without one track hogging the spotlight. You can listen to them end to end on repeat all day, and in today’s attention-sapping world, that’s a triumph. —JOSEPH SCHAFER
SATAN
9
Earth Infernal M E TA L B L A D E
Hotter than hell
Satan, one of the speediest gangs in Britain’s late-’70s heavy metal scene, quickly made their mark with themes of devilish judgment, and judging us they still are. As many bands of that scene did in the 2000s, this almost original lineup of likely
lads reunited; but unlike their peers who traded off fading glories, Satan hit the studio and their post-comeback fare has rivaled that of their mainstay ’80s classics. Now, NWOBHM isn’t known particularly for having a lot to say… unless, of course that something is in the fantastical imaginings of a teenage boy. However, in the Hellbound dock this time around is Earth Infernal, and Satan have got something they want you to pay attention to. The planet is fucked. Climate change is real, and if we don’t pay attention we’re heading for the skids. Kreator and Testament before them have given us stark global warming warnings through the medium of speed metal, and Satan have written an album that is as urgent as the message they’re conveying. But not only is Earth Infernal timely and terrifying; it’s also triumphant. There are flourishes of Latin percussion, dramatic jazz rock and acoustic folk that give this album a worldly conviction, but the dual guitars of Steve Ramsey and Russ Tippins are as heart-racing as ever, while Brian Ross wails masterfully, not losing an iota of his youthful bombast or shattering high-note. In a world where misinformation is rife, you know at least you can always trust Satan, true friends of Hell and, now, Friends of the Earth, too. —LOUISE BROWN
SHOCK WITHDRAWAL
6
Shock Withdrawal B R U TA L P A N D A
Shockingly adequate
Sometimes you hear a debut EP that sounds like it’ll probably be the best thing a band ever does. And then sometimes it’s more like a good demo, with the members still sort of feeling each other out and fine-tuning. Shock Withdrawal’s introduction is probably closer to the latter. The components are pretty much all here. Five brief songs of deathgrind, and then the traditional closer of something slow and sludgy. The drumming, which goes through the usual blasting and D-beat and so on, is super-fast and relentless. The riffs sometimes have a ’90s feel to them, like something you’d hear from Dying Fetus, and other times there’s a real Scott Hull flavor. And this is fronted by Mitchell Luna, best known as the vocalist of Maruta, who is an expert at moving between a brutal growl and killer screech. But the total package just feels thin. The riffs are not bad, and they’re played with plenty of conviction, but after multiple listens (the record is only 13 minutes), very little has stuck. Considering Luna’s pedigree, there was an expectation that some of the weirdness of Maruta would seep into this, but it all winds up sounding pretty run-of-the-mill. In other words, it feels like a
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band kicking the tires instead of kicking your fucking teeth in. If they stick around, this very well may be the best thing Shock Withdrawal ever put out. But it seems more likely that they’re laying the foundation for something better. —SHANE MEHLING
SUM OF R
7
Lahbryce
CONSOULING SOUNDS
Giants orbiting, get higher
After the post-metal boom at the birth of this millennium, some less patient bands found ways to trim all those glacial crescendos and clingy denouements, writing concise songs that began and ended within sight of their climactic peaks. (We’re looking at you, mid-period Burst.) Bands like Sum of R have taken the opposite tack—eliminate peaks altogether, and sail with the barest light pressure of solar winds across interplanetary deserts that can only be revealed to bleary third eyes. It’s not about the destination, man; the journey’s all that matters. If the phrase “psychedelic doom” means anything, it means this. The only stringed instrument in Sum of R is Reto Mäder’s bass, so all tonal rhythms and riffs rise directly from that long-necked monster. Without a guitar manhandling the midrange, the songs espouse the same slinky shuffle that characterizes much of Om’s catalog. It also clears space for the sparse synth textures (made much more pronounced in a piece like “The Problem” or the subtle piano accompaniment on “Crown of Diseased” or closer “Lust”), not to mention vocalist Marko Neuman’s astonishing vocal range, which sees him growling, screeching, wailing, groaning and crooning in the witchiest of registers. Sum of R’s strength lies in the gradual, narcotic layering of gloom upon gloom, often opening with a hazy bass march and an uncomplicated, undulating beat, then heaping on texture after ponderous texture to ensure a maximally uncomfortable groove. They perfect the formula on the delirious first track, “Sink as I,” and your enjoyment of Lahbryce will depend on your patience with seven more minor tweaks to the process. If you have access to the right chemical boost to fuel your engine, though, then let Sum of R be your vehicle to the serotonin stars. —DANIEL LAKE
ULTRA SILVAM
8
The Sanctity of Death SHADOW/REGAIN
True Swedish black metal
Black metal is heavy metal taken to its logical conclusion, so when those frostbitten extremists perched out on the subculture’s frontier introduce a little 7 6 : M AY 2 0 2 2 : D E C I B E L
classicism, it goes a long way. Ultra Silvam were clearly weaned on the helter-skelter chaos of the early ’90s. There are blasts, necro screams, trebly dissonance, and those super-cool grooves that are always the most gnarly part in any black metal jam. You know the ones—all backbeat and a halftime feel, an occasion for pyro if you’ve got it, foul animal blood if you’re Watain. But Ultra Silvam’s sense of theater and melody comes from something that was established long before the Nordic perspective took metal darker. The title track opens with a guitar riff that runs Iron Maiden’s “Phantom of the Opera” through the particle accelerator. It’s almost neoclassical, putting the Blackmore into black metal. Ultra Silvam have chops to burn. Pop-cultural touchstones might include the aforementioned Watain, and the quicksilver aggro calls to mind Taake under a full moon, but there’s something of Yngwie Malmsteen here, too. Evil has made an ally of virtuosity. Oh, don’t worry—Ultra Silvam don’t flaunt it. This is subversive and effective. And besides, with that madman on the mic, this is too savage for your average conservatoire shredder. Tracks such as “Incarnation Reverse” would make scene veterans flinch, a high-tempo therapeutic to realign your chakras… along with whatever else needs realigning. All this ferocity is brought to a close with “Of Molded Bread and Rotten Wine,” an epic in which these Swedes condense all that has gone before to sound off with a blasphemous supernova. —JONATHAN HORSLEY
USTALOST
7
Before the Glinting Spell Unvests GILEAD MEDIA
Canary yellow eyes
Though Will Skarstad is primarily known for handling guitars and vocals in Yellow Eyes, a band he shares with his brother, his sights are always set somewhere else first. The result of years of trial-and-error songwriting, false starts, and even a robbery that set the album back months, Ustalost’s fabled second album was seemingly cursed before it was surprise-dropped by Gilead Media in late December. An immediate change in the weather can be felt as soon as the album starts. A much rawer affair compared to 2015’s The Spoor of Vipers—and with a heavy emphasis on mystery and mystique— Skarstad’s solo project takes on a new character with sophomore effort Before the Glinting Spell Unvests. Having most of his equipment stolen from the Yellow Eyes practice shed, this album was made by rudimentary means—a borrowed microphone, cheap pedals and an old drum kit all make appearances. This should spell disaster for a record people have literally waited years for following
its initial announcement, and yet Skarstad embraced chaos and soldiered on, crafting what can only be described as a unique LP in the process. Comparisons to Yellow Eyes can certainly be made, and that’s all in the process. Drawing from the same idea pool that fuels his other band, Skarstad uses a deep intuition to define which project requires what riff, where and when. That being said, Ustalost in its latest incarnation stands far from its sibling band, both in its support and to its detriment. Though the ideas found within are intriguing and the album’s raw nature makes for a compelling listen, sometimes it feels cobbled together, exactly in the way Skarstad has described in interviews. —JON ROSENTHAL
WATAIN
8
The Agony and Ecstasy of Watain NUCLEAR BLAST
Wolf’s lair reminisce
Iconoclasts Watain found black metal’s ire on The Wild Hunt (2013) and Trident Wolf Eclipse (2018). The Swedes were once the starlets of the abyssal aughts, but not a decade later were victims of vociferously limp town criers, many of whom viewed the band’s signing to Century Media and sonic explorations like “They Rode On” as contra to genre’s famously myopic ethos. Indeed, a similar fate befell Mayhem on the follow-up to the band’s landmark De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas a decade-plus before. Clearly, Satanists are the most Christian of Christians, “orthodoxy or death” their steely mantra. Well, Watain have done—and are doing—what thou famously wilt on their seventh long-playing sermon, The Agony and Ecstasy of Watain. In many respects, Watain are re-invoking similar demons from their heyday on tracks like “Ecstasies in Night Infinite,” “Leper’s Grace” and “Funeral Winter,” where the cold winds of nowhere blast expeditiously and fervently. The Necromorbus Studios production is still befitting Watain’s swirling, Mephistophelian din—like left hand (As Below) in proverbial glove. Frontman Erik Danielsson’s vocals are enterprisingly (if only slightly) buried in the mix, resulting in a more effective thrust. The other side of Watain—the duality, so to speak—lies in their mid-tempo “Serimosa,” the devilishlynamed “Black Cunt,” “Septentrion” and the brave “We Remain,” a slithering slip of a track featuring Farida Lemouchi (Molasses, ex-the Devil’s Blood). The Agony and Ecstasy of Watain may not appease firmly entrenched black metal bitches, but it is, in a way, a return to the days when Watain were effusively focused on death, destruction and the odd bit of nimble songcraft. Re-hails from the rafters, boys. —CHRIS DICK
RRUMBLY UMBLY THROUGH A SPEAKER THROUGH
Tape Master BY DUTCH PEARCE
VOIDCEREMONY
At the Periphery of Human Realms 20 BUCK SPIN
VoidCeremony return after their career-defining 2020 debut full-length with a 10-minute EP showcasing two new songs plus an interlude, a new logo and a new guitarist: one Phil Tougas of Atramentus and Chthe’ilist (!!!) Apparently, this tape is itself an interlude of sorts, between the first album and the forthcoming “in-progress eventual” second LP. “Entropic Reflections Continuum,” the first track on this EP, is also the title of the first album, because why not, Carcass did it? Both tracks are pure VoidCeremonial transcendental death metal, but the opener is especially thrilling. It’s like VoidCeremony are pushing their sound in both a more old-school and a more aggressive direction. Exciting happenings for one of the leading contemporary prog/techdeath metal bands.
MYRDØD
ABAROTH
W I S E B LO O D
TIMEWORN
The Mourning Hollow This newly formed, but immensely prolific PA-based black/death duo boasts a formidable and taxonomy-defying sound, like something dredged up oily and likely dead from the remote past, preserved in some Tartaran bog for eventual prophetic unsealing. Dark and ominous, The Mourning Hollow, Hollow, Myrdød’s third full-length of 2021, segues expertly between synth, black-doom swamp ritualia and oil-fire black metal attacks. Then on tracks like “Spellbound Tree” and the jaunty and revelrous closer “Diabolical Ancient Blessing,” Myrdød’s everythingist Søppelskaler sounds to have conjured something indeed diabolic and immense, barely within his young, but eager grasp. Then it hits you: It’s great to be here, frankly, at the dawning of a new extreme metal mastermind—even if we’re already playing catch-up.
EFFLUENCE
EXTINGUISHED
P2
CALIGARI
Psychocephalic Spawning Effluence’s brand of avant-garde brutal death metal borders on comedy. Gallagher smashed watermelons, Fred Willard smashed dinnerware and Effluence smash skulls with absurd, possibly-jazz-informed—the fuck do I know about jazz?—tech-death harsh noise. While they’re a little more structured than the personified chaos of Encenathrakh, Effluence are one of the most intense and interesting bands you could hope to hear in 2022. Both this U.S.-based solo project’s demo, Ballistic Bloodspray, and this EP (along with the Charred Vulture artworks that adorns them) represent absolutely crucial possessionship for anyone who drinks straight tap water, a.k.a. crazy motherfuckers who aren’t afraid to live a little dangerously.
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Vomitous Manifestations Should it be any wonder that Vomitous Manifestations is heaps of gory fun considering that Extinguished are composed of members from Obscure Burial and Sadokist? Their demo of corroded and fuzzy primitive Autopsy worship, sporting a gonarch (gonad + monarch) from Half-Life on its cover, is more than four headstone-solid slabs of brain-dead punishment in the name of kicking the bucket. Vomitous Manifestations is certainly all that, but these Finns are lifers, and, as the intro to “Unforeseen Consequences” or the whole of closer “Devoted to Hades” can testify, there’s a lot more to this demo than just paint-bynumbers Mental Funeral regurgitation. You’re too busy headbanging, but trust me, these are impressively vomited manifestations!
Dosed
Dosed is New England atmospheric black metal outfit Abaroth leaning into their psychedelic/hard rock/Viking metal tendencies, as we all should if these four tracks are anything like what the outcome might be. Upon relistening to their 2019 banger Emissary of the Void, this unexpected step into the world of Dosed seems somehow more logical, although no less impressive. Poised between sexy and supernatural, rocking and restrained, catchy and inspired, Dosed turns 22 minutes into a good time that’ll restore your faith in the elasticity of metal. Pretty sure “Sex Magician” is a Blue Öyster Cult cover. If not, it should be.
MANAT Demo
SELF-RELEASED
Everything about this demo hits so perfectly archaic that even its so-called flaws are irrefutably sick. The simplistic artwork; the frenetic riffs; the incorrigible demon vocals; the fact that it sounds like a thrash band freshly discovering death metal; the misplaced apostrophe in the song title “Where Angel’s Bow Down”—it all just smacks of 1987. The energy is pushed into the red across all five of these tracks on Manat’s self-titled demo tape and the only breaks you’ll get will be during the few seconds in between. Besides that, it’s like each song rips harder than the one before it until you’re certain something is going to explode. And at one point, “Somnath” nearly does, but the New Yorkers hold it together and then some. This one was definitely missing from my Top 5 Death Metal Demos of 2021 list.
by
EUGENE S. ROBINSON
THE THING ABOUT
STEPHEN BRODSKY mY
kids, at one point,
unbidden by me and certainly apropos of not much of anything outside of maybe something they heard at school—now that school wants to identify every single quirk of human behavior as something with a name that can subsequently be treated—sort of launched an… intervention. “We think you’re autistic, dad.” I laughed. Based on what? “Well, you seem to have attachment difficulties with other humans…” I was the only one laughing now. And they continued. “And you’re kind of rude. You just say anything, which seems to be an impulse control issue.” Oh, these schools. These schools that I was paying for. I tried to explain that I was just, in my bones, a New Yorker, and that might always seem strange and out of pace with what passes for “normal” in California. They just stared at me. Long enough that I thought maybe I should really contemplate it. “Have you considered seeing an analyst?” Laugh if you want. But these
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weren’t children talking to me, though they were my kids. These were young adults. So, I started to consider. My consideration—while not carrying me into analysis, which is what I have OXBOW for—had me paying attention a little bit more carefully than I had. I mean, maybe they were right. But being on tour with my book Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking, as I was, left lots of time for… morbid self-attention, to paraphrase Travis Bickle. It also put me in a weird “is it me or is it them?” space. No less so than when I pulled into Boston. Nick Blakey, the promoter and show organizer, was super geeked on the gig, and was excited that it seemed like lots of folks would show. “Lots” was always weird to me, and I’ve always had a weird thing for Boston. Never sure if it was real and, if so, how real? But at least you got to see friends. Or people who would become friends. And while sitting in a booth with maybe Aaron Turner from Sumac, maybe Nate Newton from Converge, I was having a
grand old time. Days in a car by yourself with nothing but books and your thoughts might do that to you. Even though the company was good, too. Then someone I had never met before walked up. He introduced himself. Or he was introduced to me: Stephen Brodsky. Then it got weird. Brodsky was with some other cat unknown, by me, and unnamed. They seemed in a jolly mood. Not drunk jolly. Not even really jolly. But they were laughing. “So, you’re Eugene, huh?” “Yes!” In a lot of ways, I’m a rustic—and I use the word the way Russ Meyer used it when I first heard it used this way. I don’t get cute about language, and from all of my time interviewing murderers and bad men, I cleave to being plain-spoken. Just as a survival mechanism. But there was something in Brodsky’s tone that confused me. Like maybe I had somehow insulted him. Which would have been damn near impossible no matter what my kids said. I just hadn’t had time. And the conversation, as it unspooled, got stranger and stranger.
I felt like I was talking to Ben, Dean Stockwell’s character in Blue Velvet. He would ask a question, then interrupt the answer to ask the question again. I smiled. It amused me. Because something was happening here. What that was? Well, that, like the song says, wasn’t clear. And for 15 minutes this is how it went, and while I’d have been happy to play if I knew what we were playing at, I just really had no idea. See above, re: rustic. Or, as an earmark of autism, maybe I was just bad at reading other people. So, later I asked Aaron: Is it me? Or was it Brodsky? “Well, I think that’s just Stephen.” Which was a wonderfully diplomatic way of saying, “There’s a distinctly strong possibility you’re both out of your fricking minds.” I don’t know. Still don’t know. But I’m OK not knowing. I mean Cave In was/is still a hell of a band. That’s all a man on the spectrum like me has the time to give a shit about. And Brodsky? At the very least he’s given me a laugh that’s lasted much longer than I’m sure he ever expected. ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE
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Swedish extreme tech-metal pioneers MESHUGGAH return with their ninth studio manifest „Immutable“
CD Digipak | Colored 2LP | Cassette | Digital „Immutable is a slow-churning vortex of swirling atmospheres, ten-ton debris-type grooves, and vocals that seem to come from everywhere at once. This is Meshuggah at their finest hour...“ METAL INJECTION
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