One aspect of metal I have always particular fetishized is the genres ability to create a complete piece of art, with visual art and stories complimenting the actual music. Such is the case with Bhayanak Maut's latest masterwork the all encompassing Man. Featuring some of the best composing I've heard from any metal band, their seventeen track epic takes the listener on a journey and represents a gloriously brutal act who take a variety of elements to get a truly iconoclastic and inherently fascinating sound.
What dazzles me about this record is how it shifts back and forth and all around with moments of jazzy brilliance intertwined with Lamb of God-esque groove metal riffs. On top of that you find a variety of vocal styles within the music which only helps to accentuate the wonderfully organic vibes that Bhayanak Maut cultivate on Man. There is something endlessly engaging about this record and the fact that it comes with a 118 page booklet outlining the story of the record only makes it more fascinating to me. Bhayanak Maut have been able to refine a piece of art that will force you to really think and essentially raises the bar on what metal can achieve.
Anthemic and yet also strangely down to earth Man represents years of toil from one of Indias biggest metal bands. A group who have true breakout potential and who could very well alter the future of the genre, Bhayanak Maut understand what it means to forge ahead and breathe new life into a genre God despised. Man stands as a testimony to all that metal can be, sure, as per the record mankind is a cancer on the earth, but we gotta be earning some points if members of our species can put out something as good as this! Find them on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/bhayanakmaut
After
having been given the opportunity to review their stellar upcoming full-length
album The Prison Pt.II, I recently
got to set up a skype session with Godbless
thee, Mooseheart mastermind Brent
Vallefuoco to discuss the album in more depth.
1.Could you explain the concept behind
this record and tell us where it where it came from?
It’s really
not as obtuse as it might seem. When I first started working on The Prison Pt.I, I was very influenced
by albums like The Wall, 2112 or also Deathconsciousness, which has a huge
book explaining its story. There’s a whole bunch of proggy concept albums like
that made me want to make my “own story”, my own “prog-masterpiece”, and in Pt.I there was kind of a story. It’s
really just about a kid growing up and dealing with shitty stuff in his family.
However, as I was going through Pt.II,
I came to realize that I was putting so much energy into trying to make this
story but what I was really trying to communicate was all this stuff I was
going through. So I figured it would be a lot less pretentious and a lot more
intimate and meaningful to me if instead of trying to turn the concept into
some grandiose story, I just wrote about what I was going through.
So there’s’ still somewhat of a narrative on the album but it’s more about the
journey I went through as I was coping with the things in the songs.
You can
kind of break down Mountain Song, Perdu and La Forêt Noire into one act, where I become aware of the rose
colored glasses I had been wearing when I was a kid through which I would see
everything in an idealized way. You grow up and you sort of realize that things
are kind of amiss, realizing that there’s this family conflict that has been
going on this whole time or that you never knew that there was one particular
family member that was a drug addict or something like that. A lot of it is
pretty self-evident if you read it in that way. I think La Forêt Noire is really just about grieving that loss of innocence
of seeing things in a sort of way where everything was so much bigger than me,
which would make me want to explore this world that didn’t make much sense to
me but that felt so cool because I was only 6.
The next 3 songs, Molasses, The Monster Overlooking Everything Else,
and Bodies of Water are about me
coping with some of the deeper issues going on there, not just the ones on the
surface. They’re about when I first started to come to terms with certain
dramatic memories that I had repressed. Most particularly I had a really
abusive relationship with a certain family member, and The Monster Overlooking Everything Else is about how that
relationship impacted my ability to be able to connect with people because I
had a fucked up model for intimacy. I would have this image that being close to
someone is something that will get you hurt. In that song I’m expressing a lot
of anger about it, whereas Bodies of
Water represents the inverse of that, once the anger settles down you
realize that it’s the lack of self-acceptance that is driving that anger.
The last few songs, Through the Eyes of
the Suburbs, The End, Neptune are really about realizing that
I was holding on to all of these things from my childhood that weren’t really a
part of my life anymore, which made them have such a big impact on me. Through the Eyes of the Suburbs is a
portrait of how envision myself as a kid, and the song title itself is a
reference to Through the eyes of Ruby
by the Smashing Pumpkins, which captures a lot of that nostalgia for me. I
think that the one very important song on the album for me is The End, because I wrote that song when
someone suggested to me that if I really wanted to get in touch with all of
that stuff and try to cope with it, I should try and ask the kid that went
through that, asking him to talk and to tell me what he was feeling. So I sat
down with a notepad and just said to myself “Alright little Brent, just tell me
what’s wrong, what you’re feeling. I want to let you know that you can talk to
me about anything you want right now.”So that song is about everything that that kid had to say to me. I
realized that I had been setting up so many defense mechanisms to keep myself
protected because I was so afraid of being hurt that I was actually hurting
myself. I was indirectly telling myself that I needed to be different in order
to be accepted, the exact opposite of who I was. As a result, that kid just
felt like he was worthless, that he wasn’t even worth being acknowledged. So I
realized that the only way I was ever going to accept all of those things
happening was to simply accept myself, and to accept that I can take care of
myself, that I can be my own person to validate myself, that I don’t need to do
all of that stuff to keep myself safe anymore. And then Neptune is really about how I envisioned myself after that. The
whole time I had envisioned myself going on this journey away from everything,
constantly fighting against everything to try and make things my way, try to
make myself safe and try to get back at everyone, and at the end of it I’m just
so far away from anything I ever liked, you know? I was just driving myself
into a whole. So this was just me saying that I didn’t want to do that anymore.
2.Speaking of which, Neptune feels to like it bears a connection with the
opening track, as if the album shifted back to a fresh new start with a more
positive outlook. Is this just me or do the songs bear no connections at all?
I think
they should *laughs*. I feel like MAYBE that was what was going through my
head, but I can’t really tell. That’s a very valid way of looking at it. Mountain Song is the only song that
still exists from that idea of my creating a narrative, since I originally
intended to create this whole fantasy world for the whole album. So that’s me
envisioning things how I would LIKE things to be… this lonely place where I
could be by myself and explore things. The thing about that song that is always
a little disturbing to me is that I’m alone there. I hadn’t realized it at that
point but I’m beginning to isolate myself, which is a bad thing. In Neptune, it’s like: “Well, I’ve finally
gotten to where I’ve wanted to go, but it’s so dissatisfying, and this is not
where I want to be after all”. So I guess there is some sort of connection.
They’re expressing the same thing but in completely different ways.So I guess you could see it as a new start.
3.The Prison Pt.II will be your first release with the
band in over 3 years. Was there a different writing approach to this album
compared to your previous albums?
Definitely.
There was just so much I have learned from the time that I was working on Pt.II. I actually write about this in
the liner notes of the album. I think Pt.II
evolved so much from where I was at Pt.I that
I almost don’t even consider it a sequel anymore. I almost consider it as an
antithesis. I mean it clearly comes from the same root, but on Pt.I I just don’t think I had figured
out how to maturely do what I was trying to do on Pt.II yet. There are also certain things about the first
installment that still bother me a little bit; the production isn’t as good as
I’d like it to be, and there a just certain things about the song structures
where you can clearly see the ambition but I hadn’t figured out how to make all
of my weird ideas work yet, how to make them cohesive. Certain songs are still
kind of jarring, and you can tell especially towards the latter part of that
album that certain songs aren’t really fleshed out all the way. I think that
it’s because I was just too eager to get it finished. Once I had put it out and
I was reading all of the reviews I got back, I kind of realized that I hadn’t
let it really “cook” all the way, you know?
So on Pt.II, I just told myself “I’m
not even going to think about releasing this thing until I know it’s DONE”.
Every song was constantly being worked on for the entirety of that period. Mountain Song, Perdu and La Forêt Noire
were all completely re-recorded because I just didn’t like the sounds I got the
first time around. I ended up recording all of the drums at a studio that I now
happen to work at.
As far as the composition goes, I was writing that album after a long tenure
with Xanthochroid, where I learned so
much more about theory. I spent so much more time learning theory, in college
composition class, so you can hear that there’s more maturity to how the songs
are arranged and there’s a lot more themes. For example the theme on the chorus
for Mountain Song is the chorus in La Forêt Noire, simply in a different
key and rearranged. The verse La Forêt
Noire is also the interlude in Through
the Eyes of the Suburbs simply redone. There’s a lot of ideas that pop up
throughout the album.
I could also go more detail about the ways I recorded the guitars, which was
completely different this time around. I put a lot of care into making sure it
was the right guitar, the right mic, the right amp… things like that.
So there’s definitely a huge difference in maturity and how much effort you put
into it.
4.I was actually going to ask you
about one particular line that appears on a couple of tracks “This place is right for me”. Could you
explain what that phrase means to you, its place within the story ark? Does the
meaning of the phrase change from one song to the next?
It does. In
Mountain Song it’s still coming from
that feeling of being frightened, knowing all that I can figure out is that
when I can just be by myself, isolated from everything, I feel safe. I think
that phrase came to me in the middle of high-school where I was going through a
lot of social anxiety and depression and things like that. In my own head I was
becoming increasingly more alienated and depressed than I would otherwise. So I
think that the second time those words come around, it takes on more of a
feeling of being in denial about it I guess, trying to tell myself that I’m
taking care of myself, that this is what’s best for me, but really knowing that
something is wrong, that I just don’t know how to put all of the pieces
together yet.
There’s also another line that comes up twice which first appears on The Monster Overlooking Everything Else:
“There’s a little boy inside of my and
he’s always afraid to play”. In that song, it’s about how I was afraid of
the person that song is about. At the end of the album when the phrase comes up
again, it’s me realizing that it’s not just about that, but also that I’ve
completely been afraid of expressing that inner-child, being in touch and
accepting that it’s an inner part of me. It probably feels that way because
I’ve dismissed it so many times.
5.So your first few releases with Godbless thee, Mooseheart were strictly
solo, but for this album you decided to turn the project into a band and
started to play live shows as well.Did
this change anything regarding the writing and recording process?
Well most
of the album is still a solo album because I still recorded almost everything.
In the liner notes I mention the songs that I didn’t do things on; like for
example I didn’t play the piano on The
Monster Overlooking Everything Else and I didn’t do the drums on The End. However I try to shy away from
this image of Godbless thee,Mooseheart as a solo band, because even
though this is a very personal record and it is basically a solo album, it’s an
important artistic evolution and also a kind of symbolic representation of the
journey I went through while making the album that, eventually I would like to
move out of that place of doing everything myself.
As far as the drums not being recorded by our drummer John Klawitter, that was
more due to logistics, since I was almost done with the album by the time I
found him. The only song we hadn’t done drums for was The End. I was going to do the drums but he proposed to learn the
song and record it himself, and I’m really glad he did. I had done a mock
version with me playing the drums, but when we did it with him, the song was
just so much better, since he is such a better drummer than I am. He brought so
much more life into that song, which is why I think the album needed that. It’s
also important for me to express that because there’s a kind of like a theme of
me being alienated and in my own head and trying to get out of it.
So for the future Godbless thee,
Mooseheart album, I’m not going to do everything myself, we’re going to
write it together as a band, with Sam on keyboards and John on drums. We also
have a really good guitarist, his name is Bijan. I want to do a more “Swans-y” kind of approach. It’s not
going to sound like Swans, but we’re
going to flesh out the songs together, and I think they’re going to become a
lot more jam and groove oriented. So that’s the direction I’d like to take the
band into.
6.To close off this interview, could
you name one of your favorite albums, films and books
Album: I always like to say Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd just because it was the first
album I ever heard that was beyond the basic radio rock format that introduced
me to the idea that there are more interesting albums out there. But
recentlyI’ve really, really, really
been into Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, obsessed with it, all of the
different recordings of it. I think that’s been my favorite thing that I’ve
gotten into in the last year and a half, and I’ve just been obsessed with
everything Steve Reich has done. I’m pretty sure his entire anthology that I
bought recently, was the best music purchase I’ve made in years.
Book: My favorite book would have to be The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by
Douglas Adams or The Catcher in the Ryeby J. D. Salinger. Two very different books.
Movie: My favorite movie is definitely 2001, A Space Odyssey by Stanley
Kubrick.
Interview by
Robin
Godbless
thee Mooseheart – The Prison, Pt.II
To be released on July 21st (digital and physical pre-orders already
available through bandcamp)
Following
up the narrative of the previous full-length effort, Godbless Thee,
Mooseheart mark their return with the second installment of The Prison. For those unfamiliar with
this project, Godbless Thee, Mooseheartis a rock band from Laguna
Hills, California fronted by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brent
Vallefuoco, whom some of you might be familiar with from his position as lead
guitarist for Cinematic black metal act Xanthochroid (Quick anecdote: lead
vocalist and keyboardist Sam Meador of Xanthochroid contributes as a
keyboardist on the album). With this current project, the band borrows elements
from a wide array of musical styles such as Post-rock, Shoegaze, Folk, Midwestern Emo and even Metal within a
progressive rock framework to deliver a distinct and eclectic sound carrying a
strong sense of experimentation. After nearly 3 years since the previous
full-length effort, The Prison, Pt.II
continues and concludes the story that follows a boy as he grows up and learns
to find his own path in life.
With this
current album, Brent's eclectic range of musical influences are yet again on
full display and carefully blended into a coherent whole. Both the narration as
well as the compositions are marked by a strong sense of progression,
illustrating the characters' moods and phases along his introspective journey. Each
song on this LP tweaks around and draws from various musical backgrounds while
still retaining its core Godbless Thee, Mooseheart DNA.
From the magnificent sounds of Perdu, the post-rock inspired build
ups up to the tortured, chaotic yet operatic The Monster Overlooking Everything Else, this album also covers a
lot of different moods and states of mind.
The album starts off with the peaceful acoustic sounds of Mountain Song, which
reintroduces the listener into the story arc before swelling up and
transitioning into the next song, Perdu,
one of the most straightforward progressive rock tracks off the album.
One of the great things on this track which we'll come to find on a great deal
of the LP is the songs' tendency to build up within a certain stylistic
framework before taking an unexpected turn and evolving into something else by
the time the song reaches its end. For this reason, The Prison Pt.II is an album that seems to constantly evolve and
never lingers too long in one place. The album manages to keep your utmost
attention all the way throughout its runtime thanks to its constant sonic
exploration fitted within a remarkably paced set of songs.
The whole album is characterized by a strong, ever present sense of bittersweet
melancholia, supported by hazy, dreamy, shoegaze-inspired effects and crystalline
sonicscapes and ambiences throughout the album. Thanks to this meticulous
attention to detail and atmosphere, we get a profound sense of depth and
immersion, as if we were sucked into the protagonists' unconscious and
presented with Polaroid pictures of his childhood memories floating and slowly
drifting away into the distance.
Through
its' honest and deeply personal lyrics, its' oneiric soundscapes and it's
down-to-earth, heart-to-heart delivery, Godbless Thee Mooseheart delivers a
highly introspective full-length effort that is sure to strike a chord with
your inner childhood memories while at the same time baffling you with its'
compositional ambition and grandeur. From its' catchy, bittersweet melodies to
its' heartwrenching moments, The Prison
pt.II will draw you in and captivate you with its nuanced display of personality,
innovation and soulfulness.
Robin
Godbless
thee Mooseheart – The Prison, Pt.II
To be released on July 21st (digital and physical pre-orders already
available through bandcamp)
Diabolical have been around since 1996, veterans of seventeen years of death metal madness. Their new record Neogenesis is a rager, bombastic and brutal, reaching out and touching the soul with a neverending flow of hatred and power, the kind of thing that will rip your heart out and drown it under layers of riffs, and oftentimes symphonic madness. Yet do not think Diabolical have lost their sheer hatred, Neogenesis has plenty of that, they bust out of the gate and grab your skull, crushing it within a grasp made of undiluted liquid steel.
The thing is, Diabolical have always been a little different, for years they have been honing a trademark sound that will keep you going for hours on end. Neogenesis is their fifth release and the most polished to date. More than this, this is a concept record telling a powerful and moving story, it is Diabolicals most rounded work to date. This is not just an album but a novel, and the immensity of the travail, this record goes beyond, something greater than what many of their contemporaries could ever dare to do. Diabolical may have always been off the beaten path, but now they are back with a vengeance, proving their brilliance once again, triumphing over the listener with sheer death metal magic.
In conclusion, Neogenesis is one of the most impressive records I have ever heard. Not just from a musical standpoint (Which is on its own impressive) but from the sheer amount of work that must have gone into this record. It seems like we'll be hearing a lot more from these guys in the near future, the members focus seems to be back on the band and Diabolicals star is rising once more. Crafted by musical virtuoso's into a glorious overture to the neverending magic of death metal. I for one am very excited to see where these guys go next, their sound is passionate and unique, who knows where they could go in the future? Find them on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/diabolicalofficial
A prog album unlike any other prog album I have heard in my life Hibernals new concept record tells a majestic and beautiful sci fi influenced story. Communicated by a spoken word artist, a natural born storyteller The Machine tells a twisting and dark story that has the listener constantly curious to know what's going to happen next. Combined with some inspiring prog filled with all sorts of magnificent frills the end result of The Machine is a fully immersive album that will pull you in and force you to worship its glorious and fascinating story.
While I won't reveal too many details lets just say that the plot of The Machine is kind of freaky and takes place in a wonderfully crafted dystopian future. The vivid soundscapes especially on songs like Disconnection allow you to completely wrap yourself in the bands music. The songs are usually fairly light, however heavier moments are built up to, usually in order to add flavor to the tracks. They fit in nicely and flow naturally with the storyline. I love the way that they are intricately intertwined for a maximum musical and storytelling effect.
In conclusion, this is a triumphant and epic prog masterpiece that reveals the magic of prog. A exquisitely crafted piece Hibernal have put out one of my favorite prog records of 2013 thus far. With a brooding and ominous quality mixed with a surreal story packed with meaning and emotion this union of prog and spoken word music is incredible. A record that could very well change live The Machine is something that all fans of the genre, and even music in general should check out, technical, filled with great songwriting and a stellar story The Machine is a musical masterwork.
The Spade is one of my favorite modern
rock bands, with classic sounding riffs and brilliant lyrics these
guys could very well be the future of rock and roll. Their music is
very much in the vein of legendary acts like The Who. With a new
album in the works I thought it would be a good time to review their
debut release Journey of a Modern Tribesman. This is an album that
will appeal to pretty much everyone, both musically and lyrically
excellent this is a must buy!
The guitar work is high powered and
filled with riffs that really call up the days of The Rolling Stones
and Led Zeppelin. Yet there is still a bit of a modern element
suggesting a progression upon those ideas. The drums are also very
much a logical progression on early hard rock. With a lot of fun rock
beats it really sets the mood for the music. Meanwhile the bass
playing is very solid and adds a lot of energy to the songs. Finally
the vocals are very rock and roll, often reminiscent of Jim Morrison
this bands vocalist, Virgil Macbryde takes you on a epic journey
dealing with modern hypocrisy and the nature of modern society. Its a
rebellion against the societal laws, it is a “Message to all the
people born into money and raised in denial”
In conclusion this is a record for all
you rock and rollers. The Spade gets how to bring back the rock and
roll magic of the 70s and their new epic should just be an extension
on that. As is, Journey of a Modern Tribesman is one of the greatest
rock records of the decade. With solid arrangements and some really
inspiring lyrics this is an album that even pop fans would enjoy. Any
metalhead who appreciates his roots should also dig this record,
there are even a few headbanging moments. So go check out this album
and prepare to be blown away!
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