It’s never all that fun to hate on a record, particularly by a small band willing to try new things. But here I sit with Last Poem / First Light, the newest from So Hideous, and I can’t find many positive things to say. Parts black metal, screamo, and modern classical, it never particularly congeals into a whole anything, except for a post-rock record that would have felt outdated 10 years ago slathered with nasal-y screams and fractured song arrangements.

Let’s start off with the compliments. So Hideous clearly knows what it’s doing when arranging strings, and the most overtly classical elements are the record’s best, providing respite and beauty, and sometimes even unease, as on opener “Rising.” In these moments, the band demonstrates an ear for nuance that is nowhere else repeated, or is only done with an obvious “HEY ISN’T THIS BEAUTIFUL” that the effect is ruined.

Ruined being the perfect word to describe the record’s brief high points. “Stabat Mater,” presumably named for the Arvo Pärt piece, opens with strings and returns to their theme on piano, but sandwiches a supremely cliché black metal passage in between. This, for the most part, is So Hideous’s compositional game: alternating between melody and dissonance, often jarringly and with no clear goal. “Last Poem” provides another example of this, tacking a coda about a fifth the song’s length onto its end. The string passages themselves are well-arranged and performed, all credit to guitarist and composer Brandon Cruz. But the parts sound nothing like one another, and when placed together, as on “My Light,” we have the sound of a black metal band playing overtop a classical composition in the same key, but neither is particularly improved by the other.

And both are done a disservice by the vocals, undoubtedly the worst part of it all. Christopher Cruz injects a nasal whine into his screams that curdles them in a way that unfortunately reminds me of too many basement-fried screamo bands that never made it past a demo in the mid-2000s. So Hideous is clearly going for something grandiose, and his vocals are amateurish in a way that strongly hurts the music. What Last Poem demands is a strong performance with deft range and confidence, and Cruz provides none of that, instead substituting angst for strength.

Then again, even if his vocals were up to snuff, the listener would still be left with warmed-over ideas from Envy, Deafheaven and Explosions in the Sky. For how much effort was clearly put into composing and arranging this record, it deserves to be better. That So Hideous has grand ideas is a start, but its reach exceeds its grasp by an almost incalculable sum. Thankfully, a start is more than most bands even bother with; So Hideous could make music deserving of their ambition yet.

Rob Rubsam

Band info: www.facebook.com/sohideous
Label info: www.prostheticrecords.com

Rob Rubsam is a freelance writer and itinerant resident of Upstate New York. His writing about music has been published at CVLT Nation, Tom Tom Magazine, The Rumpus, Burning Ambulance, and others. When not contemplating giant squids or erecting a standing stone in his backyard, he tweets at @millenialistfun. Do not contact him with your black mass-related inquiries, please.

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Time for a confession: I don’t listen to metal lyrics. Hell, about 90 percent of the time I can’t understand a single word on most of the albums I listen to. This makes the barrier between foreign languages essentially nonexistent in a way that couldn’t work for, say, a pop-punk band. It’s a leveler, making the only learning curve one’s ear for outside sounds. This is not to say that all lyrics are junk, simply that I don’t have a clue and don’t particularly need one to enjoy.

Alcest always had an overarching theme behind vocalist Neige’s words, related to dreams he had as a child of a fantastical, impossible place. Previous albums, particularly Écailles de Lune, contained vocal allusions, sure, but more than anything the band provided a sonic means of interpreting those themes, which allowed my incomprehension of the French language (I was always more of a Deutsch guy) to fade away. On Shelter, the band’s latest, those dreamy tendencies predominate, ejecting all remnants of metal besides a residual coldness. In its place is pure stadium shoegaze, mixing Slowdive and U2 in equal measure.

This proves freeing and limiting. Gone are the blastbeats, screeches, and epic runtimes, each song running slightly-overlong for a pop song at five to six minutes. “Opale” and “Shelter” are 120 Minutes-worthy rock, Neige’s voice double- and triple-tracked and free-flowing. It’s beautiful, undoubtedly, and perfectly achieves the shoegaze sound too many bands have reached for in the last half-decade. There is still a bit of a chill left over, particularly on album stand-out “Voix Sereines,” which builds to a fantastically distorted conclusion, guitars creamy and frozen when necessary. That track in particular feels like the culmination of Alcest’s trajectory over the 8 years since Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde, and it works beautifully.

But at the end, we’re left with another question: now that Alcest is no longer a metal band, what is it? What makes it any different from countless My Blood Valentine pretenders? Shelter offers no particular answers. It hits all the right targets but often fails to puncture through them. Therefore, it seems more a step than an endpoint to me, a first project with no metal elements before the band can get on to something new. All of the ingredients are in place, and Neige’s vocal melodies are so smooth they translate even when his language does not. He clearly has ambitions beyond the metal community, and some of the guitar melodies are big enough to fill the stadiums his idols deserved. Perhaps, with something more, he can get there soon.

Rob Rubsam

Band info: www.alcest-music.com
Label info: www.prophecy.de

 

Rob Rubsam is a freelance writer and itinerant resident of Upstate New York. His writing about music has been published at CVLT Nation, Tom Tom Magazine, The Rumpus, Burning Ambulance, and others. When not contemplating giant squids or erecting a standing stone in his backyard, he tweets at @millenialistfun. Do not contact him with your black mass-related inquiries, please.

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Justin Broadrick has released an abundance of fascinating music over his long career. From his earliest days with Napalm Death and Godflesh, through to Jesu and a raft of other projects and productions, he's been hugely influential in reshaping the boundaries of underground music. That said, with so many different artistic personas, some of Broadrick's releases have felt like preliminary drafts, and in the case of Jesu, that's meant predictable techniques have led to some formulaic releases.

Broadrick will tell you the same. In a recent interview with website Metal Sucks he noted that he wished he could have gone a lot further with Jesu's past few releases. However, with the revival of Godflesh – the yin to Jesu's yang – Broadrick has been able to concentrate on exactly what Jesu stands for on its latest release, Everyday I Get Closer to the Light from Which I Came.

The album has benefited enormously from Broadrick's refocus. It contains an exquisite balance of woozy shoegaze and bright bursts of expansive post-rock. It reaches back to Jesu's earliest years, touches on many elements explored since, and still finds room to sound fresh. Broadrick's handling of dynamics and textures is the key here, and he deftly combines the expected while still pushing forward creatively.

Opener "Homesick" sees distortion and delicacy meet, and "Comforter" and "Grey Is the Colour" mix waves of reverb, crushing instrumentation, and skewed electronica with sombre passages of reflection. Of course, none of those elements are new, but what makes Everyday I Get Closer... such a sublime release is that it's a sincere reflection of Broadrick's current state of mind.

He isn't banging his head against the walls of Birmingham squats anymore, he's a 44 year old living in South Wales, and he became a father around the time of the album's creation. As the title of the album's 17-minute centerpiece "The Great Leveller" suggests, that's brought some understandable changes to Broadrick's artistic vision.

The song is not only one of Jesu's greatest ever, but it's a gorgeous reflection of that change. My Bloody Valentine by way of Neurosis churns collide on "The Great Leveller". Marital percussion arises, symphonic strings sweep in, and it all ends on lullaby piano. The track cuts density with ambience, and heaviness with etherealness, but most of all, it broadens Jesu's sonic range while holding fast to a core sense of intimacy. "The Great Leveller" underscores exactly why Everyday I Get Closer... is such an affecting album overall. It perfectly captures the feel of an artist moving forward in life, and the album as a whole maintains that personal honesty throughout.

In a world drowning in greed, lies, and selfishness, immersing yourself in the heartfelt and consoling tides of Everyday I Get Closer... is the ideal elixir. Kudos to Broadrick for providing us with such.

Craig Hayes

Band info: www.facebook.com/Justin-K-Broadrick
Label info: www.avalancheinc.co.uk

 

Craig Hayes is music writer based in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a contributing editor, reviewer, and writes a monthly metal column at North American site PopMatters. He contributes loud words elsewhere around the web, on sites such as Metal Bandcamp and Backlit, and at home in NZ, he is a freelance writer and radio producer. Craig favours sounds from the metal, experimental and noise scenes, and has a crippling love of Krautrock, vintage progressive rock, and proto-metal too. You can find Craig losing followers daily on twitter @sixnoises

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As soon as the word dropped that the rhythm section and one of the guitarists from one of the most influential bands in contemporary metal, Isis, had recruited alt. rock crooner Chino Moreno of Deftones fame to front their new project, Palms, minds were instantaneously made up about how this band would sound. Surely Palms would offer intricate instrumentals that swell and crash with the force of a tsunami coupled with Moreno’s signature vocal idiosyncrasies? In other words: Isis without Aaron Turner’s roars, riffs and song-writing and with Moreno stepping into the fray. Well if you thought that you clearly underestimated guitarist Clifford Meyer (Red Sparowes), bassist Jeff Caxide and drummer Aaron Harris. Sure, Palms shares certain characteristics with Isis (particularly the melodic passages off Isis’s final two albums), and Chino is always going to sound like Chino, but the band’s self-titled debut is a restrained affair full of blissful sound-scapes and dulcet melodies.

Palms began as a three-piece jamming in Isis’s old rehearsal room. A room without windows, the ghosts of the past dampened spirits to the point that Caxide, Harris and Meyer had to move elsewhere to gain fresh perspective. The change in head-and-rehearsal-space and the addition of Moreno as vocalist were decisive factors leading to the construction and completion of Palms’ debut. Instead of retreading old ground, the band wrote music that is more Cocteau Twins than Neurosis, more ambient post-rock teamed with ‘90s alt. rock than overpowering post-metal—and ‘Palms’ is all the better for it. Take opener ‘Future Warrior’ for instance. The song’s spacey textures are enhanced by Harris’s insistent hi-hat patterns and Caxide’s bubbly bass-lines, both of which echo The Cure at their most wistful. A downpour of distortion does occur but it’s not cataclysmic, it’s just emphatic when tied to Moreno’s pained cries of “You have destroyed it, destroyed it.” In fact, the same could be said any time the band decides to increase the noise, such as the momentary oppressive mood that drifts past during ‘Patagonia’ and ‘Shortwave Radio’.

Sonically, ‘Shortwave Radio’ is the heaviest addition here, as well as being most likely to satiate fans of Deftones as there is more than a hint of ‘White Pony’s’ “Passenger” to this piece, especially when the serpentine grooves of Caxide and Harris together with Moreno’s viperous vocal “descends into hell.” But such moments are few and far between and this is not entirely a negative slight at Palms, as the interplay between each musician makes up for the lack of riff heft. Caxide and Harris rhythmic partnership in particular shows no sign of cracks throughout each of these six, lengthy compositions. During the more condensed sections their playing is Isis-tight, bordering metronomic even (‘Mission Sunset’), yet they are loose and relaxed when the song calls for it, such as the chime and lull of ‘Tropics’ where Moreno evocatively splashes the song with imagery of sand, sea and sun. Arguments could also be made that Moreno’s vocals are not as essential to Palms as they are to Deftones. There is merit in this as the atmospheric music quite effectively speaks for itself, but his contributions do elevate Palms from categorisation as instrumental post-rock; a tired genre, ironically without a voice at present. And for the most part his breathy melodies are positioned without taking away from the vast array of sounds Meyer draws from his guitars and effect pedals. Moreno’s pacing on “Patagonia” is seasoned, and during the early parts of “Mission Sunset” his vocal lines are less about competing with Shora-esque snare runs and more about forming a duet with icy guitars that gleam white, before he really pushes his range just as a riff that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Far or Sunny Day Real Estate record appears.

Those who thought Palms would pile up a series of powerful crescendos may be disappointed with the overall direction of the band’s debut. But to rely on such would have been too easy and in all actuality, pretty uninspired. The band’s ability to create distinct moods with sound and voice, whether it is the glacial, quasi-instrumental “Antarctic Handshake” or this sun-kissed “Tropics”, is ultimately much more enjoyable than an album full of incremental builds and predictable crescendos. A couple of ferocious riffs would have been welcome, although incorporating aggression into this album may have unbalanced it as a whole. Cleverly, Palms have left the music of their debut open enough to explore different (including heavier) ventures should the band go on to record further material if schedules permit. It would be a shame if this is the last we heard of Palms, because with the amount of chemistry these musicians have together the open-ended vistas they could span in the future is vast. And that's exactly what is exciting about Palms.

Dean Brown

Band info: www.palmsband.com
Label info: www.ipecac.com

Dean Brown is a metal scribe based in Ireland. He is currently a contributing editor to the North American cultural magazine Popmatters and he regularly throws words for a number of other reputable loud noise publications such as About.com/heavy metal, Soundshock.com, MetalIreland.com, MoltenMagazine.com, amongst others. He has a strong affinity for music that shakes souls and leaves debilitating tinnitus in its wake and such obsession has left him financially and medically crippled, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. Follow Dean on twitter @reus85

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