Abysmal Dawn – Leveling the Plane of Existence (2011) [Relapse] // Grade: A

Not since Fondlecorpse’s Creature Gore was released in 2009 have I heard a good technical death metal album. Now I’m well aware that I probably missed a couple but I try to stay on top of death metal releases. There just seems to be so many OSDM throwbacks as of late that I feel like the technical death metal scene has been brushed under the carpet or locked up in a fruit cellar.

Abysmal Dawn’s third LP, Leveling The Plane Of Existence is by far their best work. The entire album is consistently creative with a production quality that’s unmatched by other modern acts. I’m still trying to nail down what makes the album so successful and it’s not an easy task. Maybe it’s because when you hear “technical death metal”, there are certain connotations that come to mind: over the top blast beats, precise riffs and high-production quality. Sure. Leveling The Plane Of Existence has all that but what makes it so great is that they’re all used sparingly.

Each track has its own identity with one of those elements taking the stage above the others; if that makes sense. Typically, technical death metal tries to stuff all its load into one package and that’s not the case here: there’s air to breath between tracks. “The Age of Ruin” and “Pixilated Ignorance” are straight fire-starters. Aggressive as all hell with the perfect vocals. When I mentioned Fondlecorpse, I wasn’t just name dropping! It’s brutal! For some of the old-school cats, you’ll also pick up hints from Morbid Angel and other acts like Suffocation: there’s something for everyone!

My favorite cut on the album is “In Service of Time”. Techy but not overdone riffs and precise as fuck vocal cuts and drums. “Rapture Renowned” delivers the blast beats, full force and after a track like that, you need some breathing room. “Our Primitive Nature” is there for that. A tribal drum fest that doesn’t drag on forever. It’s the perfect nest for “Perpetual Dormancy” to hatch. Raise those horns! The title track “Leveling The Plane of Existence” is catchy and will get lodged into your head like a battle ax.

What technical death metal album would be complete without some throwback riffs? “Manufactured Humanity” is there for ya. A collision of riffs sparks the flame and burns civilization to the ground! Another choice cut on the album and the only one that rivals “In Service of Time” is “My Own Savior”. Brutal as fuck and the vocals play up on that track-by-track individuality I referenced earlier. Leveling The Plane Of Existence calls in the doomsday device with “The Sleeper Awakens”, the final track. Albeit a bit too melodic for my taste, it’s the perfect way to end the album. No abrupt chopping off the beast’s neck here. If you’ve been pining for a great technical death metal album, don’t miss out on Leveling The Plane Of Existence!

This new year has seen a rash of music bloggers attempting to properly categorize Witch House. From the good, the dry, all the way to the silly. As always, the problem lies in the attempt to define it in reference to traditional journalistic benchmarks. This is in vain, for it is impossible to organize anarchy. The movement most often referred to as Witch House owes its roots more to the way the internet functions than any specific musical style. It is a movement based on trending, interaction and hyperlinking… it is not simply “Electroclash 2.0”

This new mythology suggests that the music started with Salem. Recent articles have stressed the importance of the Chicago group to the point of overstatement. While an integral early player, it’s a misnomer that the music of Salem is truly that important to the music being made today, just a few short years from their formation. Although many within the Witch House enjoy Salem, there was plenty of music floating around during the years of 2007-8 that helped shape the vague vision that exists today.  The main issue that I have is that this all reeks of good PR and lazy journalism and without refutation, the myth of Salem as the sole mothers of invention will be etched into history, which is always scripted by the victors.

Slowed up music has always been rooted in pitch experimentation. Whereas most slowed music tends to pitch things down anywhere between 25-50% there have always been DJs who have experimented with much slower tempos. Although it still seems exotic to some people, Screw’s music has existed for well over twenty years now so there isn’t any mystery to it’s influence, it’s simply evolution. Most don’t feel the need to mention Kraftwerk in each and every single article/review of electronic and dance music do they? That influence is a given at this point and mostly strays far from explaining the greater picture.

For Example, Memphis’ DJ Black deserves a great deal of credit for creating mixes at especially crawling tempos, which have become an integral part to the Witch House arsenal.  A fixture in the South and Midwest, slowed music has never really been quarantined to hip hop.  Flea Market DJs have been “Screwing” everything from rock music to pr0n ever since Robert Davis started selling tapes out of Apt. 100. Big name groups like Swishahouse and Beltway 8 have been doing it since the late 1990s.  Add this to the dark imagery associated with the Memphis hip hop scene, and the inherent sadness and melancholy involved in most Texas music, and the evolution to Witch House seems rather organic.

Ask Tennessee artist $LØW HE▲D, who credits the Chattanooga music scene as his main inspiration to make music (need link). $LØW HE▲D, who formerly recorded under names like Game Syndicate and Horrid Veil has been experimenting with slow music for over a decade. He also credits Kansas City art fags Ssion with helping to pioneer the current sound, yet they too usually stand on the outside looking in on articles defining the evolution of “Witch House.” With a new split cassette coming out with RΛINИIΛЯ he stresses the idea of community: “We all should be working together more often, it’s a really good time to be involved with music.”

Disaro Records and Disaro artist Party Trash can both trace their roots straight to Houston, Texas, the (oft disputed) birthplace of Screw Music. Growing up in Houston, codeine slurred beats are a fixture, and hardly even something someone in their twenties would notice. Its just everyday life.

But the magic really happened when this small group of Americans came in contact with an equally experimental group of Europeans. Something sadly, and conspicuously absent from almost all attempts by the mainstream press to define the origins of Witch House. Around 2009 music blogs caught wind of the sound and vision of conceptual artists AIDS-3D and Mater Suspiria Vision.

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I always thought it would be so cool to see a bunch of my work up on Twitter all at once.  Since my Birthday is coming up in under a week, I asked some of my lovely models if they’d be willing change their Twitter avatars to a pictures I shot of them.

Currently Justene Jaro (pictured above), Justine Joli, Kendra James, Steam and Calamity have all changed their photos to ones I’ve shot. I’m really excited to see so much of my work floating around. I wanted to shout out to my lovely girls here as a thank you for making my birthday dream come true. I encourage you all to follow each and every one of these beautiful ladies.

We know you’re still riding high off last week’s release of Hussle Club‘s new single “Loose Tights” on Мишка Records, and so to make it even better, we’re bringing you some brand new tunes from //TENSE//, who released their own 7” with us just a few months ago. The brand new, 7 song EP Turn It Off is available now for all your downloading pleasure.

One of our favorite new bands from the past few years, Houston’s //TENSE// make industrial electronic music that you don’t hear very often these days and man are they ever good at it.

The EP will be comprised of “Turn It Off,” along with it’s B-Side, their re-imagining of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” You’ll also get 3 remixes of “Turn It Off” by White Car, Valis, and //TENSE// themselves. Finally, the icing on the black leather cake, 2 remixes of “The Chain” by witch housers Party Trash and Мишка favorite Mater Suspiria Vision.

The EP is now availble via iTunes and really anywhere else that carries digital downloads. So whatever place you fancy to give your business to, go for it.

//TENSE// will also be in town this Thursday night to perform at the one year anniversary edition of Pendu Disco along with GHXST.  If you’ve never caught //TENSE// live, man are you ever in for one hell of a show! Plus you should come celebrate a year of awesome Pendu Discos.

I can’t believe that the witch house mavens over at Pendu have been hosting these foggy and awesome bashes for a whole year now! And what better way to commemorate it than with //TENSE//,GHXST and DJ sets from DJ Harrison, Frankie Teardrop, Todd Pendu, and Sean Ragon of Cult of Youth.

Thursday, January 27th 2011 – 9PM
Secret Project Robot
210 Kent Ave
Brooklyn, NY, 11211
21+ | $10, RSVP Here

A while back, Hateball plugged The Terror, a Lovecraftian piece of historical fiction based on the true story of the 1845-48 lost expedition of Sir John Franklin and the crew of the Erebus and Terror. These brave men were attempting to carve a Northwest Passage but after becoming trapped in the ice, they became lost and were never heard from again. Author Dan Simmons took these historical facts and in an epically rich narrative, adds an other-worldy antagonist reminiscent of Lovecraft’s Old Ones. I was a sucker for Hateball’s persuasive pitch and devoured Simmons’ massive novel in about three sleepless nights. It was, as they say, hard to put down.

Last week I picked up Drood, another lengthy historical fiction novel by Simmons. Before last week, if you told me I would someday read a book about the last five years of Charles Dickens’ life, I would have swiftly kicked you in the nuts and ran away. BUT, much like he did in The Terror, Simmons takes some rather obscure facts from British history and morphs them into a horrific nightmare of a novel. It’s an incredibly ambitious, well-researched, drug-addled masterpiece of Victorian horror. It’s about being inferior to a friend and not being able to do anything about it. Allowing drugs to skew your perception and welcoming those delusions with open arms. Years of hard work with no reward. But most of all it’s just damn good storytelling.

The facts: On June 9, 1865, Charles Dickens – at the time the most popular novelist in the world – was in the horrific Staplehurst train crash that left many dead. His car was the only one unharmed so he survived – but was changed forever. He became incredibly secretive and embarked on covert trips into London at night, visiting opium dens and crypts. He claimed this was “research” for a new novel. During his final tour of public readings, homeboy was so intense that people fled his performances in tears. And then, five years to the day, June 9, 1870, Dickens died. An unfinished novel was left behind: The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Simmons’ Drood is narrated by Wilkie Collins, a contemporary of Dickens who lived in constant pain caused by rheumatic gout. Because of his illness, Collins was addicted to laudanum – a liquid form of opium that caused him to have vivid hallucinations of a doppelganger. You know a novel is going to be great when the narrator is a drug addict who frequently thinks he is wrestling his doppelganger. He’s a friend of Dickens but it’s a Salieri/Mozart relationship. Wilkie is in awe of Dickens but is insanely jealous of his talent. As a narrator, he’s an unreliable ball of rage with delusions of detective grandeur. As the novel went on, I found myself hating Wilkie. There’s nothing to like about the man. He’s absolutely loathsome and pathetic. But WOW what a perfect narrator!

(above: opium addict and mediocre novelist Wilkie Collins)

Simmons injects the finals years of Dickens with plenty of supernatural elements but Drood miraculously never feels like a fantasy novel. The storytelling is that damn good. There are enough chapters of Wilkie WTF opium delusions that I was left questioning several previous chapters. It sounds frustrating but I found it addicting to read a massive historical novel narrated by a pompous junkie. Especially one concerning murders committed at public readings in front of hundreds of people.

Drood is the equivalent of reading a Victorian novel of manners penned by an eloquent douchebag who is constantly tripping balls. Said douchebag also wants to be a detective and keeps putting himself in the way of supernatural danger. If those two statements didn’t sell you, mesmerize and kill yourself.

Deerhoof – Deerhoof vs. Evil (2011) [Polyvinyl] // Grade: B+

16 years. 10 albums. Serious cult-like devotion and a song catalogue varied as a grocery aisle: indie kitsch-masters Deerhoof are such the unpredictable constant, it’s possible to imagine they always existed, happily banging on glockenspiels or something, off in an unreachable place. The world, after all, has yet to tire of Deerhoof—because Deerhoof aren’t from this world. The workaday cares of consistency, pacing, verse-chorus-whatever, don’t apply. Deerhoof is alien is Deerhoof.

And after all those studio albums—especially after 2008’s spare Offend Maggie, in which they experimented by not experimenting—it’d be easy for that quirk to feel contrived. One can jump from thing to thing only so many times, you know, before the jumping becomes schtick. But Deerhoof vs. Evil is a charming collection as any; maybe not the band’s best, or most groundbreaking, but easy enough to love. From the playful, Catalan bounce of “Qui Dorm, Nomias Soma” to the angry pony-bop “Let’s Dance the Jet” and perpetual “Must Fight Current” hypnosis, Evil wears unpredictability like a comfortable sweater, even in its most dissonant moments. And though the band definitely ups the quirk ante via all those smashed-toy synthesizers, they’re careful to offset any preciousness with sultry flamenco (“No One Asked to Dance”) and soothing vocal jams (“C’Moon”).

Which brings to light the most alien thing about Deerhoof: how far they’re able to take potentially grating elements without actually being grating. It’s a tricky business, all this flirting with collapse, but they so rarely falter. Even Evil’s pacing boasts the talent; one song more, it would’ve felt confused. One less, unfinished. As it stands, Evil is the just-right balance of ingratiating and alienating, comfy and confounding, sweet and sarcastic. Same as it ever was. Looks like we won’t be tiring of Deerhoof anytime soon.

Some months back Sounds From the Other Side did a profile on Petra Schelm. Petra recently released a debut split with Portland’s Warm Hands on Clan Destine Records. The tape comes packaged with a zine and is limited to just 50 copies. Up above is a brand new video/song from Petra called “Channel the Body.” This track while not on the debut release will soon be available on a joint Clan Destine and Beko project that you should keep your eyes, ears and browsers on the look-out for.

And a good afternoon to you all. Provided, of course, you’re reading this when I post it. This is Near Mint Condition, the column where I give the rundown on this week’s comic book releases. As all the women who have seen me disrobe have muttered, let’s get this over with.

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King Of The Flies Vol. 2: The Origin Of The World.
Did you miss out on the first volume of King Of The Flies, or am I the only dumb one? While perusing (far superior) columns today on what’s dropping tomorrow, Douglas Wolk recommended this son of a bitch. Intrigued, I followed the various hypertextual references until I found a preview of the new volume. In short? It’s weird, man. Real weird. Wolk had me at “its look owes rather a lot to Charles Burns’ Black Hole, but it’s also got a sick, surreal vibe of its own.”

Sold.

(And if you haven’t checked out Burns’ latest, X’ed Out, get on it. My favorite graphic novel of last year.)

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Action Comics #897.
Don’t let the cover fool you, Action Comics is some of the most fun I get in my funny books diet today. Quick editorializing: Fuck misleading covers. I understand that some angsty David Finch cover probably grabs the nuts of the average fanboy, but it may also dissuade others. Action Comics is funny, intelligent, and relatively XTREME free. You wouldn’t know it by the cover, though.

This month’s issue has Lex Luthor rolling up into Arkham Asylum and soliciting the help of the Joker. I don’t know where it’s going to go from there, but I’ll find myself rooting for the bastard. A megalomaniacal sociopath on a quest for the Black Lantern energy, penciled by Pete Woods?

Pick it up.

Also In DC:
Also coming out this wee is Detective Comics #837 , and as I said in my recommendation of #836, the artwork alone may be worth it. It’s Jock, yo!

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They say real men wear pink but whoever made that up was lying. Real men wear purple, just ask John Prolly. I heard he’s even trying to go all Jay-Z and trademark a Prolly Purple pantone. Everything awesome in life is associated with purple such as Grimace from McDonalds, purple drank, the only great Cam’ron album Purple Haze, even that movie with Prince had purple in the title.

Remember like five years ago when Purple was the hot shit color in streetwear? Well we want those days back again and we’re hopin’ you do too. So why not get yourself a ill purple death adders fitted? Get back on that not quite retro purplaeraaand? Lets make purple the new black, get a bigger market for it outside of LA.

So you got the fitted but now you want to find something to match. Ask and you shall receive! Presenting the Oversized Adder tee in purple (did you think we’d just make a hat without a shirt to match? Child please). It’s your favorite logo in a sea of purple. So get it poppin’ with your purple faze the right way. Cop the fitted, cop the shirt, grab your purple drank and head for the purple hills suckers.

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725

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Мишка LA
1547 Echo Park Ave
Los Angeles, CA
213-536-4234

Get out your Hoffman Lenses for this one kids. A couple months back, Oh Mars turned me onto this new book series called Deep Focus from Soft Skull Press. For each one, a notable writer tackles all the intellectual angles of a movie that’s usually considered somewhat “less than” by critics. He did a great write up on the one for Death Wish, and just this week I finished Jonathan Lethem‘s take on John Carpenter’s classic alien mind bender They Live. We’re totally blogging about these out of order by the way as They Live was the first in the series.

Lethem is a great writer, who’s been writing modernist pseduo-SciFi for the better part of two decades. He also is, apparently, a huge fan of They Live. I’ve always really enjoyed the film, but perhaps more for the indelible alien image it conjures in my head more than any sort of perceived content. Luckily, Lethem has a lot to say, and unlike what most of us would do in his shoes, his analysis goes beyond “I mean, I know it’s campy but, dude, it’s also like genius because…I mean, have you seen it?”

Whereas the Death Wish book was a set of 4 longer form essays, Lethem tackles They Live over 35 or so miniature essays, observations, and anecdotes, some less than a page long. Gotta admit, the style was a little disorienting at first. A lot comes at you fast, and the intensity/seriousness of the writing changes gear rapidly. But after a few of them, it becomes evident why Lethem chose to structure it like he did.

They Live is a movie filled with strange, spastic details that concern themselves with the entire spectrum of pop culture, with numerous shout outs to politics, media, economics, homelessness, chewing gum, back-alley fistfights, race, and professional wrestling. So Lethem frees himself up to jump all over the place too, indulging in tangential thought trains that are just as funny and strange and wonderful as the film itself. I highly recommend it.

Next up in the series is The Sting by Matthew Specktor.