The Grind Fever - Cave Transmission

It's solid

As a general rule, I'm kinda mean to stoner metal.  Of all the genres that don't exactly reward exploration and are sorta derivative by rule, stoner metal tends to be the derivativest.  Really there are only three directions you can veer off into when you take up the "stoner" mantle.  Either you lean into your rock influences, your doom metal influences, or you just go full on drone.  The Grind Fever takes the former more than anything, and honestly I really don't see how it could've turned out better any other way.

Cave Transmission is actually a pretty damn solid record all things considered, and I think it's because they spend less time worshipping Electric Wizard and instead tend to err towards Monster Magnet and Turbowolf.  As a result, these guys are very energetic and upbeat and cover everything in thick layers of sleaze, but they don't stray too far from the more metallic edge they carry.  "Precondemned" is heavy as fuck, and "Hope You Choke" is meaty and dangerous.  The album is kinda weirdly paced, with the first few songs straddling the line between metal and rock pretty evenly, getting lighter as it goes, before the last two tracks just dive headfirst into raunchy doom metal.  It's very Kyuss-esque in that regard, I get the feeling that these guys simply don't give a shit where the line between metal and rock truly lies so they just roll with whatever they're feeling.  Hell, if it wasn't for the 8+ minute length, I could see "Turbulence" being played on the radio in the 90s easily.  It's a very brooding and grungy track, with just enough accessible easiness to slot it nicely on such a rotation.

A big reason for that is the vocals, which are, unfortunately, also one of my few problems with the band.  Francisco isn't bad by any means, but he seems to be far too soft and easy-going for the rolling riffage.  He both fits and clashes with the music, and it's hard to explain such a thing, I know, but something about him just seems off.  The undercurrent of grunge that I hear cropping up in places is probably just a trick my mind is playing on me since his voice is so harmless.  Ultimately though, it's not a dealbreaker by any means, just something I think they could improve upon.

There isn't much more to say here, Cave Transmission is a fine little EP and a great way for The Grind Fever to signal their entrance into the scene.  It's short and sweet and every song is "solid" at the absolute worst.  If there are any real complaints it's simply that nothing is really a highlight besides "Hope You Choke" and the vocals are kinda weak.  Otherwise, there isn't much to recommend outside of stoner fans, but it's a good time anyway.  I certainly don't regret listening to it, even if I don't see myself returning too often.


RATING: 79%

Temple of the Fuzz Witch - Temple of the Fuzz Witch

Prematurely ejaculate my fanatics...

I've mentioned a few times that doom metal can create some of the greatest metal albums of all time when the focus is zeroed in on writing excellent riffs, but too many bands take the ethos of "tune low, play slow" as incontrovertible doctrine with no room to explore.  And if you're the type of band to take a more stoner approach to the genre and take more influence from Electric Wizard or Sleep than St. Vitus or Pentagram, then your rigid adherence to the Four Sacred Words above is augmented by suffocating layers of fuzz as well, but that's all.  It's no surprise that Temple of the Fuzz Witch is firmly rooted in that latter dogma, and it's even less of a surprise that they're not particularly good either.

I'm willing to cut these guys some slack since it's not uncommon for a debut to be kinda shaky since a band could still be trying to find their footing, and the fact that most of these kids weren't even born yet when Come My Fanatics... came out means that their obviously amateur songwriting skills can be somewhat excused for simple inexperience as opposed to incompetence.  Unfortunately that doesn't change the fact that Temple of the Fuzz Witch's self titled debut here is exceedingly derivative and unexciting.  Every single riff and motif here can be traced back to Sleep's Holy Mountain or Dopethrone and that's about as far as any of the influence really goes.  It's unsurprisingly swamped in fuzz and distant, nasally vocals, strictly sticking to a grim, downtrodden pace that seemingly never peaks higher than 80bpm.  They flirt with longer songs here and there but nothing really goes full out with it and breaches the six minute window, so instead of being sprawling soundscapes of hazy nihilism, most of the songs come off as simply drawn out and repetitive.  I don't think it's fair to expect a Dopesmoker out of any new band, but even the tiniest hint of ambition would've been welcome here.

But no, instead we get completely unimaginative fuzztone worship and dreary, swaying riffs with no real atmosphere beyond "sounding like Electric Wizard".  I'll concede some decent riffing in "Bathsheba" and "The Glowing of Satan", but by the time "Infidel" rolls around I've just completely checked out and can't be fucked to care about the rest of what's going on here.  I think most people can understand a difference between "unoriginal" and "derivative".  Unoriginal metal isn't necessarily a problem, I like plenty of bands that don't bring anything new to the table because a lack of innovation can be easily made up for with confidence, performance, songwriting, pretty much anything.  Derivative metal, on the other hand, is just an explicit rehash of well worn tropes with no greater vision or ability beyond tracing old ideas and coloring inside the lines.  Temple of the Fuzz Witch is planted wholly in the derivative camp, and their entire existence is currently defined as a clone band.  Being inspired by Electric Wizard is one thing, being an Electric Wizard clone is another.  Nobody likes a clone band.


RATING: 33%

Dragonauta - CabraMacabra

Is Satan really a secret anymore?

The World Cup starts in a few days, and as an Amerocentric white boy who grew up with football and hockey, I know jack shit about soccer.  As such, I adopted a totally random National Team to support every four years when I was a kid, and that random country was Argentina.  In that spirit, let's take a look at an equally random Argentinian metal band.  Straight outta Buenos Aires, I present to you, Dragonauta.

I have no history with Dragonauta, I was only introduced to them last week.  In this last week, I've probably spun CabraMacabra twenty times.  This isn't something that should have set the world on fire back in 2006 and was unfairly forgotten or anything, but it's undeniably an addictive album, and I just can't help but go back to it quite frequently.  The best laconic review I can muster would be "The Melvins if they bought laced weed from Satan."  The genre tag on MA lists them as "Psychedelic Stoner/Doom Metal" but I'm not sure I'd agree with that on this album.  It's very sludgy, which tends to go hand in hand with stoner and doom metal, sure, but the pace tends to stay surprisingly high, taking the punky elements of sludge classics and replacing them more with straight ahead thrash metal.  I'd also say it's less "psychedelic" and more accurately "schizophrenic", as the band tends to take on an almost frenzied approach to everything, like they're just confused and angry and want to lash out at something.  As a result the music is simultaneously hazy and sluggish while being focused and ferocious.  There are some out-of-left-field progressive moments as well, with the first half of "Funeral magico" being a quiet, almost Pink Floydian section.  "Abducido" and "En el futuro ya no habra piedad" toy around with these sections as well but it's definitely most prominent on "Funeral magico". 

CabraMacabra tends to err away from the "Honey Bucket" style of sludge/thrash and lands closer to classic Sabbathian stoner metal as the album goes on (check out "Experienciar"), which is also pretty Melvins-y in its own right.  But honestly, the main reason I keep comparing this to those Seattle weirdos is because the vocalist here sounds like a methed out King Buzzo who is perpetually stubbing his toe and invoking Satan about it.  There's a culpable sense of malice absolutely smothering his voice, and it helps the music itself sound so much more evil than it would have with any other vocal style.  It definitely works better with the more manic first half of the album but it sounds awesome when the band gets doomier as well.  He really is the highlight for me.

If there's any real flaw with the album it's simply that it gets to be a bit much to get through in one sitting.  It's not a super long album, clocking in at 51 minutes, but with how in-your-face it is for most of the runtime it gets to be pretty exhausting, despite the variance in tempo and continuously high level of excitement.  The tracks tend to run together as the album grinds along, so the more ripping tracks like "Transmutado" and "Dioses del submundo" stand out more once it's over and you recall the album from memory.  Overall it's not really a big deal though, because on the whole it's a very dangerous and feral sounding album that spans across a few different subgenres and ties itself together with those completely insane vocals.  It's a fun romp, and I'll definitely be coming back to this.  After all, I haven't been able to stop listening to it for a week now, and that's a pretty rare quality for me nowadays.


RATING: 85%

QUICK "HIT": Electric Wizard - Dopethrone

THE SECOND ANNUAL 4/21ish SPECIAL!

Hello children!  It's time once again for my new annual review, THE 4/21 SPECIAL!  For those who weren't around last year or are too perpetually stoned to remember, the basic gist is that I, as a metal fan who does not smoke, gathers up some friends of mine who do smoke but do not listen to metal, and force them at knifepoint to listen to a seminal stoner metal album to see if the genre works for people who only have half of the requisite qualifications for liking it (see: they dig ganj but don't get nearly as hard as I do when they hear a really fucking good riff dammit).  It turns out this is incredibly fucking hard for me because I didn't realize how much of a one-dimensional stereotype I was until it came time to list out the amount of friends I had who weren't metal fans and came up with like, I dunno, fuckin' two?  But, for the second year in a row now, I've somehow managed to round up three unfortunate souls to join me this year.  I'll give my short review first, as per the template I apparently use, but first you should know why Dopethrone was the chosen album.

Last year was easy, there's no stoner metal album more quintessentially "stoner" than Dopesmoker.  Sleep is the band for me, it was an incredibly easy choice.  But when it came time to do it again, I found myself struggling a bit.  I wanted it to be a first impression for myself as well, but I didn't want it to be some woefully obscure thing with ten bandcamp downloads or something because then nobody would care enough to read this.  So I decided on five random classics that I sorta knew but had never listened to in full, since this isn't my usual genre for casual listening (not nearly enough disembowelments and/or mystical dragonfaeries for me).  I started a group chat with the three participants (Returning champion Patt Mike from last year's edition, plus two new women, one I'll call NuBiz, since the original Biz Luckingham has since decided to run off and go join the circus, and one more I'll call Boo Boo Kitty Fuck, because I'm a child), and announced that this year was going to be player's choice.  I posted five album covers and told them to just pick whichever one they wanted.  The choices where: Kyuss's Welcome to Sky Valley, YOB's Atma, Goatsnake's Flower of Disease, Ufomammut's Godlike Snake, and of course, Electric Wizard's Dopethrone.

The conversation went as follows, paraphrased:

BH: "Alright guys, here are the five albums to choose from.  Debate amongst yourselves and let me know which one seems like it might be the most interesting."

Patt: "Okay obviously I have to choose the one with fucking Satan smoking a bong"

BBKF: "¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

NuBiz: "I'll take Kyuss I guess"

BH: "You all get the same one so too bad you're outvoted"

And so, with that highly scientific process out of the way, let's take a brief gander at my thoughts on Dopethrone, quite possibly one of the most iconic metal albums I've just never bothered to listen to.

The first thing I'm struck by is how absolutely fucking gargantuan the guitar tone is.  I first played this in my car and I was genuinely afraid that my lugnuts would rattle off the tires.  I realize tone worship is a thing in these circles and I'm sure that this album's sound has been surpassed a few hundred times over in the eighteen years since its release (I am at least aware of something like Conan), but since I spend so much time outside of this sound it's still pretty striking to me.  Every note is drowned in this unrelenting wall of bassy fuzz, it's a beautiful distorted mess and it calls to mind the kind of stuff Sabbath might have created if more modern recording techniques had existed in the 70s.  I've seen an interview with Geezer Butler where he attributed a lot of their early success and identity with Rodger Bain's production, since he was so laid back in the studio he didn't care that they were all playing way too loud and distorting the bass to death.  It seems like stoner metal as a whole must've just taken that lesson and run to the most logical extreme they could with it, because even during this album's quiet moments it feels like it could loosen the plaster off the walls.  Jus Osborn's vocals are a cool feature as well, since they're just a completely haggard monotone yell buried somewhere off in the distance beneath the molasses-thick riffage.  That's really the album's strong suit, because my understanding of stoner metal as "super fuzzed out Sabbath riffs" is reinforced pretty clearly here, and dammit I don't care because Sabbath was really fucking good at riffs.  This sounds like Master of Reality but twice as dirty and three times as loud, with extra moments of extreme minimalism resulting in an agonizing drone that overtakes a few of the songs.  Personally though, those segments are nice for what they are, but the band is clearly at their best when they're cranking out bluesy-swingy-groovy-doom riffs with a menacing gait like on "Funeralopolis" or the title track.  It all ties together pretty well with the disparate ideas though, as the thruline of the album seems to be some vision of unremitting misanthropy and sheer hatred.  Don't let the psychedelic font of the logo fool you, Dopethrone is all about misery and death and hatred and Satan and nuclear hellfire.  The escapist odyssey of Dopesmoker from last year is nowhere to be found here, replaced entirely with a bleak aggression.  The world is awful and Electric Wizard fucking hates everything about this awful world, and that includes you, the listener.  Ultimately, I can't fault much about this album, because it clearly accomplishes what it sets out to do with aplomb, the problem is just that, like last year, it's really hard for me to focus on.  The ambient dirge of the last two movements of "Weird Tales" is fucking brutal and hard to get through, and "I, the Witchfinder" is absolutely agonizing in its extreme repetition, basically grooving on one riff for eleven solid minutes.  I do really like "Funeralopolis", "We Hate You", the first half of "Weird Tales", and the title track, but really admitting that makes me feel like a scrub, because those are generally some of the more active and mobile songs on the record, not nearly as sluggish as "I, the Witchfinder" or something.  Perhaps this is where my sobriety comes into play, because I like the parts where it riffs, the rest of it I can take or leave.

So that's my mini-review.  Now, unlike last year, I had a bit of a rare opportunity since all of the participants are also friends of Patt (instead of being scattered across three separate groups of friends), so the plan for the day was do all meet up at his apartment, have the stoners do their thing, and then jam the album while I sorta watched their reactions and took mental notes whenever they had something to say about it.  I didn't expect a serious listening party or anything, but I thought this might be more fun than just sitting on my ass playing BlazBlue while I waited for them to text me back.

So instead of separate sections, here's a rundown of my 4/20.

The day prior, I asked NuBiz if she'd be able to join the other two and I, and she politely declined, saying she wouldn't be able to, but she'd still be happy to listen to the album and report back to me.  As I was walking to Patt's place, I thought to text her and remind her just in case I had a repeat of last year where everybody forgot to listen to the album I picked.  She responds with "Ehhh, I might not be able to after all.  I don't know yet but it might be a good idea to have a backup."

Well fuck.

Okay so now what?  Doing this with just two seems silly, I want to hit that magic three.  I arrive at Patt's place with BBKF and am informed that Patt's boyfriend will be joining us later.  Alright sweet, I still got my three!  But wait!  Patt still lives at home, and said boyfriend recently got in a row with his mother and got kicked out (they were previously living together there), so he tells me it might be a good idea to just smoke up there, and then walk back to my apartment so things aren't too tense.  Ay dios mio, alrighty, that's not so bad.  New plan is now to let the goofs rip a few at Patt's, then walk the block or so away back to my own apartment where I can crank Electric Wizard at proper volume, so they can fully experience the proper bone rattlage.

Upon arriving, Patt leads us into his bedroom, which apparently BBKF is well familiar with thanks to being friends with him forever, but was a totally new experience for me.  Every square inch of wall was covered with movie posters, spread from all over the spectrum, from great films like Alien, to awful ones like The Bye Bye Man, to, for some thematically baffling but nonetheless pleasant reason, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.  In the corner there is a wooden cabinet painted white and bloodstained.  He opens it with a meathook.  It is full of slasher flicks of all stripes, once again spanning the gamut of quality to the early classics of Friday the 13th and Halloween, to the awful celluloid abortions that are... well, still Friday the 13th and Halloween, just the modern reinterpretations.  BBKF parks herself on the bed and Patt asks her what she wants to smoke out of.  See, BBKF has smoked like, I dunno, once or twice in the last four or five years?  So she's long out of practice and isn't familiar with his collection of wares anymore.  So the next several minutes are spent with Patt playing Vanna White with his various assorted collection of bongs.  I know stoners have this thing where they name their bongs and/or pipes, but he didn't reveal any names, so I'm going to just make them up.  Highlights include a five foot long purple PVC pipe that I named "Barney's Love Bone", some weird seven-tube concoction he found at a garage sale that the person selling claimed "I don't know I think it's my son's science fair project" that I named "Highence Fair", and one shaped like a massive black dildo that you hit out of the urethra that I named "Your Real Dad".  Ultimately, BBKF chose a pink and purple striped affair that I named "Chanandler".

The two park themselves in their respective seats and I grab a chair and start to observe.  Patt takes a smaller, clear thing that looks like a beaker and hits it.  He no-sells whatever reaction he might have had, I can only assume that nothing fazes him anymore.  The only reason I'm telling this part of the story is for BBKF, who, like I mentioned, hasn't done a whole lot of smoking for several years.  She takes Chanandler and the little, I don't know what it's called, the piece or something?  I didn't know until yesterday that you can just take a little thing with some bud in it and plug it into any bong you choose, that's how fuckin' square I am.  I'm 27 years old.  Anyway, she takes the little golf-tee-looking-thing-with-dro-in-it and takes a big rip on Chanandler.  She then proceeds to hack up a lung for the next year.  She then immediately turns into what I assume Matthew Lillard is like on any given Tuesday, with her eyes fluctuating between barely open no matter how hard she tries to giant spheres she uses to gawk at things while hiding behind a pillow.  She eats a Cosmic Brownie snack that nobody saw her grab.  She holds it with two hands and nibbles on it like a gerbil.  She tells me then that "every cough is like another hit, so really I did like thirty hits so I'm good".  Patt proceeds to take roughly a million more and his demeanor doesn't change one iota, BBKF is a giggling mess after one.  Clearly I'm looking at Wayne Gretzky trying to play pond hockey with Verne Troyer here.

Two Cosmic Brownies later, they decide they're sufficiently high and ready to head back to my place.  It is now that I realize that Patt's boyfriend (who I shall henceforth refer to as "Ruffles") won't actually be there for a few more hours, long after they've passed their peak and listened to the album at hand.  Fuck fuck fuck I'm still not going to get my three.  I scramble, I try to think of somebody, anybody I can hit up and say "Hey, I know you're stoned right now so just load up this album and listen to it really quickly", and the only person that comes into my mind is a girl I'll call Moon Moon, because yes, she is just the human version of that meme.  I text her and send her a link and ask if she can listen.  She says "Yeah sure".  She texts back five minutes later and says "It's great".  You didn't listen to it Moon Moon god dammit you can't fool me.

Patt, BBKF, and myself all walk back to my apartment, where I promptly load up Dopethrone, excited to finally see the album working its magic in real time.  The two plop down on my couch and prepare themselves for some dark fuckin' doomy haze worship.  "Vinum Sabbathi" starts up and the two of them sit there, stonefaced, no reaction whatsoever.  I try to make idle conversation to keep them engaged in some way or another, mostly out of fear that they're immediately hating the noise currently blaring out of my speakers.  Patt says almost right away "I can sorta dig this, it sounds like some dudes just lighting up in the garage and jamming insanely loudly."  BBKF makes a noise that I think means she agrees, but it's hard to tell because she's too busy holding onto a potato chip with two hands and munching on it.  I didn't see her grab a bag of chips.

During "Funeralopolis", Patt draws on his obvious area of expertise and says "You know, I can see this working in a movie.  Like, as the soundtrack to murder.  Like that weird time in the early 2000s when every slasher movie crammed metal songs into them for seemingly no reason."  BBKF sets down a granola bar that I didn't see her grab and announced "Yeah, this could actually totally work in The Groundskeeper!"

Some of you may be movie buffs and have no idea what The Groundskeeper is, and that's okay, because it's not real.  Patt's forte is obviously in film as opposed to music, and like all lovers of art, he aspires to create his own.  The Groundskeeper is his love letter to the slasher flicks of yore, a film that he scripted but to my knowledge has never been able to film.  I know very little about it, I guess it's heavily inspired by Friday the 13th and tells the story of a bullied kid who dies and... resurrects as a hulking murder-person and... gets a job?  He's a groundskeeper somewhere, and I can only hope the obvious joke that his name is Willie.  Teens invade the grounds he keeps to be drunk/stoned/horny and he murders them all in creative ways, real meat-and-potatoes stuff.  All I really, truly know about this hypothetical film is that my fiance (who is also longtime friends with Patt and actually how I met him in the first place) was cast to play a lesbian, specifically because she "won't stop wearing fucking Birkenstocks".  I hope this film comes to fruition, because the only way I could possibly love her more is if I got to watch her bang a chick and then die.

The "Altar of Melektaus" movement of "Weird Tales" starts to draw to a close, and Patt proclaims that he likes how it's moved from riffs to this droning funeral dirge.  It runs the gamut of many moods, all of which work in at least some sort of way with being massively stoned.  BBKF again agrees, though much less enthusiastically.  She is eating fistfuls of trail mix.  I didn't see her grab my bag of trail mix.

We get to maybe halfway through "Barbarian" when BBKF says "Oh wow!"  I think she's going to comment on the music proactively for a change instead of piggybacking off of Patt, whose mental faculties appear to be functioning beyond "find food and eat it with two hands", but instead she says "These mango slices are expired!"  I didn't even know I fucking had mango slices in the apartment.  Where is she getting all this food?

Another minute passes by and she looks at me with a sad, longing expression, and says "Hey BH, can I be honest with you?"  Curious as to this sudden change in mood, I say of course.  She looks towards the floor, saddened, almost afraid, and says "I'm done listening to this..."  Hey man, that's fine, y'all only needed to last as long as you want to.  I look to Patt and he shrugs, saying maybe he'll listen to it later on his own time and give me another writeup like last year, but he's not really feeling it all that much either.  That's when I hear a mousey voice off to the side.  "...also can you order a pizza?"

Well it looks like that's it!  Guess it's time to pack up and let those two hit the road, Ruffles hadn't even showed up yet, but clearly Dopethrone wasn't hitting the same vibe with these guys as Dopesmoker did last year. That's fine, it's definitely more abrasive and I can see how non-metalheads won't groove with it quite as seemlessly as the Californian nug-men from before.


Now, again you may be wondering why the "4/21" Special has been postponed almost a full week.  The truth of the matter is that all of that rambling above was initially supposed to only be the first half of this review.  You see, after they decided to stop penetrating their eardrums with Electric Wizard, my two stoned compadres didn't leave to go home.  Instead, they got the bright idea that "Holy shit guys we should watch The Craft right now!"  I've never seen The Craft, but I've always known those two loved it, so I figured hey, why not.  The second half of this post was supposed to be a review of The Craft.

The problem is that I'm terrible at reviewing movies.  I tried, I really did.  I started and erased this section like six god damned times trying to perfect it, and I just can't even get it to be passable.  I'm not satisfied with my ability to describe anything that isn't purely musical, so fuck it, I'm not going to postpone this any longer.  There will be no review of The Craft further than these next few sentences:  It's not a bad movie, I thought it was "very much fine".  Skeet Ulrich is named fucking "Skeet".  It's about four misfits who start a coven and gain magical witch powers after a real life witch joins the original trio.  There are some striking visuals here and there (particularly during the ritual on the beach) but the plot itself is kinda thin and most of the characters aren't developed in any way beyond Sarah and Nancy.  Skeet Ulrich is still named fucking "Skeet".  All of these teenagers are in their twenties, and Breckin Meyer shows up a few times and I just want to give him a wedgie.  Neve Campbell is supposed to be hideously deformed but all of her scars are hidden by loose clothing and the parts of her you can see are still Neve Campbell so I mean come on who wouldn't want Neve Campbell in her physical prime?  Robin Tunney just got done filming Empire Records, a movie she shaved her head for, so she's very obviously wearing a wig throughout this and once it was pointed out to me I couldn't un-see it for the life of me.  Who the fuck chooses to be named "Skeet" god dammit.  Vicky Valencourt is probably a legitimate insane person so she killed it as Nancy at the very least.  The part where she kills Skeet is pretty hilarious.  That previous sentence has spoilers in it by the way.  Anyway she kills him by magically pushing him out of a window but before she does it she just starts screeching "HE'S SORRY? OH GOD HE'S SORRY HE'S SORRY HE'S SORRY" while she stares directly into the camera and shakes her head back and forth like a nutjob and I just have to imagine being on set while she's doing this and I couldn't stop laughing internally.  Imagine being the poor intern flicking the lights on and off or the cameraman trolleying back and forth while she's doing this.  It's hilarious to me.  At one point Sarah walks through a room and the words GUSTAV KILMT are just randomly written on the wall and that's the laziest fucking reference I've ever seen.  "Hey Cletus, do you think we should put up a Klimt painting right here?"  "Nah Jethro, just write his name on the wall.  Same diff."  Nobody gets naked.  SKEET 

So anyway now we're done!  Thank you all for playing along, thank you to all my participants for being good sports about listening to obnoxious metal.  I'll do this again next year like always and hopefully I won't kneecap myself by telling myself I'll also review a movie at the same time because man I'm really bad at it. Thanks again!  Legalize Drugs and Murder!


BH'S RATING: 70%
PATT'S RATING: PYA-RA-NYOID  
BBKF'S RATING: CONNIE FRANCIS!!  
NUBIZ'S RATING: LOL I DIDN'T EVEN SMOKE
MOON MOON'S RATING: I'M A LIAR
RUFFLES'S RATING: I WASN'T EVEN IN THIS REVIEW AFTER ALL

QUICK "HIT": Sleep - Dopesmoker

FIRST ANNUAL 4/21 SPECIAL!!

With yesterday being the ganja holiday that it is, I thought it would be high time to review arguably the most definitive stoner metal album of all time, Sleep's seminal hour long ode to haze, Jerusalem, more widely known for the remastered and lengthened single track version from five years later, Dopesmoker.  Now, right off the bat you're probably wondering why I didn't write this on 4/20 like any halfways logical human, well...

I tried.

You see, I don't smoke weed.  Never have, never really wanted to.  I don't really have a reason, I'm just not intrigued (I didn't drink until I was 23, I've played so much Final Fantasy over the years that I'm pretty sure I've somehow regained my virginity, I'm so square I'm practically cubical).  For that reason I just don't touch on stoner metal very often because I always felt like I just don't "get it".  Like, I understand what it is: it's super fuzzed out Sabbath worship based around hypnotic riffs and extreme repetition, with a newer breed of bands being less afraid to pick up the pace and introduce more punky and aggressive parts.  The problem is that I just don't have the capacity to listen to one super awesome riff for ten minutes on end, so a lot of the classic bands and hot new groups just do nothing for me.

So I had an idea.

I'll reach out to three close friends of mine, all of whom are very pro-stoner, but unlike me, are not metalheads.  There's the guy (I'll call Patt Mike), the girl (I'll call Biz Luckingham), and the guy/girl couple (I'll call Tittybong, because after two spoonerisms of prominent musicians in the style, customers demand a non-linear pricepoint.  Also because it's a real town in Australia and that always makes me laugh).  I figure that if stoner metal is a subgenre created by and for stoned headbangers, how can I trust them when they say it complements the high since they already like heavy and abrasive music?  This experiment should show factually whether Sleep is actually a great band or if it's just surrounded by an eternally skunky bukkake party.  I asked them all to listen to Dopesmoker and/or Sleep's Holy Mountain and I would just review whichever one(s) they chose.

And then, well, they all got stoned and forgot that I asked them to listen to it.

God fucking dammit.

So while I waited for them all to get back to me, I wrote down my own thoughts on Dopesmoker.  Honestly, it's pretty good.  It doesn't blow my mind or anything but in the realm of preposterously lengthy metal songs, it's certainly one of the better ones that doesn't fall under the funeral doom umbrella.  The ludicrously long and repetitive Sabbath riffs work well enough for what they are, and the droning, one-note vocals make the whole thing sound like this years long pilgrimage to Weed Mecca.  It's very weary and drawn out, clearly aiming to be hypnotic and transcendental, something meant for when you want to turn on, tune in, and drop out.  The band's very name is quite fitting, as there's this sluggish, sleepy quality surrounding the whole thing.  It's meant to be taken in as one whole experience, so the different sections all lead into each other very well and the track ebbs and flows like the tides.  It never picks up beyond a glacial paced groove, and I appreciate the band for just going all out with the idea here and not pussing out and making it sound like six distinct songs.  It's monumentally heavy and drowning in fuzz.  I chose this band/album for this celebration/experiment for exactly this reason.  It's the logical endpoint for the style.  It's diluted with absolutely nothing and just surrounds itself with a sulfuric fog and dies slowly, exactly how it was always meant to be.  The problem I have with it is that... well, it's really god damned hard for me to listen to attentively.  I've tried a couple times years ago, and by the time you reach the 8 minute mark and have heard effectively just one riff repeated twelve times, you just want to listen to the thing on fast forward and see if it's actually a real song slowed down to the point of incomprehension.  This time, however, I just had it on in the background while I chatted with my girlfriend and played games on my phone.  It worked much better this way.  It's inoffensive background noise that somehow gets better the less attention I give it.  Suddenly the repetition isn't bothersome, it's hypnotic.  The agonizingly deliberate progression goes by in a much more manageable pace, since each change is a welcome surprise instead of a "GOD DAMMIT FINALLY" moment.  The iconic opening lines of "Drop out of life with bong in hand / Follow the smoke towards the riff filled land" sound fucking monumental when they're first delivered, and when they're revisted near the one hour mark, it's actually extremely effective at tying it all together, it's just that I'd never be able to wait that full hour under normal circumstances.  Maybe this is why you need to be blazed to appreciate it, because I, as a sober person, find it to be drool inducingly boring when I'm paying attention to it, but find it to be a subtly brilliant piece of art when I'm not dedicating more than 50% of my mental faculties to it.

So with that in mind, now that it's a day later, let's see what Patt, Biz, and Tittybong had to say about it now that they've had extra time.


BIZ SEZ: Biz:[3:53pm] "I'm listening!"

BH [4:02pm] "Awesome!  Thank you!"

BH [6:14pm] "Thoughts?  Did it complement or harsh the high?  Was it awful?  Did it work well?  Did it sound like a dying pachyderm?"

Biz [10:11pm] "Honestly it was almost kind of soothing?  I fell asleep like halfway through, haha.  I really enjoyed it.  Lullaby metal [laughing emoji]"

Jeez Biz, I wake up at 4:30am for work, where were you hours ago?  Anyway that's 1-for-1, she liked it and it seemed to jive well with what she had going on.  Enough to put her to sleep for six hours at the very least, and it presumably wasn't out of boredom.  I'll count that as a win.


PATT SEZ: [3:03am] "Okay so my thoughts are this.  As a metal fan myself..."

FUCKING SHIT I FORGOT PATT LIKED METAL.  I mean, his taste is very eclectic and he's by no means a "metalhead", but he does like the odd band here and there.  He saw Black Sabbath on their farewell tour and I knew that.  So I ruined my own experiment, the whole idea was to get people who would never listen to this and see what they thought while baked.  Oh well, this'll have to do, I'll assume metal isn't one of his top five most listened to genres and soldier on as though we're still on track of the pure and untouched.  Back to it: 

"As a metal fan myself I did enjoy the songs, having never heard of the band before I was a blank slate. I started by taking one large hit and starting Holy Mountain. The intro was cool, the sound quality was a little off for me, but remember I have one deaf ear so Everything I hear is a little off. The guitars were scratchier than I would have liked for being stoned.  After another two hits I got more into the general sound of the track. I then started Dopesmoker and lit my road joint once more for the drive home. From Chicago to [MYSTERY TOWN] I was guided by their dramatic rifts and melodic drumming, I definitely was able to tune out the world, listen to the music and drive. As a stoner I might not have this as a first go to, but if it came on I would surely enjoy it. Digging through more of their work on Spotify I found myself enjoying "Evil Gypsy/Solomon's Theme" much more, I replayed that at least twice while smoking. If I had to offer a numerical value I'd say while stoned 5 1/2 out of 10. Not the worst, but wouldn't be a go to for me, but did enjoy the listen. Thank you and have a pleasant flight."

So Patt was much more mixed.  He's the only one who listened to Sleep's Holy Mountain as well, and it seems like he liked that one less than Dopesmoker.   SHM is certainly a bit more riffy on the whole so maybe the more frantic pacing had something to do with it?  Either way it looks like Dopesmoker is a hit so far.  The overall score is pretty middling and he admit that he wouldn't reach for it on his own, but enjoying it during a session is something he could see happening, and that's really what I wanted to know throughout this experiment.  Big thanks to him for the detailed response!


TITTYBONG SEZ: ...

...

...

Nothing!  Tittybong never got back to me.  The female half of the collective did inform me she'd be working until later, in fairness, but she said she'd grab her boyfriend afterwards and give it a whirl since they had no real plans for the night.  Now it's afternoon the next day with no word and I didn't pester them about it, so I'm going to be forced to assume that they either tried listening and hated it so much that they didn't want to report back, they simply had no desire to actually do it and didn't have the heart to tell me, or they just plain ass forgot and won't remember until I post this.  I did tell all three participants that I wouldn't be upset if they didn't have time or just didn't want to listen to it, so I'm not upset, but there ya go.  Three very different perspectives from three very different people who have nothing in common besides liking weed, not listening to metal, and being unfortunate enough to be real-life friends with me.


BH'S RATING: 74%
BIZ'S RATING: ZZZZZZZ
PATT'S RATING: 55%
TITTYBONG'S RATING: BUNNY FILTER SNAPCHATS INSTEAD OF LISTENING TO SLEEP


So there we have it.  Sleep is, scientifically, irrefutably, a thing.  Happy 4/21 Special!


EDIT 4/22: Tittybong finally texted me back.  Official word is "FYI metal still sucks/  Although, Sleep puts you in one of those trances.  I have to admit I listened for a solid minute before I realized I was listening to metal music and turned it off.  You've got to be PRETTY stoned to forget you hate metal music."



So there we NOW have it.  Sleep is still scientifically, irrefutaby, a thing.

MAINSTREAM EXTINCTION V: Mastodon - The Hunter

And fuck you, Ma-Ti! Your element sucks!

Truth be told, because I hated Crack the Skye such an unfathomably large amount, I couldn't give even the minutest of fucks about The Hunter.  In fact, I didn't listen to it until I decided to do this series, and even then I didn't bother with it until I'd finished writing on the four previous albums, so as to not taint anything or potentially warp my old perspective of the band.  This was going to be a new experience for me, this was an entirely new album by a band I once really liked that had since fallen into the toilet, and the only bit I'd heard about it was that it was apparently lighter and more radio friendly.  That's all I knew, no other preconceived notions.

Frankly?  It's okay.  Certainly worlds better than fucking Crack the Skye, that's for sure.

At this point, Mastodon had proclaimed that they were tired of trying to be so heavy all the time (booo!) and instead were going to go in a direction that would allow them to have more fun with their music (yaaay!).  I love fun music, I don't care how silly that makes me.  It's why I listen to Blood Stain Child and The Decline and Gargoyle and Municipal Waste and Kvelertak and all kinds of other bands, because they're fun to listen to and I love that.  Mastodon had dashes of fun here and there on songs like "Megalodon" and "The Wolf is Loose", but Crack the Skye was a tedious chore, and even if you liked the album, you certainly don't list "fun" as one of its qualities.  That wasn't what they aimed for, so hearing that their new goal was to have some more fun with what they do for a living actually pumped me up quite a bit.

The final product here, with 2011's The Hunter, is actually pretty divisive, and yet at the same time pretty homogenous.   This is a clear departure from the more matured (dull) and adventurous (meandering) direction they were taking with the previous album, so a large contingent of fans are going to have issues with how light this is compared to anything they'd done in the past ("Curl of the Burl", despite having a very catchy, bluesy main riff, catches a lot of shit in particular for this reason) right off the bat, but personally, I find the commercialism is overstated.  I mean yeah, "Curl of the Burl" could be on the radio, but that's really about it.  The rest of these tracks are all either too heavy or two weird for any substantial airplay, and they usually do pretty well for themselves depending on what they shoot for.  There are some strange, trippy pieces like "Stargasm", "The Hunter", and "The Sparrow", and unsurprisingly those do pretty much nothing for me.  I suppose they work for what they are, and they at least keep themselves for being shorter than your average drone track.  Some tracks like to wander between the two styles on display, like "All the Heavy Lifting", but apart from the droning stoner chorus, that particular track is completely unmemorable.  In fact, most of the album apart from the first three or four tracks until the last two or so are pretty unmemorable.  Oh don't get me wrong, there are pieces that stand out, like the incredibly soothing "Creature Lives" (this song would have been terrible if attempted in a previous album. The laid back style and harmonized vocals work stunningly at this point in the band's career) or the blistering "Spectrelight", but most of The Hunter ends up being nary a blur after repeated listens.

Of the two styles, I find the heavier stuff is far more memorable.  "Blasteroid" is a Mastodon classic as far as I'm concerned, with an incredibly slick main riff, just oozing with bluesy charm, and the seemingly lost Blood Mountain b-side in "Spectrelight", which starts off blazing and never nods off.  And then there is the bonus track, "The Ruiner".  The fact that something incredibly tedious like the title track or "Thickening" wound up making the final cut while this fist pumping, bone crunching stomper was left out is nothing short of a mystery to me.  It carries the most memorable chorus on the album, for Greek's sake (Heavy weeeiiighs thuuh crooow-ow-hooowwn).  It's impossible to resist singing along with.  When Mastodon said they were going to go in a less intellectual and more fun direction, this is the kind of track I was imagining.  Leviathan/Blood Mountain mashups with big hooks and singalong vocal lines.  You see, this is the kind of Mastodon I miss.  The band that used to put all of their energy into every song, every bar, every note.  That energy, that oh-so-missed showboating percussion, it's all but absent apart from three tracks that exude it marvelously.  "Blasteroid", "Spectrelight", and "The Ruiner" are by far the best tracks on display, and the only other one I can even put in that same echelon (despite being a completely different style) is "Creature Lives".  Four tracks.  Four tracks from a band whose first three albums never dipped below six or seven total classics amongst a bunch of other pretty good songs.

Mastodon really reined it in here, and that rarely works to a band's advantage, especially when they built their base popularity around how aggressive and energetic the once were.  Taking a band like Sex Pistols and telling them to write something more akin to Snow Patrol is going to end up sucking, and the same thing happened when Mastodon decided to try to be like Genesis.  Thankfully, the overindulgence is mostly gone on The Hunter, but the tripped out psychedelic parts still rear their heads occasionally, and the still managed to not really work.  It's clear that this is what the band wants to do at this point, but they still never figured out how to do it well.  They've always been at their best when releasing all that energy they've built up, and yet their latest album finds them doing their best to avoid doing just that.  This isn't really as poppy or commercial as it's advertised, but it's still just a sort of diluted version of what the band delivered on their last two albums.  The huge dead streak in the middle of the album is a huge mark against it, but the first couple tracks are pretty decent, and there are four fantastic ones that would be live staples if I had my way ("Blasteroid", "Creature Lives", "Spectrelight", and "The Ruiner"), so it's not a worthless album.  They're just missing their best elements, which really drags down the idea they were going for.


RATING - 68%

MAINSTREAM EXTINCTION III: Mastodon - Blood Mountain

KWAME!

So if Remission got Mastodon noticed and Leviathan made them popular, I'd say Blood Mountain solidified them as a premier mainstream metal band.  Around this time, they were about as on top of the world as they could imagine.  They managed to jump ship from Relapse (one of the biggest and most recognizable labels in metal) to Warner Bros, which is most certainly not known for their impressive roster of metal bands.  So they went from a major label to a major label, and after ripping shit up on giant nationwide tours like Ozzfest, damn near everybody knew who they were at this point.

Prime ingredients for a sellout, naturally.

Blood Mountain says "Fuck that" and proceeds to hammer a whopping nine excellent tracks in a row into your skull before any real misstep.  All that fine tuning that took place on Leviathan was perfected on this 2006 release, to the point where I'm not even sure what to consider it from a musical standpoint.  I was never comfortable with referring to Mastodon as a sludge band, since to me, sludge is the stuff like Grief or Eyehategod, clearly worlds apart from our media darlings here, but at the very least I could understand why that tag got tacked on to them early on.  But here?  It's gone.  They're like mid-era Death where I guess they could be called prog metal if you wanted to call them that, but they weren't really all the way there.  I mean, there's still a huge High on Fire groove going on here, plus whatever other stoner and hardcore influences, but for the most part they've just kind of become their own nebulous entity at this point.  In fact, mid-late-era Death is actually a pretty decent comparison at times when you think about how frequent the harmonized leads play a central role in the music.  Almost every track is crammed full of minor tapping melodies and harmonized runs, very similar to what Chuck fell just a little bit too much in love with around the Individual Thought Patterns era.  And of course, Kali is still the drummer, so there are still an abundance of skin pounding theatrics.

I'll admit, I was being slightly facetious when I said that we get nine tracks in a row before the album ever stumbles, as "Sleeping Giant" is merely a shorter version of those long stoner jams I disliked so much on Remission, but it manages to keep pace with the rest of the album and doesn't overstay its welcome.  It ends up being a neat little idea as opposed to a flow breaking intrusion, so I can't really stay mad at it.  In fact, the album as a whole actually contains a lot of singular experimental ideas that I'd normally despise, but mostly work out pretty well, like the trippy jam of "Sleeping Giant", the weird talkbox insanity in "Bladecatcher", and most obviously that stupid fucking Tron voice that Cynic used so much on "Circle of Cysquatch".  Oh man that will never sound cool.  Seriously, somebody needs to sit on some council that reviews every single recorded album before it's released, and if they hear the Tron voice they should give the bands a light slap on the bottom with a fucking sledgehammer. The last quarter of the album suffers a bit too from being much more laid back than the rest of the album, not to mention a frankly bizarre vocal performance by the Mars Volta guy in "Siberian Divide".  Plus "Pendulous Skin" has that fucking stupid thing that bands do where they tack a bunch of silence on to the end of the album just to stick in some little joke at the end.  Man that shit can fuck itself with dynamite.  It's normally pretty easy to ignore but it's so bloody pointless that I can't help but get upset with it.

Those quibbles aside, everything else about the album is great.  There are an abundance of guitar solos (at least in comparison to their early work) and they're all tasteful and well done, the riffs are among the the most infectious they'd ever write, and the songwriting in general is just leaps and bounds ahead of where they were before.  I mean, nothing was written poorly on the previous album, but here it's written superbly.  Every track flows beautifully from one section to another, never feeling like a haphazard mess despite each track containing so many different ideas.  The overwhelming heaviness is mostly gone, replaced instead with a very infectious and aggressive, yet still fairly poppy mentality.  Everything here can pretty safely be considered inoffensive while still clearly being hard, heavy, and aggressive, and it's rare that a metal band can manage to strike such a remarkable balance between legitimacy and accessibility.  Mastodon here nails it, with the kinda-progressive-kinda-stoner-not-really-sure style lashing out both extreme melody, extreme aggression, and weirdly effective (for a change) psyched out trippy parts, though they're still the weakest link of the album.  The neat style of riffing that Mastodon had always used but never really established as their own finally comes to life here, coming off as a high energy mix of High on Fire and Between the Buried and Me.  "The Wolf is Loose" pretty much sums up the entire album in a nutshell, with it's blisteringly high octane pace, ascending bridges, and vocals split pretty evenly between the manic shouts of the past and the Mudvayne voice of the future.  The album on the whole seems to use that goddamn Mudvayne voice most of the time, but at this point it's still firmly in the territory of Mastodon, and doesn't sound as silly as it could.

Apart from that beast of an opener, there is the "hit single" in "Colony of Birchmen", which is a great, midpaced melodic number with a very catchy main riff and instantly memorable chorus.  It's moments like this that foreshadow the more melodic and accessible direction Mastodon was pointing towards, and yet it showed how great they could potentially be with such a mindset.  Then there are tracks like "Capillarian Crest", which show case a more progressive, aggressive style, rife with tapping leads and frantic melodies.  Again, it showed that they were pretty good at most of the styles they toyed around with, even though they were mainly just reaching to other areas for inspiration in their own defined sound, as opposed to trying desperately to appeal to everybody.  Despite it's weirdness, my favorite track my actually be the instrumental "Bladecatcher".  It flows in a very creative fashion from each disparate section to the next, and the fast part with the weird whammy-ing talkbox strangeness just manages to work masterfully.  I wish I could explain how so many different, noodly sections end up sounding so brilliant to me, a guy who generally can't stand noodly prog, but Mastodon somehow manages to master it by basing the music instead around an accessible stoner/prog/modernwhatever hybrid.  "Hand of Stone" also gets special mention for the surprisingly thrashy riff it closes on.

Blood Mountain can basically just be summed up as "Mastodon".  That's it, this is what Mastodon had been building towards since their inception, and it just reached its apex here.  I'm still not entirely sure what genre to classify this as, as to my knowledge it's a style that started getting aped later by horrid modern bands that Liquid Metal likes to fellate.  Give it a listen, if only for the fact that it's one of the few definitively "modern" metal albums I can think of that both completely exemplifies the new sound of heavy music in the mainstream and is also not utter shit.  Mastodon managed to somehow strike gold here, and they were certainly on the upswing.  They'd hit their stride, surely they'd ride the momentum and creativity from this album into an illustrious career as both media darlings and legitimately good songwriters, right?

RIGHT?!

RATING - 88%

MAINSTREAM EXTINCTION II: Mastodon - Leviathan

GI!

So while Remission gave Mastodon some mainstream recognition (being released on Relapse certainly helped, and "March of the Fire Ants" received decent rotation on music channels), it's really hard to debate that their real breakthrough album was anything other than Leviathan.  If you watched Fuse or listened to any hard rock/metal radio station or used internet radio or anything of the sort back in 2004, there was no escaping "Blood and Thunder" or "Iron Tusk".  This shit was ubiquitous, no doubt about it.  And that's great and all, I thought Remission was pretty decent but had a few issues with overlong stoner jams, so seeing that Leviathan only has one track I could consider to be of a long length (though it's twice as long as the longest track on the previous album) filled me with some rare optimism.

Long story short, yeah this definitely fixed my biggest problem with Mastodon's debut.   Gone are the overly dragging, droning, no-seriously-guys-we're-totally-a-prog-band jams ("Hearts Alive" not withstanding), replaced almost entirely with those mid to fast paced rockers I enjoyed so much.  Paradoxically, the hardcore influence has been toned down dramatically as well.  I still won't be upset at somebody labeling this album or the band as a metalcore band, but the noisy chaos is much more reined in this time around, with the riffwork being more controlled and precise.  It's more melodic on the whole as well, and is absolutely loaded with dueling harmonized lead lines, which eventually became one of the band's trademarks, if you ask me.  One element that was retained, thankfully, was Dailor's completely overdone yet charismatic drumming.  I understand why people hate this guy, but I personally adore his buttnards, fill-happy technique.  It gives the band identity (oh they're the band with the Shokan meth-head drummer, right?) and keeps the songs moving forward.  Mastodon is no stranger to the stoner metal tendency of repeating riffs far more often than they'd logically need to be repeated, but with Dailor's nonstop filling, it makes the music go by without dragging on, and that's wholly welcome.

Now then, if the stoner jams are toned down and the progginess is toned down and the hardcore is toned down, doesn't that mean we have a much more restrained and bland album on our hands?  In a way, kind of.  This is certainly much less off-the-wall than its predecessor, but I look at it as more "homogenized" or "focused" than "bland across the board".  To me, Remission had a ton of ideas, and only half of them really stuck, whereas Leviathan is the band learning from that experience and instead funneling their songwriting talents into the shorter, punchier tracks this time around.  There are remnants of that early fire here and there, with "Hearts Alive" being a thirteen minute jam, taking nearly all of the leftover elements they kept from shoehorning into the other songs and just cramming them all into one track.  The slight bluesy elements rear their heads occasionally as well ("Megalodon" is the most blatant example) and "Island" gets a giant helping of that chaotic noise that the rest of the album manages to shy away from.  But for the most part, this is a much more focused and song oriented effort, jam packed with memorable riffs and melodies.

However, there is one major, major issue that began on this album and would plague the band for the rest of their career.  That would be the fucking Mudvayne vocals.  I have no idea how I'm apparently the only person who hears the Chad Gray impression in the clean vocals, but if you can't hear it in "Naked Burn", then I have no idea what to tell you.  I get that Mastodon is a cool band and Mudvayne is a lame one so there's no way you can ever compare something good to something bad, but even huge opponents of the band who will find anything crazy to say about how much they suck and are a blight on the landscape of heavy metal seem to think I'm off my rocker with that comparison.  It only becomes more prevalent with subsequent releases, apparently due to the vocalist(s) blowing out his/their voice(s) and being unable to scream anymore, which is a shame but the point stands that the dirty croon of the clean vocals remind me of fucking Mudvayne so it can be distracting sometimes.

But other than that and the production being more polished (which normally doesn't bother me but it comparison to Remission this sounds kind of tame) and the songs being much less dense and heavy than before (thanks to the band abandoning the old tunings), Leviathan manages to be a good improvement upon its predecessor.  Where Remission had clear standouts ("Crusher Destroyer", "March of the Fire Ants", "Burning Man") and clear weak points ("Trilobite", "Ole' Nessie", "Trainwreck"), Leviathan stands as a more consistently enjoyable effort, with the only low point being the needlessly overlong "Hearts Alive".  Sorry guys, but you just are not as good at this long, drawn out epic style than you are at the short, to the throat rockers.


RATING - 79%

MAINSTREAM EXTINCTION I: Mastodon - Remission

WHEELER!

One of the biggest metal bands in the mainstream of today (and I mean the real mainstream.  The shit capable of charting and the kinds of bands that people who just watch MTV for Jersey Shore reruns might have heard of) is of course, Atlanta's Mastodon.  I decided to start this series for a few reasons.  One was that I used to be a huge fan of the band.  Really, their first three albums were always in fairly regular rotation from about 05-08, and I think it'd be fun for me to take a trip down memory lane.  The other is because the reason this is a trip down a long forgotten path instead of a simple retrospective is because I haven't listened to them at all for the last four years.  Yes, Crack the Skye was so unbearably awful that it somehow managed to make everything before it sound like shit to me.  It was like The Matrix sequels.  And since I've stopped listening to them, they apparently became the new Metallica, so curiosity is leading me to re-explore and re-evaluate the band's career in some attempt to understand how in the everloving fuck that wound up happening to a band that managed to squander away their songwriting capabilities so marvelously.  So welcome, my friends, to Mainstream Extinction: The Story of Mastodon, and BastardHead's Expert Opinion on Why You are Probably Wrong.

So in 2002, after gathering up a huge amount of buzz via their two EPs the previous year (Slick Leg and Lifesblood), Mastodon managed to sign to the legendary Relapse Records, and start their career already a few steps ahead of most young, innovative new bands.  And their debut, Remission, actually holds up pretty well, even a decade later.  What this presented was a very hungry young band, out to set the world on fire.  Remission manages to do just that, with it's insanely chaotic approach to extreme music, dashed with influences of hardcore, sludge, and bluesy southern rock.

Back at this time, for those of you who got into metal around the time Dragonforce was was wrapping up production on their fourth album (never has a young person felt so old than in the metal scene!), there really wasn't a whole lot like Mastodon in the early 00s.  There were chaotic bands, there were noisy bands, there were sludgy, heavy, and bluesy bands, but few that wrapped all of it up in such a nice, appealing package in the way that this band did.  Even less so getting frequent airplay on MTV and a major label hype machine.  So at the time, this really was a cool experience.  The long, psyched out jam in "Elephant Man" was so different from the thunderously heavy "Crusher Destroyer" which was so different from the unremittingly dense "Where Strides the Behemoth".  It's a very fun, flavorful album, with enough running threads and common themes between tracks to keep the varied experience cohesive.

The one aspect that absolutely cannot be ignored is Brann Dailor's absolutely frantic drumming.  Bill Ward once said that the reason he injected Black Sabbath with so many drum fills was because he had trouble keeping time, and so throwing in a fill every few bars gave him the ability to break into free time for a short while so he could collect himself and get back to where he needed to be.  I don't doubt Dailor is more than competent enough to be able to keep time like a human metronome, but he emulates Ward so closely in the frequency, diversity, and intensity of his fills here that I can't help but wonder.  One sad, lonely evening as a teenager, I actually sat down and listened to the first two Mastodon albums to see how long they went without a drum fill, and I'm pretty sure my calculations ended up being somewhere around "every four bars, twelve seconds being the longest gap between them".  He really ends up being the leader of this band despite being the only member not to contribute vocals.  His showy, flashy style ends up being one of the most memorable elements of the early albums, and this doesn't bother me in the slightest since he's very skilled, and it helps add memorability to his performance.  So even if I ended up fucking hating this album, at least I wouldn't forget it.  I would at the very least remember the complete spaz of a drummer.

And luckily enough, I don't hate this album. In fact I feel like it's quite good, and has managed to stand the test of time as an enjoyable modern metal album.  It's hard to pigeonhole Remission into any one particular subgenre of music.  There are definitely huge heaping helpings of High on Fire in here, such as "Where Strides the Behemoth" and "Trainwreck", and not to mention the slightly prog rock styled darkness of the acoustic segments in "Ole' Nessie", "Trilobite", and "Elephant Man".  Unsurprisingly though, I feel the best tracks are the shorter, faster ones; the ones where the band just completely lets loose and delivers a chaotic, frenzied experience complete with memorable riffs and melodies.  "Crusher Destroyer" is an absolute fucking monster of a track, as are "Burning Man", "Mother Puncher", and "Workhorse", and they contain some of the most memorable riffs of the entire experience (topped only by the more crushing, mid paced number of "March of the Fire Ants").  Unfortunately, they also stand out the most because the long tripped out songs are pretty fantastically dull.

Yeah, "Ole' Nessie", "Trainwreck", and "Trilobite" do a decent job of keeping the flow of the album going, but as tracks themselves they're just needlessly boring.  I get a feeling that the "progressive" part of their genre comes from tracks like this, the long ones that drone on endlessly with jazzy percussion and long sections of harmonized lead lines.  They don't make the entire album boring, thankfully, and they're each spaced out by putting a fast, catchy song in between them all, but if you're not leaving the album on in the background or something (like say... reviewing it), they can be really tiresome and frustrating.  The band's strength lies in the fast and the midpaced, and most of these songs are indeed midpaced, but when their ideas are stretched out for too long, they tend to lose their luster, and that sucks because it means the album periodically loses steam after the first four tracks finish. They're just... not very interesting to listen to, and when you couple that with the completely inconsequential vocals, you find yourself listening to drum fills for seven minutes at a time.  Yeah, the band would be better off in the future when they dropped the idea of putting multiple long droning tracks on each album.

Overall the first four tracks are all great, with a strong High on Fire type stoner metal vibe, mixed in with healthy amounts of noisy hardcore and a very subtle southern sludge flavor, with "Burning Man" and "Mother Puncher" doing the same on the latter half of the album.  The more progressive songs, on the other hand, are kinda lame.  You can do without the five tracks that aren't the six I just mentioned, as they're really inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.  If nothing else, it's a very dense and suffocatingly heavy album for most of it's duration, even during the boring songs, and it serves as a neat reminder of the band's roots in hindsight, because they never got heavier than this.  I most certainly would not have expected Mastodon to become one of the biggest and most popular ambassadors for heavy music in the media's eye based on this inhumanly thick and impenetrable album, that's for sure.


RATING - 68%

The Sword - Apocryphon

Hey, I defended you turds. Stop sucking

Okay, one superficial thing I want to get out of the way really quickly: I adore The Sword's album covers.  Seriously, they've gotten better and better since the debut.  Age of Winters's stained glass affair was cool but nothing particularly special, Gods of the Earth was adorned with a really striking painting that instantly made me want to hear the album (plus I have an affinity for album covers unblemished with band logos or album titles), Warp Riders was just a damn awesome throwback to OG sci-fi (and for a very stupid personal connection, it really reminded me of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to read in grade school), and now with their fourth album, Apocryphon, it's just the essence of cool.  Look at that, the colors pop, the figure in the middle stands prominent, the ruins beneath are drab and scattered like dusty old toys, it's just very striking and sticks in your mind after the very first time you see it.

And sadly, that's about the extent of the praise I can give to Apocryphon.  The Sword made a huge splash with their first album, basically roaring from out of nowhere to make this huge mainstream presence with a style that is both incredibly easy to write and done to death, so they rightly earned a staunch number of non-fans right off the bat for their perceived posturing and media-friendliness.  Personally, I found Age of Winters to be a flawed gem.  The drumming style was intrusive and headache inducing, the lyrics were shallower than a petri dish, and the vocals sounded tired and lacking in passion, but the riffs where so memorable and fun and the songwriting was so devilishly catchy that I found it hard to hate the album despite the very valid complaints.  Now, I haven't reviewed the albums since then because I was never able to find much else to say that I hadn't said already about Age of Winters.  The Sword has been so focused on growing beards and trying to find different wordings of lyrics they'd already written that they forgot to write any new songs.  Gods of the Earth was an incredibly dull album, with maybe one track I remember liking at all, and even with that I can't quite remember the name of it ("Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzepherians" or something equally stupid), and Warp Riders, while at least being more energetic than its predecessor, still carried an overwhelmingly thick essence of deja vu and had very few standout tracks.  Well the fact that I didn't skip over this newest album shows promise, right?

Wrong.  This is the same problem that's been plaguing The Sword for six years now, they've done fuck all in the way of evolving since their inception.  Their genre on MA is split as "stoner/doom metal (early), stoner/heavy metal (later)", which blows my mind because their albums are all practically indistinguishable from one another.  It's a shame because I really did like that first album, but now essentially all the charm and charisma they had has been worn away with the overuse of ideas.  These riffs are on their thirtieth run through the grinder, it's time to give it a rest already, fellas.  Try something different, anything, I don't care.  Make a trip hop song, write a high octane ode to your fetishistic love of caramel apples, a ballad about poodles, just... anything other than another midpaced Sleep/High on Fire song about space or mythic gods.  It's so played out, we get it.  The lyrics still haven't improved from the amateurish slapdash style exhibited early on in their career, so it's essentially the same flawed album for the fourth straight time.

What makes flawed things valuable is their rarity.  Into the Unknown by Bad Religion is difficult to find and highly expensive because it's a strange album that is leagues away from what the otherwise consistent band has ever done.  The Yellow Goat Head Bathory LPs?  Every metal fan knows about those and the exorbitant prices collectors are willing to shell out on ebay for them.  I'm sure there's some misprinted "Bonus Vagner" baseball card in some dusty old bat's attic that Wayne Gretzky would be willing to pay another twelve quadrillion dollars for.  The thing is, if ol' Honus was misprinted on every single card produced that year, it wouldn't be a rare valuable, it'd be a defective batch of cards.  This fourth straight album full of the exact same ideas executed in the exact same way with the exact same shortcomings shows that The Sword is a defective band.  They lack the creativity and exuberance to write anything ear catching or worthwhile nowadays.  The shit drumming and agonizingly bad lyrics were more of just a funny quirk on Age of Winters, whereas since then they've been cemented as integral to the band's identity.  This is distracting and the one huge problem with the band overall, not just little nitpicky shit like a boring song here and there.  Their very existence has been rendered redundant by none other than the band themselves.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are indeed some things I enjoy about Apocryphon.  I think the closing title track is great.  Nearly every vibrant riff on the album (that the band used to sneeze out three times per track) seems to have been crammed into these five minutes, and I know it's weird but I love the silly little beep boop noises in the intro and bridge.  "Dying Earth" is probably the most energetic song on the album, with the highest tempo and most aggressive riffing, and it stands out because despite what the band aims for, I've always thought their fastest stuff was among their best ("Iron Swan" is doubtlessly the best track on the debut, for example).  And lastly "Hawks & Serpents" goes for more of a rock n' roll feel and benefits greatly from it.  Not only because it's something different from the low/mid tempo vaguely stonerish riffs we're normally treated to, but because the band is surprisingly pretty good at writing more rock oriented numbers.  It rides on no more than one main riff for most of the duration but it works very well and never gets grating.

But those are merely three tracks out of the ten on display, and the remaining seven are utterly forgettable in every way.  Those lyrics I complained about being amateurish and lazy are paradoxically inconsequential on this album, as I thought "Arcane Montane" and "The Hidden Masters" were instrumental the first two times I listened to this album.  They just blur by, nothing hooks you, nothing catches your attention, nothing fights for the spotlight, it's just one drab, grey mass of music buzzing past your ears.  Those two songs, by the way, are placed next to each other in the tracklist.  What's that tell you when two straight songs pass through my ears, barely measuring so much as an idle twitch from my... uhh, music receptors in my brain or whatever.  I can't even point out any particularly bad  moments on the album, all but the three tracks highlighted in the previous paragraph are completely lifeless and dull mid tempo stoner metal songs, that's all there really is to it.

It's honestly so much harder to review a mediocre or boring album than a truly bad one, and this is just so pointless of a record that I can barely justify ranting what I have.  I don't carry any vitriol for Apocryphon, I really don't, but I guarantee you that after I hit the "publish" button, I'll never be listening to it again.  Fans who have remained fans across the previous three records will adore this, as it's essentially Live Free or Age the Winterser with a Vengeance.  For non-fans, this won't sway you at all.  I can give the album at least a small bit of credit because there are a full three songs I like this time around, which is about as many from the previous two combined.  I really think The Sword needs to either drastically change up the writing process or take a break and work on side projects or something.  They need fresh ideas, or maybe an entirely new perspective.  The hipstery neckbearded drummer left, true, but clearly he wasn't the driving force behind the writing, because the replacement is nearly unidentifiable.  I wouldn't have noticed there was a new drummer had I not looked up their lineup to see if it was the same four chumps since the beginning.  That's a testament to what this album is, just another faceless replacement while they fund their prostitute habit.


RATING - 39%

The Sword - Age of Winters

Hell bent on destroying my credibility

The Sword is one of those bands that a lot of metalheads scoff at as being third rate wannabes with nary a shred of artistic integrity. One of those sad amalgamations of hipster kids that wanted to cash in on the popularity of metal. While, yes, the founding member was originally a founding member of an indie band, the premise of The Sword being formed purely for financial gain is laughable considering the last four words of the preceding sentence make as much sense as shit scented deodorant. Metal has a massive and loyal following, true, but if they really wanted to make money off the style, they would've taken a route like thrash revival or metalcore. Y'know, something that's proven to be an almost guaranteed snatch of at least half of one's fifteen minutes of fame. Who knows why the style switch happened? I guess only the members themselves will, but it's a pretty safe bet that they simply enjoy the music. I find it strange that people lambast a band for doing something purely because they think it's cool... why the fuck else are you supposed to do something? Sex is pretty cool is it not? Well, since you haven't been having sex since birth then dammit you don't deserve to have any now!. You eat sausage with your pancakes for years? Did you recently discover that bacon is actually the ultimate breakfast enhancer? Too bad asshole! Tough shit, you should've thought of that before you started with sausage you fucking heathen.

You see the absurdity? I can understand spiting a kid who takes up skateboarding just because his friends do. Sure, he can give the activity a bad name with his lack of understanding of the history and/or totally bodacious slang. He may even make a complete fool out of himself by busting his melon trying to drop in on the half pipe at your local skate park... but can you really keep hating him if he persists and turns out to be a solid skateboarder? That's The Sword in my eyes. It seems to me like they may have taken up playing a watered down High on Fire style for either of the two reasons listed above: either they liked it to begin with, or because of a third party. Either way, the end result isn't undesirable. It's derivative and lacking in substance at times, true, but the riffs are solid enough and played competently.

I'll be the first to admit, while I do enjoy the occasional listen to Age of Winters, there are two very glaring flaws that make the album either unintentionally laughable or difficult to listen to. The first point is the lyrics, holy hell and a half do these lyrics blow a fat one. Here is a tutorial on how to write lyrics for a Sword album: go to your local library and check out a book about mythology. Greek, Norse, Finnish, whatever, everything gets a mention. Now go to a zoo and throw it at the chimpanzees. After a few days, retrieve the book from the cage, pick out every sentence with feces smeared on it, and then throw them together haphazardly. They don't have to fit into a pleasing cadence, they don't have to follow a rhyme scheme, just as long as you cram as many awesome sounding names in there as you can. Congratulations! You have successfully written Lament for the Aurochs! +666EXP! Level up! The second point of contention is the drummer. Either this man has the ride mixed far too high, or he seriously uses the crash to keep the beat. Either way there is a constant *TEEESH TEEESH TEEESH* noise carrying on throughout the entirety of almost every single track at nearly the same beat with very little variation. It can be grating and makes the album almost impossible to finish if you notice it, and believe me, once you notice it, it doesn't go away.

As for everything else, it's nothing special, but yet it's nothing to earn your ire. A majority of the riffs may give you a little niggling feeling of deja vu, but they flow together so well you seem to forget that Sleep wrote these riffs many a moon ago. Even so, songs like Iron Swan and The Horned Goddess give my head little choice except to bang excessively. Many of the riffsets are nothing short of punishing and 100% heavy fucking metal, as unoriginal as they may be. I'll admit that the last three songs manage to fall flat on the whole, with Ebethron having a really unnecessary drum ditty in the middle, March of the Lor having easily the lamest riffs on the whole album and some of the worst I've heard period (bizarrely, they are sprinkled between some of the most intense moments on the record), and Lament for the Aurochs plodding on for far too long. Freya has gained national exposure due to the Guitar Hero series, but I still find it to be enjoyable with a scrumptiously satisfying main riff, despite the overexposure and being the band's Stairway to Heaven (I say that solely in the sense that is the only song that casual fans can name off the top of their heads). It's hard to verbalize what makes the music good, but believe me it's a love it or hate it type of thing. Imagine Blessed Black Wings simplified and with a below par drunken crooner behind the mic, but imagine it sounding good.

I've dwelled on the negative for a majority of this review, and I'm actually coming up short on why the album and band don't deserve the shit that they usually get. It's derivative, has a lazy vocalist, an annoying drum production, and god awfully bad lyrics, but dammit it's good. Age of Winters is greater than the sum of it's parts, and yet I can't quite explain why. It's comparable to (brace yourself readers, here comes another food comparison) grilled cheese. It's fatty, greasy, bare bones, minimalistic, and pretty much the bottom of the barrel when it comes to cuisine... but holy DAMN does it taste good! Really, this is a controversial record and an objective analysis is somewhat difficult to come by. The dribbling fools hailing this to be top notch doom metal need to pull their heads out of their ass for fear of choking on their heads, and the staunch haters need to loosen up their tin foil helmets, it's probably restricting bloodflow. Just because a fairly unoriginal and catchy band garners mainstream attention doesn't indicate the destruction of the underground. Motorhead will still put out great records, Altars of Madness will sound just as good as it did almost twenty years ago, and Origin will still play a mindblowingly fast brand of technical death metal. And even if any of this changes, none of it can be blamed on The Sword's rise to fame. Listen and judge for yourself, but try not to make up your mind before hearing it.

RATING - 76%