New Music Sundays: 5/20/18

Grouper: Grid of Points

Grouper's 2014 masterpiece Ruins made it onto that year's best albums list, but somehow Liz Harris's stunningly sad project fell of my radar until recently, when I came across her new record Grid of Points almost by accident. Grid of Points is played so ethereally that it nearly collapses into nothingness, but the gauzy weight of Harris's haunting voice keeps you rapt as each line melts into the void. While Ruins incorporated nonmusical sounds like scratching on metal, until the very end of the record Grid of Points is entirely the marriage of Harris's piano with her breathy, multi-tracked voice. And with only these two instruments she's able to do so much, in such a short amount of time; the album as a whole only lasts a little over 20 minutes. It's an album of pure, slow emotion, and its brevity actually works well for what it is: by the time the last song finishes, you wonder if you really heard it at all, or if it was the melody of some half-forgotten memory. 

Dylan Carlson: Conquistador

Twenty-five years on from his epochal Earth 2, Dylan Carlson shows his absolute mastery of the guitar as a tool with the ability to transcend time and space. Conquistador, like many of his records since 2005's Hex, feels like the soundtrack to an imagined Cormac McCarthy adaptation: with little more than his guitar, Carlson concocts deep red canyons and dust-blown plains, and by the time you reach the end of the 13-minute long title track, you can feel the cruel sun reducing you to a husk. The album is entirely slow repetition; Carlson fixates on a single measure and rides it until it can't go any further. The minimalism is haunting, and has more in common with a composer like Steve Reich than with any tenuous links to popular music you expect from a Seattle-based guitar project. And like Reich, instead of being indulgent, Conquistador washes over you and never feels dull for a second. Carlson is a shaman with his guitar in a way that I haven't really heard before, outside of maybe Sunn O))), but their albums exist on a different plane than Conquistador does. Like Grid of Points, Conquistador isn't a long album, but its viscous repetition can act as an anchor in the chaos of our age.

New Music Sundays: 5/6/2018

Gnod: Chapel Perilous

Gnod's last two albums, the arresting The Mirror and Just Say No to the Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine, were pure blasts of outrage, more interested in searing the flesh off your face in their outrage than in waxing philosophical like their earlier works. Chapel Perilous manages to bring the best of both words into its pitch black hallways, and the result is astounding.The album is bookended by two enormous slabs of sheet metal in closer "Uncle Frank Says Turn it Down" and opener, the incredible "Donovan's Daughters" which builds in ugliness over its 15 minutes into a stunning denouement. Seriously, "Daughters" could be my favorite Gnod song, and one of the best songs I've heard in a long time; it transports you into another realm, coiling and mutating and swallowing you whole. The songs that make up the middle of the album, the trilogy of "Europa", "A Voice From Nowhere", and "A Body", are similar to their earlier work: more experimental, mostly instrumental, mysterious and labyrinthine. These two halves, taken together, are about the closest to a 'beginner's guide to Gnod' as you can get, and it's such a strong album that it's more than just a good primer. Like with Sunn O))), Chapel Perilous feels like a terrifying religious ceremony...enter the Chapel in chaos, prostrate yourself before its dark core, and leave a changed person.

The Black Lips & The Khan Family: Play Safe

And now for something totally different, for a really good cause. Play Safe is a pairing of ultra-catchy garage rock revivalist King Khan with his Khan Family, and the sleazy fun of The Black Lips. It's an EP made in collaboration with Viva con Agua de Sankt Pauli, a German nonprofit that is trying to get clean water to needy regions of the world like South America and Africa. It's a great cause, but how's the record? Short and amazingly sweet, from garage scuzz to girl group cuteness over the course of just about 10 minutes. Play Safe's songs will get lodged in your brain long after you put the record down, and you'll just want to give it another spin. Like Tony Molina's records, Play Safe shows that you can cut rock music down to its purest essence and come out with something that much stronger.