Real Estate- “Out of Tune”
Millionyoung- “Calrissian”
Happy New Year- “Twins”
Velvet Davenport- “Run (feat. Ariel Pink)”
The Nightgowns- “Narwhal Aerobics”
Magic Places- “Through the Map Room Door”
The Declining Winter- “Killer”
Chao- “Baked Apples (Demo)”
Houses- “Reds”
Sun Airway- “Your Moon”
Sweet Bulbs- “Kissing Clouds”
Slow Animal- “Saturday Mourning”
Fergus & Geronimo- “Harder Than it's Ever Been”
Weekend- “Coma Summer”
Guards- “Swimming After Dark”
Kurt Vile- “In My Time”
Deerhunter- “Memory Boy”
Shimmering Stars- “Sun's Going Down”
Eternal Summers- “Salty”
Sleep ∞ Over- “La-Rose”
Cloudy Busey- “Pound Your Town to Hell”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.- “Nothing But Our Love”
Heavy Hawaii- “Sleeping Bag”
Outer Limits Recordings- “I'm an Alien”
oOoOO- “Burnout Eyess”
Clive Tanaka y su Orquestra- “Neu Chicago”
Philip Seymour Hoffman- “Duckfangs Tickle My Ankles”
Winter Drones- “Between the Leaves”
Wild Eyes- “Death Mouth”
Suuns- “Arena”
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
HaASL Radio Show 10/23/10
Friday, October 22, 2010
HaASL Radio Show 10/16/10
Times New Viking- “No Room to Live”
Eternal Summers- “I'll Die Young for Rock 'n' Roll”
Surf City- “Kudos”
Fair Ohs- “Hey Lizzie”
Spectrals- “Chip a Tooth (Spoil a Smile)”
Foxes in Fiction- “Bathurst”
Gauntlet Hair- “Out, Don't...”
Blackbird Blackbird- “Summer Heart”
Small Black- “New Chain”
Saharan Gazelle Boy- “Halfhair Girl”
Dada Trash Trash Collage- “Two Eyes”
Procedure Club- “Art of Ignoring”
Narwhal- “Galapagos”
Yellow Ostrich- “Libraries”
Fox Hands- “Nosebleed”
Valet- “Fire”
of Montreal- “Enemy Gene”
Porcelain Raft- “Tip of Your Tongue”
Coma Cinema- “Greater Vultures”
All Saints Day- “You Can't Be Alone”
Women- “Eyesore”
Beach House- “White Moon (iTunes Session)”
Wet Wings- “Sleep-Tight”
A Sunny Day in Glasgow- “So Bloody, So Tight”
Kurt Vile- “Ocean City”
Coolrunnings- “When I Got High With You”
Avey Tare- “Heather in the Hospital”
We Like Cats- “Money Dubby Money”
HaASL Radio Show 10/09/10
Salem- “King Night”
School of Seven Bells- “Heart is Strange”
Museum of Bellas Artes- “Watch the Glow”
Husband- “Love Song”
Slow Animal- “Godz”
Deerhunter- “Revival”
Velvet Davenport- “Warmy Personal Routine”
La Sera- “Never Come Around”
Tennis- “South Carolina”
Coma Cinema- “Her Sinking Sun”
Thee Oh Sees- “You Are in My Glass”
Twin Sister- “All Around and Away We Go”
No Joy- “No Joy”
The Proper Ornaments- “Recalling”
Avey Tare- “Lucky 1”
My Bloody Valentine- “Soon”
Otouto- “W. Hillier”
Perfume Genius- “Mr. Peterson”
Xiu Xiu- “I Luv the Valley OH!”
Ólöf Arnalds- “Innundir Skinni”
Devendra Banhart- “Pumpkin Seeds”
Why?- “A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under”
Parenthetical Girls- “Young Throats”
Small Black- “Photojournalist”
Beach Fossils- “Face It”
Ponchos- “This World is Not My Home”
Stoned Boys- “Dead Friends”
Beggars in a New Land- “The Barnyard”
HaASL Radio Show 10/02/10
Deerhunter- “Helicopter”
Procedure Club- “Dictionary of Psychology”
Fox Hands- “Branches”
School of Seven Bells- “Face to Face on High Places”
Gem Club- “Sevens”
Computer Magic- “Victory Gin”
Candy Claws- “The Sun is My Girl”
Dead Gaze- “Take Me Home or I Die Alone”
Dan Deacon- “Snookered”
Neon Indian- “Sleep Paralysist”
Botany- “Feeling Today”
CVLTS- “Microrangers”
Twin Sister- “The Other Side of Your Face”
The Antlers- “Kettering”
Best Coast- “Boyfriend”
LCD Soundsystem- “Losing My Edge”
Baths- “Hall”
Lullatone- “The Bedtime Beatbox”
Das Racist- “Puerto Rican Cousins”
Shabazz Palaces- “Barksdale Corners”
Aesop Rock- “Coffee (Clean)”
Shad- “Yaa I Get It”
Brown Study- “Just Be”
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Temporal Shift: The Kill- Soundtrack to Your Violence
Biases are one of the many things wrong with modern society. They fuel unnecessary and corrosive racial, political and social hatred, promote segregation and division, and keep us from becoming fully realized and well-rounded individuals. If you let them, they also keep you from enjoying some damned excellent bands.
A few years ago, I fell prey to a bias of my own. In this case, it manifested itself in the belief that no good music came from Australia. To my understanding, Australians were incapable of taking themselves seriously, and from AC/DC, to shitty radio rock offerings, even as far as their grindcore was concerned, it seemed like all Aussies wrote about was hanging out, sitting around, being lazy and getting laid. While that's since been rendered moot by the likes of Warsore, my first introductions to bands like Captain Cleanoff left me feeling unfulfilled (most likely from being spoiled by the sophisticated lyrical fare of Discordance Axis and Pig Destroyer and the diverse topical contributions of Napalm Death and Brutal Truth.)
Like every good sudden conversion of opinion, of course, it was sparked by a chance encounter. In my case, that encounter was with the Kill's 2003 album Soundtrack to Your Violence, the very slab of grind ferocity before us today. After hearing “We Want Blood” on the band's Myspace, I was impressed enough to download the album, yet the song titles kept me at arm's length. Looking up the lyrics on Darklyrics (really the only place you should be looking for metal lyrics, anyway) confirmed my suspicions: “Dead Babies” was about liking abortion, “Fuck Emo” was about (you guessed it) disliking emo (although the song's suggestion that emo bands start playing grind instead is, was and ever shall be fucking hilarious, world without end, amen), and I can tell you the full lyrics to the 1:03 “Tracksuit Pants Are Thrash” from memory: “Tracksuit pants are thrash / We are white trash.” Not exactly Garcia Lorca, if you ask me.
Yet the music kept me coming back. The album was two minutes long of being Amber Gray, and it assaulted with a more thrash take on the same ferocity. The guitars buzzed like Insect Warfare with a kernel of interest in songwriting, and the vocals made up for the fact that they weren't delivered by Jon Chang by being truly unhinged in their approach; I couldn't help but picture the lyrics being bellowed in my face with each syllable.
What's more, I began to stop minding them. That's not to say that my ideology changed; I'm not about to write lyrics about liking wrestling (“We Want Blood”) or fat men who would probably beat the shit out of me (“Gore”), but the songs suddenly became funny instead of annoying. Buying the rare vinyl collection of a heroin addict? Hilarious. Writing songs about track suit pants being metal? Pretty hilarious too. Babies looking like aliens? Also actually pretty funny.
Realizing how awesome Soundtrack to Your Violence really was made me look back at albums like Symphonies of Slackness and admit that lyrical silliness couldn't alter the fact that they were, musically, pretty amazing. Eventually I'd branch out from Aussie grind, realizing that even something like lack of song titles (Arsedestroyer's Teenass Revolt) or writing utterly offensive, mindless material (Anal Cunt, anyone?) doesn't have anything to do with whether you can grind or not.
If you're just going to judge a band on whether their lyrics could stack up to Nabokov or not (honestly, if those were your lyrical standards, you'd listen to exactly zero bands), you're going to have to ignore the musical talent of a good percent of pretty great groups. Same goes if you judge them on members' gender, sexual preference, race, or national origin.
The Kill's Soundtrack to Your Violence is an album that pulls no punches. It grinds you from the first note and doesn't let up until its 13:28 runtime is up, with a sense of grinding purity that's really quite elegant. No instrumentals, no bullshit boring doom track to close the album, and even no need for dialogue samples, something that would only dilute the experience. Simply put, if you don't have a copy of this record either on your cd rack, in your digital music library or in your vinyl crates (does this thing even come on vinyl? I sort of doubt it), you've got an ugly, irreverent Aussie-sized hole in your grind collection that needs filling ASAP.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
HaASL Radio Show 9/25/10
Dan Deacon- “Wham City”
Gowns- “Feathers”
Guided by Voices- “Expecting Brainchild”
Best Coast- “Sun Was High (So Was I)”
The Hold Steady- “Your Little Hoodrat Friend”
Blue Water White Death- “Song for the Greater Jihad”
Devendra Banhart- “Poughkeepsie”
Grouper- “Heavy Water/I'd Rather be Sleeping”
Dirty Projectors- “I Will Truck”
Here we Go Magic- “I Just Want to See You Under Water”
The Ruby Suns- “Oh Mojave”
The Microphones- “Headless Horseman”
No Age- “Glitter”
Real Estate- “Younger Than Yesterday”
No Joy- “Heedless
HEALTH- “Die Slow”
Memory Tapes- “Plain Material”
Animal Collective- “Safer”
Jordaan Mason & the Horse Museum- “Avalanches”
Junip- “Rope and Summer”
Washed Out- “Belong”
Mi Ami- “Echonoecho”
The Mae Shi- “Massively Overwrought”
Arches- “Behind Close Blinds”
Twin Sister- “Meet the Frownies”
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Body- All the Waters of the Earth Shall Turn to Blood
Some doom metal is called such for merely clinical reasons, i.e. its unsettlingly slow tempos, seismically heavy guitar tone, and dark lyrical themes. Other doom metal genuinely sounds like the end of the world.
Providence, Rhode Island doom/sludge cultists The Body occupy prime real estate in that latter category. In an age where virtually every event has musical accompaniment, if the world does decide to end in 2012 (spoiler alert: not betting on it), I wouldn't be surprised if somebody licensed The Body's newest LP All the Waters of the Earth Shall Turn to Blood as its official soundtrack.
The seven minute choral introduction to album opener “A Body” is like a rapturous, heavenly light, bathing us one last time before the band, a punishing duo of guitar and drums, opens the earth to swallow us whole for the remaining two-and-half minutes of the track. This song sets the stage for the rest of the record, coupling destructive, anti-social, truly doom-laden metal with unusual, atmospheric and unsettling sonic partners.
Third track “Empty Hearth,” for example, chops up actual doomsday cult chanting (from this collection, for those who just can't get enough doomsday cults) into a glitchy, inhuman counterpoint to the duo's industrial crunch that, once you get past the chanting's creepiness factor, is actually kinda catchy.
The chorus from “A Body” return multiple times, to near-transcendent effect, first on more straight-ahead doom song “Even the Saints Knew Their Hour of Failure and Loss” and again on the jaw-dropping closer “Lathspell I Name You.” Elsewhere, on “Song of Sarin, the Brave,” a straight-outta-Jonestown fanatic (or possibly William S. Burroughs or somebody, who knows) rants about pain and suffering over the band's mood-setting metallic creep, bowing out from time to time to let them storm back into the foreground.
That isn't to say that this record is great simply because of its non-metal aspects. Yes, the way those parts are integrated elevates the record, and they're certainly excellent additions that create a compelling listening experience, but the true praise goes to the band themselves. This LP would be nothing without the excellent principle performers, as well as their sense of aesthetic and considerable curatorial skills. The expressive vocal howls and heavy yet diverse guitar work lend body to The Body, and the outstanding, creative drum work propels this apocalyptic, nihilistic obelisk of an album to sludgy, outsider doom metal genius.
All the Waters of the Earth Shall Turn to Blood is similar in many ways to last year's surprise metal masterpiece, Liturgy's black metal/shoegaze bar-raiser Renihilation (which if you check back to my year-end list for 2009, you'll notice that I tragically slept on, waiting until Zmaj's year-in-retrospect kicked me in the ass enough that I went and got it) in its transcendent, almost religious quality, rendering classic-quality metal alongside atmospheric touchstones that combine to create a wholly new experience in their respective genres. Also like that album, All the Waters of the Earth Shall Turn to Blood is a strong contender for album of the year, and barring a rush of genius in the next three months (i.e. Orphan or the new Pig Destroyer record) it should rank heavily on many metal year-end lists.