Irreducible: Colossamite live (finally)

I've been on an Alice Coltrane kick lately (working my way through the Impulses right now) and also going back through some of the late Coltrane material from when Alice was in the band (Stellar Regions, Expression, etc.). It occurred to me — esp. given how much great footage there is out there of the classic quartet — what a huge loss it is that there's no high-quality extended footage of that final group with Alice, Pharoah, Jimmy Garrison and Rashied Ali. (This brief and fragmentary footage from Newport '66 is all we've got, as far as I know.)

The truth is that, in the YouTube era, we as fans are incredibly spoiled, in that we can dial up pretty much whatever we want at any moment, whether it's the Cecil Taylor Unit live in Paris in 1969, or Zeppelin live at a tiny teen club in Denmark that same year. It's incalculable how much this circumstance has enriched my musical understanding in the past 10 years or so, giving me the chance to lay eyes on countless bands — from Last Exit to '84 Black Flag, the Stanier-Bogdan-era Helmet lineup and Sabbath in their absolute prime — that whether due to age, geography or circumstance, I never got to see in person.

That collective archive extends about as far into the underground as you want to go — all the way to, say, a 1996 Karate show in my hometown of KC, where I was one of maybe 30 people in the audience. But somehow some bands seem to have slipped through the cracks, and for the longest time, it seemed like Colossamite was one of those. If you've heard of them at all, chances are you're about as obsessed as I am; if not, you're in the great majority. Though they put out two mind-searing releases on the great and relatively visible Skin Graft label in the late '90s — All Lingo's Clamor and Economy of Motion — they're barely remembered these days, even among those who might be die-hard fans of prior or later bands involving some of the same musicians (Dazzling Killmen, Deerhoof, etc.). 

Among a few friends and me, these records quickly became legendary for their combination of the calculated fury of bands like the Killmen and craw with the chaotic blurt of free improvisation and hints of esoteric and offbeat humor. In short, in my eyes, this was some of the most challenging, original and inspired music of its time. But the band sort of came and went and I never found myself near any of their performances during their too-brief lifespan.

All throughout the YouTube era, as the fossil record, so to speak, grew more and more comprehensive, I kept waiting for the day when some Colossamite footage might surface. When I had the pleasure of interviewing Colossamite guitar masterminds John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez — who first came on my radar via their participation in this band and then went on to well-deserved renown as members of Deerhoof — for my Heavy Metal Bebop series in 2012, we talked at length about Colossamite (see here and here), and Ed mentioned to me that he knew of a single show that had been recorded, and that he thought he might have a VHS copy stashed away somewhere. Well, apparently the person who filmed that gig recently dug it up and deemed it worthy of posting because — as Ed has just informed me in an email — it's now sitting there on YouTube for all to see. 

 

As I type this, I'm only about halfway through it but I wanted to take a second to document that feeling of joy and enrichment that comes with laying eyes on something you truly never thought you'd see, of witnessing a band in performance that you assumed you'd only ever hear. I tell you, friends, it's as awesome as I could have ever hoped for. Considering the vintage, the quality is excellent and, though John is sadly out of frame for a lot of it, the video really clues you in to what a fearsome organism this band truly was. 

Being a drummer myself, and having had the good fortune to see Colossamite vocalist-guitarist Nick Sakes play many times in later years in the outstanding bands Sicbay and Xaddax and guitarists Dieterich and Rodriguez play together in the mighty Deerhoof and separately in a handful of projects, a major focus for me watching this is the drummer, Chad Popple. Chad has been (at least to me) a bit of a shadowy figure in the years since Colossamite ended. From what I understand, he's been living in Europe since that time, and though he's been active this whole time in various experimental/uncategorizable contexts (including the great and underrated Gorge Trio with Dieterich and Rodrigez), he's been a bit harder to keep tabs on than his ex-Colossamite bandmates. Anyway, my first exposure to the Colossamite records came before I really had a grasp of the free-jazz/free-improv continuum but over the years, especially as I heard drummers like Han Bennink, Tony Oxley and Paul Lovens, it started to become clearer to me how ingenious Popple's style really was: the way he combined the startling aggression of the best post-hardcore and metal drummers of the '90s with a turbulent flow that seemed to have more in common with the Euro improv greats mentioned above or, say, Drumbo circa Lick My Decals Off, Baby. (Regarding the latter quality, it's interesting to note that my old friend Kevin Shea seems to have been thinking along similar lines around the same time, as heard in Storm and Stress and, later, Coptic Light.)

Anyway, all of these qualities discussed above, namely both Popple's terrifying force and precision and his warped, destabilizing eccentricity, are on full display in this video. And all of it is also evident in the entire band. From what I can tell, the material comes mostly from Economy of Motion, so we get the diseased lurch of "Mr. Somebody Does Something" along with the surrealist spoken word of "The Eagle and the Seal" and the tense build of "Arkansas Halo." (Listening further, I'm thrilled to hear "No Entran Moscas" from All Lingo's, with its endlessly unspooling chorus riff.) It's such a pleasure to watch the band tear into every aspect of this material, absolutely raging through the loud moments and relishing the wobble and fragility of the freer passages, and then smiling and joking nonchalantly between songs. 

I love how willing Colossamite were to send their audience mixed signals, never aligning themselves with any subset of metal or post-hardcore or the conventions of free improv or of more well-established avant-rock practices. They were just a thrillingly weird band that honed a beautifully organic writing style that implored the listener at every second to buckle up for what might be coming next. In my own mind, they certainly helped to redefine what a "band" could be, and helped to further drive home the idea that some of the music that would hit me the hardest and stick with me the longest would be the most personal, the least relatable to known styles or pursuits, but at the same time, the most carefully and meticulously engineered. I'm reminded a bit here of something that Dazzling Killmen bassist Darin Gray said to me when looking back on first encountering craw in the early '90s:

[From a 2015 Noisey interview; emphasis mine]

"…I think probably at the time, live, [craw] was the most unique band I had ever heard. There really isn't another band like craw. They're a completely unique entity. And I remember just thinking, like, 'Wow, someone has worked as hard as we have on a completely different thing.' It wasn't that craw sounded anything like Dazzling Killmen, and quite the contrary, really nothing like it. I could tell, I could hear that they had honed it and worked on it to the highest level. And at the time, there weren't a whole lot of bands out there touring that were like that, that had honed something to that high of a level. … The only reason I felt that they did hone their craft the way they did was because they felt they had to; they felt compelled to be great. And to be the best they could be. And for no other reason. There was no gain. There was absolutely nothing to gain, and I could tell they knew that." 

I feel the same things watching this, and am reminded why I was so drawn to this area of music — whatever you want to call it — in my youth and still am now. There was a compulsion to be great coupled with, not a desire to alienate any potential audience exactly, but a distinct refusal to pander to one either, to put up familiar signposts of genre that might orient a casual listener. If you were dealing with this music, either on record as I was, or in a tiny venue, as was the case for these lucky attendees at this Knoxville, TN, Colossamite gig more than 20 years ago, you were dealing with it full-on. That, to me, is one of the great pleasures of underground music — that you might be standing in a room with, say, 15 other people and — as the idle drift of a pre-gig lull snaps suddenly into the crush and overstimulation of the show itself — suddenly have your consciousness forever altered by some shockingly powerful and carefully honed statement. 

I love bigger shows; I love more universal and relatable aesthetics (in addition to the Coltranes, I've been listening to a ton of late '70s and early '80s AC/DC lately); but I will always hold a special place in my heart for a band like Colossamite, who developed and refined such a personal language among themselves that it's essentially irreducible and incomparable to anything other than itself. As it is on the records, that achievement is frozen in time on this live video, and I'm thrilled that even after all this time, it still feels utterly alien, invigorating, and alive.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop lives

Tonight, after an inexcusably long delay, I posted the 12th installment of my jazz/metal interview series, Heavy Metal Be-Bop: a conversation with master guitarists and longtime collaborators John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez. You might know these two from Deerhoof, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Enjoy, and Happy New Year!

List-o-mania: 1996–2011

Over the past week or so, Pitchfork has been polling readers, staffers and contributors re: their favorite albums from the years 1996 through 2011, i.e., the 15-years-and-counting lifespan of the site, via a project called the People's List. My friend and former TONY staffer Colin St. John tipped me off to the project—check out his own list and commentary—and after a little procrastination, I began frantically compiling my top 100 in time for yesterday's deadline. You can view my list here, and those of other Pitchfork writers here.

Lists of this nature are strange; that fact is well established. They are strange because when it comes to such a vast and vastly diverse art form as music or movies or books, consensus is pretty damn near impossible. Phil Freeman wrote passionately and persuasively on this topic last January, with regard to his feelings of alienation from the Kanye-obsessed hordes of fellow Pazz and Jop voters. In one sense, I do not share Phil's feelings; I really enjoyed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (the consensus critical pick for best album of 2010), and I included it on both my year-end top 10 list, and this most recent 15-year-spanning list. On the other hand, when I view friends' and colleagues' contributions to the People's List—here's a typically well-rounded one from another FAFTS ("friend and former TONY staffer"), Corban Goble—I can't help but feel a little apart from the Conversation at Large.

Again, this not out of hostility or reactionary-ness re: what I'll call the Indie-Rock Canon that has cohered during this Pitchfork lifespan (and which has in recent years expanded to included hip-hop/R&B—both mainstream and underground—as well as certain strains of metal, electronica, experimental music, etc.). I included quite a few records in that zone, including three Strokes albums, a bunch of Will Oldham selections, LPs by Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Dinosaur Jr., Battles, Dr. Octagon, Deerhoof and Sia, and a few more. And I like a lot of the other consensus faves, albums by Radiohead (I haven't listened to OK Computer in a good while, but I got really into it in college), Joanna Newsom (Ys is a beautiful, epic album), Built to Spill (ditto re: Keep It Like a Secret), Modest Mouse (the first song on The Lonesome Crowded West destroys me, but on the whole, I like This Is a Long Drive… better; didn't realize that was from ’96—probably should've included it!), Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, Japandroids, Fucked Up, Wavves, the Flaming Lips, Animal Collective and on and on. But it would've been disingenuous for me to include any of those latter albums on my top 100, because none of them has captured my heart and mind the way that, say, Colossamite's Economy of Motion (to pick one great yet largely off-the-radar album from my list) has. So my list is simply what it is, all that it really could be, i.e., a totally subjective catalog of normalcies, idiosyncrasies and, in some cases, by virtue of what is not included, blind spots, one very major one being hip-hop.

Over the past couple years, I've definitely tuned in to hip-hop more than I had in the previous decade. But I'm still no expert, and that's much of the reason why even in the case of a lot of rap I know I like (Ghostface, Outkast, Eminem), I didn't include those records; I simply haven't put in the time that in and of itself is an indication of love for an artwork. That is to say, when compiling my year-end best-of lists each December, I try not to overthink them, i.e., I simply reflect back on what I spent the most time voluntary listening to throughout that time period. In other words, you don't pick your favorites; they pick you. Last year, the Frank Ocean was a no-brainer, as was the Francis and the Lights the year before that, and the Propagandhi the year before that (speaking of Supporting Caste, which came in at No. 5 on my People's List ballot, I've started to think of this as an all-time-great album, certainly the best new record I've heard since I started to work as a full-time writer-about-music). These are simply the newly released albums that demanded my sustained attention, obsession, care, zeal, etc. during this time period. And that is all I have tried to do with this 1996–2011 list: catalog, in hasty digest form, that sustained attention over these past 15 years. I speak for no one other than myself, which is why I prefer to consider lists of this sort as lists of "favorites" rather than reflections of some monolithic "best"-ness. Taken as honest reflections of a single person's tastes, they become a whole lot less threatening and a whole lot more fun. Coming upon a list like Colin's and Corban's, where in the case of about half the selections, I know them only by title or maybe a lone track, is a chance to know more. Conversely, if even one person who checked out my picks was inspired to take a first listen to John Fahey's Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites (in TONY, I said: "During five lengthy ruminations, in which original and public-domain material mingles with Ellington, Artie Shaw and Bola Sete, you hear the haunted, heartbreaking sweep of American music as filtered through a single encyclopedic mind"), Tim Berne's The Shell Game, or anything by craw [sic], Keelhaul or Cheer-Accident, that would make me extraordinarily happy.

And that possibility, of turning someone on to something new, or inspiring them to reconsider something they thought they knew fully, is really the only reason I can see for this whole writing-about-art thing to exist in the first place. These albums speak for themselves, but for some reason, the babble of history drowns them out and we have to dig them up and praise them and let them reiterate what it is they have to teach us. Which brings me to Colin's final point, i.e., what are the sleeper 1996–2011 picks, the great albums, in any style, yet uncovered by any of the participants in this hive-mind People's List exercise? I'd be grateful for any readers' comments.

P.S. I'm already kicking myself over the purely accidental omission of Boys Life's Departures and Landfalls. I did include a record by the related Farewell Bend (Brandon Butler and John Rejba were in both bands), but Departures is a true all-time fave ’round these parts. And all of the following were records I intended to include but had to cut to get myself down to a nice, round 100:

William Parker Clarinet Trio Bob's Pink Cadillac
The Octagon Nothing But Change
Cannibal Corpse Evisceration Plague
June of 44 Tropics and Meridians
Behold… the Arctopus Skullgrid
Yukon Mortar
Territory Band–2 [Ken Vandermark] Atlas
Dan Weiss Trio Timshel 
Obituary Darkest Day 
Charred Walls of the Damned Charred Walls of the Damned
Ornette Coleman Sound Grammar 
Axis of Advance Obey

Also a shout-out to Nicki Minaj's mixtape Beam Me Up, Scotty, a shrewd selection by Corban that I totally forgot about.

P.P.S. The 1996 cut-off point was interesting for me, as it comes just a few years after the release dates of some of my favorite records of all time, albums that surely would've ended up near the top of the list had the initial year parameter been, say, 1993: two more masterpieces by craw (craw and Lost Nation Road), Morbid Angel's Covenant, Face of Collapse by Dazzling Killmen, Slip by Quicksand, Helmet's Betty, Death's Symbolic and many more.

P.P.P.S. There isn't a whole lot of jazz or improvised music on this list. I'd attribute that to a couple of factors: I didn't start listening to jazz seriously till about 1999, and much of my jazz attention up through about 2005 was devoted to playing catch-up, i.e., schooling myself on the music's vast recorded history, a project that still persists: I'd estimate that older, non-contemporary jazz still accounts for about two thirds of my current jazz intake. Also, I'd say that on the whole, album-oriented lists favor song-based, i.e., largely non-improvisatory, music. It's a silly generalization to make, I know—I'm already second-guessing it—but it's the best way I can think of to account for the fact that there's nothing by, say, Joe McPhee, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Henry Threadgill, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton on my list. All of these artists have meant a lot to me over the past 15 years, but my high estimations of their work have formed from a composite impression of live performances I've seen, records I've heard new and old, interviews I've conducted  and just a general kind of "living with" the work and attendant philosophies of figures such as these. But on the other hand, the jazz records I did include—albums by Andrew Hill, Tim Berne, the Bad Plus and others—are all albums I've savored in much the same way as the mostly rock-oriented selections on my People's List ballot: via repeated, sustained, voluntary attention. I'd like to hear folks' thoughts re: great 1996–2011 jazz records I might have overlooked; I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, especially from the period before ’05, when keeping up with current jazz releases wasn't yet part of my job.

P.P.P.P.S A running list of other worthy records from this time period, listed as I think of them:

Henry Threadgill Where's Your Cup? 
Anthrax Worship Music 
The Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers 
Weezer Pinkerton 
One Day as a Lion One Day as a Lion 
Björk Medúlla 
Xiu Xiu The Air Force
Coptic Light EP and LP

P.P.P.P.P.S Here's a great, jazz-heavy list by Destination: Out's Jeff Golick. Wadada Leo Smith's Tabligh is one of many shrewd selections here.

Sums of Parts: Nick Sakes from Dazzling Killmen to XADDAX

You often hear about artistic entities that are "more than the sum of their parts," as though it's somehow shameful or inadequate for something to simply be the sum of its parts. What if those parts are each excellent on their own, as in the Brooklyn band XADDAX (a duo with Nick Sakes on guitar/vocals and Chrissy Rossettie on electroacoustic drum kit, pictured above)? I would think that adding them together would be an achievement worth celebrating.

If you're not familiar with the work of Nick Sakes, let me try to put him into a context. There is a certain category of well-known (or even just "known") DIY-rock lifer who's been around forever and has been in a long string of bands. Folks like Ian MacKaye, Tim Kinsella (Cap'n Jazz, Joan of Arc), Geoff Farina (Karate, Glorytellers, etc.), Mike Hill (Anodyne, Tombs), Blake Schwarzenbach (Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil), J. Read (Revenge, Axis of Advance), Mira Billotte (Quix*o*tic, White Magic), Ben Weasel (Screeching Weasel, The Riverdales), Fred Erskine (Hoover, The Crownhate Ruin), Pen Rollings (Honor Role, Breadwinner), Tara Jane O'Neil (Rodan, The Sonora Pine), Dave Pajo (Slint, Tortoise), Jared Warren (Karp, Big Business), Walter Schreifels (Gorilla Biscuits, Quicksand), Rick Froberg (Drive Like Jehu, Obits), Mick Barr (Crom-Tech, Orthrelm)—even icons like Robert Pollard or Kathleen Hanna fit in this general classification.

That was a pretty long list and sort of an arbitrary one (I worship, say, Schreifels and Read but could take or leave a couple of the others). The point I'm trying to make, though, is that there is sort of generally accepted canon of these types of independent musicians: Everyone would include, MacKaye, e.g., but move down the list and you'll get a different set of names depending on whether the person you're polling happens to be into punk, post-hardcore, metal, folk, indie rock, what have you, and depending on where they grew up or reside. But if anyone's keeping some sort of master ledger of these sorts of folks and Nick Sakes isn't on it, that list is incomplete. And if you, kind reader, are into extreme/experimental-minded rock-based music of any kind and have not checked out Mr. Sakes's various projects stretching from 1990 through the present (including Dazzling Killmen, Colossamite, Sicbay and now XADDAX), you really need to remedy that. In terms of combining raw aggression with unconventional yet totally memorable form, Nick Sakes is one of the most potent musicians I've ever heard.

More than that, though, and this is where I circle back to my initial point about sums of parts and whatnot, Nick Sakes is one of the finest collaborators I've ever heard. I've been following his career since the early ’90s (just after the Killmen's demise), and in a way, my entire view of the American rock underground revolves around him. He's played in bands with some extraordinarily talented musicians—to name two of the more well-known ones, John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez (both currently of Deerhoof) were both in Colossamite—and in each of those bands, you can hear (A) a whole lot of Nick Sakes and (B) a whole lot of whomever else was working in the project. None of these bands is merely Nick plus Some Other Musicians. Each of them has been a true, start-from-scratch collaboration.

The St. Louis–based Dazzling Killmen (active from the early-to-mid ’90s) was a whole band of master collaborators: the surgically precise rhythm section of bassist Darin Gray (Grand Ulena, On Fillmore) and drummer Blake Fleming (Laddio Bolocko, The Mars Volta), plus the uncategorizable avant-rock soundpainter Tim Garrigan (You Fantastic!, folky solo material) on guitar, along with Sakes's more riff-oriented guitar and bloodcurdling shrieks. Put all that together, and voila:



Colossamite, a late-’90s Twin Cities band, upped the post-Beefheart vibe in a major way, thanks to the free-improv/art-metal pedigrees of Dieterich, Rodriguez and drummer Chad Popple. (Rodriguez and Popple both played in the fascinating post-hardcore fusion band Iceburn around the same time they played in Colossamite, and all three of these musicians have worked together on and off as Gorge Trio for years.) Sakes in Colossamite was not at all the same as Sakes in Killmen; the former project brought out a loopier, more off-the-wall side of his personality. He retained the core of what he did (see: bloodcurdling shrieks) but added a major dose of cryptic humor. Check out his insane Spanish-language ranting on this track:



Sicbay (also Twin Cities, early-to-mid aughts), which made three incredible albums that I really wish were better known, was Sakes's most pop-oriented concern, a perfect channeling of his trademark seething tension into brief, super-melodic and super-memorable—yet still very unconventional—songs. (For a more detailed discussion, see my 2003 Dusted review of Sicbay's awesome second album, Overreaction Time.) Again, we saw a totally different side of Sakes here—his most overtly tuneful vocalizing to date, for one—and that's due in large part to the brilliance of his collaborator Dave Erb, whose guitar playing was sort of like if you took those gorgeous Thin Lizzy leads and scrambled them in a blender so that they were still every bit as gorgeous but also alarmingly jagged and disconcertingly shaded, a concept which, if I'm correctly recalling several conversations I've had with Erb, was very much coming out of a progressive-postpunk (e.g., XTC) sort of place. But again, it's also due to Sakes's willingness to meet his collaborators halfway. Like Colossamite, Sicbay was very much the sum of its parts, not just the Guy from Dazzling Killmen and Some Other Guy. (Sadly, YouTube only has one very blown-out, and nearly pictureless, live clip, but it'll have to do.)

Which brings us to the present day and the band known as XADDAX. Sicbay petered out a while back (’06 or ’07?), and about a year so ago, Nick Sakes from Minneapolis to Brooklyn. (It's probably worth mentioning at this point that I began corresponding with Nick on a fan level sometime in the late ’90s and that we've since become friends.) Right away, he began playing music with the drummer Chrissy Rossettie—who had been in a number of projects, including the Chicago-based My Name Is Rar-Rar (admirably batshit post–No Wave noise-punk)—and after a long gestation period, the two emerged as XADDAX.

It's been wonderful to reside in the same city as a steadily gigging Nick Sakes and to observe his latest collaboration up close. I saw XADDAX for the third time last night—my band STATS had previously shared two very fun Cake Shop bills with them—and I was newly struck by this whole Sum of Its Parts aspect of Sakes's musical career. I guess what I'm saying is that there's no typical Nick Sakes band. Everyone in the Killmen, Colossamite and Sicbay (I should give a shout-out here to that band's succession of drummers, Greg Schaal, Ed Rodriguez—yep, the guitarist from Colossamite and Deerhoof, plus the Flying Luttenbachers—and Jonathan Warnberg, the latter a fantastic and underdocumented player who was also in Signal to Trust) had an equal stake in what was going down, and the very same is true of XADDAX.

Since there are only two members of XADDAX, that division-of-labor vibe is right in front of your face: What Rossettie brings to the table is quite literally half of the band's overall presentation. More specifically, her contribution—as drummer and full-spectrum sound generator—is an inspired short-circuiting-cyborg vibe. As she discusses in this excellent interview, Rossettie plays a hot-wired electroacoustic kit, which she wields like a post-industrial orchestra. On the bottom, there are her driving hypnotic, martial, daringly lengthy patterns. The obsessive detail and emphasis on repetition in her playing reminds me a lot conceptually of what's going on in Obscura- and From Wisdom to Hate–era Gorguts. Go here (skip to about 3:57) to watch Luc Lemay discussing this concept: As he puts it, "The drum was like a riff itself, which loops with the riff." (This idea of a through-composed drum line, i.e., not just an accompaniment to a guitar riff but an actual part of a song's fundamental DNA, as it pertains to Gorguts specifically, came up in my recent interview with Dan Weiss.)

The same sort of thing is happening in XADDAX, but rather than blast-beat-oriented death metal, here the concept of the through-composed drum riff is filtered through a perversely danceable postpunk or No Wave vibe. Furthermore, Rossettie has equipped her aforementioned cyborg kit with various electronic pads and triggers (being a totally acoustic drummer, I'm 100% unqualified to even begin to explain how this all works; see the Q&A linked above for details). Some of these produce "in time" noises, like you might hear coming from a MIDI keyboard (i.e., you press a key and you get a brief, rhythmic sound), but some of them seem to set off bursts of pure chaos (i.e., you press a key and you get a long, arrhythmic string of sonic INFORMATION, like a sample that doesn't loop, or something).

So you put all that together with Nick Sakes, who continues to abuse his vocal cords in various bellowing, hissing manners and contributes a kind of awkwardly-clanking-machine riffage—math-rock-ish in a way, but much rawer and looser than, say, the Killmen—and you get this:

Xaddax - Lives On Nerves by Xaddax

So after hearing that (incredible) track—look out for it and others on a forthcoming Skin Graft full-length—if you check out the various Sakes projects discussed above and check out My Name Is Rar-Rar (there are a bunch of tracks streaming on Bandcamp), you'll see that XADDAX is once again a deeply collaborative, sum-of-its-parts affair. There is no possible way that either Sakes or Rossettie could've or would've made this music without the other, and that no-element-is-replaceable specificity is the key ingredient in almost all great bands.

Again, Sum of Its Parts, simply that and not necessarily "More Than," isn't a negligible concept. It's quite enough for two elements to coexist in pleasing harmony—like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese's cup—or in inspired disharmony—like Rossettie's haywire beats and Sakes's dire guitar and vocals in XADDAX. There's probably a corny message about the give-and-take of all human relationships buried somewhere in here ("Can't we all just get along, or agree to squabble productively?"), but I'll just say that Nick Sakes's two-decade career, from the Killmen all the way through XADDAX, has demonstrated again and again the huge potential of strong musical personalities colliding in wholly fruitful and mutually respectful manners. You take those parts and you add them together, and that's more than enough.

/////

Check out XADDAX on SoundCloud, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Release me: New music from STATS

I am pleased to announce that STATS, a band I play in with guitarist Joe Petrucelli and bassist Tony Gedrich, has completed a new recording. It is called Crowned, and it comes out November 22 on CD via The Path Less Traveled Records, a great indie metal label based in Normal, Illinois. The cover art once again comes courtesy of the brilliant night photographer Remi Thornton. You can buy Crowned now as a $3 download from iTunes or Amazon, and you can listen to it here (in high-quality WAV format) via Bandcamp:




We will be celebrating this release on Monday, November 15, 2010 at Cake Shop in NYC, where we will be joined by three outstanding bands: Cheer-Accident, Inzinzac and Xaddax (the latter of which features Nick Sakes, formerly of Dazzling Killmen—DFSBP namesakes, as you might recall—Colossamite and Sicbay). The show starts at 8pm and costs $10. Listen, enjoy, and please do attend the show if you are able.

UPDATE: Go here to read a blurb about the show from The New Yorker.