Russian Circles play within the confines of instrumental/metal/post-rock as it exists today, a game left to bedroom dwellers glued to guitars and practice pads in an attempt to master technique and then learn how to play through it. To them, bombast is language; the quiet/loud struggle in their dynamic range is all the vocalizing asked of them. It’s hard to be all too expressive with the limited vocabulary afforded them, one abutted by Helmet to the north, Explosions in the Sky to the south, and all manners of junior varsity pedalhoppers in between.
Technically, these guys are pretty much always on, in particular drummer Dave Turncrantz, with a surprising short game that favors taut, precise control over little touches like rim clicking and hi-hat rolls. Guitarist Mike Sullivan and bassist-for-hire Brian Cook, of Botch and These Arms Are Snakes, give him plenty of chances to execute pristine builds, as on the opening moments of the title track. He’s also wise not to overplay, but his bandmates on stringed instruments might do well to ignore that style and tear into it. Everything here is so cleanly executed, so devoid of flare and flavor, that the results are quite a chore to get through for anyone who’s been following the score for even a few years through the ascent of similar acts of suburban gravitas like Isis and Pelican. Sullivan employs far too much repetition in both his riff-writing abilities and his performance. He’s a human digital delay pedal, tapping away at his fretboard in circuitous patterns and shredding away on one riff, more concerned with keeping in rhythm than breaking off and exploring all the empty spaces these six orderly tracks create. Everything they lay down on Station reads cold and resolute, yet far too earnest and eager to please.
Despite glaring evidence to the contrary, instrumental rock music can indeed have something to say. Some believe it has the most to say of any rock or pop music out there, for the expressiveness and abilities of the musicians playing it to tell the tales a singer can’t. Russian Circles nail the abilities part so hard that it seems they forgot to consider the expression. These guys have peers which currently flank and outrank them, partly because they’ve all found that voice already. Best to check in with these guys when you’re certain the other shoe has dropped.
Dead Child are so-called “new metal,” and take their inspiration from the earliest days of metal music, before the genre became a commercial windfall, then a caricature of itself and finally, painfully to many, a violent riot of noise, a morbid fascination, and a straw-man-cum-fear-tactic wielded by the Christian Right. Despite a name that might hint toward the latter–certainly nobody will mistake Dead Child for something warm, fuzzy, or pious–former Slint bassist David Pajo and his crew are a pretty far leap from, say, the Scandanavian death metal that at its most gruesome, edges dangerously close to actual violence. Instead, Black Sabbath or early Metallica are the musical reference points, though vocally and spiritually it’s not nearly as deranged as either. Ultimately, Dead Child are not scary, which makes their style of metal the kind an indie kid could like, thrashing sufficiently but tame enough to not seem totally out of place on an iPod full of the Jens Lekman or Ladytron.
Which is to say that Dead Child’s greatest triumph on Attack, their first full-length, is to aid the transformation of metal from a subculture back into a genre that’s potentially palatable to casual adherents, or another tool at the disposal any creative musician. Faith No More did this once, as did Rage Against the Machine and Infectious Grooves back in the day. Since then, so much mainstream rock has been stuck in a painful post-grunge loop, forcing metal either underground or into pop territory, both of which obscure its potential to all but the most diehard. Attack is nothing less than an intervention–a much needed back-to-the-basics. For a taste, sample “The Coldest Hands” first, where lead singer Dahm channels pure Ozzy through a mire of sludgy, disfigured riffs and expert guitar solos that blaze like flares on a frigid night. Sure, Dead Child present themselves as all psychosis and musical brutality, but to reduce them to that cheapens their potential to be a kind of ambassador. For folks like me, Dead Child are also a commentary on metal, one that acknowledges that when a genre becomes too insular, it suffocates itself. Dead Child, on the contrary, fling open its doors, and by extension lets a lot more of us inside.
Call me convinced: around 98% of modern rock and pop music exists because someone thought to combine sound x with stance y at time t, played at velocity v which is equivalent to length of attention span, divided by a nostalgia constant which we’ll call n. Drawn out on a two-dimensional graph, we can easily plot the trajectory of said music against t by its second derivative to approximate a lifespan of a particular approach for sound. (If you’re bored by now, just use the graph paper to map out a dungeon for your next RPG campaign. That’s what we were all doing in trigonometry class anyway).
What’s funny is that in 2008, no matter whether you solve the musical equation or tend to your DM duties, you’ll likely end up with something that will, on paper, sound like Torche. What this Miami quartet does is no different than what dozens of male-oriented, short-haired indie rock bands in the waning shadows of Slint and Drive Like Jehu worked out in the ‘90s: cram huge riffs and primary emotions into a dissonant, monolithic rock template–one that by turns had less to do with the punk rock its members were raised on than with the classic rock, progressive touches, and proto-metal underpinnings that their fathers, uncles, and older brothers grew up with. That sense of nostalg…er, n carried many a group to a logical endpoint: Don Caballero to obtuse geometries of sound; A Minor Forest to a major, cataclysmic hurricane of prog-rock bombast; Polvo to Who-styled largesse. It’s just what happens. To keep from making the same record time and again, bands feel the need to reach back to one or two key elements of their sonic makeup and update it based on their previous successes. But since most of the bands of the canon avoided metal as a direct influence–what with alt-rock and grunge writing over that at-the-time passé genre with dunderheaded style and stripey indifference–the places where it did manage to grow were surrounded by obscurant fences and thick weeds, visible to the few.
Torche presents a fitting workaround to this long-dead conundrum–better listening through landscaping. Guitarists Steve Brooks and Juan Montoya pulled themselves up out of Floor, a sludge-metal outfit that favored a glacial, chugging determination, and whose melodies and clean vocals eventually helped to move the band out of the margins. All those elements figure into the Torche sound, which if nothing else updates the incessant and inventive riffing of so much of the ‘90s indie mandate with a blunt, melodic presence, capped off by big drums and bigger amps. If Meanderthal does nothing but strike a balance between, say, the tightly-wound pop expanses of Chavez and the Hessian destruction pummel of Karp, then more power to it. But the fact that Brooks also borrows the champion vocal presence and chording mastery of Dave Grohl certainly doesn’t hurt, either.
Torche have come close to mastering these elements, and that’s what sets Meanderthal beyond a gladhandling rehash. Having stepped directly over the grimy tarpit of their in-between EP In Return, Torche bridges the gap since their 2005 debut in much the same way: short songs, high speed, memorable hooks piling up one after another (including a few tasteful borrowings; witness Sonic Youth’s “Mote” being appropriated in “Healer”), and pop sensibilities above all else. Not a moment’s given for the listener to catch up. One after another, Meanderthal’s thirteen tracks earn their keep, skidding between quarter pounders of cataclysmically heavy metal (“Sandstorm,” “Pirana”) and playful, scissoring hard pop (the spectacular octave-based crunch of “Across the Shields” and its emotive follow-up “Sundown”). Tempos burst forth, then slide back into half-time; vocal melodies play at counterpoint to the surging battle of guitars beneath. All the while, Torche builds up to a big payoff with the last three tracks, as the lessons learned within slow down and stretch out. They’re finally mitigated into a resin-melting bong rip of the title track, the band rolling defiantly in doom and happy to do so. They’re through finals. The dragon at the bottom of the cave lies dead. Have a great summer.
Cap’s Heavy Metal Nightmare
OK, I admit it: I am a hoarder. I find it difficult to throw anything away, still having all these boxes of old junk that go right back to my childhood. And it’s all pretty randomly packed too–which makes finding anything specific a nightmare to say the least.
So anyway, there I was the other day, ploughing through the disaster zone searching for a needle in the haystack when I made the mistake of opening one of my old diaries–and it was at this point that all hope of finding the elusive object went out of the window, as this one contained my account of a Damned tour across America in the 80s (and pretty funny stuff it is, too).
Yes, I remember those strenuous 2 month jaunts well, as they combined the good sized venues we played in the larger cities with some pretty rough and ready bars in hick towns, where it was evident that punk rock was still not exactly “flavor of the month”. So while we would be giving it our all in a seedy club sparsely populated by disgruntled potential lynch mob candidates, up the road there would invariably be some heavy metal band or other playing the local stadium in front of an audience of tens of thousands (none of whom’s day would be complete without the purchase of the tour t-shirt featuring a bloodstained dagger…yawn).
When we’d get back to the hotel after our evening’s exertions, there on the TV would be the reason for these bands’ popularity–a seemingly endless procession of clips featuring metal bands on MTV (which unfortunately for us is what puts bums in seats, as our tour manager would remind us annoyingly). Slayer, Ratt, Poison, Wasp and the unfortunately named Manowar…I mean really, have we not had rather more than enough men marching off to war in recent times?
But what is it about heavy metal that makes it such an enduring musical force…or should that be farce, as the whole thing is a dumbed down, testosterone fueled, leather clad joke to be taken seriously by nobody over the age of 10, surely?
“Gaze in awe at our scary skull backdrop and fake blood makeup…gasp at our video clip where a Harley roars over the drum kit as the fireworks explode…drool at the chained up scantily clad females as they wait for the beast to make his appearance…”
You can imagine how pissed off that made a UK punk band who had just slogged their way across the States for not a lot of reason. So I had to laugh when I opened an invite to an album launch party which was sitting on my doormat upon my return to the UK: it was from the label promoting Iron Maiden, a particularly turgid and clichéd heavy metal band without an original idea in their heads.
Of course I went…I wanted to see what made them tick. But I have to report that it wasn’t a meeting of the minds, and that they could even have been named after their hero Mrs. Thatcher for all I know, as they were indeed “the right dressed as the left”.
Call me old fashioned, but I think lyrics should say a little more than “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter”. So when I hear people criticizing hip-hop and rap I think to myself, sure, there is a sexist, homophobic element to these genres–but it pales in comparison with heavy metal, which is in my view unmitigated garbage from start to finish…and the proponents of this moronic leather clad tosh should bog off and leave the rest of us to get on with our lives with some semblance of dignity.
Er…apart from Motorhead’s Lemmy of course, as he’s my mate!