2003-2006: Department of Eagles - Archive
Daniel Rossen is one cerebral dude, and my current conclusion on cerebral dudes is that they’re better off messing with their audiences’ heads than their own. I have nothing against Grizzly Bear, besides the fact that I keep thinking their albums are going to be all-time faves – then quickly gather dust – but anyone who knew Rossen pre-brooding-straitjacket-folk can only manage a murmur: “I dunno… You’ve changed, man.” I’m cheating a bit here, having discovered Department of Eagles’ mind-bending masterpiece The Whitey on the Moon UK LP (re-released as The Cold Nose in 2005) the same year that Yellow House came out. But Polish magazine Porcys, who championed the record in their ‘05 demidecade list, sure weren’t cheating. To Porcys, Whitey’s hyper-independent scattershot approach signified something huger. Rossen was playing a rewarding game of blind man’s bluff, but the joke’s not so funny now that he can’t get the blindfold off.
Archives is a misleading title, because the ways Rossen (“Iron Chrysalis”) has used his Department of Eagles moniker in the last few years is enough to confound any archivist. Let me see if I can get the touchstones in chronological order:
• The Whitey on the Moon UK LP (2003) – Rossen and Fred Nicholaus (“Butterfly Emerging”) are fertile roommates. They record cool electronic scraps, remix opera singers, lay down lo-fi indie pop, sabotage each others work and end up with an incredibly diverse and rewarding album with more than one screw loose. Blows a few collegiate minds, but mostly doesn’t find an audience.
• Archives 2003-2006 – Rossen rooms with Chris Taylor at some point and noticeably changes his sound into something a little more drab and moth-eaten. Stitching together disparate ideas, he seems to say, is easy with a computer, but challenging in a folk paradigm. Role of Nicholaus questionable.
•Yellow House (2006) – Rossen’s aesthetic is so similar to early, solo-Droste Grizzly Bear that critics confuse their voices. The album functions well as a whole; thus, no one notices off the bat that Ed Droste’s songs like “Knife” lean towards soaring inflections of 50s-pop while Rossen’s tend to integrate several parts and eat themselves.
• In Ear Park (2008) – A testament to all that Rossen has learned from Droste’s pop sensibility. Cokemachineglow.com goes so far as to suggest that it’s basically another Grizzly Bear album. It’s nothing like Whitey, but still a good collaborative effort between old friends. So simple and streamlined, really, it was destined to be forgotten.
• Veckatimest (2009) – Now that listeners have really taken notice of the dynamic between the two, Grizzly Bear carves out a home for itself in the first two tracks. Droste’s “Two Weeks” is an even tighter paean than “Knife”; Rossen’s apocalyptic “Southern Point” is a hodgepodge of ideas, including a melodic reference (“calling us”) to the upcoming “All We Ask,” eschatological choirs and a guitar part from “On A Neck, On A Spit” that’s so familiar it can act as spongy connective tissue between movements.
• And then…?
Rossen ends up accounting for as many of Grizzly Bear’s failures as its successes: his tracks are so psychologically dense and orchestrated that a wrong step like “Dory” can be almost a hassle to listen to. That being said, Rossen is now, possibly, ironically, more integral to Grizzly Bear’s aesthetic than Droste. Droste used to be dense/dark, but now he’s throwing all of his four-chord weight into counterbalancing Rossen. This sounds antagonistic, but such tensions birth amazing artwork.
Archives 2003-2006, however, mostly stands to highlight what a match made in heaven the two were before the Yellow House recording sessions. “Practice Room Sketch 1” opens with the exact same ascending jazz chords that “Easier” does. The listener’s project becomes so clear it’s like being assigned homework: spot all the motifs from Rossen’s other works! Pure folly, though — I don’t think Rossen’s keeping track himself. That particular nylon arpeggio that’s in, like, half a dozen Grizzly Bear songs is as much a seal as Lennon’s “Dear Prudence”/“Look At Me” fixation. That “whooo!” in “Practice Room Sketch 2”! Did that peek up in the climax of “Little Brother”? Or is this, also, in too many Grizzly Bear songs to track? I don’t like this game. I don’t know which side of the skull I’m on.
A better approach is to rewind to my original hopes for the compilation — that, with so many “Practice Room Sketches,” it couldn’t possibly be as self-serious as Grizzly Bear; that its fragmentation would come with a wink — and point to where Rossen fulfills these hopes. Okay, admittedly, the existential undercurrent is inescapable here. But there’s some warmth and humor in the cowboy “hmmms” that rise out of the galloping “Brightest Minds” (hearing the bridge of “On a Neck, On a Spit” again, though). Like lushtronic types, Prefuse 73 to Pogo, I am a total sucker for the romantic vintage harmonies of early-20th-century films (think embryonic Disney, think Dorothy’s Emerald City prance). None of this can really feel like play anymore — Rossen’s too aware of the bad-trip duality between nostalgia and a nausea — but they give the songs a point of reference without actually anchoring them. The triumph of Archives is its unexpected airiness.
Which is why, even though Rossen’s songs are even more structurally tortuous than they are in his other work, this is still a better candidate for casual immersion than Veckatimest. Rossen’s apostles break down walls when he bumps into a chair; directions and transitions don’t seem so crucial when they’re not around. I am genuinely curious about where Grizzly Bear will go next, but their work increasingly hints at many ivory-tower trappings: it’s knotty, assumptive, imposing, modernist, and goes basically unquestioned. Another Veckatimest has no hope of hitting as hard. Archives gives us a glance at how studiously Rossen transformed himself into a puzzle piece for the outfit, but I’m convinced that he’s too progressive and flat-out contemporary to stick with the group (or at least its formula) much longer. Here’s hoping that, for his next project, he and some combative collaborators pick up laptops instead of sledgehammers. While I’m hoping, Whitey’s always ready for another listen!
1972: Popol Vuh - Hosianna Mantra
Hosianna Mantra is one of those albums it’s okay to call beautiful. Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh calls it a “Mass for the heart.” “It is Music for Love” he carefully adds in an interview. Popol Vuh released the album in 1972 after making two records, Affenstunde and In den Gärten Pharaos, which pioneered the use of the giant Moog synthesizer. On later albums however, electronic experimentation took a backseat, and instruments tended towards the ethnic, which, in a way, was a continuation of what had gone before: ambitious instrumentation on a surprisingly humble conceptual budget, a stated aim of nurturing and preserving a spiritual core within the music. That core was protected, like a child, by the austerity of Fricke’s decisions – not to scale down his musical ambitions, but to cut out anything that could not express what was at the heart of the matter at any given moment.
The usual tendency in prog rock is for ambition to star in the composition, like a magician in pantomime robes. Sometimes this comes across as campy, other times mystical. Although Hosianna Mantra is dedicated to spiritual matters, there is no sense of a pious intercessor molding it into a ‘difficult album’ with an agenda; there are no musical styles or alternative faiths aggressively promoted. Perhaps this is due to the peculiar ambition of Fricke, which, although great, extends into a selfless, even featureless universality. Many artists nowadays would balk at declaring their attempts to find unity between such loaded territories as Eastern and Western religion. The title Hosianna Mantra doesn’t seem to have grown on the band members in any kind of personal way, but according to Fricke, the two Hindu and Christian liturgical terms were chosen simply because they were representative of two major world religions, and expressed his purpose: to make a religious album that transcended differing traditions. The title evokes the image of an extremely stable structure, the two terms supporting each other, pyramid style. It is easy to visualize this purpose as an echo of traditional European philosophical and religious music, which was often architecturally inspired in its conceptual purity. The European influence is particularly evident on the album’s later tracks such as “Not High in Heaven,” “Kyrie” (the Greek address to the lord in Christian praise songs), and “Blessing.”
Those tracks that utilize the talents of the soprano Djong Yun – in whom Fricke discovered the beautiful voice he had previously tried to express through ethereal synthesizers – tend to have European sounding Devotional titles, and traditional, Christian influences. ‘Voices’ rather than percussion are prominent on the later tracks. These include oboe, violin, and Yun’s solo soprano (plus what sounds like an electronic choir). Though the most beautiful tracks to my mind are those that rehearse the ‘Mantras’ rather than the Hosiannas of the title. It is easy to forget that Fricke was a pianist, seeing as the piano/keyboard is so frequently dwarfed inside Fricke’s vast cathedral-like compositions. And it is difficult to pin down what influences the piano parts are channeling; although they frequently sound minimalist; mobile and modern within the framework of the overall arrangements. The Mantras of the first section of the album repeat simple phrases that gain complexity over the course of progressive key changes, unfolding glacially, deliberately, in typical minimalist fashion. The whole keyboard is used, but only with the slightest nod to Jazz. Hosianna Mantra, unlike many of the prog albums of its era, is the album that Jazz forgot; or perhaps the album that forgot about Jazz.
The forgetting may well have been conscious, part of the careful exclusion of any element that would not serve Fricke’s purpose. At the risk of sounding New Agey, the ‘energy’ of Jazz would probably have been disruptive to Fricke’s project. Quite simply, European church music demands a firm resolution to any musical narrative, mirroring its own spiritual narrative. In the same way, the album’s trajectory is overwhelmingly positive, and it fetches up in the most exalted and least chaotic territory possible. At this point, Djong Yun’s voice is permanently stuck to the ceiling, a state which many will find beautiful, but I find less moving – her voice has obviously been recorded in such a way that it soars to almost inhuman heights of remoteness and perfection, and though it sounds lovely, it loses its character up there. The PC brigade might also object to the fact that the ‘gateway’ tracks – the Mantras – are aligned with the Hindu tradition, while the album’s lofty heights are occupied by the tracks that more closely resemble European church music. It is said that Fricke converted to Christianity around the time of Hosianna Mantra, which would explain this progression. Nevertheless, his recollections of making the album are much more open and unprejudiced towards other forms of religious expression than a fanatic conversion experience would suggest.
Hosianna Mantra’s big dreams represent its own brand of prog megalomania, though it is not really a rock or jazz influenced album. Groovy guitars are present here and there, including Conny Veit’s 12-string guitar, electric guitar, and the hippie signature sound of the tamboura – an instrument that resembles the sitar. As with the piano parts, Veit’s playing is difficult to pin down to any particular style, and it is difficult to tell whether the occasional noodling scale is consciously influenced by jazz modes.
Outside of Popol Vuh, Fricke’s collaborations with the director Werner Herzog represent his most renowned efforts. Not being familiar with Herzog’s work, it is difficult to draw any informed conclusions from this, but it does seem that Herzog’s refusal to restrict himself from realizing even the most impossible artistic vision (yes I am referring to that hackneyed story about the ship being hauled over the hill in Fitzcarraldo), bears some resemblance to Fricke’s confidence that he could produce an album for all religious traditions, a ‘Mass for the heart’ in Hosianna Mantra. The product of his efforts is undoubtedly beautiful, and also humble in its realization (at least to my ears) – which raises an interesting possibility about artistic ambition; one for pondering happily ad infinitum: it may be that the most apparently haughty, exalted artistic ambitions – those that attempt to tackle the ancient themes of love, wonder and God – are the simplest, and in fact the most honest of them all.
1990: Earth - A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
If you are a fan of metal, especially slow moving riffs that make you feel entrapped in amber as every second seemingly passes like an hour, then it’s pointless to introduce you to Dylan Carlson and his main musical outfit Earth. But if you’re just tuning in and want to know what the score is so far, here it is: Dylan started the band (named in honor of the nomenclature used by Black Sabbath when they were still playing blues shuffles at moderate volume) in the early 90s as a loose ensemble featuring doom riffs inspired by Sab taken to their most snail-crawling conclusions. It recalled neighboring behemoths the Melvins and cousins from across the pond Skullflower. The loose-knit ensemble could feature anyone from bassist/future Melvs/Thrones/sunn 0)))/High on Fire dude Joe Preston to Kill Rock Stars’ CEO Slim Moon, and even a young lad known as Kurt Cobain; still, they were conducted by Carlson through amazingly realized works such as Earth 2 (1993) and Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions (1995) — all released by Sub Pop — that would send a very influential signal that years later would yield essential bands of our times like sunn 0))), Boris, Asva, Khanate, and hundreds of doomsters the world over. After Dylan retired from the drone business in the late 90s due to addiction and tragedy, Carlson resurrected Earth in the mid-00s with a sound that recalled spaghetti western scores and American primitive country instead of tuned down guitars and Indian classical music.
The matter of exhuming the band’s first ever recordings is what concerns us at the moment. “Greg [Anderson, Southern Lord’s head and half of sunn 0)))’s core] has been wanting to do it for a while.” Says Dylan via phone conversation. “And it was kinda like… part of it was on Sub Pop and another part came out on No Quarter, the agreement with Sub Pop came to an end and I basically got ownership back. We wanted to be able to remix it and improve the quality of the sound to release it as a full album the way it was originally supposed to. The timing was right, we also got Simon Fowler to do some amazing artwork for us.” The recordings, as mentioned by Carlson, were issued separately on Sub Pop as the Extra-Capsular Extraction EP and on No Quarter as Sunn Amps and Smashed Guitars. The definitive version bears the name A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction.
“Yeah, we recorded a full-lenght album and… originally Sub Pop was talking about doing a 7-inch,” Dylan explains the original format of the material, “that’s why the first song is cut in half, it was supposed to be the two sides of the 7-inch and then they decided that, since it was too long, instead we’d do an EP, and then the other songs didn’t get used, and was released years later as bootleg vinyl, which is where we mastered the No Quarter version, because we didn’t have access to the tapes at the time. So now we finally got everything together and mastered properly and what not. It’s definitely nice for it to be finally out the way it’s intended other than being split up on different releases. It’s the first thing I ever did. It’s the beginning of the journey [laughs].”
Revisiting the recordings from the very beginnings of Earth — committed to tape by Mike Lastra in Smegma Studios — must have been a bit weird for someone who hasn’t really cranked the distortion in recent years, but perhaps those early recordings held some insight on the bands long career trajectory. “I like the material, it’s a lot different than what I’m doing now… I mean, it’s different, I guess, in some ways. The songs were definitely more constructed whereas now there is more improvising, we kind of do a looser amount of structure. It was definitely more song-oriented… but, for instance, Earth 2 was more of an experiment as opposed to songwriting, and now the song is sort of a loose form that is fleshed out by improvising. It was definitely more of a traditional songwriting type of thing… I mean there’s no ‘verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge’ structure [laughs] but they were written out. It was definitely more structured and the influences weren’t quite as integrated, and my musicianship is better now. It’s not like I’m embarrassed about anything [laughs].”
As for the question that Carlson might be tempted to try his hand at ‘improving’ the recordings? “No, to me what I like about recording is that it’s a part of the time or history and, going back and redoing it… I just feel like the idea that people can experience that period in time; how I thought then, this is how I did stuff then. A recording is a document of a time, re-recording stuff seems pointless… maybe if you were ashamed of what you’ve done [laughs], you would want to do that, but I value it as a document of a certain time.”
“It’s never perfect the way you think of it,” he continues, “but it’s better because other stuff affects it… I try not to be a control freak about that; I try to do my thing and then let it go and then let other people think what they want, I’m not trying to control what people think about it. At a certain point you have to let it out and let it go, otherwise you would never get it done because you would be micro-managing. I always find that I’m much happier with all the accidents that occur and stuff that I didn’t intend to happen because that’s just the nature of reality. On Earth 2, I may have thought of it one way but it ended up pretty cool and different.”
As an example, Dylan talks about Earth’s second, near-classic album. “The first two parts definitely were written, it was what we used to play live; the third part was definitely looser. It was more experimental in the recording, it was only the second time I had been in a studio and there’s a lot of stuff we did on that record that, if I was recording it now I would have done it a lot differently. We duplicated a lot of effort in a lot of areas just because, you know, i guess, it’s what you do [laughs]. For example, some of the drone tracks, what we did was, we played the drone, then mic’ed all the different speakers and then put them on separate tracks which ended up defeating itself because some of the mics and speakers were out of phase; nowadays, I would have recorded the drone tracks separately with different gaps.”
The sounds on these first recordings are without question more metal than what Carlson is used to these days, and an insight into what he was into back then could explain the motivations behind the shift in tone. “I still listen to a lot of the stuff I used to but maybe not as frequent now. Definitely on the first one I hear a lot more metal stuff that I was into at the time… I mean I always liked the classics, stuff like Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Zeppelin and that kind of stuff, but at that time I was also listening to stuff like Slayer, Kreator, Destruction, Candlemass and a lot of the newer stuff that was coming out, but also Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head and Angel Witch. I love all that stuff still, maybe I don’t listen to it as much as I used to. Every now and then I go back and revisit [laughs]. Like just the other day I was listening to a Dio record, stuff he did with Sabbath and the first two Iron Maiden records which I still really like. Right now the stuff I’m most into — which doesn’t mean I didn’t like it then, but now I’m way more into — is a lot of the British folk stuff like Pentangle and Fairport Convention. I don’t forget any of the music I liked before, it will always be a part of what I do and what I like.”
Some other influences on Carlson were much closer and palpable (revolving around the early 90s Seattle “scene” where Earth gestated), to the point of collaborating with many of the people that inspired him. “I definitely was a huge Melvins fan, my favorite is their earlier stuff.” Dylan reflects. “Back then, it was just the people that I knew and we were sort of doing our own thing, and then certain people started getting noticed by the outside world [laughs]. At the time, that was who was around; I was friends with the Melvins and I used to watch them practice, the same with Nirvana — I knew Kurt since high school, we were in a couple of bands together before that. That was the people I knew and they were doing their thing, I was doing my thing and then certain people started getting noticed [laughs]. It’s kinda weird because a lot of people ask me ‘What was the scene like? Was there a scene?’, at the time you knew everybody because it just wasn’t that big, there were not that many venues and it wasn’t until later that some people were getting signed to majors, it changed. Whenever the media gets a hold of a scene, things start to change. At the time you might not be necessarily aware of everything… you’re going through history from the outside looking in, so it doesn’t seem ‘historical’ to you at the time, but later people ask you ‘What was it like?’ But it happened in Athens GA, in LA, in London, in Manchester and I don’t think people set out with a big plan. It’s a group of people who are all doing stuff and that just seems to be the key. As long as there are people doing their own thing, that’s the important part and whether it becomes well known or not… no one can plan that, it just happens; the most you can do is find your thing and do your thing and hope people like it.”
Many fans might wonder how Earth used to present this material in concert, and Dylan describes it as such: “We mostly played the material that we recorded, that was pretty much it, whatever we had is what we played. It varied, having one or two bass players [laughs], or two or one guitar, obviously we had a drum machine back then so the drummer always showed up. We didn’t play out a whole lot but we played as much as we could, we didn’t tour or anything until later; we mostly played Portland, Seattle, Olympia… local.”
While awaiting Earth’s activity in 2011 — which includes two studio albums in the span of one year — we can rejoice listening to what was captured long ago in the way the artist originally intended. In the drone heard across Northwestern woods, doom as experienced in half empty rooms in downtown Seattle, and the agony of being crushed by some of the heaviest music to be found on our planet.
1972: Roxy Music - Roxy Music
Sometimes it’s possible that a timely reevaluation of a band’s back catalogue and deliberate PR manipulation can converge with all the genuineness of Sunday shoppers who suddenly recognize each other as old friends. Only recently did I begin to marvel at the sophistication of Roxy Music’s early 70s experiments and now, needless to say, Bryan Ferry is back in the headlines with a newish girlfriend, a new album (Olympia), having rounded off a summer tour with Roxy Music. Early Roxy is a conspicuous presence on the new album: Brian Eno has contributed to at least one track (which may or may not herald a new Roxy album) and Andy Mackay’s oboe is featured too.
The annoyingly lavish website of Bryan Ferry (the type of site that exhibits diva behavior in calling for numerous updates meanwhile causing everything else to crash) has helpfully provided the aforementioned info on the new album. And though I don’t actually recall being groomed to admire Bryan or Roxy before 2010, it’s quite feasible that the PR machine did interfere in some subtle way with my thought processes beforehand — perhaps through a subliminal montage while I was absently flicking through a magazine in the waiting room at the dentist’s. That would be very Ferry; to borrow Jove’s deviant tactic of disguising himself as something frivolous and glam in order to seduce the potential (and preferably female) listener (Jove chose a shower of gold — the god was either un-ironic, or liked to call a cigar a cigar).
Anyway, to compare the pop-star/country squire to a god is not the aim; it’s just interesting to trace hubris back to the dressing up box; see how these young men started out – looking ridiculous, though vaguely predatory all the same. Early Roxy sounded and looked like a band of wandering (space) minstrels, an effect that Andy Mackay’s strident puffing on sax and oboe bolstered. His lines don’t bother to ingratiate themselves on Roxy Music; they are confident in proclaiming their own rogue melody. They often fall in step with the dominant theme, but these steps, although they can be intricate, don’t necessarily sound jazzy. The overall effect is part medieval drinking song and part postmodern collage. Strangely it is the jumble of elements, shadowing each other by standing stiffly apart rather than blending together, that outline the strict meter Ferry often sings in. It makes me think of Queen (who were influenced by glam rock of course) and the way they organized their songs into movements rather than attempting to marry the layers in a single sweep.
Even if there is a technical term to describe this cut and paste mode of composition, Ferry and Eno’s art school background would suggest that the visual analogies make more sense. Ferry trained under Richard Hamilton, a notable early pop artist, while Eno was trained at art school in sound sculpture, experimenting with tapes before he took up a musical instrument. ‘Instruments’ like Ferry’s voice are seemingly exploited as much for their connotation as their sound on Roxy Music. Ferry alternates between warbling (the beautiful endscape of “If there is something” where he sings fondly of youth), strutting (acting the ultimate glam-rock peacock on “Ladytron”) and poshly declaiming (on “2HB” where his diction respectfully improves as he rolls his r’s in the presence of the ineffable).
Ferry, Eno, Manzanera (and the rest will have to be the rest) — all who participated in early Roxy Music — had quite distinct parts to play. This cacophonous approach has perhaps been abandoned since technology has made it easier to create ‘tracks’ that sound seamless. The idea that the sax can have a personality like Tom Waits’ drunk piano belongs more to a vaudeville conception of art — live, disgraceful — than to the path of experimental composition that Eno later pursued. Without Eno on the other hand, Ferry was an un-anchored presence, parachuting into supermodels dreams like a man from an 80s luxury chocolate ad, posing them in all kinds of weird, sexy scenarios on his album covers. Which is not to say that he didn’t produce worthwhile music subsequently, but after running away from the circus in the post glam-rock world, his posturing began to look somewhat ridiculous. Being a pop art aficionado and cultured man, this was more than likely the point. The early 70s, however, was a time of relative innocence when he, Eno, Elton and the rest of the glam rock crew first tried on their mother’s shoes, so to speak. Even though dressing up is by nature eclectic, blending styles and gender significators for kicks, the fun of doing so is in proudly sporting an incongruity of colors, textures. With today’s indie pop a melting summer cone of evocative fuzz, perhaps a potential Roxy revival is a timely reminder that role playing is essential to create tension in music, and in order for roles to be appreciated, you can’t always play with your back to the crowd.
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1971-present: From Mahavishnu Orchestra to death metal band Cynic
Jazz fusion has all the acceptance of plague-ridden rats. Dare to speak the word ‘fusion’ and you’re most likely to get laughed at, frowned upon, or spit at, maybe all three if you’re really lucky; yet it’s hard not to maim the genre’s champions. Fusion was pretentious; its fans claimed the players were virtuosos and deemed most other music unworthy to their ears, while the sounds produced by the aggrupation of fleet-fingered soloists were mostly bland, overplayed, and highly unlistenable to anybody who didn’t own at least three books on modal harmony. Worst of all, fusion was often clawless, aiming for musical acceptance of ‘sophisticated’ listeners within the rock spectra, the musos and proggers enthralled by Ian Anderson’s labyrinthine compositions and Rick Wakeman’s sonatas in Moog-minor. It was probably the first style to be marketed as ‘Adult Contemporary.’
The (arguably) first jazz fusion band, however, wasn’t about getting people to strike their beards together in appreciation; in fact, they were all about melding the newly electrified hard-bop’s sensibilities (spewing horns aloft and drummers freaking) with the fire and orgasm of rock improvisation, started by the likes of The Who and The Yardbirds and brought to celestial heights and popularity by Jimi Hendrix. At least that was John McLaughlin’s goal when he formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a goal that got plastered all over their two albums in their original incarnation. As their name suggests, Mahavishnu’s sound was heavily influenced by classic Indian music, not so much through structures and drone, but rather with the tonalities of mood music, represented on The Inner Mounting Flame (1971) and Birds of Fire (1973), in which the guitar, violin, and keyboards would take turns tackling highly electrified passages of intricate melodic lines, only to give way to more atmospheric patches or dissolve into a mutating riff. All the while, the bass and drums would perform an ever-changing rhythmic foundation. The Mahavishnus created sounds informed by the spirituality of a place where every part of the day requires a different kind of music and, therefore, saturates the actual time and place of life at that point. The span between Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire was one of those rare instances in modern times where virtuosic music could sound amazing to non-musician ears, giving off feelings and moods to enjoy rather than to ponder; it was intellectual music for the heart and soul.
Sadly, the Mahavishnu Orchestra were virtually alone in sound and purpose, as most fusion bands could or would not tap into such emotional territory, let alone into truly experimental zones that would require a bit of fear and recklessness. Most of their contemporaries were out for the glory and the quick buck, leaving them virtually peerless; although, after the exit of violinist Jerry Goodman and drummer Billy Cobham, the Orchestra would settle for more sedated pastures, leaving behind their signature vibe and shutting the door on an exciting avenue that could have gone on to achieve a Valhalla of possibilities.
Yet, those sounds regained a new life in, of all places, a death metal band.
Out of the waves of extreme bands in the late 80s and early 90s metal underground, only a few would take death metal, already a very technically subgenre , to new heights — with sheer playing ability delivering some of the most intrinsic and virtuosic music in the world. Bands like the pioneering Death, Atheist, Gorguts, and Pestilence would bring out prog rock structures to blastbeats and deep-growling to make for the sickest and most refined music, as odd a combination this might seem to the uninitiated.
Of all the pioneering death metal bands, Cynic showed a very peculiar style that stood out, even amidst their superhuman-fingered counter parts in knotty gore metal. They displayed a level of sophistication and execution few could reach, using exotic interval-leaping scales without sacrificing double-bass drum sections and ultra heavy riffing. Their album Focus (1993) is the closest, in my opinion, the world has seen to an album by the original Mahavishnu Orchestra (without trying to rip them off), making an old sensibility something truly their own. At a superficial level, Focus doesn’t sound like something McLaughlin could have made, but listening to the mood, the melodies, the arrangements, and the quiet, arpeggiated sections that invade every corner of the record, you’ll find yourself in familiar territory.
Although Cynic might not have been the only death metal band to reference jazz fusion in an exciting way, Focus remains a sadly under-appreciated album, with plenty of beauty, brutality, complexity, and grounded songwriting holding it together. And to prove the connection, take a listen to a song by MO and one from Cynic’s magnum opus.
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I saw Cynic earlier this year, playing an all-day metal fest, and they remain the only death metal band who could get people in the audience to do yoga with them. How many headbangers can pull that off without getting killed by the crowd?
It is exciting to track a mutating sound over time — a form that drifted over the airwaves, picking up jazz, rock, and Eastern sensibilities, only to take the form of death metal decades later. The amount of distortion or double-bass in the music doesn’t really matter. The feelings it evokes does, and how connected it can make you feel if it speaks to you. In the end, that’s the real concern for the true listener, even if you hate Mahavishnu Orchestra and/or Cynic as much as the average music snob hates jazz fusion.
1978: Warren Zevon - Excitable Boy
For reasons that now seem ridiculous, I wrote off Warren Zevon for a long time. Like They Might Be Giants — who I’ve also wised up about — I assumed for years that Zevon, despite his long career, was a wacky classic rock one-off: in his case, a guy who wrote a dumb song about a werewolf. I’m glad I came around.
I don’t remember why I suddenly became curious about his back catalog, but a few years ago I picked up his best-of, Genius, and became a convert. Not every song on Genius is great, but some are downright amazing, from the acoustic jam “I Was In The House When The House Burned Down” to classics like “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me.” The guy was ridiculously talented, but you know that already, right? Everyone seems to have known this for years, and I feel like an ass for not listening sooner.
I recently bought a vinyl copy of Excitable Boy for 99¢. The album works best on record, especially a used copy with pops and hisses, because as timeless as Zevon’s songs are, Excitable Boy is very much a product of the 1970s. Specifically, the album is late-70s California, dripping with post-hippie, post-Watergate cynicism. It’s disturbing, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In short, it is quintessential Warren Zevon.
The first side of Excitable Boy is basically unimpeachable, with titles as versatile and acerbic as Zevon himself: “Johnny Strikes Up The Band,” “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner,” “Excitable Boy,” “Werewolves Of London,” “Accidentally Like A Martyr.” The first indication of the album’s genius lies in the story of Roland, a ridiculous plotline which Zevon tells with utter seriousness. Upon finding the man who blew off his head, Roland “aimed his Thompson gun, he didn’t say a word.” Because he, you know, doesn’t have a head.
That tone sticks around for most of Side 1, including the one-two punch of the title track (which I’d heard often on classic rock radio but never listened to closely for its lyrics about rape and murder) and the silly “Werewolves of London.” The latter is, of course, Zevon’s most famous song, but it’s more subtle than it appears — I don’t often laugh out loud when listening to music, but every time I hear Zevon intone “and his hair was perfect” followed by a bizarre, unwritable outburst (maybe it’s “bip”?), I can’t contain myself.
That Zevon follows “Werewolves Of London” with the heartbreaking ballad “Accidentally Like A Martyr” is an example of his extreme, and earned, confidence. The song is one of his best, from its Randy Newman-esque piano phrases to its understated lyrics, not to mention background vocals from Zevon cohort Jackson Browne (who co-produced the record). It’s a beguiling mix, proving that Zevon could use irony for more than humor.
The rest of Excitable Boy is more hit-and-miss than its stellar first side: “Night Time in the Switching Yard,” with its funk-meets-disco stomp, is the only true dud of the collection; and “Veracruz,” a character take on the Zapatas, is simply dull. But from there you get to the solid ballad “Tenderness On The Block” and the masterful “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which, in only a three and a half minutes, tells a funny story about espionage, poor choices, and spoiled rich kids.
The fact that I’ve rattled off Excitable Boy’s highlights without saying much about the musicianship is a testament to the record’s excellence. Almost all the songs feature only a guitar, bass, drums, and piano, which lends the collection a sense of intimacy. The band is astoundingly tight, and so are bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, on loan from Fleetwood Mac, who provide the rhythm section for “Werewolves Of London.”
If you’re looking for an entry to Warren Zevon’s canon, Excitable Boy is the perfect place to start — a solid representation of his songwriting and musicianship that also hints at the many peaks to come.
