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happymetalgirl · 10 months

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Listening to Problematic Bands

This is a segment taken from my Lingua Ignota review awhile ago that focuses on the aforementioned topic, and I figured I would give its own separate post. I made a few edits to make it more generally applicable and of course a few additional thoughts. It’s an interesting topic of discourse with a lot of facets and it’s certainly not going away any time soon.

The problematic artist discourse is complicated, I get it; I don't have a golden bullet answer to it. But somehow in all the discourse I've seen about being responsible and not supporting problematic artists and not enabling shitty behavior, I haven't seen anyone acknowledge the obvious elephant in the room, which is that fans don't want to be punished for something they didn't do.

As listeners, watchers, readers, viewers, enjoyers of art, we all (should) go into enjoying any piece of art with the understanding that, no matter how authentic they may come off in their music or their public appearance, we never fully know the artist. We can't know with complete certainty who of them might be up to some unsavory shit behind closed doors, even the edgy ones, some of whom genuinely do keep their antics on the stage and in the studio. And often the art we enjoy does indeed stand so far away from the artist that we don't think about the artist at all (think: lo-fi hip hop beats to study/relax to). And then there are some (think: asshole Mark Kozelek and his dumb boomer podcast ramblings that he calls "songs") who really put themselves as a person into their art. A little harder to dissociate that kind of shit.

I agree with minimizing support for artists doing bad shit on the basis of it possibly discouraging such behavior from others and it consequentially pressuring them to change, but that can be surprisingly hard to go absolute zero on and draw a line on. Does it stop at the band? Does it stop at the label? Does it stop at side projects? Does it stop at collaborators who haven't come out and said anything? But just because there's no agreed-upon line does not mean that we should just shrug our shoulders and say "well what can you do?" Ultimately, as an individual, the answer to that is pretty much nothing, but somehow you add up enough individuals and you can start to get some good change if you all know that better things are possible and expectable. Maybe you don't all agree exactly how much more you deserve but you sure as hell know it's more than that shit boss is paying you all. Maybe we don't know exactly where we draw that "problematic artist" line, but we know the behavior Hayter described of Alexis Marshall is far beyond wherever we draw it. Being attentive as a listener, however casual or invested, is not about being a paranoid hyperreactive sentinel around artists and trying to have a power trip on people you have little individual power over, and it's certainly not about policing individual fans into not listening to their Antichrist Superstar CD or whatever. Again, I get that vile behavior makes some artists immediately more repulsive and easy to let go of at the drop of a hat, and it's easier for some to drop band they've listened to forever than others. And then I think of my favorite band, Meshuggah.

I listen to Meshuggah more than anything else probably. And to my knowledge they don't have any accusers or hold any racist beliefs or anything of the like, but they could. And as much as I imagine it would very likely taint my listening to their music if everything I hypothetically proposed was in fact true for them, I have a hard time imagining not listening to them. How I listen to music has been so irreversibly shaped by Meshuggah, I tap the iconic rhythm of "Bleed" with my fingers on every surface around me without even thinking about it, and I hear Meshuggah in the thousands of bands they've influenced. I snuck Meshuggah into my wedding playlist. It's honestly hard to think about what my music-loving life would look like without Meshuggah, and in some ways it feels impossible, and for me (and probably most Meshuggah fans) it has never been about Jens or Fredrick or Martin or Tomas or Dick. And it doesn't seem like it's ever been about them to themselves either. So I get it for fans who feel torn between their love for the music and their feeling betrayed or that it's been tainted by the very artist that made it.

The whole "separate the art from the artist" cliché tends to be invoked pretty superficially and left at that as just an excuse to not think critically about listening and supporting choices. There is validity to our ability to compartmentalize the two, but viewing art in a vacuum where the artist doesn't exist is reductive, and choosing to only assess art though that lens because grappling with the complicated, dicey, or uncomfortable context surrounding an artist and their art is and lazy and cowardly.

When the Me Too movement kicked off, revealing the extensive abuse of power that went on often in plain sight did really shock the system of music and film, but it also came as no surprise that there were a significant number of power-tripping rapists and abusers within the upper echelons of politics and entertainment. Abusable power and influence tends to draw people that want that power at least partly for the sake of abusing it. My initial (naïve) expectation that Me Too would open up the festering abscess of well-connected, powerful abusers and allow them to be drained from the positions they abused. I expected it to be a tumultuous process, for the industry and for fans; it is definitely hard to grapple with a series of revelations of artists you might have liked to be revealed as horrible people behind the scenes. I can only imagine how pop punk fans feel. But I expected it to be relatively quick, like amputating a gangrenous digit.

Unfortunately, nearly a decade later, musicians, actors, producers, etc. are still being revealed for what they truly are, and it's evident that sexual abuse within the arts and entertainment is not a matter of one rotten digit but rather a sepsis that requires intense systemic treatment to fully cure. I don't think it's as much of a matter of abuse-hungry monsters being drawn to positions of power the way the U.S. police systematically attracts and grooms pathologic liars and untreated anger management cases. I think that's part of it, and I think power can definitely corrupt too. But ultimately, I think the extent of abuse is due largely to the attitudes endemic to the broader culture and (un)consciously accepted as normal that surround sex, consent, and abuse that still frame absolutely pathologic behaviors, manipulations, and violations of consent as natural methods of pursuit. It's also the general social framing of sex as a pursuit by one sex and avoidance by the other that perpetuates this, but that's too much of a tangent to go off on.

Obviously, sexual abuse by band members is not the only route for bands to be problematic. Metal is an old enough genre for its once rebellious and transgressive Gen X and even boomer pioneers to now be the out-of-touch pearl-clutchers putting their feet in their mouths and unwilling to learn where they don't understand in favor of reactionary stagnation and decay. We also have no shortage of outright racists and neo-Nazis, some of whom are just too beloved for the culture at large to reckon with, which (for lack of a more resonant term) seems pretty cucked to me. Like, we're worried about reckoning with the racism of so many of the big figureheads in the genre because, what? Metal is dependent on them? You can't let go of Phil Anselmo? We can't imagine that if Peter Steele were still alive his legacy of goth metal pioneering could be tainted by some kind of anti-vax-jizz-is-better nutjob winging about cancel culture if not outright commitment to the iffy Nazi bits he teased in his music? That's fucking weak? Metal as a genre culture looks fucking pathetic clinging onto these toxic idols like we can't do better. The people that whine about "cancel culture run amok" don't care about metal's culture surviving; they've listened to the same shit for 30 years and don't want to feel bad about being uncritical of the metal comfort food from their teens that they still consume. Part of maintaining the health of a culture is having the guts to be critical and recognize when toxicity from toxic people needs to be addressed for what it is, even if those toxic people are legends, even if that legendary band's legacy becoming sour in retrospect is hard to think about.

#heavy metal #metal #problematic content #cancel culture

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happymetalgirl · 10 months

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Dethklok, Cannibal Corpse, Korn x Adidas collab

2023 finally getting serious

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happymetalgirl · 10 months

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Ghost - Impera

I should have done this months ago. I mean this album is over a year old now, but better late than never. I don't really feel a need to get too deep into the details on this album; it's been out for 15 months and has been discussed extensively. It feels weird to be writing about an album this late in the game. This isn't meant to relitigate old discourse about it that's basically finished at this point, I basically just want to add my two cents about why I feel the way I do about it and why I still want to talk about it. But anyway...

It was no accident that Impera, came at the end of the longest gap between full-length releases for the Ghost, specifically well after the COVID-19 pandemic took its stranglehold off live music. The band was on a holistically upward trajectory for the past decade, bigger sales, bigger sound, and, critically, bigger crowds. 2015's grand Meliora was already such a practically unrecognizable size-up from the spooky retro rock of their debut just 5 years earlier, and the band made their aspirations clear with each release LP and EP afterwards. Popestar introduced for the first time in the band's self-aware campy lore a new frontman not tethered to the mic stand by the excessive garments of the satanic pope, but rather youthful, limber, and lively, more mobile and able to herd and rally the band's increasingly larger crowds. And the subsequent full-length, Prequelle, committed to this new turn fully. If you thought Opus Eponymous was too silly and over-the-top, then you weren't prepared for the full-on arena rock parade that was Prequelle. Prequelle was and still is the campiest album Ghost has ever released. The band was fully aware, and it was on purpose. Soaring group choruses, lighter-waving power ballads, swinging dance numbers, sax solos. Ghost were making a B-line for the arenas, with the big songs to handle the crowds of those magnitudes. And it worked; it worked because Ghost's songwriting masterminds put in the work.

Pop songwriting is both easy and hard. The tried and true format is and simpler is usually better. It's not rocket science. The challenge, however, is not just writing a pop song, it's writing a great pop song. And Ghost applied a perfectionist approach to chiseling out killer hooks and sing-along melodies from the brilliantly simple fun arena rock anthems of Prequelle, and the results spoke for themselves. And then 2 years later it all stopped.

It stopped for everyone. And going off their consistent release schedule up to that point, Ghost probably would have had the follow-up to Prequelle out a year earlier, but there was no way they were going to put out an album in the height of the pandemic because Impera was absolutely made for the stadiums. When the touring industry rebooted and Impera dropped a year later though, it was clear that Ghost had made the most of their indoor time.

A natural continuation from and combination of the previous two albums, Impera harnessed the grandeur and bombast of Meliora and the infectious campy fun of Prequelle into the most arena-ready batch of songs the band has ever put forward. I got the sense that this album completely achieved Ghost's artistic goal that they've been building toward for the past 10+ years, and by the end of the year, with my numerous replays of it, I couldn't help but concede that Ghost had outdone themselves. Impera is their best work. Ironic that the band reaching a new summit would be with an album about the precarious rise and fall of empires.

Hard to say now if that theme foreshadows a fall from grace for Ghost, obviously I hope not. For as much as they play into their gimmicky image, Ghost are not in danger of losing their throne due to fans tiring of their goofy novelty. No, the image is the icing on top of the solid compositional foundation and not the other way around. It will take actual creative fatigue, a major misstep, or series of missteps to derail the Ghost train. Not to say a band nosediving from their peak isn't a tale at least as old as Metallica, but maybe that's why Ghost picked the theme for their magnum opus, to remind themselves to not go the way of the Roman empire, or Coldplay. And hey, it's not like anyone would say no to the job security of a career like Metallica's or Coldplay's either, however undeserved it may be. But more likely is that the lyrical content was inspired by the present moment. I don't think anyone would argue against the current times being historic to say the least.

I won't get into it too deeply because it's really not that complicated, but also I could spend a gratuitous amount of time going into every detail of why each song is so great. Impera really is the sum of a great many little details that show how much time and care was put into making every song complete on its own and within the context of the rest of the album. The whole album is a cohesive, fun, glorious exhibition of everything Ghost, and they made that clear from the soaring high note that Tobias Forge opens "Kaisarion" with. And like Prequelle, Impera runs the gamut of chugging metallic heaviness like on "Watcher in the Sky" to the soulful ballads and power ballads of "Darkness at the Heart of My Love" and "Respite on the Spitalfields", following a similar flow to the previous album that works as well here. Also, Prequelle may be the campiest album Ghost has ever released, but "Twenties" is definitely the most over-the-top cheesiest campiest theatrical-ist song the band has ever made, too cheesy for some fans even. Personally, I'm here for it, and I can't imagine being surprised by it either; I mean it's Ghost, a cartoonish horn section over chugging heavy metal grooves and comic book villain vocals isn't that giant of a step up from the corniness of "Kiss the Go-Goat", "Ghuleh / Zombie Queen", "Rats", or "Dance Macabre". The other singles, the marching "Hunter's Moon" and the snare-driven rhythmic "Call Me Little Sunshine", are also textbook arena rockers, and I personally love the throwback to the more retro staccato keyboard motifs of Opus Eponymous on "Griftwood".

I played the shit out of Impera all of last summer and I'll probably play it again this summer, it's that fun. Like I said, Ghost have topped themselves, and every band that reaches what feels like their likely peak has that existential crisis of where to go from there if the only way to go is down. A lot of bands, either due to the pressure of future expectations or not knowing what to do next, make a big leap of faith into the unknown. Or they try in vain to replicate the lightning in the bottle that propelled them to the top over the course of the rest of their comparatively stale career. Ghost may not have anywhere higher to climb on the mountain they've chosen to ascend, but I think they can maintain a longevity at this elite level if they maintain the focus on meticulous song-writing while ensuring not to fall into the trap of formulaicness. Like I said, Ghost is not built on the satanic pope outfits or the Papa Emeritus lore or on the anonymity they started with that the lawsuit from former members eliminated. Ghost is built on the song-craft, and that doesn't wear out. The question now is, will Ghost wear out or get lazy, or do they have the stamina to keep up this level of attention-to-detail and dominate another decade? I certainly hope they can muster the latter. Here's to another decade of Ghost, in the twenties!!!

Also yes, this was my favorite album of the year last year.

It kind of sucks to say that another band's bad album is partially what lit the fire under my ass to write this because it kind of implicitly takes away from the excellent work Ghost does, but a big part of why I'm writing this now is indeed because of the band that all the big online magazines that shill for major labels are hailing as the next Ghost this year: Sleep Token.

I already made my gripes with that band's latest album known in detail in a previous post about that album, but in short, I really don't like the push I've been seeing from a lot publications for this groveling adoption of the most fleeting of pop trends into metal in what feels like desperation for broader cultural prominence. There's nothing "innovative" or "forward-thinking" or "more mature" about whoring out to the whim of trends calculated to appeal to the lowest common denominator in a bid for a shortcut to relevance. I don't mind when bands incorporate pop elements into their sound to spice it up or even writing a more straight-up pop song; like I said, pop songwriting is a challenging art, and that's part of what Ghost does so well, and what many bands who metalheads probably don't consider "pop" at all also do. What I do mind is when bands like Bad Omens or Bring Me the Horizon or Wage War try their hand at the kind of mind-numbing, middling bullshit that Maroon 5 and Charlie Puth feed to inattentive half-listeners in grocery stores. It's even more offensive when these bands know they can do better, and Sleep Token is the worst offender as of late in this department. Sleep Token is the lazy, unsustainable shortcut via the hollow gimmick of referential pop trend-hopping within metal presented as "genre-bending" to broader relevance that Ghost, by contrast, have earned through tireless improvement of pop songcraft over the past decade.

I speculated at the end of my post that this fawning over Sleep Token might come from an anxiety over metal as a genre not having anything left to offer broader culture. And I think the short-term focus inherent within capitalism that all these publications (which are basically marketing wings of labels) are beholden to is what makes the possibility of a drought so scary for them. The driving forces behind Loudwire and Metal Injection don't exactly permit the patience for what is likely just a natural lull in creativity, because to them that's a loss in productivity, and that's next to sacrilege. I also speculated on my own anxiety about metal as a genre running out of steam, but taking a step back and looking at the broader history of any genre existing longer than 10 years, there are waves, peaks and valleys, times of plenty and times of want, drop-offs and revivals. It's the circle of life, and we've seen it with metal already, and with subgenres within metal. And also, if the time is near for when metal bottoms out in a way it doesn't come back from and effectively "dies" (as much as any genre in the internet age can die), so what? If metal dies, it will not go into the ground with any unused potential, it will be because the very active and passionate community will have completed music, gotten all the achievements, and exhausted everything possible to with the genre except retread old ground. But I know that it won't be brought back or kept from the brink by bands writing songs for car insurance commercials.

This got a little tangential at the end here, but I think it's worth distinguishing (since so many people draw parallels between them lately) the genuine pop appeal of Ghost that Impera embodies so excellently and the cynical pop appeal of Sleep Token. Leaving aside the riveting discourse about whether Ghost qualify as a "metal band" or not, they unquestionably represent the genre to the unfamiliar, and I don't think metal needs the kind of submissive pop crossover appeal of Sleep Token when it has the emphatic pop crossover appeal of Ghost at their creative peak.

Anyway, Impera is a masterpiece, thank you Ghost!

9/10: AOTY 2022

#Ghost #Impera #new album #album review #metal #heavy metal #hard rock #arena rock #AOTY #AOTY 2022

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happymetalgirl · 10 months

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Chat Pile - God's Country

Chat Pile was the surprise breakout act for many fans of heavy, noisy, or otherwise extreme music last year, myself included. And for good reason, even though the preceding EPs the band released are sonically in line with it, God's Country hit like a totally different out-of-control pick-up truck through the living room wall of an Oklahoman house in the middle of the day (if you know you know; if you don't know, don't worry about it). The band members are from the desolate middle-American saucepan state, and the hidden horrors of the deep red rural hellscape of their home environment certainly seeps through on the sarcastically-titled God's Country, juxtaposed frighteningly with the album cover. Benign on first glance, the beige background features the image of a bunch of powerlines and energy infrastructure, with a massive detention center behind. Such a typical sight in the more remote parts of the U.S., but once the identity of the buildings of the image become clear, the album cover's statement on America's carceral system is impossible to miss.

It's hard in this day and age with modern metal production to really stand out from the crowd on heaviness alone, but like I said, Chat Pile hit with an unexpected and truly unique kind of noise/sludge metal heaviness. Aggressively rumbly distorted bass lines mixed as high as (if not higher than) the down-tuned guitars, booming and thundering drums, and swampy clean guitar tones are all well-arranged in chaotic and thrilling dynamic from front to back. But the real show-stealer on God's Country is vocalist Raygun Busch. The vocal prowess Busch displays across the album is not exactly the traditional sort (impeccable control of a variety of techniques across a wide vocal range). Rather, what makes Busch's performance compelling is how visceral and uncontrolled it comes across. It's still a talent that he's wielding and it only sounds uncontrolled, at least partly. The range his performance spans on the album goes from droning and unsettling spoken word, to dissociative and inebriated moaning, to the full-on manic breakdowns of full-throated wailing, shouting, and shrieking that really chill you to the bone.

The band do quite a fine job merging the theatrical horrors of B-movie cinema with the untold real-life horror stories of modern America: ("God's country"), using the excesses of the former to reel you in and press your face up to the latter. The first song on the album, "Slaughterhouse", explodes out of the gate with a concussing, industrial-grade barrage of bass-y distorted sludge that almost certainly leaves all heads ringing throughout the venue in a live setting. The lyrics leave a healthy amount of room for interpretation, but the most likely interpretation given the title is the detailing of the industrial-sized horrors of factory farming, specifically the trauma inflicted upon the workers: being watched by all the animals, trying not to look into their eyes, the head-ringing loudness throughout the labyrinthian and unescapable facility, and all the dreadful, traumatizing screaming. It's a fucking chilling track, deserving of it's pulverizing instrumentation.

The album's second track, "Why?", is arguably the standout cut on the album; unlike the first track there's really no room for interpretation. It's the most direct the band gets on any song on the album. Raygun Busch starts with an inquisitively perplexed delivery of the simple question, "why do people have live outside?", and escalates the same unanswered question to a crazed, furious, repetitive interrogation of America's inhumane treatment of the homeless. It's a simple, yet bloodcurdlingly convicting confrontation of the broader systems that brutalize the impoverished to protect the wealthy and the illusion of American utopia.

And the album does not let up from there, even on the more relatively subdued (less screaming) songs. The more instrumentally understated "Pamela" details in poetic brilliance the recurrent bargaining mechanism to cope with the torture of lingering grief and the suicidal (possibly also homicidal) resignation of a parent (probably a mother) losing a child to a drowning accident. "Wicked Puppet Dance" makes an effective use of lyrical brevity over dizzyingly pounding instrumentation to vividly portray the hallucinatory and psychosis-inducing trappings of meth addiction. The grim, unsettling subject matter and imagery of the songs and the deranged delivery of the lyrics evoke equal comparisons to heady experimentalists Xiu Xiu and to critical pariahs like self-titled-era Korn.

The always-topical "Anywhere" spotlights the endemic fear of the ever-looming possibility of being caught the fire of the American-signature brand of mass gun violence literally... anywhere, while the merciless "Tropical Beaches, Inc." focuses on the slower way America likes to kills you, through the ceaseless grind of enslavement to capitalism.

The odd name of the album's closing track, "grimace_smoking_weed.jpg", only serves to disarm you for possibly the most terrifying moment on the album. On the 9-minute closer Raygun Busch frantically and incoherently describes desperately trying to resist being compelled to commit suicide by a haunting/recurring hallucination of the furry purple McDonald's mascot under the effects of a bad heroin trip. The lyrics are so all over the place and so chaotic, the voice of the speaker shifts to and from Busch himself and the demonic hallucination of Grimace in his head. The closing track here is definitely Busch's most harrowing performance, and it's his vivid, soul-chilling panic that really gives this song the edge. The obvious parallel to Korn here is to Jonathan Davis' similarly disturbing and traumatizing performance at the end of the self-titled album on "Daddy". Whereas Davis opened up his old wounds in a very questionably unhealthy manner and channeled his trauma through his most tortured vocal performance to make a monumentally terrifying piece of art that highlights the lasting torment of trauma from childhood abuse, Raygun Busch unleashes his full vocal madness to give sight to the invisible haunting thralls of the looming specter of suicidal tendencies and the nightmarish trappings of drug addiction. Both incredible, petrifying, nightmarish, and eternally memorable performances that deserve the utmost respect.

God's Country is one of those albums where at the end of it you kind of just have to sit for a while and decompress from it. It's a very mentally/emotionally draining album, especially at its finale, but despite that, it's also a cathartically pounding and validating album. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance that all of us have to live with or at least perform, living in the United States (and the rest of the western world). God's country is the richest country in the world, the most advanced, and supposedly the most capable, the best place in the world to live, heaven on Earth. And yet, there's so much hell. So much fucked up shit, so much suffering, so much that doesn't seem right. And you know that sense that something's wrong is so widely pervasive because it's the feeling that propagandists for the powerful try to redirect toward scapegoats like immigrants, people of color, queer people, etc. Anyone but the wealthy whose insatiable and senseless greed is fed through our labor. The way Chat Pile cut straight through all the noise and confusion to get at the real issues that make horror such a latent everyday pollutant all across the country that we're all inoculated to is strangely affirming and energizing. It pushes your face up to glass to look at the grotesque inner workings of the mundane everyday things you pass by on the way to your job, take for granted as normal, and think nothing of. The suffering that drives the engines that churn out the illusion of American prosperity, and that lock the vast majority of us in subclinical misery. It shows you what really makes God's country such a living hell.

I love this fucking album; it is grueling to sit through, but it's rewarding and honestly not a hard listen at all. The impeccably heavy instrumentals sort of tap into that constantly heightened sense of urgency as though the band is communicating that, yes, they're seeing and feeling what you're seeing and feeling. And honestly, for such a critically-acclaimed album, it plays surprisingly down in the muck and the mud with the people. It's poetic, but it's not inaccessible or unnecessarily cryptic. It's brilliant, but it's not snobbish. Chat Pile meddle shamelessly with the emotional rawness of grunge and unrestrained heavy fervor and fury of nu metal, and it's just subtle enough that the reviewers who ordinarily turn their noses up to such low-brow shit probably didn't notice they had enjoyed a nu metal album until it was too late. That's right, Chat Pile are nu metal, process that on your own.

9/10, best debut of 2022 and one of the best albums of the year in any category.

#Chat Pile #God's Country #new music #new album #album review #sludge metal #noise rock #noise #noise metal #noise music #experimental music #nu metal #metal #heavy metal

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happymetalgirl · 11 months

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happymetalgirl · 11 months

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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

#Sleep Token #Take Me Back to Eden #metal #heavy metal #alternative metal #new album #new music #album review

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happymetalgirl · 2 years

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Critical Reparations

Just jumping back on here to do a quick piece as a warm-up for a longer, more disgustingly thorough (and late) piece on a long-awaited 2022 album of mine.

Anaal Nathrakh – Endarkenment

Anaal Nathrakh, Endarkenment. I reviewed this album back when it came out in 2020 when I was active on here. After a few listens (in 2020) I gave the band (new to my ears at the time) a quick and minimally impressed acknowledgement of a sorta unique but odd sound on the album, recommended workin’ on it some more, and went on my merry way to likely not revisit A.N. any time soon. Fast-forward a year, and Anaal Nathrakh have become one of my favorite bands, like very top shelf.

I decided to give a listen to the band’s 5th record, In the Constellation of the Black Widow, an album well-acknowledged among fans as a crystallizing point for the band, and after working enthusiastically through the rest of the band’s discography back up to Endarkenment, I realized I had not done that album anything even close to justice with my initial dismissive 7/10 paragraph.

Despite being signed to (and releasing 4 albums for) a rather large record label, Metal Blade, since 2014’s Desideratum (and releasing 3 solid albums with Candlelight prior), Anaal Nathrakh don’t seem to have the biggest of reputations in modern metal, unless I’m missing something. I just haven’t seen them talked about, pretty much at all on other band’s platforms or platforms related to the (several) genres they incorporate. Being rather familiar with all their work now (11 albums plus an EP since the start of the millennium), which I consider to be pretty damn consistently stellar, I find it really weird that they’re not more widely discussed and acknowledged.

Anaal Nathrakh is two dudes: vocalist Dave Hunt who goes by the name “V.I.T.R.I.O.L.” & instrumental director Mick Kenney who goes by “Irrumator”. They enlist live musicians for the occasion of course, but the creative core is Hunt and Kenney. The duo established their stylistic footing on their first proper works in the early 2000’s: a wall of sound of filthy, aggressive, and sardonic black metal more of the fast and pummeling variety than the blizzardy atmospheric variety. Less snowstorm, more raging hellfire and the demonic screams that come along with it. After laying the groundwork with their first two albums and EP, the pair took the intensity up a notch on 2006’s Eschaton, which bore a noticeable hint of grindcore to bolster the band’s fiery, but still primordial, black metal sound. A year later, the band leaned into the industrial elements they had been occasionally tinkering with, while not dropping the black metal vitriol or the grindcore chaos, and laid the foundation for what was to come on Hell Is Empty, and All the Devils Are Here. They would build confidently upon it before the decade’s end with In the Constellation of the Black Widow, which saw an improvement in mixing the band’s many sonic ingredients and a confident introduction of harrowing operatic vocals from V.I.T.R.I.O.L. to up the already biblical grandiosity of Anaal Nathrakh’s sound.

By this point (2009) A.N. would basically accumulate all the stylistic components they would be working with in the next decade, and the albums that followed in the 2010’s all reached to a higher sonic plane than anything prior to 2009 as a result. The duo put out a string of 5 incredible albums last decade that deserve far far more recognition than what they’ve been given, no dip in intensity, no sign of fatigue, no wayward artistic choices, and no compromise on letting go of any aspect of their sound. Of those albums, my favorite are probably the dizzying Passion and the punching Desideratum, which introduced the first of the more synthetic electronic industrial elements that would expand the band’s arsenal even further for the coming albums. By decade’s end, Anaal Nathrakh would have a 10-album monument to their own truly relentless and unique style of melodic extreme blackened deathgrind.

What I love about Anaal Nathrakh is the excess. I had heard clumsy attempts and always wondered if it was possible to throw together metal’s most extreme substyles in a complimentary way, and Anaal Nathrakh showed a stunning mastery of it in the 2010’s. The group’s music sounds like hell on earth itself with jagged barbed wire and shrapnel thrown into the storm and the voices of demons and malevolent deities refusing to let a second pass without shrieking torment or odes of condemnation. It’s fucking awesome! And somehow, they reached a higher level on 2020’s Endarkenment.

2020 was a tumultuous year, and the band put out an album fitting for the occasion. Not usually keen to print their barely-intelligible lyrics, A.N. printed partial lyrics this time for the apocalyptically-themed Endarkenment, dealing with contemporary crises of anti-intellectualism, fermenting fascist zealotry, vindictive human cruelty, willful ignorance, and political upheaval. The lyrics hit home, and while the band’s apocalyptic style finds itself more apt than ever, they dig deeper into the soul on this one, pushing through the misanthropy and tempting defeatism and cynicism. Though the lyrics are appropriately bleak as fuck, V.I.T.R.I.O.L. makes the bold move on this album that gives it its higher status: melody, cathartic melody. Yes, A.N. had been making plenty of use of operatic vocals and catchy guitar parts, but nothing quite like what Endarkenment introduces: anthemic choruses, soaring guitar leads, soulful solos. And again, with zero compromise on what they built to get there. The opening title track is evidence enough, and not a lucky aberration either; glorious operatic cleans, throat-shredding screams, inhuman double-bass blast beats, infectious guitar leads. There’s plenty of diversity on the track listing too, with songs like “Thus, Always to Tyrants”, “Beyond Words”, and “Finish Them” taking a more direct and hellish approach, while songs like, “Endarkenment”, “Libidinous (A Pig with Cocks in Its Eyes)”, “Feeding the Death Machine”, “Create Art, Though the World May Perish”, and “Requiem” masterfully inject a fire of resistance into the spirit in the midst of all the seemingly hopeless hellish madness through inspiring melody that manages to mesh expertly with the unyielding extreme metal it weaves itself into. “The Age of Starlight Ends” is probably the standout cut as far as achieving everything all at once on a single track goes on the album: Nasty black metal screams, soaring chorus, blistering industrial grindcore, and cinematic choral vocals, though there are no absolutely no skips on this album.

Endarkenment is one of those albums where a band you don’t think can get any better goes and gets fucking better. Not an ounce of muscle is lost with the tonal agility the band works into this album, and everything they’ve built upon up to this point is channeled into it like a goddamn sonic Kamehameha. It’s also not trying to be anything it’s not, if that makes sense; it’s one of those albums that sets itself on doing one thing and doing it really fucking well, like Meshuggah or Cattle Decapitation, or Frontierer, or Nile. It’s not an emotionally diverse and poetic Sunbather or a super lyrically poignant Toxicity or Tomb of the Mutilated (joking, please understand that I’m joking). It’s an already accomplished Anaal Nathrakh evolving their own sound even further, and unless I’m missing something obvious, they’re doing it relatively under the radar and there’s no one else really doing anything comparable.

I don’t know exactly how the fuck I disregarded this album so grossly when it first came out. Chalk it up to a crazy year, lots of upheaval close to home and on a grander scale, and me being a dumbass. I’m glad to finally be doing this album justice though. My original 2020 AOTY was Oranssi Pazuzu’s 10/10 psychedelic black metal masterpiece, Mestarin Kynsi, and while it sure as fuck deserved that spot, Endarkenment deserves to sit alongside it.

10/10

#Anaal Nathrakh #Endarkenment #metal blade records #album review #new music #new album #heavy metal #metal #black metal #extreme metal #blackened death metal #death metal #melodic death metal #grindcore #deathgrind #industrial metal #AOTY

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happymetalgirl · 2 years

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Album of the Year: Lingua Ignota - Sinner Get Ready

I knew this was going to be a challenging album to write about (as it’s already a challenging enough album to listen to), and thanks to the additional context of the album’s creation, environment, and inspiration recently provided by Kristen Hayter, that gargantuan challenge has only grown. But as inactive as I have been on this blog, I have known that I wanted to write about this album ever since it came out and immediately grabbed my ears and declared itself the year's best by a mile, so here goes.

I write long pieces. Even when I say I’ll try to keep it short. But I’m not deluding myself on this one; this is going to be long.

As strong as the urge is to “focus on the music”, there is no way to adequately or responsibly address this album without the context surrounding it, and much of that context is extremely harrowing. I will be discussing the things that happened that Hayter divulged in her relationship with Alexis Marshall of the band Daughters, and while I will avoid being intentionally gratuitous, the discussion comes with the same content warnings she provided: sexual assault, rape, suicide, mental and emotional abuse, and sexual abuse.

Lingua Ignota has deservedly garnered tremendous praise throughout the segments of the music world that have become attentive to Hayter's work, and the praise from the metal world is but a fraction of it. I discovered her through her collaboration with The Body on the best tracks from their LP I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer., shortly after the release of Lingua's All Bitches Die. But it was of course with 2019's Caligula that Lingua Ignota's gripping "survivor anthems" really broke through to a larger captive audience, and again, deservedly so. To call "compelling" the 66 minutes of juxtaposition between angelic, soaring classical vocals and shuddering vengeful screams of agony, gorgeous neoclassical arrangements and harsh industrial noise, evocative, liturgical poetry and utterly unrepentant devilish incantations, violent curses, and death wishes that Caligula offers would be a gross understatement. With it, Hayter expanded on an already-solid foundation of uniquely and honestly petrifying lyricism and a similarly unique sonic pallet that set her far apart from even her closest contemporaries (if there even are any). And yet, Sinner Get Ready is even better.

For as much praise as I gave Caligula (and it was honest praise), I felt like I wasn't really connecting to it at the level that I felt like I could or should or that the album deserved, possibly also based on how much I saw it clearly meant to people for whom its messages hit closer to home. As my blog's name implies, I'm a boy, and because of that I've been dealt a luckier hand in terms of being more likely to go through life without facing sexual assault or fearing it, and I have indeed fortunately never found myself in danger or sexual assault (not saying that men don't face sexual assault or that sexual assault against men isn't important, it's just not as much and often not as physically violent). I even wondered on and off how much of the critical acclaim Caligula received might have been based on some writers' feelings of obligation due to the grim honesty of the subject matter. Honestly, I think there probably is some element of obligation to it, but ultimately I don't think it's important, it's unprovable, likely negligible, and ultimately not worth worrying about for an album certainly deserving in significant part because of the harsh truths it so boldly presents. I've never got the sense that Hayter is manipulatively pimping her trauma for a cynical artistic cash grab or anything, even if I didn't connect as deeply to it on Caligula as others.

Sinner Get Ready, on the other hand, clicked immediately. Not only that, I gained a greater appreciation for Caligula through it, and this is after I had expected less of the follow-up to Caligula for some reason(s). The title being taken from a line from the title track of All Bitches Die had me wondering if it was going to be a handful of reworked demos or something, plus Hayter's stating that it would be calmer and not as industrially driven as her past works (which I interpreted as choosing to fight with one hand tied behind the back), and it seeming to come so soon after Caligula had me not expecting as much of Sinner Get Ready. I was so happy to be proven wrong though. "Happy" may not find a place for much else in this review though. Unlike Caligula, the lyrical focus of Sinner Get Ready was much more tangible and close-to-home for me; Hayter's dialogues with and challenging of belief in God and her experience with the sickness of organized religion came after a culmination of my own very long process of walking away from Christianity. While Hayter has a hard time describing her own complex position on faith and God and hasn't fully ruled out belief, her album does not shy away from harsh critique and conversations far more honest and biting than the thoughtless, rehearsed bullshit praise-Jesus prayers of most pastors.

Still astounding to me is how incredible these more “stripped back” instrumentals are. I thought Hayter restricting herself from her harrowing screaming vocals (with the exception of one song) and industrial noise would be her holding herself back; instead, Hayter and her producers take the more traditional sonic palette of Appalachian folk instrumentation and Cathedral-filling pipe organ, choirs, and piano and twist it all into a quite thematically fitting thing to behold. I suppose I should get past the preamble and start getting into the finer details of the album, which I will do song-by-song for the sake of organization. I’ll still have plenty to say afterwards, and not just about the album.

———

"The Order of Spiritual Virgins"

Sinner Get Ready opens with its longest track, and it is an epic indeed deserving of its 9-minute run-time. It’s not an epic in the same way winding 20-minute prog rock songs are, but it captures more vividly and scarily than any other religious music I’ve heard the type of unworldly religious experience it sets up. The song is inspired by a sexually repressive and isolating Christian sect/cult from the 1700’s that resided in the state in which Hayter took residence during this album's creation. The lyrics are few and they become taken over as the song progresses by these seriously eerie, mesmerized, atonal choir mantras of “eternal devotion”, but they are enough within the unnerving swells of strings and freakish explosions of clanging low-register piano and odd old-timey percussion to capture the sinister transfixion of being coaxed into extreme religious devotion. It is indeed not without its unambiguously negative connotations of futile hyper-protectivity and authoritarianism with the lines “Sickness finds a way in” (which ushers in the hypnotized swells of devotion and cinematically foreboding piano chaos) and “I am relentless, I am incessant, I am the ocean” making their way into the chants before “eternal devotion” takes over. Given the inclusion of elements of domestic abandonment and Hayter’s history of writing about her past (and at the time current) abuser, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to interpret/apply these lyrics to malignant devotion to a life-consuming abusive partner. The chaos of the song concludes with a spoken sample of a man talking about finding a more vivid connection to his lost mother's presence in his childhood in silent solitude than to a tangible person in a crowd, solidifying the song's theme of isolation through religious devotion: “that’s what you get out of the silence”. Whether it’s a deceptive religious leader, a controlling partner, or even a desperate devotion to an idea of God, the eerie, Cathedral-filling, soul-strangling monolith of instrumental cacophony of the song is brilliantly fitting. A phenomenal introductory movement to the album, and it's only the beginning.

"I Who Bend the Tall Grasses"

Oh shit, second track in and this album is already more intense than the most try-hard shit out there with this song’s chilling dialogue between Hayter, God, and possibly one other person. I’m sure any who’ve been to church enough or who’ve had to sit through “grace” at the thanksgiving table last month with racist relatives know how the typical performative prayers go and how aggravatingly inauthentic they grow over years of repetition as a supposed communication to the most important power in life. It's hollow bullshit. By contrast, the manic, vengeful performance Hayter gives here through some of the most dynamically and diversely expressive vocals on the album is realer than any prayer I’ve ever heard. While the lines of the song alternate somewhat ambiguously between being spoken by the praying speaker and the divine, the prayer itself is hardly ambiguous. Like she has many times before, Hayter’s speaker is a calling upon the Lord whom she has dutifully served and vociferously demanding divine vengeance upon the man in the lyrics. The way the lyrics progress, it sounds like God is refusing to grant Hayter’s demands despite her many sacrifices, and instead asserts his own power in defense of the man. While the rest of the album does see Hayter focus more on classically styled singing (however layered it gets), here she pulls out the violent, enthralling delivery that made her past works so chilling. Knowing now that this album was created not in the distant aftermath, but in the throes, of an abusive relationship heightens the grimness of this song especially. Like the preceding track, dissonant choral mantras raise the tension of the atmosphere as Hayter proclaims “where does your light not shine?” over grand pipe organ chords and chapel chimes as inverted in their appropriation as the religious imagery Hayter invokes in her vein-bulging, blood-curdling calls for death. It’s the most incantational/liturgical-like song in the album and it’s a brilliantly hellish, nightmarish distortion of it that’s as petrifying as music gets.

"Many Hands"

Reprising the refrain from “All Bitches Die (All Bitches Die Here)” that titles the album, “Many Hands” switches its mode of dialogue with the divine to from distorted Catholic chamber instrumentation to mutated Appalachian folk incantations, with sharply piercing and violent plucks of acoustic guitar or something else that sound as though they’re about the break the damn thing, along with dissonant strums of banjo or dulcimer or some shit backing Hayter’s cold recitations. The repeated lyrics about the Lord both weeping of his sacrifice for the speaker while holding her by the neck shed light on the internal contradictions of the gospel of the omnipotent and supposedly sorrowful God forced to both sacrifice himself and somehow unable to save those whom he loves. There are certainly parallels one could draw between the Lord in these lines and the controlling partner Hayter had at the time as well, and of all the songs on the album that parallel a loveless God and a loveless lover, this one perhaps paints the most candidly sinister picture of the kind of false benevolence of their repeated punishments. And the wholly unsettling instrumentation on the verge of snapping in the background behind Hayter’s operatic wails of really provides the anxiety appropriate for the song and brings out the true malevolence of both subjects in one of the album's most sonically pioneering pieces.

"Pennsylvania Furnace"

This is the one that really gets me. As soon as this was released as the first song from the upcoming album, I knew this “toned down approach” was nothing to worry about except for what it would do to my tear ducts. Damn if this one isn’t a fucking heart-churner. Sticking to minimalist piano and only the subtlest of stringed backing to supplement her beautifully mournful vocals on the track, Hayter pulls out a simply breathtaking classical ballad piece whose every chord change is a perfect twisting of the knife in the soul. The song deals with the earthly hell of isolation and other people’s creating of that isolation but it also ties in this sense of hopelessness in the unconvinced religious invocations it employs. There’s just something so heartbreaking in the somber sarcasm in the earnest softness of Hayter’s delivery of “There is victory in Jesus”. There’s so much expression in it, I can hear the regret and self-chastising of turning for help to a God who never gave any. There are many ways to read into it, but the line “do you want to be in hell with me” to me reads of a defeated self-loathing that rejects what seems like the futility of help and only accepts company in misery. Knowing now how close the the brink of death Hayter’s relationship with Alexis Marshall pushed her, I could certainly see this song’s lyrics being pulled from a suicidal mindset, giving that line an even darker connotation. Goddamn there is so much concentrated heartbroken anguish in this song, and lines like “I know you want to stop, but you can’t stop”, the lines about casting off earthly bonds, the lines about watching the home with the family from a looking-in view while alone, and “I fear your name / above all others” are given so much more deeply tragic context in the wake of Hayter’s story about the relationship this song was borne from. Everything about this song, the somber piano, the swells of vocal vibrato, the tragic lyrics, to me, makes it the best on the album.

"Repent Now Confess Now"

Hayter takes us back to mass for the fifth track of the album with the return of the hall-filling strings and layered choral vocals (and bringing this time a banjo’s subtle strums), and to paint a portrait of self-loathing blame kneeling in desperation before a thankless and spiteful God. The odd references to the surgeon’s blade and the taking of her legs certainly tie into Hayter’s emergency surgery to prevent Cauda equina syndrome. The Lord’s taking of her legs and will to live (also given extra dark meaning in the context of her suicide attempt) as the apparent abundant pardon highlights the sadism mankind has written into God with religion and the lengths of self-hatred that abuse drove Hayter to. It is both angering in its themes and terrifying in how the overwhelming voices and ominous instrumentation plays into the congregational commands of repentance, another excellent fusion of disparate sounds and disfigured religious practice by Kristen Hayter and her collaborators.

"The Sacred Linament of Judgement"

Incorporating some of the most immaculate imagery on this album, Hayter contrasts forgiveness and rejection by God on the arbitrary ground they on which they stand on “The Sacred Linament of Judgement”. Hayter seems more focused on the cruelty of (man through) religion on this song than she is on the cruelty of man himself (through Alexis Marshall elsewhere on the album), but her inclusion of a sample of the confession of infidelity by evangelical pastor Jimmy Swaggart beneath the droning horns and strings and the religion-soaked verbiage she sings ties the song back to the real-world hypocrisy and abuses of power by religious figures and how even in the face of being proven liars, they fall back on and use God to defend themselves and cover themselves with a shield of new lies. And the more minimal and less dynamic droning of the instrumentation, to me, feels like it brings out the plain-facedness of these charlatans’ honey-coated treacheries. This is not to say that the music is dull or uninteresting; it is still filled with subtle percussive accents that give the song a human sort of beat. In the sampled sermon, Swaggart cites his betrayal against his wife Frances and other believers around the world before getting to the point with his proclamation of being washed by the holy blood of the Lord’s forgiveness, and (critically, key word here) forgetfulness. Hayter’s presentation of Swaggart’s being divinely forgiven alongside lyrics of her own forsaking by God shine light on the extremity of the reinforcement of misogynist societal standards by religion, making it a key thematic addition to the album that she builds upon further.

"Perpetual Flame of Centralia"

Before building on the Swaggart material, Lingua Ignota offers up another soft piano number with the album’s second single, “Perpetual Flame of Centralia”. The title referencing and inspired by an abandoned Pennsylvanian town beneath which a coal mine fire’s ceaseless burning made it uninhabitable, “Perpetual Flame of Centralia” finds Lingua Ignota returning to the meditative calmness of minimal piano and doubt-riddled religious odes. Through the album’s most deadly soft soothing vocals, Hayter both covers herself in the blood of Jesus and compares the poison of her life to that of the devil’s, all the while casting off fear for the sake of righteousness. The line “I rest my head in a holy kingdom” seems delivered similarly disingenuously to the victorious lyric in “Pennsylvanian Furnace”, and the choruses reinforce the stronger belief in a destiny in hell. It’s another one of the more open-ended songs on the album, but the quietness of the piano chords also really forces the focus on the contrast Hayter draws between the brief and futile beauty of life with the eternal fires of hell that the aforementioned ghost town so naturally evokes comparisons to and that she feels God had placed her in by putting her in Pennsylvania with no one but a new abusive partner. It’s the softest cut on the album, but the stylistic comfort and the break from dissonance it provides is a misleading comfort, and one that plays into to the themes of religion's misleading comfort and abusers' misleading affection throughout the album. It's not viscerally violent, but it should certainly not be mistaken for peace either.

"Man Is Like a Spring Flower"

After ruminating on hell and Pennsylvania, Lingua Ignota picks back up where “The Sacred Linament of Judgement” left off, opening with an audio sample, now of a mildly adversarial interview of the sex worker who pastor Swaggart visited repeatedly. The interviewer asks if she believes Swaggart’s words of repentance and his tears, and after a brief hesitation during which the interviewer tries to suggest the sincerity of Swaggart’s confession, she responds with disbelief. She says that she thinks he is just doing at the pulpit what he had always done while he continued to come to her for sex and that the real Jimmy Swaggart is the one he showed her he was while hidden from the eyes of the congregation. Hayter then breaks into a acoustic folk-instrumentation-filled lamentation on the futility of love in what is probably her most open condemnation of the romantic infidelity by Alexis Marshall that was recently revealed to have been taking place. This song’s inclusion of the believedly true, infidelitous character of Jimmy Swaggart beneath his Christ-loving exterior and the unambiguous stanza “No one is enough / One is not enough / No one is enough / The heart of man is impossible to hold” make uncanny its inspiration by the insatiable need for sex and other women beneath the countless fake excuses for betrayal of Alexis Marshall. Hayter likens man to a vessel for God’s impulses, mostly violence and punishment, as he refers to the heart of man as a furnace, a fiery pit, the seventh gate of hell, quite frankly as the hand of God itself, and in an odd lyric that makes more morbid sense in hindsight, as a crushed horse’s tail. Anatomists named the bottom part of the human spinal cord that branches out at about the level of the sacrum the “cauda equina”, which means horse’s tail, because that’s what it looks like. Knowing now that her back injury was inflicted by Alexis and led to her having surgery for damage to these nerves makes all clearer that he is most certainly the primary subject of this song, in which Hayter undoubtedly analogizes him to the hellish punishment of God itself. Alexis’ infidelity to a degree possibly far beyond Swaggart’s only cements him further into the song as kin to the disgraced pastor with the repeated stanza of love and of no one being enough. The way the staccato strings, high-register vocals, and wooden percussion swell to a crescendo at the song’s climax make it one of the most dynamic and cinematic pieces of the album, and well deserving of its eclipsing of the 7-minute mark and yet another favorite on an album so difficult to pick favorites from.

"The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata"

With the last sample Hayter provides, probably the most infuriatingly relevant outside the album, the infamous churchgoer interview during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic provides such a concise reminder of the wide reach of the real-world damage that the careless selfishness that lies at the heart of religious lunacy does. Asked about concerns of potentially spreading the sickness to others she interacts with, the interviewee replies only about the safety she herself feels she has as a believer “covered in Jesus’ blood” and that she believes others of her faith have, essentially condemning everyone else to suffer the judgement of God through the pandemic and capturing the malicious focal intent of punishment of outsiders beneath the “love the sinner” window dressing of religion. - And then Hayter launches into possibly the most heart-crushing song behind “Pennsylvania Furnace” to close out the album. The lyrics about belief in the promise of and longing for heavenly paradise read as both unbelieved hope in God’s love and as suicidal ideation with heaven as an escape from all the hells of the songs preceding this one. It’s the tragic morbid truth that suicidal people tell themselves and the solace that the loved ones they leave behind hold onto: that there’s no more pain for them anymore. “All my pains are lifted / Paradise is mine / All my wounds are mended”. The underlying cynicism and soulful brokenness in those words is so incredibly crushing given all that has preceded it, not just on this album, but also on Caligula and All Bitches Die and Hayter’s first work as Lingua Ignota. That Hayter is singing this not in raucous or fearsome dissonance, but rather in the sweetness of the major key of traditional hymns of worship behind some of the most gorgeous instrumentation on the album makes all the more somber and climactic the finality of the song and makes it stand out among the others. But Hayter is of course writing this after surviving her attempted suicide and after escaping her abusive relationship, and the paradise she consigns herself to is under the dominion of loneliness, “ugliness my home”, a heart-wrenching acceptance of isolation and the absence of love as the best it gets. That Kristen Hayter made it out of the hell of Pennsylvania and her relationship with Alexis Marshall while there is indeed a triumph, and perhaps that she has once again survived to make a powerful album is enough to call paradise.

Sinner Get Ready is tainted by not a single wasted sound or word, and for as difficult it is to fully express what this album does to me while listening to (and how difficult it is to fully understand exactly what it's doing), I do know the incredible magnitude of its power, and it is indeed power. The impact this album makes goes beyond it sounding like nothing else with its revolutionary utilization of the sonic elements it pulls from. I am not a spiritual person, but the catharsis that Sinner Get Ready provides is certainly earns its description as a spiritual experience. It is a masterpiece of authenticity and musical vision that truly transcends genre that very few other pieces of music can also be called.

———

Contextual Discussion:

As hard as this album hit on first listens, the different light that Hayter’s revelations about the abuse she lived through in her relationship with Alexis Marshall put this album in made this already-difficult album somehow a hell of a lot more crushing. She’s not singing about the same abuser she cursed on Let the Evil of His Lips Cover Him, or on All Bitches Die, or on Caligula. Tragically, Kristen Hayter is singing of a different man whose name is even alongside Lingua Ignota’s on a few non-album tracks she's released since Caligula. It’s tragic also to think that what I had thought of as such a short time between Caligula and Sinner Get Ready for Lingua Ignota was in fact such an excruciating and probably seemingly eternal hell for Kristen Hayter. For anyone unaware, a few weeks ago, Hayter released a Google document with a statement detailing her relationship with Alexis Marshall and how he abused her. I had time and didn’t take any breaks. and it took me an hour to read it all. And it was a sickening and hate-inducing read for that entire hour which included (and now is the time to really invoke the content warning) damn near every possible color of lying, manipulation, sexual assault, outright and clear-cut rape, emotional and verbal abuse, financial abuse, and disloyalty by Alexis Marshall in service of his malignant sex addiction not just to Kristen Hayter but also other women in his life and his children. This included but was not limited to (and again, major content warning for the rest of the paragraph) penetrating her while she was sleeping (despite her already telling him this was something her past abuser did and that she did not consent to it, =rape), an instance of extremely violent sex in which he refused to stop and nearly paralyzed Hayter by inducing a hernia of one of her spinal disc (for which she needed emergency surgery), abandoning her before that surgery, repeatedly cheating on her, and callously abusive disregard after driving Hayter to attempt suicide in their basement.

What I just mentioned really is just the tip of that vile iceberg, yet for as heartbreaking as every paragraph of that massive text was, I would be lying if I said Hayter did not make me chuckle just once when she detailed how before her surgery, Alexis had himself a childish little pity party in which Hayter had to hand feed him nutrition bars while he was sitting on their hotel bed (again, before her life-threatening surgery), of which she simply said afterwards, “It was fucking ridiculous.” Again, there is so much that I simply do not have the space or desire to recount fully here that I do think is important for those with the stomach to handle it to be aware of. I think it is important to understand on as empathetic or sympathetic of a level (and not just intellectually) just how horrific abusive relationships manifest, what they can look like, and how what is a painful hour of reading for us is, for survivors, years of unbelievable torment and lasting trauma. “Life is cruel, and time heals nothing.” Far more important is that it is wholly inadequate to just gasp at another’s suffering and move on.

Hayter expressed that her reasoning for coming forward with these details was not just to shed light on truth but also to prevent what happened to her from happening to another woman. Those who followed Daughters more closely and for longer than me have pointed out that Alexis had earned himself a small but sour reputation for his rampant sex addiction beforehand and that it played no small role in the band's long break-up before You Won't Get What You Want. Yet his abuse of others for his sexual satisfaction has not yet earned him a wide or strong enough reputation to hinder his behavior. Hopefully Hayter's coming forward can be enough spotlight to illuminate his behavior to any potential future victims, because the sense I got from my reading of it all was that Alexis is pretty unrepentant about it all (minimizing the hurt he did at best) and has no intention of doing anything seriously about the sex addiction that's consumed his life and others' . It's so frustrating how clear some things are in hindsight, such as is the case here, or with Marilyn Manson, or Mark Kozelek, or Chris Brown where there were so many signs, but they were maybe just harder to see through the fog of the rest of their generally edgy and controversial personas. We can't even get started here about older rock stars like Ted Nugent and Steve Tyler who out in the open sang about and performed predatory behavior in real life, which included involving minors. It's not just the obvious suspects either. Sometimes it's the people who only offer sparse or non-specific signs only visible in hindsight with the context of more knowledge or people who are very good at maintaining a quiet, if not wholesome, public image. People you wouldn't expect. Like that guy from the now-defunct band, False, whose feminism was a significant part of their presentation.

This is not a suggestion of paranoia or baseless suspicion. It's a suggestion of attentiveness, and it's certainly not one that I'm trying to make from any kind of imagined high horse or enlightened moral high ground. I was more blindsided than I maybe should have been for Manson, and maybe Alexis Marshall as well. I saw Mark Kozelek coming though, the guy pretty much can't help himself from broadcasting that he's a miserable misogynistic asshole who's desperate to keep pretend-living his rock-star youth with young, vulnerable female fans.

I guess here is the place to put a concise version of my thoughts on problematic artists and such, everyone's favorite topic. You know the problematic artist discourse is complicated, I get it; I don't have a golden bullet answer to it. But somehow in all the discourse I've seen about being responsible and not supporting problematic artists and not enabling shitty behavior, I haven't seen anyone acknowledge the obvious elephant in the room: fans don't want to feel punished for something they didn't do.

I agree with minimizing support for artists doing bad shit on the basis of it possibly discouraging such behavior from others and it consequentially pressuring them to change, but that can be surprisingly hard to go absolute zero on. Does it stop at the band? Does it stop at the label? Does it stop at side projects? Does it stop at collaborators who haven't come out and said anything? Just because there's no agreed-upon line does not mean that we should just shrug our shoulders and say "well what can you do?" Ultimately, as an individual, the answer to that is pretty much nothing, but somehow you add up enough individuals and you can start to get some good change if you all know that better things are possible and expectable. Maybe you don't all agree exactly how much more you deserve but you sure as hell know it's more than that shit boss is paying you all. Maybe we don't know exactly where we draw that "problematic artist" line, but we know the behavior Hayter described of Alexis Marshall is far beyond wherever we draw it. Being attentive as a listener, however casual or invested, is not about being a paranoid hyperreactive sentinel around artists and trying to have a power trip on people you have little individual power over, and it's certainly not about policing individual fans into not listening to their Antichrist Superstar CD or whatever. Again, I get that vile behavior makes some artists immediately more repulsive and easy to let go of at the drop of a hat, and it's easier for some to drop band they've listened to forever than others. And then I think of my favorite band, Meshuggah.

"But one thing I've learned is everything burns."

Hayter herself said that her coming forward was not about cancelling Daughters or telling people that they couldn't listen to Daughters. She came forward to help survivors and to protect other women from having to either also be survivors or not be so fortunate. I'm sure this still does ruin Daughters for a lot of people, possibly myself included. There is no "neutral" position in any of this, however much we might sometimes wish our love for music could be a little oasis to escape to from the shit of this world, that music is not detached from this world and everything we do with that music has some kind of impact on the world and that is power. Wow, we have power. [insert Spiderman uncle Ben quote]. Even if it's just a little bit, there's no such thing as just being a listener, we are all participants in music culture, whatever sub-culture feeds into it, and the broader cultures at large that music culture feeds into. None of it is on an island or in a vacuum, and that is well worth being mindful about.

At the end of the day, being attentive and being a responsible participant in music as a fan or maybe even as a worker or artist means applying what power you have to produce the most positive impact you can (original and not cliché at all, I know). But really, where we have the most impact is with the people we know and can directly affect: friends, family, relatives, even asshole coworkers or people in our lives we kinda don't like. It certainly doesn't have to be just one or the other (artists or people we know), but if there's one thing everything around Sinner Get Ready has emphasized to me, it is to support survivors and to stop abusers, by being educated on and alert to the ways they manipulate people and knowing when and how to use the power at your disposal to protect people. This isn't scan the room constantly to make sure no jocks are dropping roofies in drinks at the party ocular pat-down vigilante bullshit (although, yes, do be smart in vulnerable situations and such). This means saying something that's confrontational or that's not easy to say to a best friend who's constantly belittling his girlfriend, or to a close family member who might be in denial about the abuse they're facing from another family member, or even just making it awkward for some rando dude at a party who's making the girl whose boundaries he's pushing clearly uneasy and making it easier for her to get away from it. Maybe you look like a dweeb for a minute, maybe that was enough to prevent a rape from happening even if no one ever thanks you for it. Maybe it's straight-up calling police. Sometimes (perhaps often) it seems like it's in vain, but your individual actions can be a seed or a catalyst for better outcomes. And sometimes better outcomes just don't happen despite you doing everything right. Pop music fans in adjacent circles and far-away circles have been rightfully standing up to Chris Brown for over a decade and he has responded repeatedly by saying, "fuck you, I'm gonna keep being a piece of shit to women." And he somehow manages to find fans and collaborators willing to support his career and look the other way on his behavior. Some games you're the better team and you still lose, shit's weird like that sometimes. By all means, continue to put pressure on artists directly, producers, collaborators, labels, and, yes, even fan bases that continue to enable shit like Chris Brown. Yours may just be a drop in the bucket that just has to keep getting fuller and heavier before it snaps.

The common (and probably also intentional) misconception about rape culture is that it's people saying "yes, that's rape, and that's okay." or "rapists know they're raping and they do it anyway; they're just terrible people.” In reality, what rape culture says is: "I know him, he wouldn't do that", or "that doesn't constitute abuse", or "she's just trying to ruin his career or get attention", or "why isn't there any evidence for this accusation from this highly private moment from which it would be incredibly hard to procure adequate evidence for legal action in an unpredicted and adrenaline-filled situation during which the objective in the moment for any survivor would clearly be to survive it?" (maybe that one was a bit tongue-in-cheek), or all the victim-blaming classics we've all heard like Christmas songs once black Friday starts every time a survivor brings their story public. With Alexis Marshall, the excuse was always, "how dare you compare me to your past abuser, I have never hit you." Up close it rarely looks the the same way it does when it becomes visible from a distance, and it's rarely cookie-cutter bad-guy shit or quote-straight-from-the-textbook shit, but it's worth being aware of as much of what points in that direction as possible.

Hell, if all you got from this was to point the finger outward, fucking think again. We've all internalized a lot of this shit as natural to our world or even just normal as parts of relationships, as so many of these stories point out, the people doing the abuse usually don't think what they're doing is wrong or what they've been doing is abusive. And goddamnit, as a stereotypical guy from a rom-com I've always got that simplistic knee-jerk urge to try to fix shit, but the hell if some blog post is gonna make a dent in rape culture. Maybe one person sees this and takes it to heart, worth the hours it took writing this. But it's not just about fixing and preventing abuse, survivors need support too, and sometimes time really does heal nothing. Some traumas do leave scars that never fully heal, and sometimes things don't get better. And that might be the hardest part of it all. But survivors need support regardless because no one deserves to have to be one and carry on alone.

"Me and the dog we die together"

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