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Dreaming
With Demons
By
Bill Ketzer
The
Wasted
We
Are Already in Hell (Hoex)
Steve Gaylord asked me to give this a spin, so I did. He signed
the letter, “Have a nice day.” Now, who is he kidding? He
doesn’t care if I have a nice day any more than if I got ass-raped
by a clown car full of Promise Keepers. And I’m not having
a nice day. My hard drive is dying and people owe me money.
It’s all getting so very old. And as I told everyone on the
Upstate Wasted board, I know as much about this music as I
do about Pilates, except for that my old roommate used to
bombard me with these kind of bands, call it what you want,
and I used to want to slit my throat. But sometimes there’d
come a compelling outfit, and I was glad to learn that the
Wasted actually have a purpose.
The first thing you notice about the Wasted is Gaylord’s sharecropper-on-acid
pipes, which quiver and resonate with a strange bravado. Unlike
Complicated Shirt’s Drew Benton, who makes no attempt to hide
his vitriol, Gaylord has a voice that is at once stilted and
infectious. It has a similar effect on me as Neil Young did:
I wanted to strangle the man with a knotted rope but I soon
became strangely comforted by its scathing awkwardness. There
is none of the hair-splitting godliness that seems so prevalent
in musical work about hatred, fear and incurable torpor. I
like the idea that, even if “Bedwetter” might be a cry for
help more than anything else, at least it’s not a thinly veiled
one. You keep guessing. Gaylord is a great writer, the lyrics
pustulant and mean, an asshole let out of the asylum. And
this is as it should be, because what do people expect from
a series of case studies on the most stupid and deadly mammal
on the planet? But what is more interesting is his ability
to transform the scathing, narcissistic tone of his prose
into something less accusatory, into something ghostly. Somehow.
It comes off sounding disaffected yet strangely celebratory,
rather than jaded and ignorant. In fact, from the haunting,
disparaging chorus of “We Are Already in Hell” to the slurred
murmurs of “Myth of Creation” (“Melt through the surrrrrrrrrrrrface
of the earrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrth,” he sings) the stripped-out guitars
and the panic-stricken vocal harmonies give his delivery a
quixotic kind of beauty and a guttural sheen at the same time.
It’s not wholly inspiring for me personally, but at least
the Wasted aren’t whiners. And it sounds good played really,
really loud.
The CD really picks up at the end, the pounding “St. Peter”
and “Ass End of the Earth” receiving the maximum benefit of
this clean, well-engineered effort. It leaves a brinish taste
in the mouth, like when your wife finds your porn stash and
leaves you in the basement to drink Piels and sleep on your
weight bench. A nice, thick layer of bass bathes you in the
simple backbeats, and logistically, the package is immaculate.
People who like this kind of music will eat it up and wash
it down with hard liquor. However. There is a danger in this
type of music for me that I both love and hate. It’s like
trying hard to sleep and it keeps waking you up, like a Chinese
torture, but sometimes you look forward to the hallucinations
it produces. At its weakest points, it can grate along, derivative,
with an almost trivial aftertaste. It’s the same reason why
I can’t listen to Guided by Voices for more than 20 minutes,
but always seem to spin Alien Lanes once in a while.
I would never seek out this kind of thing, but it definitely
has merit for what it is. I personally wouldn’t buy it. But
I might buy the T-shirt.
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Various
Artists
Cool
Jazz: The Cocktail Hour (Evidence)
When
I see a compilation with a title including the word “Cocktail”
and a photo of a toothpick-skewered olive, I generally turn
away. The “cocktail music” scene of the ’90s was, for the
most part, a thin ploy that sought to place contemporary foreground
listening value on music that was created several decades
earlier as a background mood enhancer. This compilation from
the Philadelphia jazz label Evidence has all the earmarks
of a marketing cash-in. However, it has managed to endear
itself to me. First, its being so late out of the gate for
the cocktail craze is oddly charming. Whether accidental or
not, its being so out of step is actually refreshing. Like
other label collections, it seeks to unify otherwise disparate
selections from their catalog under a single thematic banner.
Beyond the track listings, no information is provided on the
artists. The package design features photos of 21st-century
30-somethings situated around a restaurant booth, chatting
and imbibing. The cover photo has three women seated with
a man standing alongside. The cast appears again on the photo
under the disc. This time the man is seated on the left bench,
and there’s a second man, but he’s all the way on the inside
of the right bench, meaning the women had to have vacated
at some point. Also, while the cover photo has them all with
martini glasses, they now have the glasses and a pair of chrome
shakers on the table.
All right,
I’ll get to the real reason why this CD intrigues me. Five
of the 13 tracks are by Sun Ra with his various Arkestras.
(Evidence was behind the vital Sun Ra reissues that appeared
over several years a decade back). Playing like some easy-entry
jazz program on NPR, the disc sparkles when these numbers
appear, full of layered subtleties. For the novice (such as
the young people on the cover), they’re Ra at his friendliest,
with his potent soloists at their most gentle.
—David
Greenberger
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The
Black Dahlia Murder
Unhallowed
(Metal Blade)
Fantastic.
Absolutely brutal death metal from Detroit in the Swedish
melodic vein. These guys look like car mechanics and play
like rogue blood fiends. If you like Dark Tranquility
or At the Gates, you’ll devour this disc. Granted,
Unhallowed doesn’t deviate much from the standard formulas
(aggressively laying down a breakneck 2/4 drumbeat over a
slower, 3/4 song structure, for example), but the attack is
ferocious and scathing and derives its power from some strange
magic, from some unspoken “other inside” that business majors
just don’t have. I tend to speak in metaphors of warfare when
attempting to describe such a force, but this is actually
more preternatural, more implied, a foreign malady compressed
into a weird bloody cube and unleashed at inconceivable speeds
upon release. I put this thing on my home theater system and
my dog shit right on the living room floor. No lie. I can’t
even believe human beings write this stuff, much less actually
perform it with any degree of grace. The whole damn thing—well-produced
and flawlessly executed—is impregnated with a fearsome malignancy
that is difficult to fake. This is the stuff that sends the
suckerfish swirling down the pipe.
Drummer
Cory Grady is impossible here, his blast beats an unholy spray
of fists and gristle (I was crushed to learn that he was recently
fired from the band) through the foreboding “Elder Misanthropy”
and a pestilent “Thy Horror Cosmic.” Not to be outdone, BDM’s
infectious double-ax harmonies invoke images of diseased fancy,
of tall castle gables lit ablaze, of plague-era aftermaths,
of all sorts of awful things washed ashore in the predawn.
Vocalist Trevor Strnad is as versatile as he is unwashed,
implementing dank growls, black-metal gore shrieks and spittle
from the crypts, emitting stream-of-
consciousness lore in a way that would certainly please the
dead but dreaming Cthulhu. Like his master, Strnad hits the
mic during “Funeral Thirst” (and every track, really) as if
he would displace humanity forever if appropriately summoned
to do so. Trust me, these guys are spooky. But like the unsolved
murder that gave birth to the band’s namesake, the most interesting
part isn’t necessarily in the overt act—it’s in the evolution
that follows.
—Bill
Ketzer
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