Sergei Prokofiev - Piano Sonata No. 6 (1940)

I've had a three disc Prokofiev piano sonatas collection riding in my car with me for a few months now, and it is a beautiful, beautiful thing. See, driving for me is unavoidably stressful. I'm a guy who is pretty turned off to the world around me, but something about driving in a car flips every "fight or flight" switch in me and it is awful. Now, normally, I don't even understand what people are talking about when they discuss things like "being in the mood" for a specific song or "I can only listen to that when I'm in a certain mood." The fuck? It's just music, you emotionally obsessive twat. Anyway, this Prokofiev stuff is really engaging and beautiful and it turns a truly hellish experience for me into something that I really don't even mind at all. So, when I am driving, I am "in the mood" for Prokofiev.

This sonata starts with some fucking heavy piano riffing, the idea behind which I plan on ripping off for a Like Rats song sometime soon. You heard it here first. This piece is also unbelievably melodically rich with dissonant, rapidfire statements that somehow still make intuitive sense and are completely engaging. Transcend your boring, stressful reality with Prokofiev's melodic mindfuck piano experience number six.

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*I started reviewing new metal releases every week for ALARM. Here's a thing I wrote on the new Autopsy, which is really good.

Like Rats - Like Rats (2010)

So the new Like Rats record, released by Cosmic Debris Records,is available for order or download over at www.likerats.net. You can have the mp3s for free and just pretend that everything is working normally on this blog or you can internet us a few dollars and we will mailbox you a physical vinyl record with cool artwork featuring a photo by Noel Rod0-Vankeulen (one of Shea's photo buddies) and Regan did the layout and he has a gold record hanging prominently in his apt because he did the layout for Lupe Fiasco. I'm really happy with how this turned out, so join me in jubilation. This is more of that Celtic Frost worship, with some steps taken towards a more proto-death metal sound. Andy will record your band and do a really good job at Bricktop Recording in Chicago, so get into that. Love is love, everything is love, please like my band, one what? One love.

Like Rats

Buzzcocks - Singles Going Steady

My rock band aka Pagan Youth aka Pagan Diaper is playing a Halloween show as the Buzzcocks, because the fucking Buzzcocks are one of my biggest songwriting influences. I'm doing double-duty with Like Rats is playing as Black Flag, so be on the lookout.

As a young youth*, I remember checking out the Buzzcocks and being sorely disappointed because they weren't that punk, you know? I was into The Broadways & Rancid & NOFX & assorted skacore bands and had started to dig into The Clash & The Ramones. I thought the Buzzcocks were stupid, but I was actually the one who was stupid. Why can't I ever do anything right please help meeeeeee.

Anyway, these are extremely, phenomenally catchy pop songs played with just a little bit of punk edge. What I care about are the little melodic tricks that elevate these hooks to transcendental status. The key change in the hook of "Ever Fallen in Love..." is the most obvious example, as is the major to minor chord change in "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" (total Beach Boys rip on that vocal melody; not just cuz it's falsetto although that makes it more obvious; I know because I also ripped off "Keep an Eye on Summer") as is the sharp five going into the chorus in "I Don't Mind." Another band known to always be doing cool stuff like that is THE BEATLES. So tite.

*link removed*

*First time I've ever seen this video. Weird.

Dream Death - Journey Into Mystery (1987)

As you should know by now, Celtic Frost is my goddamn favorite band. This is a nice slab of Celtic Frost worship, complete with extended, chromatic doom passages, and lightning fast sliding power chords over d-beats.

This is a weird record that doesn't quite sound like anything else that I'm aware of from this time. It's quite a bit slower than other emerging death metal bands, and it mostly avoids the bluesy shuffles and overt Sabbath worship of other doom bands (except for the extended shuffle solo section in "The Elder Race"). The rhythmic emphasis typically lies on the beat, giving it a very methodical, plodding feel. If you are a frown-lover, this album will give you plenty of opportunity to frown. The drum performance is also impressive, which is important for a band with so much space in their songs.

Dan Polak, you know about this record, right? Because if you don't, I think it will be your favorite thing.

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Alkaline Trio - Alkaline Trio (2000)

Just got back from a stint on the fucking Warped Tour defending pop punk with my doggs in This Time Next Year. Surreal and exhausting experience as a whole. I grew as a person a bit, and also delved into modernist fiction. As such, here is a Warped Tour related post. I made an effort to watch Alkaline Trio as many times as I could because they didn't always play the same setlist, and they were one of my favorite bands growing up in the post-Slapstick Chicago punk scene. My life was made up of teenage depression and shows at the Fireside & The Metro featuring The Lawrence Arms, The Honor System & Alkaline Trio. I don't think I ever saw Tuesday, though.

Anyway, this is a fantastic collection of raw pop punk songs where dudes obviously like The Misfits. Skiba always fakes the chorus the first time through, either by singing it an octave low or doing it instrumental or by skipping it altogether. Also, resolving a sixth up a half step to a power chord on the tonic is super common. Kind of a black metal sound, which is interesting because I had a brief conversation with Skiba about black metal and his Until the Light Takes Us shirt. I wonder if his interest in this musical subculture came before or after he wrote these songs.

Remember that I got into US Maple because of the lyrics to "Goodbye Forever." When a man says ow...

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Death Strike - Fuckin Death (1985)

It should be obvious by now that I am a fan of primitive things. The absence of technicality reduces songs to an intuitive experience. "Does this work or not?" Although it is risky to strip things so bare, there is also potential for greatness in doing so. When it works, it really works. This is the zen meditation of proto-death metal. Let all riffs drift away until you're only left with power chords and Discharge-style drums. Acknowledge other thoughts, but let them pass into the abyss.

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Farid al-Atrash - Compilation

So, I don't know anything about Farid al-Atrash or about Arabian music in general, but this was left at my old apartment by the previous tenants, and it is fucking amazing. I'll post a few more things like this once I figure out how to rip a tape and once I find a computer that can read tricky CDs ("Big Pimpin" content forthcoming).

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Negative Approach - Total Recall

Another issue of Jettison Quarterly has hit the internet. Once again, I've written about cool records, and I also did an interview with former Punk Planet editor and current Cell Stories mastermind Dan Sinker. Check it out, ya dingus. Here's one of my reviews from a previous issue of Jettison.

Negative Approach is possibly the most pissed band I’ve ever heard. This is the musical tradition of The Stooges passed to the next decade: your lizard brain screaming disillusionment with civilization. What separates Negative Approach from other hardcore bands of the early 80s (besides their palpable ferocity) is their effective use of mid-paced rhythms and recursive phrases. Riffs morph sinuously from verse to chorus, referring back while always driving forward into crashing bursts of rhythmic intensity. While most of these songs ostensibly lack dynamics, tension and release are achieved through a manipulation of structure and managing expectations of how a phrase will terminate. As long as humans are crammed together in cities and neurotransmitters are thrown out of balance, this music will be relevant.

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DJ D-Man & Billy Boy - Dooky Boody (1995)

My friend Bria recently asked me to help her track down the songs on this list. I was surprised about the lack of availability of most of this material via my usual internet piracy waters, and I had to resort to old-ass tricks to dig most of it up. This inspired me to post this dang ol Dooky Boody so that someone who is looking for it can find it and discover pleasure in their lives.

"She got a big ol dooky boody" is one of my favorite vocal hooks to come out of my home city, and that paired with the "duh doo doo dun dun dun" melody is a real tapeworm for your ears' dookie booties. The production on this track isn't really that cool since it's mostly just a Percolator sampler, but I don't even care at all because the only thing I can think of is a nice .7 waist-to-hip ratio. Although maybe a "Dooky Boody" is more like a .15 or something. Check Urban Dictionary.

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September - Dancing Shoes (2007)

My Kylie Minogue post got taken down, so, here's this September record to fill the void.* This is really along the same lines: disco dance pop that bangs it from top to bottom. Bang bang bang. You probably remember "Cry For You" from the radio a few years ago. "Just Dance" was popular around the same time, and these two compositions are eternally linked for me as "songs where I like the pre-chorus more than the chorus."

The melodies on this record tread the epic dance pop path, but defy expectations just enough. The beginning of the chorus of "Can't Get Over" bites a well-known pop song that I can't quite get off the tip of my brain right now,** but the second part of the phrase takes an epic twist that really gets the endorphins flowing. The real strength of this album is its focus, though. The tempos stay up, and there aren't tons of syrupy bullshit ballads buffering the singles.

Also, I was listening to mainstream urban radio today, and they transitioned from Mobb Deep "Quiet Storm" into some fucking stupid-ass Black Eyed Peas song, and it was unbearably jarring. Evan Parker into September is my blogger tribute to this upsetting transition.

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*Just kidding, nothing can fill the void.
**FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS, bitch.

Evan Parker - Monoceros (1978)

When dealing with experimental, modern, atonal, etc. music there is a key component that separates the listenable from the unlistenable. Evan Parker certainly has this intuitive ear for melody amidst his aggressive free improvisation on the soprano sax. For fans of US Maple, Cecil Taylor, & Leo Ornstein.

This flurry of notes and changing registers is what I imagine social interactions to sound like to an autist.

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Guest Mix Volume 13 - Helm

If you care about the cool internet blogosphere music community people, you will recognize Helm for his insightful commentary and his deep dedication to heavy metal. He is also a brutally talented artist (see the illustration above), and his work is visible on his blog ASides-BSides. This mix features some awesome weirdo "techno thrash" bands, as well as one of the coolest bands that I've heard in awhile, Socrates Drank the Conium. Once again, my guest poster wrote a lot, so I will shut up.

Hello. I am Helm from Asides-Bsides. I listen to a lot of Heavy Metal and sometimes write about it. Todd Nief of Primitive Future asked me to do just that for you so here's a mixtape and some notes on the songs below.

Waking up today was strange. I suffered from peculiar post-apocalyptic 'digital life' nightmares that I couldn't awaken from. Lots of shit went down but dreams being what they are, most of it is hazy now. All I remember is at the end of the dream I was too afraid to unplug myself from a grotesque body-horror life-support mechanism in fear of not so much death than being 'offline from the world'. Does that sound familiar?

I finally broke the dream paralysis by screaming at the top of my lungs - in the dream, in reality I barely coughed waking up. So, I take a look around in the room and see two monitors staring at me, an abundance of cables lining the floor, felt really weird. Of course I ran to the internet first thing. This playlist was assembled to put my foul mood to some proactive use, plus give me something to do until I felt better. Listening to the full thing seems to have helped, so there you go, self-medicating for information globalism with the Heaviest of Metals.

01 - Shadow of the Beast - Intro

This is a remix of an old Amiga game's intro music, called Shadow of the Beast. I put it on until I could figure out the first few tracks of the playlist but heh, it sorta fits the mood so at the end I left it in.

Here's the intro image from the game. The original tracker music is by Dave Whittaker, if you're interested. I love the synthetic flute, very melancholic.

02 - Obliveon - Cybervoid

This pretty much captures the emotions the dream conjured. Obliveon were a lesser known Canadian thrash outfit obviously influenced in thematics and sound by Voivod. They put out 'Cybervoid' in 1996. They remind somewhat of Meshuggah but I find their compositions to be more succinct and less abstract, hence more enjoyable. The interesting quality of this song is that the lyrics are hilarious on their own,

"Face the void, prepare for the fight
Victimized by cruel megabytes"

but along with the music the end result is effective. Or perhaps it just did for me because of the dream paralysis.

03 - Protector - Nothing Has Changed

Well, this is a downer. Look at these guys,

They're German, they play thrash. Expecting Kreator-cloning or something, right? Well, yes although for my money Protector are more savage and visceral than Kreator (no kidding, check out their EP 'Leviathan's Desire'). But on this song we get one of the more depressing doom songs from a thrash band the are.

"The buildings are made of gold
The sun shines bright
Out of a blue, a clear blue sky
The streets are clean
The people laugh
The animals are free
No hate, no one cries
No more distrust
No more disgust
And no more war
Peace forevermore

No industry pollutes the water
The sea is filled with movement and life
The governments scrap all their useless weapons
They are not bribable any longer
Everyone is happy
No more pain

But suddenly it's fading away
I wake up it's 12 o'clock
And I realize, nothing has changed. "

I don't know, it's not just the lyrics. That monophonic guitar tone is murky as hell, the sharp harmonized solo on top punctuates the sentiment. The chant at the end "nothing has changed, nothing has changed" underlined by throaty screams of each word on its own. There's proper doom metal bands that have tried for records to achieve what this oddity in a thrash band's catalogue manages excellently. But where to go from here?

04 Osiris - Futurity (Something to Think About)

Oh, that's right, techno-thrash.

Not only this cover is exactly how I felt this morning, the music also captures a specific metal zeitgeist very successfully. We're back at 1991 here, thrash is trying to grow up, touches on existentialist concerns, the scope is modernist, so on. Here's some interestingly dated lyrics to go with it:

"Gazing into my crystal ball
It never seemed so dark before
The world is lost and lonely
Year 2011, twenty years from now
Will there be earth, will there be people?"

We'll see soon, Osiris.

Actually to be more precise Osiris are a bit late to the modernist techno-thrash/progressive metal party. The height of this genre's potency was circa 1989-90. When the Soviet Union collapsed, signaling the end of the cold war, a lot of this paranoiac techno-thrash (and lots of metal in general) lost its raison d'etre. But for all we know Osiris were perfecting these songs for a couple of years before the record was released. Anyway, I'll write about techno-thrash in detail in some future post, somewhere.

05 - Abstrakt Algebra - Shadowplay

Speaking of direction-less '90s metal, here's a pleasant upset: Candlemass founder Leif Edling puts out a post-metal record in 1995 and it's great! The cover's worth looking at too, (especially if you fold it out). Back when this came out I didn't know what to make of it, I were as confused about the future of metal as everybody else. Romantic doom/death had happened, Black metal had happened, nothing new and as diligently romantic (as is the essence of metal) seemed to be ready to emerge so almost all of us pursued the precarious poisons of post-modernity... perhaps this was the future, you know?

Well, it wasn't, but there's a lot of '90s artifacts worth interest nonetheless. Looking back now it's easier to appreciate them because they're benign growths on the strange tree of Heavy Metal, but back then the possibility of them being wicked stems of the new was slightly more worrying.

"Taciturned teasers with tattooed tears
A play of shadows they give
A blindfolded sojourn from Shakespeare to Marx
Directions vague and obscene"

06 - Deathrow - Machinery

This is the absolute flagbearer of what is sometimes called techno-thrash (or less aptly, 'progressive thrash' or 'technical thrash' though my distinctions and reasoning on this will have to wait for a future playlist/essay). Germany, 1988, let's look at the lyrics.

"I am walking through the streets of my old town
Looking back on the days of my youth
There are factories in the fields where we used to play
Clouds of smoke hang in the sky and block out the sun

God bless this house, the car and the TV
Show us our idols in magazines
They build us prisons without any walls
Money rules we can't resist

Snakes of commercial TV
Decoy with their apples
False priests spit out their lies
Because God sells
If we don't pull ourselves out of this mud
Our children will have to pay for our sins

God bless this house, the car and the TV
Show us our idols in magazines
They build us prisons without any walls
Money rules we can't resist
We're just wheels in a great machinery"

I'm 26 years old, I was a little baby person back at 1988 but I remember having nightmares about nuclear bombs raining down on Europe just the same. It's kind of difficult to communicate why the combination of this austere music with that type of grounded social angst is so effective. If you haven't lived in a lesser country under the influence of the world's superpowers during a critical time such as the cold war it all probably sounds kind of funny to you. "Supermarkets sell us their shit, lol, supermarkets are our friends" you might be thinking and for all I know you might be correct. Anyway, Deathrow strike a nerve for me at least. For some synaesthetic understanding, listen at the end of the song how the lead melody tries futilely to escape the grinding gears of the rhythm guitars and drums. Listen how at the end the lockstep is absolutely suffocating.

07 - Socrates Drank the Conium - Breakdown

Well this is from 1973, Greece. I absolutely adore the record it belongs in. The lyric is pretty self-explanatory, but listen how the constant double guitar licks augment the already hectic 7/8 rhythm. "Too much smoke, too many people. Gotta get away, riding on the highway. Endless breakdown. Heavy Breakdown". Extremely effective piece, doesn't even need a Cold War to give it weight. I tend to view the 'On the Wings' record as an early precursor to stuff Psychotic Waltz would be doing 15 years later.

08 - Moahni Moahna - Tales of Xet Sof

My computer crashed while I was making the playlist so now you get the appropriate song to express this frustration. Here's the transcribed lyric,

"You only need to press this key, they said
So he did too bad, so sad, they gave him hell

Destructive instructions are easy to make
They are not constructive
Illusions, confusions breaking him down

What's the point in reading this book
Where's the one I trusted, he must die
Because he lied

Nothing happened whatsoever
Days were wasted, time was tight
Book of wisdom, none too clever
It's so wrong, but oh, so right

What's the point of reading this book

*customer support voice says something inaudible on right speaker*

Now he is older, trapped in a book
And he belongs there"

As you might have realized this is an epic Rainbow-esque song about Soft - Ware troubleshooting, a badly formatted manual, lying tech support and the inevitable fate of anyone who dabbles in computer science. Moahni Moahna are a band almost nobody knows about but they're hilarious and it's a shame. Radio's to blame.

09 - Psycho Symphony - Silent Fall

Well I wouldn't like to go into detail about how this Psycho Symphony song works because it's a headache and a half just listening to it, much less trying to scrutinize its various parts. I'll just say that it captures the emotion of feeling trapped in a dream, for me. All these unresolved melodies mirror the wild changes of pace and location in dreams and the foggy spatiality in them too. It takes real songcrafting skill to have phrases that are so everywhere and still hold it together and convey subtle emotions like Psycho Symphony do.

10 - Paralysis - Arctic Sleep

And this techno-thrash band from the Netherlands ties the whole thing off leaving us exactly where we started. Only now, much wiser.

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The Verlaines - Juvenilia (1987)

I'm posting this record because I've been obsessed with the long phrase that makes up the verse of the first song. That chord progression relentlessly forces all of my hairs to stand on end. If I can ever write a pop song that has a similar melodic effect, I will just pee in my own pants all day because that is all that there is left to do.

This is a collection of The Verlaines early EPs, and is chock-full of that good, nice, wonderful & catchy white-guy rock. Those Flying Nun white guys were really cranking it out in the 80s. Get obsessively into it.

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Lisa Gerrard - The Mirror Pool (1995)

All of my readers should already have all of Dead Can Dance's releases, so here's Lisa Gerrard's first solo album which really just sounds like another Dead Can Dance Record. My recent musical exploration has taken me to look into solo works of artists that I like (Paul Westerberg, Bob Mould, Brendan Perry, Lisa Gerrard, Sisqo, etc).

The melodic possibilities of harmonic minor and its modes are explored in fascinating detail here. The songs are less "song-like" than a lot of Dead Can Dance material and function more as melodic adventures over droning backgrounds. I wonder how much of this is improvised, and I wonder how many cues Lisa took from Kind of Blue and how many she took from Indian classical music. That said, shit still sounds medieval as fuck, so blast this Lisa Gerrard album and this youtube video simultaneously and enjoy the best that life has to offer.

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