Deafheaven – Infinite Granite [2021]

From the moment Sunbather blasted Deafheaven into…whatever counts as the mainstream for this kind of music, they’ve been polarizing. Not only do metal fans either love them or revile them, the music itself often operates within very disparate styles. They’ve never had much middle ground, after all: they’re either arresting in their beautiful washes of shoegaze guitars and blissed out tremolo textures, or they’re demolishing everything in their path through siren-esque shrieks and pummeling blast beats. They borrow as much from My Bloody Valentine as they do Mayhem, but they’ve also never shied away from evolution either. New Bermuda breathed closer to metalcore and hardcore than shoegaze, and Ordinary Corrupt Human Love was a varied – if sometimes a bit confused collection – of textures, spoken word, metal, alt rock, and morbid atmosphere. But no matter what they were doing, Deafheaven never quite settled into one lane, as they seemed content to operate in the extreme ends of whatever they were exploring. And for as exciting as that tendency towards the extremes made their music, their last album showed signs that maybe they were ready for a big change, but where that change would bring them was anyone’s guess.

Well, where they’ve gone next is that fabled middle ground. Infinite Granite builds upon the promise of Sunbather’s love of shoegaze and texture and retools the band’s entire sound towards that end. That by itself feels like an evolution that was an inevitability for them, but that’s not what makes this album such a surprise. Instead of George Clarke’s paint-peeling missives, he’s instead shifted gears to almost entirely clean vocals. And to be perfectly honest, I’ve long since wanted a bit more variety in his vocal style. But considering just how harsh his vocals are – and how strained they were starting to sound – I wasn’t sure he’d be able to pull off clean singing. I’ve been happily proven wrong, however, because George’s vocals here have a shockingly delicate, soft spoken quality to them. And while he doesn’t have a huge range, he does has great control of what he does have, using it to lend these songs a hypnotic and rhythmic edge. His vocal lines sound as if he was able to transfer the patterns he’d normally use for his screamed vocals into sung ones instead, giving his cadences a unique stutter/stop edge that contrasts perfectly against the hazier, dream-like music that envelops him like a warm blanket.

Much like the huge step George has taken with his vocals, the rest of the band has taken big steps instrumentally as well. While they’ve always had those shoegaze influences as a core part of their sound, it still felt more like they were flirting with the style rather than fully committing to it. On Infinite Granite, though, they’ve found a way to stretch those influences far enough to carry entire songs, and create a bed of lush, vibrant music on every track. So much of this album pushes and pulls with a constant subtle tension, tension that is far removed from the more obvious and foot stomping attack in their metal-centric work. Yet, there’s still plenty to be recognized as distinctly Deafheaven in the way they utilize cathartic build ups and climaxes, black metal-inspired tremolo guitars, and that thick wall of sound that made their previous records so transfixing. It’s impressive how they’ve managed to retain so much of the intensity from their heavier work on such intimate, shy, and emotional compositions. And while it would be easy for a metal band to underpin these delicate tracks with their former aggression and fire, or push them unnecessarily towards big finishes just to take a half-measure towards pleasing fans of the older stuff, Deafheaven excellently walks the line of reserving those powerful finishes for the moments when they count most, making the blistering finishes of Villain and Mombasa so hard hitting when they finally do break out the screams.

However, for as much as I love the new turn Deafheaven has taken here, there’s still a few wrinkles to be ironed out if they’re to continue down this road. George’s vocals are great for what they are, but he still has a little bit of a way to go towards making sure his vocal lines are distinct from track to track and grab the ear. There’s a few stand out moments on these songs that hint at his ability to pull this off in the future, and I’ve found several of the hooks here stuck in my head for days. But his vocals can also start to turn into a bit of a blur towards the end of the album, making it difficult to latch onto specific lyrics and hooks since he essentially has one gear and one gear only. Sometimes this works in the album’s favor, and I do love the hazy hypnotism of those staccato, soft vocals, but other times it wears thin and ironically, could still use a bit more variety in tone and dynamics. The music itself suffers from a similar problem, as well. These songs are engineered to sound thick, lush, and foggy, creating dense layers of sound that are so easy to get lost in. But like George’s vocals, towards the end of the album the trick starts to wear out its welcome, sacrificing atmosphere for memorable guitar parts or tantalizing lead work. I’m hard pressed to pick out any guitar parts here that really wow me, and sometimes that’s a sign that a band knows when to focus on the songwriting instead of showing off their chops, but I can’t help but wish that the guitar work had more meat on its bones than shoegaze-y textures and simple chord progressions.

Despite all that, overall I’m intrigued and in love with Deafheaven’s new sound. They’ve taken a bold risk by jettisoning most of their trademark sound and vocal style, and it seems like Infinite Granite is a record they’ve wanted to make since Sunbather. There’s a lot of promise in how the band utilizes sound and texture to emphasize atmospheres, emotion, and George’s clean vocals, and many parts of this album truly feel like a triumph. But at the same time, there are moments where the band has simply ventured too far into that middle ground that they have avoided for so long. Infinite Granite occasionally yearns for some higher highs, more rise-and-fall dynamics, or even just the odd stand out guitar part to liven up some of what can become one-note and monotonous towards the end of its runtime. But because so much of this record is simply so good at what it is going for right off the bat, this all feels more like transitory growing pains than failure to rise to the occasion. Either way, Deafheaven have opened up a world of doors for themselves with this album, and if it was already hard to guess what direction they would go next, with Infinite Granite they’ve made the possibilities limitless.

Between the Buried and Me – Colors II [2021]

Anyone who’s consumed any form of media knows what an uneasy prospect a sequel can be. So often that word has come to be synonymous with diminishing returns, compromised visions, and creative bankruptcy that is only justified by an accountant’s balance sheet. So when Between the Buried and Me announced a sequel to what I consider their best work – and some of the best prog metal in general – I felt a weird mix of emotions. My inner 15 year old was over the moon at the prospect of more Colors, but my present self was full of nerves. After all, so many things could go wrong, right? They could phone it in and copy themselves in that cynical, jaded way so that many bands do when they attempt to “go back to their roots”. Or they could go so far off the map that it doesn’t resemble the original at all, setting needlessly high expectations just to dash them…because after all, their sound has deviated from Colors quite a bit since 2007. With all these questions in mind, I was excited for Colors II in a way I haven’t been excited for an album in a minute, and I couldn’t wait to hear what the guys had come up with.

However, right from the jump, this record clearly has a lot of Colors baked into its DNA. Tracks like “The Double Helix of Extinction” and “Fix the Error” both echo and build upon the frenzied, dissonant heaviness of this record’s predecessor, hitting hard and fast while leaving nothing but devastation in their wake. “Fix the Error” especially captures that rambunctious, everything-AND-the-kitchen-sink approach of Colors as it sprints from gospel-inspired organs, a blistering set of drum solos, and a crazed punk energy that holds this call for rebellion together. And between these tracks we find “Revolution in Limbo”, a 9 minute beast that finds the band veering through soaring choruses, thick slabs of crunchy technical metal, Cannibal Corpse-esque growls from drummer Blake Richardson, and even a Latin-inspired bit of bossa nova to close things out. A song like this sounds absolutely insane on paper – just like much of the original Colors did as it jumped between bluegrass, prog, jazz, metalcore, and more – and by all rights would be a mess if written by any other band. But this track actually highlights one of the strongest qualities of Colors II, which is the long way the band has come as song writers in the intervening 14 years. Because where once their wild genre excursions could come off as jarring and almost random, herethe band has managed to make these knotty twists and turns feel completely logical and necessary for each song, and each “wtf” moment turns from surprise to sheer pleasure in a heartbeat.

And that’s not just a feature of the individual songs on this record, but rather of the album as a whole. There’s a beautiful flow to it that is so smooth you may not even notice just how much things have changed until you’re 7 tracks deep, and starting with “Never Seen / Future Shock” is where we hit the real turning point. This track starts off as another blast of hard hitting prog in line with the more classic-sounding BTBAM tracks before it, but this is also where the record starts to play with the sounds the band has developed in the 14 years since Colors. On the back half of this song, things shift gears into some slow cinematic prog rock, with Tommy’s clean vocals reaching for the skies over a bed of tightly woven clean guitar leads from Paul Waggoner and Dustie Waring that ricochet off of each other in jazzy lock step. And for the big finish, the band pays homage to pretty much every ’80s prog record ever by bringing in a blast of reverb drenched drums before kicking off into a dramatic finish full of uplifting guitars and sci-fi movie keyboards. This is the jumping off point as Colors II shifts gears from what we expect into what we don’t, and the record takes on a focus much more its own.

It would’ve been quite easy for the band to sit down and write an honest to god clone of the original, retreading the same stylistic beats and sounds for a quick cash grab. But while the first half of the album does play with some of their classic sounds, the real power of what they’ve made here is how they’ve effortlessly blended so much more into that Colors framework. Because from here on out, the band starts wholeheartedly diving into the classic rock side of progressive music on tracks like “Stare Into the Abyss”, “Bad Habits”, “The Future is Behind Us” and “Turbulent”. Each one of these songs does have a familiar Colors slant to it, whether it be through a bit of harsh vocals to liven things up or just by adding extra oomph to a dramatic moment with angular riffs and crunchy power chords. But for as much Colors as you’ll hear throughout this album, there’s an equal amount of the underrated Coma Ecliptic too. That album found the band ditching a large chunk of their complex metal riffing and labyrinthine song structure in favor of a more streamlined, simplified approach, which meant utilizing much more in the way of clean vocals, negative space, eerie atmosphere, keyboard-driven melodies, and well as their ’70s prog heroes to guide the way. I found that record to be a fantastic bit of experimentation – and a bold move from a band with a history of bold moves – but it also received a fair bit of backlash for deviating so far from the blueprint, too.

But risks like that define this band, and they’re why Colors II makes for such a compelling sequel. By cross-pollinating one of their most beloved records with one of their most controversial, they’ve created an album that both lovingly echoes the best parts of their catalog, while simultaneously daring to bring together all the evolution and experiments that comprise Between the Buried and Me in 2021. This isn’t the sound of a band navel-gazing at their own past and patting themselves on the back, but rather a band that seized the opportunity to build upon that past in a way that they could only do after 14 years of living, writing, and playing together. Because for as much as the band winks and nods at their past through the occasional musical reference and lyrical interstitial on this album, Colors II firmly stands as its own work. If you had never heard the original Colors (or this thing had simply been called anything else), it would still be just as excitingly aggressive and heavy, gorgeously emotional and atmospheric, and adventurously written as it is now. And yeah, when the album was first announced, that 15 year old me really just wanted another helping of Colors, because honestly, why wouldn’t I? But instead, the band took this chance to do something much more important. They’ve created a record that does indeed find joy in acknowledging who you used to be, and how that person you were has shaped the person that you are now. But at the same time, they’ve also highlighted just how important it is to never stop growing, to never stop finding new things that excite and challenge you, and to never rest on your past accomplishments. So while Colors II may not be the exact stylistic successor that some people may have been hoping for, it does absolutely embody the mold-breaking, genre-defying attitude that made Colors such a special record. We were never going to get the same record again, and the truth is…we didn’t need to. I applaud Between the Buried and Me for being brave enough to recognize that, and for crafting such an amazing record this deep into their career.

Avenged Sevenfold – The Stage [2016]

The past few years have been rough for Avenged Sevenfold. Ever since drummer Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan died in 2009, the band has seemed unsure of what direction to go in: 2010’s Nightmare featured the Rev’s final songwriting contributions and had one of his drumming idols playing his parts, Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy. But Portnoy’s role was only ever to be temporary, and they quickly found another drummer in Arin Ilejay for 2013’s Hail to the King. That album found the band attempting to regroup, simplifying their sound and mining through their various hard rock and metal influences for new inspiration. But instead of sounding inspired, the band often veered too close to becoming a cheap copy of those influences rather than honoring them, and the songs were further weakened by Ilejay’s limp and rudimentary choice of drum parts. Sensing that things weren’t working out, the band has once again switched drummers, enlisting Brooks Wackerman of Bad Religion to fill the seat.

But Avenged Sevenfold had bigger ideas this time around than simply swapping drummers again. It was clear that the band was gearing up to release an album, if not this year, then probably the next. But details were scarce and besides the release of a single, “The Stage”, early in October, no one even knew if this thing had a title yet. The secrecy turned out to be for good reason: inspired by the surprise releases of Radiohead, Beyonce, Death Grips, and more, the band performed a live VR concert on October 27^th before announcing that, hey, they had a new album and you could go buy it right at that moment. And in a first for this type of release, the band managed to get physical editions made and heroically avoided a leak up until the very last minute.

The album in question is The Stage, and clocks in as their longest album to date at a whopping 73 minutes. Immediately from the titular opening track, it’s clear that the band has gotten back on track. The opening title track starts off with ominous organ akin to “Critical Acclaim”, before launching into their classic limber guitar work and muscular riffing. It’s also clear that the band has re-embraced their progressive rock roots more than they have since 2005’s City of Evil, with the track easily hitting the 8 minute mark and moving through an array of harmonized leads, classic guitar riffs, and blazing solos. “The Stage” sets the tone for much of the album, as songs like “Paradigm” (a track that’s traditionally heavy and powerful for them), “God Damn” (a song that shows off Wackerman’s drumming chops and highlights why Ilejay was such a poor fit for the band), and “Sunny Disposition” feature much of these same traits, mixing power with structural variety. The latter track, “Sunny Disposition”, is their most interesting sonic experiment in years, combining the power of traditional metal riffs with a trumpet section in order to create an eerie, unsettling effect rarely seen in their catalog. Elsewhere, the band experiments with Faith No More-esque vocal melodies on “Creating God”, and is a great example of the vocal shift on this album. It seems like their hero worship on Hail to the King wasn’t entirely forgotten or without merit, as M. Shadows switches up his delivery to include not just his stock shouted tough guy rasp, but also hints of Layne Staley in his harmonies and Axl Rose in his highs. But perhaps the biggest risk on this album is its closing track, “Exist”. Clocking in at over 15 minutes, it stands out as the band’s longest track yet, and also features its longest instrumental section as well. Opening with swirling spacey synth leads, the band comes in full force with swept arpeggio runs and thick riffs that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to any Dream Theater fan. After 7 minutes of various guitar runs, organ sections, and chaotic soloing from Synyster Gates, the track finally takes a breather and allows gentle vocals to take over. The break doesn’t last long, though, as familiar pieces from the first 7 minutes slowly reintroduce themselves under Shadows’ vocals, until the song finally gives way to a monologue about the universe and the humans living in it from none other than Neil DeGrasse Tyson himself.

While it’s great that the band has finally found themselves again and have made a more progressive, more risky body of music, The Stage is not without its dead spots. Several of the songs on this album suffer from lacking a strong hook or vocal melody to hold them together, and as a result, songs like “Angels” and “Simulation” feel like plodding repeats of each other. Avenged has also always been a very vocally driven band despite all of their instrumental flair, so for them to switch it up here and use those instrumentals for much of the album’s melodic cues is – while not a bad thing – jarring and harder to get accustomed to considering their catalog of massively hooky songs. Sections like the impressive orchestral ending of “Roman Sky” are more immediately memorable than any of its vocal lines even after several listens, as are the aforementioned trumpets in “Sunny Disposition”. And outside of those motifs, in general most of the songs feel like they could have picked up an additional 5 or 10 BPM without suffering for it, as even album highlights like “Creating God” and “Sunny Disposition” don’t feel quite as urgent as they possibly could. In combination with most of the songs’ lengths, this ends up making the album feel a bit draggy and forgettable in its middle run.

But as a whole, The Stage is definitely a step back in the right direction for Avenged Sevenfold. They’ve embraced their core sound again without needing to outright copy their heroes, and are once again taking risks musically. And while not every song here is top tier material from them, overall The Stage feels like their most cohesive and mature work to date. So despite hitting a few stumbling blocks on this album, they feel more like growing pains as they move into a newer, more progressive sound, rather than a death knell for their creativity. For a band that has historically been so eager to dive into tired metal and edgy goth cliches, The Stage opens up an exciting new path for them to trod in the future, and it’s one that we can only hope they take till the end.

Key Tracks: The Stage, Sunny Disposition, Creating God, Exist

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Dissociation [2016]

As sad as it is to say, The Dillinger Escape Plan is throwing in the towel. That’s old news. Even older news is their storied commitment to fractured rhythm and teeth-grinding musical violence, their intensely physical and destructive live shows, their defiant DIY attitude that filters down to every move they’ve made in twenty years of existence. But the how and why of the band’s demise is quite possibly the newest thing here: the band is going out in a blaze of glory with one final record and a world tour spanning into 2017. They’re not killing this thing because they’re run out of ideas, or because their bodies are only being held together by sheer force of will, or because everyone hates each other. In fact, the band’s probably operating at its highest creative gear ever. Instead, they’ve realized that once anything reaches an apex, it eventually has to come back down. In the face of potential stagnation and diminishing returns, they’ve decided to clip that apex and kill the beast while it’s potent enough to still be missed.

That final record is Dissociation. And instead of pulling out all the stops and making some unhinged, off-the-wall masterpiece untethered to any expectations and obligations, they’ve instead consolidated their strengths into one album. Dissociation reads like a weathered road map of where the band has been before: touching upon the unrefined chaos and power of Calculating Infinity and Miss Machine, the freak-out glitch of Ire Works, and the melody and more traditional structures of Option Paralysis and One of Us is the Killer, it’s a summation of their body of work. But that’s not to say that Dissociation lacks for its own voice, either. On it the band sounds more crazed, more desperate, and more lonely than ever before, like it’s using those pieces of its past to hold itself together one last time in the face of the end rather than simply revisit the past.

It’s obvious on tracks like “Low Feels Blvd”, “Nothing to Forget”, and “Fugue” that the idea here is to take those past landmarks and channel them into some new feelings and emotions. On the former track, the band fires into breakneck Ire Works-esque riffing that pummels just as hard or harder than anything they’ve done before, and just as you feel like you know where it’s going, the bottom falls out. Suddenly the track takes a detour into Mahavishnu Orchestra styled jazz soloing from Ben Weinman, accompanied by frantic brass and strings and carried by choir-like falsetto from Greg Puciato. On “Nothing to Forget” the band opts to take the ominous, chunky approach they used on much of Option Paralysis, before opening up into one of the most straightforwardly pretty and melodic sections they’ve ever put on tape. Here the band is once again accompanied by a string quartet, but this time they opt for something a little more cinematic than “Low Feels Blvd”, using them to create drama and tension behind some of the most pure and honest-sounding vocals the band’s ever utilized. And “Fugue” builds from the band’s brief flirtations with electronics and morphs it into a full scale Aphex Twin/Dillinger hybrid, smashing Billy Rymer’s drums into quantized madness while layering them over one of Liam Wilson’s most unsettling bass lines ever, turning it into the album’s most jarring and sonically unique track.

But it wouldn’t be a Dillinger album without some tried-and-true landmarks, either. “Symptom of Terminal Illness” is the band’s usual “pop” track, but approaches its melody from an eerie, dramatic, and unsettling angle that quite possibly makes it their most compelling work in that vein yet. And songs like “Honeysuckle”, “Wanting Not So Much to As To”, and “Surrogate” deliver all of the musical shock and awe that their name has been built upon, featuring plenty of the band’s trademark jagged off-time riffing, vicious vocals, and chaotic power. And despite its mid-tempo, opening track “Limerent Death” is perfect for that role, as it feels like it’s dragging the listener kicking and screaming into something bigger, scarier, and more dangerous through it’s multiple build ups and breakdowns.

Bigger, scarier, and more dangerous perhaps sums up the whole record: while the band has been getting progressively more melodic and injecting some pop structures into their sound in recent years, Dissociation is much darker, more desperate, and less obvious as a whole. The first few listens won’t yield many obvious hooks, as the music is denser than ever before, and the lyrics betray a sense of fear, anxiety, and existential dread in the face of death. There’s palpable tension in every moment here; a sense that the beast is cornered and dying, yet strong enough to make its last stand and one final statement. Nothing sums that feeling up more than the album’s eponymous closing track, a track that’s far outside of their typical sound, and yet the most fitting possible conclusion to their discography. “Dissociation” is built entirely around keening, emotional strings courtesy of SEVEN)SUNS string quartet, and layered with throbbing electronics and skittering, off-kilter drum loops that threaten to spiral out of control. And strangely enough, despite Ben Weinman being the band’s only remaining original member, you won’t hear a single moment of his guitar work on this track. Instead, Greg Puciato croons what sounds like an epitaph for the band over all of this without ever raising his voice – lines like “don’t confuse being set free with being discarded and lonely” and “couldn’t stay for you / what a strange way to lose” feel like they were written with the band’s imminent death in mind. Even more strangely, the final moment of Dillinger’s final track fades out into a gentle falsetto, with all of the remaining instrumentation dropping away and leaving nothing but the lyric “finding a way to die alone” echoing out into the emptiness. It’s heart-wrenching in its truth, powerful in its contrast, and a completely unexpected ending.

On Dissociation, The Dillinger Escape Plan have truly found a way to die alone, but not in the sense you would think. They’re dying alone in the sense that, like everything else they’ve done, they’re going out in a way that no one else could. After years of setting the standard for mathy, technical metal and hardcore, with plenty of new musical ground left to tread and with an ever-growing fanbase, they’ve bowed out on top of their game with this record. They’ve left no opportunity for themselves to simply become another band that people wonder, “wow, those guys are still around?” about. Instead, what they’ve left behind is a perfect discography, with each record standing in stark contrast to each other, and one with a clear beginning, middle, and thematic conclusion. They’ve left a myriad of crazy stories, intense memories, and music that has influenced and will influence generations to come. It’s heart breaking to know that this is the end of a band at the height of their powers, but it would’ve been more heart breaking to watch them fade into mediocrity eventually. Dillinger has always been a band that stood alone miles above the rest, so for them, dying alone was always the only option.

Key Tracks: Wanting Not So Much to As To, Low Feels Blvd, Honeysuckle, Dissociation

Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool [2016]

Radiohead isn’t a band that needs introduction at this point, at least usually. But during the lead up to their first album in five years, it seems as if they were trying to reintroduce themselves. In the days before A Moon Shaped Pool dropped, the band completely erased their internet presence, leaving nothing but a blank slate devoid of posts across their Twitter feeds and Facebook page. And when those gears DID start turning again, it was only to dribble out tiny clips of a child-like claymation video, which lacked any music, branding, or information of any kind. It signaled very clearly that something was about to happen, something that wasn’t beholden to their past, something cleaner and purer than before.

A Moon Shaped Pool is exactly that – it’s some of the cleanest, purest, and most human music the band has put to tape so far. Of course, this is Radiohead we’re talking about, so they’ll always bear some of that cold, insular, and electronic edge they’ve explored for so long. But what’s so surprising about this record is the much more emotional and naturalistic side they’ve chosen to explore within it. Acoustic guitars, string sections, and pianos take far more precedence over drum machines, sequencers and laptops, and more than ever Thom Yorke’s lyrics are focused on the pitfalls of the human condition instead of his trademark claustrophobic technophobia and paranoia. “Burn the Witch” is a perfect example of this: opening with a percussive gush of strings unlike anything in their discography, it drives forward with little need for guitars or drums, while focusing on the division of different peoples and the fear-mongering that causes it. But that song is actually a bit of a feint, as it doesn’t take long for the band to dip into more downcast, defeated territory: “Daydreaming” is one of the simplest songs in their catalog, but one of the thickest with emotion. Built upon a simple repeating piano motif, Yorke’s vocals barely rise above a murmur, and are cocooned with flourishes of violins and electronics that establish the song’s true movement and feeling. And “Decks Dark” is a slow burn of a track replete with chilly, rattling guitar lines and an introspective piano line that buoys some of Yorke’s most expressive vocals since In Rainbows – ones that equate encroaching dread and fear to visiting aliens blotting out the sky with their flying saucers.

But it’s after that three track run that the album starts revealing its truest colors. For example, “Desert Island Disk” is the closest thing to a folk song that the band has ever recorded. Calm and quiet, it’s led by an aerobic acoustic guitar line, gentle swirls of background electronics, and an oddly out-of-character set of lyrics that inspire uplift and hope instead of fear and paranoia. This track also finds a cousin on the album’s second half in “The Numbers”. It’s another gentle, folky song that this time finds its inspiration in ’60s protest music, as Yorke quietly rails against climate change and the powers that be, insisting that the people have the power to create change – which doesn’t solely have to function as an instruction against global warming. And while not nearly as folksy, “Present Tense” is a Spanish-sounding love-lost groove that’s almost danceable despite it’s lack of any sort of beat and heartbroken lyrics. Acoustic guitars aren’t the sole driving force of this album, however. “Ful Stop” throbs along with a repeating bass line courtesy of Colin Greenwood that establishes the core of the song, a song which chooses to fully explore that groove rather than searching out another, more obscure path. And on “Identikit”, the rest of the band allows Jonny Greenwood to take his electric guitar out of storage, resulting in a song with plenty of spiky dynamics and angular guitar lines to complement its grooving drums and expressive chorus.

But as always with Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool has a moodier side as well. As “Daydreaming” foreshadows, this isn’t an album without its darkness. “Glass Eyes” is a short yet powerful piano ballad punctuated with otherworldy strings, exploring the anxiety one finds themselves faced with when arriving in a new place, and its bare bones musicality only serves to emphasize its narrative (one which is formatted in the spirit of a voicemail left on someone’s phone). And conversely, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor…” finds itself straddling both that minimalist slant of “Glass Eyes” and a bigger, more sweeping cinematic feel. Its first half drifts around with little direction and a listless energy, until Jonny’s Bond-esque string score swoops in to take the song into an entirely different world. What at first seems like an almost disjointed track soon makes sense, as that swirl of strings leads into the crowning jewel, and closing track, of the album. “True Love Waits” is a storied song in Radiohead’s catalog, having been played live in one version or another dating back all the way to 1995. But it’s been a notoriously hard one for the band to try and capture, as it wasn’t until Yorke’s 23 year long relationship dissolved that they were finally able to find the inspiration to nail it. Once written with the hope and promise of a new love in mind, the song is now transformed into a fragile, twinkling, and bittersweet one of loss, barely held together as its gentle dual piano lines threaten to spiral away from each other. Despite being so gentle and low-key, Yorke manages to wring emotion out of every syllable and key, and the rasp that creeps into his voice during the chorus truly sells it.

A Moon Shaped Pool strikes a very fine balance as a whole piece of work. Despite featuring downcast, dreamy tracks like “Daydreaming” alongside folksy excursions such as “Desert Island Disk” and “The Numbers” and percussive orchestral numbers like “Burn the Witch”, and despite also pulling songs from many different points in the band’s career (“Ful Stop” and “Identikit” originated in 2012 on the King of Limbs tour, “Present Tense” in 2009 a a Yorke solo gig, “Burn the Witch” in the Hail to the Thief era, and “True Love Waits” in 1995), it feels like a body of work that was created concurrently. These songs have been massaged and finessed into the gentle, moody, yet very human forms they appear in here, and feel like puzzle pieces that were always meant to fit together. Even more so, despite their disparate eras, the fact that much of their lyrical content syncs with the huge loss Yorke has recently suffered makes these tracks feel even more fated to be together. Radiohead may have erased their own social media presence, and in doing so took a stab at erasing their own past. But the album they did it in service of inverts that by collecting little bits of ephemera from throughout their career, and uses them to form their most gentle and intimate sounding record ever, and one that’s the closest thing to a traditional heartbreak album the band has ever made. Where they once feared the world’s ever-increasing reliance on technology, here they’re fearing the breakdown of personal relationships and the loss of love. After looking outward for so long, it’s not so surprising that they’ve finally chosen to look inside and take stock of their own hearts. No longer are they paranoid androids suffering from future shock, but instead have opened their hearts up a little more to reveal the glassy-eyed daydreamers they truly are.

Key Tracks: Daydreaming, Decks Dark, Identikit, True Love Waits

Thrice – To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere [2016]

In 2012, after over 13 years of relentless touring, writing, and recording, Thrice decided to hit that ever-infamous “hiatus” button. The grind of being in a band their size had worn them down over those years, and they needed time to spend with their families – the value of which had been made even more apparent after several members losing loved ones during their last album cycle. With that in mind, the band embarked on a “farewell” tour that dug deep through fan-selected favorites, culminating in a huge 33-song long final show in July 2012. After that, the band dispersed to their families and new projects: Dustin became a pastor, Teppei opened a leather crafts shop, Riley started a baseball-themed grindcore band, and Eddie put in time with Angels & Airwaves. But the break didn’t last long, and in the waning days of 2014, the band announced their intention to get back together. And in a little under two years, they’ve returned with their first album of new music since 2011’s Major/Minor.

To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere finds Thrice essentially picking up where they left off with Major/Minor. The grungy, dirty rock sound they’ve had on that album and on Beggars before it is still firmly in place, but it seems like reconvening has also given them greater appreciation of where their music has come from in the past. One of the most obvious cues the band has picked back up are the larger, meatier guitar parts reminiscent of their Fire EP – “Death From Above” and “Blood on the Sand” both move with more power and weight than the band has shown in years, and while not quite as heavy, “Black Honey” and “The Window” pick up much of that EP’s dark and brooding undertones as well. “Hurricane” opens the album with a thick swirl of guitars and brooding atmosphere appropriate for the title, feeling as if it really could be buoyed on the winds of a storm. In fact, this record finds the band turning up the sludge and brood in every aspect, not just on the guitars – this thing is downright dirty sounding. Even in it’s most friendly and approachable moments, there’s a sense of claustrophobia and grit in the mix that doesn’t relent. Yet “Salt and Shadow” exists on that same album, a song with a gentle, heavenly atmosphere that would be able to slot itself perfectly on the band’s Air EP. But that’s about the only air and light that manages to work its way in both musically and lyrically.

Lyrically, To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere finds Dustin focusing much less on faith (as he had on more recent Thrice albums) and more on the social and political issues he first touched on with The Artist in the Ambulance. “Blood on the Sand” is a take down of the frightened apathy that causes us to build walls to keep out our fellow man instead of making an attempt at connection, and “Death From Above” tackles our willingness to bomb those same people from afar without ever putting a name or face to them. “Whistleblower” is an obviously pro-Snowden song, celebrating the individuals who risk their freedom and lives to enlighten the rest of the world to a massive wrongdoing, and “Black Honey” focuses on our often blind conquest to take the things we need without considering how the blow-back might affect us. It’s refreshing to hear Dustin have something to get angry about again, because it helps lend power to both the music and his own vocal delivery. Plus, even though some of the lyrics here suffer from being very on-the-nose, it’s brave for a band of their size to deliver a comeback album with lyrics that could potentially polarize old and new fans alike.

But for all the base-touching they do on this album, it feels like they’ve forgotten to bring anything fresh to the table. As a longtime fan you might be happy to hear those flourishes from throughout their discography, and as a new fan, they might even seem unique to you. But it’s disappointing that after five years apart – in such vastly different bands and even parts of the country – that they haven’t found one new thing to bring to the mix. In fact, a handful of tracks find the band veering dangerously close to rock cliché instead: “Wake Up” featuring a tired cock rock-esque chorus that settles for repeating the song’s title in place of any sort of lyricism, and “Stay With Me” apes U2’s worst arena rock tendencies and mixes them with a dash of sludgy guitars to no effect. At its worst, To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere ironically finds the band sloughing off some of their character and flair in an attempt to be both radio-friendly and to pay homage to their previous sonic explorations.

Sadly, this album ends up being very much a mixed bag. There are flashes of the band’s former glories littered in almost every track, but they’re also tempered by some of the band’s blandest moments ever put to tape. It’s not a bad album in any sense of the word, but after five years apart and plenty of exploration for each one of their members, it’s a shame that To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere finds Thrice simply mining old territory and watering down the rest. Perhaps this is just the band’s way of getting back to ground, consolidating the parts of the band they loved the most as a springboard for whatever comes next. Or perhaps middle age and family life has dulled their fire to prove themselves and take huge risks. And perhaps it’s too easy to compare this album to the rest of the band’s towering discography, because if this were any other band, it might be something fairly special. But in the end, they’ve simply put out an okay album after so many great ones. It happens.

Key Tracks: Hurricane, Blood on the Sand, The Long Defeat, Death From Above

Between the Buried and Me – Coma Ecliptic [2015]

I’ve had a rocky relationship with Between the Buried and Me for quite a while now.

I used to be a huge fan of the band during the Colors era, loving that album and the ones before it. But as time went on and their new releases piled up – The Great Misdirect, Hypersleep Dialogues, The Parallax II –I started to grow bored of their approach. It felt as if they had locked themselves into a sound and had no clue how to get out of it, turning every song into an endless marathon of stuck-together riffs and unending one-note growls. For a band that made a name by experimenting with their sound from release to release, Between the Buried and Me sure seemed like they were stuck in a rut.

I couldn’t bring myself to ever fully give up on them, though. This was the band that first got me into metal and progressive metal, so they will always have that place in my heart (this is the same rationale I use to justify listening to each new Weezer album, god help me). So when I heard about the upcoming release of Coma Ecliptic, backed up by the band’s assertions that they were pushing themselves in a new direction this time, I couldn’t help but give them another chance.

Coma Ecliptic is a concept album that’s styled after the classic rock operas of yore, from The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia to Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It follows a man who falls into a coma and is given the chance to explore other lives and worlds, and given the choice to decide whether to stay in one or continue searching for a better one. While Between the Buried and Me is no longer a stranger to concept albums, this being their second, Coma Ecliptic is an album that truly feels like a concept album. The music has a flow and a dramatic portent to it that The Parallax II lacked, drifting from tension building organ lines, horn sections, and their trademark metal approach with ease. This wasn’t something that was always easy for them in the past, because we ARE talking about the same band that has thrown hoe-down honky tonk music and horse neigh breakdowns into their music before. But on Coma Ecliptic, Between the Buried and Me takes a much more refined, measured approach to their writing, writing for the songs and the melodies rather than for the sake of experimentation.

With that said, it’s surprising that this is still the most experimental music they’ve recorded since Colors. The band has been showing off classic rock and prog influence in their music for quite a while at this point, but it often manifested more as a curiosity than a core element of their sound. But Coma Ecliptic shows the band stripping their sound down from their intensely technical prog metal into something more akin to a Yes or early Genesis record, bringing in organs, horns, piano, brash classic rock guitar leads, and a heavy focus on clean vocals. While those elements were always a part of the band’s sound, here they’re actually the focus and basis for much of these songs – “Node” is led almost entirely by a Rhodes piano, “Dim Ignition” is built around spacey arpeggiated synth work, and “Turn on the Darkness” boasts an unsettling atmosphere boosted by it’s huge bassy piano chords and minor acoustic guitar work. Every song here ends up having its own distinctive melodic core and musical ideas, and as a result these songs are immediately memorable. Coma Ecliptic isn’t a record that takes dozens of listens to unpack and parse, but rather lends itself to replayability by the simple fact that many of these songs are just plain catchy.

And one of the main reasons for that, besides the band’s new found penchant for smooth dynamics and instrumental experimentation, are the vocals. Much of Between the Buried and Me’s discography is led vocally by Tommy Rogers’ powerful growls, with small singing sections interspersed throughout. That script is flipped on this album, though. Where his clean vocals once sounded shy and robotic, he’s truly come into his own here. From his soaring, belted vocals in “Option Oblivion”, the muted and hushed opening of “Node”, or the crazed Mike Patton-esque delivery on “The Ectopic Stroll”, Rogers has a range and prowess on Coma Ecliptic that he hasn’t had on any other Between the Buried and Me album. Now that the band has stripped back much of their technical metal sound, there’s a space for his vocal melodies to carry the songs in different directions, and his growl is still there as a backup when the band decides to get heavy. It’s quite refreshing to hear these distinct vocal melodies where Rogers would have once opted simply to growl.

For most bands, it’s almost impossible to shift gears seven albums into their career. Many bands experiment early on and settle into a sound for the rest of their career, and Between the Buried and Me very nearly fell into that category. Instead, they wrote Coma Ecliptic, a record that challenged their own boundaries and opened up their sound to brand new territory. The result is their most focused, immediate, and rewarding album in nearly a decade. By blowing up their old school prog influences on a large scale, focusing more closely on melody and songwriting, and making clean vocals a major part of the music, they’ve written an album that will be refreshing to long-time fans, challenging to others, and exciting for newcomers. Welcome back, guys.

Artist Feature/Review: The Armed – Untitled

The Armed have never been a band that minces words, and they have no need for shiny adornments or sparkly gimmicks. Instead, they have one motto at their core – “Destroy Everything”. And if you’ve ever heard their music, it’s incredibly fitting. Their songs get right to their point, and that point is to cause as much havoc as humanly possible using the typical rock band setup. Being based out of Detroit, Michigan, that urge to rage and destroy rings very true: steeped in the history of a once-great city that has now become desolate and derelict, The Armed have every fucking right to be angry, and angry they’ve been. This band has been hardcore music’s best kept secret, having been flying under the radar ever since their 2009 debut album These Are Lights. Since then the band has kept up a steady trickle of short, incendiary EPs, slowly growing a small but dedicated fan base, but have yet to release another full-length until last week.

Untitled comes roaring out of the gate with all of the trademarks of The Armed’s sound. Equal parts Dillinger-inspired punk chaos, sludge metal, and DIY punk aesthetic, every song on this album is designed to punch you in the face as hard as possible. And punch it does – produced by Converge legend Kurt Ballou, the band has never sounded heavier or clearer (at least when they want to) than they do on this album. Having this legendary producer behind the boards gives the band even more brunt behind their sonic assault, but it also gives them room to spread their wings as well. “Polarizer” features a Nine Inch Nails-esque breakdown that amplifies its desperate verses, and the first half of “Dead Actress” sounds akin to a Mark Lanegan solo song (at least before the latter half rips it wide open). And while not too far of a stretch for the band, “Paradise Day” sounds almost like Blink-182, at least if Tom DeLonge had taken a lethal dose of amphetamines before hitting the studio, anyway. These moments are a breath of fresh air on an album that might otherwise threaten to stagnate – a continuous wall-to-wall 41 minute assault could fatigue even the most dedicated of hardcore fans without a diversion here and there. It’s a tricky line to walk for a band that’s mostly released EPs under the ten minute mark, but The Armed pull it off with flying colors.

But really, that’s enough talking from my end. The Armed are a band that’s consistently furious, powerful, and three-dimensional, with enough awareness to let other influences shine through once in a while. And the best part of all this? If you head on over to thearmed.bandcamp.com, you can get all of their music for free, no strings attached. So you now have no excuse.

SikTh and Refused are back!

It’s been a good week for new music from old bands. Yesterday, hardcore punk legends Refused announced that they were not, in fact, fucking dead, and were actually releasing a new album titled Freedom, in June. They were also kind enough to drop the first track from it, titled “Elektra”, which was co-produced with famous Swedish producer Shellback (which to me is a little odd, considering the fact that the rest of his resume is studded with huge popstars…but the song is just fucking good), as well as a video for the track. Besides the new music, they will be touring with (coincidentally or not), another reformed heavy cult band, who you may know by the name of Faith No More, and those dates can be found here.

Refused weren’t the only big comeback this week, though. British math-metallers SikTh, hailed as one of the original forerunners of ‘djent’, way before that was even a thing, have announced that they will be recording a new EP (their first new material since 2006’s Death of a Dead Day), as well as running through a short five-date trek through the UK. On the down-side, there’s no convenient link to a new song from these guys like Refused, so I’ll have to deny you the instant gratification this time. But it will be here soon enough, and you can finally be assured that there will be new music from this classic heavy, schizophrenic metal band.

So, are you glad to have both of these bands back? Or should they have stayed dead and buried? What’s your take?

Dustin Kensrue – Carry the Fire [2015]

It’s been quite a long time since Dustin Kensrue, primarily known for being the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of Thrice, has put out a proper solo album. In 2007, he released Please Come Home, a folky, country-inflected acoustic offering that was remarkably different from Thrice’s material. In the interim between then and now, his output has consisted of a Christmas album in 2010, and a Christian Worship album, The Water & The Blood, in 2013, but nothing that resembled a proper follow up to his debut release. Dustin himself even put some distance between The Water & The Blood and his regular solo work, stating his intention to record something more secular and in line with Please Come Home after its release. And that album has finally arrived in the form of Carry the Fire, coming a full eight years after its predecessor.

That said, with such a big gap in between releases, Carry the Fire feels incredibly familiar and cozy. While it’s not quite as acoustically based as its predecessor, its feel is still very similar. Most of the music here is based around simple strummed chord progressions, acoustic backings and lightly distorted leads, the occasional flourish of piano, and a much more restrained vocal performance from Dustin (a performance that sounds much less gruff and strained than he has in recent years). This coziness is also supplied by the fact that, unlike in Thrice, Dustin is not quite as musically adventurous by his lonesome – most of the songs on Carry the Fire stick to similar tempos, instrumentation, and lyrical ideas. This is what causes that familiarity to come off as something negative, because as it stands, Carry the Fire ends up being a bit too much like a more produced and polished version of Please Come Home. This willingness to stick to the middle ground makes a short album feel longer than it really is, and the songs eventually start to bleed together. And where Dustin’s lyrical ability was one of the main draws of Thrice, at least personally, here he relegates himself almost entirely to writing love songs. It’s not as if he lacked for source material, after all of the drama that came from him first becoming a pastor at Mars Hill Church, then stepping down after coming into contact with the organization’s shady characters and ungodly practices. In light of this, it makes the fact that song after song retreads over the same theme of devoted love and family stand out like a sore thumb. And while that’s certainly one of the most rewarding and fulfilling feelings one can have in life, and it’s hard to begrudge the man for being so enamored with it, it doesn’t make for exciting music when it functions as the main pillar of an album. This feeling of contentment is one of the reasons that the album sticks so close to its established blueprint, because for an album entitled Carry the Fire, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of it.

Though I’ve just spent the better half of this review assailing this new album, that’s not to say that it is entirely without highlights. “Gallows” has an energy akin to one of Thrice’s more heavy tracks thanks to the foundation its distorted bass riff lays. And “Of Crows and Crowns” has finally found itself laid to tape after years of being performed as part of Dustin’s solo sets, and it sounds as good as it ever did (if not better for the addition of little flourishes of piano sprinkled throughout). And the title track, “Carry the Fire” is one of the most emotionally charged tracks on the album. Exhibiting dynamics that much of the album doesn’t, it builds up from its initial slow burn into a rousing chorus, finally letting Dustin unleash his voice on an album mostly free of such opportunities. But the reason why Carry the Fire is such a letdown is because, simply put, Dustin can do better than this. With being part of one of the best rock discographies of the 2000s under his belt, and an excellent solo debut in Please Come Home, he’s proved himself as an amazing songwriter time and again. But his writing hasn’t been quite the same since Thrice’s hiatus, and his Worship music debut. Dustin admitted that he focused more on writing simpler hooks and songs so that his congregation would be able to follow along with them more easily, a point he made sure to underline with that album’s release, but it doesn’t seem like he’s quite left that mode yet. While the songs are no longer about God, their structures and melodies could easily fit on The Water & The Blood. And ultimately, this simplicity in both lyric and form is what makes Carry the Fire a listen that, while good enough on its own merits, is not a compelling or even particularly unique release in full view of the man’s past work. And ultimately, from the frontman whose band made a career out of trouncing expectations and following their muse into whatever new sound or idea caught their attention next, that’s a problem.

KEY TRACKS: Back to Back, Gallows, Of Crows and Crowns, Carry the Fire