The quintessential third record. With the July 1971 release of Master of Reality (also discussed here), Black Sabbath further refined the dark, brooding aggression of Paranoid (discussed here) and the riff-following bad-trip hard acid blues of the self-titled (discussed here) to become something even more their own. More than five decades after the fact, the influence of the eight-song/34-minute LP continues to spread to new players, fans and underground culture at large, and it will probably never surpass Paranoid in sales, but there has been nothing made in the last 40-plus years that doom has been a genre primarily in Master of Reality‘s wake that has not been either directly or indirectly touched by its machinations. If you add pivotal opening track “Sweet Leaf” — which swapped out the storm and siren that began their first two records for a repeated cough counting into the riff in a way that’s become no less iconic, and was by no means the first rock song about marijuana but was perhaps the first to sound so hypnotically thick in tone — as a founding moment of all things stoner in heavy music, that reach goes even further.

It was their third go with producer Rodger Bain, who was then on-staff at Vertigo Records and would produce records for Troggs, Budgie, Arthur Brown and helm Judas Priest‘s undervalued Rocka Rolla before the 1970s were done, and clearly lessons had been learned over the past year. Black Sabbath both sharpened and filled out their attack to a degree that makes it difficult to avoid hyperbole in talking about it. Like either of its predecessors, it is arguable as the pinnacle of heavy music full-length recording in the 60-plus years that such a thing might have existed, and whether it’s “Lord of This World” speaking to economic and social inequalities, “Children of the Grave” chugging out a resistant surge, “After Forever” with its worshipful lyrics by drummer Bill Ward inadvertently inventing Christian metal, or the the soft-delivered quiet melancholia of “Solitude” before the escape-the-apocalypse envisioned in “Into the Void” — “Pollution kills the air, land and sea/Man prepares to meet his destiny” — as a wretched Earth is left behind in favor of a new planet where refugees might, “Make a home where love is there to stay/Peace and happiness in every day,” it is a landmark in performance, structure, atmosphere and purpose. Even the cover font gets ripped off. Rightly so.

At the core of the band’s craft, as ever, is Tony Iommi‘s guitar, and in Master of Reality, the boogie of “Rat Salad” that provided a side-step from Paranoid‘s harder fare becomes instead a showcase of more progressive ambitions that in some ways Iommi would struggle to make a part of Black Sabbath for the band’s entire career — and one could go on about the band’s working class background in Birmingham, England, as part of that; it comes up a bit in the 2010 Classic Albums: Paranoid documentary (review here) that was part of the VH1 series — with a showy mastery in his soloing throughout, as well as the interlude “Embryo” and side B intro “Orchid.”

At just 28 seconds and 1:31, respectively, they’re of course not as much a focal point as “Sweet Leaf” or “Into the Void,” etc., but the angular, off-sounding electric guitar strum of “Embryo” makes what might’ve been a tape-rolling toss-off into a landmark contrast as the brief gestation births “Children of the Grave” with an impact given additional force by the tense but obviously more subdued lead-in. And “Orchid” laid claim to both acoustic work and classical stylings as within Black Sabbath‘s sphere. From front to back, Master of Reality presents a more professional incarnation of Black Sabbath — still with the Iommi, Ward, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler lineup and just a year after their first LP, mind you — who are more directed and purposefully denser in tone, who know what they want their songs to do and to sound like, and who are growing creatively.

The four-piece had toured diligently between 1970 and 1971 in the UK, continental Europe, and the US, taken on new management later in 1970 and as the tour wound down, both Paranoid and Black Sabbath went gold in US sales, so Black Sabbath were no longer an obscure, not-from-London band with druggy, sad-sounding songs. Their music had begun to speak to an audience, and as the third album, Master of Reality is a realization and an arrival in ways that would help define the band across the decades that followed. In its divergences as well as its most intense stretches, it pushed further than the band had yet gone into their persona, and to call it classic is in some ways laughable because its relevance is so enduring. Every single day, Master of Reality continues to have an effect on heavy music. Entire genre ecosystems thrive in the crater it left behind.

The way “Children of the Grave” and “Into the Void” anchor its sides, the way “Solitude” took the mellow-psych of “Planet Caravan” to a place of genuine emotional resonance, or how “Lord of This World” hit the economic angle in answer to “War Pigs,” or the maybe-drugs-are-the-answer-to-all-this-disillusion attitude of “Sweet Leaf” and the confidence with which Master of Reality directly addresses its audience throughout — all of this and more that had been lurking in Black Sabbath‘s approach across the year prior came to fruition here, and the result is a singular, unique achievement.

I don’t believe in gods, but Master of Reality in my mind represents an ideal of the ‘higher power’ that can be reached through creative collaboration. I offer it as nothing less than a reason to feel lucky to be alive at this time in human history and a remedy for troubled souls. Putting it on feels like going home, and while much of it is grim in theme, there is a warmth in its presentation that’s like nothing Black Sabbath would ever do again. If that’s hindsight perspective, informed maybe by the massive influence the album and band have had since, a fan speaking to fans, preaching to the converted, whatever? Good. That’s the point. If perhaps you never have, open your heart and let these songs in. Your life will be better for it.

Thanks for reading.

—

Friday. Okay. Gotta get through the morning. Gotta get the kid fed, medded up, dropped off at school, then I’m home, finish posting, start setup for the Quarterly Review, hit the grocery store, blah blah. I woke up at 3:15AM. I figure maybe noon’ll be fuckoff time if I’m reasonably efficient? Very much looking forward to that.

She — the kid — has been on methylphenidate now for ADHD since December. It’s been a pretty remarkable turnaround at school from everything we’ve heard, which is great. The comedown at home is hard — it’s a whole thing with these drugs, apparently — but I’ll take the hit(s) for her to be successful elsewhere. I don’t think she’ll ever be an easygoing, cooperative kid, but I’m not easygoing or particularly cooperative either. Generally I’m a fucking prick to everybody without meaning to be and I feel terrible about it after the fact. So I’ll say she comes by it honestly and we’ll book some social skills classes at some point so she can learn why to say hello back to her classmates when they talk to her. That usually just gets the spit swished in her mouth. Kid is brutal.

The delivery method of the meds is kind of a quandary. She and The Patient Mrs. both have notably sensitive skin, and while slapping a patch on The Pecan’s lower back was working for a while, it’s been a week now and the itchy and plainly uncomfortable — though she’d just about never admit that out loud — is still there, which says to me finding another way was the right call. It’s fading, needs more lotion, etc. But what we’ve got instead are capsules with the medication in them that I’ve been opening up and putting in the morning yogurt that’s usually what she eats before a breakfast of cinnamon toast, apple, banana, strawberries if we have them. The dilemma is she doesn’t know I’m putting that in there.

Am I really supposed to be drugging my six-year-old daughter without her awareness? Does she not have rights as an individual? Isn’t it part of my job as a parent to build trust? How am I supposed to do that if I’m lying by concealment? The kid already tells me in so many words to fuck myself daily in any number of regards. I think I might deserve it more for this even than for suggesting she go to the bathroom when it’s been six hours and she needs to so badly she can’t sit still.

But here’s the rub: she might never eat yogurt again. She doesn’t eat meat, fish, beans, eggs, any of it. She eats cheese, but currently only Muenster and only sliced into small cubes. If I make some, every now and then I can get her to take a couple bites of almond/pecan butter, but that’s never a guarantee. Nutritionally, there’s a lot hinging on that yogurt. She is adamant about not trying new foods. Hard no. She did pasta for a while with butter, but it was basically just calories to get through an afternoon, and it didn’t last. And it turns out since it’s not the ’80s anymore you can’t just shove things in a kid’s mouth. It’s that whole autonomy thing again. Wildly inconvenient, that.

I don’t have a choice but to tell her. I’ll say we tried it this week and if it was okay with her we’ll keep going. My hope is that if I can convince her it’s a plan that’s already worked it’ll be easier for her to get past that initial wall of opposition into which just about any new idea or task is bound to slam, it’ll be easier for her to see that it’s alright, that it doesn’t make the yogurt taste funny, that it’s helping and that it doesn’t need to change. I’m trying to help, but I feel a very specific rot in my mind for this one. She deserves to know and deserve has nothing to actually do with it since it’s a basic human right.

How would I feel if some strange man put a drug in her food without her knowing it? How do I feel about being that man, even if my intentions are arguable as good and the results are positive across multiple levels? Ends justifying means? Am I right to compromise my values to support her success? Or am I teaching her that even the people she’s supposed to trust the most will betray that trust? Am I taking one for the team here or is it just easier for me to deal with getting the medication in her if she doesn’t know it’s happening? And does the fact that she’s six and not really able to make responsible judgments for herself at this point play in at all? Beyond the decision to medicate her in the first place — about which I have feelings, to say the least, mitigated though they are by the to-date outcome — is this even my jurisdiction?

So I guess telling her is my goal for Saturday morning. I’ll say we tried it this week and if it’s okay with her we’ll keep it going and if not we’ll find another way. But is she going to look at her yogurt every day now and wonder if it’s drugged? Or is she going to refuse the yogurt outright because that’s who she is, write it off entirely and lose a cornerstone of her daily intake with nothing on the horizon to replace it?

Guess we’ll find out.

As always, I thank you for reading and for your time. Have a great and safe weekend. Don’t forget to hydrate, watch your head, all that stuff. Quarterly Review starts Monday. I can’t wait to be stressed out all week and behind on news posts, which I already am. Rock and roll.

FRM.

[EDIT 10:37AM: So after writing the above, I decided there was no point in delaying until tomorrow to tell her; it wouldn’t make my case any stronger anyhow. I said that this week I’d been putting her medicine in her yogurt instead of doing the patch, and if it was okay we’d keep doing it. She was headed toward no, but we were able to sort of steer that back around to realizing it’s not a big deal and she ate the yogurt this morning knowing that the meds were in it. I feel better about it, and I’m really, really glad I don’t need a new primary source of protein for my kid. Sometimes you roll the dice and come out alright. I acknowledge I got away with one here, and for what it’s worth, I’m still not really okay with how I went about it. I’d say next time I’ll do differently, like I learned a moral lesson or something, but real life makes jokes of those promises and a moment’s need can eclipse bigger-picture concerns. I will continue to try my best to do right by my kid for as long as I am able.]

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Just when you think you’ve got “02Kid” figured out, that’s when the keyboard hits. The first time I heard it, I thought a song started playing in a different browser tab or something, but no, it’s there, and as the emergently amorphous Buenos Aires-based outfit headed by Sergio Chotsourian (aka Sergio Ch.) move on from their 2023 fifth LP, La Rendición Del Hombre (review here), the new song comes coupled with word of a re-revamped lineup that brings Gaston Gullo to the drummer role and finds Chotsourian on bass and vocals alone, where the album also featured his work on guitar.

Change is nothing new for Ararat, and if you count the violin added to La Rendición Del Hombre by Federico Terranova or 2022’s Volumen IV (review here), this isn’t their first time as a duo either. As Chotsourian‘s post-Los Natas oeuvre has grown more experimental, from his acoustic-rooted solo work to varied projects like Ararat, Brno, Soldati, and so on, it’s not really a surprise to see that show up in Ararat‘s sound as it arguably has since their 2009 debut, Musica de la Resistencia (review here) — though that creative reach has gotten broader — but what is new here is the shape that takes. Stripped to its barest parts in bass and drums, much of “02Kid” feels like a rehearsal demo that effectively resets the band. They’ve gone to ground, aurally speaking.

But that’s fair enough too when the context is so open. That is to say, Chotsourian has covered a lot of ground with Ararat, from some of his heaviest, most doomed work to-date to the rawer rumble of Volumen IV, which feels relevant here in terms of the bass/drums construction of the band and a similar focus on low end and nod at the foundation. As to how “02Kid” might speak to what to expect from Ararat going forward, I won’t hazard a guess. It could be “02Kid” is part of an album already in the can — it would make a great candidate for the second of however many tracks included — or it could be a one-off to test out the chemistry of the Chotsourian/Gullo collaboration. All I know is it’s five minutes of new Ararat, there’s a video, and you’ll find it below.

It’s wait and see beyond that, but Chotsourian is prolific enough that it never seems egregiously long to find out where he’s headed next. Until then, enjoy:

Ararat, “02Kid” official video

VIDEO OFICIAL DEL NUEVO SINGLE DE ARARAT – 02KID
PRODUCIDO POR SERGIO CH.
VIDEO REALIZADO POR SERGIO CH.

SERGIO CH. – BASS & VOCALS
GASTON GULLO – BATERIA

Ararat, La Rendición Del Hombre (2023)

Ararat on Facebook

Sergio Ch. website

South American Sludge on Bandcamp

South American Sludge website

First, slow down.

I’ll spare you the diatribe about how fast life moves these days because you already know. My advice, coming from a place of friendship, is before you dig into the video premiering below, do whatever you gotta do to inject a little calm into the moment. Deep breathing is a decent go-to. I often pause to take a drink of water if I’m feeling tense, frustrated, or just need to reset my brainvoice a little bit. If you want to step out and do a j, you can keep reading on your phone. But take a second to adjust the headspace before “Hunted” starts and I think you’ll be in a better position to appreciate it. Again, friendly advice.

Baltimorean folk-infused heavy psychedelic explorers Holy Fingers released their third album, titled Holy Fingers III — or maybe just III (review here) if you’re feeling casual — in the earliest, still-solstice-dark hours of 2024. It was the first review I did this year, and that was very much on purpose. After an algorithmic fluke on a now-subsumed social media platform put their stuff in front of my face — what used to be called a ‘chance encounter’ — I had spent some stay-indoors time circa 2021 with their second record, II (discussed here) and last April, in getting to see them live for the first and hopefully not last time, it confirmed in my head the anticipation for what would come next. Sure enough, III righteously finds connections between post-rock, heavy bluesy psych, folk pastoralism and command, and a progressive songwriting mindset. In atmosphere and hooks, vibe and structure, it delivers. I waited months to review it, but knew it was how I wanted to launch the New Year last month.

It’s not where the hype is at, I’m kind of sorry to say, but as it sometimes goes with that kind of thing, the ears with which it resonates will perhaps feel it more deeply for that as something to be treasured. If you haven’t heard it yet — and if not, that’s cool; it’s been out for a month, not three years; don’t let the internet make you feel like you’re behind on a thing — the full Bandcamp stream is included below so you can get a sense of how “Hunted” fits on the album. Following the fuzzy roll of “Blood Red Sun” and the open-strum and rhythmic sway of “Bring Me the Beasts” on side A, its throbbing groove is particularly tense, bringing the reverbed breadth of Ides of Gemini-style post-heavy to bear in deceptively forceful repetitions of the title in its chorus. Consistent in ambience and general sound, it follows its own path, and is a standout highlight instead of an awkward fit.

Holy Fingers III is the band’s second album in their current configuration and the places it explores speak to subconscious familiarity, something primal but not necessarily in an aggressive way. I could go on here, but I’d rather not keep you from the clip itself if you’re still reading. “Hunted” uses practical effects by Josh James of Rainbow Death Cult to create a visually atmospheric complement to the song. It is not AI — since that apparently needs to be said this week — and like the track itself, it shows its humanity in its intricacies and finer details while reaching into the abstract, or ethereal, if you prefer, for expression. This won’t hit with everyone, but it is my sincere hope that someone reading this loves it, and maybe that’s you.

Did you slow down? Good, because they’re gonna build back up a bit. Here goes:

Holy Fingers, “Hunted” video premiere

Hunted from Holy Fingers III available now on all streaming platforms. Vinyl preorders at holyfingers.bandcamp.com.

Video by Josh James | Rainbow Death Cult

‘III’ Recorded and mixed by Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations Recording Studio, Baltimore, MD
www.instagram.com/developing_nations/

Mastered by Brian McTernan at Salad Days Studio
www.instagram.com/saladdaysstudio/

Holy Fingers are Tracey Buchanan, Dave Cannon, Theron Melchior and Josh Weiss.

Holy Fingers, Holy Fingers III (2024)

Holy Fingers on Facebook

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Science tells us of a time when it rained on earth for thousands of years. Water, having traveled to our nascent planet on various asteroids smashing around each other in the early solar system, finally cooled the atmosphere to the point where it could precipitate, and it would seem — at least in hyper-simplified terms — that happened long enough for 70-plus percent of the crust to be covered with water surrounding whichever supercontinent the landmass was at the time. It is what let life happen here. It’s how we got here.

This is what Paranoid is to doom. Not a watershed, but the watershed. Ubiquitous to a point of cliché, though fortunately the genre doesn’t seem to mind. Released in Sept. 1970 as a seven-months-later follow-up to Black Sabbath‘s likewise genre-defining self-titled debut (discussed here just last week), it was the band’s most commercially successful release during their initial run, and is arguably the most important heavy metal record of all-time, at least from a pop-cultural standpoint. It’s not their most accomplished work, or a personal favorite, but its component songs are so pivotal to the making of heavy music of any and all niches/microgenres/whathaveyou that it’s a given. It was the first Black Sabbath album I owned, and I don’t imagine I’m alone in that.

The album like a vacuum for hyperbole. I’ll just say the names of the songs since I assume that’s all you need to hear them in your head: “War Pigs,” “Paranoid,” “Planet Caravan,” “Iron Man,” “Electric Funeral,” “Hand of Doom,” “Rat Salad” and “Fairies Wear Boots.”

To call it god-tier feels inadequate, considering the decades its relevance has held and the subsequent generations of bands who’ve internalized its teachings. 54 years after its original release, it has been put through a ringer of remasters and remixes and special editions, but the power of the original material hasn’t waned. If you want to compare it directly to its predecessor, you don’t need to look further than how each LP starts: the rainstorm at the beginning of “Black Sabbath” on the first record casting a morose atmosphere for the immediately-dug-in slow roll of that eponymous statement, and the riff and air raid siren of “War Pigs.” The one is foreboding, the other a literal alarm, a more active noise, and most of all, an acknowledgment of audience.

Generally speaking, you can only do something for the first time once. Among the most substantial differences between Black Sabbath circa Black Sabbath and Black Sabbath circa Paranoid — remember, we’re talking about a difference of months in terms of when these records happened — is that the audience is a clear consideration. Not just in “Paranoid,” the speedier track famously born from a spur-of-the-moment Tony Iommi riff as the label wanted a single. Even the label wanting a single is a change. With the element of surprise no longer on their side, Black Sabbath — the original lineup of Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward — instead had to take the work they did on the self-titled and expand on it. First came the heavy and then came the metal. “Electric Funeral” hits hard at the start of side B and is dark in atmosphere in a way that is more cogent but also more performative. Black Sabbath had ‘a sound’ they were playing toward, and Paranoid allowed them to focus on elements like atmosphere and songwriting all the more for that.

In addition to setting a standard that few LPs could ever hope to stand up to, by Sabbath or anyone else, Paranoid also serves as a model for trajectory and creative growth. Much of it is in conversation with its predecessor, but at the same time the band had clearly learned. The performances are sharper on Paranoid, with Ward rolling immediately on the “War Pigs” intro, giving depth to the chug of “Paranoid” through jazzy swing and holding the proceedings together as “Iron Man” invents proto-crush. Iommi is more confident as a soloist, Butler expands his palette lyrically to the sociopolitical — I’ll spare you the I’m-a-liberal-on-the-internet-so-I’m-performing-sadness-about-war diatribe about the ongoing applicability of “War Pigs” or the class consciousness of “Hand of Doom”; you’re welcome — and Osbourne emerges as both frontman and singer. The latter’s on-stage charisma feels accounted for in the shouts of “Paranoid,” and while he never was a technical, voice-as-instrument-style vocalist, he reaches highs in the verses of “War Pigs” that have seen cover versions fall short for decades and defines the style he’d later explore in his solo career on “Electric Funeral,” and so even within the band, Paranoid is monumental. There is no understanding or engaging Black Sabbath without it.

Like Pink Floyd‘s The Wall or The Jimi Hendrix Experience‘s Are You Experienced?, if grimmer in outlook and outwardly angrier about it, Paranoid has pervaded the pop-cultural mainstream in such a way that it no longer belongs solely to the genre born out of its primordial ooze. “War Pigs” was in Marvel movies. I tell you no lie, I heard “Paranoid” two weeks ago over the speakers at the grocery store down the road (and yes I absolutely rocked out my middle-aged self while picking up yogurt and eggs, thank you very much). It’s not just a classic metal record, it’s a classic record. It belongs to everybody.

Maybe in part because of that, doom itself tends to hold other albums closer, whether that’s the self-titled or 1971’s Master of Reality (discussed here), Vol. 4 in ’72, or something else from the catalog, but there’s no getting around Paranoid since it’s so essential to the persona of Black Sabbath as a whole, casting their aesthetic in its purposeful, willful, defiant-of-moment-but-representative-of-moment heft. Even “Planet Caravan,” float incarnate, is heavy.

I won’t feign impartiality here, or insight for that matter. Whatever else Black Sabbath was, is, will or would ever be, Paranoid is the album for which they’ll most be remembered, the moment the entered the zeitgeist, and the greatest source of their ongoing influence across heavy music styles. And somehow, even in acknowledging all of this, I can’t help but feel like I’m underselling it. Maybe because the songs are good?

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

That’s two weeks in a row of a Sabbath delve. Is this how I’m celebrating the site’s 15th anniversary? I don’t know. I’m curious though. Sometimes a thing kind of happens and then you have to explain it afterward. I’m doing my best. My brain’s got nooks and crannies like a Thomas’ English Muffin, so sometimes I need to chase my own motivations to their source.

It was a week, it’ll be a weekend. The godsend was a productive Monday. Shit you not, I’m still today posting stuff that I wrote Monday afternoon, which almost never happens unless I’m really behind. The difference this time was I was ahead. My daughter went to school Monday, had a snow day Tuesday, was home sick Wednesday, went Thursday and is off today and Monday for President’s Day — just in case anyone wanted to be reminded of Joe Biden, which is kind of a drag even in concept, what with all that fostering genocide — so it was the fact that I got shit done on Monday that let this week happen without my eyeballs falling out. I am behind on news but that’s nothing new, and I managed this week to even have some flex on last-minute stuff, which was satisfying considering that most of the time the kid is home, that’s where focus goes. You can’t really bust out the laptop and expect productivity, though I did for a bit on Tuesday as well.

That chaos and the sick kid also pulled me out of my own head a bit, which I needed desperately. I renewed my prescriptions for whichever  mood stabilizer I’m on and whichever meth I take for ADHD, so I’m back on that horse, wagon, etc. Drugs. You know how we look back on people drilling into each other’s heads and think “oh how savage! how fortunate we are now to have modern medical science!” Some day people will look back on all the shit we dump in our bodies the same way. And they won’t be wrong, but you work with what you’ve got and if I can make my trip easier from one end of an average, probably-not-that-difficult-generally day to the other, there is a value to that beyond the fiscal exploitation of the pharmaceutical industry. I am fortunate to have insurance.

So, a four-day weekend coming up. I’ve got a Holy Fingers video premiere on Monday that I hope you’ll watch, premieres for Clarion Void and Kitsa, the latter a full LP stream, and a review either Thursday or Friday for the new album from The Obsessed, which is out today. I’m slated to interview Brume next Thursday as well, but that record isn’t out for like two months, so I might wait a bit to post. We’ll see how it goes.

Coming on 7AM (today was a pre-4 wakeup) and I hear thudding upstairs, so I’ll punch out and wish you a great and safe weekend. Have fun, hail Black Sabbath, watch your head, hydrate. That list is getting pretty long. Whatever you’re up to, thanks for your time and for reading and I hope it’s the exact opposite of awful.

FRM.

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Next Friday, Feb. 23, marks the arrival of the first album from Swedish endtimes drone duo Skrckvldet. Titled 1:23:40 and issued by Majestic Mountain Records into the digital ether, it is the combined ambient efforts of Alex Stjernfeldt (Grand Cadaver and the recently-featured Young Acid) and Peo Bengtsson of poetic dark-ambient droneweavers Beckahesten, and accordingly able to offer a sort of divergence from a perceived normative ‘heavy’ without straying so far as to be out of place. Sternfeldt‘s other acts being Majestic Mountain denizens and Beckahesten — whose 2020 debut, Vattenh​å​lens Dr​ä​pare is a consuming tapestry of human horrors — being so immersive creates a kind of balance that leads you, well, right into the abyss.

While one might look at the image of two dudes in hoods and read ‘drone duo’ en route to an immediate Sunn O))) association, this is the part of the post premiering their video for the single “Aftermath” where I cite some specific example to counteract that. Fortunately, although they’ve got me guessing at which vowel sounds go where in their moniker, Skrckvldet readily distinguish themselves in sound with “Aftermath,” whether it’s the busier layer of guitar deep in the mix or the post-industrial rhythm that repeats as a thread through the six-minute entirety. Repetitive by nature of the style, Skrckvldet are by no means at rest, and amid mounting swells of feedback, a monolithic tone feels declarative of intention. If you find yourself hearing throatripper screams buried in the aural rubble so vividly mourned, it’s an illusion but you’re not alone. Pretty sure there’s real birdsong in there though near the end.

And you know I’d love to tell you about the (likely) crushing claustrophobia and why-is-everyone-wearing-scary-masks chamber of malevolent secrets the entirety of 1:23:40 — which I can’t confirm but have no trouble believing is named after a coincidentally semi-sequential runtime, especially as a digital release — but the single’s all that’s out so it’s all I’ve got. And while it’s the nature of any extreme work that some will be able to find a place for themselves in its reaches and some won’t, both the conceptual exploration behind “Aftermath” and the palpable mood of the reality in listening offer more than the basic ‘here’s something that’s not just riffs’ differentiation, while yes, also that. Frankly, I don’t believe either need more justification for being than their being.

1:23:40 lands a week from today, and PR wire info follows the premiere of the “Aftermath” video below. I’m not sure if ‘enjoy’ is the right word here, but at very least be willing to immerse with an open mind.

So, to that:

Skrckvldet, “Aftermath” video premiere

Majestic Mountain Records is here to usher along the endtimes, and dredges from the depths the apocalyptic drone of Skrckvldet and their debut album ”01:23:40”.

The duo of hooded doombringers from Gothenburg, Sweden is Alex Stjernfeldt, of bands including Novarupta, Grand Cadaver, and Young Acid, and Peo Bengtsson of Beckahesten. Combining their cross-genre experience in heavy, malevolent sounds, the two birthed Skrckvldet, an exercise in droning, ambient chaos that soundtracks the dark and downward path of humankind.

Like some terrible, ancient presence, across five longform tracks SKRCKVLDET crunches and echoes, creeping forward with atonality and distortion. The thread is never lost amid the mix of noise and quiet, building towards an inevitable, crushing end.

SKRCKVLDET’s take on drone is, paradoxically, a dynamic one, balancing a suffocating use of silence with piercing squalls and lumbering distortion. Experience awe and apprehension in the keening tones of ”REVERBERATION III”, while tinkling keys provide brief respites from the colossal, looming weight of final track ”CHAOS”.

The end is nigh, and SKRCKVLDET have succeeded in the dismal task of giving Armageddon sonic form.

Album releases February 23rd (Digital only)!

Skrckvldet on Facebook

Majestic Mountain Records on Instagram

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Amsterdam-based dark-progressive heavy outsiders Iron Jinn celebrated the release of their 2023 self-titled debut (review here) by playing the release show at Roadburn Festival, bringing their sprawling, melodically-thoughtful and above-all-adventurous material to life in front of a packed Green Room at the 013 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. You can see in the video premiering below for “Lick it or Kick It” from that set that it was packed. With guitarist/vocalist Wout Kemkens, guitarist/vocalist Oeds Beydals, bassist/backing vocalist Gerben Bielderman and drummer/backing vocalist Bob Hogenelst, along with guest keyboardist Jarno van Es, on stage playing Iron Jinn in full save only for “Relic,” the resultant Live at Roadburn — why call it anything else when you can call it that? — is a new format to showcase the songs, the complement to the studio release it’s their stated intention it should be, with a vibrancy and personality of its own, and an emphasis on the distinct sounds through which the band conjures a style lush, fluid and creepy. Able to speak to the long history of European heavy weirdoism and off-kilter prog, they’re nonetheless fluid in their execution across songs like “Soft Healers” and “Winding World,” and the audio mixed/mastered by the esteemed Pieter Kloos from the front-of-house board helmed by Rutger Drenth finds them balancing the restlessness of a band playing their release party for their first album against the willful patience of the material.

There’s a bit of push-pull there, and there should be. That would have been part of the experience on stage/in the room, and the tension Iron Jinn create in their material — you can certainly hear it on “Lick it and Kick It,” a video for the studio version of which also premiered here — is an energy that band and audience both seem to feed off. Iron Jinn are methodical in their delivery, touching on folkish melody in “Blood Moon Horizon” before casting themselves into the ether in “Ego Loka” to set up an explosive cathartic shove, and thereby making clearer the dynamic within the group, who twice now have shown themselves ready to go where they must to meet the demands of their craft, which are significant considering the ambitious and encompassing sprawl both of Live at Roadburn and Iron Jinn when taken in their entirety. But what’s true of the studio record is true of the live one too — there’s no getting away from the potential of this band or the fact that, from here, they can become anything they want. They can be firebreathing monsters or psychedelic explorers, freely dropping subtle references to the krautrock of eld while in a creative pursuit that seems so forward-minded — so eager to make manifest the band’s progression; so ready to grow — that one can hardly think of the past at all while listening for the prominence of the future on one’s mind.

It would be fun to speed up time and see, all other things allowing, where Iron Jinn are sound-wise 10 years from now, because what I can’t get away from is how Beydals, Kemkens, van Es, Hogenelst and Bielderman have been able to bring their collective experience to the band and immediately create something new from it. You can dig back all you want through their pedigree, and you might find some commonality of atmosphere with Beydals‘ work in Molassess or Kemkens‘ in Shaking Godspeed, but it’s pieces from everything being put together in a different way, and the more one immerses in the proceedings, the greater the reward. It may be that over time Iron Jinn‘s sound will streamline, whittle down some of the aesthetic elements in this material to become something more straightforward, or they might push the structural experimentalism of the self-titled into exponential spaces, stepping into the realm of the avant garde and remaining probably several years ahead of their time forever how long they go. The answer is probably somewhere between, but right now it’s a joy not to know in addition to being fun to speculate. To listen to Live at Roadburn in all its grim vitality and imagine, if they can do this now, the places they may yet take their listeners in the years and songs to come.

The Roadburn set, filmed/edited by Tijmen Hobbel in its entirety, is a full dive. From thoughtful harmonies to crushing noise, contemplative spaces and caveman thud, the band leave little in reserve as they push into the foreboding “Truth is Your Dagger” and “Bread and Games,” which ends with a righteous charge and a sense of blowout that the set has by then more than earned. My friends, I will tell you in all honesty that I think these guys are onto something special, and that given the trajectory of their past work, where they are now as songwriters and players, they have an opportunity to step forward from their influences and define their own path in a way not every band can or gets to do. If you struggle to find positive prospects in the next few years, watch “Lick it or Kick It” below and just think for a minute about what Iron Jinn‘s second and third albums might sound like if this is them supporting their first.

PR wire info and the e’er crucial preorder link follow below. The 2LP Live at Roadburn releases April 5 through Lay Bare Recordings.

Please enjoy:

Iron Jinn, “Lick it or Kick It (Live at Roadburn)” video premiere

Iron Jinn Unveils Mesmerizing Video and Track from Upcoming Live At Roadburn Double Album and Announces Vinyl Pre-order

Experimental psychedelic rock sensation Iron Jinn, hailing from Amsterdam, is set to captivate the music world with the release of the first video and track Lick It Or Kick It from their highly anticipated live album. Recorded during their spellbinding performance at the renowned Roadburn Festival in 2023, the album promises to be a musical journey, showcasing the band’s unique blend of psychedelic rock and experimental sounds.

Iron Jinn comprises the exceptional talents of Oeds Beydals (The Devil’s Blood, Death Alley), Wout Kemkens (Shaking Godspeed, De Niemanders), Bob Hogenelst (Birth of Joy), and Gerben Bielderman (Pauw). The collaboration of guitarists and songwriters Oeds and Wout traces back to their shared history in Death Alley and Shaking Godspeed, united by a passion for challenging the norms of heavy rock music.

The band’s inception took place at the Last Night On Earth festival, organized by Oeds and Wout, and subsequently evolved into Iron Jinn with their second performance at Roadburn 2018.

“The Iron Jinn 2023 Roadburn performance was the perfect opportunity for us to present our debut album in the flesh. Roadburn’s Walter Hoeijmakers made it possible for us to expand the band’s line-up for this show with the addition of Jarno Van Es on keys, so we could recreate the layered density the album has to offer,” said Oeds Beydals. “This show is a moment in time that we are thankful to have captured: a band getting into its own at a very early stage.”

Expertly produced by Pieter ‘Pidah’ Kloos at The Void studio, the album promises to be a sensational auditory and visual experience. Iron Jinn aims to transport listeners into a realm of sonic exploration, weaving spontaneous improvisation and new energy into their studio-produced material.

“Creating fresh counterparts to the more produced studio versions by adding spontaneous improvisation and new fire to the music. Although we hope to keep evolving, this show is a moment in time that we are thankful to have captured: a band getting into its own at a very early stage,” added Oeds Beydals.

Live At Roadburn is set for release on 2 x 180g heavy weight black vinyl on the 5th April via Lay Bare Recordings. The double album captures the essence of Iron Jinn’s musical evolution and creative process perfectly.

Pre-order The Album Here: https://laybarerecordings.com/release/live-at-roadburn-by-iron-jinn-lbr055

Tracklist
1. Soft Healers
2. Blood Moon Horizon
3. Ego Loka
4. Lick It or Kick It
5. Cage Rage
6. Winding World
7. Truth Is Your Dagger
8. Bread and Games

Iron Jinn invites you to relive the magic and immerse yourselves in an unforgettable experience at the album release show on the 5th April at Ekko’s in Utrecht.

Buy Tickets Here: https://ekko.nl/event/iron-jinn-presents-live-at-roadburn/

Iron Jinn are Oeds Beydals (The Devils Blood/Molassess/Death Alley), Wout Kemkens (Shaking Godspeed/De Niemanders), Bob Hogenelst (Birth of Joy/Molassess) and Gerben Bielderman (Pauw).

Video credits:
Filmed and edited by Tijmen Hobbel
Audio recorded by Pieter Kloos & Loet Braamkolk
Audio mixed and mastered by Pieter Kloos
FOH sound by Rutger Drenth
Lights by Robbie van Reen
Monitors by Lars Spijkervet
Recorded April 22nd 2023 at Roadburn Festival at 013 Tilburg, The Netherlands
All songs written by Iron Jinn
Performed by Oeds Beydals, Gerben Bielderman, Jarno van Es, Bob Hogenelst and Wout Kemkens

Iron Jinn, “Winding World” from Live at Roadburn (2024)

Iron Jinn, Iron Jinn (2023)

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To the origin point of doom. The riff. Contrary to marketing hypersimplification, no, Black Sabbath did not conjure heavy metal out of thin air, but they sure as hell got there first. You can root around late ’60s rock, Hendrix, Blue Cheer, Blue Öyster Cult, Led Zeppelin, Cream, even The Beatles if you want to stretch or hang your hat on a couple tracks from their last years, and find flashes of what you might call pre-heft. With their foundation in blues rock like so much of what was emerging in the UK and US at the time, Black Sabbath codified hard blues riffing with the depth of low end essential to create a sense of aural weight. If ‘heavy’ as a musical ideal was previously gestating, Black Sabbath‘s Black Sabbath is where all the threads came together to such a degree that it tipped some imaginary balance in the brains of listeners and was born as something new. Black Sabbath‘s Black Sabbath is a nexus. Heavy music would probably exist without it, but not as it does today. We will never be able to chart its full influence, because it is endemic to the microculture.

And rest assured, it’s hard in concept to look at an album that’s among the most landmark of landmarks in the history of recorded or rock music, an icon that’s earned any and all flowery hyperbole you can throw at it and then generations’ worth more plaudits, and try to look at it objectively, but one of the key facets of Black Sabbath is that the album refuses to let you romanticize it on any other level but its own. It is not the best Black Sabbath album either of the original lineup — vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward — or the post-Ozzy years, but it has something not even Paranoid, which was released later in 1970 (Sept., as opposed to the self-titled in Feb.), could have: it was utterly clueless of what the band was about to become.

At this point, your experience of the album is probably going to much depend on which version you take on. Do you want the Crow cover “Evil Woman, Don’t You Play Your Games With Me” with its casual misogyny and a boogie speaking to the band’s early days bumping around Birmingham as blues rockers? What about “Sleeping Village?” With decades of reissues, remasters, bonus material, on and on and on, especially if you’re not holding the 1970 Vertigo Records edition in your hands — which I’ll assume you’re not — and amid the disorganized wreck that is digitalia and the world of streaming, but whether or not the rainstorm you hear at the start of “Black Sabbath” sounds four levels of volume lower than the harmonica at the start of “The Wizard,” the songs themselves are undeniable and righteously imperfect. Ward‘s over-the-top fills in “The Wizard.” Ozzy sounding nervous singing “N.I.B.,” which is fair considering the Butler bass solo from which the song emerges, and early in the album, with the first two cuts and the swinging pickup at the start of “Behind the Wall of Sleep” that leads into the open verse, Iommi leads the material riffing to such a degree that even 53 years after the band’s first release, he’s never been given the credit as a guitar player that he’s deserved for his soloing.

But the record is sloppy. Disjointed. “Behind the Wall of Sleep” fades out lazily, like the band had no idea how to finish it, and its intros confuse the proceedings. The lyrics and patterns come across as simple, the melodies are dark, and Black Sabbath sound like a bunch of disaffected working class kids from industrial-crunch England who want nothing more than to blow their brains out with drugs and volume. Get stoned and jam out some Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation in “Warning” to end the record. Screw it. Who cares?

Thus we arrive at the appeal.

Don’t mistake me. I’m not saying Black Sabbath couldn’t handle their instruments. Ozzy may have been discovering the vocal approach he’d refine on later outings, but he still nails “Black Sabbath” and the aforementioned N.I.B.” enough to make himself the godfather of heavy metal, Iommi‘s always been technically underrated, Butler is the weight and it’s utter bullshit that his bass runs aren’t taught in grade schools, and when Bill Ward was ejected from the band ahead of their 2010s ‘final’ run, the character of his style revealed itself as having earned such audience loyalty that there was practically a social movement to get him back into the lineup. Black Sabbath wouldn’t have worked if they didn’t actually have the musicianship to pull off what they were doing, but volume and tonal density in the guitar and bass on Black Sabbath made it sound hard, foreboding and despondent. You can call it a preface to the comedown era of the post-hippie ’70s, the birth of heavy, whatever you want. Primarily, it’s the work of raw kids who had no clue what they were about to get into but wanted to get into it anyway.

This and others in Sabbath‘s early catalog are essential to the point of being a given, almost a cliché, but if you count yourself among the converted either to doom or heavy rock and roll, for anything that has based itself in some way around that Iommic methodology of centralizing the riff that bands have been doing since, oh, about five minutes after this record, then it is a thing to bask in. It has an energy entirely its own and is the perfect example of a band feeling their way into their sound and finding themselves in the process. Black Sabbath‘s stylistic progression would take them to places and see them explore ideas that this self-titled could never anticipate, but wherever they went, they were never completely removed from what they laid out in this collection of songs, and when it was time for their purported final LP, 2013’s 13 (review here), it was to this era they most looked in bringing their career full circle back to an Osbourne-fronted heavy blues. True to tradition, critics didn’t like it. I guess we’ll see what everyone says in another 50 years.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

This might be a series? I might do a few Sabbath records, at least through the Ozzy years and get those covered. I feel like that should be a thing. In the back of my head I’m putting together a ‘canon of heavy’ as a book idea — probably time I did a book about music — and obviously Sabbath’s self-titled is the place to start. I don’t know that anything will come to fruition, as the vast majority of ideas I have don’t since I either get overwhelmed and give up (see my secret dream of selling homemade artisanal nut butters at Northern New Jersey’s lesser farm markets) or get distracted and move onto something else (pretty much everything to do with this site). But if I get the words out maybe some day MadJohnShaft (you know him) will make me an AI to go get all the words I want and cut and paste them into a Word doc.

Speaking of Word, holy crap, fuck Microsoft. Am I the only one out here using Windows 11? I hope so for your sake. What a wreck. Look, I can’t imagine having billions of dollars resting on the prospect of you fixing something you got right 30 years ago — which is essentially what’s been happening with Windows since the ’95/XP era; the tech ethic of ‘continuous improvement’ is both a scam to extract money and a flawed ethic generally — but they definitely broke that shit in the process. I’ve had this computer for two weeks, and every single day there’s been some instance of some intrusive-ass bundled software, or fucking OneDrive deciding to pull a ton of watermarked promos off my desktop and stick them on the internet calling them ‘safe’ — you gotta be kidding me — and secure, or Word not being able to apply an activation code, on and on, it’s just bad software. That’s all it is. My old machine was on Windows 10. I’d switch back, but I don’t trust it not to blow up the entire machine. Alas. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, and if not, apparently I love nothing more than complaining, so, fine.

Next Monday is my wife’s birthday. If you’re reading, happy birthday, baby. I love you more than I love complaining. I’m sorry I’m generally awful.

That’s kind of how it’s been: generally awful. I’m in this place, in my head, where I feel crippled in just about all situations. I accidentally deleted my entire desktop yesterday — and trust me, it’s ALL there — and I just couldn’t handle it. I started hyperventilating. I paced back and forth. I fell apart, and I lost like an hour of writing time as a result. That might not sound like much to you, but an hour a day, especially early in my weeks of late, is the difference between getting a thing finished and not.

I have a neurologist appointment for I don’t know when. I have a call in to a talk-therapy office that hasn’t called me back. I have spent the last 25-plus years shoving chemicals into my body and I have precious little to show for it other than 25 years’ worth of chemicals floating around my body. I’m not saying I’m anti-meds now — my refills await at Wegmans down the road — but the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, so at a certain point I have to wonder what ‘help’ that route has actually been. I get more to shut up the bad voice in my brain out of eating a weed gummy than I’ve gotten from antidepressants probably since I was a teenager.

But weed gummies aren’t covered by insurance, and that being bullshit doesn’t make it less true. So we persist.

I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Have fun, watch your head, all that. Next week is packed front to back and beyond, so keep an eye out Monday as there’s good stuff to come. Thanks as always for reading.

FRM.

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Sometime in the near notnow, long-running New York heavy rockers Thinning the Herd will release their third album, which has been given the synonymous title Cull. The first single from the record, which is the band’s first in the 11 years since 2013’s Freedom From the Known (discussed here), “Trampled by Deer,” is also the first output from the band since founding guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and sometimes-the-only-dude-in-the-band Gavin Spielman brought in drummer Rob Sefcik last Fall. Known for his work in Begotten and Kings Destroy (pretty sure he was in Electric Frankenstein as well?), Sefcik hits hard and has no trouble emphasizing the nod in Spielman‘s riff, a strong C.O.C. influence roughed up by the recording but still able to put through a punch of bass and account for a divergence into acoustics behind and alongside its solo section.

The song’s three and a half minutes long, so the break doesn’t last, and Spielman‘s guitar scorches back with a shredding solo as the video takes us out to a snowy field and woods somewhere outside the city (Westchester?), splicing in shots of animals and hunting implications, life, death, the icy river and ancient, drowsy Appalachian peaks. These make a fitting accompaniment for the band’s take on heavy rock, which is naturalist in its own way, and if they’re drawing inspiration from this setting — I don’t know the circumstances behind the clip’s making, but some of it looks self-filmed on a phone camera, which makes sense in terms of the story they’re telling here even as an impression given — and basing Cull around that, it seems only suited to their aesthetic generally. This riff breathes. I dig that.

It’s been a while since Thinning the Herd put out a full-length, as noted above, but they’ve trickled out singles and videos in the time since Freedom From the Known, including the 2021 single “Wolves Close In” (posted here) that boasted a guest appearance on guitar by Pat Harrington of Geezer. No clue if that song will be on Cull or not, but at very least if it was you could say it was on theme with “Trampled by Deer.” Rough times out there in the forest.

More to come I’m sure as we get closer to Cull, but here’s “Trampled by Deer” with all its attendant freeze and groove. Right on.

Enjoy:

Thinning the Herd, “Trampled by Deer” official video

We’re super excited to bring you the first single to be distributed worldwide since the last record!

The song “Trampled by Deer” is about those moments in life when a positive change only to finds you mentally worse off. The track also features a minor guest spot from an old crony Cosmos Sunshine. He plays the shorter bluesy solo after my fast one, after the acoustic break.

We’re already hit in the tail of this single, next one drops end of next month entitled “Next Level”.

We hope you enjoy and add our tune “Trampled by Deer” to your playlist, download and stream that shiz!

Thinning the Herd are:
Gavin Spielman on Guitar and Vocals.
Rob Sefcik – Drums

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