Envy - Insomniac Doze

Envy - 'Further Ahead of Warp'

All photographs of the Insomniac Doze 2xLP - unfortunately sold out, according to the Temporary Residence Limited Catalog. Just sayin'.

Before I get on with the post for this excellent album (just listen to the rumbling bass, and trilling post-rock guitar, of the opening song above), a short service announcement...

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The Hardcore for Nerds (Retrospective) Manifesto, with exposition:

• to present music accompanied by writing; there are plenty of album blogs with little content other than download links, so basing myself on my original inspiration, I try to offer description and explanation of music that I think other people would like to hear. The aim is for it to be well-written, thoughtful and (to a degree) personal, but not an objective review - every album I put up here I already really like. At the same time, I want to show that I like this music for a reason, and that means putting it in context - genres, movements, history, and art.
• to present music accompanied by images; while music can be (and mostly is) enjoyed purely through sound, the aesthetic benefit of visual artwork is integral to its full enjoyment. Also, the internet is primarily a visual medium and text cannot generally be presented on its own. Therefore, I try at least to provide a decent-sized cover (400x400 pixels) for each album. Vinyl - I've owned a turntable for just over a year - is especially well suited to visual aesthetics, and when I'm feeling artistic I like to try out my minor interest in photography on the sleeves, records and insets.
• to provide music accessibly and responsibly; of course, words and pictures can be no substitute for the music itself, and it is in this sense that the internet is the most revolutionary for the transmission of new and old styles, artists and releases. I believe in the continuing and central importance of the 'album' in music, hence the full-album downloads instead of individual tracks - that's how I like to try out and hear new music. However, for the sake of immediacy, I've also been using streaming (full-song) clips in the past while, so you can listen to the band directly. On the flip-side of accessible music is the responsibility to support the artists and labels involved; I believe that "buy it if you like it" is implied with every download, at least where practical (and where you do really like it). To encourage an ethical approach of that kind, I try to include a link to the band and/or label website, and (legal download site) eMusic where available, and likewise to the Dublin city and online store of Road Records. Furthermore, I avoid posting full downloads of current (past year) album releases, although paradoxically a simple Google Blogs or Sordo db search will quickly lead you to at least the most popular ones.

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Envy's 2006 album, Insomniac Doze, represented a significant shift from the almost genre-defining, 2001 release A Dead Sinking Story (one of my top six punk albums of the 21st century), itself a significant development in the expanse and nuance of the group's style from All The Footprints You've Ever Left Behind And The Fear Expecting Ahead (1999). Between these three full-lengths there is a fairly rapid evolution by the Japanese band from screamo to post-rock, and for many people Insomniac Doze goes too far in the post-rock dimension. For me, however, it's a great album in both categories, and deserving of almost as much praise as A Dead Sinking Story for creating the uniquely epic and intense Envy sound.

That's not to say I don't understand other people's criticism of this album, though I don't always agree with them. Pitchfork's 6.3 review took issue with the album's relative somnolence, describing it as "mild enough for the dentist's office", whereas I really enjoy its epic, cinematic tones. Nick from Worship and Tribute's generally very positive review for Sputnikmusic has a gripe with its "harmonic vapidity" and otherwise unadventurous musicianship; I have to agree that listening to A Dead Sinking Story, it seems much more musically creative in certain ways. As he says, it's "a trade-off; I like their ability to build huge passages out of simple, slowly repeating chord progressions, but I dislike the plodding feeling of it all"; though I find that the simplicity is mirrored by emotional intensity, the post-rock side just a part of the adapted screamo style.

'Scene' (video)

Though I came to A Dead Sinking Story some years after the fact, I was eagerly anticipating the release of its follow-up. 'Scene' was the first song - in the form of this video - that I heard, and it was really a microcosm of the issues raised by the whole album. Expecting more of the really crushing heaviness of A Dead Sinking Story alongside that same album's quietitude, what 'Scene' presented was a far slower build-up to a more muted crescendo. On the album itself, 'Further Ahead of Warp' is a more energetic if broadly similar opening song, and 'Shield of Selflessness' is the closest Insomniac Doze gets to the shorter old-school Envy style of hardcore.

'Scene' is the statement of the new Envy, which is really just an adaptation of the old Envy, as the video makes clear. All in a blue monochrome blur, views of clouds in the ether are interspersed with shots of the band performing the song live, edging towards full catharsis mode. It's the combination of the cinematic with the electric which makes Insomniac Doze work so well, long arcs of harmony mixed with smooth crescendos of angst.

'Crystallize'

Right after 'Scene' comes this next post-rock song, so epic that it takes up a whole side of one LP (as does the next one, 'Unknown Glow'). 'Crystallize' is in many ways more cinematic, and certainly more artistic, than 'Scene'. As discussed previously, it's got an insistent melody that reminds me of 'Soon' from My Bloody Valentine's archetypal Loveless, and I think that Insomniac Doze as a whole has a strong shoegaze feel to it. More importantly, 'Crystallize' signals a new interest by Envy in simple, yet arty, melodic songs that continues into their more recent, shorter releases, such as Abyssal and songs like 'Life Caught in the Rain' and 'Conclusion of Existence' from the Jesu split.

'Night in Winter'

Although 'Further Ahead of Warp', 'Scene' and 'Crystallize' I think provide ample proof of Insomniac Doze's brilliance, it wouldn't be right not to include anything from the second LP of the album. The ten-minute long 'Unknown Glow' is, like 'Scene', an epic movement of post-rock/screamo, at times almost quasi-classical, spanning the range from near-silence to aural near-destruction; 'A Warm Room' is an intense, cathartic closer with some of the most A Dead Sinking Story-like moments on the album. 'Night in Winter', however, is a particularly beautiful, atmospheric track to bridge the gap between Insomniac Doze's weightier moments.

Envy - Insomniac Doze (2006) (link via Zen and the Art of Face Punching)

Temporary Residence Limited

Asobi Seksu - Strawberries 2x7" (+ live at Crawdaddy, Dublin 11/02/09)

(inside of the gatefold. All artwork by Sean McCabe)

("Limited Edition Red Vinyl With Strawberry Scented Sleeves" - yes, really. Subtle enough, but in a sugary-sweet flavouring sort of way. As one might expect.)

'Strawberries' - Edit (3:29)

'Strawberries' - CSS Remix (3:19)

This double 7" came out in November 2007, a month before the Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight) single, both in support of their second album, Citrus. Currently they're touring their third, Hush, which officially comes out on February 17th, on Polyvinyl Records. Obviously I'm more familiar with the songs from Citrus, of which there were a few played at the gig - notably 'Strawberries', 'Pink Clouds Tracing Paper' and 'Thursday'. The songs from Hush sound very strong though.

First thing that hit me about the band was the sound of the drums - absolutely pummelling, a piercing bass drum - which makes a lot of sense given the drummer's previous work. Actually it reminded me, in a live setting, of a favourite Irish band of mine, Ham Sandwich (though I would make the comparison more generally anyway), who have a heavy rhythm section, shoegazy guitar and a female vocalist as well. Though there can be few modern comparisons with the vocals of Yuki Chikudate, which are simply stunning (and surprisingly audible in the context).

The show drew to a close with the My Bloody Valentine-clone of 'Pink Clouds Tracing Paper', and for an encore, a transcendentally distorted version of 'Red Sea'. Thankfully it didn't reach the sound levels or duration of MBV's recent "holocausts", but it's always a good thing when, in a gig, the visual and auditory inputs from the stage cease to appear to be 100% experientially, in-the-same-room real. Now that's shoegaze.

Other reviews here and here. It also was Gig of the Week in the Irish Times too, with a nice photograph, but only it seems available in the print edition.

Slint - Glenn/Rhoda 10" and Mogwai - Batcat 12"

Slint - 'Glenn' (1994)

Slint - 'Rhoda' (1994)

Mogwai - 'Batcat' (2008)

Slint's EP contains, minute for minute, the best music of their slender but massively important output - Spiderland a greater, but far longer, opus of the early 90s Louisville sound and post-rock point of origin. (The songs were recorded in 1989, after Tweez, but were never released until after Spiderland, in 1993/4) For a description of these two two songs, allow me to return to one of the very earliest posts on this blog, written before going to see Slint performing Spiderland in Tripod, Dublin - at which 'Glenn' and 'Rhoda' were played as part of an extended encore:

"1. this EP almost perfectly bridges the fairly disparate sounds of Tweez (a lo-fi, desultory and crunchingly metallic album) and Spiderland (a twisting, epic and subtle masterpiece of post-rock). 'Glenn' rejuvenates the minimalistic sound of Tweez, tightening it up and adding an extra dimension of tension to the instrumental style. The song quickly builds up into a crescendo, which almost immediately goes nowhere, except to introduce an ominous humming sound... part reminiscent of the antagonistic noise of Tweez, part prescient of the eerie claustrophobia of Spiderland.

2. the music of this EP was for me the most 'accessible' part of Slint, coming as I was from a particular musical direction. Previously, I had an allergy to the whole aesthetic idea of post-rock or math-rock (don't worry, I'm on meds now... the doctors call them the mercury program). The song 'Rhoda', in no small way, helped change that. You see, I was listening to a lot of Maximillian Colby, which was a very heavily Slint-influenced emo/hardcore band, similar in vein to the Swing Kids or perhaps Clikatat Ikatowi. But Slint-influenced is not the same as Slint, so when I downloaded Tweez (the only Slint record Touch and Go have released on eMusic... insert conspiracy theory here) I was a little disappointed, not to say confused. Because this alternate version of 'Rhoda' is simply so much better than that entire album. Right from the starting notes, it is probably Slint's loudest song, performing a similar synthesis of styles to 'Glenn' but simultaneously amping the sound up several notches, drenching the spaces between jagged riffs in perfectly pitched feedback, descending into weird, metallic noise and finally collapsing into a droning whine..."

(Slint - "Glenn/Rhoda" EP, August 2007)

I can't believe I had "an allergy to the whole aesthetic idea of post-rock or math-rock", because it would make a listening to a lot of what I follow now very painful. The Mercury Program are a very good band, though. After that post was the review of the gig itself, still probably the best I've seen in the last 18 months (including the Dinosaur Jr. reunion tour and Battles, twice, with the only real challenge being seeing Si Schroeder live for the first time as well).

"3. When they started playing the first few bars of 'Breadcrumb Trail', it sounded like the most familiar thing in the world. This was basically like listening to the album, but better in every way. Or if you were able to listen to the album at tremendous volume, in a room full of people, maybe that... The first sequence of 'Breadcrumb Trail' and 'Nosferatu Man' was pretty damn rocking, and then they slowed it down a bit for 'Don, Aman', when the two guitars came and sat opposite each other on stools in the middle of the stage. Halfway through 'Washer' I was thinking, maybe now I understand a little bit more what Indian Summer felt 'with the needle dragging the end of the slint lp', and where they took a lot of their sound from. The same with 'For Dinner' and the echoes of Max Colby... not really that all those bands are derivative, but that Slint just created this massively important aesthetic. Finally, with 'Good Morning, Captain', we were left with "I MISS YOU!!!" reverberating in our ears, and wondering... what happens now?

4. They played 'Glenn' and 'Rhoda'! That is, after playing Spiderland in its entirety, they played the Glenn/Rhoda EP in its entirety. I was pretty stoked to hear the album, and that would in itself have made the gig awesome, but hearing those two songs live just blew me away. Especially after just writing a review of those songs, to hear them so unexpectedly was memorable to say the least. Mind you, I used to think 'Glenn' was a quiet song. Not so live, however... 'Rhoda' was also upgraded to "earth-shattering". Just awesome."

(Slint - Live @ Tripod, Dublin)

Since then, I bought a record player, and pretty much along with it, a vinyl copy of Spiderland (the way it's meant to be heard). Later on this year, new reprints of the self-titled/'Glenn'/'Rhoda' EP, whatever you want to call it, arrived in the shops. I have to say the difference in quality - in audio terms and in the general experience - is less easily discernible than with Spiderland. Hence, the streaming clips are just ripped from the CD version. However, the pure aesthetics of the EP are enhanced by the 10" version, from the film noir-ish cover art (supposedly inspired by this 1992 book of NYPD crime scene photographs) to the unnamed, crimson-soaked pictorial side A/side B labels on the record itself.

(Click to expand)

A further enchancement of this most perfect encapsulation of the Slint sound and energy came also with the 2008 release of Mogwai's 'Batcat' EP for their current album The Hawk Is Howling. What a 'batcat' is, I don't know - visual, visceral horrorshows aside - but Mogwai did follow in the footsteps of another Slint (okay, Albini/Shellac) influenced band, Mclusky, with their song titles. And yes, that's not a hawk on the album (or at least it doesn't look like one), and no, it's not howling. But 'Batcat' the song is a condensed epic of post-metal, crushingly heavy, noise-making guitars and intricate post-rock composition, which immediately reminds me of Slint's 'Rhoda', the re-worked version.

It's not just 'Batcat', the second track on the full album after the winding, harmonious 'I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead', that makes the EP worthwhile, however. Two tracks on the flipside to 'Batcat', 'Stupid Prick Gets Chased By The Police and Loses His Slut Girlfriend' and 'Devil Rides', showcase Mogwai's less intense, more subtly crafted post-rock soundscapes, in a sort of combined 'Glenn' to Batcat's 'Rhoda'. The upfront heaviness of the EP is in some ways mirrored by the accessibility of the full-length, for all its sprawling, double-LP expanse:

"...Mogwai's sound on The Hawk Is Howling is in the style of their last few albums. The melodies on The Hawk Is Howling are direct and overt. It's grown man, heart-on-their-sleeve music without being veiled in pretense--probably why it got a 4 on Pitchfork. When Mogwai get heavy, they sound like Tool. And it rules. Mogwai are a great rock band because they sound honest."

(josephlovesit, Geek Down - Best of 2008: Rock Albums)

Slint - Touch and Go / Quarterstick Records

Slint 10" at Road Records

Mogwai - Matador Records

Lydia Lunch/Suicide - Frankie Teardrop 10"

Lydia Lunch - 'Frankie Teardrop' (originally from Suicide - Suicide, 1977)

This is the latest release from the Alan Vega 70th Birthday Limited Edition EP Series from BLAST First (petite), the same as Bruce Springsteen's cover of 'Dream Baby Dream'. This one won't get as much attention - that post of mine got picked up by Metafilter - but if anything, Lydia Lunch, from the original No-Wave movement, is best placed to cover probably Suicide's most aggressive song:

"Lydia Lunch.

Known to Rev & Vega as the Baby Faced Killer who they so kindly chaperoned through that lost downtown night world crucible from where both their futuristic, and highly influential, black arts would be born.

Artistic Kings & Queens from the dumpster side of town.

Lydia gets all wet and dirty with thought of what young Frankie Teardrop might do to her, over a twisted frug of an electronic beat-nicked soundscape by David Knight."

(BLAST First (petite))

Yeah, if you read that last part - best not play this in the streets, it might frighten the horses. The transition from male to female vocals - equally unconventional in the original and cover, and both intensely carnal in their own ways - and the more 21st-century sounding backing track makes this a really good updated version of 'Frankie Teardrop'.

Of course, the original is pretty untouchable, and the 'Frankie Teardrop, the Detective vs. The Space Alien' extended demo version which, while interesting enough in itself, is still a far cry echoey scream from the finished version we all know and fear:

"...We're all Frankies

We're all lying in hell"

The cover image is very real: an X-ray from a knife attack in November 2007 on a 16-year old boy in London (he survived) that was released to the press by the Metropolitan Police.

(Click to expand images)

10" vinyl available from Cargo Records

Downloads from BLAST First (petite) on eMusic - this particular release isn't up yet, but the Springsteen and Horrors ('Shadazz') are

Friday Video: Mogwai - 'Batcat'

Apparently tonight is some sort of pseudo-pagan festival, so here's a scary video for you.

Okay, it's not really that scary (this video "made out of an old 70's music video with a Danish dude doing a cover of Apache by The Shadows" for 'The Sun Smells Too Loud' is probably more unsettling) but it's a great song, and the video with its camp horror is pretty good too. Initially, I didn't think so, chiefly because I came in around the 2:00-minute mark and children dressed in folk clothing running around a forest to heavy guitars somehow reminds me of a lot of nu-metal and 'post-hardcore' videos from the early-to-mid 00s. Plus, as I had already discovered 'Batcat' as the awesome instrumental post-rock/metal track that it is, I didn't feel like it needed visual exposition. There's a self-contained quality to the music - like that of Slint - that fills up your headphones with sound that is both curiously mechanical and organic.

However, the video has plenty of technical and aesthetic merit to it, creating a gloomy environment (aesthetic, but perhaps not very creative), and the glistening, visceral image of the 'batcat' at the end is quite impressive. Having seen the full thing, the opening shot of the girl's hooded face, with a very painterly effect, is brilliant - as is the foreshadowing juxtaposition of the visceral, sci-fi cliche of pulsating, inhuman flesh. Man, this rocks!

More on this (and Slint) later:

Grails - Doomsdayer's Holiday

www.myspace.com/grailsongs

'Reincarnation Blues' (Edit)

Temporary Residence Limited Grails "Doomsdayer's Holiday" TRR144

"Following up last year's Burning Off Impurities and their recent Take Refuge In Clean Living EP, Grails return with their darkest, heaviest record yet. Written and recorded over the last 18 months, Doomsdayer's Holiday delivers on the promises made by their previous albums, taking equal pride in smoky psychedelics and mountain-ascending riffs. With Faust, Earth and Sunn O))) collaborators acting as engineers - not to mention drummer Emil Amos having recently become the new other half of Om - Grails' avant-metal leanings are evident as always. But Doomsdayer's Holiday finds their already-broad palette continually expanding with 70s European film noir and cosmic free jazz explorations complimenting the Middle Eastern psychedelic folk-metal the group is already known for. After a wildly prolific three-year streak that saw the band ceaselessly pushing forward, Grails have finally made an album that pushes back."

www.temporaryresidence.com

Photographs:

1. sticker

2. reverse of album cover

3. record playing on turntable

4. (below) gold coloured record on sleeve

So after a short delay when the records were shipped to TRL on (horror!) ordinary black vinyl, and had to be repressed (anyone know if vinyl can be melted down and recycled into new records, or are there just a bunch of extra black Grails records out there?), Doomsdayer's Holiday arrived on my doorstep this week. Although having had the album in mp3 for the best part of a month previous, often receiving the physical product of a record (either CD or vinyl, really) is the catalyst for really appreciating an album.

Clocking in at just over 37 minutes, Doomsdayer's Holiday marks a separation from the sprawling wonder of Burning Off Impurities, and a more focused album. Here are seven songs you could sit down and listen to, in a reasonable amount of time. The sound is more direct, if a little murkier, as though the band's "avant-metal leanings" have been compressed into more cogent bursts. But around the edges of the tracks there is still the spaciousness of their post-rock side, their experimentation.

The opening title track serves as a hazy, groovy introduction to the album, a dissolute wash of cymbals and electronics coalescing around a mean bass riff and wandering into psychedelic bluesy guitar. It's attempting to be several things at once, and succeeding; "smoky psychedelics and mountain-ascending riffs" with heavily-layered post-rock structures, and a deft touch in assembling melodies.

The album's twin 'blues' songs, one on either side, 'Reincarnation Blues' and 'Predestination Blues', are what the record coheres around. Combining the surf-like riffage from Take Refuge In Clean Living with the crashing, dense heaviness of Burning Off Impurities, they are soaked in the Easternness of those preceding records. 'Predestination Blues' in particular is as close as Doomsdayer's Holiday gets to a repeat of the stunning 'Take Refuge' from less than half a year ago, while 'Reincarnation Blues' feeds back into the tension between looseness and immediacy that characterised Burning Off Impurities.

While Grails seem to work with an ever-expanding palette of influences, the "70s European film noir and cosmic free jazz explorations" might stretch credulity somewhat. The more ambient tracks 'Immediate Mate' (mixed separately by Emil Amos) and 'X-Contamination' are ambiguous melanges of disparate elements from the rest of the album, that don't seem to me to add hugely to the whole. However, my two solid favourites from the album at the moment are the cinematic pairing of the slow-burning, understated 'The Natural Man', on the first side, and the long closing track on the second, 'Acid Rain'.

Like the quieter tracks from Burnng Off Impurities such as 'Drawn Curtains' and 'Outer Banks', or the toned down 'Clean Living' from Take Refuge, they channel a certain post-rock beauty and expressiveness all of their own when compared with their louder counterparts. 'The Natural Man' wanders through pastoral, verdant chords and spiralling melodies, while 'Acid Rain' crafts a lush, pacific world of surf melodies and jazzy rhythms, disintegrating into pulsing electronics and re-emerging cyclically into tender clarity.

I'd hesitate to place Doomsdayer's Holiday above Burning Off Impurities - TRL get it right when they describe the latter as "the kind of sprawling masterpiece that you savor for years before passing it on to your younger brother so he can repeat the process" (unfortunately I'm an only child) - but it has just as much, if not more, going for it. They might equally have got it wrong when they said Burning Off Impurities was "very likely the closest Grails will ever get to making a classic rock record", because here they are, a year or so later, with a solid (and single) LP of, if not quite rock music, then something a few steps higher up the ladder. Doomsdayer's Holiday is a great post-rock record, full of depth and soul, hard work and mindfulness.

Q and not U: No Kill Beep Beep, Different Damage

This week in the generally excellent Popless column for the Onion A.V. Club, where staff writer Noel Murray has been spending all year going alphabetically through his music collection, Q and not U ended up in the "Also listened to" paragraph with a line through it, signifying deletion of the associated track from his computer hard drive. This post is therefore an attempt to rectify the cosmic balance of the universe, by highlighting the two essential records of that band.

In fact I'm guessing that Noel Murray only had songs from the band's (inessential) third album, Power. He's no particular punk/post-hardcore afficianado (look to articles by Jason Heller and Kyle Ryan for that) but he had written good pieces on Fugazi and Operation Ivy earlier in the series, so the deletion of Q and not U came as a surprise. Q and not U's first two albums, No Kill Beep Beep and Different Damage are definitely important records; their third and final, Power, is more ambiguous.

Q and not U were likely, with Lungfish, the finest band on Dischord Records post-2000, and probably the best of the entire period after the mid-90s. No Kill Beep Beep, released in 2000, combined the energy of late-period post-hardcore and nascent dance-punk; the follow-up, Different Damage, made a substantial leap towards experimentalism and electronic sounds. The style of Q and not U was on average perhaps more towards indie rock than punk, or closer post-punk than hardcore, but in any form it remained smart, political and intellectual music. No Kill Beep Beep, my introduction to the band, is a fascinatingly fresh record. It sounds almost emo, in its use of dynamics and in its overall expressiveness and energy; but it also blends this with another layer of complexity in the rhythms and movement of what for want of a better word (and with the consequence of deeply unflattering comparisons) has to be called 'dance-punk'.

The best thing to read about Q and not U is this post by Mr. Mammoth, which is an almost perfect article on two almost perfect albums. I don't think I could really add much to it, other than rephrasing what he has said already. Hence, all quotes below are from his work (the photographs are my own.)

I: No Kill Beep Beep, DIS 123

"...no kill no beep beep is furious and detached, a mix of biting social commentary ("fever sleeves," a bald, disdainful attack on fashion and the upper class)... these traits, of course, continued to set q and not u apart throughout its lifetime, but no kill no beep beep set the foundation and benchmark for the band. every song is worth listening to; every song is worth enjoying. the air crackles with energy in eardrums, their music tenacious, raw, and exhilarating."

"instantly recalling the more well-known art-hardcore of fellow d.c.ers the dismemberment plan, 'line in the sand' is taut and furious"

"trembles with prescient anxiety, fearful of a creeping evil"

(Picture: Hooray for Humans, Irish band, recent 7" - post here)

"the joy of sweaty moshpit dancing (the anthemic "hooray for humans," where klahr wails "D-O-W-N; and that's the way we get down!")"

II: Different Damage, DIS 133

"the first two songs.... set the album's tone, the divide between ferocity and reflection - 'soft pyramids' is almost tender, a sweet singalong that is starkly contrasted with its neighbor, the vitriolic 'so many calls,' a jittery and sneering attack on our broken healthcare system"

"'no damage nocturne,' towards the end of the album, is a return to clap-happy form, but falls more in line with 'soft pyramids' than 'line in the sand.' the preponderance of quiet songs on different damage does not foreshadow power in the least, and that album shocked as many longtime q and not u fans as it attracted new ones."

III - and beyond: Power, DIS 143

"in a way, i'm almost glad q and not u broke up after this album. their evolution from an arty post-hardcore dance-punk band to a not-so-arty, not even hardcore, dance (light on the punk) band is disappointing, to say the least. with power, they were able to curry the favor of the prevailing dance craze, embodied by bands like bloc party and the rapture, but this success came at the expense of their older punk ethic. power finds q and not u relying on synthesizers in an unprecedented way; whereas klahr and richards took turns playing bass on different damage, klahr stuck almost exclusively to his keyboards and synths on this album, propelling q and not u out of tiny clubs and into dance halls...."

Q and not U on Dischord

Coming up next week - The Shape of Punk to Come: 2001-2007 ; a mixtape

Récherche Du Tunes Perdu (c'est-a-dire, Airs Trouvés)

Hello, and welcome back. First of all, that title isn’t meant to signify much. I’ve never read Proust (yet) so it’s just a bilingual pun with pretentions above its station. This is just a few notes on what I’ve been listening to these past few weeks.

Hopefully Hardcore for Nerds’s readership hasn’t atrophied too much in the past three weeks, and that likewise this post will be of interest at least to some.

Having taken with my only a ‘small’ mp3 player – one gigabyte, practically the smallest amount of music memory you can buy now, thank you Moore’s Law – my holiday listening consisted of a) the last three Envy albums plus their two more recent EPs, b) a broad selection of Hoover/Crownhate Ruin listening and c) all the really good new albums I’ve bought – or near enough – this year. I collected most of the latter at the end of the fourth month of the year, and I hope to do a reprise of that list at the end of next month. In addition, I brought a few books to read to have something to do while listening to music...

- Carry The Meek by Ham Sandwich is still going strong as my favourite album of the year, and I’m not exactly sure why. Obviously, it sounds really really good, stays fresh every time I listen to it, and is connected to some very good live memories. Yet I can’t help feeling troubled by issues of parochialism, originality and simplicity; three things which are in fact strengths of the band for me. Kells in Meath isn’t my parish, certainly, but they’re in the orbit of Dublin and it still seems odd to prefer this to anything else I’ve heard from the US or UK, especially when that’s where I get 90% of my music from. I can’t even claim them, at least straightforwardly, as great innovators or even treaders of any particular obscure branch of rock – they’re just an oddly named indie band somewhere between the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Smashing Pumpkins, and a little bit outside of either. There’s a good deal of complexity there that might be easy to miss in their songs, but for the most part Carry The Meek is the simplicity of the true punk-pop record.

- coming in a very close second is Triptych by Shooting at Unarmed Men, the follow-on band of Jon Chapple from the always-good-to-be-mentioned band, Mclusky. I was impressed by this album from the start, but thinking about in a more structured way for my post about it here helped me appreciate it on a whole other level, as a conceptual masterpiece of post-punk, hardcore and noise-rock that frankly puts Future of the Left, thrilling as they are, in the shade. Furthering this perception was a second – or third, I forget – reading of Nicholas Rombes’s Ramones essay for the 33 1/3rd series of music books. Rombes, an associate professor of English, opens the book with the statement “Ramones is either the last great modern record, or the first great postmodern one”. Not least for its atavistic qualities in returning to stripped-back hardcore punk, Triptych - essentially a series of vignettes in disparate but connected genres – resonates a lot with this description. Compared to Ramones, it really is just another one in a long line of great postmodern records.

One thing especially that struck me was Rombes’s claim that the first four tracks of Ramones - ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, ‘Beat On The Brat’, ‘Judy Is A Punk’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ – “capture the full range of the Ramones’ sound and stand as a sort of mini-album within the album” or a “self-contained mini-album” (pages 84 and 90, respectively). The premise of Triptych is of course three discs of four tracks each, and in total 13 songs, very close to Ramones total of 14.

- I don’t have very much to say about it here, but the self-titled album by Human Bell (Andy Heumann of Arboreteum and Nathan Bell of Lungfish - formerly and amongst other groups, that is) still ranks extremely highly for my year so far. It’s an incredible instrumental mix of post-rock and blues, not overlong on bombast but heavy, very heavy on texture. I’m surprised how little I’ve heard of it, even if Road Records did – and very accurately so – pimp it up as ‘if slint were more influenced by early blues music meets a bit of the explosive post rock of mogwai'.

- a new entrant to my 2008 canon is Vampire Weekend’s also self-titled debut. I took this album with me and played it more times than anything else other than Carry The Meek. Like that, it’s tremendously easy to listen to – it’s called indie rock, look it up – and if my feelings aren’t quite as strong for it in comparison, the album still has some fantastic and unique qualities . It’s not so much in the much-touted African influences although they are there and to good effect. Just as they have been done before, as the BBC Culture Show illustrated pretty neatly last night in a segment on Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, when they showed these two videos in immediate succession (although admittedly only a brief clip of the latter):

Talking Heads - 'Once In A Lifetime'

Vampire Weekend - A-Punk

What is different about Vampire Weekend, though, is the whole mix of sounds on the album; African singing and drumming, likewise indie guitar sounds, orchestral touches - faux-baroque string sections - and a real old-sounding pop style (I originally thought 60s, my friend says 80s, and I reckon music is in a constant 20-year cycle of rebirth). They also sound bizarrely English - part of the pop archaism, I suppose - right down to having lyrics about tea; "English Breakfast is like Darjeeling". Whereas as another indie band actually from England (Oxxxford to be precise), Foals, are trying really hard to sound like they're the ones from Brooklyn.

- Antidotes, by Foals is an album I didn't bring with me, but that's not out of any boredom with it. Quite the opposite, I'm fairly confident it will hold up for the year. It really was an album with a surprising amount of depth to it, considering how far it moved from the sound indicated by the early and popular singles. Anyone who judges bands on the basis of their haircuts or the TV shows their fans watch is a real chump, but my gut feeling is that Antidotes is far beyond, say, Crystal Castles. At the moment, it feels good to swop around the LPs of Vampire Weekend and Antidotes with No Kill Beep Beep and Different Damage by Q and not U, and I don't care if anyone calls me an indie hipster for my troubles.

- other albums I didn't listen to quite as much but still enjoy were the Black Keys, Attack & Release - some of the production magic is wearing off, but it's still a good one for the band - Sinaloa, Oceans and Islands - I'm really getting into this one now, apologies to any hardcore (in the genre sense) fans who thought I was oddly lukewarm before. Instrumental Irish albums Penny Black and Spectre and Crown are likewise still going strong, the latter particularly I'm starting to enjoy more fully now. Plus the two excellent Irish EPs, Bats Cruel Sea Scientist and Halves Haunt Me When I'm Drowsy; one with a heavy math-rock kind of sound, the other with a totally opposite ethereal post-rock, EITS-and-Sigur Ros style, both very accomplished and well worth a listen. And that's all the new stuff I've bought and really absorbed so far.

- Naturally, a few other recent or not-so-recent releases need a mention. I was conscious of not having Have A Nice Life's Deathconsciousness double album along with me, which has collected a lot of praise from both Geek Down and Last Train To Cool. Shoegaze-y post-hardcore, it's very hard to explain and I've been meaning to buy the proper release for a while now. Also, I just downloaded Patti Smith's The Coral Sea from eMusic yesterday. Kevin Shields plays guitar on the whole of it, quite mesmerising. Anyone else heard it yet, or for that matter the new Grails (Take Refuge In Clean Living)?

- And finally if briefly, onto things more emo-ish. The WFMU live recordings of Hoover and Lincoln are fascinating listens; the Hoover session is very lengthy, about three-quarters of an hour with songs from both Lurid Traversal and the then as yet unreleased EP tracks; the Lincoln a good deal shorter, under twenty minutes but showing some real fire in some of their songs. I think I'll sit down and work out the tracklistings (assuming no-one has done so already?) and make a full post on them. In the meantime you can of course find the Two-Headed Coin split from the two bands here.

The Fugazi Peel Session from 1988 which I just found before I left is also excellent, with more experimental version of tracks from the 13 Songs album, especially a screamingly good closing version of 'Glueman'. I haven't always been a great fan of live or demo recordings, but the above examples, plus Zen and the Art of Face Punching's timely resurfacing of the Clikatat Ikatowi demo release and the August 29, 30 1995 live recording (you can find the latter in the comments there), have certainly made me more interested.

Envy - some more Envy (incl. Envy/Jesu review)

Envy / compiled fragments 1997-2003

Front cover / record on turntable / insert

The metallic quality of the cover or the insert doesn't really come across, but where it's washed out in the top right-hand corner is from the glare of the reflection. Seriously, this whole package is impressively put together - but then it contains some very impressive music.

Previous post

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If you want to get some more Envy, then the quick way is to go to this post on Zen and the Art of Face Punching - key quote "vinly is just cooler". And to buy, go to Temporary Residence Limited as I did. They used to be on eMusic, but apparently not as of this moment - fickle are the ways of nascent progressive (reasonably-priced) download music providers.

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('initial attempt' from aaronbturner.blogspot.com. Click to see full-size; likewise with back cover, at bottom)

Ok, so the new Envy/Jesu split. It's good. It's not officially out yet (Japan in July, and October in the US + elsewhere via Hydrahead, I think), but there are few downloads floating around which sound like they're the finished item. I mean, as far as I know. I've never been up to speed on this 'leaking' business. All I know is that I'll be sure to buy it when it comes out (vinyl or CD, I'm easy), and that's its good.

Maybe it's better than Abyssal, maybe it's not. I'm not going to make any sort of final judgement here, but develop some first impressions a little further. I know people who appreciated the full length of Insomniac Doze struggled to get into Abyssal; others, including myself, see it as a sort of Insomniac redux, a concision of that statement album (previous post on Abyssal here.)

What that EP did was, track by track, to neatly showcase several different elements of Envy's sound: their complete, post-rock assault; an earlier hardcore sound; meditative, melodic post-rock soundscapes; and spacey electronics, which tied up a lot of Dead Sinking Story so nicely. Envy's three songs here follow a similarly broad spread, but it's neither so balanced nor so reflective.

As that carefully couched phrase suggests, I don't think that difference between this and Abyssal is either that important or reflects too badly on either record. Envy/Jesu seems to give more than a nod on Envy's part to what Justin Broadrick/Jesu have done with heavy, melodic music; in that way, Envy's spread is somewhat less traditional than what they've done before.

Strangely titled opener 'Conclusion of Existence' begins with quasi-electronic beats and an ambience not too far from Insomniac Doze-type territory, but as the song develops it's clear that Envy aren't still inhabiting the same soundscape. The intro steps up into a minute or so of more garage-y beats, which give way for a moment into familiar Envy melodic guitar - back into Insomniac Doze. But then the song fills up with crashing waves and, yes, strings. The whole thing - best listened to loud, for full effect - isn't as epic or as rambling as previous Envy post-rock efforts, and sounds a whole lot different. It's almost like Envy have gone slightly Portishead.

'A Winter Quest For Fantasy' treads more familiar ground, with a long melodic lead-in and then a soaring crescendo. But again, the sound is subtly adjusted - the percussion seems slightly more prominent, strings add initial colour and the transition from meditative quiet to ear-shattering loudness is aided by some more unusual electronic touches. Glissandos, even (not really.)

Finally, their third song, 'Life Caught In The Rain' at first seems even more traditional, a melodic rocker in the off-key screamo vein. But soon there is something insistent and obvious about it - the combination of a heavy, stomping rhythm and melody line which is not only catchy, but that you could almost whistle it. If 'All that's left has gone to sleep', the second track from Abyssal, connected with the old-school Envy with its turn-on-a-dime transition from calm to shrieking chaos, 'Life Caught In The Rain' harks back to the early Envy tracks which pulled out a deeply melodic hook from noisy, grandiose hardcore.

After the variety of constructions that precede it, the initial offenings of Jesu's 'Hard to Reach' seem glaringly minimalist. Quickly, however, the opening beats are supplemented by the rich shoegazing texture, as combined with strong touches of post-rock instrumentation, which defines the group's sound. I would contend that Envy have adopted a lot of the qualities of modern shoegaze, particularly on Insomniace Doze, but nowhere near as obviously as Jesu. My main problem with Conqueror was that the shogaze side was too obvious, and the inclination to channel My Bloody Valentine just wasn't matched by any really interesting exhibitions of melody or heaviness (they were there, I just didn't find them interesting.) It became too boring, in other words.

"truth be told, it's nothing special"

Ah well, it's more than that

Of course, I was aware that Justin Broadrick had developed the Jesu sound gradually, taking it by steps away from the extremity of its metal predecessors. Sun Down/Sun Rise worked better for me, as a more experimental/conceptual stretching of the sound. Without trying to fashion an album out of ethereal heaviness - a problem My Bloody Valentine themselves had with Isn't Anything compared with Loveless - it became easier to enjoy. Earlier I simply described the Jesu side of this release as 'solid and interesting', and that's still about the way I feel.

'Hard to Reach' winds its way through various sonic realms, all of them in general quite interesting, but the ultimate pleasure remains in accordance with the title. 'The Stars That Hang Above' is a bit more open and upfront about its goods, fairly dripping with melody insofar as minimalist electro can do, before opening up into shoegazing heaviness. At the end of the day, when Jesu opens up - heavy, cyclical style - and sits between the sounds of shoegaze and post-rock, this is where I sit up and take notice.