Von Braun - Cat Dog EP

(Big Red Sky Records, 2012)

Well, this is embarrassing…

Von Braun return with a new EP and I’m once again inclined to name it EP of the year so far. Anyone who read my review of last year’s Folk Devil EP will know that I’m a big fan of this Witney-based band and to be honest not much has changed here, both in terms of my opinion of the band and in the music on this fine EP. The songs on Cat Dog EP were all recorded at the same weekend-long factory recording session that produced Folk Devil EP, so the ‘live’ energy of the songs are still very much at the heart of their appeal. A few post-production tricks and jiggery-pokery have given this release a more subdued, haunting quality than last year’s offering.

Take for instance title track ‘Cat Dog’, with its Hendrix-meets-Pixies introduction; once the initial bombast has died down we’re left with smoking embers, singer Dave Anderson admitting: “I need to talk to you/Because there’s no-one else” before the sirens start and we can “feel the ground shake beneath [our] feet.” Meanwhile, ghostly background vocals and a middle-eastern sounding lead guitar part add to the ethereal mix. Similarly, the barely-audible sample in ‘Melanoma Head’ adds an uneasy texture to an already David Lynch-ian tale (“My friends think that you are scary/You are more than ordinary/Your feet don’t touch the floor…”).

But Von Braun always manage to add warmth to all of their songs, whether they’re about tumours, Pied Pipers or, as in the case in beautiful closing track ‘Into a Hollow,’ something more disturbing. A kind of dementia waltz, the track occupies the same emotional space as Vera Lynn’s wartime tear-jerker ‘We’ll Meet Again’ with its combination of blind hope and knowledge that hope is ultimately futile. It’s the vagueness of it all that is so affecting – “It feels like something will happen soon/It feels like something bad”, “I’m scared I won’t remember you/I’ve got to remember you/I don’t know what to do”. The mix is equally poignant; reverent humming, muffled drumming and reverb-drenched seventh notes adding a romantic tragedy to proceedings. It’s one of the band’s earliest songs, one that has fallen out of favour in their live performances (maybe because it’s such a downer), but it stands up against the raucous live favourites ‘Cat Dog’ and ‘Black Saxon’ that are both present on the EP.

That the band now have two brilliant releases under their belts and are still yet to release some of their best songs is quite an achievement and good news for us too – there’s more where this came from. Once again the band have chosen tracks that work well together to craft a cohesive release that balances moments of light and darkness in the band’s fully-realised sound. At a moment when so many indie bands in Oxford sound like a product of the times, Von Braun are refreshingly out of time in the best possible sense. They’re a band that will restore your faith in the concept of guitar music in all it’s simplicity and grace, a band that exude a minimalistic cool while occasionally erupting in white-hot flurries of energy. There’s only so much longer that Oxford can contain a secret like Von Braun so cherish them while they’re still here.

[Originally published on Music In Oxford, 20/06/2012]
http://www.musicinoxford.co.uk/2012/06/20/von-braun-cat-dog-ep-big-red-sky-records/

Oxford's best kept secret Von Braun return with Cat Dog EP, the follow-up to last year's criminally under-appreciated Folk Devil EP. This collection continues in much the same fashion as last year's offering, combining the best bits of twisted, angular '90's indie rock with excellent song-writing and one of the best band dynamics in town. Raucous live favourites “Cat/Dog” and “Black Saxon” are well recorded here, pleasantly rough around the edges but lesser known songs such as the Radiohead-indebted “Melanoma Head” and the heartbreakingly beautiful “Into a Hollow” shine just as brightly on this sterling EP. Boiling the band down to the prime elements you could say that they sound like the Pixies' influence on Radiohead, but the band have a dark and otherwordly charm of their own. Do yourself and the Oxford scene a favour and check this out at once. Yet another contender for best Oxford release of the year from the Von Braun camp.

[Originally published in Oxford Music Scene magazine, issue 19]
http://www.oxfordmusicscene.co.uk/images/oms_issue19.pdf

Sleep - Dopesmoker (Re-issue)

(Southern Lord, 2012)

Oh come on. This review really is redundant before it’s even begun isn’t it? I mean, where does one begin when reviewing an album that is the very epitome of a genre of music that the band who created it helped define, an album so soaked in history, mythology and THC that it’s damn-near an institution to stoners everywhere. Chances are you’ve heard Dopesmoker, you more than likely own the record in one of its many incarnations so there’s not much point in championing its merits. It’s a fully-fledged musical masterpiece, an epic symphony of distortion, crashing rhythm and flat-out Sabbath worship, an hour-long slab of the mightiest, most recognisable riffs in the history of stoner metal. And the most amazing thing about it is that it exists at all.

I’ll spare you the in-depth history lesson – let’s just say that three young Weedians somehow managed to get a stuffy old rock n’ roll major label to finance their hour-long soundtrack to an imagined, weed-fueled pilgrimage to the holy land. But then said label decided somewhere along the way that a sixty-minute jam praising weed-use wasn’t likely to get much commercial radio-play and dropped the record like a loose cherry. In the age of podcasts and the diversification of digital and online radio that all seems a bit quaint, but that is what prevented Sleep’s swansong and magnum opus from reaching their audience in any sort of satisfactory form until Tee-Pee Records gave it the official bootleg treatment in 2003, some seven years after it was originally recorded. Now the veritable taste-makers and heavy-metal preservationists at Southern Lord have done the honourable thing by giving the album a complete overhaul – new artwork by long-term Sleep collaborator Arik Roper, new mastering by Brad Boatright and they’ve even thrown in a live version of another epic Sleep cut, “Holy Mountain”, recorded in 1994 at what may well have been the height of the band’s slowly-unfurling power.

Producer Billy Anderson has stated that there was no expense spared in making Dopesmoker the heaviest thing ever put on record – sonically, this remastered reissue is the truest realisation of that goal. If you’ve heard Dopesmoker before you’ll know what to expect, but you’ve really never heard it sound this good. That oft-spoken-of, legendary heaviness is finally here in all of it’s hazy grace and glory. The sound is so crisp and clear that you could be forgiven for thinking that the album had been re-recorded yesterday – it stands up to, and in most cases obliterates, every other metal record I’ve heard this year in terms of volume, tone and crushing intensity. Bearing in mind that Dopesmoker was recorded sixteen years ago, that’s quite an achievement (or perhaps a testament to their continued “influence” on the thousands of stoner bands that have come after them).

Here Sleep sound triumphant, and rightly-so; this was their victory lap and final bow before being torn asunder into two disparate camps – Matt Pike’s High on Fire and Al Cisneros and Chris Hakius’ Om. In retrospect the mighty song, which came together over the course of about four years, feels like the perfect melting point of Pike’s raw power and Cisneros and Hakius’ penchant for meditative repetition. They got right here what so many bands get wrong – they perfected the ebb and flow of a riff that had the potential to go on forever. They bring it down, Pike lets rip with a mighty solo, they change it up and they bring it back, never allowing the song to go stale or lose it’s lurching forward propulsion towards the “smoke-filled land.”

Commentators have speculated that the song was intended to induce the listener into the trance-like state that the band would get into on-stage. It’s still a phenomenal record and it has genuinely never sounded so fucking heavy and epic as it does now. Hats off to Brad Boatright for making this record spring back into life and to Southern Lord for treating this relic with the respect it deserves. As I write this thousands of copies of Dopesmoker are making their way across the world to fans who’ve been waiting for the definitive version of this stone-cold classic to materialise. Needless to say, the wait is finally over. If we are to assume that the “weed priests” that Al Cisneros is singing of are Sleep’s alter-egos, then it’s fair to say that with Dopesmoker they found their way to the holy land.

[Originally published by the Sleeping Shaman, 19/06/2012]

http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/album-reviews/s/sleep-dopesmoker-deluxe-reissue-cd-2xlp-2012/

[Later reposted at Roadburn Festival's 'Album of the Day', 19/06/2012]

http://www.roadburn.com/2012/06/album-day-sleep-dopesmoker-deluxe-reissue/

Ides of Gemini - Constantinople

(Neurot Recordings, 2012)

LA “dream doom” trio Ides Of Gemini have, as many other reviewers have already pointed out, taken the basic principles of metal, specifically doom, and turned them on their heads to create their own broad-stroke take on the genre. The band consists of lead singer and bassist Sera Timms (of Black Math Horseman), drummer and backing singer Kelly Johnston and guitarist J. Bennett, a man who is perhaps best known for his day job as a legendary music and film journalist (you may have seen him on Such Hawks, Such Hounds filling in the gaps of the Sleep Dopesmoker/Jerusalem/London Records debacle that weed presumed robbed from Matt Pike’s memory). Musically they fulfil the “dream doom” tag which they’ve willingly accepted as a shorthand conduit into their sound; Bennett’s impressionistic guitar strokes form a hazy backdrop for the darker shades of Timms’ and Johnston’s spectral voices on this moody debut album.

Having said that, the “dream doom” tag has its limitations and first impressions of Constantinople may leave some doom fans scratching their heads and stroking their wondrous beards. In reality the band shares very little of the aesthetic of most doom bands; you won’t find any monstrously down-tuned guitars, sufwoofer-upsetting low end rumble or screaming on Constantinople. Instead the band simply borrow from the same well of despair and desperation that true doom bands take inspiration to shade the mood on this album black and grey.

The songs here are divided between being claustrophobic and possessing a sense of space; the appropriately titled “Slain in Spirit”, with it’s oppressive, nagging guitar chords and regimented, military drumming is a perfect example of the former while “Starless Midnight” and “Ressurectionists” are lighter in their approach while achieving the same sense of grief. Those who have followed the band since their 2011 debut EP The Disruption Writ will find each of the four songs on that EP here, albeit in their re-recorded forms, but fear not if you enjoyed the lo-fi versions with the tape hiss and programmed drums; the songs are given a fresh breath of life, sounding fuller and fleshed out with the addition of Johnston’s minimalistic drumming and complimentary backing vocals.

The new songs carry the same spirit of gloom with them too, often improving on those …Writ tracks and taking the mood into darker territory. Closing track “Old Believer”, “Reaping Golden” and particularly “Austrian Windows” are among the strongest songs on the album, the latter featuring an unusual, meandering chord progression that, combined with Timms’ sultry voice, sounds like a combination of post-OK Computer Radiohead and fellow LA dream-pop crew Warpaint. In fact the songs more often recall eighties and nineties alternative bands than any current metal bands; along the way you can hear hints of My Bloody Valentine, The Cure, Cocteau Twins, Joy Division and even Throwing Muses interspersed with occasional nods to metal by way of a spiky guitar riff. But the overarching mood of the album remains constant: dark.

Truth be told, there isn’t a huge amount in the way of variation on Constantinople and depending on your outlook this could well effect your enjoyment of the album. The songs all stroll along at a mid to slow pace and Timms’ melodies neither jump out at you from one song to another, nor do they bore. Bennett has half-joked that the songs here are the result of a long-overdue “mental fallout” and it’s easy to see Constantinople as a cathartic exorcism of demons. This also means that it’s an incredibly cohesive album that is best enjoyed as a whole, the songs best understood in context of the ones that came before. This is an impressionistic interpretation of doom, broad sweeps of emotion rather than fine brush strokes and so although the details that would clearly define Constantinople as a doom record are absent, the feeling you are left with is pretty damn gloomy. Of course the glass is half empty, and this is an album for the eternally glum.

[Originally published by the Sleeping Shaman, 18/06/2012]
http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/album-reviews/i/ides-of-gemini-constantinople-cd-lp-2012/

Mike Scheidt - Stay Awake

(Thrill Jockey, 2012)

In recent years YOB have become one of the most popular bands in the doom metal canon, taking the essence of the genre (ie. massive riffs) and mixing it up with a healthy dose of experimentalism by way of Neurosis. The man at the heart of the band, Mike Scheidt, has always seemed like a humble, honest and down-to-earth kind of guy – the kind of guy you could approach at a gig and just talk music with over a beer. If nothing else, Stay Awake, Scheidt’s first solo album, throws the singer out of what has presumably become his comfort zone and strips him of the bombast that he and his fellow Yobs create, leaving him, for the most part, with just his unique, high-pitched voice and an acoustic guitar for a collection of reflective, raga-like, hypnotic tunes.

Needless to say there has been a lot of anticipation about this album and the results are approximately what I had been expecting. That’s not to say that the album is predictable or disappointing – far from it – but it is Mike Scheidt with an acoustic guitar with very few embellishments. As you can probably imagine, this makes for a very pleasant album by a very gifted songwriter. As well as containing songs with the same grand, expansive feel of YOB, the tone of the album also shares a fair deal in common with John Frusciante’s solo albums, a kind of spiritual interaction between the classical guitar and that falsetto voice. Lyrically too, both songwriters confront the topics of spirituality, life and death, fear and hope with an equal measure of plain-speak and poetic turns of phrase.

As opening track “When Time Forgets Time” fades in you could be forgiven for assuming that the song had been waiting an eternity to start, the mantra-like, circular cycle of flowing chords coming across like a wash of light, fractured through a stained-glass window. “Until the End of Everything”, one of the few songs on the album to feature an electric guitar, also has a pleasing, cyclical melancholy refrain and a philosophical lyric that encompasses many of the prevalent themes on the album: “Leaves fall and grow again/ Forever, here/ Is the only real time/ Until the end of everything, you will be loved.” Structurally the song is relatively simple but all the more powerful for it. Similarly, “The Price” and “Breathe” both feature beautiful layers of overlapping classical guitars, with a  distinctly Spanish folk influence. Closing the album on a tumultuous note is title track “Stay Awake” which contains the strongest vocal performance on the album from Scheidt who abandons the falsetto for a crooning growl which adds a layer of grit to the pensive yet hopeful track.

In the grand scheme of things, “In Your Light”, as the title would suggest, is the major-feel ray of light in a particularly minor-feel album. In contrast to the sombre songs that surround it on both sides, “In Your Light” sounds like it was plucked right out of the seventies, with the mellow piano in the backdrop, the soulful, breezy backing vocals and the naturalistic lyrics all adding to the ‘easy-like-sunday-morning’ vibe of the song. You can clearly hear the influence of songwriters like Neil Young (as well as his Crosby, Stills and Nash cohorts), Jackson Browne and a host of other songwriters who spent the seventies looking back on the sixties with a mixture of wide-eyed wonderment and blurry-eyed horror. But Scheidt simply uses this tender musical template to voice his own philosophical message.

The great thing about Stay Awake is that it never feels like a rehash of Scheidt’s previous work with YOB but by the same token, it also never deviates too far from that band’s core elements to alienate Scheidt’s many fans. The overriding feeling that the album evokes is one of benevolence, of inclusion and of a universal appreciation for life. The man himself has said that his lyrics on this album have focussed on “the present moment, hope, love and redemption.” Considering Scheidt’s body of work he’s not in need of redemption but as far as debut albums go, Stay Awake is as accomplished and fully-realised a work as he, or we, could have hoped for.

[Originally published by the Sleeping Shaman, 07/06/2012]

http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/album-reviews/m/mike-scheidt-stay-awake-cd-lp-digital-2012/

[Later reposted by Roadburn Festival as their 'Album of the Day', 08/06/2012]

http://www.roadburn.com/2012/06/album-of-the-day-mike-scheidt-stay-awake/