VaccZine #12: Interview w/ Total Dissonance Worship
Couldcareless, Adharcáil, Charnel Altar. Vault: Cadavalanche
While dissonance is the name of the game, there's no dissonance behind Total Dissonance Worship's game plan for choosing what to release. "It's really just a 'do I like it or not' kind of question first and foremost," label head Simon Hawemann writes in an email. "But it is curated to a specific niche within extreme metal, namely the kind of stuff that obviously leans more into a dissonant direction or sounds oppressive and really dark in other ways."
Hawemann's Total Dissonance Worship feels especially well-curated because it states that niche up front with its name. Since starting as a way for Hawemann to release his own music, such as the genuinely excellent Nightmarer,1 TDW has expanded into a one-stop shop for those who like it oppressive and really dark. A couple of years in, TDW's name can even stand in for a certain sound, a burgeoning substyle that ties together the commonalities of the label's discography. And Hawemann keeps defining that sound by mining the past and present for gems.
"It's always great to be able to release a legacy release like the Ion Dissonance's debut LP, being that it was a formative band for me," Hawemann notes. "But on the other hand, when you put out an album by a completely new project like Kvadrat and it takes off, that is amazing as well."
At this point, it feels like anything TDW touches is poised to take off. For every established band the label reintroduces, such as Ion Dissonance, Concealment, and the weirdos under the Zeitgeister umbrella, there are deep, deep cuts that, to TDW's credit, don't feel very deep anymore.
Scrolling through TDW's discography, I spy many things I've spilled ink over: Carcinoma, Anguine, Michel Anoia, Sigil, Evilyn, etc. I can't say I've been much help breaking any of them. TDW has the touch, though, raising profiles by supplying context, presenting albums within a near-bulletproof catalog. That's the TDW effect.
I've felt the TDW effect on Klexos's Apocryphal Parabolam. The Lexington, Kentucky, duo's full-length debut is quite the prog death puzzle. There's a lot going on: some of that modern death thrum that bands like Augury bang out, but there's also a near-deathcore/-djent juddiness to many passages. All in all, it's a bit too brainy for me, and thus my first listen didn't really connect. If it wasn't on TDW, I'm not sure I would've returned. But, since it has Hawemann's co-sign, I ran it back. On the replay, I cracked "Astathmêta," an absolute banger that reminds me of Irreversible Mechanism's euphoric riffing, and the rest of Apocryphal Parabolam clicked.
If you're a fan of extreme metal, the story of how the style clicked for Hawemann has a lot of familiar beats. Why, yes, there's the metalhead, band-playing high school friend who provides proof of concept that this life can be your life, the "oh, I can do this, too" foundation that permits one to join the fold and play music themselves. The story even has the requisite lucky breaks, the what-ifs and chance encounters that are relatable because all of us seem to have them. You don't usually end up here on purpose, after all. Fortunate accidents pave the path to the underground. For instance, the fork in Hawemann's road came about because, shall we say, someone was functioning on impatience.
"I grew up mainly on '90s metal like Sepultura or Fear Factory," Hawemann recalls, "but was always looking for the next, most extreme thing. That same friend from high school gave me a Coalesce CD he bought and couldn't get into when I was like 15. That was my introduction to Relapse Records, and from there, all bets were off. Canadian death metal was another big revelation to me. I discovered Cryptopsy and ultimately Gorguts, which really changed the game. Just like a lot of the chaotic grind stuff on Relapse, they were very dissonant but seemingly came from a different scene altogether."
One of the refreshing things about TDW is that no release feels like it comes from a different scene. At the time I'm writing this, the three newest additions to the TDW catalog are RES's Cyrene, Light Dweller's Lucid Offering, and Pilori's Quand Bien Même L'Enfer et le Déluge S'abattraient sur Nous. For those keeping score, that's dark drone, discordant death metal, and HM-2core. None of them feel like a stretch or outside of TDW's boundaries. Like a good mixtape, all of them share qualities. It's the TDW effect supplying a throughline.
Here's the other thing: Cameron Boesch's Light Dweller is the most "known" band out of that haul. It has 883 monthly listeners on Spotify. Hominal, the project's 2020 full-length has 94 ratings on RYM. The breakout potential is there, but it's not a known quantity…yet. Given the "throwing money into a pit" economic inefficiency of music labels, isn't betting on that daunting? "At the end of the day, putting out newer and less known or unknown bands is the greater challenge," Hawemann answers, "and when it works out well, it makes you proud in a different way than a successful 'legacy' release."
So, how does Hawemann find this stuff? Do bands come to TDW, or does Hawemann just have an ear to the ground? "It's a little bit of both," Hawemann responds, "but I would say it's mostly me being very proactive. I've had a couple of releases where bands approached me — bands that were already somewhat established and totally unknown/new bands alike. But if the material hits me in the right way, I'm willing to get involved and put it out."
Some of this willingness, that drive to make sure the good bands get out there, might be derived from Hawemann's experiences in the business. "I had played in signed bands for about 15 years and was tired of being at the mercy of the music industry," Hawemann remembers about Nightmarer and its predecessor, War from a Harlots Mouth. "The climate sucks, the money sucks, and the vague promise of exposure is just less and less appealing when you consider all the drawbacks of being under a contract that doesn't allow you all that much freedom. So my band Nightmarer left Season of Mist, and I started Total Dissonance Worship with the intention of it being an imprint for releases of my own band(s). However, all that happened right when the pandemic hit, and all of a sudden, I found myself thinking it would be a shame not to hit up some other bands. I wanted TDW to be an extremely coherent label collective, with bands that all share a pretty specific sound and aesthetic."
Mission accomplished. Of course, there's another way you can tell that Hawemann is cut out for this line of work. "I'm really proud of everything I put out and every single item I ship, and I do ship everything myself personally," Hawemann admits. "Every tape, record, or shirt someone buys makes me proud, so even the mundane task of packing up orders is very satisfying for me."
So, I guess satisfaction isn't the death of dissonance. And I feel like Hawemann will be packing even more orders this year.
This was another interview conducted for my technical doom thing. As a bonus, a couple of Simon Hawemann's tech doom-specific answers appear below:
Have you encountered anything that could be described as technical doom in your travels?
I feel like it may not be as straightforward as that, but there are bands out there that are very technical and doomy. Just think of Portal: Their aesthetic leans so far into doom territory that it'd be downright drone metal on the one hand and savage death metal on the other. And if you've ever seen them live or even live videos, you know this stuff isn't simple to play. It is pretty damn technical.
And Portal obviously inspired a lot of bands that adopted this kind of aesthetic to a certain degree. Some slower, some faster, of course. Some more, some less technical. I am working with a band called Choir right now, and I feel like their album Songs for a Tarnished Word almost perfectly showcases the symbiosis of murky death metal with technical elements and doom metal.
Is there a reason that, for the most part, technical doom/sludge isn't a thing?
Generally speaking, the term "technical" seems counterintuitive with the slow and crawling nature of doom metal, so I'm not sure if it will ever exist as a genre of its own. But I do see a lot of death metal bands toying with doom elements and believe there is a lot of potential for that to be explored more.
Nightmarer loves toying with doom elements as well, so check out the songs "Stasis" and "Death" if you haven't. The latter features one of the most iconic voices in drone metal: Alan Dubin from the incredible Khanate
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
NEW ARRIVALS
SPOTLIGHT
couldcareless - cryptic clarity (self-released)
Confessions of a reformed cybergrinder. Back in the MySpace days, you could dial a terrible-sounding drum machine to speedcore tempos and be allowed to hang around the scene even if you were mostly talentless. How do I know? I have the compilation appearances to prove it. Anyway, cybergrind wasn't totally a landfill of hacks. A few from the Catasexual Urge Motivation-/Curse Of The Golden Vampire-/The Berzerker-influenced side made it. Fuck the Facts become a real band, Genghis Tron and Gigantic Brain got signed, and Mulk is still the Mulkiest Mulk that ever Mulked. A few others from the Bong-Ra side are still kicking around: Whourkr, Drumcorps, etc. In my best Macho Man voice, truly, the cream rises.
Anyway, besides the odd talented star briefly slumming it at my level, I never really thought there'd be digital core born and raised in a DAW that would evolve into much. Like, few had any ambition, and the tech was always an impediment, the cracked-key wretchedness of early 32-bit applications that sounded faintly like Speak & Spells. I remember the nicest thing anyone ever said about my stuff was, "Huh, there are some neat noises on here." Huh! That was pretty much the promised land. Make noise, get a huh. The idea of creating anything musical or artistically rewarding registered the same remoteness as a scout driving past my pickup game and asking me to suit up at center for the Pistons that night.
More years than I care to count later, I am listening to couldcareless, a "bedroom grindcore project of interdimensional anomaly" staffed by two noisemakers named Nub and Din. Cryptic Clarity, couldcareless's debut full-length, isn't the cybergrind of yore. Instead, it wears the mathcore tag proudly, the modern umbrella term defined and categorized by places like the Mathcore Index. Still, it me? Something powering Cryptic Clarity produces a byproduct of nostalgia, a DIYness and "what else are we going to do" restlessness that makes me feel like Nub and Din are me and I am they. Except, wouldn't you know it, couldcareless is musical and artistically rewarding and even infused with a rich emotionalism that, honest to god, made me think, Wait, am I feeling things right now?
Before getting to that, I've got to talk about the instruments. "Sampled guitars and drum machines have been compiled and processed to simulate the optimum grindcore listening experience," states couldcareless's Bandcamp bio, with Cryptic Clarity's liner notes adding that Miguel Ruiz and Keenan Ports pitch in "additional synths," along with samples and vocals by the former and noise by the later. This compiling and processing makes sense for a band that released a single on a floppy disc. That said, it's not totally clear what any of that means in practice. Is couldcareless 21st century The Young Gods? Is it sampling tones and then programming the riffs? Either way, you can see the wires on closer inspection, an exacting precision that's more Ableton than someone being able to do this without the crutch of editing and quantizing.2
Naturally, like greybeard Hall of Fame voters demanding that baseball's institutional memory should be steroid-free, some will balk at the idea of programmed guitars. If that "Ex Machina, the band" approach puts you off of couldcareless, I get it. In the duo's defense, I think sampling/programming instruments that are traditionally played is a tricky gambit, a high-wire act across an uncanny valley, a pursuit that's tougher and requires more balance than shut up 'n play yer guitar nerds want to believe. In the wrong hands, Cryptic Clarity could be lifeless, the aural equivalent of a sterile clean room where you could almost smell the disinfectant. Even worse, it could sound like grindcore Girl Talk. But it works well for couldcareless because of the duo-plus-two's attention to detail.3 And anyway, I think it wants to steer into the unreal.
Right, the too-tight chaos is kind of the point. Cryptic Clarity's grind songs remind me of the criticisms that old rock writers used to smear Boston's studio wizardry, mainly that it sounded like an arena-dominating robot.4 But I don't think you can do what couldcareless does otherwise. To wit, if you dig into its brief blasts, you notice how many independent rhythms are fired off at any given second, creating a dense mesh of interlocking layers. It's Autechre-esque, a wave machine of rhythms allowing listeners to surf atop the motion of the grind ocean.
That's not to say Cryptic Clarity doesn't have the mathcore-specific herks and jerks, stops and starts, and jump scares and smash cuts; the kitchen sink-included, whiplash-inducing everything that turns the more bananas bands into bangers. Indeed, couldcareless is complete grind chaos, but…all of it has a purpose. It's not just mindlessly injecting 40 juds, blasts, and widdles into sections for the adrenaline. Nub and Din are…almost impressionistic in this respect. You step back and see the bigger picture: Cryptic Clarity is one piece with microscopic suites.5 How about this for a comparison: It's hyper-condensed, powered milk Cleric. And once you immerse yourself in it, getting waist deep into the tumult, the clarity kicks in: couldcareless is like this because dreams are like this.
"Cryptic clarity" is a pretty good phrase for dreams, really. Couldcareless incepts the dreamworld in a couple ways. First, it's swathed in a hazy swirl of synths and whips through settings faster than a possessed View-Master. Both of those qualities eradicate a sense of time and place. The end result is that feelings seem to linger, but the memory of happenings have a short half-life. Dreamlike, in other words.
The other dreamy aspect is similar to how the absurd and surreal tend to obscure the meaningful. Like many bands before it, couldcareless uses its song titles as one-liners. My personal favorite? "Lift yr skinny dicks like antennas to my ass." These titles are, perhaps, intentionally misleading, obscuring the biting commentary lurking beneath. Think of the introvert at a party who plays off their discomfort with acidic bon mots.6 For example, check this out from "couldnotcareless, our evil twin band that plays skramz":
If I walk
Off the edge
Of this parking garage
Perhaps time will stop
Maybe time will stop
Unfortunately I've found
A coward could never take the coward's way out
OK! Well, hell. That hits hard.
What's incredible to me is that couldcareless connects at an equal if not greater level when it foregrounds those emotions, burning through the dream haze and detached punchlines and being downright vulnerable. There are three sections on Cryptic Clarity that aim straight for the heart, and, surprisingly, as an avowed hater of cleans, I have to admit that all of them work. "Occam's razor scooter" grinds chaotically and then melts into Wind-Up Bird noise while a voice from beyond plaintively calls out. "Water under the planar bridge" sandwiches its near-atmo middle between moody and noirish stretches that are exactly what I was hoping Dillinger Escape Plan would sound like after Irony is a Dead Scene. The last track, "epilogue: the culmination of a lifetime of disorder (we have made our homes in the depths, and we shall never ascend)," nimbly dodges mawkishness and strums its way to something closer to, like, The Casket Lottery playing Codeine.7 It eventually gets huge, planet-sized in its metallic bigness. But, of course, in true wrestling logic, what you build must come crashing down, preferably with your body doing the crashing. And when it does, you feel worn out, exhausted, like you’ve been through some stuff. "Epilogue" ends with a section that sounds like tears splashing onto piano keys in the middle of a downpour. It's like the requisite gut-punch scene in a JRPG soundtracked by a doppelganger of Prince's "Father's Song." OK! Well, hell. I feel every second of it.
You know, if you told me about Cryptic Clarity, I would've assumed it was meme shit, a remix of the horrible, vapid garbage I used to make. But...uh...nope. Musical. Artistic. Resonant. I feel like I get the band name now. Yeah, I guess you could care a lot less. I'm glad Nub and Din care this much, though.
HIGHLIGHTS
Adharcáil - Adharcáil (self-released)
Can you make bizarro outsider art if you know what you're doing? Clearly, everyone knows what they're doing in Adharcáil, a new all-star trio harnessing the immense talents of Will Smith (Afterbirth, ex-Artificial Brain), Andrew Hawkins (Baring Teeth, ex-Cleric), and Colin Marston (all of the bands). And the three songs that make up this self-titled EP are appropriately bizarre. They're death/doom-y in an early '90s, road not travelled sense: inchoate, pre-codified, "we're making this up as we go" trailblazing experimentalism. At times, it sounds like Mortiis, wounded by the Emperor pink slip and deep in his Vond feelings, landed in diSEMBOWLMENT. At others, it's like Darklord made a monkey paw wish and fused with Demilich. But, mostly, Adharcáil sounds like death/doom Beherit if Beherit knew what it was doing.
Did Beherit know what it was doing on its early work, such as the love it or hate it Drawing Down the Moon? Debatable. Either way, believing that it didn't is part of the appeal. Lightning in a bottle. Everything good was probably a happy accident, a thrilling sort of anti-freedom that feels about the same. As such, Beherit comes off as unfettered, released from pretention, and protected from criticism that would otherwise make mincemeat of its ability. When framed like that, Beherit, the supposed outsider, is "realer" than art in the stuffy, fart-sniffy sense. Whether that's actually true or not is, again, debatable. But that's the argument people have been having about outsider art for eons. The adjunct squabble is whether it break the spell if the artists aren't idealized oblivious outsiders but very aware geniuses.8 Let's call this the Beherit Predicament.
The best track on Adharcáil is the closer, the nine-minute "Umulamahri." It couples a death trudge with archaic synths, and it's like someone booted up King's Quest during a Thergothon practice. The incongruity rules, two things crashing together that should not produce such an electric highlight. I can't really explain the sensation. Maybe it's like how Mark Jackson's hapless defense makes Tom Chambers appear to levitate. If you're not feeling it, wait for the solos. I don't want to say they're out of nowhere, but I don't know from where else fiery Pharoah Sanders runs would come from. Think if that one Google engineer turned a TI-80 calculator sentient and it spat out variations on The Byrds's "Eight Miles High." I love it. What the hell.
Unfortunately, the rest of Adharcáil isn't as inspired. There are good ideas, but they feel stuck in a tar pit. If the trio were working with a real drummer, it might've helped. Marston is playing "finger drums" on this one. To be clear, that is playing drums on a midi keyboard, like if Just Blaze woke up and decided to cover Accidental Suicide. It's a fun gimmick that has produced cool results before, but I'm not sure it works for death/doom, a style that lives or dies depending on the deftness of the rhythm section. However, it's not like the other elements connect all that frequently. Here's a quirk: Adharcáil sounds better at lower volumes, allowing your brain to fill in the gaps with more interesting layers.9 When you crank it, your attention is drawn to Adharcáil's formlessness. Is this improv? Would it be better if I knew it was?
This brings us back to the Beherit Predicament. If I didn't know who was in Adharcáil, would I like it more? This is probably a dig at myself, but I think so. I know what all of these players are capable of producing. My expectations are high. Adharcáil doesn't measure up. If I had no preconceived notions, I think I'd be more forgiving, especially if this was sold to me as some kids picking up instruments after class, compelled to bash this ambitious mess into existence despite lacking the time and skills to perfect it. Same music, different frame. In one case, the band is playing down. In the other, it's playing up. That I'd stick these hypothetical bands in different buckets is probably...not...good criticism, but brains are going to brain, right?
Charnel Altar - Abatement of the Sun (Blood Harvest)
Charnel Altar's vibe is like one of those caves that a daredevil National Geographic photographer spelunks into and snaps pics of a subterranean Tartarus untouched by light. Whatever creeps and crawls down there looks like a nightmare because those uncanny lifeforms have ditched everything but the essentials. Eyes? My dude, eyes are an adornment. Where we're going, and that's to snack on prehistoric cave shrimp that look like xenomorph gametes, we don't need eyes. Mouth. Teeth. That's the ticket.
Charnel Altar is death/doom untouched by light. It's right there in the title of this Australian three-piece's full-length debut: Abatement of the Sun. You bet, Charnel Altar is a master abater, skulking through six songs in 47 minutes, all of them darker than the deepest cave, all of them free of adornments. Melody? No. Mouth. Teeth. Riffs.
Take the unholy din of "Malefic Blessings," a pretty excellent song title that'll probably end up naming an adherent eventually. This track has spent its life submerged in a fetid pool of sulfuric sourness. It's as if Impetuous Ritual tumbled into a lava tube to survive a nuclear apocalypse and rebuilt society in total darkness with an evil Winter. That opening riff, an undulating tremolo that could soundtrack a sea snake in slow motion, might accidentally summon the worm-eaten remains of your ancestors now hungry for some soul swallowing. Hell, the guitar tone is like the seven trumpets of the apocalypse, and it really comes alive during the outro, a heaving behemoth of metal of death gnarliness that's the most Incantation I've heard a band be that's not an Inclonetation. It's the catchiest thing on the record, which is fun to think about because it's catchy in the same sense that barbed wire is catchy. It's also austere in the same sense that something licked by a flamethrower is austere.
I would've absolutely hated Charnel Altar 20 years ago when I first started digging around for rarer metal gems. There's not much on Abatement of the Sun to latch on to: no wiz-bang, no earworms, no anthems. Instead, it's riffs and pounding rhythms and the same raspy, guttural roar, rinse and repeat. Even the production is spare, sounding like three people in a reverby space in a non-descript warehouse lot. When the album flips back to the A-side on repeat, it takes a few beats for you to be like, "Wait, have I heard this one?" So, yeah, Abatement of the Sun is a sheer cliff face without handholds, something for only the most experienced metal climbers. When my brain needed the sugar high of dueling leads, I would've thwapped this with a rolled-up newspaper harder than a city slicker seeing a scorpion for the first time.
But now, I love this stuff. There are one hundred riffs, and nothing is getting in the way of me loving them. And there's variance, although it takes some time to notice. It's subtle, but once you key into it, you hear all the neat tempo shifts and depth-expanding flourishes. And the mood is incredible, sustained entirely over Abatement of the Sun's running time; funereal, a morbid vision that would jolt Hieronymus Bosch awake. A big-ass mouth with a lot of teeth, in other words. It makes sense once you live down there long enough.
Knife - Wound (self-released)
I didn't know bands could still sound like this. It might as well be 1993 for Knife, a new duo from Australia. Two mates grabbing a drum machine at a pawn shop, making good on a summer vacation spent listening to Godflesh and Meathook Seed. A demo here, shows there. Maybe an opening slot for Pitchshifter leads to a record deal. An EP drops alongside Nailbomb and gets buried. It sits in a used bin for years until I fish it out and some grizzled record store employee grunts a "nice one" while blithely judging my haul at check out. Except, nope, Knife's self-titled debut is new. Came out this year. Somehow.
Like, really, how? While we live in a world of decent free VSTs that'll get you close to certain sounds, I figured that the metallic, grinding thump of early industrial metal was outside the grasp of anyone without access to the old equipment. Even then, recording standards have changed enough to make recapturing it challenging. Some part of the production chain is bound to be different. Even if you have the ancient drum machine and the eight-track recorder and the mics and the amps and whatever else, something else might be state of the art and it's like stomping on a butterfly in a time travel tale. That small change still tweaks things enough to make your work come off like a reenactment instead of the real thing. This future-past uncanny effect is manifested in a lot of media that tries to pass as old. Think how local car dealership parodies never quite nail the magical shittiness of the genuine article. The camera isn't right. The editing isn't right. The final product looks...off, mainly because the tools used to capture it aren't junk and it's being finessed in a $100k digital editing suite by professionals.
In my mostly worthless opinion, this is what drags down a lot of music these days, especially now that it feels like most people want to relive different decades except this one.10 On the indie pop side, we're still deep in an era of deepfake Tears for Fears pretenders that can't quite dial in the before-their-time nostalgia.11 Instead of taking those songs on their own terms, you compare and contrast them to what they're imitating. And it's always…a little weird, like snapping Polaroids of a party and everyone is on a smartphone.12 These anachronisms would be fine if there's additional commentary on how that past informs this present or vice versa. Usually, though, it comes off as little more than a space-saver for a unique creative vision. The aesthetic loses something with each successive copy because no one seems to want to answer the question, "Are you doing this because it speaks to you or because it once spoke to someone else?"
So, yeah, all of this is to say that Knife sounding so authentic is a real achievement. And there's another edge that makes it intriguing. Tracks such as "All You Can Eat," the opener for this five-song set, are like some reformed crusty with an Amebix back-patch and Sore Throat memories mucking around with a brand new Ministry obsession. An assembly line churn and screaming-robot guitar tones, but with a vestigial Discharge musical sense and worldview. Neat. Couple that with Mark Jenkins's full-throated roar and James Salter's instruments afflicting you with the same degree of tinnitus as a sheet metal factory collapsing, and you have a pitch-perfect record. It's 1993, and this is a line of punk and metal that would soon be turned into a cul-de-sac, but it sounds super alive in Knife's retelling. Are the songs good, though?
My interest in industrial is admittedly minimal, so take what I write here with a grain of salt. The best stuff on Knife is, naturally, the loudest, when the sheer volume overwhelms the listener, such as on the particularly aggressive "Justice," a two-minute Prong-y burner that only offers respite in the form of a standalone overcooked bass carbonizing its amp. "Justice" is a hell of a racket, thrashing around wildly while cuffed in the Nurse With Wound noise as punishment side of industrial I tend to prefer. It's just…not much of a song. Not that anything in this style needs to be a complicated, multilayered epic worthy of Trent Reznor, but the simplicity of "Justice" shows you everything during the first spin. There's not a whole lot of reason to return unless industrial metal is extremely your thing.
As I mentioned, industrial metal isn't mine since its goals are different from what I typically value as a listener. For instance, Knife feels too mechanized to me. Granted, that's the point, that industrial's swing-less march inoculates itself against anything perceived as funky. But even Fear Factory circa Demanufacture had some honey in its hips. So when a more human grooving riffing pops up on "Warmonger," probably the strongest track on the EP, it absolutely shines. It's the one time I think, Oh, that's a good riff, instead of, I didn't know bands could still sound like this. Still, worth a listen, either way.
Want to keep up with what I think is good this year? Follow my lists on RateYourMusic: 2020, 2021, 2022.
FROM THE VAULTS
Cadavalanche - Death Forever (2016)
Right: Cadavalanche. I'm choosing to interpret that as an avalanche of cadavers. The portmanteau looks ungainly on the page but has a nice mouth feel when you say it aloud. So too do couplets like:
Rapturous incision, spare me your restraint
Super phallic flagellation, for how long must I resist your taint
RIGHT. This Australian death metaller's debut EP, Death Forever, is that kind of collection. It's a filthy, horny little thing, a junkyard satyr lusting for death. It also feels...wetter than the armpits of a mortician working overtime on the hottest and most humid day of the year. Naturally, this predilection for gonzo splatter and gore engorgement won't land for everyone. Your one-second litmus test is that the first thing you hear on opener "Nymphored" is a computerized voice saying "fuck me to death." But if you like death metal riffs and like them played fast, I think it's worth dabbing some Vicks under your schnoz and surveying this crime scene.
Rommell the Foul is the brains behind this Newcastle, New South Wales, troop and is joined by a few session players: Ryan the Huthnance (bass, guitars), Nic le Nancarrow (guitars), and Tim the Enchanter (vocals). I gather that the players aren't meant to be the focus, though. "Performed by Men, Perfected by Machine," says the Bandcamp liner notes. In a sense, that's the Cadavalanche story: utter inhumanity.
Here's the twist: Cadavalanche is...surprisingly listenable as far as intense, twisted, inhumane death metal goes? It reminds me of something like Visceral Bleeding rerouted through fast, thrashier Nile and further augmented by early Darkane melodic embellishments. In other words, it's brutal and catchy. For all of the turbo sections that sound like a twister sucked up a scalpel factory, Death Forever is also loaded with earworms.13
The opening to "Analgesia" is like something Arsis might've cooked up if you made James Malone listen to nothing but Felix Mendelssohn. This balance of brutality and brain candy is pretty Slugdgean, really, in that it gives death metal an ever-so-slight musical theater energy that seems to temper the extremity. Like, you could imagine almost getting your friends into it if it wasn't about BDSM so wicked it would make a cenobite blush.
Cadavalanche's crowning achievement is "Angel Lust," a sweeping melo epic with an extended bridge that sounds like an awed Aeon was commissioned to write about the cosmos and reached into Back to Times of Splendor-era Disillusion's bag to get it done.14 The solo at 4:38 never fails to make me perk up like a deer hearing a suspicious branch cracking. Total fight or flight response. Gets me every time. Rules. It proceeds this couplet: "Diamond as I die hard/ The taste of her heart as she cries." Haha, chrrrist. There's the duality, the majestic and the profane. Soaring solos that singe the sky. And then, when it comes time to end: BLECH!
BUT I GOT ONE THING LEFT TO SAY
Random Band of the Day has resumed, although you got an early one because I am an idiot. To that end, I don't know if the emails are going out to everyone or not because Substack is needlessly confusing. I think you have to subscribe to it in its own subsection. If you get it and you wanted it, cool. If you get it and you didn't want it, my bad. If you didn't get it and you wanted it, I have no idea.
Another VaccZine that's extremely light on the reviews. I haven't had time to write! Again, my bad!
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The core Nightmarer trio of Simon Hawemann (guitars), Paul Seidel (drums), and John Collett (vocals) has expanded to include Keith Merrow (Merrow, YouTube gear fame) and Nicholas McMaster (Krallice, Geryon, Edenic Past, etc.).
I can't get over that kids can now be grindcore Maria Minervas and slay in a bedroom. Sure, on the drums side, I guess we've been heading this way since Catch 33's Drumkit From Hell, Agoraphobic Nosebleed's "drum solo" on Agorapocalypse, and the rise of Ugritone, but it's still quite the technological leap, none the less. Granted, Cryptic Clarity's rhythms aren't the Turing Test-obliterating work of Mare Cognitum. It ain't shabby, though. And, in that context, the guitars are really something. Anup Sastry provided proof of concept of programmed guitars in the metalsphere, but couldcareless's shred sounds nearly indistinguishable from something like Sectioned or Xythlia, i.e., living, breathing guitarists. Many widdles! Knowing the talent curve of YouTube, some 12 year old is now working out how to play this for real.
James Plotkin is your masterer (*tries singing that like James Hetfield*), which is why it sounds huge. I could make a tortured comparison and say that tapping the person behind Atomsmasher/Phantomsmasher makes a lot of sense for couldcareless, but I will refrain from doing so.
This is even funnier to me post-big beat.
The counterpoint is that human brains are made to find patterns, so things will eventually make sense if you listen to them long enough. Think Steve Reich's tape loops, that deal. I suppose that's fair, that the flow I am so impressed by isn't inherent and is instead a product of my OCD-riddled noodle. Thanks, I guess? I think that gives me far too much credit as a listener.
And, I mean, maybe it was always this way. Maybe Tower of Rome, The Great Redneck Hope, or any of the other As the Sun Sets scions also had penetrating lyrics and I just missed it. Maybe a bunch of cybergrind bands were programming stuff at this level back in the day and didn't sound like Clams Casino got a star in Super Mario Bros. Again, I just know what I know, which I've established is not a lot.
The mawkishness I have in mind is the emo stretch of Between the Buried and Me's "Shevanel Cut a Flip," which, much like any Dennis Hopper line from Blue Velvet, is a very confusing thing to yell at someone who has no idea what you're referencing.
Some smart people can pull off dumb with aplomb. Most cannot. To that end, may I introduce you to Bakteria, one of the worst things ever made. Anders and Jens Johansson, plus Jonas Hellborg and Jeff Scott Soto. h/t to Captain for this one. Putrid.
I remember Keith Berry produced a series of intentionally low volume ambient/minimalism experiments that explored this effect. If you've ever listened to the radio quietly in the car and thought, Whoa, what is this song, and then turned it up and you were like, Oh, it's this song, that’s the effect I'm talking about.
If someone wants to cover Dag Nasty's "Never Go Back" with me, though, I am game. Meta.
In metal, what differentiated bands and made them crackle was usually born out of necessity unless they had Mutt Lange on speed dial. The records sound the way they sound because the people involved either (a) didn't have much choice or (b) didn't know any better. When necessity becomes an artistic decision, a scene-setting trope, it neuters some of the element's power. I still love the sound of an HM-2, but it takes talent, perfect conditions, and a distinct point of view to make it feel as bracing as Nihilist. You can't simply dime the pedal and hope for the best. I mean, you can, but I'm not going to like it.
The unscrupulous historian injecting favorable modern concerns into the interior monologues of their subjects is related to this, but not quite this.
In that respect, Cadavalanche reminds me of another death metal band that was formed, perhaps not coincidentally, the same year Death Forever was released: Depravity.
That Disillusion album title gets more ironic by the day.