Journal sielwolf's Journal: A Wilderness of Mirrors 2
Blinds hold in that blue sky, green cumulonimbus oak tops bustling. Boy, you've got a life to live. Things to do. This is not a household without a:
dining table, four chairs, stools at the breakfast bar, tall bookshelves not plastic bags held up to the ceiling, rugs for the long wood floors, paper... what, why is all of your prints leaning against the walls? What is this? Are you waiting? The grout doesn't set itself. The tile must be clean!
Ugh. "Shit you own" right? Can't be understood. And life on the road. Complications. The travelling salesman is a dead scene. Yet back came his lifestyle; back into fashion. Your house, your car, your clothes. It feeds out of that thing- dominating your life. Holidays, vactions, visitors from the interior... far far coasts. Divides us.
So I haven't had much time to write... anything. It's bad. Once out of practice it's hard to return. I have better things to write. I think about them all the time. But I don't. I wallow, thrash. Ineffectively. Only when I get new discs in (like the double of Nina Simone and more of The Persuasions) do I get that compelling urge to write. Could be worse: some folks need a beating to accomplish anything beyond their daily grind. I should write more. The concept appeals to me. But I have little for it. Now. At least.
But the queue fills up so we got to talk about these motherfuckers. Shit... I'm only estimating 32.71 album purchases this year??? Fuck! Last year I bought 74. That's a downward track if I ever saw one. *sigh*
This Drexciya release has been cooling in my collection for a while. I actually skipped over it last time because even after listening to it... many many times I still hadn't captured what I thought about it. There is a character to Drexciya that fascinates me. It is a complete concept. No, concept is the wrong word. That's something an advertising agency would package for you. There is no deal here. No exchange of signs. We aren't nodding knowingly to each other from the stuffy corners of some record shop. Drexciya isn't some half-farted out DJ pose. It's alien. The way the outside world stumbles on tribes closed off from the rest of the globe. It is complete. Drexciya is an idea, a value system and an aesthetic.
Yesterday I downloaded the great Line - A Snowstorm in a Globe 7" from BLEEP and the press release somehow tried to impose the idea that Line sounded like a cross between Drexciya and Joy Division...
Huh? Does this guy even know what he's talking about?
Listening to Drexciya - Neptune's Lair should explode that idea. The whole Detroit post-Techno Electro thing is really its own character. And James Stinson and (supposedly) Gerald Donald got together to do this album it was something absolute. The way that a Daft Punk album doesn't sound like any other French House album. Be it Air, Cassius, Arco5 or any of the thousand of other bands that popped up in their wake. The same instruments are carved in a way that sounds unlike anything else.
Drexciya is in equilibrium with the funk jazz stylings and nightdrive futurism that where at the heart of the Detroit sound. "Triangular Hydrogen Strain" is a perfect example. It has such a loose funky baseline and that harmonizing plankton bridge and dreamy keys are set on the rat-tat-tat of a collegiate 808 drum roll kick. The verse is a bit of wierd technicolor beeps that are soft without any of the minimalism of ambient. The song strolls where others either walk, run or lie affixed to the earth. "Devil Ray Cove" is the other end of this album. A sharp cantankerous dancefloor stomping. Floating, bubbling in black water of ocean depths. There are none of the normal club accoutrements to know what to think. The 8-bit horror show organs on "Oxyplasmic Gyration Beam" with that big sticky two-step beat. And if you really listen there's this biomechanical drill noise that turns on and off throughout it. Drexciya is a character by itself. Who knows what they see when they hear this album. There is an anxiety here. The confused gaggle of foreign voices on vactations. They are talking... can we ever find out? No album could ever really get away with the paisley composition of "Jazzy Fluids".
And I haven't even gotten to the best tracks. "Surface Terrestrial Colonization", "Lost Vessel", "Andreaen Sand Dunes", "Species of the Pod". But months into it I don't know what to make of Neptune's Lair. When I listen to Drexciya - Harnessing the Storm I see the pixelated tsunamis roll up on the Indonesian shores, wiping out villages and great black vessels. This album... something about it is outside of my grasp. Neptune's Lair is gestalt to the point of being atomic. There's no track that is thrust out by all the others to demand your consideration. So many great albums have perfect tracklists but there is always that one track that you go from being excited to certain that this album kills. Those one or two tracks that stop you dead in your tracks and have you reaching for the <<. As much as I like this album I can't find any hold on it. It dissipates through a clutch of fingers. The last time I felt this was driving through DC with Arpanet's Arpanet - Quantum Transposition on loop. I was at a loss. I couldn't tell if this song was real or a memory. Something happened.
Jesu. The headline reads Local Man Does Good. The man from Birmingham being neither local nor out saving children from burning buildings. Yet there is an overstream (not real mainstream; more the heavier current of the middle flows of more populated networks of independent rock critics) of building buzz around the man Justin K Broadrick. And I wonder- does he get the urge to say "I've been doing this fucking shit for two decades now... where the hell have you been, dumb ass?"
The closure of Godflesh might have been the best thing to happen for Godflesh fans as now all of his efforts seem to progress to their logical extremes. There is none of that missed opportunity of compromise of working all the ideas into one 11 track mix. The One True Idea of Godflesh hung over him and it sucked. Not because it hurt his art. No, the man always seems to have been tracing new lines of creativity. But because all the closed cult of subgenre seems to demand the rock of certainty from his music and that expectation seemed to be crushing. Take Godflesh - Us And Them: great, great, great album. Godflesh - I, Me, Mine works over the Amen break into the Godflesh mythos. So what did the heads think? They hated it. One of Godflesh's most despised. "Where's the fucking guitar?" "Lots more guitar this time," Justin placated when pressing for Godflesh - Hymns. And that album was great too. But the one thing that always attracted your boy to Godflesh, and one of the reasons why the band has become more important to him while others from the past fade to sepia was that the band never sounded the same. The horizons where always expanding. Yes, it was always loud, and heavy as shit but Godflesh was wielded like a tool to paint on so many canvases. From the first time you heard the hellish Rodan scrape of [track artist=Godflesh]Like Rats to the stabbing arcs that opened Godflesh - Xnoybis you knew that this wasn't just a regurgitate and serve band. There was something else here. Bigger than all of that. And yet the fans still demanded formula. And that might have killed it. Odd for an act that was regarded for its pushing of the vanguard. Yet youth falls to tradition to old senile metalheads fixed to their ways. Progression to entropy and Godflesh no more.
And that might have benefited all of us. Final, Tech Level 2, Curse of the Golden Vampire are out there killing noise in all sorts of spectacular ways (sad to report that K-Mart leaked in The Wire last month that Techno Animal is done and done. Similar story: fuckheads didn't understand how they had "Techno" in their name and weren't a club act nor that they didn't fall neatly into the orderings of backpacker hip-hop. The community got an L for that one).
Jesu, then, was where the rock was and the old hacks could still see the same things there. Jesu - Heartache brought us back to when albums scrapped to a close with 20 minute masterpieces like Godflesh - Pure II and Godflesh - Go Spread Your Wings. It was big and abstract. Then there was the eponymous and that contracted a bit and the tracks where of the nine/ten minute variety. They where a doom/dronecore thing that was spectacular and we loved it as it moved from epic to howl and returned. Jesu - Silver is the next datapoint on this extrapolation. The four tracks of this EP are all of easily digestible 6.5 to 8.5 minute length. Seconds into the opener Jesu - Silver and the evolution is obvious: the distortion, delays and effects are pushed back and Jesu sounds like... a rock band. As this EP looped I tried to imagine what I would think of this band if I had no memory and this was the first I heard of them. Jesu - Star is even more of a stunner. It's... hmmm. The indie kids understand this. PFM does a write-up and Jawbreaker and Jets to Brazil are what get dropped. There's a three letter word I'm trying to avoid using here because it used to mean something in the 90's when there was these bands in the hardcore scene and the jams where pretty good but then the word got out and now there's a generation of a generation who have no idea and the thing gets dropped out there to describe any bad-haired mope singing badly to his girlfriend who didn't go with him to the Junior Prom. "Star" is kind of like that earlier stuff. Some have made a point about its driving drums and though the sort that "Machine" would play in GF if it was by a human hand and not a program this track has the classical makings of all the classic emo (whoops! shit!!) sounds. It's sung in first person to an unidentified second. It's declarative and direct with it's allusion.
Now if the EP ended there I might be a bit underwhelmed. But it closes out with the two more complicated tracks. "Wolves" could have been at home on the debut with its long reverbed intro and wide warm tones. It is more classically Broadrick's style with the affected guitar forming the high-pitched saw wave. It's drone of the most sweet variety. It is soft but weighed with a momentous inertia. It drags just below the 60 BPM mark and feels unstoppable. It's lyrics are also more abstract. It doesn't give way to easily to exposition. And that's what I like best. It's an engrossing sound. Somewhere between "Star" and "Wolves" must have been a threshold. Silver goes out with "Dead Eyes", the most avant of the set. The song has a backing track that (after listening) sounds like the very same song backward masked. Strange... only in the 20th century would that reverse slip of cymbals and guitar recorded and then played backwards be familiar. Justin's vocals are distorted into oblivion so that when he sings it is just harmonics and no lead. As he returns to the verse (chorus) again there's a gentle harmony with strings. The masterstroke of the song is the drums with their deep stutter and then thick barrage of guitar. If this was Godflesh, folks would bitch. Here, as something new, and people are intrigued. Discovering what always was there for the first time. Baffling...
As an EP Silver is very good. As a Jesu release it could use some length. Though since Justin has now done two EPs and an LP in less than a year (with another in the pipe) that isn't much of a complaint. What this disc does is expand the palette of expectation even further. The shadow cast here goes much further than any of us can think.
I guess at this time it'd also be good for all the heads out there new to the regime to get acquainted with the anthems of Godflesh. I actually compiled all of these for a friend who hated "screaming and yelling" in music and he completely ate this mix up. For a whole decade people didn't know what to make of these industrial-grind ballads. You could shop them around to the kids debating Sunny Day Real Estate but they'd just hear the weight, roll their eyes and brush off that "metal" (and to only now be migrating to it and rejoicing in there discovery. It's sort of like the second guy to discover America. Respectable but still not anything to throw a party over). Here is Godflesh at its most melodic. So, if you've got time, get yourself acquainted again:
1. Godflesh - Xnoybis (You NEED to start with this track)
2. Godflesh - Monotremata
3. Godflesh - Merciless (Hard-soft dynamic. Almost worth throwing on the Fall of Because version for contrast)
4. Godflesh - Don't Bring Me Flowers
5. Godflesh - Nihil (Godflesh at its most biomechanical)
6. Godflesh - Cold World
7. Godflesh - Empyreal
8Godflesh - Bittersweet
9. Godflesh - Body Dome Light
10. Godflesh - Tiny Tears (I love the Tiny Tears EP. It totally makes Godflesh - Streetcleaner for me)
11. Godflesh - Wound
12. Godflesh - Dead Head (THIS is my jam, right here)
13. Godflesh - Suction (Not all of them soft. But this was less dirge than what came before and after)
14. Godflesh - Anthem (To open the second half. When I run for POTUS this is the song I'm coming out to for the nomination. Yeah... I'm getting elected- by a Junta!)
15. Godflesh - Frail
16. Godflesh - Almost Heaven (This track is boss with that bassline and funky squeal. Very headnod).
17. Godflesh - Messiah (Another great EP. Damn, Godflesh ruled the EP game too)
18. Godflesh - Sungod
19. Godflesh - Regal
20. Godflesh - live to lose
21. a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Godflesh/_/The+Internal" class="bbcode_track">Godflesh - The Internal
22. Godflesh - Flowers (Gotta have at least one instrumental on here)
23. Godflesh - Mantra
Drexciya Neptune's Lair ****
Jesu Silver ****
remember when 80 columns was the norm? (Score:2)
b0llcks. I hate the internet. And I hate every web browser.
I'll look at your Godflesh list and see what I have and listen in order. Of course I started with Xnoybis; thats where it ALL started!
/Touch the sky...
Re:remember when 80 columns was the norm? (Score:2)
I was just thinking about that Godflesh list. If they had released just those 23 songs as like 3 albums indie folks would have been falling all over themselves to talk about them. But back then 'heavy' wasn't a word they liked to have around. People are nutty.