How many times did I check that I spelled the track name correctly? Many times. How much was this induced by the video that we’re premiering here? A lot. When Nick stumbled uponAiming for Enrike all those years ago, I still didn’t know what I was into. To be honest,…
Technically, this post has already been written. No, I don’t mean in the “bruh what if alternate realities are real and in it I am a vegetable of sorts that can talk?” kind of way, it’s just that we already told you to listen to this band in 2011. But a lot of abrasive water has flown under the bridge since then (although we also told you about them in 2015 and at other times) and something seems to be stirring in The Armed’s camp. Namely, the punk/mathcore/hardcore/batshit crazy band have released a new album called ONLY LOVE and you really need to listen to it. Yes, even if you’ve heard this band before. Yes, even if you didn’t like them before. This is a whole new beast.
These French delay aficionados certainly deal with the intimacies of build up and crescendos but do so in a way that is infected with a kind of cheery optimism that’s hard to resist. The main comparison point has to be Alcest. Fūjon is almost like a dirtier Shelter, doing much to better the formula of that album by injecting the production and composition with a bit more life and meat.
OK yeah, that name is weird, let’s move on together, shall we? Alpha Male Tea Party are another stroke in the fast expanding painting that is the “bright” math-rock community, once spearheaded by acts like Adebisi Shank and And So I Watch You From Afar and now containing as diverse acts as VASA or MNHM. The joining thread seems to be first a musical and, second, a geographical one. As far as the music goes, one can expect major chords played over energetic beats, creating frantic excursions into disjointedly optimistic riffs and an overall sensation of…satisfied loss? Let’s go with that. Geographically, the main output in this field seems to erupt from the British Isles, Perfidious Albion, or however else you’d like to call that strange, strange group of disparate places.
Vasa! What a wonderful word. It represents both folly and grandeur, having given its name to a marvelous, splendid and powerful ship of the line by the then Swedish Empire…which promptly sank in the Stockholm harbor on the day of its christening. It’s also the name of an amazing Scottish band…
Friday! What a wondrous day, where the world just seems a little bit brighter. As Douglas Adams put it: “You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken”. Wise words indeed. In case your Friday mood hasn’t been exactly of a sunny disposition, allow me to introduce you to Totorro, a British band who have just what you need. Come to Mexico is their sophomore release and it’s a math-rock injection of summer, open arms and hope. To put a cherry on top of this riff cake, it’s releasing on Big Scary Monsters, one of our favorite labels. Head on below for your first listen!
The goal of these taxonomy posts is not to provide an exhaustive and accurate list or definition of a certain genre or genres. Quite the opposite in fact: attempting to make such a complete list would only replace one stagnated image-object with another, creating an equally irrelevant definition, whether it can be considered currently accurate or not. Therefore, we want to keep some of that fuzz, to leave ends untied and room for further articles and discussion among our readers. We’re not saying that this is going to be a series; these posts take far too much time and energy to commit to something like that. We are saying however that there’s plenty more to discuss, within and without the progressive metal genre and we’ll try and do that when we can.
So, post rock. Post rock is a perfect candidate for such an examination. On the one hand, there’s a very strong and often negative image of what post rock is. Seminal bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, God Is An Astronaut and Explosions In The Sky have enjoyed widespread, cultural popularity, solidifying the image of post rock in the eyes of the public. Pretentious, long-winded, dreamy, beautiful, cinematic, instrumental and rarified are all adjectives which were born from this image. Post rock was, and still is, perceived as a genre for the few, starry eyed and sentimental. Perhaps owing to just how good the afore-mentioned bands really are, their music also overpowered the conceptual space for the genre, leading people to expect certain things from the music that fell under the moniker.
A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters is one of the most interesting and diverse collectives out there: we haven’t even mentioned a small fragment of the different variations of post-rock that they house. Add to that fact that they also sport plenty of math-rock, more electronic works and other side roads and you’ve got yourself an impressive body of work. Here’s to anew release sometimes this year and many more incredible bands enjoying the support and name of this astonishing collective!
Even a cursory glance of our biweekly “What Heavy Blog Is Really Listening To” posts (last week’s update here) will reveal that there is a great deal of variety among our staff’s musical tastes. Due to this, we brainstormed the idea of “Playlist Swap,” another biweekly segment that takes place between…
For those who missed our last installment, We post biweekly updates covering what the staff at Heavy Blog have been spinning. Given the amount of time we spend on the site telling you about music that does not fall neatly into the confines of conventional “metal,” it should come as…
