Good albums of 2016, part 5

Posted by Jason on January 31, 2017

White Lung – Paradise

I was really looking forward to this album, and I was also expecting it to be a big step forward from the already-great Deep Fantasy, which is pretty much the perfect setup for disappointment. Guess what though. What’s really amazing about this is, well, I mean, what was already amazing is just that this is a hardcore band that sounds modern and relevant in the year two thousand and whatever it is, and what was also already amazing is that they’ve continued to do better than that on every successive album, but what’s amazing about this album specifically is that it advances and expands the band’s sound and songwriting – smoother on “Hungry,” metaler on “Vegas,” mellower but still piercing on “Below,” and with a full-throated sing-along chorus on “Kiss Me When I Bleed” (which happens to be about bringing a child into a world of filth and despair) – while also not only maintaining but enhancing their basic force and intensity. It hits you everywhere at once, and it’s able to do this without being “experimental” or branching out into every available affect. It’s both propulsive and towering, both ethereal and bloody, both aspirational and wrathful, both artful and raw. The guitar parts take everything great that guitars are capable of doing and shift, sift, and swirl it all together into a single unrestrained style that speaks in its own new language. And the lyrics similarly confuse their emotional angles to alchemize strange substances and birth untaxonomized monsters. “Demented” insists that “you were born to ruin your life,” “I Beg You” “fights back like a full-blown rotten cancer,” “Dead Weight” is both hopelessly resigned and defiantly committed, “Sister” cobbles together a bizarre narrative out of degeneration and murder, the ironic skyward thrust of “Narcoleptic” comes across as borderline angelic, and “Paradise” is almost chill until it lashes back at itself and dies hard. So context aside, even, this is the kind of work that makes expectations irrelevant. Regardless of what you were expecting before, what you’re expecting now is for anything to even try to be this good.

And none of this “softens” anything; the music still radiates at maximum heat and the tone is still downright murderous. It tears through and apart its ideas in under half an hour while still feeling substantial and not rushed. But it doesn’t let you get all the way to feeling satisfied, because if you’re ever satisfied with anything, you’re doing it wrong. “You are never safe from yourself.” Which is to say not only that this album is deeply impressive but that the explanation of the source of that impressiveness itself is instantiated within the music, itself. This band has developed by taking what they were already great at and doing it harder, and better, and they’ve become something different by doing that. “I’ll give my heart out, I’ll bleed until I’m cold.” This is sort of like the mirror image of reinterpretation. Any one thing has its limits, but one way to overcome those limits is to take what you’re doing all the way through, such that you come out on the other side making the same connection in a different place. The result is that this is more than a cool punk album, more than an exiting new sound, and more than great music. It’s revelatory. (More later.)

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Good albums of 2016, part 4

Posted by Jason on January 17, 2017

Seratones – Get Gone

In addition to possessing strong songs and commanding vocals, this band is just immediately amazing on the level of raw sound. They’re at the extremes of both talent and intensity, and they apply those things towards something original and real. Like, really. This is one of the more “official” declarations I’m going to make here: this is an exciting new band that should by rights be going places. I mean, I’m not particularly optimistic about our society’s ability to recognize quality, let alone greatness, but also hot damn.

On both academic and impressionistic levels, this is an exhilarating combination of lots of different styles and sounds. Hardcore speed and noise, blues rhythm, metal solos, country smoothness and rich, resonant vocals are all pounded together and built up into something that sounds like the good parts of everything. It’s basically a super-drug. And it’s not just like “a bunch of different stuff”; it all works together as a new whole. It’s not a game of identify-the-influences; I’m actually not much of a historian myself. “You can feel it any way you like it.” You just listen to it, and it’s good. That’s why it’s worth bothering to do things like this.

So the band performs this synthesis on a basic sound level, and they do it over the course of the album, so you’ve got the thrash and rush of “Choking on Your Spit,” the calm flow of “Tide,” the long, tough swagger of “Get Gone,” and the slow and soft but also super loud closer “Keep Me,” and they also do it within the contours of each song. “Headtrip” cruises steadily into a wild solo and drum rush before closing off with a solid slam; “Don’t Need It” chills out and then swings back twice as twisted; “Take It Easy” is half what it says, with a second face breathing fire and glaring dread; “Kingdom Come” underlines its gospel tones with slamming rhythm and taut flair; “Chandelier” hits hard “like the rising sun” on the verses and “takes its time” on the chorus, with a stylish drum break setting up the final blow. The singer croons, shouts, shoots straight, rambles, laughs, and wails; the guitars are punk when they’re not classical and metal when they’re not bluesy; the drums can max out the speed, smooth out the tempo, or kick out the jams.

I’m not so gauche as to go overtly political here, but this stuff actually is sort of relevant to certain of our present situations, so I want to get at least halfway to making a point. I think we should try to focus on a little more on the fact that multiculturalism is not about fairness or noblesse oblige or what the fuck ever and is actually about actual greatness, and is furthermore about fun (they have a non-album song called “Necromancer,” which is so named because it raises the dead). This album doesn’t sound like some boring shit like “equality” or “diversity” or whatever; it sounds fucking awesome. It’s the same thing, though. This is the advantage we have as the people who are on the real right side of things. We can compel adherence to the truth. “You’ll hear me whether you want to or not and like it.” Not that you’re obligated to like this specific music or anything, but if you find yourself put off by things you can’t pin down, you’re doin’ it wrong. Being able to synthesize makes you stronger than simply sticking to one gun.

I don’t want to have to talk about this. It’s kind of insulting. Reducing experience to ideology gets it backwards, but things are already backwards; the only reason we have to talk about anything is because there’s a problem. I don’t know if there was ever a time at which things could have been done the easy way, but it is certainly not that time now. We need both things. “A bullet needs a gun to make a kill.” And we’re not going to get anywhere until we turn this around to aim forwards.

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Good albums of 2016, part 3

Posted by Jason on January 1, 2017

Tancred – Out of the Garden

So I saw this band open for somebody and I honestly almost missed them completely; I only caught the tail end of their set, but they sounded pretty good and I got a good feeling about them (“Pretty Girls” made an immediate impression; it’s a song that’s just weird and silly enough to work). So it’s a good thing I ended up checking them out, because this is a really excellent album. Seriously; I just relistened to it and I was blown away all over again. This was pure luck on my part, but I guess you could take it as kind of a lesson. You have to pay attention and follow up on shit. You can’t just show up, eat your complimentary shrimp cocktail and leave.

Sound-wise this isn’t a revolution or anything, in large part it’s your basic wordy head-case rock band (that’s actually the joke in the first track name), but the songwriting here is extremely killer. It’s constructed out of the basic ingredients of thrashy guitars and monologuey vocal lines, but there are a lot of smart flourishes and invigorating touches – the comedown at the end of “Bed Case,” the superconductive transition between “Hang Me” and “Sell My Head,” the dip before the chorus on “Poise,” the fake ending on “Control Me” – that give it an insistent personality and also make it an exciting, forward-sounding listen. Also on display here is an extreme facility for sharp endings.

It’s an album that takes you on a journey, but it’s one of those journeys where you get lost at every turn. “The dark can take you for a ride. Fair warning.” “Bed Case” is a disorienting intro based on a deep emotional ambiguity, and “Pretty Girls” is definitely not a calm or satisfying ending. It gets dark and introspective pretty frequently (“Not Likely,” “Pens,” “Sell My Head”), but it’s just as quick to lash out (“Rabid like a dog, I could take you out. Don’t test me”); actually, it tends to do both at once. It stomps and storms as often as it shrinks and shivers, and it synthesizes both of those affective styles into one maelstrom. It spins wildly through angst, black humor (“I would kill but a girl’s got poise”), horror, and viciousness, all while being deeply at odds with itself (“It’s crazy how stable I am”), and there’s a disturbing emphasis throughout on casual self-annihilation (“Write my name, cross it out in shame, burn it up, blow away.”).

As the title implies, this album is about living after the fall, but it’s not trying to fix anything or even trying to figure anything out. It’s just about what it’s like to exist in this situation, and the results aren’t pretty. The opener asks itself, “Do I want to save the world, or just cut out its insides?”, and as things go on it becomes pretty clear what the answer is. It’s not depressing in terms of tone, but a lot of the lyrical content is really deeply resigned, while also making frequent use of violent metaphors (“kill” seems to be the singer’s favorite word). Nothing here makes a grab for positivity or even hope, and all that self-annihilation stuff, while not appearing to directly indicate suicidality, takes its toll nonetheless. The songs don’t take the angles you expect them to take, and in not doing so they unearth disturbing emotions as familiar as they are weird (the album art is oriented wrong and it only has a fragment of a person on it). “Bed Case” establishes that it takes place not in between heaven and hell, but in the space where they overlap. “Poise” doesn’t try to make a feminist statement; it just admits that “I would kill to be one of the boys,” and then puts the emphasis on “kill.” “Control Me” inverts the usual positive spin on its subject matter, “Hang Me” is a self-directed witch hunt, and “Pretty Girls” is pretty harsh statement of defeat.

But what all of this actually means is that this is an album of productive irony. If you actually heard someone say, “Kill me just like all your other puppet girls; make me want you,” and you thought they meant it, that would be pretty fucking horrifying, but of course a) if you’re actually saying that, it means you understand what’s going on, and b) even more of course, this is a song, so what it’s actually expressing is the fact that the truth of the situation is being faced and dealt with rather than papered over and ignored. Meaning that this actually is the response to this situation. The gap between the album’s hopeless negativity and its badass rock intensity isn’t a gap; “Pretty Girls” actually is a big rock ending. As dark as this album is, what it has is better than brightness. It has vitality. It’s the farthest thing from a final solution, but, y’know, a lot of the time that’s a good thing. It’s the complete inverse of insisting on one correct politics of response (which is good, because we all know by now how bad that sucks): it’s an insistence on honesty and engagement, no matter how fucked up you have to get in order to do that. “I’m dead into the things you want me to shout”; “I’d feel better in a crypt than up there with you”; “Inside your claws, a million snakes”; “Show me all your teeth.” Maybe none of this is any good, maybe it’s even worse than nothing, but it is where we are right now, and no one is going anywhere until we understand that. “This is how we learn to be happy: the hard way.”

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Good albums of 2016, part 2

Posted by Jason on December 28, 2016

The Kills – Ash & Ice

Descriptors like “mature” or “confident” are classic faint praise, so I’m going to have to come up with something better, because this is actually a great album. The Kills have always stuck to their guns, and that doesn’t change here, but this is the album on which they become more than themselves. One way to make transcendence work is to keep doing your thing so hard that it ends up having no choice but to become something else, to embrace your chains to the point that they stop being chains. This is a Transcendence Album.

The songs tend to open with out-of-context techno beats (on “Let it Drop” this almost amounts to trolling) before the guitars whip them into shape and the neck-breathing vocals draw them close. But this doesn’t turn them all into the same thing; in fact, the songs are wildly diverse to the point that the album almost feels incoherent. It jostles left and right between radically different tones – distant disco on “Hard Habit to Break” gives way to harsh soul on “Bitter Fruit,” and then to a weirdly dazed march on “Days of Why and How.” The second half brings the slowness with the arhythmic blues of “Hum for Your Buzz” and the passionate (negative) simplicity of “That Love,” alternating with the punchy desperation of “Siberian Nights” and the menacingly dense “Impossible Tracks.” And there’s never a big moment that brings things into focus; it builds intensity only to jealously hoard it. There’s nothing inaccessible about it, but it’s inconvenient enough that you have to take it seriously.

But there’s a deeper level on which the album coheres, on which all of its twists and shards are ultimately one thing. It aims less to slash or bludgeon and more to get under the skin, or even to haunt, to get too close for comfort. “Silence is the loudest shot.” For starters, this is an album about the meaning of constraints. It “wants strings attached, unnatural as it feels.” At the same time, it claims to be “easily led,” “by whatever you like,” but its stylistic stubbornness suggests that this is more like a horse being led to water and refusing to drink. Staying where you are, or giving yourself to someone or something else, or holding onto something regardless of whatever else happens are all choices, and every choice is a constraint. “I never took off my chains; they never took my colors.” And there are a lot of different chains in this world: loyalty, compulsion, circumstance, intimacy, fear, and death. “Doing it to Death” is really the opposite of what you would expect – far from being a passionate commitment, it’s practically resigned, the loopy rising-and-falling guitar line evoking the nausea of eternity. “When the waves come, you face them, and you know we can’t stop it now.” But you can also just keep doing it, “night after night after night,” even if “the plans we’re making are the shape of things that never come.”

Maybe you can tell that I don’t actually have this figured out all that well. That’s the thing about an album like this, though. You can keep coming back to it and keep getting turned around in different directions, and you don’t even have to be looking for anything. The gorgeousness of obvious closer “Echo Home” fakes a serene and uplifting ending, because it’s not actually the closer. It’s followed up by the extreme crescendo of “Whirling Eye,” which doesn’t feel like any kind of ending at all. It just keeps building up intensity towards nothing, like the whole thing is just the pressure drop presaging the real storm.

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Good albums of 2016, part 1

Posted by Jason on December 27, 2016

Ramonda Hammer – Whatever That Means

This band really did something for me this year, although I don’t have a particularly good idea of what that something actually is. I saw them the first time with zero expectations, and their music struck me in a way that doesn’t normally happen. They’re all amazing performers, as skilled as they are energetic and committed, but there’s also something more, behind the technical aspects. I guess it’s what you’d normally call “heart,” but I usually try to be a little more precise than that.

Straight guitar lines and consistently anguished vocals give the songs a basic angst-ballad backbone, but there’s quite a lot going on on top of that, fleshing them out in many directions at once. Lofty and spacious lead guitar parts add both precision and intensity, expansive drumming pushes outward as well as forward, and the bass jolts up and down to stitch everything together. It’s all in the service of broad song structures that reach out as far as they can while still holding solid (the closer is at least three different songs fused together). In a sense, there’s nothing notable about any of this, it’s what is conventionally referred to as a “rock band,” but that concept is a real concept that exists for a reason. It’s four different people doing different things that, through physical and emotional intelligence, resolve themselves into one thing that could not have been created in any other way. I think now is a good time to remember how this works and why it matters.

And while the sound is somewhat complicated, not so much leading you down a path as overwhelming and then gradually devouring you, underlying it all is an extreme simplicity. “Angsty” doesn’t really do the vocals justice; the singer pretty much always sounds like she’s in between crying jags. Opening the album with the words “It’s hard to explain myself,” the lyrics are often very basic sentiments, drawn out and awkwardly phrased (“I make sounds and I make them sound good, but they might not be the thing”). “If, Then” moves slowly, emphasizing the indirectness of its title, but this is where it ends up:

If you’re hearing this song, then I’m something

If you’re singing along, then it’s something

If you’re crying like I am I guess that’s something

I’m not the only one who feels like nothing

Except that then the album is also conflicted on this point. “Goddamn Idiot” concedes that “these are just my thoughts; they’re not always right, but they’re always loud,” “See” specifically accuses itself of a lack of depth, and then “Out of Style” is an extended metaphor. The result is something that’s completely straightforward, while also being, in the same sense, hopelessly tangled. It’s all loud and grungy and anxious, but it’s also got a real dramatic sweep to it – not in any kind of epic sense, just in the sense that it’s the inherent drama of being a person. “Just know that I’m trying, I promise.”

None of this is actually what I’m trying to figure out, though. Analysis is all fun and games until you realize you have no idea where you’re going with it; you can explain everything right up until you get to the part that matters. But for now I’ve got about a third of an idea. “Chaotic” has been popping into my head a lot. The line is “if it’s not chaotic, it’s not real,” which first of all is literally true. The universe is just a big pile of objects; “order” is something that we impose on top of it, while the things themselves remain as they are, impervious to our attempts to understand them. Reality always slithers out from under our concepts. Accordingly, within the song, the line is a little difficult to decode – it’s drawn out and dramatized such that the cadence and the meter are both misleading, and it’s followed up by a wordless version of the same howled phrase. So when the song comes into my head it’s not as an idea or even in response to anything in particular. It’s just a sound, a raw sensation that’s inside of me. It’s a new part of you that’s going to be with you going forward. Even if you don’t know what it means.