July Recap

Scarcity, Yacøpsæ, harsh noise

Aug 07, 2024

Art by Christian Degn, source photography by Caroline Harrison. Layout and design by Suzanne Yeremyan.

New Tunes

Scarcity - The Promise of Rain (The Flenser)

From: New York, NY
Genre: black metal

Still, this is Scarcity. Abrasive riffs strobe like an alarm and pulse like a fear-flooded heart, creating a cacophonous call and response. Blast beats blow through like gales. Screams incinerate your eardrums. It might be catchier, but it’s no less powerful, flexing the same patient build and forceful kineticism as a high-category hurricane. But, like Aveilut, The Promise of Rain allows Scarcity to work stuff out below the maelstrom.

…

The Promise of Rain's title track explores whether to receive the gifts or be swept away. It's definitely desert-y if you want it to be. Kasten-Krause and Weinstein's ever-present undulating rhythms could represent the pervasive heat, forcing its way even into the shadows. Randall-Myers and DiLella's guitars could represent various elements of erosion carving out the landscape. And Moore's screams could represent the living beings that find themselves in this harsh environment.

Read the rest here.

Hypnodrone Ensemble - The Problem Is In The Sender — Do Not Tamper With The Receiver (WV Sorcerer Productions 巫唱片)

From: Berlin, Germany
Genre: prog / rock / krautrock

Nadja's Aidan Baker on guitars. Thisquietarmy's Eric Quach on guitars. Elizabeth Colour Wheel and Fórn's Lane Shi Otayonii on vox. Caudal's Gareth Sweeney on bass. And three drummers. Three! Fiona McKenzie, Angela Martinez Muñoz, and Sara Neidorf. (Neidorf's Sarattma isn't namechecked in the liner notes, which is weird to me. Great band. Great album. “Twilight Realm of Imaginary Notes,” a triumph, I’d write if I were a blurb-baiting movie reviewer.) As expected, Hypnodrone Ensemble is a rhythmically focused entity that folds in shoegaze and krautrock. What that PR-ass description fails to mention is how immersive this music can be. The Problem Is In The Sender — Do Not Tamper With The Receiver, ever a testimonial to the power of music criticism, is as hypnotic as the band name implies, but it also overwhelms the senses with so much data. Think the electronic work of Brock Van Wey, a stream of ones and zeros that somehow code a legitimate emotional reaction. You'll be deep inside a track like the opener, "Transit," feeling the universal heartbeat while floating within a womb and being carried away on a propulsive comet bound for deep space. So much of the Hypnodrone Ensemble experience is where you place your attention, or even not at all. It can be wallpaper if you want it to be. But it's much more fun to muck around in its interior, seeing how each musician adds their voice to the greater whole.

The Problem Is In The Sender — Do Not Tamper With The Receiver was recorded in Prague at Punctum, "[a] home base for various creative and educational activities." The sound is great, atypical of modern approximations of the style. Usually with this stuff, the descendants of Neu! and/or an obscure rarity moldering in Julian Cope’s record trunk, some element of the sonic spectrum gets swallowed up by the swirl. Despite modern tech, we’ve lost the art of capturing shoegaze, like future generations forgetting how to build a telescope because no one shot the YouTube video. But for Hypnodrone, everything comes through — drums, bass, everything. It's a neat sleight of sound that allows the layers to be dissected like a core sample. It rewards the one thing that music nerds are good at: listening. It also rewards the one thing music nerds probably have in their otherwise grimly undecorated living space: a good stereo system.

Defacement - The Promise of Rain (Unorthodox Emanations / Total Dissonance Worship)

From: Utrecht, Netherlands
Genre: death metal / black metal

Duality finds Defacement teasing out the possibilities of "Wounded," expanding the band's palette to include sections one could even call pretty. These shifts, tension and release and push and pull, give Defacement a more explicit compositional richness. It can still be absurdly heavy — guitarists Azagoth and Tadzio excel at a style we'll dub 'frenzied death metal in the infernos of hell' while bassist Forsaken Ahmed and drummer Mark Bestia cook up contrasting rhythms that swell the delirium like a bee sting. But the "Big Feelings," such as the heart-punching-the-gut solos, are a nice touch, suggesting that even during the unending misery of existence, there can be beauty in the experience. "Duality is as well a documentation of incidents in a retrospective development or vision," the band writes. And maybe that's the final duality: a band that won't tell you how to interpret its music but makes you feel so much.

Read the rest here.

Blind Girls - An Exit Exists (Persistent Vision / Secret Voice / Life Lair Regret)

From: Gold Coast, Australia
Genre: screamo

The many shapes of screamo. This Australian quintet trends towards the faster side of the equation, like if Reversal of Man was rebooted and fed a primer on the past however many years of mathcore and its adjacent genres Fifth Element style. (The thought of Leeloo bolting awake during the screamo section because it got to Pete the Pirate Squid is pretty good.) Thus, you get An Exit Exists, a fleet and furious album that pings between hardcore, metalcore, fastcore, and all the cores, really. Sometimes it's Ampere. Sometimes it's Ed Gein. Sometimes it's La Luna. It's an ass-kicker all the time.

What's nice is that Blind Girls never comes off as disjointed, caught at the border of different genres. Everything coalesces into these maximalist miniatures. Perhaps it's because things are so short and frenetic that there's no time to consider whether we're in, like, the To Dream of Autumn zone. (Many experimental physicists have work on defining the the To Dream of Autumn zone from the Textbook Traitors sector.) More likely, it's just because Blind Girls has a smart understanding of how to leverage its strengths in the songwriting. As such, the band never feels overmatched, never feels like it's reaching for something it's not. After all, the quickest way through is a short line. An Exit Exists, and Blind Girls knows it will get there.

Hype-O - Negative (self-released)

From: Chicago, IL
Genre: video game music

From Manic Dream Girl, one of my favorite artists right now, comes Negative, another curveball from an extended universe of hard-biting curveballs that has already given us Hypomanic Daydream. Hype-O's debut is kind of like if Soichi Terada, deep in his Ape Escape days, heard The Musical Dimensions of Sleastak and had his life changed forever.

"A refined selection of tracks I've been working on for a few years inspired by video game battle music and video game interpretations of EDM," goes Negative’s liner notes. Video game maestros Toby Fox, Hidenori Shoji, Graeme Norgate, David Wise, and Tim Follin also get their flowers in that quickie write-up. And as a way to orient a listener, that's a pretty good summation of what Hype-O offers. But it goes deeper than that, too.

Like all good video game music, Hype-O excels at setting a scene even if that scene goes unstated. You can see these levels in your mind's eye. "Song Bird" is like The Tuss soundtracking a platformer. "Spacestation Nightclub" is an RPG set at a dark techno club. But, while this stuff is inspired by music that's supposed to be in the background, the musicality is front and center. "Beating Undertale Before Anyone Could Ruin the Story for You" (lol), my favorite track of the bunch, has those smoking leads that made so many otherwise eh NES and SNES games memorable. That helps this material poke its head above a lot of material in the chiptune space that seems so slavishly enamored with being a substitute for your 8-bit bleep bloops of choice. Negative has a voice.

Salute - TRUE MAGIC (Ninja Tune)

From: Manchester, UK
Genre: garage

I don't envy the dance producer who signs up for a full-length. There's a reason the style’s format of choice is the single. Release a bad single, on to the next. A stinker doesn't upset the album flow because there is no album. Even the more and more frequent EP dispatches don't run into that problem. Shorter releases can be ephemeral. Full-lengths are forever. One is potential, the other is potential realized, even if that potential means suckiness. It’s like how the ending of short relationships, when one mourns that unrealized potential, hurts more than longer ones.

But it's not just the format. There are constraints on the overall sound and flow. For whatever reason, the album is never 10 possible singles. And artists are taken out of their element. You're no longer writing for the club. Instead, you're writing for someone's gym playlist or office job or car ride home, the booming speakers of an underground venue traded in for someone's shitty earbuds. It's like going from a mansion to an outhouse.

So here's Salute's full-length. The talented producer is responsible for two EPs I like a lot, one of which features a collaborative banger with Sammy Virji, the other leading light in this sort of speed garage scene. ("Sort of" since there are no definites when I talk about dance music; ageless neophyte me doesn’t want to go to jail for genre crimes.) The EPs have been great mainly because there's no effort to maintain any cohesion; they're wall-to-wall rippers, combining the bendy micro-sampling of The Field with high-energy garage beats.

True Magic — not capitalizing it, sorry — is good for what it is but also feels like a missed opportunity, not unlike Anatole Muster's album from earlier this year. What could've been a forwarded-looking release of futuristic sounds, the modern equivalent of what Capsule and Perfume did last decade, instead tries to fit into current pop trends. True Magic isn't a step ahead; it's in step with the times, albeit a times with more rococo four-on-the-floor thumps. Thus, there are a lot of vocal features. These guests work best when the tapped singer has solid pop instincts. "Saving flowers" deserves its front-of-the-pack sequencing because Rina Sawayama knows how to nail a hook. But stuff like "maybe it's u" with Sam Gellaitry disappoints because it forces the most interesting part of the track, Salute, to the background. It'd be like hiring Tomas Haake to play bongos or something.

Still, this is Salute, and the vocal-less tracks are superlative. After months of cracking festival playlists, the Disclosure collabo "lift off!" finally gets released. It's the best of Salute, a track both buoyant and driving with multiple drops worthy of rushing to the dance floor. That bassline is also sick. It's hard not to hear that and not wish for an entire album of "lift off!"s and "Peach"es. But, again, cutting an album statement as a dance producer is a highwire act. While I don't love True Magic, Salute definitely hasn't fallen off.

Sick/Tired - Whip Hand Paranoia (Nerve Altar)

From: Chicago, IL
Genre: powerviolence

Things I ask of powerviolence:

Be grind in disguise.
Never use the Spazz voice.

Sick/Tired hits both marks.

Kavyesh Kaviraj - "Rain" (Shifting Paradigm Records)

From: Minneapolis, MN
Genre: jazz

The rest of Kavyesh Kaviraj's Fables is [gulp] fine. “Fine” as an album descriptor is the equivalent of saying a band consists of “nice guys,” it’s pulling the rip cord instead of offering a diss. But Fables is fine in the less pejorative sense. It’s the kind of modern jazz that unites the otherwise disparate factions of cool silver foxes with nice stereo systems in their BMWs and second-year Berklee students. The sound is rich, the playing is good. But for me, it's a little dry. I either need the driving jazz that made Elvin Jones say players should want to die for each other, heady dives into deep waters, antagonistic excoriation, or teardrop-stained suicide notes. That's not to say Kaviraj is a bad technician; some killer piano stuff is packed into this record. I am a decorated despiser in the hater forever war, but I am not an idiot. It's just not my shit.

However, "Rain" is extremely my shit. Boiled down to a classic piano trio, "Rain" is everything I like about this kind of jazz. It inhabits a space that sounds like a mistake: peppy melancholia. It has pace and plaintiveness, that stereotypical Scandinavian piano jazz frisson. I find myself putting "Rain" on repeat and letting it ride, the mark of a good song. Fables, on the whole, might be fine, but "Rain" is here to stay.

Indricothere - Extruded Nonlocality Immersion (Nerve Altar)

From: Queens, NY
Genre: ambient

Jesus Christ, Colin. Well, here's Colin Marston's new 14-hour album. That's not a typo. The shortest song on this synthesizer workout clocks in at an hour and 10 seconds. Ah yes, the “You Suffer” of space synth.

Fun fact time: Much of these dark ambient drifts, which can swirl like a galaxy or be dark like Lustmord's darkest black, were recorded at LA's Vintage Synthesizer Museum. That means I've touched most of the synthesizers used on this behemoth. (It's a cool place. If you're in town, you should go.) I'm sad I didn't use my time there to make a 15-hour ambient album to stoke an ambient arms race, ever escalating until there are years-long works of Steve Roachian negative space, but there's always the next session.

Anyway, I don't even know what to write about Extruded Nonlocality Immersion. Besides the initial shock of the time investment, the music is serious and not stunty. At its best, it reminds me of Starseed Transmission's Metamorphic Illumination, one of the great lost albums of the '90s space ambient scene, an admittedly small cohort that includes the aforementioned and the Hubble Telescope. But goddamn, it is long. My best friend Michael gave me a bottle of The Last Dab, the gullet-incinerating hot sauce made famous by Hot Ones. He said he'd be surprised if I used the entire bottle during my lifetime. That's how I feel about Extruded Nonlocality Immersion. While good, I don't know if I'll ever hear all of it. If there's an eternal afterlife, I'm not even sure I'll listen to all of it then. If you can make it through this Herculean labor in one sitting, you're an absolute sick fuck and can rise to the highest ranks of Laraajian royalty. Vaya con dios, intrepid soundanaut.

Indecent Excision - Into the Absurd (New Standard Elite)

From: Bolzano, Italy
Genre: death metal

While I'll relent and acknowledge the cries that Submerged is "good, actually," I haven't been impressed with post-sale New Standard Elite. Granted, it's not like it was smooth sailing over the prior reign — the fact that the Bandcamp was rarely updated, along with some curious hints at accounting irregularities, pointed to some, uh, gaps in the quality control department. But the music was usually consistent. I feel like that has gone out the window. I fear NSE will eventually sport a hit rate in vicinity of whatever witch-born whiff curse is plaguing Javier Báez, which would suck since the label used to house, like, 85 percent of the best BDM in a given year. Like, what the fuck? Do you expect me to find music on my own? Of course, from personal experience, I know running a label is a pain in the ass, and signing artists is often a subjective leap into the unknown, but...yeah...the 2024 NSE results haven't been promising.

Indecent Exposure's third album gives me some hope that NSE still has a bright future. It's a speedy ripper reminding me of Perverse Dehumanized Dysfunctions-era Cenotaph mixed with enough weird stuff to turn a new Nithing fan's noggin. Sure, it's not quite the irradiated, mutated goo of Matt Kilner's 2023 stunner, an album so good it made me delay my constant requests for an Iniquitous Deeds follow-up. Still, it's nice hearing something that falls closer to the Malignancy side of the equation than the wet-meat murder garbage — those bands with names that would turn Wheel of Fortune into The Clock-length epics and are fronted by bro-y doofuses who do burps with that stupid-ass Cheshire grin — that seems more prone to crossover to a fanbase that isn't entirely made up of goo-drunk degenerates (hi). Wet-meat murder garbage is probably good for a label's bottom line and the GDP of Ohio, but the sicko heart wants what it wants. I'm a sicko. I want Into the Absurd.

I already hinted at Into the Absurd's MO above: Malignancy but danker, dumber. That's not so much an album title as a call to action. The musicianship and turn-on-a-dime structures are, indeed, absurd. Usually, these bands live or die by the speed of the songs, a blast first and analyze later approach to bowling over a listener. However, Indecent Excision has some chops in the composition department. I think I like this album way more the fifth or sixth time around than the first, which is a huge positive in a scene that produces so much music with a short half-life. I don't know if Into the Absurd is year-end material yet, but it's still in the rotation, greasily grinding through some guts along with Submerged. Can't really ask for much more during the most brutal days of summer.

Assistert Sjølmord - Assistert Sjølmord (Static Shock Records)

From: Oslo, Norway
Genre: hardcore / punk

Assistert Sjølmord, "Assisted Suicide" in Norwegian, is poured into that early Minor Threat mold. Guitars slash with the nimbleness of a knife-wielding drunkard. The drums clatter like cars speeding over loose potholes. Prominent bumping bass provides the same service as a foam head on a pint of Guinness. On the opener "Klimabombe," "Climate Bomb," the singer unleashes a laugh like someone showing you a gun tucked into the waist of their pants. Punk rock.

I'm not going to begrudge the punk bands that have grander aspirations. That's something that has been around since Television. Like, Nomeansno, the Rush of punk, is great. Who cares if a band actually knows how to play their instruments well? Punk isn't a sound so much as it's an ethos, Dad. It's not a phase. (It was a phase unless you're me, in which case, my god, I wish it were a phase. Everyone say hi to the old guy at shows who is definitely not a cop.)

True to form, there's something about this nasty, embryonic form of hardcore punk that hits, tickling that lizard brain. I usually get my huff of nastiness off d-beat these days, but Assistert Sjølmord's bygone get-in-the-van simplicity works in its favor. Similar to the tinnitus-inducing thesis of Colossamite, comparatively under-distorted guitars can still sound loud as shit, cutting flesh instead of blowing one away with a high-yield bomb blast. Still, none of this would work if the songwriting were ass. Lord knows I've seen so many local openers flail with these same elements. "Toxicity," “Toxicity,” has energy to spare, but it's also a well-formed song, building and releasing tension in all the right places like a stretchy pair of work pants.

The Vomit Arsonist - Everything Has Died and I Have Given Up (Deathbed Tapes)

From: Rhode Island
Genre: industrial

I'm going to reiterate a lot of this below in a mini-essay, but let me get this out of the way up front: The less I know about noise artists, the better. I don't want to lose the magic — piercing the veil diminishes the danger because it's more thrilling to think this dark, fucked up shit exists in the minds of random passersby. Like, while I love Namanax, some intangible aspect of the music, that sick-to-your-stomach gut-punch, doesn't make the jump when you know it's James Plotkin, Relapse co-founder Bill Yurkiewicz, and Candiru's Kipp Johnson. (That's not to diminish James Plotkin's abilities. He's perhaps one of the most important artists of my lifetime and one of the only people to email me after a review to fact-check some tidbits without those notes coming in the form of a request to fight him at a show.) So, I'll tell you that The Vomit Arsonist hails from Rhode Island, and that's kind of it.

Everything Has Died and I Have Given Up is like being in an industrial K-hole. The slow, mechanical tempos feel paralyzing, like waking up unable to move after a night terror. Admittedly, adding power electronics-style raspy growls pushes this stuff into a bucket of noise I'm not that fond of. Not for this to be a continual teaser for a subsequent part of this shitty newsletter, but you'll hear what kind of noise I like below. That said, The Vomit Arsonist is good at setting a type of mood I generally like, some of that walls-breathing, trapped-in-a-basement, bad-acid-trip grimness. I'd be interested if this project ever went in an Axis of Perdition, Silent Hill siren direction, playing up a supernatural component. That's just me, though. If you're looking for something dark and nasty, this'll do it. "Everything has died and I have given up" is basically how I start every session with my therapist, so it has got that going for it, too.

Mayhemic - Toba (Sepulchral Voice Records)

From: Peñaflor, Chile
Genre: thrash

Besides its breakneck proclivities, Mayhemic's adeptness at spinning a good yarn is its other strength. Much of Toba focuses on the primitive. Mayhemic wields a skull-crushing club on "Kollarbone Crushed Neanderthal," a song about Homo sapiens challenging its fellow primate. "Triumph Portrait" does a five-minute thrash roundup of the Black Death. My favorite of the bunch is the instrumental "Eschatological Symphony," which is exactly that, a thrash symphony (thrashphony?) that might've been a respected part of the classical canon if bygone composers had the privilege of hearing Pleasure to Kill. This stuff just works: barbaric music about ancient barbarity, hellish howls about past hells, violent metal explosions about world-ending volcanic events. When Toba gets going, it sounds like a roller coaster car getting speed wobbles, ready to jump off its track at any point, which is the real thrill of thrash. But don't sleep on the songwriting, which is like when an action movie has a great script.

Read the rest here.

Conglaciation - Conglaciation (Sepulchral Voice Records)

From: New York, NY
Genre: death metal

The New York trio's leads-heavy approach has garnered comparisons to Spawn of Possession and Anata by way of Artificial Brain thanks to a flurry of notes flowing from guitarist Cotter Champlin's dexterous digits. (Champlin has played live with Artificial Brain, and while it may be an oversimplification, one could say some of that band's space dust covers Conglaciation.) The deluge of sonic data, this rushing river of notes that would've crashed MetalTabs back in the day, can be overwhelming. It may take your brain a few seconds to register precisely what has buzzed your tower. And while that's not dissimilar from other chops-monsters in the tech death game, Conglaciation's self-titled debut is much more human than cyborgs constructed in a clean room. Like Anachronism, one of our favorite boundary-pushers from last year, Conglaciation understands that for any of this stuff to work, you've got to feel it.

Read the rest here.

Old Tunes

Photographs taken by Naomi Hosokawa at Factory Pub Bon-Ba-Ye.

As research for a future newsletter to be run at my older-sister publication, the as-neglected Plague Rages, I listened to 10 years' worth of brutal death metal albums in the space of a week. It borked my brain. Absolutely fucked it beyond repair. I can't hear normal music normally anymore. So, what should one do when they need an ear-rinse to defrag the mind? The reparative dulcet tones of Steely Dan? Ha. No. Harsh noise wall.

Noise is one of those genres that even most degenerates can't get down with. I think the reason is that some people want to exert control over the music they listen to. Noise — at least the good stuff, and before we start arguing about this, there is good stuff — is more about relinquishing that control and letting all of it wash over you. You sink into the morass of feedback and let it subsume your life.

I've been into noise for as long as I can remember. In the house I grew up in, a gigantic boiler would fire up during freezing nights and make the entire house sound like it was a launch pad for a rocket. It clattered, it groaned like a dying dragon, but, best of all, it made a sustained deafening drone. Because it was happening in a safe space, I found that inside-a-tornado racket, which essentially deleted one of my senses, calming. It set me up for future bouts of noise infatuation: The Beatles's "Tomorrow Never Knows," spending entire music classes playing with a keyboard's tone wheel. The knock-on effect of boiler-inspired weirdness was that I found the exploration beyond the accepted-by-most sphere of music to be energizing. Out on the fringe became my new safe space, adrift in a vortex of chaos.

It didn't take much to get me on board when I learned there was a whole dang noise genre. Couldn't tell you my inroads: Merzbow or Whitehouse one guesses. Perhaps it was the vaunted Nurse With Wound list, the Library of Alexandria for experimental music nerds in college with too much time on their hands and zero hope of touching another human. None of it was exactly a hop, skip, or jump away from what I was listening to, being deep into the bowels of metal and, like, Venetian Snares's delightfully purient Doll Doll Doll. Soon enough, I had chosen my fighter. Other styles were fine, but I preferred the full-body obliteration of harsh noise wall.

Now, like how Fenriz doesn't care to know how early techno and house are made so as to not ruin the magic, I couldn't care less about harsh noise's leading lights. I don't have time for trivia. This isn't harsh noise Jeopardy. It's better that way. I'm here for the music. Thus, my interest is strictly on an album-by-album basis. Some albums I like, most I don't. The ones I do like are intricately layered — blown out, sure, but also featuring a dynamic, artistic sensibility within that bricked soundform. The equipment also needs to be analog. I don't know what it is, but you can't push digital into the red like analog. Digital loses its bite. Analog is like getting chomped on by a jackal.

The two albums I've been playing recently during my biyearly descent down the noise hole are Incapacitants's As Loud As Possible and C.C.C.C.'s Phantasmagoria. Both adhere to my noise standard: to steal a title from Kevin Drumm, sheer hellish miasma. That these albums were produced in the '90s within a then-fertile Japanese noise scene isn't lost on me; like how '70s Bollywood is that good, good stuff, '90s Japanese noise is a surefire bet to get me in the ballpark of what I want. But I think my interest runs deeper than that.

Thanks to a 2022 remaster released by Total Black, As Loud As Possible, notably the album's centerpiece, "Necrosis," lives up to its billing. However, there's so much more happening beneath the crashing storm waves. Listen to the squiggles, those squirming tones that writhe beneath the static. Listen to how the high and low tones meld into this shockwave blast. Listen to the 29-minute composition's rise and fall. This isn't random. It isn't nonsense. Incapacitants is in control.

Phantasmagoria works on a similar level. Recorded during a 1992 live show, the foursome approaches noise from the same direction but ends up in a different locale. Aided by bass, although the thin recording (which works in the album's favor) doesn't quite reproduce the surely venue-swallowing thrum, Phantasmagoria is more psychedelic, stretching the possibilities, like Les Rallizes Denudes or Mainliner's more unhinged jams. I don't want to write that this is the Dead of noise because that's stupid. Still, there's something almost jazzy about Phantasmagoria, how C.C.C.C. has an improvisatory telepathic sense of what needs to go where to exponentially increase the sum of its parts.

I don't know. I'm not going to say this stuff is for you. This isn’t a recommendation. It’s like uni at a sushi house: you either get down with the textures or not. Plus, much like goo, you gotta realize that no normal person will ever talk to you again if you say this is what you're listening to. "Oh me? I like a lot of things." That becomes the party line at every party. Be that as it may, give these two albums a shot. [Kuato voice] Clear your mind. Suppress preconceived notions. Give in, and let Incapacitants and C.C.C.C. take the wheel. For an hour, it's you within a cocoon of noise. There's nothing else. No bills, no job, no anxieties, no life. Let's escape. Submit.

Concert Highlights

Guck @ Church of Fun, 7/5/2024

Bears repeating: I'm all in on Guck. "What does the LA noise rock band sound like?" you chant with the forced fervor of a game show audience. Well, if there was an abrasive band version of the video game Spore (RIP Will Wright's vision), it'd be like paramecium Arab on Radar ate The Locust and reconfigured its DNA for its own evolutionary purposes. Does that make sense? Who cares. The quintet smokes, layering guitar squalls, keyboard squeals, bass subsonic wums, and eight-armed drum rhythms. On top of that is a singer mid-breakdown, sounding like the internal monologue of someone who hasn't slept for three days. (Hello, it’s me.) This was the third time I've caught Guck, and they keep getting better and stealing shows. I will see them every chance I get. If I have enough juice to book a tour without having to do the actual booking work, let it be Guck and Chaser, and let me chase three dates of it.

Church of Fun is one of the nicer DIY venues in the city, pairing a spacious indoors with a quirkily cool outdoors, complete with an outhouse. There are also chairs outside, a rare amenity that has rocketed Church of Fun up my list of destinations. Tell me you’re old without telling me you’re old. There's also more of a communal, convivial atmosphere, which runs counter to the typical DIY digs that emanate an 'am I going to look over and see someone shooting heroin' aura.

Perhaps that amiable ambience was why I was more inclined to chat than I have been recently. While I generally espouse the wisdom that you'll hear the best stories of your life by talking to other audience members, even the social battery of chatterboxes gets drained. So, lately, I've even been trying to hide away in a book, which, let me tell you, is a killer icebreaker for someone else. I think more people have talked to the weird metalhead because of the book I was holding than when I do my Interview Joe, Cub Reporter thing.

Anyway, I made talk of the small variety with a member of the opening band Nights Templar, a fun post-punky, garagey band that reminded me of The Cleaners From Venus if they were more into romantically lofi post-punk and drum machines. The member told me they were manning the door at a "chess rave" later that night. Chess rave, eh? Turns out, the chess rave was exactly what it said on the tin. To the right, a dance floor with people grooving to a DJ spinning, forgive my musical ignorance here, something that sounded like cumbiaton. To the left, tables set up with chessboards. I, of course, wasn't going to leave a chess rave without playing chess, so I parked myself on a couch and waited for a competitor. One dropped by. We made our openings, then stared at the board like it was the void. Huh, didn't know I was in for some Grandmaster shit. As the music throbbed, we were deep into this ancient battle, our collective concentration unwavering. When I finally pulled off the resignation, seeing the satisfying fall of the king, which looked like an EPL striker taking a dive, I sneaked a peek at my phone, and it was the early morning. The chess rave claimed another soul. You've always been the chess caretaker.

Yacøpsæ at Townes Ave, 7/10/2024

The only thing you need to know about where Towne Ave is located in the city is a Lyft driver once pulled over to drop me off at 1720, the few-blocks-over upscale shithole, turned to me, and said, "Are you sure?" On an absolutely miserably muggy day in July, punkers of all ages (ugh) descended upon the no-AC confines of one of LA's premiere underground extreme music venues, where you might see someone doing graffiti art on the wall during a show, to catch a stacked bill that added German legends Yacøpsæ last second before the turbo speed violence heavyweights headed to the Bay to play a fest. Did I mention the venue was hot? My god, it was hot. It felt like being trapped inside of a cow. With a bunch of feral teenagers running around and doing nitrous hits like a reenactment of Green Velvet’s “Flash,” it was like someone filmed a remake of Salo on the Sun. "I'm going to get arrested if this place gets raided," one of the only other older people said to me while we tried to protect the mixing equipment from flying bodies getting ejected from the pit. “It’s their scene now,” they added, a sentiment mixed with lament and reluctant acceptance.

However, despite the walls sweating, a steadily growing circle pit that looked more like a black hole, and the sound person continually trying to troll the crowd with Soft Cell's "Sex Dwarf" between bands, the show ripped. Vulva Essers is one of the better grinders in the LA scene, a bulldozer outfitted with a jet engine. Controlled Existence, the Czech band then about to embark on a US tour with Shitbrains, played songs with its original singer, setting up a two-vocalist attack of high/low screams that made everything pop that much more in a live setting than on the new album.

And then there was Yacøpsæ, a band I've wanted to see ever since I heard Einstweilige Vernichtung. The trio, complete with a drummer sporting a majestic skullet, burned through a set of stop/start insanity. Amid the aural chaos, the room turned into some Lord of the Flies shit that looked like a hockey line brawl. Speaker stacks shook like high rises in an earthquake as unsuspecting spectators were checked into them. A circle pit broke out, filled with those inexplicably indestructible tiny people who ping around like superball grenades. And then, right when the fever pitch had a COVID-intense fever, the electricity gods decided the mayhem was too much. Old Testament comeuppance: Off went the lights for the umpteenth time I've been at a show this year. (Is it me? Am I an X-man?) Eventually, power was restored. Game on. Yacøpsæ finished its set with the same force, a recharged capacity for roughness like a team coming out of a Knute Rockne halftime speech. 20 years of waiting paid off in full.

Despite a potentially good Morgue Breath set closing the show, I had to bail, staring down an early workday. I left the venue and heard a weird snapping sound. I looked to my left and saw a man walking down the street, cracking a bullwhip. To that Lyft driver’s point, was I sure I wanted to be there? Yeah. Never change, DTLA.

Capsule at The Wayfarer, 7/11/2024

Sometimes, you have to pay off the dreams of a younger you. That's what got me to a midweek show at The Wayfarer to catch Capsule, the composers of one of the last pre-renaissance screamo/Robotic Empire albums I truly loved, 2008's Blue. Ever since I heard the opening off-kilter chug of "True Blue," I've wanted to see this band that's not to be confused with Japan's Capsule. (I also want to see Japan's Capsule, for what it's worth, but that's a request best saved for a different newsletter.) So, when Florida’s Capsule started heading out on reunion dates following its Zegema Beach Fest appearance, it appeared that I finally had my chance. Alas, I was one of the lone souls in Costa Mesa who beckoned that call. In fact, I think I was the only fan in the building.

Tours are tough. That's a fact of life every band that didn't jump straight to the luxury bus level has learned the hard way. But it feels especially cruel to keep having that lesson beaten into a band this far into its music career. So, it's with no pleasure I report that Capsule's gear got stolen in Portland, Oregon. The guitars that recorded Blue? Gone. But the expanded-into-a-quartet outfit soldiered on, receiving loner gear thanks to the generosity of some connections so they could play a triumphant set in SoCal for...uh...one person who really liked them a lot. When it rains, it pours, and some tours feel like a monsoon.

To its credit, while older — although not to the midlife crisis extent of a show earlier this year when I looked into the raging pit and thought, "Good god, we all have mortgages" — Capsule still admirably plowed through its set. It wasn't perfect because how could it be given the circumstances? (Not that anyone should lust after studio replication; that’s not why we go to shows.) But the vibe, as the kids say, was good. And when "Cobalt Connection" kicked in, 2008 me started losing their shit, which made 2024 me pull a muscle. 27-year-old Stevie Nicks knew: I'm getting older, too.

Flamin' Groovies at Zebulon, 7/18/2024

It's weird when you like one album from a band's oeuvre. I'm not mad at Flamin' Groovies's other albums; Teenage Head is great to hear in a bar or whilst post-bar smooching on a couch. But like many people prone to jangle, I'm in the thrall of Shake Some Action, the pioneering San Francisco garage rock band gleaming proto-power pop stunner. Nearly 40 years later, the Byrds-but-tough, heart-on-its-torn-sleeve qualities can still make a person wistful for better days, even if those days were never lived. Shake Some Action has a lot of stuff going for it: an updated British Invasion modiness flexing a muscularity that could withstand the oncoming punk hurricane; gorgeous guitars and harmonies; and Dave fucking Edmunds in the producer's chair. But it's the emotional component for me. Shake Some Action is almost ODing on that melancholy Yellow Pills shit. It's that first cold wind of fall that reminds you that the mistakes of summer are now deathbed memories. It's that agonizing moment between telling someone you love them for the first time and their response. It’s the ache, that feeling when your bones have been so hollowed out, you can almost hear the wind whistling through them. "I can't hide the way I feel inside," goes "I Can't Hide," one of my favorite songs. Thank god for that.

So off to Zebulon I went to see what remains of Flamin' Groovies, hoping I'd hear at least a snippet of Shake Some Action. Much to my surprise, what kicked off the night was a reformed Pandoras playing as The Tigerellas. (RIP Paula Pierce and Kim Shattuck. Kim Shattuck, man. I need to write about Kim Shattuck sometime.) Anyway, that nervy, messy energy that made The Pandoras stand out in the burgeoning Paisley Underground scene is still there, rocking through past nuggets and a banging cover of The Who's "I Can't Hide" that was punchier than the original.

Flamin' Groovies is down to just Cyril Jordan, who admitted he has survived for so long by doing drugs in moderation. Take that lesson, rockers. Chris Wilson, a crucial part of the tri-guitarist attack on Shake Some Action and later member of The Barracudas, is now retired, so we got some hired guns instead of the OGs. That's fine. It's hard to expect anything different from a band approaching its 50th birthday. And it didn't really diminish the performances, as evidenced by the joyful crowd. And that crowd didn't skew old, either. There were a lot of kids bopping along, demonstrating that heartfelt music can be timeless...or because Cracker covered "Shake Some Action" for the Clueless soundtrack, a nearly 30-year-old movie (fuck me) that has a similarly enduring quality.

So, about "Shake Some Action," the song that has been following Jordan around like gum on his shoe. As soon as that opening arpeggio kicked in, it was an oh-shit moment, like hearing the echo of the Big Bang. That made the night worth it. Would I see Flamin' Groovies again? Probably not. But I checked a pretty big box. Still the one.

Raw Addict at Towne Ave, 7/19/2024

Let's get down to business. The first, and maybe last, Raw Addict show in the States. Half the band resides in Canada, and paying for flights on a goregrind budget ain't happening. So, this set approached can't-miss status, especially after preeminent blast addict Isaac Horne said Raw Addict was the favorite band he's drummed in.

The two-piece on past albums became a four-piece for this one, and I can only ask it to retain that configuration if it records again. The energy was unreal, with the singer gurgling pitch-shifted expulsions while hitting everyone brave enough to stand up front like Ronnie Lott. The band blasted and grooved, and then the power went out. Again. It's definitely me.

Once power was restored a la the scene in Jurassic Park, Raw Addict wrapped its set and released us back into the night, the air delivering a newfound sting because no one had a face left to block it.

Fuck on the Beach at The Regent, 7/20/2024

FUCK ON THE BEACH!!!!!!!!! That's what was displayed on the screen behind the Japanese powerviolence trio at The Regent, a venue I hate for reasons I can't articulate. (I'm not a venue scientist. I have no insight. Some places just bug.) Getting a chance to see Fuck on the Beach's penultimate show in America (more on this later) was worth me overcoming my irrational, one-sided beef. And yeah, can concur: FUCK ON THE BEACH!!!!!!!!!

I was also there to see Violencia, a Mexican powerviolence band I quite like and caught earlier this year. That set was sick. This set was kind of a mess and demonstrated how weird it was seeing a lot of these bands in a big venue. There are a lot of bands with a surging popularity that forces them into larger venues. Problem: the music doesn’t fill the spaciousness. Powerviolence, to me, belongs in smaller clubs. It's harder to zap the crowd on a bigger stage with that same energy. Anything punkily death-defying gets swallowed up by the enormity of the space. It's like watching someone do card tricks in an opera house. Suffice it to say, I don't think this was Violencia's normal — everyone seemed a little off that night, and I have proof of concept that it's a great live band. But it did put a damper on the evening, considering that most other supporting acts weren't must-watches.

However, Fight It Out, a moshy hardcore band from Japan, transformed itself into a must-watch by dint of its stage antics. The singer tossed the microphone into the middle of the circle pit like a spelunker dangling a rope and dove in. I couldn't get a glimpse of the ruckus from my vantage point, but based on how many audience members were screaming into the mic, I assume it was absolute pandemonium. I also laughed pretty hard when a good slam-dancing Samaritan handed the bassist a lost-and-found wallet, which triggered said bassist to make a "why the fuck would I want this" face before tossing the wallet back into the pit.

Slight Slappers used that same aggression to power its dangerous goofiness. Every way a band could violate an insurance plan was on display, from wrecking mics to crowd surfing to climbing on parts of the stage like Alex Honnold. Naturally, we all ate it up. It was a show. The music? Ass. The spectacle? Top notch.

And then, your star of the show: FUCK ON THE BEACH!!!!!!!!! Pretty much what you'd expect: ramshackle irreverence prioritizing speed above all else. And boy, did the pit appreciate that. It was bedlam; whatever thin line separating propriety and batshittery was torn away like a slider-dominant pitcher on their fifth Tommy John surgery. One person booted from the venue for pit crimes even covertly re-entered the mayhem bedecked in a luchador mask. Fuck on the Beach's blazing powerviolence called for that kind of commitment to raucous limb flinging. When the band closed with, what else, "Fuck on the Beach," Tsuyoshi Ito scaled a pillar in a thrilling display of not giving a shit. I'm sure an insurance adjuster somewhere was having a heart attack, but here was this power trio overpowering the Regent's large confines.

Later that night, Fuck on the Beach played at a smaller venue: Towne Ave. The show kicked off at some stupid time, like 2am. I thought about going because I can't remember when I did a double with the same band on the same day. But as soon as I stepped outside the Regent, I was like, Nah. The Instagram videos looked cool when I watched them in bed. Sometimes, you just gotta crash.

Baring Teeth at Knucklehead, 7/25/2024

I think I write this every time I report a show at Knucklehead, but it's such a clean summation of the venue: You have to walk across the stage to get to the bathroom. It's some of that quirky dive magic until you have to go to the bathroom.

Anyway, someone finally took my advice and booked two bands with similar names. Shot: Teeth. Chaser: Baring Teeth. If Steel Bearing Hand could just shorten its name to Bearing, we could have a Bearing / Teeth / Baring Teeth tour.

Teeth: Heavy. Not with 75 percent of the band in Tzompantli (and 50 percent in Duhkha, a band I'm legally responsible to write is still severely underappreciated), the long-running tech death band with Cro-Magnon chugs has only gotten heavier, much like a raccoon trapped in a donut joint. Backed by a creepy red light, the quartet crushed through a set of songs, including selections from its forthcoming hearing-fucking-upper, The Will of Hate. Always nice to hear some Angelenos shaking the room.

As for Baring Teeth, this was the Dallas trio's first time in LA...ever? Someone might need to fact-check me on that. Or don't. I don't need to know that I'm wrong about another thing on top of everything else.

Amazingly, Baring Teeth sounded as good as its recent album, The Path Narrows, which is something because that's a brain-spraining display of technical ability, shifting time signatures, and spicy tones. I spent a lot of time looking at Scott Addison's bass, partly because I used to play bass and partly because, damn, that's a big bass. But everyone came to shred. Andrew Hawkins ripped through riffs while singing, something that's extra impressive to me, a person who can barely listen to music while breathing. And Jason Roe was a beast behind the kit, playing with unreal accuracy while maintaining a music-expanding looseness. Baring Teeth: pretty good. Please come back.

Fabiano do Nascimento at 2220+ Arts, 7/30/2024

The release show for Fabiano do Nascimento's Olhos D'água was my reward for filing my monthly column before seeing the wrong side of a sunrise, a Pyrrhic victory that foretold a writer's tale as old as time: I didn't sleep a fucking wink that week. So, there I was, in my typical back-of-house perch at 2220+ Arts, fighting for my life to stay awake before the show. And then do Nascimento hit the stage with percussionist Ricardo "Tiki" Pasillas, and I was rapt for the next hour. Funny how that works. Music is caffeine for the music lover. Who knew.

People who have been reading this newsletter long enough, and for that I'm genuinely sorry, will remember that I was a big fan of do Nascimento's Lendas, so I was stoked to hear a stripped-down and elongated version of "Retratos," with Pasillas filling in the edges with percussion that matched the original's string arrangement. But the less familiar material also had me on the edge of my seat because do Nascimento is such a dynamite technician and keeps evolving as an expressive player, emphasizing space where possible, which must be a real trial for someone who can shred.

Still, as I wrote above, we come to live shows to see and hear the unpredictable. Before the final song, Pasillas started playing around with bird-sounding gadgets before do Nascimento kicked in some impromptu hand farts. The two grooved on the idea for a couple minutes to everyone's delight. Here's the thing about master musicians: That shit worked. Aside from the incongruity, the polyrhythms were sick. May we all have a similar moment in life when we can turn the silly into the sublime.