A long-standing – if rarely applied – rule of my record shopping exploits is that any record featuring a picture of some Space Marines or other Warhammer type fantasy battle characters on the front will be automatically purchased. (Yeah, I know, keep me away from those Bolt Thrower reissues…)

In part, this is a childhood nostalgia thing (just leave it, please), but at same time I have faith that any heavy music (and it WILL be heavy music, let’s face it) that seeks to evoke the spirit of… this sort of thing… is liable to be pretty cool. (Yeah, those Bolt Thrower reissues.)

As such, the beautiful rendering of some copyright-skirting DEFINITELY NOT Chaos Marines on the front of this 2012 release from Swedish/Hungarian band Megatomb (you’ll need one of those after a Megadeth, presumably..?) made it a no-brainer.

With only six song titles listed, I was hoping Megatomb might be a doom band, but no dice. Turns out this is actually a 45rpm 12” EP kind of deal. Bah!

In the great crap-shoot of contemporary metal sub-genres, I’d probably peg these guys as blackened thrash, with touch of death on the side. Which I suppose makes them yet another nice example of the boundary-blurring “bit of everything” / “it’s just METAL, FFS” approach that has become increasingly widespread amongst metal bands in recent years, and that, from my POV at least, seems like a very positive development vis-a-vis making the genre more fun and accessible to outsiders.

Specifically, things here lean toward entry level teen thrash riffs abetted by down-tuned/compressed DM low-end, drums that alternate between aspirant blast-beats and leaden, ‘ominous’ breakdowns, and, most prominently, BM style “vokills” executed in that “sneering troll-vampire ranting in his slime cave beneath the ice” type manner that can’t help but sound at least a little bit ridiculous when – as here – it is combined with music anything less than monumentally intense and terrifying.

If Megatomb’s name and artwork betrays the band’s almost heroic disinterest in innovation, a quick scan of their lyrics sheet seals the deal, confirming that the interests of “Kobra” (vokills), “Skull” (guitar), “Kommando” (bass & vokills) and “Fist” (drums) lie entirely in offering a comforting, paint-by-numbers reiteration of extreme metal’s founding aesthetic principles. (Song titles: ‘Dealing With The Cross’, ‘Forbidden Altar’, ‘Nuclear Violence’.) Drop the needle on side A and you'll even hear a “bring out yr dead” type atmospheric intro with half-speed triad riffs and a big, tolling bell; cozy as a teapot on a doily, so far as this genre’s concerned.

Vocals (sorry, voKILLS) are far too dominant in the mix for my taste, but the guitar sound is still suitably thick n’ gnarled, with the bass in particular sounding in-the-red filthy during the chord riffing segments (which certainly puts a nix on the ‘80s nostalgia angle). In fact, the whole thing benefits from a great, raw, black-paint-peeling-from-rehearsal-room-walls kind of sound, which blends in well with the kind of four-beers-in, punk-spirited mid-fi attack that I tend to like from my thrash/death/black/whatever.

The main problem here is probably the drumming, which sounds uncertainly executed (by metal standards), and often gets a bit lost in the mix, preventing the band from ever really hitting a solid groove and leaving us kinda floundering where we should be headbanging. Nonetheless though, this is jolly good, spirited stuff and it gets better as it goes along. If for some unaccountable reason you’re forced to choose in fact, side B is definitely the one to go for here.

The way that the pummelling bass drum intro on ‘Dealing With the Cross’ gradually speeds up is awesome – in fact, both this song and the following ‘Forbidden Altar’ have a dementedly enthusiastic, clod-hopping brilliance to them that I really enjoyed. Sounding like the likely results of a “learn to be Slayer in a day” masterclass designed to keep delinquent teens off the street, these tunes ace it on sheer enthusiasm alone. Reading the lyrics sheet along with them meanwhile is a Venom-level hoot (“Darkness and evil and power from hell / twisting the flesh! / Beasts of death feast tonight / revel in doom!”), and old Mr Kobra’s “Cor, I’m knackered” retching type noises at the end (and frequently the start) of each track are hilarious, particularly given the extent to which they’re boosted into the foreground.

Sadly, a quick internet search tends to suggest that Megatomb have not been very active subsequent to the release of this record in 2013. Perhaps a legal team jointly representing Dave Mustaine and Games Workshop caught up with them and had a quick word…?

Nonetheless, ‘Louder Than a Thousand Deaths’ at least exists, and, though it will change NOT A SINGLE THING about your life, beliefs, or tastes, if you like metal and you like pictures of space marines, it will make a fine addition to your home. It’s a whole bunch of fun to listen to, it looks great and the printed sleeve & vinyl pressing from UK based label Me Saco Un Ojo is of an admirably high quality.

‘Louder Than a Thousand Deaths’ by Megatomb gets a THUMBS UP. 

 

Labels: EP reviews, Megatomb, METAL, old LPs

Price paid: £3 (Rat Records, Camberwell)

I can’t say for sure readers, but I’m guessing that if you too enjoy browsing in second hand record shops, you’ll be used to seeing this album pop up like a bad penny on a fairly regular basis.

On at least 147 separate occasions, I have seen it in the racks for a fairly low price, and thought: “Wow, what the heck is that? Looks pretty far out!”

Due to the cover design and the record company’s infuriating refusal to actually acknowledge that this is a Santana record, it generally takes me at least thirty seconds of squinting at the text on the spine before I realise that it is, in fact, a fucking Santana record. At which point I tend to think, “ugh! A fucking Santana record,” and send it back from whence it came, my hopes of a crazy psychedelic bargain dashed, and a crucial minute or so of browsing lost.

When I fell into this trap once again on a visit to Camberwell’s estimable Rat Records earlier this year (most varied and unpredictable stock (& pricing) in London, guaranteed) I thought, y’know what, I’m sick of this – I’m actually going to just BUY the damned thing and settle the matter once and for all.

Thinking back further, I’m not really sure when my instinctive dislike of Carlos Santana first originated. I’m pretty sure that I recall hearing ‘Black Magic Woman’ on the radio as a teenager, and feeling as if my ears were folding up and trying to tunnel their way back inside my head from sheer embarrassment. So, there’s that. I also remember (and, I should stress, quite possibly MISREMEMBER) reading an interview quote from him somewhere in which he was carrying on like a right chauvinist arsehole, boasting about “balling chicks” in some back street brothel or something. So I was all like, man, fuck this bloke and his holier-than-thou cosmic bodhisattva bullshit.

Although the idea of fusing psychedelic rock with Latin rhythms ostensibly sounds like an admirable project to undertake, the bits and pieces of Santana music I’ve subsequently encountered over the years have similarly failed to impress. Heard in passing, his / their stuff just comes across as bland and slightly cheesy, with an unappealing ‘cabaret crooner’ vibe to it, and a whiff of smug, hippie entitlement so stifling it makes The Eagles sounds like Discharge by comparison. Is that fair? I dunno. Just my fleeting first impressions.

In recent years however, I’ve vaguely begun to consider the possibility that I might have written old Carlos off unjustly. After all, I love forward-thinking, jazz-inflected ’60s rock, I love twiddley guitar-playing and I love pseudo-mystical psychedelic hoo-hah. There’s got to be at least something here for me, right? I mean, a guy who was friends with Alice Coltrane surely can’t be all bad, and think I recall reading an interview with Nick Mitchell from the excellent Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, in which he stated that he liked nothing better of an evening than to pour a big glass of red and jam along with some Santana albums [again, could be a total misquote – I should check]. (1)

Contemplating the copy of ‘Oneness: Silver Dreams, Golden Reality’ as it sat before me in the shop, I figured that, well, if he’s going to be doing cool, psychedelic stuff anywhere, it must surely be on this mysterioso, spirituality themed gatefold LP with a never-ending rank of gigantic, alien Buddha statues disappearing into the eternal horizon on the front, right…?

So I paid my £3 and took my choice.

This ostensibly being a music review, you’ll naturally want to know what I thought about it.

So, let’s get to that, shall we?

Ok.

‘Oneness: Silver Dreams, Golden Reality’ is terrible.

Well alright – it’s mostly terrible. It does have its moments, which I will outline below, but the bad far outweighs the good, so far as I'm concerned.

Taken as a whole, this album speaks of how completely lost the hippie / new age generation had become by the dread year 1979. Almost every creative decision on it feels like a blunder, a bad move, an awkward “ooh, sorry guys – not sure about that” moment. I can’t speak for their earlier work, but by this point I’d venture to suggest, Santana and his pals were up an aesthetic shit creek sans paddle. Even taken as pure kitsch though, it’s difficult to find much to enjoy here.

Overall, feels like a relic of some *other* 1979 that our parents and cultural guardians tried to protect us from. They probably thought it had been taken out the back and shot long ago by some gaggle of NME / Village Voice writers, but here I am, all these years later, senselessly subjecting myself to it for the sake of three small pound coins.

Actually, I was disappointed right from the outset when I realised that this record is made up of lots of little bits and pieces, immediately nixing my hopes for some meditational / long-jammin’ kind of stuff, but I’ll at least admit that the first part of side one – recorded live in Osaka! - is fairly ok.

There are some bells, some keyboard that sounds like the accompaniment to an ice-skating demonstration, and some slick, Mahavishnu-style fusion jamming – great drumming and super lively bass, and there are a few nods to ‘Bitches Brew’ here and there, but the overall feel is disappointingly bland. Carlos’s tone just sounds horrible here, as if he were playing through some kind of cheap midi guitar emulator or something, and his up-and-down-the-scales type chops ain’t exactly knocking me out either.

Thereafter, the same performance briefly takes a sharp left turn toward what I can only describe as a kind of Copacabana supper club cod-calypso vibe, as the big S duels with a jaunty boogie-woogie pianist and the dungeons & dragons keyboards continue to work their dubious magic in the background. Ye gods.

You’ll appreciate that I speak as someone whose tastes have shifted primarily toward the appreciation of pre-1975 music and modern derivations thereof when I say: THIS is why punk had to happen – these few minutes, right here. It’s almost enough to make me cry ‘uncle’ and go back to glowering away with my Au Pairs and PiL records for the rest of eternity, like all those journalists said I should.

After some “atmospheric interlude on a Dio album” bombast, our tour through the darkest realms of bad taste continues with ‘Silver Dreams & Golden Smiles’, a vocal ballad – Greg Walker on the mic, ladies & gents – so monumentally awful it frankly beggars belief that anyone would think to present it as part of a suite of purportedly spiritual, consciousness-expanding type material. It’s cocktail hour at the Holiday Inn, folks!

Thankfully, ‘Oneness’, which opens side two, is actually pretty great – a gentle organ drone, layered over the sound of waves lapping at the shore, over which Carlos drops some smouldering, controlled licks, gradually building up into a convincingly impassioned, over-driven wig-out, followed by a startling interjection from some wailing, fire-alarm-on-venus synths. Definitely the album’s highlight, and very much worth a punt, if you can find a way to enjoy it in isolation.

Perhaps buoyed by this, I also quite enjoyed the next track, ‘Life is Just a Passing Parade’, another vocal song with a muscular, Stevie Wonder pastiche funk arrangement. It’s a bit of the OTT side, with all kinds of gross, unnecessary flourishes from the players, but it’s lively and interesting enough for me to give it a pass. Ripping solo too. If Prince had recorded this a decade later, we’d all be worshiping at its feet, most probably.

Of course this upswing can’t last, and it doesn’t. Routine ‘Laguna Sunset’ acoustic meanderings, then we’re back to the Greg Walker cocktail hour for some overcooked, string-enhanced Latin vibes that feel about as authentic as a junior clerk in the CBS accounts department rocking a sombrero.

Next up, we have a reading of a poem composed by Santana’s guru, Sri Chinmoy, performed by a woman who sounds about as enthralled by this prospect as I am.

More jaunty, hi-fi demo fusion noodling follows. My god, will this thing never end?

Yes. Ok. It just ended. I feel as if I could have listened to ‘Double Nickels on the Dime’ about seventeen times in the time that took, but it’s finally over.

Jeez.

So ok – in retrospect, I’ll freely admit that it might well have been unfair of me to try to introduce myself to the work of a ‘60s era musician using an album that he recorded at the dawn of the 1980s, having changed his name whilst apparently in thrall to the teachings of Jamaica, N.Y. based spiritual leader.

I mean, let’s face it, there were precious few stars of Santana’s generation who were really keeping body & soul together and producing vital work at this point in time. Compare this thing to the sorry plight of some of his contemporaries in fact, and his fans might at least have taken heart from the fact that their hero was apparently living clean, feeling happy, and playing painstakingly accomplished virtuoso noodling to beat the band. CSNY fans should be so lucky.

At the time of writing, I’m kind of torn as to whether or not I can really afford the two centimetres of shelf space that this LP will take up in my collection, or whether it goes straight to the charity shop bag. If any readers would like to point me in the direction of some Santana stuff that I might actually like however, or to generally make a case for his defence, or whatever else – the floor is yours, friends. Comments box below.

For the time being though:

 ‘Oneness: Silver Dreams, Golden Reality’ by Devadip Carlos Santana gets a THUMBS DOWN.



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(1) The interview I was thinking of is here. Mitchell says, “Santana's early groups have been a big tower of joy for me,” but he does not explicitly say the glass of red n’ jamming thing I wrote above. Not sure where I got that from. Apologies, anyway.

Labels: album reviews, Carlos Santana, old LPs

Price paid: £10 (Peckham Soul).

I’ll confess, I was hesitant about dropping a full tenner on a common-or-garden ‘70s Atlantic LP in less-than-stellar condition, but the recently opened Peckham Soul record shop (‘round the side of the Bussey Building for any South-East Londoners in the audience) has a really nice atmosphere, and I didn’t want to leave without buying something .

Several factors caused me to zero in on this particular platter by smooth jazz flute overlord Herbie Mann. Firstly, the track times. 8:52, 10:42? Nice. Having spent the past few years digging deep into Isaac Hayes’s similarly expansive productions of the era, the idea of hearing a crack team of Stax/Atlantic session guys stretching out across semi-side long jams on stuff like ‘Chain of Fools’ and ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ is an extremely pleasing one to me, irrespective of whatever Mr Mann happens to be getting up to over the top of ‘em.

Secondly, a cursory glance at the featured players pretty much ker-chinged up the “SOLD” bar on my internal cash register. Roy Ayers and Sonny Sharrock on the same session? *sharp intake of breath* Nuff said. Larry Coryell? Isn’t he that goofy muso-fusion guitar guy who looks kind of like a wigged out Hank Marvin? Well, I don’t know much about all that, but as regular readers will be aware, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been able to even conceive of the idea of a record with too many guitarists on it, so hey, why not.

And finally, that great photo of the band in the studio on the back cover pretty much propelled me directly toward the very friendly Peckham Soul man’s external cash register, and the deal was done. And, in short, I’m very happy it was done, because ‘Memphis Underground’ is fucking brilliant.

The title track on the A side kicks things off pretty much as I hoped it would, with the band (credited here as “the Memphis rhythm section”, in that old fashioned use of the term that includes electric piano, organ and rhythm guitar) delivering a nice, almost Bobbie Gentry-ish country-soul feel, over which Mann gets stuck into some of his mellifluous, bird-songy magic.

Truth be told, I’ve always liked a bit of jazz flute, so ergo, I like Herbie Mann, a chap so supremely in control of his eminently pleasant art that one imagines a renegade surgeon could sneak into the studio and cut his feet off mid-solo, and still he wouldn’t drop a note that was anything less than an agreeably melodic, harmonically appropriate addition to what the backing band is playing at any given moment.

Free-ranging variations on a central riff is the name of the game here, with gentle touches of fuzz creeping across the background – courtesy of Coryell, I’m assuming. Upping the ante slightly, he proceeds to drop some swampy washes of overdriven sustain into his otherwise controlled, ballroom rock-styled solo spot, before Ayers exorcises this minimal quantity of menace with a few bars of his transcendently nice vibe tinkling. A few errant bits of feedback can be heard as the boss man swings back in round things off, but Sharrock seems to be keeping his powder dry for now.

After a transitional ‘New Orleans’ (rhythm on this is great (that bass!), but I recall little else, even after 10+ listens), ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ is where things get really good – I mean, really, REALLY good.

Imagine a tightly drilled band of pros running through those choppy, hard-riffing verses and hair-raisingly thrilling horn blasts again and again and again. Sounds pretty good, right? Indeed, I could probably just listen to that for eight (or indeed, eighty) minutes and feel entirely happy with my place in the universe, but wait up, here come our featured players, stepping up one by one in a delightfully well-mannered, old school jazz type fashion.

First spot of course goes to our esteemed band leader, shifting into higher gear to match the more energised nature of the track (would it even be POSSIBLE to make this particular composition sound “laidback”?). At one point, he drops a dazzling tangle of sweetly, salubrious confusion over a kick-ass break from drummer Gene Christman, and the moment when the rest of the band comes back in, organist Bobby Wood hitting this kind of unbelievably-fucking-funky low-end thrum on the far end of his keyboard, is just so damn cool.

Next up is Coryell, again wrangling a thick yet mannered fuzz-tone for a series of careful, gimlet-eyed ‘psychedelic cowboy’ type licks. Simple, restrained but stone-cold class, it reminds me (both in terms of tone and content) of some of the lead playing on Creedence’s early albums. Great stuff.

Cue Roy Ayers, wielding his mallets with a level of intensity pretty much unheard of in his usual chilled out universe.

By now, we’re about five minutes in, already cookin’ like… hell, I dunno, insert your own overblown chef/kitchen metaphor here… as the stirring spoon passes to Sonny Sharrock, who promptly bites it in two and spews splinters into the heavens. Friends, I can’t even tell you how exhilarating it is to be listening to an extended jam in this general vein, and to hear a kamikaze guitarist crash in with a hurricane of full bore, slide n’ scrape, screwdriver-under-the-strings dissonance that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Sonic Youth bootleg.

Presumably Sonny was at the mercy of the session engineers here, so he’s pretty much clean-toned, unable to harness the rich, distorted overtones that characterise his best-known solo work, but still, he’s ridin’ bareback across the fretboard like an out of control dodgem car running a suicide mission through the Kentucky derby, and it’s amazing, particularly when the rest of the featured players return for the track’s conclusion, sliding in around the maelstrom he’s kicking up with a new level of joyous abandon. Wow.

I realise that some readers might be finding my prolonged muso reveries here pretty insufferable and/or ludicrous, but seriously, this on of the most monumentally satisfying pieces of music I’ve heard in ages, and I would urge you to make it part of your life by any means necessary.

Nothing on the B can quite equal this scorcher, but the expanded rhythm section certainly excel themselves on ‘Chain of Fools’. Both bass and drums are, uh - ‘right on the money’, I believe is the terminology – and we get another welcome blast of both Coryell’s sweet swamp-fuzz and Ayers’ tiptoeing through the tuned steel tulips, too. Having taken he roof off the joint on the preceding cut meanwhile, Sharrock seems to have collected his cheque and dragged his amp back to the station, leaving these other fools to it.

(Actually, Sharrock seems to have played extensively with Mann, appearing on no less than *nine* LPs released between ’68 and ’71, as well as touring as part of his band (thanks, Wikipedia). Were ALL his spots on Herbie’s records this incendiary? If so, I’ve got some digging to do. I don’t really know the history here, but I’d be fascinated to know whether the two men – icons of melodicism and dissonance, respectively – shared a genuine musical / personal bond, or whether Sharrock just took on this work as a paying gig, keeping it at arms length from his own, considerably more challenging, music.)

The decision to end ‘Memphis Underground’ with a version of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ (you know, “glory, glory hallelujah” etc) is certainly a weird one. Largely a Mann solo excursion of subdued and melancholic character, gradually blossoming into sunnier and funkier territory as it goes on, the reclamation of this bulwark of white, American historical chest-beating within the context of the multi-racial, genre-blending gumbo of this LP adds a certain, strange political tension to proceedings, and it was this spirit that likely accounts for the fact that ‘Memphis Underground’ was repeatedly cited by the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson as one of his favourite albums.

I was unaware of this factoid when I purchased the record, but as a lifelong admirer of the Good Doctor’s writing, I’m happy to find myself inadvertently following in his footsteps - just as, in fact, more or less every single thing about this album makes me happy. If you’re looking for the dictionary definition of a keeper, here ya go.

‘Memphis Underground’ by Herbie Mann gets a big THUMBS UP.

Labels: album reviews, Herbie Mann, Larry Coryell, old LPs, Roy Ayers, Sonny Sharrock