Album Review: Bereft - Lands

Blackened sludge metal out of Madison, WI to give voice to a once sacred, now defiled and ravaged terrain, Bereft play a deeply atmospheric hybrid of black metal and sludge metal, placing them in a uniquely crushing category of extreme metal with other chimeric monstrosities like Stone Titan and Chicago’s own Lord Mantis (circa their 2017 LP Lands- the subject of this write up). Think Agalloch meets Baroness, with all the aspirational and uplifting parts sucked out and replaced by earth-cracking, tarry guitar dirges and despair-inducing primal howls. This is bleak, acerbic, and enveloping metal music that is as compelling as it is desolate... and it’s pretty fackin' desolate. Lands is Bereft’s second album and first with Prosthetic Records. Brace yourself for the leviathanic “We Wept” with its lumbering, impossibly heavy bass which collides with knotted guitar dirges under pained howls and other vocal lamentations before exploding into a fury of tremolo-picking and ruthless blast beats, “The Ritual” which leads in with Agalloch-esc ambient guitars before unfurling into weighty funeral march with an ever-quickening tempo which ramps up into a tug-of-war between swampy mid-tempo chords and a dissonant stomp of blast beats and demonic guitars, and (lastly) the devastating fourteen minute closer, “Waning Light” with its gargantuan, rolling riffs that produce the auditory sensation of being swallowed in the yawning mow of a tremor with brief reprieves of rippling ethereal guitars to break the filthy, clausterphobic tension. This land isn't your land, this land isn't my land, this land belongs to the dead. 

We can rebuild your record collection... make it better, faster, stronger, and heavy as fuck (Prosthetic Records)

Album Review: Lowe Cellar - TAGU

I always appreciate it when post-hardcore bands approach each song like it's an abstract art piece, and that's where I think Seattle's Lowe Cellar is coming from on their LP, TAGU. Every lyric, every riff, and each gripping groove is meant to exhaust your interpretive dexterity and pull you into a resonant headspace with as much depth to be explored as the Earth's Lithosphere. Lowe Cellar often sounds potent and dire without giving way to overt aggression or tipping the scales into sheer chaos, preferring to build elaborate continuities of tension with unexpected payoffs that are as sweetly melancholy as an unturned sundae left out in the rain. While maintaining a protracted distance from direct expressions of mood and social observances, they meticulously nurture a ripe intellectual peat from which elucidatory explorations may blossom- they can really write a hook too! As much as Lowe Cellar take after hyper-expressive and adventurous emo bands and burning-heart Prometheans like Cursive and mewithoutYou, there is also a playful elasticity to them that I would hazard to attribute to some preoccupation with Built to Spill, as well as a fundamental pop orientation that is roughly aligned with '90s indie jangle jockeys like The Posies and Velvet Crush. That is to say, that as much as these guys get into their own heads on this record (and help you draw into your own), they never shrink so far away from the light of accessibility that they eschew enjoyability for the purely evokative. 

Not as much of a pariah as you'd think (Outcast Tapes Infirmary).

Album Review: Batuqueiros e Sua Gente with Douglas Germano - Partido Alto

It's getting to feel more and more like summer in my zone of the Midwest, and it's got me in the mood for some samba- particularly singer and composer Douglas Germano's 2021 collaboration with Batuqueiros e Sua Gente, literally titled after the style of samba to be found on their record, ie Partido Alto. It's generally a nectarous ensemble of spritely and spiritedly animated tracks characterized by bustling rhythms, cavorting percussion lines, trading call-and-response melodic choral cues, and the overwhelming sense that you've just stumbled upon the most fabulous block party of your otherwise parochial existence. From what I understand, the record is felicitous in its reproduction of the styles of samba that were popularized in Brazil during the '70s, but I wouldn't have known that just from hearing the record, as it feels very fresh and unburdened by nostalgia or any covetousness for a bygone era, instead representing a fashionaly conscious if almost timeless party record, steeped in the culture and dignified history of Latin America as it manifests in the modern day. That's more or less what you want from a record like Partico Alto, honestly- something that you can listen to anytime, and every time feels just as rich as the first. 

Album Review: Cime - The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble

When it comes to punk-jazz hybrids, the obvious and best example that comes to mind is Naked City. However, I wouldn't make this comparison to California's Cime too hastily. Not because I don't think the latter isn't of the same caliber or quality but due, in my opinion, to Cime representing an entirely different approach to the concept at its core- for starters, I don't think Naked City ever bore their souls on any record like Cime does on The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble (despite what you might think based on their name). The lyrics on Cime's six track LP (and before you say to yourself, "Six tracks? Is that really an LP?," note that the full runtime is 56 minutes in length), are delivered in such a raw and unfiltered manner that you'd swear they were peeled from vocalist Monty Cime's spirit like loose pieces of birch bark, before combusting on the heft of their breath like a burnt offering. The declining state of the American polity- spiritually, psychologically, morally, and artistically- is raised like the rifles of a firing squad whose imminent volley- daily indignities, constant scams, the raising of false idols, and general hostility to group's self-evident queerness- are reconciled by the band as inevitable, even if unjust, and acknowledged in light of faith in the fact that a broken body does not make a broken spirit. What's remarkable about the Cime Ensemble on this record, is not necessarily how they articulate their pain, but rather the joy that is expressed in the face of such destructive reverberations- a facet that unequivocally qualifies them as unique amongst punk-jazz hybrids, is that the focal points of dissonance and despair are communicated topically, while the real flesh of the compositions- drawing from traditions of Latin, fusion, lounge, and even some classically baroque genera of the jazz form- commit to a jubilee of transformative triumph, recasting the strife they feel into a bountiful current of ebullience. In rising to the challenges of this era with such elation, the group proves that you can only be brought as low as you yourself allow your spirit to be corrupted by the fallen state of your surroundings. 

Reach for the Skyline.