#andrew notsch

[doomanddead]

Probing New Album from Monovoth

Monovoth’s self-titled album is an offering at the feet of despair… if despair is an intergalactic goddess wielding arcane knowledge with one hand, and unspeakable terror with the other. One look at the album art tells you it’s going to be interesting. Frontman Lucas Wyssbrod (MOSTRO) dreams up a realm “where in [sic] a female extraterrestrial deity - a corruption of the notion the Catholic religion has of the virgin - is seen suspended in the voids of space.” Let’s strap in and cue the X-Files theme for this journey into the black vacuum of the cosmos.

Monovoth by Monovoth

The Key begins at a creeping pace. A faint static pulse creates an otherworldly atmosphere. Tinny synth notes jangle your perception— it’s unclear whether time is moving forward or backward. A heavy melody sets in with plodding drums and crashing cymbals. It’s ritualistic and foreboding, with dark majesty at an unfathomable scale. 

Ulcerated and Ablazed has Close Encounters vibes with an unsettling tune in minor chords. There’s something both resonant and discordant about the progression of notes repeated like a mantra. Listening to this composition makes you feel like you’ve caught the attention of something alien, whose intentions are beyond out comprehension. The drone subsides, and we re-orient ourselves to waves lapping a shoreline. It’s as if we’ve been abducted and returned to a different location, dazed but finally lucid.

Servants is slow and solitary. Each note echos in the emptiness like water dripping in an abandoned space. The intensity swells and sadness bursts through the walls in slow motion, inundating the room. As quickly as they arrived, the layers of sound recede and we find ourselves alone again. The track is an emotional powerhouse that manages to sneak up on me even on subsequent plays. 

Dour and heavy, Tace Dolorem is as impenetrable as a sheer rock face. This deliriously doomy offering picks apart its own strata, exposing muscle and bone in a solemn act of sacrifice. Federico Ramos (Avernal) adds extra weight to this track with arrangements for electric and acoustic guitar.

Hands skulks onto the scene with a haunted stare and an insatiable appetite. It quickly distends over its own borders encompassing both religious ecstasy and outright fury. Spoken word poetry and relentless drumming underline the duality of this intense offering.

Laesura is a funerary trudge through the brain-scramblies. It’s like riding around inside the hollow shell of someone who is completely disassociated, emptied of all thought and meaning. Again and again, the electric guitar pierces the stillness of the vacant vessel. 

This saturnine album closes on a piece of unexpected beauty. Franco Colautti lends his talents on the brief instrumental Cerro Sangre. His mandolin adds punctuation and form to an intricate, tangled tableau.

Monovoth has constructed a shrine to sadness, with each track more haunted and otherworldly than the last. I don’t know if this extraterrestrial cult is recruiting, but I’m ready to put my name in the offering plate.

[dustedmagazine]

Upper Wilds — Jupiter (Thrill Jockey)

Photo by Andrew Notsch

Jupiter by Upper Wilds

Dan Friel’s Upper Wilds stands in awe of the cosmos, letting fly their sprawling guitar dissonance and modal, faintly folk-shaped melodies across a psychedelic expanse, riding the space contrails of the Voyager crafts to see planets and systems never witnessed before. The rock trio—that’s Friel, bassist Jason Binnick and drummer Jeff Ottenbacher—have now been at it longer than much loved Parts & Labor, but that makes sense. There’s a lot of universe to cover.

This is the third of Upper Wild’s planet-themed album releases, following 2021’s Venus and 2018’s Mars. Jupiter is the largest of planets, named for the king of gods, so no surprise that this record is an expansive one, bursting with jagged rock mayhem and soaring rock and roll choruses. The title track fires rocket fuel blasts in short, one-two bursts, then coalesces in an antic, mosh-pit frenzy, a dense fray of guitar, drums, bass that begs for up and down jumping. “It's bigger than our minds could know/So heavy that our hearts explode,” sings Friel, and that, perhaps, is the album’s central dilemma. How can you write about something so vast and make it accessible on a human, relatable scale?

The sweep and glacial timeline of outer space squashes human history down into nothing, as illustrated in the drum-battered, droning skirl of “Short Centuries.” A martial thrill runs through its keening chorus, its war-drum cadence. There’s something tribal and primitive about the way it sounds, however it’s electrified and amped. And indeed, that’s something that Upper Wilds has always been good at, channeling the feral joy of militancy into fuzzy, guitar-drenched soundscapes.

The largeness of the subject matter is somewhat daunting. Friel admits it in “Infinity Drama,” noting the crushing weight of the eternal on the human spirit and adding, somewhat slyly, “Just don't try to tell me how it ends.” And so it’s left to punk rock heroes from days past to make sense of the infinite. The Husker Du cover, “Books About UFOs,” makes the drive to understand ordinary and human—a trip to the library, a pile of books about UFOs—and so universal in a way that songs about the universe can never be.

But meanwhile, Friel and his Upper Wild brethren boldly go, guitars flaring, drums pounding, bass thudding, spirits alive to the vast mysteries of the cosmos. Jupiter’s a banger and bigger than we deserve.

Jennifer Kelly

[thevisualartofmetal]

Artwork by Andrew Notsch Baring Teeth - Transitive Savagery (2018) Progressive Death Metal

[riffrelevant]

THOUGHT EATER 'Bones In The Fire' Review [Select Track Streams]

THOUGHT EATER ‘Bones In The Fire’ Review [Select Track Streams]

(By Pat ‘Riot’ Whitaker, Senior Writer/Journalist, RiffRelevant.com)

It is with great excitement that I am here to bring you my take and insights on the debut full-length from Baltimore’s THOUGHT EATER, “Bones In The Fire“. (more…)

[megatrip]

Crow by Andrew Notsch

[ffuckthesepeople]

Students in the News, July 1

Blackduck: Andrew Grundmeier, diploma of occupational proficiency, heavy equipment operation and maintenance, honors; Hattie Notsch, certificate, ... from Google Alert - Heavy Equipment https://ift.tt/2KFAtvC

[thevisualartofmetal]

Artwork by Andrew Notsch Sunless - Urraca (2017) Death Metal

[dustedmagazine]

Upper Wilds — Venus (Thrill Jockey)

Photo by Andrew Notsch

Venus by Upper Wilds

Is all music a love song? Dan Friel, once of bludgeoning Parts and Labor, rides a surging mass of noise over anthemic melodies in this third album from Upper Wilds. He shouts and chants and intones modal melodies over a chaotic floor of rumbling drums, letting buzz-ripping arcs of electric guitar fly, and every song is a love song, numbered one to ten.

“Love Song #2” sings of love in the time of the COVID-19, a monstrous, mind-addling barrage of guitar/bass/drum noise bombing through lyrics about Friel’s cousin Amy, driving a truck through America while her husband keeps the kids at home. “Love Song #3” speaks of love among the stars, caterwauling electronics doing backflips on top of sheer undulating volume, as constellations form and reform themselves in the night sky. “Love Song #4” and “Love Song #5” admit the limits of love, an amp-fried chant confiding, “You know the sun won't care if you fall in love/And the void still stares if you fall in love,” as a carnival swell of agitated electronics builds to hurricane strength. All of which is to say that these may be love songs, but they are not sweet or sentimental. They’re love songs made of chaos and adrenaline and explosions, and they rock pretty hard.

That’s partly because of Friel’s band, Jason Binnick on bass and Jeff Ottenbacher on drums. Unlike on his solo albums, this is not just Friel on his antic guitar and electronics, channelling giddy euphorias in squiggly sound. No, it’s a continuous barrage of bass and drums, knocking his inimitable fuzz-crusted hooks sideways and to pieces and rampaging on regardless.  It’s a different kind of love when the three of them are involved, more muscular and not as whimsical and smelling sharply of testosterone. These are pop songs moved to violence, joy heated to a roiling boil, and you could ask, “Is this love or war?” and answer, “Yes.”

Jennifer Kelly 

[megatrip]

Death Blooms by Andrew Notsch