Day 30: Shipwreck A.D. – Abyss

I’m beginning to distrust my random number generator. It seems to land on hardcore for days in a row, sometimes.

Back on the first day, I remarked about how Belleruche sounded like a pleasantly convincing imitation of something else I really liked. And since I didn’t have the option of just listening to that thing I liked instead, I found that likeness charming rather than tedious. There’s a similar thing going on here.

I’m of the opinion that Mastodon’s Leviathan is pretty much unbeatable as far as heavy metal goes. There’s an album that just oozes licks, where every song is memorable; an album that just by its recollection makes me hum guitar parts out loud and headbang when I’m alone. It could be the only metal album I ever hear for the rest of my life and I can’t imagine tiring of it. The best thing I can say for it is that it’s so richly melodic and catchy, so full of music, that it contains its own mood. It doesn’t require anger, or frustration, or any such glum emotion to tap into, because it is a self-contained tale.

This would be a hard thing to imitate. I haven’t seen many people try. I don’t feel that Shipwreck A.D. were necessarily trying to draw from it, but the suspicion nags at me anyway. It’s compelling  that the band name, the album title, and several of the song titles (“Squall”, “Beached”) are vaguely nautical, but when the music starts the similarities fade away.

The album opens with “Squall“, an aptly titled song, which doesn’t fuck around. From the get-go the band’s twin-guitar riffage comes heavy, angry things are screamed, and the bass drum fires off a burst of machine-gun fire. Heads are banged. Unrelentingly they press on, taking a breather with the opening of “Samur“, peaking with a breakdown in which sustained power chords seethe over a brutal flurry of drums. On to its conclusion, they hammer away relentlessly. Rhythmically restless, the songs charge, retreat, and trample, often all at once. They never let the mood settle until “Ascent“, which (on the album) opens with howling winds and a forlorn guitar.

If I have one complaint about the album, it’s that it lacks riffs. The guitarists throw out some awesome parts, really good-sounding parts that interweave and pull against each other, but the band doesn’t play behind them. In the best riffs the whole band moves in formation, like Blue Angels, but most of the riffs on Abyss find the guitarists flourishing against the work of the rhythm section rather than because of it. But despite a lack of earworms, the album is enjoyable throughout, peaking (appropriately) with Zenith, which has several of the moments I describe — moments where the unified assault leaves you gasping, and later humming.

It’s no wonder ‘miasma’ is a popular word in metal. Meaning “an influence or atmosphere that tends to deplete or corrupt”, it describes perfectly what bands like Shipwreck A.D. do. From the start of the album through to its conclusion they forge a current of malevolence, a bitter channel of spite that burbles like a hot spring from a hillside, tainting the soil around it with alkaloid blood and searing the lips of any creature that dares to dip try a sip. Such is this album: a half hour of sheer spite set to rhythm, of frustration given a cadence. Abyss unspools a tale for you, a tale of mood perhaps rather than the Moby Dick-derived narrative of Leviathan, but one more general: one of a man adrift at sea, dying of thirst, lost in waters that cannot quench him.

Day 29: Cro-Mags – Before The Quarrel

As with most of the hardcore I’ve reviewed so far (a coworker gave me a pretty broad swath of it) I had never heard this before. I’d heard people reference the band, and I had always assumed from the context they were mentioned in that it was stoner metal or something silly like that. Unaware of the history lesson I’d be getting today, I settled in.

The Cro-Mags’ first LP, The Age of Quarrel, was apparently one of the albums that defined what would go on to become New York Hardcore when it was released back in 1986. The band took punk and made it bigger, heavier, and infused enough metal into it to give it a certain crossover appeal (and went on, several albums later, to become more of a speed thrash band). In 2000 they released Before The Quarrel, which is actually the demo recording of The Age of Quarrel. It sounds raw and urgent, practiced and determined. The best way I can describe it is it sounds like something that was happening, and had been for some time, and people still weren’t wise to it, but someone stumbled into it and happened to have a tape recorder.

The difference between the original album and this demo version is pretty startling. Compare the original version of “By Myself” and the demo re-release. The original barely sounds heavy. The drums echo a Winger track, and the vocals are pinched and weak. The demo version is bigger, the sound messy. The vocals are inaudible in some tonal ranges. And this is why it works. It’s deliciously ragged, the guitars sounding underrepresented at times and flailing wildly in the foreground in the occasional drunken solos. The rhythm section chugs, even though the bass is recorded terribly and you can’t really make out half of the drum set. That’s why this recording is so good.

Take, for example, the re-release version of “Malfunction“. I actually liked this song so much that I came back to it a few times. The vocals sell it for me. He sounds outside the music somehow, like he’s talking over it. His voice is almost atonal, but it’s not like No Warning’s droning sound — he emotes with it, whipping it around threateningly. The best example of what I like about it, and the part that I kept coming back to, is around 1:10. Something about his voice works really well there for me. It sounds angry, but composed. It’s a moment of seething calm in a mid-tempo tantrum of a song. And on the original release, the last verse (around 1:55) doesn’t have nearly as much force. He seems to be trying to be use his voice in a totally different way, and to my ears it rings false.

I find it interesting that to me, the original album sounds really mistreated, like they tried to shine shoes with the wrong color polish. It sounds dated and corny. It’s almost hard to take it seriously. The re-release sounds familiar. It stirs memories of all the musicians I grew up listening to that probably thought The Age of Quarrel was the shit at some point. While those who came up with the original will probably always remember it fondly at least in a historical sense, I, being unaware of most of the scene’s evolution, am more appreciative of this re-release because it sounds more authentic somehow — like the studio sound of the original just can’t represent this sound genuinely.

So though it’s not my bag at all, this album did still transport me to a scene I can only borrow nostalgia for, a scene that I can’t imagine as anything but sounding like this particular recording. And for that, it was entertaining.

Day 17: Terror – Keepers of the Faith

There’s straightforward, and then there’s Terror. Their essence as a band is summed up aptly by the album’s cover, which is a picture of the back of the shirt that the band members and fans wear. This is music that needs no introduction or explanation: if it’s something you would be interested in, you would have found it by now.

This is music that plays like a secret handshake. Much like the second week’s Guns Up!, this is raw hardcore, the spiritual successor to thrash metal.

“We never asked you for much/But still you threw us all away/Test me, judge me, I’ll laugh in your face/I learned long ago not to give a fuck what you say.”

Bitter music for bitter people. In a time where metal has found its way into what passes for the mainstream and begun bleeding into other genres, becoming something like bacon — an ingredient you can sprinkle into just about anything — Terror takes pride in straying very little from the formula that made their scene what it was in the first place. In the process, they achieve the goal they set out to accomplish in the album’s eponymous thesis: a circling of wagons, crossing of arms. Yes, in the midst of a scene that has been eaten alive by popular music, their greatest claim to fame is adamantly dismissing anything like innovation. Like a restaurant that offers only one or two things on the menu but focuses obsessively on making those few things as perfect as possible, Terror keeps their sonic palette traditional. To some craving more exotic food it may seem boring and pointless; but to those with the taste for it, having it presented so purely and so raw, so undiluted by foolish attempts at improving on a perfect formula, the ingredients come together into something greater than the sum of their parts.

If you find yourself listening to metal and pining for the old days of thrash, yet want a band that you can see perform without paying $120 for Metallica reunion tour tickets, this is the album for you. And if Hardcore saved your life, you’re probably listening to this already.

Day 9: Guns Up! – Outlive

I always found hardcore kind of a confusing taxon. See, I got into it way, way late, when it had become mostly about people getting together in camo shorts and kung-fu fighting during breakdowns in songs. I didn’t realize it had ever been anything but. So when people talked about liking hardcore and then went on to say they liked bands like Black Flag, I got a bit confused. Now I understand a bit better that there is windmill-punching hardcore and then there is hardcore punk.

Guns Up! falls into the latter category. It’s pretty straightforward: medium-to-upbeat tempos, very crispy guitars, and a vocalist with an impressively controlled scream. By the way, it’s nice to see, from looking at that video, that kids at shows these days don’t even wait for breakdowns to start hardcore dancing.

This really exemplifies why I find music criticism such a frustrating idea. I’ve long been interested in it and wanted to write it, but I sometimes have no idea how to approach it. See, an album like this, it’s hard for me to review objectively. For my purposes, as an album in my life, I would give it a very low score. I would almost never want to hear this unless I was using my fists to defend a woman from an attacker or outrunning an angry dog.

But you can’t write reviews about how you don’t get it. That would be terrible. I’m only getting away with it because of the context of this project. To be a critic, you need to create some kind of context. You need to be able to compare this in some way to the other hardcore that’s come out in the last decade and judge how it compares. If this had been the first hardcore album ever, it would be incredible and revolutionary. It would be purely unique. But it’s not. It’s another entry in a crowded genre, and its merits and detriments need to assessed as such.

Here’s what I think is meritorious: their songwriting is sharp and concise. The songs bound out of the gate and into rollicking verse/chorus/verse, smashing full-bodily against you, occasionally slowing down to run you through their power-chord meat grinder. They don’t dawdle; they pummel your eardrums. Their sound is tight and well-produced, with instruments that duel between the left and right channels in your headphones. It’s exciting music, and it could definitely get me all brutal and sweaty if I were at a show.

I say their songwriting is concise, and that’s definitely a back-handed compliment. The reason that’s a plus is because, despite the fact that it’s fun in a kicking-a-soccer-ball-around kind of way, the music is repetitive. Thankfully the songs average 2 minutes long (the album is 11 tracks at 22:35 length) so the limited scope of their musical ideas never makes itself too obvious. If the songs were 4 minutes long I might have hated this album; as it is, each song is over before it gets too wearisome, like getting raped by a premature ejaculator.

I suppose if I were a real music critic, I would be much better versed in every genre, or failing that, would do a lot more in-depth research into the context of the album. I would be able to tell you that Guns Up! sounds like Gristlechop crossed with Spiked Collar Crew but with less Tallahassee hardcore and more Rhode Island crunchcore, or some other shit. I’d sketch out a nice word portrait of what the music sounds like, and since you’d know reference A and reference B, you’d independently figure out whether it was close to things you already know you like, and decide from there whether you wanted to give it a shot.. What I actually think about the music would have very little to do with it. The rating, between 1-10, would indicate not much more than my “dude, you should check this out” meter.

Unfortunately I’m not a music critic, so all I can tell you is this: this is a perfectly good album for some people. I’m not one of them.