Noothgrush - Erode The Person

As I lower the needle on this record, the world outside my window is chaos.

My little corner of the world is being blasted by winds of up to 130mph (apparently), rivers have burst their banks, the roads are paved with black ice, trees creak, snap, and are uprooted, windows of high-rise buildings shatter and rain glass on the idiotic few who have ventured out in this harsh night.
I have been stuck inside a shell of a factory with no heating for hours, waiting until I can hitch a ride back to my hometown with anyone going even near that direction.
Today has not been a good day.

Arriving home to find the repress of Noothgrush's 'Erode The Person' LP lurking behind my storm doors wasn't so much a pleasant surprise as a fucking necessity. A soundtrack to the foulest of moods on the foulest of days.

 

So it was with actual NEED to hear something other than a howling gale that I cranked up the volume, collapsed on my floor and let the opening squalls of feedback fill the room.

The feedback lasts mere seconds before Chiyo Nukaga's tumbling, tribal, one-woman-drum-circle kicks in, accompanied by a woozy riff for a couple of bars before the whole thing falls apart with a howl.
Things slow to a neanderthal stomp, the track crashing along haphazardly, held together by one of the most corrosive tones I've heard. It lumbers, the strings bend, tempos shift, and bassist/vocalist Gary rages against "the closed mind of my species".
The tempo lurches up and down, before settling into a doomy plod towards the finish line. The feedback rises and consumes the whole thing once again.

"People are scared, angry, hostile, hate everything, don't know what they hate, don't have anybody else to talk to... just angry, desperate!"

So begins the second track, the 9-minute slog 'Deterioration'. It goes from that sample into one of the doomiest marches I've heard in a while, all spaced-out strings and battered cymbals.

There's enough space in the music to focus on the words, reading along with the lyric sheet as I go, something I NEVER do. Matching these words to this song makes for just about one of the biggest downers you can experience outside of chemical narcotic experimentation.
About halfway through the riff switches up to something a little more light-hearted. Relatively speaking, of course. Oh, spoke too soon, it crashes out into a hungover series of droning, aching picked-out notes.
The last third of the song is almost cheery, with lyrics concerning the extinction of the species as it stands, and 'a rise of altruism and compassion [...] what we know as human will be dead and a superior species will thrive'. Probably the most positive lyrics ever spewed from the gaping maw of doom.

The final track of side A is a Pink Floyd cover. I fucking hate Pink Floyd. I'll give it a shot anyway.
The guitar tone is fuzzed-up and nasty, so it already surpasses anything I've ever heard by the most over-rated band in the world.
This cover is an exercise in minimalism, the drums hitting sparsely but hard, the strings stretching out their contribution to breaking point. I dig this, but it's still never gonna make me reconsider my opinion about the band being covered.

Side B claws it's way out of my speakers with a wretched scrrrape of a song, 'Oil Removed'. Fucking foul. That's a good thing, incase it wasn't obvious. At a running time of three-n-a-half minutes, it's probably the most accessible thing on the whole record. But that's a purely relative term, obviously, it's still a rotting corpse at a beauty pageant compared to other songs of this made-for-radio length.

Final and title track, Erode The Person, is a low and slow beast. Over a minute passes before the other instruments join the bowel-shuddering bass. It's a torturous ten-minute slab of self-loathing, hateful noise, and it's just what I needed to hear tonight. No sarcasm, it really is.
With just a couple of minutes to go, the song momentarily races for the finish line with a downright little boogie of a riff before exhausting itself into an out-of-breath finale.

I mentioned before that I rarely pay attention to the lyrics of most bands operating within the sludge idiom, but this band actually has great mini-essays accompanying each track. These songs, the words, they actual MEAN something. If I knew more about existentialism, environmentalism, gender politics, and the examination of the self in relation to the environment it inhabits, I'd be able to pinpoint their references, but as it stands I'm a fucking philistine, so all I can do is appreciate the themes and words as they are presented here.
This is sludge to get your neurons firing.

I normally don't write this bullshit with the intent to recommend releases, I don't review records so much as simply document my own thoughts on them, giving me a chance to really think about what I'm hearing, but I can wholeheartedly recommend this album. If you're a fan of heavy music with something to say (even if you have to decipher the inhuman screeches with the aid of the record insert), please get a hold of this album as it was originally intended.

I picked this disgusting little beauty up from Portland, Oregon's PARASITIC RECORDS. The guy who runs it was super fast in getting back to me about buying this, and the delivery was fast as fuck too, so support this excellent label/distro by either picking this up, or checking out what else they've got for your listening displeasure.
http://parasiticrecords.blogspot.com/

There aren't many places to hear the almighty Noothgrush online, but they are experiencing something of a resurgence at the moment, with reissues coming out on various labels, a collection of radio sessions or something out on Southern Lord, and an appearance scheduled for next year's Maryland Death Fest.

Now if only they'd get confirmed for Roadburn...

The Obsessed - The Church Within

Anyone who pays attention to breaking news about all things heavy will know why I'm giving this album a long-overdue relisten. The rumours had been flying around for weeks, the excitement building with every dropped hint, until the good folks at Roadburn had the decency to put everyone out of their misery, and announce that yes, they had infact managed to score an Obsessed reunion show for next year's fest.

I typed a whole paragraph about how excited I am to attend next year's Roadburn, before realising that whoever is reading this is probably already aware of how fucking ridiculously good the lineup is even at this early stage. If you're somehow completely unaware, ignorant, or just fucking stupid, check it out here:
http://www.roadburn.com/roadburn-2012/

I'll get the usual backstory bullshit out of the way with quickly so I can get into talking about the actual album.
I remember the first time I heard The Obsessed. Back when my main gateway to new music was purchasing metal magazines that came with free CDs (we're talking 2002 or something), I got one particular compilation that blew my mind. It was around the time that Dave Grohl's Probot project was finally being released, and to coincide with that, some publication had asked him to put together a comp of his favourite metal tracks. He'd gone for old-school tracks featuring all the guest singers he had gotten to sing on Probot, legends like Cronos, Tom G Warrior, Lee Dorrian, King Diamond... look it up already, I'm not going to list all of 'em! Basically, this was my gateway into real metal. This shiny little disc, given away free, and probably discarded by most buyers, changed my life.
In the space of an hour, I heard Cathedral's groovey take on doom, I heard Celtic Frost's abrasive, decaying, primal guitar tone, I had my ears blasted by DRI and early Corrosion of Conformity, fell about laughing at the piercing screams of the King in Mercyful Fate, was creeped out by an early Trouble track... but one song stood out.

Enough said, right? If you want to know what it was like to be me as a teenager, track down an old portable CD player, grab a skateboard, and play this track on repeat as you skate back and forth in your shitty local park's leaf-strewn bowl. It suits it perfectly. Anyway, enough of this fucking rose-tinted nostalgia shit...

The Obsessed went through many line-ups, to the point where there can't be many people in the world that Wino HASN'T been in a band with at some point, but the one that is reforming for Roadburn is the band that recorded the last Obsessed album, The Church Within. I'll admit that it's definitely the album I've paid the least attention to, even out of their limited discography, but since it's highly likely that I'll be witnessing many of these tracks played live in about six months, I better familiarise myself with 'em!

Since this is a tape, and I'm lazy, circumstance dictates that I must listen to side B first.
Which is more than okay with me, because it kicks off with what probably counts as the band's biggest song (there's a video and everything!), Streetside. This song is pretty standard fare, a swinging backbeat rythm, some guitar noodling, y'know, the stuff that a million other songs are made of, but it's Wino's instantly recognisable, soulful vocals that set it apart.
The next track, Climate Of Despair begins solidly enough, but towards the end it descends into this rich, deep organ sound, which is fine with me, I fucking love me some hammond organ. It picks back up again before a pretty abrupt end.

This album was recorded in '94 by some fucking idiot named in the credits as 'MC Snoob', which doesn't bode well for the production. In the case of side two, track three, this rears it's ugly head. I struggle to find a single album of any genre, except maybe some rap stuff, recorded in the '90s which doesn't sound fucking terrible in terms of production techniques. Prove me wrong?
Anyway, this track, Mourning, is swathed in some terrible echo-y delay effect on EVERY instrument. The cymbals that introduce the song sound like water balloons bursting, and Wino's usual rich timbre is reduced to sounding like Mr fucking Roboto. I really cannot recommend it at all.
If you want to hear the track as it was probably originally intended, check it out on the 'Incarnate' compilation.

Things get back to normal on the next song, Touch Of Everything, which makes you wonder why they decided to fuck with the previous track so much? Not even the worst drugs in the world woud lead to such bizarre decision-making. This song is another solid effort, if a little average. If I strain my ears, I can just about hear what I think is more organ underpinning the guitar/bass/drums. Again, I bemoan the production/mix of this record.
I'm not normally one for paying too much attention to lyrics, but one particular couplet grabs my attention:

'Cause living day-to-day gets downright obscene

I need a touch of everything
We've lost touch of everything...'

Which brings to mind the same sentiment he bellows in Saint Vitus' 'Born Too Late', that of a man out of place in the world. Which, to be a total cliche about it, is something I can relate to. So that merits another listen of this track.

The rest of the second side passes by pleasantly enough, but despite normally being a rabid fan of everything Wino puts his name to, I just don't feel too attached to this album by the time it ends.

But then I remember that it hasn't ended at all! Side A, work your magic...

To Protect And Serve struts out of the speakers, a swaggering, swinging ode to law enforcement, which some ambiguous lyrics leave my wondering if it's Anti or Pro police? Either way, this is awesome.

Field Of Hours opens with some horrible bass tone, before mercifully being obscured when the guitar and drums begin. Not much interesting to say about this track. Or any of the others that follow it to make up the rest of side A. What is definitely apparent to me is that I definitely prefer early Obsessed. Such a cliche, but it's usually true: their earlier stuff was better.

This tracks ain't BAD by any means, they just sounds a little... sluggish, compared to what made me fall in love with the original incarnation of the band. Overlong tracks, which is an unusual thing to complain about within the realms of the doom/stoner genre, but when they're played at a relatively midpaced to fast tempo, they just seem to drag on forever.

I really hope that just because it's the Church Within lineup playing Roadburn, that doesn't mean they'll do that horrible reformation trick of sticking to playing just a 'classic' album all the way through. Because as solid a record as it is, The Church Within sure ain't a classic album.