Old Man Gloom – Christmas

Three years in the making, Christmas is the triumphant return of the Old Man Gloom Simian Alien Defense League, which features members of Isis, Converge, and Cave In. This is the fifth full-length release from these noise mongers, but I haven’t heard an entire album other than this one, so I really don’t have anything to compare it to.

Christmas is one of those oh-so-rare heavy albums that manages to be as weird as it wants to be but maintains a listenable quality based on diversity and cohesion. The majority of the album is actually a combination of the art-noise-metal of Isis, the textures of Converge, and the spacey elements of newer Cave In. All of these elements seem to be pretty different, but the OMG crew pull it off with flying colors.

One thing that is kind of strange about this album is that there are quite a few parts of electronic noise. The only problem I have with this is that these parts tend to be sectioned off by themselves and contained within their own tracks rather than being fully integrated with the metal. If you listen to the album from beginning to end, however, it’s harder to notice that the electronic sequences are a separate intity.

A few parts of “‘Tis Better to Receive” have a Black Sabbath vibe to it, but definitely muscled up quite a bit. My favorite of the electronic interludes is definitely “Accord-O-Matic,” with its organic noises and textures, including an actual accordian part that is pulled off extremely successfully. “Volcano” shows the bands ability to write a seven-plus-minute song and keep the listener grooving the whole time, while “Skullstorm” stands in at a mere 45 seconds but manages to kick your ass in that small amount of time.

Diversity is definitely the order of the day for Old Man Gloom, but these folks manage to keep a balanced diet with a large amount of cohesion. To receive the maximum output of this album, crank your stereo to 11 and listen to the whole album. Particularly stick around for the second half of the disc, because things really pick up after track 8.

Moving Units – Dangerous Dreams

I’ll give the average DOA reader credit for knowing more about the dance-punk movement than I do. To the best of my knowledge, it started with either the Rapture or !!!, at least tangentially involved bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Futureheads (they all cite Gang of Four as influences, so to me they are all brethren), and is probably overdue for a backlash, if it hasn’t already begun. My rule is that if a band is too identified with a sudden genre, I’ll tune in three years later. If they still exist, fine, I’ll investigate; if not, than I assume I didn’t miss anything. Thanks to this asinine policy I’ve been spared the two-tone revival, horrorcore, nu-metal, electroclash (I still have no idea what the hell that was), and countless other dead genres, leaving ample time to wallow in the unchangeables.

Dangerous Dreams can’t help but have the air of bandwagon-jumping about it. Suddenly angular guitars and stuttering hi-hats are everywhere, and who shows up insisting that they had planned this all along? Moving Units, that’s who. Zeitgeist is a funny thing, I guess, and all those unconsummated 80s influences were bound to erupt in these young lions, so why hold it against Moving Units that they sound so similar to their peers, all raised in the same musical environment more or less?

For the first four songs of Dangerous Dreams, the grudge is easier to hold since the Los Angeles-based trio fails to offer anything essential in terms of invention or in just plain fun. That begins to change with “Unpersuaded” though. Suddenly, the groove explodes, competing vocals heckle each other, and the snare drum spasms en route to the chorus. The record finds its identity, or at least its mojo, and for the next few songs it is bliss. Without doubt, “Scars” is the highlight, doomed to the inevitable Interpol comparisons to be sure, but also too damn good to be overlooked.

“Killer/Lover” may be an even better template for future Moving Units successes. A nervy thumper with a brief, hypnotic chorus between agitated verses, it sounds a bit more curious as to the possibilities to be explored with this trio’s tried-and-true approach. Here is where the band sounds like it is actually drawing on deep influences instead of playing to its peers.

Moving Units are painfully of-the-moment in some senses but awfully good fun as well. Will this band be here in three years? I have no idea. Will it have anything to offer once the dance-punk thing has tired? I told you I have no fucking idea! Dangerous Dreams is definitely a good time though, but if it doesn’t grace your late 2004 get-togethers now it may not get another chance until the dance-punk revival circa 2010.

Bloodthirsty Lovers – The Delicate Seam

Me and Dave Shouse go way back. He was in a band called the Grifters back in the early 90′s. The Grifters specialized in a Southern variation on the lo-fi indie rock that was semi-unpopular at the time, sounding like a Pavement or Guided by Voices from Tennessee. Their work at Easley Studios in Memphis briefly turned that establishment into the hip indie-rock recording studio for a while back in 1995 and 96. The albums the Grifters made there, released by local Memphis indie Shangri-La Records, were some of my favorite albums back when I was in high school. 1994′s Crappin’ You Negative, in particular, was fantastic. The band was great live, too; a two-night engagement at New York’s Under Acme in April of 1996 sticks out as one of the highlights of my concert-going youth.

Okay, so we don’t go back at all. I’ve never met the dude, other than a brief, tense exchange after a concert in Atlanta. He does make good music, however, or at least did, at one point. Not that the Bloodthirsty Lovers are bad, at all, but they definitely can’t hold a candle to the Grifters at their peak. What made the Grifters great – their strength, their sweat, their literate muscularity – has been set aside in favor of a more ornate and sedentary, electronically-assisted pop classicism. Whereas the Grifters were a Southern gothic indie-hipster Rolling Stones with Sebadoh’s production values, the Bloodthirsty Lovers are a tasteful but largely unexciting approximation of what Bowie and Eno’s late 70s collaborations would sound like if they had been made 20 years later.

The Delicate Seam is not bad, but it is unexciting. The mostly mid-tempo, synthetic-rock flatlines by without leaving much of an impression. Shouse’s lyrical acuity, which started to show signs of dissipation on the Grifters last album, 1997s Full Blown Possession, has diminished to the point of mere inoffensiveness. Like many integral artists’ latter-day solo works, The Delicate Seam sounds like a Dave Shouse record that has been refined, processed, and matured into something far less invigorating than what could have been, and what would have been had it been made a decade earlier.

Shouse does get it right on “Postcard from the Sea,” but it’s little relief. “Postcard” is the Grifters’ sound, all grown up, successful and sure of itself. Unfortunately it’s brief respite from The Delicate Seam‘s pervasive mediocrity. If more of The Delicate Seam possessed the spark of “Postcard from the Sea,” the Bloodthirsty Lovers would have made a fine, commendable record.

The Telepathic Butterflies – Songs From a Second Wave

With a name like Telepathic Butterflies, you might think you’re going to be hit with some crazy psychedelia. Instead, the band hits you with a sound that predates the psychedelic revolution. Remember the British Invasion? The band name apparently comes from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, but again, don’t expect any wild experimentalism or zany antics based on the name or its associations. These guys give you straight-ahead pop-rock. It’s catchy, it’s fun, and it’s likely to feed your sugar fix.

“Four Leaf Clover” features melodic verses almost worthy of Big Star. The bass bounces along smartly while the guitars alternate between subtle chords and sustained notes. “Bangor” finds the band in a more raucous mood (which means the song sounds a little like Lotion, not Big Black). It’s a radio-ready track, for sure, and deserves some airplay.

Telepathic Butterflies aren’t afraid to get meditative, either. “Rescue Mission” starts with a delayed guitar chord (which would have been welcome had it been repeated in the chorus) before following a fairly slow, standard, sing-song formula. The bass cuts through the mix occasionally with its staccato thumping, giving the song a very 60s feel. “Angry Young Man” sounds very 60s, very Beatles. Something about it even makes me think of the Who’s “Boris the Spider.” I can’t figure out why, though.

Although sometimes a little too bluesy for my tastes, there’s no way around it: these guys write really catchy stuff. Sure, the guitars are bright and trebly, and the harmonies are sometimes a little cloying. You just have to ask yourself: “How’s my sweet tooth?”

De Trop – After the Water

De Trop certainly doesn’t make it easy for someone to gather even the most scant information about this Glaswegian duo. Apart from the one-sheet accompanying the release of After the Water, De Trop seems to be shrouded in as much mystery as its latest release. After listening to After the Water a few times, the absence of press, scene hype, or biographical data makes this record’s anomalous ambition, full of wonderful drone properties and melancholic scenery, all the more curious. The dictionary defines De Trop as “excessive” or “too much”; the irony is not lost as De Trop coaxes minimalist 4-track lo-fi elegies and plaintive environmental ambience seemingly from thin air. After the Water threads delicate weaves of melancholic musique concrete, guitar static and hum, and subtle hymns for deserted cities and buildings at night. After the Water is built up solely from the embers of stark guitar, out-of-tune piano, tinkling found sound, and dense washes of drone and ambience.

Opening track “Stars and Angels” is a slow-motion drone, painting strokes of grey landscapes in an abandoned industrial building. This curiously gives way to follow-up track “Foo,” which starts life as a slow-core guitar riff that could be lifted from any glacially paced antecedent. It soon develops into a circuitous repeating guitar line, underpinned by an undulating melodic lead with a muted roots feel and lush ambient background swirls. “Cracked Bleeding Lips and Red Shoes” hangs on a damaged wire of broken circuitry, enmeshed by feedback manipulation.

Both “Little Broken Kittenheart” and “Angels Hanging From a Rope in a Darkened Room” serve as melodic and intricate counter weights to the dense tonal blocks found elsewhere on the album. They also serve as a road map and give some insight into the impetus and inspiration behind some of the tracks on the album. Both tracks start from a Godspeed/Set Fire to Flames axis but luckily progress from this into its own trajectory. The former is a mantra-like toybox rhythm that whirls like a Victorian madrigal played by Coil, while screwdriver guitar (a self-conscious Godspeed affectation) gently builds in slow dense curlicues. The latter starts off, again, with a Godspeed/Set Fire to Flames pastiche that alternates between gently strummed Velvet Underground-styled guitar and manipulated echo and flanged guitar, sounding not unlike a low-flying aircraft.

With a few stumbles along the way, most notably “For the Duck People” that borders on libellous for its proximity to A Silver Mt.Zion’s “This Gentle Hearts Like Shot Birds Fallen,” De Trop has come up with a flawed, yet pleasing diamond in the rough debut. After the Water shimmers with hope and promise in its languid bedroom 4-track vistas. Mind you, a greater breadth of panoramic hues and colors, plus more fully formed plot lines rather than sonic meanderings, should make De Trop something to keep an eye out for in the future.

Fear Before the March of Flames – Art Damage

I’m glad I got this in the mail because I had sort of written off Fear Before the March of Flames (FBtMoF) as a band that was trying too hard without much success, so I definitely wouldn’t have bought this. My first impression was sometime in 2002 when the act opened for Underoath and, though I admired their energy, I wasn’t too impressed honestly. Since then I’ve happened to see them three or four times and found the band vastly improved. This could partly be because at that time the band had only been together for about five months, it could also be they were youngsters around 19 or 20.

Anyway, the new full-length, Art Damage, sees the band coming into their own with a more distinct sound and a seemingly more comfortable songwriting approach. The sound on Art Damage is somewhere between the likes of Every Time I Die and Converge with a hint of Blood Brothers, for a metalcore/indie hybrid. I really dig a lot of the ideas and structures FBtMoF works with on this new album a lot more than previous material. As a whole, this is WAY more focused than anything else I’ve heard from them.

“Should Have Stayed in the Shallows” is one of the stronger tracks with its varied time signatures and structured chaos. “The Story of the Curious Oysters” has a more pronounced indie feel to it that is semi-Blood Brothers-esque. “The State of Texas vs. Fear Before” has a few rock ‘n roll licks toward the end that bring to mind Every Time I Die. On “Law of Averages,” the band delves into the buzzing harmonics that Norma Jean has mastered, and it does so pretty successfully.

Although Art Damage is way better than I ever expected it to be, it still needs a little work. FBtMoF has progressed from “energetic-but-misdirected” to mediocrity to a band with tons of potential. If these artists harness their energy and work with their potential, Fear Before the March of Flames could do some real damage.

The Colour – The Colour is Out & About EP

The Colour is a five-piece band from California, but if you weren’t told that bit of information you’d likely assume these guys were from the United Kingdom. Though the music itself could be considered to have its fair share of British influence, it is largely the singers’ vocal affectations that give you this sense. He just sounds like he went to the Robert Smith (of the Cure) school of singing to be able to nail down warbling with a slight accent and plenty of soaring dramatics. To be as simplistic as possible, if you loved the Cure you will likely really dig the Colour, and if Robert Smith’s vocals didn’t ever interest you then this EP will likely grate on your last nerve.

The Cure comparisons could go on for days, but there is more to the Colour than a singer who sounds like Robert Smith. The band plays an interesting blend of new-wave and R&B – think plenty of blues guitar, tambourine, and tons of good, pop-oriented hooks. These guys also tap right into 70s-era rock attitude, and their songs possess a certain swagger and sexiness. It’s all very upbeat, but with an odd feeling of melancholy enveloping the whole thing. You could just as easy dance to these tracks as you find yourself slowly slipping into depression.

The Colour is at its best when the band gets a little funky, like on “Mirror Ball.” This song is almost like modern rock-disco: catchy as hell and lots of fun to listen to. “Tambourine’s” R&B style is enjoyable and could have easily been a huge hit in the 80s. In fact, all of the tracks here have a retro feel with a more contemporary rock edge.

My biggest problem with The Colour is Out & About – and this is really rather minor – is that the disc is short, even by EP standards. With five songs barely filling 15 minutes of play time, you are definitely left wanting to hear more from this intriguing band. I would really like to hear a full-length effort these guys to see what they can create on a larger scale. From what I understand, the Colour has only been together for about a year so there are (hopefully) still plenty of good tunes to come from them in the near future.

Post-Haste – Untitled

I know it’s an overused term. I know everyone and their mother’s uncle is using the term to describe bands of every genre and influence. I know it’s a word that most folks that I personally know are absolutely tired of hearing. Let’s face it, kids, “garage” is the new “grunge.”

So what happens when a band comes along with a release that actually does sound like it was literally recorded during a live performance in a garage? … And what happens when there’s nothing stylish, trendy, or ironic about that performance? Instead of sounding like a purposely unpolished pop band cashing in on a fad, what happens when a band releases something rather gritty sounding that actually has feeling, warmth, and substance? The answer to all of these questions can be found in Post-Haste’s Untitled.

I was surprisingly hooked on Untitled after only one listen. Sure, the mix is uneven at times – the vocals get nasally at times, cutting through the backing instruments; one of the rhythm guitars gets a bit muffled in the mix at points; and the cymbals seem to linger over the instruments a bit too much during some songs.

The charm of this album is in the imperfection, though. What the guys in Post-Haste do with these 12 songs is offer up one of those rare collections of music where the flaws add character and personality to the performances. Playing Untitled in my bedroom, I can close my eyes and easily imagine myself sitting on a dingy old couch tossed in the corner of a dark garage, watching a group of fellas band out a ‘practice set’ before hauling equipment to play an opening gig at some local dive bar.

I love it. I love it, I love it, I LOVE IT. Performances like these are wasted on sub-par material; luckily for Post-Haste, the songs here are simple and catchy. “Insides Out” serves as one of the album’s crowning moments, sounding like something a high-school-aged Rivers Cuomo might’ve busted out. What makes the song so good? Well, it could be the sweet, muzzled ‘oooooh’ backing vocals, or the sweetly plaintive vocals riding over the impressively tight rhythm section during the verses, or maybe even the way the guitars explode into dueling rhythm lines at one or two points in the song.

The 20-second opening to “Practice Prude” sounds like some sort of homage to The Who before the guitars bash out some fuzzy chords and turn the track into something Superchunk would be proud to drop on wax. Album opener “Frozen Thin” is a bit more contained than the rest of the material here, though the gravely vocal parts and slightly unkempt guitar solo bit are more than a bit reminiscent of Nirvana’s Bleach days. The extremely basic sounding “Academy of 3” chugs nicely on simplistic riffing; “Chemical Favours” melds textbook pop/rock riffing with handclaps, whimsical backing vocals and a catchy-as-you-wanna-be chorus into two minutes of head-bobbing action.

While other songs on Untitled hint at a bit of The Who’s simplistic beauty from the 60s, the two-minute grimy pop purge of “I” legitimately sounds like something I’d expect to hear on a reel of unpublished Who rehearsals/demos. The more contained, poppy “New Brighton the Mighty” is a nice change of pace, though the band is at its best on tracks like the album-closing “Symmetry,” which couples aggressive riffs with rhythm section explosions and unnaturally sweet backing vocals (which only make the impending guitar rips on the chorus seem that much more powerful).

It’s great to see that the members of Post-Haste knows the band’s strength and stick close to it for most of Untitled. Catchy, quick-riff tracks are the name of the game here, and the only place the disc even remotely near falters is on the four-minute “Green Alumni,” which stands out as just a bit too drawn-out amongst the rest of the material here (only one other song on the disc even passes the two-and-a-half minute mark, and even that one runs under three minutes). No pretension, no ‘trends’, no hackneyed attempts to sound like a million other bands that are making money and grabbing Rolling Stone/Spin headlines – this here is just straight-up, plug-in and rip stuff, and man oh man, Post-Haste does it well. Recommended for fans of the true spirit of being in a rock band.

Melk the G6-49 – Glossolalia

The first time I put this disc in my stereo, I had no freaking clue what the hell was going on. Thoroughly at a loss as to what had just happened, I put the record back in my stack of promos and figured I’d find a way to deal with it some other time. After a few days, I started playing the record for my friends in a “check out how fucking weird this shit is” sort of way. And, lo and behold, at some point I started to “get” it.

“Glossolalia,” I’m told, means speaking in tongues. It’s pretty much the perfect metaphor for what these guys do with their music – it’s a random-seeming string of musical syllables devoid of any literal meaning to the listener, and most likely to the band as well.

Their influences likely run the gamut of out-there heavy music touchstones such as early Sonic Youth, Mike Patton, Melvins, Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, etc. But like all of these acts, Melk is so idiosyncratic and flat-out weird that they defy direct comparisons.

Melk the G6-49 is a two-piece comprised of John Spencer (a different one than you’re thinking) on bass and Karl Hofstetter on drums. Over the course of these seven instrumental tracks, these two pound out some pretty heavy riffs, interspersed with several minutes of near-silence. They pretty much follow a basic loud-soft dynamic all the way through the 35 minutes of music (maybe sound, or noise, would be more accurate).

Depending on your mood, this stuff can either sound like the most intelligent, next-level “metal” you’re likely to ever come across or the most random collection of half-formed riffs two stoners ever managed to string together. The free-form structures of the individual tracks and the album as a whole leave a lot of room to consider why exactly these guys made the specific musical choices we find here.

This recording is so, so terrible that it creates a texture that’s entirely unique. It’d be odd to see these guys in a live context after becoming acclimated to them on disc – they’d be hard-pressed to get their instruments to sound this awful. The playing here is amazingly loose – deliberate, I’m sure, but it’s still very discomforting.

It goes without saying: this record is not for everyone. It will probably be pretty much unlistenable to almost everyone. That said, I was able to find something intriguing here, albeit only after repeated listens, and I’m not generally one to go for this sort of thing. If you’re feeling adventurous, or you want to have something to freak your friends out with, this would be a great record to check out.

Mister Metaphor – Die on the High Road EP

True Confession No. 45: Despite occasional name-dropping and elitist attitude that’s been taken in reviews written and yet to be wrote by me, I was a clichéd emo kid. The first “emo/indie” album I heard was Jawbreaker’s Dear You. The first time I heard “Accident Prone,” I was hooked and began a quest to consume everything about that “scene” that I could. Jawbreaker led to Jawbox’s Your Own Special Sweetheart and Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary. This was all back in the mid 90s when I was living out Empire Records fantasies in suburbia. I think I was reading some issue of Alternative Press (March of ’97 actually, but fear not true-believer … I googled it) when I happened upon a review of Mineral’s Power of Failing. I was long gone from the record store by then, making a living answering inane questions denizens of the east coast had about dial-up Internet and troubleshooting things like slow-downloads and no dial-tone. Without the ability to just order things from the store computer, and still too green to order music off the net (it was 97 after all), I hopped over to the local hip-ass record store and bought the album. “Slower” did it in for me. After that, weekly trips to SoundWaves were made. After all, they had a entire section helpfully labeled “Independent” that I could shop in. I bought things at random, or because the cover looked cool. The Promise Ring, *shudder* Penfold, Christie Front Drive, Piebald, and at some point an album called Frame & Canvas by Braid.

Sacramento four-piece with the horribly unfortunate name of Mister Metaphor kicks off its debut EP with a sincere channeling of Braid’s sloppy start-stop jingle-jangle indie-pop sound. “90 words” is capable of time travel, and immediately I was thrust back into 1998 tooling around in a tired Ford Bronco blaring “Collect from Clark Kent” through fried speakers. Since I can’t be an emo fan without a taste for nostalgia, this was a really cool feeling. On the other hand, 1998 kind of sucked and that Penfold EP was really embarrassing look back now. Musically, the track is slight more priggish and refined that Braid ever wanted to be. The vocals are much more slick than Bob Nanna and Chris Broach’s call response style, channeling more Late Morrissey than New Nathan. The mozzer’s influence is further supported with Smithy lines like “what could you do in ninety words to make me suffer?” The question is never answered (even though the song has 101 words, I’m a geek and counted), which pretty much sums up the first track: unfulfilling. It’s a decent enough opener, but nothing too terribly exciting going on.

Mister Metaphor pick up with the second track (one of the standouts of the EP), “Can’t See the Picture.” Opening with a clean bass line and smooth guitar, it flows into some math-rock chops before launching into more Braid-ish trashy, all in the first minute. When the harmonies kick in on the bridge, it’s a deadly moment so nice the slightly poetry work shop lyrics of “and you could say that interpretation / is often judgement yet open ended / and hiding places they yield salvation / like one way tickets and lives pretended.” C’mon guys, this is the day and age of Conor Oberst ripping his heart out on an album and bands like Isis pulling all their material from dead French philosophers. You can do better. Questionable lyricism aside, the track flexes all the aspects of Mister Metaphor’s skills from the tasty math-rock hooks to the exploding choruses with call-response vocals.

The rest of the EP passes along quite nicely except for the awful suspicion that this has all been done before, and it has. Mister Metaphor does not veer much from the rooms of its members’ influences. Braid and late 90s indie/emo reign supreme here. More importantly, these guys have proven talent and a knack for a dangerous hook. This works best when they combine their Braid tendencies with paying respect to The Smiths (a band Braid them selves pulled off some admirable covers of). “The Gloaming” (and these guys fucking RULE for not making this a Radiohead cover) is hands down the best thing on the EP. This is what The Smiths might have done had they been born 20 years later. When they come to the break down of “it’s not a question of faith / cause god knows I’ve set that record straight” I had the urge to hug my copies of Hatful of Hollow and The Queen is Dead.

Die on the High Road is the sort of thing I would have killed for back in the late 90s. The type of band I would have devoured for mix-tapes and crowded into smoky clubs to see. In 2004, the sound is a little tired, but they make up for it with some tasty nods to the Smiths and a firm grasp on technique. Unfortunately, like a lot of good bands from that period (fuck you very much Burning Airlines) they don’t last long. This EP was released in October of this year, and as of November the band has disbanded. However, there’s still hope. Since bands that reform and tour seems to be all the rage these days (hot damn, Slint!), you can order this now and be one of those stand-offish old school fans at the reunion show. How cool is that?

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