Minóy – Celebration of the Sunrise

1987 • self-released

Somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of the lost '80s underground lies Minóy, whom I know nothing about, except that he (she? they?) made a handful of obscure tapes of experimental music. This one, Celebration of the Sunrise, is a decent but ultimately disappointing representation of their work.

This particular tape harbors a collection of musique concrète, drones, electronics, and found sounds, all mashed up together in a long droning fever dream. It sounds like being lost in a huge '70s-era data computing center stationed underwater—echoing synth glitches and voice samples come from all sides while low scrapings and pulses drone on underneath. During "Celebration of the Sunrise", you're stumbling between racks of flashing lights while machines beep incessantly; then on "Nightride" you've escaped but are now trapped in a flooding radio room.

Of course, at an hour and a half with little variation to the sounds, Celebration of the Sunrise gets fatiguing quite fast. Each side of the tape is more or less the same thing for its entire forty-five minute duration, and they are each only interesting for about ten minutes. After that the music loses its novelty and becomes a bit dull.

It also means that there really isn't much to say about the album at all. It has two decent, if long, tracks, and that's it. It's disappointing because, had Minóy definitely had the potential to put together an excellent tape of shorter pieces similar to this, but it didn't happen.

4

Cryptopsy – Cryptopsy

September 11, 2012 • Defen Society

I'll be honest, Cryptopsy has never been anywhere near my list of top death metal bands—None So Vile was alright but nothing terribly special, and I haven't heard much of their other stuff. So I don't know why I even bothered with their new, self-titled album. While not horrid (and almost certainly better than its predecessor), there's almost nothing appealing about it that would make me want to listen to it.

For death metal coming out in this decade, Cryptopsy is just about as generic as you can get. It's got all the typical elements. The drumming is interesting and nicely complex, though the obviously-triggered nature of it wears on the ears. The guitar riffing is almost random, the sort of dissonant jumping-around I've come to accept, even if I don't like it. I will give the bass plenty of credit for being interesting, though, with a nice thick sound and plenty of its own neat moments. But I cannot stand these vocals. They haven't ventured far from the deathcore sound of the last album, those pigsqueal-sort of growls that are almost embarrassing to listen to. Texturally, they make the album almost unlistenable.

Sonic qualities aside, there still isn't much going for this album. It's just a confusing mess of unrelated riffs, tacked on one after the other. While that does tend to be the nature of tech death, I have a very difficult time getting into what the band is doing here, even compared to similar stuff I've heard. The album just blows by on every listen and none of it stands out as being particularly good or memorable. It's true that really careful listening will unearth a siz able collection of satisfying bits and pieces—a few per song, perhaps. The album's relentlessness and almost complete lack of dynamics makes this fatiguing, though.

As an exercise in technical proficiency (specifically guitar skills), sure, Cryptopsy is fine. It'll satisfy the metalheads who are in it for the brutality and the double-kick drumming and the downtuned guitars. It's got all that. But for me, there's nothing worthwhile to be gleaned from this album. They haven't progressed (or reverted) from The Unspoken King as much as some people make it out to be, either, if that makes a difference. All I know is I won't be coming back to this.

4

Sturqen – Raia

April 25, 2012 • self-released

Another random Bandcamp discovery for today: Sturqen's Raia. I've finally hit a sort-of-average release after a slew of good ones. (About time.) It shows the somewhat amateur side of Bandcamp well, though it's not terrible.

Raia is basically a noisy and bleak sort of minimal industrial music—lots of distorted and amelodic synths, noisy beats, dissonant and aggressive tones, and the like. Sort of like super-slow electronica, on LSD, in space. It's a very concrete atmosphere they have going on here, very cold, mechanical, and, again, bleak. It's an okay style, not totally appealing to me, but sometimes it's the kind of thing I'm in the mood for.

However, the tracks are mostly short and quite simple, which leads to the album's biggest problem: nothing ever really gets a chance to develop very much. Instead, most of the tracks are just a few simple loops which fade in, play for a bit, then fade out rather unceremoniously. While many of the sounds and textures are pretty neat, the fact that they just don't go anywhere makes the album a bit dull and difficult to really immerse yourself in.

So I find it really hard to recommend this. There are, again, some cool ideas, but the way they're presented doesn't really do anything for me. I can see this duo releasing some really interesting and focused material at some point (maybe they already have) but I don't think this is the one.

5

Converge – All We Love We Leave Behind

October 9, 2012 • Epitaph Records

I've been listening to Converge for a few years now, and try as I might their music has never clicked much with me (neither Jane Doe nor No Heroes). By rights they should be a band I moderately enjoy, but it just hasn't happened. All We Love We Leave Behind is more of the same; perhaps solid, but not terribly appealing to me.

Like their older albums, All We Love has the same extreme-metalcore thing going—fast, technical riffs, aggressive and complex drumming, incomprehensible screamed vocals. Converge sounds a bit more punkish this time, though, with a bit of hardcore and grind influence leaking out. It's intense music, to be sure, and it doesn't really ever let up over its forty-minute runtime, instead simply trading the metalcore for slower, doomier sludge-metal-like stuff.

I guess my beef with Converge is mostly personal as I've never really been that into the whole "chaotic hardcore" style, especially not the way Converge does it. It seems like they just can't decide what sort of music they want to play, ever, and are always switching between slow sludgy sections and fast blasting sections with no warning (or playing them at the same time, somehow). It's a weird juxtaposition that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, and I don't think Converge can do it well. It feels like the songwriting just tends to meander pointlessly for the sake of technicality, which is a huge turn-off.

I guess it's just me, though, since this album has been extremely well-received. I guess that for the style, it's probably one of the better albums I've heard (and I've been listening to a lot of stuff like this lately) and it's definitely listenable; it's just not something I'm going to listen to much at all in the future. And that's fine. Plenty of other people will get enjoyment out of it.

5

Special bonus: Album stream courtesy of Epitaph!

Cristal – Apostate

July 16, 2012 • Flingco Sound System

Another Bandcamp discovery today, this time from the drone collective Cristal. I've never heard of them before, but they share a member with the relatively well-known Labradford (who I've heard of but never heard myself). While I'm usually wary of side project sorts of albums, Cristal is a pleasant surprise, albeit nothing truly interesting.

Apostate fits pretty snugly with the simple implications of the word "drone": long, slow sections of deep, foreboding drones, shimmering light noise, and the occasional creepy sampling. There's a lot of subtlety going into the textures themselves: minor perturbations in tones, small samples fading in an out, etc., the keep the album interesting throughout most of its runtime. There are a few places where it tends to drag on but I suppose in a drone context that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The album's atmosphere as a whole changes quite a bit (as hinted by the multiple movements)—sometimes it's very dark and murky, like watching a clanging submarine go by; other times it's a bit lighter and spacier. Either way, the album usually keeps on an incredibly dark mood, evoked perfectly by the cover art. It doesn't do the best job at switching contexts, though, as transitions between different pieces can be a bit jarring and break immersion. This is especially apparent halfway through the third track, going from a mostly quiet and simple tone to a loud, distorted, banging collection of noises—it's almost scary.

In the end it's not the best ambient/drone album ever, and I wouldn't put it up there with my favorites, but it does the job well and is a pretty satisfying listen. Definitely worth checking out, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to dig into their other stuff either.

6