Sadgiqacea | Submerged in Manichea
These guys are local (South Jersey/Philly) but they’re starting to get big. Bigger than local. Big for sludge-doom metal. Big enough that a google search actually brings up the band instead of whatever they are named after. [Actually, the name is pronounced like some Native American word but it turns out to be completely made up.]
They’ve got a new one coming out on Candlelight Records, but I just got around to this one, which is their debut EP. I think it’s just a cleaned-up demo, in that it’s probably the first thing they recorded, done entirely on their own and then they got a label to put it out pretty much as is. But I’m just guessing. That makes the most sense, but it’s the music business. Maybe there are demos of this album, one dude on a beat-up acoustic, the other beating on a cardboard box, recorded onto micro-cassette in a basement bedroom. Epic 10-minute songs like that. Just the thing the people at HORROR PAIN GORE DEATH Records are looking for. (That is really the name of the label.) So maybe they do that and get an advance to buy real instruments? I really don’t know.
It was recorded at the Savage Rock School by Mike Britt. Savage Rock School is, or was, an actual place of musical instruction, not a clever name for a recording studio. Maybe a lot of bands record there. It is a mystery. South Jersey is sometimes a mysterious place. Mostly mind-numbingly boring, but sometimes mysterious. (The answer to the mysteries is usually also boring; in this case the answer is probably “sometimes”.) Mike Britt is the dude who records pretty much every band around here and even has a recording studio in a storage bin…somewhere. (Some mysteries are due to “lack of proper permits”.)
Anyway, those are the facts of the recording but it’s not like you can tell cause it sounds pretty good. I didn’t even get the record from the label, I just got it from Bandcamp. So I got the mp3s. It sounds about as good as any metal album like this. It was mastered by Chris Grigg of Woe at his studio BS1 in Philly, but just like mediocre mp3s of a good recording sound better than bad recordings in hi-fi, you can’t really fix a bad recording just by mastering. So I’m gonna say it’s a good recording. On earbuds it seems a little muddy, but this is not earbud music. I think of bands that write 3-5 minute songs, no matter how extreme, are making pop music. You can put a bunch of that of shuffle and just have fun (or, like, walk the dog or whatever.) This music is more like a soundtrack to an epic stoner brodown or solo space-faring sesh. I no longer do drugs or have a social life, but luckily I did put a new stereo in my car with an iPod jack, and this album is awesome for blasting down the turnpike. It really sounds huge; for two dudes in back room of a former dentists’ office or whatever that building is, just massive. (Britt sometimes gets into recording sessions, is there additional guitar on this? I thought it was only bass and drums, but it must be guitar through a bass amp. I think the dude is playing out of multiple amps. It’s pretty stupid I have not seen this band live at this point.)
I’m most impressed by getting the vocals sounding right in this style, the Melvins-esqe bellow. It’s overall that Melvins sound with more of a Neurosis feel in the format of the songs. There’s definitely room to develop in the area of composition when you go that route. Personally, I don’t know how much I can get into it, but it’s a band to watch. %
En Vogue | Best Of
I was looking through Who Sampled to research my HALCALI samples for my Spotify playlist which should get at least a post or two of its own. I wasn’t sure about LL Cool J’s Boomin’ System. Isn’t the chorus a vocal sample from a previous song? I should include both songs maybe. Couldn’t find that but it turns out that song samples the beat from Hold On…[or both songs sample James Brown’s The Payback…yep.]
Damn, Hold On was a great song. I took my case to twitter, with multiple tweets of praise for the song and group in general. As is usual, The twitterverse stood silent in awe. For a normal person, this would be enough. “Hey, remember this group? They were pretty good.” Fine and dandy. But nope, I can’t just leave it at that. What am I talking about, liking En Vogue so much? I don’t have any En Vogue records. What kind of asshole poseur am I? I needed to buy at least one En Vogue record to back up this outlandishness.
Specifically, I was praising early En Vogue. Because I was there, man. Hold On was the first single. I needed to get the first album. Ahh, but Never Gonna Get It is not on that one? Jeez…how deep am I going into this?
Sidenote: Remember this started with an inquiry on Hip-Hop references in J-pop songs. In addition to praising the group in general, I suggested that J-pop acts should be trying to rip-off En Vogue more. (Early En Vogue.) But Check out the mp3 samples on that first record. Impossibly Corny skits, horrible throw-away ballads, a 40s Jazz tune? J-pop albums are already like this. Or they were until recently. Hold On, with its soulful intro, smooth natural harmonies, modern (non-80s cheese) production, and minor key shift in the pre-chorus (challennnge meee), is the outlier on this album. So why didn’t I just say they should copy that one song? And spare myself agony and embarrassment? Because I was thinking of Namie Amuro’s In the Spotlight (which is not a bad video, I’m a jerk, whatever. I also assume you regularly read and recall my opinions, it’s a total ego trip. Anyway.) It has the same kind of minor key shift in an uplifting song. I like that. Every song should be like that, and I don’t see how I could regret that statement.
So…I just bought the Best Of, of which there are several. This one has the best cover. Why bother with CD? Used, it was cheaper than the files. Plus, full liner notes. Did you know Grover Washington, Jr. is playing sax? Of course not, the people who edit wikipedia do not give a fuck about Grover Washington, Jr. Well, some of them so, but not the same ones that like En Vogue. (I obviously do not give a fuck about him because I just found out he was dead.) Produced and written by Thomas McElroy and Denzil Foster. Most of their good songs were, it turns out.
So I’ve got my hard copy of both Hold On and Never Gonna Get It, twenty-something years after I first heard them. These songs are now as old as the Led Zeppelin I was listening to at the time. So I rip the CD, put it on my iPod, and take the dog for a walk. Even tho these are quality songs and not what you might call a guilty pleasure, I felt a little odd listening to them on purpose without the video. You know, those videos are pretty good. And the girls…I don’t have to tell you Terry is my favorite, but I will. I mean, they are all amazingly hot. But Terry, c’mon. Clearly remember that face in the Whatta Man video, something about her is just cute to me. Wait, she does have a cute face but there’s some other stuff in this video which obviously distracted me from the song because at this point in the record I fully hate myself for listening to this and it’s only 3 songs in. (I think the other best ofs don’t include it because it’s really a Salt-N-Pepa song, but I wanted this one. It’s not the worst song ever, but these raps, they are not so good. They were better in other songs, right? I’m not even checking.)
Then there’s Free Your Mind which begins with an In Living Color reference, wow. It’s one of those kind of message songs you can’t argue with but man there’s some corny lines. It’s overall a good…it’s basically a rock song. Which they never came back to as a style as far as I know, but I’m admitting I don’t have the entire discography. And yeah it’s probably all on Spotify. That’s great. I do have Spotify. Yes, thank you, normal person. That must be great.
Don’t Let Go (Love) is a good song. Forgot about that one. I like the guitar line. It’s played by…Tommy Martin. Or Martin Terry. I guess it doesn’t matter.
Giving Him Something He Can Feel is the only other song I really remember by them. Which is a Curtis Mayfield cover, and it’s well done, because they are good singers. And it’s even further out from something I would normally be listening to in that it’s not either really, really good, or strange in some way. So I get that feeling from it that is not full-on self-hate, but the odd feeling of being in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. Which is a feeling I used to go for as much as possible, but now that I’ve listened to every type of music, I get it from music I’ve heard before and neither love nor hate. Because there’s not really a reason to listen to it, not because I’m not supposed to be listening to it. It’s not quite the same feeling. I’m not breaking some kind of self-imposed taboo, I’m just wasting time.
This album goes on for over an hour. It almost includes their cover of the Beatles’ Yesterday, but then it doesn’t. It’s just part of Give It Up, Turn It Loose, which is not a James Brown cover. It’s ok. It’s pretty good. I’m starting to like it a lot. It would be a lot better without the Beatles/skit in the beginning.
The whole thing is not at all chronological, so you’ve got an another song from the first album later on (Lies, a decent song with an awful rap in it for no reason) and there’s some other early singles later on that were supposedly hits but I don’t remember them. And Runaway Love which was supposedly their only single to really flop, I’m gonna say deservedly. Let It Flow is an odd later album cut, like that one.
I just noticed my mp3s are mistagged. Don’t know how that happened. Someone entered it into the database wrong. It’s not an important detail for you to know, but it does increase my time spent with this record, cause I’ve gotta fix that shit and I guess I’m taking it out on you. It’s completely uncalled for, sorry.
Whatever was a good later single. With the BUM BUM BUM BUMMMs and some nice production touches…I’m a complete asshole. “Early En Vogue”, jeez. It’s mostly all good. There’s no irony about it. There was no irony. I’m glad I bought it. Would buy again.
Oh man, I forgot about the awful remixes at the end. I actually deleted the mp3s of those. No reason for that. %
Yamantaka // Sonic Titan | YT//ST
Hm. According to…my own internet presence…I’ve gone completely insane as of a few years ago. I’ve just been looking through what is the backlog of records I should be in the process of reviewing, if I’m taking this project seriously, and uh…it’s not looking too good. But I know better. The truth is, I’ve been insane most of my life maybe until…today? I dunno, people can snap and go insane one day, not always traumatically, just a lot of little things build up sometimes. Why can’t it work the other way around? I’ve had a few good night’s sleep in a row and things have been generally ok…maybe that’s all it took. After…so many years.
So anyway, in Japan, it’s Buddha’s birthday today, or yesterday, since it’s already tomorrow there. Some people think it’s in early December. It’s not really important. But you’re supposed to spend the day in mindful reflection, I guess, which in what you’re supposed to be doing all the time, but it’s like every other religion pretty much in that most people aren’t taking it very seriously most of the time.
So here we are. I’m picking this one unrandomly out of the pile.
Hey, I’m glad I have a blog. I would not have remembered this album. I’m trying to reorganize my files and it would take years to get to this listening to this again. Goddamn mess. What the hell do you expect from a crazy person? It made my Best of 2012 (altho it came out late 2011), which should really be a best of albums I already reviewed, shouldn’t it. Well.
☸☸☸☸☸
First of all: could we just call this album “self-titled”? We could. It is. But you know what the deal with this band is? They’re fuckin’ cool. It’s a good thing. It’s a band. That’s why you start a fuckin’ band, to do something cool. Look, if you put some unicode bullshit in your name that has to be copypasted every time, you’re kind of a cock. Granted. Some would say double slashes are just as pretentious, but it ain’t. It’s just the right amount. So the name of this album just looks better in this format so I’m using it, but let’s be clear that it a self-titled album and we’re not going to say “why-tee-slash-slash-ess-tee” in conversation, if it comes up. Which it should. Also acceptable at this point would be “the album” or, in the future, “the first one”. OK.
This band has a whole live element I don’t know much about, it’s supposedly “operatic”. I only get this from the first track, Raccoon Song, which is the most forgettable. I had literally forgotten about it. This is definitely against the general common sense “rules” for new bands, which is to put your best song first. But another of those rules is to not make the cover some kind of incomprehensible artwork that does not even have the name of the band on it, but like, a picture of the band. That makes sense. But man, fuck making sense. This cover rules. There’s no way I could not listen to a record with this cover. I would be so bummed if it wasn’t great. What the fuck is that thing? Fuckin’ cool, that’s what.
Also, there’s only 7 songs that average out to average length, for a total of only about 31 minutes. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a full album, but how many songs do you need. More than 1 or 2? NO. It’s just about perfect. If you can’t say something in under 45 minutes, you don’t have anything to say.
And what are they saying? Absolutely nothing coherent or intelligible as a real message. JUST THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. (Or not, get off my back, I’m just not-crazy today.) The only words I can make out on this album are in Japanese, a language I don’t believe any of the members actually speak. They translate to “I AM STAR CAT.” YES.
This is the single I guess, Hoshi Neko. The big stand out with a with a phased intro and the catchy Japanese hook. These are Canadians, btw. I assumed at least one was J-Canadian but apparently not. The bandcamp page uses the tags “chinese” and “iroquios”, so it’s intentionally mixing things up. Seems like some of the references are Buddhist and some are Native American…maybe. Maybe they are just making some of the shit up out of thin air. You can totally do that when you work on something cool. It’s not like fucking fan fiction. There’s no canon!
The other songs are also pretty good put not as pop. “Operatic” outside of whatever the live show consists of is squarely within the concept and sound more or less of “rock opera”, altho this is usually a bad thing in my opinion. They make something that works. I think they achieve the effect by making music that is more like soundtrack music than part of a musical.
Reverse Crystal is like a more-rocking out/less Kraut Stereolab with those same kind of high-register, unintelligible, repeating vocal phrases, and even a long second-half pop drone coda but with a lot of cymbal bashing, and it’s got like an Iron Butterfly organ solo in there. Great.
A Star over Pureland is the only explicit Buddhist reference I can find apart from the name, which most people(?) will people recognize from the Boredoms’ Eye Yamantaka (it’s not his real name). Altho if you want to get into it, these are reference to competing schools of Buddhism. Yamantaka is mostly a Tibetan thing. Pure Land is a like a Buddhist afterlife which not all Buddhists believe in. No, there’s no way to prove I am not looking this up as I go along. Oh wait, there is Pure Land in Tibet. I did just look that up. Well, there you go. There’s some Tibetan cymbals and horns in there. I knew that. I know stuff. Guitar freak-out on this track is cool, but it’s clear the keys are more their thing. It’s definitely the climax of the show, but as far as songs and general moods go, they are best and building up the tension than actually exploding. Or resolving. But it all seems worth it for the parts that work.
You know what, Crystal Fortress Over a Sea of Trees could also totally be a Tibetan thing. I don’t know that much about the Tibetan stuff. But I do know it has another killer organ solo. The particular synth rhythm track they use sounds a little out of place. It’s like we’ve been in something like a 70s horror movie and now it’s like Knight Rider all of sudden. Doesn’t quite mesh. Ends with some vague chants. Maybe that is in Tibetan. Usually done by dudes of course so it doesn’t sound anything like the standard stuff, or maybe it’s not that at all. Questions, with answers, that I am not going to try to find out. It just doesn’t matter. %
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