Low

Record Review: Low’s C’mon

Low: C'monLow: C’mon (Sub Pop, 4/12/11)

Low: “Try to Sleep”

[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/8631.mp3|titles=Low: “Try to Sleep”]

After more than 15 years of stringing together grim, minimalist lullabies that are equally at home on long walks through moonless winter eves or in well-lit churches, slowcore stalwart Low has begun to experiment a bit more with the trappings of, and opportunities created by, modern music. On its ninth record, C’mon, the band blends its signature brand of melancholia with bouncing, uptempo electronic textures, giving the 11 songs a lively, volatile feel.

In the third track, “Witches,” guitarist/singer Alan Sparhawk advises listeners to confront their problems with a baseball bat, and in the same spare voice, he tells guys who “are trying to act like Al Green” that they are weak. He sings this over drummer/vocalist Mimi Parker’s characteristically haunting “ooos” and “ahhs,” while a choppy, lighthearted guitar riff drifts over barely audible acoustic-guitar (or banjo?) plucking. Much like the song “Hatchet” on the band’s previous effort, Drums and Guns, “Witches” is a catchy number that adeptly references select facets of pop-music history and, in doing so, reveals a playful side of the band.

Liturgy

The Metal Examiner: Liturgy’s Aesthethica

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Liturgy: AesthethicaLiturgy: Aesthethica (Thrill Jockey, 5/10/11)

Liturgy: “Returner”

[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/03-Returner.mp3|titles=Liturgy, “Returner”]

For a moment, Brooklyn-based quartet Liturgy seemed poised to steer black metal into a bold new direction. Renihilation, the group’s debut full-length from 2009, showed that even while employing the classic tenets of black metal, it was possible to push the genre forward and put it in a more efficient package. Yet whereas that album made a statement, the band’s follow-up, Aesthethica, turns many of those tactics into a mere reminder.

Liturgy comes armed once more with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s mostly indecipherable howl and quasi-anthemic guitar lines blasted with co-pilot Bernard Gann, both positioned over Greg Fox’s machine-gun drumming and Tyler Dusenbury’s frenetic bass lines. But rather than let its pieces work alongside each other, Liturgy places its components atop each other, turning its formidable wall of sound into an unfiltered onslaught.

By most standards, Liturgy still has a fairly forward-thinking vision of what black metal can be, reaching out of the genre playbook at will. Odd-pattern tremolo picking gives “Tragic Laurel” a progressive feel that leaves the door open for the sucker punch of its main section, and “True Will” stacks layers of screams over a seesaw chord progression, interrupted only by a skipping-CD breakdown.

Tombs

Tombs: Political, Apocalyptic Metal

The members of Brooklyn-based metal trio Tombs take pride in their work ethic and don’t bother worrying about what others might think. As for the band’s sound, front-man Mike Hill says, “The music itself is just intensity.”

Jono El Grande

Q&A: Jono El Grande

Jono El Grande: Phantom StimulanceJono El Grande: Phantom Stimulance (Rune Grammofon, 2/1/11)

Jono El Grande: “Borrelia Boogie”

[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Jono_El_Grande_Borrelia_Boogie.mp3|titles=Jono El Grande: “Borrelia Boogie”]

The off-kilter art rock of Norwegian bandleader, composer, singer, guitarist, and kazoo player Jono El Grande is like candy to fans of Frank Zappa and whimsical, progressive rock. In his 10 years of playing with The Luxury Band (née The Jono El Grande Orchestra), he has released four albums, including the multi-layered Neo-Dada in 2009 and the raucous Phantom Stimulance this winter.

Though he has enjoyed success in his native Norway, Jono’s delightfully eccentric music isn’t yet as well known overseas. Here he opens up about composing, why there’s no such thing as a “live favorite,” and how songs can take more than a decade to record.

According to your label, only one song on your newest record, Phantom Stimulance, is newly composed, with the rest being unreleased live favorites, compiled to commemorate your 10 years as a bandleader and 15 as a composer. Why did you decide to record these songs to celebrate this occasion?

There are two brand-new compositions on the album, not one — “Borrelia Boogie” and “Rise Of The Baseless Press-Base Toy.” The other songs are completely rearranged versions of songs that never reached an album and new arrangements of earlier-released songs that have evolved so much on stage during the years that they deserved to be released again, with new titles. “Live favorites” is a term that the record company came up with. Even if this record is presented as an anniversary, it is nevertheless the music that is most important. Always.

Why hadn’t the songs on Phantom Stimulance been recorded previously? Were they more suited to live performance than the studio? Are there any live favorites still yet to be recorded?

I am a composer who likes to develop compositions over time at live shows by adding new themes and parts to them. My working process is very often like this: I write the basic scores at home, then the band rehearses the music, and then we play the material live and mold it until I feel that it is ready to be recorded. And I never know exactly when each song is ready. The reason why these tracks haven’t been recorded previously is that, on earlier albums, there were other compositions that I felt were more ready than ones on Phantom Stimulance. You may call them “live favorites” — to me these tunes were the hard ones, the ones that I had to work a little extra with to make them worthy to be immortalized on an album. We used 40 to 60 tracks on each song. “La Dolce Vidda” contains 10 drum tracks, I think.

It was actually quite the same with Neo-Dada. Some compositions there date back to the ’90s. And to the last question: yes, there will be more “live favorites” to be released in the future. I just have to compose them first.

Morrow vs. Hajduch

Morrow vs. Hajduch: Fabric’s A Sort of Radiance

Scott Morrow is ALARM’s music editor. Patrick Hajduch is a very important lawyer. Each week they debate the merits of a different album.

Fabric: A Sort of RadianceFabric: A Sort of Radiance (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego, 4/5/11)

Fabric: “Camera”

[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Fabric_Camera.mp3|titles=Fabric: “Camera”]

Hajduch: Having folded a few years back, experimental music label Mego has come back full force as Editions Mego.  Initially started as something of a reissue label (pressing remastered, deluxe editions from label faces such as Fennesz and Kevin Drumm), Editions Mego has begun cranking out brand-new releases, most notably the most recent releases from Emeralds and its guitarist, Mark McGuire.

The Emeralds working relationship continues with the formation of sub-label Spectrum Spools, headed by Emeralds member (and prolific solo artist) John Elliott. Spectrum Spools’ debut release is an LP by Chicago artist Fabric, who mines the same kosmische layered-synthesizer territory as many of the above artists with great success.

Syntaks

Syntaks: A Dream-Pop Love Child

Though started as a solo project by Jakob Scøtt, Danish dream-pop band Syntaks is now a duo, filled out by Scøtt’s muse and significant other, Anna Cecilia. As a result, the band’s most recent album, Ylajali, is a true labor of love.

Grails

Guest Playlist: Grails picks the 11 best songs for OD-ing

Grails: Deep PoliticsGrails: Deep Politics (Temporary Residence, 3/8/11)

Grails: “I Led Three Lives”

[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Grails-I-Led-Three-Lives.mp3|titles=Grails: “I Led Three Lives”]

The newest album from Portland, Oregon-based instrumental-rock band Grails, Deep Politics, got a nod in a recent installment of This Week’s Best Albums. Mixing cinematic compositions with worldly sounds and a little ’60s psychedelia, it encapsulates, perhaps better than any of its other releases, what Grails is capable of as a band.

For its guest playlist, Grails made 11 picks based on a new, tongue-in-cheek method of determining a song’s quality.

The 11 Best Songs for OD-ing
by Grails

Emil Amos: At a shitty party some years ago, a man was heard to have said in a drunken defense of the Eagles, “More people have shot up and died to this band than will ever hear ours!”

That man was me. After this rip in the logical fabric of the universe was torn, a new yardstick was introduced to the high-record-collector culture around the concept of “Can you OD to it, though?” And then the inevitable schools of thought naturally followed: “Is it a harsh track to OD to, or more mellow/inviting?”

See what you can get out of these, enjoy yourself, and don’t die!

Tangerine Dream: “Ricochet”