Musings on music, old, new, popular and obscure. Post punk, metal, hip-hop, funk, and rock in general. A music fan with a desire to lose boundaries on what should and should not be listened to writes about experience in music from a listener's perspective, hopefully unhindered by prior expectation.
CAVEAT: Metal, especially death metal, and even more especially sub-subgenres like grindcore (or, worse, goregrind) are not everyone's cup of tea. I ask that, dear reader, you willingly submit yourself to some of this and take it as a curiosity or an analysis: it's an emotional and personal writing style I have, it's true, but this is music, despite the claims of some, and there's something in it. I'm not asking you to like it, I'm asking you to listen to it with an open mind, to hear what there is to hear in it--after all, that's my own goal here, and my own approach to music, as best I can manage it. Good luck--this band hit a few different styles, and I urge you to sample each of them as I embed them for the sake of this. Think of it as an academic exploration in curiosity, if you must.
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Recently, I was out at a local café and started a peculiar run of people across my path. I was served my slice of cake (I actually don't drink coffee, but cafés have the most interesting dessert foods) by a woman in a Satyricon shirt.
"Samael is an excellent album," I say, by way of hoping to skip ahead to actual discussion.
"What?" she says, as we all do when someone makes a non sequitur comment on our shirts. Well, I do it, as well, at least. "Oh!" she says as she realizes my seemingly random comment actually had a sensible origin. "I'm a little bigger on Dark Medieval Times."
"Oh, old school, then. You must be big on Darkthrone, too."
"Yeah."
And off it went. Later, I was at CD Alley (as usual) and a fellow shopper was searching for earlier Death albums--earlier, that is, than their very last one, Sound of Perseverance, the only one in stock at the time there--and had a brief conversation. Back again a few days later and I was recommending Kylesa too a woman shopping there at the same time I was.
Vocals in a band can be something of a peculiarity. I listen to a number of artists that at least primarily lack them, and enjoy many of those artists on into the "upper echelons" of my taste in music. My affections for Goblin, Aphex Twin, Mogwai alone are enough that when they come up with some people it's with the acknowledgment that their appreciation stems from my own and the sharing of it. But instrumental music isn't always for everyone--heck, all three of those artists have used vocals in one way or another¹.
But vocals are more likely to be a splitting point for people, it seems. Sure, the 80s are maligned in general for their drum sound a lot of the time, it having become so dominant that The Church had their third album, Seance, rendered with gated reverb drums basically without their knowledge, let alone their consent. That, however, tends to be more association and generalized preference, and it hasn't had a major effect on things like popularity of songs overall. In a sense that might confuse the issue, it's similar to the usage of heavily auto-tuned vocals in the modern era, which tends to bug a lot of the same crowd that hates gated reverb. No judgment here, incidentally--but there is truly plenty of crossover there.
Unusual, especially off-key, non-melodic, grating, unusually pitched, or strangely toned or timbred voices can rapidly put people off an entire body of work. Some will even forego an artist's work until someone covers it, simply because the original author's voice is inexpert, amateurish, or just plain weird. Respect is occasionally given to these artists by folks who can't stand their voices, because it has nothing to do with the song itself.
To ease us into something that will eventually start annoying the hell out of some readers, let's start with the voice of one Tom Waits:
About two years ago, I went out to see some friends that I only ever see once a year. Occasionally, we'd exchange gifts, partly because two of them had birthdays right around that time, partly because it was the only time we saw each other. That year, though, my friend Yannick handed me one and said he was looking through my ridiculously extensive Amazon Wishlist¹ and said he could not believe that I did not have the albums he was handing me.
Of course, one of them I did (kind of) already have, that being Death's Symbolic, which was the album recommended to me by the friend who was the most help in expanding my knowledge of metal (introducing me to At the Gates, Opeth, In Flames, Dark Tranquility, Emperor, Mayhem, Cancer, Cathedral, Cynic...that list would take a while to finish, so let's stop there) out of Death's entire catalogue. It's an excellent album, but, as I say, I did already kind of have it--I had the original CD issue, and this was the reissue that included 4-track and 8-track demos Chuck Schuldiner had recorded prior to the album's actual recording sessions.
So that was not any kind of revelation. What came alongside it, though, was Bad Brains' I Against I. My knowledge of Bad Brains came from my best friend in high school and college, Jogn, who knew or knew of a slew of punk bands, as far as I could tell as a relative--almost absolute, to be honest--neophyte. Now, as a result, I knew Bad Brains as a hardcore band. That strain of music that followed on the heels of punk and sped things up to a blur of sound and a wave of aggression in most cases. Some punk bands recorded limited hardcore releases, like the Dead Kennedys' In God We Trust, Inc. EP² or The Misfits' Earth AD, both of which are ridiculously short, as hardcore songs had (and have) a tendency to be very short.
Indeed, Bad Brains, the self-titled debut of the band of Rastafarian punks responsible for I Against I blasts through 15 songs in about 34 minutes, almost half of them clocking in at less than a minute and a half. I have that release on vinyl (though, originally, it only appeared on cassette), but, at the time I received I Against I, all I knew was The Omega Sessions, equivalent to a lot of the cheap-o artist compilations that can be found in bargain bins around the United States for relative chump change, though the prices for "real" (older) albums are rapidly approaching the same. Well, that's not exactly fair: the EP is titled this because it's a set of recordings made at Omega Recording Studios in Kensington, MD, rather than a bunch of random junk live tracks that the "Extended Versions" series throws out without telling people. But demos and live tracks in general are perceived very differently when we're talking about Bad Brains and not Kansas.
Interestingly, The Omega Sessions does include a very early version of the title track "I Against I," but, though it is structurally similar, it is a lot muddier, being a cheap demo recording, and it's played a bit more loose, lending itself more toward the songs on Bad Brains. Of course, these recordings also include the reggae leanings of Bad Brains, with songs like "Stay Close to Me" and the pseudo-dub of "I Luv I Jah."
To give you an idea, if you don't know, what both hardcore and early 'Brains sounds like, here's "Attitude" from their self-titled debut.
