Of all the extreme music subgenres I’ve been tasked with defending to unimpressed friends and family members, crafting a convincing argument for the qualities of noise has by far been my toughest endeavor. Whereas ambient and drone have alluring, relaxing qualities that some outside listeners can appreciate, noise often just sounds…
Album art in the modern age is in a precarious position, but it’s no less important than it’s ever been. For many of us, these visuals have been relegated to a tiny square, requiring a number of pinches, pulls, and slides to explore the details of an album’s cover. Streaming…
As obsessive music fans, we have a pretty intense love/hate relationship with the constant onslaught of new music that crosses our paths on a weekly basis. By the time we sit down to compile our Release Day Roundup every Thursday, there’s a whole new slate of records that we need to tack onto our backlogs of new albums from weeks past, a list that remains replete throughout the year. This being the case, there are bound to be a handful of these albums that slip through the cracks, only to cross our paths months or years later and leave us wondering what possible reason we could have had to not listen to it sooner. While the time has passed to recommend these albums for your 2017 year end lists, we’ve decided to tweak our typical “Hey! Listen to…” series to launch Heavy Delinquency, which will allow us to talk about albums we slept on and make sure they receive the attention they deserve. Which brings us to Street Sects, the inspiration for this column and one of the greatest bands in modern synth punk.
Comeback albums are in vogue this year, especially for rock music and its offshoots. At the Drive-In, Gorillaz and nearly every major shoegaze pioneer (The Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, Slowdive, etc.) have all resurfaced for returns-to-form or late-career flops, depending on whom you ask. The fact many of these bands had been laid to rest for decades certainly contributed to disappointment among some fans, as did the heightened expectations created by their pre-breakup classics. Part Chimp bucks the drawbacks of all these metrics with their hiatus-smashing record Iv, which provides and incredible delivery of the band’s signature blend of sludge-ridden noise rock and stoner metal. The band’s comfortable position in the underground and relatively short hiatus—they disbanded in 2011 and reunited last year—has allowed Iv to feel less like a comeback album and more like a reunion with a beloved friend, where good memories come flooding back and it feels as though everything is still in its right place.
We’ve covered a fair bit of ground with our Starter Kit series, where we select a handful of key records that highlight a niche musical style or penetrate the prolific status of a staple genre. Unfortunately, this format doesn’t lend itself to covering proto-genres—microcosms of musical history comprised of a specific set of albums released in a fixed period of time. But these movements are crucial to the evolution of our favorite genres, particularly when it comes to the trajectory of sludge metal. What’s become a multifaceted and often refined style was once a disparate lineage of bands from different genres who all applied the “sludge factor” in different measures. While you won’t find a dedicated section for proto-sludge at your preferred music store, the following albums an artists laid the framework for the modern sludge landscape. So whether your sludge purveyors of choice come from the atmospheric, blackened or progressive sects of he genre, they’re all indebted to the groundbreaking statements these albums made.
Sometimes a band can be so schizophrenic stylistically that it’s hard to pin them down. Other times that particular wide range of tweaks and twangs helps to keep that band a moving target which means it’s much harder for a sound to get stale. Of course, merely observing a band…
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 no surprise that many of us on staff have pretty eclectic tastes that range far outside of metal and heavy things. We can’t post about all of them at length here, but we can at least let you know what we’re actually listening to. For those that would like to participate as well (and please do) can drop a 3X3 in the comments, which can be made with tapmusic.net through your last.fm account, or create it manually with topsters.net. Also, consider these posts open threads to talk about pretty much anything music-related. We love hearing all of your thoughts on this stuff and love being able to nerd out along with all of you.
To fully play noise rock, a certain aesthetic lyricism is required, even grimier than the music that surrounds and drives it. Initially, this lyricism was pioneered by the slacker-by-way-of-burn-out California hardcore “legends” Flipper, as well as the often perverse and sadistic Big Black. The two acts, stylistically different in many ways, drew a certain kind of glee in exploring the smut that truly made up the average human being, and consistently reflected that lyrically. These lyrics, in addition to the music, supplied a certain attitude to noise rock that became as essential to the genre as the music itself. Unfortunately, this attitude is not always easy to emulate, and has led to an aggressive number of hopeful noise rock bands who simply cannot pull off the swagger. Luckily for us, however, Whores. is not one of those bands, but instead pulls off the grime of noise rock with flying colors.
I can already see the comments flowing: “Modern Mathcore? The fuck is that?” Yes, in a sense, modern mathcore is not a genre, but rather describes a specific time in the history of mathcore, much like the new waves of British and American Heavy Metal (1970-80’s and 2000’s-present, respectively). It’s…
Even a cursory glance of our biweekly “What Heavy Blog Is Really Listening To” posts 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 playlist updates. We randomly select two of the participants from each update, have them pick their favorite track from each of the nine albums in their grid and then send the list over to the other person to listen to and comment on. Within these commentaries occurs praise, criticism and discovery, and we hope that you experience a few instances of this last point as well. This week’s post brought staff members Scott Murphy and Karlo Doroc together to peruse each other’s tastes:
