Chronicle #9: September 2020
Possibly the busiest week so far, and by far one of the most rewarding ones. Veterans, newcomers, second chances, expectations met and unmet, and more!
Deftones - Ohms
Deftones’ reputation as one of the best metal bands around is not surprising. At least not in part. It is somewhat surprising that a band at first so attached to the overblown and mocked "nu-metal" could transcend its original sound, to become a hybrid of post-metal with hints of dream pop, shoegaze and alternative rock. But it’s not surprising when one hears how their abrasive and heavy guitars hit, their compositions never fall on the too progressive side of metal, and they’re led by a singer like Chino Moreno, never too theatrical and never too serious, who always gave them a shocking and powerful amount of gravitas. At their best, when they were well produced and well mixed, they became a band of penetrating mass and noise, playing beautifully gray highs and lows.
Attention to tone is something that Deftones has always kept in mind - records like Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan had a shocking rich sound, and it's something that has always carried them over the years. Ohms, in that case, it must be one of their most ambitious and flourishing albums. Right from the start, with the thick synthesizers of “Genesis” that give way to a devastating groove, which takes place step by step, as if it were dragging in the sky. The texture of the guitars, withering in how they shine so bright that they obscure everything around them, is reminiscent of the tones of Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins, although this time, with an even more focused and less wandering sound.
If there is a certain character that makes this album, it’s that of being one of a slow, steady pace. No song breaks out of the midtempo rhythm that Deftones establish from the first tune; even the fastest ones are full of cuts that stop them and put them in their place. That makes the first few listens somewhat monotonous, and some songs shouldn't be heard out of context on the record, but it does make this an easy and even almost pleasant listening. Although obviously "pleasant" given the heaviness of alternative metal and Deftones in general. Tracks like "Urantia" and "The Spell of Mathematics" create a space in which breathing is an arduous task, as they suffocate the mix with dense synthesizers, like constellations looking over the abstract hell that is being subdued below, and bass that does its job of purging the brain and snatching away what flaming guitars and crunching drums can't play.
Something very peculiar and salvageable about this album is that it does not have any song that is considered the center of the album, since everything shares the same ambition and intensity. They will not have the best melodies, but they do have a fury that makes them succumb to their best and worst intentions. Chino Moreno can sing and marvel at his own performance, and then scream through an ugly and gaseous filter that distorts him and turns him into one more frequency, all in the same song, such as “Pompeji” for example. They have never been great lyricists, but neither have they needed to be when they have such a defined and scary sound. A song like “Ceremony” prepares the listener for its explosion that comes and goes; even with a mildly catchy chorus, it prepares to make a total atonement, which is in part what the entire album seeks.
That moment comes, in its own time, but it comes, in the form of "The Link Is Dead." Right from the beginning, it prepares the listener with soft keyboards, to later corner them with an incessant drum rhythm, some guitars that point up and not to the sides, and a Chino Moreno close to the mix, screaming and twisting on himself as if with each word, something of him decomposed. "I'm slowly closing down/You snap your fingers and you think I'll respond", while the groove dissects itself, and the little air that the production has gradually fades away, and everything goes. "You’re on your own."
Ohms' last 3 tracks aren't exactly the best, but they don't hurt the record in any way. It includes several of the most chaotic and also calmest moments on the album, although never without breaking the passionate state of the entire project. "Radiant City" has to deal with the scraps of "The Link Is Dead", having to deal with that ball of heat and having to touch it with unprepared hands. It calms the record down enough for “Headless,” who dabbles doubtfully and hesitantly on a more subtly paranoid basis - they feel like they have to put the explosions down for a moment to focus on surviving.
Which brings us to the homonymous song on the album that closes this solid project. It is no coincidence that this closing theme was the first song the band released for this album, since it serves to announce not only the sound of this record in general, but what to expect from Deftones from now on, if anyone I thought they were going to get carried away by nostalgia. It begins with "We are surrounded by debris from the past", and from there they create such a well-armed disorder to declare before their fans, their detractors, and God, that nothing is going to be able to change their ideals and his main beliefs. They'll keep digging deep, and the heaviness may never go away, but if they stick together, it's not going to be as bad as it could be. Within all the darkness, it is a message of unity and of staying close, even, or especially during the adversities and troubles of life; all said on top of the poppiest and most accessible instrumental on the album. As it should be. Hopefully this magic, dark but never ominous, won't be over soon.
Review originally published on El Quinto Beatle.
Machine Gun Kelly - Tickets to My Downfall
Isn’t it so cool to be trash? To enjoy that trash knowing that the trash you’re rolling around on won’t judge you? The first track of this album, Tickets to My Downfall, was supposed to be the title track, and then they renamed it “Title Track”. Complete and total bullshit. “If I’m a painter, I’d be a depressionist”, it’s like a joke. But then, that’s part of what makes this album so good and endearing. Machine Gun Kelly does a hard pivot from hip hop to pop punk simply because he got his one pop punk song from his last album to do partially well, so maybe that’s the well he should be digging into. It’s calculated and would be desperate, if it wasn’t for Kelly understanding exactly what he’s making and leaning into the bullshit-he’s 30 years old, he should know better than to give in to all the clichés of angsty youth that comes with this style of music, and he is! He gives in with a wink and a nod, almost like he admits to the audience that he’s fooling around, dabbling into a genre that isn’t his, all the while strutting around just how much he fits into it. “I know that I’m immature, but at least I’m not a goddamn failure.” Because that’s the thing, he still comes up with an endearing and fun listen, one that utilizes all the right tropes at the right times.
It’s always something nice when albums understand their limitations, and Machine Gun Kelly and his accomplice Travis Barker focus on making catchy, fast and economical songs-only 3 songs here are longer than 3 minutes. Songs that easily could be interludes have as much presence, if not more, than some of the main attractions here-”WWIII” blasts in and breaks through everything and it’s gone before anyone noticing, and “Jawbreaker” is one of the poppiest cuts on an album that puts the ‘pop’ emphasis on pop punk, and neither one of them is even 2 minutes long! By all means, every song comes in with such immediacy, and stays with that level of intensity all throughout. Everything fits; “Concert for Aliens”, one of the main highlights, comes up with about 3 different ways to perform the call-and-response chorus, it works; “My Ex’s Best Friend” is an ode to trying to understand how to fall in love, only for Blackbear to show up with a pissy verse dismissing a former flame as if he was screaming directly to her, it works; “Drunk Face” is ridiculous with its trap snares and the lyrics that seem to want to explain themselves, it works; “Forget Me Too” has Halsey exploding, it’s one of the best moments of her career; “Bloody Valentine” pumps up a synth like it thinks it’s “Just Like Heaven”, and I’d even go so far to call it moving. Just about everything works; this shouldn’t happen, but it did. Lightning in a bottle? I can only hope not.
Lydia Loveless - Daughter
It’s a shame hearing albums like these, where the potential is realized and then repeated over and over, each time with considerably less results than the last. Then again, that might just be what to expect from Lydia Loveless’ career by this point, and that’s a shame, given that she very easily could have become one of alt-country’s most exciting and daring stars. She once had a fire and ruckus that she brought to the table where everything seemed to be on the line for her, as she would fight the odds of her place in life and herself and wouldn’t complain about losing. Yet slowly with each album, that power slowly went away-people grow up, they settle down, their settling down fails, and they don’t go back to their old habits. She hasn’t put out a bad release so far because she’s been able to expand her sound and come closer to comprehend her inner emotions of loneliness and abandonment, but there was a spark there that’s been fading away, and listening to her albums chronologically puts that into focus.
In a poetic way, Daughter follows that same pattern. Kicking the door open with “Dead Writer”, a sturdy and lonesome ballad detailing Lydia’s off conflict with her partner, as she throws away her old place of comfort, but she doesn’t know what to fill that hole up, as the room spins and deepens with a slight tinge of drama’s echo somewhere among the ruins. Follow up “Love Is Not Enough” is almost as good, poppier, more direct in its sadness, where the resentment is felt throughout its melancholic musing (“I can’t believe the worst kinds of people achieve everything they want/But it takes medication to get me off” hits in multiple ways when played at the right time). Yet immediately right after this incredibly promising start, each track becomes worse than the previous one. Some pretty acoustic arrangements, spme well done harmonies, some biting lines, and the decay that comes with leaving behind a romance she’s worked so hard to maintain is very present and well developed lyrically throughout the album-but that lack of a spark becomes more and more present with each song, as the album shuts itself off in a path of ambiguity and sorrow, especially as the album physically slows down the deeper one goes. She got very close to landing what she wanted to do, and for a couple of tracks she even gets there, only to lose herself along the way. Again, kinda poetic.
Anna von Hausswolff - All Thoughts Fly
The organ! Of course! Someone with the caliber and audience of Anna von Hausswolf should have thought of this sooner-if they haven’t already-, to explore the sounds, the tones, the ebbs, the flows, the ecstasy of the organ as an instrument of virtuosism, of belief, of interaction, of conflict via truce with a being far beyond us, of humanity having a fighting chance against the eternal nothingness that may or may not await us. Anna is not wrong to go for this angle, the organ has been one of her main assets all throughout her discography, as she explored the gothic undertones of what seems to be the other side while trying to figure out the meaning behind it. But never like this, never where the organ isn’t just the center of attention-it is omnipresent, with no backing accompaniment; a 43-minute long organ solo. Easy to dismiss, easy to shrug aside, easy to catalog as one of her minor works, a passion project that gets in the way of a long-term career-yet this is her best work to date.
Once again, easy to dismiss. The compositions are simple, very minimalist, almost predictable-if you’ve heard one Godspeed You! Black Emperor song, you know where these songs are going: buildup through chord passages, harmonic playoffs with the high and low frequencies, accentuations on the more acute arrangements for a crescendo, and then a slow burn into its descent. In many ways, very meat-and-potatoes ‘modern classical’ drone music. But good Lord, have you ever heard these nonetheless moving compositions played into the thrusting sounds of an organ? Yes, this record is very much a gimmick, but one of the best gimmicks you’ll find all year. It’s a long walk in a long forgotten century through the purple seas, knowing that you should forget something that’s still very much a part of you, and as every lonely soul walks by, you wonder if they know. What a shame that would be, because then you’d have to do something about it. Also, it’s all in black and white.
“Sacro Bosco” is the foggy night as the lighthouse illuminates what little it can through the shore, and everything starts swelling around you, and you try to hold on to every bit of lighting that you can-if you could only hold lighting in a bottle. A soft hiss of longing into the night. “Dolore di Orsini” and “Persefone” hold very similar thoughts, as they ruminate on one main thought and hold it dearly to their chest, as the pipes reminisce and the lows sulk into the night sky without any answers, as the thought takes over the brain and becomes its own entity, flying like a blackbird forgotten to everyone but itself. The opener “Theater of Nature” might be the album’s surprise, because it sets you up for an album that doesn’t exist-a chipper, playful, almost optimistic track that wishes to explore every aspect of the instrument it’s playing, only to be consumed by its own wishes. The title track may be the one that takes up all the attention (that’s what 12 minutes will do), and though it’s not quite the highlight-takes a bit too long to get going-, once the landscape opens up and reveals more than flashing lights passing through the sky, and reveals its crushing depths that will put those lights to test, that faith being plunged through the dirt, it’s a moment of fear and bewilderment like no other… and the ending is so sudden, so disclosed like nothing was revealed, no big revelation out the other side. It just has to keep going. “Outside the Gate (for Bruna)” is that ideal, that resistance that forces you to not surrender-never too solemn, never too broken, never too scared.
A. G. Cook - Apple
This is a disaster! What even happened here? After 7G, which felt more like a vomit of ideas, some of them great, some of them bad, hearing that A. G. Cook was putting out yet another album a mere month after it, this time with a normal length of 40 minutes with 10 tracks, it felt like this time, he was really sitting down to make a proper album. But this is not it! It’s a bad collection of bad ideas that become worse when they’re together. There was a reason the acoustic songs were separated from the harsher electronic ones on 7G-because Cook doesn’t know how to put them together! Yet, this is his attempt to unite all of his thoughts into something that’s just about unlistenable from a sonic and aesthetic point of view. The distortion is no longer evocative, it’s repulsive; the melodies no longer feel simple enough to tell a complex story, they’re now just plain and basic; Cook’s singing, which was never a great asset for him, is no longer endearing or even salvageable, it sounds rotten, amateurish, like a bedroom pop project that should have stayed in the bedroom. Put 7G on shuffle, take the first 10 tracks that come out of it, you’ll get a substantially better album than this (and about a third of 7G was trash, too!).
IDLES - Ultra Mono
It’s easy to trash an album like this. I’m about to trash it right now, and there are so many easy lines and easy lanes to go for that would eventually do a disservice to what truly makes this a bad album. It’s not the catchphrases or the political references themselves-it’s not the “cringe”, or whatever you wanna call it. At their best, some songs here, the more abstract and overarching they go-“Pull on my reigns”; “I am I, unify”; “Take flight, take flight, model village”-, could really inspire something out there. But at their worst, they sound like forgetting the most important thing. IDLES used to be incredibly good at pointing out discontent, sociopolitical irritation and that unique sentiment of blood getting hot with a kind of energy that tried to show the hurting, the aching, the bruises, the black and blue. Only to be boiled down to ‘cool’ turns of phrase and terrifyingly simplistic ideals, as if all the answers could be contained within one flick of a pen. Populism is always appreciated, but not when it pats itself and its supporters on the back for having ideals and gets no one anywhere. Especially not when the energy feels this canned and almost patronizing-it doesn’t have the guts to be either anthemic or anxious, so it goes for a happy middle ground where no one can question anything because it’s all so agreeable- “Anti-war!” “I have got anxiety!” “Consent!”, who’d say no to that? Then again, they seem to be aware of this, this seems to be the lane they’re going (“Fuck you, I’m a lover”), and if live shows ever become a thing again, I’d go see them live, they sound like blast-but I’d like to see their response once the grooves grow staler than they already have. And most of all, I sure hope they don’t think they’re actually saying something with this; a mantra is more than a tweet.
Sufjan Stevens - The Ascension
This man did not come to play. Every major release from Sufjan Stevens is one that rattles around itself, as it fights and passes through different genres and subgenres, to portray a yearning that’s religious not only through his conflicted bond with Christianity, but through a seek for an understanding of himself and the world around him that could make him seem ridiculous if you’re not in tune with what he’s doing. Not only that, but they’re a search for color like few other indie artists out there-universes built for specific moments then disregarded and thrown away in order to make room for something more daring than before. His music is a constant challenge, and every listen is an appropriately long and winded one, that demands a lot from you. The Ascension feels like the natural progression after 2010’s impenetrably penetrable The Age of Adz when it comes to aesthetics, following the misty, electronica-shaped worlds he builds for himself, but also the proper path to take after his last solo project, 2015’s Carrie & Lowell, his most barren and simple, where he left all those universes aside to reconcile the destruction of his own, after the death of his absent mother. That album left him stranded and lost, his beliefs questioned with no answer, and looking forward to a world that didn’t seem to know what to offer him.
In turn, this may be his messiest, most complicated and most downbeat release, and that’s saying a lot, but it also might just be his most accessible, his most pop-thinking. You can tell even through the song titles, how many of them are named after pop hits (“Run Away with Me”, “Video Game”, “Tell Me You Love Me”, “Sugar”) as if he was inviting you to consider what separates his songs from those he references. Obviously, they’re not built for any kind of radio, but they’re easy to separate and even easier to play in isolation, because they have the melodies and the arrangements to make you comprehend their meaning and their intent. There’s also the issue that most of these songs run for longer than they probably should-the shortest song here edges the 4 minutes-with a lot of repetition and less focus on abstract-minded lyricism, this time with sharper and more immediate mantras- “Tell me you love me anyway”, “Come on, baby, give me some sugar”, ”I don’t wanna play your video game”, “I wanna love you”, “I wanna die happy”, “I’m your ticket tonight”,”, a lot of “I”s. This could be thought of as Sufjan’s most personal release yet, the one where he decides to pull no punches regarding his readings on his own decay, his leaving behind his old habits, his forever-there conflict with God this time more present than ever, as he questions why he’s been left alone alongside the rest of the world. His briefings on climate change and politics may be surface-level and not that insightful, but they’re not trying to be-they’re just more reasons he lists as to how and why everything is so downbeat on this album.
But that’s the thing: as much as this album dwells and borderline wallows in its own musings of feeling abandoned by forces around and above him, it’s never asking you to pity it-if anything, it’s just asking you to accept it as is, confused and wandering. Once you try to reach out, you’ll find a lot of beauty that, despite some tracks pushing past their runtimes, features some of the most exquisite and heavenly moments of his career. The more straightforward ballads in the first half like “Run Away with Me” and “Tell Me You Love Me” slide along a heavy mist that looks for clearer answers across longwinded afterthoughts and questions to respond. They’re aching, but out of that aching, they strive for more than what was given, and they crush into stunning climaxes, as they find themselves surrounded by multicolor landscapes that end up ascending to the sky, only for the essence to be left behind. There’s a distinct kind of tragedy to songs like these, that make way for an abstract cut like “Die Happy”, melodic and pretty but also full of unmarked darkness as it looks forward to something (death) that’s not there yet. Sufjan’s an expert at hiding his vocals in the mix throughout his album, so that when he comes out of the shadows for a song as confessional and bleak as “Ativan”, where his broken vocals have to deal with some harsh truths as the glitch and fear surround him-the mountains and the passages of wind that colored most of the early tracks eventually leave the album, as it becomes drier and looks forward to even less. Demonic vocal glitches surround Sufjan more and more as his expectations towards God become simultaneously clearer and less satisfactory (“For the love of God, for the love of Ursa Major”).
There’s a lot of circularity throughout the album, as the melodies run in circles around themselves, and since most of the tracks might as well be 12’’ versions of themselves, there’s a sense of running around these ideas for as long and as much as they can before tiring themselves out. If there’s been one motif to most of Sufjan’s compositions, it’s relaying on one melodic idea throughout the entire song, and that’s most present here, sometimes to the songs’ detriment. But that’s what Sufjan seems to be doing anyway, as his beliefs become more muddled and his already low confidence get darker and more obtuse, like a man by himself in a desert island, walking around the paths he knows by memory, resenting them more and more as time goes by. The tones become more crystalized as the album goes on, a dense hall of mirrors where you can’t tell the way out. The aforementioned beauty never quite leaves, but it’s juxtaposed with rougher tones and more dramatic undercurrents of sensations previously unknown, only now coming out of the misty shadows. It may very well be the end, even in more hopeful songs like “Goodbye to All That” and “Sugar”, the latter of which sways and moves around a central idea of revitalization that’s more than welcome in an album as bleak as this. It’s the first song since the early tracks that realizes there’s got to be more than the wreckage it’s navigating.
But then, of course, comes the reckoning of the final 2 tracks. The first one, the title track, is one of Sufjan’s most open songs of his entire career, one where he lays back all his cards, an epitaph of disappointment, loss, and false expectations that never came to materialize. It’s as if it was his time to go, and he came to reconcile the beliefs, the curtain pulled back to reveal a movingly human egomaniac disguised under good intentions. It puts this album into perspective; the season of pain and hopelessness comes from thinking he could achieve more than he could, that he’s been left with a hole that he can’t fill with sex, God, or a combination of the 2, and now he must navigate the remains of his attempts with bitterness and lack of consolation, as he now asks himself, “What now?”. Sure, we’ve all thought we were acting like believers when we were just angry and depressed, but to the scale that Sufjan has? Hard to process. Thankfully, he’s a smart enough man to leave himself behind in the 12-minute long behemoth of a closer, “America”, a lowkey anthem to leave behind thoughts unfinished to look for something else, even if he may not be saved; his final, beautiful begging being a prayer to spare what little can be spared, for himself and for others.
The Ascension is an album where a man who was once so focused on bringing salvation to himself and others realizes the answer never comes from one man, one messiah, one leader; it’s a collective experience, that must be shared and expanded beyond the mere individual to truly work. Otherwise, what you’re left with is what this album demonstrates: nothing but ruins in a forgotten land. This album sounds like a man understanding the need to reach out to something beyond his grasp, and realizing that what’s beyond his grasp isn’t God or a heavenly presence-it’s others, it’s those around him. After all, if the planet’s a Death Star, it might as well be one where we’re all in the same frequency. One of the most beautiful and damning experiences of the year, and one that never seems to be as long as it is. When his time comes, he will have earned his ascension.
Bonus track: Sufjan Stevens - “My Rajneesh”
A song that came out as a B-side to “America”, and it might just be the perfect continuation of the arc The Ascension presents. It gives us a Sufjan with a chance to build himself back up again, with a clearer and more daring mindset. It doesn’t give away its cards all at once, as it starts pretty slow and mellow, detailing with enough modesty its melodic ideas. “After the storm, we shaved our legs to the skin”; starting anew, moving forward, finding little elements that take us into a distant journey. Once again, a circular melody that plunges through the ether, but this time accompanied by different noises; for the first time, something that doesn’t appear all throughout the album proper, other voices! Female backing vocals that accompany him, as if a crowd was accumulating in a collective journey, finding comfort in each other’s arms. The God he speaks of now goes far beyond the Christian one, as he accepts different cultures and religions into his arms, and the instrumentation becomes more varied and organic, like a walk through a windy desert. The first half of this song presents a moment of communion so euphoric and unique, it’s touching.
Only for the second half to come up and presents its doubts once again. The glitchy aspects of Sufjan’s music comes back, this time more reserved, but still, like a devil on his shoulder, questioning his motives; but Sufjan responds! Past the vocoders, past the electronics, there’s a core that rises through, like plants growing in the middle of machines, althewhile echoes of former melodies come in to remind Sufjan he’s going through the right path, the path of love, the path of trust. He may not get the revelation he wants, but he may just find something better, something that suits him and everyone else, and he won’t find it alone. Whether it be through folk, electronica, chamber pop, or whatever, it will be worth it, and it will be as sonically impeccable as always. For his final trick, Sufjan will lay the track to rest. And so he does.