Beyond Creation-Algorhythm

I honestly came close to purposely not purchasing this album simply because of the title.  Algorhythm.  See, it’s clever.  Algorhythm.  It sounds like algorithm, but they spelled the “rithm” portion of the word as “rhythm”.  Because music has rhythm.  And, see, Beyond Creation is a technical death metal band.  So, they do a lot of weird time changes and shit that involves fractions and other math type shit.  Just like algorithms involve math type shit.  See, it all coalesces perfectly.  Algorhythm.  Music and math and shit and Beyond Creation.  It all comes together in the Rick Grimes’ dad joke of album titles.  Algorhythm, Coral!!

So, let this be another piece of evidence for not judging an album by its cover or album title.  Because in spite of the not so great title, this thing rips.  I’ve seen Beyond Creation open up a couple of times and they have always impressed with their technical skill.  However, I’ve never completely embraced them because their past material seemed to focus more on the technical proficiency of their performances rather than crafting some really memorable songs.  It seems that with Algorhythm that the band has finally found that balance between the two.  The album has all the flash and brilliance in the performances, but the flash never feels overindulgent and doesn’t overshadow what are some very strong songwriting.  This feels like an exciting album and one that the band can hopefully capitalize on.  Let’s just hope the album title doesn’t end up being a hindrance.

4 flip flops out of 5

Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats-Wasteland

Hard to believe that this is now album number five for Uncle Acid.  This one is right in line with past Uncle Acid releases.  You’ve got this weird channeling of an evil intentioned post-summer of love burned out hippie vibe through fuzzy guitars and strangely recorded vocals.  These bands that trade in this throwback sound walk a very fine line between rehash/copying and creating something new that is merely influenced heavily by the past.  There are some bands in this sub-genre who sound great their first couple of albums, but seem to stagnate by album three or four (I may or may not be looking at you Kadavar).  I’m not entirely sure why, but Uncle Acid keeps with a fairly formulaic sound structure and still manages to sound different and fresh with each release.  They are one of the few bands in this sub-genre that has managed to avoid any missteps in their career up to this point.  Wasteland continues on with this progression.  Compare the way the guitars and vocals sound on Blood Lust or Mind Control to Wasteland and you’ll find them pretty much the same.  But each album retains its own specific feel and vibe.  I’m really not sure how they manage to pull this off, but it is an impressive feat especially in light of how many bands seem satisfied with rehashing what is essentially the same album over and over.

4 flip flops out of 5

Behemoth, At The Gates and Wolves In the Throne Room at The Aztec Theatre, San Antonio, TX 10/23/2018

I absolutely love packaged tours that don’t have any filler.  Give me a triple or quadruple stacked bill and I am just about as happy as I get.  This one was a great blend of European and American black metal with a chaser of Gothenburg death metal.

If you had approached me years ago and said that Behemoth would be a band that would start to gain a fairly substantial footprint in the mainstream metal world, I probably would have considered you a nutball.  Black metal is just extreme.  From its blasphemous subject matter to it’s scary visuals to the extremity of its abrasive sound, black metal isn’t something that is going to appeal to your average metal fan, let alone your mainstream consumer of music in general.  So, for Behemoth to ply their trade in black metal and not compromise in its presentation of such and to start to accumulate a very strong fan base within the metal community is still surprising to me.  Granted, Behemoth has enjoyed a healthy reputation in Europe, but I’m used to seeing them play small, dingy clubs.  The Aztec Theatre in San Antonio is one of these fancy old theaters that has been refurbished recently.  It’s a classy venue is what I’m trying to say.  I think the pull of this band and the reason for their upward ascent to becoming one of the first black metal bands to fully gain widespread fame/notoriety is due to the creativity and charismatic performances of their frontman Nergal.  He’s one of those guys who is hard to take your eyes off of.  He has crafted Behemoth in his image and has created this stage persona of Nergal into one of the more interesting stage characters in metal today.  Going beyond just corpse paint, Behemoth comes out in full costumes, masks and all sorts of headgear.  At one point, Nergal even channeled his inner Gene Simmons and coughed up blood during the beginning of one song.  Which.Was.Fucking.Awesome!  I couldn’t repress a goofy grin when this happened.  Its theatrics, dammit.  And the metal world is better for it.

Openers At The Gates and Wolves In The Throne Room both brought energetic sets prior to Behemoth taking the stage.  At The Gates is touring off of their second post-reunion album, To Drink From the Night Itself, and they hit the new album and their classic period albums in about equal force.  Seeing the energy these guys bring to the stage really makes me wonder why it took so long for them to get back together.  This was my first experience with Wolves In The Throne Room and was kind of surprised to see them come out as a five-piece rather than the trio that performs on their albums.  At any rate, they provided a wall of sound and really captured the sound of their albums in the live setting down to the ambient fires burning and dripping sounds of water interspersed between songs.  They definitely seem like the band who will be filling the void in the Northwestern U.S. black metal scene left by Agalloch.

Behemoth-Ov Fire and the Void

At The Gates-At War With Reality

Wolves In The Throne Room-Angrboda

FIDLAR at Emo’s, Austin, TX 10/22/2018

My first experience with FIDLAR was a fabulous trainwreck.  The punk rock fiancée had come across these guys and was very enthusiastic about their debut album.  She found a gig that these guys had during SXSW at the Historic Scoot Inn in Austin.  If you’ve never been to this venue, it’s a two-headed beast.  They have a nice outdoor stage surrounded by old oaks trees.  It’s a lovely spot for a show.  Then, there is the hole of an inside stage.  This is a dingy and cramped space on the best of days.  We managed to make our way into the venue as FIDLAR was already in the middle of their set on this inside stage.  By the time we worked our way over to the entrance, the room was at capacity with a “one out-one in” policy in effect.  We could hear the destruction going on inside and randomly some sweaty and pummeled punk youth would come staggering out of the door.  One we finally made it just inside the door we were sucked into downright punk anarchy.  The place was an absolutely sweat-house.  Kids were being hoisted in the air.  Kids were jumping on and off stage.  Kids were slamming everything and everyone in sight.  Sweat was pouring out of the walls.  The band, meanwhile, was crammed into the corner stage and was just pounding out their caustic punk tales of degradation while the chaos of the room just swirled around them.  It was truly one of the most unhinged moments I’ve been a part of over the course of many years of going to shows.  And it was fucking glorious.

The first FIDLAR album is a downright near perfect platter of punk.  It’s a bunch of fuckups celebrating being complete wastoids.  Beer, cheap pills, cocaine, skating, surfing, homelessness, jail time and just being an all-around directionless asshole hanging out with your shitty friends.  It’s all here is stark depiction.  It’s one of those albums that just feels wrong and right at the same time.  Shit, it makes you want to quit your job, cash in your 401k and go on a world-is-going-to-shit-fuck-it bender.  We were able to see these guys once more in a dingy little club here in Austin while they were still touring off of this debut album and it really felt as though they had tapped into something amazing…if they could only manage to not completely burn out in the process.

Now this is going to sound really shitty, but fuck it.  Sometimes a band getting cleaned up is the worst possible thing that can happen for the quality of the music they produce.  Call it the Mustaine Principle.  Now, it’s great personally that the dudes in FIDLAR are getting cleaned up.  I’m glad they aren’t going to die of an overdose.  But, damn, album number two just completely lacked the edge and danger of the debut.  It sounded more like a commercial pop-punk band trying to follow in the footsteps of a Blink 182 or Green Day than a genuine punk band coming up from the L.A. gutters.  And it was sad.  And this leads us into last night’s show.

FIDLAR has a new album in the can and it is supposed to come out right after the first of the upcoming new year.  They have dropped a couple of singles.  And, man, are they shitty.  It’s even more polished and more poppy sounding than the stuff on the second album and if they are any indication as to the remainder of the songs on the new album, it doesn’t bode well.  However, the punk rock fiancée and I were such big fans of the first album and have always had a rowdy good time at their shows, we decided to go check out how their live show is at this point and time.

So, the older songs:  perfect.  Just great and the band still brings the same amount of energy that was present in days past.  The new songs:  not so great.  Some just come across as sad emo pop punk anthems.  Some, however, did come across a little better live than the recorded versions did.  The majority of the crowd at the show was definitely there for the new material.  It feels like this new material is definitely aimed for the late teen and early 20s crowd (i.e. I felt old as fuck at this show).  The band would launch into an older song and the reaction was OK.  The band would launch into a newer song and the place just exploded with hipster 20-somethings just bouncing up and down.  It was weird.  And it just made me long for that sweaty hot box back during SXSW 6-7 years ago.  Punk should be dangerous.  This felt sanitized.  I guess that’s the price of progress and sobriety.

White On White

Cheap Beer

Windhand-Eternal Return

Sometimes doom bands can go overboard.  I mean, there are doom bands in the normal sense and then there are DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM bands.  Bands that crank the fuzz up to eleven and just drone the fuck on and on and on.  Now, I’m as negative in my outlook on life as anyone and I think we as a species are completely fucked, but some of these bands in the latter category really need to lighten the fuck up.  I mean, we can agree that things are shit, but can we at least have a little groove to wallow in our negativity, please.

So, if you haven’t guessed already, Windhand is a doom band.  They are one of these bands that has really generated a lot of really positive buzz over the course of their last couple of albums, but, for some reason, I just haven’t been able to fully embrace them.  I think it may be that their previous albums tended to tread a little too closely into that aforementioned DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM area.  Things just were a little too dense, a little too fuzzy, a little too abstract for it to really grab a hold of me.  So, count me surprised when Eternal Return came out.  I approached this album with a bit of trepidation and wasn’t expecting it to do a whole lot for me.  But, this is why you should always give albums and bands an open mind.  Because this is a downright fantastic album.  Windhand seems to have tried to make their sound a tad more accessible.  Accessible is a term that can be seen as a loaded word in the metal world.  Accessible can infer mainstream or sell out.  That’s not what I mean at all in this case.  It just feels as though the band has tailored their sound to facilitate the songs more than they have in the past.  The fuzz of the guitars and bass don’t drown the songs.  I think they’ve managed to find that perfect pitch of good songwriting paired with staying true to their bedrock doom sound.  It’s Windhand with a brand new polish on it.  I like it.  I think you may as well.

4 flip flops out of 5

Behemoth-I Loved You At Your Darkest

Anticipation was great for this one.  Behemoth’s last album, The Satanist, ended up on the top spot of my little end of year list.  That album was one of those special ones that only comes along every so often.  A clear masterpiece if there ever was one.  A band trying to follow-up their grand opus is always faced with a daunting task.

So, how did Nergal and Co. fair in their attempt?  Pretty damn good, I’d say.  I Loved You At Your Darkest isn’t quite as grand of a statement as The Satanist was, but it still contains enough engaging moments to be considered a really good album.  It feels like more of a stripped down Behemoth.  You’ve got all of the trademark Behemoth hallmarks on this album with a smattering of Nergal weirdness thrown in for good measure.  Having children’s choirs on metal records has always been kind of a weird thing to me.  Most of the time is just sounds canned and lame.  However, the opening of this album with a group of children chanting “Elohim!! I Shall Not Forgive!!!….Jesus Christ!!!  I Forgive Thee Not!!” is downright fucking chilling.  You’ve got the dorkily entitled “God = Dog” (and it’s God = Dog branded dog food as a tie-in.  Bands gotta make money however they can!) as a first single and the song is actually a lot better than the title would suggest.  Bartzabel seems to be the track most inspired by Nergal’s dark folk/country side project Me and That Man.

Overall, this is a solid Behemoth album.  Not their greatest and not their worst.  But, still this will probably end up being one of the better albums to come out this year and I think will help Behemoth to continue in their climb from the underground to a little more mainstream exposure.

4 flip flops out of 5

Riverside-Wasteland

Riverside has been one of the top progressive metal bands in the world for most of the 2000s.  This latest album is a big one.  This is the first release from the band following the devastatingly sudden death of original guitarist Piotr Grudzinski.  I honestly wasn’t sure if the band would carry on or decide to call it quits.  When the band finally announced their intentions to go forward with the band as a three-piece with bassist/vocalist Mariusz Duda taking over the guitar duties in the studio and having a session guitarist fill in on tour, I was kind of concerned how it would affect the band’s sound.  It always seemed as if Duda was a major creative force in the band, but it was unclear how losing Grudzinski’s understated and creative guitar playing would change Riverside’s sound.

So, here we are with the new Riverside trio.  And I can say that if you’ve been a fan of the band up to this point, you won’t be disappointed with the new version.  Granted, Duda’s guitar work is subtlely different from Grudzinski’s, but overall not much has changed.  It’s Riverside, plain and simple.

Also, curiously, I wondered if this new album would be in honor or in reflection of the band’s loss.  It doesn’t seem that way.  I mean, some of the song titles seem to reflect loss and looking back at what might have been (The Day After, Guardian Angel, Vale of Tears, The Struggle for Survival), but the lyrics themselves seem like they are painting a separate picture of loss.  I’m sure the music and lyrics had to be influenced in some part by Grudzinski’s passing, but it is not presented in such an overt manner.

This is a quiet celebration of the continuation of one of prog’s shining stars.  I’m really happy that these guys have decided to continue on and have provided us with another classy release.

4 flip flops out of 5

All Them Witches-ATW

I see what you are trying to do, All Them Witches.  You think you’re being clever in an attempt to get around my hatred for self-titled albums, especially those that aren’t debut albums.  But I see through your clever ruse.  ATW?  Really?  You think I can’t figure out that that stands for All Them Witches?  Well, the jokes on you, buddy!  I totally figured it out.

OK.  Thanks for indulging that bit of nonsense.

I’m new to the All Them Witches bandwagon.  From what I gather, this group of retro-rockers has been at it for a few years now and have released what is album number five with ATW.  This is a damn solid effort.  I have to say that the thing that impressed me most about this album is the diversity in tracks.  So many times, I will listen to an album and be left amazed at the homogenized nature of all of the songs.  I will have a tremendously hard time recalling individual tracks because they all tend to run together in my mind due to the similar structure of each.  Not so with this album.  Each track has its own vibe, its own character and its own story.  You’ve got a psyche influenced track.  You’ve a got stoner track.  You’ve got a straight ahead classic rocker.  You’ve got a bluesy track. You’ve got a grunge track.  And all of them are delivered with All Them Witches spin.  It’s just a really refreshing album to have so many distinct tracks rather than just ten songs which are just a rehash of each other.

I love everything about this one except for the title.

4 flip flops out of 5

Future Usses-The Existential Haunting

Yeah, I’m not exactly sure how to pronounce the name of this band either.  Is it pronounced like “uses”, but just spelled weird to make it seem “arty”?  Is it pronounced like a plural of “us”, as in us-ses?  That seems to make a little more sense.  Shit, I don’t know.  Artists are fucking weird.  Bonus points for the creepy as fuck album cover.

At any rate, this was a must listen of a release for me due to the presence of one Sacha Dunable, he of Intronaut fame.  Intronaut is another of those plethora of underground metal bands that can just do no wrong in my eyes.  This side project seem Dunable joining forces with ex-Mouth of the Architect guitarist Dan Wilburn and ex-Bereft drummer Derek Donley.  You’d probably guess based on the background of the players involved that this is going to be some sort of post-metal project.  And you wouldn’t be wrong.  No vocals on this one and it isn’t quite as heavy as the members’ main gigs, but the vibe on here is right in line with what you would expect from these dudes.  It’s atmospheric in places and doomy in others.  Overall, it’s kind of one of those albums that would be good to just have on in the background.  Soothing is what I’m trying to get at.

3 flip flops out of 5

Revocation-The Outer Ones

Back in the 70s, it seemed like bands never took any breaks.  It wasn’t unheard of for bands to release not one, but two full-length studio albums of original material.  There weren’t any of these double-digit year breaks between albums like you see with some of the bigger names in metal.  Revocation brings that old school blue-collar work ethic back.  This latest album is the seventh full-length LP released by Revocation in the past ten years.  They are a thrash death metal machine and I absolutely love them for it.

So, I’ve gushed about these guys before.  They remind me of old school Megadeth crossed with a modern technical death metal sound.  Dave Davidson should be this generation’s Mustaine.  He is just in a class of his own in terms of technical prowess and the ability to craft an innovative and catchy riff.  This latest album is right in line with what you would expect from Revocation, but it seems like the riffs are a little more harnessed or a little more focused this time around.  The album isn’t slow by any measure, but it just feels like things are a little less chaotic.  The results are a concise and extremely infectious album.  I know these guys have a solid underground base of fandom and I keep waiting for them to explode a little more in terms of mainstream metal acceptance.  Maybe this will be the album to fully blow them up.

4 flip flops out of 5