Glass Half Empty: Pessimiser's Legacy Lives Miserably Ever After

 

In retrospect, Pessimiser/Theologian Records was probably doomed to an early grave by virtue of the collective weight of addiction and bad choices embodied by its roster of toe-stubbing glumsters. While most famous for the incredibly awesome collection of Cry Now, Cry Later compilations, owner Chris Elder, also of Despise You, collected a cross-genre stable of uniquely miserable fucks who bled out their sins for our audio pleasure. Unlike a label like Willowtip, which traces its origin to a small cadre of like minded tech-death/grinders, Pessimiser was all over the genre map. Its constituents were united less by sonic similarities than they were by dismal outlook. Whether you cried now or cried later, the goal was to burrow deep into those shadowed recesses where the worst aspects of your soul rot, a polluted parade of junkie odes, misanthropic memories and downer days.

The Namesake Series: "Black Sabbath"

Considering Black Sabbath single handedly (more or less; suck it, Blue Cheer) invented this heavy rock thing we all love, it takes gigantic hairy balls to nick not just one of their songs titles but their namesake song. However, that's exactly what happened in 1999. Though to be fair, Black Sabbath did steal their name anyway. I guess it all evens out.



Swedish noisecoreniks Breach swiped the name of the gods on album Venom, an unheralded gem of second gen noise rock that lands somewhere in the sweet coital space between Converge and Anodyne. Rather than a doomy dirge about a lovely midnight dinner party with Satan, Breach make their "Black Sabbath" a scraping noisy hardcore freakout.



And just because I love them so much, here's Australia's sludge monsters Halo absolutely pounding out the tale of the most atramentaceous Sunday in history.

G&P Review: Yama

By the water of Leman I sat down and wept...
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear

T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
III. The Fire Sermon
1922

Yama
Seaquake
Mind Flare
For all of Seaquake's nautical themes, Yama's three song stoner dude excursion to Hindu hell is desert dry. Rather than billowing swells crashing against mossy rocks covered in seagull shit, Seaquake sounds more like a parched sirocco scraping through an arid sagebrush plain. Like a scorching summer, Seaquake starts out seasonably pleasant, but it grows a bit more suffocating as Yama drag on. With only three songs and 20 minutes of baked doom, that causes a bit of a problem in spots.
First off, the Dutch quartet's influences nod to the obvious: Master of Reality, later Sleep and the sunbaked Sky Valley where Kyuss would hang out taking drunken pot shots at gila monsters. Everything starts off strong enough. Lead track "Hollow" is the best of the bunch, a head nodding jam that thrums with a nicely throbbing rhythm that will cradle and comfort whatever recreational pharmacopia you choose to augment your musical experience. Vocalist Alex's stab at a Layne Straley croon is at its loosest and most vibrant even when he's yowling nothing more complex than a prolonged "Hey, yeah."
The subsequent two songs, "Seaquake" and "Synergy," are a bit spottier. The title track's dusty blues (you can practically see the grit blowing out the rusty harmonica) becomes increasingly desiccated, teetering on the verge of inertia. "Synergy," a seven minute seminar on a single riff, tumbles straight over into stasis. Sleep proved with Dopesmoker that a single riff could be transcendent, but "Synergy" is less than the sum of its parts. The monotonous vocals and unidirectional riff don't cohere into something that elevates your brainwaves through warping reptition.
"Hollow" proves Yama can pen a quality tune when they have half a mind. Now they need to work on crafting a coherent album experience. As strong as Seaquake started, it withered rather than flourished under the scorching noonday sun.

[Full disclosure: Mind Flare sent me a review copy.]

500: The Doom That Came to Sarnath Andrew

If there’s a plodding, miserable yang to my normally up tempo grinding yin, it would be my love for painfully slow doom of the most miserable variety. Which is kinda odd considering how even tempered and phlegmatic I am in general. I love good doom – something heavy and with some heart, none of that weepy red wine and roses bullshit – because it usually evokes a nice emotional reaction. I may not be a miserable bastard, but I can appreciate music that can conjure that kind of bleakness. A man cannot live on blastbeats alone.
About a year ago I commemorated my 300th mental fart with the most retardedly short mixtape I could compile. Loath to repeat myself having hit the semi-millennial post mark, instead I’ll indulge my oft-ignored penchant for sitcom-sized tunes. The 300 mixtape featured 3 second songs. This one features 30 minute songs (and one fat, hazy bastard weighing in at an hour-plus).
This is my way of saying thanks to all of you have stuck around for 500 freaking posts (For fuck’s sake why? Don’t you have lives?) . With several hours of suicidal music in the offing, don’t say I didn’t give you your money’s worth this time. In fact, it’s so fucking large (thanks, Sleep), I’ve had to upload it as two separate files.

500 Part 1

500 Part 2

Part 1:
Sleep – “Dopesmoker”
Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine – “He Who Accepts All That is Offered (The Feel Bad Hit of the Winter)”
Thorr’s Hammer – “Norge”
Eyes of Fire – “The End Result of Falling…”
5ive – “The Hemophiliac Dream”
Corrupted – “Bloodscape/[Japanese]”
Burmese – “Preyer”
Earth – “Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine”
Cathedral – “Ebony Tears”
Unearthly Trance – “In the Red”
Black Hell – “Zero (Deuce)”
Grief – “Earthworm”

Part 2:
Mindrot – “Incandescence”
Khanate – “Under Rotting Sky”
Halo – “20,000 Tonnes of Machinery to Smash Matter”
Disembowelment – “A Burial at Ornans”
Winter – “Destiny”
Electric Wizard – “Son of Nothing”
Boris – “Vomitself”
Sunn 0))) – “Cry for the Weeper”
Floor – “I Remember Nothing”
Burning Witch – “Sea Hag”
Wellington – “Friend, Son”
Toadliquor – “Nails”
Acid Bath – “Venus Blue”
Warhorse – “Scrape”
Gallhammer – “SLOG”

G&P Review: The Sun Through a Telescope

The Sun Through a Telescope
Green/Black and Orange
Dwyer Records
As another wise bunch of Canucks once observed, Inertia Kills, and that’s the pitfall that awaits many a drone doom band. To the uninitiated, busting out languorous washes of over-amped feedback sounds as though it would be the sonic equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s splatterpieces: something your six year old could whip out over a rainy weekend between temper tantrums. Anyone who has ever tried to make minimal music compelling will quickly disabuse you of that notion.
Ottawa’s one man drone-monger The Sun Through a Telescope often wallows over the germ of a great hook or riff or vocal approach over the course of nine songs divided into two EPs (available as a single cassette) Unfortunately, too often the songs fall victim to inertia, the good parts get repeated until they lose their potency. But the germ is there. Like Disembowelment before him, The Sun Through a Telescope likes to mix up the drifting doom currents with blast beats and splinters of Jesu ambience on songs like “They Used to Worship the Svn.” The spectral, reverbed, hellish and occasionally roboticized vocals are generally very effective at evoking the retro-digital-pastoral-pagan ambition of the songs and show a keen ear for atmosphere. I think the largest challenge for The Sun Through a Telescope lies in being a solo project. Sunn O))) and Earth wrote effective drone jams that succeeded because of the interplay between the multiple instruments. Here, it’s largely just one guitar with maybe some electronic ambiance. Check out Orange here or Green/Black here.

[Full disclosure: The band sent me a download.]

Total Doom

The combination of age, apathy, arthritic knuckles and that little problem of zero recognizable musical ability have conspired to keep me from my life’s masterwork: an epic 10 minute drone doom cover of “You Suffer.” I mean, why not? It worked for Sunn 0))) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And with every hipster douchebag who was ironically sporting a trucker hat two years ago swinging from Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s collective sack, I might as well get in on the action too. While my blog may be speed-centric, I have a deep, abiding love from the crustier, sludgier, dronier fringes of the doom-sphere. Frilly shirts, violins, red wine, vampires and tales of lost love need not apply. It’s the same impulse that drives me to obsessively listen to both grind and doom – Extremity of speed, whether up tempo and down. And while that may seem antithetical to some, there’s actually been a pretty steady traffic between the two ends of the pendulum with plenty of grinders leaving the blasts in the past to get down with the doom.

In the Name of the Father and the Son
For a guy who’s been cranking out 8-minute drone pop doom jams for the last decade, young Justin Broadrick famously didn’t have a lot of patience, quitting Napalm Death after the first Scum recording session. Though classic grind tunes like “You Suffer,” “Siege of Power” and “The Kill” have his dexterous fingerprints all over them, fast and blasting just weren’t in Broadrick’s stars. But we all know the man’s true calling lay in meticulously crafted walls of sound, whether they crushed you with their iron shod shoes a la the mighty Godflesh or buried you in suffocating walls of ambience like Jesu. While Broadrick has never helmed what I’d consider a “true” doom band his coattails permeate deep into modern doom. I’m not going to expound on the obvious but will say few before Godflesh were that heavy and Broaderick continues to crack – and drop – jaws with his latest work.

Birmingham Dorrian and the Cathedral of Doom
If there were template for the grind to doom transition, it would be a cutout of Lee Dorrian. Having helped lay a corner stone for grind with Napalm Death, like the aforementioned Broadrick, Dorrian quit that band after burning out on punk and death metal. Of course, we all know what happens next. Dorrian channels his love of Black Sabbath and Pentagram by way of his love for really horrible horror films like Tombs of the Blind Dead (“Templars Arise!” on Endtyme), Witchfinder General (“Hopkins, the Witchfinder General” on Carnival Bizarre) and Hammer horror gems like Night Creatures (Caravan Beyond Redemption’s “Captain Clegg”). From its mouldering bones begin to its increasingly bell-bottomed later offerings, Dorrian and constant companion Gary “Gaz” Jennings pretty much defined the scope of doom in the 1990s and on through the new milennium.

Warrior of Ice
Extreme grindcore demands an extreme drummer and Brutal Truth’s Scott Lewis is a lodestone for extremity. Before being tapped to handle the 'Truth (and later Exit-13), Lewis was the servant of New York warsmen Winter, whose frigid ecological meditations were instrumental to shaping the death doom sound. About as far from blasted beats as you could get, Lewis plowed into the heart of Winter’s mix of To Mega Therion-era Celtic Frost atmosphere and gloom with Amebix-blasted apocalypse crust (that band, of course, had a song called “Winter” on No Sanctuary). So it turns out the planet is destined to fry rather than freeze, but Winter’s end of the world-isms are just as trenchant. That environmental awareness probably didn’t heart when Lewis made the transition to plant-powered Brutal Truth (though lore has it his penchant for byproducts of grain put him at odds with his bush baby cohorts). In a far too common story, Winter never seemed to get their due during their four year existence and Nuclear Blast has let their their sole EP and LP (conveniently collected on one disc) go out of print. But like Otzi the Iceman, Winter remain perfectly preserved in time, a crystalline fossil of doom’s early deathward trudge.
No Fear Before the March of the Eyes of Flame
If I asked to you tick off a list of premier grind drummers, I’d fully expect names like Sandoval, Harris, Witte and Fajardo to immediately come up. But I bet John Haddad would not be the first name to spring to mind, which is fucking shame because there’s not too many people who could ably step into Raymond Herrera’s shoes. After the Fear Factory drummer sat in as a session member on Phobia’s debut EP, Return to Desolation, the Cali-grinders tapped Haddad to man my favorite album from the band to date, Means of Existence. That would be his only outing with the band and after a 6 year period during which not much was heard from Haddad, he resurfaced with Dan Kaufman and Matt Fisher, the musical axis behind the godly Mindrot, in the grumbling and downtrodden Eyes of Fire. The guy seems to have a thing for kick-starting new bands and splitting before the credit rolls in because Haddad left after debut From Ashes to Embers. However, he did reunite with them as an engineer on follow up Prisons, and Haddad’s grind career came full circle in 2008 when he manned the producer’s chair on Phobia’s 22 Random Acts of Violence.

Cerulean Transience of all my Imagined Grindcore
Remember what I said about hipsters swinging from O’Malley and Anderson’s ball bag? What goes around comes around. In addition to fellating Earth’s Dylan Carlson for most the millennia, that pair has also been lovingly stroking Aussies Disembowelment’s shaft. Earth may have birthed the drone, but Disembowelment brought the atmosphere and gloom that shadow Sunn 0))). But before they transcended into the ambient peripheral, Disembowelment started out as a Napalm Death cover band (named Scum, natch) and death/grinders Bacteria. Apparently for drummer Paul Mazziota old habits die hard. Right off the top of the Transcendence into the Peripheral, their sole album from 1993 (available in awesome two- and three-disc versions via Relapse), Disembowelment open “The Tree of Life and Death” with blastbeats. I’m going to repeat that to make sure it sinks in: Disembowelment were a funeral doom band that wrote songs full of blastbeats. Disembowelment may be better remembered for their spooky reverbed guitars, chanted vocals and unique visual aesthetic but their willingness to shatter what by then were already fossilized doom conventions can’t be overlooked either.


Do Not Deny the First Stage of Grief
Disrupt was the greatest haHHdcore band from Boston not named Siege. Can we all agree with that? Despite its constantly shifting, rent-a-member line up, Disrupt cohesively melded d-beat, scabies-afflicted crust and flashes of grindcore impatience into a pissed bunny hugging kill machine. It was also home to Randy Odierno, who drummed on a bulk of the band’s discography (which if you haven’t purchased from Relapse, then you suck) as well as guitarist Terry Savastano, who was also briefly in the band for a few early EPs. But the duo were doomed to live miserably ever after in sludge mongers Grief, who, along with Eyehategod, pretty much defined crusty, junkie doom. Rather than the flights of fancy – or Lee Dorrian’s flights of Video Nasties – that typically defined doom, Grief never left the crumbling confines of their collectively miserable skulls. Addiction, dementia, misery and depression were the staples of the band’s monochromatic palette. Aptly named Grief, the band’s songs wallowed in such misery it was impossible for them to move at more than a shuffle.

Little Old Lady from Bergenfield, New Jersey
At this point James Plotkin is so well known for his bpm-challenged work with Khanate and Khlyst younger ’heads may not even know the guy was tooling around the Earache stable at the dawn of grind and speedy punk. While not necessarily a grind fixture, musical visionary Plotkin was not averse to speed, whether it was with Old Lady Drivers, who scored a spot on the classic Combat/Earache Grind Crusher comp nearly 20 years ago, or when he recruited human drive shaft Dave Witte to back up slantwise spazz freakazoids Phantomsmasher. Armed with a bent sense of humor and a willingness to challenge grind and punk’s self-imposed limitations, the only constant in Plotkin’s career is his protean willingness to constantly explore new vistas whether it was the punk and industrial poundings of O.L.D., the spazzercized DJ-driven downbeat of Phantomsmasher or the slo-mo meltdown of his recent drone work. Regardless, Plotkin’s work has consistently crushed with the force of a Florida geezer mowing down a farmers market with his car.

Razing Arizona: Black Hell

Black Hell
Deformers of the Universe
Hater of God
2006
Skew your perspective slightly and suddenly the golf and geezer friendly climes of Arizona seem less like a liverspot mecca and a tad more like a sun blasted hellscape where nothing will grow and yards have to be painted green. All of which must have been gnawing at Mike Bjella’s subconscious post-Unruh when the bassist recruited two thirds of fellow doomsters Carol Ann to form Black Hell, giving free reign to the stoner sludge anthems that had always been lurking wraithlike at the haunted edges of his songwriting on sole sludge manifesto, Deformers of the Universe.
Sheer away the obligatory intro and overlong ambient closer and you’re left with six, six, six tracks of swinging blackened doom. If you have visions of early High on Fire or Electric Wizard dancing in your heads, you’re not far off. But Andrew, I can hear you say, why do I need another Nth generation Black Sabbath clone when just about every doom band since after forever has dry humped that corpse into submission. Astute question, little grasshopper. The difference being where most members of the low and slow club seem fixated on “Sweet Leaf” and “Snowblind,” Black Hell are among the few to descant the insalubrious vibes of their forefathers, the corrosive paranoia of the Cold War, urban blight ennui and the misanthropic certainty humanity will leave nothing more than a smoking, radioactive crater as its cenotaph.
Black Hell draws more from Sabbath’s apocalyptic “Electric Funeral” and “Hand of Doom,” chronicling the end times when nuclear dukes (“Nuclear Duke,” which makes way for Iron Maiden twin guitar goodness beyond all the plodding) rain gasoline (“Rain Gasoline”) until everything burns (“Burn,” a galloping march to the end of the universe).
Black Hell proudly wear their Sabbathisms on their long sleeves and while they may not be the Masters of Reality, they have successfully deformed their particular corner of the universe.

Razing Arizona: Wellington

Wellington
Discography
Deep Six
2000
Coeval with Unruh, Ryan Butler and Mike Bjella dropped the BPMs and a few octaves in Wellington, combining prime Cavity with the B side of My War for a stomp and stumble cacophony that shared wax with Noothgrush and shelf space with Grief.
Like those bands, Wellington’s testicle swinging sludge rested on an infrastructure of iron girded hardcore. Frilly shirts, bottles of Chablis and lame romantic poetry are nowhere in sight. This is street level gloom that barks back the toxic sludge of ozone, particulate matter and sulfur dioxide we breathe in each day overtop simmering rush hour rage riffs and creaking subway drumming.
While Butler and Bjella are dynamic, engaging songwriters, Wellington’s secret cache of WMDs was stashed atop the drum riser. While other doom and sludge drummers only stir from their Vicodin stupors every five or six measures to pound out a solitary beat, Gordon Heckaman pounds his kit like somebody slipped him a PCP mickey on “Friend, Son” and even ramps up to proto-blastbeat speeds on “Isolated in Despair.” “Harness” and “Shoes” actually rock out, which is rare for a sludge song and “Interlude” may be the best shotgun marriage of desultory doom and blastbeats outside of Disembowelment. Please try not to hold it against Wellington that Heckaman currently backstops Boston puss-metalers Powerman 5000.
Musically, one of Wellington’s most impressive feats was their bold use of white space for songwriters so young. The haunting drums only passages of “Please” recollect the Melvins’ “Oven” or Harvey Milk whisper to wail dynamics.
More than just a “featuring members of…” kind of band, Wellington deserve recognition for both their songwriting risks and successes.

G&P review: Unearthly Trance

Unearthly Trance
Electrocution
Relapse
I’m still not sure what whacky electrophile Nikola Tesla did to deserve being portrayed by David Bowie in a film as bad as The Prestige, but Brooklyn sludgesters Unearthly Trance hope to at least balance the karmic scales on their fourth platter, Electrocution.
The Serbian tinkerer once predicted he could crack the earth in half if he could find the right frequency, hence the album artwork (how the Maltese Falcon lookalike fits into that, I’m still not sure). And that kind of crust cracking oomph is signature metaphor for the band’s brown note bass workouts.
While not a tremendous leap forward from 2006’s The Trident, Electrocution finds Unearthly Trance striding comfortably through a swamp of Darkthrone iciness, Melvinsly sludge and His Hero is Gone crust, weaving the disparate influences into a seemless whole.
The album’s breakout track is “God is a Beast” – this album’s equivalent of the real life Godzilla nightmare of Sept. 11 that was Trident’s “Wake up and Smell the Corpses.” Despite the song’s title, frontman, magickal misanthrope and principle songwriter Ryan Lipynsky did not pen the tune after perusing Richard Dawkins’ latest tome or wandering into the infamous Pharyngula comment threads. Rather the staggering, creepy crawl tune gets all metaphorical about humanity’s fascination with tossing around the old nuclear pigskin and destroying all life on the planet as we know it. If you're determined to give Allah the finger, I recommend fast forwarding to self explanatory sixth track “Religious Slaves.”
While the album does not make great strides forward considering the band’s past growth from Sunn O))) Jr. drones to crust/black bleeders, Electrocution does feature a few microevolutionary highlights. Lipynsky is clearly much more confident vocally, sliding from buzzing Melvins wail to guttural chug to frostbitten black metal howl seamlessly within songs. Drummer Darren Verni is determined to kick sludgy doom out of its accustomed torpor. Lead off track “Chaos Star” kicks all denim vest and bandana with thrashtastic double bass work and “The Dust Will Never Settle” leaps out of the gate at hardcore tempos that would make Tomas Lindberg smile before coursing straight into full on blast beats toward the end.
In all, Electrocution is an admirable slice of crust punk sludge and doom that charges and crackles like a Tesla coil straight through to closer "Distant Roads Overgrown" with its magnificent climbing staircase riff and electrified fuzz out denouement.

G&P review: Gallhammer (Better late than never edition)

Gallhammer
Ill Innocence
Peaceville
I meant to review these delightful doom pixies several months ago, y’know when this album actually came out. But after scouring several stores and being back ordered (twice) I just now got my hands on this solid, if rough, mash of Amebix and Hellhammer. I thought about skipping it, but Terrorizer just gave them a cover, so why not?
Yes, these Japanese sprites have a deep love of the crust, and that’s we’re gonna focus on. Instead of being yet another retread doom band or a novelty chick act, Gallhammer are mix up all of their influenced on their first international LP to craft a sound that is endearing in its wide eyed naiveté
The latest version of “Speed of Blood” comes off a little crisper if no edgier and “Delirium Daydream,” with its strummed acoustic intro, and “Ripper in the Gloom” chug along at mid-tempo punk speeds with crusty, grarled guitar lines screeching through the feedback laden mix. But one of the album’s most delightful moments is the third track, “Blind My Eyes,” a rawking punk number that channel’s Melt-Banana right down to the charming chirped Pokemon vocals.
The whole 50 minute affair is bookended by straight up sludgy doom such as the aptly titled penultimate track, “SLOG,” an eight minute dirge that goes spelunking in the caves where Stephen O’Malley conjures demon drones. The not quite as aptly titled closer “Long Scary Dream” gets two out of three right. It is indeed lengthy and has a wonderful somnambulistic quality that makes it a great soundtrack to sit down with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, but it fails to evolve from mildly interesting phantasmagoria to outright nightmare.
Overall, Gallhammer have improved leaps and bounds over The Dawn of... proving they are not a novelty act stage managed by Peaceful and turning in an album, with a stunning all white layout, that would sit capably along side the other punky doomsters in your collection like Unearthly Trance.