SLUDGE ZAC, PT. 3: UNSUNG SLUDGE Like we did last time with Loudwire’s list of best black metal albums, I would like to single out some sludge metal albums that didn’t make Kerrang’s essential list. But I also want to acknowledge that I think I fundamentally misunderstand the genre. If you asked me a month […]
It’s very hard to make scary music that is actually scary. Even when, say, Carcass uses pictures of autopsies on their cover art of their death metal albums, the whole package can feel a bit…well…silly. I don’t find Gaza’s No Absolutes In Human Suffering silly in the slightest. In the wake of Israel’s genocide, Gaza’s […]
One of the most punk rock things a punk rock band can do is deny their punk rock audience punk rock music. By the early 1980s, the punk rock revolution that had begun a half decade earlier as an artistic free-for-all had begun calcifying into a genre. Where earlier punk rock brahmin saw The Ramones’ […]
Last THIC MASC practice, while playing one of our shortest tunes, Cass waited until we cycled through the main riff a couple times before singing the final verse. “I thought it should breathe a little at the end there,” she said. “Blackshirts” crams three verses, two choruses, and a two-part bridge into about a minute […]
Although Part Time Ghost ended with a whimper, playing a semi-acoustic show as a three-piece at the Lion’s Lair in September 2022, the band had been on life support since that April when Keiton announced he was moving from Denver for financial reasons. Money kills more bands than drugs ever could. There was never any […]
In Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, ZE Records co-founder Michael Zilkha explained that the quirky disco bands he championed like Was (Not Was) and Material didn’t make the commercial impact he wished because, “all my bands were too clever, and it took me forever to understand that ‘clever’ isn’t necessarily it…. Truly […]
Back when Lee and I were in Flowlines together, we had a disagreement about songwriting. The way I saw it, if I employed a distinct musical technique on a song (say a shuffle beat, or an Andalusian cadence), then that was my one opportunity to use that technique, and so I had better nail the […]
She introduced me to her friend. “This is Zac. He’s really funny.” “Oh, yeah,” the guy said, sizing me up, probably rightfully concluding we were chasing the same girl. “Make me laugh.” Ugh, gauntlet thrown. After giving him the side eye, I chuckled. “Fuck that, man. Make me come.” He laughed. Mission accomplished. Well…I won […]
This week let’s do something dumb.* While the experience of going onto Twitter is akin to wading into a pond filled with radioactive medical waste, occasionally a stupidly engaging bar conversation rises above the sewage and flits across my timeline like a majestic dragonfly. Last week, Granite Mtn. asked the mostly bot-filled void, “Why […]
When first heard the term “blackgaze,” I thought of these guys: But apparently the term is a portmanteau for the music of bands like Deafheaven (and Alcest and Oathbreaker), who draw from both the filthy well of black metal and the angelic pond of shoegaze. In fact, any music that includes a soupcon of black […]