Death-metal dad rock

Carcass are a couple weeks away from putting out another excellent post-reunion album (hail Surgical Steel), and it was an honor and a pleasure to be able to talk to them about it for Rolling Stone.

Aiming for forever: Krisiun's steady climb to greatness in the face of Metal Myopia

Note: The following post is presented with gratitude to the great Bill Ward, who included Krisiun's Southern Storm among his top 10 metal albums of all time, in a list that he assembled for RollingStone.com and later discussed with me in detail — see also this interview drawn from the same conversation, dealing with his current perspective on the Black Sabbath Siatution — thus inspiring me to really delve into this band's work for the first time.

What does a fan of death metal want? After following and living with this style of music for roughly 25 years, I'm starting to realize that there's no good answer to this question. Or at least no all-purpose one. It would seem that so-called extreme metal draws much, if not all, of its strength from its passionate, opinionated fan base — the ones who come to the gigs, buy the records (or at least illegally download them and argue about them on message boards) and T-shirts, and generally wave the flag for their favorite bands in quasi-patriotic fashion. In a resolutely anti-pop, or, one could even say, extra-pop (as in, outside of...), medium, your relationship with your public is really your only currency.

But to circle back, what does that public want? I can only really speak for myself. I'll do so here using my latest death-metal obsession, the long-running Brazilian band Krisiun, as an example. During the past couple weeks, I've worked my way through pretty much their entire discography, and what's been most rewarding about this listening project is charting the band's steady march to what I view as greatness. By this I mean, more specifically, hearing how over the course of 10 albums and around 27 years, they've grown into their own skin, gradually locating what their unique contribution to the rich tradition of death metal might be, and then honing and perfecting that, while — and this part is key — also learning to gaze outward, backward and beyond, as they transcend petty and ultimately arbitrary notions of so-called underground authenticity, enriching, strengthening and clarifying their sound with the goal of making a lasting impact on the larger culture of heavy metal.

Metalheads love to draw lines in the sand, barriers of supposed legitimacy: "Metallica are dead to me after the first four albums," "I only listen to the demos," that sort of thing. (Call it Metal Myopia.) In death metal, the idea behind this logic, as I understand it, is that you want only the purest state of primitivism, the work that stems out of somehow not knowing any better. In Krisiun's case, their first full-length, 1995's Black Force Domain is a good example of this:



I get it, of course. There's something deeply appealing about the way this music smothers the rational mind, storming out of the speakers like some unholy tornado. (I'm a huge fan of Revenge, for example, a band that lives for pure sonic filth, or as I put it here "barf music.")

But in all honesty, there's also something boring about it. Of the 10 Krisiun albums I've listened to recently, Black Force Domain and its 1998 follow-up, Apocalyptic Revelation, were the only ones that felt like a chore to sit through. These records felt like onslaughts to be endured rather than music to be enjoyed. And again, believe me, I get it, the idea that metal is, on some deep level, masochistic. But at a certain point, I tend to want music to go somewhere, to reveal a sense of form, a reason for being. (Not too surprising that the die-hards don't seem to agree; poke around the message boards and you'll find plenty of "It's all downhill after Black Force Domain" proclamations regarding Krisiun's body of work.)

After Apocalyptic Revelation, the band got down to the sometimes controversial business (in death metal, at least) of evolving. On 2000's Conquerors of Armageddon, the feral energy of the early stuff is still there, but the music is starting to take some kind of shape, make some kind of sense. The rabid energy is still there, but you can tell here that the band — made up of brothers Alex Camargo on bass and vocals, guitarist Moyses Kolesne and drummer Max Kolesne — is starting to pay attention to dynamics, to structure, to precision, to the craft of their musical violence.

Ageless Venomous, from '01, goes even further in this direction. It's also an album that sums up a lot of the issues — the word "problems" might be more apt, but I'm being diplomatic — with death metal production from, say, the mid-to-late '90s through the early 2000s. (Death-metal production problems still persist, of course, but what I like to call the Pro Tools Nightmare, that insanely artificial-sounding approach illustrated by recent Immolation and, especially, Suffocation albums, didn't really seem to come into full flower until the 2010s.) Fascinatingly, this band that once wholeheartedly embraced a primitivist sonic dust cloud decided here that they were ready to be fully and completely heard. (Max Kolesne on Ageless Venemous: "It sounds clearer, it shows how precise we can play, there is no blurry parts, everything is there, and that's exactly what we were trying to get.") The album's sound is almost shockingly dry: All sense of sonic space is absent, leaving a weirdly neutered sound that I've actually come to enjoy on multiple listens, largely because of how alien and unconventional it is. The sound only serves to highlight the aesthetic risks the band was taking at this time; see the album's pair of instrumentals: the near-six-minute death-prog workout "Serpents Specters" and dizzying 90-second acoustic track "Diableros," which sounds something like John McLaughlin's Shakti meets Rodrigo y Gabriela.

The band's next album, 2003's Works of Carnage, is, to me, a clear demarcation point in their discography, and the point at which Krisiun really became themselves, so to speak. On songs like "Murderer" and "Wolfen Tyranny," you can hear them embracing this sort viciously precise staccato riffing style that would become one hallmark of their mature style.



As opposed to the undifferentiated, everything-in-the-red approach of the early work, here the band is expertly controlling the interplay of stabbing attack and cold silence. A song like this almost strikes me as the death-metal equivalent of Helmet, in the sense that the sonic blank spaces the band builds in only make the violence of the riffs themselves that much more pronounced. (Venerable metal writer, and my former Invisible Oranges editor, Cosmo Lee was all over this principle in his beautifully written Pitchfork review of Krisiun's 2008 LP, Southern Storm, as solid a summation of the band's appeal as you'll read: "Now their signature is precise machine-gun riffs punctuated by short pauses," he writes. He's also dead-on re: Max's parts sounding like "drum rudiments on steroids." It's noteworthy that Cosmo was all over the online metal beat — and paying close attention to worthy yet wholly unfashionable bands such as Krisiun, to boot — well before the current metal blogosphere took shape.)

You can hear how by this time, the band has essentially thrown out the stock death-metal playbook — the blastbeat is still there, but it's been obsessively chiseled, manipulated, honed. Instead of just surrendering to primal, blasphemous energy, the Krisiun of 2003 is making choices. They're making their music work for them rather than the other way around, and in the process taking steps toward becoming a band that's busy carving out a distinctive and substantial legacy, rather than one that embodies some fetishized idea of primitivism. (Reflecting more on Metal Myopia, I think it's a mindset that values underground cachet at the expense of actual, honest-to-God greatness; witness the common overuse of words like "legendary" in reference to bands who broke up before they even so much as recorded an album, went on tour or, you know, made music worth listening to.)

The upswing continues on the next three Krisiun releases: 2004's Bloodshed (an EP's worth of new songs plus a handful of tracks from the band's 1993 EP Unmerciful Order), 2006's AssassiNation and 2008's Southern Storm. I'm still getting to know these records, but they've nevertheless become instant death-metal core canon for me. Especially by the time of Southern Storm, the band just sounds so in control of its volatile materials, weaving the furious blasting that lies at the heart of its sound into gripping, epic songs. Here's Krisiun playing the opening track of that record, "Slaying Steel," on a Brazilian TV show in 2015 (I highly recommend checking out both full episodes of this show Estúdio Showlivre that the band has appeared on, from 2013 and 2015; incredible to see full-length death-metal performances being documented in-studio like this):



Krisiun may have reached their intensity threshold on Southern Storm, but they still had plenty of growing to do. It's tough for me to pick a favorite record of theirs, but if pressed, I'd go with their next LP, 2011's The Great Execution — a frankly stunning album and one that makes me wonder where the hell my head was at that year when I could have been savoring this upon its release. (I certainly knew of Krisiun and had heard bits and pieces of their work over the years, but this recent listening jag represents my first real dive into their catalog.)

To my ears, this is the album where Krisiun really graduated into the realm of the death-metal elite, populated by some of their key influences such as Morbid Angel and Deicide. Before, they were masters of speed, intensity, tightness. Here, they focus more on dynamics and variety — without losing an ounce of their patented ferocity — and the results are magical, one of those death-metal albums where the subgenre tag seems entirely superfluous. Think of a record like Morbid Angel's Domination or Death's Symbolic, albums that bear obvious "extreme" trappings but that present their ideas in such clear, accessible fashion that any metalhead with open ears can easily hear the brilliance on display.


Songs like "Blood of Lions" and "The Extremist" feature blast sections as fierce as the ones on unremitting speedfests like Conquerors of Armageddon, but here they're framed by tasteful set-ups and ass-kicking breakdowns, and topped with catchy-as-fuck choruses. You can hear Krisiun reveling in the fist-pumping power of metal that really and truly rocks. Songs like "Descending Abomination" place half-time riffs front and center, and the results recall the best of Morbid Angel's slower moments circa Domination, or the groovier bits of Sepultura's Chaos A.D — like The Great Execution, albums that marry the fury of the underground with the crowd-savvy accessibility of more mainstream acts. (The fact that Execution is the best-produced album of Krisiun's career to date — big ups to Andy Classen — doesn't hurt one bit.)

As you can see from this 2004 Moyses Kolesne quote — emphasis mine — from the Works of Carnage period, the band had been thinking along these lines for a while:

You gain maturity after touring a lot. We've learned so much. We play so much better now. We've played for such huge crowds. We've seen how people react; we've seen how the dynamics of the groove works. We've learned to work more into the groove, into the dynamics of the music itself. We used to only go for the fast wild stuff all the time. Works of Carnage is easier to understand, its easier to get into. I think the other albums were a lot of chaos. We're still chaotic but there's more of a groove and we tried to achieve a heavier production. It's really straightforward, not so many riffs. The musical structure is simpler. I don't know how to describe this. I just know that we've grown up a lot.

More on that theme from Moyses in 2012, following the release of The Great Execution:

When you’re young, you just want to go really extreme, y’know? You don’t really care about your roots; you just want to play as aggressive and fast as possible, because that’s the driving feeling you have inside. But once you start getting older, you feel that if you just keep doing it the same, things can get a bit boring. So instead of just taking influences from the trends in music nowadays, we decided to look to the past, to stuff we grew up with, like the old Maiden, old Black Sabbath, old Metallica, old Sepultura stuff, and put it in our music. It came out really satisfying, I think.

This kind of thinking — in fact, the act of thinking at all — these ideas of progression, development, refinement, audience-consciousness, communion with your musical predecessors, etc., are anathema to the rhetoric of the underground, to the Metal Myopic concept of remaining "true," i.e., stunted and essentially amateurish, at all costs. This exchange, from a 2014 Alex Camargo interview with MetalUnderground.com, is telling in that regard:

MU.com: …when someone hears the term “death metal,” they tend to think of one thing. So the challenge is to turn death metal into something bigger than that one thing.
You got it, man. If you make it your career… I mean, we’re here forever. I’ve got nowhere to go! [Laughs] We have to try to expand it, make it bigger, no matter if people give a shit or not. But we have to try. If people like it, that’s killer. Death metal isn’t as popular as melodic heavy metal, so it definitely is a challenge to stick around while playing fast and hard. We do it because we love it; otherwise we’d sell out or just stop doing what we’re doing. We wanna keep doing it, man. We wanna keep having a good time, keep feeling good. That’s what it’s about; as long as we’re motivated to do it, we’re good to go.

There you have it. The progression is about feeding the music, helping it grow and, God forbid, reach new ears. These guys are lifers — professionals, moreover — and unlike the many extreme-metal musicians for whom music is not a full-time gig — including members of relatively big-name bands like Immolation and Suffocation — they don't have the luxury of being content with the status of back-patch/message-board legends. Krisiun will likely never be as big as an Iron Maiden, a Mastodon or even a Cannibal Corpse, but that doesn't mean they're going to build some kind of aesthetic ceiling into the music itself. The Great Execution is the sound of a band saying, "We can retain everything we were before and be so much more at the same time."

Krisiun set an exceedingly high bar there, one that, to my ears, they didn't quite meet on their most recent LP, 2015's Forged in Fury. My current impression of this one is that it's a very good album that lacks the breathtaking command and confidence of The Great Execution. You can hear the band trying out still more new ideas — Forged is definitely the proggiest Krisiun album to date, in the sense of unexpected time signatures, varied dynamics and intricate arrangements — but while on Execution, their fresher elements sounded seamlessly integrated with their old, unrepentantly extreme ethos, on Forged, a bit of awkwardness creeps in, especially when it comes to Camargo's vocal delivery. On earlier albums, he had always sounded rivetingly intense and wholly unfazed; here, there are times when he sounds like he's struggling to fit his trademark gruff roars over the songs' rhythmically thorny arrangements. Forged isn't a bad record by any means — great riffs still abound, for one thing — but it's one that strikes me as more of a transitional statement; accordingly, I have high hopes for whatever Krisiun does next.

It's likely that the message-board police won't be listening either way. I found this section from the 2012 Moyses interview to be an extremely apt, wryly funny illustration of the "plight" of a band like Krisiun — one that at this point in their career is neither a critical darling (probably because their work exists completely apart from the style of death metal that's currently in vogue, one that privileges arty, in some cases pointlessly or inconsequentially so, weirdness over intelligible, effective songcraft and traditional — or to put it another way, Wacken-friendly — heavy-metal values) or a favorite of the wearisomely orthodox underground-til'-death die-hards.

A couple people have said, “What, are you guys wimping out, or something?” And “The record’s not a hundred percent fast,” and shit like that. Kids, man. They need to bitch about anything. And some critics back in time have said, “Oh, Krisiun’s so boring, they just play the same shit,” and we put the new record out and some say, “Now I can listen to them.” So nobody has the same opinion, but we’re gonna feed some hungry kids that like extreme metal, like me when I was a kid. I just liked blasting stuff back then. I mean, I always liked all kinds of metal, but I REALLY liked the blasting shit. So I know there are kids out there that like that stuff, and we’re there for them. And if a critic just listens to “soft” metal, sure, he ain’t gonna have any clue about us. We play for us, for metal – not for critics. So if you like the music, you like it, and if you don’t, you don’t, but you don’t need to be out there spreading bad news about bands.

The funny thing is that the Metal Myopic "kids" he's referring to are really, at this point, often just tediously close-minded adults. But the point is well-taken. The metal scene is at once an oasis of support and positivity and passionate engagement and a cesspool of stunted, dismissive thinking. To any clear-eyed, open-eared observer, a band like Krisiun is as "true" as they come: three musicians deeply invested in underground values (that adolescent part of one's self that "REALLY liked the blasting shit") but also thoughtful enough to leave room for growth, for progression, for the no-shortcuts-allowed cultivation of a long-term aesthetic arc, the kind that marks the careers of all the true, deserving legends — the Metallicas, the Maidens, the Mastodons.

Krisiun is a band that's daring to aim for greatness, for a spot in the pantheon, not in that lower tier of cult favorites but in the realms of the etched-in-the-stars elite (as Moyses puts it, "...whatever comes or doesn't come for us, the music stays here forever"). Following high points like Southern Storm and The Great Execution, they're still on the upward ascent, and you can bet they'll be climbing as long as they can.

/////

*Another awesome artifact from Brazilian TV: a near hour-long 2015 sitdown with all three brothers in which they tell the complete story of the band.

*Alex's perspective on Morbid Angel's Illud Divinum Insanus, an album that was of course burned in effigy by the message-board police (and, let's be fair, most everyone else) upon its release, is refreshing and apt, given M.A.'s status as a band that's long been subjected to "They're dead to me after X album" treatment by the underground peanut gallery: "It took me some time to get it and understand the point, but I got it, man."

*Max on the awesome drum-centric "video podcast" drumtalk.

"Pure physical euphoric energy": Obituary's eternal gifts

Now live at Rolling Stone, a new feature on the mighty Obituary.

The seeds of this piece were planted back in 2011, when I wrote about the band for DFSBP. As I explained then, I'd been listening to them on and off for close to two decades by that point, but it was only after seeing them live that I fully comprehended how special they actually were. (A similar thing happened more recently with Crowbar, a band I wrote about for RS last year.)

I've since reached a new peak of Obituary obsession, and thus it was an absolute pleasure and honor to put together this piece. Obituary are the shining exemplars of an M.O. I've written about a lot over the years, fairly common in the metal underground, wherein a band establishes a signature sound early in their career and simply sticks with it, album after album, show after show, year after year, decade after decade.

It's not exactly true to say that Obituary haven't changed. Pore through their discography and you'll start to discern clear early-, mid- and late-period sounds: unrelentingly harsh yet at times surprisingly compositionally involved (Slowly We Rot, Cause of Death, The End Complete); tougher, leaner and bullishly groove-centric (World Demise, Back From the Dead, Frozen in Time); and, most recently, looser, rawer and more all-around rawk-and-roll–ish (Xecutioner's Return, Darkest Day, Inked in Blood and the new Obituary). Not every one of these albums is flawless, but every one is worth hearing, as is the robust, spectacular-sounding 1998 live release Dead.

This band's head-down consistency brings me inordinate pleasure. I'll turn the mic over to Andrew W.K. — friend and former employer of Obituary drummer Donald Tardy and, incidentally, a former co-owner of Santos Party House, where I saw Obituary back in 2011 — who had this to say in 2015 of his love of vintage death metal, specifically Obituary and their peers Napalm Death:

"To be able to listen to something so many times and only like it more, and I liked it a lot the first time, but now to be able to rely on that as an energy source, to be able to turn to that no matter what state I'm in and have it instantly take me to this place of pure physical euphoric energy, it's one of the things I'm most thankful for in life, it's like water or food to me, it feeds my soul in a very fundamental way, and I can't believe how lucky I am that it exists."

I relate to this sentiment completely. I absolutely rely on Obituary as an energy source, as food for my soul. For all its minimalism, I find their catalog to be inexhaustible, because it's just that goddamn powerful and true and decisive and real-feeling. The agreed-upon shorthand for what they do is "death metal" — a term that already falls so woefully short as a catch-all because all these great first-generation bands, from Death to Deicide to Morbid Angel to Cannibal Corpse, sound completely different from one another — but their output is so clearly born out of passion and love and life. The product of finding that one thing, that precise vision that you want, need, to realize and seeing it through, time and time again, over the course of the decades. Some music pushes outward; Obituary's gift is for burrowing inward, for becoming more and more themselves as time goes by. Stand by and behold and marvel and — if you're anything like me — rejoice.

Here are eight great Obituary songs. (I wanted to pick one from each studio LP, but sadly, Xecutioner's Return and Darkest Day, both very good, overlooked albums, aren't currently streaming.)

Delivering the death metal: A new Cannibal Corpse LP

The death-metal band Cannibal Corpse released a new album this past September: A Skeletal Domain, their 13th LP. As with the prior two Corpse records, 2012's Torture and 2009's Evisceration Plague, it took me a second to come around to ASD. What typically happens is that I register the fact of the album release without really registering its considerable significance to me, a serious Corpse fan. I spin the record once, half-listening and thinking, "Yep, another Cannibal Corpse album" (you'll often read this sort of dismissive phraseology applied to the Corpse; Brooklyn Vegan recently wrote that ASD was "notable simply for being Another Cannibal Corpse Record"), and then I move on. Some weeks or months later, I think to myself, "Wait a minute, a new Cannibal Corpse album?!" Then I load the record onto my iPod, and the serious engagement begins. This time around, it took a couple tries. Even after I started listening closely, I wasn't crazy about ASD. But within the past week or so, something has clicked: I've been spinning ASD obsessively, and I'm now thinking it might be the best Corpse disc of them all.

As I've discussed here before, Cannibal Corpse turned a corner with 2006's Kill. In my opinion, that's when the latter-day incarnation of the band—fronted by George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher, who replaced founding vocalist Chris Barnes back in 1995—really got their shit together and began cranking out truly elite product worthy of their elder-statesmen status within the death-metal realm. I believe that, taken together, Kill, Evisceration Plague, Torture and A Skeletal Domain are the best that contemporary death metal has to offer. Not necessarily the most challenging or the most innovative, or the most extreme or harsh or thought-provoking or unsettling or what have you, but simply the best. This is death metal that perfectly balances technicality and brutality, chaos and catchiness. These are albums you can play all the way through, again and again, full of songs that sound great on record or onstage. Like most great music, the recent Cannibal Corpse output is music you can use.

A veteran band besting themselves with each album. Not just upholding a standard but pushing. This is not a common phenomenon. As evidenced by the Brooklyn Vegan quote above, it's not the sort of career arc that's going to gain you much respect outside your own die-hard fan base. But death metal is, at its core, an insular art form. I recently stumbled across a making-of documentary dealing with The Wretched Spawn, the Corpse album that preceded Kill. There are many beautiful moments here, many of them dealing with the idea of the fan/band symbiosis, and the members' gratitude at being able to do what they love for a living. At 32:45, drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz says, "That's our job: delivering the death metal." Fisher follows him up: "This music is everything to me. It's given me so much, and the fans have given me, and all of us, more than we could ever give back. But we try to give back."

I'm still somewhat iffy on mid-period Corpse, the years between when Fisher joined the band and Kill. But when I've heard each of the prior three Corpse records, I've heard exactly what Mazurkiewicz and Fisher describe above. A band giving back, delivering the death metal. Professionals doing their job. ASD upholds this standard. There is so much craft and care and love, and so little bullshit, on this record. Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse had a certain seedy grime to it. (Yesterday, I stumbled across this incredible 1994 soundboard boot, which captures that lineup in its prime.) Corpsegrinder-era Corpse, on the other hand, is all about the fury, the relentlessness, the onrushing mincing machine that is the band's riff factory / nervous system: guitarists Rob Barrett and Pat O'Brien, and bassist Alex Webster, the Corpse's three principal songwriters.


Like the last couple Corpse discs, ASD actually improves as it goes on, growing steadily more demented and adventurous. The first three tracks are total anthems—clear future live staples. The title track and "Headlong Into Carnage" up the speed and intensity and breakneck Corpsegrinder word-munching to near-absurd levels. "Icepick Lobotomy," probably my current favorite track on the record, shows off two of late Corpse's signature moves: the agonizing doom breakdown (:33) and the thrilling uptempo 6/8 rock-out (2:00). "Vector of Cruelty" is one of the grooviest songs in the band's discography, orbiting around this sort of cruising midtempo feel, while "Asphyxiate to Rescuscitate" is one of the most manic and mathy, frantically juggling five- and seven-beat clusters. The last track, "Hollowed Bodies," starts off with a needling blast-beat riff that harks back to the Barnes-era heyday of 1994's The Bleeding, and goes on to effortlessly juggle tempos and feels—there's no last-track curveball here; just more Corpse-y excellence.

Basically, you finish the album and you want to play it again. There's no drop-off. ASD is just the latest example of Cannibal Corpse giving back, delivering the death metal. There's no ceremony about it. The next chapter is built in. You know the next LP will arrive in two or three years and you know it will be humbly outstanding. You know the casual spectators will take it for granted. You know the fans will show up to the concerts. You can count on this reliable cycle, and though you might grow temporarily numb to it, you know that when you hear what the Corpse does next, you will remember why they are at the forefront of their genre, 26-plus years after they started. It's a simple matter of releasing quality product. Of evolving without losing the thread. Of balancing immediacy and cleverness. Of doing their work lovingly and with full commitment. Art and craft, craft and art. Job, done; death metal, delivered. Fans, like this one, happy as hell.

Recently: my year in death metal + Black Flag

Two pieces to share, along with brief postscripts:

*Via Noisey, a round-up of the death metal I loved most in 2013, all of which took the form of new music by old bands. In prior DFSBP writings—including four posts anthologized in the recently released seventh issue of Burning Ambulance, at the kind request of editor Phil Freeman—I've made no secret of my bias toward the genre's veteran acts. As I tried to make clear in the Noisey piece, I'm not suggesting that newer groups aren't currently making great death metal; I'm simply drawing attention to the fact that a weirdly large number of bands from the movement's early-’90s heyday (not coincidentally, the moment I came on board as a fan) are still at it, and have issued top-quality product this year. Some of my favorite albums of 2013, regardless of genre, are on this list.

*Via Pitchfork, a review of the new Black Flag record. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that I found the album disappointing. I'm a huge Greg Ginn fan—his guitar sound/concept sums up what I love about music about as well as any other instrumental voice I could name. At the same time, as I indicate in the piece, I think that when it comes to releases, he tends to opt for quantity over quality. The man still issues a ton of music, just as he has for decades, and it bums me out to think that—in the context of this spotty yet significant trove—What The… might be the first and last Ginn-related record many listeners will hear outside of the original Black Flag discography. Considering this new LP in light of the full spectrum of Ginn's work over the last quarter century might not result in a more pleasurable listening experience, but I think it does soften the blow a little bit. I assure you: This will not be the last we hear from the man.

If you haven't yet seen Ben Greenberg's Talkhouse write-up of What The…, I highly recommend it.

Bagchus / Van Drunen: This one true thing

A toast to the parties that have occupied so many of my listening hours in recent weeks. Sirs Bob Bagchus and Martin Van Drunen, a drummer and vocalist, respectively—second and third from left in the pic above—and principal members of the Dutch extreme-metal band Asphyx. The pair also play together in Grand Supreme Blood Court, which includes former Asphyx member Eric Daniels. The details are a bit confusing, but don't worry; this is a unified body of work.

Here are ten of my favorite tracks from the (by my count) five studio albums these two have made together thus far: two early-’90s Asphyx records, The Rack and Last One on Earth; two post-reunion Asphyx records—Death…the Brutal Way and Deathhammer—which I generally like better than the original two LPs, as good as those are; and one GSBC record.



I've written here before about the appeal of Asphyx. I don't have a whole lot to add to that. For me, the pleasure of this music has to do with an integrity, a phenomenally strong inner compass, the equivalent of a tractor beam that leads you along this one narrow aesthetic track for the entirety of your creative life. As any fan of death metal, or I guess I should say this strain of death metal, the one that's about paring ideas down rather than stacking them up—it's an elite crew, maybe only these guys and Obituary who do it in such a supremely satisfying way—could tell you, it's not about the quantity of ideas. It's about the weight you put behind your statements, the gravity of your stride.

There are moments here—like 2:07 into "Bloodswamp," when the tempo downshifts into that mean-ass swagger, or 1:40 into "The Herald," where, well, basically the exact same thing happens, except that the resulting tempo is just…that…much…slower and more agonized—that make me so happy I want to mutate, devolve, in the manner described here. It's about getting so, so low to the ground, this music. These two men, the vocalist with the gargling-sandpaper blurt and the drummer with the deliberately leaden, masterfully stoic, just-get-the-job-done cadences, and the guitarists—Paul Baayens, who also plays with Van Drunen in the good but, for my money, not quite as transcendent Hail of Bullets, on the post-reunion Asphyx discs; Eric Daniels on the old ones and the GSBC LP—who know the hymns that need to be sung, these towering riff colossi, like the swinging, almost balladic, "Let me tell you, son, a story of old" theme of "As the Magma Mammoth Rises," or the vicious yet melodically fine-tuned trilling of the main riff on "Asphyx (Forgotten War)," which you can't hear without thinking of getting threshed up into little bits. Or, maybe best of all, that strutting-down-a-boulevard-in-the-underworld sneer you hear on "We Doom You to Death," a track chronicling, yes, the badassery of Asphyx, and the feebleness of its competitors.

"No one will remember you / Nor your fucking band," growls Van Drunen on "We Doom…," and it's worth thinking about why the opposite is true of Asphyx. An art project can be an umbrella, a wide open creative space—the Melvins, let's say—and still make sense in the long run, still embody a sense of legacy, a sense that a fan's long-term investment is worthwhile. But there's something so satisfying to me about these narrowly defined zones of inquiry, as in Asphyx's case. You are who you are, you grow and change and all the rest, but you keep the family business sacred; you make one thing, really well, and you keep all your pride bound up in it.

It means so much, this consistency. I put this stuff on my iPod, the complete Bagchus / Van Drunen collaborative works, and I just go and go for days. It's like a North Star for me, the dream of an uncluttered statement, of channeling heart and mind into a single mode of expression, clenching down so tightly on this one true thing. And that's when you feel the gravity I spoke of above, the result of merciless focus, of unwavering determination, a grim yet somehow celebratory kind of will that meshes perfectly with the despondent mood of much of Asphyx's music. The rain and the sleet are driving down, the sky is black, you're sloshing through mud and muck, but you're pressing on. And on and on and on. And because you know you're on the right path, you're having a hell of a good time. That's what all this means to me.

[End-credits music: Asphyx - "Asphyx II (They Died as They Marched)"]

Feels like home to me: Convulse / Sorcery

A lot of my recent recreational listening has focused on two Nordic death-metal albums, Convulse's World Without God (1992) and Sorcery's Arrival at Six (2013). Despite the two-decade gap between them, these records share some key factors in common. Convulse and Sorcery both formed in the mid-to-late-’80s—in Finland and Sweden, respectively—broke up in the mid-to-late ’90s and reunited recently: Convulse in 2012 and Sorcery in 2009. (World is original-era Convulse, while Arrival is post-reunion Sorcery.) More importantly, they both home in on a willfully limited but immensely satisfying aesthetic.

These two bands don't sound much alike—Convulse has a more traditional death-metal sound, with super-low, almost gurgled vocals and endless doomy riffs, while Sorcery takes a punkish, almost rock ’n roll approach, focused on a wildly unhinged vocal delivery and galloping uptempo rhythms. But both bands thrive on a sort of paring down of aesthetic parameters; essentially, they each do one thing extremely well, a thing that "on paper" or on a first listen, can seem slight or rote. But there's an intangible brilliance at work in the output of each, a quality that I've come to think of as "closeness to the source," a feeling of in-the-blood-ness that's often detectable in bands formed just as a given style was coming into being but before it was a codified, cataloged movement. Obituary, another death-metal band with ’80s roots, gives me a similar kind of feeling, as does Asphyx. I don't listen to these bands to be challenged; I listen to them to be sated, in some primal way. I'm not sure what it is, but there's something so exciting, vital and, at base, pleasurable to me about this strain of death metal, these bands who channel all their effort not into progress or freshness but into making a few basic elements feel, for lack of a better word, true.

Convulse - "Godless Truth":


What do you say about a track like this? You do not get anywhere by analyzing its constituent parts; you do not, as a commentator, "make a case" for it. It either entrances you, seduces you with its dark song, or it doesn't. There's a certain artfulness to the composition, but the overall appeal is pure primitive, teeth-gritting shagginess. Think monosyllables: weight, doom, blurt, girth. It's animal music, executed with great intentionality. Two metal-obsessed friends of mine have their own terms for this kind of metal: one refers to it as "knuckle-dragger" music, the other as sound that it's in touch with the "lizard brain." Both terms emphasize a kind of primitiveness, and that's absolutely a factor here, maybe even the overriding factor.

But I don't think Convulse played this way because it's the only way they knew how to play. Their next album, Reflections, went in a more groovy, rock-oriented direction, but in recent interviews, bandleader Rami Jämsä has all but disowned that effort and stated that he's conceiving of the new Convulse material as a sequel to World Without God. In other words, the uniformity of WWG—spoiler alert: the rest of the album sounds very similar to the track above, a fact which will either delight or horrify you, depending on your personal affinity for this brand of death metal—seems to have been very much by design. The band wanted their work to function like a single blunt instrument, and their reunion effort is an attempt to capture that glorious single-mindedness.

Sorcery - "Created from Darkness and Rage": 



It's difficult for me to describe how happy the intro to the above Sorcery track makes me. (Consequently, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank That's How Kids Die's Josh Haun for turning me onto this band.) It's as though I can feel my metabolism changing when I hear it, slowing down to the level of the beast. I play it now and I think about a scene from the original Clash of the Titans that fascinated me as a kid, when Zeus punishes Calibos by turning him into a monster. I always found that moment when his shadow morphs to be so grotesquely compelling, and this passage ensnares me in a similar way. It's a sort of musical wallowing, a glorification of filth. Again, it's not about the on-paper content so much as it is the feeling. The unholy crunch-and-stomp here is not a guise, not a matter of received knowledge; it is something native in these players, something they've been driving at since they were young men, since the mark of metal first fell upon them as Zeus's curse falls upon Calibos.

The track speeds up, and the mood becomes less about anguish than seething, venting explosiveness. But there's still this enormous integrity to the presentation. It sounds strange, but I simply feel like I'm in good hands when I hear this brand of death metal: the hands of experts, of lifers, of players who get that in many cases, great metal is first and foremost a matter of passion and sensation, of technique perfected only to a point, of pride in primitiveness, of deliberate myopia. You zoom in your sights so that only the bulls-eye is in frame, and you bombard that target again and again. Like World Without God, Arrival at Six is that kind of record. It is connoisseur's death metal. No argument can be made on its behalf, but if all of the above is speaking your language, no argument need be made. Like that of Convulse, Sorcery's music springs from and aims directly for your lizard brain, that knuckle-dragging part of you, serenading the beast, eliciting that sinister smile, that strange masochistic glee, like a gene that we have that non-metalheads lack. (Think of cilantro.) There's a serenity there, amidst the pummel and the churn, a kernel of contentedness. What I hear on Arrival at Six and World Without God feels like home to me.

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I saw, and loved, Convulse at MDF XI. They issued a new EP, Inner Evil, in early 2013 and are prepping a full-length for later this year. Sorcery toured the U.S. in April but didn't make it to NYC; I really hope they remedy that oversight soon.

Here's a Spotify playlist containing both albums in their entirety. Pay special attention to the exemplary production quality of each. The material on these records is impeccable, but the beautifully raw, full way they're rendered makes them all the more durable and enjoyable.

In praise of Obituary: Forgoing the space race

"We did the same thing on the new album [as] we normally do. We don't try too hard. We stick to what we are good at. We know that Obituary has a sound and a style, and we want to preserve that, so when the fans buy these albums, they know that they're getting a good Obituary album."—Obituary drummer Donald Tardy, 2010 interview with Art ’N’ Roll WebZine

I've been a fan of the Florida death-metal band Obituary for something like 20 years. A friend passed me 1992's The End Complete at school, and I was immediately sucked into its slow, tortured soundworld. I stuck around for 1994's World Demise—I distinctly remember participating in an Obituary rite of passage around this time: developing my own comical-yet-reverent impression of frontman John Tardy's soul-vomit growl—but I got off the train after that.

As a young listener, I regarded Obituary—along with bands like Deicide and Cannibal Corpse—as part of my death-metal phase: in other words, great at what they did but not really a band you could grow up with. They'd always be there if I needed a little shot of nostalgia, but I didn't think of them the way I regarded, say, Morbid Angel, i.e., as a band I could count on to evolve, to present me with new information over time, and/or to compose material that was so strong and compelling that it transcended the genre entirely.

Over the past few weeks, in advance of last night's Obituary show at Santos Party House, I made a point of catching up on all the Obituary full-lengths I missed, i.e., 1997's Back from the Dead through 2009's Darkest Day, and found that I wasn't necessarily amiss in letting my real-time fandom of the band lapse. It was almost shocking to me how little their sound had progressed. If you'd played me Darkest Day blind, I'd have had a hard time dating it as a post–World Demise release. Still the same mix of excruciating doom-groove passages and bottom-heavy, hardcore-infused thrash (still no blastbeats, a key distinguishing feature of this band); still the same ghastly John Tardy vocals. Obituary was, to borrow the title of their 2005 comeback record (the band was dormant between Back from the Dead and that release), frozen in time. (To be fair, guitarist Ralph Santolla's florid, virtuoso leads, heard on Darkest Day and 2007's Xecutioner's Return, did constitute a modest new wrinkle.)

Before seeing Obituary live last night, I'm not sure that I would've regarded the above quote from Donald Tardy (John's brother) as a particularly admirable one. I'll fully admit that I've often favored artists, musical or otherwise, who placed a premium on evolution, bands where every album provides a new plot wrinkle, where the obligation to the fan is not, as Tardy suggests, to deliver the familiar, but to move forward at the risk of baffling or even losing the listener altogether. I've had the idea of relentless progress on the brain lately in light of the exemplary Death reissues on Relapse. In terms of a death-metal career arc/track record, there really is no greater one than Death's. Once the band really started evolving in earnest, there was no looking back; trying to square the band's very good, very primitive 1987 debut, Scream Bloody Gore, with, say, 1995's Symbolic—a true progressive-metal masterpiece—is next to impossible. The band was still called Death, but leader Chuck Schuldiner (RIP) wasn't going to let that constrain his ever-heightening interest in dynamics, fluidity, technicality, beauty.

After seeing Obituary live, though, I think I need to reconsider the idea of holding every band to this standard. The fact of the matter is, if a band feels creatively satisfied tending to a small, well-defined garden year after year—and if you watch the video quoted above in full, you'll see that Don Tardy feels just fine about it—and if the audience supports that in full, what's the harm?

Working in the quartet line-up of the Tardy bros, guitarist Trevor Peres and bassist Terry Butler (no Santolla), Obituary put on an outstanding show last night, one of the best extreme-metal shows I've seen. And one of the major reasons for this was that their staunchly untechnical compositions—it's not too much of a stretch, nor is it a dis, to say that for the most part, the songs all sounded the same—made 100 times more sense onstage, to the extent that I had a kind of "Ohhhhhhhh, now I get it!" reaction. What I mean to say is that I can't tell you how many times I've gone to see a more technical extreme-metal band and been disappointed that the mindblowing level of detail I'd grown to love on their records was lost in the deafening blur that is the live metal show. These songs, on the other hand, are designed to be played live in front of a rabid, possibly intoxicated crowd. Obituary's songs are anthems; they are groovefests; they are the death-metal equivalent of great, catchy pop tunes. Whether you know them or not, they move you right on the spot; you dance; you mosh; you headbang; you marvel at how well John's vocal spew complements Peres's caveman riffage and Don's straightforward, borderline funky pummel. At Santos, this music sounded beautifully clear.

That's partly a credit to the club's excellent sound system, but it's also a credit to Obituary: Don Tardy's "We stick to what we're good at" took on a whole new meaning. To him, Obituary is like a really reliable family-owned pizza joint, let's say, that you can confidently patronize year after year. As it should be for just about any metal band, the point is to tour and put on great, fun and, yes, accessible shows. This means crafting material that will work onstage, and super-technical metal often doesn't work onstage. Obituary's material, on the other hand, comes screaming to life at their shows. They are playing for the kids, both in the audience and in their hearts.

This is a band that has never seen fit to compete in death metal's ongoing space race: the largely unspoken, but clearly very real competition to be the fastest, chopsiest, most complex. There's nothing inherently wrong with the progressive impulse, but the trouble is that it only favors the absolute elite, the handful of bands in the genre that can evolve without losing the plot. (Again, Death might be the pinnacle of this practice—the band that has done the most convincing job of upping its technicality while forsaking neither its extreme-metal-ness nor its compositional coherence.) In the end, the long-running band has no responsibility other than to itself, and at the core of that is Don Tardy's idea of knowing what one is good at.

Chuck Schuldiner was good at progressing, at pushing himself and the genre forward, and that's why Death never made the same album twice; Obituary on the other hand is more like any other great genre band: a great hard-rock group, a great bluegrass ensemble or jazz combo. They defined the parameters early on—the key ingredients were all there on the band's first record, 1989's Slowly We Rot—and they've thrived within those parameters ever since. See them live today, 22 years on, and you'll understand that there's no shame in that. Every member of the band was having as great a time as every kid in the pit. (I especially loved watching a clearly psyched John contribute guest floor-tom work on a few passages, as Don handled the rest of the kit—a modest curveball that yielded maximum charm.) These musicians found—some would say founded—death metal in their youth and they've held onto it like an elixir ever since.

The beautiful thing about the underground is that their fans feel the same way, by and large. They don't want Obituary to change. The message from the pit is "You're perfect just the way you are," and Obituary has no complex about that. They're close enough to their life force (i.e., the headbangers who attend their shows and buy their records) to understand that "progress" isn't for everyone. It holds no inherent value, only what you bring to it. If you can make a living as an artist, if you can satisfy yourself and your audience, churning out a uniform, high-quality product, then you are as successful as the artist who makes headlines by turning his/her aesthetic on its head every time out. As Obituary proved to me last night, staying still doesn't necessarily equal stagnation; for some creative entities, it's the smartest thing they could possibly do.