Gorguts

Calexico, “Heart of Downtown”

This comes from Calexico’s Christmas album, Seasonal Shift. The major concession here is that the guitar line is a little more filled out, and there’s a little bit fuller chorus. It’s a Calexico song otherwise, which is a perfectly good thing.

Mastodon, “Divinations”

Crack the Skye is Mastodon at its most Mastodon-y, with their prog-metal thing reaching a logical endpoint. They’d back off a bit from this sound later, but I kind of wish they hadn’t. I want a band to just keep getting more and more elaborate and decorated. I want them to get ten albums in and have the whole damn thing be totally unparseable by normal humans. Have it sound like it fell to Earth from outer space.

Less Than Jake, “Automatic”

As the majors decided that ska, and especially ska-punk, was Really Hot, a bunch of bands signed contracts even though it probably didn’t make a ton of sense. But, honestly, Less Than Jake wasn’t a bad bet by the labels. There’s enough catchiness in their songs that you could see Green Day’s audience becoming interested, and ska was also pretty trendy. It made some sense, and given that there were some pretty huge hits from similar bands, there’s no reason one of those couldn’t have been LTJ. But, it didn’t quite work out, so only two records came out on Capitol Records before they moved back to smaller labels. Good record, though.

U.S. Maple, “Rice Ain’t Afraid Of Nothing”

A thing about U.S. Maple is that they frequently sounded like they were playing three different songs at the same time. It legitimately sounds like they got their wires crossed while playing, but then it kind of comes into focus and you realize it was all deliberate. It’s very difficult to sound this chaotic on purpose.

Metallica, “Confusion”

Metallica’s throwback to their heyday began with 2008’s Death Magnetic, but 2016’s Hardwired…To Self-Destruct is the record that really brought things back. There’s no way for Metallica to really capture the fury of Master of Puppets at this point in their career, but they can certainly try and write songs in that vein. It’s certainly a decent album, but it kind of lacks a spark. There’s monster riffage all over the album, but it just doesn’t sink its hooks in.

Windhand, “Halcyon”

Windhand are usually categorized as playing doom metal, which is to say that they kind of follow in the footsteps of Black Sabbath or at least Sleep. There’s aspects of the sound here which really kind of blur into adjacent genres, which is to say that there’s a certain psych-rock thing going on here, as well as more than a little grunge. Genre categorization aside, this is pretty easy listening for heavy music, and is just kind of pleasant. At least for me.

Today’s music.

Coil, “Who By Fire”

Peter Christopherson is one of the true innovators of underground music, performing as a member of industrial/noise pioneers Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle. He then went on to become part of Coil, a band dedicated to electronic music in all its forms. Coil worked with an impressive list of collaborators over the years, and their career is hard to describe. While usually lumped in with industrial acts, usually due to the company they kept, Coil was much more organic and human than most of industrial music. It usually made them all the more unsettling as a consequence. Coil tended to explore the underbelly of human existence, and their lyrics were usually pretty unflinching and often pretty out there.

Today is not the most coherent set.

Wu-Tang Clan, “The M.G.M.”

A repeat! Six songs today, people!

Gorguts, “Nostalgia”

This comes from Obscura, a landmark album in death metal where Gorguts explored how dissonant and downright strange they could make a metal album. This kind of unhinged musical exploration is where I’ve always found my favorites in death metal, and this kind of spastic noise really has as much in common with the avant garde as it does with traditional metal. This kind of thing can take a bit to absorb, as it’s disorienting to listen to at first, but I find it all really interesting.