This is the second premiere from Buzzard‘s new album, Mean Bone (review here), to be posted on this site, and it comes with some context. I know. The c-word. Sigh. Just bear with me.
If you click that link, you’ll see that in the review, I said the record ends with a song called “Sorrow, Terror and Evil,” a heavy and lumbering culmination of the statement in doom that Buzzard‘s lone denizen, Christopher Thomas Elliott (also of the folk duo Austin and Elliott and various other solo works), was making throughout the songs prior. Cool way to end a declarative second full-length from Elliott‘s project, the only trouble is that’s not how the record actually ends.
Oops.
To be fair, that song is real and was on the version of Mean Bone that I got to review, it just got crossed up between the album being done and the other premiere being slated, hearing the thing, etc. As clerical errors go, it could be far worse. But once I heard it, I did want to write about “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century,” because it changes on the level of persona the way Mean Bone finishes. It’s not at all an apex of the heavy riffage that rolls out in other songs. It’s a decidedly quieter, more contemplative finish.
Like a lot of Elliott‘s work to-date as Buzzard and elsewhere, it tells a story. Folk balladry, as a form, is crucial to how the material is framed — think of songs like “Murder in the White Barn,” which tells a troubling tale of its own through dialogue, and “Flies, Mosquitos, Rats and Sparrows,” which recounts a Chinese famine resulting from Great Leap Forward-era ecosystem tampering — and “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century” isn’t his first foray into incorporating science-fiction as part of that.
To story, put succinctly below, is that far-future archeologists discover a mall and attempt to figure out what it’s for. Good luck. Hearing the song for the first time, I couldn’t help think of the sentient insects who evolve on Elliott‘s earlier-2025 Satiricus Doomicus Americus (review here), which I’ve been largely unable to put down, in the closing track “Cockroaches and Weed.” But it doesn’t seem like we know ultimately who these future entities are, only that they’re looking back and seeing how we lived through our savage age.
Elliott was kind enough to put together the lyric video premiering below for “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century,” and especially as Mean Bone has been out for a couple weeks now and attention spans go the way of attention spans, I appreciate the chance to give the album review an addendum and let the song stand on its own as well, since that’s how I’ve experienced it.
If you’ve never heard Buzzard, Elliott or any of it, this might not actually be a terrible place to start. Just a thought.
Congrats. You made it through the context. I hope you enjoy:
Buzzard, “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century” lyric video premiere
“Writing this song I imagined alien or human archeologists in the distant future excavating the remains of a shopping mall.” – Christopher Thomas Elliott
Posted in Reviews on April 14th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Welcome back to the Quarterly Review. Just because it’s a new week, I’ll say again the idea here is to review 10 releases — albums, EPs, the odd single if I feel like there’s enough to say about it — per day across some span of days. In this case, the Quarterly Review goes to 70. Across Monday to Friday last week, 50 new, older and upcoming offerings were written up and today and tomorrow it’s time to wrap it up. I fly out to Roadburn on Wednesday.
Accordingly, you’ll pardon if I spare the “how was your weekend?”-type filler and jump right in instead. Let’s. Go.
Quarterly Review #51-60:
Megaritual, Recursion
Last heard from in 2017, exploratory Australian psychedelic solo outfit Megaritual — most often styled all-lowercase: megaritual — returns with the aptly-titled Recursion, as multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and producer Dale Paul Walker taps expansive kosmiche progressivisim across nine songs and 42 minutes. If you told me these tracks, which feel streamlined compared to the longer-form work Walker was doing circa 2017, had been coming together since that time, the depth of the arrangements and the way each cut comes across as its own microcosm within the greater whole bears that out, be it the winding wisps of “Tres Son Multitud” or the swaying echoey bliss of later highlight “The Jantar Mantar.” I don’t know if that’s the case or it isn’t, but the color in this music alone makes it one of the best records I’ve heard in 2025, and I can’t get away from thinking some of the melody and progressive aspects comes from metal like Opeth, so yeah. Basically, it’s all over the place and wonderful. Thanks for reading.
Slab-heavy riffage from Andalusian three-piece Red Eye‘s III spreads itself across a densely-weighted but not monolithic — or at least not un-dynamic or unipolar — eight songs, as a switch between shouted and more melodic vocals early on between the Ufomammut-esque “Sagittarius A*” (named for the black hole at the Milky Way’s center; it follows the subdued intro “Ad Infinitum”) and the subsequent, doomier in a Pallbearer kind of way “See Yourself” gives listeners an almost-immediate sense of variety around the wall-o’-tone lumbering fuzz that unites those two and so much else throughout as guitarist/vocalist Antonio Campos del Pino, bassist/synthesist Antonio Pérez Muriel and drummer/synthesist/vocalist Pablo Terol Rosado veer between more and less aggressive takes. “No Morning After” renews the bash, “Beyond” makes it a party, “Stardust” uses that momentum to push the tempo faster and “Nebula” makes it swing into the Great Far Out before “The Nine Billion Names of God” builds to a flattening crescendo. Intricate in terms of style and crushingly heavy. Easy win.
Even by the respective standards of the bands involved — and considering the output of Detroit grit-doomers Temple of the Fuzz Witch and Montreal sans-guitar scathemakers Seum to this point, it’s a significant standard — Conjuring is some nasty, nasty shit. Presented through Black Throne Productions with manic hand-drawn cover art that reminds of Midwestern pillsludge circa 2008, the 27-minute split outing brings three songs from each outfit, and maybe it’s the complementary way Seum‘s low-end picks up from the grueling, chugging, and finally rolling fare Temple of the Fuzz Witch provide, but both acts come through as resoundingly, willfully, righteously bleak. You know how at the dentist they let you pick your flavor of toothpaste? This is like that except surprise you just had all your teeth pulled. It only took half-an-hour, but now you need to figure out what to do with your dazed, gummy self. Good luck.
Uncle Woe offer two eight-minutes-each tracks on the new EP, Folded in Smoke, Soaked and Bound, as project founder/spearhead Rain Fice (in Canada) and collaborator Marc Whitworth (in Australia) bring atmosphere and grace to underlying plod. It’s something of a surprise when “One is Obliged” relatively-speaking solidifies at about five minutes in around vocal soar, which is an effective, emotional moment in a song that seems to be mourning even as it grows broader moving toward the finish. “Of Symptoms and Waves” impresses vocally as well, deep in the mix as the vocals are, but feels more about the darker prog metal-type stretch that unfolds from about the halfway point on. But what’s important to note is these plays on genre are filtered through Uncle Woe‘s own aesthetic vision, and so this short outing becomes both lush and raw for the obvious attention to its sonic details and the overarching melancholy that belongs so much to the band. A well-appreciated check-in.
I would not attempt to nor belittle the band’s accomplishments by trying to summarize 35 years of Negative Reaction in this space, but as the West-Virginia-by-way-of-Long-Island unit led by its inimitable principal/guitarist/vocalist Ken-E Bones mark this significant occasion, the collection Salvaged From the Kuiper Belt provides 16 decades-spanning tracks covering sundry eras of the band. I haven’t seen a liner, so I don’t even know the number of players involved here, but Bones has been through several incarnations of Negative Reaction at this point, so when “NOD” steamrollers and later pieces like “Mercy Killing” and the four-second highlight “Stick o’ Gum” are more barebones in their punksludge, it makes sense in context. Punk, psych, sludge, raw vocals — these have always been key ingredients to Negative Reaction‘s often-harsh take, and it’s a blend that’s let them endure beyond trend, reason, or human kindness. Congrats to Bones, whom I consider a friend of long-standing, and many more.
Given how many different looks Fomies present on Liminality, and how movement-based so much of it is between the uptempo proto-punk, krauty shuffle and general sense of push — not out of line with the psych of the modern age, but too weird not to be its own spin — it feels like mellower opener “The Onion Man” is its own thing at the front of the album; a mellower lead-in to put the listener in a more preferred mindset (on the band’s part) to enjoy what follows. This is artfully done, as is the aforementioned “what follows,” as the band thoughtfully boogie through the three-part “Colossus,” find a moment for frenetic fuzz via Gary Numan in “Neon Gloom,” make even the two-and-a-half-minute “Happiness Relay” a show of chemistry, finish in a like-minded tonal fullness with “Upheaval,” and engage with decades of motorik worship without losing themselves more than they want to in the going. At 51 minutes, Liminality is somewhat heady, but that’s inherent to the style as well, and the band’s penchant for adventure comes through smoothly alongside all that super-dug-in vibing.
Classic Boston DGAF heavy riff rock, and if you hear a good dose of hardcore in amid the swing and shove, The Long Wait‘s self-titled debut comes by it honestly. The five-piece of vocalist Glen Dudley (Wrecking Crew), guitarist Darryl Shepard (Kind, Milligram, Slapshot, etc.) and Steven Risteen (Slapshot), bassist Jaime Sciarappa (SSD, Slapshot) and drummer Mark McKay (Slapshot) plunder through nine cuts. Certainly elbows are out, but considering where they’re coming from, it’s not an overly aggressive sound. Hardcore dudes have been veering into heavier riffing à la “Uncharted Greed” or “FWM” for the last 35 years, so The Long Wait feels well in line with a tradition that some of these guys helped set in the first place as it revisits songs from 2023’s demo and expands outward from there, searching for and beginning to find its own interpretation of what “bullshit-free” means in terms of the band’s craft.
Since 2020, Miskolc, Hungary-based solo-band Babona have released three EPs, a couple singles and now two full-lengths, with Az Utolsó Választás Kora (‘the age of the last choice’) as the second album from multi-instrumentalist and producer Tamás Rózsa. Those with an appreciation for the particular kind of crunch Eastern Europe brings to heavy rock will find the eight-tracker a delight in the start-stops of “2/3” and the vocals-are-sampled-crying-and-laughing “A Rendszer Rothadása,” which digs into its central riff with suitable verve. The later “Kormányalakítás” hints at psych — something Rózsa has fostered going back to 2020 with Ottlakán, from whom Babona seems to have sprung — and the album isn’t without humor as a crowing rooster snaps the listener out of that song’s trance in the transition to the ambient post-rocker “Frakció,” but when it’s time to get to business, Rózsa caps with “Pártatlan” as a grim, sludgy lumber that holds its foreboding mood even into its own comedown. That’s not the first time Az Utolsó Választás Kora proves deceptively immersive.
Sit tight, because it’s about to get pretty genre-nerdy. Sutras, the Washington D.C.-based two-piece of Tristan Welch (vocals/guitar) and Frederick Ashworth (drums/bass) play music that is psychedelic and heavy, but with a strong foundation specifically in post-hardcore. Their term for it is ‘Dharma punk,’ which is enough to make me wonder if there’s a krishna-core root here, but either way, The Crisis of Existence feels both emotive and ethereal as the duo bring together airy guitar and rhythmic urgency, raw, sometimes gang-shouted vocals, and arrangements that feel fluid whether it’s the rushing post-punk (yeah, I know: so much ‘post-‘; I told you to sit tight) of “Racing Sundown” or the denser push of “Bloom Watch” or the swing brought to that march in “Working Class Devotion.” They cap the 19-minute EP with posi-vibes in “Being Nobody, Going Nowhere,” which provides one last chance for their head-scratching-on-paper sound to absolutely, totally work, as it does. The real triumph here, fists in the air and all that, is that it sounds organic.
The story of Sleeping in Samsara‘s self-titled two-songer as per Christian Peters (formerly Samsara Blues Experiment, currently Fuzz Sagrado, etc.) is that in 2023, My Sleeping Karma drummer Steffen Weigand reached out with an interest in collaborating as part of a solo-project Weigand was developing. Weigandpassed away in June 2023, and “Twilight Again” and “Downtime,” with underlying basic tracks from Weigand in drums, keys/synth, and rhythm guitar, and Peters adding lead guitar, vocals, bass in the latter, the songs are unsurprising in their cohesion only when one considers the fluidity wrought by both parties in their respective outfits, and though the loss of Weigand of course lends a bittersweet cast, that this material has seen the light of day at all feels like a tribute to his life and cretive drive.
Posted in Reviews on April 10th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
A lot going on today, not the least of which is the Spring 2025 Quarterly Review passing the halfway mark. Normally this would’ve happened yesterday, but half of 70 records is 35 and unless I’ve got the math wrong that’s where we’re at here. It’s a decent time to check and see if there’s anything you’ve missed over the last couple days. You never know how something will hit you the next time.
The adventure continues…
Quarterly Review #31-40:
Messa, The Spin
Now signed to Metal Blade — which is about as weighty as endorsements get for anything heavy these days — Italy’s Messa emerge from the pack as cross-genre songwriters working at a level of mastery across their fourth album, The Spin, elevating riff-led songs with vocal melodicism and aesthetic flexibility. “Fire on the Roof” is a hook ready to tattoo itself to your brain, while “The Dress” dwells in its ambience before getting intense and deceptively technical — just because a band dooms out doesn’t mean they can’t play — ahead of the Iommi-circa-’80 solo’s payoff. It’s all very grand, very sweeping, very encompassing, very talented and expensive-sounding. “At Races” and “Reveal” postulate a single ‘Messa sound’ that someone more important than me will come up with a clever name for, and the band’s ascent of the last nine years will continue unabated as they’re heralded among the foremost stylistic innovators of their generation. You won’t be able to say they didn’t earn it.
Kansas-based heavy djent instrumentalists After Nations offer their fifth full-length, Surface | Essence, with a similar format to 2023’s The Endless Mountain (review here), and, fortunately, a similarly crushing ethic. Where the prior album explored Buddhist concepts, the band seem to have traded that for Hinduist themes, but the core approach remains in a mix of sounds churning and progressive. Meshuggah are a defining influence in the heavier material, but each ‘regular’ song (about four minutes) is offset by a shorter (about a minute) ambient piece of one sort or another, and so while Surface | Essence gives a familiar core impression, what the band add to that — including in short, Between the Buried and Me-ish quiet breaks like in “Yāti” and “Vīrya” — is their own. Not to harp on it, but the last record played out the same way and it worked there too. Eventually, one assumes, the two sides will bleed together and they’ll lay waste with that all their mathy interconnected atmospheric assault. As-is, the gigantism of their heaviest parts serves them well.
Taking its chiaroscuro thematic to a meta level, The Complicate Path to the Multiverse breaks its eight-song procession in half, with four heavy rockers up front followed by four acoustic-based cuts thereafter. It’s not a hard and fast rule — there’s still some funky wah in the penultimate “When it’s All Over,” for example — but it lets the Roman troupe give a sense of build as they make their way to “Cradle of Madness” in drawing the two sides of light and dark together. The lyrics do much of the heavier lifting in terms of the theme — that is, the heavier material isn’t overwhelmingly grim despite being the ‘darker’ side — but they let tonal crunch have its say in that regard as well, and side A brings to mind heavy rockers with a sense of progressivism like Astrosoniq while side B pays that off with a creative turn. If you don’t know what you’re getting going into it, the songwriting carries the day anyhow, and as laid back as the groove gets, there’s an urgency of expression underlying the delivery.
Likely no coincidence that London instrumentalist guitar/drum duo Bident — get it, bi-dent? two teeth? there are two of them in the band? ah forget it — launch their debut album, Blink, with “Psychological Raking.” That opener lives up to its billing in its movement between parts and sets up the overarching quirk and delight-in-throwing-a-twist that the subsequent eight tracks provide, shenanigans abound in “Calorina Leaper,” “Thhinking With a Moshcap On” and “Blink,” which renews the drum gallop at the end. With a noteworthy character of fuzz, Blink can accommodate the push of “Two-Note Pony” — which sure sounds like there’s bass on it — the nod in “Bovine Joni” and the sprint that takes hold in the second half of “That Sad,” and their use of the negative space where other instruments or vocals might be is likewise purposeful, but they don’t sound like they’re lacking in terms of arrangements thanks to the malleability of tone and tempo throughout. They operate in a familiar sphere, but there’s persona here that will come to fruition as they proceed.
Death-sludge and post-metallic lumber ooze forth from the five songs of Harvest of Ash‘s second full-length, Castaway, which keeps its atmospheric impulses in check through grounded riffing and basslines as the whole band takes straightforward nod and extreme metal methodologies and smashes them together in a grueling course like that of “Embracing.” Remember in like 1996 when a band like Skinlab or Pissing Razors could just make you feel like you needed to take a shower? There’s a bit of that happening on Castaway as well in the opening title-track or the nine-minute “Constellation” later on, what with its second-half murk and strident riff, but a turn to quieter contemplations or a flash of brighter tone, whatever it is that offsets the churn in a given song, gives breadth to all that misanthropic plodding and throaty gurgle. Accordingly, Harvest of Ash end up both aggressive and hypnotic. I’m not sure it is, at least entirely, but Castaway positions itself as post-metal, and if it is, it is its own interpretation of the style’s tropes.
Berlin’s Vlimmer — the solo-project of multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, label head and producer Alexander Leonard Donat — return on a not-surprising quick turnaround from late-’24’s full-length, Bodenhex (review here) with six new tracks that include a Super Furry Animals cover of “It’s Not the End of the World?” and quickly establish a goth-meets-new-wave electro dance melancholy in “Firmament” that gives over to the German-language “Ungleichgewicht,” residing stylistically somewhere between The Cure and krautrock experimentalism. Guitar comes forward in “Friedhofen,” but Donat keeps the mood consistent on Diskomfort where the album ranged more freely, and even as the title-track moves into its finishing wash, the bumout remains. And I don’t know if that’s an actual harpsichord on “Nachleben,” but it’s a reminder that the open arrangements are part of what keeps me coming back to Vlimmer, along with the fact that they don’t sound like anything else out there that I’ve heard, the music is unpredictable, and they take risks in craft.
When Duskhead posted “Two Heads” in December from their The Messenger four-songer EP, it was the first new music from the Netherlands-based rockers in a decade. Fair enough to call it a return, then, as the band — which features members culled from Tank86 and The Grand Astoria — unfurl a somewhat humble in everything but the music 15 minutes of new material. “My Guitar Will Save the Day” answers the Elder-ish vocal melody with a fervent Brant Bjork-style roll, while “Kill the Messenger” cuts the tempo for a more declarative feel and “Searchlights” takes that stomp and makes it swing to round out, some layering at the end feeling like it’s dropping hints of things to come, though one hesitates to predict momentum for a band who just got back after 11 years of silence. Still, if they’re going for it, there’s life in this material and ground to be explored from here. Concept proven. Back to work.
Plenty to hear in The Watcher‘s Cruz Del Sur-issued late-2024 debut Out of the Dark as the Boston unit — not to be confused with San Fran rockers The Watchers — unfurl the Trouble-and-Pentagram-informed take on traditionalist metal. The title-track opens and makes an energetic push while calling to mind ’80s metal in the hook, where “Strike Back” and the lead-heavy “Burning World” emphasize the metal running alongside the doom in their sound. Time for a big slowdown? You guessed it. They fall off the edge the world with “Exiled,” but rather than delve into epic Sabbathianism right then, they break into to the thrashier “The Revelator,” which only gets grittier as it goes. “Kill or Be Killed” and “The Final Hour” build on this vitality before the capper “Thy Blade, Thy Blood” saves its charge for the expected but still satisfying crescendo. Fans of Crypt Sermon and Early Moods will want to take particular note.
Each of the six inclusions on Weed Demon‘s cleverly-titled third long-player, The Doom Scroll, adds something to the mix, so while one might look at the front cover, the Columbus, Ohio, band’s moniker and general presentation and think they’re only basking in weed-worshipping dirt-riffed sludge, that’s not actually the case. Instead, “Acid Dungeon” starts off with dungeon synth foreboding before the instrumental “Tower of Smoke” lulls you into sludgenosis before “Coma Dose” brings deathlier vibes and, somewhere, a guest appearance from Shy Kennedy (ex-Horehound), “Roasting the Sacred Bones” strips back to Midwestern pummel circa 2002 in its stoned Rustbelt disaffection, “Dead Planet Blues” diverges for acoustics and the vinyl-only secret track “Willy the Pimp,” a Frank Zappa cover, closes. By the end of the record, Weed Demon are revealed as decidedly more complex than they seem to want to let on, but I suppose if you’re numbed out on whichever chemical derivative of THC it is that actually does anything, it’s all riffs one way or the other. You want THC-P, by the way. THC-A, the ‘a’ stands for “ain’t about shit.” I’m gonna guess Weed Demon know the difference.
The one-man solo-project of Jon Weisnewski (also of Sandrider, formerly of Akimbo), Nuclear Dudes released the rampaging full-length Boss Blades (review here) in 2023, glorious in both its extremity-fueled catharsis and its anti-genre fuckery. Weisnewski described the seven-song EP Compression Crimes 1 as “a synthwave album, probably,” and he might be right about that, but it’s definitely not just that. “Death at Burning Man” brings unruly techno until it lands in Mindless Self Indulgence pulsations, where “Tomb Crawler” surges near its end with metallic lashing. “Skyship” is so good at being electro-prog it’s almost obnoxious, and that too feels like the point as Weisnewski sees through creative impulses that are so much his own. Sleeper outfit, maybe. Never gonna be huge. But if you can find someone else making this kind of noise, you’re better at the internet than I am.
Just Gozu on fire, you know how it goes. I was fortunate enough to catch the Boston throttlers last Fall at Desertfest New York (review here), and golly, that was a pleasure. That performance was part of a Fall tour that itself was only a fragment of one of the busiest years Gozu have had as a band. Setting out to support their 2023 album, Remedy (review here), the four-piece hit the road about 13 months ago with The Obsessed and Howling Giant, and it’s from that Spring tour that this footage comes.
There’s more than just this, as I understand it, and watching “Tom Cruise Control,” I can’t help but feel like Gozu are readier to put out a live record than they’ve ever been. Guitarist Doug Sherman has backed guitarist/singer Marc Gaffney on vocals all along, but as “Tom Cruise Control” makes clear, the band are all the more able to bring the layering and character of their studio work to life with Seth Botos on drums. Botos, who resides in the rhythm section alongside the charming groove factory that is Joe Grotto, joined Gozu in 2021, and the hook of “Tom Cruise Control” tells the story. Gaff goes up for the falsetto, and Botos slides in to cover the lower vocal part, and all of a sudden, Gozu are more able to bring the studio version of that song to life. Sherman can focus on shred as his apparent preference would dictate — certainly if he had any real interest in singing more, some chances would’ve come up in the 18-or-so years of the band — and the dynamic gets stronger for their having the additional flexibility. In this way, an already awesome band is made better. Watching the video is cool, and I’m not telling you not to do that, but if you focus on listening, I think you’ll agree: a live record sooner rather than later would be the way to go.
Until I can start the billboard campaign along I-95 between here and Beantown, please feel welcome to check out “Tom Cruise Control” below, as recorded in Vermont a year ago. And heads up, if I see more of these coming out I’ll probably post them too. Gozu are ‘any excuse is enough to write about’ in my mind.
Dig:
Gozu, “Tom Cruise Control” live
GOZU UNLEASHES LIVE VIDEO FROM STONE CHURCH, VT FROM THE OBSESSED / HOWLING GIANT TOUR
Boston riff-masters GOZU have released a searing live video from their performance at The Stone Church in Brattleboro, VT, recorded during their run on The Obsessed / Howling Giant Tour. The video captures the band at full power, delivering their signature mix of bone-crushing grooves, soaring melodies, and psychedelic swagger.
Credits Stone Church VT Videography: Garth Dunkel & Ryan Campbell Edit: Garth Dunkel mixed: Ben Grotto
GOZU has also officially begun writing their next album, set for release through Blacklight Media/Metal Blade Records.
GOZU is: Marc Gaffney – guitar and vocals Joe Grotto – bass Doug Sherman – lead guitar Seth Botos – drums
Posted in Reviews on February 24th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Before Show
The ride up here was a breeze. It’s been a while since last I set foot in the Bay State, but the route I took — rt. 287 to 95 to 91 to 84 to the Masspike — is one I’ve been driving since my wife was undergrad at Brandeis in Waltham. So not without some element of nostalgia for times I drove north in high school and college to see her, in snow, the middle of the night, whatever other stupid situation.
But driving four-plus hours to see three bands isn’t so crazy in this day and age, right? I don’t know. If it is gonna take me two hours each way to see a show in New York, is two more hours up the coast for Worshipper’s 10th anniversary really that wild? They’ve got Roadsaw and Summoner on the bill, I have a place to crash (thank you to John and Kerry Pegoraro for the hospitality), and I’m able to drive. Seems like kind of a no-brainer to make it happen if you can get up the gumption, which I’ll note that I haven’t been able to do in the six years since we moved from Massachusetts back to New Jersey. Obviously that’s on me.
Worshipper released their first single, Black Corridor/High Above the Clouds (review here), early in 2015. I don’t know the exact date, but when they announced a 10-year show, I realized it’d been too long anyway since I saw them, and with the company they’re keeping it was an easy choice.
Like a lot of breweries, Widowmaker’s setup can by design easily accommodate a rock and roll show, and for sure it got one. Plus it’s in Braintree (which I’ll forever here in the guy’s voice announcing the T stop). If brewery shows are how heavy rock happens in the suburbs, I’ll take it.
Here’s notes on the night:
Summoner
The last Summoner album, Beyond the Realm of Light (review here), came out in 2017. Why lead with that factoid, I don’t know, but I’m trying to give myself some sense of scale for time. They were an easy band to like at the time, and before that as well — it was their third album — and they were an easy band to like going on eight years after the fact. Funny to feel nostalgic as they hit into “Phoenix” at the start of the set, but there it is. I don’t know how much they’re up to, but they were always super-tight and a ton of fun besides. Whatever else the intervening years have wrought, their time on stage was enough to have me wondering what a circa-2025 album might sound like from these guys. Full-blown prog metal? Maybe, but they always had that underlying impulse to ride a riff when it worked, so I’m not sure I’d want to predict. I wouldn’t mind finding out, of course, but there was no mention of working on anything new or anything like that from the stage. I’m not holding my breath, but still, never say never, and as packed as the room was, clearly I wasn’t the only one who’d be up for such a thing. Good band. It would be cool to see them get credit for being as ahead is the heavyprog curve as they were.
Roadsaw
I think maybe it’s been 11 years since the last time I saw Roadsaw, which seems impossible, but the links don’t lie. Their 2019 album, Tinnitus the Night (review here), was kinda-maybe-sorta their swansong — or at very least I’m not expecting a follow-up anytime soon — retained their signature charm and songwriting, throwing somehow-friendly elbows, and so on. But that wasn’t the focus here. With Darryl Shepard on guitar alongside a largely mustacheless Tim Catz, Craig Riggs and Mike LeFevre their drummer whose name I don’t know, the set was centered around their earlier work. First three albums. They had CDs of Nationwide for sale and I bet they sold a few, since I own the record and was thinking of picking up a copy just on moral grounds because they were so much fun to watch. Darryl, of Kind. Milligram, Hackman, Blackwolfgoat, indeed Roadsaw, and I honestly don’t know how many others, is always a thrill to watch on stage, and Tim Catz remains a punker with classic heavy tone. His and Riggs’ energy, chemistry, was a familiar (if long ago) dynamic, and Riggs teased the prospect of doing more from the stage, so I’ll just for the announcement to come through that they’ve been added to Ripplefest Texas or some such. I wasn’t the only one feeling nostalgic — the older material made sure of that — but after 11 long years, to get to see them again was humbling. Let this be signs of life.
Worshipper
Happy 10th anniversary to Worshipper. This was my first time seeing the band as a three-piece, as they bid farewell to lead guitarist Alejandro Necochea right around the release of their third album, One Way Trip (review here), which to put it bluntly took some of the wind out of the sails of the band’s best work to-date. Worshipper were actually the band I’ve seen most recently in this show, and it’s been since 2019. I was glad to have come north before they were done playing songs from 2016’s Shadow Hymns (review here), their first LP and thus the beginning of their chronologically-arranged set. Widowmaker was packed out, and I can’t speak to the experience, but if I was in a band for a decade and we pulled like 200 on a Saturday night in our hometown, I feel like that would be pretty satisfying, and indeed, guitarist/vocalist John Brookhouse (who handled the solos), bassist Bob Maloney and drummer Dave Jarvis looked pretty stoked on how it all turned out. Me too. They didn’t make it easy on themselves in setting up the night to follow Roadsaw, but there was no doubt whose party is was when they got going and they held it down until the venue had to cut them off for time, losing out on some of the material from One Way Trip in the chronological running, but throwing in their take on Uriah Heep’s “Easy Livin'” as appeared on their 2018 Mirage Daze EP (review here) to finish with a blowout, and to be sure that worked just fine.
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Thank you to The Patient Mrs. for making this quick trip north possible. Thank you to John Pegoraro and Kerry Pegoraro for letting me crash at their house and do a little writing on their couch. And thanks to John Brookhouse for making sure I was okay bringing my camera through the door. I saw some old friends at this one, and that made the night even more special. More pics are after the jump, as usual.
If Buzzard‘s first album, Doom Folk (review here), cast its own genre designation in the title, the upcoming second Buzzard LP, Mean Bone, flips that around. Not doom folk, but a ‘folk doom,’ drawing from Americana and slow, churning heavy groove in such a way as to feel like a reversal of the balance that Buzzard‘s sole auteur and denizen, Christopher Thomas Elliott, portrayed on the first record less than one full year ago.
And yeah, all this narrative about “first record” and “second record” when it comes to Buzzard is complicated by the release in January of Satiricus Doomicus Americus (review here), a largely-heavy, sample-laced and frankly brilliant examination of the current sociopolitcal moment, issued by Elliott under the eponymous guise of Satiricus Doomicus Americus and filtering its perspective through story and metaphor in a way that the 13 tracks and not-a-minor-undertaking 55 minutes of Mean Bone expand upon in multiple directions.
For example, “Conclusions,” which isn’t the last track but drops to acoustic guitar and ties directly with “Too Many Humans” from Satiricus Doomicus Americus and is a lyrical complement, but prior single “Crushing Burden of Despair,” the opener/current single “Darkness Wins” (premiering below), the chugging “Primitive” and “Changeling” are more about outward impact and feel freer to explore lyrically. “Changeling,” in particular, is parental in its point of view despite ending in murder, and actually “Murder in the White Barn,” following the initial salvo of “Darkness Wins” and “Crushing Burden of Despair” — maddeningly catchy, blindsiding in tone if you heard the debut and don’t know hard riffs are coming — ups that body count as well. Can’t have modernity without at least a little wanton killing, it seems.
In his propenity for shifting arrangements, clear singing voice and his foundation in folk and Americana, Elliott calls to mind an isolated David Eugene Edwards, perhaps if 16 Horsepower had felt their way through as a solo-project. But here, on Doom Folk and on Satiricus Doomicus Americus, the recording is part of the character of the listening experience. Elliott‘s voice is often layered but rarely enough drenched in effects to make the repetitions of “I bite my tongue/I bite my tongue…/Until I spit it all out” amid the pointedly Mars Red Skyian fuzz of centerpiece/highlight “Twisted Love” genuinely stand out.
Against a backdrop of probably-programmed drums and a sound that’s raw enough to be called organically digital — that is, it sounds like it was made on a laptop and it’s not trying to pretend that laptop was a million-dollar studio. I’m pretty sure it’s not AI, but it’s not like I was there when it was made, and if you asked me to prove I’m also not AI to you at this point, I couldn’t. Regardless, Elliott‘s homemade-feeling penchant for hard rhymes in thoughtful lyrics tells the decidedly human story of “Ghost of Orphan James,” become moodier and more creepingly malevolent to suit the cruelties described, even grimmer than “Murder in the White Barn,” though both songs seem to be about justice from some angle, their lyrics and those of the rest of the material made a focal point by the clarity of the vocal delivery.
Based around a bible story where a demon possessing somebody or other is cast into a herd of pigs who are then thrown into a river or some such, “Gadarene Swine” feels sincere in examining cruelty to animals in christian dogma, while “Dunwich Farm” directly pairs country blues and doom traditions, laying itself out like “Parchman Farm” to the horrors of present-day capitalist exploitation — the penultimate “Plight of the Planet” answers back with heavy-landing stomp and crash later (also the album’s title line), more specifically environmental in scope — or China’s Four Pest Campaign as depicted in “Flies, Mosquitos, Rats and Sparrows” that discounted ecology to the tune of 55 million deaths. In the song, Elliott is sure to mention they were peasants, the implication that no one cared about this ‘cost of progress’ laid bare.
It’s not all heavy-handed, but some of it definitely is, and that’s not a weakness considering how much the songs stand up to the message(s). Even closer “Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century,” which wraps with a weirdo-key-and-distortion-backed harmony worthy of Uncle Acid repeating warnings to women about, “Sorrow, terror, evil in the hearts of all good men,” brings a moment to complement what’s come before or expand the breadth of Buzzard in some way. The album by no means works from an optimistic point of view — see “Darkness Wins,” right up front — but neither is it entirely hopeless.
In “Crushing Burden of Despair,” as Elliott brings a duly cynical view of his times in lines like, “Knuckles dragging on the ground/Creationists arch a unibrow,” when he gets to “Stare into the abyss” in a later verse, the next line’s answer back is, “The abyss stares back and blows a kiss.” Sometimes if you can’t cry, laughing is all that’s left. And if you’re curious as to why I’m so focused on the lyrics, they’re relevant. Elliott notes below in talking about “Darkness Wins” that the music, “poured forth naturally from the lyrics.” That means the lyrics were there first. I’d be surprised if much of Mean Bone wasn’t built up that way. The words have been worked on no less than the riffs, which feels weird mostly for feeling weird.
Doom Folk brought Elliott to light as a solo, mostly acoustic-based singer-songwriter working from a heavy underground — doom and stoner, classic heavy rock, etc. — influence and bringing that forward alongside Americana and darker folk craft. Not the first to unite those worlds, necessarily, but doing so on a basis of notably strong songwriting and nascent persona. Mean Bone skillfully reinterprets this formula and claims new stylistic ground for Buzzard as a project, opening new possibilities — would/could an actual full-band happen? live if not in the studio? — while showing that the impressive 2024 outset was no fluke and, in combination with Satiricus Doomicus Americus, representing an expressive voice that seems to be disovering new moments of realization as it goes. There are plenty of them here, and if the quick turnaround on this second LP is an indicator that more are on the way, fair enough. That’s Buzzard offering a bit of hope as well, maybe.
Enjoy “Darkness Wins” below, followed by more from the PR wire:
Buzzard, “Darkness Wins” lyric video premiere
Christoher Thomas Elliott on “Darkness Wins”:
“Darkness Wins” is a response to the optimistic statement made by Detective Cohle at the end of True Detective, Season 1: “If you ask me, the light’s winning.” Actually, no, it is not.
In his essay “Through a Ligottian Lens: Session 9 and True Detective,” weird fiction author Jon Padgett discusses how the HBO series incorporates the cosmic pessimism of Thomas Ligotti into the monologues of Matthew McConaughey’s character, who spouts passages nearly verbatim from Ligotti’s anti-natalist treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. However, despite the show’s pervasive bleakness, the final episode betrays its Ligottian nihilism with a pat whodunit conclusion in which our heroes nab the “Scooby Doo villain,” as author Laird Barron quips. Hope is rekindled, however tentatively.
But the song is here to remind us, sorry, my friends. Darkness did, does, and will prevail.
Besides Padgett’s essay, another inspiration for the song is Brandon Trenz’s artwork for the Chiroptera Press edition of Michigan Basement: the ghostly carnival, the oppressive darkness, the raw dread. The music of “Darkness Wins” poured forth naturally from the lyrics, made easy by a lifetime listening to Sabbath, Candlemass, and Trouble.
Injecting more metal into the malevolent Americana of Doom Folk, Buzzard’s 2nd LP Mean Bone aims to define the modern singer/songwriter doom genre. Created by Christopher Thomas Elliott, the 13 tracks traverse extremes of haunting beauty and brooding heaviness. Sabbathian riffs meet traditional folk songs in tales of depraved zealots, mad tyrants, and avenging ghosts.
Unlike Doom Folk, which was composed mainly on a handmade Alan Carruth acoustic guitar, Mean Bone was written mostly with an Ibanez electric guitar sporting a Cattle Decapitation sticker. Influenced by classic Doom and Americana, the music of Mean Bone ranges from crunchy metal to creepy folk. Informed by socially conscious Weird Fiction and Dylan-esque songwriting, the lyrics lament the evils of religion, the cruelty of mankind, and the plight of the planet.
Mean Bone was written, performed, and produced by Elliott in his lean and mean home studio, dubbed Inscrutable Studios for its tangled wires and eldritch gear.
Tracklisting: 1. Darkness Wins 2. Crushing Burden of Despair 3. Murder in the White Barn 4. Primitive 5. Changeling 6. Ghost of Orphan James 7. Twisted Love 8. Gadarene Swine 9. Dunwich Farm 10. Flies, Mosquitoes, Rats, and Sparrows 11. Conclusions 12. Plight of the Planet 13. Ancient Ruins of the 21st Century
Posted in Reviews on January 13th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Satiricus Doomicus Americus. Released this past Friday, it is timely enough that it felt in the spirit of the thing to review it the next day, and it serves as something a sidestep, or a holdover, or a gap-bridger between Christopher Thomas Elliott‘s first album under the moniker Buzzard, which was the well-received, less-than-a-year-old Doom Folk (review here), and an impending second full-length, Mean Bone, previously announced as due in 2025. At least as of now, Satiricus Doomicus Americus is listed as a separate project — there are times where it feels like it’s the second Buzzard record we’re getting before the second Buzzard record, and that’s not a complaint — and its songs are distinguished by their outward heft. But, if it is a separate project, it remains adjacent to Buzzard in style and comes across as building off that record’s floor of — wait for it — traditionalist folk influenced by doom metal, tipping if not outright reversing the balance between the two.
Comprised of nine songs, some which reportedly date back to 2009 but are fresh in construction and recording, Satiricus Doomicus Americus lays out its purpose firmly and decisively in the leadoff title-track. The line, “I’m not a cynic I’m a realist,” is defining. There and across much of what follows, Elliott positions himself as a doom troubadour, a post-apocalyptic dustbowl plugged-in Woody Guthrie, skewering fascists and fools with poetry in straightforward language in songs like “Wrong Neighborhood” and “Too Many Humans,” distortion at the ready but never a crutch to be leaned upon. Satiricus Doomicus Americus, in another marked departure from its Buzzardly beginnings, presents a conversationalist aspect with a liberal use of sampling. Not just as random bits of noise or speech thrown here and there, but sounds being purposely applied for rhythm and theme. Part of what a given song — in fact all of them — is expressing.
So although it’s fair to say Satiricus Doomicus Americus is complementary to Buzzard‘s to-date lone LP and likely the one to come it is not shy in its divergences. More on it below, but the closing duo of revamped Buzzard songs that close out, “Death Metal in America (Meat Market Version),” which gets a winning extra verse I won’t spoil and “Cockroaches and Weed (Kills Them Dead Version),” which puts old commercial taglines to good use, are a ready analogy for how Satiricus Doomicus Americus and Elliott‘s ‘main band’ (?) are intertwined. As the name of the project, title and eponymous opening track reaffirm, social critique is also a big part of what’s on display.
The sneer of “Nice Little Annihilation Song” is well suited to the frenetic acoustic strum and banjo arrangement as Elliott and his litany of old clips conjure endtimes preach, departing the stomp of the opener for a dark Americana shuffle — as opposed to the “Shuffle of the Dead,” which comes later — before the fuzz returns in “Wrong Neighborhood.” A ballad in terms of the lyrical storytelling, it cleverly takes the trope of a racist dogwhistle and turns it on its head to point out the hypocrisy beneath, and has one of the album’s best hooks besides and an arrangement that’s atmospheric and heavy with a garage-doom strut.
Satiricus Doomicus Americus is louder, generally, than circa-’24 Buzzard, but the manner in which it varies in mood and what’s happening in the details of each song is consistent. “Grass is Greener” stays mellow with foreboding plucked notes and the standout line, “A leaf will curl and die to catch the rain,” starting with a sample about man’s dominance over nature and mesmerizing with subdued vibe before old horns spliced in from the public domain blast to snap you back to reality for “Automobile,” which brings the drums back to the mix with a splash of cymbals to meet the low fuzz in the bass before the first verse, thoughtful in its rhyme scheme and lumbering in its chug as the hook asks who’s gonna kill the automobile. And indeed, who?
This kind of direct sociopolitical comment, unrepentantly relevant, was part of what made Doom Folk such an immediate standout, and Elliott is in his element across Satiricus Doomicus Americus, counting on his audience to get the Candlemass nod and understand that beneath all the trades between acoustics and electrics, electrics and acoustics, acoustic electrics and electric acoustics, banjo, bass, probably-programmed drums, the foundations of songs like “Too Many Humans” is as much slow metallic crawl as it is gothified pastoralia or protest folk.
That Elliott can dwell in either space, as that same song readily proves en route to the Night of the Living Dead sample that makes itself a hook in the subsequent “Shuffle of the Dead,” is revealed as a strength here that Doom Folk only hinted toward, and for what it’s worth, neither the doom nor the folk are skimped. If you caught Buzzard‘s single “Crushing Burden of Despair” (posted here) back in October, the full-tone, full-band-style swing that was being explored is part of Satiricus Doomicus Americus as well, at least intermittently, and the statement is plain that Elliott refuses to be limited to one modus or another in terms of sound or statement.
Again, “Death Metal in America (Meat Market Version)” and “Cockroaches and Weed (Kills Them Dead Version)” say it even plainer. Both are thickened up versions of cuts from Doom Folk, as noted, and before you start to wonder if that counts as a cover when somebody reworks a song across two at least nominally different solo-projects and surely cause your head to explode, what matters more is the willingness to let those songs be malleable. To let them live. My understanding is these are earlier versions or at least rooted in earlier versions than what showed up on Doom Folk, but the point stands. Just because one version of a thing is recorded, that doesn’t mean it has to be static, only that, forever. That very same creative openness, Elliott letting himself just mess with it, is likewise responsible for the varied arrangements throughout and Satiricus Doomicus Americus‘ capacity to boil down complex ideas into accessible sound.
You can pinpoint this or that nuance in terms of influence, either from doom, metal, folk, or, with the samples, hip-hop and pop, but I can only think of one other outfit with a style like Satiricus Doomicus Americus, and that’s Buzzard. This record will resonate more with some than others — it hit a nerve with me, clearly — but it shares Buzzard‘s listenability as it expands on the purpose and scope of the craft. It makes me more excited to hear where Elliott might take Buzzard over the course of Mean Bone while likewise making it harder to predict just what that will actually sound like. Given the results here, Elliott obviously thrives in open possibility.
Whatever else is to follow, as my homeland makes ready to reembrace the politics of hateful and destructive absurdity with demonstrably little to no preparation to get what it asked for, the moment feels right for Satiricus Doomicus Americus. Sometimes you get just what you need.
Posted in Reviews on December 11th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Wow. This is a pretty good day. I mean, I knew that coming into it — I’m the one slating the reviews — but looking up there at the names in the header, that’s a pretty killer assemblage. Maybe I’m making it easy for myself and loading up the QR with stuff I like and want to write about. Fine. Sometimes I need to remind myself that’s the point of this project in the first place.
Hope you’re having an awesome week. I am.
Quarterly Review #21-30
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Thou, Umbilical
Even knowing that the creation of a sense of overwhelm is on purpose and is part of the artistry of what Thou do, Thou are overwhelming. The stated purpose behind Umbilical is an embrace of their collective inner hardcore kid. Fine. Slow down hardcore and you pretty much get sludge metal one way or the other and Thou‘s take on it is undeniably vicious and has a character that is its own. Songs like “I Feel Nothing When You Cry” and “The Promise” envision dark futures from a bleak present, and the poetry from which the lyrics get their shape is as despondent and cynical as one could ever ask, waiting to be dug into and interpreted by the listener. Let’s be honest. I have always had a hard time buying into the hype on Thou. I’ve seen them live and enjoyed it and you can’t hear them on record and say they aren’t good at what they do, but their kind of extremity isn’t what I’m reaching for most days when I’m trying to not be in the exact hopeless mindset the band are aiming for. Umbilical isn’t the record to change my mind and it doesn’t need to be. It’s precisely what it’s going for. Caustic.
The fourth full-length from Boston’s Cortez sets a tone with opener “Gimme Danger (On My Stereo)” (premiered here) for straight-ahead, tightly-composed, uptempo heavy rock, and sure enough that would put Thieves and Charlatans — recorded by Benny Grotto at Mad Oak Studios — in line with Cortez‘s work to-date. What unfolds from the seven-minute “Leaders of Nobody” onward is a statement of expanded boundaries in what Cortez‘s sound can encompass. The organ-laced jamitude of “Levels” or the doom rock largesse of “Liminal Spaces” that doesn’t clash with the prior swing of “Stove Up” mostly because the band know how to write songs; across eight songs and 51 minutes, the five-piece of vocalist Matt Harrington, guitarists Scott O’Dowd and Alasdair Swan, bassist Jay Furlo and sitting-in drummer Alexei Rodriguez (plus a couple other guests from Boston’s heavy underground) reaffirm their level of craft, unite disparate material through performance and present a more varied and progressive take than they’ve ever had. They’re past 25 years at this point and still growing in sound. They may be underrated forever, but that’s a special band.
Writing a catchy song is not easy. Writing a song so catchy it’s still catchy even though you don’t speak the language is the provenance of the likes of Uffe Lorenzen. The founding frontman of in-the-ether-for-now Copenhagen heavy/garage psych pioneers Baby Woodrose digs into more straightforward fare on the second full-length from his new trio Lydsyn, putting a long-established Stooges influence to good use in “Hejremanden” after establishing at the outset that “Musik Er Nummer 1” (‘music is number one’) and before the subsequent slowdown into harmony blues with “UFO.” “Nørrebro” has what would seem to be intentional cool-neighborhood strut, and those seeking more of a garage-type energy might find it in “Du Vil Have Mere” or “Opråb” earlier on, and closer “Den Døde By” has a scorch that feels loyal to Baby Woodrose‘s style of psych, but whatever ties there are to Lorenzen‘s contributions over the last 20-plus years, Lydsyn stand out for the resultant quality of songwriting and for having their own dynamic building on Lorenzen‘s solo work and post-Baby Woodrose arc.
The popular wisdom has had it for a few years now that retroism is out. Hearing Baltimorean power trio Magick Potion vibe their way into swaying ’70s-style heavy blues on “Empress,” smoothly avoiding the trap of sounding like Graveyard and spacing out more over the dramatic first two minutes of “Wizard” and the proto-doomly rhythmic jabs that follow. Guitarist/vocalist/organist Dresden Boulden, bassist/vocalist Triston Grove and drummer Jason Geezus Kendall capture a sound that’s as fresh as it is familiar, and while there’s no question that the aesthetic behind the big-swing “Never Change” and the drawling, sunshine-stoned “Pagan” is rooted in the ’68-’74 “comedown era” — as their label, RidingEasy Records has put it in the past — classic heavy rock has become a genre unto itself over the last 25-plus years, and Magick Potion present a strong, next-generation take on the style that’s brash without being willfully ridiculous and that has the chops to back up its sonic callouts. The potential for growth is significant, as it would be with any band starting out with as much chemistry as they have, but don’t take that as a backhanded way of saying the self-titled is somehow lacking. To be sure, they nail it.
Oase is the second full-length from Berlin’s Weite behind 2023’s Assemblage (review here), also on Stickman, and it’s their first with keyboardist Fabien deMenou in the lineup with bassist Ingwer Boysen (Delving), guitarists Michael Risberg (Delving, Elder) and Ben Lubin (Lawns), and drummer Nick DiSalvo (Delving, Elder), and it unfurls across as pointedly atmospheric 53 minutes, honed from classic progressive rock but by the time they get to “(einschlafphase)” expanded into a cosmic, almost new age drone. Longer pieces like “Roter Traum” (10:55), “Eigengrau” (12:41) or even the opening “Versteinert” (9:36) offer impact as well as mood, maybe even a little boogie, “Woodbury Hollow” is more pastoral but no less affecting. The same goes for “Time Will Paint Another Picture,” which seems to emphasize modernity in the clarity of its production even amid vintage influences. Capping with the journey-to-freakout “The Slow Wave,” Oase pushes the scope of Weite‘s sound farther out while hitting harder than their first record, adding to the arrangements, and embracing new ideas. Unless you have a moral aversion to prog for some reason, there’s no angle from which this one doesn’t make itself a must-hear.
Big on tone and melody in a way that feels inspired by the modern sphere of heavy — thinking that Hum record, Elephant Tree, Magnetic Eye-type stuff — Florida’s Orbiter set forth across vast reaches in Distorted Folklore, a song like “Lightning Miles” growing more expansive even as it follows a stoner-bouncing drum pattern. Layering is a big factor, but it doesn’t feel like trickery or the band trying to sound like anything or anyone in particular so much as they’re trying to serve their songs — Jonathan Nunez (ex-Torche, etc.) produced; plenty of room in the mix for however big Orbiter want to get — as they shift from the rush that typified stretches of their 2019 debut, Southern Failures, to a generally more lumbering approach. The slowdown suits them here, though fast or slow, the procession of their work is as much about breadth as impact. Whatever direction they take as they move into their second decade, that foundation is crucial.
As regards genre: “dark arts?” Taking into account the 44 minutes of Vlimmer‘s fourth LP, which is post-industrial as much as it’s post-punk, with plenty of goth, some metal, some doom, some dance music, and so on factored in, there’s not a lot else that might encompass the divergent intentions of “Endpuzzle” or “Überrennen” as the Berlin solo-project of Alexander Donat harnesses ethereal urbanity in the brooding-till-it-bursts “Sinkopf” or the manic pulses under the vocal longing of closer “Fadenverlust.” To Donat‘s credit, from the depth of the setup given by longest/opening track (immediate points) “2025” to the goth-coated keyboard throb in “Mondläufer,” Bodenhex never goes anywhere it isn’t meant to go, and unto the finest details of its mix and arrangements, Vlimmer‘s work exudes expressive purpose. It is a record that has been hammered out over a period of time to be what it is, and that has lost none of the immediacy that likely birthed it in that process.
Indianapolis four-piece Moon Goons cut an immediately individual impression on their third album, Lady of Many Faces. The album, which often presents itself as a chaotic mash of ideas, is in fact not that thing. The band is well in control, just able and/or wanting to do more with their sound than most. They are also mindfully, pointedly weird. If you ever believed space rock could have been invented in an alternate reality 1990s and run through filters of lysergism and Devin Townsend-style progressive metal, you might take the time now to book the tattoo of the cover of Lady of Many Faces you’re about to want. Shenanigans abound in the eight songs, if I haven’t made that clear, and even the nod of “Doom Tomb Giant” feels like a freakout given the treatment put on by Moon Goons, but the thing about the album is that as frenetic as the four-piece of lead vocalist/guitarist Corey Standifer, keyboardist/vocalist Brooke Rice, bassist Devin Kearns and drummer Jacob Kozlowski get on their way to the doped epic finisher title-track, the danger of it coming apart is a well constructed, skillfully executed illusion. And what a show it is.
Although it opens up with some element of foreboding by transposing the progression of AC/DC‘s “Hells Bells” onto its own purposes in heavy Canadiana rock, and it gets a bit shouty/sludgy in the lyrical crescendo of “What a Dummy,” which seems to be about getting pulled over on a DUI, or the later “The Castle of White Lake,” much of Familiars‘ Easy Does It lives up to its name. Far from inactive, the band are never in any particular rush, and while a piece like “Golden Season,” with its singer-songwriter vocal, acoustic guitar and backing string sounds, carries a sense of melancholy — certainly more than the mellow groover swing and highlight bass lumber of “Gustin Grove,” say — the band never lay it on so thick as to disrupt their own momentum more than they want to. Working as a five-piece with pedal steel, piano and other keys alongside the core guitar, bass and drums, Easy Does It finds a balance of accessibility and deeper-engaging fare combined with twists of the unexpected.
Progressive stoner psych rockers The Fërtility Cült unveil their fifth album, A Song of Anger, awash in otherworldly soul music vibes, sax and fuzz and roll in conjunction with carefully arranged harmonies and melodic and rhythmic turns. There’s a lot of heavy prog around — I don’t even know how many times I’ve used the word today and frankly I’m scared to check — and admittedly part of that is how open that designation can feel, but The Fërtility Cült seem to take an especially fervent delight in their slow, molten, flowing chicanery on “The Duel” and elsewhere, and the abiding sense is that part of it is a joke, but part of everything is a joke and also the universe is out there and we should go are you ready? A Song of Anger is billed as a prequel, and perhaps “The Curse of the Atreides” gives some thematic hint as well, but whether you’ve been with them all along or this is the first you’ve heard, the 12-minute closing title-track is its own world. If you think you’re ready — and good on you for that — the dive is waiting for your immersion.
