Shameful Otaku Secret!

Kickin it old-school with Autechre?

You don’t often hear people talking about Autechre as old school. Despite their obvious affinity for electro and old-school techno beats, they’ve been known for 15 years now as the guys riding the very front of the electronic wave. And since 1998’s LP5 (my and many others’ first exposure to them, since the predecessor Tri Repeatae++ had made them underground stars), they’ve been taking their unapologetic brand of software experimentalism farther than anyone else. Aphex Twin sort of petered out, Coil went back to singing, but Autechre got more and more dense and oblique.

Now I love abstract music, even abstract beats, but Confeld (the last LP I actually bought from them) lost me a little. It seemed to exist for its own sake, and that’s perfectly fine (I’m not going to get rid of it, it’s on 180 gram for fuck’s sake), but there’s not much enjoyment to be derived from listening to it. Some Autechre tracks require ages to decipher the location of the beat, but Confeld’s tunes didn’t always have something to decipher. Draft 7.30 came back to earth a bit, but Quaristice is really what people like to call a “return to form.”

Old school, if you will.

Almost all tunes have beats, save the bookending ambient tracks — and recognizable ones. Of course, there’s nothing four-on-the-floor about this, but the connection with electro is far more evident than it has been since Tri Repeatae++. They have clearly learned from their experiments: While nothing here really resembles throwing beats up against the wall and recording the shattered pieces, certainly the rhythms of “Chenc9″ were roughed up a little bit.

The occasional melody peeks out, as in “WNSN,” which resembles an Aphex-y tune. And the sounds themselves are still straight out of the future, satisfyingly artificial but with enough thud and smack to give them impact, unlike say EP7’s fuzzy bit-crunched sounds.

Overall, this is unlike anything they’ve done for a while, and structurally it’s unlike anything they’ve done ever: Twenty songs, all reasonably varied, and all (save the closer) 5 minutes or under. It’s also the most satisfying thing they’ve done in ages, and the first since Tri Repeata++ that is actually a blast to listen to front to back. If Autechre lost you in the past few years, come on back and kick it old school.

- Mike

 Needs more distortion

From the opening few seconds of Occasion’s first song, “Mew,” it’s pretty apparent that Florida duo the Goslings are not trying to go in any new directions. Actually, those opening seconds sound like some sort of glitch until a simple and absolutely brutal guitar riff creeps out of the distorted mire, followed by singer Leslie Soren’s spaced-out, reverse-echoed vocals. The more you hear the riff, the more it threatens to crush you under the weight of its psychedelic heaviness.

And that’s the main thrust of this album, and of the Goslings in general: heavy, heavy, noisy, and above all psychedelic. Bands like Comets on Fire or Awesome Color, in their stoner-riff vintage style, peddle old-school hard psych effectively enough, but for a real drug-binge experience without chemical aid, you’d be hard pressed to find a more face-melting vibe than the one oozing off the Goslings.

Sometimes the sound is more contemplative, sometimes it’s downright melancholy in that Justin Broadrick kind of way, but it’s never really tense or tightly-wound, and it’s always extremely distorted. Sometimes there are drums for extra crushing power (also distorted), sometimes not, but there is never a fast tempo.

While the Goslings are sticking to what they do best (distortion), it’s not to say they’re not moving forward. Listening to the progression from Between The Dead through Grandeur Of Hair until now, the sound is clearly refining. And by “refining” I mean that they have taken the elements that used to make up their sounds — nasty guitars, distorted drums, spacey vocals — and distilled them into one single textural entity. In fact, whereas before they sounded a bit like a doom metal band with too many distortion pedals, they’re more and more like a psych-heavy noise crew. Perhaps the production aid of grind/noise-meister James Plotkin (O.L.D., Khanate, numerous collabs with Mick Harris and many more) had a hand in that newfound sonic focus.

That is a mixed bag for me; the overall product is awesomely beautiful, but nothing stands out to me. At least nothing as ridiculously grandiose as the epic, melancholy, shoegaze-on-merzbow kick of Grandeur’s “Haruspex.” I was buying what they were selling from minute one, but that song made me want the warehouse.

I suppose saying that there’s no “Haruspex” on the album is a small complaint from such a holy-fuck experience. If you liked the Goslings’ other records, you will almost without a doubt like this one. If you don’t know them, Grandeur of Hair may be a (slightly) better place to start, but I couldn’t recommend against this one. Just killer.

- Mike

I’m trying to get back into this whole writing thing. Until then, here’s Ian Mackaye bitching about the emo label before you were born.

And… for my own benefit, Technorati Profile. No need to follow that link.

- Mike

When I was in high school, one of the most influential recordings I heard was the Crass Records A-Sides compilation. It was a dub of a dub, the guy I got the dub from couldn’t remember the name of most of the bands, and it sounded pretty much like ass. Eventually I found a used copy of it, though some of the gaps filled in intermittently (Poison Girls’ “Promenade Imortalle” is a pretty distinctive tune, no way around it). For those unaware, Crass the band started Crass the label with the intent of documenting some of the anarchist bands of the early 1980s — both their peers and followers —in the form of short 7-inches with distinctive Crass-based sleeves. Each band’s art was sublimated into a round stencil form designed be Gee Vaucher. A-Sides is a CD that collected some of the most important of those, and in fact many of the bands were the most influential in British punk: Poison Girls, Zounds, Rudimentary Peni, Flux of Pink Indians, Conflict, and Dirt. It was my first exposure to punk beyond the mainstream, and (other than maybe Bauhaus and Wire) probably my first exposure to some really artsy, almost avant stuff. Noise was integral to Crass’s approach, but artists like Annie Anxiety (who later cropped up with Coil, Current 93, and many more) used cut and paste tape work as music. Sometime in college I chanced upon A-Sides, Volume 2, which collected more of those 7-inch sides onto a CD. A lot of these bands were even stranger to my ears, even though I’d gone the way of Throbbing Gristle and Merzbow at the time. The Cravats were just plain odd, all hopped up on saxophones, Drum & Vocals were exactly that, Hit Parade shouted in an enormous Irish accent over a drum machine, and MDC were… from Texas?

The problem with most of these bands was that the extent of their discographies was comprised of little more than those Crass Records sides, and anything else was usually a much smaller print of a much more obscure 7″. The Internet’s great for hearing these things now, but for good quality sound and something you can hold in your hand, very unlikely reissue is pretty much your only way. Gradually, some of those have trickled out. The Cravats in particular have done a great job with their Land of The Giants comp, and Zounds with The Curse of Zounds, but this extremely long-winded setup is all in celebration of the newest of the lot, Anthrax. Yes, the name sounds familiar, but unlike Bullshit Detector 3’s Napalm Death, this is decidedly not the same band. Anthrax were featured on the second A-Sides for their Crass release “Capitalism Is Cannibalism,” and in truth it didn’t stand out much to me —compared to the catchier Omega Tribe, weirder Cravats, or darker Joy-Division-like Lack of Knowledge, they seemed like an almost run-of-the-mill punk band. But here, their complete works combined onto a CD called One Last Drop, it’s easy to see why they rise to the top of the punk crop.

Firstly, there’s no disputing that they must have fallen in well with the Crass crowd thanks to their being a total package: the intricate ink artwork is incredibly detailed and suitably menacing, especially the cover with its cigar smoking, fat-cat capitalist squeezing that titular last drop out of a punk rocker. The art immediately gives them an edge in my mind that should make you take notice: it looks like they mean business. They come out firing on all cylinders with “All The Wars,” and things start to fall into place even more solidly. Anthrax’s mostly mid-tempo stomp contains some genuinely intriguing riffs, and the band keep the energy level up the whole time. If I was in a comparing mood, I’d compare it to a harder-edged early Flux or a more melodically leaning early Conflict, but these (still relatively few) songs are very much their own.

Lyrically, Anthrax seemed to avoid empty polemics in favor of a style that mixes thoughtful verses with a rallying slogan-based chorus. “Violence is Violence” is one of pacifist punk’s great lyrical angles, reducing the complexities of war to the same terms as a streetfight. Most other songs attack the capitalist system. Specifically “They’ve Got It All Wrong” goes after labels and promoters profiting from political music (without taking the same old easy shot at the Clash). It’s not particularly uplifting music, but it’s not the downer of Rudimentary Peni or, say, The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks. It’s got a very call-to-arms quality about it, and the conviction with which it’s delivered once again confirms their “professional” feel.

A lot of the songs are repeats, and each different version has something else to offer. With some bands’ compilations, I find the Crass Records versions to be the most well-produced tracks, but here Penny Rimbaud and John Loder’s trademark buzzsaw guitars and trebly snare thin the overall wall of attack that gives the tunes a lot of their impact. Not a huge fault though, it’s always interesting for me to hear different bands put through that same “filter” to see what comes out. Some bands get a bit sucked in; while Anthrax may lose a little impact, they never lose their identity.

Overall, it’s a great bargain at $10 US, and a good compilation for anyone into the Crass/anarchist punk scene of the early 1980s, anyone who owned but lost their records over time, and even for folks just starting to go down the “serious” punk road. Anthrax are an accessible enough band that fans of, I dunno, Stiff Little Fingers won’t be too frightened away, but fans of bands like Conflict and Flux will no doubt dig them a lot.

- Mike