Whoops two day bump, but what a pair I have for you today.
23. Strapping Young Lad – AlienOK I lied about Dechristianize being the heaviest album on my list, but that’s because in my opinion Alien is the heaviest album of all time. Not heavy in the sense that it’s thrashy and noisy and impenetrable (although it does have its moments) but rather heavy in its intensity, anger and insanity. And insanity really is the word. For those not in the know about Devin Townsend he is quite severely bi-polar, although he is able to control it with medication. For Alien, afraid that Strapping’s music was losing its edge, he stopped taking that medication and allowed himself to regress. The panic, schizophrenia and paranoia that followed are chronicled via the devastating sound of the album. This is not easy listening. Shitstorm is the single angriest song I’ve ever heard, with Devin ranting and raving at himself, other people, and the world in general. I love the lyrics on this record, with other subjects including the problems of being human, dealing with materialism, and the complexities of love (dealt with with STL-era Devin’s trademark skepticism, of course.)
But it’s not just the lyrics and the vocal performance which are great on this album, the music more than matches Devin’s intensity. Gene Hoglan’s drums are the perfect battering ram with which to hammer home the emotional beating this record delivers, and between screaming his head off Devin and the rest of the band deliver some seriously great grooves. The main riff to Love? Is guaranteed to grab my attention and get me nodding my head no matter where I am or what I’m doing, and the moments of relative calm such as Thalamus have an ugly beauty which betrays the other side of Devin’s split personality, the man coming to terms with a world he struggles to understand. And topping it all off is Info Dump, Devin’s attempt at putting the feeling of relapsing into his disorder into a single track. Listened to loudly through good headphones it is a genuinely frightening experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw903mFTkcEThings start to get less heavy from here on.
22. Miocene – A Perfect Life With A View Of The SwampOf all the albums on my list this is the one which I would recommend the most highly to those who haven’t heard it. Which I suspect is most people
Miocene are sadly not around anymore, having split in 2006, but their legacy includes an album of fantastic, original music from a band who were not afraid to push musical boundaries or try something new. ‘A Perfect Life…’ took over three years to write and it shows. It is difficult to label them as belonging to any particular genre because this is an album of such varied music, but you could probably describe them as being experimental progressive metal. When playing ‘as a band’ their sound is not dissimilar to Tool, both vocally and instrumentally, with the same tortured guitar tones, prominent bass, stunning drumming and frequent time signature and tempo changes employed by Maynard and co.
But that style of music doesn’t make up even half of this record. There are several fully electronic tracks, not just the interludes that many metal bands employ, but fully realized pieces in the vein of Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares. Other genres to be found include ambience, drum’n’bass, hip-hop, the closing track is acoustic, and there is even a spoken word piece. And these genres are by no means relegated to their own specific tracks, but incorporated smoothly into songs which were previously heading in a completely different direction. ‘The Fall,’ for example, is a prog-metal style song for five and a half minutes, before going off on a tangent and becoming a live drum’n’bass track, whilst ‘Sympathy For Gordon Comstock’ starts as an ambient synth piece before being layered with traditional instruments, and then finally breaking down into an electronic glitchcore mindfuck. I really really love this record, not just because of how Miocene pushed the boat out musically, but also because they clearly put everything they had into making it, and that labour of love has resulted in an album they can look back and be proud of.
Have a listen if you fancy something a bit different, or just want something to fill the gap until the next Tool album!
https://grooveshark.com/#/s/The+Fall/2zq2MF?src=5https://grooveshark.com/#/s/Colloquial+Drug+Terminology/2zpZ1S?src=5