Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mondo Cane) and renowned French composer Jean-Claude Vannier, share the final glimpse into their new album by way of the album track ‘Browning’ ahead of the release of Corpse Flower (Ipecac Recordings, Sept 13th).
A variety of musicians, both in Los Angeles and Paris, took part in the recording of Corpse Flower with the Los Angeles team including Smokey Hormel (Beck, Johnny Cash), Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Air, Nine Inch Nails) and James Gadson (Beck, Jamie Lidell). The Parisian players are Denys Lable, Bernard Paganotti (Magma), Daniel Ciampolini, Didier Malherbe, Léonard Le Cloarec and the Bécon Palace String Ensemble. The lyrics for “Ballad C.3.3.” are drawn from Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’ poem, which was initially published using the name C.3.3.
Corpse Flower is available now for pre-orders (http://smarturl.it/CorpseFlower), including special embossed versions featuring Kenro Izu’s stunning cover photo. The album will be available on 180gram coloured vinyl, as well as a CD digipak and digitally.
Spotlights have covered some significant ground and developed a critical mass in a comparatively short time-frame: in just three years, they’ve gone from slipping out their D.I.Y. debut, Tidals, to touring with Deftones, Melvins, Quicksand, Hum, and Glassjaw to Pelican and Pallbearer, thanks to a feature in Brooklyn Vegan. And so the story goes that Ipecac Recordings co-founders Mike Patton and Greg Werckman fell under the band’s spell and signed them. And lo, Spotlights’ Ipecac debut, Seismic, arrived in in the Autumn of 2017.
Follow-up Love & Decay picks up where its precursor left off, and launches with a deluge of crushing weight, with ‘Continue the Capsize’ crashing on with a wall of simmering guitars, slow, pounding percussion, and shuddering bass, a slow, low-end orientated doom-laden sonic assault, over which taut led guitar lines build a web of tension… heavy doom meets post-punk dynamics… and then it all goes mellow. That gritty, dingy bass still churns beneath it all, and as dream guitars and vocals call to mind early Ride, the bass remains pure doom.
Hybridisation is nothing new, but on Love & Decay, Spotlights have hit a magnificent sweet spot that forges the perfect balance between wistful and weighty: ‘The Particle Noise’ is all the 90s shoegaze, slowed down, and rendered with all the throb, all the weight, and it’s the noise of particles shattering against one another. The vocals are melodic, laid-back and fragile, and while the guitars are layered, textured and luscious, they’re also dense, distorted and cranked up to the pain threshold. When the midsection hits, the sludge factor soars to 10 and the decibels rocket and it’s like a punch in the stomach with a mess of pulverising low-end which feels like a dangerous undercurrent dragging hard beneath gentle, lapping waves.
‘Far from Falling’ slips into proggy post-rock territory, with an epic slow-build and sustained crescendo. It’s somehow entirely unpretentious, and works in context: as the e-bow-driven guitar comes to the fore, the enormity of the sound becomes utterly captivating and wholly immersive.
Landing at the mid-point, ‘Xerox Mix’ is the shortest song on the album, and has the most overtly pop tones, but at the same time is propelled by driving grunge guitars, overdriven and up in the mix.
The second half of the album shows no let-up in intensity, and again maintains the balance between emotive vulnerability and brutal force, with ‘Mountains are Forever’ hurling forth a volcanic tempest in which the gnarled metal vocal is all but buried in a deluge of thick, molten guitar and pulverising bass.
It all guides the way to the final track, the eleven-minute ‘The Beauty of Forgetting’, which brings everything together: beginning with delicate, chiming notes, it builds and builds to a sustained crescendo that roars. And when it ends, I find myself feeling empty, and somehow altered.
Love & Decay sees Spotlights do shoegaze in the vein of Justin Broderick’s Jesu: epic, expansive, emotive, blending ethereal with crushing weight, it’s a potent cocktail that stirs deep emotions while vibrating the physical being to achieve maximum resonance and optimal impact. And that impact, while almost impossible to articulate, is uniquely profound.
And the bonus track, ‘Sleepwalker’, which appears on the physical editions, is definitely worthwhile, too.
Dead Cross, the SoCal hardcore outfit featuring Dave Lombardo (ex-Slayer, Suicidal Tendencies, Misfits), Mike Patton (Faith No More, Tomahawk), Justin Pearson (The Locust, Retox) and Michael Crain (Retox, Festival of Dead Deer), have released a self-titled, four-track EP via Ipecac Recordings.
News of the EP arrives as the band premieres a video for ‘My Perfect Prisoner’. The clip was produced by Eric Livingston who also created the cover art for both the band’s full-length debut and this EP.
“I think part of Dead Cross’ motives are to bridge gaps between useless genres and definitions. Part also might be to just burn that shit down. It’s in our collective DNA. Either way, as long as people love it or hate it, we succeed.” – Justin Pearson.
Dead Cross, the SoCal hardcore band featuring Dave Lombardo (ex-Slayer/Suicidal Tendencies), Justin Pearson (Retox / The Locust), Mike Patton (Faith No More / Tomahawk) and Michael Crain (Retox / Festival of Dead Deer), premiere a new video for ‘Obedience School’ directed by Dennis Bersales, whose work has been used in collaboration with Dim Mak, Three One G, SM Prime, Kenneth Cobonpue, and Roberto Cavelli. The track features on their new self-titled album, produced by the legendary Ross Robinson, to be released August 4th on coloured vinyl and CD via Ipecac Records and Three One G, as well as digitally through iTunes.
Dead Cross’ debut self-titled LP vacillates from sounding like Godzilla attacking Tokyo to becoming the potential soundtrack of witches catching waves in a hurricane. Its highs are sharp and wicked, its lows ominous and evil, all the while laced with wit and, many times, an element of tongue-in-cheekiness not often found in thrash or hardcore music. Dennis Bersales brings the unyielding intensity of the band to life in the video for Obedience School, made from actual footage of a cockfighting event in the Philippines. Though brutal, the violence is anything but gratuitous; the imagery meaningfully works in conjunction with Patton’s lyrics, forcing the viewer to consider the ugly tendencies of mankind.
Check out the video here:
DEAD CROSS TOUR DATES:
August 10 Santa Ana, CA The Observatory *
August 11 Las Vegas, NV Brooklyn Bowl
August 12 Phoenix, AZ The Marquee *
August 14 Dallas, TX Gas Monkey Bar & Grill
August 15 Houston, TX Warehouse Live
August 16 Austin, TX Emo’s
August 18 Tucson, AZ The Rialto Theatre *
August 19 San Diego, CA The Observatory North Park
According to the band’s biography, ‘Dead Cross emerged out of a series of impractical schemes, fallen-through plans, and last-minute musical experimentation. Shows were scheduled before a single song was written, fans were formed before even one show was played. The chaos of its creation seems apt; after all, the band is comprised entirely of artists who have thrived playing tightly-coiled turmoil—intelligent dissonance disguised as disorder.’ None of this is surprising, given the co-conspirators who make up Dead Cross – namely Dave Lombardo, Justin Pearson, Michael Crain, and Mike Patton. On paper, it’s a recipe for sonic mayhem. And that’s precisely what Dead Cross delivers.
It’s fast, furious and frenetic from the first bar. ‘Seizure and Desist’, recently unveiled as a video single, kicks it off in spectacularly explosive style and sets both the tempo and the tone. It’s a snarling, furious assault. It’s brutal and deranged, and yet it gloriously melodic, with a chorus and a hook that’s almost chartworthy.
Dead Cross is intense. Loud. Hard. Fast. Mental. Throw Faith No More, Pantera, Strapping Young Lad and The Wildhearts in a blender and you’re in the vicinity.
On one hand, this is a proper, old-school thrash album. On the other, it’s got Mike Patton all over it. Since forever, Patton has demonstrated a unique style and an even more unique sense of theatricality and melody. Unique, in that he’s able to incorporate these elements into the most incongruous and unexpected musical contexts, and successfully. Certainly, his immense vocal range and versatile delivery is a key factor, but there’s far more to Dead Cross – the band and the album – than once man. It’s all about the disparate parts and how they melt together to create something distinctly different. There’s no one dominant aspect here: this is a true collaboration, and all the more intensely insane because of it.
In the hands of pretty much any other band, thrash or other, the cover of ‘Bella Lugosi’s Dead’ would be both shit and pointless. But Dead Cross fill it with violent menace while retaining the finely-balanced drama of the original – and condense it all into two and a half minutes by pummelling it out at a hundred and fifty miles per hour and driving it along with a dirty, gritty as fuck bassline overlaid with heavily processed vocals. The end result is bloody brilliant.
Dead Cross is relentless and brutal. The shrieking venom of ‘Grave Slave’ is a grinding churn of guitars propelled by nonstop blastbeats. ‘Church of the Motherfuckers’ closes the album off with a throbbing chug, and, while slower, brings Patton’s capacity for flamboyant theatricality to the fore, while diminishing for fevered attack not one iota.
Often, I’m given to criticise so-called supergroup projects for failing to produce anything even as great, let alone greater than the sum of the parts. But it’s the fact that Dead Cross have produced an album that is precisely the sum of the parts which makes it such a belter.
You think of the human voice and you’ll probably immediately cast your mind to speech and singing. But the extremity of the range of the human voice is truly remarkable, and extends far, far beyond these limited parameters. Index sees Oslo-based Agnes Hvizdalek explore, over the course of forty-seven minutes – mastered as a single track – the potentials and possibilities of her vocal cords. The CD’s packaging offers nothing but a fingerprint by way of an explanation, but thankfully, the accompanying press release assists with the provision of context and framing the ‘pure vocal sounds that oscillate between fragility and levity, in the most well-shaped musical manner’ by explaining the way in which they’re ‘interwoven with, and set in contrast to the buzz of the city sounds and the building acoustics’. That city buzz is São Paulo, and the album was recorded at the bottom of a 60-metre-high chimney at the old factory “Casa das Caldeiras” in the heart of the city with the world’s largest helicopter fleet. As such, Index captures the correspondence between the individual and environment as well as exploring the limits of the individual themselves.
It perhaps goes without saying that this is about as far into avant-garde territory as it possible to get: a work of pure experimentation, of parameter-pushing and prioritising process over end product. That doesn’t mean that Hvizdalek’s concept is entirely original: Mike Patton’s Adult Themes for Voice (1996) stands as a bewildering document of one man’s immense vocal capabilities. It’s largely unlistenable, at least in anything more than small doses, but at least it’s broken into bite-sized chunks of sonic derangement. Hvizdalek makes no such concessions to accessibility, and while many of her vocal acrobatic are less extreme than Patton’s, Index is nevertheless a hugely challenging album, a morass of saliva and tongues and brain-bending bleating and blowing.
To describe the various sounds would be essentially pointless – not only dull, but abjectly failing to convey the actual experience of the album. So, Hvhizdalek hums and drones, wheezes and moans, ululates gutturally and breathes like a bellows. She squeaks and snarls and snarks and spits. But what’s remarkable is that while at times she sounds perfectly human and natural, oftentimes the sounds issuing forth from the speakers sound like no creature on earth. And yet the bewildering polytonal rasps and drones sound like no instrument known to wo/man either.
There’s no way in the world anyone is ever going to sit down and play this album for pleasure. I write as someone who’s actually spent the best part of an hour with these sounds rippling and bouncing from the speakers wired to my laptop wearing pyjamas and a bemused expression. A part of me feels obliged to give the album at least one more run-through, but the fact is, while I have absolute admiration for Hvizdalek’s artistic commitment and vision, I simply can’t face it, at least not now. This is absolutely no sleight on Hvizdalek’s work: Index is a true work of art. It’s a work to ponder, to reflect on and to sample when the mood takes. This may not be often, but in a world cluttered with sonic wallpaper, there’s a real need for an album like Index.
And so the story goes that originally formed by two frustrated drummers, Godzilla Black was the brainchild of two frustrated drummers who came together to release their eponymous debut in 2010. They evidently did something right, catching as they did the attention of Ginger Wildheart, which led to frontman John Cormack contributing vocals to Ginger’s Mutation project alongside members of Napalm Death, Cardiacs and The Fall, which was later released on Mike Patton’s Ipecac Records.
As you may reasonably expect from an ever-mutating project with a crazy wealth of crazy references, there’s a lot going on here. The album’s first track, ‘The Wizard of Ooze’ brings together elements of Kong’s skewed post-Shellac racket and the bombastic bravado and melodies of Faith No More. Sling in some bold brass and it’s one hell of a strange stew, but that’s exactly what Godzilla Black do – they melt multitudinous improbable bits and pieces together to forge something that’s weird, wonderful and rocks like a motherfucker.
The breezy vocal melodies of ‘Take Me To the Countryside’ may carry a psychedelic edge and hints of The Monkees in the verses, but they’re driven by a barrage of beefy guitars and a warped take on the overall production worthy of The Melvins. And we’re still only two tracks in.
‘First Class Flesh’ is just under two minutes of musical mania, the screaming abdabs finally defined sonically, and then there’s ‘Spaghetti’ which is a slice of wild desert blues, Sergio Leone and Queen of the Stone Age stranded together, in fucked up on peyote and hallucinating mirages of who the fuck knows what.
Most bands would have shot their load for ideas long before now, but the rockabilly math-rock frenzy of ‘Polydactyl’ and the crazed, full-throttle attack of ‘The Other White Meat’ (which even manages to reference The Blues Brothers in the midst of a bonkers explosion of raucous brass) more than abundantly show Godzilla Black are a band who are constantly on the brink of rupturing themselves lest they don’t give vent to their creative fermentations. In the hands of lesser artists, such an explosion of divergent musical bits and pieces would be a horrible mess, but they hold it together, and even the shorter tracks – there are a fair few that run between two and three minutes, and a couple are even more brief – sound fully formed, and even focused despite their everything all at once stylings.
It may take a few listens through to really get a proper handle on, but Press the Flesh is a classic example of what you might call ‘warped genius’. Restless, relentless and audacious as fuck, there really is never a dull moment.
