my war

Too much of a good thing always turns pleasure into some form of distress. We knew this from a very young age. When you chomped a big load of Halloween candy, your stomach throbbed with pain.

The same principal can be applied to art. The theory deviates slightly, producing similar, but not identical, results. Too much exposure to a given niche, genre, trend, style, etc. tends to water down or devalue the original musical intent. When something catches on, people usually try to capitalize on it until they grind it into maggot feed. The masses ripped punk to shreds and turned it into a traveling circus called the Warped Tour. Honestly, when did seeing a guy with a mohawk become commonplace? In the mid-'80s, when I was a child, scummy-looking dudes with red spiky hair and studded leather jackets scared me. Not a great look but it pulled off the trick. Now, the kids buy their rebellion at the mall and fail to even shock grandma.

Music wise, this sort of takeover starts with the "lite" version of the original flavor and grows into a cultural coup. Grunge, for lack of a better pigeonhole, thrived aesthetically in its small Petri dish until corporations co-opted it. The Stooges-inspired heavy guitar buffoonery of Mudhoney and the slow thunderous thud of the Melvins still sound fresh to these ears today. After the third, thud-lite generation of these Pacific Northwesterners hit it big, bands wandered out of the woods to grab their cash bag and the music is now synonymous with watered down stadium rock like Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd.

In the past eight years, the flurry of activity in the avant, noise, weirdo underworld served to somewhat devalued the uniqueness of the music it meant to enhance. Fly-by-night labels churned out band practice tapes from the latest prolific wunderkind. Everyone seemed to operate a label and every label seemed to release limited edition cassettes or CDrs by new artists. The capitalistic initiative inspired many musicians to solder together expensive machinery or purchase pedals and samplers. Somehow, quality control never entered the minds of the machinery operators, the product inspectors or the administrators and, as a result, mediocrity flows through “out” distro lists like corpses through the Mississippi River.

Capitalistic tendencies ruin music. Sure, music needs a means to reach audiences. Many labels provide invaluable resources to struggling audiences and ensure the artist will connect with like-minded folk. A lot of people saw an opportunity to cash in when Nu-Weird America and neo-noisers hit the indie consciousness. It takes very little effort to mimic the newspaper cutout collage, thrift store Jackson Pollack or children’s drawing that appears on certain album covers. All you have to do is splatter paint or glue newspaper cut outs on a CD slip or cassette cover. Pick a band, collective or collaboration of people from semi-well-known bands and ask them for a band practice tape. Release them in editions of 30 and keep five for eBay’s sake. When a label releases five to ten albums each month, my suspicion grows, as the law of averages dictates ten horrid ones exist for every solid effort. The business model works for certain labels, namely Breakdance the Dawn, Not Not Fun (most of the time) and a few others.

By flooding the market with mediocre product, you’re cruisin’ for a revolt from the music-buying populace. Consumers grow weary of the same quality standard and will eventually raise their expectations. Soon enough, mass production dulls the initial thrill of free, formless music. Bands stop attempting to refine their skills and, instead, try to meet a product quota. The audience loses track of the various side-projects, limited-run releases, art prints and the rest of the cavalry and quit buying the albums.

Long in the brewing, the backlash is finally taking hold. The economic recession (re: Great Depression v.2.0) on the loom is forcing people to cut back on expenses. Ten years from now, 20-somethings will probably reissue some of the gems and some of the stinkers from this era. Until then, you can sift through the dollar bin at your local record hole or get one of those 10 for the price of one deals on eBay.

I was trying to find a reason why, for the past few weeks, I could not bring my self to search for something new. I feel like I’ve gotten burned more times than I struck gold. Lately, I've taken some chances on things people send me (good stuff, btw) but, for the most part, I stick with the faithful stand-bys—artists who put the work in.

Sickness/Wolf Eyes “There is Part of Me You Will Never Know” LP (Hospital, 2008): Despite the big-name co-billing, this is Chris Goudreau’s show. He orchestrated it. He provides the general narrative outline and the Wolf pack fills in the blanks. Like a solid author, he controls language and the audience. For the album, Goudreau carved source material from Wolf Eyes into a compositional meditation on mortality and insanity. Like his 2008 No Fun appearance, Sickness shows remarkable restraint and a penchant for setting a dark mood. A lot of his (non-immediate) peers in the noise world expect their blasts of sound to automatically invigorate but fail to work at it (see above). Every pitch, echo, pause, repetition and rumble is deliberate on this album and most of the sounds achieve their goal. On album opener “A Diet of Speed and Beer,” Goudreau sets the pulse of Side A with a glistening high-pitch sound, echoing metallic wind gusts and creepy-crawl snake squelches. The side slithers like a night stalker in the brush alongside his prey. It climbs to a false peak and then bottoms out, leaving large bass rumbles to float across speakers. As sound fritters into and out of the auditory frame, the collab achieves a sort of disturbing ambience through harsh tones. The negative space appearing between sound movements suggests some sort of unsettling thought pattern. The calm lasts a few short minutes as a blitzkrieg of dissonance attacks the speakers to end the side. Side B starts with a similar mood and rhythm but builds into a horror stomp. In the final third of the side, Goudreau adds the spastic jolts of scraping metal to which he often builds in concert. The sound emerges as our protagonist unravels. The dark thoughts turn into a violent resolve. Sickness does not just insert a climatic violent peak. When the record reaches that point, it is well-earned.

Heavy Winged “Alive in My Mouth” (Three Lobed, 2008): Last year, this Brooklyn-based three-piece melted faces with a fine tapestry of psych guitar called We Grow. In between that LP and Alive in My Mouth, the band threw some limited run release our way. None of it lived up to the heavy dose of lysergic confusion found on We Grow. The band almost reaches the majesty of that album with Alive in My Mouth. Comprised of two side-long stunners, Alive in My Mouth shifts into multiple auditory modes without sounding forced or overly loose. “Gruesome Pillow Talk,” which trucks through Side A, features a flickering shoegaze guitar washing over jagged buzz-saw string scrapes. A steady, somewhat unchanging drumbeat lends the song a sort of ragged Neu quality. The mournful quality of the guitar eventually subsides for a full-on fuzz fest. The final quarter of the side features bursts of dissonant-yet-funky robot skronk being overtaken by an angelic choir of gray sound. As the song could feasibly morph into other fascinating shapes and hold the listener’s interest for an eternity, the band sucks it into a void, signaling its death knell with a drum attack. A heavily distorted stoner metal riff commences “Wounded Crystals,” a hazy, aggressive mind-warp. For a quarter of the song, the riff grows almost too repetitive and the song collapses under the weight of the guitar feedback smatterings. The band wanders into the self-indulgent bliss momentarily but it regains its focus with an introverted Van Halen riff blended with blurs of angelic falsetto vocals. A band exhibits its chops by moving as one through the improv swamp. For the most part, Heavy Winged’s tunes fail to sound improvised, as the band transition into different portions of their jam so effortlessly. The band coalesces in a manner that suggests they can pull something like Alive in My Mouth from the fog whenever they feel like it.

sooner rather than later will update and try to write better/ more coherent