The book: Arkham Aslyum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean
I currently have subscriptions to three separate Batman titles. My home library has a dedicated Batman shelf. I have a different Batman shirt for just about every day of the week (not including my hoodie, pajamas and ubiquitous hat). My only contribution to decorating Lil Grinder’s room was installing a Bat Signal night light. I’ve been known to blow whole weekends watching Batman movies, starting with Adam West and working my way up to Christian Bale, only stirring from the couch as my bladder and stomach demand. I would go gay for Kevin Conroy. What I’m trying to say is I have a thing for Batman. (My wife would say that “thing” is an “obsession,” but what do she and that psychologist at my intervention know?) Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum is my favorite Dark Knight story. No other Batman tale is as visually arresting, artistically dazzling or as thematically rich as the hypnogogic menagerie of Carroll-ian revelry McKean and Morrison magicked up in 1989. The very loose inspiration for the game of the same name, Arkham Asylum locks Batman in the titular madhouse to be h(a)unted by a roster of his most challenging villains after the Joker springs them loose on April Fool’s Day. From there, Morrison weaves a symbolic, psychologically rich story that casts Batman in a whole new light, forcing him on to the path of the hero’s journey as he plumbs the depths of his own fear. Let’s just say it’s not every day you see the Dark Knight crying for his mommy like a little bitch. It also turned the Mad Hatter from a B-list joke to one of the absolutely creepiest villains in the entire rogue’s gallery. McKean's impressionistic, multi-modal art would only intensify the fractured, dreamlike logic that pervaded the entire story. Unlike the Bat-titles Morrison would pen later, here he has no interest in rehashing the mythos of the stoic Caped Crusader and his implacable quest for justice. Instead, Morrison breaks down Batman psychologically, forcing Gotham’s favorite crypto-fascist plutocrat to contemplate the warped motives that would drive a man to dress up in a rubber suit and spend his nights beating up the diseased and deformed, the impoverished and insane.
A representative passage:
“Afraid? Batman’s not afraid of anything. It’s ME. I’M afraid. I’m afraid the Joker may be RIGHT about me. Sometimes I… QUESTION the rationality of my actions. And I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates… When I walk into ARKHAM and the doors close behind me… It’ll be just like coming home.”
While not Batman themed (and oh does the world ever need a Batman themed grind band!), Tusk’s grind/sludge masterpiece is psychological horror tale about a dude getting lost in the woods, going insane from exposure and dehydration and eventually getting eaten by bears. Both Arkham Asylum and Tree of No Return are possessed by the notion of how your surroundings can affect your outlook (the relevant phobias being claustro- and agora-, respectively), something that has intrigued me since my first visit to the psychological gauntlet of the Holocaust Museum. The wide open woods have never felt so fraught as they do in the hands of 75 percent of Pelican gone grind. The songs blast and snarl at the start but elongate and warp as the album wears on, drawing out into sludgy psychedelia as our protagonist loses not only his sense of direction but his sense of self. It’s much the same psychological breakdown Batman suffers in the shadow-haunted halls of Arkham.
A representative song: “Starvation Dementia”
Black swarms cut the moon apart. Leather wings carry rabid heart. Skyward hordes over moon-swept wood. Wraiths of madness fro blackest earth. Lunarscape shown bright, now gone. Nowhere lands orbit on. Unseen vissoth stir about. Hidden something , crawling sounds whipper out there from a rock, scratching round tree bark.
…
No more feeling like a human being. Necron spider limbs rattle along herky jerky from wilderness to beyond. No more feeling like a human being. No more.
Grindcore is hit and run music. Its strength comes from an unrelenting campaign of musical shock and awe, dispensing with songwriting conventions like verses, choruses and all that other assorted folderol to boil tunes down to their atavistic core. And then it pummels you with a dozen songs in a row, often with no pause between to catch your breath. It's that synergistic adrenaline rush that gives the style its power. So why do so many bands muck it all up by ending albums with drawn out slow songs? What is this inexplicable compulsion to tack on an unnecessary slow song at the end? It doesn't have to be this way. Discordance Axis made "A Leaden Stride to Nowhere" the penultimate song on masterpiece The Inalienable Dreamless, stabbing you in the earholes with the brutalizing "Drowned" as you limp off spent and bloody. Nasum probably wrote the single greatest slow song ever penned by a grind band with the poignant "The Final Sleep" on Helvete, but they recognized the power of what they had in the tune and stuck it in the middle rather than relegating it to the end. I've mentioned bands throwing unexpected bits of musical failure at the end of albums before, but this ending on a doom song thing is so pervasive to have become a cliche. How did we get to this place, you ask? Here's a quick jog down memory lane.
Don't Fear the Reaper
Probably the first instance of the phenomenon can be traced to arguably the first ever grind album, Siege's 1984 demo Drop Dead. The length and contents have Drop Dead have shifted and grown over the years as bonus tracks have been added and deleted, but one constant remains: it always ends on the seven minute sax-laden freakout that is "Grim Reaper." The band took the training wheels of fast hardcore and set it on the path of the one true grind, but they also inadvertently established the ending on a doom song cliche as well.
Cursed to Crawl
As with any good grindcore cliche, of course Napalm Death has to factor into the script. Though they set into stone what Siege had pressed into clay, Napalm Death took their time to leave their mark on this one. In fact, the Side A Scum lineup went to the opposite extreme, closing out their half of the album with the two second bliss of "You Suffer." No, it wasn't until 1988's From Enslavement to Obliteration that Napalm Death caught the slow song bug, capping off the album with three minutes of fake Swans plod in the form of "The Curse," which served to bookend the album with slow motion starter "Evolved as One."
Another dozen albums and a whole new lineup later, Napalm Death are still pulling this trick out on occasion. In fact, for The Code is Red...Long Live the Code in 2005 Napalm Death pulled the double whammy, closing out with a pair of slow songs (and again shamelessly stealing from Swans) in the shape of "Morale" and "Our Pain is Their Power."
Semper Grind Fidelis
The stylistic tick didn't take long to embed itself in the second wave of grindcore royalty either. Brutal Truth have never had a problem mixing and matching styles and tempos, but they never really fell under the spell of the last song doom phenomenon until 2009's comeback album Evolution Through Revolution and its end piece, the decidedly non-grinding "Grind Fidelity."
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
While I keep saying Phobia's 1998 album Means of Existence is my favorite album of their extensive catalog, the longer I keep writing about it, the more I keep picking up on irritating little quirks. Like the seven minutes of stumbling doom slumber that are album finisher "Ruined." Obviously, I need to stop thinking critically about this record before I ruin it for myself. However, this does help put drummer John Haddad's later jump to doomsters Eyes of Fire into perspective.
In fact, Phobia pulled the exact same stunt three years later on follow up full length Serenity Through Pain. This time they kept last song "Sovereign" to a more concise four minutes of ambient drone and spoken word mumbling.
Go, Go Gadget
If there's a formula to Gadget albums, it would be this: slam listeners in the face with a crazy intense song off the bat and then chill it all out at the end with a slow song. It's a remarkably potent formula that's apparently served them very well because they've done it twice now. Starting with 2004's Remote, Gadget said fare thee well with the rolling bit of ambient unease that was "Tema: Skit."
They clearly thought the formula worked because they did it again at the end of 2006's The Funeral March. Once again the plodding dirge of " Tingens Föbannelse" calmed everyone out on their way out the door. Unfortunately, this one's not available on YouTube and SoundCloud won't let me upload it. So you'll just have to take my word for it on this one.
Mess With Texas
Kill the Client have a well deserved reputation as unrelenting grind maniacs, but they've also succumbed to the seductive allure of getting all down in the dumps at the end of an album. For 2005's Escalation of Hostility, the Texas chainsaw massacre crew departed from their frothing mouthed style to slow everything down like a sizzling, lethargic Texas panhandle summer on "Negative One." Interestingly, they've not gone back to that move since their first full length. The subsequent two long players have been all grind all the time instead and are probably the better for it.
Rotten to the Core
Rotten Sound are fond of shoving the longest song on the album to the end, but they usually kept it grinding. They never went for the full slow song closer until 2008's Cycles. Five albums in, that's when the Finns decided to mix the formula up a tad and get their doom and gloom on with the four minute plod that is "Trust." This is not what Rotten Sound are known for or what they really do best, but if they keep it to one album out of every five, I'll let it slide.
You Suffer...But Why?
I'm going to say it. It needs to be said. If you're in a grind band, your strength is probably in writing great grind songs. Doom is not your thing because otherwise you'd be in a doom band. Case in point, Suffering Mind's "Ostateczny Pogrzeb," which puts paid to At War With Mankind. Now Suffering Mind are an excellent grind band and you won't catch me disparaging their way with a blastbeat, but "Ostateczny Pogrzeb" finds one slow motion riff, rides it to death and then takes it out back and pokes with a stick for a couple extra minutes just to be sure. In a shorter, tighter incarnation, I wouldn't have a problem with it. However, I think as is it ultimately deflates the end of At War With Mankind a tad.
Blasphemy Made Flesh
Baltimore's Triac actually pulled off one the better slow song finales on short album Blue Room. The band's signature brew of blasting grind and scrungy power violence came to a nicely fermented hardcore head on last song "My First Blasphemy." Unlike a lot of other grind bands, Triac actually have a way with a slow song that doesn't completely negate the preceding album experience. Ending on a slow song may be a tired cliche, but I wouldn't be as irritated by it if more songs were this good.
Bloody Hell
The slow final song shows no signs of fading into grindcore history, either. Bloody Phoenix got into the act in 2010. The title track of album Death to Everyone, which opened with a rip on Neurosis, closed out with three minutes of slow rolling drums and jabbering about god being dead. Band mainstay Jerry Flores has been kicking around grindcore for 20 years, but as far as I know, this is the first time he's resorted to this particular genre trope.
The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
So after all that bitching, I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm opposed to ending on a slow song entirely. In fact, quite the opposite. Done well, a good slow song at the end lets an album's ideas simmer in the brain, slowly seeping through your cortex to embed themselves in the stuff of your nightmares. Tusk very effectively pulled off that move at the end of 2004 masterwork The Tree of No Return with not one but two slow doom songs at the end. It works largely because the band's cross breeding of Pig Destroyer and Neurosis give them the musical palette to explore wider vistas and the EP's central narrative -- a man gets lost in the wilderness, goes crazy from hunger and thirst and is subsequently eaten by bears -- demands a musical arc that bends from initial grindcore panic to doom metal delirium. So Tusk left us with the twin desolation that was "Starvation Dementia" and "Ursus Arctos -- Walk the Valley." This is how you do ending on a slow song properly.
Tusk Tree of No Return Tortuga 2003 Between the too clever by half false start of Get Ready and the Pelican-lite disappointment of The Resistant Dreamer, Tusk glanced off grindcore perfection with Tree of No Return in 2003, the most disturbing travelogue since Ned Beatty, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voigt and Ronny Cox took an ill starred trip up the fictional Cahulawassee River back in 1972. Featuring three quarters of Pelican (and actually preceding that band), Tusk’s self described “avant-grind” on the nightmarish Tree of No Return blends Pig Destroyer style ferocity with the experimentation of Converge and Neurosis. The Cliffs Notes version: a camper sets out into the wilderness (“Tree of No Return”), gets lost (“The Rising Terror, the Setting Sun”), stays lost (“Lost in the Woods”), slowly goes insane from hunger (“Starvation Dementia”) and gets mauled by brown bears (“Ursus Arctos – Walk the Valley”). Beyond the Larry Herweg/Laurent Lebec/Trever de Brauw axis’ well documented instrumental prowess, Jody Minnoch’s increasingly deranged and expressive vocal delivery gives startling life to Tree of No Return’s unhinged narrative as he rasps and snarls like a grindcore Nick Blinko. His unwholesome whisper greases through “Tree of No Return,” exhuming childhood nightmares from your id. Minnoch’s vocal gyrations are bolstered by a sonic assault that errs on the side of unsettling. “The Rising Terror, the Setting Sun” is a demonic pixie dance that gets stumbled over and crushed by a drunken ogre while the incipient insanity of “Starvation Dementia’s” delirious acoustics are abraded by grinding madness. All of this psychic battery culminates in “Ursus Artcos,” a Hitchcockian masterwork that accounts for half the EP’s play time. It incrementally builds on electro-lit unease that crests but never breaks, slowly dissipating into a lingering dread. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a camping trip to cancel.
Tusk The Resisting Dreamer Tortuga More than two years after the mindfuck camping trip nightmare that was Tree of No Return, the three-quarters of Pelican that comprise Tusk return with a revamped line up and a revised sound. Anyone looking for another round of Tree’s Pig Destroyer/Neurosis cage match sound should just stop reading now. With nary a blastbeat in sight, The Resisting Dreamer brings in a more pronounced influence from the band members’ other project. Recorded during sessions for Pelican’s breakout The Fire in our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, Tusk’s four new tracks swim in the sludge the other band has steadily been shedding in favor of a leaner sound. Instead it’s The Resisting Dreamer that boasts the same beefy bottom end that made early Pelican and fellow Tortugans 5ive so enjoyable. “The Everlasting Taste of Disguise” opens like a Jesu outtake before greasily sliding into jarring nightmare territory where spiky, corkscrewing guitar riffs stab at you like the flock of marauding crows in The Birds. Final instrumental cut “The Lewdness and Frenzy of Surrender,” weighing in at a hefty 16 minutes, could easily serve as a companion piece to the recent Sunn O))) and Boris collaboration album. The dominant lyrical theme is “ruin,” album as Young Widows’ Even Patterson and Toby Driver of Kayo Dot (standing in for MIA vocalist Jody Minnoch) expounding on crumbling realities literal and figurative. Though it’s a solid and enjoyable sludge album, the new direction just makes Tusk feels redundant. If this is the band’s future and not an artistic blip, they might as well recruit Bryan Herweg for the next outing and call it what it really is: a throwback Pelican album that experiments with vocals. It would probably sell twice as many copies that way.
