Man’s Gin: Cracking a Dog Smile Through Broken Teeth
Posted in Reviews on August 16th, 2010 by H.P. Taskmaster
It’s a rare album whose choruses will have you singing along the first time. Usually you have to hear a song once or twice before you feel comfortable belting it out with the kind of reckless abandon you can only have in your car when you think no one is watching, but in the case of Smiling Dogs (Profound Lore), the first album from Man’s Gin, the solo project of Erik Wunder, also known as the Hemingway obsessed half of the black metal duo Cobalt. First time listening to the hyper-Jerry Cantrell-esque “The Death of Jimmy Sturgis,” it was as though I’d known the song all my life, and listening to it was like revisiting an old friend.
That’s par for the course to varying degrees for Smiling Dogs. What I take away most from my repeat sessions with the album is how Wunder managed to hide this innate songwriting ability in Cobalt, whose songs rely on more open structures and esoteric methods. Man’s Gin might be an overflow of the impulse to create, but whatever the case, it’s delivered soaked in passion, so that even as Wunder begins a song in his big boy deep singing voice, it’s not long before a track like closer “Doggamn” has him so psyched to play it that there’s a quick key change. That kind of thing happens a lot, and it only adds to the natural, genuinely organic vibe of Smiling Dogs. Colin Marston of Dysrhythmia, who recorded the album at his The Thousand Caves studio in Brooklyn – to which Wunder relocated prior to putting Man’s Gin together — is hardly known for this kind of thing, but damn if he doesn’t evoke a deep-hued, almost morose beauty in a memorable track like “Solid Gold Telephone.”
The Cryosphere being that part of the planet covered in ice (the poles, etc.), one would expect, Into the Cryosphere (Profound Lore), the second album from cross-country black metallers The Howling Wind to sound pretty cold and desolate, and it does at that. I don’t know if it’s a concept album in the narrative sense, but the record is certainly thematic, and the theme is chilly. Five of the seven total tracks have some mention of ice or frost or snow in the title (I count “Will is the Only Fire Under an Avalanche” among that number), and even unto the album’s design work, layout and cover art, the feel is frigid, desolate, and bleak.
When Yakuza vocalist/saxophonist Bruce Lamont talks about a great change and “something beyond ourselves” imminently about to occur, I don’t think he means apocalypse in the traditional sense, like he pictures some kind of catastrophic societal collapse nightmare scenario à la Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road, because, as he notes in our interview, it’s happened before. If you don’t think World War I was the end of the world, go back and read up.
Smiling Dogs is a moving musical pilgrimage reminiscent of the vibe of such acts as Woven Hand, Deadboy & the Elephant Men, Dax Riggs’ solo stuff, 16 Horsepower, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen Nebraska-era. With a singer-songwriter approach (obviously this is not metal in the slightest) that dabbles with southern rock and Americana folk, Smiling Dogs is a journey through the dark heart of America’s desolate, barren, and ghostly wastelands.
Yakuza are a critic’s band. Certainly for as long as I’ve been reviewing albums, I’ve been saying of the Chicago outfit, “They’re doing really important things, it’s only a matter of time before the public catches on.” Century Media probably felt the same way when they signed the band in the early part of the last decade, and Prosthetic too when they put out 2006’s Samsara and 2007’s Transmutations. And you know what? We were all right. Yakuza have been making innovative and individualized metal for over a decade now, and it just seems like nobody’s paying attention.
[Please note: Pekka Koskelo plays drums and Lasse Pyykkö plays bass, guitar and sings on Never Cross the Dead. This information was not included with the album promo I received. Sorry for any inconvenience this mistake caused.]
The mighty Slough Feg will release their next album in North America through Profound Lore Records and we couldn’t be more psyched to work with one of our favourite heavy metal bands ever. Mastermind Mike Scalzi has been pounding away in the studio over the last while crafting what we could only imagine to be one of the best heavy metal releases you’ll hear this year. Slough Feg’s next full-length album should be released early fall. Expect more album updates to surface sometime soon.
Worm Ouroboros will be doing their first short US tour on the West Coast in support of their self-titled debut album.
The above headline, “Looking Forward to Go Back,” is modified and taken out of context from the last line of my recent telephone interview with Apostle of Solitude guitarist/vocalist Chuck Brown. Brown was talking about touring Europe, which is something he did as a member of The Gates of Slumber. But I think the phrase can be applied to Apostle of Solitude as a whole, what the band does, their sound and their execution. They look forward to go back.
When it comes to the kind of emotive, traditional doom in which Indianapolis, Indiana, four-piece Apostle of Solitude traffic, an album like their 2008 full-length debut, Sincerest Misery, is a hard one to top. The record was a triumph of precisely what the title suggested, and each song carried a drama with it that was neither over-the-top nor silly, but felt remarkably human and real to the listener. The guitar and vocal work of Chuck Brown (ex-The Gates of Slumber) was essential to this process; his voice in particular heralding the doom of yore with an urgency not often heard in their genre.
As over the course of this decade San Francisco has become a hotbed of neo-artsy metal, it’s not surprising that the aughts should end with a release like the Profound Lore debut from the trio Worm Ouroboros. It’s been called chamber metal because of its classical influences and operatic vocals, but over these nine mostly extended tracks there are a wide variety of styles and sounds, mostly mellow in execution, but periodically picking up into a post-doom heaviness that’s notable in its grace and flow.
We?re awaiting the final master to the new album from the new gods of US doom metal, namely Apostle of Solitude. Last Sunrise is a doom metal masterpiece that comes across as the heaviest and most emotionally driven material that Apostle of Solitude have crafted. In what easily surpasses the band?s previous work (and we know how good that is), Last Sunrise is a soul stirring doom metal opus that is a soundtrack to the emotional and tragic circumstances that we get confronted with during these harsh times of need and desperation.
Returning after a four year absence and finding their name now synonymous with the top echelon of this decade’s doom innovators, the Eugene, Oregon trio YOB have released a new album in the form of The Great Cessation (Profound Lore) that only further solidifies the position and notoriety gained while they were defunct. Would have been something if they came back and sucked, next to impossible as that would be.
