275: Shane Embury

Dreams of Consciousness Podcast Episode 276 features an interview with Shane Embury.

[cover photo by Gobinder Jhitta]

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Earth Day [Weekly Mixtape 68]

Sepultura • Dead Kennedys • Ratos de Porão • Suffer • Testament
Adversor • Lüger • Bulldozer • Mass Extinction • Cattle Decapitation
Earth Crisis • Metallica • Obituary • Napalm Death • Proletar

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Six Degrees of Shane Embury [Weekly Mixtape 39]

Lock Up • Disfear • Murder Squad • Carnage • Carcass • Napalm Death
Blood From The Soul • Converge • Old Man Gloom • GREYMACHINE
Cathedral • Repulsion • Expulsion • Exhumed • Terrorizer

 



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Noise Apes Polluting All Like Minds [Weekly Mixtape 37]

Napalm Death • Unseen Terror • Benediction • Fall of Because • Cathedral
Meathook Seed • Blood from the Soul • Scorn • Jesu • Head Of David
Menace • Extreme Noise Terror • Lock Up • Venomous Concept
Corrupt Moral Altar • Defecation • Carcass • Terrorizer

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Hindsight in 2020

Episode 152: Corrupt Moral Altar

Here is Dreams of Consciousness Podcast Episode 152, featuring an interview with John Cooke of Corrupt Moral Altar.

Cover photo by Ryan Fallon.

The podcast is available through the following streaming services (click to listen):

Episode 151: Mitch Harris

Here is Dreams of Consciousness Podcast Episode 151, featuring an interview with Mitch Harris of Brave The Cold, Napalm Death, Menace, Righteous Pigs, Defecation, and Meathook Seed.

The podcast is available through the following streaming services (click to listen):

Episode 150: Napalm Death

Here is Dreams of Consciousness Podcast Episode 150, featuring an interview with Barney Greenway of Napalm Death.

The podcast is available through the following streaming services (click to listen):

an interview with Rainbow Grave

Nic Bullen has always been on the vanguard of heavy music - as the original vocalist of Napalm Death, he was a grindcore pioneer; and with Scorn, he and Mick Harris expanded their sights to include experimental and electronic music. His newest band Rainbow Grave contains some of the abrasive and experimental facets of his previous bands, but employs them in a noisier, less structured manner. Nic was kind enough to spare a few words about the project.

Mixtape 89 - Slave To The Grind

Here is the 89th installment of the Dreams of Consciousness podcast, featuring an interview with Doug Brown, director of the documentary Slave To The Grind: A Film About Grindcore.

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Bandcamp Picks - Venomous Concept, Die Hexe, Pink Mass, Black Shiva

Shane Embury and Kevin Sharp, seen here
with their OTHER grindcore supergroup

Grindcore supergroup Venomous Concept return with their third and strongest album to date. Kick Me Silly; VC3 sees them expanding on their Poison Idea fetish and veering remarkably close to recent Napalm albums (though with Shane Embury as lead songwriter, maybe that was inevitable). With the members being involved in a ridiculous number of other bands, the necessity of one more is debatable; this album must owe its existence to nothing more than love. [$9.99]



Toronto's Die Hexe sent me their self-titled debut EP, and I'm glad that they did, even if it's not the kind of thing I usually listen to: Emotive hardcore with an ear for melody, at times going "post" like a lot of modern hardcore does. But they wear their hearts on their sleeves like the oldest and truest hardcore bands. The EP is available as a "name your price" download.



Whatever that is on the sleeves of New Jersey's Pink Mass is probably not heart. Their debut full-length Slvt Kvlt is a brutal hatefuck of death, thrash, and grind that's quick and to the point, and will leave you either satisfied or guilt-ridden. Just make sure you wash your hands after. [£7 GBP]



Geneva's Black Shiva can't decide whether to rage or to party, and so they alternate between both. When Evil Lives flips a switch between turgid powerviolence a la Nails and Disfear's rock and roll crust - HM-2s set to "chainsaw" the whole time. The integration of the two styles isn't seamless, but it is an idea that apparently hasn't dawned on Trap Them or Blackbreath yet. [12 CHF]

Grindcore 101

Rich Hoak of Brutal Truth/Total Fucking Destruction

Considering half the people I know in KL are in grindcore bands (some of them in two or three), I thought I'd flex my cred as someone who's followed the genre for 20 years, and seen most of the movers and shakers play live (some of them two or three times - suck it, Malaysia). Grindcore has a long history littered with thousands albums that anyone can (and will) argue for - but these are the ten most essential.

Mixtape 25 - The Road to MDF XIII, Part One

Mixtape 25 - The Road to MDF XIII, Part One by Dreams Of Consciousness on Mixcloud

Here's the 25th installment of the Dreams of Consciousness podcast, featuring a conversation from my ride down to Maryland Deathfest with Josh Landes (Limbs Bin/Infinite Distortion Radio), Jesse Bagels (Spite/Stygian Black Hand Records) and Henry Yuan (Electric Assault Records).

The World Keeps Turning

Hot off the release of a slamming new album, Napalm Death's Barney Greenway has been in the news twice in the last few weeks, due to a couple of open letters written to new Indonesian president (and ostensible ND fan) Joko Widodo. Barney petitioned on behalf of civil rights groups to free a British woman and two Australian citizens sentenced to execution for drug smuggling. It's good to know that the world's foremost grindcore band is still out there trying to change the world for the better and not just cop free Red Bull.

Napalm Death @ Red Bull Music Academy Festival: Hardcore Activity in Progress

A kind of spiritual successor to the House of Vans shows that ran a few years back, Red Bull sponsored a number music events in New York over the summer. The highlight for me was obviously the one with Napalm Death. It seems strange for bands like Napalm and Bastard Noise to glad hand with, ahem, "multinational corporations"; and frankly, what companies like Red Bull and Scion see in sponsoring extreme metal events is baffling. But with extreme music being split into smaller and smaller pieces by increasingly niche scenes, and very little money going around any of them, metal can use all the help it can get. I say we take their sickly sweet energy drink money and run while we still can.

When the Napalm rains, it pours

Accompanying Mitch Harris' excellent new Menace album and an EP released to coincide with their Roadburn appearance, there's a new Napalm Death recording - and more excitingly, a Napalm Death Bandcamp page. The new release is a Cardiacs cover, released as a benefit for The Cardiacs' Tim Smith, who suffered a heart attack and stroke in 2010.

I remember checking out the Cardiacs' A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window a decade or so ago, largely due to a dedication to the band on the Live Corruption DVD. To say I didn't understand their music would be a gross understatement - their mix of post-punk, prog, and pop seemed to me like one of the drug induced hallucinations in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.



The Napalm cover is similarly batshit crazy. Along with the typical guitar and drums carpet bombing, there seems to be either a keyboard or a melodica and something akin to the harmonized guitar interplay that their friends in Carcass are so fond of. Napalm have always worn their influences on their sleeves - Siege, Repulsion, Swans in particular - but any impact the Cardiacs may have had on Napalm's sound is hard to parse.

Most likely it's less the Cardiacs' sound, but more their "anything goes" approach to songwriting that rubbed off on Napalm Death. Napalm were probably the first band to consciously mix shoegaze with extreme metal; not to mention all the skewed side projects they've done over the years like Meathook Seed and Malformed Earthborn. The two groups probably recognize something of their own renegade spirit in the other, hence the mutual love. One more reason why Napalm have always been a few steps ahead of their peers.

Making Friends, starring my Napalm Death hoodie [Volume IV]

It's been a while since my Napalm Death hoodie caused a stir in a supermarket - not since my last visit to Costco in fact. But here's what happened last Monday when I was in the Philippines:

Big Dude pushing a shopping cart: "Nice hoodie."
Me: "Thanks. You a fan?"
Big Dude: "Yeah, I saw them back in 2006."
Me: "Nice. Whereabouts?"
Big Dude: "Minnesota. I asked Barney what he did for work; he said 'Napalm Death is my job.' I said, 'Yeah, but do you have a real job?' "

I love you, sweatshirt. I may even write a song that says just that.

Fuck This Place: A Mixtape

This place by Adrian Sol on Mixcloud

Sabazius, "You Suffer," and shifting the goal posts of extremity

I finally got around to listening to The Descent of Man, the 11 hour meisterwork by drone lords (and DoC faves) Sabazius. Earache released the album, and the pairing makes sense; Dig and co. were responsible for gifting us with the shortest song ever recorded, Napalm Death's "You Suffer." If anybody would release the world's longest metal album, it would be them.



I'll admit, I have yet to make it through the whole album in one sitting, mainly because a) I have shit to do, and b) Are you fucking kidding me? But over the course of three days, I did indeed listen to the whole thing. And it is probably the most impressive album I'll hear this year.



For the last ten years, my gold standard for slow, heavy music was Sleep's Dopesmoker; an hour-long dirge that's been described as a "stoner spiritual." Sleep took doom metal farther than it had been taken before. For anyone with time to kill and a vaporizer within reach, Dopesmoker was a pleasant (if long and meandering) journey, entreating listeners to "drop out of life with bong in hand."

Sabazius offer no such comforts. The Descent of Man isn't an escape from life, but an elucidation of its drudgery. Unfeeling, monotonous, and (when played at full volume) painful. It's like Sabazius sought to recreate all the hours you spent stuck in traffic, on a double shift at work, or behind someone paying their grocery bill in pennies. What few comforts the album offers in terms of riffs and vocals come sparingly and begrudgingly. When it comes to slow and heavy, Sabazius have taken the throne. Dopesmoker is officially now for beginners.

Which brings me back to "You Suffer," and bands who shift the goal posts of what we consider "extreme" in "extreme music". When I first heard that song, I was 17 and enjoying the last week of summer vacation with my high school metal friends. We were sitting around someone's living room, shooting the shit, letting Scum (which I had just got) provide the soundtrack to our (pretty inane) teenage musings. The first 11 tracks had flown by without much comment from any of us; I'd been listening to death metal for a few years at that point, and frankly blastbeats had lost their shock value. We had become numb.



As fate would have it, "You Suffer" hit us during a lull in our conversation. We sat in stunned silence before erupting in laughter. We had to play it again. And again. And again and again and again (which seems to be common to everyone who experiences the song for the first time). In those seconds, Napalm had ricocheted back and forth in our minds from being one of the heaviest bands on the planet, to one of the funniest. Extreme music's mandate of shorter/faster/louder had reached its inevitable peak. And that peak was no longer music, but something else that was at once sublime and ridiculous. "You suffer...but why?"

Likewise, The Descent of Man forces listeners to expand and redefine the way we think of heavy music; it is in most respects not an album but an endurance test. The majority of the reviews I've read seem to stress how little pleasure the reviewer took from the experience. Which may in fact be the point; I don't believe that The Descent of Man (and indeed, the drone oeuvre for the most part) is meant to be "enjoyed" in the conventional sense. The seemingly endless swathes of feedback, sporadic drum hits, and occasional trudging chord progressions... Like Napalm Death before them, there is a prankster element in how Sabazius challenges our willingness to embrace true extremes. It's as if they looked at the long history of slow heavy music, from Black Sabbath to Sleep and Sunn 0))), and asked "How slow can you go?"

In a Terrorizer article, the band themselves described the demands of recording for 14 hours straight as "closer to pyschological torture"; to say nothing of the time spent mixing and mastering, and the tricky task of actually releasing it. Which leads me to ask: If the album was a painful and difficult endeavor for the artists, why should it be any different for the listener? They suffered, why shouldn't you?

I don't actually know if The Descent of Man is the longest song/album ever recorded. If it is, I guess it's inevitable that some band will come along and record an even longer song; 18 hours long, 24 hours long (as Dig originally challenged Sabazius to record), maybe even 48 hours. It's all par for the course with extreme music; just as Napalm's audacity inspired its own imitators (some who attempted to outdo "You Suffer", some content to merely poke fun), so too have Sabazius thrown down the gauntlet, whether they intended to or not.

Revolution devours its own young; what's mindblowing now is only five years away from being commonplace, and another five from being quaint and retro. Those early Bathory and Hellhammer records are pretty tame by today's standards; and the big four are pretty much classic rock at this point. Maybe that's why the thing that bothers me most in metal right now is the endless regurgitation of what Slayer, Morbid Angel and Nihilist did 20 years ago. Extreme metal has become safe, predictable, and fucking boring, with few bands challenging the status quo. Kudos to Sabazius for attempting to redefine our accepted notions of "heavy." They've shifted the goal posts of extremity, a feat that's becoming increasingly rare. And that in itself is worthy of praise.

The Descent of Man is available through iTunes and as a limited edition USB. Questions about a possible release on vinyl and cd have been met with either silence or laughter.

Dreams of Consciousness is on Facebook... but why?

2012: The best albums from the year the world was supposed to end

 

Napalm Death - Utilitarian

Look back on any of my earlier year end lists, and you'll see that two words are a fixture: "Napalm" and "Death". This may simply be because, as my buddy Jay puts it, "those are my guys," but there's no arguing that Napalm have been on a hot streak since the career (and cred) resuscitating Enemy of the Music Business over a decade ago. Utilitarian, instead of trying to top the bare-knuckled fury of previous album Time Waits for No Slave, sees Napalm indulging their experimental side. John Zorn pops up to throw some hot shrieking sax on an already wild "Everyday Pox"; elsewhere, Barney and Mitch take turns imitating Michael Gira's spooky baritone. Strange off-time riffs abound, keeping listeners on their toes; and throughout, the band that coined the term "blastbeat" show all the young'uns how it's done. A quarter century since Scum was recorded, Napalm Death are still campaigning for musical destruction. These are "my guys" for a reason.
Listen to: Errors in the Signal, The Wolf I Feed, Fall On Their Swords, Everything in Mono

Glissando - The World Without Us

Strange but true: I was looking forward to the third album by these British ambient experimentalists almost as much as any death or black metal album. Anchored by Elly May Irving's ethereal vocals, and fleshed out by an accompaniment of strings and piano, The World Without Us is at once fragile and apocalyptic. Glissando have mastered the art of building their sombre melodies to oppressive heights. In a year of hurricanes and turmoil, this was the quiet eye of the storm. Armageddon never sounded so beautiful. [Also recommended: Richard Knox, the other half of Glissando, put out an excellent ambient neoclassical album called The Rustle of Stars]
Listen to: The Long Lost, Of Silence, Still (II)

Naglfar -Teras

How now, Naglfar? Whither wander thou? Never considered a worthy successor to Dissection, and somehow overtaken in popularity by Watain, despite having a better track record than both. And yet here you are on your sixth album, carrying on with your version of Svenske Svartmetal: Hook-driven; blistering; misanthropic. It's only fitting that the nailship of Ragnarok set sail in 2012, the year the world was supposed to end.
Listen to: Bring Out Your Dead, Invoc(h)ate, The Monolith

Kreator - Phantom Antichrist

It would be easy to misinterpret my contempt of thrash revival as a dismissal of the style itself. If I'm down on these new bands, it's because they've mastered the genre's cliches without capturing its excitement. The same can't be said of Kreator; since 2001, they've made everyone else who peddles the style seem increasingly redundant - and that includes most of the Big Four. With songs as fast and razor-sharp as the band's eighties heyday, Phantom Antichrist is balanced by melodic moments that recall the mighty Dark Tranquillity. As long as Mille is around to keep the flag of hate aloft, I'll never need another thrash band.
Listen to: Phantom Antichrist, Death to the World, Victory Will Come

Narbeleth - Diabolus Incarnatus 

This cult Cubano has delivered on the promise of the excellent Dark Primitive Cult demo, and then some. A throwback to the best of black metal's second wave, this is the coldest record I heard in 2012; and it's from a country that's never seen a spot of snow. A blaze in the Havana sky. Hail! [If you're not KVLT or hip enough to find the cassette tape, fear not: Lord Dakkar has given his consent for you to download it.]
Listen to: Walk Unholy Paths, Raw Hatred

Anathema - Weather Systems

I actually worried that the huge stylistic departure Anathema made on their previous album We're Here Because We're Here would cause such an uproar from fans that it might lead to the band breaking up; instead, it's given them a second life. Weather Systems expands on the onetime gothic doom metal kings' newfound love for soaring, shamelessly pop melodies. Boosted by the mellifluous singing of Lee Helen Douglass, it's more nuanced and textured than its oft-bouncy predecessor. If it seems like it starts to sag near the end, it may be because sustaining the emotional intensity of the album's first half would be nearly impossible; but taken individually, each of Weather Systems nine tracks are perfect. Another stage in the evolution of British metal's most amorphous band.
Listen to: Untouchable Part One, Part Two, The Gathering of Clouds, The Beginning and the End

Abnormality - Contaminating The Hive Mind

Taking the best bits of Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Origin and Cannibal Corpse, Contaminating the Hive Mind is merciless in its blistering assault, whilst being mindblowingly technical. This smokes every other death metal album released this year (and that includes a few of the names mentioned earlier). Abnormality have definitely made a case for their inclusion in the genre's elite. Fast, precise, unrelenting: This is death metal the way it should be.

Sea Bastard - Self-titled

Featuring a member of drone kings Sabazius, I expected this album to be a solid exercise in floorshaking ultradoom. But as much as it delivers on that, what's truly impressive is the songwriting. Writing ten minute songs that stick with you after they're over is a hell of an achievement. Whereas most sludge/doom is monotonous and self-satisfied, Sea Bastard have the gift of The Riff, that precious element that divides great bands from the rest. Doom album of the year.

Troglodyte - Don't Go in the Woods

Origin made a science out of crossbreeding technical hooks with unrelenting blast, and it sounds like their Kansas City neighbours Troglodyte took careful notes. This sophomore album is a half hour of blasting death metal that's as catchy as it is furious. While I was slow in embracing their strange Bigfoot fixation, even a curmudgeon like me can't stop himself from wanting to headbang and throw shit around every time this comes on. Book me on the Discovery Channel: I believe in Sasquatch death metal.

 

Macaroni - A Gift for Corpse

Originality is often overlooked and underrated in the current metal landscape; whereas most death metal bands seem content to merely rehash Morbid Angel and Suffocation riffs, Macaroni (one of Thailand's oldest death metal bands) have embarked on their own path, full of unexpected turns and strange digressions. A unique and accomplished vision that fans of Immolation and Gorguts would be wise to seek out.
Listen to: A Gift for Corpse album preview (unfortunately, my attempts to find songs from this album online proved to be fruitless; take my word, though, it's pretty awesome).

 

I come old friend from hell tonight

2012 saw a flurry of new albums from many of my favourite bands, and I greeted each like the return of an old friend. Testament's Dark Roots of the Earth was an immensely enjoyable album that fell just short of being a classic. Terrorizer's Hordes of Zombies didn't impress many critics, but it fueled many a cab ride to my jiujitsu class. As an exercise in pure distilled rage, it couldn't be beat. Orange Goblin's Eulogy for the Damned would have been the soundtrack to all my nights of drinking with the brahs, if I drank or had brahs. Cannibal Corpse released Torture, a Cannibal Corpse album that made Cannibal Corpse fans happy, this one included. Cryptopsy redeemed themselves in the eyes of fans and critics with their self-titled album, whilst still maintaining their legacy as a band that strives to keep death metal fresh and original. Headhunter D.C. are as no-frills as Brazilian death metal gets; they may not make it to any best of lists, but they did write my favourite new anthem: Hail the metal of death!

Dreams of Consciousness was voted the best metal blog of 2012 by the editors of Dreams of Consciousness metal blog. See for yourself.