Best Albums Ever of 2013

O, the hiatus! 

a guy writes one "Best Albums of 2010 Ever" blog and all of a sudden he thinks he's freakin' Liberace and decides to take the next 3 years off (not really, Liberace was a very hard worker). no, i haven't been back to the blogosphere (as cable-news pundits and my Republican uncle still call it) in some time but the collection of albums that i have listened to this year with all the intensity of a meth-head on some kind of addictive drug of their choice have been so evocative and surprising and redemptive that my conscience can't abide any dearth of pretentious pseudo-critical vomiting on the topic... 

so here you go... 



MGMT by MGMT

  
MGMT is really weird...


and this, their newest and most named-after-them album, is no exception... "MGMT" the album as a whole is pretty weird. that said, i re-listened to it on my run this morning, fully preparing to write an "it grows on you" review and ended up feeling similarly to hearing it for the first time; specifically: disappointed, confused, and ironically, like it wasn't even close to being weird enough.

now, i get that MGMT hates their first album for its radio success and indie-pop appeal and i sympathize. i much prefer their allergic reaction of a follow up album "Congratulations" with its Brian Wilson harmonies, Brian Eno psychedelics, and Brian Dennehey awesomeness. 

and i'm a firm believer that the greatest artistic endeavors are often reactions to what has come immediately before them but MGMT can really only sustain a "we are not our first album" credo for so long before they spiral off into an unapologetic weirdness so weird that it stops being weird at all and just ends up being a repetitive, obnoxious, Syd Barrett-esque album full of "do-you-get-it-yet" songs.

and that is exactly what the A-side of MGMT's album-named-after-the-band-album threatens to become. while there are plenty of interesting yet limited songs on the first half of the record, they all remain only that: limited and interesting.

and the single is dreadful. 

but most of the reviews of MGMT's latest, focus not on the quality of their music (a telling response) but rather on their conscious intention in writing it. specifically, most reviewers are interested in how aware the band is of it's own esotericism. 

i, however, don't really give a crap about their awareness or their intention. it would be easy for me to defend the band's single, "Your Life is a Lie" as a comment on the music industry and a huge winky joke about perceived success and artistry in a capitalist society... and as overwhelmingly novel as that particular idea is...  

"Your Life is a Lie" is a terrible song. if MGMT thought to themselves, "hey, let's put out a really repetitive, crappy, song as our single to teach people a lesson about what gets played on the radio and the nature of corporate media" i suppose they succeeded but really, all the people who will buy an MGMT album of their own volition in 2013 kind of already knew that.

my first reaction to the song and most of the first half of the album was, "i don't think MGMT wants to make music anymore..." so either i didn't get the joke or MGMT actually gave up on music, in which case they should really all just set down their keyboards and Jacob's Ladders-attached to accordions or whatever-the-crap it is they make music with and just apply for data entry jobs with consulting firms in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

the other possibility is that this band has truly lost touch with what is effecting, important and magical about music, which is a somewhat reasonable conclusion to be drawn from MGMT: the album... until you listen to the second half of it.

suddenly and seemingly unanticipated, the band begins to take its cues from late Flaming Lips and Radiohead and creates a B-side as deft, exciting, and genuinely fucking weird as any i have heard in the last year. in fact, the last half of the "god-if-there-were-only-a-word-for-albums-named-after-the-bands-that-wrote-them" album, reminds me, in a wonderful way of how i felt and still feel about the B-side of "Oracular Spectacular" which contains some of my favorite MGMT music. it's all the songs post "Electric Feel" and "Kids," the part of the album that contains "The Handshake," "Of Moons, Birds and Monsters," and "Future Reflections," all songs, equal parts strange, gorgeous, and deeply compelling. 

it's also the superlative version of the deceptive winkage that the A side of the album may or may not intend to contain. the singular, "Plenty of Girls in the Sea" stands out, sounding like an "isn't this easy? see? anyone can make pop music" endeavor until a beautifully simple baseline hums its way in and resolves the song with a surprising emotional depth, completely absent in the album's earlier offerings. 

MGMT then closes up its self-titled effort with the movingly conclusive, Zepplin-esque, "An Orphan of Fortune" which is as welcome a song as it is varied, complex, unexpected and well... weird. 



BANKRUPT! by Phoenix 

this is a pretty good album... okay, on to Arcade Fire!

REFLEKTOR by Arcade Fire 

Arcade Fire had the best album of the year in 2010: i said it, then the old lady who gives out her eponymous "Grammys" said it, everybody knew it. "The Suburbs" was, is, and will remain one of the greatest albums i have ever heard in my time on this earth... 

"Reflektor" is not "The Suburbs" but really, how could it have been? it's like saying "whatever-the-crap came after 'Graceland' is no 'Graceland'." it's just not a fair comparison- like comparing Shakespeare's follow up to Hamlet with Hamlet (it was "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by the way, so if you've seen that show, you know what i'm talking about and if you haven't seen it, well, there's a reason for that) that said, "Reflektor" is a good album... a really good album. 

conceptually, it's based on the Greek myth of Orpheus who ventures into hell for his love Euridice, and wins her back from Hades and Persephone with the beauty of his music. Orpheus is told that Euridice is to follow behind him on his journey to the world of the living as long as he does not look back to her before they reach the upper-world... spoiler alert: he looks back. 

and Orpheus loses his Euridice for a second and final time.

"Reflektor" seems to argue that technology doesn't connect us to one another any longer but only reflects our own ego and anxiety as foretold by our Greek ancestors, and as evidenced the presence of David Bowie's ever-ennui-inducing voice on the album, supported by lyrics like, "we fell in love, when i was nineteen, and now we're staring at a screen / our song skips, on little silver discs, our love is plastic, we'll break it into bits / i want to break free but will they break me / i thought, i found the connector, it's just a reflektor..."

the first four songs of the album (Reflektor, We Exist, Flashbulb Eyes, and Here Comes The Night Time) keep loosely and somewhat less loosely to this idea with great and dynamic success and are truly worthy and successful efforts... then comes to the final songs of the A side where "Reflektor" loses me. 

in what feels like an MGMT-esque move, Arcade Fire writes three, "see? doesn't radio rock suck?" songs which contain tremendous verses, followed by an unimaginative, repetitive, generic rock chorus that completely undercut the value of the work that has built to them (except for "Normal Person" which actually contains an exceptionally shitty verse and a yet fairly dynamic, effecting chorus). 

the audio that begins this sequence is stereotypical pre-rock-show banter in which what is presumably Win Butler poses the question to the fake audience "Do you like Rock and Roll music? 'cause I don't know if I do..." well, if the next three songs are what you consider "Rock and Roll music" then, no... i don't like it: its over-thought and emotionally abortive dross.    

"Normal Person," "You Already Know," and "Joan of Arc" aren't terrible songs, they just aren't particularly interesting songs beyond their first listen. and redemption beyond the first listen is something i have come to expect from Arcade Fire. but then so goes the follow-up to what could be the greatest indie-rock album in a generation... 

i feel very similarly toward "Reflektor" as i did toward "Neon Bible" which inconsistently produced some of my favorite music from the band... 

and then, once again... 

suddenly and without anticipation, a B-side redeems what is beginning to sound like an important cause deluded by commentary. opening with the beautifully simple "Here Comes the Night Time II" a thematic, conceptual, through-line song, reminiscent of "Wasted Hours" from the previous record and continuing through the pinnacle of the album, "It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)" one of the finest, most inspiring songs in the Arcade Fire cannon, preceded by the surprisingly moving, Flaming Lips-inspired and ironically named "Awful Sound (Oh Euridice)" it closes out with the gorgeous epilogues to the album: "Porno" and "Afterlife." there is only one other title on the record, "Supersymmetry" but it does little more than to draw the album to a close with a long, sleepy descent into sound effect. 

all in all, "Reflektor" is a very worthwhile offering from the seemingly four-thousand-member Canadian Indie-pop group. 

i often like to expound on my pet theory that all albums are either an expansion or a contraction from the group's previous offering (whether you agree or not, Mom). both have their merits and successful bands seem to follow a basic pattern of albums that expand their repertoire and follow them within a few albums by those that collapse on their essential themes of success. for example, Radiohead contracted in "OK Computer" what they had expanded on in "The Bends" and expanded from "OK Computer" out into the unprecedented realm of "Kid A." then through a series of expansions (Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief) Radiohead eventually collapsed on the master piece that is 2007's "In Rainbows." 

i'd like to imagine that "Reflektor," while an exciting offering in its own right, is also an expansion for Arcade Fire that can only eventually contract into a future album as complete and surprising and perfect, if not more perfect, than "The Suburbs." 

but perhaps that is me hoping for Arcade Fire to out Arcade Fire Arcade Fire... Reflektor indeed!

i don't actually know what "Reflektor indeed!" means but it's how some music magazine ended their douchey review and i thought it sounded stupid and pretentious enough to use.   




AN AWESOME WAVE by Alt J (∆)

                
so i believe i was mentioning something before about weirdness...? 

enter Alt J (∆), a band that chose a triangle (or rather the symbol made by holding down the alt then J key on a standard QWERTY keyboard) as its name.... so, yeah. they also happened to be a band that created entirely a cappella interludes that make no bloody sense but are somehow as unassuming as they are complex and evocative. 

there is a sequence of interludes and songs on this album that is as exciting and satisfying as any i have heard this year, from "Interlude 1" through "Tesselate" "Breezelblocks" "Interlude 2" and finally "Something Good." it is a fully realized, shockingly fresh breath of air for the listener that i would love to say echoes Radiohead's "The Bends" and yet, Alt J's perspective and creativity is so unique that to lump them generally in with early Radiohead is unfair to the depth and acumen of their musicianship.   

this said, in opposition to the first few albums on the list so far, the B-Side of "An Awesome Wave" feels unfortunately inferior to its opening salvo. the one-two punch of "Tesselate" and "Breezleblocks" is (for lack of a more appropriate and less hackneyed superlative) worth the price of admission. this stretch of the album makes you wonder how one group of people can come up with two songs in such close proximity to one another, that are both so completely unique and in the latter case deeply moving and utterly disturbing...

if you wonder what i mean, i challenge you to google the video to "Breezleblocks" and not freak out at the terrible genius that is whatever-the-crap Alt J is... 

while "Fitzpleasure" is a notable, Dub-Step inspired offering on the album's second half, nothing after this early sequence reaches quite the level of challenging, terrifying pop-alt music which Alt J is clearly bent on exposing us to as listeners. and again, unfortunately, the second half of "An Awesome Wave" threatens to drone away into generic electronica at its best and modern elevator music at its worst.  

however, the world of pop-alternative music needs bands like Alt J to come along and deliberately upset the balance. the cool thing is they actually accomplished this early with this album and they did it by taking huge musical risks. what this band has created on the A-side of "An Awesome Wave" is a series of songs with an unsettling depth and an undeniable power.

if you're reading this, Alt J, (which you're not) you're welcome for the earlier comparison to Radiohead and also please never come sing happy birthday or like, you know anything to me, lest your conspicuously creepy Cthuluian harmonies drive me to apocalyptic madness and ruin... 

(sigh) okay... mea culpa time, suckas...



MODERN VAMPIRES OF THE CITY by Vampire Weekend

alright, i'll admit it... i was NOT kind to Vampire Weekend in my review of their last album. actually i was more than not kind: i was downright slanderous. if i had posted my review of "Contra" on the internet in the 1700's (when it was all My Space and hotmail), there is no doubt in my mind that Vampire Weekend would have challenged me to a duel over their honor, sullied so heedlessly by a character as woebegone and unseemly as myself... luckily for me, that scenario would never happen because of the obvious fact that Vampire Weekend are all physical cowards. 

that said, in 2013 they produced one of the best indie-pop albums i have heard in years. for a band that was as surprising, clever, and inventive in its first offering as it was myopic, inaccessible, and plain ole' boring in its second album, "Modern Vampires of the City" comes as a glorious and welcome surprise.

it's hard not to compare the American-African and decidedly NOT African-American band (Vampire Weekend could be THE whitest music in the history of both music and whiteness) to Paul Simon's post-Garfunkelian work (oddly, this will not be the worst use of Art Garfunkel's last name in this blog. fair warning). 

and yet, all greatness of this album aside, i have to admit a certain fondness for the sentiment that just might fuel my over-abundance of enthusiasm for the record beyond its artistic value. "Modern Vampires of the City" is a record centered around American faithlessness, not as a fiery atheist advocacy (we'll get to that with the metal albums) but as a quiet, simple recognition of the inaccessibility of belief in a divine power in the modern world.

and while some of this may be conjecture on my part, it is an unavoidable conclusion that Vampire Weekend is both sympathizing with and glibly criticizing the faithful, all while utterly undermining their illogic with a kind of poetic shrug, the simple clarity which speaks to those millions of us who find the transparent surety of the religious simultaneously enviable and patently silly.

in the album's first track, "Obvious Bicycle" one can't help but hear a sympathetic treatment of this country's missionaries as they make their way from fruitless opportunity to fruitless opportunity: 


"Oh you oughta spare your face the razor,
Because no one's gonna spare the time for you. 
No one's gonna watch you as you go, 
From a house you didn't build and can't control, 
Oh, you oughta spare your face the razor, 
Because no one's gonna spare the time for you. 
You oughta spare the world your labor
It's been twenty years and no one's told the truth."

this could simply be one heathen's interpretation of the album opener but the follow-up, "Unbelievers" seems undoubtedly a portrait of personal reticence to engage in an indiscriminate, undiscerning, and uncaring religion: 

"We know the fire awaits unbelievers,
All of the sinners the same,
Girl you and i will die unbelievers, 
bound to the tracks of the train,

I'm not excited, but should i be,
Is this the fate that half of the world has planned for me? 

I know i love you, 
And you love the sea,
But what holy water contains a little drop, little drop for me?"

again, this is not a chaotic fight to the death over one's personal beliefs... it's a quiet questioning, a "well, if you say so but..." mentality that pervades the album, one that grows and spreads and sets the stage for the doubt, introspection, and existential uncertainty to come...

the band follows "Unbelievers" with the beautifully languid "Step" (another album highlight) and their forgettable, pun-inspired single "Diane Young," whose immediate successor is possibly the most sublime, and inspired individual track that i have heard from Vampire Weekend and a musical testament to the philosophical maturity of the band itself.

i have to admit, "Don't Lie" chokes me up... every time. it's such a gorgeous song, so brilliantly written and executed that it sounds more like it was 'channeled', the irony of which is crystalized by its lyrics, 

"Don't lie, i want him to know, 
God's love, die young, is it ready to go?
It's the last time running through snow, 
Where the vaults are full and the fire is bold,
I want to know, does it bother you?
The low click of a ticking clock,
There's a lifetime right in front of you,
And everyone i know."

Vampire Weekend goes on to crush the rest of the album: thematically, philosophically, lyrically, "Hannah Hunt" and "Everlasting Arms" continue the through-line of the faithlessly absurd and the absurdity of faith in modern America, and its closing argument comes in the form of a metaphor about God as a dust-covered and functionless computer:

"In the dark of this place
There's the glow of your face
There's the dust on the screen
Of this broken machine
And I can't help but feel
That I've made some mistake
But I let it go

Through the fire and through the flames
You won't even say your name
Only "I am that I am".
But who could ever live that way?"

the biblical reference to Moses and the burning bush in which God refers to Himself as "Eh-Yah-Hey-Yay" or "I am that I am" is the culminating, "mirror-up-to-nature" argument of the album articulated with this, the punctuation mark on Vampire Weekend's description of an aimless, faithlessness in these, our United States. 

the penultimate track and true finale of "Modern Vampires of the City" is a lingering dirge of the only true eternality in the span of a human life: the natural phenomena of the earth, specifically in this case, the Hudson river. having been wrapped in the flag of the American Nation as a temporary comfort in the face of an eternal dynamism that is as uncontrollable as it is limitless, Vampire Weekend closes its musical thesis on the human, ephemeral experience, with the sympathetic soliloquy of a river that wishes us all the best, but in the end, offers no real hope. 

it is not dissimilar to the offering that God makes us in "Modern Vampires of the City," one that is unsatisfying, intransigent, and ultimately insufficient to reconcile the problematic nature of a 60-80 year life span in the face of the inherently false promise of eternity.
   
in its latest, most accessible and patently human endeavor, Vampire Weekend has matured before our eyes and crafted one of the most cogent and yet least imposing arguments against American Christianity that i may have ever heard from pop music... 

and while the dust settles on that idea, let's talk about the band that has dedicated not just an album, but rather an entire musical cannon to a vitriolic and philosophical opposition the status quo... a band that after a hiatus of more than 30 years has returned astride it's pale horse, Hell in tow, as critically and influentially viable as ever, if not more... 

my friends, i FINALLY get to review, for the first time in the history of my 33 years on this earth, a NEW album by my favorite band in the world, BLACK SABBA-- 

nope, wait, executive decision... Sahg comes first... 



DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR by Sahg

now, if you're thinking, "isn't Sahg that Swedish car company that went teats-up a few years back?" then you're a comic genius. no, i'm talking about the band, Sahg, and they're not Swedish, they're Norwegian (i know, i didn't realize there was a difference either!) and instead of making cars, they make metal (well, cars are made with metal but not metaphorical metal. cars are made with actual metal but then most of the car is made out of plastic- you know what? google it and decide for yourself).

yes, those lovable lads from Norland are back with their fourth album and a shiny new bassist whose name isn't "King ov Hell."

yep, you read that right! the former bassist for Sahg was, in fact, a dude who wore corpse make-up on stage, called himself "King ov Hell" and played for the Black Metal band Gorgoroth. in case you're curious, the other dudes' names are Thomas, Thomas, and Olav. and apparently, King's replacement is nothing more than a guy named Tony... presumably Tony ov Hell. 

if you think naming yourself "King ov Hell" is a bit creepy and overly-serious, please remember that we are talking here about Norwegians. 

you see, Black Metal in Norway is what your parents thought you were listening to in the 80's (for those of you who lived in the 80's and had parents) when what you were actually listening to was just Poison and Twisted Sister; the former merely dressed like women while making music about having sex with women and the latter merely dressed like women while eventually becoming Republicans (yes, Dee Snyder was the J. Edgar Hoover of Butt-Rock). 

digressions aside, Norwegian Black Metal is truly scary shit. what is known generally as the movement's "second wave" began in the 90's, and was like the 'extreme punk' of Heavy Metal (think G.G Allin but like, mean about it). anti-authoritarian, anti-Christian, violent, Satanic and with just a touch of neo-Nazism around the edges, Black Metal is the kind of music that people in Norway should legitimately fear... 

not most of it mind you, most of it is just an aesthetic (like the goth kids behind the counter at Hot Topic, only when they talk they sound like the Swedish Chef) no, i'm talking the extreme of the extreme here, the people willing to carry out the subject matter of their music, and many of whom, as a result, are shunned and reviled by their own genre. 

and look, if a bunch of people who stage mock crucifixions and douse themselves in animal blood, all in the name of Satan while rocking out to Black Metal classics like "Fuck Me, Jesus," shun you for being too 'out there', chances are you may have taken this whole Black Metal thing a bit too seriously... again, Norwegians.   

radical Black Metal fans (read: sociopathic assholes looking for an excuse) committed an unfortunately numerous amount of arsons against Christian churches in the 90's, some of which were apparently really old, really cool, historical sites. that, along with acts of murder, and other generally shitty behavior, which is "frowned upon" by "people" have made Black Metal into kind of a dirty word in Scandinavian culture and something of a real problem for the average Norwegian metal devotee, who just wants to kick back and enjoy the occasional horrifyingly godless death-anthem over the sound of cannibalistic swine gang-raping Mephistopheles...   

so, there you go. Black Metal is a heterogeneous mixture of dudes that are really into music about weird, scary shit and dudes that are really into actual weird, scary shit... and the music is generally atrocious because they don't know how to play their own instruments. 

Sahg, however, is not Black Metal. Sahg is not even really Metal, they are more like a Psychedelic Rock muffin with elements of progressive metal sprinkled sparingly atop it... 

so why the long, unnerving divergence into the subject of Black Metal? because, believe it or not, Sahg was co-founded by Mr. ov Hell himself and he was probably their most famous member because of his other, unconscionably more popular Black Metal quintet, the aforementioned Gorgoroth. 

all of this is simply to illuminate why it is that most people haven't heard of Sahg (granted, most people haven't heard of Gorgoroth, but then we are way down the Metal rabbit hole, here so bare with me). King ov Hell (yep, gonna keep saying it) co-founding Sahg is a bit like Dave Mustaine deciding to take a break from Megadeth and form a supergroup with Simon and Garfunkel, which one can only assume would be called, "Mega-Funkel." the people who like Simon and Garfunkel are going to hate "Mega-Funkel" and the people who like Dave Mustaine are going to call Dave Mustaine a sell-out for ever daring to make music that doesn't sound exactly like his first album (most metal fans are myopically purist in that way). so, suffice it to say, Sahg was and probably still is, facing an uphill battle in the music industry... 

just like Mega-Funkel.

now, i have always liked Sahg, they've put together some interesting sounds and made some great songs but there's always been something lacking for me in their work. it isn't that they lacked creativity, but rather a kind of cohesive creativity. each of their previous albums, while consistently worthwhile, have conspicuously lacked any kind of thematic significance... for me the technique was there but the art was missing. 

when my brother, Ryan (font of all things metal) first told me about this fourth Sahg album, my inner monologue droned, "yeah, but what's it about?" admittedly, i'm a concept album guy. i'll forgive a lot if you can put the whole kettle of biscuits into a conceptual prism. and when i finally got around to downloading and listening to the album, i was shocked to find that it wasn't titled "Sahg IV".

you see, as evidenced by my whole "lack of cohesive creativity" argument above, i anticipated this title because the previous 3 Sahg albums were, named, respectively, "I, II, and III". and as a whole they weren't really about anything. 

exit "King ov Hell" and re-enter Sahg. 

from Olav's (yep, Olav's) own gushingly dramatic description, the album "Delusions of Grandeur" is highly conceptual:

"(it's) about a person, whose delusions of grandeur escalate to the level where they consume him completely... From becoming increasingly psychopathic and dominant, he loses touch with everyone around him and isolates into his own imaginary, psychotic world, where he becomes the almighty ruler of (his) universe. As he stands on the highest peak of his domain and beholds all that he has conquered, he suddenly slips off the edge and floats away, weightless. Helpless and stripped of all power, he drifts further into the open space, until he disappears into the darkness. It's an album about how desire for power and property can distort and destroy who we are."

that, ladies and gentleman, is an album about something; cohesive and coherent, creative and cre-awesome... this is the Sahg album i knew i could hear underneath their first three, this is the one i have been waiting for. oh, and as you may be able to tell from the cover art, it's all set in outer-space... cue 'inaudible squeal of joy.'

from the opening moments of "Delusions of Grandeur" the contributing musical influences are made unmistakably clear: it throbs with the spacey-psychedelic-prog metal sound of Mastodon's 2009 magnum opus and what is arguably the greatest album in the history of the genre, "Crack the Skye." in fact, Sahg is explicit about the homage, name-dropping the album into the lyrics of its exemplary second track, "Blizzardborne."

one of the reviews i read of "Delusions of Grandeur" said that if there is any criticism to be made of this, Sahg's greatest offer to date, it is that they almost sound too much like Mastodon from "Crack the Skye". 

there are a few things that i think inoculate the record from this critique: 

1. "Crack the Skye" is only one of many musical inspirations for Sahg here. yes, some of the most striking and engaging moments are progressive metal riffs that Mastodon would have been honored to be followed by but the story also filters through The Sword's previously-reviewed doom-metal-blues/rock-space-epic "Warp Riders" as well as "Sabotage"-era Sabbath, Randy Rhoads-era solo Ozzy (Blizzardborne, methinks?), latter-day Metallica (which produced some underrated and over-hated material... i said SOME) and even pre-sugar-doused Def Leppard from back when they all had a set of balls to match their set of arms. 

2. secondly, (that's what the 2 means) Sahg has asserted, and rightly so, that the sum of the album's parts are not equal to its whole. the album is a synergy of musical influences that create something beyond the limited narrative of "going Mastodon." its effect is neither pastiche nor piecemeal. it is, however, as i've offered before, cohesive and no amount of notable derivation from other great albums can undo the potency and effectiveness of "Delusions of Grandeur."

3. saying that a band borrows too much from "Crack the Skye," is like saying that you're really excited about a college basketball star who runs the off-guard slot but that he reminds you a bit too much of Michael Jordan... which is just a stupid thing to say. if i could hire a band to simply sound like Mastodon from "Crack the Skye," (as if it were some mean task) i'd pay them the greater part of my life savings and spend the remainder of my empty days as an unwashed hermit-groupy, feeding off their music like a South American stomach parasite... Sahg is taking their cues from some of the greatest rock/metal albums ever written, i think we can all agree that sometimes sounding too much like another great musician is not the most egregious sin to be committed... they could have modeled "Delusions of Grandeur" after "Contra" by Vampire Weekend...   

okay, enough of this, onto the actual album...

the very first sounds of "Delusions of Grandeur" appropriately echo Ozzy Osbourne's solo masterpiece, "Diary of a Madman" courtesy of the spaced-out weirdo himself, (we'll get to him in a bit) but by way of the dissonant, ethereal verse we are eventually drawn into a classically Sahgian chorus, the bleeding lyrics of which remind us exactly where we are:

"Circle the night 
Devious satellite 
The ground beneath your feet 
Slowly sinking 
Slip off the edge of the universe 
Into the black beyond 
Thousand light-years gone"

after which comes what i like to call the "Harrowing Descent," it's a convention i imagine (with a deliberate speciousness) to be unique and original to metal-based music (with the notable exception of certain classical musicians such as Wagner, Orff, and Holst) and tends to rear its awesome head at or near the end of the most metal of songs. it signals a kind of declination or downfall (which contains the kind of energy that a terrible shipwreck, the loss of a great and ancient battle or fall of a tragic hero might have) and here, for Sahg, the impulse is all Mastodon... and they are right to trust the influence. 

it serves them even more effectively in the opening track's follow-up, "Blizzardborne" which is the musical and dramatic apex of the record's A side. "Blizzardborne" is "Delusions of Grandeur" in potentia. it contains all that makes the album great and all that makes the album of a piece. for me there is no more concise offering of what is outstanding about "Sahg" and about "Delusions of Grandeur" than "Blizzardborne". and if one were to put his proverbial money where his proverbial mouth were, one might offer the song up on this very blog... 

how about the whole album; give "Blizzardborne" "Ether" and "Sleeper's Gate to the Galaxy" a listen if you're interested. it's pretty excellent music:

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/sahg-entire-delusions-of-grandeur-album-available-for-streaming/

then comes the single, "Firechild" which is unequivocally meh. 

after that unsatisfying little red herring, comes "Walls of Delusion" a track with a sudden, dramatic, and unapologetically intrusive metal sound. not as an answer to the notable dearth of metal that came before it but rather a visible reminder that this band was stitched together from something constituently more aggressive and discordant, and just when you, (or rather me) the average metal listener, begin to adjust his/her ear to the soothing sounds of a shredded refrain, Sahg, shifts deftly into my other favorite and least ubiquitous heavy-metal convention, the "Lament" (which explores the distinct feeling of loss or mourning, as a opposed to the fiery fall of the "Harrowing Descent": for both of you theatre majors reading this, think Blanche DuBois as opposed to Macbeth). 

this is typically the music that metal-head children play for their non metal-head parents to convince them that the horrible music they listen to is actual music and not Norwegian Black Metal. 

Sahg, startlingly and quite movingly puts their most discordant music next to some of their most melodious and most melancholy themes on the album. renaissance Italian artists called such stark light/dark contrasts in immediate relationship to one another, "Chiaroscuro." (thanks Theatre History 101) and it is this contrast which has served and continues to serve as the palette for all of my favorite heavy metal bands: Mastodon, The Ocean, Gojira, etc.  

and then comes "Ether," which may be one of the greatest, most layered, openings to a rock / prog metal song i have heard since Mastodon's "Blood Mountain"-era epic, "Sleeping Giant." for those of you who know what the hell it is i am talking about, yes... its that good. 

"Ether" is the kind of song that i would like to play for fans of R & B. not because i think R & B fans will like "Ether", but rather because, i consider myself the kind of music-connesiouer and critic that can listen to a genre like R & B (a genre that for the most part i am deeply disinterested in) and discern a good song from a song that is complete crap. this kind of discernment, i think, denotes an appreciation for a collection of musical conventions, in spite of what may be an aesthetic antipathy toward it. there is, after all, no arguing taste... only execution.    

if an individual can listen to "Ether" and still not understand what is at least interesting and valuable to people who might love a musical genre different from their own, then i wish upon them children who grow up to work at Hot Topic and blast Gorgoroth from their bedrooms at three in the morning (and only speak in an extended sequence of "bork", for these people have absolutely no ability to empathize with the ear of others.

finally, after an utterly blues-rock-Sabotage-Blood-Mountain-Warp-Riders inspired interlude of "Then Wakens the Beast" and the instrumental, "Odium Delirium" which satisfies in the way those later, greater B-sides always do, we arrive or rather are delivered by the hands of the newly re-born Norwegian Prog-Metal/Psych-Rock masters, to the grandest of their musical experiments to date, "Sleeper's Gate to the Galaxy," the song which closes out the album, and soundly too... 

one might wonder how it is a band that has at least one fourth of its origins in Black Metal conceives of its album closer as a ballad-to-anthem epic whose opening is inspired by Cat Stevens... no seriously, until you hear the Bill Wardian drums thundering in like the "Sabotage" B-Side that the song longs to and succeeds in echoing, "Sleeper's Gate..." begins shockingly as a folk song... and yet in the course of its 12 minutes, it manages to evoke their many musical influences (Def Leppard, Metallica, Ozzy Ozbourne... all in their better days) and ends with the kind of "Harrowing Descent" that a rock/metal dork like me yearns-in-his-soul to hear, the kind of conclusion that all of those musical influences, would loved to have written. 

i can only imagine, Tony Iommi of Sabbath, Brent Hines of Mastodon, Steve Clark of Def Leppard, and Yusef Islam of Cat Stevens listening in on Sahg's album-closer, with knowing smirks of recognition and admiration, with nodding approval and a subsequent toast (of animal blood) to the the newest and most promising kids on the block, with hopes that they might take up the mantle and run with it; even if they don't fit into the genre they were born of, a genre confused with its own worser, most deleterious parts, even if they sound at times "too much" like the greatest of heavy music in the last 40 years, even if, like the Black Metal they came from, "Delusions of Grandeur" is the brain-child of an oft-derided and little understand band of misfits, a heterogeneous mixture of dudes who are into music about weird, scary shit... 



13 by Black Sabbath 

             
Black Sabbath is and always has been my favorite band... 

as a kid, in middle school, out of morbid curiosity i picked up their second and most popular album "Paranoid" just to see what was the behind the curtain, and turns out... i loved it! it was dark, aggressive, simultaneously simple and complicated, with great musical depth and power and to my surprise, it was, at times, unexpectedly moving. it didn't take me long to discover, in spite of all i had heard about the band and their music, that these guys weren't "scary" or "Satanic" at all... this was protest music. the first track, "War Pigs" was a description of the Apocalypse brought about by military and political figures that use people "like pawns in chess." simply put, they weren't arguing that the picture they were painting was a good thing, they were, in fact, calling it a bad thing... and they were right.   

if one were predisposed to think Black Sabbath was advocating the end of the world in just such a way, lyrics like "in the fields the bodies burning / as the war-machine keeps turning / death and hatred to mankind..." would indeed sound like a statement of purpose... but for me, as a sixteen year old kid who wore shirts emblazoned with the "Blizzard of Oz" album cover while my peers shuffled about all shruggy and itchy in their Cobain-inspired Grandma-sweaters, it was impossible to miss the fourth part of that simple rhyme scheme which concluded, "poisoning their brain-washed minds..." that is, of course, if one had already missed the opening lyrics, "politicians hide themselves away / they only started the war / why should they go out to fight? / they leave that all to the poor..."

it was a very simple idea that determined what heavy metal was and also what it was decidedly not. Sabbath was never advocating for the doomsday scenarios and post modern horror that they described. they were, however, performing the function of the artist, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as t'were, the mirror up to nature. 

heavy metal music was born of a response, a reaction, and a revolt against the status quo and all its terrifying political and human ramifications. and while most protest music of the 60's and early 70's was passively advocating the answer and alternative to the status quo, asking its listeners to "give peace a chance" and the like, Sabbath was showing the dominant culture its own reflection through a glass darkly; a cracked, blood-spattered glass that they then smashed unceremoniously into its own face. only later, as an adult, did i learn that "War Pigs" was actually a song about Vietnam (Vietnam having ended almost 20 years before i ever heard the album.)         

"Paranoid" is a classic record on par with the likes of "Led Zepplin IV" and the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper." now, you may disagree with this interpretation, but in terms of the influence that each of these albums had, "Paranoid" (and really Black Sabbath) is frankly the only one that created an entirely divergent genre of music that has dominated counter-culture since 1970, a genre that has reflected and refracted itself into the myriad of sub-genres comprising blues-rock metal, speed metal, thrash metal, sludge metal, doom metal, black metal, death metal, progressive metal, math metal, etcetera metal, etc...   

yes, Zepplin and the Beatles influenced popular music in an unprecedented way, but if you ask the members of bands like Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Pantera, System of a Down, Mastodon, The Ocean, and a crap-ton of others that probably include Evanessence and Gorgoroth and definitively include Nirvana and Pearl Jam (who when i saw them, closed out their encore set with "War Pigs") what their musical influences are... it all comes from Black Sabbath, like a million Athena's sprung violently from the head of Zeus.

here are a few delightful and gratifying snippets of what the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame wrote about the boys from Birmingham in 2006:

"Black Sabbath is credited with creating heavy metal. The success of their first two albums "Black Sabbath" and "Paranoid" - marked a paradigm shift in the world of rock. Not until Black Sabbath upended the music scene did the term “heavy metal” enter the popular vocabulary to describe the denser, more thunderous offshoot of rock over which they presided... in their own words, Black Sabbath saw themselves as a “heavy underground” band. That term denoted both the intensity of their music and the network of fans who found them long before critics and the music industry took notice. In a sense, though they’ve sold more than 75 million albums worldwide, they still are a heavy underground band. Although they became eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, they weren’t inducted until 2006. The truth is, they remain one of the most misunderstood bands in rock history..."

agreed... but really, it is only fitting that the progenitors of heavy metal, a genre more consistently and deeply misunderstood than any other should remain a perpetual outsider and underdog to the industry that has begrudgingly and quietly accepted their existence for over 40 years. 

as my father loved to say when he didn't really mean it "i hate to say it but..." Black Sabbath is one of the most important influences in music in the last half-century (whether music knows it or not). 

so like most deeply devoted Black Sabbath fans, when i first heard the news that after an almost 30 year hiatus, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and yet NOT Bill Ward would be writing and recording a new album together, my brain bifurcated: one side screamed "NO!!! WHY??? WHAT ARE YOU DOING...???" and the other whispered, quietly, hopefully, "go back to where you began, be honest, good luck."

in the way of good fortune, good luck, and good judgment, the latter half of my mind won out. Black Sabbath produced an album titled "Thirteen," presumably in reference to the year in which the record debuted but also after the ominous date which the first, eponymous Black Sabbath album came into the world in 1970, Friday the 13th...

before i go into the virtues and the victims of "Thirteen" i want you to understand the surprising fact that the album rose to #1 on the Billboard charts in June of 2013. it reached a critical and commercial success as yet unachieved by the band, all of which merely reinforces the burgeoning reality that Black Sabbath has tunneled clandestinely under the radar of popular music, regardless of reward or consequence and continues to offer a more earnest and critical alternative to the status quo of music for the masses.

"Thirteen" opens with the kind of ominous, thundering minor-chord progression that original drummer Bill Ward described in a recent interview as giving him, "the same shiver up me back as when i was an 18 year old kid" (me too, Bill... me too). but when the tidal flood of sound ceases and the music ebbs into a simple, portentious refrain with just the lightest touch of symbol behind, the lyrics begin. and i hear the voice of Ozzy Osbourne, my coming-of-age musical idol, and on-again-off-again adult musical hero singing new Black Sabbath material for the first time in over 30 years, and i think, "holy shit... he sounds so old..." 

the 64 years young Ozzy who drones in at the beginning of "Thirteen" honestly just doesn't sound up to the task. he ploddingly and drudgingly mouths his way through Geezer Butler's ever-pessimistic lyrics like an anachronistic machine, slowly winding its way down to a full stop, "is this the end of the begin-ning? / or the beginning of the end? / losing control or are you win-ning? / is your life real or just pretend?" 

the response to these four simple thesis questions at the beginning of "Thirteen" seem to answer themselves for the listener... it is, in fact, over. so skip ahead and see if they cover any old blues songs or do something surprising that might salvage what is now promising to be a train-wreck of nostalgia and missed opportunities... and as the constituent, four-part sound slows to a near silence, Iommi's chord progression suddenly, vigorously, reboots itself and roars back into the album's opening track with the kind of musical violence that one would only expect from the likes of... well, Tony Iommi. Butler's bass line and lyrical repartee to the album's opening soliloquy is as prescient and as reflective as ever, fulfilling the four decade old promise of an aggressive alternative and full-throated critique of the status quo, "reanimation of the sequence / rewinds the future to the past / to find the source of the solution / the system has to be recast..."

and then there is Ozzy...

the fading, drug-addled, pill-popping, reality TV curiosity of the aughts, long past his prime, in way over his head and having been critically discarded as a rock and roll side-show of days long gone suddenly, here, and in mere measures, transforms before our very ears into a snarling, other-worldy wraith, hell-bent on pummeling us with the horror to which he has given his inspiration and soul for over 40 years now. it is the kind of sound that after a decade-plus of double-recorded, over-synthesized, Sharon-ated and auto-tuned vocal tracks, i didn't realize Ozzy Osbourne was still capable of...

and in that moment of realization i am immediately and intimately reintroduced to the musical genius of John "Ozzy" Osbourne...

i know what you're thinking... genius? or you were thinking "chicken casserole?" in which case you weren't listening, it's all the same to me, no worries. that word, that ubiquitous word "genius" is indeed bandied about far too frequently and haphazardly in 2013. the "genius" often referred to simply applies to those individuals whose real skill lies in having material accurately fit to their individual set of skills. and while Ozzy Osbourne may fit somewhat loosely into that category, the quality of people who provided him with said material were his bandmates and not a team of 19 song-writers and producers whose job it is to sit around and think up Katy Perry cliches that will be in your head a week after you heard them waiting in line at Chipotle.

the genius, and a true genius it is, is in Ozzy Osbourne's gift as an interpreter of sound and story. Ozzy, like the many greats in my chosen field, always knows what act he is in... if Macbeth enters the stage, holding 2 bloody daggers after murdering the king of Scotland in his sleep and interprets all of Macbeth's language and action as the absolute, utter unravelling of the human mind in its biggest, most dramatic form in Act 2, Scene 2 of the tragedy that bears his name, then where does the actor have to go in Act 5? the answer is nowhere... Macbeth stays at a fever pitch for 3 acts and we all wish he would die long before the play grants it to us...

the opening sound of "Thirteen" is Ozzy's interpretation of outdated machinery, whirring quietly down to an electrical death, its second verse is Ozzy channeling that same impulse projected onto a society, an entire culture enslaved and dehumanized by the technological advances they have created, an inorganic Frankenstein from a darker future that has returned to annihilate its past.

and Ozzy knows exactly what act he is in, even if the listener does not. there is a moment on the album's follow up track and single (maybe the only single i will praise in the entirety of this blog) where Iommi launches into one of the greatest riffs to ever come from a guitar, then the music rolls into a powerful but simple classic Sabbath refrain as Ozzy leads us into the "Harrowing Descent" to come... and he literally sounds like he is just talking. i thought, "what an anti-climactic choice. this is supposed to be the apex of the song, the violent downward spiral intro-ed by Iommi's blues-turned-metal riff... and then, brilliantly, the riff returns, and so does Ozzy with all the glottal fry and frenzied intensity that his 64 year old pipes can muster and i realized that all along he knew where he was going, and i hadn't...

if one listens to the entire canon of Ozzy Osbourne's music (and one has) one finds a surprising level of depth and variety. look, i'll openly admit the man has his limits, there is no doubt about it. for example, he really doesn't sing across the melody: if the music goes up, Ozzy goes up, if the music goes down, Ozzy goes down (which is also one of my favorite indie-films featuring a Culkin child). Ozzy's melody lines rarely include much complexity beyond what is already suggested by Geezer's base line or Iommi's riff.

but again, Ozzy's gift is in reflecting the distinct energy and story of the music to which he lends his vocal talent... Ozzy can, at any moment, play sympathetic victim or malevolent villain, the horrific monster of the world's own creation come to exact its vengeance on the   people by whom it has been forsaken or the unassuming innocent who reaps the unseemly fate of an act it had no design in committing. Ozzy is subject, object, narrator and bystander... all of which, played to perfection through what is his truly greatest ability... theatrical imagination. 

you see, the opening of "Thirteen" was disappointing to me at first because Ozzy was reflecting the music's disappointment with it's own subject matter. "End of the Beginning" is a song about the gradual and almost mechanical erosion of humanity by way of the technology it has created. Ozzy sounds like a machine, slowly winding its way down, because this is the world Black Sabbath wants to reflect; a world being brutally and systemically stripped of its natural vitality in preparation for the inevitable end and once the mask has slipped, the true and terrifying face of a demonic computer-god that now controls the fate of humankind is projected through the dark, blood-spattered and cracked glass of Ozzy's vocals... and then promptly smashed into the listener's face.

then a third perspective shift into the objective point of view, we hear an Ozzy making a clear case for a rejection of the doomsday scenario he has just painted us. his voice is pleading, sympathetic, worried and clear-as-a-bell, "regeneration of your cyber-sonic soul / transforms in time and space beyond control / rise up resist and be the master of your fate / don't look back, live for today / tomorrow is too late."

the album's follow-up "God is Dead?' is, on its first glance, a hard sell. any Sabbath fan, well-versed in the band and its music, had to have seen the title and thought, "oh no, what kind of cliche nonsense is this going to be...?" 

yes, "God is Dead?" with its Nietzsche-inspired title, safely punctuated, retains the band's gloomy, counter-culture image yet inexplicably softens that same credo by employing a Fox News style question mark, so as to relieve the artists from culpability due to any difficult ideas that the song may contain.

and then i read the digital booklet. see, i've learned a lot from studying Shakespeare, and one of the most important of those things is to pay attention to the punctuation...

more than likely, Shakespeare only wrote some of the punctuation that we read in his texts. it was probably amended by Condell and Hemminges, the two actors who published his First Folio (and then further amended by the purview of which ever editor saw fit to muck about with the Bard's immortal semicolons). regardless, those two dudes knew something about the way this shit made sense to an actor and to an audience. Shakespeare wrote thought by thought, he wrote specifically, and he wrote for the listener, NOT the reader... so at the risk of elevating Sabbath to the level of Shakespeare (or really anything to the level of Shakespeare) we have to pay attention to the punctuation in the digital booklet of "Thirteen." 

the phrase "God is Dead" is followed far more often by a period than by a question mark (as it is in the song's title). its thought progression moves from question to answer (just as thought does in a Shakespearean soliloquy). "God is Dead?" seems to be asking uncomfortable, unanswerable questions of its listeners: is it possible that in the face of all that is done and will be done in the name of God, that God still means anything... and then the song brings us from that question to an answer: no... God is dead and it is we (his followers) who have killed him.

again, i don't think it's Sabbath saying, "there is no hope, God is dead and everything is pointless" but i do think that they, like Shakespeare, are inhabiting the point of view of someone they want to deconstruct and understand, someone with a religiously violent, fundamentalist mindset and through this perspective, are asking, "if this is what your God has brought you to, then what was the value of your God? if God commands you to kill your enemies, then doesn't your God die with them?"

Geezer's surprisingly insightful lyrics use the metaphor of the communion ritual that points us to a very specific conclusion about a religion steeped in violence: the problem stems from an inherent ideological imbalance; too much wine and not enough bread, too much blood and not enough body. the perspective they have adopted to convey this problem is an individual haunted by doubt, question, and fear:

"lost in the darkness, i fade from the light,
faith of my father, my brother, my maker and savior,
help me make it through the night,

blood on my conscience, and murder in mind,
out of my gloom, i rise up from my tomb into impending doom,
now my body is my shrine,

the blood runs free, the rain turns red, 
give me the wine, you keep the bread,
the voices echo in my head,
is god alive or is god dead?"

this is not the last time on the record, Black Sabbath will address the subject. the album closer is a lumbering giant of revenge-themed darkness that makes clear the true subject of Black Sabbath's 2013 aggression.

"Thirteen" is a rejection and a deconstruction of religious violence, both as cause and effect, physically, psychologically, sexually; Black Sabbath is still arguing against the culture from which it came and yet not with an entirely unsympathetic voice. both "God is Dead?" and "Dear Father" take a complicated, antithetical approach to the topic by taking on the perspective of individuals who are driven to kill for and because of their religion. 

"God is Dead?" opens the argument. "Dear Father" closes it, but without entirely resolving it either... like all great art and artists, Black Sabbath is posing difficult question to its audience and offering no reprieve from it's reverberations. if the first song in the metal binary, asks, "what is the point of a religion for which ones kills?" the second answers with the equally unnerving postulation that "the violence of a religion will turn back on itself." 

Sabbath offers no comforts here. as it should be. they, again, offer no alternative to the status quo, they only offer what they have from the beginning: a blistering, mirror-into-your-face critique...

but all of that philosophy aside, let's get to Mr. Tony Iommi... 

Tony Iommi, was a working-class italian kid from depressed, industrial Birmingham, UK who it turns out could, in fact, play a guitar just like he's ringing a bell... Iommi had played for a number of bands in his young life (including back up for Jimmy Hendrix at one point) before he finally booked a touring gig and his ticket out of the post-war wasteland that was the English midlands in the 1960's. 

the very last day before he was to take off for rock and roll stardom, he left the industrial plant for his kitchen table and a home-made lunch, confidently telling his mum and dad that he would not be returning to work later that day or ever again. 

as a rebuttal, Iommi's mother reminded him that he was, in fact, an Iommi, and that his particular lineage did not neglect to finish the work which they had promised to start. 

so a begrudging young Iommi returned to his industrial plant job and promptly, unceremoniously sawed the tops of two of his fingers off in a machine accident...

Iommi's career, Black Sabbath's future and the future of heavy metal should have ended right then and there. but after much pain and trial, after much adaptation and determination, Iommi's mother had won the argument, and Tony was determined to finish the work that he had started. 

the industrious little monster made make-shift finger tips for himself out of metal... METAL, i mean, how bloody metal does one get? they hurt like hell to play on and limited him by forcing the young guitarist to loosen the strings of his electric instrument significantly. eventually, he learned to play with his cyborgian fingertips and the result was a down-tuned and heavier sound than anything he or the world of rock and roll had imagined until then. 

Tony Iommi is one of the greatest musicians to whom i have ever had the pleasure of listening. he is the reason for Black Sabbath's fame, its heart and soul, its beginning and its future. Tony Iommi is the be all and the end all of heavy metal music.... and mostly what he wrote was the blues. 

if you listen to Black Sabbath's fist record, what you will hear after their staggering heavy metal opening, is predominantly a blues-jazz-rock album. Iommi's unquestionable genius comes from turning what would be jazz and blues riffs into heavy metal anthems by down-tuning and leaning heavily on their more aggressive aspects i.e. speed and complexity.

if you have ever heard the song "Paranoid" (and you have, even if you don't think you have) easily one of Sabbath's most famous tunes, it's interesting to know that Tony Iommi wrote the music for the song because the record company needed 2 and a half more minutes to fill the album. so he set to back to work, as his mother once perilously commanded him and within an hour or so, the most recognizable heavy metal riff in musical history was born. 

Ozzy has always been fond of saying that every time he heard a new Iommi riff, he would voice to his friend, "that's it... you're never going to get any bigger or better than that." and with every new riff, Iommi proved him wrong... 

"God is Dead?" contains one of the most exciting, blues-turned-metal selections that i have ever heard in my 34 years on this planet (with the exception of the Mozartian "Lament" which closes the epochal "War Pigs" and could be the best thing i have ever heard the man produce) and considering that he is my favorite of all rock guitarist, that, my friends, is nothing to turn up your cross at...

the single is followed by something that sounds more like an A side from one of Ozzy's late-80's drug addled solo efforts that kinda suck ass. "Loner" doesn't really do anything for the album beyond a mildly interesting bridge but thematically, musically, it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the tracks... so let's move on.

up next is one of my favorite efforts on "Thirteen" and just further confirmation that what Sabbath has managed to create in its latest, isn't just great nostalgia, but rather an important final chapter of the band's work.

"Zeitgeist" begins with a simple melancholy baseline, a now-acoustic Iommi, Brad Wilke on the bongos and Ozzy in a fully ethereal lament. "Planet Caravan" from Sabbath's second album is one of their well-known mournful ballads that tells the story of a humanity that has left the earth in "a purple blaze" and "pass on by, the crimson eye of the great god mars, as (they) travel the universe..." the story implied by the song which begins similarly in lament, with bongos and Iommi on some kind of Spanish lute or some shit, is that the human race, having destroyed itself through war, now floats through the universe, looking for hope among the stars.

"Zeitgeist" concludes that same story begun decades before as that of a dying people, adrift in the void, having exhausted their resources and lost their hope, putting their faith in god for a redemptive descent to a second planet Earth. 

it is here that Geezer Butler is at his lyrical best. Ozzy tells a great story of Geezer calling him up while they were writing what i consider their inarguably greatest album, "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and dictating lyrics to him over the phone. Geezer simply spoke the words as Ozzy wrote them down: 

"Sorcerers of madness / Selling me their time
Child of god sitting in the sun / Giving peace of mind
Fictional seduction / On a black snow sky
Sadness kills the superman / Even fathers cry"

Ozzy's response, having read the lyrics once over was something to the effect of "what are you smoking right now and where did you get it?"

Geezer is just as evocative, clever, and melancholy as ever on "Zeitgeist" as he closes the mythology created all those years ago:

"astral engines in reverse, i'm falling through the universe again.

down among the dead man's vision. faded dreams and nuclear fission spent.

the strings of theory are holding up the race. 

the puppets falling to the ground.

the love i feel as i fly endlessly through space. 

lost in time i wonder will my ship be found.

on this sinking ship i travel, faster than the speed of light.

not-so-supernova burns, the black holes turn and fade from light.

the strings of theory hide in the human race. the answers buried underground.

the love i feel as i fly endlessly through space.

lost in time i wonder will my ship be found.

and very soon the bomber's moon will show us light 

and as we crash we'll pray and kiss and say goodnight... good night."  

Sabbath has returned to their metaphor for human civilization as one drifting hopefully through the stars as one that is now flying "endlessly through space," one that has trusted that its own technology will save it, and at the end, one that is lost, alone and preparing to say 'goodnight.' 

like i said, Sabbath doesn't offer us much hope here. they simply describe what they see around them; a faded dream of the future that has left us isolated and adrift. and in our final moments we return, predictably to the ones we love and the god we fear... 

Black Sabbath, everybody... Black Sabbath. 

one of my favorite things about this song however is that, traditionally, these kind of melancholy ballads were really just gorgeous delivery-devices for an Iommi solo on the ancient-Caspian Ukelele or whatever-the-crap he was interested in playing that week, and had no real summit. so, gorgeous though-they-were, they just remained at one continuous level; a sort of a slow churning which is repeated so that Iommi can provide the pinnacle with his solo work. "Zeitgeist" is the first Sabbath ballad that I think has a distinct build, it really travels somewhere, it arcs. it isn't just a great Sabbath song, it's a great new Sabbath song. something we may never have heard from them before: one of the great songs on the record and really one of the places i think an argument can be made for the importance of "Thirteen" in the Black Sabbath canon.

the album then moves to "Age of Reason" which simply furthers the themes i have already expounded on but with a much less subjective form of storytelling, including fleeting homages to their earlier work "Into the Void" from the third album, Master of Reality and "Everything Comes and Goes (Under the Sun)" from my favorite of all Sabbath records, "Volume 4." 

next is the second weakest offering next to "Loner," a song called, "Live Forever" which has something of a Ronnie James Dio feel to it and just doesn't resonate with me the way the rest of the album does...

and now we come to the penultimate and ultimate offerings of "Thriteen"...

remember how i was saying that Black Sabbath began as a blues band and it would be cool if they had covered an old blues song like they did on their first album... here they do us one better and write an old-school Sabbath blue-jazz tune called "Damaged Soul." it has all the slow-driving riff-based blues sound one would expect but with a distinctly Sabbath "i'm too evil to live" take that gives the song a superlative uniqueness... oh, and also it ends with an Iommi jazz breakdown, backed up by the harmonica... played by Ozzy Osbourne. 

"Damaged Soul" is the first song since "The Wizard" to include Ozzy on the harmonica, the jazz riff that serves as the songs conclusion is so fun and infective that suddenly, and without any anticipation, i am listening to a couple of old-blues musicians jamming with their best friends just to see where they can go... and at once i am 16 again and listening to the first Sabbath record alone in my room, trying not to be too loud, so as to avoid waking up my parents, two rooms down.

"Dear Father" is the album closer, a song from the point of view of someone molested by a man of the church, whose life has been taken from him, and as a response decides to take the life of that same man. the song recalls musically the eponymous track to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and its dominant-culture critique from the mid-seventies, "nobody will ever let you know, why you ask the reason why, they'll just tell you that you're on your own, and fill you head all full of lies." 

here, Sabbath is finishing its final album the way it began its first, with a critique on a religion based in violence, one that is damaging our souls, psychologically and physically, a violence that like all of Sabbath's greatest terrors, is self-inflicted. Geezer's unapologetic lyrics, scored menacingly by Iommi and voiced with such simultaneous sadness and aggression by Ozzy, reminds me of what i have always loved about Black Sabbath: they are unafraid to tell the truth, no matter how ugly or scary or frightening a picture they may be painting, they hold it up to us the listener and offer no solutions, no safety from their simple yet dangerous ideas, they offer only a description of the problem as they see it, the thing that made them write music in the first place:

"Dear Father... forgive me, i know just what i'm doing,
in silence, this violence, will leave your life in ruin..."

"Thriteen" is a surprisingly artistic album, one that asks questions to which is does not have the answer, one that digs deeply into the subject of religious violence and pulls no punches in the investigation. it is the kind of fearless, uncompromising, counter culture thesis that gave birth to the blues, to heavy metal, and to Black Sabbath.

and it ends the way it began, the gravedigger puts on the forceps, and as the first Black Sabbath album opened, the last Black Sabbath album closes: with thunder, rain and the distant tolling of bells... take a bow, gentleman (and leave a little room for Bill).  

"Thirteen" is an important album for the originators of heavy music. it's the kind of record that challenges and inspires; that pulls no punches and never apologizes... it's the kind of record that four kids, born and raised in the slums of Birmingham, England, with no prospects but the instruments in their hands and a deeply ingrained, blue-collar work ethic would have needed to hear just about this time, almost a half a century ago...

  

PELAGIAL by The Ocean 

one of my favorite quotes about the theatre and really about the creative process as a whole comes from the playwright of the existential masterpiece "Waiting for Godot," Samuel Beckett:   

"the artist's journey is inward and downward."

it's always resonated with me and sat, quietly in the back of my mind in the decade and a half that i have made my career in the theatre.  

the german progressive metal band, the Ocean begins its latest album, the heavily conceptual "Pelagial" with the following lyrics...

"The light is fading.
Everything dissolves in blue
As we become one with what surrounds.
Crawl back into the womb
But it's getting colder.
There's no comfort in this place
Even now that we're still so far away.
From this point on there's only one direction: down.

From this point on all we do
Is let ourselves sink down
Until the bottom, until we hit the ground.
Sinking towards the unknown inside of ourselves.
Towards me and towards you,
Towards the essence, towards truth."

and so it begins, with piano and cello, both of which find their way back into the album, woven between the harmonious and discordant dynamic that is the hallmark of the Ocean's sound. as the music progresses, as the pressure increases, the perspective descends deeper and the album gets... well, heavier. 

the title of the record, "Pelagial" comes from ancient greek and means "open sea," the metaphorical and conceptual through-line is from the perspective of an individual, descending through each of the oceanic zones respectively: Epipelagiac, Mesopelagiac, Bathyalpelagiac, Abyssopelagiac, Hadopelagic, and two titles which refer to the bottom of the Ocean, Demersal and Benthic... and each of those also happen to be the first part of individual song names with subtitles like "Boundless Vasts" and "The Origin of Our Wishes."

like many of our great thinkers and every rapper in the history of the Universe, "Pelagial" gets deep. as the album moves forward, it also moves downward and inward, traveling from lightness to dark, from levity to gravity until the individual subject comes face to face with loss, with loneliness, with the darker side of their own nature and ultimately with the nature of existence.   

The Ocean, who have undergone 40 musician changes since their inception at the turn of the millennium (sounds like a lot of shuffling but remember they're German so it was probably very efficient) are coming off of one of the greatest heavy metal albums i have ever heard: a double-cd, graduate-thesis, titled, individually, "Anthropocentric" and "Heliocentric".

"Anthropocentric / Heliocentric" were essentially the A side and B side to the band's comprehensive philosophical rejection of Judeo-Christianity by way of philosophical, scientific, and artistic metaphor. they traversed the works of Nietzsche, Darwin, and Dostoyevsky, each as a vehicle for a comprehensive critique of the dominant religious culture of the western world. 

how very metal of them. 

but the Ocean is metal with which a lot of metal doesn't wish to meddle (i don't know, i get weirder with age). to be entirely honest and self-critical, metal fans are often so limited and purist in their tastes that bands like Mastodon and the Ocean receive critical short shrift because they are not as formulaic as many of their contemporaries. 

to put it plainly, many metal music devotees abhor change. if it were up to the majority of aficionados, Metallica never transformed into pop sympathetic, ballad-writing, non-anger emotion having, shadows of their former selves that they were on the albums "Load" and Reload" (which are terrible albums and have no business being included in the cannon of Metallica). most Metallica fans would probably have been greatly satisfied if the band had just made 13 different re-recordings of "Master of Puppets" and then jumped off a bridge and into the Sarlac pit... but IF that had happened, Metallica also would have never written their piece de resistance, "And Justice For All".

so there is a delicate balance to be walked with advancing the formula of a heavy metal sound. my sense from what i have read in the ever-prescient "comments section" of album reviews and metal news sites, is that metal-enthusiasts aren't interested in a band walking the line... they want them to stay right where they are, where they were on their last album; the one they liked. and in this desire, they have done a deep disservice to the medium by completely ignoring the fact that metal is not simply a product to be consumed. it is an art.

when i walk into Subway, i get the same sandwich. every time. because, that's the sandwich that tastes the way i want it to taste... the sandwich is a product that i have designed based on my limited choices of veggies and other various accouterments, whose explicit purpose is to fulfill my longing for a tuna on wheat. 

metal is not a sandwich (quote me on it). heavy metal is an art form, the same way that rock and roll, blues, jazz, and hip hop are art forms and you cannot expect artists to simply re-create the album you liked last time without growth and change or else what you're listening to has ceased to be an art and has instead been relegated to being nothing more than a product.

heavy metal is not your tuna on wheat.    

progressive metal bands like the Ocean are and have been since Black Sabbath dedicated to expanding and challenging the genre and its listeners. and in a medium that rarely rewards divergence, albums like "Anthropocentric/Heliocentric" are vulnerable to collecting such derisive and dismissive monikers as "homework metal" or "college metal".

ya know, 'homework' and 'college' the two worst things in the universe for people who want to change the way the world works...  

much of metal culture is based in a mindset that has become as rigid and ideological as the very status quo against which it has built itself up in opposition. 

"Anthropocentric/Heliocentric" weren't albums you could put on and just rock out to (well, you could but you could also read the lyrics and actually fucking learn something)... it really required something of the listener: it made you want to google the lyrics and research the subject matter. i had never read "The Grand Inquisitor" by Dostoyevsky, but because "Anthropocentric" included direct quotations from it as lyrical and thematic content, i researched it, read it, and built up my understanding of the world with it... 

i guess i have trouble understanding what the detriment is to such a philosophical investment by musicians into the music which they create... 

the Ocean is making music that does not simply satisfy... it challenges; it questions and unnerves, it upsets by reflecting and refracting, by going heavier, darker and deeper and not just aesthetically. metal needs more challenges. people need more challenges. and our world needs more challenges, or else we will simply retreat into the dust-covered reality of the mentally stagnant consumer-opolis that Wall Street and organized religion have agreed upon for us.

"Pelagial" does not retreat from this task... but unlike its predecessor, the album doesn't project itself outward onto an object of criticism as much as it spirals inward, embarking on an introspective journey into the origin of human hope. 

and the self-referential nature of the title is not lost on the group. after crafting what was a truly expansive effort of heavy metal music, the band descended into a period of dissolution. in fact, the album was never intended to have lyrics...

it was originally conceived as an instrumental record, but lyricist, Loïc Rossetti, at the last hour, recovered from a vocal disorder and managed to voice "Pelagial" with all the depth and complexity of a man on the verge of abdicating his place in one of metal's premiere incarnations. 

i'm glad the album does include lyrics, because they are of intrinsic importance to the work, and add an amazing dimension to its sound but the album also had to work without them. the band even released "Pelagial" with an entirely instrumental version to accompany its official release, which is an equally exhilarating way to experience the record.  

as a result, the sound of "Pelagial" never settles. there is a constant sense of movement, nothing is too formulaic or too conclusive. upon first listen, i thought that the album had skipped back on itself (skipped, listen to me... like it was on a CD in the 1880's or something) because there are two songs which begin nearly identically to one another. within moments one realizes that they are not the same song, because the echo has been altered by the music that came between the first and second iteration. the album is reflecting itself, it gives the listener the briefest sense of fleeting familiarity and then moves on, sinking deeper as the album and the listener are left with a distinct sense of loss; that feeling and that sound is now unreachable because we've fallen too far and the pressure is intensifying.

on the record's second track (third including the intro which is an instrumental of a piano slowly finding its way to a melody with the sound of water bubbling to the surface around it) the sense of loss is crystalized by the lyrics and built into a gorgeous piano and string ballad:

"try to make sense out of what we've been through
and still i justify the things i used to do.
i don't believe in nothing - but i believe in you.
take my word and move on."

this is the sound of letting go, specifically of letting go of someone else. the central perspective in the album shifts, and begins talking to itself (about the other):

"i wish i could recall every word, everything you said.
you're digging in the past: a deep hole that will wolf you down.
i've chosen to embrace all the things that i cannot change
but i'm not sure if this helps to relieve you from bitterness.

the song then ends with an idea that is central to the album and receives a refrain at the conclusion of the next track:

"how much control do we have over what we wish for?"

the record progresses seamlessly. there are track breaks but one would be hard-pressed to find them without watching the display screen. one of the reviews i read for this album used "Pelgial" as a way of differentiating between a CD and an album. a CD, even a conceptual one has a clearly defined single. it has repeatable and riffs, distinct tracks and songs that can be either played or skipped (which is also applicable to parts within the song). in "Pelagial" nothing is skippable. i have never listened to the album as a series of songs but rather as one continuous journey in which every moment is necessary to understand the whole. 

Pelagial is not a sandwich. it's not even a CD. its an album in which the sum of all its parts do not equal it as a whole... 

in the next track, which contains some of the most sublime music on the album, the individual begins to question what it was they wanted before they began this downward trek... and as the pressure continues to build, the focus turns further inside and they openly wonder who is in control: the wisher or the wish?  

"i wanted to shape and change them
but it's they who've changed me.
i wanted to get on top of them
but they wouldn't let me.

They're elusive as air:
as soon as we name them they are gone
their meaning disappears.
melts like and icicle in the sun."

and it is here that "Pelagial" takes a decidedly darker turn. the beauty of the album isn't that it gets progressively heavier in sound. when you think about the prospect of that, it ends up being musically a bit gimmicky and unfeasible. when the Ocean includes music that feels as if it is lifting from the downward progression of that which came before it, it is not the music which descends but rather the concept itself. 

the journey grows dark and deeper, the light fades further and the pressure begins to find its way in... 

the shift into something more bleak begins to make itself known in the album's fifth track "Bathyapelagiac III: Disequilibrated" which begins:

"we sink through boundless vasts of blue
when we come home at last: you'll see for yourself
just how far down into the black these rays can reach" 

the line is later repeated only with an amendment to the last line. the journey has changed the truth of what we know about ourselves and now the lyrics reflect that:

"when we come home at last: you'll see how silent it is."

and if you notice, there is an even more subtle shift in perspective. the individual point of view began by describing their experience, saying goodbye to the other that had began the journey with them, and once lost, the discovery became an introspection of the self. now 5 tracks in, the voice jumps outside of the individual and becomes a 2nd person narrative... 

as we continue into the Abyssal layers of the sea, the language becomes third person, the music becomes a mournful, soaring ballad and the language deeply metaphorical:

"she was standing close to the shore,
she watched the waves below,
and she said 'you'll understand, later.'

then she cast a stone into the foam,
while something occurred to her,
and something broke in her."

the towering offering of the albums latter half comes as an epic and devastating observation on human nature entitled "Hadopelagiac II: Wishes in Dreams" Hadopelagiac, is the term given to the depths of the sea trenches which plummet far below the sea floor proper and takes its name from "Hades" the ancient greek word for Hell. this is the song i am always tempted to skip because i am personally unnerved by the ramifications of the lyrics. i'll let the language speak for itself:

"i can feel 
these circles will always touch in more than one point
repelled and pulled towards each other: repelled again.
unconditional projection alternates with short,
fervid intervals of perfection and boundless bonding.

but to be sure: trust is to be re-evaluated
while our aging promises turn to plights
and their weight and meaning changes...

so let them live with their contradictions
between what they call passion
and the constraints of modern living
which leave no space for the arational.

and most importantly, let them have confidence and peace
let them be powerless...

all these restrictions are self-inflicted:
let them be helpless.
let them embrace symbols of commitment 
to compensate for the lack of it...

what they call passion is just the turmoil 
caused by repression of their ambitions.
let them believe."

if you, my dear reader, can hear and/or read those lyrics and not find anything to be mildly uncomfortable about, you probably need to re-read it... and if you still don't find anything to be uncomfortable about... you might need to put away the blog and embark on an introspective journey of your own. 

okay, i'll just let that wonderful little hallmark card sit with you for a while and move on to the final moments of the album. 

the term "Benthic" refers to the Ocean floor and includes the Hadopelagial zone, and is fittingly littered with the detritus of the corpses that have sunk down to the earth at the bottom of the sea. so it is fitting that the sound of "Benthic" is that of the ominous approach of something with which we, as individuals are not equipped to deal. 

"Benthic: the Origin of our Wishes" carries the sound of doom. not doom metal (which just means that you sound like you're in the seventies) but actual doom. to once again reference that most horrifying of Shakespearean tragedies, doom is the sound of the knocking which grows louder and begins to undo Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. doom is the sound of the heart beating beneath the floor boards. it is the sound of anxiety and of the creeping terror that all the evil you have done in your life is coming home to find you. 

the lyrics read as such:

"we are now on the threshold.
hold your breath and close your eyes.

this is what you have been hoping 
and waiting for all your life.

but don't have any illusions:
i will not forgive you.

and the worst thing is
that you won't ever forgive yourself for this.

there is no one here.
no one can harm them here.
oh, god..."

in case you were wondering, i have no idea what those last two lines mean. why the voice suddenly changes from "you" to "them" and ends with the exclamation of "Oh, God!" i do not understand and am always as simultaneously confused and appropriately unsettled by... something about its logic evades me but perhaps that is why it's so effective. 

the album then trails off into the long slow distortion of the electrical instruments, in clouding feedback and extended distortion accompanied by the even longer, slower journey of the air making its way back up to the ocean's surface, reminding us, just briefly, of the depths to which we have sunk in "Pelagial." 

it is fitting that i was able to talk about Black Sabbath's last record back to back with the Ocean most recent. i hoped to contextualize the final chapter of heavy metal's history, with the unquestionable standard bearers of its future. 

in "Pelagial" the Ocean have created not just a great album, but an album that redefines greatness within its genre. this is one of the albums, with which all metal offerings from here on out will be compared. 

we metal-nerds will talk about the progression of the medium from its undeniable origins in "Paranoid" its aggressive expansion into "And Justice For All," and its thematic and conceptual climax in "Crack the Skye." 

"Pelagial" will write a new chapter, not just about what metal can be, but about what music can be and hopefully it will changes some minds within and without the community about just what it means to make a heavy metal record. 

this is an album that not only takes it's place alongside the greatest heavy metal albums of all time, for me, it takes its place among some of the greater musical endeavors of all time... 

none of which, unfortunately, can ever compare to the greatness we, as fellow listeners, can all only imagine to have come from the most superlative of all musical juggernauts...

Mega-Funkel.