Some sick underground metal bands touring this summer

There are a ton of thrash bands coming out in the US metal scene. While it will get stale pretty quick, there are a lot of people doing new and interesting things and or just writing excellent music. Here are a handful of solid underground metal bands that are touring this summer (particularly in North America). I’ll give you a brief rundown of why they’re awesome, but clearly you should just click on their MySpace links rather than read my impromptu journalistic brilliance.

• Fatal is a serious thrash metal band from Florida with some doom-y breakdowns and gorgeous German thrash (Kreator, Sodom) worship. Their technical playing is incredibly tight, they have catchy choruses (imagine that!) with vocals that vary between shouts/barks and classic thrash/death singing (Obituary, anyone?), they use really tasteful production flourishes for certain sections and have clever/classy arrangements that place them a notch or two higher than most solid thrash metal bands that have surfaced in the last few years. They’re real fucking good, ya dig? And their solos are high-quality.

• Ramming Speed is a fantastic Boston thrash-metal band that has been attaining notoriety on the DIY metal circuit in the past few years. Their new album is just dropping and they’re promoting it with a European tour. I wish the guys the best of luck, as they’re one of my favorite US thrash bands at the moment! I wholeheartedly recommend you check these guys out, buy a CD, and try to see them the next time you can.

• Inter Arma – I mentioned these guys before, because when I saw them live they totally blew me away. They’ll be touring this summer, and you could probably help book ‘em a tour-date if you live in the Mid or Northeastern USA. See ‘em live and see what all the commotion here at CRM COMMAND CENTER is all about!

• The Gloominous Doom is a Pennsylvania band that shares some compositional similarities to the solid Richmond band, Battlemaster, in that they combine gritty American thrash metal with the harsh, black/Viking metal of classic Enslaved. The result is a technically interesting mix of classic LotR/Pagan fantasy elements, toilet humor, somber melody and thrash excellence. The band and song names are pretty strange, and I don’t really resonate with their potty humor, but some of the music is great ( “The Desolation of Smaug”!). Check their MySpace to see when they’ll be playing near you.

• The Athens, Ohio group, Skeleton Witch has gotten pretty big in recent years and will be playing a lot of dates throughout the west coast and south and south-western US. They’re a solid blackened thrash metal band and have some really slick riffage and songwriting going on in their last album, Beyond the Permafrost. I’ve had that one on rotation in my car pretty consistently. I like their stuff a lot; think of really good Scandic death metal (maybe mid-period The Crown) mixed with old-school Helloween dual-guitar riffage and classic Bay-area thrash.

Hors d’oeuvres du blog musique

I’ve been swamped with work and my internet service has been down for weeks. But enough chit-chat: let’s get down to business, like good human peons playing grown-up in the “real world”. I’m not here to hold your hand, I’m here to toss you headfirst into the musical labyrinth.

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The singer from Anthem, Eizo Sakamoto, has some solo projects (where he actually sings some of the music from Fist of the North Star, among other things). But check these tracks out from his 2000 album Metal Icchousen; mad crazy fast Marty Friedman arena metal!

Taishuu Sakaba
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFdJLkVhddw

Or how about a classic Manowar cover? (I sure hope Eizo doesn’t live with his parents)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V8A2XxJsY8

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Renaissance choral music was pretty tight. If that bores you, I should mention it’s the stuff that the cathedral music in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is referencing/copying. Of course, SotN is able to do a lot more stuff with it because Konami’s musicians weren’t limited by weird church music theory laws and Satanic bishops, and had organs and percussion to throw into the mix.

Check out these tight period composers:

Arcadeldt — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-crvm7AmOU

Palestrina — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dvvuCMVbk

Tomas Tallis — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq5rXwWp8UM

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If, for some reason, you want to have an OOBE (out of body experience) that is beyond your control, put on your headphones and listen to these samples from one of Coil’s last project, The Coilans .

It was done on some archaic experimental Soviet synthesizer with 100 oscillators or something, and they made the music by inserting metal sheets with magical glyphs or sigils engraved upon them. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Time travellin’ CRMz

I was sitting around with my usual group of “cool” “friends” the other day, and we decided to take a trip through time.

• First, we went over to Youtube.

• Next, we listened to the following two songs: Song A; Song 2

• Then, we were in Victorian England!!!1!

• Then we stupidly listened to this song.

• But this song stopped our free-fall depression, because Michael Kiske sang on it (or was that Ralph Scheepers?). Also, it has more power ballad than all other power ballads!

Get Hip!

• A friend of mine just started a slick new music blog with a metal focus, called Sour Lows. Looks tight so far, so check that piece! You probably are not going to find many better tips on the current metal scene.

• Another certain friend is posting bomb-ass chip-scene music links on his Twitter page, Hyperfail. Who is this mystery man? Let’s just say this cat is from a certain city against whom the Washington Capitals are currently competing against in a feisty play-off series, and he’s mentioned in like every substantial post on this here music blog. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

• Some pals of mine, the venerable grindcore outfit Magrudergrind, are about to release their new full-length album. It was recorded by Kurt Ballou (of Converge fame) and what I’ve heard so far is insanely crisp, heavy and energized. I don’t care that much about hardcore/grindcore now that I’m an old man, but if you like extreme punk’d out music with attitude and you don’t like Magrudergrind — you dumb.

• I have been spending mad internet time over on the Reaper forums. For anyone who hasn’t figured this obvious piece of information out yet, Reaper is a really sick DAW and is dirt-cheap (it’s programmed by the guy who made Winamp and then sold it for a bajillion dollar moneys to AOL/Time Warner back in the late ’90s). I daresay Reaper is single-handedly pushing affordable, nearly free, audio software to a new echelon and is going to be a serious risk to Pro-Tools/Cubase/Logic sales in the near future.So! if you are delusional enough to think you have talent and that it’s worth recording your music and figuring out how to mix and master it, then by all means — join the caravan…

• Looks like I’m laying down some tracks this weekend for my sick, sick metal project that has been in the works for years now. You’ve been warned — this is going to rock really damn hard. I mean, can you imagine what this charming narcissist sounds like behind a musical instrument? I’m engineering/producing this baby, doing half of the guitars and bass, programming drums and performing vox, and then (finances permitting) sending it on over to the talented, reasonably priced people at Wired Wrists studios. Ah but this is irrelevant to CRM, since I keep my own musical projects separate from said webspace (however, I did randomly decide to pull an old-person-trying-to-be-cool trick, and grow a MySpace).

Musical Fares

Well, believe it or not, once upon a time this blog was updated regularly. Save your griping, as I know it all too well already — ” Chaos is burnt out”, “snarkitty-snark, I knew he’d give up eventually,” “lol how do u burn thos emp3s?”, “when u gon write about FF 7?”, etc. I get it all the time. It is teh old newz.

I wonder if I have overextended myself with this blog, though. It is awesome, I agree, but the problem is that it’s too wide; I don’t focus enough on niche genres to draw a consistent crowd. And to boot, I don’t spend a lot of time uploading albums for my readers to illegally download, so I feel eclipsed by all the other young ‘n spicy MP3 blogs out there. However, since you read music blogs just to one-up other people in the social niche cool factor, I may still be helping you champion that cause.

I am a cool cat, in that regard (which was what again?). And a musician. So…

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Why are musicians cool?

1. They don’t hate their lives (Kurt Cobain excepted)
2. They are legitimately creative people
3. They are way more socially experienced than you — and even most businessmen and schmoozers; they are just less conniving

Think about it: musicians are willing to live in poverty, fore-go higher education or the fruits of its labor, stay up late every night, and hold down precarious jobs which they have to routinely quit or leave to go on tour, on which they often lose money and in the process only have the luxury of sleeping on couches or in vans. A musician’s life is un-glamorous.

And to add to the mix, let’s not forget that almost nobody makes it as a pro musician. It’s like trying to be a professional athlete, movie star, freelance writer, chef, or martial artist. This is a tough (dareisay dumb?) game.

And then let’s try balancing a successful love-life or family on top of that; or a career and friendships; home-ownership, as well as time to write and record more songs without getting creatively burnt out. Sure, plenty of folks have it rough in a similar way — the military, contractors for oil rigs and commercial maritime vessels, adjunct professors, the aforementioned careers before going pro, and so on. Hell, anybody who’s emigrating from an impoverished country to work for low wages in a rich superpower is making similar sacrifices, but in their case it’s more understandable and perhaps necessary.

Ahaha, what am I beginning to sound like I romanticize the gritty lifestyle a bit? Does this sound a little… perverse? Tootin’ my own horn?

Nah, you’re reading into it too much. But I’m starting to think about a point a reader recently contributed to my old post about Judas Priest. Namely, he said that the problem with a lot of mainstream music today, and particularly “Indie Rock” and related genres, is that they are often intentionally subversive niche genres — they are comprised of people from a cultural dominant who intentionally choose to be in a selective, ostracized minority group of society, who would not be so otherwise (but we can also say that no group is the cultural dominant in modern society).

But hey — doesn’t that describe anybody who chooses to be a musician or anything else which possesses an extremely remote chance of success — unless one possesses the golden tri-force of dedicated work ethic, luck and talent? It’s open willfulness to be someone who lives a life of uncertainty, amidst compromise of job security (ha!) and the safety of being average. People do it all for different reasons, sure; and poseurs be damned. But what is this stupid choice?

I feel like I’ve heard this somewhere before, put much more eloquently…

Some of envy
Some of fear
Admonish by the graves of those who fell
Praise the fool that pure of heart
Leaps off your finger
Into grace
–Emperor, “An Elegy of Icaros”

A Quick [Blast] of Melancholy

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. –Henry James

And now I am thinking of Arvo Pärt. For those who do not know, Arvo Pärt is non-poseur dirge music; modern Ulver meets European renaissance chamber music. That’s almost not a comparison, considering said chamber music influenced AP and AP influenced Ulver. I am so much more down with this brand of melancholy than typical funeral doom/drone. Put that in your (water)pipe and smoke it!

For those who care:

Arvo Pärt’s “Pari Intervallo” on accordian(!) by Francesco Palazzo

Inter Arma = Rock ‘n Roll

I saw one of the best shows of my life on Saturday night, by a band from Richmond called Inter Arma. They played with Ilsa, Lost Again, and Cough — all excellent bands in their own right (all worth checking out — Ilsa and Lost Again are DC locals; Cough is from Richmond), but Inter Arma totally slayed me. This is all the more insane, because I am a high-fallutin’ snob who is never impressed by live shows.

Inter Arma comes from Richmond, VA which has always had a thriving music and metal scene. The bigger names to come from Richmond in recent years are Municipal Waste, Lamb of God (formerly Burn the Priest), Battle Master, the long-since-disbanded Page 99/Page Ninety-Nine, and of course, the brilliant GWAR. As you know, those bands basically all rule. And there are plenty others I’m surely forgetting.

Inter Arma’s live sound mixing/set-up was absolutely professional, even though this was a basement show. The band members (particularly the singer and drummer) were practically virtuosos. The band’s style is a kind of progressive blackened doom-thrash hybrid. It’s similar to some of the common things going on in the metal scene at the moment, but it is a very innovative take on the usual technical metal and doom trends.

Not only were the compositions and arrangements phenomenal, but the band’s songs and performance had an incredible sense of dynamics. This is something absent from 95% of the bands that exist — black metal, indie rock, punk, hardcore, thrash, doom (okay, with doom it’s somewhat excusable). Their shows become kinda monotonous a few songs into the set, because the initial thrill of their live heaviness or attitude or audio aesthetic becomes absorbed and wears off. Not so, here.

To top it off, the guys in the band were really cool! — very nice, decent and laid-back folks, and their handful of Richmond friends that came with them were really bad-ass as well. An awesome crew all-round — I recorded an interview with them that I’m hoping to get online sometime in the near future. In the meantime, check the couple of tracks these cats have on their MySpace page. The recordings don’t really do the band justice, particularly compared to their live show, but they have a full-length coming out in a few months. I’ll be sure to mention it here.

I was one of maybe ten people in the audience — the show wasn’t promoted and there was a big doom/metal show going on up in Baltimore on the same night. What a fucking personal treat! I hope these guys agree to come down to DC and play again — I’ll be sure to help promote the show next time around.

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Inter Arma on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/interarmametal
Cough on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/cough666
Ilsa on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/ilsadc
Lost Again on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/werelostagain

Eat ya chiptunes, kids

• 8-Bit Collective member Derris-Kharlan did a chiptunes medley of songs from the Nintendo 64 Zelda games, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Both of those (cartridge!) releases had fantastic music, but it was composed with high-quality orchestral samples — not chiptunes. DK’s version is absolutely fantastic! Listen and download it from the song’s 8-Bit Collective page.

• Another 8-Bit Collective artist with some real pizazz is the brilliantly named Ghostface Kilobyte. GK’s website is a hilarious art project: some of his covers are fantastic; I dig pretty hard on the “We Are the Champions” cover.

• Also fantastic is the blog, Cruise Elroy, which dissects the music theory behind Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, among others.

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*Thnx 2 Jonbro 4 some of these linx

Soul Sequence: Rex Machinae

These days it seems like every last one of you has been knocking down my door with the same string of questions: “What in the blazes is the blog on about these days? Madonna?! Embedded Youtube videos?! Is this 4 real? What happened to you, beloved Fretbored CRM Simonious Punk, Esq.? Where are my Sega Genesis MP3s (and how do you rip those dang things, anyway??)?” But all I can say is this: things are only changing for the better around here — just wait and find out! And that’s no joke, although this blog does occasionally make jokes, believe it or not.

I find it somewhat…. ironic, that the main kind of ‘lectronic music that I write is often chiptune/tracker music. I say “ironic” because chiptunes are like the “low-fi” end of the spectrum of electronic synthesis and music production. Not that I myself would define it as low-fi in any sense, but it does share some aesthetic similarities with the whole “post-punk” cash crop. Besides that, it reeks of retro-cyberpunk noir and childhood nostalgia molded into saccharine auditory visions. It’s impossible to resist such overwhelming charm. Chiptunes = robots + emotions.

Most electronic music is done with exceptional production values. In fact, the final aesthetics on the production are probably a bigger factor in electronic music than almost any other kind of music. House, trance, IDM, DnB, glitch, etc. just don’t really exist without high-end samples and synth patches. So I find a lot of people who produce or record or engineer music also are “electronic musicians” or whatever, and vice-versa. And I, like many folks, find the production of the sounds to be the most interesting aspect of techno (uh, along with the songwriting and collage/cut-up/sequencing composition of course!).

Since I horrified you all with some raw new Madonna yesterday Tuesday, let’s up the ante and rock out to some popular Euro-dance techno. What have we got to lose (except our daily blog stats)?

Soulwax – Too Many DJs

I’ve heard it all before, you know

It seems like only yesterday Madonna was taking off her clothes in music videos, on bangin’ tracks like “La Isla Bonita” and uh… well, I didn’t really like Bedtime Stories, to be honest. You know, old Madonna is more of my thing (as it was for Harvey Keitel’s character in Reservoir Dogs and every other hipster like me or you).

Ah, but it was only yesterday that she was taking her clothes off in front of the ‘lectric eye! Or only last year or whatever — because Madonna has been stripping in all her recent videos, such as this one here: “Sorry”. But I can credit her (producers) for the fact that her most recent singles have been her best songs in a long time. Blah, yeah I know, you don’t agree; I’ve sold out or am an idiot. At least one of these things is true, but! good dance music is something that I am prone to get down with, despite the fact that I do not actually dance — at least not in locations where there are cameras or human beings (animals are okay though, because they save their penetrating social judgment for more humiliating human actions/blunders, like global warming and online dating).

So I guess it’s cool that Madonna still takes off her clothes. I don’t know. I don’t even notice it anymore; it’s so “par for the course,” wouldn’t you agree, my dear [google-referred page statistic]? But there are other typical Madonna (and modern pop/dance/hip-hop) things going on in this video. Let’s see: there’s a bunch of super cut, stylish male dancer types (friends of mixed ethnicities, of course!) who get playfully shafted from the cool party the main character (Madonna & co.) are going to (but let’s not kid ourselves — these are the only guys with a remote chance of seeing action in this scenario); there are a bunch of folks who would never actually be at a dance party getting a suspicious amount of mad respect for their dorky moves (body builder, nerd, etc.) as well as Madonna’s much younger, ethnically diverse dance crew. Are we inverting the concept of rejection? Accepting freaks and denying “cool” bamas? It’s really deep now that I think about it… What this all means, I have no idea, but I’m sure it’s at least as real as the advertisements and TV shows and films I subject myself to on a weekly basis.

But I gauge it the way I gauge all good dance music: effectively melodic, simplistically catchy, well-produced, and somewhat melancholy — it creates an emotional cocktail that emulates how the alcohol starts to hit you at the club when you realize you’re crashing and burning your one shot at love.

(Was this the first CRM post to end in a rhyme?!)