Among the broad expanse of Emma Ruth Rundle’s oeuvre, you’ll find psychedelic tinged shoegaze, Pink Floyd-y post rock, no-holds-barred art rock, dark folk, doom metal, and more—not to mention her expansive visual work.
Even as far-reaching as her catalog is, nothing can prepare you for EG2: Dowsing Voice, the second of her experimental, instrumental records released under her name. But where Electric Guitar One still mostly stayed within the realms of post rock, this record is positively feral.
It’s said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. I’m not sure just how universally true that axiom is, but in the case of Sixty-nine, the debut full length from British dream pop duo (note: they coined that term themselves), they ride that line like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove.
The record is fiercely experimental—to the point that it’s almost a wonder that anyone agreed to release it. Nevertheless, the record became a huge influence on trip hop, post rock, and shoegaze.
I want to be clear that I love this record. There is nothing quite like it. But as is often the case with these sorts of artistic milestones, the scope of its influence may far outshine the record itself. Not everything thrown at the wall sticks. In fact, depending on my mood, this might strike me as completely transcendent, or as the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Continue reading
“Ecstatic black metal” seems a bit like an oxymoron. If you were to ask someone to describe black metal in one word, “ecstatic” might not come up very often. In fact, if you were to create a relevant Family Feud category, guessing it would land you a big fat X and a Steve Harvey overreaction.
Yet when you listen to Agriculture’s debut full length, it makes perfect sense that they would describe themselves as such, using the white-hot sonic bombast of black metal as a vehicle for transcendence and jubilation.
Helms Alee has always been unpredictable. Even besides the triple-vocal attack—which ranges from throaty screams to dreamy cleans to riot grrrl-esque shouts—they have always implemented a number of styles into their brand of heavy, weird music. I first discovered them on a Wikipedia article about sludge metal fusions, describing them as “Sludge/shoegaze,” even though they themselves simply call themselves “grunge” (probably just because they’re from Seattle).
But they have never been as fearlessly inventive and monstrously heavy as they are on Keep This Be the Way. Nonsense title aside, this is a staggering album that showcases the best that Helms Alee has to offer, and pushes them into bold new territory.
Album art is a funny thing. As often as the warning is given not to judge a [record] by its cover, sometimes the visual aesthetic of the record perfectly matches the sound contained therein.
Take for example Dreams Drenched in Static, the new album from Cremation Lily, the solo project of Zen Zsigo. Soft images of waves, grasses, and sand dunes are torn apart and combined to form a jagged abstract collage. It’s a stunning visual representation of the sounds on the album: gentle elements like ambient guitars, floating keyboards, clean vocals, and laid back drum machines are chopped and manipulated and pasted together to create something that is harshly overexposed and monstrous. But at the same time, beneath the hiss of white noise and squeals of feedback is a sort of zen-like peace, like the warm embrace of the snow after an avalanche.
(And if it sounds like I’m just parroting the promo email from The Flenser, that’s because they quoted me in it).
Few bands are as prolific as Boris. The Japanese trio has done everything from shoegaze to synthpop to drone to thrash metal to harsh noise to garage rock to punk to hardcore to post rock to rockabilly (probably—I’m not actually sure if they’ve done any rockabilly, but probably). The sheer mass and diversity of their output makes for some great moments, but it makes it very difficult to call any of their albums essential.
Sure, there are some legendary mile markers in their discography: most people point to Pink, I point to Noise. But for the most part, while their consistently enjoyable and impressive as a whole, most of the individual albums aren’t very distinctive from one another.
To that point, W is their twenty-seventh album—a number that doesn’t include their seemingly endless list of collaborative works. However, W feels unique enough even among Boris’s discography that it warranted adding it to my collection.
Last week, while recording an episode on experimental music for my new podcast (oh yeah, I have a podcast now), I remarked that part of what makes Radiohead great is that they take the harsh weirdness of far more inaccessible bands and mold it into pop structures. “Radiohead would be the first ones to tell you, ‘just listen to Autechre,'” I said, and then I realized two things.
One: I didn’t know how to pronounce Autechre.
Two: I had never listened to them.
I promptly sought to correct that, and within half an hour of listening to their pioneering opus Tri Repetae, I ordered a copy. And now, I’m not sure which is harder to believe: that this record came out in 1995, or that humans had anything to do with its creation.
Few musical movements are as weird, wonderful, and influential as Krautrock, a collection of West German bands in the 1970s that pushed the boundaries of what music could actually do to its extremes. The movement had an incredible influence on post punk, progressive rock, new age, shoegaze, and the birth of post rock. The shape of modern, electronic leaning pop music can be traced back to Krautrock, specifically the synthpop pioneers Kraftwerk.
But perhaps no band in Krautrock was more influential than Cologne’s Can, whose sprawling jazz-and-funk jams, improvised vocals, psychedelic exploration, tape editing techniques, and ambient experimentation went on to define Krautrock and influence everyone from David Bowie to Radiohead to Joy Division to the Flaming Lips to Kanye West.
Among their monstrous catalog (they recorded ten albums between 1969 and 1979), most fans and critics agree that the pinnacle of their career was the trilogy of records featuring vocalist Damo Suzuki, which includes the criminally underrated Future Days, the seminal Ege Bamyasi, and this, the eldritch, immense Tago Mago.
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.
Genre alchemy gets into diminishing returns pretty quickly. While fusion was once incredibly revolutionary, the internet has hastened the pace of these reactions so that there’s almost no crossover that hasn’t been tried.
We’re almost two decades past the advent of Girl Talk, whose genre-defying mashups saw acts like Fleetwood Mac, Ludacris, The Ramones, Lil Missy, Radiohead, Jay-Z, and Metallica featured on the same track. Babymetal debuted eleven years ago. Ill-conceived chimeras like crunkcore and emo rap are now old enough to vote. Then you have the entire crop of bands blending metal with shoegaze, post-rock, spirituals, and even Azerbaijani folk music.
Genre-bending alone isn’t enough to make compelling music.
So it’s a good thing that Ultrapop has much more to its credit, because this is one of the freshest takes on genre fusion in a long time.