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 21: Deceased – Up The Tombstones!!! Live 2000

This album marks three weeks of the project done, with 49 more weeks to go. Really putting a dent in it, now.

Today’s music is a live release by Deceased, a band I had never heard of. They’ve been at it since 1984, and they were the first band signed to the now-legendary Relapse Records. They are death metal to a T, although by the time this album came out their sound had developed into something blacker and more thrash-propelled. The lyrics are about the living dead, the Devil’s Triangle, people in mental institutions, and Edgar Allen Poe.

This is a live album, and a poor mix at that — guitars and vocals sound good, but the drums are somewhere in the back of the soundstage, barely audible. It makes the music kind of disorienting, since the drums are the motor for music like this and are responsible for solidifying and propelling it. During long solo passages, once the guitars start bleeding together, the drums almost disappear completely and the music becomes a morass of sounds that seem to imply underpinnings but fail to portray them. This makes it hard to actually listen to the album since it doesn’t feel like it’s actually happening.

With the mix being as atrocious as it is, this album can only really appeal to people who already know the songs and can fill in the details in their minds.

Okay, five minutes later, I just listened to a few of the originals from the tracks that they play on this album. I don’t actually recognize them as being the same songs. So that theory’s probably terrible. But the more I listen to “Robotic Village“, the more I get this nagging feeling that there’s a song I could like in here somewhere, if only I could hear it. I guess you had to be there.

(Side note: the show at which that footage was taken is either the saddest thing I’ve ever seen — a band of dedicated metalheads whose 25-year career has resulted in them playing in what looks like a church basement for a crowd of maybe a dozen — or the most uplifting — a band of dedicated metalheads who refuse to yield their love of metal to adapt to a changing musical climate, and instead hit the road year after year, playing to a fanbase that, though it dwindles, only grows more intense in its adoration. You choose.)

I’ve said that one of the things that struck me recently was that I was taking music for granted. I’m beginning to realize that the real tragedy of this was that I was really taking the musicians for granted. I realized that all the bands who have put out one or two good or great albums have put out a bunch of others that, while being good, weren’t the thing I liked. And because I have allowed my tastes to become so fickle, it has resulted in me thoughtlessly sweeping a lot of bands under the rug as I go along. And as a music lover, that makes me genuinely sad. (See The Walkmen: I would like to be buried with You & Me, but when they played for me live and only played two songs from it, choosing instead to focus on the back catalog that people fell for them with, my first response was to get mad.)

That’s what I do like about this album, though. This is a record in the literal sense. This is a snapshot of a beloved band playing for their true believers. It summarizes the scope of a band’s early career into something that will pull you along into their future. Saddest thing? That was a trick question, before. That video is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

“This show meant a lot to us, man. That’s fifteen fuckin’ years with this band. We got fifteen more comin’ for ya. No techno remixes, no dance club remixes… just fuckin’ sick thraaaaaaash. Fuck this place up!”

I can’t predict how I’ll feel about all of this in a month. I can’t predict whether this project will teach me anything. I can’t guess whether being forced to listen to so much music I wouldn’t ordinarily select will refine my taste, dilute my prejudices, expand my horizons, and convince me to like all sorts of things I wouldn’t have, or whether it will just make me freak out once this is all over and disappear into a Dirty Projectors record, never to be heard from again. We’ll see.

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.