Album Review: Cryptopsy – The Unspoken King

Cryptopsy – The Unspoken King
Century Media – 26 May 2008

The return of Lord Worm to the Cryptopsy fold for 05’s Once Was Not should have been a triumphant return to the highs of the brilliantly malignant malevolence of None So Vile. However, a phoned-in vocal performance coupled with some rather tepid songwriting resulted in the group’s least inspiring work to date. Lord Worm’s obvious ambivalence towards his task saw his reappearance as merely a disappointing nostalgia trip, sullying the band’s name worse than anything the much-maligned Mike DiSalvo put his vocal chords to. Yet, the biggest problem with Cryptopsy’s latter-day material has had less to do with vocalists than an increasing reliance on technicality – Flo Mournier’s always jaw-dropping blasting speed in particular – over songwriting. Not once since None So Vile have we been treated to anything to match the likes of ‘Phobophile’, ‘Crown of Horns’ or ‘Slit Your Guts’. The Unspoken King – featuring new vocalist Matt McGachy, a keyboardist in Maggy Durand and the loss of long-term guitarist Jon Levasseur – is unfortunately no different.

Indeed, Cryptopsy go down some frankly bemusing avenues on their latest batch, such as the godawful ‘Bemoan the Martyr’ which includes ill-advised emo-esque crooning in a hackneyed attempt to latch onto the Dillinger Escape Plan bandwagon. Elsewhere, memorable riffs are a virtual non-event, with myriad unconnected, complicated riffs vying for attention in a messy barrage that gives little adherence to cohesion. Flo’s drumming is as usual second to none, but by this stage it seems as though he’s playing as fast as possible just for the sake of it, because he can. Is it unreasonable to expect more from the band that brought us a bona fide death metal classic in the past? ‘Leach’ and its cohorts also go down the cleanly such chorus route, and McGachy is certainly no Greg Puciato despite possessing a fairly diverse range of growls and screams at his disposal.

Cryptopsy seem at something of a loss as to what direction they want to take on The Unspoken King. Death metal? Death core? DEP clone? The whole thing plays like a mish-mash of ideas flung together in a flurry of technical riffing that simply fails to hold the attention. It’s galling that the only memorable moments occur because of their sheer ham-fistedness, and this along with a dry-washed-out production leaves The Unspoken King as Cryptopsy’s weakest effort yet. Furthermore, Maggy Durand’s name in the band member list is a mystery, for there is little sign of her input aside from the occasional trite noises that have found their way onto past Cryptopsy albums anyway. A major disappointment from a band who have lost direction – The Unspoken King was a golden opportunity to clear the decks after the misstep of Lord Worm’s return, but Once Was Not is a classic compared to this.

Official Cryptopsy Website
Official Cryptopsy MySpace
Official Century Media Website

Trent Reznor loves us all

Fact. Point your browsers to www.nin.com and you’ll find a link to download Nine Inch Nails’ new single, ‘Discipline’, for free. Trent seems to be forming a bit of a habit of throwing new material at his adoring public from out of nowhere – the 2-hour instrumental set Ghosts I-IV has only appeared in stores recently. Thankfully, ‘Discipline’ sees Reznor excercising his vocal chords again, something the varied but ultimately mood-driven Ghosts… sorely missed, raising hopes that a new batch of somewhat longer-lasting material will appear very soon. Nice.

Metallica – Forward thinking futurists or cynical cashgrabbers?

Being the progressive-minded thrash titans that they are (sic), decrepid millionaires Metallica have apparently decided to put their past scrapes with napster behind them and embrace the internet. The band notoriously sued file-sharing pioneers Napster in 2000, raising the ire of millions of music fans worldwide and spitting upon their last shred of credibility (if they even had any in 2000) in the process.

Citing the likes of Trent Reznor and Radiohead as inspiration for this about-turn, the band claims to “be looking forward to everything in terms of possibilities with the Internet”. Great.

Of course, with St. Anger generally regarded as a steaming pile of half-baked faeces – barely worth the time it takes to download an album, let alone your cash – it remains to be seen whether Metallica still have it in them to make anything halfway decent anymore. Still, thousands of people are bound to enjoy propelling it all over cyberspace just out of spite. Ouch.

Source: http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9440/Metallica+Now+Embraces+File-Sharing%3F

Opeth in New Album Leak Shocker

After what may have seemed like an eternity since the announcement of Watershed as the title of Opeth’s 9th studio album – due in stores June 2nd – and after the recent leaking of 2 tracks, the full thing is now all over the internet like a rash. Initial listenings suggest a distinctly less immediate experience than its predecessor, Ghost Reveries, with some rather odd moments sprinkled amidst the very 70s prog-orientated material. Chief amongst these is a tie between the quasi-funk keyboard workout in ‘The Lotus Eater’, Mike’s detuning of his guitar midway through a folky acoustic lick at the tail end of ‘Burden’, or new man behind the drumstool Axenrot’s wonderfully off-kilter drum spasm in ‘Porcelain Heart’. It’s bound to cause all kinds of debate over the coming months, and a full review will be posted here in the very near future…

Album Review: In Flames – A sense of Purpose

In Flames – A Sense of Purpose
Nuclear Blast – NB2083 – 4 April 2008

A sad state of affairs it is indeed, when the once seemingly infallible In Flames become something of a guilty pleasure in one’s record collection. For a band once so revered within the underground to have become the proverbial whipping boys to an ever angst-ridden metal community is by no means an unheard of phenomenon, but In Flames have had to endure more flak than most in recent years. Of course, the collective groaning of the underground is unlikely to bother the band too much – with ’06’s Come Clarity apparently shifting 400,000 units, their star is burning brighter than ever in the wider metal fraternity. This reality is much to the chagrin of those schooled in the ways of the magnificent trio of The Jester Race, Whoracle and Colony – with their beautifully winding, melodic leads, thunderous riffs and Anders’ snarling yet strangely emotive growls. 2002’s Reroute to Remain was undoubtedly the noose to their underground suicide, with nods to the alternative metal climate of the day, abandonment of the classicism of the past for a more straightforward, riff-based approach, and Anders’ adoption of a less throaty, more mainstream-friendly rasp in conjunction with the increasingly cleanly-sung choruses. Reroute… caused much of their traditional fanbase to erupt into convulsions of spasmodic aghastery, the mainstream metal media caught wind of all the fuss, and the rest is history…

Two albums of mixed results later and next up is A Sense of Purpose. A certain UK ‘metal’ magazine recently proclaimed this work to be a return to twin-guitar mania of their earlier days – the reviewer was clearly either listening to Clayman by mistake or is an evil liar – it isn’t. Rather, it’s another step into the realms of imminent commercial metal superstardom that retains cursory elements of their tantalising past, but more often than not leaves them behind completely. Opener ‘Mirror’s Truth’ is a bog-standard moder In Flames number, and its follow-up ‘Disconnected’ is almost identical – the latter wandering dangerously into dreaded emo territory with laughable lyrical abominations such as ‘I feel like shit, but at least I feel something‘. ‘Alias’, although sure to annoy the old guard with its heavy reliance on synths, is maddeningly catchy, Anders’ clean vocals working well in this instance, and it’s acoustic interlude an obvious nod to the Whoracle era. Bizarre as it may seem, Anders appears to be getting angstier with age, and as ‘Disconnected’ suggests, A Sense of Purpose is loaded with teen-friendly choruses designed to saitiate their newly pubescent fanbase. ‘The Chosen Pessiment’ is an 8-minute anomaly for the band, as they attempt the ’slow build to an epic crescendo’ tack, Anders doing his best Thom Yorke impression early on, but the track is stilted by a repetetive guitar lick that fails to utilise the time afforded to truly go anywhere interesting.

Despite its obvious shortcomings, A Sense of Purpose is regardless a mostly enjoyable slice of poppy alt. metal, best listened to in the context of its mainstream contemporaries rather than as any addition to the current crop of Swedish melo-death pretenders. Indeed, alongside the many Killswitch Engage-esque bands who have shamelessly pilfered from them in recent times, In Flames are still a cut above most of them. It’s just a shame that the fans of old must now look elsewhere, and it’s unlikely that any of their Swedish copyists will ever create anything to match In Flames at their peak. A Sense of Purpose isn’t the dismal failure the old-schoolers will have you believe, but nor is it the ragingly successful blend of vintage and modern the mainstream media are putting forth – rather it sits uncomfortably between these two summations.

Official In Flames Website
Official In Flames MySpace
Official Nuclear Blast Website

Album Review: Meshuggah – ObZen

Meshuggah – ObZen
Nuclear Blast – NB1937-2 – 11 March 2008

Meshuggah may be coasting along in their own little niche nowadays, but let’s face it – what a niche! With a multitude of copyists in their wake, yet none of them offering any real threat to the summit of their sizeable ultra-tech bizarro-thrash mountain, a new Meshuggah release is always greeted with endless platitudes from critics and fans alike. ObZen doesn’t really tread any new ground per se, but instead acts as a superb summation of the many head-spinning vistas they’ve frequented over the years, pinching elements from their entire catalogue, from the thrashy classic Destroy Erase Improve, the slowed-down groove of Nothing, the panic-stricken I EP to the all-out head-fuckery of Catch Thirty Three.

‘Combustion’, for instance, is as straightforward a Meshuggah song as anyone could hope for these days, its opening riff nearly recalling Tool before it blasts off into myriad rhythmic twists and turns, before climaxing in an ear-splitting solo amidst Tomas Haake’s omnipresent drum abuse. The incredible ‘Bleed’ rumbles menacingly, raising the ghost of Chaosphere but implementing the lessons learned from I in the process, thudding mercilessly in a barrage of controlled pounding. ‘Lethargica’ is just that, and it could have easily found a home on Nothing, creeping slothfully along and winding its tentacles around the ears. The proggy title-track seems almost structureless, but as always with Meshuggah the chaos is tightly controlled by guitarists Thordenal and Hagstrom, as the band effortlessly switch tempos at whim. This may sound rather tantalising, but closer ‘Dancers to a Discordant System’ is ObZen’s major triumph, a 9 minute epic that is breathtaking in its scope, constantly heaving and swelling, Haake possibly flailing his drumsticks like a tribal robot, as Jens Kidman meanwhile rasps threateningly and screams manically throughout. The soaring refrain is the kind of effortless piece de resitance that the likes of Textures and Gojira only wish they could pull off with such grace, and Meshuggah do it with ease.

ObZen doesn’t attempt to reinvent Meshuggah, but it does an almost flawless job of reaffirming one’s faith in a band who have consistently delivered the goods songwise, and for music this precise and technical, that is certainly no mean feat. At times ObZen may come across as a little too comfortable, mainly because we’ve become accustomed to Meshuggah constantly challenging us, be it with Nothing’s sudden de-tunement or Catch Thirty Three’s 40-minute, 1-track insanity. ObZen is a consistent, thoroughly arse-kicking play on Meshuggah’s many strengths, and that should be all you need to know.

Official Meshggah Website
Official Meshuggah MySpace
Official Nuclear Blast Website

Album Review: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
Mute – CDSTUMM277 – 3rd March, 2008
By Paddy Walsh

Nick Cave’s run of introspective, piano-led albums may have come to a sudden halt with 2004’s Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus double-set, but it is Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! which sees Cave return to the sardonic baladeering which had permeated his work up to Murder Ballads. Cave carefully remains detached from the protagonists and subjects of his ire throughout, with only ‘Hold onto Yourself’ and the violin laden ‘Jesus of the Moon’ offering a glimpse into his penchant for forlorn lovesongs. Elsewhere the garage-rock of his 2007 Grinderman side-project heavily informs this album, with juddering, clangy guitars skittering all over the songs adding a pulsating energy that is as much at odds with The Boatman’s Call as it is Henry’s Dream’s apocalyptic tales.

Yet even though Cave is obviously more at ease with both himself and the world these days, his merciless wit and cynicism is rife on this album. The title track tells the lamentable tale of the biblical grave-hopper as he is thrust into modern New York, charting his descent into debauchery, fame and ultimate ghetto ruin. Elsewhere, ‘We Call Upon the Author’ is a fist-shaking rant at god, Cave hysterically listing the world’s ills and demanding an explanation. Lyrically this is one of Cave’s best – he melds the bile of his youth with a nworld-weary, sag-like quality that often invokes one of his most obvious influences in Leonard Cohen.

The Bad Seeds, as ever, are a reliably off-kilter bunch, the trashy guitars, hard hitting drums and disciplined basslines form the backbone, whilst frequest keyboard interjections add a vintage touch to proceedings that at times even recall the swirling cacophany of The Doors. Whilst old Nick has long since exorcised the angry demons that infused his earlier works, there remains a playfully dark cynicism to his observational lyricism, much to Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!’s benefit, so that fans of the Aussie troublemakers will find much to get their teeth stuck into here.

Official Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Website
Official Mute Records Website