Heavy Metal Be-Bop #13: Matt Mitchell

I'm proud to announce the arrival of Heavy Metal Be-Bop #13! This is the first new installment of HMB — for those just tuning in, my interview series dealing with the intersection(s) of jazz and metal — in roughly 20 months. The subject is none other than Matt Mitchell, a pianist who over the past five years or so has become a ubiquitous avant-jazz breakout star, anchoring killer bands led by Tim Berne, Darius Jones, Dave Douglas and many more while also advancing his own severely advanced composition/bandleading aesthetic on an increasingly ambitious series of Pi Recordings discs. The latest — A Pouting Grimace, out next week — is an exhilarating and throughly batshit marvel than any lover of any kind of radical, progressive or just plain weird music needs to hear:


As you'll read, Matt is a serious head when it comes to metal, and he and I went deep on his many underground faves, including Portal, Virus, Jute Gyte and Incantation. He also offered some insight into how his steady intake of outré heaviness might have informed his own new music.

Check out the "theatrical release" of the interview here, via WBGO. (A big thanks to Nate Chinen for hooking this up.) And read the considerably lengthier director's cut here, at HMB HQ.

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PS: Mitchell and Kate Gentile, the kit drummer on A Pouting Grimace, both also appear on Gentile's recent Skirl release, Mannequins. If the head-spinning complexity, insane textural variety and overall relentless rush of fresh ideas heard on the Mitchell disc appeal to you, I strongly urge you to pick this one up as well. I'm still digesting Mannequins, and that may be the case for years to come, but I can easily say that along with A Pouting Grimace, it's one of the most striking records I've heard in 2017, in any genre.

Heavy metal reckoning

Update [6/30/17]: I also participated in a podcast discussion of the RS metal list, with my colleagues Kory Grow, Brian Hiatt and Brittany Spanos. We were joined by none other than Rob Halford of Judas Priest!

Here, as published Wednesday on RollingStone.com, is a list of the 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. My friend/colleague Kory Grow and myself spearheaded the project, and we were joined by a squad of enormously talented writers, too numerous to shout out here. As I stated in this follow-up interview with Metal Insider, Kory's expertise really drove the project, though everyone involved was essential.

I have long identified as a metalhead, though working on this list put me in my place a bit. The truth is that, despite having spent the past 25 years or so immersed in metal and related styles, there's just so much I haven't heard or really spent good time with, including many of the stone-cold classics and cult favorites found throughout this list. Chalk that up to my diverse musical interests, I guess — I've never claimed to be a completist, only a passionate and dedicated listener who makes a habit of following his nose.

Anyway, I'll just say that I feel proud to have participated in this project, both behind-the-scenes and as a writer, and I hope that the final product at least proves to be an interesting — if, like any by-nature-subjective list, somewhat maddening — read.

Many of my favorite metal records did thankfully end up on this list – among them Morbid Angel's Covenant, probably my stone-cold No. 1 if I had to pick; five incredible Metallica records (my personal top picks being Justice and, of course, Master); six by the mighty Black Sabbath (Sabotage is probably my truest jam among them); Dio's towering Holy Diver; Slayer's impeccable Reign/South/Seasons run; Pantera's '92/'94 knockout combo; Danzig's flawless self-titled debut (I'm more of a III guy, but all that early-period stuff is essential); Tool's engrossing Ænima (though Lateralus is probably my favorite by them); Rage Against the Machine's shattering debut; and outliers like Helmet's Meantime, Eyehategod's Take as Needed for Pain, Melvins' Bullhead, Type O Negative's Bloody Kisses, Life of Agony's River Runs Red and Death's Human. I've been keeping a running tally of metal albums I love that didn't end up on the RS list for various reasons. Here, in alphabetical order, are some of the ones that are most dear to me, with links to coverage where appropriate:

Autopsy: Mental Funeral

Axis of Advance: Obey [J. Read post]


Behold... the Arctopus: Skullgrid, Horrorscension 

Black Sabbath: beyond the ones on the list – Mob Rules, Born Again, Headless Cross, Dehumanizer, The Devil You Know (the latter credited to Heaven and Hell), 13

Bolt Thrower: every LP from The IVth Crusade through Those Once Loyal

Cannibal Corpse: The Bleeding, every LP from Kill through A Skeletal Domain

Carcass: Necroticism — Descanting the Insalubrious, Surgical Steel

Christian Mistress: Possession [mentioned in 2012 year-end round-up]

Clutch: Passive Restraints (I love many Clutch releases, but this might be the only one I'd actually feel comfortable pegging as metal)

Confessor: Condemned [Steve Shelton round-up post, Modern Drummer article]

Coroner: Punishment for Decadence, No More Color, Mental Vortex, Grin

Crowbar: basically every LP from 1993's Crowbar through The Serpent Only Lies, with special mention of the self-titled, Odd Fellows Rest and Sonic Excess in Its Purest Form

Cynic: Focus, Traced in Air

Danzig: II: Lucifuge, III: How the Gods Kill, 4p, plus Deth Red Sabaoth [Samhain live review and Glenn Danzig–obsession overview]

Death: Individual Thought Patterns, Symbolic, The Sound of Perseverance

Defeated Sanity: Passages Into Deformity

Deicide: Legion, Once Upon the Cross

Dismember: full catalog, with special mention of Like an Ever-Flowing Stream and Massive Killing Capacity 

Dysrhythmia: Test of Submission

Entombed: Wolverine Blues, Uprising, Morning Star [some discussion here]

Fucking Champs: IV, V

Gorguts: Obscura, From Wisdom to Hate, Colored Sands, Pleiades' Dust

Immolation: full catalog, with special mention of Close to a World Below, Unholy Cult and Majesty and Decay

Incantation: full catalog, with special mention of Onward to Golgotha, Mortal Throne of Nazarene and Vanquish in Vengeance

Iron Maiden: The Book of Souls [mentioned in best-of-2015 round-up]

Keelhaul: II, Subject to Change Without Notice, Keelhaul's Triumphant Return to Obscurity

Khanate: Things Viral, Capture and Release

Krallice: Ygg Huur

Loincloth: Iron Balls of Steel

Mastodon: Remission, Leviathan (which does appear on the list), Once More 'Round the Sun, The Hunter, Emperor of Sand

Meshuggah: The Violent Sleep of Reason

Morbid Angel: full catalog beyond the aforementioned Covenant (yeah, even a handful of songs on Illud Divinum Insanus), with special mention of Altars of Madness, Domination, Entangled in Chaos, Gateways to Annihilation and Heretic

Necronaut: Necronaut

Necrophagist: Epitaph

Obituary: full catalog, with special mention of The End Complete, World Demise, Back From the Dead and Inked in Blood

Pallbearer: Sorrow and Extinction

Pantera: beyond the ones on the list – Cowboys From Hell, Reinventing the Steel

Revenge: Victory.Intolerance.Mastery; Behold.Total.Rejection [J. Read post]


Sepultura: Arise, Chaos A.D. (on the list)

Sorcery: Arrival at Six

Suffocation: full catalog, with special mention of Effigy of the Forgotten, Pierced From Within, Blood Oath and Pinnacle of Bedlam

Voivod: Killing Technology, Dimension Hatröss (on the list), Nothingface, Angel Rat, The Outer Limits, Target Earth (mentioned in 2013 round-up), Post-Society

The underground contract: In praise of Crowbar

"I may be the best writer in this country ... But I'm still a 'mystery writer.'" —Raymond Chandler, from a letter read by Ian Fleming as a preface to this 1958 BBC interview. [Note: Scare quotes around "mystery writer" are mine, but the context makes me think they're warranted.]

By coincidence, I was just finishing up my first Chandler novel, The Lady in the Lake, last week, when I attended a show featuring the bands Carcass and Crowbar at the Gramercy Theatre. That convergence got me thinking about the pros and cons of genre, whether that be "mystery writing" or the practice of playing capital-M Metal music — how these frameworks can restrict an artist's work in the commercial or critical sense but maybe also protect it in the creative one.

I have a long history with each of these bands, dating back more than 20 years. I'm pretty sure I first encountered Carcass and Crowbar for the first time on MTV's Headbanger's Ball and that I bought their respective 1993 albums — Heartwork and Crowbar — soon after they came out. (I saw Crowbar the following year when they set the stage for an astonishing Pantera set in support of Far Beyond Driven.)

Carcass is a band I didn't think about terribly much in the years between that initial exposure and 2008 or so, when they reunited for some touring. But by the time Surgical Steel, their 2013 comeback album, came out, I was fully back on board; it's one of my favorite records, in any style, of the past 10 years or so, and easily my favorite metal record of that period, in part because of the way it gleefully tramples on the idea that various arbitrarily distinct subgenres ought to be kept distinct from one another. I think it's every bit as good as Heartwork and the band's other true back-catalog classic, 1991's Necroticism.

With Crowbar, the situation was a little different. I'd loved that self-titled album back in the day — the one that spawned a couple singles/videos that Beavis and Butt-head had a field day with — but even though, unlike Carcass, they never disbanded, I stopped paying attention for some reason.

That changed quickly at last week's show. Onstage, Crowbar radiated intensity, passion and the kind of blue-collar conviction that had drawn me to them in the first place. Original bassist Todd Strange (known in the ever-witty world of New Orleans metal as "Sexy T") recently rejoined the band after a roughly 16-year gap, which is a blessing, because he and vocalist-guitarist Kirk Windstein were clearly born to play together: Two burly, bald, bearded men, now in their early fifties, laying down a classic form of dirge-blues-metal that's sometimes, reductively, pegged as "sludge," while wearing that classic hard-rock scowl — that forbidding posture tempered, between songs, with Windstein's expressions of unabashed gratitude and enthusiasm. (Fellow Southern-metal institution Corrosion of Conformity, whose sometime member Pepper Keenan formerly worked with Windstein in Down, embodies a similar kind of dark/light duality, an "an auspicious evil borne out of sheer fun and bro-hood" as I called it here; same goes for Crowbar's NOLA comrades Eyehategod, whose guitarist Jimmy Bower also played in Down.)

Crowbar's set last week featured a few of my old favorites from Crowbar, including punishing opening track "High Rate Extinction," in some ways the quintessential Crowbar song — an excellent example of the band's ugly, relentless churn and clench, the way its riffs slam down on you over and over like heavy machinery. But, near the end of the set, they also played this, a song from 1998's Odd Fellows Rest that I wasn't previously familiar with:



After the show, I did some Googling, found out the name of the song and dialed it up, and I was absolutely floored by its artfulness, how it married Crowbar's trademark agonized trudge with yearning pop vulnerability. I hadn't been totally oblivious to the hook-y side of Crowbar — Windstein sort of roar-croons a gorgeous melody during the "Save all that you feel for me" bridge of Crowbar's signature song "All I Had (I Gave)," the same track Beavis and Butt-head ripped on — but I had no idea to what extent Windstein, the band's leader, chief songwriter and only consistent member throughout its lifespan, had cultivated and refined this element of the band's work over the years.

"Planets Collide" was the spark. In the week since the show, I've listened to every one of the band's 10 albums, from 1991's Obedience Through Suffering through 2014's Symmetry in Black, finally placing Crowbar into its proper discographical context. A few things are clear: 1) As much as I loved (and still love) that self-titled album, I've been sleeping on the true power and majesty of this band for quite some time. 2) Crowbar is a classic American band with an incredibly rich, consistent discography.

The latter point brings me back (finally!) to the reason I cited that Raymond Chandler quote above: Crowbar is a band that's perhaps destined to be underrated by the world outside the metal community.

In interviews, Windstein has always flaunted his diverse tastes — citing influences ranging from Thin Lizzy to Steely Dan, U2, the Neville Brothers and Wings — and the band has recorded gorgeous and brilliantly Crowbar-ized covers of both Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter" and Gary Wright's Wayne's World–enshrined soft-rock classic "Dream Weaver."



But while Windstein has never been shy about namechecking his varied influences and, accordingly, gradually broadening the scope of his own work in surprising and often revelatory ways, he's never tried to portray himself as anything other than a humble metal craftsman, grinding away in the trenches. Windstein begins every show by bellowing an endearing greeting to the crowd: "We're Crowbar from New Orleans, and we're gonna kick your ass!" He's comfortable in the role of the ass-kicker, and he's one of the best in the business; his commitment to the monolithic macho groove has never wavered and even his most melodic songs are often delivered with guttural anguish. But as with Chandler, there's a risk of camouflage here: that Crowbar will forever be seen as merely a great genre band rather than a great band, period.

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, I'd love to see Kirk Windstein enshrined as a great American songwriter, which I think he is. On the other, the conditions of the contemporary metal underground, the way it allows bands to achieve a certain degree of traction and success — regularly selling out club dates in the U.S. and playing high-profile fests in Europe and elsewhere — without ever truly "breaking," do seem especially conducive to fostering the kind of consistency that Crowbar embodies. How many other bands can you name that have put out nine very-good-to-great albums during the past 25 years, as Crowbar have? (I say nine rather than 10 because I'd count their debut, Obedience Through Suffering, as more foundational than essential.) Hell, how many bands can you name that have put out five, or even two? Looking at some of the great Big Rock Bands of our time, at least the ones whose music I enjoy, I see either spottiness (Pearl Jam and even Queens of the Stone Age who, as brilliant as they are, I find to be hit-and-miss on record) or frustrating sluggishness, bordering on inactivity (I'm looking at you, Tool). And so many of the great '90s hopes left us with stunted discographies: Rage Against the Machine or Pantera, or less widely known but equally worthy bands such as Quicksand, Helmet and Jawbox. (Fugazi had a hell of a streak going there, but they're gone too.) Or they simply evolved into something less urgently great, like Metallica — I love a lot of what's on Death Magnetic and even some of St. Anger, but it's hard to argue that some essential magic, even with re Black Album era, hasn't been lost over the years.

What I'm saying in a nutshell is: Could it be that remaining firmly ensconced within Metal has allowed an artist like Windstein the freedom to evolve while also keeping his band from going off the rails aesthetically or simply imploding due to industry pressure and interpersonal b.s.? Is the ceiling (or umbrella) of genre somehow beneficial in this way?

One thing that's clear: Metal, and especially the underground, is definitely a culture of the long game. As a fan, one reason I've stayed interested for so long is that there's just so damn much material out there. Even when bands make only the slightest incremental changes to their core sound — let's shout out the almighty -tions here: Incantation, Immolation and Suffocation, three groups that I hold up as gold standards re: all that's great about a "lifer" approach to metal in specific and music in general — there's something so rewarding, so fulfilling about these shelf-filling discographies, this consistency of quality product, issued steadily over the course of decades. If you're an album-focused listener, the world of extreme metal is a vast treasure trove.

I'd peg all the -tion bands cited above as relatively conservative when it comes to aesthetics and the progression of time. They've refined their approaches over the years, but these days, they're out to satisfy, not to surprise. None, of course, are as conservative as Obituary, and on a slightly lower rung of recognition/impact, Asphyx, both of whom take what is essentially an AC/DC-esque, ain't-broke-wouldn't-dream-of-fixing-it approach to extreme metal. On the other end of the spectrum, you have your Gorgutses, bands for whom evolution and experimentation are part of the deal — an approach that can — in the hands of Luc Lemay and others on his level of genius, though there aren't many — work wonders (as it did earlier for, say, Death and the sadly defunct Cynic).

I realize that Crowbar aren't a death metal band, but I find the above taxonomy and implied spectrum of aesthetic pathways useful. So where do Kirk Windstein and Co. fit? There is a certain Obituary-esque stick-in-the-mud quality to the band, a basic allegiance to Crowbar's core low-and-slow dirge-rawk style, intact for a quarter-century, but as a songwriter and, most notably, a singer, Windstein has never stopped pushing himself. Read the following Windstein quote (from a 2000 Chronicles of Chaos interview; emphasis mine) and compare the aforementioned "High Rate Extinction" with "Planets Collide" or with that choice "Dream Weaver" cover.

"It's cool because we made a couple of changes beginning with 'Nothing' on Broken Glass. That was the first song we ever wrote that way; melodic vocally. I really got bored with all the barking-type vocals thing. For some of the faster hardcore ones it's cool, but for some of the riffs — the riffs are getting more melodic even though they're really heavy — it's better to do something melodic on vocals on top of it. We've been doing this shit for twelve years, we'd get bored doing the same thing over and over again. We always want to stay true to what Crowbar's about, but we feel that we've made subtle changes over the years that enable us to do different stuff now: to not feel like we can only play this one style."

Windstein is essentially operating as a soul singer here:



And there are examples of those "subtle changes" all over the Crowbar catalog, even predating Broken Glass, from 1996, which Windstein cites as the turning point. See Crowbar's "I Have Failed", "I Feel the Burning Sun" (Equilibrium, 2001) or "Symmetry in White" (Symmetry in Black, 2014), not to mention the almost chamber-music-esque palate-cleansing interludes that started to crop up on the band's albums around the time of 1998's Odd Fellows Rest.

Similarly, Windstein's lyrics have progressed from self-flagellation (see "I Have Failed" above, which memorably features Windstein bellowing, "I have motherfucking failed!") to self-help, e.g., Symmetry's "Walk With Knowledge Wisely" ("I am the living proof / That you can right what is wrong in your life"), mirroring what was apparently a long, hard path to sobriety for Crowbar's leader. (The longest, hardest stretch being chronicled, one suspects, on 2001's Sonic Excess in Its Purest Form, an aptly titled album that's surely the most extreme and excruciating in the Crowbar discography and possibly one of the two or three best.)

So there is an evolution here, but it's tempered with a common-sense, don't-fuck-with-the-formula instinct. Not surprising, given that Motörhead — a band that changed with the times just enough to avoid stagnancy while keeping its core sound within its sights at all times — embodies Windstein's own personal career ideal. From the same Chronicles of Chaos interview:

"... my main goal, when I started the band, was that if we could just get to where Motörhead is or something ... You know, not like mainstream, not on the radio, not on MTV, not on none of this shit, but able to just go on for fuckin' twenty-five years. I want to be the Lemmy of my generation. I want to be fuckin' fifty years old and three hundred fuckin' pounds. Full of tattoos, drinkin' beer and fuckin' jammin' my balls off because that's all I know how to do."

(Tangentially, I love how Windstein talks about how he never feels the need to play faster than what he calls "Motörhead speed" in this Metal Injection interview.)

The result of all this is that you have a band that, in 2016, sounds unmistakably like the one I fell in love with 20-plus years ago but with just enough variation that you can tell that Windstein has remained engaged, passionate, prolific, humble, driven.

It was apparent at the Gramercy Theatre show that Kirk Windstein is Crowbar, that his personal journey — finding greater visibility with Down, a relatively high-profile supergroup, only to leave that project and focus solely on his signature band — has led him to a place of absolute leave-it-all-on-the-stage conviction each night. (I find the speech he gives here, an impromptu tirade against a stage-crasher that culminates in a statement of total vulnerability — "My eyes are closed; I'm singing my goddamn heart out" — extremely moving.)

At that point, when you, as an artist, are also the nerve center of your own small business, a business whose only product is what we refer to as a sound — in the case of a metal musician, this nexus of word and riff and emotion and volume that you have wrought and so carefully, methodically refined over so many years — you're existing in a kind of exalted space. Sure, Metallica is still going strong, but do I believe the 2016 James Hetfield onstage like I believe the 2016 Kirk Windstein? Not a chance. That's because unlike Hetfield (an artist who long ago transitioned from Metal Musician to Rock Star, as a novelist might from Mystery Writer to Famous Bestselling Author), Windstein is still operating according to the contract of the underground, still paying the greatest cost and reaping the greatest reward of a life spent toiling in that sphere, gradually working his way toward a music that is as natural as breath, that is the result of the anguish of living being swirled together with the joy of creation and sublimated into something so harsh it's soothing. So grizzled it's constantly renewed. So familiar it's a revelation each time. The fan shows up and meets the artist in that space and a brotherhood is formed, another contract is drawn up and signed: "I'll keep showing up if you do."

I want all that out of music, and as Crowbar — all 27 years' and 10 albums' worth — shows, it's not too much to ask.

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Here are 16 Crowbar songs I love for various reasons:


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P.S. I'm intrigued by this musical nexus that unites Crowbar, their fellow New Orleans artists — such as Eyehategod and Phil Anselmo of Down and Pantera — and NYC's now-defunct Type O Negative (R.I.P., Peter Steele). Crowbar toured with Type O back in the day; Windstein shares a heartwarming story about Steele's generosity here. He has the green Type O logo tattooed on the back of his left hand, and he dedicated the song "Symbolic Suicide" on Symmetry to Steele.

All of these artists have made (or did make) art that fixates on the concept of negativity and/or depravity, chronicling what it feels like to succumb to these forces, to defy or resent them, to laugh in their faces, or even to conquer them. But their worldviews are very different. At base, I'd call Eyehategod a fundamentally negative band, one obsessed with the idea of wallowing, while I'd call Crowbar a fundamentally positive band, one obsessed with the idea that some sort of mastery, or at the very least progress, is possible. Anselmo's work has run that gamut, from repulsive to inspirational. Steele's work found great power at the intersection of cold ugliness, rapturous beauty and deadpan humor. In all these cases, and I find this admirable, there seems to be a one-to-one relationship between personality and artwork: What you see in the individual is what you get in the music. There's no softening or blunting going on in any of these catalogs.

Craw

The Craw Kickstarter campaign is now live. To anyone reading this, I'd be very grateful if you could click over to the page, watch the video and have a look around. Whether or not you're inclined to pledge, please share this link with anyone who might be interested. Pardon the brevity here, but I've left it all on the field, so to speak—everything you need to know about this project, you'll find at the link above. Sincere thanks to anyone who has already pledged or helped to shine a light on this endeavor.

Read/hear more at:

Everything Went Black Media
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The Subversive Workshop
Noisey
Cleveland Scene
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Heavy Metal Be-Bop #8: Damión Reid

The eighth installment of my jazz/metal interview series is now live in both extended and abridged versions. I've loved Damión Reid's drumming ever since I first heard him with Robert Glasper (it was either 2005's Canvas or 2007's In My Element), and more recently, his work with Steve Lehman and Greg Ward has been blowing my mind. But I had no idea he was a metal fan until Matt Merewitz, who had been keeping up with Heavy Metal Be-Bop, suggested that I talk to him for the series. So a big thank you to Matt for the tip, and to Damión for being so generous with his time. I had an awesome time working on this one.