Twofer: HMB # 7 / Moss Icon

Two-long gestating pieces went live yesterday. I'm happy with how they turned out.

1) The seventh installment of my jazz/metal interview series, Heavy Metal Be-Bop, featuring Weasel Walter. Invisible Oranges has the abridged version, and you'll find more or less the complete Q&A at heavymetalbebop.com. Weasel is a great talker, and since he and I knew each other prior to the chat, there was an easy flow to the conversation that wasn't as easy to achieve in some of the earlier installments. We touched on some of the same issues I discussed with prior HMB subjects—can one musician excel at both jazz and metal? what are the core prejudices of both scenes? what about Naked City?—but we were able to go deeper more quickly. I hope you enjoy the interview.

2) A Pitchfork review of the new Moss Icon reissue, Complete Discography, on Temporary Residence, a label that has become a key post-hardcore mini archive. (They put out last year's Bitch Magnet set as well.) I'll state plainly that I'd never heard Moss Icon before news of this set dropped a few months ago; I'm not even sure I'd heard of them. But I'm passionate about the period they came out of: the space between first-wave hardcore and what came after. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to study this body of work over a long period, to hear the band way after the fact and find a way to incorporate them into the underground-American-rock timeline I've spent the last 20 years or so constructing in my head.  It's been easy to see why Moss Icon has bred obsession. I find myself wondering what it would be like to see them live. Has anyone reading this had the chance? Obviously, there are reunion shows coming up, and I hope to check one out, but I'm specifically curious about their late '80s/early '90s shows. If I had to guess, I'd say they had life-changing potential.

Cosmo Lee on Metallica

Just a quick post here to say thanks to Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges—the site that launched my Heavy Metal Be-Bop interview series—for his outstanding ongoing series "Metallica: The First Four Albums." To bring you up to speed real quick: Cosmo is, in my opinion, hands down the best writer-about-metal on the internet, and for the past few years (five or so?), he's overseen the Invisible Oranges site. He's leaving IO in a few weeks to focus on other projects, and by way of a farewell, he's been running down the first four Metallica records track-by-track (one blog post apiece, i.e.). It's a really impressive project, and as rigorous as it is, it's not formulaic—he's basically taking each track as it comes, offering focused yet unfettered impressions filtered through his identity as a guitarist and through his lengthy Metallica fandom (i.e., how the music sounded to him as a teenager and how it sounds to him now). Here's yesterday's post on the classic instrumental "Orion"; you'll find the rest of the series linked at the bottom.

In particular, this series has reawakened me to the glory of Master of Puppets. My favorite Metallica album is …And Justice for All, but Cosmo has helped me to see that in a way, side two of Puppets is a prelude to Justice. During the "First Four Albums" series, he has written several times about the "anxiety" of Justice. It's not a word I ever thought to use to describe the album, but I know what he means: Justice is incredibly clenched, obsessive, maniacal in its detail, devoid of fun, exhaustive. The band members look joyless and battle-hardened in the inner-sleeve photos, and this makes sense when you hear the music.

This obsessiveness kicks into high gear on side two of Puppets. The track that grabs me the most is "Disposable Heroes"—stream it above—which has long been among my two or three favorite Metallica songs. I was just listening to it this morning and marveling at the enormous amount of CONTENT in the song. Same goes for pretty much all of Justice: You simply can't believe they're stuffing this much INFORMATION into a rock composition, and not useless technical detail. It all makes total, merciless sense. And set against this proggy maximalism is an anthemic-punk sensibility. At the same time as it was scaling new heights of technicality, Metallica was writing its catchiest songs to date.

Dig the prechorus thrash section in "Heroes"—it reoccurs in the song, but you can hear one example at 3:12—which follows a pattern of two bars of four, then two bars of three. The little rhythmic hiccups created by the three-beat bars are pure pleasure for me. This fast, techy build-up gives way to a brief lead-guitar passage and then a turbulent transition sequence before opening up into a total rock-out chorus (the "Back to the front!" part). This is just one of the countless little journeys that Metallica took its listeners on during this classic mid-to-late-’80s period: a perfect juxtaposition of Apollonian and Dionysian musical tendencies.

It's a pleasure to rediscover these albums that I've loved so long in the company of a writer as skilled and insightful as Cosmo. Read the posts and savor the glory of the music, the absolute pinnacle of metal.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #5: Gentry Densley

I'm very happy to announce that Heavy Metal Be-Bop #5, an interview with the guitarist-vocalist Gentry Densley, is now live after a long gestation period. Invisible Oranges is hosting an abridged version, by way of directing readers to the new online home of the series: heavymetalbebop.com, where future installments will appear, and where you can read a much-longer cut of the Densley Q&A. Densley's account of hanging out with Branford Marsalis is priceless, so don't miss it.

Gentry Densley has played in a bunch of bands, but he's best known for his work with Iceburn—a progressive-hardcore band that turned into a noise-worshipping free-improv collective—and the coal-black avant-doom duo Eagle Twin. As great as Iceburn was (I'd recommend Firon, Power of the Lion and Hephaestus to newbies, in that order), I think that Eagle Twin's debut full-length, The Unkindness of Crows, might be my favorite Densley release. It's an agonizing yet transcendent record.

As with previous HMB subjects, this is a man who has thought extremely hard about both jazz and metal, and how the tactics and lessons of each idiom can be fruitfully repurposed in service of the other.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #4: Melvin Gibbs

I'm proud to present the fourth installment of this ongoing series. Thanks as always to Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges for his design/layout expertise and for playing host, and thanks, of course, to the subject himself, Melvin Gibbs.

I have to say, I've rarely had more fun preparing for an interview. I knew a bit of Rollins Band back in the early-to-mid '90s, but I definitely wasn't savvy enough as a teenager to hear the outfit as a "combination of Funkadelic and King Crimson," as Gibbs brilliantly describes it. And though I may have been vaguely aware of Gibbs's presence in the group, I didn't have a clue what his history was.

Street Priest by Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society (thanks to Steve Smith for digging this out), Seize the Rainbow by Sonny Sharrock, Strange Meeting by Power Tools, I Am a Man by Harriet Tubman, For You - For Us - For All by SociaLybrium. These are just a few of the great records Gibbs has made, and I'm still discovering more (e.g., Ellery Eskelin's Ten, which I can't wait to hear). He is a hero of a movement that doesn't have a name: postfusion, hardcore-informed, noise-embracing, funk-loving.

Currently, Gibbs works with Harriet Tubman—check out their new Sunnyside release, a 2000 live interpretation of Coltrane's Ascension with special guests—which played at Undead Jazzfest just the other night. If anyone caught the set, I'd love to hear about it via the comments. He also just completed a tour of Europe with Encryption, his trio with Vernon Reid and Ronald Shannon Jackson (you can hear an exclusive live track on the interview page at Invisible Oranges). Keep up with Gibbs via Tumblr, Bandcamp (where you can hear two full albums by recent Gibbs-led all-star projects) and Twitter.

P.S. As of this writing, two more Heavy Metal Be-Bop interviews are complete and in the queue. Stay tuned!

Happy Morbid Angel Day

Morbid Angel, my favorite metal band, breaks an eight-year silence today. Let this post be an official welcome to Illud Divinum Insanus. I bought it on two formats (can't remember the last time I did that with any album); you too should grab a copy via Season of Mist.

You've likely picked up on some of the deafening (and already extremely tedious) backlash that has greeted this release. Here is my preliminary response to that. And here is an eloquent—and dare I say moving?—defense of the record from Earache's Digby Pearson. Thanks to Invisible Oranges for the tip-off.

Defending the indefensible: Morbid Angel's Illud Divinum Insanus, pre-release

[Ed.: After I wrote this post, I continued my Illud-related ranting at That's How Kids Die. I posted a lengthy comment there—also reprinted below—after I'd spent more time with the record.]

Like every other extreme-metal fan with an internet connection, I've had Morbid Angel on the brain recently. I discussed the build-up to their new album, Illud Divinum Insanus (out in early June), in an earlier post, but now that the record has actually circulated among reviewers and fans—I heard a "beeped" streaming version—aesthetic debates are raging.

To summarize: Basically Morbid Angel—a veteran death-metal band, one of the most respected in its field—has embraced the left-field influence of industrial music (think pounding electronic beats) on this record, and folks are calling foul, portraying this as some kind of jumping-the-shark move. My basic feeling, having spent quality time with their entire catalog, is that this point holds no water, simply because Morbid Angel has always mingled straightforward death-metal badassery with elements of severely questionable taste. Below is a slightly cleaned-up and augmented version of a comment I posted on Invisible Oranges this morning, in response to a flood of blanket hater-type remarks left by prior commenters. Check out the original post for context.

/////

I think it’s worth revisiting the original point made by Invisible Oranges ed. Cosmo Lee: “…every Morbid Angel record sounds drastically different, and also “bad” in some way (too clean, too murky, too strong, too weak).…” [See this prior Invisible Oranges post for context.] To expand upon that, being a fan of this band in the David Vincent years—I’ve been a die-hard since about ’93—has always been about reconciling the incredibly savage and awesome (all of Covenant, basically) with the borderline cheesy. Think of Vincent’s goofball laugh on “Maze of Torment,” or the MIDI-style instrumentals on Blessed Are the Sick or the—for lack of a better term—radio-friendly tracks like “Dawn of the Angry” or Caesar’s Palace” on Domination, both of which I love, but they still walk the line of questionable taste in pretty much the exact same way that “I Am Morbid” does. Then there’s the whole matter of Trey’s constant shouting-out of folks like Anthony Robbins and Deepak Chopra, or the band’s horrific graphic sense (people have been ripping on the cover of Illud, but what about the cover of Domination?!?). What I’m saying is that, as Cosmo implied, it’s not like Morbid Angel has ever really been some sort of bastion of stone-faced death-metal purism and that this new twist is some sort of huge, shocking concession. Since the early ’90s at least, they’ve portrayed themselves as a bunch of extremely loopy, out-there dudes who happen to be great at writing death metal. They’ve always been completely willing to fall on their face if it meant trying out something different, and I deeply respect them for that. That Trey is so willing to let his dorkiness hang out there—the Super Nintendo shout-outs in the Domination thank-you list, e.g.!—totally endears him to me. I'm a big proponent of "Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then, I contradict myself" in any kind of art, and Morbid Angel embodies that in spades.

I think the important counterweight to all this is the Steve Tucker period. While I enjoy Formulas and Gateways, both are far more generic albums than anything from the Vincent years. To me, there are no tracks on either of those albums that can hold a candle to core Morbid Angel masterpieces like “Rapture” or “Lord of All Fevers and Plagues,” and if that was all I knew of Morbid Angel, they wouldn’t really mean anything to me at all. (As it stands, they’re probably my favorite metal band, period.) During the Tucker period, you saw what a “pure” Morbid Angel would look like, i.e., one with a lot of that lovable loopiness stripped away, and honestly I found it somewhat boring. Heretic is another matter—the songwriting and production improved by leaps and bounds on that—but think of all the insane filler on that album! I just don’t understand why people are pretending that this new left turn is any more weird, surprising or (if you want to look at this way) disappointing than any other oddball aesthetic move they’ve ever pulled. The fact is that I'd infinitely prefer a Morbid record sprinkled with weird industrial detours than with tacked-on throwaway tracks like "Drum Check".

I’m withholding full judgment of Illud until I can really spend time w/ the unbeeped tracks. But I can say that I LOVED the wild unpredictability of it the first few times I checked out the stream, and that the more straight-up death metal material sounded completely raging and state-of-the-art. Honestly, I think we should start thinking of this album as a return to form rather than some sort of bizarre derailment.

////

In response to this review of Illud:

Greetings,

I don’t agree with your assessment of the record, but this a well-written and -argued review. I was glad you mentioned your enjoyment of Heretic in particular b/c a lot of people commenting on Illud seem to sort of wave their hand backward and refer to “old Morbid Angel” as if it were a single monolithic thing. The fact is that while so many people are calling this album out as a jumping of the shark, I felt that exact same way about the trio of Steve Tucker albums at the time they were released. I’ve since come around on Heretic, and there are some decent moments on Gateways and some very intriguing oddball outbursts on Formulas (that swing breakdown in “Invocation of the Continual One” gets me every time), but honestly I think it’s just as easy to accuse those albums of sullying the legacy of the earlier releases as it is to say the same of Illud.

Yes, there’s an awful lot of cheese on this record, but I don’t agree with you that the death-metal tracks are negligible. I actually think the slower songs, like “I Am Morbid” and “Beauty Meets Beast” are extremely fun, not to mention heavy and catchy, very much in the vein of “Caesar’s Palace” from Domination, i.e., this sort of poppy doom/death vibe. And the fast stuff, like “Nevermore” and “Blades for Baal,” sounds totally brutal and committed to me, if not as memorable compositionally as similar stuff from the Domination era (which is clearly the closest point of comparison in terms of the MA back catalog).

As for the industrial tracks, I definitely don’t love them, but I don’t think they’re throwaways. I actually think some of Trey’s most interesting and unusual playing on the record comes on these, esp. “Too Extreme!” The electronic beats are definitely fueling his creativity and songwriting, however dated and silly they might come off. As I’ve written on my own blog—http://darkforcesswing.blogspot.com/2011/05/defending-indefensible-morbid-angels.html—I really think people need to step back and think about how much filler there is in the Morbid Angel back catalog. The last Vincent full-length contained two pointless instrumentals, as well as several uninteresting or negligible songs (“Hatework,” “Inquisition,” “This Means War”). Heretic, as often been pointed out, contains a ton of skippable nonsongs, as does Formulas. Even Blessed Are the Sick has a number of these. Basically the band has always gotten off on throwing these sorts of curveballs, it’s just that here they seem to have spent a lot more time and energy on said curveballs.

I think Cosmo Lee made a good point here: http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2011/04/new-morbid-angel-song. Namely that each Morbid album has its own weird idiosyncrasies, whether it’s terrible production (Blessed Are the Sick) or a totally generic veneer (Gateways). To me, the only flawless one is Covenant, which I think is literally the best metal album ever made. The fact is that almost any of the albums since then could be viewed as a travesty in light of that masterpiece. I totally understand your negative feelings toward Illud, and I share some of the annoyance at the pervasive cheese, but I don’t think this album is an embarrassment or a letdown to long-time fans. Trey sounds great on it, for one (way more unhinged than on the previous three albums, in my opinion) and Vincent sounds extremely intense, whether or not you agree with how that intensity is channeled. I just think that the left-field nature of this album has led people to forget that there have been some very unusual and in some cases inconsistent entries in the Morbid discography up till now. In other words, it’s not as though you’re dealing with an “all killer no filler” band up that has all of a sudden turned into a loopy and unpredictable one.

To sum up: As a longtime Morbid devotee, I think Illud is an exciting and substantial album, if also a frustrating one in spots.

Thanks for reading,
HS

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #3: Trevor Dunn

The third installment of my Heavy Metal Be-Bop series, an interview with Trevor Dunn, is finally live at Invisible Oranges. This Q&A was a pleasure. Dunn is a really friendly guy, and he's also admirably casual about his mindblowingly eclectic résumé: Playing metal one night and jazz the next is not a gimmick for him; it's simply the professional path he follows as an open-minded freelance musician.

If you're in New York, go see this man live—he plays all the time. (Check his website for details.) Dunn was a revelation at a recent gig I caught by the Celestial Septet (Nels Cline Singers + ROVA Sax Quartet).

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #2: Craig Taborn

I'm happy to announce that the second installment of Heavy Metal Be-Bop, my jazz/metal interview series, is live at Invisible Oranges. Once again, a big thanks to site honcho Cosmo Lee for hosting and for lending his editing and layout expertise to the project.

My guest this time around, Craig Taborn, is more or less the main inspiration behind the series, and I speak a bit about that (specifically Taborn's connection to the Gorguts universe) in the intro. I also mention Taborn's seemingly boundless metal knowledge, but I feel like I ought to note that this knowledge extends way beyond a single genre. Taborn has his iTunes hooked up to his TV, so I got a chance to check out his music library; I have to say, it might be the most diverse and comprehensive collection I've ever seen. I hope he won't mind me listing a few of the artists I spotted in there: Springsteen (Nebraska), This Heat, Thelonious Monk, Arcade Fire, Stravinsky, Sonic Youth, Henry Threadgill's Air, the Walker Brothers, Shudder to Think, Muddy Waters, Descendents. (He even had craw in there, which—as any regular DFSBP reader could guess—absolutely blew my mind. It turns out he went to college with their early-period drummer, Neil Chastain!) Looking at that list now, it doesn't scan as terribly unusual (everyone's got a world of music on their iPod these days), but the point I'm trying to make—a point hopefully illustrated in our conversation—is that Taborn is an especially deep listener; he really gets inside all of these different areas. That may be one reason so many different bandleaders call on him regularly. Dan Weiss, my first Heavy Metal Be-Bop guest, made all this explicit during a recent appearance on WKCR's Musician's Show. Listing the personnel for the new Dave Binney album, Graylen Epicenter—on which both Weiss and Taborn appear—he shouted out Taborn's insider nickname: Encyclopedia Tabes. Having spent time with the man, I assure you that it's an accurate moniker.

I hope you enjoy this installment of Heavy Metal Be-Bop. I have another interview in the pipeline, which I hope to publish soon, but I'm definitely on the lookout for future subjects. Can you think of anyone who might be able to shed light on the jazz/metal connection? If so, please let me know via e-mail or the comments.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #1: Dan Weiss

I'm pleased to announce the debut of Heavy Metal Be-Bop, a new interview series dealing with the intersections of jazz and metal. Cosmo Lee, the editor of Invisible Oranges—my favorite place to read about metal on the internet—has kindly agreed to play host.

The mission statement of the series could be expressed colloquially as, What's the deal with jazz and metal? As any reader of this blog knows, the two styles form the main pillars of my music consumption. I'm far from alone here: In addition to Ben Ratliff and NPR's Lars Gotrich—both of whose jazz/metal examinations I cite in the intro to HMB #1—Phil Freeman and various others have written extensively and intelligently about both genres and the ways in which they reflect one another. In terms of this series, though, my intent is to focus on musicians—more specifically (at least for starters) jazz-loving metal musicians, and still more specifically, jazz-loving metal musicians whose work might not reflect an obvious metal influence. ("Moving beyond Naked City" might be a good subheading for the endeavor as I see it.)

The brilliant drummer Dan Weiss—who made my favorite jazz album of 2010 and who used to play in doom-metal outfit Bloody Panda—is my first guest. As you'll read, we talked jazz and metal for a while and then listened to some music together (his choices): Gorguts, Metallica, Meshuggah. Dig, especially, Weiss's attunement to the emotional trajectory of the riff. The next installment of HMB (which will post as soon as the transcribing gods will allow) is a chat with jazz pianist and scarily knowledgeable metalhead Craig Taborn. I'm psyched to have HMB out there—do let me know what you think.

P.S. I can only view it as auspicious that the Times has just published a Brad Mehldau playlist that cites Cancer Bats.

P.P.S. A few of Dan Weiss's listening selections got edited out for space, and I wanted to list them here for the record:

1) Cardiacs - various songs, including the phenomenal "Dirty Boy". Insane British "pronk" (prog-punk) band—had never heard them before. It's like King Crimson gone Rocky Horror! Weiss: "For me, this is their anthem. I think I listened to this 10 or 15 times in a row one night. It just keeps going the whole way. And the harmony is almost like Renaissance, Medieval music, the way the harmony moves. Very strange. Beautiful stuff. So weird, fuckin’ weird melody. They just lay on this; they hang on it. I love the way they lay on that."

2) Ustad Rais Khan - "Raga Marwa." Weiss drew several parallels between the complex beat cycles in Indian classical music and extreme metal. Weiss: "Classical Indian music: Could it be equated to blast-beat metal? It’s just all groove to me."

3) Miles Davis - "Directions" (live at Antibes, 1969). Weiss: "Just the way [Jack DeJohnette] opens this shit up. He’s playing as hard as he can. Hear those crashes… He’s bashin’. That kills me."

Dead-ass doin' it: Phil Lynott, Nicki Minaj and other pop chameleons

Time Out New York: Do you think you can still be believable singing a sweet love song after you’ve done all that [raunchier material]—?
Nicki Minaj: Absolutely… I’m believable at whatever I do, because I’m dead-ass doin’ it.

The above was one of my favorite exchanges from a really enjoyable conversation I had with Nicki Minaj on behalf of Time Out. (Check out the full Q&A here if you have a sec.) The sentiment she's expressing—the weird dual personality that's required of a pop star, and the unflappable confidence needed to pull it off—has been ringing a bell with regard to my current listening obsession: Thin Lizzy.

The other day I finally watched The Rocker, a doc about the late Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott that I'd had lying around for a while, and I found myself newly impressed by his versatility. As with Ms. Minaj, whatever he did—whether it was a nakedly sentimental love song, a streetwise picaresque or a sleazy come-on—he was thoroughly convincing. Ludicra and Hammers of Misfortune guitarist John Cobbett eloquently summed up the core paradox of the man in a fine recent Invisible Oranges interview (a quote brilliantly excerpted by Inverted Umlaut): "Phil Lynott is the ultimate lyricist for the tough guy with the broken heart."

Today I've been spinning the outstanding 1979 Lizzy disc Black Rose: A Rock Legend, and I'm somewhat shocked by the sheer variety of emotions expressed here. There's one of Lynott's classic paeans to gritty urban life ("Toughest Street in Town"), a weirdly moralistic meditation on kinky sex ("S&M"), a determinedly sappy yet utterly charming tribute to his daughter ("Sarah," see above for a mind-blowing über-lounge rendition, complete with time-lapse-aging model stand-ins), a rueful I'm-through-with-the-bottle lament ("Got to Give It Up") and a half-crazed romantic kiss-off ("Get Out of Here"). I'm not yet through the concluding title track, but I'm prepared for another left turn.

In a weird way, this wanton versatility, the sheer disregard for emotional continuity, reminds me a lot of Ween's masters-of-disguise approach to album-craft. The message is that of all great pop (from Black Rose to Chocolate and Cheese and beyond): Each song is its own universe; live in this feeling for these three minutes. And maybe when that time has elapsed, you'll be transported in an instant to somewhere completely different. It's the same chameleonic impulse that allows Nicki Minaj to sass her way through "Itty Bitty Piggy" and then dreamily croon "Your Love" in the manner of a doe-eyed teenager. As fans, we're okay with the contradiction—as long as, like the great Phil Lynott, whatever the artist in question is doing at a given moment, he or she is indeed dead-ass doin' it.