Rock!
Since Matt and Turnbuckle brought up the subject of rock’s lack of, uh, rock (rocking? rockingness? rockosity?), here’s some good old fashioned rock-yer-ass-off rock:
As tough-guy sludge rock goes, this is solid stuff — technical but not too wanky, speedy enough but paced with a sturdy groove, gruff and gloomy without descending into self-parody. I find myself subtly headbanging — fine, it’s just nodding my head, but that’s because I’m in my home office by myself — as I listen along. But here’s the thing: I spent a fair amount of time listening to grumpy, brutish rock just like this as a high schooler, and even on into college, but I’m not sure I could really see myself rocking out to HOF on my walk to work or at the gym or while reading The Hill on my laptop in the morning. It’s not that I’m embarrassed (I still read comic books and play video games!), or that I think it’s bad — like I said, it’s good, solid sludge. It’s more like this sort of music doesn’t seem like the right soundtrack to my life anymore. Maybe (probably) that’s kind of lame, but I suspect it’s true of a lot of recent punk, hardcore, and metal fans who’ve settled into amiable lives as young professionals and, perhaps in doing so, traded shoe boxes full of handmade Dillinger Escape Plan and Swarm of the Lotus tapes for iPods packed with Grizzly Bear and Dave Bazan.
(Thanks to TAS contributor James Poulos for alerting me to this album’s existence via the Tweeting machine.)
When I wrote in the thread to Matt Feeney’s last post that “alternative metal might be thriving,” High on Fire was one of the bands I had in mind. Along with Harvey Milk, Baroness, Fucked Up, Isis, Mastodon, etc. . . the head-bangers art is pretty robust— not just technically sharp but increasingly layered, atmospheric and sonically gorgeous.
The unfortunate, all-but-ironclad rule among these bands is that the vocals must be heaved out in demonic wails. It’s as though each frontman practices his delivery with the same regimen: scream at girlfriend for three hours, break away to smoke silica, take mind off girlfriend by bandsawing homosote panels in an unventilated basement, sleep, repeat.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Ozzy, Bon Scott and Maynard J Keenan sang distinctively over heavy stuff.
Regarding your earlier concern about the difficulty finding room for open-throttle rock in your mortgage-stalking lifestyle, just imagine if you get a tattoo of the Snakes For the Divine album art on your chest. Your loan officer gets a glimpse of it when you unwisely forget to wear a t-shirt under your Brooks Brothers polo. His eyes get big. He seems suddenly cold and a bit frightened. Your significant student loan debt, he regrets to inform you, will be a problem after all. So much for locking in at 4%. But fuck it. What do you care? You have Sleep’s Dopesmoker disc queued up in your Volkswagen Golf, a stale Tampa Blunt somewhere in your glove box and a functioning sunroof. Rock on.
— turnbuckle · Mar 2, 04:48 AM · #
Meh. . a little too death metal for my tastes, even in my younger incarnation. A couple of years ago I was pleased to find Wolfmother slotting in perfectly for my needs for unrepentant guileless rock, but they sort of dropped off the map.
— sidereal · Mar 2, 06:02 AM · #
Not sure what you mean by “dropped off the map” but Wolfmother released an album, “Cosmic Egg,” last year.
— Bob · Mar 2, 03:02 PM · #
Three bands that rock:
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Foo Fighters
Silversun Pickups
— Bob · Mar 2, 08:01 PM · #
Just as turnbuckle says about the cookie monster voice, I always appreciate a band that can do heavy without getting all lyrically mystical. Mastodon, for instance, is decent as far as metal goes (and their visuals are impeccable), but they indulge too many prog tropes for my taste. The Melvins, Jesus Lizard, Helmet, et al. could build their enormous heaps of pummeling noise without any Valkyries involved.
Not that there’s anything wrong with some campy occultism every now and then.
— Matt Frost · Mar 2, 08:56 PM · #
…reading over that last comment, I should probably add the obligatory “get off my lawn.” Sorry.
— Matt Frost · Mar 2, 08:57 PM · #
And everyone should immediately watch this Clutch video that I’ve been shilling for months.
— Matt Frost · Mar 2, 09:01 PM · #
But, Matt… that’s what people like about metal. Are you saying you aren’t a Manowar fan?
— Freddie · Mar 2, 09:24 PM · #
Frost, many thanks for the link to the Sunn O/Boris indulgence. . . “a wholly unique album that stands on its own unique ground. . . “Altar” moves into a completely new dimension.” My pupils are dilating already.
Something about the packaging and aura of that album reminded me of the old 4AD label, like what you’d get if the Cocteau Twins were possibly evil and inclined to use more feedback.
And like a lot of the 4AD misfires— heavy on atmosphere and dark, engrossing cover art— I came to Altar with high expectations only to be underwhelmed.
Much of the Boris album, Pink, however, was a fantastic bludgeoning— yet another exception that proves the hard-knuckle-rock-is-scarce-nowadays rule.
— turnbuckle · Mar 2, 09:58 PM · #
Freddie-
Yeah. I think what I’m saying is as deep and sophisticated as “heavy metal really isn’t my thing.”
— Matt Frost · Mar 2, 10:12 PM · #
Me neither! But oh, how I’ve tried….
— Freddie · Mar 2, 10:45 PM · #
Is metal conservative or liberal? I say conservative. It snakes a tube back into the depths of time and siphons forth a dream of dark northern forests, monsters, swords, and big tits. This is the true american dream, residing in the lizard brain of every white man, and the basis of our culture.
— cw · Mar 3, 12:18 AM · #
This is like the argument, put forth by a friend the other night, that fantasy, at least in its high/classic (read: Tolkien-influenced) form is essentially conservative. I’m not sure I buy it though; fantasy may be wistful and long for established order, but is also frequently both transgressive and idealistic.
— Peter Suderman · Mar 3, 12:36 AM · #
Did someone say Manowar? Well verily I say unto you:
Crack the Earth, Gods of Thunder
Men and beast will be torn asunder
Into the Fight I own the right
To be the King of Kings
— Mark in Houston · Mar 3, 01:04 AM · #
There is nothing more conservative than expressing a yearning for the fudal system in song.
— cw · Mar 3, 01:24 AM · #
And of course there is the super-martial aspect of the music itself. It does not swing. You cannot dance to it, but you can march and fight.
— cw · Mar 3, 01:27 AM · #
I keep harping on Clutch because I think they are a great example of a loud band — to which one could march and fight, even — inventing its own (distinctly American) mythology as it goes along. Like Tom Waits or the Pixies or Sparklehorse, Clutch are world-builders going way beyond Nordic swords and runes. Instead, they pull from good old-fashioned American paranoia. I mean, that last example I posted ends with the lyric “The seven habits of the highly infected calf.”
Another early example.
Of course, there’ also Craig Finn’s take on metal: “I don’t think you can be truly angry and play 64th notes.”
— Matt Frost · Mar 3, 02:25 AM · #
“It snakes a tube back into the depths of time and siphons forth a dream of dark northern forests, monsters, swords, and big tits.”
Wow, cw, that’s the best thing I’ve read here in a while, although it will not endear you— or metal— to the IBTC.
— turnbuckle · Mar 3, 02:49 AM · #
As for whether metal is conservative, I’ll go with Lemmy, who puts metal squarely in the Nader camp:
“We don’t care about politics, they are all the same anyway. All politicians are bastards.”
— turnbuckle · Mar 3, 02:55 AM · #
If you are talking about the International Bong Testing Consortium, they have explicitly approved of my take on metal, and in fact, can be considered a defacto sponsor of my comments here at [Cosell voice]: THE….. AMERICAN….. SCENE.
— cw · Mar 3, 04:03 AM · #
The sole purpose of this argument is to allow conservatives an “out” for blasting “Hollyweird” but liking Lord of the Rings. To that end, anything any particularly conservative enjoys will be argued to be “conservative.” Doubtless you’ll soon be subjected to a very serious argument that “Avatar” was actually a conservative movie. These arguments are made possible by the fact that, to conservatives, conservativism is essentially a meaningless shibboleth. Anything can be “conservative” because, in fact, nothing is.
— Chet · Mar 4, 12:22 AM · #
Chet: that your account of conservative motivations for making this particular argument about fantasy is psychologically far-fetched is merely the small-but-obvious substantive point against it. The deeper formal problem is the performative contradiction (to borrow from Habermas) it involves you in. I.e. You can be proven right only in a scenario where it is likewise proven that you earnestly and passionately, and thus absurdly, argue with insane people.
— Matt Feeney · Mar 4, 06:14 AM · #
So good to see this post and ensuing thread. Hard to believe no one has mentioned Converge, Pelican, Lords, Torche, Darkest Hour…
— Matt Stokes · Mar 4, 08:23 PM · #