Friday, October 1, 2010

Secret Pleasures

This little album's been with me since high school. Instead of becoming interesting and knowledgable, not to mention cool, through listening to Broken Social Scene or Conor Oberst or somesuch others, I alienated myself entirely by getting into heavy metal, a subgenre of rock so militant its press and the rest of the world's do not at all meet, except for the latter to poke fun at the former. Emperor, Mayhem, Burzum--these motherfuckers burn churches & slit their wrists & aren't even that gifted (but they sure as hell are principled).

But Electric Wizard, well, these dudes just rock. At the time of Dopethrone, the fine album I'm pitching today, it was three late-20-somethings, apparently super-stoners, using a detuned, fuzzy bass, a detuned, almost superfluous guitar, and a most-likely-detuned drumset to make very heavy, very slow rock. The lyrics are best explained by the album cover:


Ah yes.

Anyways I don't expect people to like this album, or even be interested by it. Nor am I claiming that Jus Onborn, the sole songwriter/singer/guitarist, has all that much in terms of musical talent or even ideas, at least no more than, say, a rabid lover of Black Sabbath muck might gain by taking said sound to its natural limits. So as an experiment in heavy rock haze, this is the fucking cat's pajamas. Get it now and listen to it at once.

Check out these track lengths:

There's a 3' opener which feels like pop in comparison to the rest. The second track is nine minutes long and it's worth the entire wait just to hear the same riff get faster & faster & heavier & heavier. The third is 15', split up conveniently into a 5 minute song, a 5 minute riff, and 5 minutes worth of feedback fuzz named 'Altar of Melektaus' (I suggest splitting up the song in GarageBand, these latter two really press the patience).

Then there's a 6'30" standard fare riff-rocker, an 11' snoozer, a 0:47 bass riff w/guitar-accompaniment that is the very highlight of this entire genre & mood, another 5' standard riffer, and finally a 10' closer featuring the title (and heaviest) riff, followed by another 10 minutes of silence before a hilarious radio encounter in hushed Satanic tones. I transcribed it a while ago cuz I felt like it:

- That's terrifying, and that's.. no, look, if this happens to your kids, or if you look at this and you have children and you say, 'Could this happen to my child, out of some kind of rebellion?' how would a parent be aware?
- Many youngsters are into it, uh, teenagers and younger, and the..the..the clues are there, the satanic symbols, 6-6-6, if you see that written on your child's notebook, if they're into heavy metal music, if they're associating with strange characters or drifting off to ceremonies and not explaining where they're at, it's well worth it for parents to look deeper and ask, 'What exactly are you up to?'
- And with whom!
- Because this is serious...
- It could be harmless. It could just be a diversion. But it could also be DEADLY serious.

The phrase "drifting off to ceremonies" never fails to crack me up.

1 comment:

  1. i've been meaning to get into this for years, ever since you introduced me to it. cursed giant libraries...

    ReplyDelete