April 2010

Spring is here, and everywhere you go, young lovers are enjoying the sunshine, the beauty of the natural world, and the promise of new life. Unless, of course, you go to Leonard Pierce’s house, where the Texas sun beats down on his roof but never penetrates the eternal darkness of his heart, soul, and home office. For it is from there that he brings The A.V. Club the best in metal, hard rock, and affiliated white noise, and will continue to do so until Jesus finally returns and tells him to knock it off. So open up your black curtains and blink into the unsparing light streaming from April’s Metal Box!
RENEWING THEIR LEASE. Long a favorite of those plugged into the San Francisco underground scene, the tricky black-metal outfit Ludicra raised a few eyebrows as details of its new album, The Tenant (Profound Lore) began to emerge. For one, it would be its first effort since the band jumped ship from Alternative Tentacles to its new label, which is often—and unfairly—tarred as a bastion of hipster metal, whatever that is. Second, it was rumored that with The Tenant, Ludicra would be going full prog, which set off warning signals of possible musical pomposity in the offing. Luckily, it turns out there’s nothing to fear: The Tenant is far and away the finest album Ludicra has ever done, and the change of pace allows it to open up its distinctive sound while still maintaining the twisted black-metal foundation that made it so appealing in the first place. Tracks like the nasty, brutal “A Larger Silence” hearken back to Ludicra’s violent past, but on songs like the polyrhythmic, drugged-out “Truth Won’t Set You Free” and the expressive but still riff-crammed “The Undercaste,” it really shines. Those songs incorporate progressive sounds in the best possible sense of expanding a style, moving forward with it, and incorporating it into an already-stunning sound. Laurie Sue Shanaman’s urban-despair lyrics and howling vocals remind listeners where they are at all times, but the best moments are when John Cobbett’s guitars and Aesop Dekker’s drums leave those listeners out in unexplored space.
DECADES OF DECAY. This month’s death-metal pick—and one of the most surprising things to show up in the mailbox in April—is Majesty And Decay (Nuclear Blast), by old-school NYC death-metal stalwart Immolation. The band has been going, though not always going strong, since 1986; a general lack of direction, accompanied by the inevitable lineup changes, rendered its last several albums not worth writing home about. But Majesty And Decay represents both a return to form and a satisfying comeback. The current lineup finds Ross Dolan holding down the traditional death-metal vocals and anchoring it all in place, while guitarists Robert Vigna and Bill Taylor are left free to bring in sinister black-metal shadings and some crazily daring angular chord progressions on terrific tracks like “The Purge” and “A Glorious Epoch.” There isn’t much new in the lyrics or the general approach, but musically, Majesty And Decay is the most interesting thing the band has done in a decade, and a testament that even old dogs like Immolation and Suffocation can learn a few new tricks.
BARREN BLOOD. The heavy-metal super-group is a tricky proposition: At its best, it represents a coming-together of the best talents of disparate bands to create a whole new sound. But at its worst, it just raises the question of whether you’re listening to material that wasn’t good enough for the individual outfits. Barren Earth, a Finnish group consisting of members of Swallow The Sun, Moonsorrow, Amorphis, Kreator, and Rytmihäiriö, lands somewhere in the middle. On its debut album, Curse Of The Red River (Peaceville), singer Mikko Kotamäki skillfully swings from clean vocals to death growls, but in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s into the current Swedish prog scene. Likewise, the overall musical approach, blending churning, thrash-influenced death metal with proggy Scando art-rock, is played with unimpeachable technique, but is certain to leave a lot of listeners wondering when the new Opeth album is coming out. Where the album’s first half seems like a bunch of guys with no compelling reason to have gotten together in the first place, though, the second half finds them starting to get comfortable and open up, and that’s when Barren Earth sounds like a band with something to say. “The Ritual of Dawn” is a respectable slice of progressive death metal, and “Cold Earth Chamber”—by far the album’s standout—delivers a pulverizing breakdown worthy of anything its players have done in their own bands. (And are Wild-West-sounding album titles officially a trend now?)
AT THE POST. So, you have a) a concept album b) about the philosophical flaws in Christianity by c) a German band that d) looks to Richard Dawkins as its primary inspiration. I know what you’re saying: “Sounds like a good time to kill myself!” And yet while I scarcely wish to encourage this sort of thing, I am forced to admit that Heliocentric (Metal Blade), the first of two such releases scheduled for 2010 by gloomy post-metal band The Ocean, is pretty damn good. The album’s weighty—well, let’s be honest, overweighty—themes are salvaged by some well-crafted, structurally complex songs, the expressive voice of new vocalist Loic Rossetti, and a desperately needed sensibility on the part of primary songwriters Robin Staps and Jona Nido, who know when to cut out the ethereal minimalist piano stuff and pile on the murky, heavy sludge that gives the record its power. I’m not exactly looking forward to the follow-up, Anthropocentric; this one is surprisingly successful, but I have my doubts that The Ocean can pull it off twice in a row. But it definitely isn’t like anything else released this month, and it manages to rise above what could otherwise be fatal levels of conceptual self-involvement.
Elsewhere in the post-metal scene, Italy’s At The Sounddawn makes itself known with Shifting (Lifeforce). This is a curious little concoction: Elements of heavy atmospheric music like Isis, Katatonia, and Cult Of Luna appear in here, but it also brings in some modern indie-rock elements of the more experimental kind, and whips them all into a froth injected by an almost free-jazz looseness. (The latter shows up in the unexpected appearance of a brass section!) It takes a bit of getting used to, and definitely has the good and bad qualities of a band that seems like it’s developed largely in isolation, but don’t be shocked if Shifting grows on you after repeat listens.