Therion – Lepaca Kliffoth (1995)

If Symphony Masses was a step in the direction for normalcy for Therion, this album is a 30 minute car drive towards that location, followed up by an acid trip. You can hear the seams of traditional heavy metal, with tinges of groove and thrash, but the production, riffs, and instrumentation give this a very strange atmosphere that I don’t think the band ever tried to replicate. If the albums before this were the darkness, and everything written after this is daylight, then this is the dawn. Hung over and pissed off, the band tries to articulate something they can’t quite comprehend by mixing in new forms of communication with the old.

Considering that this album ushers in latter day Therion’s favorite musical elements, like symphonic elements in meaningful quantities, opera singers,  etc. while retaining tinges of the band’s death metal past, the atmosphere on display here could be best described as ‘gothic’ in more than one way. It smacks of effort to recall the glories of the past in a more accessible form. Besides, it has “The Beauty in Black”, which is the band’s first real effort at writing a ballad. Check out the cover art of that one, and tell me you don’t want to write cliched love poetry with references to suicide.

At times, this actually sounds more like a gussied up, symphonic version of ’90s Pantera than anything. It never goes into “ARE YOU TALKING TO ME” territory or 3 note riffs, but everything is simplified and slowed down compared to previous works. The opening track, “The Wings of the Hydra”, is a perfect example of this. The opening riff is stripped down as hell; eventually a violin keyboard patch is brought in over it. The rest the riffs gallop along in the groove-thrash mold, while all these new aesthetic elements dance over them. More simplistic grooving shows up on tracks like “Melez”, “Let the New Day Begin”, and “The Veil of Golden Spheres”.

This album’s songwriting is middle-loaded – there’s a string of awesomeness that begins with “Riders of Theli” and ends with the cover of Celtic Frost’s “Sorrows of the Moon”. The four songs in said bracket seem to merge the old and new aspects of the songwriting most effectively – “Black”, in particular is a miniature epic with the most coherent riffing and transitions on the album. In general, the songs are very theatrical and occasionally cheesy. It’s partially the aesthetics – some parts of the songs (like the middle of “Evocation of Vovin”) would still sound fairly silly if, instead of keyboard patches, they had real instruments. In short, it means that the major weakness of this album is that it suffers from the same attempted mix of softness and pseudo-heaviness that Dream Theater’s Awakedid, if not to the same extent. If this album was rearranged using the musical language of Beyond Sanctorum, Lemuria, or some other non-transitional album, it might improve significantly. Anyways, it’s still historically interesting. I don’t know how much this album sold compared to other albums by the band, but this and Theli were definitely very influential on various symphonic/gothic metal bands.

Mudhoney – Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (1991)

In the deep past, I wrote upon the subject of alternative rock, and how similar it was to the classic rock that preceded it. In the process, implied that I enjoyed the works of the band Mudhoney. That was intentional.

Since the amount of grunge rock I’ve listened to is very minimal (mainly because I consider Alice in Chains to be a bona fide heavy metal band), I can easily say that this is the best of the genre that I’ve been exposed to. It’s pretty relaxed, smoothed out, slappy music, and I get the feeling that drugs were involved in its creation. Mudhoney, at their core, play somewhat lo-fi punk rock with a heavy blues influence. Nothing here is technical or flashy. There’s a bit of dissonance in the solos, and lead vocalist Mark Arm occasionally shouts on occasion, in addition to singing and yelping his way through the songs.

Why I like it? I’m not sure. Mostly, it’s because it’s A. A collection of fairly simplistic songs (albeit not entirely formulaic) that don’t try to pretend they’re anything more than good times, and B. It doesn’t use its’ accessible song structures and aesthetics to pander to the mainstream. In this respect, Mudhoney fills a relatively neglected niche in my listening rotation – that of non-contemplative relaxation. Like Devin Townsend, I end up listening mainly for the emotions, but I can appreciate the band on a musical level as well. Obviously, this leads to some occasional lyrical dissonance – take the song “Broken Hands”, the lyrics of which are what you’d expect it to be about. Again, listening to death metal for a few years has irrevocably altered my standards for what “dark” music would sound like, but outside the wailing vocals and minor key chord progressions, this isn’t very morose. In fact, its lyrics could probably be swapped out for a variety of topics, and unknowing listeners would be none the wiser. Another song, “Good Enough”, veers in the opposite direction; long story short, there’s more to mood than tonality.

Long story short; this album is more than the sum of its parts. Mudhoney isn’t very well known by the general public, but its members were also involved in the even more pioneering grunge act, Green River. Before Nirvana went all power-pop on Nevermind, Mudhoney/Green River was probably many a person’s introduction to the genre, and even now, they’re probably a frequent stepping stone into the Seattle scene.

I’m out of my league here. Has anyone ever done a fusion of grunge rock and death metal? That would probably incite me to further explore the genre if it was done right. Then again, it might not.

Blut Aus Nord – Memoria Vetusta I (1996)

Prior to being an avant-garde black metal band, Blut Aus Nord was a fairly typical black metal band – Sorcier Des Glaces level typical, enamored with the Norwegian scene and employing the same Mayhem/Burzum/Immortal/etc. cocktail that so many bands before them and after them mixed. On the other hand, BAN had the gift of songwriting that characterizes so many of the works I like. This album employs basically the exact strategy that Sacramentum used on their debut, to the point that I can summarize the differences between this album and Far Away From The Sun with a short list:

1. Fathers of the Icy Age has more prominent and complex basslines. Sacramentum didn’t shy away from bassing it up, but their debut is pretty much carried by guitar counterpoint.
2. Fathers of the Icy Age contains a greater variety of vocals, due to the addition of clean chanting,  which is sometimes harmonized. The harsh vocals have less ‘body’ to them, and the entire vocal track is softer relative to that on Far Away From The Sun.
3. Far Away From The Sun has a much cleaner production. While everything is reasonably well mixed on Memoria Vetusta, the production tends more towards the ‘necro’ style associated with Norwegian black metal, and in general goes for a more ambient ‘wall of sound’ approach.
4. Far Away From The Sun‘s songs are generally faster than that of this album, in terms of pure BPM, and also riff/drumming changes. It has more blastbeats, as well. However, it also changes its tempos up within songs more than this album, which does it fairly infrequently. Even this album’s predecessor, Ultima Thulee, was more varied in terms of tempos.

Note how these are almost always aesthetic differences. Both of these albums rely heavily on their melodic/harmonic prowess to retain listener interest, but Blut Aus Nord’s second album is basically the atmospheric counterpart of its Swedish sibling.

Anyways, the compositional similarities render this one of my favorites along with Far Away From The Sun, although that album still edges it out in riff writing and song structure. The amount of counterpoint at any given time is generally lower, as many of the riffs are monophonic, with harmonic reinforcement. The occasional keyboards and clean vocals are more likely to perform something that doesn’t quite match the guitars and bass. Percussion is provided by a drum machine, but the unknown W.D. Feld writes a reasonably large amount of mid-paced patterns. Variety is not as high as it was on the recently discussed Here in After by Immolation, but since the drums are relatively subdued and ambient compared to that album, that’s not really a problem.

Overall, how much you’ll enjoy this album depends on how much you like the melodic sorts of black metal. This is a very ‘predictable’ release, in that it conforms to a style that was well defined by 1996, uses fairly simple song structures, and isn’t given to variety. On the other hand, it does what it aims for very well. Vindsval, after writing this, probably felt that continuing to write in this style would lead to artistic stagnation, hence the transformation of BAN into a horrific, apocalyptic industrial beast that probably listens to more Immolation than is healthy. Opinions on it are divisive. It seems like the sort of music I’d like, but I’d actually have to give The Work Which Transforms God or whatever a spin to actually make that decision.

The Return of The Primary Writing Class – Final Paper

Several months ago, I showed you guys the short essay I wrote on blogging for my primary writing requirement class way back in my freshman year. Given some time, I’ve decided that my final paper, in which I discussed the value of video games in an educational context (mainly using the MMO Atlantica Online as a source of examples). It was written under time pressure, but it seems relatively coherent in retrospect, although the seams of heavy revision show (in the few days before I published it, I rewrote several pages of it). Anyways, you might find it interesting, so check it out (and the sources I cite, if you have access to them) if you’re into video games and justifying things.

 

“Why Video Games Have Use In A School Context”

 

As for Atlantica Online? It was fun in late 2009/early 2010, but I lost interest around level 95 (out of 130) or so, which incidentally is when the game starts getting much grindier than before. Nothing against the developers, although I’m not really seeing myself being able to get back into it.

Immolation (1996) – Here In After

In many ways, Immolation’s second album is particularly unusual. It walks very thin line between being very accessible and easy to pick up, and being very uninviting and difficult to comprehend. This may be its greatest strength. Sure, the riffs are dissonant, rhythmically complex, and arranged in complicated, ‘narrative’ song structures, but they’re also catchy and hooky as hell. The album makes significant use of pinch harmonics in its riffs, contributing to its unique aesthetic. It has a very deep, bassy production, but unlike, for instance, Suffocation’s debut (Effigy of the Forgotten), guitar tone is very strong, making each specific note easy to pick out. Ross Dolan leans towards the deep end of death growls, but his enunciation is excellent to the point where I can easily make out what he’s saying when I pay attention to the lyrics. Admittedly, my love of and acclimation to dissonant music (even before I got into extreme metal) may be skewing my perspective, but this is definitely a lot easier to get into than albums of similar complexity and ambition, like Obscura or Pierced From Within.

Every song here has its own unique identity despite the constant aesthetic. Immolation takes various sorts of riffs – dissonant blasting phrases, more spacious hook riffs, pinch harmonics, and builds a variety of songs from sets of them. Due to the sheer variety of drumming on this album, each riff is inseparable from the drum pattern underlying it. How many death metal albums can say that? Here in After, in short, smacks of massive effort and craft – the band took 5 years to write and record it.

Take, for instance, the second track, “Burn with Jesus”. A popular sentiment, I suppose, but the first 30 seconds or so (up until vocals come in) are best described as “infernal”, and the dissonance that the two riffs introduced here showcase is very open, unresolved. The riffs in the refrain (0:48-1:12) are also dissonant, but the melodies they trace out are provide some resolution. Again, one should note how the drumming enhances them – within this minute you can hear a rise and fall of intensity, moving from drum hits as accents, to various permutations of blastbeats, and back to drumming as accentuation. There’s a lot of circular writing going on here, but Immolation doesn’t spend the entire song trapped in one circle – they move between them. The second set of riffs, coming after the introductory material, are slower and again showcase the band circling through dynamics and dissonance induced tension, before transitioning back to the introductory material, and finishing with a coda, encasing everything in a larger circle. It’s basically the same form of songwriting that you see in classical music, with introductory themes, development in the middle, recapitulation/expansion of the theme at the end, and new material as a coda. Sections that would seem unrelated at first glance are hereby linked together.

Other songs showcase this same circular/narrative approach. The title track and “I Feel Nothing” contain the greatest degree of melody and consonance on the album. “Nailed to Gold” and “Away from God” give us a great deal of blasting, and “Christ’s Cage” is a lengthy, mostly down-tempo conclusion to the album. Outside of lyrical content, inter-song connections are fairly limited – I think there’s a general slowing down of tempo throughout the album, and the most accessible, ‘normal’ sounding songs are in the middle, but since this isn’t a strict concept album, such is acceptable. Anyways, due to its high degree of musical complexity, this album is definitely worthy of further study. Of course, if you just want to rock out to some death metal, there’s plenty of that to be found here. If you didn’t, you’d probably be at the local concert hall now instead of reading this blogpost.

Of Immolation’s albums, I have only listened to this one and Close to A World Below. The latter has better production, and slightly less dissonance in favor of melodic songwriting, although the songwriting is similar. It’s also the band’s best known and loved album. Coincidence?