Hey folks, thanks for your patience on my extended break from writing the newsletter! This week we talked to John and Garrett from Calyx who put out a record I talked about earlier this year in the newsletter. I think it’s one of the best this year and you should listen to it if you have not yet. I’m going to keep things a little brief this week but hopefully I dug up some good stuff for you to chew on
Here are your Lucky Numbers
The playlist this week is under half an hour and sticks pretty exclusively to screamo from 2001. If you never had a “tr00 screamo” or (sigh) a “skramz” phase it’s never too late. 2001 is a pretty good year to start with with some prominent releases(two Pg.99 records!) from some big names.
No Pitch this week! Justin gave me something to listen to way back at the beginning of the month but I forgot what it was and he doesn’t remember either. However, Justin remembered to ask the Twittersphere for their favorite releases from 2001 and while reviewing the charts I came across a record that had completely slipped my mind but was an all-timer for a few years. That prompted me to look at adjacent records in the same vein from the same year and that connected up with a phrase I’ve had stuck in my head and wanted to use for something. So here’s a new occasional feature for the newsletter for me to wheel out depending on how I feel that week.
I Was a Teenage Metalhead
We have talked about on the show how we really came to Punk via Metal so I wanted to pay a little tribute to a few records that sort of kicked off an era of Heavy Metal that is near and dear to my teenage self.
Post-Metal, Atmospheric Sludge, Brown Pants Metal, whatever you call it became a fixation for us through my late teens, owing largely in part to our strange neighbor who introduced us to entire worlds of extreme and experimental metal.
I’ll stick to the corresponding year for this feature, 2001, which means that the bench isn’t very deep but has a few really heavy hitters for me to talk about. Of course, I wasn’t listening to these records when they came out, I turned eleven years old that June and very much was still listening to the radio, playing THPS and spinning Christian Rock and Pop Punk CDs.
The three records I am going to talk about did became very significant to me over the course of the decade before my eventual Metal burnout in college.
First up is the weakest of the three but it has a sound more immediately engaging to me now, so much so that I wonder why I ranked this record so low in the Cult of Luna discography. Sweden’s answer to ISIS has long been a personal favorite from the NeurISIS school of bands that were regularly praised on blogspots and in the pages of Decibel mag. Maybe it’s their roots in Hardcore that makes them more appealing to me? This self-titled debut is very much in the same lane as their follow up The Beyond which has been my favorite CoL record for as long as I have been a fan of the band. There’s just something really fuckin cool about the way they layer impenetrable sheets of concrete guitar tone, esoteric sound clips, feedback, half buried Sean Ingram-esque larynx stomping vocals over a consistently driving HXC beat. If you ever wanted to 2-step to Space Metal for 10 minutes, put on “Hollow” don’t worry though, you get a little breather on the cello laced mid-song breakdown and shimmery tremolo reconstruction.
I have long contended that Oakland Post-Metal originators’ 7th album is their best. I think that’s a controversial opinion but I can’t understand why. I mean, okay, it’s not a landmark record the way Through Silver in Blood is but I see it as a creative peak the band never touched before or since. A Sun That Never Sets pulls back more than ever Neurosis records on the toxic fog of fuzz and tribal drumming to reveal some achingly beautiful and contemplative if still oppressive and gloomy ideas. Of course, there’s still mammoth bones giving most of this record its structure. Pretty much every song has a major arc from setting to denouement to deconstruction giving this album a stunning cyclical feeling. This is Neurosis gone baroque with bell-toned guitar peels(also real church bells, sampled, chopped and screwed), new agey textures, cicada buzzing synths, strings and ancient sounding close interval chanting, Floydian flanger sweeps and the kind of dynamic range you rarely find in a Metal album.
Back to Sweden with some pummeling hardcore gone gonzo. This is the record I mentioned in the intro that sent me down this rabbit hole. I got tipped off to Breach as a college kid branching off from Cult of Luna and Refused and learning a little about the Swedish Hardcore scene. Their 1997 album It’s Me God is one of the most ungodly heavy Hardcore records I’ve ever heard, think Unsane meets Deadguy but faster! Kollapse winds down the heaviness in a few similar ways to the Neurosis record I mentioned above but retains the pacing and ugliness the band was known for on most of the record. The opening track sets the mood with a hypnotic, djembe backed Krautrock instrumental jam. “Old Ass Player” and “Mr. Marshall” have some of the most unhinged vocal performances I’ve heard on record. “Lost Crew” is tuneful and danceable Post-Punk track obliterated by the rhythm section. While instrumentals like “Sphincter Ani”, “Seven” and the title track weave dark, jazzy Post-Rock reprieves into the erratic patterns of the record with the latter—the album closer—building up to a sublime Goblinesque finale replete with glockenspiel’s and shakers.
Thanks for taking a winding walk down Post-Metal memory lane with me this week. Until next time fellow travelers!
Stay lucky
Dylan