I once read an essay that conjectured that the moments we feel most fully alive and present in the world are the moments in which we get closest to the impossible. For example, what if you turned around right now and Bill Murray was in your bedroom, staring at you, eating an apple? You would probably remember that moment for the rest of your life, and it would certainly put a thrill into the rest of your day, if not your week or month. Think of all the conversations you would have about it (“I have no idea how he got in! And then he just climbed out the window, never said a word!”), whereas if you turned around and found the pile of dirty clothes you left there yesterday, you wouldn’t even remember that moment ten minutes later. This idea has stuck with me since then (it’s not unlikely that I’ve mangled or misunderstood it in some way, but if so then it is now my idea) and it resonates with my experience of music as well as my experience of life. The music that always grips me in the most visceral and immediate way is the music that sounds impossible, that generates in me a feeling of joyful surprise. Sometimes it happens in straight-up pop music, if I hear a new three chord song that sounds so eternal and so unique I can’t believe it wasn’t already written decades ago, or an unconventional yet lovely chord progression or melody. More often it only lasts for a moment, a rhythmic hitch in the chorus of a song or one bar of sublime and strange harmony. These are the moments in pop songs I play back over and over again, but in other modes of composition, minus the familiar pop anchors, the feeling of being in wonderfully unfamiliar territory can last for far longer.

Bing and Ruth, the compositional outlet for Brooklyn-based pianist David Moore, manages to reach and sustain this feeling of the impossible impressively well. His lovely, winding pieces manage to achieve some of the same hypnotic and otherworldly qualities as electric and electronic music despite the fact that they are built almost entirely out of acoustic textures (my first, probably simplistic, reaction to hearing Bing and Ruth was to think “acoustic Stars of the Lid”). The key to the otherworldliness in Moore’s work is the combination of disparate instruments to form singular, unified sounds that seem entirely alien to the instruments we think we know so well. For example, there is a wash of sound in B-side “go on.” which sounds to me like clarinet, cello and bowed cymbals, but part of the beauty and the fun of the music is that it’s very hard to tell just by listening what is making the strange sounds that you are hearing.

Moore is also unafraid of allowing his music to unfold naturally and gradually, which accounts for the longer track times and the sense of luxurious pacing. Exploring for three minutes the sound of two clarinets slipping in and out of tune with one another with an aching slowness (as on the very start of “go on.”) is something that takes a bit of compositional bravery, but it more than pays off. As with much minimalism (this is, in fact, one of the points of Cage’s often mocked “4′33””, which causes the audience to listen not to silence but to the ambient and human sound in the concert hall), the simplicity and clarity of the ideas causes the audience to listen with an intense focus seldom given to music that dances and cavorts for attention. The sound of the accelerating and decelerating beats, generated by the two tones as they drift apart and then back together, is a fascinating and strange one, putting the focus not on the pitches of the two woodwinds but on the rhythms generated by their intonation differences (Beats are natural sound interference generated by two tones which are very close together but not quite in unison. They sound like a rhythmic swelling, almost like tremolo, the speed of which varies by how close the two tones are to one another). Around this locus, Moore gradually adds other instruments, culminating in the arrival of his piano, which plays a gentle, steady, three-chord pattern. Over this pattern there are fragments of lovely, melancholic piano melodies set against drones created by the intersection of bowed cymbals with bowed strings and analog synths with mellow clarinets, combining pitches and textures from different instruments into one sound that is unrecognizable and inimitable. The description may sound labored but the music is anything but. The effect is stunning, and it’s only enhanced by the moments when you hear a human voice or a cello emerge with a clarity that’s hauntingly brief. The way the song melts back into a single note at the very end (this time cello overtones and voice, I think) is a moment of delicate and perfect symmetry.

The A-side “Rails” drawn from the band’s forthcoming City Lake album, begins with some Reichian clapping, overlapping different claves like puzzle pieces and then matching them with a piano figure that neatly parallels their rhythms. Like the much sparser piano figure in “go on.”, this serves as an anchor for the rest of the song and a springboard for overlapping vocal, string and reed melodies, which sit just far enough back in the mix that you have to really focus to draw them out. They always seem to dance away from your ear, and just as soon as you catch on to one it disappears and you find yourself suddenly drawn to a different melody. Nothing ever seems to repeat, and the song has a lightness to it that would almost make it sound improvised if it weren’t so carefully woven together. It really ought to be said that the musicians who give life to Moore’s pieces are immensely skillful and subtle (for those keeping score, or trying to discern various instruments, the lineup is as follows: Becca Stevens, Voice; Jean Rohe, Voice; Jeremy Viner, Clarinet; Patrick Breiner, Clarinet; Greg Heffernan, Cello; Leigh Stuart, Cello; Jeff Ratner, Acoustic Bass; Chris Berry, Percussion; Myk Freedman, Lap Steel; and Mike Effenberger, Analog Synth). Everything is in its right place, and all the sounds blend effortlessly together. Without such tightly, expertly controlled performances, the pieces could never reach their deeply textured heights.

My favorite moment in “Rails,” one which gives the listener a thrilling weightless feeling, is right around 4:20, when the floor tom and bass that have been with us for minutes suddenly drop out and a thick, clustered chord, composed of nearly every instrument in the band, swells and swells as if to burst. It’s a fantastically tense moment, and when the bass and drum come back in it’s with the same subtle part, understated as everything else in Moore’s music, yet in context, buoying up that thick cloud of sound, it feels absolutely triumphant, like the biggest sound in the world.

Gabe Birnbaum

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Once in a blue moon a movement kicks up on the scene that makes a big fuss over the way an artist’s music finds its way to the listener’s eardrums. Remember the 4-track hullabaloo in the 90s? Didn’t matter if the music was the most god awful shit ever produced–if it was churned out on one of those cheap Aiwa 4-track recorders, then it deserved a listen. Now finally the twenty-first century has its own trend: cassette rock! Fashions of this sort can be fairly hit-or-miss. If the bands’ style of delivery doesn’t mesh with the style of production, the whole approach can come off as a misfire. Do you really want to hear Dark Side of the Moon redone on four tracks? Or how about Leadbelly in a twenty million dollar studio? If the shoe doesn’t fit, you can’t wear it. Luckily for Girlfriends the shoe fits just right. There is something about the cheeky, cheapo fun of tapes that captures their approach perfectly. There is a cream to every crop, and cassette rock may have found its very first keeper in Girlfriends.

The band out of Boston wastes no time on stylistic curlicues in their compositions. Fuzzed-out, stomp-boxed 60s power pop melodies grab you in the first few seconds and don’t let go. The songs are short, direct, noisy- and that’s exactly how the trio of Ben Potrykus (guitar), Jen Dowty (bass) and Andy Sadoway (drums) like it. Their first EP Our Very First Cassette, released late 2009, was a quick and dirty romp that got solid reviews from critics and tastemakers. Though the band’s approach sounds simple, there’s a complexity bubbling beneath the surface that holds your attention. The jagged guitar lines and off-the-cuff vocals are tossed off like the mad strokes of an action painter in full frenzy, while remaining confined within pop art superstructures. Imagine Jackson Pollack, drunk on corn whiskey, trying to copy Warhol’s soup cans: a superlative mess that nonetheless attains a certain iterative fascination. Girlfriends took a similar tack on the EP, trading on the listener’s familiarity with certain pop forms to introduce a decidedly unfamiliar savagery into the proceedings. The song “suckin rare meat off the bone white china” mixes whammied guitar, megaphone vocals, and some rough Beach Boys’ harmonies into a beastly surf safari. “bites + scratches” captures Girlfriends in a more reflective, Pogues-mode, attempting to muster up a mood of good old-fashioned heartbreak. It’s a great song, but the heartbreak isn’t entirely persuasive. The riffs are just too damn fun to frown over.

The ease with which Girlfriends traverses the pop register is a testament to their origins out of the roiling, moiling cauldron that is the Boston music scene. Discount booze and college kids aplenty keep the clubs filled while the insane 1am closing time of the subway preserves a niche for late night DIY house parties. The give and take between public and private forums sustains an occasionally inspired dialectic within the scene. “2004 was a formative year for me,” as Potrykus recalls, “cos I started living in the city in late 2003 and I saw and met Clickers and Night Rally and the Faux and the Mules and Dreamhouse and Neptune, and now Denial and, I think, Wildildlife (they were just ‘Wildlife’ then) and everyone was being really loud and noisy and splitting their time between basements and clubs, which I thought made things a lot more interesting.” That’s quite a list of bands; but what artist can resist the louche allure of down-and-out of bohemian Boston, of Jamaica Plains, of Allston “Rock City,” of Cambridge and Somerville? Breeding grounds, one and all, for raunchy rawk and fine purveyors (according to Potrykus) of “authentic south American food,” “organic fair trade markets,” “thrift stores” and “all that crap.” When Potrykus, Dowty and Sadoway aren’t shopping for ethically-reared beef to mix into their picadinho de milho, the band members find time for other projects including Christians & Lions and Magma Divers- that’s a pretty full plate.

For their A-side, Girlfriends chose “Good To Be True” from their first EP Our Very First Cassette. It’s a straightforward Ramones-style ballad that has lived a few lives since the band recorded it late in 2009. On the first edition of the cassette, “Good To Be True” starred an as-yet-unidentified “space alien laser” solo and might have been recorded in a shoebox. In the words of Sadoway, “Tapes sound like shit usually, am I right?” For the Ampeater 7-inch, Girlfriends gave the song a quick spitshine: bulking up the vocals, balancing the mix, and generally bringing the track up to the strenuous standards of a self-proclaimed “garbage power trio.” While the “space alien laser” solo gets more or less dropped (you’ll have to see the live show for that, or dig up a first edition cassette somewhere) the crisper mix targets two elements that makes Girlfriends great: sing along lyrics and simple song structures. The lyrics of “Good To Be True” describe a downer narrative of teenage emotional insecurity, but the words are set to a bouncy, jangly riff that is so catchy it’s impossible to brood.

The good vibes continue on the B-side with a cover of the Vaselines’ “The Day I Was a Horse.” Clocking in at a trim 1:39, the cover satisfies the band’s appetite and predilection for the short form. In fact, their longest song appears to be “I Was Here But I Disappear” (3:22) from the EP. Commenting on the short form, Potrykus remarks, “…so many good bands and people are into writing shorter songs again too- which I really like. Good two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minute songs are hard to beat sometimes.” One notable master of the short form, the recently-passed Jay Reatard, appeared to be on the verge of reintroducing the mainstream to the unique possibilities of the short, sweet and simple. Whether brevity makes a comeback will depend on bands like Girlfriends reaching back to a time before bloated Bjorkestras became the apple of every indie musician’s eye. Seriously, how much time is required to relate the absurdity of “the day I was a horse”? Even the Metamorphosis was a short story.

With the release of the second edition of their debut EP, Girlfriends has shown the beaten-up, old cassette format still holds some intrigue. Whether this heralds a triumphant return to the cassette in general (don’t hold your breath) remains to be seen. The irony is, of course, that the Ampeater Review is releasing “Good To Be True” and “The Day I Was a Horse” as digital pantomimes of a vinyl 7-inch. The world is topsy turvy with different ways to listen to music. The appeal of one specific format appears to be the same appeal of music subgenres: a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of whatever-let’s-party.

There’s a slew of bands that have recently released work in the cassette format, like Quilt and Truman Peyote, and a ton more that are percolating within the same scene, including Kid Romance, Thick Shakes, Earthquake Party!, Young Adults, Maine Coons, and more. These are bands that play all different types of music- garage, electronic, folk, psychedelia- so there doesn’t seem to be any coherent movement afoot. But one trait they do share is that they’re all putting together exciting new music that merits attention: really, what more could you ask for?

Mike Gutierrez

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Inserting moments of musical unrest into pop music without disturbing the graceful flow that makes pop songs so pleasurable is an incredibly difficult task. Even brief moments of dissonance can be distracting (occasionally one gets the feeling that they are intentional distractions from poor songwriting) or come off as forced, an insincere attempt to make a band sound more interesting or difficult than they really are.  It requires a remarkably gentle touch to make dissonances and rhythmic quirks not only slip by without disrupting the song, but actually lock in and sound as if they are essential and natural, and this is, in fact, just the thing Tavo Carbone of Brooklyn’s Horse’s Mouth excels at.

Carbone’s songs are short and restless, full of small idiosyncrasies and twitches (beats added or missing, lush vocal harmonies appearing and disappearing just as fast, tempos that lurch and accelerate).  You may feel like you’ve had your fill of idiosyncratic Brooklyn rock bands (lord knows I get that feeling sometimes), but the members of Horse’s Mouth are probably not quite what you are picturing after that description.  There is nothing irritatingly or safely cool about them.  Horse’s Mouth is actually refreshingly and genuinely nerdy.  In live videos, they are mostly clad in white t-shirts and jeans and Carbone himself sports an unassuming Monkees-style bowl cut, opening his mouth cartoonishly wide and bowing his head to hit the lowest notes.  After all, the band draws as much influence from showtunes (bear with me) and classical music as they do from the staples of indie pop.  Their Ampeater B-side “Thin Branches Against a Window” actually ends with a loop from a familiar-sounding orchestral piece.

A Brooklyn native, Carbone met his bandmates, drummer J.J. Beck, bassist Matt Scott, violinist Heather Sommerlad, and multi-instrumentalist Michael Chinworth, at Bennington College, a school in Vermont that has produced other Ampeater favorites like Trevor Wilson (AEM022) and Will Stratton (AEM70).  Carbone actually has quite a lot in common with Wilson, from his tightly coiled vibrato and theatrical delivery to his compositional and conceptual ambition.  The members of Horse’s Mouth have been playing Carbone’s songs together in various forms and with various other musicians since 2005 (including, at one point, a 17 piece orchestra), though Horse’s Mouth as a band only officially dates back to 2008.  You can hear the chemistry between the musicians almost immediately upon listening, and especially on watching some of the live footage shot by Connor Kammerer and Pixelhorse. The live performances are impressively faithful to the record without losing any of the feeling of fun and spontaneity that comes from the itchy arrangements.

A-side “In the Woods” (both songs in today’s single are drawn from the band’s new album Sophia, which will be released later this month in CD and DVD form, the latter featuring original films made by 12 videographers, one for each song) opens with a sprightly picking figure on the electric and a drumbeat that matches the guitar’s rhythmic accents precisely.  The verses each close with a lovely, harmonized “not old enough to know”, on the last word of which the vocals begin in a tense minor 7^th before leaping up to catch and hang on a high falsetto harmony.  It’s one of those effortless little moments of dissonance that provide the tension and release in Carbone’s songs, rather than the usual gradual emotional crescendo thing, which is okay too, only significantly more expected.  Also notice the way the lovely spiraling violin figure that leads us into the instrumental verse is cast into bold by the drums brief disappearance, and the way the drums are called back by a handclap (the only one in the entire song).  The most unexpected moment of unease comes during the very last descending “know”, where instead of resolving to the root, Carbone’s vocal melody rolls down through perfect consonance before landing on the flat two, a half step up from the one of the final chord.  It’s probably the most dissonant note you can sing over a minor chord, and it has an intensely disquieting effect as the last note of the whole song, especially the way Carbone coats it with pretty vibrato, as if it’s the most beautiful note in the world.  Yet this is actually the very thing that sells it on the recording: it doesn’t sound like it’s an ugly note to him.  It sounds like the note that he wanted the song to end on.  On the album (which drops on March 20^th and which I haven’t heard in its entirety), each song is strung into the next, so perhaps this final tension is a way of moving into the next song.

B-side “Thin Branches Against a Window,” after a brief organ intro, again matches the rhythmic emphases of the guitar to the drum part, giving the song a lilting, dancy feel that unifies it with “In the Woods” somewhat, though this song is much more of an exercise in constant motion.  Before the first verse even starts, it careens off into a very brief sort of Deerhoof interlude, which pockmarks the song periodically, in which the tempo abruptly and completely changes and the drums play a couple of quick, skittering fills.  The song rarely stays in any one meter for more than a few bars, sticking mostly, but not entirely, to 4/4 during the verses and otherwise jumping around like a madman, a feeling that is countered only by the calm and stately violin parts.  After the one moment where everything coheres into what sounds as if it’s going to be an actual chorus (repeating melody and lyric, 4/4 time, descending harmony), the meter changes and the violin and guitar spin out of control, everything clashing and then somehow resolving into what sounds like a loop from a Schubert record, which finally plays itself out into three acoustic guitar arpeggios and…the sound of a bird chirping?  It’s an unbelievable amount of stuff crammed into less than three minutes, and when faced with it it’s easy to overlook the loveliness of the chiming guitars and glockenspiels that underscore the verses.

I’ve mentioned before how music that maintains its mystery is often far more effective, and Carbone does exactly that here, giving us lyrics oblique enough to mean a great many things and music that skates through so many moods and meters and feels that it’s hard to say just what exactly makes it feel coherent, though certainly something does.  Perhaps it’s the common sounds of each member’s voice (they all sing, excluding Beck, the drummer), or the distinctly personal style each has on his or her instrument.  Perhaps it’s that all Horse’s Mouth songs feel odd in precisely the same way, the product of Carbone’s unique and unified vision, impossible to pin down completely but evocative and pleasurably strange, like a fairytale landscape (not one of the neutered ones where everyone is nice and boring, but the Hans Christian Andersen kind, where little girls get their feet cut off with axes).

Gabe Birnbaum

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If you are a serious, disciplined listener of music, black metal might be an as-of-yet unwritten entry in your encyclopedic grasp of music and its oft notorious sub genres. You might view it as elusive or even contradictory. Perhaps you find it overly serious, dark, depressing, maybe even unintentionally funny and ridiculous. But there it is, this entry, unfinished and perhaps unfairly ignored. Black metal traces its origin to thrash metal acts like Venom and Bathory but its real history begins in the early 90s in Norway where bands like Mayhem, Immortal, Emperor, and Darkthrone perfected a raw, low fidelity sound defined by trebly guitars, continuous pounding double kick drums, tortured vocals, and pagan, anti-Christian lyrical content. It was a scene that was linked to murders (most notably the murder of Mayhem’s Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth at the hands of Varg Vikernes, who still records under the moniker Burzum), the arson of dozens of historic Stave churches throughout Norway (some at the hands of Varg Vikernes himself), and suicide (most notably by Mayhem’s vocalist Per “Dead” Ohlin). Black metal’s “second wave” was met with a satanic panic of press in Norway and all over the globe. Its corpse-painted performers were seen less as members of a musical sub genre and more as willful participants in out and out Satanism and far-right politics, a reactionary categorization that still permeates accounts of black metal’s history and current iterations, most notably in Michael Moyinhan’s Lords of Chaos, a book which has been criticized for failing to dispel this categorization and even tacitly endorsing this (mis)understanding of the music. Varg Virkenes denied accusations of Satanism and insisted this (or maybe his) music was something more primitivist, a-Christian, and neo-pagan. Yet he aligned himself with toxically xenophobic political viewpoints, and although he (and the incredibly nascent national socialist black metal movement) operate within an extreme minority of an already obscure genre, the associations stick. Darkthrone’s Fenriz dismissed any political associations whatsoever, and his jovial, light-hearted demeanor belies Varg’s self-seriousness and the genre’s stereotypically dismal attitude. Whatever “second wave” black metal was, it was the ultimate enactment of what extreme music always masqueraded as and never quite was, it was excess and violence and confusion. Yet, theological and semantic arguments regarding “Satanism” aside, it was absolutely misanthropic, anti-Christian, and deeply nihilistic.

American black metal, if anything, further internalized these themes. Though the Norse originators were bands who weren’t shy of the things bands do—who were perhaps straightforwardly debaucherous individuals behind all their cryptic pseudonyms, painted faces, and a darker-than-thou ethos—their American counterparts had become one man “hordes,” known only by their pseudonyms. Leviathan’s Wrest and Xasthur’s Malefic are particularly salient examples (not to mention associated acts Weakling or Lurker of Chalice), seeming ascetics who shun live performance, interview requests, and anything beyond a sustainable baseline of existence, musicians who deeply embody black metal’s extreme emotional negativity. And even among the more public, performance-based bands—from Washington’s eco-pagan Wolves in the Throne Room to Texas’s esoteric, somewhat traditionalist Absu—the commitment to nihilism and “darkness” remains. And then there is New York’s Liturgy. Perhaps such a historical introduction is unnecessary, but if it seems over-indulgent let me clarify. This musical lineage, at least its European strain, is something Liturgy, a solo project cum four-piece from Brooklyn, pays particular attention to. I think, most of all, it is something they pay particular attention to because they seek to destroy it, to create something new with the pieces, to attempt a musical evolution. Or, at least, another evolutionary strain.

On December 19th of last year, Liturgy’s founder and principle member Hunter Hunt-Hendrix spoke at a symposium of black metal theory in Brooklyn entitled “Hideous Gnosis”, his lecture on “Transcendental Black Metal” appears in a recently published book containing the essays presented at the symposium. In a dark bar in Brooklyn Hunter urged for a black metal of “affirmation” over “nihilism,” “hypertrophy” over “atrophy,” and “courage” over “depravity”. In a sense, he asked black metal to be black metal and also its opposite. As he tells me, this new iteration of black metal “should channel and renew the spirit of liberation, and it should consume everything that’s out there and reterritorialize it on the basis of a vision of apocalyptic ecstasy“. There is an inherent openness to this approach, and perhaps not a more fitting name than Liturgy—this is black metal to be played publically in sunlight, in joyous almost spiritual ecstasy. It is this in the face of black metal’s inherent dark void, perhaps even embracing it, standing above and looking inside.

It might all sound entirely convoluted but I swear this imagery makes sense as soon as you hear the music. At any moment Liturgy’s pieces sound like they are going to self destruct, to be sucked back down as severed arms and guitar strings and drum sticks into the eternal void its predecessors lauded. But before we get there we have Side A, a subdued untitled track (one of many interesting near-ambient pieces peppered throughout the album) that starts off Liturgy’s debut as a full fledged band, Renihilation, and serves as a prelude to its second track, Side B’s “Pagan Dawn”. Over its brief two minute span a vocal incantation slowly builds on itself and anticipates a coming storm. This storm is “Pagan Dawn”, with Greg Fox’s frantic drumming speeding up and slowing down (a masterful blend of technical ability that avoids sounding robotic or inauthentic) as the harmonies arc and Hunt-Hendrix’s vocals—still the traditional blackened howl—are somehow excited, joyous, and yearning. This is not a woeful yearning, but a yearning for some momentary “yes,” a “yes” through gritted, grinning teeth. Those harmonic moments build into a brief unaccompanied progression about a minute and half in, announcing the return of Fox’s breakneck tempo-shifting rhythms, what Hunt-Hendrix calls the “burst beat”. It is exactly that, a burst, a propulsive force, an impermanent acceleration away from black metal’s cold dark interior. Liturgy is very frank in its desire to be musically transcendent, and cognizant as well that this transcendence is “an immanently generated mirage of transcendence, like a horizon or an asymptote”. They structure their songs to be ever-climbing beasts, fast and loud as hell. In the hands of any other group of musicians Side B would be called “Pagan Dusk,” a lament, a complacency with darkness and nihilism, a set pounding tempo with depressive shrieks and despondent riffage that might otherwise drone on for ten minutes. But Liturgy is not any other black metal band. The latter half of “Pagan Dawn” almost recalls this monotony as it breaks down into a plodding, methodical mid-tempo march, as though walking with black metal of old for a little while, placating it, challenging it. And then Greg Fox launches into yet another ever quickening burst beat, Bernard Gann and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix build a towering harmony on guitars underwritten by bassist Tyler Dusenbury. It is elating and rich and it resolves and retreats as suddenly as it began, having only skimmed the horizon.

A few years ago my obsession with black metal began. I was in my dorm room in the middle of the night, forcing myself through Ulver’s seminal Nattens Madrigal. “Hynme VI: Wolf and Passion” kicked in, and its soaring opening was a revelation—it was sincere and affirmative and fleeting, and it died eventually into diametric, ominous verse. But that opening moment was a crystallization of the idea that extreme metal, and even black metal, is only extreme in its cacophony, and to some extent its postured conjuring of “darkness,” sometimes a jejune and silly “darkness” at that. It was a realization that there could be emotional nuance in the most extreme metal, that it was serious, that this was a joyful seriousness, that it was art. Liturgy is a re-affirmation of this notion. And maybe, reading all this, it still seems ridiculous to you. A symposium on black metal “theory”? A band with a dense conceptual underpinning? But again, I am addressing you: the serious, disciplined listener of music. And I’d hazard to say that you listen to music because its expression of the ineffable is deeply resonant on a wide spectrum of emotional, intellectual, and (maybe) spiritual levels. It is a medium to transmit what mere words or mere images cannot alone express. Black metal has long broadcast a very particular expression: deep sorrow and depression, an intellectual longing for a pagan pre-history (and often the “darkness” or “evil” that is intentionally conjured is conjured to show us that these emotions and concepts are only connotative in such ways in the wake of Judeo-Christian tradition). If anything, the emotions and this idea of “darkness,” silly or not, are things we typically try to tuck away and hide, and so it is in a sense a genre that is hidden and tucked away. What is exciting is to see a band attempt to forcibly remove a genre from its cave and expose it mercilessly to the light, a band who takes its lineage seriously and decides to actively do something with it, something truly experimental, American, and ultimately uplifting. Liturgy is taking the sound of black metal’s past and asking it to express something unique and new while still remaining secular, musically destructive, and chaotic. It’s alchemy, really, an almost contradictory dark positivity.

The following appeared recently in a New York Times article about the “Hideous Gnosis” symposium:

During a Q. and A. period Mr. Hunt-Hendrix was challenged by Scott Wilson, a professor from Lancaster University, […] Mr. Wilson wondered, skeptically, if transcendentalist black metal just boiled down to “all you need is love.”

“I’m not so interested in defending anything I say,” Mr. Hunt-Hendrix replied. “I only like to be judged on whether it’s interesting or not.”

So whatever your entry on black metal looks like now, it ought to include at least a sentence on Liturgy, whether you see them as standard-bearers or visionaries, noodling hipsters or serious musicians. All they ask of you is what you ought always to be giving as a serious listener—your interest.

Liturgy’s full length album Renihilation is available here from 20 buck spin. An interview with guitarist/vocalist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix appears after the jump.

John Ganiard

Read the Ampeater exclusive interview after the jump!

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All digital 7-inches posted on The Ampeater Review include an A-side and a B-side, just like a classic vinyl 7-inch. Most of the bands that we work with chose an accessible A-side to hook new listeners and a more experimental B-side for the adventurous listener. But Austin-based band The Laughing has taken their selection a bit more seriously and, upping the ante, they’ve presented us with something unprecedented—a concept 7-inch. Get ready for “pop music as envisioned by The Laughing.”

You’re probably scratching your forehead right now and wondering just who the hell The Laughing is and what their vision of pop music could possibly entail. I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical too at first. But this isn’t the vague and far flung pile of bullshit you tried to pass off as your comp lit thesis, it’s a bold vision that The Laughing paints with remarkable clarity and confidence.

The Laughing is a four-piece rock band but don’t be fooled by the conventional lineup. Featuring Logan Middleton on guitars and vocals, Sean Neesely on bass, Grant van Amburgh on drums, and Adam Glasseye on organ, the band likes to keep it fresh by tossing bells, dulcimers, ukuleles, synthesizers, clarinets, flutes, an array of percussion, and any other noises they can dream up into the mix. They draw inspiration from music, both popular and experimental, that spans eras. The band explains that their varied instrumentation and ornamental arrangements “adorn core song structures and melodies that take cues from the likes of Harry Nilsson, Os Mutantes, Jorge Bem, Silver Apples, Love, Roxy Music, Sonic Youth, 13th Floor Elevators and more.” Yet the recipe is so complicated that the ingredients become obscured. What do they do? The Laughing manage to drum up the same excitement that pop music once inspired but now lacks. How do they do it? By milking a century’s worth of music for everything its worth and fucking it up beyond recognition. The product captures the spirit of pop without seeming derivative. There are very few bands out there that can do what The Laughing is doing right now.

Let’s listen to A-side “Runner.” Middleton explains, “we present a core melodic and chordal structure of a classic early 60’s R & B influenced American pop song, that got unknowingly dosed with some sort potent combination of psychotropic substance and amphetamines.” Awesome. “If someone had informed Sam Cooke ahead of time how his brilliant career was going to come to such a violent and bizarre end,” Middleton continues, “he might have have leaned his later compositions in this direction. Incorporating a little 80’s new wave synth on top of Hammond organ the song is considerably faster, and more unhinged than the traditional pop form on which its based. Lyrically swapping out the innocence of the 50’s with a tinge of cynicism, all the while singing the same old song: I love you… I messed up…. now I want you back!”

“I messed up,” might be the dominant theme, but Middleton delivers it with such a cocky drunken American punch that one couldn’t exactly call it apologetic. In his deep vibrato and swooping melodies I hear traces of Presley to Pavarotti, Dr. Martin Luther King to Oscar de Leon to a laughing hyena. The Laughing’s style is bold and resonant but a little wild, accompanied well by a whiskey on the rocks. And what about Sam Cooke? My hunch is that even if he’d had the foresight to imagine what happened at the Hacienda Motel on that fateful night, he wouldn’t have created something quite so perverse as “Runner.” Yes, perverse. Why? Because it’s out of control. It’s an uncensored portrait of the inner workings of the diseased mind. And you can’t look away no matter how hard you try.

Sometimes when I’m listening to music I’ll zone out and without any conscious effort I’ll orchestrate an elaborate scene for which the music is the soundtrack. These scenes play out in my mind shot by shot, as if I were reading the storyboard of a film. “Runner” is the soundtrack to a chase scene. Frantic synths and guitars push the narrative along at breakneck pace. As the momentum builds, the cuts get more rapid. The screaming guitar becomes the screaming of breaks. Alternating drum and noise breaks on the bridge mark cut to after cut to! The drums break into a steady roll and the song explodes. Don’t expect to listen passively. This spirit is contagious.

B-side “Help Me” is a little less frantic. Middleton explains that “it slows things up and strips things down.” But please don’t get the wrong idea. “Help Me” is no ballad. It’s a dancing-on-the-kitchen-table-in-your-underwear-and shouting-into-a-broomstick kind of song. To put it more directly, “Help Me” is not a song for normal people. Though outwardly upbeat it’s deranged at the core and has a deceptively calm energy that builds steadily throughout. “Bringing in the ukulele and substituting the the persistent drums with hand claps and shakers,” says Middleton, “we depict a more personal account of some one in a sticky situation that stubbornly wants to be left alone to sort things out for himself. The title along with the overly re-assuring lyrical content betray this idea though, instead revealing that this person, really does need help! Complete with synth arpegiators and a ghetto-blastered-out finale we wanted to give the listener something to shout along to, while their ’subs’ rattle their neighbors coffee-table collectibles.”

“Help Me” lacks the force of “Runner” but more than compensates for that with catchy hooks and unconventional instrumentation. The chorus is beautiful for its simplicity. At only three words and four chords it’s easy (and nearly impossible)to forget. “Don’t help me…” As Middleton emphasizes, in context the lyrics appear ironic, the music suspiciously peppy. The plea is altogether unconvincing, it lacks composure.

Both “Runner” and “Help Me” come from The Laughing’s debut album, FEVER, which they released in 2009. Borrowing from the production tactics of genres as diverse as classic dub and noise rock, the album was collaboratively engineered by Erik Wofford (Black Angels, Voxtrot), Danny Reisch (The Lemurs), and Middleton himself. FEVER juxtaposes the “warmth of analogue tape and vintage effects” with the “infinite other-worldliness of digital.” Every track is memorable, interesting, and theatric… even the ones deceptively titled “(((pause)))” and “(((silence)))” Middleton explains that FEVER is named after a book he discovered as a child that discusses his grandfather Dr. John Frame’s discovery and treatment of Lassa Fever in Africa many years ago. “I liked it as it thematically ties in with the topic of the diseased (mostly mentally diseased) people throughout the album, but can also equally refer to a sense of fanaticism for something,” he adds.

Maybe it’s a disease and maybe it’s a fanaticism, where do we draw the line? Whatever the ‘fever’ is, The Laughing has it. Just listen to their wild and meticulously arranged music and I think you’ll understand what I mean. This band is a little bit crazy and a large bit brilliant. Catch them next month SXSW.

Nate Greenberg

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