Might as well start with my favourite record of this fall. Katatonia's the perfect autumn band come to think of it...their downcast, melancholy songs immediately conjure thoughts of grey skies, biting winds, dead leaves, bare trees, fading grass, 5:00 sunsets. At least for me. It's my favourite time of year, and when autumn miraculously stretches out for us on the prairies as it's doing right now, every day a crisp five degrees (40 F), I just relish it, and it's always great to have a piece of new music to be a fitting soundtrack for that season. And that's certainly the case with Night is the New Day, which I first heard on the first day of fall, and has only gotten better over these past two months. Considering the steady improvements the band has made with each new record, I had high expectations for the new one, and they were all exceeded. It's gorgeous, plain and simple, a perfect balance between Jonas Renske's languorous vocal melodies, the band's tasteful arrangements, and electronic-tinged production. It was fussed over for years, the songwriting painstakingly slow and careful, the recording and mixing arduous, and boy, is that ever reflected int he music, it's just immaculate. I had the pleasure of interviewing guitarist Anders Nystrom while they were recording the album at the dingy Ghost Ward in Stockholm, and then he and Renske a month later when it was all finished for my piece in the next issue of Decibel, so watch for that in the next few weeks. In the meantime, though, here's my full review of the album...I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Though an astute commenter mentioned how I compared it to the Cure's Disintegration (not so much musically as a moment of perfection after years of evolving), but he compared it to Roxy Music's Avalon, something I really agree with now. Dead-on.

Over at Hellbound I whipped up a review of the debut EP by Finnish supergroup Barren Earth. Formed by two former members of Amorphis and fronted by the singer from Swallow the Sun (two excellent bands), not surprisingly this bears a strong resemblance to Amorphis circa 1994, which considering the more streamlined sound Amorphis has taken on these last five years, is not exactly a bad thing. They have a full-length album due out in early 2010, and if these four tracks are any indication, it's going to be a good one.

In the current issue of Decibel I have a ton of content, more than usual. I had pitched a feature piece on Saviours because their new album back in the summer because their new album turned out to be far better than I'd expected, and the boss said cool, so I wound up having an entertaining conversation with drummer Scott Batiste and guitarist Austin Barber. And of course, when you have a couple of gregarious guys serving up choice quotes nonstop, putting together an article is always a breeze, and this one was no exception. On a side note the article wound up putting me in contact with the guy who recorded the three demo singles that I mention at the beginning of the piece, and he was kind enough to hook me up with the full album in demo form, and considering how much I loved the six tracks on the singles, hearing the other five was very gratifying. I just love the loose, sloppy, filthy feel of those recordings, it goes perfectly with the rampaging NWOBHM of the band. Awesome stuff to be sure.

In the reviews department, I wrote my first feature review in a while, for the excellent new Nile album. The last one of theirs was a big disappointment, and it was great to hear that Karl Sanders had returned to form in a gigantic way. When I was writing the review on extremely short notice, Sanders was extremely kind enough to forward me his full lyrics and liner notes...if you know Nile at all, you know the lyrics and notes play a big, big part in the full album experience, and to have that to work with made writing the review so much easier. It's awful having to write about extreme metal without lyrics, especially when it applies to bands that supposedly put a great deal of emphasis on the lyrical side of things, so this kind of cooperation from artists is invaluable, not to mention hugely appreciated.

It feels like ages since I had a couple days to form an informed opinion on the new Between the Buried and Me album, a daunting task if there ever was one, but I think I did a decent job of it. Great album, that one. I actually wrote a feature on BTBAM for an upcoming issue (February I think), so watch for that in a couple months. Ignitor is an interesting trad-metal band from Austin that recently employed the vocal services of the dude from sleaze faves Dangerous Toys, and their new CD is spirited, harmless fun. Morrigu, on the other hand, isn't interesting at all, its blend of Soilwork-style melodeath and post-hardcore whingeing too much to bear for a full album. Profound Lore finds Worm Ouroboros, on the other had, is a really, really cool discovery...like I say in the piece, it's like Alison Goldfrapp fronting Atavist. You've got to love anything that sounds like that. That album comes out later this month, I believe, so keep your eyes peeled.

Lastly, I wrote a short feature piece on Brooklyn black metalers Liturgy, which turned out quite well I think. Their new album is wicked, a barrage of insanely fast blastbeats and waves of guitars. A little similar to Krallice, but not as focused on melody, instead going for a more cacophonous, enveloping sound, which I find works extremely well. Anyway, I conducted an email interview with guitarist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, and came away so impressed, I thought I'd post the interview in its entirety. So here you go...enjoy, and don't forget to check out the music!

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You and your band certainly don't look the part, you're not flamboyantly satanic, your form of black metal feels more uplifting than grim, and to top things off, you're from Brooklyn. Just how much heat have you had to take from those purists and 'scene police' who only like their black metal a certain way?

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: It's always been palpable that there isn't a readymade audience for us. We switch back and forth between playing metal shows and more brooklyny art/psych/experimental shows, and feel a little out of place in either situation. But I've found that most people are open minded, even if they can't quite place us. People who only like their black metal a certain way don't have to listen to us of they don't want. We're trying to be as authentic as possible, making the music that it feels most urgent to make. So I'm happy to do that and let others judge according to whatever criteria they want.

"Transcendental Black Metal" immediately comes off as a positive description, and I've always felt that way hearing the blend of melody and dissonance, be it in black metal, krautrock, or shoegaze. Plus there's the cover photo of the eclipse. Is it wrong to feel some sense of optimism in Liturgy's music?

I've always felt that the most legitimate time in the history of counterculture was the 60s, back before punk and metal had fully developed, when it had a lot to do with revolutionary politics and a critique of western society and norms, but driven first and formost by a utopian vision for the future - however vague or contradictory that vision may be. I think even in Black Sabbath there was something in this. But now metal is fallen and is about solipsistic despair - a nihilism with no redemption. I think that's valid too, but Liturgy's project is to reinvent metal in a way that reconnects it with its roots in utopianism and liberation. And I think this is an tendency that is already immanent to and latent in black metal. I'd like to think we're drawing out something that's already there, or emphasizing an aspect which isn't talked about so much.

Do you feel black metal shouldn't have to be so preoccupied with acting and sounding morbid?

I that musically black metal has a close connection to the romantic period of classical music in the 19th century - when Brahms, Wagner, Scriabin and others were using triadic harmony in a way that activates a very wide range of emotion, from deep despair and anguish to mystical ecstasy. Music doesn't usually map onto emotions in such a concrete, specific way, and I'd say this is something the Romantics invented. Black metal is the only kind of rock music that uses the same kinds of harmonies - it's the style of rock music with the widest emotional range. As opposed to, say, death metal, which is firmly locked into a sort of monochromatic, a subjective brutality. I think it's cool that black metal reconnects with western tradition in this way - all I'd say is that it ought to utilize the full emotional range that is available to it - not just the "bottom end". Black metal should and can be both morbid and ecstatic, it is inherently capable of producing the lowest and the highest emotional states, and ought to be utilizing its full potential. I want to make music that is as True as possible.

With a name like Liturgy many of us would expect a black metal band to view the name with a great deal of irony, yet judging by the song titles it feels that the choice was a sincere one on your part. So why did you choose to call your band Liturgy?

Ultimately a liturgy comes down to a group of people coming together and recognizing the human bond between them by participating in a ritual. To me that's what music has always been about, and especially rock music. that's why I go to shows. It's a sort of sacred space. Metal is the most sacred music of all in my view.

The label did not give us writers lyrics, your MySpace doesn't reveal them, and of course it's impossible to tell what your saying. That said, just how important are Liturgy's lyrics?

The lyrics will be printed in a booklet that goes with the vinyl release. I don't know, I'd say they are important but not essential. If people just want to hear the music, that's great too.

What sort of topics do the songs on Renihilation touch on?

Basically they're all about the meaning of life...

On a more specific note, can you explain the meaning behind "Beyond the Magic Forest" and "Ecstatic Rite"?

I hope you don't mind if i quote a little bit from previous interviews:

"Ecstatic Rite" relates to the status of transcendental experience in the contemporary world, as shaped by the dialectic between advanced capitalism and the counterculture. The lyrics will be published in a booklet that goes with the vinyl release: The most important line goes, "Ecstatic rite/Divide the father."

Beyond the magic forest is basically about the idea that life is ultimately meaningless, and we are ultimately alone, but there's a sort of half-meaning in the act of striving towards something impossible, believing in something that you also can't really believe in. "Brother, sister, tear through the forest" is the key line.

What exactly does Renihilation mean?

I like the idea of a second nihilism or a double nihilism, a sort of annihilation of an annihilation amounting to something altogether different from a return to what was originally destroyed. That's what renihiliation is.

"I choke the apocalyptic trumpet with my power / resounding through the arcangel like marrow" Is the key stanza.

How was it working with Colin Marston? How did you get in touch with him?

I knew him prior to recording with him, just through the music scene in brooklyn. I know people in lots of bands that have recorded with him (extra life, zs, ocrilim, stats, genghis tron) and he's got a great reputation, and is great to work with. The recording session was a real whirlwind - we did all the tracking, mixing and mastering in only 4 days.

You mentioned being influenced by people like Angelo Badalamenti and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan…What is it specifically about their music that is so important to you, and how did they influence Liturgy?

I'm a huge David Lynch fan, and the scores to his movies and shows are very important. Badalamenti is able to write in a way that is simultaneously truly moving and at the same time dripping with irony, and insane. His music touches on the kind of impossibility I mentioned in relation to beyond the magic forest ... though it's hard to put into words what I'm trying to get at.

Your mentioning Gérard Grisey is particularly fascinating. What is it about his music that had such a big impact on you? Are there any correlations between spectralism and your form of black metal?

There was a time when I considered doing contemporary composition rather than play metal. I studied spectral music, but ultimately decided that it had already been exhausted as a musical language by Grisey and Murail, or anyway that it wasn't right for me. But I feel Liturgy is attuned to the same kind of experience that Grisey's music creates. Grisey, but also Ligeti and Xenakis, and post-integral-serialist composition generally I think is really wonderful, both primordial and transcendent. Of course there's little we share with any of these composers in terms of technique, although the chant at the beginning of the record travels the overtone series and is a sort of homage to Grisey. Perhaps we have more of a similarity to Xenakis in his use of crossing thresholds between different gradients and patterns - I think of the blast beat and tremolo guitar as unique in rock in that it creates the same kind of continuous drone that one finds in contemporary composition. We're very interested in working with this drone aspect of black metal, and we try to make it ebb and flow, expand and contract.

Greg Fox's drum set-up is pretty much as minimal as it gets, which seems like more of a Sonic Youth or free jazz influence than metal. Is he strictly a metal drummer, or is his background a lot more varied?

Greg and I went to highschool together, and would go to a lot of shows. Back then we'd listen to tons of metal by way of the internet, but the live shows we were going to see were more in the vein of the diy experimental/art/hardcore scene. Lightning Bolt was a big influence on his style, I think, and yes jazz as well. So we were always mixing those influences together. Definitely a varied background.

Though for Liturgy he's doing something very specific - a new kind of blast beat I developed called the "burst beat". The burst beat differs from the blast beat in two ways: 1. It uses accelerations and decelerations, expansions and contractions in tempo to create an organic ebb and flow. 2. It crosses thresholds between different kinds of beats mid-song and even mid-phrase. In much the way a horse goes from walk to canter to trot, or water goes from ice to liquid to steam, or the body goes from REM sleep to dreaming to waking - in the same way the burst beat abruply crosses threshold between different blast/grind beats. In my view the burst beat is the heart of what's really original about Liturgy. Initially I was doing this on a drum machine - just accelerating and decelerating the tempo mostly. Greg and I worked together to actualize it live, and he really put his unique stamp on it.

All the live YouTube clips sound incredible…when and where did you find all your bandmates?

As I said, Greg and I went to highschool together in the bronx, and we went to college in different places. When he moved back to new york, it was obvious we'd start playing music together again. I'd already been doing Liturgy as a solo project, and wanted to expand it to a full band. He was already in a stoner metal band called Family of Love with the bassist, Tyler, and the two of them also played in Bernard's math rock/metal band Architeuthis. I already knew Bernard independently through another friend. It all fell into place smoothly and quickly.

How much has the band improved since first forming?A lot! With our band especially, pratice makes perfect. With the free tempos we use, the only way to be tight is to play the songs together over and over again. These days we're playing as often as possible.

Will the band be involved in the songwriting from now on, or is that still all done by you?

Still all done by me.

How do you envision Liturgy evolving musically on the next record, and in the future for that matter?

In my view, black metal as a genre has enormous stores of potential that have never been touched. And I think that the relationship between black metal and american independent music is extremely alive and fertile. I still have enough material that sounds like the music on Renihilation that we could put out another album that sounds just the same, but I may not use it - instead the the new material will be very different, traveling further down the iceberg. I think there are a lot of exciting points of resonance between black metal and minimalism, spectralism, shoegaze, free jazz, krautrock, drone/noise, romanticism, medieval music. In a way black metal is resistant to innovation - personally I like very little black metal that doesn't basically sound like darkthrone, and I think there have been a lot of attempts at originality that have failed because they weren't listening closely enough to the possibilities immanent to black metal. But genres have lifespans, and I think at this stage black metal is ready for true cross fertilization.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

I've always been on the fence when it comes to the Black Dahlia Murder. They've got the death metal chops, but they never seem to be able to make music with much staying power, at least enough to make up an entire album's worth. Flashes of inspiration, but that's it. With Deflorate, though, it feels like the Detroit band has turned a corner. It's potent enough to send the moshpit children into a frenzy (as yours truly witnessed last month), but this time around the music is actually catchy. You actually remember the riffs instead of having everything go in one ear and out the other. It's nothing very inventive, but there's a lot worse metal bands kids could be listening to (like these dummies). Thumbs up from me. Here's my review.