happymetalgirl

[happymetalgirl]

At least someone is so fucking back.

[happymetalgirl]

Uboa - Impossible Light

Of all the artists I've reviewed prior, Uboa is the one whose work I have the most unique whiplash with covering. I actually felt compelled to look all the way back to 2019 with my review of her grippingly monumental death-industrial breakout, The Origin of My Depression. It was an album which revolved very harrowingly around the constant and inescapable distress of gender dysphoria, and my review of it of was one of impressed but detached and analytical empathy for the autobiographical struggles that creator Xandra Metcalfe so nakedly and horrifyingly expressed on those songs. For many of the same reasons I don't frequently revisit albums like Lingua Ignota's Caligula and Sinner Get Ready (despite it being my favorite album of 2021), my re-listens have been fairly few and far between for The Origin of My Depression. It is a testament to the emotive capacity of albums like those that with such dark subject matter being so commonplace in metal and listeners like me being largely desensitized to lyrics on depression, brutality, and abject human cruelty that albums about foreign and specific personal experiences like surviving sexual assault and persisting on spite (Caligula) and confronting God about allowing it (Sinner Get Ready) and the inescapable oppressive thralls of gender dysphoria in a virulently transphobic world (The Origin of My Depression) can elicit such heartfelt pain.

A lot has changed since I reviewed The Origin of My Depression. Five years later, revisiting that seminal Uboa album for the first time in at least a year or so and sitting down with its successor, my approach to Xandra Metcalfe's crushing self-portrayal of trans life through grippingly intense music is not, this time, with a detached empathy for the trans struggle.

I do intend to maintain my anonymity and healthy distance on this blog, especially now, but I will make at least one thing about me clear because it is an unavoidable facet of a review of this album by me: I am a trans woman. This was the realization that I came to last year of a clearer vision of myself that upon realizing I wasted no time in pursuing. I consider myself one of the lucky ones, relatively: financially stable/independent, insulated at least partly from the worst legislative actions being taken against trans people, and mightily euphoric, strengthened more than I imagined I could be in my transition.

That said, I still identify, as do most trans people I know and have spoken with, deeply and personally with the intense struggles that Metcalfe poetically details on The Origin of My Depression and this new record, whose lyrics were birthed from a similar time and mind-state to its predecessor. My very fortunate mental and emotional strength in feeling as though I am very much winning the battle against my own gender dysphoria has not precluded me to sitting back and resting on my laurels, but rather has driven me to turn my efforts outward as much as I can toward the war against societal transphobia. So many of my fellow trans people suffer needlessly because of blind, stupid, disgusting hate, and their many heartbreaking stories of being trapped in the throes of dysphoria surrounded and suffocated by ignorant malice fill me with such anger that they are being kept from the fulfillment and joy that I have found in being trans, that they deserve just as much as I do. This album, like a lot of trans art, serves as a plea for compassion and help from those privileged enough to offer it in desperate and exasperated terms and a plea for perseverance in these dire times to all trans people and from Metcalfe to herself.

An emblem of life around the time of The Origin of My Depression, the lyrical content of Impossible Light was spawned during a plateau of a rising wave of anti-trans bigotry, about half a decade or so into the significant increase of visibility of trans people and the mainstreaming of the "trans issue" in public discourse in the 2010's, a discourse full of obvious lies and deception through bigotry disguised as moral panic which largely misrepresented and demonized the trans people who were sidelined in the debate on their own existence. That wave of hate from religious and right-wing bigots has only grown since then, reaching a frightening height in 2022 when Republican congressional candidates and governors made combatting transness the forefront of their electoral strategy for the midterm elections. It was a strategy that wound up failing massively in a way that would push any rational political actors away from it in the immediate future, and yet, despite losing on it, republicans held firmly to the hot potato that just burned them, a grim prognosis of the party consolidating into its most rabid devotees behind anti-electoral fascism driven by transphobic vitriol. The party shifted its losing focus on transphobia back to its winning focus on xenophobia and fear-mongering about immigrants in time to capture all branches of the U.S. federal government earlier this month from the inept and incompetent institutionally entrenched opposition party, but the transphobia never went away, and the American conservative movement's most devoted believers have been licking their lips and champing at the bit to see their most evil wishes come true for trans people through the authoritarian action of the coming administration. As a time capsule of sorts of the bleak environment of 2018, this is the even bleaker world that Uboa's next album was delivered into, and yet somehow, it's perfect for the world into which it emerges.

Impossible Light is about reaching for the unreachable: joy in a world of misery, self-worth amid ubiquitous denigration, womanhood from manhood, love in a world of hate. Created at a time when the light was at least visible and now released into a time of seemingly absolute darkness, Uboa's message might seem near-prophetic, and given the insight she expresses in the album's liner notes into the rising tide of fascism sweeping through her own home town in Australia, I imagine she probably had a feeling it was always going to go like this. But the reality is that for trans people, that light has always felt distant, if not outright unreachable; we've always weathered difficult times, we've only ever known struggle, making the essence of Impossible Light, sadly, evergreen. But the caveat to that is that so are we.

As with its predecessors, the musical content on Impossible Light is befitting of its subject matter and context: eerie darkwave ambiance with melancholic low-hummed vocals, jolting blasts of harsh noise, and existential screams of rage, agony, ecstasy, euphoria. Cavernous drones through ambient darkness become suddenly claustrophobic storms of distortion, white noise, and screaming, with "Phthalates" setting the tone via wavering hums of low-register synth hovering over the sounds of destructive industrial clanging of metal. It's very much got the feeling of the opening of an A24 horror movie. The smooth segue into the building, pounding drums over the melancholic singing of "Endocrine Disruptor" is thematically fitting and serves as a great dual opening to the album, with Metcalfe's vocals dripping with disregard serving as a representation for a lack of care for a world with a lack of any benevolent care for her. But the album's apathetic tone does not last long as the blasts of harsh noise and scratching/scrpaing industrial dissonance erupt from the brief but colossal "A Puzzle" and while a djent rhythm of all things rides the tempestuous waves of synthetic distortion and rattling drum-programming on "Gordian Worm". And all of this occurs seamlessly as a deranged progressive suite over the first 18 minutes of the album's four opening tracks, which I love as a representation of the ceaseless mental and emotional chaos of navigating the internal and external highs of euphoria and lows of dysphoria, an ethos that persists through the haunting dark of "Jawline" and the careening explosions of warping noise on "Pattern Screamers" and "Weaponized Dysphoria". It might seem from a cursory listen like it's all just kind of aimless madness and uncontrolled neurodivergent mania... until it all comes together.

While the minutia of the lyrical content is indeed very insular and contained within the trans world, the broader fighting spirit is subtly brimming from the overarching themes and emerges more stoutly as the record progresses, though not linearly and not without constant, dramatic, human flux the entire time. The mood of the album is indeed all over the place from the lofty objective of gender abolition being analogized through the fantasy of estrogen-driven mutation of "god's" nature through pollution on "Endocrine Disruptor" (an analogy for trans people's presence within the cis-heteronormative/patriarchal hegemony as inherently disruptive) to the dissociative respite of "Sleep Hygiene" that sees Uboa tempted by a return to suicidal ideation through indulgence in the escape of sleep. The album is definitely representative of a relatable and chaotic mind state very common to the trans experience, but Metcalfe brings the crucial message of queer perseverance home, with a little help from her queer friends, on the closing track, "Impossible Light / Golden Flower", which very fittingly follows the emotional exhaustion and the dejected repetition of the despondent mantra of "stay in bed" with the simple and potent singular counter of "get up and run". All the afflicted screaming, heartbroken pessimism, and dysphoric depression of the previous tracks and the catatonic escapism of "Sleep Hygiene" are brought to a beautiful and breathtaking crescendo of hope and love on the closing track's glorious multi-stage swell of a choir of organic and emphatic trans voices and catharsis through persistence and euphoria. It's the rebutting of the social narrative of transness being a curse and trans people being the shame and weakness and rot within civilization to be purged with the converse of that fascistic narrative: that in the face of so much hate and opposition trans people are strong, that being trans in a world that represses us is worthy of pride rather than shame, that being trans is a blessing rather than a curse.

It is a time of limbo for trans people now. We've never had it particularly easy as a group, and while the increased community and allyship we've found as of late has served a benefit, the past several years under the scrutiny of the cis-normative lens have been especially volatile. Republicans turned their focus back onto racialized people to win the general election, but the transphobia never withered, it only went quiescent. Even before it became an issue that directly affected me personally, I had kept up with and continue to keep up with the rise of American fascism in the republican party. Consequently I've heard a lot of Donald Trump, unfortunately, half the time at one of his many rallies, rambling like a sundowning racist grandparent about "what they've done to our country" and how unfair everyone is to him. And I have noticed, amid the dull, numbing rambling from the podium about his many grievances that becomes tedious even to his devout cultists, the reliable and resounding Pavlovian response he gets from the crowd whenever he makes some reference to anti-trans sentiment or aspirations. It is indeed a time of very anxious limbo for trans people now that the worst premonitions of a future second Trump administration have become a very possible reality, especially racialized trans people, trans kids, and trans people living under republican governors. And in a time of stockpiling HRT and scrambling for passport applications while the neoliberals who failed to defend us prepare to throw us under the bus for their loss, the plea to stay awake and keep ahead toward the impossible light at the end of the suffocatingly dark tunnel is a more desperate one than ever. Hope is scarce and reaching that increasingly distant light within our lifetimes definitely feels impossible.

But

Why should we languish and doubt ourselves? Are we not strong? Have we not already transcended and defeated gender itself? Have we not already turned over the impossible weight of millennia of gender paradigms? Trans people are so strong! The light of being who we are is already an existentially massive feat, and we are less alone in the glory of gender transcendence than ever. Why CAN'T we reach the light of simple human joy?

With the physical record, Xandra Metcalfe included a small sheet with liner notes delving into the origin of Impossible Light and its contrast to The Origin of My Depression. In it she discusses the necessity of reaching for that impossible light with motivated hope in sharp contrast to delusional optimism and toxic positivity, and in succinct terms the imperative for queer people to do so together, not alone, in community, as she does on this record in participation with other trans and non-binary peers (Tig Harutyunyan, Haela Hunt-Hendrix, otay:onii). She also directs her focus on the primary driving root cause of the suffering and bigotry in the world, capital, and the need for the few of us to act in solidarity in the face of poverty, genocide, climate destruction, apartheid, and fascism. During the time this record was put together, Metcalfe attended multiple funerals for trans friends, and the final touches of the album were done in the midst of the genocide of the people of Armenia in Artsakh by the state of Azerbaijan and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by the state of Israel, and Metcalfe writes about the much of the grim civilizational ills surrounding these injustices in very similar ways that I have found also myself writing about those same omnipresent ills and in a similar way that I'm sure millions have also found themselves thinking about them, with a deep sense of daunted uncertainty in even the near future. These liner notes were surely written before November 2024, but the message within them has only become more poignant.

Xandra Metcalfe's plea for collective strength among trans people is more important now than ever, as we face down the last months before heading into a fascist administration that will either moderately target us with discriminatory legal and executive action or severely demonize and scapegoat us for the pain they are about to worsen on the poor and working class people of the US and the global South through escalated parasitism of the less powerful to increase even further the concentration of wealth into the hands of the already-wealthy via a gutting of the social safety net and destruction of public communication and education. Now more than ever, we need each other.

Of the many changes I have made in my life, transitioning has been far and away the best change I have ever made. The clarity I'd never experienced before, the weight of masculinity that I was convinced for so long I just had to carry lifted off my shoulders, the euphoria of self-realization in embracing womanhood, the confidence in reaching and becoming the person I want to be even when she seemed too far beyond my grasp. It's a very strange dynamic to have that euphoria also tied to such fear of increased discrimination, of increased harassment, of being scapegoated for the ills of capitalism by capitalists, of being scapegoated for the failures of the neoliberal paid opposition party, of targeted violence, of losing it all. It's strange and disheartening to see the quick return to silence from the privileged moderate liberals who lamented Trump's electoral victory. It's strange to go to work and act like everything is fine and normal for the benefit of the same corporate bosses who threw their support behind a fascist movement that dehumanizes me to pad their bottom lines and who also plan to throw me away as soon as all the value from my labor can be extracted. But it's also strange to feel such motivation in the face of unwinnable odds. It's strange to feel such self-love and self-confidence that I never felt I deserved before. It's strange not being crippled by depression because I finally found and conquered the origin of MY depression. I have been much more hopeless in the past than I am now, and I know that I'm not alone. This album is not just a reminder that we need each other, it's a reassurance that we have each other, there are people like us who understand us. But even before that, it's a contrast to the search for an escape from the misery of the transphobic world through self-isolation and suicidal ideation of The Origin of My Depression. The thesis of Impossible Light is that there is no peace in suicidal acquiescence, no peace in defeat, and probably no peace ever for trans people, but that the impossible is worth the reach, that if you're going to be alive as a trans person then you may as well live fucking vibrantly, that there's some good in this world for us, and it's worth fighting for, and we have to do it together.

Trans liberation now.

MY album-of-the-year 2024

[happymetalgirl]

The Last Ten Seconds of Life - No Name Graves

I said I was gonna get back in the swing of things by writing shorter, not-so-heady reviews of some of my favorite albums of the year before the year is up, which I have not really stuck to because I can't help it. I can't help but write extensively and elaborately on albums that I love. Some albums though, it would be ridiculous to get trapped in the weeds of because it really is as simple as they just go fucking hard, and No Name Graves is one of those albums. Despite this vein of filthy, extreme deathcore seeing something between a renaissance and a fleeting Tik Tok trend, this is The Last Ten Seconds of Life's seventh full-length, and their persistence and experience with the genre shines through the multitude of Lorna Shore and Kublai Khan imitators crowding their field on this album.

This album does not have any grander overarching theme than vengeance and fury for the rot of mankind in biblical and uncompromisingly brutal terms and with the kind of unrelentingly nasty riffing, monstrous growls, and pounding rhythms that accurately depict the pure, unquenchable, blood-drunk wrath that this subgenre of deathcore can really tap into at its finest. And this is that style of deathcore at its finest; it really is one of those not-that-deep kind of albums whose appeal is just in how well-produced its theoretical prospect is. The band keeps it short and sweet in just over a half-hour of extreme, instinctive pummeling, like a focused, in-form, and thoroughly trained elite fighter with muscle memory guiding their fluid movements. And throughout the entire 34 minutes, there's never the sense that the band are trying to be anyone else or do anything other than their mission and what they thrive at doing. In a landscape saturated with so much try-hard inauthenticity and over-produced Marvel-movie special effects bullshit, this is a deathcore album whose genuine intensity stands out. No Name Graves does not rely on bells and whistles or ripping off Will Ramos' snarls or ripping off the "Bleed" triplets or ripping off Knocked Loose's dog-barking. It relies on lethal double-bass blast beats, bass-heavy mixing, tactical guitar flair, and the simple continuation of the gritty ethos TLTSOL have been crafting for over a decade now, no shortcuts, no bullshit, and in a deathcore climate increasingly polluted with fabricators and quick-buck makers, No Name Graves is absolutely a breath of fresh air.

8/10

[happymetalgirl]

Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere

Blood Incantation is not the only band or the first band to make death metal progressive and spacy and cerebral, but across their now four-album discography they definitely have developed a signature style and ethos within that already niche sub-subgenre, an ethos of imaginative existential musing on the biggest fundamental questions of our species: the nature of the universe, the origin of life, the extent of the cosmos, the possibility of other life, etc. This existential speculation the band engages in is not done super self-seriously, as was exemplified by their widely lauded 2019 LP, Hidden History of the Human Race, which dabbled playfully (I hope) in the idea of humanity being placed on Earth by another species. Ancient Aliens death metal. The record even came with a little pamphlet on opening your third eye and discovering the truth of the universe and all.

I've never got the sense from the band that they're super true believers in this kind conspiratorial thinking, at least not in a committed way; I didn't get the vibe from Hidden History that they were actually trying to evangelize some flat-Earth-level type of alternative theory of human existence of whatever, even with the pamphlet. If anything, the pamphlet seemed like a tongue-in-cheek touch and an adjunctive component to the imaginative world-building the band was engaging in. It seemed more about building an immersive fantasy and stimulating grandiose speculating than about pushing some specific hairbrained conspiracy theory. That said, even most conspiracy theorists don't hold their wacky beliefs with such confidence that they dare express them publicly outside forums and comment sections, because those beliefs are more of an emotional crutch for not understanding the massive and complicated world around us and validating whatever biases they have, like what religion is functionally for most people who subscribe to one.

And somehow (ownership of new media and legacy media being gradually consolidated in the hands of a disparately wealthy few who actively thumb the scales of algorithms to favor the spread of anti-class-conscious information like right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theories to prevent any type of threat to their wealth and power that working class solidarity might pose, capitalism) conspiracy theories are a real actual sociopolitical ill that we have to contend with seriously now, with actual batshit true believers like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and RFK Jr. and more than a handful who've unironically pondered "the Jewish question" now holding higher office and shaping policy in the federal government of the most economically and militarily powerful country in the world. It's so awesome that we have to take fucking "globalists starting wildfires to promote 15-minute cities" type bullshit seriously now.

Mark Bankston, the lawyer prosecuting Alex Jones for his defamation of the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, lamented frustratedly that conspiracy theories used to be fun, benign little thought experiments in the fantastical and absurd that he felt like people back in his day could engage with in good fun and not actually become so seriously sucked into, and now in the age of the internet consolidated onto a handful of social media platforms they're a weapon of anti-progressive propaganda. This has been a slow-building phenomenon, and it's not like InfoWars wasn't a major cog of the right-wing misinformation machine back in 2019. But it's so much worse now, and with the trajectory the U.S. is on in the wake of the election and the cabinet nominees being assembled, it's likely going to become an unprecedently severe problem.

All this is to say, do I think Blood Incantation (or anyone) dabbling in the mushroom-tripping vibes of space-alien existentialism with a flair of mystical thinking is worsening a serious problem of anti-intellectualism with this kind of artistry or even just doing so in bad taste? I would say no. Sure, satire is dead in an era in which it's indistinguishable from the genuine expression it satirizes, but I don't think in the context of a genre of music (death metal) that has always held ties to the cartoonish and fantastical and made very clear its fictional nature, that what Blood Incantation is doing is really normalizing or legitimizing "Jewish space laser" horseshit. Old songs with (at the time) relatively innocuous lyrics about Trump being a rich and brash public figure as more of a character archetype than anything he is now have soured more than I think Hidden History of the Human Race ever will to my ears. And that IS definitely in part due to the TYPE of conspiracy theory being toyed with, which is just the silly ancient aliens stuff that's kinda too esoteric to be tied into sociopolitical conspiracy and weaponized like holocaust denialism or something. The band stick firmly to the realm of discussions held while hot-boxing in pizza delivery vehicles after shift ends, and five years after Hidden History, they're still focused mainly on what's going on in the stars and beyond.

The cover of Absolute Elsewhere hints at a continuation of the same alien historicism, with a clearing of the crater-riddled surface of some mysterious planet with two moons in its starlit sky somehow decorated with two of the same types of pyramids of Giza. Comprised of two central compositions each divided into three tracks, it really is an album of two halves in the thematic sense though. While "The Stargate" picks up right where "Awakening from the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)" left off in terms of grand celestial projection, the lyrics of the album's second hemisphere are surprisingly grounded, at least in the sense that the grandiose existentialism is turned inward. It's actually surprising how direct the message of "The Message" is in the album's last 23 minutes in its humanism. The band don't break the fourth wall or anything, but even in mystical character the answers they give to the age-old questions on the meaning of life and consciousness and humanity are not the least bit cryptic. "To create." "To give." "generosity". "sow peace through deeds." "To grow beyond the animal instinct to fight." I don't know if the concerns I laid out earlier about conspiracy and anti-intellectualism taking hold of power had anything to do with their rationale or thought process for doing so, but I am glad that Blood Incantation did decide make a concrete statement at least about the purpose of the types of intergalactic thought experiments they engage in, which is not to uncover ancient secrets or expose the lizard people or any of those other harmful distractions from our obligation to support our fellow human and cherish the possibly rare and unique life present on the Earth.

As for the music... the scope of the subject matter of Absolute Elsewhere is matched in breadth with the scope of the style and composition of the instrumentals behind it. It's not just that the band employ these spacier psychedelic passages inspired by 70's prog rock between careening passages of death metal, and it's not just that they manage to tap Tangerine Dream for the second "tablet" of "The Stargate", it's the intentionality of the long-winding compositions and the way these elements are woven so thoughtfully together, with wonderful little memorable motifs of guitar and orchestral synth builds making it more than just the novelty of the combination of ingredients at play here. That said, more than any individual riff or sweet clean guitar passage, the tight symbiosis of death metal with 70's new age music and space rock is the real masterclass here that really brings the extraterrestrial introspection home. There's not really a way to easily get into the highlights of finer details of such a seamless album without it becoming tedious or spoiling, but I can at least heap massive praise on the accomplishment made here in the immersiveness into the huge scope of the subject matter here made possible by the meticulous and crisp production of each piece of the album, whose varied individual components must have been a real puzzle to mix and master.

I remember when I was hearing so much hype about Blood Incantation before Hidden History and then hearing that album and becoming a believer; I think Absolute Elsewhere could easily be that album for the unconverted because it really is a masterpiece of a progressive and grandiose compositional approach to death metal with some of the most natural integration of disparate styles ever. I love this album, and as impressive as it is from Blood Incantation, it's no surprise that they could reach even higher than Hidden History of the Human Race and that they could make so many diverse sounds work so well together. If you're not a believer all I can really say is look into it yourself, open your third eye.

9/10

[happymetalgirl]

Cane Hill - A Piece of Me I Never Let You Find

It was in the early days of this blog, 2017-2018, that a supposed nu metal revival was brewing and being spearheaded by a vibrant new generation who grew up with (hopefully) the wheat rather than the chaff of the 90’s nu metal movement as their inspiration. There were a lot of names being thrown around regarding who was going to be the decisive band to really bring nu metal back and Cane Hill was not one of them, at least not as much as other acts like Vein.fm, Vended, Tetrarch, Loathe, etc.

There were definitely others, but I struggle to remember who exactly, precisely because that fabled nu metal revival never really materialized as such, and the bands associated with it pretty much all got absorbed into the larger metallic hardcore/metalcore movement, probably because those bands were also largely heavily influenced by 2000’s metalcore and hardcore as well.

Consequently, being wrapped up into the more burgeoning movement and keeping up with its glitchy synthetics and angular riffing kind of sandblasted away any nu metal elements beyond open-string chugging, gritty industrial elements, and dissonant clean chords. It’s hard to really say if this was for better or for worse in the long run in general, as the modern metalcore movement has definitely produced some excellent crop from the likes of nu-metal-associated acts like Tallah, Northlane, and Dealer.

Modern metalcore hasn’t all been peaches and cream of course; there’s been a parallel movement among bands like Bad Omens, Wage War and a million other I swear to god AI-generated copy-cat-ass boring bands of very pop-focused alternative rock with occasional metalcore grooves. I’ve stated my support for metal bands doing this kind of thing well, but it’s now like THIS is the new metalcore revival: a few bands sometimes doing a cool thing with a very hot sound and countless cheap imitations. Bad Omens has some gems, Wage War has some gems, but overall I really dislike the general influence they have had on metalcore.

Cane Hill was THE band I was waving the flag for when a nu metal revival seemed prime for takeoff. Their 2016 debut, Smile, was a nasty and infectious rager that wore the band’s early Korn and Slipknot influence shamelessly on its sleeve. The album’s lyrics were gritty and pissed off and direct in the way that premium nu metal is, and aimed at American racism and white Christian nationalism without the cringeworthy trappings of teen angst that were the pitfall of so many nu metal bands. And their sophomore follow-up in 2018 with Too Far Gone kept the momentum of their debut going strong in all departments. The band went off on a brief acoustic tangent with the Jar of Flies-influenced EP, Kill the Sun, in 2019, which I wasn’t too impressed or upset by, especially given its acknowledged off-course nature. That said the band’s momentum definitely took a hit when, for whatever reason, they separated from Rise Records and went independent in 2020.

They released a few very solid EPs and singles that took on a more modern styling and highlighted their metalcore influences with excellent glitchy metalcore highlights like the frenzied “Power of the High”, the righteous anti-theocracy “God Is the Enemy”, and glitchy death blasting “A Form of Protest”, but the past four years have been slow for Cane Hill, and any hope that they’d be the band to rejuvenate the style of nu metal they started with is pretty much evaporated.

So where to next for them? Back to the raw nu metal of Smile? Forward with the volatile industrial nu-metalcore of Krew de la Mort? After 6 years, the band’s third studio album, is, tragically, a much worse third thing. I don’t know if it has to do with their new label, Out of Line, or if it’s desperation, but on A Piece of Me I Never Let You Find, Cane Hill have surrendered to the gravity of the melodic alt metalcore trend of aping Bad Omens and have released the most unmemorable and bland music of their entire career. In hindsight, there were some signs during their independent season, like the post-grunge droning melody of “All We Know” and the similar melodicism of “Blood and Honey”, but those were lone tracks in a transitional era juxtaposed against other hard-hitting and promising cuts from that era.

I could get into the details of the album and the minor highlights (none of which are nearly worth returning to) and worst offenders, but it’s honestly not worth it. Any new band who’s put out an album in the last two years with gamer-ass computer-generated cover art with the left third covered with a solid bar with the band’s name and album details written sideways, sounds just like this. Where once the guitars hit like a ton of bricks now they do little more than wash in with a haze of synthesizers, and where once Elijah Witt’s shouted with such conviction and fury I felt secondhand vocal soreness now he croons and falsettos like he’s doing a Sleep Token impression, and I have torn into that band enough already.

In my mind, as someone who likes to engage with art thoughtfully and dissectingly, the worst kind of music really is the kind that’s just so mid that there’s nothing to it. It’s just filler, background noise. Not like ambient music, which is crafted to be hypnotic or even just background-setting intentionally. Slop. Generic death metal with no riffs and cheap gory lyrics. Meandering and unimaginative black metal. Paint-by-numbers pop songs about heartbreak. So what’s there interesting to say about the music here and not just the context of its failure? I mean I feel like it’s not even a style that the band couldn’t necessarily execute well, but their hearts aren’t in it, at least not from what it sounds like here. It sounds so stale and lifeless, and there’s gotta be some connection, however tenuous, between this album and the looming consequences of the massive failure to cultivate an energized labor-driven populist movement in place of status quo neoliberalism. I don’t know, it’s definitely harsh to compare my disappointment in Kamala Harris and the dems in America not preventing the takeover of government by fascists with their tired and uninspiring rhetoric to my disappointment in Cane Hill sounding hollow and corporate, but my hopes for Cane Hill were definitely higher, and so as far as music goes, this album is probably the most disappointing thing about 2024 for me.

4/10

[happymetalgirl]

Nails - Every Bridge Burning

Eight years later, and we finally get the fourth album from the ever-punishing, powerviolence stalwarts, Nails. A lot of bands have some long gaps in their discographies; shit happens. But for a band like Nails whose songs average out at somewhere between one to two minutes and whose whirlwind albums are similarly brief and to the point, it's kind of a trip to think back to where I was when they put out their last album, You Will Never Be One of Us, their longest record yet at a whopping 21 minutes, which is followed by Every Bridge Burning here, which doesn't even eclipse 18 minutes. So much has changed in my life and the world between those 39 minutes of music, including nearly the entire lineup of Nails, with frontman Todd Jones apparently burning every bridge between 2016 and when this album commenced, every bridge apart from that between him and tattoo artist and Leviathan mastermind Jef Whitehead, whose fittingly animalistic and cerebrally violent artwork once again graces the front of a Nails record eight years later. Despite the many changes of the past eight years, Nails' modus operandi remains steadfast in uncompromising antisocial rage and nothing else. There's no deep introspection or dissection of the details of the fury on this album, just the pure, distilled explosion of every instigation of the past eight years, and again Nails hasn’t ever done it any other way. It's all confrontation and all fighting words, no compromise, no offering to hear anybody out to come to a collaborative or diplomatic solution, just violence. And what better time for Nails to come back than now? Could there really be a more apt time for such music? When the western world and Europe are being plagued by the crystallization and consolidation of fascist movements characterized by mask-off hate and utter disregard for empiricism and reality, completely open in their intent to take power against any democratic will and wield it cruelly and destructively in a blind, stupid blaze of insecure and imagined revenge, when the constant spilling of immense and increasingly corrosive bigoted fascist propaganda by the insulated wealthy owners of corporate media enterprises erodes the social fabric this badly, really, what bridges are there worth preserving with those who have seen and supported the continuous creep toward open fascism as the last fumes of plausible deniability in complicity evaporate? What bridges are worth trying to repair between those whose aim is to uplift the whole of humanity, to progress, and to move society forward, and those whose ideological or functionally captured operative is to burn all bridges and burn the supposed degenerates within society and burn books about those “degenerates” and burn and burn until there is nothing left to turn any impotent rage against? What else can be done except sequestering this vile, hateful, miserable, misguided, and sad political movement intent on nothing but destruction and extermination, and desperately keeping it from seizing power in hopes that it burns itself out in a blaze of pathetic and incoherent anger?

It seems almost comical to segue with the grace of the whiplash of a head-on car collision into the music on this Nails album, but the opening track and lead single, “Imposing Will” captures the toxicity and anti-sociality of the minoritarian fascist mindstate with lyrics like “I know I don’t have a place”, “give me strength to cause them pain”, “force my vision into law”, “it can never be enough / no matter how deep it cuts”, and “keep reason under control”. It’s all written in the first person perspective in a way that vibrantly and grippingly captures the stream of dumb uncontrolled but determined fury to “take back what they stole” of the perpetually aggrieved fascist who always feigns defensiveness even with disproportionate power and even when the cruelty is obviously the only real purpose, and the Todd Jones’ venomous and spitfire vocal performance against a backdrop of grinding, crusty guitar distortion and unidirectional self-exhausting blast beats could not be more fitting.

And from minute zero to minute eighteen, that’s basically how the whole album goes, not to say it’s homogenous (only as homogenous of an experience as the violence of a warfield can be) and not to be reductive either. There are many delicious riffs, pointedly vile and poisonous lyrics, and interesting musical dynamics at play on the rest of Every Bridge Burning but it would honestly just be quicker and more effective to just listen to the other quarter hour of music after the first track than it would be to read me spoiling the details song by song.

9/10

My enjoyment of this kind of music, this kind of art in general, that plays with fire in the expression of convincingly performing sociopathy (especially sociopathy as broadly consequential as fascism as opposed to other forms of less systematically destructive sociopathy like self-isolation, depression, or even interpersonal abusive tendencies) hinges heavily if not entirely on it being performance and not just a plain-faced expression of the artist’s actual sociopathy. I’m sure Todd Jones is a genuinely difficult and not friendly person whose confrontational tendencies have informed Nails’ anti-social music for as long as Nails has been around. And I think seeing a negative tendency in one’s self that perhaps seems or feels innate and choosing to portray it sympathetically and honestly in its negativity can have a great impact on preventing or combating that negativity to the audience. Screaming “I’m a giant piece of shit and I fucking hate my life” with the right passion and honesty can strike the right chord in people who resonate with those words to incite them to work on stopping being self-hating assholes. And, done the wrong way, loudly proclaiming an antihuman hatred for the world and a seething desire to burn it all down can also just make racists and neonazis feel validated and legitimized in their hateful motivations.

The rest of the album is not as lyrically pointed and checking off of every box of fascism as the opening track, but the broad strokes are very much present and consistent, with supportive lyrics and song titles like “don’t look for me I’d rather stay lost”, “committed to revenge”, “frenzy of anger shoot your mouth like a gun”, and “Lacking the Ability to Process Empathy” being emblematic of the fascist reverence for violence and enacting supposedly necessary evil. And it’s also not just an album about fascism but about consigning one’s self to a broad and seemingly unfixable inability to function as a social creature part of a social species. The second to last song on the album, “I Can’t Turn It Off”, is both an obvious fuck you to Todd’s former collaborators and a cathartic revelation in the glory that being a brash, unrepentant, and standoff-ish asshole has got him farther than it got them. And yet the next song, “No More Rivers to Cross”, takes a 180 on the previous track’s arrogance and closes the album in a barn-burning dirge of apathetic loneliness, self-isolation, and being knowingly used in life as a means to an end by an even bigger asshole. I’d be lying if I said this shit isn’t relatable to at least some degree. The toxic high of schadenfreude or of the delicious spite in success in the face of doubters and haters, being the one envied, feels exhilarating, and I think indulging in some toxic behaviors in moderation is possibly an integral and defensible part of the human experience. But plenty of things that come naturally and easily, socially and individually, are worth tempering, if not excising: insecurity, selfishness, innate fear and disgust, in-group prejudice.

My enjoyment of this album absolutely does not hinge on Todd Jones not being an asshole, not at all. My enjoyment of it hinges on it being an honest cautionary dissuading of the excesses of those behaviors and not an advocacy for them. My appreciation for a song like “Imposing Will”, which is just the vomitus of the incongruent inner machinations of the malignantly sick fascist mind, hinges on it being a portrayal of sickness and not a call to action to other sick fascists. The fact that nothing on this album reads as a cringeworthy piss-fit against cAnCeL CuLtUrE or ThE wOkE LeFt and that I’ve not yet caught wind of Todd Jones bitching to some interviewer about being “cancelled” or “the woke mind virus” or some other shit that would indicate that he’s just another pathetic and unlikeable piece of shit who fell down the reactionary rabbit hole with so many other weak and gullible dipshits because it fed their fears and insecurities is why I feel like I can interpret and enjoy this album as a raw and personal expression of Jones being trapped in his own self-made vices and completely out of ways to escape, choosing instead to burn out alone instead of futilely clawing at a human connection he can’t reach. Like Acid Bath’s or Eyehategod’s visceral imagery of being trapped in heroin addiction or alcoholism, or like DSBM’s deranged defeatist revelry in the assumption that one of these days the constant thoughts of suicide will finally end the constant teasing and become manifested in action, Nails is all about negativity, and art about negativity is necessary and valuable in showing why it persists in us and getting us to think about how to get rid of it. And sometimes just showing it all using the hook of rage-room drumming, nasty guitar riffs, and borderline non-linguistic demon-screaming to show up-close how miserable that negativity is is a highly effective way of doing it.

I don't think Todd Jones is a stout leftist or a pearl-clutching liberal with an "in this house we believe" sign on his front lawn either. Like if I ever met him out in the real world and talked to him, I imagine the best outcome I could reasonably expect would be him calling me a cunt. If I had to, I would guess, based on his expressed disregard for participating in society, that he's not planning on voting for anybody or anything, but to say it would be frustrating and disappointing to find out that Todd Jones is just another sucker for the easy-answer scapegoating and thought-terminating clichés of the MAGA movement who made this album in support of the impending tide of dumbfuck American fascism would sound like the spineless opposition we have currently facing down that fascism with expired and lethargic pleas for unity and civility with the brown-shirts actively pouring gasoline on you with a torch in their hand and would not adequately capture how stupid it would be for Nails and for Todd Jones to make this album that so poignantly illustrates the ills of anti-social psychology and its role within fascist mentality and then go, “yeah Trump 2024”.

[happymetalgirl]

Nile - The Underworld Awaits Us All

In the vein of technical death metal that Nile have occupied since their debut and flourished in since at least Annihilation of the Wicked, they have remained a consistently reliable force and probably my personal favorite group within that category, balancing impressive technicality with grandiose brutality. The departure of Dallas Toller-Wade, who had become a pillar of Nile's sound by that point, surprised and worried me and at least a few other fans, but the band's emphatic return to form on 2019's Vile Nilotic Rites with new guitarist Brian Kingsland's strong vocal delivery at the forefront showed that they were far from out for the count yet. They took their time with that album, and they took their time again with their 10th and most recent full-length album here, The Underworld Awaits Us All, which follows another personnel change as the group trade bassists yet again and add third guitarist Zach Jeter to the mix. A third guitarist! in Nile! Of all the bands for whom such a move is completely unnecessary and gratuitous, yet also so fucking awesome, Nile has got to be the most apt to fit that super-specific description. With three guitars on board, three vocalists in the mix, and nearly five years in the making, The Underworld Awaits Us All is a record that pushes further along a plateau (though an incredibly high plateau) of diminishing returns at the height of what Nile's favored style of technical death metal can accomplish. Like a dash of pepper into an already-complex and multi-layered soup, more guitars and more vocals layered onto a Nile project really does only serve as a relatively marginal increase in flavor and intensity. Nile have done more with less, however, utilizing dynamism rather than marginal increases in gratuitous extremity, as exemplified on records like Annihilation of the Wicked and Those Whom the Gods Detest, extreme and highly technical albums as well, but albums on which the extremity and technicality was harnessed and directed to serve a greater compositional end rather than its own. This is not to say that there aren't tasty hooks and nasty riffs abound or that the technicality is of a grossly masturbatory nature on the album, but I would say that the approach is redundant and very much feels like Nile retreading very heavily tread ground. They have their niche, and they are certainly reliable in producing the type of death metal anyone should come to expect from them, but I think this album, with the addition of more guitar parts, more growls, more wailing background vocals and choirs, more excessive instrumental layering, and just more of everything shows that Nile have realistically expanded their style to its limits, as the novelty of these new-ish elements proves to be window-dressing on an impressive but otherwise somewhat undercooked and rather unadventurous effort.

7/10

[happymetalgirl]

Undeath - More Insane

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Well in the spirit of dusting off this blog and scrubbing off some of the rust with some brief album reviewing, what better way to ease back in than with some simple, good ol' meat & potatoes death metal. This is the third album from old school Floridian death metal revivalists (from New York), Undeath!

Their 2020 debut album, Lesions of a Different Kind, instantly hooked a great many death-metalheads clearly hungry for the primal, groove-focused, hardcore-influenced stew of gory, straightforward death metal that Undeath was cooking, myself included. Though a subtle feature of their craft, I think the band's hardcore influence is what ultimately gave them the edge over the surrounding death metal crop with the dynamic punch of hardcore, and the surge of bands with similar influence like Frozen Soul, Gatecreeper, Sanguisugabogg, and 200 Stab Wounds represented, I think, a shift in the death metal landscape toward leaning into allyship with the meteoric rise of metallic hardcore thanks to bands like Code Orange, Harms Way, Kublai Khan, and especially Knocked Loose. Undeath's sophomore effort in 2022, It's Time...To Rise from the Grave, deviated basically not at all from the mission statement they'd put out two years prior, in style or quality, to the dismay of no one really.

More Insane finally does show a change of trajectory for Undeath as they showcase some technicality and finesse through some slightly more sophisticated composition as a break from the infectiously filthy, nonstop go-dumb approach. Nothing radical, but I think a fresh approach for the band relatively speaking, even if Cannibal Corpse worship or Bloodbath worship aren't exactly new in the death metal landscape broadly.

I actually was kind of disappointed by this album's playing into those over-played death metal compositional tropes on my initial listens to it because the shift of focus onto more intricate guitar passages and more ornate song structures does indeed kind of clash with the simple, no-nonsense, anti-overthinking approach that made Undeath's hooky and delicious pair of albums before More Insane such a breath of fresh air for death metal. And it was disappointing to hear what I first heard as being dragged into the muck of death metal by the mere gravitational pull of it simply to keep on schedule and put out an album. The more I listened, however, without the expectation of the same jungle-pit-opening death metal experience the band already kindly delivered twice, the more I came to appreciate the finer details of the arpeggiated melodic leads on "Sutured for War", the ripping speed of the drumming on "Cramped Caskets", the intricacy of the riffing on "Disattachment of a Prophylactic in the Brain", Alexander Jones' more expansive vocal technical prowess all across the album, and the more I came to appreciate More Insane as a finely crafted death metal album in a slightly different vein that showcases the instrumental talents Undeath has to offer without sacrificing too much of the hooky, meaty core of the band's primary compositional appeal, and definitely one of the year's most solid death metal records from a band who has, through both their consistency and boldness, definitely earned being trusted to try something different and to expand their sound in the future.

The strength of More Insane lies less in the brute force and hardcore-infused muscularity of their prior output and more in the band's practiced and meticulously honed technical abilities in death metal's foundational elements both in writing and playing. And with less of a lean-in to the novelty of the hardcore influence that colored the previous two albums, Undeath prove that they're not on top of the death metal game because of a gimmick or a trend, but because they know their shit, and they've got their shit together, and in that sense, More Insane is an even simpler display of their death metal supremacy than It's Time and Lesions.

8/10

[happymetalgirl]

Getting back out there

It's been a minute. I basically didn't write about anything last year, in part because it was an anomalously underwhelming year for metal music, and for music in general; I saw a decent bit of discussion from other music enthusiasts toward the end of last year about it being kind of a not great year for music. Amid last year being underwhelming, I also became a doctor (the last year of which being the most demanding within that process). And that wasn't even the most massive life change that happened last year...

When I named this blog I wanted it to be a contrast between the hyper-serious, moody, angry, hyper-masculine ethos that pervades metal culture, mainly because even though I love the music I felt that those aspects of the culture need tempering, and because those aspects of the culture kind of also kept me from engaging in the community of it aside from shows and minimal online discussions. Admittedly I also felt that a blog with a silly name would also provide an advantageous contrast to the level of effort I wanted to put in and an indicator/reminder to mostly myself that it's just a blog about a broadly not super relevant genre of music, hence the name happymetalboy. Astute readers will notice that isn't the blog's name anymore.

Anyway, this past month has got me real extra motivated to write about so many of the excellent new releases, but I am also, if you can believe it, extremely busy still. I'm torn between wanting to write within my means to express my admiration for the music I've been loving and also wanting, if I am going to write, to write something that's not just generic surface-level "i like this album" that you can find anywhere with publications desperately trying to keep up with the endless rapid flow of new music.

When I was at the height of my activity on this blog, I was reviewing albums nearly every day, kinda just out of obligation, and I reviewed so much forgettable, generic metal in forgettable generic words just for the sake of it, and now I'd rather put more time into saying something truly unique and valuable about art that actually motivates me to write about it in such a way.

I definitely don't have enough time to do that before year's end with the multitude of albums I want to appreciate from 2024. So I'm gonna start with a string of a few album reviews, probably brief, maybe some will go into greater depth if I feel so inspired, but hey, happymetalgirl is back either way :)

[happymetalgirl]

Hello very much :)

I thought about making a video on this topic but I decided to just write it out in a post instead. Either way, I'd like to speak a bit more specifically about a drunk rant I made on a separate account the other day that was not as well put together as I'd like to stand as my viewpoints on the subject.

tl:dr, I just feel as though there's a lack of sincerity in the world these days. I speak from personal experience as an artist putting things out into the world, yes, but also as a human being interacting with other human beings on the regular, and I have had my sentiments echoed by many other friends of mine over the past year or so, both artists and non-artists alike. Most of this will be framed through the consumption of art, because that's my own personal passion in this life of mine, but also the way we interface with each other and process the world around us. Now, don't get me wrong, I love to laugh. I love a good joke, and I love lightheartedness as much as the next person. But I saw someone this morning put it very succinctly in response to my rant, something along the lines of "don't let the joke about it overtake the source material." It feels as though it's a common occurrence these days to take a pinch of something with a lot more weight to it, often a humorous bit, and then run with it. Everyone then gathers around the pinch to ooh and ahh and consume it as a whole. Context is immediately lost, the legacy of that body of work becomes its own caricature, and anyone discovering that body of work via said caricature may forgo a piece of art they would otherwise love because "there's nothing there". And don't think this is me griping at those making jokes at the expense of my art. I make jokes about my own art. But when the joke dies, yet continues to grow, and spread, and finds its way back to me both on the internet and off for months (or, God forbid, years) to come, I can't help but say to myself; what the fuck is happening. Artists have fled the public and all their outlets for personality and expression outside the medium because they feel ridiculed. It's not even just their art. Katya comes to mind, speaking on how she went on youtube live a few years back in literal tears talking about police brutality and the injustices marginalized communities were facing at the hands of the government. Meanwhile, the entire comment section "yass" and "mother"ed her in barrages, not paying attention to anything she had to say. I get asked about when I'm dropping Preacher's Daughter vinyl en masse in response to my Palestine fundraiser links. It's everywhere and it's inescapable. No one can be serious for even two seconds.

This may all sound obnoxious; so be it. I tie strings from this central problem to many other complaints I have heard repeated ad nauseam the past few years. For example; the death of subculture. Goth, punk, whatever, you name it. People who built an underground counterculture movement with a rich history based on a love of art, community, and otherwise misunderstood worldviews and experiences deemed foul or inappropriate. Now we see bits taken from it, the terms and the looks, without any of the meat, spread thin across society as a whole. Words mean nothing anymore. One can rest on history and say they were a part of it when in fact, they did nothing. No appreciation or understanding to be had for the love and passion that built it. No serious interaction with the culture's very real confines and boundaries, just mindless co-opting. This has just as much to do with late stage capitalism as it does with excessive humor in lieu of sincerity, but it's certainly both. Again, this may sound like a silly complaint, but I don't care. The collective ennui we're all experiencing has a very real reason, whether we're ready to acknowledge or not.

In a twisted thread, it's even tied to our lack of care to change the world around us. People cheer on the idea of communism, but who among us is ready to give up the convenience of society as it stands? Amazon prime, doordash, fresh fruit out of season as I saw someone mention in a similar post last week; the marvels of modern technology. Do we really think these things can last in a society that isn't actively destroying the planet? We talk about the idea of something all day long but have very little to do with the actuality of what we're talking about. And don't think I consider myself exempt from this problem. I couldn't even try to claim to be. It seems nearly silly to be complaining, then, about the way people consume the art around them these days as we creep towards what feels like the end of days. But as long as I still draw breath, I must complain.

I miss genuine passion. As an autistic individual, when I'm alone, sometimes I cannot contain myself with how things make me feel. The music I listen to, the video games I play, the books I read. I almost feel the need to run through the house and scream in everyone's face how I'm feeling. It feels good to love intensely. Now, I won't pretend like autistic people haven't been bullied for this since the dawn of time, but there is surely a noticeable lack of passion in everything these days. Everyone can feel it, everyone is talking about it. Everything now is "cringe", or "doing too much", or "not that serious". Actually, it is that serious. Insecurity in one's own deeper feelings may not be a new thing, but a culture that seems to promote this eschewing of them does seem to be a new evil. The tone of the internet has completely shifted. I spent most of my time here when I first discovered it a little over a decade ago on Zelda forums and other chat-based websites, talking about how much I loved whatever fandom I was in at the time and having genuine and memorable interactions with like-minded individuals who felt the same way I do. Now, you have two options; if you hate media, you rip it to shreds, and if you love it, you word-salad it to death and parrot a joke about it that someone else said. I'm not saying people don't still talk seriously in a heartfelt way about the things they love, but it does not seem to be the initial reaction anymore. Do I have a solution to this problem? Of course not. I'm a 26 year old girl posting on a tumblr blog. If I had a solution, this is not where I would be dropping it. But conversation is God to man, and I believe in the ability to change things from the inside out. We make the rules, and we can change them.

Before I go, I'd like to just clarify that I am very grateful for my career, grateful to anyone who has ever given me and my art the time of day, grateful to anyone who has ever come up to me and connected with me over my work, and grateful for a life where someone making too many jokes is the worst part of my day. I do not think I am better nor smarter than anyone on or off the internet. I am simply a girl with big feelings and I enjoy talking about them with other people with big feelings, and it makes me sad when something avoidable or unnecessary gets in the way of that.

All in all, I love to love, and I love all of you, I love my life, I love this record, and mi amore vo- i mean.... oh, whatever.

(Feel free to sound off in the comments and please be nice to each other)

[happymetalgirl]

Please review the new Blood Incantation! Curious to hear what you think of this one.

P.S. I forgot what your blog was called and found it by searching for Khemmis 😆

Oh it is EXCELLENT! That’s not a review but I actually do want to talk about that album. I’ve listened only like 3 times because there’ve been so many awesome releases this week and last week, so many that they’re inspiring me to dust off this blog and do some reviewssss

P.S. blog name changed because I’m not a happy metal boy anymore

[happymetalgirl]

Damn feeling pretty validated after listening to that fantano interview with Eli Enis (stereogum writer). I was spittin here

Sleep Token - Take Me Back to Eden

Sleep Token seems to be the first thing that's really got the metal world talking this year; it's certainly noteworthy that it's the first thing that's got me talking here during this busy year. I didn't do a year-end list last year or even shout-out my favorite albums (which I still should), but after all the lead-up to this album and all the spicy discussion and hype surrounding the band and after finally hearing it in full, I felt motivated to dust off the blog and say in way more words what I'm sure someone else has already said somewhere.

There are a lot of opinions on this album and this band, and they are very much a love ‘em or hate ‘em kind of band, especially with this new album. There’s a very obvious comparison that's been drawn with regard to the hype (some of which I would agree with the haters does seem pretty artificial) around Sleep Token being the next big thing in metal and the more traditionally-minded metalheads being very resistant to them. And that comparison is Ghost. There are definitely parallels there: the anonymity, the lore, Loudwire creaming themselves over them. The comparison to Ghost makes sense on those grounds, and despite the loud minority of haters, after 5 albums and a decade of continuous meteoric rise in sales and increasing venue sizes, Ghost has undeniably won. They did become the next big thing. So, is Sleep Token destined to the same auspicious fate? Are they the next big thing?

The problem with the comparisons to Ghost is that Ghost kicks ass.

I won't bury the lead any longer, this album is way overhyped. I've said it plenty, but I'll say here again just to re-emphasize, I'm no puritan; I like metal adventurous, bold, experimental, unafraid to eat of supposed forbidden fruits like hip hop or pop music, which is clearly the ethos Sleep Token are going for. And on paper, a bold fusion of progressive metal, modern R&B, and swaggering pop music is definitely intriguing, and I'd love to hear what that sounds like someday, because that's not what we got from Sleep Token on this album.

What Sleep Token presents themselves as being what they actually do on record are two rather different things. Sleep Token's primary selling point as the next phenomenon apart from the pseudo-mystical lore and anonymity is the uniqueness of their sound. They do get credit for the uniqueness of the list of ingredients, but a unique sound they do not. And that's because they have several individual sounds that they bounce back-and-forth among, and none of them are at all unique. The handful of modern post/prog-metal sections don’t vary much from each other and aren’t really stylistically unique on their own or even that exhilarating. Most of the time we get either middling rock instrumentation, which is effectively background noise and nothing more than filler stopgap material, or tacky synth pop or trap beats. Neither are made any more evocative by the superficial addition of the synthetic orchestral elements that get peppered into the track list.

There are a lot of various gripes about the album from the haters, and some of it I don’t mind. I don’t mind the R&B-styled vocals, overdone as they can be in some places. I don’t mind (most of) the lyrics, obtuse as they can be. I don’t even mind the clean, polished production too much, but it is compressed to all hell and it doesn’t help with the nonsensical dynamics of a lot of these songs, which leads me to my biggest problem with this album. The compositional direction across the board, from the straightforward post-metal slow-builders to the tacky pop tunes, is aimless and clumsy.

It is so obvious even on the first cursory listen that Sleep Token did not really put much into constructing this album beyond the broad ideas, cutting corners on pesky tasks like song-writing thinking the supposed novelty of the sound would carry the project on its own. Yet for all its commitment to modern R&B, there’s hardly any of the actual cool or sensual appeal there that the band is kinda hinting at. For all the artificial bombast, this album washes over as mindlessly as your average atmospheric-djent/alt-metal project. And for its “bold” implementation of modern pop elements and stylings, of which there is quite a lot, there’s almost none of the basic compositional pop sensibility or even the reluctant memorability of pop music, which leads me to what my other big problem with Take Me Back to Eden, the way they approach pop music.

I’ve been critical in the recent past of the forays into modern pop by the likes of Bring Me the Horizon, Architects, and Bad Omens, not on principle, but just because they tried too hard to fit into the radio-friendly mould that so often led them to awkwardly imitating the likes of Imagine Dragons, Bon Iver, or god-forbid Maroon 5 to make sure their pop-crossover intentions flew over like a lead balloon. And it led to dull song-writing to accommodate the signaling of the intent for a broader appeal. But for all my criticisms of those bands, at least they still tried to bring over some of their performing vigor to their style. Sleep Token, however, overplay their hand on a superficial, overdone swagger that has nowhere near the stamina needed for the 64-minute album they present, and the result is over an hour of awkward toggling between imitative pop-R&B on autopilot and generic alt-flavored post-metal on autopilot.

It’s been said by others and it’s gonna make me sound like such an “elitist” when I say it too, but it’s true, this thing arguably hardly a metal album. Sometimes you’re waiting through several minutes of flubby R&B crooning and trap high-hats until halfway through for distorted guitars to kick in on songs like “Ascensionism” or “Granite”, which sounds like if Five Finger Death Punch were to try their hand awkwardly at an swaggering R&B ballad for the first 2/3rds. And sometimes when the guitars finally do show up after the generic synthetic pop beats, they’re a dull, faint drone under all the other instruments like on “Rain”, the drawn-out title track, and possibly the worst offender: “Are You Really Okay?”. The closing track, “Euclid”, probably integrates the band’s advertised styles the most fluidly, which is to say, not very; the band toss in some choppy bursts of distortion awkwardly into the rest of the otherwise sappy piano-pop ballad.

Sometimes it’s just straight up pop music. And I don’t mean the simple sugary fun kind of pop music. I mean the mind-numbing, practically AI-generated kind of pop music: the kind that inattentive listeners think is fine, the kind that makes people who actually listen to pop music want to pull their hair out (and consequently also repels most metalheads like skunk spray). I criticized BMTH for this on amo (“Medicine” and “Mother Tongue” gave me flashbacks to being trapped listening to top 40 radio at work). And Sleep Token aren’t any more convincing on their more holistic attempts at pop music. I’m amazed that so many metalheads have seemingly unquestionably eaten up what they otherwise would probably spit right out if fed to them not by a nominally metal band.

For example, “Aqua Regia”: it sounds like Imagine Dragons, and when I say Imagine Dragons, I don’t mean when they’re belting out ridiculously like on “Natural” or on “Believer”; I mean when they’re on their waiting in line in the grocery store kinda shit like on “Thunder”. And then there’s the directionless minimalist electro-pop of “DYWTYLM” that completely wastes 4 minutes on something I could only imagine Adam Levine forcing his audience to sit through. It’s the mindless pop melodrama on songs like this and the more spacey sections of other tracks that make the whole vessel-for-some-deity-named-“Sleep” lore thing seem really goofy. Like come on, this deity is communicating through you via vague pop love songs? I guess that tracks given the kinds of scriptures that the major Abrahamic religions running the world enjoy endlessly re-interpreting in their political favor.

I’ll take a break from the negativity and give the band some points where they earned them. For as overly theatrical as they can be, Vessel is a good vocalist and I hope that none of the critique regarding the vocals leads to any kind of shy retreat into a shell of comfort and decreased expressiveness just to play it safe in the future; I definitely prefer the more over-the-top deliveries on the album to the dry, monotonous mumbling sections. The rest of the band prove their instrumental chops too on the few chances they get to make it count within the heavily washed-out tracklist. Cliché as they are, I love a good down-tuned djent breakdowns, and this album’s breakdowns are okay, albeit pretty damn generic and often truncated. But often they’re just kinda tossed onto the tail end of a song they make little sense in the context of and not enough to get me more into those songs.

As far as highlights in the tracklist, there is a scant handful of moments more so than complete songs that show some clear (or wasted) potential. “Chokehold” opens the album pretty well with some tasty industrial grooves that unfortunately doesn’t get built upon as much as it should have, and “Vore” is a pretty decent post-metal-centric cut with some fast drumming and screams to defibrillate you from the past 2 tracks’ induced coma. And apart from the Ivan Moody-esque ballad-y vocal melody on the chorus, it’s a pretty soaring piece of modern alternative metal. In spite of its slightly excessive length, “Ascensionism” is also one of the more really dynamic and heartfelt alt-metal cuts on the album, and the bursts of metallic instrumentation are actually efficacious and feel intentional on this song.

Though it’s unfortunately the only one on the album, “The Summoning” is a genuinely well-rounded, fleshed-out, solid, and ethereal progressive metal song from beginning to end, including the bass-y groove rock outro. Granted, it does kinda just sound like a TesseracT song, but it’s the one song that both encapsulates prog-metal and seems like there was actual work put into the finer details rather than just a vague idea of the broader composition.

Even on this track though, there’s not really as much of an actual meshing of styles as there is the stacking of styles next to each other, which doesn’t make me optimistic for Sleep Token’s future since they’ve clearly decided their path forward is going to be leaning into being the pop-alt-R&B-prog-metal band phenomenon, when a more standard prog-metal route has produced (and seems like it still would produce) the better results for them. Hell, they’re plenty eccentric enough to carve out a pretty enviable niche in the prog metal landscape and stand a head or two taller than the rest of the crop too. Unfortunately carving out that niche might be a tedious process with no guarantee of success, and with all the attention they’re receiving for what they’re doing now, I doubt they’ll change course.

For all its novelty, Take Me Back to Eden did not hit for me, and that's because its eccentricities are superficial, its composition is heavily style-over-substance, and its "genre-blending" is clumsy and unappetizing. I do think the novelty will wear off before this time next year for all the people hailing this album as a masterpiece, and I hope I'm right about that not just because I like being right or because I want to stick it to over-enthusiastic fans in some snooty/critic kind of way. I just don't want the next big thing in metal to be something that sounds so lazily calculated to pander superficially to the lowest common denominator. I do still have some faith in the sort of meritocracy that is the ears of the people, and the penchant for discovery the metal community still has; the most influential and iconic advancements of the genre continue to emerge out of nowhere rather than being heralded in on a silver platter by a media parade. Think the djent revolution that Meshuggah spurred, or the blackgaze revolution that Deafheaven kicked into full gear, or the surprise revival of deathcore that launched Lorna Shore from C-listers to the top of the game.

When it comes to the publicity that any band gets, especially from the big publications that effectively serve as advertising wings of major labels (hence major publications pretty much never giving major releases less than a 7/10 even if those releases are objectively trash, like Nightmares of the Decomposed), that stuff is shallow and most listeners are privy to it. Like any hype train that’s given a big boost on novelty fuel, eventually Sleep Token will have to run on their own, and I think that once the high wears off, a lot of people will realize it was all just gas. But it does still frustrate me that these pop crossover attempts get boosted and talked up like they’re the acts that are keeping metal alive, like the groveling act of making metal on the terms of fleeting pop trends is what needs to be done to keep metal alive and relevant. That’s lazy and weak and it hasn’t ever been what put metal into people’s ears in the past either, not for thrash, not for grunge, not for nu metal, hell not even for glam. The broader pop music sphere caught wind of what was happening and reached out because they wanted what metal was doing, not the other way around. Metal is a genre built on an ethos partly of exhilarating power, and I don’t think that power should be ceded so much to the volatile trends of the day.

To be honest, I guess it makes me a little worried… Pop music has historically come to metal, seeing all sorts of weird, new, exciting, visceral stuff worth trying to emulate and boost. But now it seems like there’s this big push for metal to go the other way, like it’s out of ideas, like there isn’t any more the genre has left to offer, and like it’ll die out without reaching out to the reliable appeal of pop. It’s been a pretty slow year so far, this is the first thing I’ve talked about and the most discussed album of the year so far, by far. Is this the most exciting thing to happen in metal this year? Is this really the best thing we have to offer? Fuckin’ Sleep Token? I hope not.

3/10

[happymetalgirl]

Yep

[happymetalgirl]

My truest love

❤️❤️❤️

[happymetalgirl]

Let's Explore a Metal-Rich Asteroid 🤘

Between Mars and Jupiter, there lies a unique, metal-rich asteroid named Psyche. Psyche’s special because it looks like it is part or all of the metallic interior of a planetesimal—an early planetary building block of our solar system. For the first time, we have the chance to visit a planetary core and possibly learn more about the turbulent history that created terrestrial planets.

Here are six things to know about the mission that’s a journey into the past: Psyche.

1. Psyche could help us learn more about the origins of our solar system.

After studying data from Earth-based radar and optical telescopes, scientists believe that Psyche collided with other large bodies in space and lost its outer rocky shell. This leads scientists to think that Psyche could have a metal-rich interior, which is a building block of a rocky planet. Since we can’t pierce the core of rocky planets like Mercury, Venus, Mars, and our home planet, Earth, Psyche offers us a window into how other planets are formed.

2. Psyche might be different than other objects in the solar system.

Rocks on Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Earth contain iron oxides. From afar, Psyche doesn’t seem to feature these chemical compounds, so it might have a different history of formation than other planets.

If the Psyche asteroid is leftover material from a planetary formation, scientists are excited to learn about the similarities and differences from other rocky planets. The asteroid might instead prove to be a never-before-seen solar system object. Either way, we’re prepared for the possibility of the unexpected!

3. Three science instruments and a gravity science investigation will be aboard the spacecraft.

The three instruments aboard will be a magnetometer, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, and a multispectral imager. Here’s what each of them will do:

Magnetometer: Detect evidence of a magnetic field, which will tell us whether the asteroid formed from a planetary body

Gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer: Help us figure out what chemical elements Psyche is made of, and how it was formed

Multispectral imager: Gather and share information about the topography and mineral composition of Psyche

The gravity science investigation will allow scientists to determine the asteroid’s rotation, mass, and gravity field and to gain insight into the interior by analyzing the radio waves it communicates with. Then, scientists can measure how Psyche affects the spacecraft’s orbit.

4. The Psyche spacecraft will use a super-efficient propulsion system.

Psyche’s solar electric propulsion system harnesses energy from large solar arrays that convert sunlight into electricity, creating thrust. For the first time ever, we will be using Hall-effect thrusters in deep space.

5. This mission runs on collaboration.

To make this mission happen, we work together with universities, and industry and NASA to draw in resources and expertise.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the mission and is responsible for system engineering, integration, and mission operations, while NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Services Program manages launch operations and procured the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Working with Arizona State University (ASU) offers opportunities for students to train as future instrument or mission leads. Mission leader and Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton is also based at ASU.

Finally, Maxar Technologies is a key commercial participant and delivered the main body of the spacecraft, as well as most of its engineering hardware systems.

6. You can be a part of the journey.

Everyone can find activities to get involved on the mission’s webpage. There's an annual internship to interpret the mission, capstone courses for undergraduate projects, and age-appropriate lessons, craft projects, and videos.

You can join us for a virtual launch experience, and, of course, you can watch the launch with us on Oct. 12, 2023, at 10:16 a.m. EDT!

For official news on the mission, follow us on social media and check out NASA’s and ASU’s Psyche websites.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[happymetalgirl]

Why in the year of our lord 2023 are like half of the stories on Metal Injection and Loudwire about how bitter Dave Mustaine is today about Metallica or about Motley Crue drama?????

[happymetalgirl]

Holy shit! Ghost is on FIRE 🔥🔥🔥