Having come to the attention of ex-Bad Seed/Einsturzende Neubaten frontman Blixa Bargeld, who coached and produced the band’s debut, White went from being a side-project jam session with once-in-a-while releases (as both members are full-time in successful bands in Beijing) to having a full-length LP, a touring schedule, and a sizeable amount of underground press. Besides CarSick Cars, the Beijing band who opened a number of dates in Asia and Europe for Sonic Youth, White are one of the first Chinese bands to make an impression in Western media–which unceremoniously dumps on White’s shoulders the responsibility of telling the world “what does Beijing sound like?” Pure? Unknown? Or in mourning?

White, made up only of guitarist Shou Wang (of CarSick Cars) and synthesist Shenggy (of Cosmic Shenggy), makes that description with a limited pallete. Splitting the difference between being a “real band” which writes songs, rehearses, and plays instruments, and being an autonomous creator/composer like an Aphex Twin or Steve Reich, Shou Wang and Shenggy base most of White‘s songs on a template of noisy guitar squalls and guttural synth-rhythms from Shenggy’s Korg MS-20. This minimalist setup allows White to subvert a number of tired rock cliches: firstly, while some songs, such as “Spring House” feature actual drums, there’s no pretense of a “beat” or a trap kit. There certainly aren’t any fills. Instead of a drummer with a six piece kit and a forest of cymbals shredding away in the background, White fills up the same amount of earspace with minimalist loops and textures: chanted vocals, humming guitars, and metal percussion all help build mostly-instrumental songs like “Space Decay” from what may well have started as a sparse rehearsal-room jam to a dense tapestry of pulsating sound.

This isn’t exactly unmined territory. The drum samples that drive tracks like “Conch Crunch” and “Roswitha Strunk” don’t go too far beyond the sonic libraries of 80′s industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle or Einsturzende Neubaten. And while being a mostly synth-and-vocals duo with no traditional guitar parts or any sort of drummer unsurprisingly garners immediate Suicide comparisons, Shenggy’s programming on the aforementioned “Conch Crunch” and the follow-up “Build a Link” is probably best described as “Alan Vega lost in Chinatown”. White’s debt to no-wave goes even deeper–taking more than just a few plays out of Brian Eno’s book; (his compliation No New York defined the genre and was the sole recorded output of some of its greatest bands). White draw more from his later days as an ambient composer, shaping the layered flow of their one-chord (and sometimes even one-note) songs in a way not unlike Eno’s Music For Aiports and the Ambient series. Shou Wang and Shenggy also take time to worship at the real altars of minimalism, paying tribute to Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and a host of other minimalist and electronic composers, without whom, White would suddenly cease to exist.

Already re-contextualized by their importation to Beijing, many of these 20+ year-old sounds and approaches are freshened by the lyrical themes and content. Like Einsturzende Neubaten before them, even subtle lyrical gestures are enough to politicize White‘s tremendous noise. Where Neubaten’s earsplitting clamor represented the frustrations of a recovering Germany (especially with the fall of the Berlin Wall), White take a slightly different tack. With China as the capital of the manufacturing world, the repetitious loops of “Train Song” and “Spring House” seem to describe workaday Beijing as a Marxist Limbo of piecework for export and gridlocked public transportation.

Commercialization seems to be another major theme of White: much like Sigue Sigue Sputnik before them, Shou Wang and Shenggy break up samey-sounding album tracks by including fictional commercials between songs: White’s “Beijing Beer” is definitely one of these, with its pop-top samples, as well as opener “Really Real German” and “English School”. While the specifics of the last two are lost in translation, there’s also a good bit of English on White’s album. Mirroring the trend for English-for-business, and the taking of English-sounding “business names” in China, “Conch Crunch” and “Build A Link” have just enough English to give the songs a slightly political edge: the former might well be (but in fact is not) a popular brand of Chinese snack, and the latter song comes on like a board meeting for a new English-language corporate slogan: “time alone left to think:/Build A Link/pushed too far on the brink/no one there to help to think:/Build A Link/Build…A Link”.

One lyric in particular stands out as a theme for the album, one from the first real song, “Space Decay”. Over a quivering bed of synths and through what sounds like a train intercom, Shou Wang extends his greeting: ”welcome back to the real world!” he shouts. And nothing could be more fitting. In his Pitchfork review of the 4AD indie-for-charity compilation Dark Was the Night, Scott Plagenhoef bemoans the fact that in 2009, “rock is less central than folk in underground North American music”. Seeing as charity organization Red Hot’s 1993 compilation, No Alternative, was a genre-defining 90′s watershed, packed with tracks from Nirvana, Pavement, and the Smashing Pumpkins, that’s saying more than just a little.

Dark Was the Night is glutted with earnest folkiness and 70′s covers, with the likes of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings doing them nearly up to spec. And while there’s certainly room in the world for retroism and folk-rock, and even charity albums, Shou Wang’s lyric keeps coming back to me. “Welcome back to the real world,” he shouts, as Shenggy warms up her MS-20. And from there on, it’s 40-odd minutes of synth loops and chants that numb the mind as much as they bend the ears–all of which hints at a message beneath the surface. A metal file baked into the birthday cake. Just as Black Sabbath’s blistering grind captured the drudgery of Ozzy’s native steel-mill-town of Birmingham, England, White describes a Beijing struggling with ever-increasing globalization and mechanization. Rather than retreating to the comfortable grounds of rich musical history, or picking time-tested 70′s songs to cover, White pushes forwards with its true colors run up the mast–with a commitment to purity, a taste for the unknown–and perhaps not just a little sense of mourning.

Check Out:
“Space Decay”

Marrying the droning fuzz-pop of the Electric Prunes to the driving rhythms of NEU!, with a penchant for Velvet Underground-style guitar explorations, Wooden Shjips craft the perfect lost psychedelic album with Dos. Drawing from a set of bands that despite not being contemporaneous, all share the unique quality of having posthumous cults that drastically outnumber their original fans, if you found a beat-to-hell copy of Dos at the bottom of a bargain bin with a sticker that said “1969″ on it, there’d be no question that it was the missing link between the American psychedelic scene and German Krautrock.

Either a tribute to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider”, or a reworking of “The Living End” by the Jesus and Mary Chain, opening track “Motorbike” does nothing to dispel this “missing link” myth. After a chewy guitar intro, the Shjips quickly lock into a mechanical groove, complemented by pulsing organ work that deserves the “Ghost Rider” mention. The few vocals there are only serve to provide a little atmosphere and frame Shjip’s captain Johnson’s cascading walls of fuzzed-out guitar, drenched in reverb, a la the JAMC. Ironically, it’s these later influences that keep Dos‘s psychedelica from going stale. Even though “Motorbike” is unabashedly indebted to 60′s psychedelica, there’s enough well-rounded 70′s and 80′s influences to keep the songs from descending into acid-rock cliches. No drum solos. No backwards tape effects. No peace-love-dove lyrics or tie-dyed shirt. Wooden Shjips doesn’t need these things to authenticate its psychedelic haze. All it takes is a half a tank of gas, a decent car stereo, and forty miles of uninterrupted highway.

But two albums and a handful of singles in, leather-clad psychedelica like “Motorbike” is par for the course. Dos distinguishes itself from the rest of the band’s work because of its increased predilection towards succinct songwriting over free-flowing jams. Compared to earlier epics like “Shine Like Suns”, Dos’s songs are almost radio-friendly. Case in point: “For So Long”. Following up on the final guitar histrionics of “Motorbike”, “For So Long” jumps straight into a fun, funky bassline, and the clearest, most up-in-the-mix vocals of Johnson’s career. As much Swinging London as it is Summer of Love, “For So Long” is a dancey, to-the-point number that finds the band at its most focused–but without compromising the band’s woolly jamming.

Dos, as with the rest of the Shjips’ work, will have its criticisms. As before, they will not be unjustified. “It all sounds the same”, they’ll say–and despite the fact that consistency and flow are this band’s bread and butter, they’re right. Even though it’s a relatively short album at 38 minutes, Dos feels overlong, due mostly to 10-minute-plus jamathons like “Down by the Sea” and the closer, “Fallin”, which admittedly does start off on the right foot as a tight, Roxy Music-style pop song, before eventually descending into the gratuitous organ solos and laid-back guitar licks trading off into eternity.

In spite of the great length and minimal dynamics of these songs, Dos is a surprisingly listenable album. Winding jams are this band’s stock-in-trade, and Dos finds the Shjips in top form, serving up “European Son” impressions to the stoned and square alike–and at its best, Dos finds these jams elegantly set into increasingly well-written pop songs, in the cases of  ”For So Long” and “Fallin”. Although Dos isn’t going to replace anybody’s collection of obscure psychedelic LPs, it’s certainly a worthy addition to such a collection.

Check Out:
For So Long

And then suddenly, breaking the humid silence, comes the sharp, alarming report of boot heels against stone floors. These three musclebound guys, squeezed into white tees and jackboots with funny little red berets,  step off the escalator and start pacing around the El stop, looking like some kind of bizarre Masonic Nazi paramilitaries. Everybody gets nervous–who are these guys? “The Guardian Angels?” “Safety Patrol?” Their shirts aren’t really making this any less confusing.

Everybody fingers their keys, watching the train lights pull into the station. We slide into tattered blue seats, moist with somebody else’s back-sweat. The Safety Patrol just stand, looking slightly sinister. The El car just drips. The red berets ride the train for one stop and then transfer. Everybody puts away their keys. Me, the lady across from me, the homeless guy, Paul Simonon.

Paul Simonon? The bass player from The Clash?

Well, in another time and place, yeah. Go back to 1982. The Clash, less one drummer Topper Headon, are piecing together Combat Rock, although at this point, the working title is Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg, and it’s another sweeping double LP in the vein of London Calling or Sandinista! It’s going to be their last good album. Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, Simonon, and a laundry list of producers and musical guests are playing a complicated game of musical chairs in the studio, always managing to never be there together, writing future hits like “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” and “Rock the Casbah” by piecework.

Simonon, who’s no mean songwriter himself (just replay “The Guns of Brixton” if you’ve forgotten), is cooking up a dubby bass part and some tight one-drop drumming–but he needs some lyrics. He’s probably thinking about vigilante justice in America. He might even be watching Taxi Driver. An American newspaper is laying on the mixing desk–a member of an American community watch patrol has been shot to death by a cop in Newark, NJ. His name is Frank Melvin. And he’s a member of the Guardian Angels’ Saftey Patrol, a private volunteer crime patrol organization based out of New York City.

Sinomon puts away the paper. Kosmo Vinyl, The Clash’s erstwhile manager is probably somewhere off in the studio dicking around, doing Robert DeNiro impressions–and then it crystallizes…”tonight it’s raining on the city/who could have prophesized these people/only Travis”.  Travis, of course, is Travis Bickle–the titular taxi driver of Martin Scorscese’s 1976 movie, and the personification of mohawk-sporting, .45-wielding vigilante justice. Interlacing a tribute to the New York City community taking care of itself when “not even five enforcement agencies can save their own” with Vinyl’s very passable readings of the Taxi Driver script, Simonon stitches together one of the better, if stranger, songs on Combat Rock.

But who are these Guardian Angels? Where did they come from, and what are they all about? Formed in 1979 by NYC native Curtis Sliwa, the non-for-profit citizen’s watch group was originally formed to combat violent crime in the New York subway system, with members being trained in unarmed combat and prepared to make citizen’s arrests. After a great deal of adversity and controversy (not limited to Sliwa making staged arrests on busy subways to drum up publicity for the group), the Guardian Angels have found late-career success in crime education and internet safety education, while still making occasional patrols, which mostly consist of riding the subway in the business district and helping women find taxis.

It’s a far cry from Travis Bickle, that’s for sure. Maybe if Simonon had known the whole story, he might have even scrapped the song. But what fun would that be? Even if “Red Angel Dragnet” is a misguided pean to a vigilante anti-crime organization that didn’t turn out to be quite what it appeared, it’s still got a rock-solid bassline, a couple of lyrical gems, (if a bizarre delivery from Simonon), and Kosmo Vinyl’s priceless “one of these days, I’m gonna get organiz-ized” in the fadeout. And an odd bit of trivia, to boot. So the next time you see an out-of-work UFC fighter in a red beret on the train after midnight, and you maybe want to let him know you appreciate his efforts, feel free. But maybe don’t sing him ”Red Angel Dragnet”. Because if I can’t figure out what half of the lyrics to the song mean, God knows what he’ll think of:

“Hands up for Hollywood, hooray!/ I hear you/Snappy on the air/hang in there/wall to wall/ you saved the world/what else? you saved the girl/Champagne on ice/no stranger to Alcatraz to boot/or strip it down/chop it up a little/just freedom to move, to live/for women to take a walk in the park at midnight/hey, but this is serious/she can’t even get back home!”

Ostensibly named in honor of the mountain range in which the band makes its home (yes, they do in fact live in a mountain), Black Cascade focuses on the latter half of the band’s mission statement: this album is by far the most claustrophobic, blood-curdling slice of metal Wolves in the Throne Room has carved out since its earliest demo tapes. The band hammers out riffs and blastbeats with a vengeance–almost in a backlash against the near-universal blog acclaim that met 2007′s incredible Two Hunters. And while this tactic finds the band ripping through fifty minutes of nearly unadulterated thrash, Black Cascade attains its fearful might in exchange for the cohesion and diversity that distinguished Two Hunters from the rest of its metal brethren.

Not that this is entirely a negative point. Opener “Wanderer Across the Sea of Fog” cuts straight to the chase, forgoing the ambient intros that had heretofore been the band’s trademark. Just a few seconds of sampled rainfall, and then the band kicks off into tight unison riffs and clattering drums. After a droning break in the middle of the song augmented with a touch of vintage synthesizers, Wolves in the Throne Room revisit what made their initial demos so great: clattering drums and twisted, tremolo-picked harmony guitars, with a torrential intensity that recalls the doomy rain-soaked Northwest. Halfway through the track, drummer/lead farmer Aaron Weaver breaks off his hectic blastbeats in favor of a driving groove that transforms the song from a Category 5 thrashfest into a stirring epic, bringing the song to a close.

This simplified, bare-bones approach may have much to do with the addition of new guitarist Will Lindsay. Late of stoner rock trio Middian, Lindsay may have much to do with the band’s straightforward, pummeling sound on Black Cascade. Where Two Hunters featured synths, reverberant Ennio Morricone guitars, and haunting backup vocals from Jessica Kinney, Black Cascade goes straight for the throat with out-of-control guitar feedback, and a raw, under-produced aesthetic that pays tribute to the band’s roots in both early ’90s Scandinavian black metal and American crust punk. Even when later tracks like “Crystal Ammunition” do venture into gentler territory, with its gently picked acoustic middle section, it’s only a brief respite from WITTR’s metal assault, which comes on all the more crushing after the interruption.

While Black Cascade is a simpler, nastier record than Two Hunters, the band does little to forgo the former album’s marathon track lengths. Without the instrumental complexity and graceful dynamics of songs like “Cleansing”, Black Cascade sometimes gets lost under its own weight. The long, epic run times with which WITTR made its reputation seem redundant here–the 14-minute “Ahrimanic Trance”, for example, really only contains three different sections, which are hammered into infinity at full force with very little variation. Instead of seamlessly blending one composition into the next with moody transitions and recurring themes, Black Cascade’s songs wind up being difficult to distingush from one another: all four are built on scathing guitar chords which drift between jackhammer intensity and ominous drone, usually with a short change of pace.

On the other hand, it’s hardly fair to criticise Black Cascade for not being exactly like its predecessor. Instead of remaking their last album with different chords and calling it Three Hunters, Wolves in the Throne Room explores its own roots in the grittier realms of bands like Venom and Holy Mountain, while all the while carving out its own niche in the Southern Lord roster, marrying the charred black metal clatter of labelmates Xasthur and Striborg with the lethargic drones of SUNN 0))) and Earth. Black Cascade Wolves in the Throne Room makint an effort to keep its sound changing, despite the high acclaim won by Two Hunters–a move which takes no small amout of courage. The result is a very solid album from one of America’s top bands, within the realms of metal and without. While it may not be the WITTR’s definitive release, Black Cascade is an excellent addition to the band’s rapidly expanding canon.

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“Ex Cathedra”

-Michael Roffman, Editor-in-Chief

The calling card instrumental of the definitive tastemaker of 80′s hard rock guitar, “Eruption” is a minute-and-a-half of Eddie Van Halen doing his worst to abuse the guitar with mostly unprecedented technique. And on thousands of copies of Van Halen I, there’s a little nick in the vinyl right at 1:03 into “Eruption”. It’s a good solo–it’s got a good sense of build, and Van Halen keeps pulling new tricks out of his bag about every thirty seconds–but back to that nick. Scarred by hundreds of repeated needle-drops, 1:03 marks the spot where Eddie just gets too fast, making millions of bedroom-bound teens go “WTF?!”

The technique responsible is called “tapping”–and depending on who you asked, it was either the scourge of the Eighties or the greatest thing since sliced bread. By shifting his grip on his guitar pick, Van Halen freed up his right-hand index finger to sound notes by slamming against the fretboard, resulting in silky-smooth, otherwise impossible to reach arpeggios. By 1984, the floodgates unceremoniously kicked open by the band’s heavy-rotation video for “Jump”, just about every rock guitarist worth his salt (or not) had worked tapped arpeggios into his repertoire–often ill-advisedly. It didn’t take a genius to see “Eruption” as the cornerstone of tapping’s Spandex Age; but thirty years later, a far-flung selection of buzzworthy artists’ careers would hinge on the technique, from right-brained mathcore bands to girl-powered acoustic indie rock.

But let’s rewind several hundred years for a moment. Although credited by many as the “inventor” of the two-hands-on-the-fretboard technique, even Van Halen’s swollen ego wouldn’t allow him to take top honors, claiming to be inspired by Jimmy Page’s solo on “Heartbreaker” from Led Zeppelin II (which did not feature tapping). However, a variant of the tapping technique had been used as far back as the early 19th century by Italian violin virtuoso/composer Nicolo Paganini, who worked a stunning psuedo-tapping pizzicato technique into his 24th Caprice, a technical watershed that’s pretty much the “Eruption” of the classical violin world. In the 1950′s, jazz guitarist Jimmie Webster published a book called The Touch System for Electric and Amplified Spanish Guitar. The book didn’t exactly fly off shelves–but the technique, which was Webster’s attempt to play piano music on guitar, didn’t go unnoticed.

Along with 60′s jazz greats like Barney Kessel, one player who picked up on Webster’s technique (whether under his instruction or not) was Genesis’s Steve Hackett (side right). His two-handed solos on classic tracks like “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight” and ”Firth of Fifth” predate Van Halen’s work by nearly a decade, and lack for nothing in terms of complexity and speed. However, Hackett’s solos had a tendency to get lost in side-long mega epics, like the jaw-dropping guitar/organ tandem tap solo on “Supper’s Ready” which lives a mayfly’s life about a third of the way into the twenty-minute prog marathon.

And while thousands of tapping solos, from the awful to the sublime, glutted 80′s radio waves, the early-90′s alternative underground waited sulking in the wings. Strangely enough, in 1992, the year when Nirvana’s Nevermind made hair-metal irrelevant, that tapping went from being a center-stage showstopper to a deepest underground cult phenomenon. Chiefly responsible for tapping’s secret life, Don Caballero’s Ian Williams (now of Battles fame) crafted huge walls of sound using both hands and a loop pedal–a technique as ubiquitous and played-out amongst indie-folksters and post-rockers as Van Halen’s tapping was in the white-sneakers-and-Aqua-Net set, as evidenced by the steady spread of tapping techniques throughout the math-rock elite.

Radiating from Don Cab’s home in Chicago to Milwaukee’s jazzy Pele, eventually reaching Seattle-based quintet Minus the Bear by the early 00′s, the technique eventually became so widespread in the insular circles of math-rock that bands like Hella and, to an even greater extent, Chicago’s own Maps & Atlases, made tapping the foundation of their songwriting. But where infinite sustain and ear-splitting distortion had been the hallmarks of 80′s metal’s take on tapping, these below-the-radar pioneers relied on a clean, compressed sound, usually swathed in rhythmic echoes, a la U2′s The Edge–a fitting move, considering the technique’s sordid history.

Perhaps “Eruption”‘s most interesting reflection is in the wave of female guitar players staking their claim to tapping mastery. In a sort of “reclaiming” of the macho spitting-contest attitude towards technique in the 80′s, indie shredders like the mostly-instrumental Kaki King and Pitchfork favorite Marnie Stern have been tapping their hearts out since the early 00′s, putting most of the boys to shame in the process. And these aren’t your Jennifer Battens, with the imitative Spandex tomboy mega-hairdos and Marshall stacks–no, it’s a whole new ball game. No balls involved, in fact–just finger-twisting riffs, guttural slap bass attack, and scintillating tapped arpeggios. In a slice of irony worthy of Voltaire, the very same “Pretty Women” who Van Halen famously objectified in the 1982 banned-by-MTV video for a Roy Orbison cover are giving Van Halen a taste of his own tapping medicine twenty years later. Better late than never.

Tapping’s cyclical history will doubtless continue–its more headbanging incarnations are beginning to crawl out from the shadows again. Mostly under the aegis of sped-up metal shamsters Dragonforce, 14-year-olds and World of Warcraft players everywhere are getting a second helping of recycled tap-wankery. It’s doubtful that any instance of the technique will be as universally influential as ”Eruption”–which even reached people who hated (and maybe even some who had never heard) Van Halen. But it will doubtless survive, just as it has, surreptitiously morphing between cock-rocking caprices, bebop slight-of-hand, progressive bombast, and superhip feminist jams. And just like the 24th Caprice and “Eruption”, some new song will come along and redefine the technique for the next hundred years–as long as stringed instruments are still played (call me in 2109), someone will be tapping. And some douche in the front row is going to thrust up his wiggling fingers in adulation and spill your beer. Or whatever they drink at shows in the 22nd century.

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The rest? Yes, the rest. Not every German band was tricked out in matching jumpsuits and Moog synthesizers, singing electro-fried peans to calculators and highways–no matter what the Coens would have you believe. Kraut (not the cabbage kind) had been stewing in the basements of Berlin and Cologne since the late Sixties–and the earlier Kraut bands, such as Amon Duul II, and the early lineups of Can and Kraftwerk, dealt mostly in half-hour experimental prog jams, replete with tape-loop experiments, flute solos, and free jazz drumming. But this prog-rock idyll was short-lived. One band came along which drastically changed the face of Kraut–and unknowingly became the major influence of many of the best British bands of the Seventies.

This band was called NEU! – German for “new” – and no name could be more appropriate. A splinter faction from the earliest lineup of Kraftwerk (which had more in common with Genesis than Justice at that point), NEU! was made up of guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger. Eschewing the free-jazz and classical influences which initially inspired their contemporaries, Rother and Dinger forged an uncompromisingly futuristic musical vision–a bleak landscape of howling guitars and driving drumbeats, regulated by a strict, Teutonic sense of funk that still left nothing to be desired in terms of experimentalism.

While the sounds of NEU! all but changed the face of German rock, and laid some of the earliest templates for post-punk, space rock, and electronic music, the band plays the role of a sort of musical middleman; while albums such as Ege Bamyasi and Autobahn have become eminently namedroppable in their integral roles in molding the Radioheads and Daft Punks of the world, NEU! has wallowed in a comparative state of obscurity. Ironically obscured by hyper-influential powerhouses like Can and Kraftwerk, Rother and Dinger are the true engineers of the later Kraut sound–and mostly because of an infamous drum beat.

Dubbed ”motorik,” a portmanteau of “motor” and “musik,” by the German press, Klaus Dinger’s drum work on tracks like opener “Hallogallo” and the exhausting “Negativland” is NEU!’s major point of departure from the more improvisational larval stages of Krautrock. Where the free-jazz influence expressed by earlier lineups of Kraftwerk was marked by evocative tom-tom and cymbal work, Dinger, playing in strict 4/4, with usually just a driving hi-hat beat and a pounding kick drum, made a revolutionary argument with his beats, marrying ham-handed rock n’ roll with modern minimalist savvy. The motorik, or “Apache” beat which jump-starts NEU!, has been copied by everyone from space-rockers Hawkwind (their entire 40-year career) to dad-rockers Wilco (to the letter on 2002′s “Spiders/Kidsmoke”); in terms of influence and sheer awesomeness, Dinger’s Spartan timekeeping on “Hallogallo” is to indie rock what “When the Levee Breaks” is to metal, even what “Amen, Brother” is to breakbeats.

Dinger’s drum work hardly overshadows the entire range of influential sounds and radical forms that make up guitarist Michael Rother’s contribution to NEU! Listening closely, Rother’s howling guitar work and ear-bending samples set trends for decades to come–from his elegant leads on “Weissensee” that find an echo in Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” of the late Seventies (Rother even recieved, and declined, an invitation from Bowie to work on the Low sessions), to the “Negativland”‘s jarring jackhammer noises that surely inspired Blixa Bargeld’s noise-collective Einsturzende Neubaten. Even some contemporary bands claim a first-generation influence from NEU!: the bizarre “Lieber Hoenig”, with its field recordings, wheezing “vocals” (that’s a generous term), and sparse guitar melodies sounds like nothing less than a thirty-year-old prototype for Efrim Menuck’s work for Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Although Rother certainly wasn’t the first guitarist to experiment with tape loops and definitely wasn’t the first–nor the last–Krautrocker to get his foot on a wah-wah pedal, his droning, flowing guitar work on NEU! crystallized the West German scene, inspiring contemporaries like Michael Koroli of Can to simultaneously stretch the sonic capabilities of his instrument while making extra room for the rhythm section to be heard. Despite the group’s influence overseas, even amongst English-language contemporaries like Roxy Music and Hawkwind, commercial success eluded NEU!, who failed to garner international hit singles like Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” or even the regional Top 40 success of Can’s “Spoon”.

Perhaps this explains, despite the group’s influence, why there isn’t a major cult following for NEU!, at least not like that of Kraftwerk or Can or even Amon Duul II. While NEU! could hardly be called a “missing” link–as it’s totally integral to the later sounds of Kraut and a benchmark recording for underground music around the world–its influence is overshadowed by that of Autobahn, Ege Bamyasi, and Popol Vuh’s dizzying score for Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Sadly, Klaus Dinger died last year, in this very week–and while there was a timely biopic on Pitchfork which featured a number of excellent Youtube clips of Dinger’s drumming, the article, which is now a dead link, failed to sum up just how integral and influential NEU! was–not only in its influence on today’s bands, but in its nearly complete resurfacing of the sound of Krautrock in the early ’70s.

Hats off, then, to Dinger–and Rother, too. While their influence may not be as universally acknowledged as their contemporaries, their work on NEU! has scuplted the experimental underbelly of rock music for the past thirty-eight years. And coming from the scene that practically invented post-punk, neo-folk, and electronic music in less than ten years, that’s a hell of an accomplishment. Even as it stands in the shadows of giants like Kraftwerk and Can, NEU! continues to be a bright beacon for the ever-changing face of music.

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But rather than deliver an outright kick in the stones to longtime Mastodon listeners, the Georgia quartet play it smart with opener “Oblivion”, slipping in hints that this isn’t going to be any ordinary Mastodon record. From the opening stoned-out riff (subtly layered with acoustic guitars) to the writhing chorus (featuring sneakily complicated chord voicings from the band’s twin-guitar powerhouse), and culminating in a guitar solo duel, “Oblivion” carefully sets itself apart from the High on Fire-meets-Converge suckerpunch brutality of earlier work like “March of the Fire Ants”. The most marked change in Mastodon’s approach to its musical metallurgy is singer/bassist’s Troy Sanders’ decision to drop his trademarked growl for a smoother, prog-friendly croon.

Not that this does anything to temper the band’s catastrophic sound-”Divinations”, the second track and lead single for Crack the Skye features some of the nastiest guitar parts Mastodon has yet recorded. But “Divinations” proves to be more than just a metal-clad riff fest: in keeping with the widening scope of the album, the song opens with a Deliverance-worthy banjo fusillade, and features a Dick Dale-style surf solo that’s just as likely to induce permanent whiplash as the back-to-basics thrash of the verse.

After two songs, Mastodon figures it’s due time to drop their prog bomb on the audience. Later tracks like “The Ghost of Karelia” are a guided tour of prog and metal’s most harmonious moments, as the band channels former tour-mates like Tool and Opeth to create a progressive magnum opus that’s anything but toothless. Surprisingly, it’s the nine-minute-plus, ridiculously titled “The Czar: I. Usurper, II. Escape, III. Martyr, IV. Spiral” that’s Crack the Skye‘s miracle success story. Packed to the gills with layered keyboard parts, guitar solo expeditions, and an unfathomable amount of riffs and sections, what makes “The Czar…” so awesome is the fact that although it reads like the ultimate recipe for embarrassing disaster, it kicks an unprecedented amount of ass-as the organ-heavy extended introduction jolts into a bong-shattering metalfest replete with Slayer-style harmonies, culminating in a melodic half-time section and a bookend coda, it’s clear that the promise shown on tracks like Blood Mountain‘s “Siberian Divide” has been fulfilled, and that little stoner band from Georgia has moved to the head of the metal class.

However, Crack the Skye does have its few moments of chagrin. Most of these are concentrated in “Quintessence”: although it features a number of finger-twisting riffs, many of them layered up on acoustic and electric guitars, it suffers from poor composition. Where “The Czar” naturally glides from riff to riff with an expert sense of tension and release, “Quintessence”, at its worst, sounds like a cobbled-together riff tape that grossly abuses ProTools’ cut-and-paste functions. To make matters worse, Sanders’ attempts at falsetto during the bridge are nothing short of cringe-inducing. It’s the tendency towards musical accidents like these that trap bands in the prog-metal mire; thankfully, “Quintessence” is quickly forgotten as a slightly sour note in a rich tapestry of wicked riffing and epic, brooding passages.

Where “Quintessence” fails is where it violates the hard-and-fast rule that keeps the rest of Crack the Skye in check: when getting progressive, keep it succinct. The lush, snaking guitar-and-bass interplay on “Ghost of Karelia” would get old fast if it weren’t married to drummer Brann Dailor’s dead-dry kick drum assault that drops around the two-minute mark. The same is true for the lumbering title track, which slides through plenty of changes and some electric piano experiments before locking into a Cro-Magnon riff that gives way to a soaring, melodic chorus and a cascading flurry of guitar solos. Rather than making up the brunt of the music, moments like these are made all the heavier for being set into Crack the Skye‘s winding forest of riffs.

Crack the Skye‘s success is down to this expert play between heady, labyrinthine prog-rock and Spartan metal chug-and-shout. Mastodon understands, better than any band since Opeth, that more than just being technically impressive or a challenge to write, snaking epics like Crack the Skye need to be fun to listen to. Sure, some die-hard fans of earlier albums like Remission will balk at the longer run times and brainy melodies that Mastodon has spent the last three years cooking up, nuggets like Sanders’ throat-shredding growls a minute into “Crack the Skye” should not only come as a welcome surprise, but an incentive to explore the album more deeply. As for the rest, this album should stand as a continuation and refinement of the style spearheaded on Blood Mountain. Rather than being a band content to cover itself and pump out albums every year to increasingly lukewarm praise, Mastodon demonstrates on Crack the Skye not just a commitment to prog, but to progress. Which leaves the listener to wonder what’s next for Mastodon-a knee-jerk return to its Relapse-era stoner/hardcore, or Genesis-like levels of prog excess? Only time will tell: but if Crack the Skye suggests anything, it suggests that it will defy expectations. Mastodon’s creativity is anything but extinct.

Live, most of Brighten Up’s songs build a bed of looping electronic swells or sampled beats, while Smith and Bean bang out contrapuntal rhythms and melodies on everything from entry-level synthesizers to broken cymbals to clattering drum sets, at one point, even running a vocal mic into a Marshall stack to build thick, distorted textures over their lock-step electronic grooves. It’s this extra level of complexity that sets Brighten Up apart from the hordes of disappointing buzzword noise bands clogging up the music world. Rather than just pumping out a one-dimensional wash of noise and calling it a song, Brighten Up trades in dynamic drone pieces that marry the epic build of post-rock to the dense composition of IDM, complemented by a handcrafted roughness that recalls early My Bloody Valentine.

While Brighten Up may not be the first band to bring experimental electronics to the live stage, the Chicago duo does the half-man-half-machine act so well, it’s nearly impossible to tell which half is which–and that’s no mean feat.  Even live, it’s difficult to tell whether it’s Smith, Bean, or their towering array of samplers and keyboards that are making any particular sound; Bean and Smith are sequencer-tight, and cook up sounds from analog instruments (including antiquated contraptions like drums and guitars) so nasty, they sound like 2001‘s HAL9000 getting the Hostel treatment.

Dystopian Utopia, Brighten Up’s debut EP (available for free here) captures most of these sounds and a few others from the magic bag of studio trickery. And while Dystopian Utopia oozes promise, it’s nothing compared to the live show this duo puts on. Hearing the fruits of Smith and Bean’s efforts is all well and good (and Dystopian Utopia would even be worth paying for) but it’s got nothing on watching them tweak samples, bash out complicated counter-rhythms, and conjure up howling squalls of noise. Brighten Up is a band that needs to be seen to be believed.

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“Praying and Weeping”

Okay, maybe that’s a little much– but it might be the best way to express the bad taste left in the mouth after watching the meteoric rise to blogpop success that’s been afforded to Brisbane, Australia’s An Horse. A boy-girl duo (think a sex-changed White Stripes) hawking the latest in jangly indie pop, An Horse was formed from the ashes of two other Australian bands: singer Kate Cooper of Iron On, and drummer Damon Cox of Intercooler. An Horse sounded like a whole lot of other bands, with 3-chords-and-the-truth songwriting aesthetics and vaguely confessional lyrics, propelled by polite pseudo-punk drumming. Except, according to an interview with Spinner, Cooper happened to strike up a friendship with Tegan or Sara of twintastic pop duo Tegan and Sara. Which led to an opening slot on a sold-out US tour, and an instant record deal with Florida-based label Mom and Pop Records.

All this is well and good: far be it from this reviewer just to rag on a band for having a chance to break out of weekend warrior status and get the ever-coveted shot at stardom. But a quick listen to An Horse’s Rearrange Beds and the previous output of Cooper and Cox immediately raises one burning, stupid-obvious question: “Why did they quit those bands?” The irksome part of An Horse’s success story has nothing to do with ease or paying dues. It’s that even within the tiny indie scene of Brisbane, mediocrity is rewarded over creativity.

Check out a song like An Horse’s “Postcards”. On its own, it’s a hooky little pop song that never gives up on a dependable three-chord progression. Ever. Now, a lot of amazing songs have been written with the I-VI-VII chord progression. “Free Money” and the entire Iron Maiden catalog use this basic outline for harmony. It’s just that those latter songs add something else that sticks to your ribs, like a great melody or a signature riff. “Postcards” has nothing. And what makes it seem even worse is the fact that Cooper’s last band, Iron On, had some awesome songs. On “One Man Band”, from 2007′s The Verse EP, little caring touches like an overdubbed guitar track, persistent rhythmic tension, and tense boy/girl backup harmonies generate massive catchiness and return appeal—two things “Postcard” sorely lacks.

What really turns the stomach about Rearrange Beds is the lesson it teaches: how a play for crowd-pleasing mediocrity really does pay off. All but erasing the Aussie accent that gave her vocals such charm and character in Iron On, Cooper tries to play to the center with An Horse, going for a generically fey indie singer/songwriter approach, only slipping into her natural accent when the songs reach their most fevered pitch. Rearrange Bed’s songs, too, seem not only average, but averaged. Eight of the ten songs on Rearranging Bedssee Cooper strumming away on basic chord progressions that change in exactly the same way, with Cox providing a nearly uniform beat for the entire album’s length, clipping along in the neighborhood 130 bpm for at least thirty of the album’s thirty-six minutes.

Rearrange Beds‘ few sublime moments are when Cooper and Cox throw a few curveballs at the listener–”Little Lungs”, for instance, is the only song whose runtime falls outside of the comfortable 2:30-4:00 range. Not only that, but its crescendo structure and throbbing bass part (the only presence of that instrument on the entire LP) seem like genius musical innovation when held up against the surroundings. The closing track, “Listen” also comes as a bit of a surprise–the ubiquitous indie drumbeats are left aside, as Cooper plays some solo guitar over a bit of harmonica accompaniment, even dabbling with a little reverb on the vocals by the end of the track. And while this is hardly the work of Kevin Shields, even just the slightest touch of studio experimentation makes it seem like An Horse have been touched with unforseeable inspiration.

Some of this effect may be due to the disturbing fact that over half of Rearrange Beds is a wholesale recycling of the band’s 2008 Not Really Scared EP, which only forgivable by the fact that Not Really Scared enjoys a much more limited availability. An Horse doesn’t even bother with new recordings or arrangements–Not Really Scared is just shuffled in amongst five new songs, probably straight from a playlist on Tegan or Sara’s iPod. It’s good business sense to have a full-length LP before embarking on a two-month journey to middle-of-the-road pseudo-indieocrity, but repackaging Not Really Scared under a different name reads like a rather flagrant “fuck you” to anyone who actually purchased Not Really Scared and still thinks they’re getting $10 worth of new material. Maybe that’s a moot point in the iTunes era–but it’s still incredibly sketch that Not Really Scared’s “Warm Hands” appears on the LP as “Scared As Fuck” without any indication that it’s the exact same performance, rebranded with an attention-seeking title.

It may seem unsporting or even unfair to pass judgement on an album for anything but its musical merits; however, when An Horse’s backslapping rise to the arena of international touring and somewhat unscrupulous marketing strategies are married to the unabashedly redundant songwriting, uninspired performances, and the transparent (self-conscious, even) smoothing-off of anything that might have been worthwhile or unique about Rearrange Beds, there’s really little choice about the matter: this album deserves, more than any other in memory, to be unsparingly panned.

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This is one of those questions constantly knocking about in the minds of music critics. Usually, the answer is located in the subtle grey Limbo between “sucks too much to matter” (Ssion) and “too awesome to care” (Turbonegro). Apparently, that’s just a smidgen too subtle for Manchester dance-rock quartet The Whip. In fact, “subtle” might just be a recent addition to their vocabulary. But this fearsome foursome have decided to rewire our dictionary, too–on the band’s U.S. debut, X Marks Destination, which they’ve somehow convinced Razor and Tie to release, The Whip cooks up a couple new entries for “cliche” and “outright theft”.

But to be fair, X Marks Destination has a few things running for it: aside from a cute female drummer (who can indeed keep a beat but has some stupid stage name that I forgot) and a promotion campaign for FIFA ’09, there’s also the lead single/album opener “Trash”. The only song on the album worth putting 99 cents in Steve Jobs’ pocket for, “Trash” revisits the rubber band bass, clickity high hats and slashing Telecaster riffs that you fell in love with, cheated on, broke up with, forgave, and then got a naughty text message from back when “House of Jealous Lovers” first came out.

And while it’s hardly refreshing, there’s little bad that can be said about “Trash”; it’d fill out a house party mixtape nicely, and might even garner a few cries of ”hey, what was that band you played right before The Faint” at indie DJ nights. The band even manage to get through the whole music video without inducing any gut wrenching cringes.

Which, as further listening confirms, is a fucking miracle: after hearing the whole of X Marks Destination (at a torturous 51 minutes), the best part about “Trash” is the fact that the lyrics sheet is two lines long. Singer/guitarist Bruce Carter appears to have decided that his debut album, along with shifting some units for Razor and Tie, will be particularly useful to posterity as the definitive treatise on lyrical faux pas.

A sampler: “Every time I close my eyes” (“Frustration”); “don’t wanna hear voices/spinning around my head/can’t tell me what to do no more/keeping it to myself” (“Muzzle No. 1″); “I play the fool/I play too cool/but there are no rules/and I’m still in school” (“Save My Soul”); “Throw it all on the fire/I don’t wanna go home/and I can’t stay here” (“Throw It All on the Fire”) ”I gotta block out the pressure/pressure/pressure/pressure/pressure, unh!” (“Blackout”) and a probably-unintentional Dylan quote with “you go your way/and I’ll go mine” linked up with ”one-way street/I see the sign” (“Sister Siam”), forming the most painful couplet in the history of rhymed verse. This is obviously the work of an expert in the field of suck, and should be duly noted by all students.

However, X Marks…‘s greatest gaffe comes with the awful “Blackout”. Six minutes of “blackout, blackout/I’ll see you in the blackout”, and other lyrical Ipecac, all to a tune that’s more than just a reminder of Blur’s “Boys and Girls”–not least the verse-ending turnaround. But aping one great band isn’t enough. Check out the Whip’s instrumental shot at French house with “Divebomb” (which is magically available as a 12″ single from Kitsune Maison) –not to mention the wretched “Frustration”, which is benefited greatly by the listener’s singing “Ceremony” by New Order over the chorus…ouch.

What really ought to chap the ass of the musically-inclined public isn’t the awful lyrics or derivative music that plague The Whip’s debut (this is rock ‘n roll, last I checked). Bands are allowed to be bad, after all. But this particular ear sore is taking up valuable word space that could be devoted to bands that sound stunningly similar, but exponentially better. Namely, excellent import bin dance-punk from the likes of Does it Offend You, Yeah, Hadouken!, and Late of the Pier, among many other superiors. Thankfully, the latter of these is attending SXSW–alongside The Whip–and can give US festivalgoers a better taste of what’s worthwhile across the pond. The Whip, meanwhile, should pray. Pray to those lucky stars that netted a 12″ single, a record deal, and an overseas release. Forecast says Austin should expect isolated thunderstorms…better pray harder.

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“Blackout”