Bad Keys of the Mountain - As It Is

 #Bad Keys of the Mountain #country rock #alt-country #Southern rock #blues rock #Americana #animated music video

The shuffling boogie and Southern-fried licks in the opening title track of “Together and Alone” are an indicator that there’s plenty of good old-fashioned American, down-home rock in the new album from Bad Keys of the Mountain. But it’s not long before it becomes apparent how deep the influences of this West Virginia trio get, as Beatlesque melodies wind their way into the song. “I am you, and you are me / All in all is all we’ll be forever,” vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter David McGuire sings. “Laughing as we pass the time / ‘til we can be together and alone.” True to the album’s title, Together and Alone was recorded in quarantine during the summer of 2020. The band, which also feature bassist Joey Lafferty and drummer Joey Reese, holed up in a studio in their hometown of Charleston, West Virginia. “As the Covid pandemic hit early in the year and brought all things music to a halt, we decided to put all of our creative energies into making a record that we feel is both timeless and of the times, and that both looks inward and outward,” says McGuire in the album’s press materials. “Capturing the sounds of rock ‘n’ roll ranging from the 1960s to the indie wave of the early 2000s, this record is the best example yet of who we are as a collection of musicians.”  From: https://www.popmatters.com/bad-keys-mountain-together-alone

Tardigrade Inferno - How Nightmares Die

 #Tardigrade Inferno #avant-garde metal #alternative metal #dark cabaret #dark circus music #Russian #animated music video

Coming from the musically rich city of St Petersburg, Russia is the extraordinarily zany and creative band Tardigrade Inferno which formed somewhere around 2016 and released one self-titled EP and has been somewhat quiet for a few years. The year 2019 has barely had time to warm up and the band finally unleash the very first debut full-length MASTERMIND which displays the band’s unique mix of alternative metal with dark cabaret circus music. Add in sprinklings of death metal, thrash and power metal and you have one of early 2019’s most promising new acts.
The word “Tardigrade” can refer to either a variety of slow-moving microscopic invertebrates or it can simply be an adjective that means slow-moving or slow in action. I have no friggin’ idea how this applies to this band since this is high energy metal and there is relatively little info about this band on the net as i can’t even find any sort of biography whatsoever, however i can say that this band has found a unique sound right off the bat. However if i had to compare Tardigrade Inferno to any other band it would definitely be Diablo Swing Orchestra as it has the same cartoonish feel and the singing style of lead vocalist Darya Pavlovich sounds a lot like both AnnLouice Lögdlund and Kristin Evegård of DSO.
Musically though, this band doesn’t break out the jazz instrumentation or even circus accordions but rather delivers a metal music heft piled on top of dark cabaret and circus melodies alongside the bouncy festive rhythms that are associated with the greatest show on Earth. The metal bombast is mostly carried out by the power chord slapping staccato style accompanied by circusy keyboard runs but different metal variations come into play however mostly in an alternative metal down-tuned power chord rampage. While Darya Pavlovich’s vocal range stays more in clean vocal cabaret mode, she occasionally screams in metal style reminding me of Arch Enemy for short stints but unfortunately not nearly enough! The circus bounces are always under the surface despite heavy metal thunder stomping fast numbers or slower subdued moments.
While i’m constantly reminded of Diablo Swing Orchestra, Tardigrade Inferno isn’t nearly as daring and out there and is rather restrained in comparison. While the music is definitely quirky and playful it doesn’t change the sound up nearly often enough although there are moments such as on the title track where death growls and guitar solos enter the picture, otherwise Darya is pretty much on cutesy Gwen Stefani mode and reminds me a bit of the 90s band No Doubt only with more metal bombast. While a band to look out for as the members become more comfortable with this stylistic fusion approach, this debut is a great start with elements of ska, gypsy swing and the dominant dark cabaret sounds keeping the album infectiously catchy and light-hearted without skimping on the metallic angst.  From: https://www.metalmusicarchives.com/artist/tardigrade-inferno

Cut Glass Kings - Shadow of Your Love

#Cut Glass Kings #alternative rock #blues rock #indie rock #rock & roll #fuzz rock #animated music video

Bassists? Who needs bassists? I’ll tell you who doesn’t. Birmingham band ‘Cut Glass Kings’ have said ta-ra to the traditional line-up, and instead compensated with a fuck-load of fuzz pedals, and the most bass-face inducing drums I’ve heard in a long while. But does it work you ask? Of course it does. The band played to small Manchester venue ‘The Castle’ last Tuesday evening, with the conviction you’d expect only from an established rock ‘n’ roll band playing to a sell-out stadium. After wandering up to the foot of the stage, and after an incredibly flat pint at the bar, I was met with the leather-clad Cut Glass Kings, waiting to begin their set. Opening with 2017’s single ‘Here Comes the Light’, the band needed no introduction. Before I could utter the words ‘fucking hell, this is quite good’, the song was over. I’d immediately forgotten about the glass of disappointment in my hand, and wanted to hear more. ‘Pull You Down’ preceded their rowdy greeting, and immediately I was hit with a familiar sound. I must say, the temptation not to compare them to their rock-duo counterparts is strong, however unavoidable. Imagine a mix of The Black Keys, Royal Blood and Queens of the Stone Age all being swilled in to a dirty pint, aggressively downed and spat out by Miles Kane, you would arrive at Cut Glass Kings. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. The band’s bluesy aesthetic and heavy distorted guitar riffs combine everything we know and love about the genre, but in the most refreshing way possible. On the third track of the night, ‘Gonna Get in to You’, we were introduced to a volley of harmonics being passed back and forth between Cross and McMurray, giving a pleasant depth to the songs and adding to their already impressive stage presence. All in all, the gig was one to remember. In my book there will always be room in music for un-apologetically loud and in-your-face rock bands, and I was left totally confident that the genre has been left in good hands. I can say for certain that this won’t be my last venture in to their crowd. Hopefully next time with a better pint.  From: https://www.yuckmagazine.co.uk/reviews/cut-glass-kings-the-castle

Needshes - One Day

 #Needshes #Otabek Salamov #alternative rock #indie rock #pop rock #soul #blues rock #funk #singer-songwriter #multi-instrumentalist #Uzbekistan #animated music video 

The Central Asian country of Uzbekistan is the homeland of Otabek Salamov (Bek), songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and founder of the alternative rock/indie-pop band Needshes. Currently based in Moscow, the band – rounded out by Ivan Petukhov (guitar) and Alexey Manakhov (drums) – continues to expand their eclectic style rooted in David Bowie, Queen, and James Brown in 2020. Bek started his musical journey in early childhood. He attended the music academy in his hometown, Tashkent, where he was awarded the first national prize for his precision on clarinet at the age of 13. As a teen, his interests varied, and he was drawn to compose and perform metalcore in night clubs with cross paint on his face. At that time, Bek was working as an assistant audio engineer in local studios, so he quickly adapted to recording and producing his own music. One day he decided to dilute it with melodic undertones. In the process of creating this transition, he realized that the switch was something that gravitated to his liking. In 2013 he founded a melodic rock project, Needshes, and moved to Moscow. His biggest influences stemmed from The Killers, Jack White, James Brown, David Bowie, Queen, RHCP, U2, a-ha, Coldplay, and Nirvana. Otabek gathered a full traditional formation around his brainchild with the intent to create authentic rock music. In 2016 after several line-up changes, Ivan (guitar) and Alexey (drums) joined him and made it possible for the sound created in the studio to fully sound live.  From: http://syncsummit.com/needshes/

Bjork - Wanderlust

 #Bjork #art rock #avant-garde #experimental #electronica #alternative rock #glitch pop #psychedelia #trip-hop #neo-classical #singer-songwriter #ex-Sugarcubes #Icelandic #animated music video

Video production team Encyclopedia Pictura created the mind-boggling 3D video for Bjork's new single "Wanderlust".

Dazed Digital: What is Encyclopedia Pictura?
Isaiah Saxon: Right now Encyclopedia Pictura is Sean Hellfritsch and me, working together to make movies, often in collaboration with artists Daren Rabinovitch and Vanessa Waring. Soon it will be more people, working not just on movies, but on augmented reality applications and practical magic.

DD: How was it working with Bjork?
IS: Bjork is very tapped in. She assumed a position of support and generosity with us rather than a position of creative oversight. Her energy and focus were so strong that it pushed us to take this project on with a tremendous amount of mythological weight and tunnel vision enthusiasm.

DD: What's the basic concept of the video?
IS: Bjork is an archetypal nomad, shepherding giant yaks through the Mountains. She does hydromancy to decide whether to take them down a river or not. A second self, the Painbody Backpack, sprouts from her like a growth and then engages her in an action play which displays their relationship. The force which compelled Bjork to go down river begins to manifest itself in Bjork's head and in the physical world. This character, the Rivergod, is a transcendental attractor which pulls her into the future.

DD: How long did the video take to create? What was the hardest aspect?
IS: The video took nine months from concept art to us being pulled - kicking and screaming - from our computers. Sean had to become a 3D expert and build a 3D camera system and playback box and pioneer lots of DIY processes. For me the hardest aspect was trying to achieve an immersive, complete, and very specific aesthetic - because the only thing in the video that isn't hand crafted is bjork's face, hands, and feet. I used my own hands everyday but also worked with over 50 key artists to achieve the forms and textures of this world. We tried to lodge ideas into the forms and use the patterns and textures of these forms to transmit meaning to the viewer.

DD: What made you want to work with 3D in the age of YouTube?
IS: Well, firstly let me get out the news that 3D doesn't work on YouTube because of heavy color compression, which is what anaglyph 3D glasses rely on for decoding the 3D properly. A lot of people watch 3D on YouTube without knowing that they are actually looking at something that is way screwed up, or 'ghosted' in stereoscopic jargon. Secondly, why 3D? Because we see the ultimate transcendental function of art as "expanding the realms of direct experience." 3D allows a film to be more like direct experience and less detached and seperate from how we organically percieve. Right now technology is still trying to create better home viewing solutions (anaglyph sucks), but theatrically it’s already there. Because we are trying to touch people the best we can, we don't take into consideration the unfortunate current quality standards set by PooTube (or more accurately, the bandwidth limitations of today), but this will all be changing very soon.

From: https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/296/1/creating-bjorks-wanderlust-video

Andy Shauf - The Magician

 #Andy Shauf #folk rock #baroque pop #indie rock #jazz rock #indie folk #chamber pop #singer-songwriter #Canadian #animated music video

Hailed as “a gifted storyteller” (NPR Music) for 2016’s 'The Party' and 2020’s 'The Neon Skyline', Andy Shauf writes albums that unfold like short fiction, full of colorful characters, fine details and a rich emotional depth. With 'Norm', however, Shauf has slyly deconstructed and reshaped the style for which he’s been celebrated, elevating his songwriting with intricate layers and perspectives, challenging himself to find a new direction. Under the guise of an intoxicating collection of jazz-inflected romantic ballads, his storytelling has become decidedly more oblique, hinting at ominous situations and dark motivations.
Shauf had planned to be touring around 'The Neon Skyline' but, like many of us in the early days of the pandemic, he spent a lot of time alone instead. He sequestered himself in his garage studio, self-producing and playing every instrument on 'Norm', a collection of more conventional songs written predominantly on guitar, piano and synths. The latter was essential to creating the more spacious and tactile sounds he sought. Shauf’s goals were uncomplicated: create something melody-driven rather than chord-driven, and make it modern. Shauf recruited Neal Pogue (Tyler, the Creator, Janelle Monae, Outkast), a prodigious shaper of genre-and-time-defying tracks, to mix the album, further building on the gently levitating, synth-laden atmospherics.
During this period, he was captivated by David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’, which seemed to validate Shauf’s instinct to mix perspectives and tinker with shadowy narratives. He even rewrote all of the album’s original lyrics, recreating the story, and enlisting Nicholas Olson as a story editor - it was only after writing the title track that Shauf decided to build a narrative around the character Norm. "The character of Norm is introduced in a really nice way," Shauf says of the pleasant songs that precede the album's centerpiece. "But the closer you pay attention to the record, the more you're going to realize that it's sinister."  From: https://www.anti.com/artists/andy-shauf/  

Tool - Prison Sex

 #Tool #alternative metal #art rock #progressive metal #progressive rock #experimental rock #post-metal #animated music video #stop-motion

“When we got signed by Zoo Records in 1992, the most important thing for us was to have creative control,” Tool guitarist and art director Adam Jones emphasized in a 2008 interview. “We went, ‘OK, if we take less money can we have control of the music?’ And the label went, ‘Yeah, no problem!’ And we said, ‘If we take even less money can we have final say over the videos.’ And they went, ‘Sure.’” At the time, Adam was working in Hollywood on set design, make-up and special effects for big-budget movies, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park. He wanted to be able to use his movie-making acumen to create strange, imaginative clips that were more like short films than conventional music videos.
The stop-motion animation in the band’s weird and wonderful second video, Sober, turned many MTV viewers on to Tool, but it was the even more unsettling follow-up, Prison Sex, that truly showcased Adam’s cinematic skills. But the creation of the clip was far from effortless. When people from Zoo first saw the treatment, they asked Adam not to make another thematic stop-motion video, especially if it didn’t star the band members. “There was a lot of banging heads with the record company, because they still wanted to do things in the traditional way,” Adam said. “They’d go, ‘Well, if you’re not gonna be in your video, we’re not gonna pay for it.’ And we’d say, ‘What do you mean? We’re supposed to have creative control.’ It was typical, slimy shit, but in the end they gave in.”
Frontman Maynard James Keenan wrote Prison Sex about the tragic cycle of domestic abuse; people who are sexually molested when they’re young are far more likely to become abusers themselves later in life than those who were never abused. In the first verse, Maynard sings, ‘I’ve got my hands bound, and my head down and my eyes closed/And my throat’s wide open’, introducing the topic in no uncertain terms. In the lines after the bridge, the victim becomes the assailant: ‘I have found some kind of temporary sanity in this/Shit, blood, and cum on my hands/I’ve come round full circle.’
Adam, who directed the Prison Sex video, captured the menacing and horrific tone of Maynard’s lyrics by using dark visual metaphors about being physically and mentally dismantled and then abandoned. The clip contained no graphic violence or sex. Instead, the stop-motion animation used monstrous creatures, which wouldn’t be out of place in a Tim Burton film, to convey manipulation, confinement, abuse and hopelessness. The Prison Sex video features a sinuous, sadistic female black leather creature that taunts, terrorizes and maims a legless marble robot she keeps in a cement drawer. At one point in the video, the robot sees a wasp buzzing around and traps it in a bottle, suggesting that he, too, is now capable of cruelty.  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/tool-prison-sex-story-behind-song 

Black Mountain - Florian Saucer Attack

 #Black Mountain #psychedelic rock #stoner rock #space rock #acid rock #alternative rock #Canadian #animated music video 

After founding Jerk with a Bomb in the late ’90s, Stephen McBean had by the mid-2000s transformed the Vancouver area band into a group called Black Mountain. Drawing on blues, psychedelia, acid rock, and the Velvet Underground, Black Mountain’s sound was a cross between the darkness and grit of the Warlocks and Brian Jonestown Massacre’s trippiness. After debuting in October 2004 on Jagjaguwar with the 12” Druganaut, Black Mountain stayed with the label for an eponymous full-length, issued the following January. Joining McBean for the album were local players Matthew Camirand, Jeremy Schmidt, Joshua Wells, and Amber Webber, listed collectively to preserve the band’s communal ethic. (Black Mountain ran concurrent to and intermingled with McBean’s other band, lo-fi classic rockers Pink Mountaintops).  From: https://www.discogs.com/artist/336341-Black-Mountain

A no-holds-barred psych-blues assault that interweaves space-age synths into its otherwise paleolithically savage goth-metal sound, the newest single from Black Mountain’s forthcoming album IV, “Florian Saucer Attack,” shows the band pressing their instruments, and thereby the song itself, toward some limit-point where eschatological destruction looms precipitously near. We start at the almost-cosmic height best articulated by Robert Plant in “Kashmir” — “Oh, baby, I’ve been flying / No, yeah, Mama, there ain’t no denying” — but, as soon as the track roars to life with a ferocious drum break, we’re plunging toward Earth again, inexorably, flames and and debris and trails of smoke marking the descent, and while it’s unclear what knocked us out of the sky in the first place, one thing is certain: there’s nowhere to go but down.  From: https://www.popmatters.com/black-mountain-florian-saucer-attack-singles-going-steady-2495445091.html

Danko Jones - King Of Magazines

 #Danko Jones #hard rock #garage rock #garage punk #blues rock #blues punk #Canadian #animated music video #Dave Cooper

We just got word of a new Dave Cooper animated video for Canadian rock band Danko Jones. Nick Cross, an award-winning animator, teamed up with Cooper to make this drum-pounding latex-headed bounce fest sing, oddly perverse and frantic like a Clampett cartoon. We’ve got an interview with Cooper on the project:

How long have you known Danko Jones?

Dave: I’ve been a fan of their music for quite a while. They’re sort of an institution in Canada. Very big in Europe too; just haven’t cracked the US market yet. Anyway, I sent them a fan email a couple of years ago, saying that i wanted to send them all my books. JC, the bassist, got back to me to thank me for all the swag and said that they really loved my work. So I wrote in passing, almost as a joke, “You should get me to do a video for you guys, even though i’ve never done one in my life.” He seemed receptive. The rest is a pretty long story, but basically they offered me the third single off their new album and i wrote up a treatment for a live action video. Big, beautiful models, custom made latex outfits, tons of pretty extras, a custom built rocket car, sets, locations, props, camera men, a producer, etc. etc. Needless to say, the budget was a little steep. so the label put the kibosh on that. I was bummed, but then a few months later, I decided to re-pitch the same treatment but fully animated by one of my favorite animators, Nick Cross - for a third of the budget. In the end, the label, the distributor, and the band themselves all pitched in and got us the budget. Suddenly I was faced with a 6-week turnaround time! Unheard of. So i started making the storyboard sketches. Each day i’d bring the days work over to my animator friend, Nick, and go over them with him, describing how I wanted things to go. He’d get cracking and I’d come over again the next day. After the first week, my part was done and Nick was in for a very long, hard 5 weeks. All this during a time when Nick was putting together his very first TV pilot for Canada’s Teletoon! He was a wreck. Man, animators are hard workers. Make’s me feel like a total slacker!

From: https://hifructose.com/2008/12/19/new-dave-cooper-animated-video-interview/

Kuunatic - Tītián

 #Kuunatic #psychedelic rock #experimental rock #progressive rock #folk rock #noise rock #post-punk #avant-garde #Japanese #animated music video

Kuunatic is a thrilling Tokyo based tribal-psych trio bolstered by diverse global sonics and powerful female vocals. Drawing on the members’ different musical and cultural perspectives, their music explores ritual drumming, pulsing bass lines, atmospheric keyboard sounds and Japanese traditional instruments. Having previously released an EP (“Kuurandia” 2017) as well as a split 7” (with Taiwanese fuzz psych garage band Crocodelia), “Gate of Klüna” is Kuunatic’s much awaited debut album. Produced by Tim DeWit (Gang Gang Dance) the record reveals a mesmerizing sound world that transcends genres and hemispheres and succeeds in being both boldly experimental and wildly catchy. Kuunatic are Fumie Kikuchi on keys and vocals, Yuko Araki on drums and vocals and Shoko Yoshida on bass and vocals. The possibilities to project onto Kuunatic’s music are endless. This is because the band has created that rare thing: catchy music that is impossible to pigeonhole. The track ‘Lava Naksh’ is a form of renaissance dance; a pavane, maybe, albeit with Kraftwerk’s early organ sound. ‘Full Moon Spree’ could be a ritual version of The Fall’s ‘What You Need’. ‘Raven’s War’ is a dry-as-dust progressive soundtrack, it could be a lost cut from the Valley of the Dolls record. The transportative elements in all are key: certain beats and near-melismatic melody lines hark back to archaic processional and ritual music. In ‘Desert Empress Part II’ for example, a glowering bass line walks ponderously alongside the toms, framing and guiding the mood. Finishing matters off with what sounds like a backwards organ is also discombobulating. Such sonic sleights of hand are part of the Kuunatic playbook.  From: https://swampbooking.com/kuunatic/

Rïcïnn - Doris

 #Rïcïnn #Laure Le Prunenec #neoclassical darkwave #art pop #avant-garde metal #baroque pop #experimental #gothic rock #French #animated music video

Laure Le Prunenec returns with another avant-garde masterpiece on her solo project Rïcïnn's sophomore album Nereïd, mixing classical influences with folk, electronics, and gothic sounds. Laure Le Prunenec is well-known for her work, among all those who enjoy the more experimental and avant-garde end of dark music. Her operatic vocal delivery on Igorrr, Öxxö Xööx, and Corpo-Mente has rightfully earned her a strong fan following, but what often flies under the radar is her solo work under the moniker of Rïcïnn – a captivating project, whose debut Lïan in 2016 put Le Prunenec’s vocals front and center, while bringing together bits of all the previously mentioned projects, to form a colossal masterpiece unlike any other. Four years later, Rïcïnn returns, taking a broader yet nuanced approach with a sophomore full-length – Nereïd. What made Rïcïnn‘s debut stand apart from her other projects is that it showcased Le Prunenec in her most expressive form, free from any restraints on style. Yet Lïan was just the first step of expression for Le Prunenec, whereas Nereïd sees her break all the shackles and soar high. The multiple layering of the vocals is more refined, and the vocal delivery has an even wider variety.  From: https://everythingisnoise.net/reviews/ricinn-nereid/

Chad VanGaalen - Monster

 #Chad VanGaalen #indie rock #psychedelic folk #electronica #psychedelic rock #alternative rock #singer-songwriter #Canadian #animated music video 

2020 was a terrible year for gardening. It was terrible for peppers, it was terrible for tomatoes, it was terrible for the condition of the soul. But Chad VanGaalen somehow raised a garden all the same: carrots and sprouts and broccoli and a revivifying new album, all of them grown at home. He likes to eat directly off the plant; he says, ”I get down on my knees and graze. It’s nice to feel the vegetables in your face,” and the 13 songs on World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener were harvested with just such a spirit: in their raw state, young and vegetal, at the very moment they were made. What that means is that the Calgary songwriter’s new album is a psychedelic bumper crop. A collection of tunes that does away with obsessiveness, the anxiety of perfectionism, in favor of freshness and immediacy - capturing the world as it was met while recording alone at home over a period of years. “Don’t overthink it,” VanGaalen told himself again and again, despite the push/pull love/hate of his relationship with songwriting. “I’m always trying to get outside of the song - but then I realize I love the song.” This is a record that gleams with VanGaalen’s musical signatures: found sound, reverb, polychromatic folk music that is by turns cartoonish and hyperphysical - like ultra magnified footage of a virus or a leaf. Apparently, the LP began life as a “pretty minimal” flute record. Later it became an electronic record “for a while” and finally, “right at the last second,” it “turned into a pile of garbage.” The good kind of garbage: glinting, useful, free. Music as compost—leaves, and branches ready to be re-ingested by the earth, turned into a flower.  From: https://www.subpop.com/artists/chad_vangaalen  

Ghostemane - Bonesaw

#Ghostemane #trap metal #hardcore punk #noise #alternative hip hop #black metal #industrial hip hop #animated music video

Eric Whitney, known professionally as Ghostemane or Eric Ghoste, is an American rapper, singer, and songwriter. He has released eight solo albums and three collaborative albums under his Ghostemane moniker, primarily merging elements of heavy metal, hip hop and industrial music. Whitney has also released music with a number of additional solo projects, pursuing styles including black metal as Baader-Meinhof, noise music as GASM, and electronic music as Swearr. He began his career in local hardcore punk and doom metal bands around Florida. In 2015, he moved to Los Angeles, starting a career as a rapper, under the moniker Ill Bizz. Around this same time, he was a member of the hip hop collective Schemaposse.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostemane

While eagerly awaiting Ghostemane’s forthcoming album, ANTI-ICON, let’s recap some of the defining points in his discography so far. These are the picks from Ghostemane’s creative timeline that reflect his ability to take the elements from trap, metal and industrial worlds and mix them in genre-defying ways that redefine the framework of trap metal and heavy music in general.

Swan: If you could imagine the spooky synth lead in “Swan” played on a guitar in tremolo picking style, the references coming to mind would be along the lines of early Mayhem or Darkthrone, as this haunting melody mirrors some of the most typical riffs in black-metal classics. So much so that you might expect an outburst of blast beats to eventually break the suspense. But instead, Ghostemane’s agitated flows, deep lo-fi beats and crawling atmospheres culminate with a guitar sample from Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral,” making the track anything but predictable.

Elixir: Way before he debuted his black-metal side project, Ghostemane put out Blackmage — a record which continued pushing the limits of the genre that in 2016 was already gaining a cult-like following. In “Elixir,” as soon as you get used to the mashup of distressed rap verses, piano melodies and open hi-hats gliding along the guitar hook from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the flow gets interrupted by a heavy riff from Pantera’s “Walk.” Its rough, ostensibly random, I-don’t-give-a-fuck placement reflects Ghostemane’s bold and straightforward approach to mashing up references in his Blackmage era.

Rake: In this unruly track from Hexada, Ghostemane’s creative process comes off as that of a painter picking colors for a contrasting yet weirdly harmonious palette. No, wrong metaphor. It’s more like a twisted artistic villain sawing off random body parts from zombified trap, death-metal, nü-metal and industrial-metal archetypes and grinding them up in a superpowered food processor. It takes about one-and-a-half minutes, and that’s all Ghostemane needs to mold this sticky matter into an astonishing trap-metal Frankenstein.

D(R)Ead: If you’ve only heard one song from Ghostemane, chances are it’s this one. If you’ve only seen one music video by Ghostemane, chances are it’s also this one. One year after he debuted the post-industrial/techno side project Swearr, Ghostemane dropped “D(R)Ead,” a single that foretold the dominance of industrial sound on N / O / I / S / E. Chill(y) trap meets glitched noises, and rap verses shift to panicky Slipknot-style vocals as the track, with the help of live drumming by blink-182’s Travis Barker, progresses into a scream-powered industrial-metal explosion—then makes a full circle back to a dark trap ritual.

From: https://www.altpress.com/best-ghostemane-songs/

The Smile - Thin Thing

 #The Smile #Thom Yorke #Johnny Greenwood #alternative rock #art rock #post-punk #experimental #progressive rock Radiohead spinoff #animated music video

When Thom Yorke introduced his new band at their first gig a year ago, he took a moment to explain their name. “Not the Smile as in ha ha ha,” he said, his faux laugh echoing eerily, “more the Smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” Of course, no one figured that the most uncannily accurate doomsayer of the modern age was taking a sharp left to clown town with his latest project, but the Smile are not just aimed at shifty politicians, either. Their pearly grins are myriad, taking inspiration from smiles of love and deceit, bloody smiles and blissful ones, smiles that mend and smiles that destroy. At 53, Yorke has seen them all. And once again, he’s battling the absurdity of existence the only way he knows how: by offering a salve for his anxieties without letting anyone off the hook for turning everything we hold dear into one big joke.
This bid for transcendence amid chaos isn’t the only thing that’s familiar about the Smile. The trio also includes Yorke’s main songwriting partner in Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood, along with drummer Tom Skinner, whose eclectic resume includes work with jazz-funk explorers Sons of Kemet, electronic fusionist Floating Points, and UK rapper Kano. It’s the first time Yorke and Greenwood have collaborated on a major project outside of their main gig, and, not coincidentally, A Light for Attracting Attention sounds more like a proper Radiohead album than any of the numerous side projects the band’s members have done on their own.
We’ve got Greenwood’s lattice-like fingerpicking and saintly electric guitar tone. There’s Yorke’s voice, still in pristine form, wailing like an angel in limbo and gnashing like a punk who woke up on the wrong side of the gutter. There are synths and Greenwood’s sidelong orchestral flourishes signaling end times. Longtime producer Nigel Godrich is in the control room, giving each sound an immense and terrifying and beautiful glow. How about some wonky rhythms that keep your mind from slipping into passive mode? Yep, lots of those too. All due respect to the guys from Radiohead who are not in the Smile, but if A Light for Attracting Attention were presented as the triumphant follow-up to the group’s last album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, I’d bet that most people would have happily been fooled.
From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-smile-a-light-for-attracting-attention/

The Smile are an English rock band comprising the Radiohead members Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, bass, keys) and Jonny Greenwood (guitar, bass, keys) with the drummer Tom Skinner. They are produced by Nigel Godrich, Radiohead's longtime producer. They incorporate elements of post-punk, progressive rock, Afrobeat and electronic music. The Smile worked during the COVID-19 lockdowns and made their surprise debut in a performance streamed by Glastonbury Festival in May 2021. In early 2022, they released six singles and performed to an audience for the first time at three shows in London, which were livestreamed. In May, the Smile released their debut album, A Light for Attracting Attention, and began an international tour.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smile_(band)

The Beatles - Come Together

 #The Beatles #John Lennon #Paul McCartney #George Harrison #British invasion #pop rock #psychedelic rock #blues rock #classic rock #British psychedelia #folk rock #1960s #animated music video

‘Come Together’, the lead song on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, was conceived by John Lennon as a political rallying cry for the writer, psychologist and pro-LSD activist Timothy Leary. ‘Come Together’ was composed for Timothy Leary’s campaign to stand against Ronald Reagan as governor of California. Leary and his wife Rosemary had traveled to Montreal for John and Yoko’s bed-in for peace, which took place on 1 June 1969. The Learys participated in the recording of Lennon’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’, and were both name-checked in the lyrics. The following day Lennon offered to help Leary’s campaign. His slogan was ‘Come together, join the party’. Lennon sent Leary a demo tape of song ideas. However, the campaign ended when Leary was imprisoned for cannabis possession, allowing Lennon to record the song with The Beatles.
“The thing was created in the studio. It’s gobbledygook; ‘Come Together’ was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t come up with one. But I came up with this, ‘Come Together’, which would’ve been no good to him – you couldn’t have a campaign song like that, right?”
Leary was bemused when he came to hear The Beatles’ recording of the song. He said, “Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way. When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else.” ‘Come Together’ was Lennon’s last politicized stance in The Beatles, although much of it was shrouded in imagery: the song lampooned the hippy figureheads who would seek followers among the dropouts of society. Musically, ‘Come Together’ took its cue from Chuck Berry’s 1956 song ‘You Can’t Catch Me’; both songs contain the lines “Here come old flat-top”. Lennon was later sued by Berry’s publisher Morris Levy. They settled out of court, and Lennon agreed to record more songs owned by Levy.
“‘Come Together’ is me – writing obscurely around an old Chuck Berry thing. I left the line in ‘Here comes old flat-top.’ It is nothing like the Chuck Berry song, but they took me to court because I admitted the influence once years ago. I could have changed it to ‘Here comes old iron face,’ but the song remains independent of Chuck Berry or anybody else on earth.” The result was his 1975 album Rock ‘N’ Roll, which contained Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘You Can’t Catch Me’, along with Lee Dorsey’s ‘Ya Ya’ (also recorded with the 11-year-old Julian Lennon on drums for 1974’s Walls And Bridges).  From: https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/come-together/

tUnE-yArDs - Water Fountain

 #tUnE-yArDs #Merill Garbus #art pop #alternative rock #pop rock #worldbeat #indie pop #lo-fi #electronic #animated music video #puppetry

tUnE-yArDs, the duo of Merill Garbus and Nate Brenner, combine soulful vocals, unusual percussion, and trenchant social commentary into uniquely vibrant music. Starting with the raw collages of 2009's self-released BiRd-BrAiNs, the project immediately attracted attention for its impassioned sound and viewpoint. Though Garbus and Brenner polished their music slightly on albums such as 2014's Nikki Nack, the combination of their explorations of complex issues like race, gender, and privilege with bold song forms indebted to playground chants, work songs, and non-Western musical traditions remained as distinctive and acclaimed as ever. The duo took a more reflective, electronic-based approach on 2017's I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life. 2021's Sketchy, saw Brenner and Garbus combining more personal songwriting with the anthemic, kinetic style of tUnE-yArDs' earlier work.
Born in New York City and raised there and in Connecticut, Garbus had an eclectic creative background. She spent some time as a puppeteer at Vermont's Sandglass Theater and also played ukulele in the Montreal-based band Sister Suvi. She began writing and performing under the tUnE-yArDs moniker in 2006, using a digital voice recorder and shareware mixing software to assemble her first songs. It took Garbus two years to craft her debut album, BiRd-BrAiNs, which she offered on cassette and as a pay-what-you-want download on the tUnE-yArDs website. Thanks to frequent touring with artists like Thao and positive buzz from music blogs, the album became a cult favorite. In June 2009, Marriage Records released the album on cassette; that August, 4AD Records reissued it in a special screen-printed version before distributing a CD version of BiRd-BrAiNs in November that coincided with a tour opening for the Dirty Projectors.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/tune-yards-mn0002144063/biography

Mountain - Mississippi Queen

 #Mountain #Leslie West #Felix Pappalardi #hard rock #blues rock #heavy metal #heavy blues rock #heavy psych #animated music video

Bob Dylan once said that the ‘60s reminded him of a flying saucer landing – everybody heard about it, but only a handful ever saw it. Out of that handful who saw the decade up close, few had the view of the musicians who played the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The festival, long since pinned like a museum butterfly under history’s glass, misfired for some and cemented the reputations of others. The performance of Crosby, Stills & Nash marked only their second public appearance. Other bands such as The Grateful Dead still talk about how dissatisfied they were with their performance, while the great Alvin Lee and Ten Years After enjoyed, particularly after the concert film’s release, a considerable boost in popularity. Most famously, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” filled more pages in the guitar great’s growing legend and lingers in public consciousness as the event’s defining moment.
Treading the boards in Max Yasgur’s field transformed Mountain’s career as well. The band’s close to classic lineup, sans soon-to-be-enlisted drummer Corky Laing, ripped through a set largely culled from guitarist Leslie West’s recently released solo album entitled “Mountain.” The wide-eyed, expressive and impressively built West manned center stage as if the fates conspired to place him there at that moment and time, while former Cream producer Felix Pappalardi stood semi-shadowed to his right unleashing furious bass runs in accompaniment. It is little stretch to say the massive crowd heard nothing quite like this before.
It wasn’t the overpowering bluster or blues histrionics of West’s guitar. By 1969, Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience spawned a host of imitators and influenced countless others to carry on their groundbreaking work to its logical conclusion. However, the public had yet to hear a guitarist capable of uniting accessibility, melody, power, fluent vibrato, and strong rhythm playing into one package. His imposing frame juxtaposed against the small size of his Les Paul Junior along with his surprisingly soulful and muscular vocals completed the picture. His torrid performances on “Beside the Sea” and “Southbound Train” impressed many and didn’t go unnoticed by record executives.
Mountain formed, in significant part, as a vehicle to highlight West’s talents. The July, 1969 release of his first solo album laid down a rough template of the band’s sound, but transitioning from a solo act into a band necessitated changes. Pappalardi, sensitive to musical similarities between Cream and the new band, recruited keyboardist Steve Knight over West’s objections to play organ and fill out their sound. West, an enormous admirer of Clapton’s stint with Cream, shrugged off potential comparisons. Such maneuvers, however, certainly insulated the band from such charges and provided a textural counterpoint for West’s guitar that recalled other emerging bands such as Vanilla Fudge and Deep Purple far more. Knight’s formal approach and reluctant musical improvisation further rankled West’s attitude towards the keyboardist, but the jazz devotee brought considerable chops to bear that few then-prominent keyboardists could claim.
Switching drummers didn’t impede their ascent. West and Pappalardi grew quickly disenchanted with drummer N.D. Smart’s musical suitability and Pappalardi recommended Canadian-born New York City transplant Laing as his replacement. The new drummer came to Pappalardi’s notice after the latter produced the debut for Laing’s then-current band Energy. The addition of Laing brought Mountain a versatile and physical percussionist unafraid to expand his style. And, perhaps even more crucially, Laing proved to be another songwriter to add to the mix.
One of the earliest dividends from Laing’s membership, “Mississippi Queen,” is arguably the band’s defining work. The story about its genesis has long since passed into rock ‘n’ roll lore, but the track’s gloriously electrified raunch and West’s revival preacher vocals has long obscured its cultural significance. “Mississippi Queen” occupies a significant place in the Great American Songbook for a few reasons, but one of the most important is how it illustrates the breathtaking pace of musical and cross-cultural assimilation underway in the late 1960s. It’s nothing short of indelibly American that a professionally trained musician, composer and University of Michigan graduate, teamed with a gifted, but raw and self-taught, New York City rock ‘n’ roller, a Canadian drummer with a potpourri of musical influences, and a jazz pianist playing keyboards, to record a song that, stripped of its modern gloss and volume, sounds straight out of a Clarksdale juke joint on a Saturday night.  From: https://www.goldminemag.com/articles/story-band-mountain   

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath

 #Black Sabbath #Ozzy Osbourne #heavy metal #hard rock #classic rock #heavy blues rock #British blues rock #doom metal #1970s #Fantasia #Night on Bald Mountain #animated music video

Listening to Black Sabbath’s self-titled 1970 album is a lesson in heavy metal history. Though bands such as Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple influenced the formation of the genre, Black Sabbath is often considered the first true heavy metal band, perhaps because they were the first to devote their focus to the darker themes that became an often controversial element of metal. Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin also has been quoted as saying he thought Black Sabbath was the first true heavy metal band. Living in an impoverished English town where career choices for most were limited to factory worker or criminal, the boys of Black Sabbath could not relate to the idealistic hippie music that was popular when the band formed in 1968, considering themselves a blues band. Guitarist Tony Iommi, observed the lines that formed at the local movie theater whenever it showed horror films and remarked that if people were so willing to pay to be scared, perhaps they should try playing evil-sounding music. With that in mind, they took their name from a Boris Karloff film.
The title track exemplified Sabbath’s goal of capturing horror in music. It began with atmospheric sounds of heavy rain, thunder, and a single, tolling bell. Then Iomi played a slow, ominous riff based on the “devil’s tritone,” an interval notoriously avoided in medieval music because its dissonance evoked a sense of evil - perfect for Sabbath’s purposes. Though speedy, seemingly effortless shredding has become nearly synonymous with heavy metal, the slogging pace of this formative song was truly heavy, creating a feeling of immense weight and pressure intensified by the dread-soaked vocals of Ozzy Osbourne in his prime. The story of being dragged to hell by a figure in black was not conveyed so much by the lyrics as by the despair in Osbourne’s voice when he moaned, “Oh no, no, please God help me.” The song was haunting in a way that most listeners in 1970 had no idea how to process. This dire sound eventually became the primary influence of the doom metal subgenre in the early 1980s.  From: https://www.classicrockhistory.com/black-sabbath-album-review/

Dead Pirates - UGO

 #Dead Pirates #McBess #psychedelic rock #garage rock #art rock #heavy psych #animated music video

Dead Pirates roared into existence in 2009 as the “band” behind “Wood (Dirty Melody),” an infectious slice of garage punk that soundtracked an animated music video by the French illustrator Matthieu Bessudo — better known as McBess. At the time, the “band” was just McBess himself, a chance for him to stretch his creative muscles beyond the Max Fleischer-inspired artwork and videos for which he’s become known. McBess created the video for “Wood” during his day job at Oscar-winning VFX studio The Mill. “What I wanted to do was make music,” he says. “It didn’t really matter if I became famous or anything like that. It just started to get bigger and bigger.”
It happened quickly; after the release of “Wood (Dirty Melody),” a friend asked Mcbess to play a private Christmas party, so he put together a rudimentary group, including his younger brother, Tristan, flown in from Berlin, on guitar. In 2010, a Dead Pirates 7” was recorded to accompany a McBess-penned comic book entitled Malevolent Melody. Two more EPs followed in 2011 and 2014, along with shows in London and Europe, and a tour to South America in 2015. “It was strange,” says McBess, explaining how his band ended up playing to a crowd of 500 people in Buenos Aires. “I went to South America to do an exhibition, and a friend of mine there was into some good music and said it would be easy to set up a tour. He landed us like six or seven dates.”
Now, Dead Pirates are gearing up to release their debut LP, “Highmare,”a collection of ultra-heavy psychedelic jammers as indebted to ‘70s classics as McBess’ artwork is to Betty Boop. And they’ve had no trouble finding an audience — the first pressing of Highmare is almost completely sold out on Bandcamp. McBess is ready for the attention. “Before this I was never 100% certain of what we were doing, he says. “But this one is different. Nobody is taking it lightly.”  From: https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/dead-pirates-interview

Infant Annihilator - Blasphemian

 #Infant Annihilator #deathcore #technical death metal #heavy metal #brutal deathcore #extreme metal #animated music video

For anyone who's been indoctrinated into the heavier side of metal, grindcore sweethearts and one-time boy band Infant Annihilator may be a familiar name to you. For those of you who just looked up the name in order to prove you already know them, welcome to the shit show. No hipster bullshit here. Infant Annihilator was formed in 2012 by drummer Aaron Kitcher and guitarist Eddie Pickard. Since then, they’ve released three albums and a few loose singles. That’s all you’re getting, look the rest up on Wikipedia. Now, on to the butt-fuckery. Infant Annihilator is a band full of dudes who like taking the piss in a traditional post-modern way on the surface, but once you’ve looked past the superficial you learn very quickly that these boys are incredibly talented in such a way that it actually frustrates you that they don’t seem to take it all that seriously.
In the early days, vocalist Dan Watson set the tone for the brutality with an impressive array of grunt-styles to really set the tone for the pounding you’re meant to take. Coupled with the near machine-like drumming of Kitcher and the impressive and sometimes soulful solos of Pickard, you’d almost think they’re an incredibly talented Grindcore band that only improves on the pre-established legacy. Then you watch a video and holy shit, these dudes really just don’t give a fuck and go all in. Decapitation Fornication (2012) tells a Cannibal Corpse-style story of a deranged person viciously murdering their victim and then disposing of the body. The video, on the other hand, showcases the band’s love for one another, in sometimes graphic detail, complete with thrusting and black box action. Not my kind of good time, but hey, metal is a judgment-free zone.  From: https://sinneth.com/do-you-know-infant-annihilator/