Noise Not Music #4: Eyehategod, Ben Frost, Mayhem And More
Thursday, 29 May 2014
Written by Ben Bland
Welcome to the latest edition of Noise Not Music on Stereoboard, the only repository for all your extreme musical needs. My apologies for the delay in producing the fourth instalment - it has, alas, not been the most enjoyable of months - but thankfully the extra time has allowed plenty of wonderful, harsh sounds to make their way into the world. So, with the usual warning that listeners of a more circumspect nature should read on with caution, let’s get on with it.
New Releases
Austin Buckett - ‘Grain Loops’ (Room40)
Lawrence English’s Room40 label has explored all manner of experimental sound stylings across the years - many of English’s own releases have been highlights - but I’m not sure I’ve heard anything quite like ‘Grain Loops’ from the Australian imprint before.
What Buckett has essentially presented here is the bare minimum of sound, and yet the impact of the 30-minute-long loops (created using snare drums and sandpaper) is far greater than the premise suggests it ever could be. The brevity of each track creates a sense of constant motion and, by the end of the record, one feels that every possible avenue through these textures has been explored. Whether his investigations are for you is likely to cause you some thought, but records that make you think are usually the ones worth thinking about.
Eyehategod - ‘Eyehategod’ (Century Media)
One of the founding pillars of what has become known as sludge metal - even if they don’t like the tag - New Orleans veterans Eyehategod (pictured, main) have celebrated their 26th year of existence with only their fifth studio album (and first since 2000’s ‘Confederacy of Ruined Lives’).
Bands who release records so infrequently tend to do so either because they don’t have many ideas, or because they secretly hate each other. In the case of Eyehategod, though, it seems that the band have felt it necessary in 2014 to remind everyone quite how venomously they view the unjust world in which they live.
Raging out of the blocks with Agitation! Propaganda!, which proves straight from the off that age has not diminished the band’s interest in out-and-out heaviness, ‘Eyehategod’ is a vitriolic demonstration of everything that made this band so great in the first place. There are brilliant riffs, moments of barely contained aural violence and, most memorably of all, the ever-distinctive vocals of Mike IX Williams. There are a couple of slight missteps in the middle of the album, but this record is a worthy addition to the band’s already impenetrable legacy, as well as being a fine send off to drummer Joey LaCaze, who died after recording his parts for the album last year. May he rest in peace.
The Quebec black metal scene has apparently been thriving for a few years now, but it’s taken this four-way split between some of its leading lights to make me aware of it. I’ll have to make up for lost time because ‘Légendes’ is four tracks of limb-severingly brilliant black metal.
Forteresse offer a more melodic take on the genre than the other three acts assembled here. Wendigo, their contribution, is surprisingly catchy, but not at all lacking in the heaviness stakes. Chasse-Galerie have a harsher edge to their sound, which isn’t all that far from early Enslaved in its use of Bathory-esque dynamics. Monarque are probably the best known act here and La Griffe du Diable illustrates why that might be the case, showcasing a strength of atmosphere that only the best black metal bands are able to muster.
Csejthe, meanwhile, close ‘Légendes’ with arguably its best track, one that harks back to the glory days of many of black metal’s founding bands. Echoes of Scandinavia have certainly reached across the seas. What’s most impressive, however, about ‘Légendes’ is how, aside from obvious references to some of the genre’s most influential and definitive bands, each of these Québécois artists have a distinctive feel of their own which separates them from many of their peers overseas. The Canadian underground scene is ripe for exploration if these four tracks are anything to go by.
Much of the pre-release chatter about Australian native, and Icelandic resident, Ben Frost’s long-awaited new LP has been focused around its use of live drums (provided by Swan Thor Harris and Liturgy’s Greg Fox) and the involvement of noted multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily.
The impact of the drums on ‘A U R O R A’ is, however, fairly negligible in the grander scheme of things. This is a record that sees Frost, a contemporary composer and sound artist of the highest order, savage the already mutilated corpse of dance music with an astonishing barrage of noise. The electronics do the bulk of the damage here, not the drums.
Yet, for a record that is, for a large part of its duration, a rather punishing listen, ‘A U R O R A’ is also remarkably accessible. Tracks like Nolan and Venter use their distance from conventional electronic music to allure rather than to frighten and that, it soon becomes apparent, probably makes ‘A U R O R A’ Frost’s most deadly collection of music to date. After 2009’s incredible ‘By the Throat’, a record that shattered every sonic boundary that it attempted to cross, that is quite a statement indeed.
Mayhem - ‘Esoteric Warfare’ (Season of Mist)
It’s all too easy to forget that Mayhem’s post-‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’ discography is actually pretty great for the most part. Yes, ‘Grand Declaration of War’ was utterly mental in places, ‘Chimera’ had a few filler tracks and ‘Ordo ad Chao’ was a bit much to take in, but none of their full-lengths have actually been bad at all. Nevertheless, I feared that ‘Esoteric Warfare’ might be a disappointment, but only because of a rather underwhelming experience seeing the band live in Tilburg last September. There was no need to worry.
‘Esoteric Warfare’ sees Mayhem subtly reinvent themselves at the same time as affirming their continuing position near the top of the black metal tree, something they achieve through both sheer ferocity and inventiveness. Opener Watcher is one of the most genuinely fantastic tracks the band has put to tape since the old days, blending Attila’s demented vocals with thoughtful, but sharp, riffing from new guitarist Teloch and a dose of that classically cold Mayhem darkness. Even the album’s most progressive moments, such as the mid-album duo of Mylab and VI Sec., all benefit from a certain atmospheric consistency. If anything it’s the more traditional black metal tracks, like lead single Psywar, that fail to impress, but overall this is pretty engaging listening from a band with much more life in them than their history would suggest is reasonable.
Shift - ‘Altamont Rising’ (Cold Spring)
“We sacrificed you,” roars a voice that is human and yet not human, projected somehow over a sonic wasteland of broken glass shards. ‘Altamont Rising’ sees Swedish death-industrial expert Shift in typically brutal form, with They Don’t Suffer Enough just about claiming the honour of being the most harrowing piece here. The seven tracks assembled for this release feel as if they last an age - in the best way possible - with each combining nightmarish samples and debauched electronic manipulations in genuinely effective fashion.
The downside with this type of noise music is often that artists feel the need to try and compensate for their lack of a distinctive sound by overdoing every element at their disposal. Shift doesn’t do that. It’s the subtler moments on the record that place extra emphasis on the most vicious parts, something which ultimately places ‘Altamont Rising’ on the upper level of noise releases from the last few years.
Wold - ‘Postsocial’ (Profound Lore)
Have you ever imagined what a collaboration between early Mayhem and early Ramleh might sound like? Well, if you haven’t then a) why not? and b) probably something like the new Wold album. ‘Postsocial’ is Wold’s seventh album and these pillars of the “black noise” scene haven’t got any more melodic as time has gone by. A band who are probably unusually worthy of a “post-” prefix, Wold’s approach has always been confrontational but I wouldn’t hesitate too much in proclaiming ‘Postsocial’ their nastiest distillation of black metal’s core values yet.
While there are moments here when the razor-throated vocals veer into Consumer Electronics/Con-Dom territory, especially on Five Points, the main debt Wold owe to “original” noise music is the churning industrial static that makes up much of the album’s sonic template. Any metallic musical elements are buried in the mix but black metal was always more than just a sound, and Wold demonstrate the genre’s misanthropic attitude clearly throughout the five tracks here.
Strangely, despite the scornful industrial discord at the heart of the record, ‘Postsocial’ has an almost euphoric impact. The bleakness at the heart of the record mutates and becomes the canvas for all one’s own inner rage, making the world seem an infinitely better place after listening.
Phew, if that’s not enough to keep you going for the next few weeks then your extreme musical greed knows no bounds. Until next time, adjø!
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