This has been the week for sludgy post-metal. Plenty of bands have jumped into the build-explode-repeat, wall-of-sound, and crushing riffs of the genre this year, but the two best albums of the scene came out this week.
Burst - Lazarus Bird
Burst has been moving slowly deeper into the genre, from what were crust/hardcore roots. In Coveting Ways was their peak of layered, spacey, labyrinthine arrangements. Origo should have cemented their leadership in the genre, but poorly arranged good cop/bad cop vocals and compressed production hurt its appeal. Lazarus Bird fixes all that, it's their finest album yet. The clean vocals now stand on their own, layered in their own right, and more tightly integrated than just a counterpoint to the heavier elements. Linus' hardcore vocals have become more expressive as well, including growls, spoken passages, allowing the shouts to be more emotional, by not being so repetitive. The songs from their myspace are still the standouts from the album, though Cripple God is enhanced by the end of Momentum - There are plenty of songs that waffle in abstract sounds for more than half their length before exploding back into metal territory.
IntrOnaut - Prehistoricisms
IntrOnaut's follow up to their well received (a 10 on Blabbermouth) Void was also released this Tuesday. Where their previous efforts played on the progressive polyrhythms of the likes of Meshuggah, the previous spacey elements have now exploded into longer fusion-jazz in a completely metal aesthetic. Unlike Cynic, or other prog/fusion metal bands who mix jazz sounds into metal, IntrOnaut just plays fusion like it's metal, never letting up the heavy.
Kylesa/Pinback
I closed out the week by seeing Kylesa at Mohawk. Kind of an odd show, they were opening for Pinback. Nonetheless, the first few rows of the crowd were full of older, tattooed dudes, rocking out. The sound was a bit muddy, as you would expect for a sludge band with 2 drummers, but as the set got tighter, so did the sound.
Pinback was plagued by a multitude of issues. The last time I saw them, shortly after Offcell, their fastest and most electric EP, they played all their songs twice as fast. This time, at least their tempo was more level. I really shouldn't expect a band formed by a bunch of studio musicians to be able to translate their flawless albums to a great live show. The overlayed vocal and guitar harmonies comes across as rich and beautiful on their albums, but seem too much too fast, live.
Mohawk has built a new concrete block wall, presumably to shield the new condos across the street from the brunt of the sound. I can't imagine it's helping them much, since Pinback were assaulted by music from Club De Ville next door, and music from indoors at Mohawk. For a band as understated as Pinback, that's a pretty major issue. They were also plagued by a faulty slideshow, and a broken sampler, which weren't huge obstacles, except that they all seemed very awkward and frustrated by the setup.
By the end of the set, though, they started coming together. Frenetic songs like Fortress and From Nothing to Nowhere go better with the live aesthetic. They closed with AFK, my personal favorite, before the encore. When they came back, Rob took over on keys, and their touring keyboardist took up the bass. The result was a warmer, softer sound, that was better suited to most of their songs.
Comment Authority
Every few months, a new service comes out with their own WordPress plugin, to add their centralized service to the standard wordpress comments. Dutifully, I try them all out, and inevitably decide that there's no value add for me. A lot of this has to do with my relatively complex comment layout. Most of these services aim to get as many members as possible, so they try to make installation as painless as possible, often at the cost of losing customization. Most of them hook the comment's content. Disqus, the newest fad, actually hooks & replaces
comments_template();forcing users to completely restyle their comment section.The issue that most of these services seems to be trying to mediate is "truthiness" or "authority". Assigning some sort of integer to the value that a commenter typically brings to a discussion. The first such plugin that I tried was Buddycards, which were relatively non-invasive as far as layouts go. The problem being that not enough people use the 30boxes service, or were willing to create another profile just to have an identity to map to their truthiness.
The next one I tried (that I remember) was SezWho. All of my comments were imported there, so that users can claim their comments here, to obtain better karma elsewhere. Disqus followed later this year, you can claim your comments at archgfx.disqus.com. The problem with both of these is that the company's entire business revolves around comment authority, which is inherently tarnished by a profit motive. If we can't trust the company, how can we map real trustworthiness to their scale of authority?
Centralized anti-spam services play largely the same game, and indeed disqus appropriately cuts out Akismet, Defensio, or any local spam prevention measures. Ultimately, anti-spam services don't try (yet) try to merge disparate communities. That's the biggest problem I see with comment authority - The authority I would have on a music blog is different from the authority I might have on a tech blog. The comments I might leave on a feminist blog would be little more than conjecture or anecdote.
Ultimately, the reason that I, and most people choose to run our own blogging app, instead of using a hosted service like wordpress.com or blogspot, is that we don't want to be dependant on the standards and defaults of a larger, authoritarian group. By removing the ability to customize, and normalizing the authority of commenters, commenting services like disqus take away the things I like about having my own blog, even while they attempt to mitigate the unpleasant elements of spam and trolls. Anonymity and decentralization are linchpins in the present nature of the internet.
I haven't bothered installing Intense Debate or JS-Kit yet, because each new plugin from a non-reputable source is another security risk, as I allow it to rummage through my database for comment information, and email addresses of people who wordpress assured wouldn't be shared.