THIS WEEK BLOGPOST;

Things of note I’ve done this week;

MUSIC;

Last Friday: Having previously not had a chance to hear any of her music, decide to watch Joanna Newsom play on that despicable Jools Holland programme. With a belly full of pizza and red wine, after half an hour or so of MOR soul and NME-band slop, myself and Pete were both rather taken aback by Joanna’s startlingly unusual Lisa Simpson-esque voice and almost malevolently odd harp playing. Hopefully viewers across the country were too. On a personal level, I’m not really sure whether or not I even liked her song or style of performance that much, but regardless, there’s something fairly primal and unique going on there and further investigations are a certainty.

One of the records I’ve been rocking the most this week has been ‘Dopethrone’ by Electric Wizard, which I inexplicably stumbled across in Leicester library. It is some seriously nasty, heavy shit. It’s is the kind of album I’m probably never gonna lend to anyone, never put anything from it on a mixtape etc. – the audience for this stuff is pretty specialist. To the majority of people, even the vast majority of music fans, it would undoubtedly be received as a hideous, monotonous, ugly dirge with no redeeming social value whatsoever. But to the select few who share my weird cultish metal fetishes, it.. is… SUPERB.
Utterly, utterly vile, misanthropic, creepingly slow stoner-sludge doom, obscenely overdriven, massively downtuned, caveman riffs grinding on for ten minutes at a time. ‘Dopethrone’ sounds like it was recorded at horrific volume on a boombox in the darkened basement of an abandoned church… feedback on EVERYTHING, bass crackling around the edges as it beats your puny speakers into submission. This is the sound of three wild-eyed West Country stoners raised on a diet of Sabbath, gore movies and HP Lovecraft dredging up the darkest depths of mindless violence and cosmic terror they can find within their blackened souls. The vocals are amazing – lyrical fantasies compiled from a lifetime of frustration and resentment channelled through the narratives of comic books, weird tales and hammer horror, howled seemingly through a megaphone by a man undergoing the worst torments of the Spanish Inquisition, intermittently rising and fading through the brainfucking wall of sludge.
I absolutely love it. The album’s thanks list gives a shout out to “HPL, REH, CAS, WHH”, and if those initials mean anything to you then I guarantee you will dig this. Total fucking doom classic, dude. Perfect music for the current grim times.

Also on a generally nasty tip, I’ve finally got round to checking out The Icarus Line’s ‘Penance Soirée’. It’s… hmm, well I’m in two minds about it to be honest.
It’s not as good as ‘Mono’, let’s make that clear from the outset. When they sacked their rhythm section, I’m afraid the band sacked a big portion of their initial power, and the first album’s gloriously jarring post-hardcore structures and Jesus Lizard-style rampaging, unpredictable foundations have mostly been ditched in favour of a rather uninspired load of lumbering, straightforward LA drug-rock. Similarly, Joe Cadethingy’s viciously fucked hardcore shrieking has disappeared, giving way to an unconvincing “I’m a jaded badass and I do lots of drugs” Iggy Pop impression which gets pretty tedious after a while, bordering onto almost Marilyn Manson-like ridiculousness, an impression lot helped by the tendency of the (often quite good) lyrics to slip a bit far towards “throw as many drug references as we can think of in a hat and see if any of them rhyme” banality in places.
The album’s not without it’s heavy strong points to counteract these disappointments though. The guitars, courtesy of mainman Aaron North, really hit the spot – they’ve clearly spent a long time with a stack of underground-classic albums going “right, let’s make this bit sound like THAT”, so spikey cyber-metal riffola rubs shoulders with Jesus & Mary Chain feedback whiteout, shredding Thurston Moore string abuse, Spacemen 3 black hole freakouts and evil mutant blues ala Penthouse. And it’s this heap of constantly shifting, lovingly layered noise that really keeps this record’s shit together and provides it’s strongest link with the primal violence of ‘Mono’. Also, this stuff just has a basically great atmosphere, dripping with the aesthetic of the cold and twisted LA damaged-glamour-punk self-destructive frenzied world that the Icarus Line would like us to believe they live in – drunken girlfriends passed out in bathtubs, bodily fluids splattering the walls of luxury apartments, taking heroin and forgetting how to wash your hair, non-existent rock clubs where every surface is black and shiny and the clientele don’t eat and carry knifes – this is the territory they’re wading through here. If you were gonna do some kind of Gregg Araki style transgressive goth-slacker-apocalypse movie, and you were doing a scene set in a rock club, The Icarus Line would HAVE to be your soundtrack of choice. No question. As contrived and irresponsibly romanticised as Motley Crue it all may be, but when it’s cannibalising from the spirit of Black Flag and the Stooges and played by… who was it who coined the phrase “the kind of young men who look like they want to stab their mothers”?.. it’s pretty damn irresistible. If you can ignore the obvious flaws and crank the volume up enough, this is an unbeatable “let’s get fucked up” album.

So nothing for you but angry man noise in this week’s blog update I’m afraid, but, aah, just thinking about this kinda stuff helps me numb the pain of the unspeakable and unrelentingly horrid FM commercial radio banality thrust upon me all day at work. Sorry pop kids, but that castrated and stifling offspring of popular music traditions is just pure slop, and as a result the good pop is gonna be getting short shift from me whilst I’m still working at this dump. Don’t worry, hang on in there, everything’s ok, just close your eyes and think of detuning and distortion pedals…

FILMS;

I’ve watched quite a few films of interest this week, but annoyingly I’m going to compile my thoughts on them later for my hopefully-soon-to-be regular film-watching journal thingy. I bet you can’t wait.

COMICS;

I’ve been reading a copy of that big American Splendour anthology released to cash in on the film. It’s really good stuff too – better than I expected. Harvey Pekar passes the test of a genuinely great writer, in that he takes this stuff which is initially like, well, that just sounds incredibly dull, who the hell cares, and makes it so lively and engaging and fascinatingly detailed that you can’t stop reading. What’s painful however is the extent to which Harvey’s life as presented in these comics IS A NIGHTMARE VISION OF OWN FUTURE. Seriously, the similarities are uncanny. He is I and I am he and we are all together.

DREAMS;

I dreamt on Wednesday night that I auditioned to join a Japanese girl-punk band, but didn’t get in. Their manager was this bloke who looked a bit like Billy Bragg, and he just wasn’t into what I was doing. I don’t know if there’s a message in that, other than perhaps a really stupid one (damn you Billy Bragg!), but it was an interesting dream.

Last night I dreamt that I went to a firework display to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower. All but the most daring of amateur psychologists had better steer well clear of that one I think.

OTHER STUFF;

I wish, I wish, I wish I was at home in the countryside and didn’t have to go to work. It’s amazing how you end up taking such paradise for granted, and once you’ve lost it… a leisurely breakfast, a wander around Tenby’s boat sheds and a slice of almond sponge is all I crave.

Oh well, back to the doom metal.

Until the next time, Vinnum Sabbathi!

Ben