Posted in Whathaveyou on September 27th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
London’s Orange Goblin issued their digital-only live outing, Rough & Ready Live & Loud (review here), in the dark hours of 2020. The footnote context now is that it serves as the capstone of the Martyn Millard era of the band, who’ve since brought in Harry Armstrong to take on the bassist role. They’ve been doing live shows, have more coming up, and were recently confirmed for a delayed 25th anniversary celebration at Desertfest Berlin next year. No doubt that’ll be a good time. Orange Goblin always are.
Dissonance Productions, which will also oversee a reissue of 2007’s Healing Through Fire, will produce a physical edition of Rough & Ready Live & Loud that will be on CD in November and 2LP the middle of next year. Because that’s how long records take to make these days. Times we live in, and so forth.
In any case, Orange Goblin put word out about the release thusly:
ORANGE GOBLIN – ‘ROUGH & READY, LIVE & LOUD’ – VINYL & CD RELEASE ANNOUNCED
We are very happy with this one!
Due to massive demand from YOU, the fans, we have teamed up with Dissonance Productions to bring you this awesome physical release of last year’s digital live album ‘Rough & Ready’ Live & Loud’.
This beauty will now be released on CD in November 2021 and very limited ‘orange splatter’ double vinyl in May 2022 and both are up for pre-order now.
The physical version comes with an unreleased live track ‘Blue Snow’
1. Sons of Salem 2. The Devil’s Whip 3. Saruman’s Wish 4. Made of Rats 5. The Wolf Bites Back 6. Mythical Knives 7. The Fog 8. Some You Win, Some You Lose 9. The Filthy & The Few 10. Shine 11. Renegade 12. Time Travelling Blues 13. Blue Snow
GO GET SOME!!
Tickets for our ‘The Cold North’ Scandinavian Tour in November 2021 are on sale NOW from the link below:
Support on all dates comes from Swedish rockers Bürner.
Full set of dates as follows: NOVEMBER 2021 THU 11 – BETA, COPENHAGEN, DK FRI 12 – PLAN B, MALMO, SE SAT 13 – THE CRYPT, LINKOPING, SE MON 15 – JOHN DEE, OSLO, NO TUE 16 – FRIHAMNEN, GOTHENBURG, SE WED 17 – DEBASER, STOCKHOLM, SE FRI 18 – KLUBI, TAMPERE, FI SAT 19 – KORJAAMO, HELSINKI, FI
Orange Goblin live: Sat 31 Jul – The Yard, Cornwall, UK Sun 15 Aug – Bloodstock Open Air (Main Stage), UK Sunday 22 Aug – Dynamo Metalfest, Eindhoven, NL Sat 02 Oct – Headbangers Balls Festival, Izegem, BE Fri 05 Nov – Night of Salvation (Damnation Fest), Leeds, UK Sat 04 Dec – Dome of Rock Festival, Salzburg, AT Wed 08 Dec – The Booking Hall, Dover, UK Thu 09 Dec – The Tivoli, Buckley, UK Fri 10 Dec – Limelight 2, Belfast, UK Sat 11 Dec – Grand Social, Dublin, IRE Mon 13 Dec – King Tuts, Glasgow, UK Tue 14 Dec – Gorilla, Manchester, UK Wed 15 Dec – Asylum, Birmingham, UK Thu 16 Dec – The Globe, Cardiff, UK Fri 17 Dec – The Underworld, London, UK Sat 18 Dec – The Underworld, London, UK
Orange Goblin is: Ben Ward – Vocals Joe Hoare – Guitar Harry Armstrong – Bass / Backing vocals Christopher Turner – Drums
Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 27th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Pay close enough attention and you might notice we’re creeping ever closer to the Oct. 22 release of Green Lung‘s new full-length, Black Harvest (review here). As their new video for “Graveyard Sun” readily reminds, it’s also coming on autumn. In the interview recently posted with guitarist Scott Black and vocalist Tom Templar — who in the clip play an unruly youth and a priest, respectively — the latter talks about Black Harvest as a Fall album. In addition to accounting for any and all Type O Negative comparisons one might want to make, this applies particularly to “Graveyard Sun” even among the rest of the included tracks on the offering. The lyrics are not only conscious and blatantly expressive of it, but they seem to derive that direction from the instruments behind.
The video itself stars actor Julian Firth, whom one might recognize from any number of films and/or television appearances throughout the last 40-plus years. He was already on Call the Midwife this year and has a string of very-British credits to his name, including having been a maester on Game of Thrones. If “Graveyard Sun” is the cult horror flick, he might be the Peter Cushing more than the Christopher Lee — his character, as it happens, is named Lee Cushing — but the vibe the band are going for is unmistakable and he helps them readily pull it off. Likewise the font of what might otherwise be closed captioning for a voiceover. Like Green Lung‘s songwriting, it all ties together toward an aesthetic purpose that pulls individuality out of familiar elements and makes its own memorable impression therefrom.
I don’t know where the hype is at for Black Harvest at this point. To be honest, I reviewed the thing, interviewed the band early ahead of the release, and I’ve been so relieved ever since that I could just enjoy the album instead of trying to imagine sentence phrasing in my head that I haven’t paid much attention. But we’re inside the less-than-a-month mark at this point, and this is a great song to unveil for these chilly mornings and cooling evenings. Fall is my favorite season.
Enjoy:
Green Lung, “Graveyard Sun” official video
A MESSAGE TO THE COVEN:
We are pleased to share some long-lost paranormal investigation footage discovered in the depths of Highgate Cemetery, meticulously restored by director Billy Howard Price and featuring yours truly… watch it if you dare…
Song taken from the album Black Harvest, out October 22nd 2021 on Svart Records
Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 24th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Psychacheis the kind of record that makes everything else seem needlessly complicated. That’s not to say it’s dumbed down. It isn’t. The melodies are broad, structures are skillfully applied, the overarching flow between the songs is well considered, and I’m sorry, but nothing with Michael Petrucci drumming on it is dumb. The end result of Curse the Son‘s intention, however, strikes right to the heart of what stoner metal is and can be. Riffs, groove, melody, hooks, thick and full sound, sometimes oozing, sometimes shoving, but always righteous in the going.
First released by the band in 2012, Psychache (review here) was the follow-up to the Hamden, Connecticut, trio’s 2011 offering, Klonopain (review here), and for the purposes of narrative ease we’ll call it their third full-length. They’d issue it digitally and on CD in 2013 before seeing it picked up for a deluxe vinyl treatment through STB Records in 2014. In the interest of honesty, I’m kind of murky at this point on the actual release date. I tend to associate the album with the band’s performance in New London, CT, at day three of the Stoner Hands of Doom XII fest (review here). Founding guitarist/vocalist Ron Vanacore handed me a CD at that show, and after a long day of bands — of which Curse the Son had been a highlight — I put it on for the car ride back to where I was staying and, even having spent all day being assaulted by distortion and riffs, found myself blasting it full volume for its 31-minute duration on that trip. Call it love at first riff, but Psychache has held a special place in my heart ever since, whatever one might consider the day it actually came out.
The band at the time was Vanacore and his former Sufferghost bandmate, bassist Richard “Cheech” Weeden, and Petrucci, and they made Psychache at Underground Sound in East Haven, mixing as well at Higher Rock. The lack of pretense remains staggering. If you pull back and look at it, there are really four full songs included, with the title-track an instrumental — albeit a crucial one — and “Valium For?” (get it?) a noisy minute-long interlude, but on vinyl, the total six split into an even three tracks per side, and the bookending effect of its two longest pieces in leadoff “Goodbye Henry Anslinger” (6:21) and finale “The Negative Ion” (7:22) isn’t to be understated when it comes to immersing the listener in the tone and groove that are so, so, so central to the entire proceedings. Again, this isn’t a dumb record. It is willful, however, in its primitivism.
Imagine a complex circuit with wires all over the place. You don’t know what the wires do, but there are a lot of them and they’re all different colors. You start ripping out wires at random and you find that the circuit still functions as it should, so you keep going. You pull and you pull and maybe even the circuit starts to function more efficiently for your efforts. And after however long repeating this process, you see the circuit doing exactly the thing it’s supposed to do and you find yourself looking at all the wires on the floor and wondering why in the first place you thought needed all this bullshit? Psychache is that. It has everything it needs and nothing it doesn’t, and even through the haze of its tone and the lumbering nod of “Somatizator,” it’s a moment of clarity.
Side A builds through the midtempo chug of “Goodbye Henry Anslinger” — named for the man who banned marijuana use; it’s worth noting that weed was made legal in Connecticut this year for adult recreational use — and the slower highlight “Spider Stole the Weed” en route to “Psychache” itself, which starts with Weeden‘s bass and moves into a shuffle that carries through most of its first half changes its central riff in the second. All groove, but a speedier pace that adds to the reach of the album overall in subtle fashion, which “Valium For?” answers with its there-and-gone moment of weirdness ahead of the closing duo “Somatizator” and “The Negative Ion,” the former of which mirrors “Spider Stole the Weed” in its memorable chorus while pushing the vocals into a lower register instead of a higher one, and the latter, which meanders for about two minutes before suddenly kicking in at full volume.
There’s a bit of feedback at the end, but the bass is ultimately the last thing to fade out, and fair enough for what Weeden has by that point added in terms of thickness to the procession. By then, if you’re left wanting, it’s your own fault. In 31 minutes, Curse the Son crush and compact the pivotal aspects of their style into a collection that makes its own depth feel simple and that has continued to make the band undervalued in my mind ever since.
They’ve done two albums after this, with 2016’s Isolator (review here) coming out through Ripple Music and The Company and beginning a collaboration with producer Eric Lichter at Dirt Floor Studios that continued onto 2020’s Excruciation (review here), also on Ripple. In the meantime, between the two records, Vanacore would see an entire swap-out of the rhythm section, with Robert Ives taking over on drums for the 2020 outing and Brendan Keefe donning the bass for Isolator and pulling that duty as well as adding vocals to the darker-in-mood Excruciation, building on Curse the Son‘s melodic growth and pushing their songwriting in new, exciting and still-footprint-on-skull-heavy directions.
But Psychache remains a one-of-a-kind outing. If Curse the Son had moved forward and said they were going to do the same thing twice, it wouldn’t have been the same as the moment they captured here, in these songs. I won’t decry the work they’ve done since. They’re a better band now. What makes Psychache such a standout, though, is how much it offers and how casually it does so, how easy it makes it all sound, and how it has managed to shift into a kind of timelessness that one expects will endure precisely as a result of the aesthetic truths it tells.
Thanks for reading. As always, I hope you enjoy.
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I got a call earlier this week from the school nurse to tell me The Pecan had been falling asleep in class. Unheard of. He’d had boogers for a few days, but that kind of fatigue from him is a firm ‘never’. He got home about a half-hour later, was way out of it and feverish. You know where this is going: To the doctor for a Covid test.
We spent the better part of Wednesday and yesterday sweating it out before at about 6:30 this morning — right after I finished the above — I refreshed the page where his test results would appear and they were at last there and negative. He was better yesterday and — more alert, more of a pain in the ass — but still nice to have the assurance. He also yesterday had a 45-minute nosebleed in the morning, first thing. Compared to that, wrestling him into an outfit for school today was a walk in the park.
We are much relieved, though both The Patient Mrs. and I were also already in the midst of making kid-has-plague-antibodies travel plans for if he did have it and came through without serious complications — she to a conference, I to Maryland Doom Fest — but I’m prepared to call it a fair enough trade for him to not be seriously ill in the first place.
Off to school with you.
Obviously a fair amount was hanging on that precarious balance, all joking aside. The anxiety level was high in the house yesterday and since I couldn’t really take him anywhere and it was raining, we were stuck reminiscent of early lockdown. The Patient Mrs. went to a work meeting in the early afternoon, which I understand on multiple levels. Neither he nor I was easy to be around at that point.
So I guess today’s after-school activities will involve going to places and breathing on stuff. Sounds like fun, right? Should be a blast.
Whatever you’re up to this weekend, I wish you the best. Next week starts the Quarterly Review, so that’ll be fun. I’ve got seven days’ worth of stuff and I very purposefully scheduled a premiere after that so I couldn’t go any longer. Because I would, you know.
Great and safe couple days. Have fun. Hydrate. Watch your head.
Posted in Whathaveyou on September 24th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
I don’t follow a lot of music-related stuff on Twitter. Mostly, to be honest, I’m there for the Star Trek. But among the several bands, outlets, etc., I do follow is the label 20 Buck Spin, and I’m continually glad I do. For example, I caught sight of Dream Unending‘s cover art scrolling past all the Shatner the other day, checked out the track and, yeah, I am reaffirmed in my follow. With the combined efforts of Tomb Mold‘s Derrick Vella and Justin DeTore — who’s also in Innumerable Forms but who I know from his work in Magic Circle — the two-piece are set to issue their debut album, Tide Turns Eternal, through 20 Buck Spin on Nov. 19, and if you’re not yet down with the imprint’s all-things-death renaissance, now might be a good time. The extremity of ‘lead-single’ (such as it is) “In Cipher I Weep” is its own best argument. Find it at the bottom of this post.
The PR wire followed up on the social media algorithm thusly:
DREAM UNENDING, FEATURING TOMB MOLD’S DERRICK VELLA AND INNUMERABLE FORMS’ JUSTIN DETORE, SET NOV. 19 RELEASE DATE FOR DEBUT ALBUM: TIDE TURNS ETERNAL
HEAR “IN CIPHER I WEEP” FROM THE 20 BUCK SPIN RELEASE
LP / CD / TAPE / DIGITAL / TS / LS Releasing November 19th, 2021 Vinyl releasing February 4th, 2022
Dream Unending, a cleverly self-described “doom metal Postal Service” by founders Derrick Vella (Tomb Mold) and Justin DeTore (Innumerable Forms), release their debut album, Tide Turns Eternal on Nov. 19 via 20 Buck Spin.
The illustrious pair give listeners a taste of the seven-song, 45-minute album with today’s release of “In Cipher I Weep.”
“’In Cipher I Weep’ was the first song we wrote,” explains Vella of the sprawling track. “That must have been nearly 2 years ago now. Definitely the darkest song on the album. Intense lyrics. It leads off with that strange fretless bass, those dying flange harmonics, the vampiric harmonizing, the haunting organ (Thanks, Dad) and transforms into this spellbinding piece full of beauty only to be undone with the heaviest moment of the album. Justin’s vocals sound like the pillars of heaven crashing into the earth. It’s good stuff.”
Tides Turns Eternal sees the musicians expand into entirely new and unexpected directions, composing songs that drift between emotional states both forlorn and uplifting. Ascendant Floydian guitar textures and sparkling Cure-esque strumming lift the music out of the purely metal realm, where moody rock introspection allows for Elysian respite before DeTore’s world crushing roar assures no escape from earthly tumult is certain.
“Dream Unending and Tide Turns Eternal is a testament to the idea that music can be limitless,” continues Vella. “This album was created by Justin and I without ever being in the same room, city or country. It defied closed borders and acts as more than just a record. It’s an affirmation of life. It’s a vision quest. It poses questions pertaining to fear, discovery, the value of one’s soul and offers an answer. Dream Unending serves as an excellent outlet for a language that Justin and I speak that we can’t express elsewhere. It pays tribute to not just doom, but to all the styles of music we love, and the immersive/cinematic quality of fully realized albums. The songs are heavy, dreary, and dreamy. What more could you ask for?”
Tide Turns Eternal track list: 1. Entrance 2. Adorned In Lies 3. In Cipher I Weep 4. The Needful 5. Dream Unending 6. Forgotten Farewell 7. Tide Turns Eternal
Posted in Whathaveyou on September 24th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
How’s this for an update? Rezn have recently finished recording a thing. That’s right. Not just any thing, really, but something. Mmm hmm. Yup. I know.
That’s the extent I know about what the Chicagoan unit have been up to. They’ve got a date slated for Oct. 2 that will mark their first gig “post-“pandemic, and then they take off for an East Coast tour in December after a couple November shows in the Midwest. Neat, right? They go supporting 2020’s Chaotic Divine (review here), which was a hoot and a half, and which if you’d like an excuse to revisit it, you’ll find it at the bottom of this post. Not that you really need the excuse, mind you.
As to what they’ve recorded, it could be a new record, or it could be their part of the collaborative release they’ll share with Vinnum Sabbathi as a part of PostWax for Blues Funeral Recordings, or it could be something else entirely. Definitely something though, whatever it is. For sure, a thing.
Their posted tour dates follow:
THIS FALL. We are coming back to the east coast for the first time since 2018. West coast, you’re next. Dates below, tickets available soon:
Nov 12: Indianapolis, IN @ Black Circle Brewing Nov 19: Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall w/ King Buffalo Dec 1: Cincinnati, OH @ Urban Artifact (early) Dec 1: Cincinnati, OH @ The Comet (late) Dec 2: Youngstown, OH @ Westside Bowl w/ Frayle Dec 4: Rochester, NY @ Bug Jar Dec 5: Toronto, ON @ The Garrison Dec 7: Somerville, MA @ The Rockwell w/ Lesser Glow Dec 8: Washington, DC @ DC9 Dec 10: Charlotte, NC @ Snug Harbor Dec 11: Winston-Salem, NC @ Monstercade Dec 12: Asheville, NC @ Odditorium Dec 14: Lexington, KY @ The Green Lantern Dec 15: Columbus, OH @ Spacebar Dec 16: Detroit, MI @ Sanctuary Dec 17: Grand Rapids, MI @ Pyramid Scheme Dec 18: Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club
REZN are: Phil Cangelosi Patrick Dunn Rob McWilliams Spencer Ouellette
Posted in Whathaveyou on September 24th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Here come Chorosia out of Wien with a reminder of how fine the line can be between sludge, doom and post-metal when you have a band willing to screw with the formula. “Seeds of Hate” is the four-piece’s first single from the upcoming sophomore full-length, A Call to Love — and no, that contradiction isn’t being ignored — which is out Oct. 22 on Grazil Records as the follow-up to a 2018 self-titled debut, and by the time you’re ready to think you’ve got a handle on the dirt-coated roll they undertake with willful repetitiveness and the post-Scott Kelly raw-throat vocals that accompany, the Austrian outfit are already gearing up to smack you in the face with a NWOBHM-style guitar solo.
A Call toLove continues to play out in this somewhat unexpected stylistic blend, keeping one foot in ambience with cuts like “Dune Messiah” and “Hope Country” and the other foot on your throat with the opening title-track — don’t let me spoil it; I think it’s meant to be the biggest surprise of all — as well as extended pieces like “Innocence” and the closer “Star Veins.” There’s some metal in there for sure. Not always the friendly kind.
Bottom line? “Seeds of Hate” is more ‘heads up’ than ‘full summary’ when it comes to the rest of the album, but as it’s my first experience listening to Chorosia, it immediately made me want to investigate further. Perhaps you’ll find the same.
Background info and audio follows:
Chorosia – A Call to Love – Oct. 22
Chorosia is a progressive sludge metal band from Vienna, Austria founded in 2017. The band is composed of Anto Pranjić (guitars/vocals), Florian Zeus (guitars), Christian Umkehrer (bass), and Gregory Reinig (drums). So far, Chorosia has released one album in 2018.
After doing a number of local dates to promote the album (which included playing with various well-known names such as Crowbar, Dopelord, Yob, Neurosis, Black Tusk, and the Skull), the band had decided to take their music on a tour in 2019. The self-organized tour consisted of five packed shows in eight days in central and southern Europe.
In 2020/2021, due to the global pandemic the band was stopped from going on another tour which had been planned for southern Germany. However, using the circumstances and the time on their side, Chorosia has written and recorded their second album which consists of 9 songs clocking in over 60 minutes of new music. “Seeds Of Hate” is the first single off the upcoming album called ‘A Call to Love’ coming out on October 22nd. Grazil Records will release the album on CDs and Tapes and digitally.
Chorosia: Anto Pranjić – guitars/vocals Florian Zeus – guitars Christian Umkehrer – bass Gregory Reinig – drums
Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 24th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Swedish trio Cavern Deep made their self-titled debut (review here) in July on Interstellar Smoke Records, and in so doing, chronicled the story of an archaeological dig gone horribly wrong. “Fungal Realm,” the penultimate of the included eight tracks, is the point in the narrative at which that seems to happen. It is here that the Umeå-based three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Kenny-Oswald Duvfenberg, bassist/vocalist Max Malmer and drummer/backup vocalist Dennis Sjödin (also keys) present the tragedy this exposition finds on its journey into the titular deep cavern. Not to give it all away or anything, but the song is called “Fungal Realm.”
Maybe this is off-topic — and maybe not — but anyone remember that episode of The X-Files where Mulder and Scully go out to investigate whatever it is, somebody disappeared or something, and they find out that the entire hillside is actually a giant, living fungus that tries to trap them and make them think they got away by making them hallucinate while it digests them? So much goo and ’90s special effects of faces melting. It ain’t the Smoking Man or “Is your hair chemically treated?,” but it was an awesome one-off episode just the same. Cavern Deep and “Fungal Realm” particularly kind of remind me of that, except, you know, epic, melodic, ambient doom instead of Gillian Anderson in shoulderpads. Can’t have everything.
To this point, Cavern Deep have done an admirable job reaching out to establish a following for their work. This lyric video series, which boasts a chapter for each song on the record, follows a series of live performance clips and another video series. In the meantime, they’ve also taken it on themselves to record and finish a second album, though when it’ll be out, I have no idea. Not before the end of 2021, in any case. Still, it tells you this is a band who not only believe in what they’re doing, but are looking to show that to other people as well. Seems like such a straightforward idea, and I suppose it’s true of everyone to some degree — myself included — but not everyone does to the same lengths, and as ever, I respect the hustle.
Under the lyric video and accompanying info, I’ve also included the live-in-studio clip of “Fungal Realm” and the Bandcamp album stream. Happy excavating.
Enjoy:
Cavern Deep, “Fungal Realm” lyric video premiere
Cavern Deep releases the 7th lyric video in the process of releasing an entire long concept video for their debut self-titled album.
Fungal Realm is the 7th song on the Cavern Deep concept album released on Interstellar Smoke Records worldwide on vinyl and digital distribution the 23rd of July 2021.
The songs synopsis is as follows:
“I am alone.. Traitors! They could not endure.. Out of sight.. Engulfed.. I am abandoned.. The spores burn.. Burn my lungs. The pulsating mass is limitless.. layers of layers.. The triangular gate.. The bridge.. I can see it.. I must reach it! Before this horrid, rotting organism takes hold of my mind completely.. ”
Cavern Deep is: Kenny-Oswald Duvfenberg – Guitars and Vocals Max Malmer – Bass and Vocals Dennis Sjödin – Drums, Backup Vocals and Keys
Cavern Deep, Cavern Deep (2021)
Cavern Deep, “Fungal Realm” live at Malmer Productions
Posted in Reviews on September 23rd, 2021 by JJ Koczan
In a career arc that spans over three full decades, Richmond, Virginia’s Erik Larson has contributed to a range of acts from Avail to Axehandle, Alabama Thunderpussy to Backwoods Payback, Birds of Prey, Hail!Hornet, The Mighty Nimbus, on and on. Currently found in Omen Stones, Roy Batty and Thunderchief — at least two of whom have new material in progress, if not all three — he is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter, entirely capable of serving as frontman or propulsive drummer, and in the case of his solo work, he often functions as a one-man band.
His best known solo outings are probably 2003’s The Resounding and 2005’s Faith, Love, Hope, both of which were released through Small Stone, and in 2013 and 2016, he followed with the Garrett Morris (Windhand)-produced A Dedication and Haura, prior to joining Backwoods Payback for a pair of LPs and numerous tours. On Sept. 17, he released two new full-lengths and an EP, playing entirely solo on Favorite Iron (some guest horns aside) and Siste Latter and bringing in two drummers for two tracks each on the four-song Measwe. Each offering was produced earlier this year in a different studio, and each follows its own path forward.
In whatever incarnation a given outing might have him working, it is the work that is defining. Larson‘s voice, sometimes clear, sometimes guttural, is distinct even among throatier deliveries, and much of the Southern metal that comes through in his style derives from aesthetic he helped shape. There is little mistaking his presence generally, and his own material is very much that.
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Erik Larson, Favorite Iron
Co-produced by Larson, with recording and mixing at Minimum Wage by Lance Koehler in Richmond, the 10-song/45-minute Favorite Iron offers surprises from the moment the horn-quartet kicks in on opener “Backpage,” a stated homage to front-of-house manage/recording engineer John Hopkins (Sleep, Bongzilla, Melvins, etc.). Whether it’s the acoustic “In the Threes” and “OVFNI,” the latter digging into moody grunge melody, the Southern-style heft of clean-sung second cut “Darker Blue,” the hooky “Off With That,” “Starting Who?” and the especially hard-hitting closer “The Heavies” — a fitting bookend to “Backpage” sound-wise — or a punk rocker like “Middle Age,” the album works in sets of three songs each the establish a flow across its entirety. “Backpage,” “Darker Blue” and “The Dr. is In” provide the surge at the beginning with “In the Threes” as the 1:45 outlier, then “Middle Age,” “Off With That” and “OVFNI” move between hardcore and friendlier punks before “S.O.T.S.O.G.” — a cover of UK heavy rockers Blackrock from their 2002 EP, Clutching at Straws — shifts into the final duo “Starting Who?” and “The Heavies” to rage, crash and ultimately feedback out. The opener is the longest track (immediate points), and the closer slams meanest, but in between, Favorite Iron‘s songs are a journey to be undertaken, united by songwriting and production even while careening, elbows flying outward, through deceptively encompassing breadth.
Erik Larson, Favorite Iron (2021)
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Erik Larson, Siste Latter
Shorter on runtime, but big on grit, Siste Latter was tracked in Asbury Park, NJ, with Pete Steinkopf (BouncingSouls) co-helming at Little Eden Studio. The title is Norwegian and translates to ‘Last Laughter,’ so fair enough. “Wanted as We Were” builds in intensely, but is more about swing than pummel in its groove, and the exclamatory “It’s a Caper!” — which is about as close as Larson comes on any of these releases to sounding like Backwoods Payback — actually isn’t the most exclamatory song on the outing, as following the acoustic interlude “Happy Accidents,” “Little Boogie” emerges as willful in its good time. Opening chug gives way soon to a bouncing riff and churning chorus, out of which come a series of “woo!” and other shouts, even a “c’mon!” included, though as he’s the only player on the outing, Larson‘s essentially talking to himself, rather than a band behind him. One way or the other, the track is a blast, and easy to imagine it coming from a stage. It finishes even short of its 3:48, and tape hiss stops as a transition to the acoustic-led “Pull the Brake,” — “Pull the brake/Let me off/I ain’t quittin’, I just stopped,” the standout lyric — which weaves electric guitar in with its strum and cymbals, the vocals forward and natural-feeling. The finale, “Zelig Aspirations,” splits its six and a half minutes between driving dirt rock and foreboding acoustic guitar with effects-laced cymbals behind, gradually incorporating electric distortion which ultimately caps, feedbacking into a quick fade. Debate EP/LP if you want, the bruises are there just the same.
Erik Larson, Siste Latter (2021)
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Erik Larson, Measwe EP
“Front of House” leads off the four-song/16-minute Measwe with echoes of “Backpage” from Favorite Iron in its John Hopkins homage — “I’ll never see you again/I’ll never hear you again/Say to me/’Do your thing'”; the last lyric also having appeared in “Backpage” — which sees Larson joined by drummer/recording engineer Jordan Faett (Paper Trail) and drummer/bassist Buddy Bryant (Dirt Merchant) for an even more complete-band feel. Faett and Bryant alternate between “Front of House,” “AsWas,” “Old Friend” and “Indipleading,” and both suit the rough edges of Larson‘s riffs well, whether that’s the rush of the noted chorus to “Front of House” or the still-hardcore-kids cap put on the ending of “Indipleading.” Between them, “AsWas” is brooding where “Old Friend” is more spit and nastier in its shove, but the bottom line with Measwe — also stylized all-lowercase: measwe — is that where Siste Latter and Favorite Iron pull back on the heavier intention, the EP simply doesn’t have time for it. The tradeoff is a more intense listening experience, and in working with other players despite still being responsible for the entirety of the songwriting, there’s an energy to the EP of its own, but if Larson is trying out bandmates, he’s got his work cut out for him. “Indipleading” finishes with a sudden few snare taps, quick hits, and leaves a heavy silence afterward, making it clear that despite the 20 songs across these three releases, this might be more beginning than end. So be it. Hopefully, anyhow.
