Trap Them - Seizures in Barren Praise

Another review for the www.drop-d.ie boys, this time on the band I reckon will change metal...

Every so often, a band comes along and grabs your reviewer with such conviction that he's shaken out of his usual state of jadedness and wired awake, awestruck at what unfolds before him sonically. It doesn't happen often these days, but when it does you can be sure this act is of seismic proportions. Trap Them are just such an outfit. Forget everything you know about metal. These guys have just redefined it...

Hailing from Salem, New Hampshire, Trap Them offer a hardcore-inflected grind with an intensity that blows all these perfectly coiffured scene kids right out of the water. Seizures in Barren Praise, the continuation of an ongoing musical concept begun in their 2007 debut, Sleepwell Deconstructor, is their clear declaration of future greatness, and a genuinely menacing piece of malevolence, executed with the precision and purpose of a contract killer.The minute you hear Day Twenty: Flesh and Below cut through your ears like a rusty blade, you know you're in for something special.

Ryan McKenney's vocals come off somewhere between bewildered howl and directly threatening growl, with a vengeance not seen or heard in a long time. Day Twenty Nine: Reincarnation of Lost Lones sounds like Pantera jamming with Napalm Death in the bowels of hell. Blastbeats pepper the soundscape like machinegun bullets while chords the size of the world serve to crush the listener into submission. Day Twenty Eight: Targets lashes at the ears with all the subtlety of a kick in the teeth, beating upon your senses at feral pace.

Day Twenty Three: Invertopia/Day Thirty: Class Warmth, is the one-two dynamic from hell, speeding away before coming to an almighty breakdown. Day Twenty-Five: Guignol Serene is a down-and-dirty-as-fuck grind, oozing the filth and visceral tumult that hardcore was built on. Day Thirty-One: Mission Convincers, trudges along like the best of sludge, laying into everything in its path.

Everything about this album is genuinely dead-on. As touched upon, Ryan McKenney takes the reins as the voice of metal, while Brian Izzi's guitar work lies somewhere between Dimebag Darrell and a very rusty chainsaw. Kurt Ballou of Boston's Converge very ably produced the whole thing, ensuring that all the elements Trap Them possess in abundance fall into place, ready to crack skulls. If there's any criticism that can be made of the album, it's that some effort could be made to distinguish some of the shorter tracks from the others, but this is a minuscule complaint when you have the material Trap Them are serving up.

In summary, this is the statement of a band about to do bad things to bad people in music. Investing the tired and cliched world of metal with a good dose of testosterone and a fierce kick in the balls, Trap Them have set themselves far, far apart from the crowd. Watch as Trap Them take every liar and phony in music and bleed them dry.

On the Road With I'll Eat Your Face: Part 2

Jager for breakfast.

The champion start to the morning our heroes need. Tonight’s support, Concept 02, have cancelled. Bjorn’s dad has us in the family backyard, where we are reminded that Bjorn’s bro, Wesley, (a member of Concept 02) is going for an appendectomy. Not before showing us his magnificent sex cavern, mind. While poring over a recent article on indie music shops, coffee and “some sort of honeycomb madness” is feasted upon. By way of some degree of consolation, our ragtag crew head to the hospital, which more resembles an office block than anything else. We meet Wesley upstairs and the boys shoot some shit about tonight, and the tour in general. Meanwhile, THE BOY poses with some hospital equipment.

Shotgun is called on the way back to Hilversum, where we sample the local market and shops. Drop-d finds a Biomechanical album for a fiver, and later finds Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the same. Nice. BOY wraps his meat hooks on a sweet pair of entirely overblown specs. The results are astronomical.

THE BOY, as mentioned in last week’s article, is guitarist, and also functions as a vocalist of sorts. A 24-year-old molecular biology student, his square head and deranged expressions are made even more distinctive by the presence of a protruding birthmark under his eye (a haematoma, as it turns out) and greying hair. A caustic sense of humour and penchant for dispensing scientific factlets at random aside, THE BOY’s trademark is his boundless capacity for shite-talk, a seeming groundswell of bollocks that never ceases to spew up laughs from unsuspecting civilians, shitting on about topics as diverse as wasps, hens, cricket and dildos (preferably covered in oil).

Set up for tonight, we head to Leiden, a grey, dull and depressing-looking town, to a rock dive rather mannishly-titled Brothers of Beer. The venue is lined with people as we set up, but it’s clear they’re not really into it. One of them, however, is enthusiastic about his recollection of Cork’s late-80s thrash scene, and Nancy Spain’s in particular, but it gets clear he’s a bit of an acid victim. Kinda serves to remind of a more kempt, but ultimately more fucked, John Lydon, regaling Drop-d with tall tales of his gangland days. The Face and Tsunami Fest, meanwhile, engage in an epic international war of pool which threatens to spill over at any time.

With no support bands, no crowd bar a few barflies & two metallers Drop-d talked into checking the band out earlier, and dodgy sound, tonight’s gig flounders. “Do ye think we’re shit?,” asks THE BOY, “’cause you can tell us if we are.” The people lined up at the bar turn their heads back to their pints, pinball, etc. The Face are disappointed afterward, but in short order, their alter-egos, Whiskey Paul and The Beer Baron make an appearance to deliver the shit-talk.

On the way home, Bjorn nearly runs out of petrol. Turns out no-one wants to help out five scraggly metalheads (The Face, Bjorn and I are joined by Richard from Concept 0.2). We end up beating it down the road to a BP station just in the nick of time. We course home to Bjorn’s gaf, part of a block of old retail units and flats. Here is the base from which Tsunami Fest is run. The flat is cool, the upstairs littered with boxes of flyers and posters.

Tsunami Fest is what you want to be involved with in music: music for its own sake. Bjorn is obviously so proud of what he does and is so motivated (every show this weekend is punctuated with a mad pre-gig postering session) that it shines through in every aspect. The main festival’s line-up is typically a mix of local, national and international underground bands, coming together for one purpose. To rock the fuck out. Not much in the way of sub-genre politics. It’s inspiring to be around and watch, from organisation to the end product. The passion is evident all the way through.

On our arrival at Bjorn’s house, we learn we are kipping in the spare room. Walking in, we find a hard concrete floor. Comedy. We crash on the ground, which is eventually covered in a tent, no less. BOY craps on about Laserhawk, singing in the air of the Spiderman theme until he forgets mid-song what he’s actually singing about.

“Hawkeyes?”.

Drop-d goes to sleep on a cold floor thousands of miles from home, sharing a collapsed tent with a grindcore band.

Ash - Return of White Rabbit (Single)

Another one for Drop-D:

Ash's first new single from their planned campaign of A-Z releases has found its way onto the web some 20 minutes ago, via the website.

And?

It's mad.

It's absolutely as bat-fuck-insane as a rabid balloon bearing the likeness of the Marquis de Sade off his face on pills.

It's Ash, the loveable scamps from way back, the same minds that spawned Goldfinger and Oh Yeah and Wildsurf and Burn Baby Burn.

And they're playing this mad disco-electro pop.

It's insanely hooky, and between the sleazy guitar, god-awful synth beats and THAT chorus, you'll find yourself begrudgingly liking the fucker the same way you did first time you heard Supermassive Black Hole.

What else is there to be said? Let's see how the other 25 hold up!

On the Road with I'll Eat Your Face: Part 1

“WAHEY! Mike made it!” Some eight hours, two missed trains and an erroneous changeover earlier, Drop-d’s intrepid reporter set off on a mystical journey to the lowlands of Holland, to observe the road habits of Cork’s favourite pair of noisemongering eejits, I’ll Eat Your Face. Having torn up every stage unfortunate enough to cross their path over the course of the last three years with their overawing mix of grindcore, beer and bollocks, The Face set off to once again test the resolve of the Dutch, an excursion facilitated by Hilversum concert promoters Tsunami Fest, after a rapturously received first trip. Not that the Dutch seem to mind at all.

Cafe de Roozen, in Hilversum, is reminiscent of a slightly more roughshod Fred Zeppelin’s, a narrow venue with little room to manoeuvre. Furthermore, a wall divides the place in half, ruining the flow of it entirely. Not that any of this stops the boys. Drop-d is led to de Roozen just in the nick of time by some friendly metallers on its train. The crowd is beered up to the scut and good to go. As a matter of courtesy, Tsunami main man Bjorn Poort has moved the pit back to the small side room, where it tazzes on regardless.

“Hi, we’re I’ll Eat Your Face, and you’re all really sound! This song is about zombie, robotic fat women..”. So sayeth guitarist and vocalist extraordinaire THE BOY. Lurking behind him and to the left slightly at the drum kit is lightning-limbed BARRYTRON, and the gruesome twosome are tearing through material, new and old with gusto to an enthusiastic, if uninitiated crowd. Drop-d takes note of the new stuff. It’s very fuckin’ good. This is night one of a three-night tour, one of the first of its kind for the band, and important for Tsunami Fest to establish itself… As the boys exit stage left for the night, the mood is good.

Hilversum is a big town, but according to Bjorn, is merely classified as a village here. Fuckin’ hell. The streets here are alive, people emptying from clubs and cafes to take in the night air. Bikes weave in and out, stopping for no-one. Drop-d nearly finds itself on the business end of a motor scooter on several occasions.

Outside Cafe de Roozen, the Face are boozing and bollocks spews forth from their trenchant word-holes. Discussion ranges from travel, to personal lives, to our Irish orals. It isn’t long before we rejoin company and the foam begins to collect: conversation turns from Steve Albini’s Big Black. Drop-d, ever a smarmy-arsed collector, mentions it has Songs About Fucking on 12”. ‘Tron replies in a joking beat-this-asswipe manner that he “has it on 13”. To which Boy responds: “Aw, yeah? Well, I have it on hen-wing!” The two begin to bust their holes laughing at an obvious in-joke which leaves Drop-d confused but most amused. Oh, yes. And this penchant for the absurd and downright obscure penetrates the conversation for the entire trip, much as it does their music, which only serves to make it all the more entertaining to be around.

“What’s the hardest part of rollerblading? Telling your parents you’re gay.”

A lesser website than ourselves once stated that the Face are “not a rational band, more a force of nature”. This is true: the band take everything they have at their disposal - grind, samples, and the aforementioned intangibles – pare it down to a reed and then use it to whip pre-conceptions around. Enough bollocks about needing a singer or bassist: there’s clearly enough noise here for anyone.

Grindcore was the child of hardcore and crust-punk, two abrasive and bowling-shoe ugly genres, usually of an archly serious nature, and an axe to be ground all day.

With the Internet and drum machines, so too came in a lot of humourous bullshit and such. To see such bands going live, however, is an oddity, which is another key to the Face’s popularity: there is nothing at all like them out there. Not bound with a serious message other than that of wasps and weed, they are a grind band everyone can enjoy. You don’t need to be versed in Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, et al to party with these two streaks, and conversely, they’re heavy and frantic enough for any metaller.

Our crash-pad tonight is Martijn’s house. An IT dude, the gaff is warm, spacious, and most importantly, housing a quality CD collection. “Annihilator!”, exclaims THE BOY, “I’ve never seen so much Annihilator in my life!”.

The two of ‘em are well-beered now, and the questions flow back and forth, as the twosome get used to having a relative stranger on tour with them. Does Drop-d actually like IEYF? Who would you rather have as a manager; the Polish national soccer team or a cheetah? Which videogame dinosaur do you prefer? The relentless randomness continues until BOY finally needs to reboot after 48 hours on the go. The pair take a mattress between the two of them, while Drop-d commandeers a couch. Nice.

Everyone goes to sleep, awaiting the next chapter in the epic journey of The Face in the Netherlands…

Manic Street Preachers - Journal for Plague Lovers

Written for the most excellent DROP-D webzine.

Journal for Plague Lovers is a huge risk - a Manics album whose lyrics are patched together from the remnants of Richey Edwards‘ writings and lyrics. What they are aiming for here is uncertain. Is this tribute? Closure? An attempt at stoking the fires of anger and protest that used to fuel their work? A cheap cash-in? A cry for attention? The fire and the bluster that permeated Richey-era Manics disappeared with Richey himself, replaced with a patchy run of albums that veer from masterful (This Is My Truth…) to utterly banal (Lifesblood). This is not the same band as it used to be, and some would say it shouldn’t attempt to be so. And so pillaging the last of the old inspiration can only go two ways: masterful, or complete and total bullshit. You can’t be true to the writer’s original vision if you’re adding half of the work yourself…

The use of samples that has been trademark for the Manics is here as always, and opening Peeled Apples slithers from under whispered opining, and quickly goes nowhere, a song that sounds like a feeble attempt at that old vitriol, but never quite leaves the posturing either. Jackie Collins Existential Question Time is an inoffensive pop tune, marred by the controversy-baiting chorus of “Oh mummy, what’s a sex pistol?“, which sounds more amusing than really being confrontational. Me and Stephen Hawking is possibly the example of how weird this album is: Edwards‘ lyrics, shocking and attention-grabbing in the 1990s, are welded to a standard post-Edwards pop song. This is a continuous theme in this record: the messages here are lost because the material is half-finished, the music being half-hearted merely serves to hamper it all further…

The fact of this album, though, is it was doomed from the start.

A brief respite comes in This Joke Sport Severed, a nice acoustic-and-strings tune which inexplicably uses a string breakdown midway, and in the title track, a collection of likeable hooks makes for an alright pop tune. She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach is a tragedy told in the intentionally trashy way typical of early Manics, and though it shows periodic genius, it cannot help but feel somewhat tired. Facing Page: Top Left is a pretty acoustic ditty soaked with the ennui that Edwards must surely have felt in the spotlight, but feels somewhat incomplete.
At this juncture I must say that listening to this album has been unlike any other Manic Street Preachers album I have ever listened to in my life (bar Lifeblood); it feels like a chore…

Marlon J.D. is peppered with synth drums and a smattering of indignation, while possibly the most interesting track for Manics fans comes in Doors Closing Slowly, perhaps the most clearly defined insight into Edwards’ mind before his disappearance, marching on in a controlled, cold fashion becoming of the lyrical matter. Possibly the highlight of the album. All Is Vanity is another of Edwards’ ruminations on celebrity life and the acts people act, and also the closest the remaining line-up gets to getting the blood up and putting any effort in.

Pretention/Repulsion is another good, hooky tune that again, comes frustratingly near to the old fire, only to veer off at the critical points. The fantastically-titled Virginia State Epileptic Colony is the track that comes closest to being lyrically finished/focused, but unfortunately gets lost in another generic Manics tune, while closer William’s Last Words, sung by bassist Nicky Wire, is so obviously meant to be a poignant close to what must have been a difficult album to compile and record, but is hindered by Wire’s tuneless droning.

The fact of this album, though, is it was doomed from the start; the band was so devoid of its own ideas that it had to mine Richey Edwards’ personal effects to garner any attention for it, and while Edwards’ ideas and wordplay are true to his (living?) work, they were obviously nowhere near as fleshed out as they would have been. Meanwhile the music, which would have been fine for a new Manics album being considered on its own merits, seems tired and unimaginative, lacking in even the energy their last album, Send Away The Tigers had, and definitely lacking the passion both Richey and the band as a unit used to have. And while the band felt they had to do this, whether to close a chapter, air the last lines, or angry up the blood again, whatever they were going for here has failed.

Think about it this way, lads, at least now, with this spectre off your mind, and with nowhere left really to go with this attempted revival, you can hopefully take some time out, regroup, focus and create something entirely new, a complete departure and wow us all again. Because cashing in on yer past ain’t doing it.

Drop-d Rating: 4/10

Husker Du - Zen Arcade

First off, thanks a million for reading this blog. I dunno how often I'll be updating it and so on, but will do my best. :) Right, here's a review I did for my college course this year on Husker Du's classic concept album, Zen Arcade.

Band: Husker Du

Album: Zen Arcade

Label: SST Records, 1984

Producer: "Spot", Husker Du

Genre: Rock, Punk, Hardcore, Pop

By the 1980s, the socio-political and musical movement of punk had been entirely commercialised and assimilated into the mainstream. The media-savvy like of the Sex Pistols, and other UK punk bands bent on playing up to a mass-media stereotype, opened the floodgates for thousands of copycat bands to don the uniform and get their piece of the pie. But punk's real meanings - social protest, the raising of awareness of the issues, creative freedom and the abolition of establishment - while debased by commercialisation in Europe, were still truly taken at face value in America, where Ronald Reagan's rule was stifling society, and the mainstream's idea of cutting-edge music was Grand Funk Railroad and their peers. In response to the stifling knownothingism of "Morning in America", and the excess of rock 'n' roll, there slowly came together a shadow network of independent artists, labels, distributors, magazines & fan publications, booking agents, venues and fans, who formed an underground system of their own, free of, and unharmed by, the grip of popular culture, at least until Nirvana's success in the early 1990s shone a light on its activities. Many of this era's bands rightly take their places in the pantheon of rock legend: Rastafarian speed-punks Bad Brains, the down-to-earth Minor Threat, and folk-inflected proto-grungers The Replacements, amongst so many greats. But one band stands to mind more than any: Husker Du.

Hailing from Minneapolis, Minnesota, the trio of Bob Mould (guitar, vocals), Grant Hart (drums, vocals) and Greg Norton (bass) came together in 1979, under the common influence of punk godfathers The Ramones, and quickly earned a name locally for their locomotive-paced live show and bracingly intense music, heralding an evolution in punk's history: introducing escape-velocity speed to an already abrasive and confrontational sound. Releasing two singles, Statues/Amusement and In a Free Land, and an album, Everything Falls Apart, Husker Du caught the attention of discerning music fans by welding hardcore punk's power to everyday life: "music you could hang your heart on", according to author Michael Azerrad. Indie giant SST took notice and signed them, issuing live bullet Land Speed Record and Metal Circus, an E.P. which hinted at a less frustrated-sounding Husker Du: the murder ballad Diane even had a big sing-along chorus. Through incessant touring and a steady stream of quality creative output, Husker Du had firmly placed themselves on the map of punk in America. What came next would place them on the map of history.

Zen Arcade was the album that broke all the rules that punk had secretly adhered to, and publicly abhorred: whereas punk had pigeonholed itself into short, sharp blasts of noise, the Minneapolitans wove pop and folk influences into the already powerful sound. Hardcore punk in particular favoured brevity, and while this was the case with some of its songs, the album finishes with a 14-minute improvised instrumental; the simplicity that punk had treasured overtaken by psychedelia and experimentation. Even its double-12"-vinyl format raised the ire of purists, usually being the premise of prog-rock dinosaurs. It wasn't so much a departure from hardcore punk, as the genre's evolution itself, replete with piano interludes.

A concept album, possibly the first concept work in the punk bubble, Zen Arcade is the story of a boy running away from home. The strident snares that open the album in Something I Learned Today make a marching beat, representing the routine and helpless of everyday life that the boy tries desperately to escape. Realising his useless friends and squabbling family have no interest in his problems, he leaves home, ventures into the city and experiences life as an adult for the first time: he considers religion, gets involved in drugs, falls in love and is torn apart by grief when his lover dies of an overdose. It is only through introspection and painful soul-searching that he returns to the relative comfort of home: an embittered, introverted, grieving young man. Bleak? Perhaps. The story that ties Zen Arcade together is a tragedy, but one that brings the listener on an unforgettable sonic and emotional rollercoaster, encompassing love, humour, wonder, complacency, rebellion, and even a sliver of hope, all tied together with defining social commentary and an autobiographical aspect rarely seen in punk past or present.

Broken Home, Broken Heart and Chartered Trips, with their duality of pop and velocity, perfectly encapsulate at once where Husker had been, and were going, showcasing Mould's song writing skills and ability with hooks. This duality splits along the album, with Mould's bristling growls and breakneck guitar issuing terrifyingly intense hardcore missives such as I'll Never Forget You, Beyond the Threshold and Pride with authority, though nestling nicely with pop bijous like Never Talking to You Again, Pink Turns to Blue and Standing by the Sea. However, the loud/quiet dynamic isn't the only aspect to the album: experimentation and the feel of a cinematic piece are key, as trippy psychedelia (The Tooth Fairy and the Princess) leads to bold improvisation (Reoccurring Dreams/Dreams Reoccurring), all the while peppered with jaunty piano here and there, particularly the powerful interludes One Step at a Time and Monday Will Never Be the Same. Raucous old time rock 'n' roll is graciously nodded to: 50s standard I Want Candy is warped by a cult in Hare Krsna, and Hart's final salvo in the album, Turn on the News, is a raw, soulful masterpiece, almost a nightmarish realisation of a fantasy clash of Motown and metal.

Musically, Zen Arcade is an insanely beautiful tour-de-force that will never leave you once you let it in. But even more so, Zen Arcade hit a nerve with people because of its story, shining a mirror on the desolate state of Middle America in the 1980s, and in light of the band's upbringings, autobiographical: "I'm not the son you wanted, but what could you expect?/I made my world of happiness to combat your neglect" is an iconic couplet in Mould's Whatever, and can also be seen as an attack on parental disappointment in their children's homosexuality (both Mould and Hart were gay). The confusion, wonderment and bitterness felt by our protagonist could be that of any of the millions of people to have been touched by this work. It is this universal appeal that makes it a favourite to new generations, nearly twenty-five years later.

Though Husker Du would later find greater critical plaudits with subsequent albums New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig, and later sign to Warner Bros. before splitting up in 1988, Zen Arcade was more than a band finding its niche. It marked a whole movement being forced to move forward. Sales-wise, it was the great phenomenon of independent music in the 1980s, consistently in short supply for nearly a year due to SST's limited budget. But artistically, it was a titanic shift for a generation. Anything else after it for a while seemed pale and retrograde. Its anger transcended hardcore's macho posturing, and influenced a whole wave of punk bands to belt at their guitars with precision and fury. Its melodic prowess inspired the currently-fading phenomenon of pop-punk. Indeed, everyone from Green Day to underground icons Therapy? have cited them as influences.

In closing, Zen Arcade is essential listening, whether as a quality record for a new generation of fans, the defining document of an entire movement for veterans, or as a historical entry for those interested in the development of modern-day music. Those disaffected by today's bog-standard punk posers need this album. Those in search of a cathartic, inspiring experience need this album. The heck with it, if you are a rock fan, a music fan or even a currently existing human being, you need this album. And that isn’t hyperbole, or the ravings of some random fanboy. It’s the truth. It’s that important.