












Absolutely frenetic, guitar searing heavy psych from
Comfortably, this album is a lost classic of the proto-metal period, still rooted in the heavy psych of the time, but washed in its own world of morbid insanity and maudlin mental anguish. The Laser's Edge magazine once declared this album "unihibited guitar debauchery." Soundwise, the closest comparison from the bands we’ve reviewed in the Proto-metal report is Dschinn, but they make the standard song structures that Dschinn favored seem prosaic. While they sound absolutely nothing like Atomic Rooster, that’s the band that comes closest to describing the tone of tortured dysphoria that seeps through this disc like a odor lingering in the air from a recent suicide.
“There’s a Kind of Nothing,” starts off quite normally enough, riding on the back of a moderately fuzzed simple chord riff, but then that guitar comes in, screaming with a psychic pain that needs to be heard to be believed. Titlbach wrings more anguish from his opening lead volley than most death metal bands achieve in a career. This is emotive playing to the Nth degree. Harry Unte’s strained voice follows next, a primal scream set to melody. The bass, drums and rhythm guitar keep the song propelled forward at a charging pace, while Titlbach keeps dropping in lead fills like a prisoner screaming for escape. The entire song builds to a crescendo of near mental illness, then suddenly. . . it’s gone. Silence fills the space, perhaps even more intense than the madness you’d just witnessed. A lone bass plucks out a riveting solo, building in volume, the drums adding on, the guitar gently layering on top. An acoustic strumming. Then, delicately, Titlbach adds his tone, hiding underneath the bass, filling the atmosphere with punctuated arpeggios. This is mourning in music, like the lament for some lost love.
The main riff and more frantic guitar follows for the final 35 seconds of the song, then suddenly we’re into the stuttering, staggering doom-filled riff of “Can’t Get Through.” Here, Unte steals the show, his vocals a squealing, cracking, incomprehensible journey to the edge of sanity. The harmonica keeps the frenetic pace revving, charging into the mix at the 1:30 mark, leading us off into a an absolutely acrid smoke filled eight minutes of searing hard psych guitar wizardry. Again, Titlbach wrings tortured tones from this axe that are hard to believe. This song is like the lost grail of heavy psych guitar jamming, a florid explosion of leads, barely anchored to this stratosphere by the looping bass and motorik drumming. By the six-minute mark, the jam begins to lose focus, but who the hell cares, you’re nearly to exhausted to pay attention anyways.
“It Must Be an Officer’s Daughter,” comes next, starting off with a cacophony of feedback and fuzz, picking up right where, “Can’t Get Through,” left off. Just like “Tomorrow Night,” this is a love song of such demented proportions it seems to border on obsession and is probably illegal in several states. Lost amidst the horror movie Sabbath riff, and Titlbach’s wailing fills, Unte’s voice, verging on the edge of comprehension, screams such words of love as “I want to feel your 27 fingers explode in my body!” and the ever-popular expression of love, “You’re my bourgeois, my bourgeois sweet fantasy.” Don’t know about you, but that line’s never worked for me. Not even once.
“As We Crossed Over,” is a bizarre anomaly, a beautifully strummed guitar piece, the bass playing some other random tune underneath, while a trumpet (??) burps out a death march. I do believe the “crossing over,” he’s referring to is suicide, but truthfully, I haven’t the faintest idea what’s on that dark organ he calls a brain. Quickly, the song degenerates into a mishmash of random noises coming from every instrument the boys could get their hands on, while Unte wails on as if someone's got him by the balls.
Finally, “You’ve Got to Follow This Masquerade,” brings the disc to a close, another riff-crazed, psychedelic guitar freak-out of monstrous proportions, capping off an entirely exhausting, beautifully satisfying and ultimately terrifying journey through the band’s tenuous mental state. Left nearly breathless after each listen, Hairy Chapter plays like an addictive drug, one that I can never seem to get enough of. Quivering after each mind-blowing, IQ shattering listen, my shaking hands continues to reach for the play button. Needing to give the disc another spin.
--Racer
Buy here: Eyes/Can't Get Through
Winston's Zen discovers new artists....
I came across The Boxer Rebellion when they asked me to add them on MySpace a couple of weeks ago (you can find my space here, by the way). Now normally I'd ignore the invite and kid myself into believing I'll come back and check the band out later, but for some reason I was drawn to The Boxer Rebellion's unusual moniker and I delved right on in. And I'm pleased I did.
What I found was a MySpace player flooded with six likeable and charismatic tracks, among them the gorgeous, almost epic We Have This Place Surrounded and the head noddingly addictive Watermelon. Seemingly named after turn-of-the-century Chinese dissidents, The Boxer Rebellion are four lads from London pushing the kind of bass heavy, melancholic rock you may more readily associate with the likes of The Verve and Radiohead. And it really is quite good.
Check out the afore mentioned Watermelon and see for your self. Click play below;
The Boxer Rebellion - Watermelon
After a track or so I was beginning to think that I'd found an NBT (a Next Big Thing, for the uninitiated) and a glance at their friends tally, showing a relatively paltry 7,000 odd did noting to temper my excitement. But then I noticed their biog......
Formed in 2001, an appearance on Glastonbury's new bands stage in 2003, an apparently acclaimed album, Exits in 2005 on Alan McGee's Poptones and the finishing touches being put to a follow up?! How have I missed these guys? I'm sorry, I am thoroughly embarrassed. My head hangs as low as confortable.
Don't make the same mistake as me, go check out The Boxer Rebellion now, it's not too late to become a fan, and if the track above isn't enough to encourage you, then how about two FREE DOWNLOADS? Run over to The Boxer's MySpace to get a copy of Broken Glass and JFKFC, presumably two tracks from the new album to be released in 2008. Winston's Zen is looking forward to it.Back Soon,
Winston
Links:
The Boxer Rebellion Homepage
The Boxer Rebellion on MySpace
The Boxer Rebellion - Broken Glass
Hello and welcome aboard Ripple Airlines.
Today's destination is to the slightly freaking, incredibly brutal world of Gojira. On the way be sure to notice a satisfying dose of progressive experimentalism and straight ahead riffs and drumming to go along with your scenic landscape of pulverizing death metal.
Sit back, set your headrest, and buckle your seat belt tight and low across your lap as Gojira takes off in a hurry. As soon as the doors close, you'll notice a blasting, rolling guitar riff, more suggestive of their experimental tone than a standard death metal blast, but don't worry, by the second track you'll be heading directly into a maelstrom of brutality. Along the course of our flight, expect intermittent bouts of smooth flying, gentle acoustic strains, mixed with the more abundant passages of extreme turbulence, coming to you in the form of blistering hyperbeats and impenetrable walls of sound. You'll find this flight to be more experimental than a death metal band like Execration, but not as technical as Byzantine. It's a full-on pulverizing attack of the ears.
Our pilot today,Joe Duplantier, leads the Gojira flight through the skies of madness and despondency on guitar and vocals along with his co-pilot and brother, drummer Mario Duplantier. Please pardon our pilot's voice. Although his words are audible and he sings rather than grunts, he gargled with battery acid before the flight, assuring his voice to sound as tortured as possible.
Unexpected turns abound in our flight plan, like the tribal drumming intro to "The Art of Dying," the gangland meets world music vocal chanting of "Vacuity," and "A Sight to Behold," which can only be described as Death Metal Disco Electronica. And that's not a bad a thing. Who said you can't have a little groove in your metal?
Overall, we expect you to arrive safely at your destination, although not necessarily unharmed. Flying to Gojira is quite a trip. Some of the bumps and jolts along the flight path aren't necessarily satisfying, and overall, you may wish for the flight to be shorter, a bit easier on the ears, hoping for it to end long before we actually touch down. But in the end, you will land, satisfied and slightly more disturbed than before you departed.
A worthwhile, exhausting flight to try.