7/22/2023 0 Comments Metal vinyl club![]() "Lunge" would have been voted most likely to succeed as a hit back in the '90s: Guitars squeal octaves, riffs do what the song title suggests with channel-panning glee, vinyl scribbles maniacally and the call-and-response chorus between Brents' harsh growl and Mirosh's melodic howl is instantly memorable. ![]() Several guest vocalists appear, including Fire-Toolz and Aki McCullough (A Constant Knowledge of Death), but the most satisfying collaboration comes from Ilya Mirosh, a Minsk-based musician who posts vocal covers on YouTube. Rager gives the demented "Knurl" - and the album, quite frankly - a much-needed moment of melodic respite, spinning Incubus-cool webs behind frenzied breakbeats. Lest you worry about the project's bona fides, nary a turntable is left unscratched: Two DJs split the duties, acting as lead instruments and syncopated ornamentation. "Exit" and "Reek" make compelling cases for Godflesh's tangential influence on the scene, pitting industrial clang and hip-hop beats against caustic riffs and an unmistakable bark indebted to Justin Broadrick. Brents delights in nu-metal's sonic tropes, but experiments with the lyrical lens through which he unleashes his fury. "Memory Leak," performed entirely by Brents (as is the majority of the album), is a good introduction to his science fiction-inspired world building: A cybernetic organism awakens to a world not only drenched in but defined by violence and injustice, and like the replicants in Blade Runner, finds itself at odds with human existence. ![]() In the opening seconds, harmonics are pinched in a swirl of creepy sustain before the bass slaps away a torrent of crunchy riffs and mathy breakdowns, as if the polyrhythmic chaos of Slipknot got caught in a Converge chokehold. His project Memorrhage, unabashedly a subgenre exercise, manages to both reclaim and reshape nu metal with a portmanteau'd moniker that also acts as a thesis on how a memory can flow uncontrollably once unblocked.Įverything on Memorrhage's self-titled debut is executed with mech-warrior ferocity and precision. ![]() Last summer, Brents - who makes an absurd amount of extreme metal music under several names including Cara Neir, Gonemage, Homeskin and Sallow Moth - found himself in a black hole of nostalgia, fueled by Korn's live performance in a Woodstock '99 documentary and the endlessly entertaining " Crazy Ass Moments in Nu Metal History" Twitter account, and decided to forge some freaky ground. and Deftones.) That recombined nostalgia can sometimes have a disingenuous halo effect on how we remember, but it's also a crucial lesson in what we take away from music.īy his own admission, nu metal was Garry Brents' first love. Code Orange, Tallah, Vein.fm, Cheem and Tetrarch are not only scene leaders, but have stretched the sound by expanding perceptions of who makes this music even pop singers like Rina Sawayama have gone all-in on songs like "STFU!" (I'm not made of stone: These bands inspired me to reconsider the likes of Papa Roach, Coal Chamber, Filter, Snot and Slipknot, not to mention rekindle my love for P.O.D. In the last few years, younger metal musicians have been cribbing the nu style. (Of course, emo and punk weren't that much better just read Jessica Hopper's necessary " Where the Girls Aren't" essay.) and I was an emo kid raised on guitar twinkle and nasal pining. Nu metal appeared to be isolationist in its anger - the salve for pain was pain - and that didn't feel particularly productive. As a quiet teenager seeking a scene in those years, I found the positive reinforcement I craved through punk and hardcore. These were the features, not bugs, of nu metal as it overtook what remained of commercial rock radio. The angst? Petty at best violently misogynistic at worst. The vocals? When rapped: pitchy when screamed: puffed. The bass? No less than five strings of wobble. The first coming of nu metal, as much a subgenre as a suburban raison d'être, both overpromised and overdelivered on its hostile id.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |