Monodrone vs. METAL

Yep!

This might make me a bad fan, but I don't like talking about metal with non-fans. I should proselytize and spread the good word, but I'd rather just not be asked about it. Like if they ask what kind of music I like, and I say metal, and they say "Oh, like Metallica!" I'm pretty much done with that conversation. Sometimes it'll be a group setting, like driving to a lunch with coworkers, and they'll be talking about putting on some music and they'll tell me to put on something I like, but I really hate that. Maybe it would actually be fun for them to listen to two minutes of Fleshgod Apocalypse, I don't know, but I don't want to share this particular hobby with randos. 

My officemate puts on music in our office sometimes, and a few weeks ago she was all, "Here, something for you. I looked up death metal and this was the first thing" and it was the band Death, who I don't like. So I got to sit and choke on my frustration that this band - while deservedly revered and instrumental in the development of death metal - was becoming for her the banner for a genre that sounds nothing like that any more.

I just nodded though. Maybe said something about that band being "old school" or something like that. 


 

Replace "death metal" by "black metal", and "Death" by "Cradle of Filth" and I had the same experience almost word for word.

94. Deafheaven - Sunbather



Who the heck are these chumps?
Held responsible for popularising the divisive sub-genre that has come to be known as black-gaze, Deafheaven have been maligned for daring to have short hair and as many as 2 delay pedals and pink (PINK?!) album cover while being a black metal (or black metal adjacent, at least) band. Old school black metallers aren't keen on people playing with the format at the best of times and this was seven digressions past acceptable for many trve cvltists even if Alcest did it first and no one gave them shit for it.
I'm not trve cvlt in the slightest so obviously got into them in a big way on the back of Sunbather getting good reviews on pitchfork and our old pals at the av club and Sunbather was probably a top 10 album for me in 2013 and top 3 for metal (listen to my favourite metal album from 2013 here: lightbearer.bandcamp.com if you are at all curious)
I haven't gone back to it much in the last couple of years because I think New Bermuda (2015) is better so I always put that on first but let's see if I'm missing out.

The songs, are they good?
Dream House - those are some blast beats if ever I heard them. So far, so black metal in the first minute albeit the chords are a bit more major than is standard. I'm huge on change up of the drumming at the 70 second mark, those fills are great. The 'lead guitar' section with the fast drums (2:40-3:10) is something I'm not totally sold on but I get why it's been done that way - the song would lose too much momentum if they did anything else - so I'll go with it. The last couple of minutes of it drifted past me tbh and I'm now half way through...

...Irresistible - interlude #1. It's pleasant enough. No drums though, so who gives a fuck?

Sunbather - title track, eh? Back to the drums - I like the use of the hi-hats on the off-beats in the intro but the first few minutes is a slog to get through. Nothing of note going on before the burst of energy brings the track to life just past the 3 minute mark. I think the shoegaze lead guitar with blast beats fits a lot better this time round, probably because of how things have built up to get to that point and the switch to the rolling drums at 4:43 is ace. When Deafheaven run at full speed I get effortlessly swept along by it, it's sublime. The brief pause/bend on the guitar strings at 6:40 is good.

Please Remember - interlude #2. Swirly. Makes me nauseous. Usually skip it.

Vertigo - tuned out there and suddenly this song's been on for 3 minutes. It gets good soon, as I remember. I was right, starts ramping up at 3:30 and doesn't give an inch for the next few minutes. TIDY. I think this is my favourite one so far. There's more to the slow sections in Vertigo, can't put my finger on what because I'm an amateur but it feels weightier.

Windows - interlude #3. This chap does not represent me.

The Pecan Tree - the old pecan tree. The pie nut. The piss pot (pee can). I think I've hit my limit. I get the point of what they're doing and this isn't doing anything different enough from the other 3 main tracks to hold my attention. There's a pure Mono-esque post-rock section near the half way mark that's got me back on board. Nice one, lads. Fade out ending to the album is a sin. Pure garbage move.

What d'ya make of it then?
Good. I didn't say anything about the vocals in the track-by-track but they sit well for the most part. Not high enough in the mix to grab the headlines but adding an extra layer of anguish in the heavy sections. It might have been interesting to mix things up when the instruments weren't at full throttle but maybe yr man is a straight-up shit singer.

Does it belong on the dang list? Should it be this high?
There's room for it but I'd rather have New Bermuda which is tighter with better riffs and smoother transitions but I know they've gone for this one because it opened a world up to a lot of people who hadn't previously had a way in. It could probably be a touch higher but it wouldn't be close to a top 20 spot on my list (maybe I'll do one of them at the end. Maybe I won't. Get back to me in 2021 with your thoughts)

Next up, at 93, White Zombie - La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One

The list is from June 2017 so they had plenty of time to sort their dang heads out and put the correct album in. I get why it didn't get the props it deserved though, their shelf life as a mainstream darling was always going to be shortlived when they play something as niche as this. Incremental gains and the honing of an art aren't as exciting to write about for a music Journalist as The New Sound must be.

You didn't let me down.

I'm interested to see what you make of this, while it's on my mind. Not exactly black metal but major key metal with a few blasts in it:

GODDAMN IT. GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. I happened upon the Rolling Stone top 100 metal albums list over the weekend (I looked up what Life of Agony are doing these days and fell down the link-hole) and thought that it would be a really good one to do one of these review things in the TIF, and now I come here and find that monodrone is already doing it. You selfish cockend Mono! You stole my idea and, just to add insult to injury, you stole it several months before I even had it. 

Anyway, I'm going to gradually start making my way through the posts here. Prepare for a bunch of "like" notifications.

Welcome aboard.

I love White Pony too.

Deafheaven. I don't fucking get it. I don't get it to the point of 'fuck this' that's how much I don't get it. Bleah. But we are usually quite close to the same opinion on things monodrone so I am going to give the track "Vertigo" a try and see if I can find something, anything at all, even slightly worthy of the praise heaped on this album.

OH MY GOD IT'S 14 MINUTES LONG

Ha, I'm similarly surprised that you're that put off by it. Vertigo is 14 minutes long but it doesn't feel like hard work in the same way that I found the White Zombie songs that went on for 5+ minutes difficult to get through. It's got some standard post-rock ebb and flow to it, especially in the build over the first few minutes which is better than I gave it credit for last week. I like all the ebows and delay before it gets big and there always seems to be a purpose to what's going on, ideas aren't allowed to drift along unchallenged for too long. The vocals are pretty one note, I can see why that would bother people but I'm too busy with the drums to care too much about them.

This is the first album on the list that I've owned. I have no recollection of how I came to own it, but I suspect it was from my beer money scheme where my parents would give me a box of garage sale books to trade in at Bookman's, where I'd buy cassettes with store credit and then trade the tapes at Gopher Sounds for cash. I don't think I listened to it very much.

Strip away all the samples, and this is the sort of vaguely thrashy groove metal that a lot of 80s bands adopted when they realized they were getting old and couldn't keep up with the death metal kids. "Welcome to Planet Motherfucker/Psychoholic Slag" has a sample of the same weird backwards bird sounds as the startup on my old Windows NT workstation. "Thunder Kiss '65" is still a decent song, and "Black Sunshine" isn't half-bad. After that, the album falls off in a big way. I thought maybe they were going to pull Megadeth's post-Rust in Peace trick of starting with a couple of neck-wreckers and then throwing in a bunch of filler before finishing strong, but nope. The highlights of the album after "Black Sunshine" are the Batman sample in "Cosmic Monsters Inc." and the "million miles an hour" part of "Starface". Rob Zombie has a decent Hetfield-ish voice, but these watered-down half-speed Slayer riffs just don't do much for me.

Not only is this the first of these albums I own, it's the first on the list so far I've even listened to. At least up until last weekend when I gave City of Evil a spin, more on which at a later date.  

I had expected this to immediately bring back memories of 1996 and being 17 and going to The Mayfair*, drinking four pints of snakebite with half a dozen Pro Plus, dancing like an imbecile and chucking up in the back of a taxi on the way home**. But it didn't, because when I put it on I realised I wasn't actually familiar with this album at all. Astro-Creep: 2000 was out at that point and that's the White Zombie album I do know.  

Which also makes this the first album in what I suspect will be theme: why did Rolling Stone pick this one rather than the same band's better known / more successful other effort? I listened to AC2K*** for the first time in, ooh, fifteen years or more, was instantly familiar with all the tracks on it and was transported back to 1996, The Mayfair, chucking up etc. And yeah, though it's not an all-time classic, it's a better album with more faster ones (faster is indeed better), a respectable thrash drummer (Mike Tempesta, ex-Testament and Exodus; he probably doesn't really get enough to do, but that just creates a sense of him champing at the bit), really slick production and just generally it's where their whole sample-y, horror-themed 90s pop-Metal schtick properly congealed came together. 

Anyway, on to this one. Generally, I kinda liked it more as it went on. Mostly from about "I Am Legend" onwards, from which point its scuzzy, groove-rock thing grew on me as they seemed to let their drummer loosen up a bit and have some fun, and mostly upped the pace. It occasionally even engendered this odd compulsion I've mostly forgotten about where my feet, sometimes even my hips, wanted to move in a some inept attempt to follow the beat. I think I'd certainly enjoy smoking weed while listening to this, were I at a point in my life where I got to smoke weed anymore.

Definitely got its problems mind you:

• Ideally, Metal albums should begin with Battery and end with Damage Inc. This starts with a mid-tempo grinder and ends with a plodder which in no way lives up to the psychedelic promise of being a track called "Warp Asylum".

• Also re: the start - look, I like sex noise as much as the next chap. It makes me think of sexy girls having sex. But if you're going to have sex noise, it needs to be in a song about having sex with sexy girls, or a song about being a sexy girl and having sex. And you need to commit to it. "Love to Love You Baby" is obviously the ne plus ultra of sex noise songs, but in rock music "Rocket Queen" does it pretty well. This one though just comes across as "we need a sample here to fill it in a bit, I guess sex noise will do". 

• 58 minutes is way too long for an album of this same-y material. Also, almost all the songs are over five minutes long. Unless you have a brilliant song architect in your band (which White Zombie emphatically did not) you have no business dealing with song lengths significantly over the four minute mark.

tl;dr version - I'd say this one goes up to about 7.



*It's gone now of course, the site gentrified into a cinema and some chain restaurants and a fucking sports bar.
**This last one is a lie. I've never chucked in a taxi. I just feel like somehow I should have, y'know?
***No one else calls it that, but I'm not typing the whole name out again.

Urrmmm.

Well, the truth is that I'd forgotten about those tracks in Lateralus. But I do kind of think they're more "interlude" and less "skit" than Intermission or Die Eier Von Satan. 

"So Lurky, explain how those tracks in Lateralus are "interludes", but the ones in La Sexorcisto are "skits"."

Well that's easy. It's because the ones in La Sexorcisto are annoying. 

I love when people articulate my thoughts for me because I co-sign ALL OF THIS. (Rocket Queen is so good I'd actually MISS the sex noises if they were censored out.) I saw White Zombie in 1993 and thought Rob's vocals sounded absolutely awful live. I don't know if I've told that story here before but early into their set someone grabbed a fire hose and sprayed some sound equipment which caused about an hour delay in the show. We stuck around anyway and the band finally returned......to play two more songs and call it a night.   

Also regarding More Human Than Human.....that song has become fairly ubiquitous despite the sex noises which seem to go on forever. Especially when your sitting in the office you share with co-workers, a doctor's office waiting room, your Uber, etc. It literally feels like 5 full minutes of moaning when it's in an embarrassing setting. On top of that it just fucking suuuuuucks anyway. 

I know we've talked about this before, but remind me: you're from... is it one of the Shields? Or was it Sunderland? Sorry, I've got a piss-poor memory and I've forgotten. And you're in Jockland now, right?

Went to club nights at The Mayfair but never gigs. Good venue for a club night - used to be a ballroom/dance hall and had this sweet vibe of having seen much better days and being really scuzzy and down at heel. Problem with it though was that it had too much capacity for the typical Friday night attendance, at least by the time I was there. Not quite intimate enough.

Any band I wanted to see played at The Riverside instead. Which was (maybe still is) an awesome venue for rock/metal gigs - it'd get so hot and sweaty in there that condensation would drip off the ceiling like light rain. 

I know Trills is still there. Any idea if there's still a rock/metal club night going in Newcastle?