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Friday Full-Length: Sunnata, Climbing the Colossus

Posted in Bootleg Theater on February 17th, 2023 by JJ Koczan

It’s been about a decade since the Warsaw-based heavy rockers Satellite Beaver revamped their name and the concept of their band to become Sunnata, having made their full-length debut with 2009’s Trip Outside Your Mind (review here) and followed it with the 2012 EP, The Last Bow (review here). And if the kind of ritual metal, heavy psych and meditative spirit of Sunnata‘s work was the vision they were chasing all along, unquestionably that moniker swap was the right choice — it was on a few levels, actually. With the continued lineup of guitarist/vocalist Szymon “SZY” Ewertowski, guitarist Adrian “GAD” Gadomski, bassist Michał “DOB” Dobrzański and drummer Robert “ROB” Ruszczyk, the aesthetic turn was made manifest when Sunnata released Climbing the Colossus in March 2014. Here’s what the band had to say about the change at the time:

“Many things have changed since our start in 2008. After three short-length releases and numerous shows we all (finally) agreed to make a step closer to become premium pop-stars. However, the new band name doesn’t imply any lineup or makeup changes. It simply suits our approach to the music, which has become way heavier and trippy in comparison to what we played back in 2008. So here it is. SUNNATA is a soundscape, where noise crossfades clearness – where walls of fuzz, delay and reverb confront the monolith of absolute silence.”

As it turns out, they’d be confronting all kinds of monoliths as Sunnata, be it loud, quiet, in between or existential, and the “heavier and trippy” direction manifests clearheaded in Climbing the Colossus‘ 49-minute run across as series of short-growing-longer tracks the trail through which is marked by a series of aurally diverse interludes, be it the 40-second “I” which opens the record and leads into the horror-slash intensity of the guitar and the massive roll that typifies “Orcan,” repetition becoming ritual, the eight-second echo wisp “II” that swirls into the start of the subsequent “Asteroid,” a fuzzed but sharply executed thrust finding its apex after a series of start-stops in its second half, the shortest of the ‘song-songs’ at 3:39, or the almost-a-minute churn-noise and feedback of “V” that closes the record following the nine-minute “Fomalhaut,” which crescendos the aggression on display throughout Climbing the Colossus without letting go of the atmosphere that’s so much a part of the album’s overarching impression.

On a straight-through listen, as opposed to, say, hearing it on vinyl, the atmospherics become part of the songs. They are transitional intros/outros that flow from one piece to another, not in between every track, but something to move the listener along with the material so that the crushing low-end that rises to such unsullied crush in “Seven” after the end of “Asteroid” — a rolling movement that becomes elephantine as the song, which runs an appropriate 7:07, shifts into its back half, becoming likewise psychedelic and monstrous and massive; a watershed moment — gives over to the jingling and drone of “III” smoothly and with purpose, adding character to tracks that don’t necessarily want for it but that are richer for its being there. A key stretch arrives on what for the LP is the beginning of side B, with “Path” (7:48), “Stalagmites” (7:09) and “Monolith” (6:38) in a row.

There’s a pattern, you see: Interlude, one song, interlude, two songs, interlude, three songs, interlude, song, interlude (and if you want to replace the first and last “interlude” there with “intro” and “outro” I won’t stop you; I use “interlude” to show the consistency of purpose in deepening the ambience), and the intention even nine years after the fact still feels like Sunnata are pulling you deeper into this world as they go. Thus “Path” into “Stalagmites” and “Monolith,” even though each one gets subsequently shorter, is the stretch in which the listener is most immersed. “Path” has a hook and is as aggro in its vocals and chugging low end as it is spacious in the guitar later on — a kind of cosmic metal that in hindsight is very much Sunnata‘s own — and crashes to a stop for a few seconds of that “absolute silence” before “Stalagmites” begins to stir with a few nudges of echoing guitar before the proggy bassline starts that probably could’ve been their own interlude.

Nonetheless, once “Stalagmites” (which come up from the ground; ‘stalactites hold on tight, stalagmites might poke you in the butt’) kicks in from its buildup, it maintains its weight for the duration, and though “Monolith” has a quieter break as part of its procession, the muted stops in the second half are an early example of the band making the studio an instrument — ‘studio’ being a relative term since the drums were done at Demontazownia Studio while guitar, vocals and presumably bass were handled via home recording, ‘edited’ by Dobrzański while Jan Galbas had the difficult task of mixing and mastering to find balance amidst the purposefully conjured chaos — and pummeling in their own right, another call out to the metal of the mid-to-late ’90s. A moment to process in “IV” and then “Fomalhaut” feedbacks into immediate destruction. It is a summary as much conceptual as practical, sound-wise, has a mellow bridge and a languid lead that’s almost stoner rock as it moves to the halfway point, but makes that jangly chug transcend and become something bigger, a march that gets topped with a clean, low-register verse like cosmic spiritual swagger, growing more feverish as it goes before a resolute twist finishes, some residual feedback smoothing the way into the postscript grey psychedelia of “V,” which fades quickly on its way out.

It’s not just that Sunnata pulled off an aesthetic turn with Climbing the Colossus. They did, to be sure. But this record also set in motion a stylistic growth that continues to this day, with the same lineup behind it. That they’ve together undertaken the journey from Climbing the Colossus to 2016’s Zorya (review here), 2018’s Outlands (review here) and 2021’s Burning in Heaven, Melting on Earth (review here) isn’t to be understated, as they’ve managed to consistently move forward with a sense of progression while reveling in the enduring atmospheric elements of their approach. In the varied realms of Polish heavy, they’re part of a generation of players emergent over the last decade who stand astride the 2020s as still-evolving veterans, and even as one looks back at the beginning steps of that process here, robes and harem pants and all, it’s almost impossible not to look forward to what they might do next.

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

—

5:19AM at present. I woke up this morning at about 2:30, spent the next hour-plus tossing and turning, drifting to sleep and waking up again about every 20 minutes, until at 3:40 I gave up and decided I was just awake and that was it. That’s been a fairly steady pattern the last couple weeks. Yesterday, I think it was, I made it until the alarm went off at 4, and I felt like I had slept late.

So anyway, coffee.

Okay. Last weekend was The Patient Mrs.’ birthday. Happy birthday. All was good. We had my family over for dinner Saturday, and Sunday went to brunch in Brooklyn with friends of hers (who have three kids) who live there. After that, because The Pecan said it was his only goal for this year to see a dragon dance (he is a special kind of kid), we went to the Chinese New Year parade. It was overwhelming on the whole, but I was glad there wasn’t a mass shooting, which pretty much anytime you put humans in a place together these days in America becomes a concern; I’m standing there with the kid on my shoulders (he’s getting big for that), scanning the crowd for people who look like me except particularly distraught. Glad to see there weren’t any and nobody got killed. Mark it a win.

Except for the fact that The Patient Mrs. starting on Tuesday was violently ill. Not covid, she tested, but a stomach thing she and the friends’ kids seemed to share. Neither The Pecan nor I picked it up, which feels like a great, great victory, having seen her go through Tuesday and Wednesday, especially, without being able to eat or even really drink water without unfortunate consequences, but she was miserable and mostly in bed for that time, so probably not the post-birthday week she was hoping to have. I don’t understand how anyone who lives in a human body can believe it was made in the image of an almighty deity. Yeah, I hear god also projectile vomits when he eats some funky strawberries. Totally legit.

She seems like she’s on the other end of it now — or at least she managed to hold onto the white rice and scrambled egg she ate for dinner last night — but that kind of defined the week. The Pecan, meanwhile, had his first and second Tae Kwon Do classes with other kids. He likes it, seems to like it a lot, but is sort of transient by nature so we’ll see if he wants to stick with it after a couple more lessons. He likes things that are new, tires eventually and moves onto the next thing.

When I was a kid, the messaging that went along with that was that you needed to dedicate yourself to something, to “stick with it.” Having already seen him ice skate, play soccer, do tee-ball, track and field — he’s five, remember — I don’t necessarily believe he needs to “stick with” something that’s going to make him unhappy and think that his time might be better spent exploring new things until he finds what fits. I stuck with a bunch of shit in my time, including Tae Kwon Do, well past the point where I was enjoying any of it, and all I feel like I got for that was an obsessive personality and a constant feeling of failure. So yeah, when and if he’s ready to move on, that’s fine.

I need to remind myself of this because at this point it’s my nature to dig into a thing entirely regardless of enduring pleasure or displeasure. You might say it’s how and why The Obelisk exists and persists. Part of it, anyway. I consider myself fortunate that when I put on a record like the new Sandrider or REZN, or an older one like the Sunnata above, that I can still enjoy hearing it. Music has been the most consistent source of joy in my life. Worth waking up for.

This weekend, more family time. I was thinking of inviting my mother and sister and that crew for dinner tomorrow, but we might actually just mellow it out — can it be both? not entirely sure — and take a break for a day since on Sunday into the holiday Monday, The Patient Mrs.’ sister, her own two kids and two dogs are coming to stay, having not been able to make the trip down from Connecticut for her actual birthday. So you see how those afternoon hours on Saturday, which surely will drag without some ‘event’ scheduled, might be a bit of restorative boredom worth undertaking.

Whatever you’re up to, I hope it’s great and that you enjoy. Today at 5PM is a new ‘The Obelisk Show’ on Gimme Metal. Please listen. The music’s good and the support is appreciated. Plus it’s free on their app or site: http://gimmemetal.com

5:54 now and The Pecan just opened his door, which means it’s the start of the morning shift. It’ll be Sesame Street in no time. I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Have fun, watch your head, hydrate all that stuff. Next week is jammed front to back — premieres for Slumbering Sun, Dead Shrine, an Enslaved review, etc. — so that’ll all start to unfurl on Monday. Hope to see you then, and thanks for reading, as always.

FRM.

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Friday Full-Length: Elvis Deluxe, Lazy

Posted in Bootleg Theater on February 10th, 2023 by JJ Koczan

I always thought these guys had another album in them. Elvis Deluxe formed in 2002, concurrent to acts like Sweden’s Dozer from whose earliest work they took some notable influence, and while they by no means were the first Polish heavy rock band, their 2007 debut album, Lazy (review here) was in conversation with desert-style rock in a way that was an early arriver to the shifts in international creativity that the internet provided. In the era of bands flourishing by finding friends on MySpace — the quaint notion of a social media company actually allowing streams on a page — Elvis Deluxe were fuzzy and classic-swinging and, yeah, maybe more than a little stoned; a precursor to some extent of the modern Polish heavy rock scene, which is among Europe’s most vital in line with Greece, the UK, Germany, and so on.

During their time, which was relatively short, they offered up three albums — Lazy, 2011’s brilliant-yes-I-mean-that Favourite State of Mind, and 2013’s The Story So Far (review here), which was a mix of songs recorded live in the studio in 2012, demos from 2003, and a Stooges cover compiled — and seemed to be fading out from the vanguard just as Polish heavy began to flourish with the rise of bands like Belzebong, Satellite Beaver (who’d become Sunnata) and Dopelord, among others.

The band for Lazy‘s 10-song/40-minute run was the four-piece of bassist/vocalist Wojciech Ziemba, guitarists Tomasz “Bolek” Sierajewski and Marcin “Mechu” Hejak and drummer Mikołaj “Miko” Malanowski, and the work of the latter is particularly crucial. Not devaluing any performance here — how could I as “27” imagines Fredrik Nordin fronting Fu Manchu and “Money to Burn” rolls its second-half jam to a finish like a lost Kyuss B-side? — but as most of the album’s tracks run in the three-to-four-minute range, there’s an abiding sense of casual cool, and it’s rooted in the swing of Malanowski‘s drums before it can be built on with the deceptively light fuzz in the guitars as bolstered by the bass and the laid-back delivery of Ziemba‘s vocals.

From the loud-then-quiet noise that introduces opening track “Superorfeo,” which is among the speedier of the pieces included, through the breaking-apart wash that is the culmination of Lazy in closer “Between Heaven and Hell,” the band does nothing so much as toss off one memorable song after another like it’s no big deal, the second track “Extraterrestrial Hideout Seeker” emblematic of their ability to take garage rock push and desert tonality with more than an edge of swagger and build songs that, while largely traditional in their verse-chorus structures, nonetheless felt open and languid regardless of tempo, resulting in a vibe that was all Elvis Deluxe‘s own and that few bands I’ve come across from Poland or otherwise have been able to capture in quite the same way. If it needs to be said — and over 15 years later, maybe it does — the album was not lazy. In fact it was rife with movement.

To wit, the count-in-and-go of “Perfect Ride,” which sets its ambition in its title, is one of the more punkish cuts, maybe a bit of Demon Cleaner or Lowrider in there, as it definitely sounds aware of what stoner rock was at this point, but turned toward its own purposes, and off at a solid clip to do so. After the start-stop-and-roll of “27,” the outright nod of “Sleep Brings No Relief” taps …And the Circus Leaves Town-style bounce, but is given hints of psychedelia by the vocals, which sweetly contrast some of the rougher fuzz in the guitar and the buzzsaw wah solo (actually solos, since there are two lead layers there) that follows while the drums hold down the central progression they started with as though waiting for everyone else to rally around the verse again, which of course they do before a full-on distortion-wall push into a final chorus.

The subsequent “For the Soul” blends thrust and a tension-release bridge that’s not quite a chorus but not quite not, the mellow vocals pulling back from the harder delivery of the verse, the riff of which is delightfully twisty boogie rock, before it opens up again, resolidifying for its final stretch, topped with either synth or effects for good measure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “Ready to Rage” goes even faster, and underscores its urgency with Little Richard piano strikes in its culmination, crashing out ahead of “Money to Burn” which starts with the bass and drums and is the longest track at a still-manageable 6:49, using that time to showcase nearly every strength that has worked to Lazy‘s benefit thus far, including a bit of weirdo jamming skillfully brought around to a righteous but not overblown finish.

Placed between that jam and the closer, “The Mountain” feels somewhat like an afterthought, but isn’t, as the second half of the song reveals another highlight melody in the layered vocals to go along with its engaging hook before giving over directly to “Between Heaven and Hell” as it might have done on stage. And “Between Heaven and Hell” is blown out even before its blowout, rising to a crescendo of noise that borders on the caustic before it fades out to cap the record. Even in that moment, Elvis Deluxe maintain their complete lack of pretense and easygoing mentality — like, “Oh the universe is collapsing on itself now? yeah that’s fine” — to the very last, letting it be a defining aspect of a debut that demonstrates nothing if not a purposeful declaration of who they were as a band.

And again, they’d build on that with Favourite State of Mind before the kind-of half-album that was The Story So Far, and to me, their second record always seemed to call for more of a follow-up than it got. Everybody is still alive and active musically, so never say never. Ziemba currently plays in The Heavy Clouds, Malanowski is in Wij, and Wojciech “Bert Trust” Trusewicz, who took over on guitar for Hejak in 2010, is in the Warsaw Afrobeat Orchestra, while Sierajewski started the hardcore punk outfit Czerwone Świnie in 2019. It’s not impossible they could come back together at some point — certainly there are many from their time doing so now, be it Mammoth Volume, Josiah or the aforementioned Lowrider and Dozer — and if they did, it would be a welcome return to be sure, and one would hope they’d get a bit of the respect at last that this record and the rest of their studio work diligently earned.

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

—

Good morning. Everybody’s up. I got up at 4 with the alarm, The Pecan got up at 5:30, The Patient Mrs. about 15 minutes after that. It’s about 6:10 now and I’m just happy I managed to get the above done. These mornings I take what I can get.

Yesterday was a trip. I woke up at 2:30AM to go to the bathroom like the old man that I am — at least I woke up — and never got back to sleep. The kid took a Tae Kwon Do lesson yesterday afternoon — which he fucking loved — and it was a trip to be sure. Fun fact: I also did Tae Kwon Do for a few years as a kid, and unbeknownst to me, The Patient Mrs. booked him at the same school I went to when I was young. So I’m sitting there while the master is teaching The Pecan how to do a high block and I’m having flashbacks to when I was a little older than him doing the same thing. Different teacher, obviously. But yeah, weird. He wants to take classes. They’re expensive. We’ll see what happens.

This weekend is The Patient Mrs.’ birthday. I bought her present shortly after Xmas and it’s been nice to have that taken care of rather than hanging over my god damned head like it otherwise would be. We’re having my family over, as we will, while her sister and her sister’s family will come down from Connecticut next weekend. Gonna be a lot, but a hoot, which is pretty much how it goes with the loved ones. My entire family gets high now, which I think is hilarious. If you’d told my 18-year-old, just-got-busted-for-possession ass that someday I’d be asking my mom if she needs any edibles, well, I might believe it but I’d certainly be more pissed about having gotten arrested in the first place back then. But anyway, the slowdown of anxiety and general brain intensity is good for all of us, I think. I’ll gladly slough deeper into middle age with a goofy grin rather than my generally wretched, cruelly lucid state of self-loathing. Largely to myself, I’ve been thinking of it as a brain break, and in that regard, it both feels better and is more effective than xanax.

Next week is packed. I’m triple-booked for Tuesday, which is Valentine’s Day. Lot of love to go around, apparently. The rest of the week is full too, which is daunting but barring disaster I should be able to get through it alright. Does not allow for much fuckoff time, though, which is like mana to me. Also a Gimme Metal show next Friday, so I need to turn that in, and the PostWax liner notes for the REZN/Vinnum Sabbathi collaboration are coming due this weekend. I’ve only been talking about needing to bang those out for, oh, four months or so, so yes, it’s probably time to do so. I’ve also just been asked to finish an interview I started a while back that goes pretty deep into some of the back end work involved in this site and my personal history, so yeah. Busy, I guess, is the bottom line. Apparently that’s how I like it. Who doesn’t want to feel completely overwhelmed like all the time? Certainly no one I know.

Did you listen to that Westing track? Did you listen to Polymoon? Bastard Sword earlier today? I’ve resolved to dedicate more of my time to albums I choose rather than what comes across in premiere pitches and things like that, so that’s how you get Polymoon and Mathew’s Hidden Museum at the start of this week. I’ve been feeling a bit like I’m shouting into the void about records like that, but I’m enjoying writing about them, and in the next few weeks as we move into March, I’ve locked in album streams for the aforementioned REZN, Sandrider and Stoned Jesus, among others, and those are three of the best records I’ve heard so far this year, so I’m stoked on the alignment there. This coming week, I’ll also premiere a video from The Machine’s new LP, which is a gem. That’s one of the three slated for Tuesday. Indeed, lovely.

I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Have fun, hydrate, watch your head, get laid if you can and the vibe is right. I’ll be back on Monday with a L’Ira del Baccano video premiere and more besides. Good stuff to come. Thanks again for reading.

FRM.

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Friday Full-Length: Dopelord, Black Arts, Riff Worship & Weed Cult

Posted in Bootleg Theater on February 3rd, 2023 by JJ Koczan

If one considers the cover art’s pipe-organ bongs emitting purple smoke, stoner pinup, Satanskull on keys — and of course he has a beard — a red sky far back and all the pot leaves, then yeah, you could probably say Dopelord‘s Black Arts, Riff Worship & Weed Cult is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of record. The sophomore full-length from the Warsaw-based four-piece was self-released on April 24, 2014, which one assumes is as close as they could get to 4/20 that year, and fair enough.

Comprised of five tracks and running a tidy 40 minutes, with a sample about a sabbath at the start of the hooky “Addicted to Black Magick,” some standalone horror piano at the end of “Preacher Electrick,” a languid slog even behind the buzzsaw solo in the second half of “Acid Trippin'” that calls back to Black Sabbath‘s “Snowblind” before the tempo finally kicks up to its winding finish, the sense that “Green Plague” is falling apart even as it runs at a gallop reminiscent specifically of “Into the Void,” or the way the 11-and-a-half-minute finale “Pass the Bong” seems to lay it all on the line in its combination of Electric Wizard and Sleep influences, pulling together a Jus Oborn-style vocal over tonality that rests nicely alongside Sleep‘s “The Clarity,” which was released in July of the same year.

Black Arts, Riff Worship & Weed Cult — which certainly could be the name of a catalog I’d look forward to getting in the mail every month — codifies the ultra-stoner foundation Dopelord put forth on 2012’s Magick Rites (review here) and is a crucial moment for the band, coming at a time when the next generation of meme-ready weedian heavy was really just taking shape. Part of the record’s brilliance is in speaking to the subculture from within the subculture, as believe it or not, not everyone in the world is going to look at a bong pipe organ and understand that translates to the thick walls of fuzz distortion wrought by guitarist/lead vocalist Paweł Mioduchowski, guitarist Grzegorz Pawłowski, bassist/vocalist Piotr Zin and drummer Grzesiek “Xerxes” Wilpiszewski (currently in Black Tundra) or know immediately what planet that red sky is on.

Stoner doom is not the only subgenre under the heavy metal umbrella that preaches to the converted — see all, yes all, thrash metal since about 1989 — but the sense of Dopelord being fans of the style as well as players, rather than distancing themselves from it to pretend toward some kind of artistic objectivity, which is a fantasy at best in 99 percent of cases, is palpable throughout, and their revelry of nod becomes all the more accessible to the listener for the fact that the band is actually enjoying what they do.

And from the still-goes-where-you-think-it’s-going-but-twists-on-the-road-to-get-there changes in “Addicted to Black Magick” through the subversive critique buried in the lumber of “Preacher Electrick” — I saw Dopelord in October and before they played “Hail Satan” from 2020’s Sign of the Devil (review here), Mioduchowski noted from the stage that they could get arrested for playing that kind of song in a church in their home country; “Preacher Electrick” feels like the prototype on which that’s built — as the record moves into that three-song mega-dig of doomed riffs and hazy vibes, in “Preacher Electrick” (8:52), “Acid Trippin'” (7:39) and “Green Plague” (7:29), the roll they conjure coming out of the album’s opener is deepened, stretched out, beat up and chugged into oblivion across this span of tracks, listenable and melodic but never failing to speak to the style, is the heart of Dopelord‘s righteous in self-awareness.

That is to say, they know what they’re doing as they enjoy it, and whether it’s the black arts, the riff worship, or the weed cult, the vibe in the album is celebratory even as the riffing that leads the way through so much of it is downer-doomed and baked to the nines. It’s not so much “drop out of life with bong in hand” as it is, “we already dropped out of life with bong in hand, we recommend you do the same immediately, in fact, here’s an extra bong we have lying around, why don’t you take it and come party with us for a bit?” As invitations go, one could do far, far worse.

Whether or not you get the VHS-horror references tucked into the lyrics of “Addicted to Black Magick” — Riding with the Devil, anyone? — or get swept up in the is-that-an-extra-layer-of-drums headfuckery of noise in “Green Plague,” Black Arts, Riff Worship & Weed Cult remains brazen in its adherence to the tenets of genre, breaking the fourth wall a bit with a knowing wink directed toward its listenership, but clearly executed with a love of the heft it makes even in that chaotic wah-swirl as “Green Plague” moves toward its residual feedback culmination and “Pass the Bong” slams its massive initial crashes as if to announce you’ve arrived at the gates of the Riff-Filled Land with Al Cisneros as St. Peter, the consuming spirit of fun is reaffirmed in gloriously voluminous fashion.

Yes, fun. Among the greatest innovations of the generation of stoner heavy to which Dopelord belongs is to remember that for both those playing it and those hearing, this kind of music can be a good time, celebrating the legacy of the style and inherently adding something new to it in tone, method and construction of its own songs. Coming off their debut, Black Arts, Riff Worship & Weed Cult was a moment of realization for Dopelord, and for all its overbearing plod, there are flourishes and details throughout, be it vocal patterning, a run on bass, or what seems to be an extra layer of snare drum, or even just the way “Pass the Bong” seems to decide to swing on a whim in its final couple minutes on the way to the inevitably noisy ending, the is-as-does weedism of Dopelord is no less infectious than their catchiest chorus, and nine years after its initial release — there have been other reissues and pressings along the way — Black Arts, Riff Worship & Weed Cult speaks to a time of heavy resurgence not just for its native Polish underground, but for the heavier realms of fuzz as a whole. If it isn’t yet, it’s the kind of thing that those who were there will at some point be nostalgic about.

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

—

On Sesame Street this morning, they’re using science to make a rainbow. There are human beings who would find such a thing threatening, and I don’t mind telling you those people are fucking idiots. No, that’s not a hot take, but it’s true just the same.

The Pecan got up at 5:15 this morning, made his way downstairs, and believe it or not was more interested in watching tv on my laptop than letting me finish writing the above. And as I was in the bathroom moments ago, number one, I could hear him in the living room yelling, “Daddy, yogurt!” as though I’d either forgotten or not told him I was hitting the can first. At least I didn’t get punched when I “finally” got back to the couch with the coveted Siggi’s vanilla. In a bit of a tyrant phase, we are.

The Patient Mrs., meanwhile, sleeps, and where I might otherwise get her up so I can go swimming, I’ll let her get whatever rest she can since she was out last night having dinner with a friend in Jersey City. I’ll go later, or tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. I do need to buy more yogurt at the Wegmans by the gym though, so that’s gonna weigh on my brain until it gets done, as that kind of thing does. Also, I missed taking out the garbage yesterday and I’m a little furious at myself for it.

My neurologist put me on Adderall, for ADHD, presumably. I started on 5mg last month, which was nothing, and moved up to 10mg this month, which by the way is also not a magic bullet for shutting up an apparently persistent sense of panic in my brain. This and 150mg of Wellbutrin for depression, along with a slew of vitamins, are the current morning regimen. I don’t like Wellbutrin and don’t think it helps, but I take it because I’m told to, and without my support whatever would become of those poor pharmaceutical companies? They should have a Bandcamp Friday for pills.

Speaking of, it’s Bandcamp Friday. I got a bit of cash from merch sales so have been enjoying that. Thanks if you bought a shirt or anything: http://mibk.bigcartel.com/products.

While I’m dropping plugs, new Gimme show at 5PM Eastern. Playlist will be posted before this is, and go here to stream it: http://gimmemetal.com.

Before I go make toast for the next stage of The Pecan’s breakfast, I’d like to thank you for the love this week as regards The Obelisk’s 14th anniversary. It doesn’t feel like all that long, but we’re heading toward 16,000 posts, so I guess my perspective on that is a bit warped. I’m pretty sure I’ve still missed more good stuff than I’ve caught, but I’m doing my best, gonna continue with that. In any case, the response was appreciated. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one getting something out of this.

Up and down week. Most are. Last weekend was crazy busy and I’m hoping this one will be less so. You know, once the sun finally comes up today.

Whatever you’re up to, have a great and safe time. Have fun, hydrate, watch your head. Next week I’m reviewing Polymoon and there’s a bunch of other stuff going on that I need to organize, so I’m gonna go do that. Okay. Thanks again.

FRM.

Friday Full-Length: Tortuga, Deities

Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 27th, 2023 by JJ Koczan

Poznań, Poland’s Tortuga released their second album, Deities, early in 2020 on vinyl through Greece’s Made of Stone Recordings. The follow-up to their 2017 self-titled debut, it runs seven songs and 53 minutes — one assumes the vinyl is edited, or otherwise that the grooves are packed very, very tightly together — and is a pure example of what I mean when I employ the oft-used phrase ‘dug in.’ With production, guitars and vocals from Bablo (who softened his first consonant; it was previously Pablo), guitar, synth and vocals from Kłosu (who also mixed and recorded, with Achim), bass from Heszu and the steady rolling drums of Marmur, Tortuga languidly lumber through the culmination of “Esoteric Order” like they just invented wah, and it’s precisely that sense of the band being right there with the listener at the moment of righteousness, that kind of feeling that one might share in-person at a show, when they know it’s going good and you know it’s going good and that feeling of electricity and communion circles through the crowd. They’re into it as much as you are. You can feel them in the rehearsal space thinking, ‘Yeah, this is gonna be great,’ when they were writing, imagine the same conversation in the studio and then hear it in how they actually play the song.

That kind of feeling is writ large across Deities. It is a major unifying factor of the songs, which take a loosely Lovecraftian lyrical thematic and basically just play with it. The source of so much ultra-serious heavy metal, things dark, grim and tentacled, is on Deities boiled down to a kind of stoned brain-meander in which Yig, H.P. Lovecraft’s the lord of the Lizards, a god, is jealous of all the attention Godzilla gets in movies and so on. “Black Pharaoh II” is also Lovecraft-based and in complement to “Esoteric Order,” which puts the audience in this land of monsters following the instrumental intro “Shining Sphere” — which makes plenty of declarations of its own as regards the tonality with which Tortuga will convey their plod — the penultimate “Trip” is a lyrical moment of clarity in which the character making their way through this hellscape realizes that it’s all the result of having dropped too much acid. The lyrics, by Bablo and Anakolut — last names need not apply; they keep it casual — are a particular point of charm, but it’s really that ‘dug in’ sensibility that most comes through the listening experience. The distinct feeling that they’re having a good time too, that they know their music taps into a very specific kind of fun — a very specific kind of humor, though I wouldn’t call their material a joke on any level, even on “For Elizard” where the chorus is, “Yig hates Godzilla/Fuck you Godzilla” — and that not everybody is going to understand. They’re dug in. They’re riding the grooves of their own making. They’ve worked to craft their tones, their riffs, their songs, into either these hugely weighted slumps or the kind of rocking pushes one finds in the early going of the instrumental “Defective Mind Transfer” or the more atmospheric beginning of “Shining Sphere” from whence the full breadth of their distortion emerges like a tentacled god-beast from the more ethereal waters. It’s at 1:12 in the intro. You can’t miss it.

And if you’re listening at all, you won’t miss it, which is even more important. Because part of the communication that’s coming through Deities, and part of its being so dug in, stems from the fact that Tortuga clearly know who their audience is, because they’re it. Even as closer “Galeón de Manila” swaps out English lyrics for Spanish and moves with deceptive smoothness between elden doom and bell-of-ride, heads-down, forward-surge black metal before dissolving to nearly eight minutes of feedback, residual coming-apart and drone — this is in the digital version, not necessarily the LP — finishing the record with an unexpected twist, that change isn’t out of line for the kind of heavy that Tortuga play, and so it doesn’t feel out of place. If they started singing in Polish, I don’t think it would hurt the experience either. By the time they get there, you’ve already been up, down and around the mountains of madness, past the fields of wah in “Esoteric Order,” into the explosive, revelry-plod of “For Elizard,” through the semi-psych sample-topped musings of “Defective Mind Transfer,” the slam-that-fuzz-home midsection of “Black Pharaoh II” — you want to hear ‘dug in’ made manifest; cue up “Black Pharaoh II” at 2:30 into its total 6:10 and let it ride until the vocals come back at the very end, which is exactly what they do — the jaunty bounce that starts “Trip,” and far back at the start, the little flourish of synth that maybe marked the transfer from one world to another, so that they decide to turn all that dense fuzz to more ripper purposes for a stretch, well, you’ve already been steamrolled so why not?

No, Deities isn’t revolutionary. It’s not shaping genre in its own image either in the stoned or other heavy styles. It has a presence and a personality of its own, to be sure, but that comes well within the borders of genre, and the sense one gets from Tortuga is that they know it, they celebrate it, they want to celebrate it with their audience, as if to say, ‘Come check out this very, very large sound we have made.’ Or perhaps alternately, ‘Come dig in with us.’ Thus Deities, like religious dogma, offers an inherent feeling of community for those who listen and ‘get it.’ It’s not going to be everybody, but if you can hear the fun in “Esoteric Order” and “For Elizard,” then that invite to dig in should be a simple enough RSVP. Tortuga are the converted, holding a mass for the converted, and as much as their theme on Deities is hyper-specific, that ethic is mirrored in their instrumental bent. They know what they want to sound like because they know what they like. They are well and truly dug in, and unto its last drone, Deities is that much stronger an offering because of it. I don’t know if the Great Old Ones dig riffs or not, but if not, they’re missing out here.

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

—

Already this morning, the kid’s up. 5:06AM he came downstairs the first time. I was about two and a half paragraphs into the above. I put him back to bed — because, well, that’s too fucking early for him to be up — told him I’d set a timer for an hour and to go back to sleep. It’s 5:35AM right now and he’s come out of his room twice since, so really I’m just delaying the inevitable trying to get him some more rest which he’ll need so that at 2PM he doesn’t collapse into being a complete bastard because he’s too tired, and allow myself some time to work. I expect and know this effort will fail.

He just opened the bedroom door and said he has to pee; his ultimate not-going-back-to-bed weapon. Like a limit break in Final Fantasy VIII. I am defeated. It would really be something to be able to finish one of these posts on my laptop instead of my phone for a change one of these weeks. Feels like it’s been a very long time. I also wouldn’t mind going a day without having to mop up piss from all over the bathroom floor because, while gender is a complex issue in our house — I actually had another aside here explaining that but it was too long; bottom line is maybe trans? which presents all kinds of dangers in this hateful-ass country — he still wants to pee standing up and also holds it in for too long and then sprays the bathroom like he’s fucking powerwashing it. But these are apparently pretty big asks of life right now. And I work to remind myself that things will not always be as they are right now. Daily. Also I get high. Mostly in the afternoons and evenings. It is a wellness thing for me. I’ve been swimming every other morning at the gym near the house. The Patient Mrs. and I have been doing yoga videos. All of these things connect in my mind.

This weekend is family time. My oldest nephew turns 15 on Monday, so we’re having that whole crew over for dinner tomorrow, then brunch with Slevin and his fiancée on Sunday. Somewhere in there I’m supposed to do a sticker-quote for a Blood Lightning album and liner notes for PostWax. It’ll be a fucking miracle if I can get to the one-or-two-sentence thing there, let alone dig into the REZN/Vinnum Sabbathi collaboration and give it its descriptive due for a sheet that will be included with the release. I feel stupid and useless, even sitting here giving a shit about that stuff while my kid counts the seconds on the timer I set until we can turn on Sesame Street. He got a little music player this week that plays the theme. He sings along to it. It’s the kind of future-memory I should treasure for the rest of my life an example of what a sweet, wonderful person he is. But because I’m a narcissistic ogre, all I can think about is getting ‘work’ done for which I’m neither compensated nor ever truly able to finish.

So there you have it. Next week is a premiere from the new Stöner EP, a review of Strider, a premiere for Blackwülf, a full stream for Soothsayer Orchestra, and a review for Mathew’s Hidden Museum. That’s where the week is at now. Looking at it, it seems kind of ambitious. If I still have it in me by next Thursday to review that Mathew’s Hidden Museum and give it its due, I will. Otherwise I’ll push it back. I doubt Mr. Bethancourt is holding his breath for that, in any case. Really, I’m just ready to check out now and maybe spend the rest of the day just listening to music instead of thinking about it. Probably not going to happen.

A little discouraged, maybe, but persistent. Put it on my tombstone.

Have a great and safe weekend. Have fun, watch your head, hydrate. I’m punching out to go do domestic whathaveyou, which probably means dishes, laundry or both.

FRM.