Posted in Whathaveyou on October 30th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Executed with a lush psychedelic fluidity offset by periods of more weighted thrust, IAH‘s simply-titled album, II follows behind their early 2017 self-titled debut EP (review here), and might just qualify as their first full-length. The self-titled was picked up for a bonus-track-inclusive release through Kozmik Artifactz that fleshed it out to an LP either way, so however you slice it, II is their sophomore release, and it very much sounds like it. Recorded live, it finds the Argentinian three-piece engaging a raw sonic chemistry between them that has developed quickly even from where it was a year and a half ago. Songs like “HH” and “Pri,” both of which top seven minutes long, cast themselves between chugging progressive metal and fluid psychedelic heavy, and refuse to commit between the two or really acknowledge any disparity that might exist there. Weaving in and out of more aggressive riffage with ease, they also wander into post-rock musings with the guitar on “Nihil Novum,” only to issue a slap in the face via full-boar distortion in a louder section.
It’s a record that finds IAH developing their sound and going wherever the hell they want with it, essentially. They answer the potential of their debut with a flow and a confidence that allow them to direct the songs rather than being led by them, and by the time they get around to the prog/jazzy drums and keyboards in the second half of closer “Sheut,” it’s apparent just how wide open they’ve thrown the doors with this record. Another one that seems likely to wind up on vinyl sooner or later with a proper release, but if available digitally for the time being and streaming at the bottom of this post.
Dig it:
IAH – II
Tracklisting: 1. El silencio del agua 06:56 2. hh 07:15 3. Nihil novum 04:41 4. La niña del rayo 06:37 5. Pri 07:34 6. Sheut 05:44
Recorded live, mixed and mastered at 440 Estudio. Engineered and mixed by Mario Carnerero. Mastered by Mariano “Nano” Dinella.
Drum Doctor: Facundo Rodríguez Guitar Doctor: Mario Carnerero Assistant: José Bazán Artwork: Guillermo Scarpa
Produced by Mario Carnerero and IAH.
IAH is: Juan Pablo Lucco Borlera: Bass Mauricio Condon: Guitar José Landín: Drums
Posted in audiObelisk on October 30th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Finland’s Craneium will release their second album, The Narrow Line, Dec. 7 via Ripple Music. The Turku four-piece were picked up by the label in 2016 ahead of the release of their debut, Explore the Void, and with the seven tracks of their sophomore outing, they bring together psychedelic adventurousness with clarity of songwriting and a healthy dose of fuzz. Their songs work to find a niche in heavy rock that’s neither overly weighted so as to lose sight of its focus on melody nor so tripped out that the existence of any kind of focus at all is a contradiction. While seemingly based on jams, songs like “The Goat” and “The Soothsayer” have been carved into structured pieces, and with the rolling fuzz of opener “Manifest” as a forward first impression, the dual vocals of guitarists Andreas Kaján and Martin Ahlö complement as an immediate distinguishing factor that the subsequent, heavier chorus of “I’m Your Demon” only reaffirms. With Jonas Ridberg on bass and Joel Kronqvist on drums, “I’m Your Demon” is able to evoke boogie rock without losing itself into retroist cliche, and as with so much of the album surrounding, a pace is maintained that keeps the feel laid back when it wants to be but still able to push ahead when it wants to.
You can listen to the premiere of “I’m Your Demon” on the player below, and while it’s the shortest song on The Narrow Line at four and a half minutes, it nonetheless stands as an example of Craneium working in the space they’re making their own throughout the album, culling influence from desert rock and heavy psych, doom and a full swath of other whatnots in order to strike the balance between wall-o’-fuzz and the solo that cuts through in the second half. Dig that mix. Then the vocal harmonies return. There’s some underlying grunge thrown into the stylistic palette as well — it’s the brown you’ll hear in the guitar tone — but Craneium emerge clean from “I’m Your Demon” and continue to build momentum in “Beyond the Pale” while bringing to bear a more patient delivery as led by the guitars, moving into a dynamic interplay between lead guitar and Ridberg‘s bass in the second half that only feeds into the electric surge happening as they make ready to close out side A with the aforementioned “The Soothsayer,” the groove no less paramount there than it has been all along.
I’ll admit I keep wanting closer “Man’s Ruin” to be about the defunct record label headed by Frank Kozik that did so much to break ground for heavy rock in the late ’90s, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s about space and hubris, which is fair enough. The finale reinforces the fuzz of earlier cuts “Manifest” and “I’m Your Demon” while answering a bit of the funk that shows itself early in “The Soothsayer” and following Side B slabs “Redemption” — the longest inclusion at 6:44 and a highlight of Kronqvist‘s drumming in meter, cymbal splash and tom work — and “The Goat,” which is as languid as Craneium get, with a dreamy meandering at about four minutes in that offsets the more weighted shove that accompanies. “Man’s Ruin,” as it should, brings the various sides together in a last display of all of it as the band’s own pastiche and the expanding ground on which they’re continuing to work to coalesce their approach — so much as they want it to coalesce; some aspects here are definitely intended to remain liquefied — and to refine the balance of structure and space in their craft. They strike that balance well throughout The Narrow Line — one doubts they titled the album thinking of the thin borders between heavy subgenres, but it applies nonetheless — and emerge from the other end of “Man’s Ruin” having not at all succumbed to tragedy as a result of their ambitions.
“I’m Your Demon” is on the player below, and Kajántook some time to talk about The Narrow Line and the song itself, so you can read what he had to say beneath that. The album is out Dec. 7 on Ripple.
Enjoy:
Andreas Kaján on “I’m Your Demon”:
Our second album has been a long time coming. After releasing “Explore The Void” back in 2015 digitally we got signed by Ripple Music and the physical album was out in 2016. Since then we’ve had some bass players come and go which have made it difficult to move forward and write new material. We finally found a guy and got around to writing new material and by summer of 2017 we had 8 new tracks. We recorded the album during the spring of 2018 and it will be released by Ripple Music December 7th this year. This time around I think we learned a little something from recording our first album and applied that while recording “The Narrow Line”. I think we have listened to the critics and tried to put more time and effort into the production this time. Lets hope you think so too!
The new songs highlight the Craneium sound like the last album, but we’d like to think it has evolved since and that we have refined it. A lot of clean and mellow parts rounded off with heavy grooves and hooks.
A few words about this second single release: “I’m Your Demon” was actually the last song that we wrote for the new album. Most of the other songs we had been working on a couple of months before this one came along. It’s a bit of an oddball for us since it’s the first song that isn’t in a 4/4 time signature, so we’re calling it our prog-song — justified, right? The guitar solo in the beginning of the song came about in the studio while recording it. We decided to play the clean part a little longer before the vocals come in, so we went ahead and threw a solo in there. Really fun to play with a cool breakdown part that culminates in a guitar solo and then on to a modulation of the last chorus. If it weren’t for all the fuzz we might even make the European Song Contest!
The album is called “The Narrow Line” and will be out on Ripple Music worldwide December 7th 2018.
Craneium is: Andreas Kaján – Vocals & Guitars Martin Ahlö – Vocals & Guitars Joel Kronqvist – Drums Jonas Ridberg – Bass
Posted in Whathaveyou on October 29th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
I’m not, but if I was scoring one of those serial horror dramas or a film or even a short or something like that and I needed a creepy aural vibe to accompany, at least I know who I’d call. Working under his full name, Thomas Andrew Doyle, the creative force better known as Tad — he of Tad, Hog Molly, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth and copious production work at his Witch Ape Studio — hereby issues Experiments of the Spectral Order Vol. 1, a collection of five ambient pieces running 27 minutes that, if we’re talking about a spectrum, run from terrifying to, well, more terrifying. From the shocking burst in opener “Adorned in Maggots” to the eerie string sounds and swells of centerpiece “Mortality is the Rule, Life is the Exception” and into the depths of nine-minute finale “Outside of Reality,” Doyle makes Stranger Things sound like Strangers with Candy and brings to bear atmospheres of unremitting tension and darkness. Sometimes minimal, sometimes assaulting, it seems perpetually to be a downward trip into something bleak and consuming.
So yeah, good times.
And of course, as any quality work of horror should, it sets itself up for a sequel. Here’s Doyle‘s announcement of the release that came through last week:
As of today, I have a new recording that I am releasing to the world.
Experiments of the Spectral Order Vol. 1 is the first in a series of music that is fit for the days we live in. Volume !, is composed of five songs from deep within the dark realms of the psyche that is taylored to those with a tasteb for the macabre. Best of all, it is completely free. You may download the full length on the Incineration Ceremony Recordings bandcamp here at this location.
Some people make joyous and happy music. I do not. However, this is the music that I love and it brings a smile to my face. May it be so with you.
Tracklisting: 1. Adorned In Maggots 04:39 2. Breeding “IS” Pollution 05:09 3. Mortality Is The Rule; Life Is The Exception 04:17 4. Bridge To Purgatory 03:56 5. Outside Of Reality 09:06
Posted in Whathaveyou on October 29th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Well, every All Them Witches record has been different from the one before it, and no matter what else happens, that’s bound to be the case with their next one as well. In an announcement posted over the weekend, the Nashville heavy-psych blues forerunners made public the departure of keyboardist Jonathan Draper. Draper was, of course, their second organist, taking the place of founding member Allan Van Cleave, who left the band prior to the recording of their latest album, ATW (review here). The stated intention is to carry on as the core three-piece, though if you have Rhodes and will travel, I wouldn’t not hit them up, since as bassist/vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr. says in the statement below, it’s an “indefinite” change. That hardly means forever.
Parks, guitarist Ben McLeod and drummer Robby Staebler certainly want for nothing as regards chemistry between them, so while that dynamic will inherently change without a fourth member, one expects they’ll come through. It might be an album or two getting settled, but the fact that they tour so hard invariably means that if there’s something to figure out musically or in terms of their presentation, they’ll have plenty of opportunity to do so. These guys have earned a good amount of trust in my book at this point.
Here’s what Parks had to say:
Hi there, time to talk about change!
Robby, Ben and I have been making music together for 6 years, and since then we have had an insane array of friends and family come and go through our musical life. We love all of them, we cherish all of them and their time, and talent. We want to celebrate the time we have spent together. Since our formation, the one goal I have had for this band is to be open, vulnerable, and willing to love and adapt to change as it presents itself.
That being said, we have decided to proceed in our musical experience as a 3 piece band, indefinitely. The power trio has been a huge part of rock tradition, and we are happy to join the ranks. I know this may be disappointing to some of you who have known us for awhile, and I fully understand the hesitation when the “known” becomes “unknown.” But what I want to say is, we love music, and there would be no reason for us to go on the road or endure what we endure if not for the transformative power of music. It is an ancient pull, and I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but we are knee deep and wading out.
Sincerely, thank you for supporting and trusting us. We have all rooted ourselves into the lives of each other, us to you, and in kind, you to us. There is no way to describe sharing the band/fan connection every night, but we are overjoyed to experience it with you.
Posted in Whathaveyou on October 29th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Though it’s kind of a wonder they can manage to cross state lines let alone international borders, Wisconsin’s Bongzilla toured Europe this past summer, and they had copies of their compilation Thank You… Marijuana, along with them for the ride. The 2LP brings together the band’s off-album catalog — tracks from splits, EPs, singles and so on. Other songs that presumably got high and wandered off. With a suitably stonerly respite between, Totem Cat will release Thank You… Marijuana on Nov. 15, with preorders starting next week.
Bongzilla releasing a comp called Thank You… Marijuana is nothing if not “on theme.” But any new outing from them is welcome, as it’s been some 13 years since they issued Amerijuanican, their most recent studio album. I of course don’t know what their plans are, but in noting this was coming, Totem Cat also hinted at another announcement to follow shortly behind, and it seems entirely possible that’s a new Bongzilla record or the long-awaited debut LP of side-project Aquilonian, which rumors had circulated might actually take shape sometime this or next year. I wouldn’t complain with either.
When/if I hear something I’ll put a post up, so if you want to consider this the first half of Totem Cat news going on, that’s fine. Certainly worth noting either way:
[Click play above to stream Frozen Planet….1969’s The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition in its entirety. Album is out Nov. 1 on Pepper Shaker Records and HeadSpin Records.]
Step right up, don’t be shy. One has to wonder when it comes to the sixth — count ’em, six — full-length outing from ellipse-inclusive Sydney/Canberra psychedelic improv specialists Frozen Planet….1969 as to which came first, the concept or the execution. That is, The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition is a somewhat weighty title, and obviously that’s on purpose as the classic power trio of guitarist Paul Attard, bassist Lachlan Paine and drummer Frank Attard, being entirely instrumental, lean on the cartoon artwork and the liner notes of the CD and LP — released by Pepper Shaker and HeadSpin Records, respectively — to tell the story. That’s not to say the record itself, which is comprised of one 39-minute title-track broken down into six subtitled parts and a six-minute follow-up called “Encore: A Herbal Miracle,” isn’t plenty malleable.
Indeed, in sound, open structure and form, Frozen Planet….1969 jam and jam and jam and jam their way into the greater reaches of Far Out, a naturalist production helmed by Frank keeping some human presence in mind behind all the willful instrumental meandering that, all things considered, isn’t nearly as effects-baked as it could be, even in the latest stretch of the “The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition” itself. But they go where they want to go, and of course, the live feel of the recording is one of its most essential facets. For something that’s at least in some part made up on the spot, that’s bound to be the case, which leads back to the initial question of which came first, the story or the jam.
Does it really matter to the listening experience? I suppose not. It’s possible to put on “The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition” without engaging Doctor Berner or reading in the liner notes about his traveling show selling the miracle herbal elixir to relieve pain and ward off evil, strengthen body and mind, and so on. But it’s not nearly as much fun, and Frozen Planet….1969 sound well like they’re enjoying the process of creating the album on the spot. Shouldn’t the listener endeavor to do the same with the listening experience?
Thus we meet the Swordsman, the Juggler, Sundae, Doctor Berner himself and the rest in the title-track. Conveniently, they’ve split the 39-minute piece up into subsections. On the vinyl it all plays together naturally, so whether one thinks of it as one or six different cuts is moot. On the CD and digital versions, though, we see the band purposefully linking the pieces together as the single jam that they are. The list of subsections reads accordingly:
The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition:
I. Oddball Sundae (00:00-05:15)
II. The Juggler (05:16-10:08)
III. Introducing… Oxandra Lanceolata (10:09-16:26)
IV. The Talking Juice (16:27-27:31)
V. Swords for Hire (27:32-31:47)
VI. Never Should Have Left Town with a Whistling Monkey by My Side (31:48-39:25)
There’s a lot of information packed into those subtitles. ‘The Talking Juice’ refers to the potion itself. ‘Swords for Hire’ has a companion Swordsman as seen in an executioner’s hood on the front cover standing next to Oxandra Lanceolata, also on the cover holding — for some reason — a bonsai tree. The art is meant to evoke a comic book sensibility — we see Doctor Berner in the top left corner where the comic company logo and issue price might otherwise be — and that tends to give the whole affair a lighthearted feel suited to the music itself, which is laid back even at its most active points, the title-track getting funky in ‘The Juggler’ or jamming into a classic fuzz solo in ‘The Talking Juice’ after the “hubba hubba” of pulled notes and spaced-out guitar echoes in “Introducing… Oxandra Lanceolata.” Part of the fun of engaging with The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition becomes reading these things into it.
And yeah, if they had elected to do a futuristic sci-fi theme instead of an old traveling medicine show, it would probably be just as easy to hear a cosmic pastiche in the spacey wanderings that take hold in ‘The Talking Juice’ and the lonely reach of feedback in ‘Never Should Have Left Town with a Whistling Monkey by My Side,’ the bass and drums holding the jam together beneath the floating guitar overhead, but the point is they didn’t. The Attards and Paine created the characters and the theme they wanted to use and set about bringing that concept to life as a full experience of the album. That’s exactly why The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition works as well as it does. It’s a complete, multi-level realization of its central idea.
So which came first, the music or the theme? Hell if I know. What’s more important is that the two work side by side to give a whole impression through both the title-track and the complementary “Encore: A Herbal Miracle” that wants nothing either in narrative presentation or actual sonic execution. They finish the second jam with jazzy punches of guitar, bass and drums, odd-time strumming and kick cutting off suddenly to bring the record to its end, and by so doing, they reinforce the notion of The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition as a work of improv. It’s there while it’s there and then it’s over. There’s no real grand finale to it. The jam just concludes and then, presumably, it’ll be on to the next one.
Fair enough. The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition is Frozen Planet….1969‘s sixth LP since 2012, directly following 2017’s From the Centre of a Parallel Universe (review here) and Electric Smokehouse (review here), so they’re used to a quick turnaround. Whenever their next offering surfaces, the fact that they’ve put so much into the conceptual foundation of this one can only help them as they move forward, and whether they work with another specific plotline or not, the mere fact that The Heavy Medicinal Grand Exposition was approached with a sense of storytelling is bound to make the listening experience that much richer. It certainly does here.
Posted in Whathaveyou on October 29th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
I always approach with a certain amount of trepidation when a band puts a word like ‘final’ in an album title since, sometimes even subconsciously, it becomes a signifier that it’s their last outing. Whether or not that’s the case with Dead Witches — who, hey, are already dead to start with — and their second record, The Final Exorcism, I don’t know, but it’s always something that catches my attention. Either way, it’ll be interesting to hear what the Dorset doom specialists conjure up for their sophomore outing following up 2017’s Ouija (discussed here), which will also be their first with Soozi Chameleone of Killing Man Jaroh on vocals.
Of course, the band’s connections to Electric Wizard via Mark Greening are front and center as well, and it’s worth noting that The Final Exorcism brings the drummer once again to Chuckalumba Studios, wherein Dopethrone was recorded way back when, as well as Dead Witches‘ own debut outing.
The PR wire has art and details:
DEAD WITCHES UNVEIL ALBUM DETAILS!
‘The Final Exorcism’ To Come In February 2019 On Heavy Psych Sounds!
Haunting vocals, heavy riffs, fuzzed bass, savage drumming, Dead Witches will take you to another world… a world of darkness. Today the band unveiled the hotly anticipated details and cover artwork for their brand new album ‘The Final Exorcism’, due out on February 22nd 2019 with Heavy Psych Sounds Records!
Dead Witches roar back from the studio on two wheels, the Chuckalumba studios, where the fabled sessions for Dopethrone and Let Us Prey by Electric Wizard were recorded and Dead Witches debut Ouija.
The sessions began on the full moon 25th of August in the heart of the New Forest deep in Dorset, the hallowed home of 90’s doom legends and Electric Wizard folklore, marking Mark’s fourth time in both bands at Chuckalumba. John Stephens, operating the living museum of antique analogue and valve driven studio gear and tape machines captured a world of demons and possessions… A banshee wail of woeful siren song weaving a sinister world of horror doom, through waves of burgeoning fuzz and hell sent thunder on the drum kit. Realising the magnitude of what they had committed to tape, Dead Witches began to seek Doug Shearer, wizard of mastering and the final member in the coven. His previous work also includes Dopethrone and Let Us Prey.
‘The Final Exorcism’ will be available in the following formats on Heavy Psych Sounds, with a pre-sale to start on October 31st :
– 25 TEST PRESS VINYL – 250 LTD GREEN FLUO VINYL – 500 LTD SPLATTER, TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND RED-PURPLE – VINYL – BLACK VINYL – DIGIPAK – DIGITAL
[ album artwork by Goatess Doomwych ]
The tracklist will read as follows: 1. There’s Someone There 2. The Final Exorcism 3. Goddess Of The Night 4. When Do The Dead See The Sun 5. The Church By The Sea 6. Lay, Demon 7. Fear The Priest
We will also reissue the Dead Witches debut album Ouija. The record will be released in early 2019 !!!
Dead Witches Are: Mark Greening – Assault and Battery Oliver Irongiant – Guitar Soozi Chameleone – Vocals Carl Geary – Fuzz bass
Posted in Bootleg Theater on October 26th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Type O Negative, October Rust (1996)
I hereby claim this album in the name of doom. Do I have any right or authority to do that? Nope, but it’s out there now and there’s no going back.
It’s not such a stretch anyway. Type O Negative released October Rust on Roadrunner Records in 1996 as the follow-up to 1993’s Bloody Kisses, an album that at least in the New York market produced successful radio singles in songs like “Christian Woman” and “Black No. 1.” Seems unfathomable now, but a quarter-century ago, that kind of thing happened, and I remember it distinctly because I was a 12-year-old boy calling Q104.3 incessantly to request them. The station even let me on the air a couple times in recorded intros to the songs on their nightly top-five countdown or whatever it was. They said I sounded good. Pubescent-me was stoked in a way that still makes me smile.
I was in high school when October Rust came out and the album hit me as few have. It was a bridge between my Beatles fandom and the appreciation for heavy metal I couldn’t help but develop as the wake of grunge found my weirdo-dork-ass looking for something angrier to relate to. By the time October Rust was released as the Brooklyn band’s fourth overall full-length, they weren’t as aggro as they had been on, say, “Kill All the White People,” but songs like “Love You to Death,” the woefully catchy “Green Man” and “Red Water (Christmas Mourning)” were lush in a way that was enticing, their arrangements thoughtful, sweeping and commanding while still remaining heavy in tone and presence. The bass fuzz from Peter Steele at the start of “Be My Druidess” remains a swaggering showcase of unmatched tone: “Here it is, fools. Good luck trying to top it.” And if anyone has, I’m not sure who it would be. Where Bloody Kisses, 1992’s The Origin of the Feces and 1991’s Slow Deep and Hard were all pretty raw in their basic sound, October Rust didn’t shy away from being over-the-top in its production any more than it did in the sexual mischief of “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend,” “Be My Druidess” and “Wolf Moon (Including Zoanthropic Paranoia),” etc. The album’s 15-track — three of which are gags; I always thought the phrasing in track two of “We’d like to thank you for picking up our latest recording of October Rust” was a little odd, as though there’d been some earlier recording of it — and 72-minute runtime is daunting but never monotonous, the songwriting of Steele and his ever-malleable low register vocals complemented by the guitar/voice work of Kenny Hickey, the drums of Johnny Kelly and the keyboard/backing vocals of Josh Silver, who remains the unsung hero of the band in songs like “Love You to Death,” “Red Water (Christmas Mourning),” “Die with Me,” on and on.
But as to what makes October Rust doom, the arguments are myriad and largely pointless. Yes, Type O Negative play slow. Yes, they tune low. Yes, they’re clearly influenced by Black Sabbath as well as the aforementioned Beatles — they covered “Paranoid” by the former and “Day Tripper” by the latter, daringly bringing their own take to both — and like a lot of releases that were outliers while still being considered under the general umbrella of “metal” at their time, October Rust is never overly aggressive. Closer “Haunted” stretches just past the 10-minute mark and is among the most atmospheric songs they ever composed, and though the earlier stretch in “Be My Druidess,” the dance-y single “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend” and their cover of Neil Young‘s “Cinnamon Girl” are uptempo, the crux of the album, especially in the context of what was then happening in the band’s echelon of heavy music — certainly Kyuss were on a major label and Black Sabbath were about to reunite with Ozzy, but there was nobody really bringing goth theatricality and doom together in the way Type O did — remains more about composition than aggression. They were a standout. More than two decades on from this album’s release, they still are.
Does it matter? Not really. The language of subgenre didn’t really exist at the time in the way it does now — the internet, social media, blah blah — but the bottom line is any angle you take it from, October Rust plows through whatever critique you might want to apply.
Much of the focus on it remains on songs like “Love You to Death,” “Be My Druidess,” “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend” and “Cinnamon Girl,” but for me, the greatest impact comes between the latter two in that list, with the three-song punch of “Die with Me,” “Burnt Flowers Fallen” and “In Praise of Bacchus,” each of which shows a character, emotionality and craft that’s simply in a league of its own. I still can’t enter a European airport without hearing Steele‘s verse, “Hey KLM, AT&T/The UK post-system/Do you still love me” play in the mental jukebox from “Die with Me,” and the hooks of “Burnt Flowers Fallen” were deceptively simple and surrounded by guitar and bass brimming with tonal vitality pushed forward by drums (or was it drum machine?) at a pace that filled the gap between the slower and faster material around it. And “In Praise of Bacchus?” It stands as one of the best songs Type O Negative ever wrote, and they wrote a few good ones along the way. That 21-minute stretch has come to define for me everything that works best about October Rust in melody and the poise of execution that makes the record so enduringly special. It was never just about the hits.
They come back on after “Haunted” to let Steele say with typical performed self-deprecation, “I hope it wasn’t too disappointing…” and while an afterthought, that little bookend with the untitled second track after the white noise goof of “Bad Ground” winds up tying October Rust together with a sense of completion that shows that as far into the wash as they go at the end of what’s essentially the album’s grand finale — if one suddenly cut off; cold endings abound — they never lose sight of their overall purpose. I don’t know if it would be right to call October Rust mature given the pervasive sense of multi-tiered chicanery at work, but it was a huge step forward in their approach and aesthetic even from where they’d been three years before and a rare instance in which a band took commercial viability not as a cue to water down their output to reach as many people as possible, but to expand their sonic palette and create something richer on the whole.
They would answer October Rust in 1998 with the After Dark video and 1999’s World Coming Down, which chronicled Steele‘s cocaine addiction in “White Slavery” at the outset and made a running theme of it from there on. 2003’s subsequent Life is Killing Me was a triumph, casting off the residuals of goth in favor of a well-claimed sound and songwriting process that was entirely their own, and 2007’s Dead Again offered an actually-mature Type O Negative in songs like “The Profit of Doom,” “September Sun” and “Tripping a Blind Man” while seeing Hickey come to the fore on vocals more often in complement to Steele with a riffier approach overall. Steele of course passed away April 14, 2010 — I was in a depot in the UK waiting to take a ferry to the Netherlands for my second Roadburn Festival when I heard; all flights were canceled owing to the volcano Eyjafjallajökull — and Hickey and Kelly (the latter of whom also joined Danzig) went on to form Seventh Void which eventually begat Silvertomb, who toured last month with fellow Brooklynite Roadrunner vets Life of Agony ahead of a presumed eventual album release.
Being as seasonal as it is, I felt the need to get this one in before October ends. Doom or not, it’s a record that feels like home to me. As always, I hope you enjoy.
—
Yesterday was The Pecan’s first birthday. One year. He spent most of the day refusing to nap, but had a little bit of brownie before the bedtime ritual — we put toys/books away, change diaper, brush teeth, sing “C is for Cookie” and then say goodnight — and we sang to him like you do. The real parties were last weekend in New Jersey and this weekend in Connecticut, so it was kind of just a little thing on this end. We gave him a pillow shaped like a grilled cheese sandwich and a clacker out of a toy instrument pack we bought last weekend. He seemed to dig both and demolished the brownie, so there you go.
Thanks to any and everyone who has yet checked out The Obelisk Show on Gimme Radio. That’s been a lot of fun to put together thus far and I’m going to keep it going for as long as they let me.
And thanks to any and everyone who’s bought a shirt from Dropout Merch so far. I’ve been talking about getting another design or two together, so I’ll hope to have more news on that front soon.
Next week, there are premieres coming from Frozen Planet….1969, Craneium, Holy Grove and Empress as well as a review of the new album from Castle, but I might go hit a show this weekend, so that would bump the schedule of other stuff and you’ll pardon me if I don’t do full notes as a result of that. I got invited and sometimes it’s nice to go someplace when you’re invited.
I’ll leave it there since this post is already longer than I intended and it’s past 5AM. I pushed my alarm from 2:30 to 3AM all week and it did me much good. Going to keep that up for a while and see if I can get away with it and still make it through the day.
Okay. Thanks for reading and please have a great and safe weekend. Don’t forget to check out the forum and radio stream.
