Thursday, February 29, 2024

Song Highlight: Black Tusk - Brushfire

I did not grow up listening to heavy music, but started to garner an appreciation for it in my later years of college and into my time in graduate school. Perhaps it was the air of frustration and stress that helped make dejected and angry music seem more appealing? The specific subgenre of metal that drew me in the most was sludge metal, with its combination of punk rock aggression and down-tuned distortion of doom metal. It is a style that wallows in a despondent groove, one that is largely devoid of the self-indulgent guitar theatrics that are a mainstay of a lot of heavy metal. One of the bands of the sludge metal style that first pulled me in was Savannah, Georgia's Black Tusk. They started out as a three piece with Andrew Fidler (guitar), Jonathan Athon (bass) and James May (drums). One thing that really drew me in was each member of the band would provide vocals to the songs, their varying vocal styles helping to add an interesting texture and variety to the songs. The band released four awesome full length albums before the untimely passing of Athon in a motorcycle accident in 2014. The band decided to continue on after the tragedy, honoring their fallen brother-in-arms with more gnarly riffs and pummeling drums.

April 2024 will see Black Tusk releasing their second full length album since Athon’s passing, aptly titled The Way Forward. The first single from the album is called “Brushfire,” and it feels right at home with their rollicking legacy. “Brushfire” is able to take the murky oppressiveness of sludge and make it surprisingly catchy. This new album adds both Derek Lynch (bass) and Chris Adams (guitar) to the line-up. “Brushfire” is apparently Lynch’s first time performing abrasive vocalwork and you would not be able to tell it was his first foray into the territory. The song is over in a brisk 2 minutes and 22 seconds, but that means you can just start it over and listen to it again! I am excited to hear what else The Way Forward has to offer. April 26th cannot come soon enough!

Buy Black Tusk’s music here!

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Under the Dice Fest 2024

 

On the last weekend of January, I was fortunate to be able to attend Under the Dice Fest 2024, a small festival in Massachusetts celebrating miniature-based tabletop wargaming. The festival was designed to appeal to those who shy away from the mainstream iterations of the miniature wargaming hobby, focusing on those who want play the games on their own terms, sometimes outside of the scope of the game rules as written, or those who want to play old games which are no longer supported by their publishers. It is highlighting those who are more concerned with telling a story with the miniatures they build than with creating something that would be optimal in terms of a game’s rule system. A punk rock approach to the miniature wargaming hobby, if you will. Beyond the opportunity to play games like Mordheim (a fantasy skirmish game released in 1999 by Games Workshop, set in the remnants of a city destroyed by a comet), a host of musical performances were planned for Saturday evening. The musical guests were from around the New England area and thoroughly rooted in the underground music scene.

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Hole Dweller and Dungeon Synth

Despite my love of angry and abrasive music, I have started to become more and more interested in somber and reflective music as a respite from the harshness of my normal listening regime. This interest arose from my discovery of experimental drone metal bands like Locrian, who were mixing echoing drones with melodic post-rock guitar lines, all supplemented with crackling noise, guitar feedback, and sparse percussion. Locrian, along with other minimalistic drone bands like Earth, helped show me that there was a whole world of compelling music outside of more conventional, vocally-orientated music. This discovery had me scouring music blogs and websites for similar work and the forerunners of the style, and somewhere in those searches I learned about the genre of ambient music. 

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Song Highlight: Dead Moon - Parchment Farm

The world of rock and roll music is filled with great bands that never quite got the recognition that they deserved. Portland, Oregon’s three-piece garage rock band Dead Moon is a prime example. Formed in 1987 by singer/guitarist Fred Cole, singer/bassist Kathleen "Toody" Cole (Fred Cole’s wife), and drummer Andrew Loomis, Dead Moon forged a fiercely independent path through the music industry for more than 20 years. Musically, they combined the jangly guitar sound of the 13th Floor Elevators, the downtrodden sadness of country, and the urgency of punk rock into a musical construct that always felt like it was on the verge of falling apart. 

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Camping in Alaska - why can't i be snowing?

Anyone who has stuck around here long enough will know that I have a soft spot for Midwestern Emo, a subgenre of emo music that does not necessarily hail from the midwest. The genre revels more in the melodic guitar lines of indie rock than the unrestrained anger of the emo’s forefathers in the hardcore punk scene. YouTube’s algorithms have done a great job of helping me find Midwestern Emo, with the band Camping in Alaska being one of the highlights. 

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Song Highlight: The National - Smoke Detector

“Music for people on the verge of a midlife crisis” is how I would describe the music of The National, the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Cincinnati rock band. They are not a band portraying the wistfulness of youth and young romances, rather they plumb the depths of adult life from unfulfilling jobs to stagnant relationships. They write songs about the banalities of a normal life, something that not many bands succeed in writing compelling songs about, or even try to do, for that matter. 

Thursday, August 31, 2023

Spanish Love Songs - Bellyache

Anger and sadness are the emotional states that I am most drawn to in music. But of these two, if I was forced to pick a favorite, I would have to choose sadness. It is an emotion that we are all forced to grapple with during our lifetimes, so it is something that everyone can resonate with in some capacity.  Maybe it is the stage of my life that I am in, or my music snobbery, but happy music does not sound genuine to me. Fortunately, there is no shortage of sad music. The Los Angeles, California-based pop punk band Spanish Love Songs has been an ample supplier of sad music since I discovered them in 2018, shortly before the release of their second album, Schmaltz. Any devotee of melodic punk music will liken their sound to that of the early Menzingers' releases, back when the Menzingers still had some gruffness to them, and dwelt in unhappy places.