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.

Chico Hamilton, 2006

In 2006, I spent an afternoon at Chico Hamilton's apartment, interviewing him for Time Out New York. I was underprepared; he was ailing and rightfully impatient. The conversation limped along until I mentioned, in quick succession, that I was 1) from Kansas City and 2) a drummer. The Q&A is no longer on the TONY site, but after I heard about his passing, I dug it out of the archives and transcribed it.

I still don't know Hamilton's music as well as I'd like to. I do love what I've heard of the early quintet material, and about a year ago, I caught a few pieces off Man from Two Worlds (a ’63 Impulse set with Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabó) on WKCR and sat spellbound. The only time I saw Hamilton live was at the 2011 Winter Jazzfest; here's my mini review:

"I'm happy to be here.... At my age, I'm happy to be anywhere," joked 89-year-old drummer Chico Hamilton from the stage, before offering a textbook demonstration of how swinging propulsion can coexist with whisper-level dynamics.

I look forward to further listening. Hamilton seems to be someone who fits into no jazz school; from what I remember, those early records are exceedingly polished, while the Impulse dates are loose and raw. Anyone know of any detailed primers re: his body of work? I'd love a guided tour.

In the meantime, here's the TONY interview, in both photo and text form:

"Backstage with… Chico Hamilton"
By Hank Shteamer; Time Out New York – September 21, 2006

You're commemorating your 85th birthday this year by releasing four diverse CDs. They include your own tunes, pieces by Duke Ellington and the Who, plus DJ remixes—why cover so much ground?
Well, that's what music is all about, isn't it? Versatility in regards to sound, rhythms and melodic structures.

One CD has a vocal cameo by Arthur Lee.
Yeah, I was really shocked when I heard that he died [in August]. I think this was his last recording. My band performed with his group Love [in the late ’60s] out in L.A., where I'm from. It was unusual for a jazz organization to share the stage with a rock group.

Speaking of your past, you worked for years in commercial and movie music, scoring films such as Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Why'd you move away from that?
There's really no such thing as a film score anymore. Everybody lifts prerecorded tracks. As for my commercial period, that was the only time jazz was played on TV. Most of the commercials were recorded by jazz musicians, who had no choice in the matter—but that work drains you, you know?

I can imagine. You teach drums and lead ensembles at the New School—what led you to that?
I realized that this could be my way of giving something back, because music has been very good to me. Schools are the only place to learn jazz today, but sadly, a lot of people teaching this music know nothing about swinging.

Okay, how do you teach someone to swing?
It takes two things: patience and fortitude. [Taps rhythmically on table] You hear that? Okay, do that for me.

[Taps along]
Good. Now can you talk at the same time?

Okay… [Still tapping] My name is Hank; I was born in Kansas City…
You're from Kansas City? Oh shit, okay! All right, keep tapping; now I want you to do this at the same time: [Sings] daaah-dah dah.

[Taps, sings] Daaah-dah dah…
See what kind of a groove you got in all of a sudden? Your whole body started to feel it, didn't it? It's just that simple, man.

Well, I actually play drums too.
That's cool. What kind of group do you have?

It's kind of a loud, heavy rock band.
Why loud? If you start loud, where you gonna go?

Down, I guess!
I think you should have some sensitivity to your sound, because the ear can only take so much.

Do you ever play loud?
I don't have no need for it. I play in the danger zone.

What's that?
It's a way of playing that's very tensified, but at a volume where you can hear everything. And I stay in that zone, with that energy happening, you dig?

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)"]

Goodbye, Ronald Shannon Jackson: drummer/sorcerer

Photograph: Dani Alvarez Cañellas

Like Paul Motian, he was a drummer who became a genre. As Motian did, he established himself as a sideman to heavy players, but it was only when his pen and his bandleading instincts came into play that he truly found himself. There's clearly a thread running from Ornette Coleman's Prime Time to the Decoding Society, the band Ronald Shannon Jackson led in one form or another from 1979 up until his death yesterday at the age of 73: the sour harmonies, the ragged rubato theme statements, the sense of funk being regarded in a funhouse mirror.

But Jackson took this concept far further than Ornette ever did. I'm listening to the title track of 1981's Street Priest right now, and its weirdness is intoxicating. This is a dance band from Mars. Jackson's patented Little Drummer Boy march pattern—rushed, tense, almost antic—giving way to a theme statement that would sound exuberant if it didn't sound like it was coming off the rails, like half the band was meandering off, each player exploring his own orbit. Electric basses thrumming, Vernon Reid unspooling merciless sci-fi shred, the saxophones not squawking in that manly free-jazz way but zipping and snaking around in the upper registers. It's cacophonous but it's also whimsical, bordering on cartoonish. (For a similar sensation, see also: the Lounge Lizards.) And it's unrepentantly of its time.

I think Shannon was looking for a new kind of hip that he couldn't find elsewhere. The results were different, much more knowingly engaged with the language of free jazz, than Miles's electric experiments. (And, it must also be said that while Miles never seemed to have much time for composition, using thematic material as a mere springboard, Shannon was a true writer, a lover of themes and arrangement, a romantic with the pen.) But there's a similar sense of a bandleader wanting to tear down the walls separating art music, popular music, folk music—to cram radical ideas into a format you could wiggle around to, to square the esoteric with the earthy. The same principle is at work in Last Exit, a band to which Shannon contributed the essential soil, the backbone of the blues.

Early last year, I went through a serious RSJ obsession, which had grown out of a specific obsession with the album Power Tools (a favorite of RSJ expert Steve Smith), a fascinating collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Melvin Gibbs, the latter a Decoding Society mainstay. I haven't thought about RSJ or the Decoding Society much since that time, and I think that's fitting, in a way. Again, as with Motian, Jackson is an acquired taste. As drummers, the two share a certain stubbornness of aesthetic: if Motian wanted to indulge in uncomfortable sparseness or obtuse abstraction, he'd do it; if Shannon wanted to play his borderline-cornball see-saw march-funk patterns, that was what was gonna happen. But, almost as a reward for our patience, each drummer gave us an entire world of music, only obliquely related to their formative work or various outside collaborations, a brand of sorcery that could only be experienced when Motian or Shannon, respectively, was the one in charge, exerting a not-always-traceable but ever-palpable influence. (Theirs were presences that altered the physical properties of the spaces and settings in which they played.) This parallel went right down to the fascination with multiple guitars/basses, and the wizardly use of language: "Look to the Black Wall," "Owl of Cranston," "Fantasm," "Yahllah"; "Sperm Walk," "Boiling Cabbage," "Aged Pain," "Green Coronas." There's a sense in each of wanting to levitate above the stultifying normalcy that can creep into jazz, as it becomes more and more a known quantity, to reinject some of the mystery (in Motian's case) and the vibrant lunacy (in Jackson's).

I never got to see Jackson play live. I sent a few interview requests to the e-mail provided on his website and didn't hear back. But those are selfish regrets. Ronald Shannon Jackson left an enormous body of work, enough to relish and puzzle over for many lifetimes. What I really wish is that someone would undertake a Complete Decoding Society box set; too many brilliant records under RSJ's leadership are still too hard to find. No online database will get you where you need to go, RSJ-wise, but below are a few recommendations.

"Ashes," from Red Warrior (1990):


"Gossip," from Barbeque Dog (1983):


"Time Table," from Music Revelation Ensemble's No Wave (1980):



For the record, my favorite Last Exit album is Köln, which is available on Spotify. In terms of recent RSJ, there isn't much to choose from, but Wadada Leo Smith's Tabligh is outstanding. And here's some tantalizing footage from what I believe was the last RSJ live appearance, last summer in Texas. (Some valuable context here.) Drumming-wise, he sounds as good—i.e., as much a steward of the music in its delicate entirety, not just of rhythm—as I've ever heard him:


P.S. There's some relevant RSJ talk in my Heavy Metal Be-Bop interviews with Melvin Gibbs and Gentry Densley.

Blood-brothers/sisters: Obituary + RVIVR live

I've caught a trio of incredible shows in the past week, surely some of my favorite live music of the year: a pair by Obituary at Saint Vitus, last Wednesday and Thursday, and one by RVIVR at Cake Shop, this past Monday. I've previously gushed at length about each of these bands (here and here), so I just want to make two quick points:

1) Thank God for the small show (club, loft, DIY space, what have you), the principal medium of my lifelong experience both as an audience member and as a performer. Yes, there's always the threat of a body check or a boot to the back of the head, but nothing can top the physical and spiritual sensation of being that close to the source.

2) Thank God for bands like Obituary and RVIVR (pictured above), and for their fans—each party in turn entering into a mutual pact that can only be described as blood-brotherly/sisterly. Obituary, who turn lead—riffs that groove then gallop, and groove then gallop some more—into gold, transforming roomfuls of willing diehards into ghoulish cavebeasts. And RVIVR, who project all their convictions—loves, hates, gripes, adorations, dreams, fears, prayers, spells and vows—as if from a confetti cannon, sowing a vibe that feels more like, yes, a revival meeting than a punk show.

Relishing the tempest: McCoy Tyner at the Blue Note

I saw McCoy Tyner play an extraordinary set at the Blue Note last night, with an extraordinary band. (Go see them tonight—8pm, 10:30pm—if you can.) I'm in my 15th year as a New Yorker, and I'd never heard Tyner live before last night, a fact I can't really excuse. Living here, it's nearly impossible not to take certain legacy artists for granted, but that doesn't make it okay—as a friend I ran into yesterday put it, we do indeed need to see these musicians while we can.

And not just out of some sense of duty or obligation. Because, as I learned last night, sometimes these older players can truly blow your hair back, transcend the mundane, multiset-per-night jazz-club idiom and achieve something otherworldly, dangerous, borderline scary.

I wasn't prepared for Tyner's intensity, nor for his unpredictability. The general framework of the material followed what I think of as a classic Tyner model, known to me via records like Enlightenment (recorded 40 years ago this past summer). It's a sound built on these rolling, cascading vamps, executed at precarious tempos, so that the music takes on the quality of a spiritual quest. This approach scans in my mind as post-Coltrane, but it is literally that, i.e., not as much an aesthetic that Coltrane himself pursued as one popularized by those, such as Tyner and Pharoah Sanders (I think of the vamp section of Pharoah's "Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt") who played with him.

When the band joined up for the opening and closing themes, there was a gorgeously ragged, almost dixieland-ish sound—with saxist Gary Bartz and violinist John Blake Jr. (a new name to me and an outstanding player) keening in the upper register, interweaving their ecstatic cries as Tyner lashed the band on with his rumbling, headlong flow. Bartz's solos were among the rawest I've heard in a jazz club in years. He'd start slowly, inquisitively, and work himself into the realm of expressionism. I don't just mean squeaking and squawking for the sake of it; there was a bit of that kind of abrasiveness, but Bartz's climaxes felt intensely earned, the product of total effort, absolute concentration. As with the rest of the band, there was an engagement, a conviction to his playing that startled me. In general, the pieces (two or three of what I assume were Tyner originals—the vampy selections described above—plus "Moment's Notice" and "In a Mellow Tone," as well as an incredible unaccompanied piano feature) proceeded in an orderly progression of solos, but each musician was so engaged that the format never seemed stale or predictable.

A lot of this had to do with drummer Francisco Mela, who juxtaposes hard-driving flow with turbulent interruption. It's hard not to think of Elvin Jones when you hear his thunderous tom-tom thumps, which egg the band on while simultaneously introducing a sort of random, weather-event chaos. But it was Tyner himself who was the real upsetter. He'd lay out during the beginnings of solos, building dramatic tension, then zoom back in with a flourish—he's a true daredevil, and not sparing with the showboat-ish, one-finger runs down the length of the keyboard—powering the music with a mighty force totally at odds with his frail, 74-year-old frame. Often, the band would lay out in turn during his solos, leaving him to his stormy reveries.

The dynamic range of these passages was enormous. I mentioned weather above in reference to Mela, and that was the prevailing metaphor that kept popping into my head as I listened to Tyner—the man conjures storms as he plays. I've always known him to embody this sort of holy-roller force, but the role he played in the Coltrane band was so oddly thankless at times—i.e., it can often seem to me, in the Classic Quartet context, that his solos are rest stops between the superhuman Coltrane and Elvin clashes; I'm oversimplifying, but his gestures in that group can't help but get swallowed up at times by the maelstrom outside. At the helm of his own band, he embodies this sort of divine will, a mercurial force that ranges from sweet and merciful to scatterbrained and roiling, to downright world-shaking. The band would watch Tyner's solos with a kind of awe; they never seemed to know when (or if) he was going to cue them back in, and both they and the audience seemed to relish that unpredictability.

We were all in the hands of a benevolent wizard, a veteran player intent on, quite literally, moving his audience, by sheer force of will, through both the power he commanded in his hands and the passion in his heart. This was jazz as conjuration—not simply about "swinging," about slickness, but about sending huge boulders of feeling rolling down the mountain, about ensuring that danger and risk took precedence over mere proficiency. There was a seat-of-the-pants quality to this set, a sense of the players constantly overshooting marks and recalibrating, and not caring in the slightest, because that was where the music was leading them. It was the storm and they were the ships, navigating valiantly but also relishing the tempest, inviting it in—as one would a muse—and singing its praises.

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Here's a great 2011 clip featuring four fifths of the same band:

DFSBP archives: Grachan Moncur III

 

NOTE (July 24, 2021): I've re-upped the links to the Grachan Moncur III WKCR interview below. If you have trouble accessing them, drop me a line at hank [dot] shteamer [at] rollingstone [dot] com, and I'll send them to you directly.

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and online audio interviews recently. I highly recommend Jeremiah Cymerman's 5049 Podcast (I've checked out about ten of these so far, and I've loved pretty much every one), Aisha Tyler's Girl on Guy interview with Clutch's Neil Fallon, the Luc Lemay (Gorguts) and Bill Steer (Carcass) episodes of the MetalSucks Podcast, and the Lemay appearance on the Invisible Oranges East Village Radio show (click on September 3 here). While I'm not equipped to put together snazzy-sounding, nicely edited content à la what's linked above, I do have a fairly extensive archive of audio interviews, some recorded live on air. Since most of these radio shows are interspersed with music, they play like readymade podcasts. As time permits, I'll be going back through and digitizing various programs from the vaults, e.g., the 2000 Steve Lacy show I posted back in February.

Next up is an installment of the WKCR Musician's Show, featuring trombonist-composer Grachan Moncur III, that dates from less than a month after the Lacy Q&A. This has to be one of my most treasured interview tapes. As with the late, great Walt Dickerson, Moncur was an artist who existed in a kind of mythical state in my mind before I was lucky enough to be able to meet him. (I made the connection via a wonderful woman named Glo Harris—the widow of the drummer Beaver Harris—my collaborator on a memorial show concerning Beaver, which featured in-studio appearances from Moncur, Rashied Ali and Wade Barnes, and call-ins from Andrew Cyrille and Jack DeJohnette; maybe that'll be my next post from the archives!) I didn't know Moncur's story; I only knew his records, and at that time I was completely obsessed with them, especially the 1963 Blue Note set Evolution, which I still regard as one of the masterpieces of the period, and of jazz in general. Grachan (for the record, it's pronounced "GRAY-shun") and I sat down for three solid hours of talk, music and off-mic reminiscing. It was a really special experience—for one thing, I'll never forget Grachan discussing how his experience of the Kennedy assassination related to the title track of Evolution, one of my favorite pieces of music ever. I was just a kid at the time of this interview—a month shy of my 22nd birthday—but Mr. Moncur treated me like a peer. I hope you enjoy the show. Here it is, in four installments:

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part I

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part II

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part III

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part IV

NOTES:

1) The easiest way to stream these files is by clicking the Streampad link (the blue bar) you see at the bottom of the page. You can also download them as MP3s.

2) The level on the title track to Aco Dei de Madrugada (played at about the 24-minute mark in Part III) was too high, so I cut that piece from the MP3. You can hear it here. The same goes for Echoes of Prayer (featured on Destination: Out back in 2010), announced right at the end of Part III and continuing into the beginning of Part IV; I'm pretty sure we played the majority of the LP, which you can hear in five parts here: I, II, III, IV, V.

P.S. I want to thank my Aa bandmate Mike Colin for reminding me of the existence of this tape. I have a fond memory of he and I going to see Grachan Moncur III play at Iridum in a band that included Moncur's old Blue Note comrades Jackie McLean and Bobby Hutcherson. They played the classic "Love and Hate" that night and Moncur took a solo for the ages. (Judging by this review, this must've been 2004.)

P.P.S. Steve Lehman's 2000 interview with McLean, recently posted at Do the Math, is well worth your time.

The ecstasy of the present: Gorguts and Carcass return

For sheer big-event-ness, no metal comeback record this year can compete with 13. But for those of us obsessed with death metal and related styles, Colored Sands and Surgical Steel—the respective new ones by Gorguts and Carcass—are each pretty damn momentous as well. My Pitchfork reviews of these titles are linked above.

As I did in my reflection on the experience of reviewing 13, I'll take off my ill-fitting critic's hat here. From a fan perspective—really the most important one, in the end, especially when the subjects are two legacy acts in an especially fan-driven subgenre such as death metal—I'm ecstatic about these records. The respective trajectories (not to mention aesthetic priorities) of Gorguts and Carcass vary, but one thing these two bands have in common is that, as of roughly the mid-aughts, we had no reason to believe that we'd ever hear from either again. And yet even stacked up against each band's classic back catalog, these records are outstanding—they're statements not just of sustained proficiency but of sustained excellence.

Each in its own way, Colored Sands and Surgical Steel—and, now that I think about it, 13 too—is about coming to terms with the weight of history, then shrugging it off and embracing the ecstasy of the present moment. These LPs are meaty statements: dense, info-packed, loud, wild, weird, fucking fun records, and also ceremonies of communion between first-generation extreme-metal practitioners (Luc Lemay of Gorguts, Bill Steer and Jeff Walker of Carcass) and younger virtuosos (Colin Marston, Kevin Hufnagel and John Longstreth on Colored Sands; Daniel Wilding on Surgical Steel). In short, any quibbles I've aired aside, they're exactly what they should be. These are the kinds of albums that reaffirm fandom as a lifelong pact: "As long as you keep making music, I'll keep caring." I love them.

Surfing the sludge: Goodbye, Joey LaCaze

I did not know the man, so this is what Joey LaCaze means to me. In the selection below—the title track on an all-time-great heavy-rock record—listen to that sloshy double-time (:24), the groove-vortex half-time (:39), the fearless stomp-marshaling (1:37), the hyperbolic slow-down on the toms (1:54), leading into that unholy gnash (2:10). It just makes you want to get so low, that sound. Like all great drummers, he's doing a dance, a pantomime, enacting a feeling with the timbres he wields and the spaces between his beats. I have heard few cadences more exquisite than that shagged-out cruise at 2:50 and the coolly syncopated variation that follows.



What you hear here—both in Eyehategod as a whole and in LaCaze's playing particularly—is not, as so many would have you believe, the natural expression of a burnout, the inevitable result of hard living. You hear craft and command, the very deliberate will to get so, so low with your rhythm, to swing it as wide and hard as you can. You work at that; you grow it over time. You get so you can fling the pendulum out with ever-greater force and gracefully receive and absorb its natural return arc. To be able to smash the drums like a brute and also create a sense of dancing on air, waltzing with time, seducing it, dropping it at the listener's feet like a sack of potatoes, dribbling it like a basketball, pummeling it and pulling back. It's all a feeling, learned over a lifetime.

I saw him play only once, at Maryland Deathfest X in 2012. This is a good example of what recent Eyehategod shows were like. Tune in around 1:18 and you'll see LaCaze rocking incessantly back and forth, part of that stubbornly obnoxious preshow EHG feedback ritual. I'm sure the band has enacted this little bit of audience-baiting theater countless times during their career, but when I saw it, I believed it. I really believed LaCaze's tics, for lack of a better word; I believed that he was courting some evil spirit—seducing it, taunting it even, preparing it for the sludge ballet to come.

His playing was a kind of singing. Watch him handling—not manhandling—that groove around 5:20, that classic downshift in "Blank." He is fucking serenading that rhythm—not forcing it into place but laying down a pillowy red carpet for it to land each time. That is the place where drumming becomes a kind of letting go, not a willing into being but the riding of a wave. Among those who surf the sludge in that way, there are really only a few that truly matter to me, that can bring me to tears with the way they lay back on a beat. Joey LaCaze was one. I will miss him.

Recent raves: Jason Becker + Space Opera

There are tales of dashed hopes and then there is the story of Jason Becker, a classical/metal shred-guitar virtuoso who landed his dream gig (the lead-ax spot in David Lee Roth's band) in 1989 only to be diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease before he could go on tour. I highly recommend Not Dead Yet, the new documentary about Becker.



The subject himself—now paralyzed, he communicates and composes music via a series of eye and facial movements—comes off as a hugely inspiring figure, but what grabbed me most about the film was the portrayal of Jason's parents. They'd always encouraged his art, and in the interviews featured in the doc, they seem as heartbroken as their son (and maybe even more so) over the fact that he wasn't able to seize the opportunity he'd created for himself. There's one moment that really stuck with me: Becker's parents recall how Jason once said to them (I'm paraphrasing here), "You know, Mom and Dad, my friends are always complaining about their parents, and I don't have anything to say." That clichéd heavy-metal narrative of a repressive upbringing just didn't apply to Becker, in other words. It's doubly sad, then, that he eventually encountered a much more severe obstacle to success.

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A few weeks back, my friend Nick Podgurski—an extraordinary drummer, singer and composer who heads up the New Firmament initiative—introduced me to the self-titled 1973 album by a Texas band called Space Opera. Since then, I've been having a serious, extended Moment with this record. Nick relishes musical excavation, digging up weird, forgotten gems, whether they be ambient, psych, black metal, punk or what-have-you. I always approach his playlists/recommendations with curiosity, a feeling that sometimes morphs into delight or pure bafflement, depending on what I encounter. But when I heard "Holy River," I knew this was something different:



Some obscure records are good for a quick mindblow and then you set them aside; you're just as intrigued by the simple fact of the unknownness of a certain piece of compelling music as you are by the sounds themselves. This Space Opera album is different; it's an eccentric release, yes, but it's also incredibly soothing, nourishing and fulfilling—accessible is what I mean to say. It fits into life, rather than simply being an irreconcilably weird object that you hold at arm's length. It is an incredibly well-conceived record but also an improbable one. Space Opera bridges two worlds of early-’70s musicmaking that I love equally dearly yet that have always appeared entirely separate to me, namely U.K. prog/art-rock (King Crimson, Yes) and U.S. folk-rock (America, CSNY)—with a little twangy, Allman-style flash seasoning the mix. You can hear the resulting tension in the track above, in which placidness and harshness collide to brilliant effect. I'm trying not to spoil the surprise, but I'll say only that the entry of the distorted guitar is one of the more heavenly musical curveballs I've ever been thrown.

The whole album isn't this dissonant (and I mean that both conceptually and sonically); several of the songs choose one or the other of the two aforementioned camps (i.e., the prog or the folk) and hang out comfortably there—see "Country Max" and "Guitar Suite," respectively. But I'm completely cool with that, because the material is uniformly outstanding; Space Opera doesn't need to clash and disorient in order to impress. The peak for me might be "Prelude No. 4," where all sorts of other right-up-my-alley influences from the general period start seeping in—this track honestly sounds to me like Rick Danko of the Band sitting in with Steely Dan circa Can't Buy a Thrill, which, as anyone who knows me will tell you, adds up to a seemingly tailor-made musical nirvana for me—but I love the entire record. Dig in:


P.S. Go here for more info on Space Opera. They issued a comeback album in ’01; haven't yet spent good time with that one, but I look forward to it. There's also an odds-and-ends comp out, Safe at Home, which I think contains material from the period that produced Space Opera. I highly recommend this interview with SO member David Bullock, unfortunately available only as a RealAudio stream.