Expertly mixing a broad range of styles, moods, and techniques, Mamaleek’s sixth album streams along through its varied forms with high finesse and intriguing emotional turmoil, frequently fusing harsh and gentle elements. Trip-hop beats, neofolkish guitar texturing, blackened vocals, tribal rhythms, free-wheeling drum arrangements, bursts of chaotic noise, and post-punk bass-lines get used in quick turn, along with other touches, with the careful assembly making them all somehow work together, and produce moments of beautiful pressures. Though it runs by fairly quick, there’s so many details packed into the music as to ensure plenty of potential for deep examination.
The instrumental cut of Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation brings the work by Dan the Automator, DJ Qbert, Kool Keith, Paul Banks, and Del tha Funkee Homosapien into clearer focus, with the scratching, beats, synth textures, and samples feeling like a complete construction even without Keith’s rapping, albeit one on the simple side. Occasional strains of electric guitar blend well with the generally gritty vibe, and while the underlying loops are fairly chill, the action on top gets almost hyper at times. Attention to fleshing out the numerous layers is evident throughout the album, and pulls from a wide array of sources broaden the flavor palette. Though not especially interesting listening, the exposure it gives to the supporting structures is appreciable.
Released twelve years after Kool Keith’s last album under the Dr. Octagon persona, The Return of Dr. Octagon (which ended up being finished by the OCD International label without Keith), Moosebumps quickly finds its footing after getting a too-long intro track (which tries to cram the word ‘octagon’ into every verse) out of the way. The subsequent tracks mix firm beats, odd synth texturing, fast-moving vocal work dropping pop culture references left and right, and turntable action from Kid Koala and DJ Qbert, while Dan the Automator provides co-writing on all songs.
The kaleidoscopic results are almost all high-energy, with a couple of stops in more mellow territory, and the broad range of samples sources adds to its eclectic impressions. The focus balance of words and beats feels a little skewed too far in either direction at times, with bass surges nearly drowning out the vocals or cadences running free from the backing rhythms, but the energetic assemblage of everything helps smooth out those rough patches. Lots of fun and rich in detailing, and a nice way to get the Dr. Octagon side-project back on track after a long hiatus.
On his second single, Lucky Tubb brings in Reverend Horton Heat bassist Jimbo Wallace to co-write and play a pair of songs. A-side “Cattlemen’s Stroll” plays with some retro Western dance-hall material, with a mellow melody eased along on brassy guitar licks. The B-side, “There’s Not A Day”, shifts to a more modern rockabilly strut for a quick ramble, returning to the throw-back flavor for its finish. Well-played and earnest in its homaging, but nothing to make it really stand out too much besides the pedigrees of the people involved.
With their seventh studio album, the instrumental doom metal of Bongripper is kept to its usual formula, though with fewer (titled) tracks than ever before. Split into “Slow” and “Death”, the album rolls along on slow-hammer poundings from bass and drums, with the grimy-toned guitar laying a layer of sharper nastiness over the booming riffs. Despite limiting themselves to just two tracks, the band seems lacking in inspiration and execution when compared to earlier works, with much less distinction between the different movements and a narrower range of instrumental interaction dynamics at play.
A few bridges do offer brief changes of pace, but end up having little bearing on the overall direction of the song-writing. What deviation there is from the base-line beats and bass plugging brings just too little to the table to off-set or justify the lengthy runs of dullness surrounding them, and in the end, it feels like something the band put out not from any particular enthusiasm for the material presented, but simply to keep themselves in the metalhead public eye. Hopefully this is just a stop-gap on the way to something of greater effort and interest, but given their track record with attempts to provide anything that measures up to 2010′s Satan Worshiping Doom, it doesn’t seem that likely.
Recorded before the death of founding drummer Adrian Guerra, this live album captures the two-piece doom metal and Bell Witch in fantastic form, coaxing enormous-sounding caverns of slow-throbbing atmosphere out of their bass-and-drums combo. Opening with “I Wait”, from their debut album Longing, the band capably demonstrates their way with building up grand walls of sound while following a clear central melody, and with exploring the transitional cool-downs between those slabby passages.
Eating up the rest of the record are two tracks from Bell Witch’s sophomore album, Four Phantoms, which would be the last to feature Guerra. “Judgement, In Fire: I – Garden (Of Blooming Ash)“ leads the way out of “I Wait”, with
clear and focused melancholy
pulling across bridges and measures of crushed mournfulness, both a breather and an intensification of purpose.
“Suffocation, A Burial: I – Awoken (Breathing Teeth)“
expands the suffocated rumblings of the first track into fuller form, returning to the rough guitar timbre with a more even ratio of sadness and anger, and employing the wordless moans and groans to fine effect in complementing its despairing resonance. For just three songs, the band communicates some powerful emoting with expansive detailing, the instrumental tracks coming through with distinctive projection and clarity. An excellent performance, and a strong send-off for half of the original band.
With their first album of new studio material in twenty or so years, the stoner metal legends of Sleep step up to the heavy expectations of their fans with aplomb, picking up smoothly from their exit on Dopesmoker / Jerusalem despite a change of drummers for the three-piece. Expansive riffs, craggy bass-lines, singing with a tinge of growling, and lavish lead guitar work are par for the course, with the band pulling a couple of tracks (i.e., “Sonic Titan” and “Antarcticans Thawed”) out of their live-only purgatory and into vibrant presentation.
It’s difficult to gauge how much influence the scores of imitators and emulators of Sleep in the band’s decades of hiatus have had on the shaping of their return material, but (discounting Dopesmoker and its lone hour-long song), the songs are longer on average than on the group’s previous albums, with three of its six tracks topping ten minutes (in comparison to one on Sleep’s Holy Mountain, and none on Volume One). And while a large part of those lengthy songs does consist of circling around a main riff for what feels like minutes on end, it also seems that the work put in by the musicians in other groups and solo efforts during Sleep’s down-time has helped inform their sense of how to grow those riffs while keeping them controlled.
The time rift also puts an odd spin on the flavor of the songs, with their broad bass strokes and buzz-sweeping guitar-work riding an edge between blueprint and parody of the stoner metal style. It’s hard to escape the self-conscious vibes (especially with a song titled after Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler, “Giza Butler”), but the largely instrumental nature of the songs helps tamp down the weirdness of that impact on the music itself. Taken on their own, they’re also well-written, atmospheric, and suitably energized, and while it’s not a giant leap forward for the band, the demonstration that they can still meet the bar set by their past work is an incredibly welcome one.
For the score to the 1973 vampiric drama film Ganja & Hess, Sam Waymon uses elements of soul, psychedelic, gospel, and experimental electronic to effectively communicate the weight of stress and cultural pressures upon the lead characters, with (for example) strains of old jazz threaded through echoing gasps and hyperventilation, simple string instruments plucked over intense drone beams, and chanting giving way to clear melodies and horrified screams.
Like the movie, the score is strikingly ahead of its time in terms of content while recognizably using the forms of its day, and while the splitting of the tracks is done in odd ways , it still achieves a bizarre sort of hypnotic momentum while spinning about from one piece of juxtaposition to the next. Though it took almost half a century for the music to receive its own release, it’s aged quite well (though it is distinctly early-’70s), and is certainly worth hunting down for fans of well-made experimentalism.
With their fourth album, Merlin make some tweaks to their blend of heavy psych, doom metal, and country western music, blurring in a little jazz by way of horn accents and sleeker string tones for a more upbeat vibe in comparison to their earlier albums. Their grasp of how to organically move songs from brooding riffs to speedy intensity holds strong, with quicker transitions in play, and the melodies still manage to burrow into the back of the mind before resurfacing piece-meal in memory days later.
At the same time, it feels uncharacteristically short, particularly with the dwarfing of ~11-minute closing track “The Wizard Suite” when held up against “Tales of the Wasteland”, the previous album’s ~23-minute finisher. Aside from that sense of compression, there’s a fair amount to enjoy with the music’s shaping, and the portions which drop the vocals and drift off into the most indulgent psychedelic territory stand out as probably the most distinctive part of the album.
Unfortunately, and unlike their last two LPs, The Wizard lacks a strong ‘single’ song, something with a melody and chorus strong enough to stick in the mind in full and pull listeners back in for a go at the other tunes that surround it. “The Wizard Suite” comes closest, with its recurring chants of “I am the wizard!”, and lengthy riff ruminations, but the broad travels of its bridges introduce too much rambling to quite meet the bill. The shows of the band expanding their instrumental palette are welcome, but while the energy is there (and much of it surely makes for great live material), it just doesn’t feel as fully or coherently realized as their last couple of outings.
In this one-track single, Acid Dad plug out some high-polish garage rock with a twist of psychedelia, fuzzed vocals melding nicely with the bleariness of the guitar riffs and thumping drums. Though it basically circles in place for the full run, there are some nice licks thrown in, and it serves its purpose as an album teaser with no real problems.
Scrambled Brains 