A Year of Music

Electric Wizard’s Witchcult Today sounds, on record, like Bardo Pond used to sound live. Which is to say Witchcult Today is very good indeed, if not quite the monolithic monster of Satanic fuzz that, say, Dopethrone was. Which is also to say there was a time when Bardo Pond would come on stage looking like a bunch of scruffy MIT grads plus some random hippie chick they rousted out of the Haight and proceed to bludgeon the crowd half to death with some of the heaviest music ever played.

When I saw Bardo Pond play Terrastock in 1998, I swear the air started to congeal. That was the first time I really understood on a gut level why it’s called “heavy metal” (technically Bardo Pond aren’t a metal band, but songs like “Tommy Gun Angel” and “This Time (So Fucked)” are basically Jesu, made years before Justin Broadrick got his new religion). You can get some idea of what Bardo Pond were like live back then here, but listening to this is sort of like watching a phonecam recording of really hot sex. It gets the idea across while being entirely inadequate.

Ursula K Le Guin, a very wise author, critic, feminist, anthropologist, and all-round God Who Walks, once wrote a spirited essay entitled Genre: A Word Only the French Could Love. At some point, I’ll discuss this essay in depth, especially as it pertains to music, but for now, the title is enough. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my time on earth trying to file the art I like into little boxes that are partitioned into subboxes that have little halo-like graphs of signifiers and tags rotating around them in a complexified hyperdimensional paraspace. It’s always been lots of fun, but I eventually decided I wasn’t sure how edifying it all was.

These days I’ve shifted to cleaving to another notion stolen from literary critics, which is that an interesting piece of art is a finished work that has something wrong with it. This notion of the problematic comes to me from a quote of Randall Jarrell’s (“a novel is a prose work of a certain length that has something wrong with it”) cited in an interview with Samuel R Delany, who was using it to point out that even The Dispossessed – Ursula K Le Guin’s most successful novel – was flawed, but it really gets to the heart of what is special about the music that has stayed with me the longest: it exerts a kind of Lovecraftian hold over my imagination because there’s something going on that just doesn’t quite work, signs of a reach exceeding a grasp.

Smoosh all that together and you get Mordant Music’s The Tower – Parts VIII-XVIII. They don’t seem to have any idea what they want to be when they grow up. There’s some bathtub electronic experimentalism in the vein of early Tangerine Dream, a hint of Mogwai’s bombastic instrumental post rock, some bass-heavy dubstep miserablist isolationism (Shackleton once put out a record on Mordant Music’s eponymous label), a lot of Glenn Branca’s rigorous and tendentious guitar drones, but none of it’s in the service of any kind of structured program. The net effect is as if they’ve somehow captured on disc music in the raw, a protean cloud of sound, but it’s more beautiful and affecting than most of the outsider electronica it superficially resembles. It’s remarkable, and surprisingly accessible, even though it’s far from perfect. It would be far less interesting if it were perfect.

Stuck in head this morning: Torche’s “Fire”, a two and a half minute buzzbomb of droning catchy pop melodies running on consonant bass-heavy stoner metal rails. The fact that the lyrics are apparently sung in some otherworldly foreign key (which they keep in harmony, despite being at least half a semitone sharp throughout the song) only adds to its wayward charm, although it makes it somewhat awkward to have stuck in your head. I keep trying to force the singing into tune, but my brain won’t let me.

This song, more than any other in Torche’s catalog, lays bare their debt to Jane’s Addiction, who I would describe as “long gone and lamented” if they – especially Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro – had not so badly overstayed their welcome. As it is, their inescapable sensi frat-boy hijinx keep me from forgetting how the jocks in the dorms used to play Ritual de lo Habitual every day, sure as morning wood.

It’s a good thing I didn’t know or forgot that Dead Meadow’s Howls from the Hills was a reissue, or I might have skipped picking it up. Somebody told me once that their old records suck, and like a chump I believed Andee. Somebody. Whoever it was who told me that who definitely wasn’t Andee. The lead singer has kind of a whiny voice, but not in a Doug Martsch way, and I’ve come to love Martsch’s voice anyway. These are some epic stoner jams here, sort of as if Black Sabbath and got together and recorded some jams with Bardo Pond at their most baked. The whole thing is very 1975. It’s not quite as space-rocking or as catchy as the more recent Dead Meadow albums, but their combination of midtempo sludge, fuzzed out guitars, and wah-wahed droning feedback is instantly recognizable. These guys are like comfort food for me. Now I gotta go pick up the other reissued old album and their live CD. I can’t believe I passed up the chance to see them live. Stupid tinnitus.