Black Math Horseman - Wyllt - Expanded Review

         With their first album Wyllt, slow-burners Black Math Horseman provide a brooding and ultimately cathartic addition to the doom metal and dark psyche rock catalog. A big part of stoner rock and doom metal’s appeal is, of course, the almighty monolithic riff. Black Math Horseman don’t ride out monstrously fuzzy riffs like Kyuss or Melvins, but the album boasts its fair share of nasty, wall-shaking, low-register guitar work (see “Deerslayer and “Origin of Savagery”). While it would be easy for these powerful musicians to riff first and ask questions later, BMH set themselves apart with really deliberate songwriting and production. Wyllt is meticulously constructed in terms of song structure, dynamic shifts, and orchestration, but unquestionably stays on the near side of the “post-rock” barrier and avoids the drawn-out metalgazing that might turn some listeners off of bands like Mono or This Will Destroy You.  

          Torment of the Metals” is a fine example of the band employing structure to create surging emotional tension, proving that metal bands can use more than just down-tuned dissonance, lyrical malevolence, or crushing overdrive to sound heavy or dark. This track, like many of the others, starts slowly with a distant, almost tempoless treble strum and patiently folds in rising, hypnotic bass drums that, in turn, act as foundation for the lead guitar melodies. Rather than follow any verse-chorus-verse structure, melodic leads are subtly passed around from guitar to bass to guitar to vocals, introducing melodic variations and additional sonic layers as the songs progress through their dynamic contrasts. “A Barren Cause” might otherwise sound like standard stoner sludge with its ham-hock drums and overdriven bass lines, but anguished guitars fade in and out to keep time over the muddy riffs and create a dogged uneasiness that relentlessly pulses the song forward. The guitars gradually become more and more piercing and eventually blossom from mood-setting accompaniment into the song’s centerpiece, intertwining with late-arriving vocals on the way to a quaking finish. Black Math Horseman, like their spirit cousins Isis, seem to have a destination in mind as they play out each phrase, making Wyllt an uncommon find in a genre where cohesion and careful arrangement are often scrapped in favor of weighty, blurred grooves or the simple pleasures of aping Tony Iommi.

         Black Math Horseman’s measured sense of composition wouldn’t really matter if the band’s component sounds didn’t complement each other so well. Producer Scott Reeder (formerly a bass player for Kyuss and Unida) made sure that no particular instrument or tonal quality dominates, giving the album a layered clarity that highlights the each instrument’s precise phrasings and the album’s quiet spaces. Ian Berry and Bryan Tulao’s restrained and razor-sharp guitars peel off doubled guitar-bass lines and float above singer Sera Timms' entranced vocals; drum fills are well-placed and never feel extraneous. These layered atmospherics, which recall a cleaner-sounding Mouth of the Architect, are complemented by a tight and unyielding rhythm section (the first lines of “Tyrant” follow a drum-and-bass mind-meld that immediately evokes Al Cisneros and Chris Haikus from meditative doom grandmasters Om) that shifts from background groove to primary pummel to great effect in the songs’ rumbling crescendos. The vocals are generally ambient and monotone, but pair well with the lead guitar’s lilting eighth-note agitations to suffuse the album with an ominous mysticism. (To be completely honest, I can’t understand many of the lyrics, but they sure sound creepy).

  All of this comes together to make some darkly satisfying rock music, but some of the tracks would benefit from a little less control and a little more raucous abandon. When Timms finally looses her throaty wail on the final track “Bird of All Faiths and None/Bell from Madrone”, it sounds singularly gnarly, operating as an explosive conclusion to the preceding tracks’ dark, controlled build-ups. Despite any slight shortcomings, this is consistently compelling heavy music – by turns, mysteriously slinky and impressively forceful. (If you don’t listen to the album in its entirety, try “Deerslayer” and the portentous “Torment of the Metals” which sounds like the musical equivalent of saying, “Enemies whom I am pursuing slowly but surely, pee thy pants in fear of my calculated rage during the next seven minutes and four seconds.”)

LISTEN HERE

Late Night Drinkin' Music - "Loan Me A Dime"

      Feeling the urge to put on a good late night drunk, but just can’t decide on the perfect musical accompaniment? In a “Best Songs” special issue of the UK magazine Q, the editors offered Jeff Buckley’s “Last Goodbye” as the best song “for being alone at 2 AM with a bottle of red wine.” If you aren’t feeling that brokenhearted and prefer, say, bourbon as your drink of choice, try “Loan Me A Dime” from Boz Scaggs’s eponymous debut. (Note: This song does not sound like the softy rock “Lowdown,” “Lido Shuffle,” or “Harbor Lights". None of ‘em. I promise.) This epic down-on-your-lady-luck blues cover validates your besotted melancholy with forlorn organs and a plodding beat, but then swings you out of the dumps with the rhythmic flex of the Muscle Shoals session players and Duane Allman’s screaming guitar. Unlike most songs that last over ten minutes, this one also plays pretty well to the late-night crowd in your favorite dive bar.  

      The original by Chicago Blues guitarist Fenton Robinson is equally great (and much shorter) in its own right. It’s got some killer drumming and Robinson’s voice blows Boz’s out of the water.

DIG IT

HEAR ROBINSON'S ORIGINAL

I Hear They Can Wail Mixtape # 1 - Taking Out the Thrash (Mostly)

Here's the first in a series of loosely themed, annotated playlists/mixtapes that I'll be posting.  All of this stuff is available on Rhapsody (I'm working on a good way to search for and find the comp; not working at the moment, but that might be an indexing issue), iTunes (hopefully coming soon assuming availability), and maybe some other music retail/sharing outfits.  Most of these songs are pulled from my personal collection or from Rhapsody.  I'm obviously not affiliated with Rhapsody at all, but I find that its pretty handy (albeit ultimately limited in selection) for checking out new-to-me music, especially with a limited budget for records. 

If you don't have access to Rhapsody or iTunes, or just want to quickly check out a few of the tracks, I've linked most of the song titles to "videos" of the tracks that I could find on the web. (No guarantees for sound quality).

1) S.O.D. – “King at the king/evil is in” – Hardcore verses and a campy bridge nail the hilarious absurdity of worshipping the Dark One in a mundane, minimum-wage world.  (Last Line, Best Line: Evil, hell, Satan, goat, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun).  

2) Megadeth – “Devil’s Island” – Classic Megadeth with a goofy refrain.  Bass players are often underrated (shameless plug), but few have been more integral to their band than Dave Ellefson.

3) Municipal Waste – “The Art of Partying” – The philosophy behind Old Milwaukee and raggggge-ing.

4) UFO – “Lights Out” – Catchy melody + rhythm section that refuses to let up + Michael Schenker putting on a guitar clinic = a 1977 song about the London Blitz (or some have suggested the 70s power cuts) that deserves the recognition it gets as a cult classic.

5) The Accüsed – “Take My Time”- Yup. Work sucks. (Great whacked vocals, but better follow along HERE.)

6) Hirax – “Unleash the Pack of Dogs (Open the Gates)” – Relatively new song by thrash stalwarts Hirax opens with the first lines of the shallow, but pretty vampire-werewolf throwdown movie Underworld. This song is much better than the movie. Great album overall. 

7) Sepultura – “Mass Hypnosis” – Crazy fast, but foreshadows the chugging, pounding groove and political vitriol they would perfect on Roots. 

8) Converge – “Eagles Become Vultures” – Scathing and intense (what else?).  One of their biggest and one of their best.

9) Morbid Angel – “Brainstorm” – From the awesomely evil Blessed Are The Sick, this is Tampa death metal at its most economical.  And these dudes can really, really play; guitarists Trey Azagoth and Richard Brunelle sound like Kerry King and Jeff Hannemann’s equally demented cousins.

10) 3 Inches of Blood – “Infinite Legions” – Cam Pipes is as an intense singer you’ll hear in metal and the dual harmonized NWOBHM guitars (even if just heard in small bits of this song) really work with the upped tempos. 

11) Excel – “Insecurity” – I heard about this early metalcore gem from Ian Christe’s excellent and deep metal chronicle Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal.  They are Excel!

12) Gallows – “In the Belly of a Shark” – This song made it on a 2006 Kerrang! compilation; I think they made a good choice.  Dig of the organ and the dissonant guitars.  (Actual video with moving people here.)

13) Deathrow – “Pledge to Die” – Anti-war sentiments similar to “Mass Hypnosis” – familiar, but indispensable lyrical territory for metalheads.  This one really gallops.  Also, the fantasy-style album cover has a super phallic rock in the background.  Raging steel indeed.

Saint Vitus's "Born Too Late" and Iced Earth's "Diary" - Cloned Riffs?

Check out the similarities between the opening (and recurring) riffs on "Born Too Late" - recorded in 1986 - and "Diary" - on 1995's Burnt Offerings. It's a simple pattern, but very distinct.  Was this a self-conscious quotation/homage, unintentional convergence, or a blatant snatch and grab?  My guess is option A.

Saint Vitus - "Born Too Late" (via Youtube)

Iced Earth - "Diary" (via Youtube)

The Entrance Band - The Entrance Band

        In a recent press release, the Entrance Band – a rehashed version of Guy Blakeslee’s stoney psych rock band Entrance – invite the listener on an “incendiary ten song journey,” achieving “the full realization of the power trio” along the way. Problem is, the journey just isn’t incendiary and it won’t take you anywhere you haven’t been before. The Entrance Band are technically solid musicians, blending straightforward alt-rock melodies and herky-jerky post-punk rhythms with flowing, busy guitar lines and frontman Guy Blakeslee’s bending tenor. These components, though, never really gel into the high-energy psychedelic blues-rock trance the band seems to aim for in its mission to become the Alpha and Omega of power trios.  

        The band makes its best showings when they keep it short and/or simple, like the twisty counterpoint of “Lookout!” and the insistent, clambering drum and bass of “Grim Reaper Blues pt. 2.” Too often, the guitar lines are tweeting, ornamented filler that weigh the tracks down rather than take the melodic lead or even just add some desperately-needed drive or grittiness. (Blakeslee cheerily noodles around throughout, but maybe doesn’t remember that he’s still singing and the rest of the band is still going too.)  Remember in “Amadeus” when Emperor Joseph II listened to Mozart play and told him that there were “too many notes?”  Ironically vapid for Jeffrey Jones’ monarch, but spot on for the extraneous guitar work of “You Must Turn,” “Hourglass,” and a good portion of “Still Be There.” “Grim Reaper Blues pt.2” - a new, but inferior version of the opening cut from Entrance's 2006 album Prayer of Death - suffers less from this baroque affliction.  Instead of Blakeslee’s vocals, Paz Lenchantin’s warm bass takes the lead and it pays off in some beefy Mountain-ous thump.  Still, the only places where the embellished guitar twiddle doesn’t detract from the music are on the hit or miss instrumental passages (where soloing makes a little more sense), like the enjoyable mid-tempo jams between verses on “Hourglass” or the latter half of "Sing for the One."  On the airy “Lives,” the band even takes a stab at twinkly Brit-ish rock, with Blakeslee doing his best impression of Keane’s Tom Chaplain.  Unfortunately, this one’s a dud too.  Overall, the overplayed guitar lines match the album’s overstuffed and largely undifferentiated songs; many of the tracks are too long by half and the jammy lack of structure makes for a “power” trio album that rarely sounds powerful, urgent, or even cohesive. 

        To make matters worse, Blakeslee’s simple lyrics are bland at best and, at worst, they're stale schmaltz masquerading as rose-colored wisdom.  On "You Must Turn", he's tryin' to help, but nothin' happens.  ("Do you see the prison walls you build around yourself/Hope you'll(?) see that you are trapped/Do you blame someone else?"..."You say there's just one way, but I know you are wrong/You will see a new direction everywhere you turn/Will you seize the magic hours and hold them in your hands?").  “M.L.K.”, a good-hearted, but ham-headed tribute to you know who, pairs the sweet cheese of undulating jam band guitars with an inane mash-up of hollow positivity and civil rights-lite sloganeering (e.g. “Try a little bit harder/open your eyes up/you got to wise up/and then you’re gonna rise up/keep on pushin’ a little bit harder…”).  While hacked or humdrum lyrics don’t necessarily break an energetic rock album, Blakeslee’s voice alone wrecks some otherwise listenable tracks.  Blakeslee is keen on soaring elastics akin to a higher-pitched, less tuneful Chris Cornell with a hint of Devendra Banhart’s wavering timbre. Too bad he has neither Cornell’s powerful pipes to sustain his voice above frenzied guitars (or empty space - i.e. “Grim Reaper Blues pt. 2”), nor Banhart’s judicious sense of timing and phrasing.  As a result, Blakeslee draws out lyrics into shrill, thin cries, his vocals sprawling without pause over the verses on “Hourglass,” “You Must Turn,” and the decidedly unsexy “You’re So Fine.” 

       If Blakeslee drew back both his vocals and guitar, and the band instead built their sound around the call-and-response staccato opening of “Still Be There,” the stripped-down punch and reverb between 1:10 and 1:30 of “You’re So Fine,” or the solid opener “Lookout!”, the Entrance Band would be a quite bit closer to realizing the aggressive, but melodic swagger and slap-happy rowdiness that make power trios like Blue Cheer, Mountain, and Rose Hill Drive so much damn dirty fun.

LISTEN HERE ("Lookout!")

LISTEN TO SAMPLES ON ALLMUSIC

Black Math Horseman - Wyllt

        With their first album “Wyllt”, slow-burners Black Math Horseman provide a brooding and cathartic addition to the doom metal/post-metal landscape. A big part of stoner rock and doom metal’s appeal is, of course, the almighty monolithic riff. BMH don’t ride out monstrously fuzzy riffs like Kyuss or Melvins, but the album boasts its fair share of nasty, wall-shaking, low-register guitar work (see “Deerslayer and “Origin of Savagery”). While it would be easy for these powerful musicians to riff first and ask questions later, BMH set themselves apart with really deliberate songwriting and production. “Wyllt” is meticulously constructed in terms of song structure, dynamic shifts, and orchestration. Restrained and razor-sharp guitars peel off doubled guitar-bass lines and float above singer Sera Timms' entranced vocals; drum fills are well-placed and never feel extraneous. These layered atmospherics (which recall Mouth of the Architect) are complemented by a tight and unyielding rhythm section (the first lines of “Tyrant” follow a drum-and-bass mind-meld that immediately evokes Al Cisneros and Chris Haikus from meditative doom grandmasters Om) that shifts from background groove to primary pummel to great effect in the songs’ rumbling crescendos. The vocals are generally ambient and monotone, but pair well with the lead guitar’s lilting eighth-note agitations. (To be completely honest, I can’t understand many of the lyrics, but they sure sound creepy).

        All of these components come together to make some darkly satisfying rock music, but some of the tracks would benefit from a little less control and a little more raucous abandon. When Timms finally looses her throaty wail on the final track “Bird of All Faiths and None/Bell from Madrone”, it sounds singularly gnarly, operating as an explosive conclusion to the preceding tracks’ dark, controlled build-ups. Despite any slight shortcomings, this is consistently compelling heavy music – by turns, mysteriously slinky and impressively forceful. (If you don’t listen to the album in its entirety, try “Deerslayer” and the portentous “Torment of the Metals” which sounds like the musical equivalent of saying, “Enemies whom I am pursuing slowly but surely, pee thy pants in fear of my calculated rage during the next seven minutes and four seconds.”)

HAVE A LISTEN