Town Portal: Vacuum Horror (2011)

Vacuums Freak My Dog Out

Instrumental prog rockers Town Portal asked me to review their free-to-download debut Vacuum Horror.

I listened to a couple songs from it, and it reminds me of either Pelican or Russian Circles, or both. I don't remember exactly which one, just that I didn't really care for either of those bands. If that's your thing, and if you think it's clever to title an interlude song "Segway" like the personal transport, instead of "segue" like a thing that connects two other things, you ought to check this out.

For me, it doesn't make much of an impact. I don't hate it, but I don't like it either. So I'm issuing summary judgment against the band on this one. Nifty album art, though.

Happy Birthday!

Happy 61st birthday to my favorite actor, Kurt Russell. Yes, I will be going to an early St. Patrick's day party, but what I will really be celebrating is his birthday. I'll probably be watching Soldier this evening, which I think is his strongest performance even if it's not his strongest film.

Also, looking forward to Tarantino's Django Unchained. Russell will be appearing in it, although I think it may be a small role.

Music Production and the Loudness War

Magnetic Death to Your Ear Drums

 

 

The vast majority of my music consumption is through headphones. There are many advantages to this--it reduces outside distractions, clearly reproduces every detail of the songs, and allows me to pick up on production that plays with the stereo channels. But there are also disadvantages, the biggest of which is that, from album to album I have to adjust the volume. That's even worse when playing my entire library on shuffle. I've tried options such as the "Sound Check" on my iPod, but that just makes everything flat and shitty-sounding.

You would think that by now there would be some kind of standard or technology to make sure that everything is at the same volume. Sadly, that's not the case. And things keep getting worse.

A recent promo from groove/technical metal band Misguided Aggression is a particularly bad offender. Upon playing it, I quickly had to turn the volume down, literally all the way. Even so, it was an unpleasant listening experience, and despite two attempts I couldn't make it through more than a couple songs. As such, I issue summary judgment against the band. (With a cheap pair of ear buds you wouldn't have that problem so much, because they lose a lot of signal between the player and the speakers.)

The Why

Why do people want to make the production louder in the first place? The simple fact is that people like their music loud. It sounds better when it's loud. When you have your own volume control, you can turn it up yourself, but this problem began with jukeboxes, where no one adjusted the machine's volume between songs. If your song was louder than the one that preceded it, then it sounded better, at least in an environment where there is a lot of background noise or the speakers are of low quality. This resulted in labels, producers, and musicians engaging in an arms race to make their recordings louder, to sell more singles.

Eluveitie: Helvetios (2012)

M. Night Folkmetal

In 1999, M. Night Shyamalan wowed audiences with the mega-blockbuster The Sixth Sense. Everything came together perfectly--the right story, the right actors, the right tone--making for a film that was so popular it spawned a number of cliches and launched Shyamalan into superstardom. The writer/director's previous work never hinted at such brilliance, and his subsequent work has eventually proven that he was just a flash in the pan.

Eluveitie is folk metal's M. Night Shyamalan. In 2008, they blew just about everyone away with the brilliant Slania. In a pure, magical moment, they combined folk metal with melodic death metal so perfectly that it's never been matched before, or since. Particularly not by them. They experimented with a purer folk approach, then unsuccessfully tried to re-hash Slania. Now, they've once again attempted, and failed, to recapture any kind of magic.

Tort: Tort (2012)

Sadly, Not a Concept Album about Medical Malpractice

Tort's self-titled debut is the final album out of three submitted to me by TotalRust. I question a few things about this one. First of all, their logo looks a lot like the Blair Witch's symbol, so I guess there's that. But mostly I question their name. I'm all about the legal thing--I am Full Metal Attorney, after all--but why name yourself after the term for a civil wrong? Were "Sin" and "Crime" too obvious?

Anyway, the Spanish band has a good sound. When you compare them directly to Weedeater, you'll see a lot of similarities, including the fuzzy, heavy sound and the raspy vocals. It illustrates how blurry the line can be between sludge and stoner doom, with Tort being the former, on balance.

Embrional: Absolutely Anti-Human Behaviors (2012)

Not Fully Formed

Guest review by Patrick, proprietor of Beards Etc., home of metal, beards, and more.

Embrional are a Polish death metal outfit founded in 2003. Their second full-length album, Absolutely Anti-Human Behaviors, is set for release at the end of March. This record was my first exposure to the band.

Embrional take an atypical approach which sonically separates them from other Polish death metal acts. This divergence primarily lies in their guitar work. They employ a wide range of timing shifts, and many of their guitar riffs are peculiarly dissonant. Unusual chord progressions trade back and forth with the more standard death metal fare, giving the entire experience a somewhat experimental feel. The drums blaze away, providing a more conventional backdrop against which to set the guitar work. The vocals are solid death metal growls, though nothing terribly out of the ordinary.

Psycroptic: The Inherited Repression (2012)

Tasmanian Devils Deliver Again

Reviews of technical death metal albums usually include a lot of criticisms. It's too sterile. It's just wankery, without any real songwriting. They can play their instruments, but they can't make you feel anything.

Similarly, reviews of bands from out-of-the-way places usually say something along the lines of, "If they were from (London, New York, Oslo, etc.) then no one would care."

Psycroptic, of course, is a technical death metal band. They are from the ass end of the world, in Tasmania, better known for the Looney Tunes character Taz than anything else. And yet, none of those criticisms can possibly be leveled at them.

Horrendous: The Chills (2012)

Old-School Death Metal Release #838175

I've talked about old-school death metal at least two dozen times on this blog, but even after two-plus years of its resurgence, I'm still interested in the best the style has to offer. Horrendous has birthed debut The Chills. It's the best one since Disma hit us last year.

I've done so many reviews of this genre the formula should be familiar by now. If you're a regular reader or a fan of the style yourself, you should be aware of the various permutations of OSDM. True to their spread-out geography (they hail from all over the east coast), Horrendous have created a blood-slick crossover between the best Floridian death and the best Swedish death, both circa 1991. It's as if they camped out somewhere in the mid-Atlantic on a ship full of zombies for the last two decades, surviving on canned beans and live rats.

Through Emptiness v. Demo 2012

v.

There are probably still a few people out there who are confused about the difference between technical music and progressive music. Two demos recently submitted to me perfectly illustrate the difference.

The international (Swedish/Russian) duo Wall of the Eyeless gave me a copy of Through Emptiness, their four-song 2011 demo. The first thing I noticed was the kind of cool abstract/surrealist art, which is pretty disturbing despite the not-so-metal color tones. Behind that art is a fine example of what progressive death metal can sound like. They have a nice growl, a traditional death metal tuning (not ultra-downtuned) with a somewhat blackened tone, and a raw production. Their songwriting is dynamic, with plenty of soft/acoustic/clean sections, tempo shifts, and riff changes.

Ancestors Blood: When the Forest Calls (EP 2009)

Grammar Nazi, Genre Nazi

I am a grammar nazi. As such, the name Ancestors Blood drives me crazy. I try not to think too much about it while listening to the music. Their EP When the Forest Calls was submitted to me by Heidens Hart.

Aside from being a grammar nazi, I’m also a bit of a genre nazi. This is yet another Viking metal band miscategorized as “pagan black metal” on Metal Archives. It’s fairly standard Viking metal at that, with a straight-forward black metal spine, girded with ribs made of steady drumming, and flesh made of synth, all working together to create an epic-sounding body flowing with, of course, the blood of ancestors. Their standout features are the desperate-sounding vocals and bass that’s very prominent in the mix. The latter is especially endearing to me, as one who used to fancy himself a bass player.