Deafheaven - New Bermuda

Ah man, this is just, like, so lush. That was probably the Welshest sentence I've ever written to describe music, but I feel like it is somewhat entirely justified in this instance; you tend to hear the term "nice" black metal bandied about to describe acts such as Alcest, but I don't usually rate those types of acts. However, Deafheaven for some reason seem to be an exception for me. This band have managed to follow up the ethereal Sunbather with something even more profound, expansive and all-encompassing than before; heaps of washing atmospheres and glittering passages of light mash head on with elements of blasting brutality, throat shredding vocals and soaring leads. Or, you could just write it off as hipster black metal, if you like.

Can't wait to catch these guys live in a few weeks; if this material is anything to go by then the live show is bound to be intense as fuck. Favourite track: "Baby Blue".

Swans - The Glowing Man

The Glowing Man is the final Swans studio album in the current reformed incarnation of the band. At first it seems extremely reminiscent of it's predecessor, To Be Kind, due to the package setup (another triple LP on card with minimal art) and the length of the record (although despite it's enormous run time, The Glowing Man is the shortest record the band have released in five years). As with 80s Swans, I've noticed an overall thawing in the menacing, noisy edge of Swans as the records have progressed, but this time, the delivery simply becomes more ethereal and almost peaceful, rather than deliberately less abrasive. Just compare the title track of The Seer to any of the 20+ minuters here, and hopefully you will see what I mean.

I mean, this is Swans, so it's hardly easy listening, but it's like your now being lifted to a higher plane, rather than being dragged there kicking and screaming. "Frankie M" is a stand-out track for me personally, especially the latter half with it's twisting lyrical repetition (I remember it from recent live shows), as is the rather harrowing piece by Gira's wife, "When Will I Return?". The title track, at a fucking glorious 28 minutes, reprises To Be Kind's "Bring The Sun" before culminating in, dare I say it, some sort of almost Kraut rock-style march. These 28 minutes seem to recap to me this entire recent reincarnation of Swans, pulling from all corners of the chaos in one final piece. The closing track that comes after it merely seems to exist as a cool-down period for the listener, and is aptly titled - "Finally, Peace".

Whilst I am extremely sad to see this era of Swans come to an end (I will miss mainly the death stares and gurns of Christoph Hahn) I am very excited to see where Michael Gira will take the project next, and if nothing comes of it, then The Glowing Man serves perfectly as an ending chapter to a long and extremely challenging musical career. 

If you have Spotify, you can stream the whole thing below. 

Deafheaven - Sunbather

It's easy to write off a band like Deafheaven as pure hipster fodder, but looking past that probably media-perpetuated stereotype (I'm contributing in my own little way by even mentioning it) you will find an extremely talented band with really awesome music. Sunbather opens up to me sounding like the bastard lovechild of post rock and black metal, with "Dream House" punishing you not only in the feels with the melody, but in the face with the brutality.

And the album continues in this vein. It is a perplexing marriage of styles, granted, but sticking with it if you find it a bit weird at first will reward you handsomely. The title track brings those soaring guitars from the opening moments back in again, and all is well with the world. Well, with my world. For now. The guitar sound is almost depthless; distorted yet possessing a clarity required for those sailing melodies. Closer "The Peacan Tree" opens with a riff nodding towards more traditional black metal, which is only cemented further with the use of flat-out blastbeating on the drums.

Seriously give this a go if metal has been tiring you lately, or if you like your black metal with a little artsy twist.

Swans - To Be Kind

A recurring theme in my posting to Lines In Wax is my reluctancy to approach my absolute favourite bands. I eventually get to it with most of them (look how many Agoraphobic Nosebleed posts I’ve done!) but with Swans I always hit that wall. How in the fuck am I supposed to describe this album in only so many words?

 I was still getting my head around The Seer when To Be Kind was announced. In a press release, Michael Gira stated something along the lines that this new album will be as long as it needs to be, and with live versions of “The Seer” mashed up with “Bring The Sun” and “Toussaint L'ouverture” reaching nearly an hour in length, I was expecting To Be Kind to be a bigger, badder, mind-boggling big brother to The Seer. But it wasn’t.

Instead, what I believe we have here, is the much calmer and more refined sequel to The Seer. A gentle, elegant older sister, rather than a snarling big brother. It’s actually a little bit shorter than it’s predecessor. I’m not saying that it lacks at all in what Swans do best (total sonic transcendence / annihilation), you just need to spin the unfathomable epic “Bring The Sun” to confirm that; it’s a track that builds and builds (and builds and builds) with maddening repetition to ride a crest of an all-consuming musical orgasm. Personally, I feel sorry for the drummer(s), and slightly more long term – my ears. But, man it’s good. No, what differentiates To Be Kind from The Seer is the aching passages of calm moments in between the sheer walls of aural bliss , accentuated and kept plodding mostly by a much more prominent presence of the bass guitar. The bass playing on this album is absolutely fucking phenomenal (check “Oxygen”), and the songs seem to be built more around bass grooves rather than repetitive guitar leads.

My favourite tracks are “Just A Little Boy” (which takes a while to get going but has the most epic ending sequence ever), the previously mentioned “Bring The Sun / Toussant L’ouverture” (the 34 minute centrepiece to this circus of insanity), the maddening bass verses brass  frenzy of “Oxygen” and the ultimate duality of the title track, with it’s  love/hate, hot/cold, creation/destruction kinda vibe as it folds from sheets of sheer bliss into cataclysmic free form noise and destruction.

Like I said, words can only describe so much. Play this as loud as you possibly can.

Earth - Primitive And Deadly

Fuck! What happened here? Earth are definitely not messing about on their new record - the heaviest thing the band have done in over a decade. I can get behind this! Since their reformation / regrouping, Earth have been all about calm, serene, bright and wavering tones; colossal monuments of clean guitar work and uplifting instrumental soundscapes - almost like the shoegazing equivalent of their early drone days. But this is something else entirely. Someone finally decided to turn Earth's amps up, and I couldn't be happier with that decision.

The Bees Made Honey... is one of my favourite things ever, and I loved the first part of Angels Of Darkness Demons Of Light, with it's dusty, haunting, almost western sound. The second part of that double album was much, much more sparse, and I must admit I lost interest a bit, with Earth's already stripped back sound being reeled in even further (I gotta say though, the bass playing was pretty funky). 

I'm not sure if I'm entirely sold on the inclusion of guest vocalists (Rabia Shaheen Qazi and sometimes-QOTSA collaborator Mark Lanegan) but the reappearance of distortion in Earth's work has made a world of difference for me. It's not as if it is overpowering in any way, or like it even detracts from the subtleties going on around the guitar, it's just that everything sounds much more alive and vital - something that can do no harm for a band as far into their career as Earth. 

Enter a shimmering, mesmerising desert of sonic absolution.

Nadja - Numbness

This is the first time I've actually successfully sat through an entire Nadja album. They definitely made delivering kebabs and pizza an ethereal experience, I can say that much. Numbness is like many other releases in the sizeable Nadja catalogue; ridiculously fuzzy, enormously slow, miserable yet hopeful and just a little bit pretentious. Numbness offers (to me) nothing new; it is simply Nadja for Nadja's sake. Depending on how much you like Nadja, you may or may not be in for a treat. If you're secretly hoping for the band to mix it up a little bit from the usual template, then you might as well uncross your fingers now. This duo are the Agathocles of the 'slow and moody' universe. 

This isn't to say that Numbness is a particularly bad album - it's actually very enjoyable - it's just that it genuinely baffles me how Nadja can release so much of this stuff sounding all the same yet still be able to craft new and genuine songs from it? Surely there is only so much you can do with a drum kit, a synth that apparently plays only one note and a bass guitar that sounds like radio static pumped through a sunn O))) amplifier. At times songs resemble something altogether more Jesu, and others sound almost like Merzbow fell asleep on the lower-end of a keyboard. Closing track "Numb", which builds slowly and with menacing purpose, was set to be my favourite track, until some crazy effect on the drums kinda ruined it for me. 

Honestly don't know what to make of this. Really on the fence with Nadja. Guess I just gotta be in the mood to listen to them, which is very, very rare. If you know and love what Nadja is all about though, you'll fucking love this. 

PS - after listening to this I found out that this is actually a fucking BEST OF compilation! (??????). I think it's safe to say I'm done with Nadja for the foreseeable future)

Anathema - A Fine Day To Exit

This is one of my favourite Anathema albums - if not my favourite out of them all (that I have heard). It was also the first "soft" Anathema record I got hold of after discovering the band didn't play doom metal anymore. I spent a while worshipping the Serenades album, which was probably one of my first introductions to the ultra-slow and miserable side of doom metal. I was so excited to see the band play live at Download 2007, as they were one of the few decent acts on the line up. Having only heard Serenades, you could imagine the fucking shock I had when the band took to the stage (with Lee Douglas in tow, as I believe they were still touring A Natural Disaster at the time). 

It took me a while to adjust to these fancy English-folk with their flowery shirts and uplifting music, and A Fine Day To Exit helped me greatly to appreciate the softer side of music! For somebody who through 2007/2008 was pretty much 100% living and breathing shitty grindcore, A Fine Day... was one of my more experimental purchases, but it has through time cemented itself as one of my favourites. I don't really listen to it that much, but when I am in the mood for it, there really isn't anything else that can be accepted as a substitute. 

Opener "Pressure" is epic as fuck, which a huge piano leading a stomping drum beat and soft vocals. Second track, "Release", starts off all twinkly and acoustic but develops into something much more progressive and "rock-band" based. This song can really sum up what Anathema is all about! "Underworld" has one of the weirdest (and best) guitar riffs in the history of music and track seven, "Panic", is one of my favourite songs of all time, sounding like an upbeat and slightly heavier (and a whole world less boring) Radiohead. I won't go into every song here, but the four above are probably my favourites so I'll just leave it at that.

 

If you've never heard Anathema I implore you to check out the link below and chillax to the fuckin' max. If you're a regular on the metal or rock festival circuit, keep your eyes out for these charming gentlemen as they still seem to play a rather large amount of heavier festivals. I guess that's where their roots are, as are a lot of their fans despite their softer sound, and whilst they do seem out of place sandwiched between the likes of Candlemass and Turisas etc., I promise you it will be a refreshing and eye opening break. 

Swans - Soundtracks for the Blind

Soundtracks for the Blind is often hailed as something incredibly special in the original Swans catalogue. After spending the majority of the 90s focussing on much more softer material, Swans' issued a perplexing final death rattle with this double album. Listening to it, even from the first few opening seconds, evokes deep feelings of sadness for me, even though I never got into the band until they reformed three years ago. This record was literally everything the band had left before they quit. There are a few full-band songs in here, but the majority of the two discs is made up of sound collages by Gira and Jarboe. Some of them are tests of patience, sure, but for the most part they are extremely efficient and poignant passages of noise, ambience or atmosphere to rival any long-term artists in this field.

As a whole, Soundtracks for the Blind is an absolute mammoth task to try and conquer in one go. You really do get your money's worth here. Both discs are crammed full, and the total running length for the entire album is nearly two and a half hours long. Even with the recent release of The Seer, I believe that Soundtracks is by far the most "out-there" thing that Swans have ever done. It's creepy, moving and downright edgy, and leaves you with that sinking feeling you get in your chest after looking at old photographs or something. Due to the sheer volume of ambient tracks here, when the full band finally kicks in it is infinitely more impressive. Most of the band tracks last easily between 10 and 15 minutes, a scary decade-plus long ago look at what was to come in the future, and also a downright perplexing move for a band that had spend the previous seven years or so peddling acoustic-driven four-minuters like it was nobody's business. I mean, just compare this record to the album before it (The Great Annihilator); such startling change continues to puzzle me to this very day.

Couple that with the fact that a few of the songs here scarily pre-date the stylings of the post rock explosion ("Helpless Child" and "The Sound" as examples) and you really have an absolute relic of a record that must be cherished until the end of time. Its length makes it almost impossible to market commercially, its content relating to neither the brutal Swans of old or the soft Swans of the 90s, and it was released at a time when it would be seen as a statement along the lines of "This is all we have left of any worth. This should have been the future, but it is all you are getting". If I had been a Swans fanatic in the 90s then I would have torn this record apart and analysed every single second of it. I'm so fucking glad Swans reformed. So. Fucking. Glad. Out on Young God Records.

 

If you have a spare 2 hours and 22 minutes why not give the entire album a listen right here. What do you have to gain expect complete and total enlightenment? 

Swans - Swans Are Dead

This marks the first time in fuuuuuuck knows how long I've actually paid full retail price for a CD (by that I mean £9 or higher) but it is just impossible to get the career-end late 90s Swans stuff anywhere any cheaper (in Britain, at least). Swans Are Dead is a retrospective live album, released not that long after their original demise, and features two discs of live performances. 1995-1997 was an interesting time for Swans, having gone full circle through the spectrum of non-threatening genres, the band were on the verge of returning to their downright weird and extremely experimental ways when they abruptly ended. The mega-oversized Soundtracks of the Blind amply documents this, and Swans Are Dead is the live album for that era that accompanies it.

There are two discs, one is a show from '95 and the other from '97, and despite this they flow pretty well and I originally thought when I downloaded it that it was the same show spread on both discs. It's even a different line up and I didn't realise - perhaps I'm losing my touch? Or would that be my hearing? Anyway, Swans Are Dead showcases the band's very experimental final tour and is a slice of a place in time that was once very sad and nostalgic. Now that Swans have reformed however, the Are Dead set hasn't lost any meaning; the Swans here is unlike any other period in the band's lucid history so it still stands up with the rest of the catalog, even today. Out on Young God Records.

Year Of No Light - Ausserwelt

I don't normally like post rock type stuff. Sure, I appreciate what the genre is all about, the sheer scope and beauty of it seems fantastic on paper, but for the most part I just can't see passed the whole twinkly-twinkly-becomes-epic-climax-in-7-11-minutes thing. Ugh. Build, bash, repeat. Wow, that's art, man. What I like about Year Of No Light however is that they retain the post rock epic and meld it with something more dark and haunting. There are overtones of doom metal galore, and an underlying sense of something altogether more film-scorey. Yes, I just wrote "scorey". It's how they say scary in Liverpool.

This record opens like a slow-motion, mega-HD punch to the face. Guy Ritchie is filming the fucker and after the initial burst you're left reeling backwards in all the sickening, gritty detail you could imagine. Possibly in sepia, too. Equal parts beauty and beast. I initially saw Year Of No Light live at Roadburn 2011 but didn't feel them, but I was attracted to check out this record on the cover art alone. That is how I used to suss out records when I was in my early teens, and it is still quite fun to just go for a record because it fucking looks awesome, although I gotta be honest I end up disappointed more often than not, but now and then a diamond like this will come along and make it all worth while. Bizarrely, I ended up picking up this record at the next Roadburn when Year Of No Light didn't have a set. Genius. Out on a variety of colours thanks to Music Fear Satan.

Bucket Full of Teeth - IV

I always forget how much I love BFOT until I spin this one-sided nightmare. The mix of power electronics and harsh (dare I say it) post-grind really is something to behold. The electronic and noise passages range from the downright horrid and nasty through to floral and sprawling; lush soundscapes of peace acting as intermissions between the balls-to-the-wall full band pieces, which are something to behold all on their own with their genre-bending groovyness.

BFOT go from sounding like Magrudergrind to Dillenger Escape Plan to Pelican in one forty second blast of hell, and before you can figure out what the fuck is going on, you've got harsh noise melting your face, or rich ambience lulling you into a false sense of security before the next round of perplexing 'metal' commences. Holy fuck. One could argue that the formula of nice/noise/nice/noise is tiring, but here it works so well; you really are kept guessing and not one single part sounds the same.

 

I must implore you to listen to BFOT yourselves. I believe they are long split up and the record long sold out, so download that bitch and have a gander. I got this really cheap and you can still get it cheap off record collector sites such as Discogs. The original press by Level Plane was 300 on yellow (why so low?) but that was quickly followed up by 300 on a red/yellow half and half split, and then 500 on green marble. I personally think the green marble looks the best.