Author: Nathaniel FitzGerald

Record #805: Mogwai – Atomic (2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Across their prolific and celebrated career, Mogwai has managed to use their ability to twist music and mood to conjure up narratives that don’t need words to be understood. So naturally, a few filmmakers have come to the Scottish post rock godfathers to help them tell their own stories.

One of these was Mark Cousins, who brought the group on for his documentary Atomic, Living In Dread and Promise, which examined the enormous possibility for both prosperity and destruction that nuclear power brings.

I haven’t seen this documentary. I’m not sure I need to. What I do know is that this album manages to capture the awe and dread of the topic with such clarity that the film might be unnecessary.

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Record #803: Melvins – Hostile Ambient Takeover (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

A couple posts ago, I made a vague parenthetical statement about whether there has ever been an album that has encapsulated the full essence of Melvins. I suggested that The Trilogy—the three-album run of The Maggot’s sludge-doom, The Bootlicker’s avant-pop, and The Crybaby’s covers and collaborations—might have been the closest they’ve ever gotten to offering up a concise CV.

But I must confess: I said that knowing full well that it was a lie. Because there is one album that—in my opinion at least—perfectly captures exactly who the band is and what they do.

That album is Hostile Ambient Takeover, a title that serves to describe both the eight tracks on this disc and the Melvins as a whole. They are hostile. They are ambient. And they are taking over.

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Record #802: Melvins – The Bootlicker (1999)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

While it’s difficult to distill the whole of  Melvins’ eclectic essence into a single release, the Trilogy, released between 1999 and 2000, came pretty close to doing so between three records.

While The Maggot saw them indulging their most volcanic heavy metal instincts, The Bootlicker was almost a complete rejection of their metal influences, exploring elements of jazz, funk, and psychedelic. In fact, many refer to The Bootlicker as one of the band’s most “pop-oriented” albums. But given that we’re talking about Melvins, there’s still plenty of wonderful weirdness here.

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Record #801: Melvins – The Maggot (1999)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

By 1999, Melvins were already a band of legendary repute. Their uncompromising adherence to noisy rock and roll experimentation that blurred the line between grunge and sludge metal had already landed them—and lost them—a major label deal. The late Kurt Cobain had already called them one of his favorite bands, and they had already influenced scores of similarly noisy and experimental acts, such as Japan’s Boris, who are themselves named after a Melvins song.

And in 1999, Melvins released one of the most ambitious projects of their career: a trilogy of albums that each leaned into a pocket of their sound. The Maggot is the first and most aggressive of these albums, and even in a catalog as harsh and abrasive as Melvins’, it is a challenging album. But that challenge brings a great reward, because it might also be one of their best.

Read more at ayearofvinyl.com #melvins #sludgemetal #grunge #avantgarde #noiserock #vinyl

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Record #800 – Elliott Smith – Elliott Smith (1995)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

There have been hundreds of singer/songwriters that have put out stripped-down songs armed primarily with an acoustic guitar and their own voice. But even among such a crowded throng, Elliott Smith is celebrated as a truly unique voice.

And while Either/Or may be the album most people point to as his opus, the self-titled album that preceded it showcases a raw aesthetic, free of the baroque and powerpop leanings of later albums. And stripped down as it is, it maybe hits a little closer to the heart of Smith’s legacy.

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Record #799: Godspeed You! Black Emperor – F♯ A♯ ∞ (1997)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few bands have such celebrated reputations as  Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They are inarguably one of the pillars of the post rock movement—and rightly so. Their body of work is marked by a fiercely uncompromising vision, their albums filled with lengthy compositions that make no effort to be accessible. At this point in history, fans and critics alike revere their experimental ethos and artistic stubbornness.

But debuting with that sort of vision without the benefit of the legacy is a different sort of monster. The legendary post rock collective might be able to get away with releasing an album with two twenty-minute songs with multiple movements and no lyrics, but as a debut? That’s a bit more difficult to sell as an introduction.

Lucky for us though, Godspeed didn’t let pesky things like marketability or accessibility get in the way of their debut record.

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Record #798: Five Iron Frenzy – Until This Shakes Apart (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If you would have asked me ten years ago which band’s new album I’d be most excited for in 2021, it would have taken me hundreds of guesses to finally land on Five Iron Frenzy. After all, I first discovered them in 7th grade, and I’d hope to have grown out of goofy ska songs and Pants Operas in the space of twenty-one years.

However, I realize now that all of their wry, irreverent humor was a sort of Trojan horse, through which they smuggled cutting criticisms of the Church’s hypocrisy toward racism, police brutality, and greed into youth group kids’ Discmans.

While these messages have always been hiding amid the upstrokes, horn lines, and bad puns, Until This Shakes Apart pulls off all pretense, abandoning their wooden horse in favor of a full-on frontal assault.

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Record #797: Black Swift – See Me Human (2017)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

When you release a record produced by a legend like Sylvia Massy, you run the risk of undermining your previous releases. When the core of your musical essence is uncovered and enhanced by such a skilled architect, it might make the releases before that feel cluttered and unfocused.

Might is the keyword there, especially in the case of Black Swift’s See Me Human, which I’m coming to backwards from their fantastic Desert Rain EP. While it doesn’t have the sonic clarity that Massy brought to that disc, See Me Human has the same passionate songwriting and raw rock and roll, giving it more than enough clout to stand on its own.

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Record #796: You Could Be a Cop/Amid the Old Wounds – Split (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Perhaps the biggest problem with emo is how the term has been fundamentally misunderstood.

When the term finally broke into the cultural lexicon in the early 2000s, it was mostly attached to bands like Panic! At the Disco, Green Day, and My Chemical Romance, who are not emo bands—MCR would even tell you this themselves. And yet, legions of yuppies and soccer moms would see dark clothes, shaggy hair, and eyeliner and attach the three-letter epithet to it. Even bands who did claim the tag for themselves in those days bore little resemblance to the emo bands of yore.

But over the last several years, a crop of musicians have risen up to free the word Emo from the girl jeans of its mallcore misappropriation and return to the sparkling guitars, patient dynamics, and mournful vocals of the scene’s earlier days.

And this split, between Norway’s You Could Be A Cop and Germany’s Amid the Old Wounds, is a perfect example of what emo is supposed to be.

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