She's a Motherfucking Princess

Have you heard the new Avril Lavigne single? Holy shit. I don't think i've heard a more infectious piece of candied up pop fluff in a loooooooooooong time-whoever wrote this thing is a genius. It's called "Girfriend" and it's a crazy three minutes of schizo hyper over digitized beauty, wrapped up in a ridiculous putrid sheen of crunchy guitars and sickly sweet vocals. Avril sounds likes she's about 15 in this song which seems about right, since the song is about some obvious high school crush bravado (i.e., Avril hears you've got a crush on here, she wants to be your girlfriend, the girl you've been making time with now is stupid, and yes indeed, Avril is a motherfucking princess-it's all in there.) But the lyrics, ridiculous as they are, especially since Avril is a married woman, aren't the sickest part of the song-it's the drum hook. She's reached right into the Toni Basil bag of tricks and plucked out the only one in there, the simple back and forth schoolyard drum beat that Gwen Stefani recently brought to the fore in "Hollaback Girl" (but to be fair, Avril works a lot more wonder with it.) The only thing i can compare this song to is Kelly Clarkson's defining moment, "Since U Been Gone," but where Kelly was at least feigning integrity and you got the feeling that the song might have meant something to her, Avril makes no such efforts. She knows she's delivering a piece of addictive garbage and she's knows that we're gonna fucking love it (i do!) and makes no apologies. She goes so over the top in this song on every level-by the time you get to the final anthemic chorus and you're hearing a million digitized Avrils telling you how much she wants to get with you you almost belive her. You want to hold Avril tight in the middle of a crowd of goony disdainful high schoolers and tell the world how awesome this relationship is really gonna be-seriously fucking awesome. Could i listen to this song ten times over? Probably not, it's just too insane, but having it thrown at me for three minutes at unhealthy volumes once a day could do me a lot of good.

http://www.myspace.com/avrillavigne

A quick addendum: a short visit to Avril's myspace page has revelaed that she now has a signature Fender guitar. Jesus fucking Christ indeed.

R.I.P BUNGE

Rest in peace BUNGE Silos. (Or more accurately, unrest in pieces)

Housing redevelopment - PPL is planning to remove all of the hazardous materials from the site in March. They will then begin the demolition of the silos parallel to 12th Ave SE in April. This demolition will last for approximately two or three months. The next step will be to start construction on the road, the sewer and the first building in July of 2007. That building will take about one year to complete.

MONARCH "Dead Men Tell No Tales" 2xCD

What to tell you about Monarch? Well they're from France, which is good, because France to me is responsible for the BEST outsider metal music. They have an amazing little chanteusse for a singer, who screams like hell is erupting from her lungs but looks like the timid little indie goddess i wish would fall in love with me. They play SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW and agonizing doom metal in the vein of Khanate, Atavist, Burning Witch, etc. And of course, they're pretty damn awesome. I don't say this lightly, especially within the very limited confines of the extreme doom metal genre, cuz there really isn't that much variety among any of these bands. You get slow, atonal/chromatic riffs and some pretty harsh screaming, and that's about it. What i enjoy about Monarch's delivery is the urgency of it-there are no tricks in the recording or their setup-they tune down, yes, but they're not overloading the recording in bass or tracking a thousand guitar layers for the added heaviness-they're just plugging in and exorcising some doom demons through caustic death sludge. This is a reissue on Crucial Blast consisting of two out of print earlier vinyl releases, which i actually don't possess, so it was a welcome release from the Blast. Alas alas Monarch have broken up now, but this early pairing definetely shows you a band that really had mastered the genre pretty quickly and perfected it a few albums later-their last record consisted of one astonishing 60 minute song that is very difficult listening indeed. It's just oppressive, even for me, and i enjoy this sort of thing. Here Monarch deliver five songs unto thee, all of them hovering in the 20-25 minute range, and all save for one fuzz slabs of hateful, epic doom. One of the tracks takes a quieter ambient approach and allows you to cuddle up to the very pretty accented voice of the little French girl who fronts the band as she whispers some sort of horror story about mythical things or seajourneys gone wrong or some sorta weird Melville-esque rant along those lines. Totally essential listening for those bored of Sunn 0))) (and jesus christ, who isn't by this point) and those lamenting the dissolve of Khanate, or maybe for those people like myself who wish that Charlotte Gainsbourg was into more metal.

http://www.crucialblast.net/

TROUM & ALL SIDES "Shutun" CD

Gloriously gorgeous collaboration between dream droners Troum and All Sides, whom i know nothing about. No doubt a simple googling would provide some answers but i'm too damn tired right now to worry about trivialities such as an artist's identity. What we have here is a really really beautiful piece of crystalline guitar shimmer, run through about a million effects and transformed into fragile swells of saddened drone tears. Troum have long been one of my favorite groups making ambient music and this is another notch in their belt of fine releases. I can't think of a bad one in the bunch! This record is one 60 or so minute piece that morphs and changes and mutates throughout its course, but always keeping one foot firmly planted in the garden of sadness that Troum eternally tends to. What i like best about Troum is that everything is done live-there isn;t any after the fact processing, all the sounds that they make come from their guitars and effects as they're played, which is an odd thing for this sort of music, and a fact which makes it all the more amazing. Sure, Tim Hecker creates equally beautiful and placid lakes of melancholy sound, but he runs everything through computers to achieve the desired results. Call me a purist but i like the live bent of Troum's stuff. Towards the end of this record the effects start to fade out and we're left with a good 15 minutes of Mogwai style delayed guitar melodies, repeating over and over until things quietly crumble and fade away. It's the sort of record that you wish went on forever! Pretty swanky packaging too-comes in a metal box with screened printing on the top. Minimalist but maximalist at the same time-just like the sounds on this wonderful album.

KEVIN DRUMM "Sheer Hellish Miasma" CD

This is a short one, but i felt the need to say a little about this being that it's just been reissued. This is my favorite noise album of all time. EVER. Nothing comes close to the pure destructive essence of this record, and nothing ever will. It's the ultimate expression of what a pure noise record should be-no relent, no salvation, just pure, dense speaker-destroying shards of white hot brain eviscerating horror. Kevin Drumm knew exactly what he was trying to accomplish on this record. Nothing in music tops this, not even supposed noise legends like Merzbow, Aube, JoJo Hiroshige, etc. This is in league with maybe Haino, but even he doesn't get this punishing. The influence of this record is felt across the genre today, and how sad it must be for even amazing sound sculptors like Prurient or The Rita to know that no matter how corrosive their own aural symphonies may be, they will never match the power inherent in "Sheer Hellish Miasma." There's no point in talking about individual songs here because they're irrelevant, the whole record just grabs you by the throat and bludgeons you endlessly for an hour. The last track provides some brief respite but even it's fucking noisy by most people's standards. What i really like is that Kevin never really tried to repeat this either, even his other noise records-nothing is as sonically whole and enveloping as this record. I love this album-it's definetley in my top 20 of all time and it's essential to anyone interested in noise. My favorite memory of this is listening to it with Ben and his ex wife Margaux in a car as we drove somehwre that was quite a distance away. As Ben and i just zoned out and took in the terror in an awestruck manner Margaux was in pain-which doesn't surprise me because this record is PUNISHMENT for people who aren't familiar with noise. And yet we listened to the entire record, no stops, no reprieve-part of me feels bad for making Margaux suffer through it, but i think somehow she's better off having had Kevin Drumm in her life. So this is Drumm's masterful love letter to noise and black metal (the more outer strains of it in sound, but completely devotional to black metal in its aesthetic) and it's a must have for anyone even feigning an interest in noise-if you don't love this record then the concept of noise music will never be grasped. Thumbs down to Editions Mego for reissuing this and including a pointless ambient bonus track-this record's sole prupose is terrorism of the ears. Double thumbs down for jumping on the bandwagon and paying Stephen O'Malley money to basically redo the original cover art in a less impressive package. I mean, seriously, all he fucking did was shrink it down to the size of a jewel case and move the "KD" over a bit. Way to go, Mego. Boo and hiss.

LIFELOVER "Erotik" CD

There's a difference between sad music and depressing music. To me, sad music is more about the actual sounds and melodies. Bands like Mogwai and My Bloody Valentine and Slint deal in certain kinds of emotional triggers, and while much of music created may indeed be mournful or melancholic, there always is that ladder climb to an intense, triumphant catharsis-this music makes your skin prick up and you feel elated and hopeful and filled with a love of just being here and exisiting. And then there's a band like Lifelover, who i can truly call depressing becasue listening to their music makes me feel like they must have felt when they created it. This is music that has so much power and gravity that it pulls you into its painful nether and just keeps pushing down until you feel what it actually is- tortured confessions of regret and sorrow and failure. This is why black metal is the music i love the most -no other music is able to pull me so close and envelop me and make me identify with the actual emotions involved in its creation. That's why Lifelover are so amazing to me as a band, and also why it really isn't fair to simply label them black metal. Sure, the roots are there-there's the ultra fuzzed out guitars and the thick dense drum machine sounds thudding your brain into ooze, and of course there's so many different style of grating, shrieky vocals and suicidal melodies from tinny, caustic guitars. But there's also gorgeous and muddy clean delayed guitars, hypnotic swathes of melodic murk and backwards looping tapes and sprinkles of high end pianos leading the way to despair. And the lyrics-of what's in English (two songs, the others are in Swedish, i believe), it's simply some of the most honest and beautiful lyrics about frustration that i have ever heard. These are songs of loss and hopelessness, dripping with self loathing and anger at having made so many mistakes, and scorned by memories that will never ever be recaptured. The prevalent theme is of loss, of self, of identity, of hope...the artwork is shot through with blurry images of colorful nighttime city scenes and intense splashes of violence and blood, making you feel the abandonement that one feels when you're completely alone. The world is huge, and empty, and with no one, there really is a sense of coldness and dread. The fear will always grow, knawing away at the person you were until all that's left is a wrecked paranoid shell subsisting on what once was and what could only have been. This is an absolutely visionary record, more honest than anything i've heard with maybe the exception of Mark Kozelek (another artist who can actually draw you into his psychoses), and i don't think that i will hear anything as gorgeously defeatist as what Lifelover have created. This is a new mark for black metal, ultimately surpassing even their own spectacular debut record and setting themselves alongside such revered practitioners as Shining, Forgotten Tomb and Xasthur. This is a record of true and frightening feelings. You can't be unaffected by this. Powerful, powerful music is being forged. We're lucky to be allowed into Lifelover's world.

http://thr666.horde.se/
http://www.goatowarex.org/
http://www.autumnwp.com/

Don't even tell me a simple record review and google bans your adsense?? That is BS.