Seeing as I was linked as something of an online Morris news avenue when rumours of his latest projects started, I thought I’d post this item of delight. From the relevant FaceBook group:

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Subject: FUNDED

Hello

Due to this week’s final confirmation on our funding, your chance to be in the film has just become more real… no specifics yet but it might be worth getting yourself physically fit over the summer. We may need you to do some running on camera this autumn (to cut into our shots from the london marathon last year).

This last word on our financing means we can move from faith to reality and actually start putting together a full team over the next few months. Rewrites continue. There have been meetings about posters(this seems to be far more important than actually getting the film cast, written and shot). Location planning reports are good – we are currently focused on the Alps for Pakistan.

More news when the work kicks in. Meanwhile go and see In The Loop. Chris has been banging on about it since xmas & says it is “very funny” and had him laughing “in three different registers”.

DS
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‘DS’ apparently being Deidre Steed. Good news indeed – can’t wait to see some new Morris, and glad some proper satire is on its way. Quite fancy seeing ‘In the Loop’, even though Iannucci is currently in my bad books. ‘Skin Deep’, his alleged ‘opera’, was so feeble and joke-deprived that – even now – I have been unable to finish writing my piece on it. And I was at the world premiere!

One day…

Wolves In The Throne Room – Black Cascade

Southern Lord (2009)

Even more FACT-age…

Wolves In The Throne Room. While overused nomenclature, Wolves, when used correctly, can evoke a certain snarling menace. The tepid likes of Wolfmother and Wolf Parade have certainly besmirched this signifier in recent years, but there has always been a Wolf Eyes or Rye Wolves to restore sufficiently brutal, flesh-ripping primevalism.

Wolves In The Throne Room scored another one for the good guys with their debut, Diadem of 12 Stars, in 2006. Its beautifully epic, dreamy, yet ominous, artwork was at once bewitching and appropriate. The music – four extensive examples of USBM (that’s the American form of black metal, for those not up on their kvlt abbreviations) – was dynamic and engrossing.

This was around the same time sunnO))) released their last ‘proper’ album, the all-conquering collaboration with Boris, Altar. Since then, sunnO))) have seen fit to tempt us with side projects, while Wolves released another album, an EP, and now this. Such proflicacy, combined with their allegiance to BM (as opposed to the vagaries of drone-, doom- or post-metals) has led to feverish support from discerning metal hordes.

Controversy struck when WITTR decided to change their logo to a Christophe Szpajdel design. He did the Emperor logo, see. This caused consternation among true believers, as the band’s identity was now irrevocably besmirched by legibility and mass production. Obviously, this means nothing. The debut LP didn’t even have the band’s name on the front or back covers. But I suppose it’s another emblem you’ll have to scrawl on your Twilight pencil case.

The logo means especially little in the light of the musical developments. After accusations that the last album, Two Hunters, was rather too similar-and-inferior to Diadems, WITTR started using old-school equipment with Randall (Earth, Grails) Dunn. Perhaps because some semblance of pesky individuality remained. Despite initial misgivings, this has paid off.

The dynamic BM-to-melodic swings of old have largely gone, replaced by more single-minded, unified sounds. The Burzum-inspired, buzz-saw, guitars of the past have been clawed back into the murk of the mix, adding to the accumulating musical miasma leaking out of your speakers. And it’s fucking epic. There are still the time changes one would hope for in quarter-hour songs, and shifts from quiet to loud, but it’s all presented in a synth-integrated, Gestalt-friendly whole, rather like Neurosis’ move back to nature with Times of Grace in 1999.

It’s not all forest-dwelling, subsistence-idyllic harmony though. Step outside the comfort zone, into the world of evil and strife, and you’ll find better recent BM. Like the immense last album from the bizarrely out-of-favour Leviathan. It’s confusing why so many are sleeping on Wrest’s Massive Conspiracy Against All Life, but they shouldn’t because it’s a work of art. And, unlike WITTR (and 90% of po-metal bands), it’s dripping with malicious intent.

Despite the gurning misanthropy that can sometimes be metal’s undoing, all the best examples of the genre – from Sabbath through Carcass, Neurosis and Converge – have managed to balance the outsider-friendly smarts and ideology with refined aggression and ill will. WITTR claim they want fans to ‘prostrate themselves on the floor and cry’. There is a certain melancholic intensity in the latter half of Black Cascade for sure, but if they want us to get that involved, they have to do their bit, and bring the pain.

Mono – Hymn to the Immortal Wind

Conspiracy Records (2009)

More FACT-age…

Post rock’s dead, innit. What was an exciting, experimental avenue in the mid 1990s turned into an earnest search for glistening, actual-rock, perfection at the turn of the century. Both eras had their moments of greatness: Tortoise, the first Papa M album, Ui and Gastr del Sol. Kid A, Levez Vos Skinny Fists Comme Antennas to Heaven and the heartbreakingly perfect Lift To Experience.

But somewhere the bombast was turned up to twelve (modern compression techniques mean “two louder” now constitutes the extra push off the cliff), ‘post-rock’ became ‘indie’ and it all got a bit crap. I blame this decade’s output from Sigur Rós and Explosions In The Sky, as they smothered us in metric tonnes of cotton wool and candy floss; mile upon mile of cod-Romantic dross.

Japan is a bit different though their rockers have a habit of taking arguably stake genres and making something new and great out of them, like Guitar Vader (garage rock), Corrupted (sludge), Ghost (epic folk rock), Xinlisupreme (noise-pop) and Boris (all of the above). And, since 2000, Mono has been refining the art of post-rock.

Their last album, You Are There, was pretty much the peak of this generation of post-rock. Around this time, they blew Jesu off the stage when the two bands toured together. The band also collaborated with the mysterious and wonderful World’s End Girlfriend: has some of his (her? Its?) magic rubbed off?

Yes and no. this is still epic post rock as has become the norm in the last few years. It’s just been refined to the point of no return. Opener ‘Ashes in the Snow’ makes it clear that bigger is better in the eyes of Mono: post-rock is now pre-symphony, as the orchestra swells, the band apparently wooing Hollywood with their massive production.

This is post-rock as soundtrack. Mono’s music always had a visual edge to it, and for most of …Immortal Wind, you can imagine the equivalent of Dark Knight or The Fountain flickering on the silver screen. This is how big the music has become, and if it means I can stop hearing that Clint Mansell tune every time I go to the cinema or watch the football, then all the better.

The album’s peaks are the lengthy ‘Burial at Sea’ (sadly not a dubstep reimagining of Neil Young’s On the Beach) and surprisingly brief ‘Follow the Map’. Both are dynamic works of art; justifying the continued existence of post-rock in this post-everything climate.

That is not to say the music is original. To anyone familiar with the genre, the comparisons come thick and fast. ‘Everlasting Light’, lovely though it is, comes with a scratched-off ‘Godspeed’ label. ‘Pure as Snow (Trails of the Winter Storm)’ is an uninspired – and less subtle – retread of Mogwai’s genre-high ‘Ex-Cowboy’. ‘Silent Flight, Sleeping Dawn’ is promising, but too short to effectively use the Mono dynamic.

Hymn to the Immortal Wind is the definition of a genre piece. While executed with aplomb and much enthusiasm, one has to imagine this is it for this type of music. Whether Mono go on to soundtrack the next Chris Nolan film, or scenes of icebergs plunging into the sea for David Attenborough, the well of inspiration has apparently run dry.

Cut to: The horizon. Looming ominously, black cloud overhead, is a new Explosions In The Sky record.

Fade to black…

The Low Frequency In Stereo – Futuro

Rune Grammofon (2009)

Getting some FACT-age up pon de blog…

Another couple of months, another great Rune Grammafon release. The label should hook up my bank account to their headquarters, intravenous-style, and constantly drip, drip, drip-feed their luscious black wax into my house. Kim Hiorthøy, I think I love you.

I don’t believe any member of Low Freq (as we have taken to calling them in the virtual FACT Towers) has been in Jaga Jazzist, which is probably a first in Norwegian non-black metal bands I have happened upon. I might be wrong. What is becoming commonplace with this current scene of bands is how consistently good they are.

Every song here is a self-contained gem, blessed with hooks and great sounding instruments. The enigmatic producer ‘Sir Duperman’, of Duper Studio, has much to be proud of. As with most things Grammafon, Futuro has a crystal clear mix, through which you can hear the varied sounds.

‘Geordie La Forge’ manages to stand out, not just due to its titular homage to the blind Star Trek character. Male vocalist (there is a man and a woman, though the sleeve notes credit the whole band with ‘voice’) Per Steinar’s delivery softens the edges of what would otherwise be quite a Queens Of The Stone Age song, replacing that band’s inherent ‘cool’ with more of a ‘cute’.

‘Starstruck’ marries latter-day Screaming Trees soft psychedelia with indie pop, hooks assailing your cerebral cortex. The band knows that effective melodic simplicity is key, so you quickly remember the rhymes of ‘Sparkle Drive’ with ‘45’. You’ll pause for thought, wondering exactly what that’s supposed to mean, but you will soon be swept away once more in the unabashed enthusiasm of the album.

On rare occasions the spell slips and you wonder quite what it is you’re listening to. ‘Texas Fox’, a sonically well constructed song, has absolutely horrible lyrics. You give a little leeway to bands whose first language isn’t English, but this is a ham-fisted attempt at surrealism that falls flat, regardless of good intentions. ‘Me and the farmer have to figure out the cow / The cow is the farmer, I really don’t know how’: it’s hard to be kind to that couplet.

Such stumbles are soon forgotten when you consider the relatively epic concluding song, the nine-minute ‘Solar System’. Its intro puts you in mind of the musical leg-stretching Kyuss would engage in when beginning their longer songs. But the mess of gleeful chaos and saxophone that unfolds is more reminiscent, again, of QOTSA, on ‘I Think I Lost My Headache’, or perhaps Radiohead’s ‘National Anthem’.

These aren’t lazy comparisons: this album, just like Kid A and Rated R, is a concise meditation on rock’s past and present seen through a very particular collection of eyes. It revels in generic hallmarks, but the band executes these with such personality and natural-feeling eclecticism that you forgive without a second thought.

Regardless of whether any of these players have worked with Horntveth, Munkeby or Qvenild, Low Freq have clearly established themselves as a band to be reckoned with. Futuro, while it nods blatantly to the past, is the place to be right now.