A farewell to the king: Goodbye, Neil Peart

Sure, I've put together a top 10 list or two in my day. But the practice of ranking and quantifying artists and artworks is generally not something I place much stock in. Let's just say, though, that someone were to ask me to name my favorite band. I've answered craw in the past, and I take nothing away from their towering significance within my personal pantheon. But if we're talking about the one whose music I've spent more time with than any other, whose output has provided me with the greatest amount of spirit food for the longest span of time, it has to be Rush and no other.

They've been my happy place for so long, I can't even remember a time before. Just about every album. (Honestly, the self-titled debut might be the only one I don't adore.) Nearly every song. Throughout all those records, there are maybe four or five tracks I don't outright love. (Strangely, two of them, "Chemistry" and "Countdown," happen to be on the same LP, Signals, which is otherwise maybe my favorite Rush album.) All the DVDs and live albums, which in recent years, I've gone back to as much if not more than the studio records. Five live shows, stretching back to April of '94, when I had my mind blown by the Counterparts tour, and including the Snakes and Arrows tour in 2007, the Time Machine run in 2010 (Moving Pictures front to back), the Clockwork Angels tour in 2012 and the phenomenal R40 in 2015.

But also, like, two half-marathons completed with predominantly Rush blasting in my headphones. Runs, walks, subway rides. Moments of hazy pre-sleep consciousness with Rush playing on the stereo or in my ears. A very fragmentary "Xanadu" cover learned with my friends and bandmates. The big "Tom Sawyer" fill, a good chunk of "Subdivisions" and a few other choice bits labored over and sketchily reproduced in the practice room. Countless nerdy conversations. Innumerable air-drum sessions. Recently, fledgling attempts to play a bit of "Limelight" on guitar. Just, like, a life with this music as the backdrop or, not all that infrequently, the central focus. The impact is indescribable, the debt unrepayable.

There is so much more to say, but here's what I pulled together in tribute to the great man on the occasion of his passing, inspired in part by this ancient DFSBP riff on the "Subdivisions" drum part.

Thank you for everything, and farewell.

Lately (11/20/18)

*Frank Mullen's final NYC show as the vocalist of Suffocation (a band I've written about at some length on DFSBP) turned out to be a surprisingly touching event. I'm very interested in the idea of true mastery in a field like this (i.e., death-metal vocals), which to 99% of the populace would scan as pure absurdity. But Frank has put in the time, to say the least, and now gets the last laugh. In the end, I feel like mastery in a field like extreme metal, which when you get down to it, is a pure fan-powered meritocracy, is maybe somehow even more "authentic" than mastery in a more "legitimate," "respectable" artistic field. In short, Frank Mullen is a guy who simply got extremely good at something for which, during the time he was coming up, there was really no established rule book (let alone rewards or accolades). Insofar as there is a rule book for death-metal vocals now, he helped write it, along with a handful of others, like Chris Barnes, for instance. Anyway, yes, this was a hell of a night, and here is my attempt to convey why.

*Hemispheres is definitely in my personal Rush-albums Top 5, likely in my Top 3 and possibly in my Top 1. Here is my take on the new expanded reissue. Ryan Reed's Geddy Lee interview from a few weeks back, linked right up top, is essential reading.

*Some thoughts on a new David S. Ware archival release. David S. Ware was "breaking" (in Rolling Stone, for one thing) right around the time I was getting into "this music." I was engaged with his work then but not, I have realized and continue to realize, as engaged as I ought to have been. (To be more specific, I think I was still pretty immersed in the history of free jazz at the time, to some degree at the expense of the music's present, though I did get out there plenty.) The more I listen, especially to the quartet, on albums like Go See the World, the more impressed I am. This trio with William Parker and Warren Smith is a very different animal, but it's dawning on me that there is really no lesser DSW.

*Harriet Tubman are, at this point, something of an NYC institution. Their new album is fitting of such a group, in that captures a band fully at ease with itself, and with the fact that it will probably never fit neatly into any scene, let alone genre. As discussed in this track write-up, with commentary from the musicians, there are strong and sturdy Sonny Sharrock–ian overtones to the Harriet Tubman project, which manifest in a particularly gritty and transportive way in the Bob Marley cover under discussion. Given my Sharrock fanaticism, I do not point out the above lightly — since his departure, few have managed to even touch on his aesthetic zone / life force, let alone harness core elements of it. That's not to say that this is some kind of tribute band or copycat endeavor. Harriet Tubman are a whole universe of sound and sensation unto themselves, and this new album is an excellent demonstration of its scope and character.

See also: Heavy Metal Bebop with Melvin Gibbs.

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Also, re: Heavy Metal Bebop in general, if you have enjoyed past installments, please stay tuned. As always, the series is in glacial yet perpetual motion. We're heading somewhere with HMB, slowly, steadily, and I will share details when I'm able.

Snarl and snap: Goodbye, Chris Squire

There is the air of classic prog, the songs' ornate, easily caricatured latticework—in Yes terms, the Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman element. And there is the earth, their harsh, wiry skeleton—in Yes terms, the element of the late, great Chris Squire, along with Alan White and before him Bill Bruford. Anyone playing hard-hitting, compositionally daring rock music (math rock, tech metal, a million other microstyles) is, or ought to be, planting their ideas in the Squire soil.

The girth, the clarity, the metallic thwack of his bass tone. The bridge between, say, Mahavishnu Orchestra, where the bass typically took a backseat, and Rush, where it essentially became a lead instrument. For me, when Chris Squire's bass started to snarl and snap is the eureka moment when so-called prog became electrifying and essential, when geek brain met cyborg muscle. I'm not a Yes completist, but in the classic ’70s material, whenever the rhythm section starts to kick (and/or the Steve Howe visionary-shred roller coaster starts zooming around the track), it's a drop-everything moment for me.

Zero in on the riff that starts at about 6:04 in "Close to the Edge," the one with those thrilling syncopated Squire/Bruford stabs. It's all there. Props also to the monster mutant-funk groove at 6:51, with those grotesque melodic outbursts and chasm-like rests. Thank you, Chris Squire—you harnessed the low end, sacrificing none of its primal power, and made it dance and sing.

Neil Peart: A 60th-birthday playlist

Last week I wrote about a so-called prog band that doesn't really fit that mold. I held Rush up as a band that does conform to what prog is commonly understood to be, but you can't put them in a box either. I've been listening to and loving Rush for more than half my life, and they're still one of the staples of my musical diet. Say about them what you will, but it's important to understand that the thumbnail version of Rush—screechy vocals, OCD drumming, sidelong songs—is way out-of-date; for the last 30 or so years, since around the time of Moving Pictures, Rush hasn't really been a prog band at all. They've gradually streamlined their sound to the point that what they are is a great rock band, period—a lofty and brainy one, sure, but no more self-indulgent than, say, the Radioheads of the world.

Following this post is a playlist of some of my favorite Rush tracks, all released within the past decade. I offer this as a modest birthday tribute to drummer-lyricist Neil Peart, who turned 60 yesterday. I attempted a close read of a key Peart performance on DFSBP back in ’06; that's not what this sampling is about. My goal is simply to demonstrate the pleasures of late-period Rush. Peart shines here, of course—not just as a drummer but as a lyricist, especially on the harrowing "Ghost Rider," which captures his haunted state of mind in the wake of the deaths of his daughter and common-law wife—but more importantly, these are just good songs. The current/recent Rush output means as much to me as anything they've done. The new Clockwork Angels is scary-good; it's probably my favorite Rush album since 1993's stunning Counterparts.

We'll start with an instrumental off the latter record. Look out for the heavenly delayed crash-cymbal/bass-drum accents that Peart throws in on what I'll call the prechorus starting at :32. Then we move on to "Dog Years," which features Peart playing more or less a punk beat, followed by a quasi-disco one. On "BU2B," listen very closely (headphones will help) after the bombshell kick-in at :50, and you'll hear Peart offering up tasteful commentary with the left foot on the hi-hat; I also love the slashing China-cymbal syncopations that start around 1:15. Re: "Workin' Them Angels," I have little to say other than that I think it's a great, dramatic song. And we end with the darkly majestic "Ghost Rider." Happy birthday, sir, and thank you for your music.

Shapeshifter: In praise of Bruford/Wetton/Fripp King Crimson

Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time self-educating re: rock from the ’70s. We always hear about the ’60s, specifically the end of the ’60s, as a rock heyday, but the next decade seems to me to be the One, when all the warning shots had been fired and the premier bands were all just, to use a term coined by Damión Reid, showing up to crush. As usual, I speak only for myself, oriented according to my inescapable biases, biases that go by names like Black Sabbath (who started out strong but attained some kind of exalted state of fried-mind excess around the time of 1975's Sabotage), Thin Lizzy (who issued their own fireball of a record that same year, just one of at least five all-time-great LPs they'd release throughout the decade) and Led Zeppelin (let's stick with the ’75 theme, and take a moment to reflect on two of the sickest grooves ever recorded: exhibits A and B).

I will love all of these bands/records for as long as I am on Earth, but at this point, they are like comfort food to me: known quantities with a predictable, though not commonplace effect, i.e., they yield ecstasy the way great coffee yields a buzz. But much of my RLT (recreational listening time) over the past week has been spent chasing down a different kind of feeling, furnished by a band that thrived contemporaneously to the woolly rock mammoths enumerated above, but was on, as they say, a whole different trip.

I'm speaking about King Crimson, specifically the version of King Crimson that existed—with more or less stable personnel, give or take percussionist Jamie Muir and violinist David Cross—from (I think I've got this right) the summer of 1972 through the fall of ’74. Aside from perennial KC mastermind Robert Fripp, this lineup was all about bassist-vocalist John Wetton and—I feel like I need to cross myself while typing this, so large does this musician currently loom in my personal pantheon—drummer Bill Bruford, who reported for Crimson duty as soon as he had finished laying down tracks for this prog monster.

If this specific version of King Crimson occupies a different galaxy than the Rock Gods I mentioned above, the Sabbaths, Zeppelins and Lizzys, it also has surprisingly little to do with what I think of as capital-p Prog. I love much of the output of the aforelinked Yes, as well as that of Rush, who really came into full flower later in the ’70s on albums like Hemispheres (some will point to 2112 as the Rush landmark from that period, but that was just the icebreaker), but at this point, those bands too are known quantities, both to me and the World of Rock. They really do exemplify most of the traits they're said to exemplify: long-ass songs, foregrounded virtuosity, helium-voiced vox, etc. (Those descriptions aren't loaded in any way; they're simply neutral catalogs of what those bands sounded like at that time.)

But BWFC (Bruford, Wetton, Fripp Crimson) is, again, something other, and I've spent the last week or so trying to get to the bottom of exactly what that is, or at least observe the full range of its behaviors. I'm finding those tasks extremely daunting but at the same time, I'm enjoying myself immensely. This is not a band you comprehend right away, and that is primarily because BWFC is a shapeshifter. You cannot get your head and heart around it via conventional means, i.e., albums; you have to experience it, live with it, in the wild—that is to say onstage. For several years now, I have really enjoyed the BWFC studio output, namely Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black and Red. (I included the first chapter of the two-part Larks' title track in a math-rock mix I compiled a couple years back.) But to be honest, at this point, I'm considering this trilogy as little more than a digest version of BWFC. I feel like I never knew the band until very recently, when I started digging into the band's own immaculately maintained live archives, known as DGM—i.e., Discipline Global Mobile—Live. (Search 1973 and 1974 here to get a sense of what a treasure trove this is.)

So far, I've picked up three shows: 10/23/73 in Glasgow; 3/30/74 in Mainz, Germany; and 6/28/74 in Asbury Park—the latter of which is heard, in edited/meddled-with form, on the USA live album. (It's funny to think about how in June of ’74, Asbury Park's most famous musical export, Bruce Springsteen, a.k.a. prog's antithesis, was in the process of becoming a star.) My knowledge of these official bootlegs is no means encyclopedic—Steve Smith, the most avid/learned Crimsophile I know, is your man—but I can vouch for every one of these shows, and more specifically, for the way they complement each other. Yes, there are song overlaps—I'm starting to sound like a Deadhead here, and though I'm no die-hard there either, I do love me some cherry-picked live Dead—but these are three completely different concerts: different energies, different trajectories, different purposes. I was hoping I'd purchase three of these boots and feel like that was enough, but sadly (for my bank account, i.e.), I think I'm just getting started.

So what is it about BWFC? What's the big deal? I really wanted to link the Glasgow version of "Easy Money," one of BWFC's signature jams, here, so the music could do the talking, but it isn't on YouTube. I just put on a snippet of said track, to get the scent back in my nose. What is it? It's ear-bleeding art-funk, primed for maximum timbral abrasion, gritted-teeth extremity, with harsh and peculiar textures protruding from every strata of the sonic spectrum. That latter point is key for me. One of the chief joys I derive from BWFC is how strange and utterly distinct each sound you hear is. The timbres of the various instruments don't comfortably jell, as is the case in, say, Sabbath or Zeppelin; they war and clash. You've got the flopping, distorted, ungainly beast that is Wetton's bass tone in the low register—like the grotesquely exposed metal skeleton of a sci-fi cyborg—then you have Fripp's merciless high-end fuzz, scratching at your right ear like steel wool; and then there's Bruford's multifaceted soundmaker—I hesitate to call it something so mundane as a drum kit: the ugly wash of the hi-hat; those way-tight toms, which sound like crude timbales; and that piercing snare, softening often into a Tony Williams–y press-roll caress.

The band does kick and slam as one but what makes BWFC special is the way they elude and toy with the groove—each player off on his own orbit like a planet in a solar system—as though no one member wants to be caught playing it straight. Bruford in particular seems to love the delicious tension that comes from hinting at a metallic stomp; he could easily Bonham (to coin a verb) his way through the grooves—"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One" comes to mind—but so often chooses to keep the beach ball in the air, so to speak, giving the band the low-end kick it needs but satisfying his own improvisational drive with destabilizing fills and other purposeful inconsistencies. He is not exactly a busy drummer; it's more that he's a restless one. The lumbering doomgroove in the middle of the Red track "Starless"—the definition of a musical slow burn—is a great place to hear what I'm talking about. During the Mainz show, the band draws out the off-kilter riff for more than two ominous minutes, with Bruford limiting himself to minute cymbal taps, before kicking in. But even when Fripp and Wetton near their crescendo, the drummer is still strutting and stuttering along, totally unperturbed; he increases his volume and power, but rarely goes two measures without throwing in some sort of ungainly fill or daring syncopation. In this section, Bruford makes me think of a train-jumper who toys with a slow-moving freighter for miles, flamboyantly hopping on and off as he pleases, never content to simply pick a car and ride. (You get a sense of what I mean around 6:30 in this 1974 TV clip, though the out-of-sync-ness of the audio and video bums me out sufficiently that I held off on an embed. You can view the full four-song performance in excellent fidelity on the 2009 CD/DVD reissue of Red.)

All the band members' performances during this period—my apologies for short-shrifting the often-breathtaking David Cross, whose keening violin is a key feature of these gigs I've been checking out—tend toward the same controlled-chaos brilliance, to the extent that it's easy to forget just how special the material itself is. The variety is simply awesome. Yesterday I marveled at the four-song run at the end of the Mainz show: After "Starless," you've got the relatively concise "Lament," maybe the single strangest piece in BWFC's repertoire. It starts off exemplifying one of the band's key song types, i.e., the brief, ballad-like, almost stagy ditty (I wish I could think of a more dignified word), in which Wetton—whom I've begun to regard as quite possibly the most compelling singer in so-called progressive rock, and one of the most underrated in rock, period—plays the husky yet tender straight man to lyricist Richard Palmer-James's wry satirist. Then, much like in "Starless" itself, the scene changes completely: after a brief instrumental interlude, the band explodes in a deranged art-funk riff fest, with Wetton sounding like he's coming completely unglued. Next up is "Improv Trio," one of the many impromptu interludes that marks this period of Crimson; these pieces take all different shapes (there are four very different ones in the Mainz show alone), but this one is like a pastoral bit of drumless soundtrack music, on which I believe Fripp and Cross are both playing sparkly Mellotron while Wetton lays down a chilled-out bass skeleton. The piece leads into the grandaddy of BWFC's many balls-out jams, the aforementioned "Easy Money," rendered here as stumbling, seething, drunken death funk, with Wetton's signature scat episode at the beginning coming off as a burlesque of airheaded rock & roll. "Easy Money" is always a set highlight, but this version is particularly dire and ragged—a noisy morass. And this very punk element of BWFC is part of what sets them apart from any other contemporary band that you might be tempted to label prog: BWFC understands the value of pure amplified slop, and how effective it can be when juxtaposed with a very British kind of proper-ness and refinement (I think of other brief, chill tracks of the "ditty" variety," such as "The Night Watch"). And there are so many other elements and imperatives at play in the BWFC repertoire: quirky, riffy, Woodstocky blues-rock (see "Cat Food," a track from the pre-BWFC Crimson album In the Wake of Poseidon, which closes the Glasgow show) sits next to obsessive-compulsive epics like "Fracture" and "Larks' Tongues… Part Two." Anyone with even a passing interest in math rock needs get familiar with the former (the Glasgow version is tremendous); the juxtaposition in moods—from notey geekery to flailing violence—is something later exponents of the style have rarely been able to capture in such an organic way. And I'm still getting my brain around the many improvisations that dot these set lists.

There's something very unusual going on in these performances—a marriage of prog's grandeur and virtuosic flash with an almost proto–mid-’80s–Black Flag live-wire scrappiness—that I'm not sure you hear in any other band of the period. Mahavishnu does skew "punk" on their first two records, but they never let themselves sound as frenetic, as hungry, as wild (or on the other hand, as unmoored or abstract) as BWFC do in these performances. This version of Crimson seems to embody the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses—each one pushed to the limit—in a single uncanny unit. I've yet to really get to know Crimson before or after this period, but from what little I do know, BWFC was a unique episode in the history of the band, and maybe of music, period, at least the Western styles I know and love best (rock and jazz).

BWFC was a meteor shower, smashing the airlocks that separated the proto-metal space station from the fusion one and the postbop ones and setting all those impulses free. Pretty much everything I love about music from the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s is here somehow: the mercurial looseness of the Davis/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet, the bombed-out bash of early Sabbath, the D&D-presaging sweep of Yes, the white-hot shred of Mahavishnu and even an undercurrent of especially grimy funk. It didn't last, of course, but for that glorious moment, BWFC had it all, and we are extremely fortunate that the fossil record is so complete. If you need me, I'll be in the DGM archives…

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P.S. Speaking of archives, a mammoth new Larks' Tongues in Aspic box set—bulging with extra live audio and video—is coming 10/15. Scroll down a bit here for details.

The spirit of radio: WKCR's blessing

Last evening I drove to Westchester with my wife to celebrate a happy family event. On the way, we listened to WKCR, catching the tail end of Afternoon New Music (featuring side A of Distinction Without Difference, an intense 1979 Billy Bang solo set I'd never heard before) and the first chunk of Jazz Alternatives.

The show began with Chico Hamilton's Man from Two Worlds, a 1963 record that was also new to me. The title track started with a shifting bed of uptempo rhythm from Hamilton (sounding more Elvin Jones–like than I've ever heard him) and bassist Albert Stinson—a carpet of almost Indian-esque drone. Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabo drifted in with tranced-out tenor and guitar, engaging in a brief improv tangle before launching into the sing-songy, unmistakably Ornette-ish head (written by Lloyd, I'm now finding out). It was classic inside-outside jazz: steady and propulsive underneath and ear-bending up top. Unlike the Bang, it made sense as drive-time music, but the calories weren't empty. The same went for the next selection: side B of Jimmy Smith's Got My Mojo Workin'. I wasn't in love with the title track (a showcase for Smith's gruff vocals), but the Ellington (Strayhorn?) pieces that followed, "Johnny Come Lately" and "C Jam Blues," killed me with their combination of sass and class; the rhythm section alone—Kenny Burrell, George Duvivier and Grady Tate—had me doing internal cartwheels.

I didn't get to listen beyond that, but what a pleasure: to tune in at random and hear this wonderful—and in the case of the Hamilton, fairly obscure—vintage jazz, not being played to celebrate an anniversary or a new reissue, or to commemorate a passing, but spun just because. A set of music that challenged but didn't alienate, that, in the end, served the function you'd hope radio would serve around 6 p.m. on a weeknight.

For maybe a year and a half in college, I hosted a show on WKCR, the 5–8:20 a.m. Daybreak Express program, which segued right into Phil Schaap's Bird Flight (thus giving me ample opportunity to learn firsthand from the sensei). These days, I'm more a WKCR appreciator than a participant; I still host the occasional show, but whenever I tune in to the station and hear something great, I can't help but wish I still spun there regularly. I spent so many hours in that incredible library, scanning the LPs from A to Z, writing down the names of hundreds of titles that interested me (I did the same at Jazz Record Mart in Chicago around the same time), and checking out five or so at a time for dorm-room research.

Some of my happiest times at WKCR were when listeners would call in to say, "I dig what you're playing," or some variation thereof. (Plenty of times, you'd get the opposite: "This isn't jazz!" etc.) One instance in particular stands out: It must have been about 7 a.m., and I was playing "Who Does She Hope to Be?"—that gorgeous and perfectly accessible ballad from Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages. A man called the studio and said, with genuine rapture in his voice, "I love this song." It was a brief exchange—I'm pretty sure I thanked him sincerely for listening and that was pretty much it—but it planted a vivid picture in my mind. I heard background noise that suggested a car, and I imagined him cruising across one of the NYC bridges, convertible top down, just drinking in the Sonny and the sunlight and smiling contentedly. Sure, I spun plenty of "out" records during my time at WKCR, but it was at moments like this when I felt most deeply connected to the DJ's trade and to the glory of jazz radio. I felt like I was both meeting my own needs, i.e., those of a discerning curator, and the customer's, as it were, i.e., giving this kind man something beautiful to listen to on his a.m. drive. It's like Neil Peart said in "The Spirit of Radio":

Begin the day with a friendly voice,
A companion unobtrusive
Plays that song that's so elusive
And the magic music makes your morning mood

We are all our own DJs, scouring the internet, cramming our hard drives full of obscurities. But sometimes you want to surrender to a trusted source, tap into something communal, let the current carry you. Do not take WKCR for granted. To be able to turn on the radio at random on a weeknight and hear Billy Bang, Chico Hamilton and Jimmy Smith consecutively, from original LP sources and without commercial interruption? That is what is called a blessing.

The misery/mastery of Asphyx and other recent raves

A busy spell has kept me away from DFSBP for more than two weeks. Here's a top-heavy summary of what's been on my mind, musicwise.

Asphyx
In my Maryland Deathfest round-up, I mentioned some new friends my wife and I made that weekend, a metal-obsessed couple from Wisconsin. During the whirlwind "Dude, you need to check this out" discussions I had with H.S. (the male half of the pair) at MDF, he was more fired up about the Dutch outfit Asphyx than any other band he recommended. I'd heard samplings of their stuff in recent months—material from the new album, Deathhammer—but hadn't yet spent good time with any of their records. A few weeks after the fest, I received a package in the mail from H.S. containing a few old-fashioned mix CDs, one of which featured a whole bunch of Asphyx songs, including a few from their 1991 debut LP, The Rack. These tracks sent me into a delirious Asphyx obsession. I respectfully took temporary leave from the mixtapes and went burrowing into their discography, not coming up for air for something like two weeks.

While the early stuff hit me hard, it was the more recent material—Deathhammer, which came out this past February, and 2009's Death…the Brutal Way—that really ensnared me. As DFSBP readers may have noticed, old-school death metal—or more specifically, recent work by old-school death-metal bands such as Obituary, Cannibal Corpse and Immolation— has formed a major pillar of my listening over the past few years. A lot of what I've been craving this sort of gruesome primitiveness, expressed most purely in Obituary's work. It's an anti-evolutionary stance, a commitment to improving as a band without "progressing" in obvious, easily quantifiable ways. (I also touched on this in my recent Unsane review.) It has something to do with becoming more and more one's self as a band without messing with the core formula. Having stacked the old Asphyx records up against the new—and I'm specifically talking about the work they've done with their signature frontman Martin Van Drunen, i.e., two early-’90s LPs, and then these two latest ones, made after he rejoined the band in 2007—I can say that they are a perfect example of this. The latest Asphyx records sound a thousand times crisper and more hi-fi than the band's ’90s output, but they also have this unquantifiable x-factor that I also hear in recent Obituary. I can only describe it as the weight of years. Like Obituary, Asphyx thrives on the concept of anguish. The simulation of pain and suffering and ponderous psychic weight is their bread and butter. These new Asphyx records are among the most sheerly pained I've ever come across in the realm of death metal. Even at fast tempos, the band—and especially Van Drunen, who has one of the most genuinely dire, soul-vomiting deliveries I've heard coming from a death-metal frontman—sounds like its being driven against its will through frozen wastes, the music serving as a "Why have you forsaken me?" outcry.

The Asphyx songs that hit me the hardest were the slow ones, grim death marches like "Minefield" from Deathhammer. Like much of Asphyx's recent material, this song deals with a horrors-of-war theme. Martin Van Drunen (along with current Asphyx guitarist Paul Baayens) also plays in a World War II–themed metal band called Hail of Bullets, and he's funneled that same obsession into Asphyx. Here's a stream of "Minefield"—play it deafeningly loud, I implore you—and a sampling of lyrics:

Crawling through barbed wire
Into no-man's land
Soil soaked in blood
The crying of men
Terror unveiling
In between the lines
They scream mutilated
Detonating mines

You wouldn't think twice about lyrics like this if you read them out of context. I guess that's kind of a "Duh" observation, but I think it's worth pointing out. More than many bands I could name, in any genre, Asphyx is about raw sensation. Formally, i.e., when it comes to the on-paper aspects of what they do, they could not be more straightforward or potentially dismissable. They play some of the most easily pigeonhole-able death metal I know; basically they pick a tempo, either crawling or galloping (in the hardcore-derived sense—no blast beats here), and just let Van Drunen loose over it. But the sensation they give off, this feeling that you get from "Minefield," of trudging depression, of men being ground mercilessly into dust by their own savage impulses, of the cold unforgiving-ness of the universe, is the furthest thing from commonplace. In terms of pure feeling, I can think of very few metal bands that sock me in the gut the way Asphyx do. I love the minimal structures of their songs, the way they only shift gears when they really mean it. The first 2:20 of "Minefield" is straight crawling-on-hands-and-knees molasses doom, and then at that point, they switch into this woozy, lumbering shuffle groove. I can't get enough of this relentless drive, the way the band gradually flattens you with one texture till you absolutely can't take it anymore, and then switches to another and does the exact same thing. Death metal should feel like this: endless, vast, utterly miserable. You should want to tap out because it's so unrelenting. It should make you wince, as if against a biting wind, and Asphyx at their best have that effect on me. Crucially, they can also bring me to the verge of tears. Listen to the downshift back to trudging misery that happens at around 4:25 in "Minefield." Here Baayens blindsides you with an incredibly majestic lead, an Iommi-worthy elegy that lays aside brutality in favor of epic sadness. This is some funereal, bell-tolling, hand-of-doom shit here, people. It sounds to me like an epilogue to the gruesome war depicted in the main body of the song; you imagine a surviving soldier standing beside a mass grave as the rain drives down on him, realizing he's no better off than the ones who perished. (I should note here that Asphyx named their second LP Last One on Earth.)

If these sorts of sensations appeal to you—maybe "appeal" isn't the right word; it might be better to say, "If you feel the pull of this cold, dark, gritty art the way I do…"—I encourage you to check out Deathhammer in its entirety. The great thing about Asphyx is that they're not a one-note band; maybe a three-note band, but definitely not a one-note band. Aside from the molasses-paced, war-is-hell-and-so-is-life vibe they're working with on "Minefield," latter-day Asphyx has also been digging into this meta-metallic theme, i.e., the idea of actually pairing death metal with lyrics about death metal. It's an idea that's no so uncommon in, say, hip-hop, where part of the point is to rap about how good one is at, well, rapping. Asphyx does something very similar on their two latest albums. It's important to understand that the titles Death…the Brutal Way and Deathhammer refer not simply to dying, but rather to the craft of death metal itself.

Here's how drummer Bob Bagchus (the only remaining original member of the band) put it in a Decibel interview:

Decibel: What is the Deathhammer?
Bob Bagchus: Deathhammer represents the book of death metal. Our view on real death metal. It’s like the rules of what real death metal was supposed to be. Death metal was supposed to be hard, raw, dirty, creepy, dark and brutal to the bone. Music to be scared of. Just listen to bands like old Venom, Messiah, Slaughter, Hellhammer, Possessed, old Death, Autopsy, Necrophagia, early Mayhem, Necrovore, Incubus (Florida) etc., and you’ll know what we mean. During the last decade, it seems that death metal has turned into this hyper-blast technical nonsense bullshit that they dare to call “death metal.” In fact, it’s a contest of who can play the fastest bpm or riffs (sometimes 10 in 1 single song) and they seem to forget about the song itself. I mean, where’s the song? Where’s the catchiness and where is the atmosphere? Nowhere! And this is supposed to be death metal? It’s a joke! We say, “Go listen to Hellhammer’s Triumph of Death and discover what real death metal is!” So we thought that there should be a sort of guide book to remind those people of the essence of real death metal. We, of course, don’t want to be arrogant—hell no—but since death metal is in our hearts and souls, we hate to see it destroyed by those technical-bullshit-musically-graduated-soulless bands, pretending they know it all. Death metal comes from the heart, not from the mind.

As if the album's title track weren't already a perfect summation of these principles, dig how van Drunen growls, "This is some death metal, you bastards!" during the guitar break around :37:



The point that Bagchus makes above might seem like sort of an obvious one, but the truth is, it's an important gauntlet to lay down. Over the past 15 years or so, death metal really has bifurcated to an almost absurd degree. You've got this staunchly primitive, slither-through-the-muck-and-bang-your-fuckin'-head aesthetic that reemerged old-schoolers like Autopsy (and, I'd argue, Obituary, though I'm not sure whether or not they'd have a place in Bagchus's death-metal "guide book") and a bunch of neo-old-schoolers (I'm not knowledgeable enough about that movement to name names) champion, and then on the other hand, you've got this noodly, absurdly intricate technicality, as perfected by bands like Necrophagist. Now I absolutely love Necrophagist, and I also love Atheist and a ton of other bands that I'd place in that latter category, but listening to a super-techy but, to me, hard-to-really-love band like, say Origin, or a million faceless typewriter-blast-beat outfits, it's hard not to agree with Bagchus's polemic. Fortunately, this is music not war, and no one has to take sides. I'm sure that whenever the new Necrophagist album drops, I'll be happily indulging the side of my death-metal brain that can't get enough speed, precision and virtuosity, but lately, my compass has been pointing straight toward Aspyhx's shaggy, mud-smeared version of the truth.

P.S. I leave you with a a further illustration of Asphyx's lovably nerdy death-metal orthodoxy, a lyric excerpt from the title track to Death…the Brutal Way, which actually narrates the band's 2007 comeback gig at Germany's Party San festival. (Note that "Vermin" and "The Rack" are Asphyx song titles.)

Krushing at the Party San, hear the hordes rejoice
Filth to feed the Vermin, 'n beer to oil the voice
We'll beat your eardrums useless, and tie you on the Rack
Bones and nerves are grind to pulp, we are fucken back
Again we set the standards, get the message clear
Leave the fucken stage bitch, no room for you here
Mercy won't be given, as we enter our domain
Endlessly you'll suffer, on the altar of pain

Merchants of brutality, death our only rule
The doctrine of true metal, gods of the old school
Die by fucken Asphyx, ultra loud we slay
Skinned alive you humbly beg for death the brutal way!

/////

Other recent raves:

Marc Ribot Trio
I adored the Marc Ribot Trio set I saw at the Village Vanguard last Friday. Thank you to Nate Chinen (and to G.G., who dropped me a breathless 2am e-mail the next night) for encouraging me to attend.


Rush's Clockwork Angels
The new Rush album is outstanding. I will always be a Rush completist, but I've been mixed on their most recent studio output; I love 2002's Vapor Trails but I find 2007's Snakes & Arrows a little ponderous. This new one, though, is a straight killer: brisk, muscular, extremely varied and catchy across the board. It might be my favorite since 1993's Counterparts, which I consider to be the gold standard for their late-period sound. The title track is a standout, combining the Police-style pop-reggae lilt of their '80s work with the ass-kicking power-trio-ism they've excelled at since the late '70s:


Nick Sakes
This man needs no introduction 'round this parts. (If I'm wrong about that, go here.) Just this week, I discovered a guest-DJ segment that Nick did for WFMU back in March, via the Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine program. Go here to check out an extended on-air interview and various musical picks from one of my favorite living musicians. (The Sakes portion of the program begins a little over an hour into the stream; WFMU's pop-up player allows you to navigate there easily.)

News: Ween and Frank Ocean
Ween breaks up! Frank Ocean is gay! I've been a little dismayed lately by the sensational treatment of stories like these, especially since said instances concern artists that mean a lot to me.

In the case of Ween, I think it's best to exercise a little patience before we nail the coffin lid shut. The facts are simple: 1) Gene and Dean have been pursuing separate lives/careers for a while now—you know of Mickey's Guide Service, yes?—and Ween has really been more of a sporadic touring project over the last few years. 2) Gene has recently sobered up, not for the first time. He's got a cool new solo record out, and he probably just wants to put a little space between "Aaron Freeman" and the drug-fueled caricature that the Gene Ween persona has become in the minds of a lot of fans. 3) Both men have families, and Ween live shows are presumably their main respective sources of income. It makes a lot of sense to me that the project would be taking a little breather right this second (and even that the hiatus might hold for a few years), but the idea that Ween will never perform/record again seems a bit far-fetched to me. It sort of bugs me how people fall all over themselves to write these grandiose epitaphs in such circumstances. Aaron Freeman is a troubled guy who's obviously developed a bit of a love/hate relationship with the band that made him famous, but that has also been his personal undoing in many ways. So he has no plans to record or tour with Ween for the time being—so what? Let's give the man some space to come to terms with his demons. If in, say, five years, Freeman's solo career is thriving, Mickey is still out on his fishing boat full-time and there's been no further word about Ween qua Ween, then yeah, maybe we'll have a clear answer. Right now, at least as far as I—a serious Ween enthusiast and devoted fan—am concerned, this "break-up" is still a temporary hiatus.

In the case of Frank Ocean—who made my favorite album of 2011 and whose new one, Channel Orange, I can't wait to hear—why reduce such a beautiful and elliptical personal statement as this to a mere black & white revelation of sexual preference? The more important revelation is the continued intensity of this dude's self-inventory, and the fascinating methods through which he's seen fit to share that process with his ever-growing audience. I'm proud to be a Frank fan.

The fine art of saying no: A glorious new Rush documentary

Beyond the Lighted Stage, the new documentary about Rush that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend, is a near-perfect film that answers one simple question: Why is this band different from all other bands? As someone who's loved Rush for going on 15 years, it was thrilling and vindicating to see someone plead their case so lovingly.

Thematically, the doc focuses on the notion that Rush's sustained success throughout four decades boils down to the band's shrewd instinct, both as a trio and as individuals, for knowing when to say no:

*Alex Lifeson saying no to making his parents proud by getting a "real" job

*Neil Peart saying no to suppressing his bookish tendencies in the name of rock & roll, and later to the idea that he ought to make himself unduly available to obsessive fans

*Rush as a whole saying no to debauchery on the road (as no less a debauchery authority than Gene Simmons of Kiss, who toured with Rush in the early days, attests in the film)

*...saying no to the record label's demand for more concise, accessible material after the failure of Caress of Steel (Rush's middle-finger answer? a little album called 21-frickin'-12)

*...saying no to letting the band overwhelm the members' family lives

*...saying no to continuing as an epic-prog band after they'd outgrown that sound in the early '80s

*...saying no to continuing as a keyboard-drenched pop-rock band after they'd outgrown that sound in the late-'80s

*...saying no to hurrying back into working mode after Peart suffered the loss of his daughter and wife in rapid succession in 1997

There are many more examples, but you get the idea. And in case you don't, the film offers a parade of talking-head rock experts to hammer home its theses: Trent Reznor, Billy Corgan (who blew me away with his quiet poise and articulateness), Kirk Hammett, Rage Against the Machine's Tim Commerford, Tool's Danny Carey, Primus's Les Claypool, the aforementioned Simmons, Skid Row's Sebastian Bach (utterly hilarious), Pantera's Vinnie Paul (yes!) and many more, including a hammy but still sincere Jack Black. Counterbalancing these celebs are major behind-the-scenes players (longtime producer Terry Brown, Rush's early label and radio champions Donna Halper and Cliff Burnstein, etc.) as well as each member's loving parents and a few handpicked fans, who offer a crucial perspective re: how Rush speaks to the alienated teen in all of us.

And then there's the footage. Oh, the glorious footage. A vintage version of "Xanadu" (one of my most treasured Rush songs) that gave me chills; Rush's first-album lineup performing in a school auditorium; the band members warming up backstage; Lifeson and Geddy Lee scarfing sandwiches and signing autographs in a restaurant. And tons more gems.

I honestly have no idea how this will play to the non Rush fan. My love of the band is so deeply ingrained that it's impossible for me to take an objective view. (Though a sympathetic yet nonfanatical friend who accompanied me to the screening was riveted.) But I will say that I don't think this film could have been done better and that Rush geeks the world over are going to go wild. I'd enjoyed codirector Sam Dunn's previous feature, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (great metal 101 doc), but this is a much richer, warmer film, a beautifully wrought summation of a truly singular career. And the best part is, it isn't an epitaph. Rush is touring this summer and they've got new material on the way. Bring it on, I say. (Seeing the doc sent me immediately back to 2002's Vapor Trails, which is rapidly ascending the ranks of my favorite Rush albums.)

For more info on Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, check out my TONY colleague Joshua Rothkopf's recent Q&A with Lifeson.

O Canada

Not unusually, I have Canadian music on the brain. Thinking about the marvelous spectrum. This evening I reveled in "Last of the Blacksmiths" and "Sleeping," and read up on the upcoming Rush documentary (codirected Sam Dunn, the man responsible for the oustandingly diverse Metal: A Headbanger's Journey). Topped it all off by indulging my current obsession with the joint work of Luc Lemay and Steeve Hurdle, the latter of whom is (I seriously can't wait) headed NYC-ward in a week's time. Feel it: