Progressive rock had its inexplicable day in the sun a decade ago, when The Mars Volta, Motorpsycho and Porcupine Tree were selling out huge venues and creeping up the Billboard charts. I say inexplicable because even when prog rock is popular it is never widely loved, always the butt of a joke even when praised. This was the same in the genre’s 60s-70s heyday, when Yes was filling stadiums while being ridiculed in Rolling Stone and Cream. Some hated its inherent cosmic navel gazing, others what was seen as an emphasis on musicianship over songcraft. This was bullshit, of course; I mean, have you heard “Siberian Khatru” or “A Passage to Bangkok” or “Exiles”? Compared to the coked-up and blown-out noise of hair metal, early prog was arena rock writ large, huge melodies paired to jazzy scales and 15 minute synth solos. Sure it wasn’t for everyone, but what is?

Messenger dregs up some of this past for Illusory Blues, pitching its tent somewhere between the mid-oughts revivalists and the classics. Anchored by acoustic guitar and Khaled Lowe’s flighty voice, these Brits freely indulge in flute solos and string quartets, fingerpicked classical leads and mutating time signatures. I hear Porcupine Tree and King Crimson, with a little Jethro Tull thrown in for good measure on tracks like “Piscean Tide.” Nerdy though it maybe, Illusory is a hell of a lot of fun.

Take “Midnight,” the longest and most self-consciously ‘epic’ track of the bunch. After beginning with some classical flair it erupts into a motorik groove at about 3 minutes, eventually settling into a chugging strut accompanied by falsetto “ooh ooh ooooooohs.” Jamie Gomez Arellano’s drums are crisp and sit way up in the mix, snapping out jazzy beats over zither strums and hitting hard for a violin solo straight out of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic. These songs travel places, jumping between movements and ideas that nevertheless feel tethered together, less by mode or scale than energy and feeling. 8 minutes shouldn’t jump by as fast as “Midnight” does, but Messenger finds a way.

Elsewhere the band sticks to smaller ideas, developing melodies and rhythms instead of jumping among them. “Somniloquist” plugs psychedelic pop, mellotron and all, into a classic rock mold, with honest-to-god riffs bridging it all. Years ago a band as well crafted and huge-sounding as Messenger would have been massive, Lowe projecting his ace vocal chords through stadium after stadium. But that is no longer the world we live in. The days of bands descending to the stage in spaceships and ripping out bitching pan flute solos are long past, with the occasional flare-up whenever Jon Anderson decides he doesn’t mind most of Yes, or the annually uncelebrated but nonetheless attended Rush tour. Even the aforementioned revivalists threw in punk and metal and salsa to their mix, stressing chaos as opposed to new age calm. By digging back to a poppier (and more populist) time, Messenger has crafted an interesting little gem. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the world for it.

Rob Rubsam

Band info: www.messengerbanduk.com
Label info: www.svartrecords.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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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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Is it a bad thing to be stereotyped as full of big ideas? Junius approaches that line on Days of the Fallen Sun, a recent EP featuring two new songs, two (potential) re-recordings of older, hard-to-find tunes, four ambient synthesizer interludes, and a whole lot of catastrophism. Always a master of craft, the band grafts together huge choruses, mountains of reverb and some of its heaviest riffs to date here, never deviating from its path while still finding room to maneuver therein.

As it has on past releases like Martyrdom of a Catastrophist and Reports from the Threshold of Death, Junius tackles Big Concepts here, particularly those of disgraced scholar and theorist Immanuel Velikovsky, whose catastrophist interpretations of ancient history found him scorned by the scientific community. Esoteric though this may seem, his portentous writings about worlds in collision make for great metal lyrics: “we are the light / we are the fire,” he intones to end “Forgiving the Cleansing Meteor,” a song, appropriately, about accepting one’s inevitable negation by the universe. Joseph Martinez sells every word, and his natural feel for melody drives the band here, as it always has; though it would be hard to say it suffers per se, Days nonetheless feels like a slightly different record when his voice isn’t heard.

This is because Junius has never been a true metal band, though on “Battle in the Sky” it provides some of the heaviest riffs yet. Rather, in its amalgamation of goth, post-hardcore and sludge, the band serves as an exemplar of consonance in a scene obsessed with the dissonant. Previously released tracks “A Day Dark With Night” and “The Time of Perfect Virtue” favor full-bodied synths and crystalline guitars to head-pounding distortion, allowing Martinez’s voice the ability to duck and soar as need-be, never showing off and always in service of the track. This is perhaps best demonstrated on closer “Forgiving,” where he provides his own harmonies and counter-melodies, providing a wall of sound almost as formidable as that presented by the constantly-churning bass and multi-tracked snare drums. Even if his lyrics strike one as a little broad, he sells them with absolute conviction; by the end of Days, you’d have to be unnaturally confident not to fear death-by-meteor during your daily commute.

Unfortunately, Will Benoit’s production, while full-bodied and powerful, brickwalls the entire recording, and in doing so renders whatever nuances might have been heard absolutely invisible under the weight of each track. This is a minor complaint, but coupled with the poor-quality review copies distributed by Prosthetic, it gave me a headache initially. This has been resolved post-release, but a word to the wise: your music shouldn’t actively turn people away for any reason other than its content. And the songs here are damn good, with “Forgiving” absolutely among my favorite Junius tracks. Anything that takes away from that is, simply, unfortunate.

Rob Rubsam

Band info: www.juniusmusic.com
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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Best Metal Albums of 2013, by Matt Hinch

1. Clutch - Earth Rocker (Weathermaker)

I'm unashamed of my total bias towards Clutch. Part of the reason for that is they never release the same album twice. Earth Rocker does just that by being one of Clutch's most energetic albums. Their continual evolution keeps listeners coming back for more. Bar none best band on the planet. Ever.

2. Anciients - Heart of Oak (Season of Mist)

Vancouver's Anciients have had a monster year. From the reception of debut Heart of Oak to a number of high profile tours, their name was everywhere. And with good reason. Heart of Oak takes progressive sludge to the next level with an unstoppable torrent of riffs erupting like geysers and incredible dynamics.

3. SubRosa - More Constant Than the Gods (Profound Lore)

This Salt Lake City group sound so unique with their use of electric violins to compliment their brand of emotionally taxing doom/sludge. I'm a tough bearded dude and this album brings me to tears every time. Heavy as a lead balloon musically and lyrically, Subrosa are only getting better with each release.

4. Vhol - Vhol (Profound Lore)

Aesop Dekker, Mike Scheidt, John Cobbett and Sigrid Sheie. Do I really need to say more? Fine. Severely punked up black metal with touches of classic rock and thrash. It's always pushing forward with determined passion and brilliant performances. I've got my fingers crossed this isn't a one-off.

5. Batillus - Concrete Sustain (Seventh Rule)

Batillus are so heavy it's almost not even fair. Concrete Sustain ups the electronic elements from previous album, Furnace. The album worms its way under your skin where it's nice and warm to escape the heartless chill of the urban landscape. It's been on my phone all year and I have no plans to take it off.

6. Jucifer - Beyond the Volga There is No Land (Nomadic Fortress)

Like Clutch, Jucifer never fall into redundancy. Beyond the Volga centers on WWII Russia and the city of Volgograd. Gazelle Amber Valentine and Edgar Livengood capture the pain and anguish of death as well as the pride and fighting spirit of a proud nation, and then flatten you with it.

7. Cloud Rat - Moksha (Halo of Flies)

I'm pretty sure I hurt myself kitchen-moshing to this one. Not a good idea when you're cooking. But it's hard not to do when something grinds this goddamn hard. Vocalist Madison delivers a performance for the ages (especially on "Vigil") and their cover of Neil Young's "Needle and the Damage Done" is beyond words.

8. Noisem - Agony Defined (A389)

Long live thrash! A bunch of kids barely old enough to shave are shaping the face of thrash to come. Agony Defined is 26 minutes of pure aggression and flat out fun. Ripping guitars, blasting drums and energetic vocals are wrapped around an infectious catchiness. The future of thrash is as bright as a brand new pair of white high-tops.

9. Woe - Withdrawal (Candlelight)

The highest ranking black metal release on my list. (VHOL really, defy categorization.) There's something about the level of personal emotion that comes across on Withdrawal that I just can't shake. Not to mention a raft of absolutely killer riffs. Put your troo or kvlt arguments away. This is great stuff.

10. Windhand - Soma (Relapse)

Female vocalists in doom bands has been a common theme on my listening list this year and there has been none better than Dorthia Cottrell. Regardless of gender, the vocals are just one part of this monstrous record. Insanely heavy stoner doom and haunting drone. I'm surprised the Appalachian Mountains are still standing.

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Party-metal is a genre that should really be much more popular than it is. Bands in this style sound like they wrote and recorded all of their songs in the midst of a drunken weekend bender, possibly while hanging out with their recently-dead boss and getting into some serious hijinks. Most famously embodied in the eternally-partying Andrew W.K., the style has seen a resurgence in recent years thanks to Kvelertak, and it’s basically impossible not to crack a smile while listening, even for the craggiest of old (at heart) men like me. There are harmonized guitars and breaks designed to give the singer time to crush a beer can on his forehead, wrapped up in a catchy package.

When at its best, Doomriders, fronted by Nate Newton of Converge, lives up to the moniker. On Grand Blood, the band’s newest, it splits the time between these fun party-mosh tunes and heavier, dirge-like songs that suffer in the comparison. Hardcore-tinged tracks like “Back Taxes” and opener “New Pyramids” rollick and roll while Newton spits in his Coliseum-style bark. Do I know what he’s saying? Hell no. But I’m too busy punch-dancing around my house to notice. It sounds like music both jocks and the nerds they are currently pushing into lockers would enjoy. “Mankind” has the kind of tapped guitar lead that is played with one foot on the monitors, the guitarist occasionally taking breaks to pump his fist at the crowd, and the bassist sounds like he could totally kick your ass. The title track is a little spacier but no less fun, in an early Baroness style.

For the first six tracks, this roaring doesn’t let up, and while it’s almost relentlessly one-note, Newton’s vocals in particular, it’s still a pretty good time. However, on track seven, “Death in Heat,” Grand Blood hits a speed bump it never really recovers from. “Death” has a slow, Sabbath-y riff which is, in theory, no different from what came before, but by stripping away the energy and the feeling of a beer-soaked good time, it starts to sound tired, and the rest of the record, minus “Back Taxes,” follows suit, even when the tempo is increased. These songs are less bad than uninteresting or uninspired, dynamically flat and forgettable.

In a sense, the rest of the record is just as unoriginal, but that boozy rock-and-roll quality lifts it up to another tier. This is flying-v metal, for bands with long hair who hate wearing shirts onstage and repeatedly dive into the crowd for the hell of it. I have no clue if this remotely describes Doomriders, who might do all or none of those things. But it sure sounds like they do. It makes sense the band is playing with High on Fire and especially Kvelertak on an upcoming tour of the U.S.: this is music to be heard in large groups, where the anonymity of the crowd lets you get a few good natured punches, karate chops, or high kicks in. So long as they stick away from the turgid back half of Grand Blood, the crowd will love it.

Rob Rubsam

Band info: www.facebook.com/doomriders
Label info: www.deathwishinc.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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I should like Perigea Antahkarana more. The latest from Wolvserpent, it hits plenty of the targets of what I enjoy: blackened doom, drone, expansive instrumental choices, voices that sound like they’re being astrally projected into the studio from the sixth dimension. Maybe it makes sense that my favorite track, “A Breath in the Shade of Time,” hits most of these, but at the same time, I’m actually confused. While I enjoy extreme music of all kinds, I’m a big rock guy, in terms of rhythm, momentum, the tension inherent in even a simple bass-drums-guitar lineup. And “A Breath” is almost entirely void of these things, instead consisting of about ten straight minutes of feedback drone overlaid with chanting vocals, opened by expressive cello work and closed in a harsh sound collage.

But, somehow, that’s the most exciting the record gets. The first and last ‘real’ tracks are fairly standard issue doom, super slow and very protracted. You could stretch an entire powerviolence album between the strums on closer “Concealed Among the Roots and Soil,” it takes so long with its time. This style is gratifying, certainly, or otherwise bands wouldn’t still be playing it. But so much more can be done with it: look at something from just this year, like Northless’s World Keep Sinking, or maybe 2012’s Longing by Bell Witch.

Wolvserpent prove this themselves with “A Breath,” which tries so many new things and ultimately succeeds at all of them. “In Mirrors of Water,” while carrying more of that doom baggage, nonetheless throws in a blackened barrage for good measure, varying things nicely. I don’t doubt live that I would want the exact opposite, desiring the crush of their standard-issue doom as opposed to drawn-out amplifier torture. But listening at home, the latter proves much more interesting to me, holds a greater draw. I can’t tell you why, it just is.

This is why I wished I liked Perigea more than I do. It’s certainly a well-made record, and Wolvserpent is a band that knows what it’s doing, but the things I want to excite me just don’t. Most of their atmosphere, being campfires and birdcalls and wind, is pretty par for the course in the genre, and there’s nothing about their riffs that puts them apart from most other riff purveyors. It’s not a bad record by any means, and if this style is your bag Wolvserpent do more than most with it. If only there was a little more of the strangeness of “Breath,” less of “Mirrors’” standard-issue riffs.

Rob Rubsam

Band info: www.facebook.com/wolvserpent
Label info: www.relapse.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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Watain seems like one of those bands we assume are important because everyone else does too. As soon as release copies of 'The Wild Hunt' went out, journalists debated it on twitter, because that’s almost what we were supposed to do, right? Merits of the album in a changing black metal landscape or no, it was sold to us as the album for metal fans to talk about this summer.

In a sense, this worked. It received big write-ups on sites like Pitchfork, and debuted in the Billboard 200 chart in North America. Now, a proudly-satanic band dropping a top-200 album would have caused a stir in the mid-80s, but either due to the decline of sales or a cynicism about evil or the conversion of all Christian Mothers associations into debased cults of our southern lord, this just registers as another reason why we’re supposed to be paying attention to Watain. After all, it’s big, right?

But at the end of it, 'The Wild Hunt' is still an album, and Watain a band, whether they smear themselves with the blood of the unborn onstage or not. And frankly, I had to get past all the hype, and even the expectations of other music journos, before I could enjoy Hunt on its own terms. And yes, I did say ‘enjoy,’ because in many ways Hunt kicks ass in an old-school way, all sneering guitar solos, cheesy lyrics and hammerhead riffs, aiming for cheap seats that are probably only about 20 feet from the stage, anyway.

My first step toward appreciating these songs was to get out of my house. I listened to it a lot driving to and from work, gathering a few weird looks in the process, and I was struck by how much rawk was in this album. For a band that takes itself so seriously in print and presentation, Watain are masters of cheesy thrills. Chugging guitar lines can be fist-pumped to, solo sections sound like they should be accented by onstage fireworks displays, and once “The Child Must Die” really gets going it more than resembles the Power Rangers theme song. “Outlaw” even opens with straight caveman grunts. Instead of the insanity and claustrophobia of its peers, Watain offers a vision of black metal you could blast at a particularly kvlt barbecue.

In 10,000 years, when the whispers of our internet communications long outlive us and travel to the farthest edges of the galaxy, aliens will know at least one thing: people sure had a lot of opinions about “They Rode On.” It forms the thematic centerpiece of Hunt, describing an endless touring lifestyle and the desire for stylistic evolution on the part of Watain. It also comes wrapped up in an 80’s metal ballad that could have been written by Poison. You can probably guess which of these aspects has caused so much opining. For my part, I’m indifferent; the band clearly accomplishes what it means to, just in a style I have no affinity for. Clean vocals interlock with flanged guitars and simple, weeping melodic figures in a mode new for the band, if not for music in general.

But doesn’t that describe Hunt, and Watain in general? They’ve been ‘innovating’ within the band for over 10 years, even if that just means picking up the best of Bathory and Dissection and adding a coat of stage makeup to make it a ‘BIG IMPORTANT EVENT.’ They’re certainly good at it, and that may explain why a very retro album like Hunt has been pitched as something new and progressive. These are fun songs, certainly, but undermined by groundless expectations that Watain will be a band it cannot possibly, and definitely doesn’t want to, be. Come at it with an ear for enjoyment, however, and I think you’ll be surprised just how much you’ll like Hunt.

Rob Rubsam 

Band info: www.facebook.com/watainofficial
Label info: www.centurymedia.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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Heavy as hell and strange as sin, 'World Keeps Sinking' is a weird record. The latest from Milwaukie’s Northless, it trades in sludge of your Neurosis variety, but twisted in strange, delightful ways that turn what could have been an exercise into something genuinely exciting, if not exactly perfect.

That quality can make it tough to get into for a new fan. Opener “Last of Your Kind” moves in a bizarre syncopation that sounds completely tuneless the first few times through, as if part of a melody that refuses to congeal. Others throw strange, virtuosic whole-band runs into sludgy breakdowns, or deliver off-kilter guitar solos in middle-eastern modes, and flange effects are deployed to turn leads into 8-bit video game noises.

To a certain extent, I find this all strange because I began listening with my own idea of what ‘sludge’ means: typically, 3-4 dudes slogging through slow tempos, hitting slower mid-sections, howling about “GAPING WOUNDS” and occasionally employing a keyboard player. This isn’t to disparage the genre, it’s just that so many groups, good ones included, find a groove and build a career out of it, doing very little exciting with sounds that, even when tired, are very enjoyable to listen to.

What makes digesting 'World...' that much more interesting, even fun, is that it at the very least tries. The off-kilter solos, the decision to devote about fifteen straight minutes at the center of the album to clean guitars, and the employing of non-metal keys allow these songs to shuffle your expectations every couple minutes, and in doing so they remain fresh after multiple listens. No riff stays put for more than it needs to, and a song like “Communion” actually uses about six others’ worth of ideas between its 4 and 5 minute marks, somehow crashing doom into Black Flag into NWOBHM guitar harmonies in a way that works. At an average of about 10 minutes per song, that’s an awful lot to throw around.

Best of all, it seems like Northless is having a blast messing with their formula and morphing it into new territory. If only more bands had their mad scientist impulse.

Rob Rubsam 

Band info: www.northless.com
Label info: www.gileadmedia.net

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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