| Artist: | Amebix | Album: | Arise |
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| Year: | 1985 | Genre: | Hardcore, Punk, Metal, Death Metal |
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Review:
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Amebix. A name I thought might be forgotten, and hoped would not be. It isn't. :) I'm especially keen to review Arise, as it is part of my own history. Though the sound of that snare drum ringing through that old Art reverb sucks, in my view, doing NO justice to the great sound that slammed from the fifty foot stone walls and wood floors of Trinity Hall during a soundcheck, and again at the end of the evening when they played, following Disorder, Chaos UK and others, this album brings back those times to me. The hideous glee in the shout of "Axeman!", the chugging guitar, and grinding Thunder 1A bass, the galloping rant in riffs and chorus. The mad and whimsical guitar work in Largactyl, a song that is caught between the hilarity and the tragedy of what is done to people when they have to take that stuff as part of 'treatment'.. This stuff brought together two scenes previously independent. I remember nights of pogoing shirtless to this stuff in a crowd full of metal heads, and punks with studded jackets so heavy they were like armour, and psychobillies with feral attitudes circling the crowd like wolves and picking off people who were reckless or drunk enough to be careless of them. We didn't know what a mosh pit was in those days (term hadn't been invented yet), but most mosh pit crowds would have envied those days and apparently do, judging by bands like Sepultura that now quote Amebix as major influence. Amebix were caught between two views, I thought, and it showed at the time. On the one hand, they urged people to arise out of the mire of mindless acceptance of control, to avoid becoming part of the down and out wino and drug culture that was always entirely too close to the punk scene here (Bristol, UK), and at the same time, they sailed too close to that wind themselves. I know this is true, I lived with them for long enough to be part of it, and I don't miss that part of it at all. The presence of two tracks, Drink And Be Merry, and Arise itself, best show up this mixed view, and especially the tone of the first of those two songs. The sharpest view of this is in the berating bit of speech Rob delivers to the audience (us, effectively, and we knew who was who and in most need of that admonishment), but Amebix weren't any freer than the rest of us. Which doesn't detract from the fact that they tried. Most of us who survived all that stuff pulled away to find our own ways, but few if any tried to make it possible for a whole group of people at once. There is only one other band I can think of to parallel them, for that grand raw onslaught of ordered mayhem, and the visceral pleasure it gives, and I actually like that band better, if anything. Bile. Still, Slave (from cradle to grave) is a track to rival the best on Bile's Teknowhore, and I rarely felt adrenaline better than when they played that for us live. Then they'd deliver the Darkest Hour, right after that, just like on the record, and it would raise hairs on the back of my neck, and it was glorious, I kid you not. >:)  |
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| Author: | Lostgallifreyan | Reviewed: | 25-02-2005 |
| Artist: | Bile | Album: | Teknowhore |
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| Year: | 1996 | Genre: | Industrial, Hardcore, Punk, Metal, Electronic |
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Review:
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It starts in with something like dread, heavier than the gloomiest symphony. It then opens out like a flower made of tearing metal. It's ugly and beautiful. It grips and it doesn't let go, not even when it's finished. It also repays repeated listening, so much that it makes sense to try to understand why. Most hardcore is fun, or good angry noise, but not exactly deep. Bile set out to explore hatred, and anger, despair, loss, any amount of things that make us hurt really badly, and I don't understand all of that, but as Krztoff has said, it's up to us to think, to find that for ourselves. There is a narrative, of sorts, specially in the multi-part sequence of songs that end the set, which deliberately externalises the kinds of inner shit that can happen when love gets screwed up. It works too, this stuff. It might not be what most people want, but there's no doubt it does what it's meant to do if you listen when times are really bleak. It purges something and makes real light afterwards, not the superficial kind that comes with trying to avoid that pain. I guess it's like cinnamon.. the stuff makes me feel sick, except if I'm sick already. On the other hand, Bile only very rarely make me feel ill. :) Technically this stuff is brilliant. It's not a studied brilliance, at least not on the face of it, and Krztoff has said his longer experimental stuff is more a stream of consciousness than a plan of any kind, but that sort of proves a point. Even now, most metal bands use synthesisers for padding, a few aetherial ambiences like some gothic movie, but Bile have taken them to something much more completely involved with the rest of the sound. I've done enough work on mixing these kinds of sounds to know that it's not easy to mix clearly, and still find more room for the kind of crushing crescendos that Bile can deliver. It actually takes more skill than mixing clean sounds, as the headroom is tight, so one or two decibels make a LOT of difference in the way the sound expresses itself. Many more famous and apparently cleverer bands have struggled for years to push for such effective sound, and failed. Either they sound polished to the point of lifelessness, or they sound so full-on it's just wearisome to listen to. Bile haven't made these errors, and they've shown a huge number of people, including me, how it can be done. Anyway, I don't know what else to say, I'm going to just listen to the rest of this, it rocks.  |
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| Author: | Lostgallifreyan | Reviewed: | 14-08-2004 |
| Artist: | Bile | Album: | Biledegradable |
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| Year: | 1997 | Genre: | Industrial, Hardcore, Ambient, Electronic |
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Review:
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I read a review where a woman said this sounded like Anal Cunt. Reading that, it wasn't sure if it was a compliment or not. I've heard Anal Cunt though, and I reckon it wasn't. >:) It's NOT a great album, either. It sounds muddy and slack. Directionless. And sleazy. Which is probably one of the good things actually. It's good for brooding to, as well, but mainly because you ending up thinking about dark stuff while waiting for the next song.. Still, I don't mind that. One of the things that make Bile so good is they're not afraid of sound bad. Tangerine Dream, another favourite of mine, are very different but have this in common. They probably take themselves too seriously though, and I suspect Bile don't. Anyway, both bands have produced things so great it's hard to imagine how they could come out of any band that dared not take those risks. I prefer this to those bands who always sound perfect, and somehow dead, whether their releases are live or studio works. There are times when nothing but Bile will do, and this is part of the ride. To be fair, even Biledegradable wakes up a bit by the time Fascion is played. And while I'd be cool about never hearing My Generation again, ever, that second instance has a long and mesmerising sequence that would do well in a good horror movie, and as it's said this was the original intro, I wish it had been left unchanged. That first track sucks. Not good, in comparison, at all. The Phantom God is though. While it tends to repeat things a bit lazily, the echoes of earlier material are not the same as that laziness. (Something the review I read seems to miss). They work well, and there are things happening in this, as is usual when Krztoff takes the time to rant a bit musically, at length, that are good enough to draw full attention for a long time. The last track, Planet Weather Control, continues with some of the more directed feeling that was set up in the previous track. It's like a night ride through a landscape so ghoulishly compelling that even sleeping passengers will be waking to look out at it.  |
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| Author: | Lostgallifreyan | Reviewed: | 26-08-2004 |
| Artist: | Cynic | Album: | Focus (Remastered) |
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| Year: | 2004 | Genre: | Death Metal, Rock, Jazz, Avantgarde, Gothic Rock |
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Review:
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I don't know how to talk about Cynic, but I want to try. There's death metal here, the kind that hammers out beats like Nile do, but it fluently moves to jazz, with a bass like Jaco Pastorius plays, and a lucid harmony that works with the metal like the colours in oil on water that flows round the exposed and corroded steel reinforcements of wrecked buildings. There's a vocoder on some of the voices, beaming them through this soundscape like something tunneling in from a very different space. Everything is virtuosic, almost scary. This is an age where metal-heads have earnt the right to tell the teachers of formal music how real music should be played. It's not just playing with styles anymore, it's weaving new things with them, expressing things as satisfying as a symphony. Some might still think it a pretension hard to take, but I reckon it's time to cut the crap and get into this because it isn't going to go away. It's going to get better. It's like when punk happened. People were playing anything, guitars, saxes, synthesizers, anything that they could use to say what they wanted. And then there were those who only accepted the limited four-piece band, like the Clash, as a standard. Nice to see such limits being broken so convincingly. |
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| Author: | Lostgallifreyan | Reviewed: | 07-11-2004 |
| Artist: | Dirt | Album: | Black And White |
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| Year: | 1999 | Genre: | Punk |
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Review:
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A two-CD set of everything they did. I'm not sure what the release year was, but it covers everything from 1980 to the 90's. Dirt are a punk band that have had too little attention considering how good they are. I had the first two releases in 1981 and 1982 (a 7" EP and a 12" live 45 rpm EP). I liked them a lot, I think they were maybe better live that Crass, but they must have got even better as they went on, judging by the stuff on these CD's, whereas a lot of punk bands were only at their best early on. They really are shockingly good, it's real pyrotechnics, their sound, I'm surpised they aren't much more widely known. Also surprised I haven't listened to them more. They cover a lot of ground too, they can sound like themselves, all the time, but also like Crass, Plasmatics, Amebix, Vice Squad, early Toyah, Honey Bane... and that's just part of what they can do. Some excellent metal guitaring in some of it too. I saw them live in 1981. They were good then, but if I'd known they'd continued to get this good I'd have gone to see them often. And, I hate to say this, but they make Bad Religion sound totally ordinary. They can play with the same tight control and melody and invention, but they never lost the raw energy they began with years before. That's extremely unusual. I often hear good playing, or enthusiastic and aggressive performance, but rarely both in equal and extreme measure like this. |
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| Author: | Lostgallifreyan | Reviewed: | 11-04-2005 |
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