A Difficult 2011, 5 to 1

Ah, 2011. Wasn’t that a time? Remember the clothes? Wow, what were we all thinking? I gotta delete those pictures! Food tasted better then too—fresher, more buttery. Remember how stuff “went viral,” especially that weird patch on my lower lip? Thank god that cleared up. 2011 was the year that a lot of things happened, that’s for sure. Here’s the final look back at my little corner of the world—the last five entries in A Difficult 2011.

5. Graveyard—Hisingen Blues (Nuclear Blast)

I’d seen Graveyard’s first album around, and it looked like the sort of thing I’d enjoy. I was all about the Witchcraft, though, when it came to my Swedish retro-rock needs. I caught the buzz on Hisingen Blues right away and got the album as soon as I saw it. I was glad I did, because I discovered that Graveyard’s supercharged blues rock is very much its own thing. This record cooks from start to finish, fueled by feel, groove, and passion—the latter mainly due to Joakim Nilsson’s tortured “baby done me wrong” delivery. They’ve already released the follow-up, which I’m hesitant to get. It’s hard to imagine they could produce another album packed with as many big moments and wicked songs as Hisingen Blues. I guess I’m going to have to find out eventually, though.

4. The Gates of Slumber—The Wretch (Metal Blade)

The Gates of Slumber appeared to be the kings of epic, Robert E Howard-inspired doom, then they went and released this sparse, despairing, and personal record. The Wretch captured the essence of doom—the personal abyss from which you instinctively seize a few power chords to give voice to your deepest misery. It’s about brave, honest communication, not about death growls and guitars tuned way, way down. Such tactics seem like cheap party tricks in the face of The Wretch. TGoS are one of the coolest bands ever, but this one was a real sock to the gut.

3. Primordial—Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand (Metal Blade)

Ireland’s Primordial are rightly revered by now, and Redemption… was yet another triumph. To make my top 3, an album needs to carry some serious emotional weight, and Redemption... certainly does. It bears the weight of centuries of torment and bloodshed on its shoulders. This album was so good I reviewed it twice.

2. Hammers of Misfortune—17th Street (Metal Blade)

As you can tell from this Top 5, 2011 was all about songs. I don’t care what kind of new extremes of brutality or cutting-edge genre innovation you’ve cooked up, it means nothing if you don’t have songs. Holy Christ on a crutch, Hammers of Misfortune have songs—real heavy metal songs. John Cobbett and his crew of old hands and new recruits put together an album that achieves a new level of craftsmanship and class for Hammers of Misfortune. The Fields/Church of Broken Glass album(s) showed how lush and expansive their material could get. 17th Street took that melodic sophistication and toughened it up to suit these tough times. “The Day the City Died” was the song of the year, a lament for the Bay Area and those who’ve had to move out of a city where property speculation has replaced any real industry and sense of community. Living in Vancouver, I can relate. “This one’s called 'I’m moving to Portland'” goes the chorus. A friend of mind did exactly that in 2011.

1. Red Fang—Murder the Mountains (Relapse)

2011 was looking pretty lacklustre until I took a chance on this thing at Scrape Records. After taking it home and putting it on, it proceeded to drink all the beer in the house, crush the empties on its forehead, and overturn all the furniture. Hello, new best friend. Sometimes you get a vibe from a band; that they have a sensibility that’ll mesh well with your own predilections. Portland’s Red Fang were that band. I already knew they made the best videos. Their new album delivered too, with loud, rowdy songs that nevertheless went down some cunning paths, aided by ingenious production and arrangements. Murder the Mountains turned everything around for me, and helped me stomp through the rest of the year. I still haven’t seen them live, but the opportunity will come, I’m sure.

Primordial — Redemption at the Puritan's Hand (Metal Blade)

This is another masterpiece from Irish black/pagan stalwarts Primordial. You could argue that Opeth or Enslaved can stand alongside them in terms of consistency, although recent albums by both bands have plenty of detractors. I’ve never read anyone accusing Primordial of dropping a discographical turd. For me, Primordial’s main “problem” is their consistency—I don’t know if they have that one “Hall of Fame” album for the ages. Hence, I listen to each new album a lot then file it away till the next one (I’d hate to part with any of them, though). Maybe Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand will be the one. I have been playing it a lot lately. I’ve tried to get sick of it, but it refuses to get old for me.

When I get a new Primordial release, I worry that all the songs will fall into the same rhythmic rut. The rolling 6/8 feel is Primordial’s thing and I feel they’re a little too comfortable with it. I was happy to hear that they break out of it a couple times on Redemption… on “God’s Old Snake” and “The Puritan’s Hand.” “Lain With the Wolf” also stands out for its unique rhythm, a propulsive, ultra-fast triplet feel that I don’t think I’ve ever heard in a metal song before. It sounds like it was a difficult song to record. The drums are right on the edge, but they always come back to hit hard on the “one” with the help of the locked-in bass line. The song generates huge momentum, and by the time it charges into the final frenetic 90 seconds you’re feeling as exhausted as the band must have been laying it down.

Singer (as opposed to vocalist, note) A.A. Nemtheanga is as articulate and passionate as ever here. He made last year’s Blood Revolt album a genuinely moving experience, and his work on Redemption… proves he can still go for the throat and the heart. “Bloodied Yet Unbowed” is the kind of song you want played at your funeral; a grim hymn to defiance and an instant classic that I’m sure Primordial will be playing live for the rest of their career. You can’t write a line like “Raise a glass, raise hell” without expecting people to respond in kind!

May Gigs: Paganfest and Gojira

Paganfest II, May 13 at the Commodore Ballroom
With a few days left before Paganfest II hit town, I realized that I’d be a fool to miss a chance to see Primordial. So I plunked down $35 at Scrape Records and got my ticket. I went solo, Billy No-Mates style. I should have dragged a friend or two along, because attendance turned out to be dismal. The Commodore was only about a quarter full. The troo pagans in the crowd—some sporting horned Viking helmets and one bloke in chainmail—must have felt right at home on the open tundra of that famous dance floor. I missed Swashbuckle and Blackguard, arriving just in time for Moonsorrow. Based on the half hour tracks on V: Hävitetty, the only Moonsorrow album I have, I expected them to play maybe two songs. They edited themselves, though, and raged through a handful of numbers, all perfectly enjoyable aside from a few distractions: their vocalist’s pasty man-boobs (complete with nip ring), the silly buggers in the crowd getting up some serious slamming momentum in the vast expanse of the pit, and some overly twee musical interludes that brought to mind a Spirit of the West show, only with fewer lesbians in the audience.

Primordial simply slayed. Alan “Nemtheanga” Averill is a fearsome frontman, the kind of go-for-the-throat performer who commands/demands the attention of every punter in the place. I don’t throw the horns at gigs anymore (the gesture having been tainted by Avril Lavigne and a million other clueless douchebags), but when Nemtheanga asked us to throw ’em, I sure as hell did. The seven-song set, drawn mainly from the last two albums, was pure power and emotion, from opener “Empire Falls” to “Heathen Tribes,” and marred only by a guitar malfunction during an otherwise staggering “The Coffin Ships.” It was like seeing Marillion on the Misplaced Childhood tour; a slightly surreal experience that I think about now: “Did that really happen?”

After having witnessed the gig of the year (so far), I didn’t have much hope that Korpiklaani could make any impact on me. Nothing short of the classic Skyclad lineup performing all of Prince of the Poverty Line could have rivalled what Primordial threw down. It didn’t take long to confirm that Korpiklaani were basically a partyin’ polka band, albeit a very heavy and professional one, with a full-time fiddle player and accordionist putting a little too much “folk” into the folk metal. If your only care in the world is finding your way back to the bar for the next beer, they’d be the perfect entertainers. As it was, I headed to the coat check.

Gojira, May 17 at Richard’s on Richards
I arrived too late to catch more than a couple minutes of Car Bomb, and The Chariot were no great shakes in the middle of the bill—lots of energy, but no riffs or songs to speak of, and Botch did it all better 10 years ago—so it was up to Gojira to save the night. They did so easily, with an impeccable set of cyber metal performed with 100 per cent commitment to a packed house. Call them Meshuggah-lite if you want, but it turns out that Gojira are the band I wished Meshuggah had been both times I’ve seen the Swedes. They have distinguishable songs, they have energy and charisma, and they play proper 6-string guitars. Opening with the pulsating hammer-on riffs of “Oroborus,” Gojira were a precision team throughout, separating only to let ace drummer Mario Duplantier take a solo. Placed late in the set, it looked like an exercise in sadomasochism, seeing as the poor guy was already drenched in sweat and grimacing his way through the rhythmic demands of the material. My bones shudder at the thought of having to do that night after night. Guitarist/singer Joe Duplantier (evidently a Beatles fan, judging by his t-shirt) took his own lumps, weathering the occasional crowd-surfer coming feet first at him on the stage. Seeing how the band celebrated the end of the gig by diving in and doing some crowd surfing themselves, they couldn’t have been too offended by the disruptions. Damn impressive stuff from a band on their way to bigger things.

Primordial — The Gathering Wilderness (Metal Blade)

Ireland’s Primordial are one of my favourite black metal bands partly because they’ve grown beyond the conventions of the genre. Instead of grooveless blasting, their rhythms surge at a satisfying pace; instead of adding keyboards to affect cod-symphonic majesty, they build their atmospheres with good old guitars/bass/drums; and instead of screeching, buried vocals, AA Nemtheanga’s singing is understandable and up-front, and of varying timbres—similar to My Dying Bride’s Aaron with his alternating wailing/growling style. Primordial have done some label hopping in their decade together: The Gathering Wilderness is their first for Metal Blade and fifth overall. Despite this instability, they’ve never stopped honing their sound, and here it is spread over an hour of savage, passionate metal, captured with the perfect balance of grime and clarity by doom-master Billy Anderson. Primordial’s main concession to black metal philosophy is their reverence for heritage. They’re aggressively Irish in both their music and lyrics. Their riffs have a pronounced Celtic feel, with broad-stroked strumming that I can imagine working well in an acoustic context. The drums are often tribal, like a mighty bodhran of the gods, as you can hear in the introduction and denoument of the first track, “The Golden Spiral.” This approach manages to retain the uneasy dischord of black metal, and thankfully never descends into Riverdance-style kitsch. The words, written exclusively by AA Nemtheanga, use a lot of nature imagery—the first track alone incorporates the wind, rain, the sky, streams, and forests—to evoke the mysterious forces that beset us; again in keeping with a lot of black metal. “The Coffin Ships,” the album’s emotional centerpiece, is devoted to the Irish famine of 1845–49, when Ireland lost 3 million people to starvation and emigration. (This info courtesy of AA’s booklet notes, another indication of Primoridial’s desire to communicate to its audience.) Primordial also retain black metal’s apocalyptic/genocidal sensibility, unafraid to depict carnage on a massive scale, as they do on the title track where Nemtheanga, personifying the terrible maelstrom gathering to cleanse the world, doles out punishment to men, women, and children "with a rusted blade across their throats." Like Sabbath before them, however, the message behind the lyrical grand guignol is cautionary and moral. Primordial’s strength, their singular style, perhaps contributes to the album’s only weakness, which is a lack of variety between tracks. Each song uses the same rhythm at different velocities, and lasts for 8 or 9 minutes. I would have welcomed one or two digressions, like the sparse, nearly a cappella "Solitary Mourner" from A Journey's End, to disrupt the uniformity of song. Still, it’s not so bad to be overconsistent if you’re consistently good—which Primordial are here.