Fences and fingers.

It’s strange that some music, played just right, can stop your heart cold. When all the instruments and recording and listening experience are in total alignment, something really exciting and sublime happens. When John Bonham suddenly shifts to double-time it’s like an enormous hole has been punched right through the song, like someone’s reaching out from the speaker to grab you by the arms and shake you. When Mastodon locks into some circular descending lead, it sucks the air right out of your lungs. When Harvey Milk leaves a bent chord hanging, punctuates a phrase with some twisting howl, time has totally stopped, and music has completely removed you completely from the moment.

It’s hard to describe exactly what makes these moments for me. The best way to describe it, perhaps, would be as an element in a song that surprises you no matter how many times you hear it, maybe even shocks you. It’s the distillation of pure energy, excitement captured in the music; when a part like this hits, I’ll often realize I’d completely stopped whatever I was doing and am sitting or standing with some moronic grin on my face and glazed-over eyes. But that’s the power of music – to completely dissociate you from time, to propel you in some unexpected direction.*

The point is, some music seems to contain some kind of electricity in its sound. Songs can be fast without being driving, and songs can be loud without being intense – actual intensity is something harder to come by. It’s the difference between a toaster and a blowtorch: both are controlled heat, one is just a little more dangerous.** Wetnurse’s Invisible City, thankfully, is a blowtorch.

Guitars are ragged and fiercely aggressive. They roar and growl, and leads are piercing and bright – everything on this record has some kind of rawness to it, a live element. Drums are manic, switching beats rapidly and fitting in some frenetic fills – though there often seems to be no time. They clank and rattle and pound, each instrument seeming to struggle to keep up with the others. Vocals are disarming and abrasive, favoring sloppy mush-mouthed yells coupled with a discordant falsetto.***

The record is expertly paced, with solitary acoustic guitars forming bookends to the exploration of pretty much any sound Wetnurse would like to make. Their signature is their ability to take any variety of riff and make it their own, fitting the guitars parts into cohesive songs. It’s not a perfect album – some turns in the music don’t quite click, some leads could be improved – but despite it’s flaws… it’s awesome.

Rating: 480

*I think this moment is one of the reasons the whole Guitar Hero Rock Band movement has become so popular. It’s really cathartic to feel like you’re contributing to these moments, to settle into those epic rhythms or connect yourself to those guitar tones. Yeah, it feels pretty awesome to completely nail a Slash solo on your plastic guitar. Obviously, you could do the same thing with couple thousands of dollars in musical equipment and years of solitary practice, followed by assembling a band who’s willing to obsessively rehearse “Sweet Child o’ Mine” a hundreds of times and… geeze, why does anyone form a band, ever?

**Dumb metaphor alert? These should all have warnings on them, if possible.

***One of the later tracks features a female guest singer, who does her best classic rock impression to great effect.

Though nothing will ever take the place of a solid blood-curdling scream, muscular roar or even a well-placed growl, I usually enjoy hearing actual singing in metal. No, not the kind of singing with easily definable notes or melodies, but singing where the vocalist strains awkwardly to hit every note, or at least makes an effort to change their inflection once in a while. So basically, Lemmy has the voice of an angel. The vocals that High on Fire or Harvey Milk squeeze out are generally what I’m attracted to, where it seems to physically pain the singer to create any semblance of melody; the vocals are gritty and abrasive but a more versatile that traditional yells, which adds a whole different dimension to the music.

Of course, there’s also an opposite, more talented wing of metal singers who take the operatic, punched-in-the-balls approach to vocals. Those upper-register notes tend to cut through the music rather than trying to muscle through it, and while they’re probably much more talented singers than the growling, rasping group, they still don’t necessarily have what would be regarded as a ‘good’ voice.*

That said, when I hear vocals in metal that don’t fit into either of those two categories – ruggedly inept or falsetto – it’s generally a turnoff for me. That’s a gut reaction I should probably shake, but solidly constructed, melodic vocals usually signal something’s going to be boring, flacid rock.** Part of this is probably an issue with the music production. If rock vocals are forefront, they’re most likely layered, auto-tuned and polished until they’ve lost any kind of emotion or nuance.

ASG sings just like that: lots of harmonies, layering and super-clean vocals. Many of the hooks sound radio ready. Win Us Over is a record of concise, melodic songs with catchy riffs. If that sound like condemnations of the record – it’s not. It’s a solid album, each song unique, with powerful guitars forefront and a parade of interesting riffs and interlocking guitar parts. Think the last Torche album taken a step closer to mainstream.

ASG works within traditional song structures, and what makes it different than probably most music on this blog is that each track could stand on its own with just an acoustic guitar and vocals. That’s not a good or bad thing in itself – it just means that the different instrumental parts were written around the songs, and not vice-versa, which I think is an interesting distinction.*** Anyways, there are sweet guitar lines, driving yet unobtrusive drums and hook-laden vocals. It’s good to hear a band who had interest in writing catchy songs, yet still has some real chops.

Rating: 310

*Once again, Christ Cornell is probably an exception to this, but he’s using his voice for evil now. So, yeah.

**Not always – for example, I think Josh Homme has some solid pipes and has really mastered the art of creating worthwhile rock songs. Queens of the Stone Age are sort of the anti-Nickelback, or something like that.

***I want to see some kind of graphical chart with song-oriented bands on one side and instrumental-oriented bands on the other. ASG would be near the midpoint though.

But on the other hand, what I haven’t been able to get very into – perhaps because it is incredible boring – is most instrumental post-hardcore. All the elements for cool music are there: technical prowess, a strong focus on composition, the appearance of taste and intelligence. But, for whatever reason, the music becomes too clean, too sanitary and distant for me to get into. There’s something about indecipherable screaming that gives music so much more depth.

On the other hand, I really do like Russian Circles and their newest record Station. Not that they wouldn’t benefit from tossing in the occasional scream, but their sound generally stands on its own. Songs start off whisper-quiet with circular delay-pedal guitar parts, slowly building segment by segment until they’re ready to burst open with some pounding drums and sharp-toothed riffs. Then, they slowly decrescendo, the pace slackens, and the song dies out – only to start the whole cycle over again with the next track. This whole process takes a little while, so the average song stands at about seven minutes, though for some reason you never get the rude urge to look at your watch, and you know well enough not to clap between movements.

The driving core of this record, though, are the drums. There aren’t any heart-stopping fills or mind-boggling beats, but the drums remain dynamic and muscular through the album. When the drums are hit hard, you can feel it, and perhaps even more than the guitar part they dictate the pace and feel of each song. The drums know when it’s time to tap on the cymbal quietly or simmer beneath the music with rumbling tom-work. It’s bootiful.**

The songs in Station are generally tense affairs, incrementally ratcheting up the tension until they explode. That makes it a great album for working on deadline-related stuff – filling out your taxes, working on a paper, whatever. By the time you get halfway through this album, you’ll be working frenetically and sweating bullets. Also, it’s a great album to just kick back on the porch with some ice tea and take in a sunset. Either way, Russian Circles have put together another great instrumental record that won’t bore you to disinterest, and contains some real depth and aggression.

Rating: 417

Harper Lewis

 
*Speaking of new-age ambient noise, Sounds of the Ocean Volume IV is a great record. When those seagulls kick in around 17:42, it’s pure heaven.

**Being, personally, a really terrible drummer, I’m always looking for albums to play along with, and this is a great one for that. There are rest periods for when your arms get all tired, beats almost always last long enough for you to figure out what’s going on, and, there are plenty of interesting rhythms and fills to work on and build up to speed. Most importantly, there are rock-out parts where you just seem to be running on all cylinders, and you can close your eyes and imagine you’re actually playing a Russian Circles song on Rock Band.

Maybe that’s an obsessive way to look at music, but for me, that’s what makes it interesting. Albums contain an incredible wealth of information, and I can’t understand an album until I’ve really learned it, absorbed it over multiple listens, absorbed the twists and turns, the odd time signatures and pauses and hooks and riffs. I’m not sure how long it takes to reach this point – a dozen listens? twenty? – but obviously that’s only going to happen if a record really resonates with me.

The Ocean’s Precambian isn’t there yet, but it’s close. Recorded by a German collective with over forty contributors, Precambrian follows the various stages of earth’s creation in musical form, being broken up into specific eons* within this time period. Since the actual Precambrian era lasted 4 billion years, the album describing it spans two discs.

Surprisingly enough, this huge cast of musicians, toiling under a weighty, abstract concept, managed to create an incredible album. The first disc is a powerful, raging behemoth, erupting with all the force and natural violence of a bleak world battered by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Enormous riffs plow forward with titanic inevitability, and vocals tear through the mix with primal ferocity.

The second disk is where the band really creates room to breath, making full use of orchestration, yet often relying on a single piano or violin to accentuate dynamics or build to a breaking point. Not to say the second act isn’t powerful, just that all the rage and fury have been pushed underground, where they rage and stew just beneath the surface of the record, occasionally bursting forth into monstrous dirges.** In a way the record presents itself as separate but equal, parts, the whole it creates is as monstrously deep and imposing as an actual ocean, possibly the Atlantic.

Rating: 528***

The Ocean – Eoarchaeon 

http://worldofdelusion.com/wp-content/uploads/Audio/2009/Eoarchaean.mp3

*Such as the Hadean, Eoarchaeon Paleoarchaeon, and so on. Also, are there any good albums about dinosaurs? Or by dinosaurs? Also, maybe I should note, I’m just writing about this album because I had an almost overwhelming urge to listen to it today.

**Also, one of the tracks is framed by a Kevin Spacey monologue. I still dig the song, but were the rights to Will Smith monologues too expensive?

***Still doing the 0 – 555 rating system, which may still be explained with benchmarks and such eventually. For example, Cave In’s Antenna is a 275 and Paul Simon’s Hearts and Bones is a 301.

What psychadelic, feel good tunes lie inside this house?

When I’m cruising the town in my enormous, silver Grand Marquis, I generally listen to the radio. Yeah, the car has a compact disk player, but it’s generally not worth the effort to dig through the enormous pile of CDs on my floor in order to pull out a scratched and battered copy of Superunkown.* Plus I like to keep tabs on what kind of music all the kids are listening to these days, which is something most people who drive a Grand Marquis puzzle over, I suppose.

I was lucky enough to catch some interesting new music today: Beyonce’s “Put a Ring On It,” Kanye’s “Love Lockdown,” and some other track where TI offers to buy me Petron. And, just in case I haven’t started to sound out-of-touch, there was some absolute crap playing after that: music compressed to the limits of human listenability, with vocals that conjured up an entire demented choir of emotionless R&B songstresses. Pop music is always eager to synthesize these glassy-eyed figures, package them up with music videos and insist they’re the next big thing. This music, sadly, has no depth, no pacing, no dynamics – and absolutely no relief. It’s been steamrolled flat, until it has all the authenticity and nuance of the artist’s Photoshopped poster on your wall.**

But just because music is synthetic doesn’t mean it can’t have depth. Genghis Tron’s Board Up the House, for example, is absolutely loaded with different textures and layers, dynamic shifts and throat-ravaging screams. From the first track, Genghis Tron demonstrates just how much room they have in which to experiment. Programmed drums swing from ferocious blastbeats to tom-driven rhythms, eventually settling into patient electronic grooves. Signature keyboard tones add pop hooks, duel with other instruments or shadow the guitar to create powerful, epic riffs. The introduction of more melodic vocals adds a whole new weapon for Genghis Tron to employ; or, more in tune to their style, they add another gear to violently shift to and from without warning.

Though Board Up the House has countless stylistic shifts, the record is paced expertly. Each sound, as well, is unique but still a critical component of the whole: Boards of Canada electronic grooves can give way to segments of fierce electronic grindcore, stuttered robotic riffing or even spaced-out melodic chants. Often these elements build off each other, and just as often the listener is ratcheted between them like some pinball, violently rebounding off flashing walls and at sharp angles, triggering bells and bursts of percussive sound, given only slight relief when upon escape from the frantic arms of the flippers.***

Genghis Tron have taken their unique mix of electronic and metal, their dynamic rhythmic and melodic attack, and figured out how to fit all the pieces together. They’ve managed to significantly hone their songwriting without surrendering the edge and exploring new ground. Just like their ancient forbearer, Genghis Tron have conquered with unyielding violence; they’ve ripped the still-beating heart from their prostrate victim and can now taste the salty sting of victory – sweet, sweet victory.

Rating: 511

http://worldofdelusion.com/wp-content/uploads/Audio/2009/02%20Endless%20Teeth(1).mp3

Genghis Tron – Endless Teeth

*And once a CD is in that changer, it roosts there for months. That’s how I end up listening to Mars Volta’s Scab Dates fourteen times consecutively. Not surprisingly, I don’t drive much anymore.

**In pop music, the surface is often flattened intentionally to obscure the substance, but this happens in metal too. Listen to Hetfield’s robo-voice on the new record, something I will doubtless discuss soon. Or you can find it in hardcore records that are glossy and maxed-out – if the record’s supposed to be loud, then I can turn it up myself.

***If pinball seems like a stupid metaphor, just wait till next week. I’ve got this fantastic “Big Buck Hunter” simile I’m working on.

I’d like to think I stay pretty current on world events, that I have a pretty fair perspective on what’s going on in the world. No, I’m not a news expert, but I do know how the economy is doing (badly), how that whole Israel-Palestine thing is coming along (badly), and that there’s a new President in town. If someone attractive on television is talking about news, I listen to it.* If there’s a funny editorial cartoon in the newspaper, I’ll at least look at the picture. That being said, when I watched Heavy Metal in Baghdad, it made me feel like I’d been missing out on some important information over the last eight years.

Being halfway around the world, it’s easy to become pretty distanced from the Iraqi war. The stories are horrifying, but they appear with such regularity that they fade into the background. Death tolls and civilian casualties are frightening, but they tend to be pretty abstract when they’re just a graph in a magazine. Heavy Metal in Baghdaddoesn’t exactly bring the grim reality directly to you, but it does follow the four dudes in Acrassicauda (the only metal band in Iraq) as they struggle against war, destruction and international politics to pursue their one true love: metal.

You see them perform in pre-war Iraq, when they had to write songs praising Saddam Hussein to be allowed to perform in public. You see their loyal fans risk life and limb and cross security checkpoints across Baghdad to arrive at a show, over-sized metal shirts in tow. You see Acrassicauda’s practice space get destroyed by a missile, as the condition in Baghdad gradually worsens. People can’t speak English on the streets, and there’s apparently no place in the town that’s safe from snipers, bombers and insurgents. To continue playing metal, and for their own safety, the band eventually flees the country (along with 2.5 million other refugees).**

Acrassicauda is surprisingly good – if your country’s only going to have one metal band, they’re not a bad place to start. They have, it seems, nothing to live for other than their music; it’s hard to imagine much of a future in the bombed-out husk of Baghdad. The interest, however, isn’t necessarily in the music, but in the strength it takes for these guys to stare into the void of hopelessness and destruction and yet come out alive, with drums pounding and guitars thrashing. Keep on rocking, Acrassicauda.

Go ahead and Netflix it:

**The take is a fairly non-partisan one.

The sad world of grandfather clocks.

When the world seems to be doing everything it can to frustrate you, throws everything at you at once, music can be a welcome release. The trained musician understands how to expresses this anger, has sympathy with your condition and knows how it feels to want to lash out in a blind rage. That is, in part, what draws people to music: the comfort in knowing that when you are blinded by an uncontrollable range, there’s always the perfect song to reflect just how you feel. Of course, music expresses more emotions than just anger. Sorrow, repulsion, despair and ambivalence are all themes that popular music tackles. When a certain mood hits, there’s always a certain album or band or song that matches it.* Metal music has the popular reputation of fueling hate and violence, but really it can be triumphant, energetic and virile; or, it can be relaxing and a release valve for stress. After all, if a type of music really stirred up only negative emotions, who but the most sadomasochistic would ever listen to it?

This is what brings me to Portal’s Outre. I’ve never had music hit me quite like this record – it’s like staring into an eternal void of absolute blackness, like being pulled slowly under the icy water without even struggling. It’s a recording of the complete abandonment of hope. And strangely enough, it’s not repulsive sound, but draws you in close and smothers you, obscures your vision with suffocating mass of smoke and slowly numbs your consciousness with a dull, pulsing pressure.

Portal plays hypnotizing, wholly encompassing pitch black death. Pounding drums are buried under massive waves of toneless, discordant guitars, and percussion occasionally abandons the music entirely, leaving you without a temporal compass in a oily black ocean of detuned, buzzing distortion. There are, surprisingly, discernible riffs: the best of which slides chromatically down the fretboard into tremolo-picked, buzzing oblivion. A voice rasps over the guitars with directionless monotony, in the same way the bass drum rumbles under it.** The album is cohesive to the point of being airtight. It evokes one massive, building inhalation and exhalation of surrender, like the final breath of some defeated giant.

So, if you’re suddenly feeling down in the dumps – if perhaps you’re a victim of the floundering economy, or just arriving at the realizing that life is never going to stop beating you down, but will only continue to do so with more force, more regularity, and less reason – cheer up, because I have some good news! Portal knows exactly where you’re at, and has created the perfect album accompany your inevitable decline into a numb, emotionless state of absolute despair.***

Rating: 398

http://worldofdelusion.com/wp- content/uploads/Audio/2009/Portal.mp3
Portal – Abysmill

*The correct song for the moment, strangely enough, is usually Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time,” though sometimes it’s “Moving Out (Anthony’s Song).”

**As usual, I say “directionless monotony” as a compliment.

***Expect something more uplifting tomorrow. I mean, assuming there is a tomorrow.

Owlman is an intimidating figure.

When critics put together their year-end lists, there often seems to be a concerted effort to be as inclusive and wide-ranging in taste as possible. Electronica and dance music are saddled up next to rap or hip hop in the ratings; indie darlings and mega-platinum poplets alike may receive a glowing critical consensus; lasts gasps from heritage artists are trumpeted alongside some myspace band with sales driven by well-placed “Internet buzz.” Metal, however, is almost categorically left out of the critical conversation.

What gives?

Metal, in the general sense, is a very inclusive and self-referential genre. It has its own vocabulary, its own critical voices and its own expansive list of sub-genres in which bands can be distributed. There is Pop Music, and there is Metal, overlapping only in bouts of retro kitsch or smirking irony. This separation makes sense in some ways: much metal is created to be, in part, abrasiveness and distancing. It requires more effort than simply tapping your toes or recognizing a catchy melody – it can be complex bordering on incomprehensible, it can be abstract and violent or hypnotically repetitive. In short, there’s a freedom in metal that doesn’t exist in a lot of other music.*

There are brief moments in Cult of Luna’s Eternal Kingdom that really utilize this freedom. Tn “The Great Migration,” for example, a metronomic high hat competes with the rhythm of rolling toms, turning over upon itself in a twisting, cyclical beat. A cavernous bass wanders lower and lower, ominously growling under the disjointed interjections of a muted guitar. Different beats and rhythms are accentuated by different instruments, creating kind of a moving painting where different colors glow and fade to accentuate contrasts within the piece, slowly deconstructing to shattered, bare rhythms and a throaty scream.

The album in it’s entirety, unfortunately, is not as sublime. When the band ventures to take chances is generally when they succeed: the mournful trumpet interlude, playing like a restrained, tasteful Mars Volta; flourishes of keyboards or bells that peek through the droning guitars; rhythmic complexities and creative instrumental layering all add significant depth. Other segments of the album, however, can be a little blunt – not as in hard hitting** – as in dull, plodding. But then again, that delicate line between being crushingly direct and predictably plodding is one all doom records must tread, and Cult of Luna generally walk it with admirable skill.

Rating: 312***

*Yeah, metal can be rigid and formulaic, and other music can have that same kind of compositional freedom that exists in metal: Max Tundra, Animal Collective, The Week That Was, Why? come to mind immediately. Even if you don’t like it, you can’t say it’s not interesting. However, metal is generally more free from traditional chords, structures, keys and time-signatures than other genres of music (c’mon, show me a pop song in the dilodian mode).

**Or as in, well, you know.

***This is the new rating scale I’m going to be using for at least the next two weeks, which rates an album between 0 and 555. Perhaps I’ll put together some kind of chart to explain it, to show where historical albums fit on it. For example: Isis’ Panopticon rates exactly a 277.5; Boston’s Boston would be a 532; Billy Joel’s The Stranger is around 174, maybe 175 (just get the greatest hits album, he’s kind of a singles guy). 

Staying up planning the downfall of your corrupted system – what plot will I figure out, what thoughts will I pen down? I will have my coup d’etat, I will start a riot, I will hold your burning flag in my hand.

-Refused

Obama's official Presidential seal.

Today, for many of us, change has finally come. It didn’t take rioting, and it didn’t take burning flags. As President Barack Obama stood up in front of all America and took that solemn oath, it wasn’t a physical coup d’etat,* but an ideological one. The old systems has been toppled, and the new ones can be built. The anxiety and anger that had grown to consume this nation has been transformed to hope, fear and uncertainty falling away under the protective gaze of our new Commander in Chief. America has entered a new era.

But is this really a good thing?

Metal is a genre that feeds off strife, off political and economic unrest. It gives a voice to that unspoken rage which flows underneath the downtrodden, the fearful, the marginalized. Metal was in part birthed of this uncertainty, as Black Sabbath’s Paranoid decried the machinery of war, the hypocrisies of government and the terrifying threat of nuclear weapons.

Skipping past the corporate-rock juggarnauts of the 70s, the 1980s opened with a crippling recession, skyrocketing unemployment, and what was a new golden age of metal. But was this huge economic sacrifice more than balanced out by the rise in power and popularity of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Merciful Fate, Slayer, Metallica, RATT and a host of others who laid the foundations for modern metal? Of course it was.*

The 1990s, by contrast, were a time when the economy grew exponentially and prosperity seemed endless. But as the paychecks rolled in, the country soon grew stupid and careless and started listening to Nu Metal. The punishment for this, of course, was eight years of George Bush, which likewise engendered a metal renaissance.**

Will Obama’s goodwill and optimism destroy all the perfectly useful rage and despair from the past administration? Would he be better off tearing the constitution to shreds, instituting a police state and randomly imprisoning dissenters? Please Obama, don’t act hastily, and choose your Secretary of Metal carefully. The future of history is in your hands.***

*Maybe I should note right here that this whole theory is rife with inaccuracies, exceptions, generalizations and liberalities that add up to what would be considered horrible, intellectually insulting journalism (aka blogging).

**First of all, “Renaissance Metal” seems like a genre waiting to happen, when Viking Metal loses its edge. Secondly, there are a million exceptions of “what about this band” in this chronology. Also, didn’t the mid-80s signal the rise of the modern businessman? Well, that’s why I’m cherry-picking.

***I was going to tackle the newish Cult of Luna (formed in the 90s!) record today, but this post is long-winded enough. Wait till tomorrow, when posts suddenly become frequent, informative, and well-written.

Not a very gruesome skeleton, sadly.

Most of my listening is done en route to, or returning from, work, which usually allows me time to listen to one or two complete albums. I close the door to my apartment, checking to make sure its locked, and carefully insert the L and R earbuds into the corresponding ear, though speakers are identical, as far as I can tell. Queuing up the right album for the day definitely requires a certain level of attentiveness, but from that point on I can blend seamlessly in with the zombified workforce, reading romance novels and newspapers and staring blankly into space all along the underground metro ride.

This is in no way the ideal way to listen to an album, but I assume it’s a pretty typical experience. Earbuds generally give the approximation of listening to an AM radio station through a tin can, especially over the din of the metro, and public transit generally has ridiculous rules prohibiting stereos and boomboxes on their system. Perhaps I need to invest in some fancy, noise-canceling headphones, but whenever I see someone sporting enormous headphones on the street, I can’t help thinking that they look like some sort of space cadet.*

But when I really want to listen to an album, at home, without any outside distractions or noise, really want to put my full focus on an album and listen to it like one would watch a movie**, I pull out my Grado SR-60 headphones, get something to drink, and go for a ride. This is going to sound like I’m hawking a product here, but I haven’t heard an album at all until I’ve heard it through those Grados. You don’t need equalization or bass boost – the bass drum snaps out of the headphones, the frequency response is perfect. It’s like switching from antenna television to HD.

So obviously, the first thing that strikes me in Gojira’s The Way of All Flesh is the pristine, glossy production. The drums are so compressed and pronounced that it’s impossible to miss a single tap on the bell of the ride, or flourish of the double bass, and the vocals are layered with strangely crystalline screams, which are consequently fairly intelligible. The band is stunningly tight, especially the powerful drumming, though the heavily compressed melodic guitars are the center of the bands sound. Fluid, technical fretwork gives way to punishing Meshuggah-like runs, and the songs are held together with the deliberate pulse of the vocals.

The vocals are what initially put me off of the band: the synthetic layers add a strong melodic aspect to the songs, and the catchiness struck me as a little artificial. Regardless, some of the songs will stick in your head even after a first listen, especially “A Sight to Behold,” perhaps the most easily digestible track on the album. The guitars have distinctive hooks, the drums groove effortlessly and the vocals tell the story of man’s carelessness wrecking havoc upon nature.***

Really, The Way of All Flesh contains something for everyone: catchy vocal hooks, grinding palm-muted sections, rhythmic complexities and polyrhythms, and left-handed technical riffing. These elements reveal themselves over the coarse of the album, which gives it a strong variety of styles and approaches without deviating too far from the bands signature sound.

Rating: Excellent, really.

*So, your music is more important than all the other sounds in the world? What about car horns, police sirens, chirping birds, the sound of cool rain on a summer day? Unless you’re listening to something damn good, why not come join us back on earth.

**Is that creepy? Does anyone else do this? Normally music is a background to a myriad of other activities: I listened to music during some NFL playoffs this weekend, and absorbed some Sunn O))) while reading The Watchmen.

***This review wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that these Frenchies (that’s right, they’re French) are sometimes considered ‘eco-metal’, which is just what it sounds like: ecologically aware metal. It’s strangely refreshing to hear a band that has a positive, actionable message: don’t screw with the earth