2 posts tagged “drone”

Wrote by Soup

Receiving a copy of Genevieve by Velvet Cacoon from Southern Lord was somewhat of a surprise to me. I've had the vinyl edition for almost a year, I'd guess, and to be honest, I just assumed the CD version had been out for about as long.

I'm not complaining, though. Writing about a band (the names Josh and Angela are the only clues given as to who they actually are – and there's speculation that Angela doesn't exist) as utterly absurd as Velvet Cacoon is something I've wanted to do for quite a while, and honestly, I was actually considering just writing a review of it earlier based on the vinyl edition. For those who don't know the story, Velvet Cacoon is a Portland based ambient black metal band that extols the virtues of DXM, the active ingredient in Robitussin. They made a name for themselves spreading rumors about the band's supposed ecofascist activism, the death of a band member in the Cascades, and accounts of incredibly violent live shows. On the album I'm reviewing now, they allegedly used a homemade invention called a “diesel harp” - a guitar with diesel-powered pickups amplified through aquariums. Of course, all of these things were later revealed to probably be completely untrue (except the diesel harp thing; in case your common sense hadn't tipped you off as you were reading it, Josh openly admitted it was after the album's release). Eventually they put recordings of Portland-based dream pop artist, Korouva (listen to this stuff; it's good) on their MySpace page as their own and faced further controversy after the plagiarism accusations. The band's response: to admit that everything about them is a joke, that they're horrible people and an excellent example of what too many drugs will do to a person, and announce a still-unreleased new album. Of course, this presented a hell of a lot more questions than it answered, and the band's intentions are even more unclear at this point than they were before.

Recently, Southern Lord picked up a couple of the recordings that were theirs to reissue. Northsuite, an earlier recording, and Genevieve, which is their actual debut album. And for a “joke” band, this is a really great, really powerful album.

At the core of the sound here is fuzzed-out, noisy black metal. Droning ambient passages hide surprising melodies and drugged out, distant vocals. A thick, distorted haze surrounds everything, from the drugged out lullabies presented on “P.S. Nautical” and “Avalon Polo” to the sleepy clockwork guitars of “Laudanum” that fade out for a vocal break and then again for an ambient passage toward the end of the track. The title track probably sounds the most like traditional black metal, with fast drumming and buzzsaw guitars providing the backdrop for tortured raspy vocals and subtle keyboard holding down the melody. The last track, “Bete Noir” takes up a good third of the playing time of the album. This track is the album's comedown, a slowly building ambient track that exercises considerable restraint, consisting mostly of ambient noise and layered keyboard melodies, all hanging in the background for 17 minutes, getting noticeably louder and then disappearing completely in the last 30 seconds.

As for finding further information on this band, you're essentially limited to what Wikipedia and Google searches turn up. They haven't really maintained an official website (their current site features nothing more than an e-mail link and a picture of a lady on a bike) in quite some time, and they will probably never tour. Still, they're responsible for some of the most oddly atmospheric black metal in recent memory, and I have to highly recommend it to anyone who's into that sort of thing.

Soup wrote this:

Asva is a band helmed by Stuart Dahlquist, formerly of Burning Witch, Sunn o))), and Goatsnake, and recorded with members of bands like Burning Witch, Mr. Bungle, and Earth. You probably don't need to know much beyond that to have some idea of what this sounds like already, but leaving this at a paragraph wouldn't do it justice. Their new album for Southern Records (not to be confused with Southern Lord, who I initially thought was putting this out), What You Don't Know is Frontier, is a sparser, more composed, more varied take on the metallic drone pioneered by Sunn o))), and ultimately, manages to be a pretty damn good album.

The first track, “What You Don't Know in Frontier” (sic), is a Sunn o)))-style drone, sped up, with a very prominent organ in front of it. Noisy, fuzzed-out, feedbacking guitars drift in and out, and give way to atmospheric, Earth-y leads, subtle changes in the rhythm guitar, and so-slow-they're-barely-there drums.

“Christopher Columbus” is built on a subharmonic bass drone that sounds like the movement of the ocean, with cymbal crashes adding a sense of impending doom. Inevitably, the feedbacking guitars come in and drone mechanically over it, sounding something like a doomed vessel lost at sea. Drones are piled on and phased in and out over time. Drums and metallic chugging create a surprisingly rhythmic build-up to slow, actually musical sounding guitar leads.

“A Game in Hell, Hard Work in Heaven” starts out with a clean, contemplative guitar on top of a subtle organ drone. Organs overtake the guitars, evoking more of a sense of hope than anything else on the album so far. Chanting vocals in a language I honestly can't identify come in over sometimes discordant keyboards and an Earth-y lead guitar, which all eventually builds into a meandering climax of sound.

The last track, “A Trap For Judges” is a sprawling, almost 25-minute epic that builds from a keyboard drone up to a strangely hopeful sounding cloud of feedback, keyboards, and the ever-present downtuned rhythm guitar and drums trying to crush it all underfoot. This song turns into probably the closest thing to Sunn o))) these guys do on this album, with the trademark Sunn o))) guitar dynamic, with the “rhythm” guitar stomping around like an angry dinosaur, and the “lead” droning on top of it. The biggest difference is, these guys actually speed it up quite a bit, although still keeping it incredibly slow. It breaks down into an organ drone that builds into a hopeful climax and an awesome ending for the album.

I can't find any tour dates or anything for these guys, but everything I've read about their live set suggests that you should probably actually wear earplugs for once if you catch them. The album is out today on Southern Records. While I doubt this album will change your mind if you're not into this sort of thing, generally, fans of Sunn o))), Burning Witch, or Southern Lord style metal will definitely dig it. More info can, of course, be found at the band's MySpace page.