BRUCE LAMONT

Yakuza vocalist/saxophonist Bruce Lamont released his first solo album, Feral Songs for the Epic Decline, on the At A Loss label in January. That's the cover art above. He did some killer performances to promote it at South by Southwest this past week, and Mike Williams of Eyehategod showed up to help out:





I wrote the liner notes to the CD. Here they are:

Those of you who’ve picked this album up because it’s the solo debut by the frontman for Chicago avant-rock band Yakuza should be aware that you are not holding a metal record in your hands. Of course, if you think Yakuza, Bruce Lamont’s primary creative outlet, is just a metal band, well, I don’t know what to tell you about that. Yakuza makes some of the most absorbing ultra-heavy psychedelic post-rock around, but calling it “metal” would be awfully reductive. You’ve got the Tibetan-style chants, the drone interludes, the saxophone…Yakuza’s got more in common with Hawkwind than High On Fire, is the point here. And apparently, Bruce Lamont is the kind of guy who finds even Yakuza’s expansive musical vision just a little bit constricting.

Most folks who know his work know Lamont has one foot in out-jazz (he’s performed and recorded with saxophonist Ken Vandermark, and stood up to the full hurricane force of upstate New York sax-sax-guitar trio Borbetomagus) and another in out-rock (in addition to Yakuza, he’s been an in-studio guest with fellow Chicago bands Nachtmystium and Minsk). But now they’re gonna get to know Bruce Lamont, singer-songwriter. He wrote all the songs on this disc, and played every instrument: guitar, saxophone, keyboards, percussion, all of it. And as recorded by Sanford Parker in Chicago’s Semaphore Studio, it’s got all the warmth and humanity of the best music to come from that city in recent years.

The first track, “One Who Stands On The Earth,” is also the longest by a good five minutes, and it’s like a buffet, laying out every sound you’re gonna hear for the rest of the album’s 43-minute running time. Acoustic guitar, saxophone, hypnotic tribal percussion, rhythm loops, bursts of static, and Lamont’s own trance-like vocal chants…imagine if Peter Gabriel had invited Michael Gira to collaborate on Passion, his soundtrack album for The Last Temptation Of Christ, and you’re getting there. There’s a strong desert vibe to tracks like “The Epic Decline” and “Disgruntled Employer.” Other pieces, like “The Book Of The Law” and “Deconstructing Self-Destruction,” blast from the speakers full of industrial/black metal fury, while the detuned guitar of “Year Without Summer” could be a nod to the Texas-based outsider-folk recluse Jandek. Feral Songs For The Epic Decline is multifaceted, is what I’m saying. Like its creator. Come in with open ears, and they will be filled in a very pleasing manner.

Buy Feral Songs for the Epic Decline from Amazon

PAZZ AND JOP STAT BREAKDOWN

Here's the link to the poll itself, and all the affiliated essays 'n' whatnot.

Here are the 10 albums I voted for, with their placement on the final list:

1. Ayumi Hamasaki, Rock 'N' Roll Circus (#1001)
2. High on Fire, Snakes for the Divine (#162)
3. Rick Ross, Teflon Don (#34)
4. Iron Maiden, The Final Frontier (#273)
5. The Sword, Warp Riders (#179)
6. Kylesa, Spiral Shadow (#86)
7. Ratt, Infestation (#407)
8. Yakuza, Of Seismic Consequence (#673)
9. Flesh Consumed, Ecliptic Dimensions of Suffering (#1023)
10. Kill the Client, Set for Extinction (#1151)

Of those, I was the only voter for Ayumi Hamasaki, Flesh Consumed and Kill the Client.

I also sent in a long-ass comment, as follows (the parts they actually used are in bold):

Though I’m proud to vote in Pazz & Jop every year, it always ends up exacerbating my feelings of alienation from my so-called peers. I’ve never heard 80-plus percent of the music that winds up filling out the year-end lists published on Pitchfork, the AV Club and here at the Voice. (This year, I heard seven of Pitchfork’s Top 50, and two of the AV Club’s Top 25; I fully expect to have heard no more than two of the top 10 Pazz & Jop albums, and a maximum of five of the top 20.)

I’d like to offer my peers a deal: If you listen to Rotting Christ’s AEALO or Decrepit Birth’s Polarity (#s 7 and 9 on my year-end Top Ten for MSN Music) and find something thoughtful to say about either one, I’ll try and do the same for Kanye West or the Arcade Fire. If you listen to Ayumi Hamasaki’s Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, I’ll try my damnedest to make it through a whole Robyn song.

At one point, I was accused by a friend and colleague of “always us[ing] your ignorance of pop music as a pole to raise your flag upon. Like, I can't fault anyone for not caring about Adam Lambert, I'm faulting you because you constantly think it’s grounds for bragging rights. And yeah, you are def right about the music audience getting more stratified and retreating to more insular worlds, but I generally see this as a BAD THING and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around not wanting to see these walls topple.” And I admit that 2010 really sent my snarky D-bag side into overdrive, to the point where I was commenting on Facebook about how glad I am that I don’t get paid to care about Taylor Swift. But here’s the thing: My so-called peers don’t get paid to care about what I listen to or write about, either, with one or two exceptions, and they’re fine with that. So why am I expected to care about what I’m supposedly “missing”?

I write about what people are willing to pay me to write about. That’s mostly metal, with some side trips into jazz and Latin music. That takes up enough of my time that I listen almost exclusively to what people are willing to pay me to write about, with one or two exceptions, notably Japanese pop. In this way, I have been the beneficiary of cultural balkanization. Since most of the other critics filling out Pazz & Jop ballots are all busy listening to the same three dozen records, I can keep my calendar pretty damn full just by writing about stuff that sells as well as or better than the music reviewed on Pitchfork, stuff with a very real fan base that buys CDs (I know, right?) and T-shirts and tickets to shows, but that isn’t remotely cool in Voice/Pitchfork/Brooklyn Vegan/AV Club circles.

I’m far from unaware of pop music. I really liked the Diddy-Dirty Money and Rick Ross albums. I like Kelis and Kylie Minogue and Pink (though to my ear she’s never topped her third album, Try This, the one nobody else liked). M.I.A. isn’t pop music (she’d have to be popular—as in, sell some records—for that to be the case), but I’ve listened to every one of her half-baked, jabbering records at least twice. Outside of R&B-based pop music, I like Brad Paisley, and I liked Jamey Johnson’s The Guitar Song, though That Lonesome Song, from 2008, was clearly the better, more cohesive album. But for the most part, when I keep up with the so-called mainstream, it’s through videos. I don’t listen to the radio (terrestrial or online), but I watch MTV, VH1, Fuse and mun2 (the latter of which offers a killer hour-long show of norteño/Tejano videos everyone reading this should check out), and I’ll click links to videos on YouTube when I spot them on Twitter or message boards.

That kind of casual, semi-passive osmosis is how I know I haven’t missed anything by never listening to a whole Kanye West album. He’s a pop artist, so presumably his singles represent the best of his work, the stuff he’s presenting as the bait to lure listeners in. But I’ve seen the videos for every one of his singles, all the way back to “Through the Wire,” and not one of them has ever done a thing for me. I’ve had the same reaction to Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Ke$ha and just about everyone else who sold what passes for a lot of records in 2010, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to state that if I can’t make it a full minute into your video without switching the channel, I’m not gonna listen to your album.

Here’s the real problem, though. The Big Lie of generalist pop criticism (people who claim to cover “everything”) is actually two lies bound together. The first is that when you write about Kanye West, or whoever his equivalent will be in 2011, you’re writing about “mainstream” music. West, like every other musician on earth, is a niche artist—he may have millions of listeners, but there are untold millions more who have never heard him, may indeed have never heard of him. There is no mainstream. Critical consensus is built through publicity campaigns—writers (still, mostly) get records for free, and then they talk to each other about those records on Twitter, on Facebook, via email, and sometimes in person. And gradually a collective verdict emerges, with the token dissenters oftentimes anticipated and always genially taken into account, all under the unquestioned assumption that this is a record which Must Be Discussed. Which leads to the second lie, which is that the three dozen or so records that become The Sound Of [Year] cover all the bases. That outside the small pasture in which the pop critical community is carefully fed, tended and groomed by the labels and the publicists (and the musicians themselves, now), nothing of importance is happening. If the few dozen critics who write for the ever-shrinking roster of magazines and websites that cover “mainstream” music (including the “indie” division) don’t know about it, it must not be worth knowing about, basically.

But that’s absurd, and my own career path proves it. I write about metal five days a week for MSN Music. In mid-December, I posted a list of the 40 best metal albums of 2010. Mainstream and indie-minded critics, who consider themselves conversant in music, have probably heard as few of them as I’ve heard albums on their year-end lists. The music I spent all of 2010 listening to barely exists, as far as my so-called peers are concerned. And yet, I’m the one who’s considered ignorant when—if—these matters are discussed. The idea that metal (to pick only one) is a specialized genre, but “pop” is the mainstream, the baseline from which all other deviations are calculated, is utterly wrong. I’ll close with my response to the accusation quoted above, which could serve as advice to next year’s crop of eager children looking to break into the writing-about-music-for-money racket:

“Generalist, buffet-table pop criticism is dead. Specialist genre criticism is all that matters anymore, because listener communities are atomized, self-sealing and frequently hostile to outside input. I know who I'm writing for, and more importantly, I know who I'm not writing for. And I'm not gonna pretend to give a flying fuck about Taylor Swift or Kanye West just because all the other writers on my Twitter feed still think platinum-selling records ‘say’ ‘something’ ‘about’ ‘the culture.’ There is no monoculture. Pick a niche and grind it out.”

AMG UPDATE

Another two weeks, another nine reviews for All Music Guide:

Foghat, Last Train Home
Kruger, For Death, Glory, and the End of the World
Noctiferia, Death Culture
Parkway Drive, Deep Blue
The Ruins of Beverast, Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite
Sabbath Assembly, Restored to One
Witchery, Witchkrieg
Yakuza, Of Seismic Consequence
Dweezil Zappa, Return of the Son of...

Also, one that I submitted, but which didn't run:

JUAN GABRIEL
Juan Gabriel
Fonovisa
Juan Gabriel’s 2010 album, his first since 2003’s Inocente de Ti, couldn’t be more different from that record. Where Inocente was an attempt to modernize his classically gooey pop-balladeer style with alt-rock guitars and radio-ready pop songwriting, Juan Gabriel (as its cover art, with Gabriel perching a sombrero on the back of his head like he’s afraid it’ll muss his hair, should indicate) is a shockingly traditional album almost entirely composed of mariachi songs—trumpets and surging strings are all over this thing. There are some weird touches, of course; on “Por Que Me Haces Llorar?” the string arrangements are more Roy Orbison than Vicente Fernández, and the echo effect on Gabriel’s voice at the end of each chorus is distracting in a sort of awesome way. There’s even a song called “Mariachi,” and it’s as over-the-top as everything else here. Gabriel never sleepwalks through a song—he sells every note, which is exactly what a sobbingly dramatic style like mariachi demands. This is a terrific record slathered in Juan Gabriel’s trademark passion and vocal mastery.

INTERVIEW: BLAKE JUDD (NACHTMYSTIUM)

[Cross-posted at my MSN Music metal blog.]

Chicago-based metal band Nachtmystium's fifth full-length studio album, Addicts: Black Meddle Part II, comes out tomorrow. It's a sequel of sorts to 2008's Assassins: Black Meddle Part I, which was a somewhat controversial entry in the band's discography. Nachtmystium started out as a pretty orthodox black metal group, thrashing and bashing away in a high-pitched, high-speed assault on the listener. But each album was a little more ambitious than the one before, and starting with 2006's Instinct: Decay, a strong element of psychedelia seeped into the music. This was even more prominent on Assassins, which frequently sounded like an overt homage to Pink Floyd (note the subtitle). It also featured guest saxophone from Yakuza's Bruce Lamont. About the only link between it and early Nachtmystium was frontman and group leader Blake Judd's hoarse, rasping vocals. (The lack of artistic continuity isn't just about the songwriting, either—the rate of member turnover in Nachtmystium is absurd, with literally dozens of musicians having passed through the ranks in the group's decade-long existence.)

Addicts is another change for Judd and crew, as it abandons the psychedelia of Assassins in favor of...Gothic rock and industrial. There's still some black metal in the sound, most notably on "High On Hate," but the biggest influences here, as Judd will freely admit, are bands like Killing Joke, Nine Inch Nails and Sisters of Mercy. The disc is swathed in analog synths, dubby basslines and even a few electro-disco beats. I called Judd at his home in Chicago to talk about Addicts, as well as Monument to Time End, the recently released second album by his side project Twilight. That band was originally a sort of black metal all-star group, featuring Judd, N. Imperial of Krieg, Wrest of Leviathan, Malefic of Xasthur and Hildolf of Draugar, but since the group's self-titled debut was released in 2005, Malefic and Hildolf have departed, and some unlikely new members, including Aaron Turner of Isis and Sanford Parker of Minsk (who, along with Wrest, also plays on Addicts), have joined.

Each album seems so different from the last. Are you headed in a specific direction, or is the band’s evolution sparked in the studio, in the moment? Or does each album depend on who’s playing on it?
I think it’s a little of all three of those things, actually. In general, I’d like our music to head in a more accessible direction, just 'cause that’s where my tastes have gone as I’ve gotten older. I’ve found myself less drawn to really extreme metal music, and maybe it’s just me growing up or whatever, but I listen to a lot of different types of music, and metal has kind of dwindled on the spectrum of things I’m listening to lately. I think that has the most to do with the sound you’ll find on Addicts being a little more rock-oriented. But also, the people that are playing on the records, they’re all chosen specifically for what I’m trying to go for at the time, and I’m fortunate enough to know a ton of people that play in good bands and are willing to come and work with me. So it’s a little of everything. But as far as the future goes, I don’t think we’ll ever have one set style, and it’s not like we’re lost directionally at all. It’s what I feel like doing at the time more than anything, and currently it’s kinda this wannabe Killing Joke/Queens of the Stone Age thing, and I think the music we’ll be doing in the future will be more on par with what we’re doing now than, say, Demise or Instinct: Decay or something like that.

The Pink Floyd influence that was so prominent last time seems mostly gone, except on “The End is Eternal.” Why did you choose to call this one Black Meddle Part II, given how little it has in common with the last record?
Basically, the lyrical content is pretty similar. The themes of the records are the part that’s the most cohesive—the visuals and the lyrics are the connection between the two. I kinda wanna throw a curve ball at people, too.

Listening to what you're doing now, I kinda feel like your vocals no longer fit, that maybe you should start pursuing a more Pete Steele/Andrew Eldritch type baritone delivery. Have you thought about that at all?
You know, I agree with you, and I actually tried to sing in the studio for Addicts. I tried to do a more proper vocal style, and basically, I’m good at some things but singing just ain’t one of 'em. Given my limitations naturally with my ability to sing, the thing I try my best with is to make sure that even with the harsh vocal approach, you can understand me. I try to be more intelligible than most people. I think that’s one thing that keeps a lot of people away from metal music, is that they can’t understand the lyrics, and I figure if I’m gonna have this kind of delivery, I’m gonna enunciate enough that if you listen carefully you can pick out good chunks of the phrases if not all of em. That’s about as good as I can do at that. And I struggle, too. Ideally, I would love to have an actual singer at this point, but it would change the dynamic of the band so much that it wouldn’t be Nachtmystium anymore. So I feel like I’m kinda stuck in this place where I need to continue to be the vocalist, just because we have about ten releases prior to this. If we brought a real singer in, that would mean we’d probably have to abandon the majority of our back catalog in terms of live performance. And it just wouldn’t be the same band anymore. So if I ever get inspired enough to do something where I really wanna bring in a new singer, I’d probably just start a new band.

There are some clean vocals on the record—who’s doing those?
That’s our producer, Chris Black. He can actually sing a little bit, so we stick him in there and let him do it.

I thought it was Bruce Lamont from Yakuza. It kind of sounds like him.
He’s on the last track on Addicts. The throat singing, the kind of Eastern vocalizations, that’s Bruce Lamont. As far as anything where there’s actual lyrics being sung, that’s all Chris Black.

There are a lot of Goth and postpunk and early industrial sounds on this album. What were you listening to and taking inspiration from this time out?
Oh man, I’ve been totally guiding into classic Goth rock, and some industrial as well. I kinda went back to some of my roots—when I was a kid I was really into Nine Inch Nails' early stuff, basically right up through The Downward Spiral and including all the EPs that followed that record. I kinda shelved those records for a lot of years, 'cause I turned into "Black Metal Kid" and I didn’t wanna listen to the music that was associated with the guys wearing makeup at my high school, so to speak, so I didn’t listen to a lot of that stuff for a long time, but I found myself coming back to it in the last year or two and being like, "Man, a lot of these are really great records, I don’t know why I stopped listening to them as much as I used to." So there’s that. Killing Joke is a new band for me. I never got into them when I was younger and Sanford Parker turned me on to them when we were making Assassins, and since then I think I’ve obtained most of their discography, and I find that to be an endless wealth of great music. Also lots of Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus, early Christian Death, Fields of the Nephilim, all bands that I listened to when I was a kid and, again, just kinda shelved those records and didn’t find myself coming back to them until more recently. So it’s all that stuff, in combination with my love for anything that sounds like Joy Division, including Joy Division. I’m the guy that loves all those knockoff bands. I love Editors, I love Interpol, I actually kinda like the Killers, I’m not gonna lie. There’s an influence from all that stuff coming through.

You’ve got Wrest from Leviathan playing drums on this disc, and he’s also part of the second Twilight album, as is Sanford Parker. How did the sessions overlap?
They didn’t really overlap at all. We did the second Twilight record in March 2009, and it just came out this year. The reason that album got held up is, I’m not sure if you heard, but I broke my leg really severely during the recording, so there was a three-month window where I wasn’t walking. I broke it on the first day of mixing, and we just put the session on freeze until I healed up, and then we got back in and mixed it months later. Then we had to wait and get it mastered, and get the art together, so there was a huge delay between when that was recorded versus when it was released, and it’s just a coincidence that that album and Addicts are being released so closely together. But as far as the sessions go, there’s really nothing too similar between the two records other than the fact that the three of us were there. Twilight’s a cohesive thing between a group of people, where Nachtmystium is more guided by me. Not to say that the guys involved don’t have their own input, that would be a lie if I said they didn’t, but we just operate differently. What I did take away from the Twilight session and bring to the Nachtmystium session was an extremely easy time bringing my ideas to life, because I did write a chunk of that Twilight record, and Sanford and Wrest know exactly what to do with my music. It’s kind of amazing, especially Wrest and I. You put us together, we don’t even have to talk about it. We just show each other the parts and the other one just feeds off of it. We work really, really well together like that; it’s not a challenge to create together. Sanford is the same way. Sanford’ll have some idea that neither one of us is hearing, and he’ll start incorporating that and say, "What do you think of this?" and it’ll be like, "Well, duh, of course that’s what we should do there." He’s just the guy to bring that to life, so it works really well. Those guys are great to work with and I hope to continue to work with them in the future.

What changed between the first and second Twilight records? Was there ever supposed to be a second Twilight record?
Yeah, I think right after we finished the first one, we were all really excited about it, not the fact that Southern Lord hyped it as much as they did—that was a great thing and a really horrible thing. What people don’t realize about the first Twilight record is, that’s a demo. None of us had ever played music together, and we made that album on a Tascam 424 MK3 four-track, in Wrest’s bedroom, with V-drums, which are like an electronic drum kit, a pod, a guitar and a bass. We never turned an amplifier on to make that record. The loudest thing recorded was the vocals. It was basically thrown together, like, "OK, I’ve got these ideas, you’ve got these ideas, we have two weeks here because this is all we can afford." Because this was before Southern Lord was in the picture. That record was done for a year before we even knew Southern Lord Records. We made that with a thousand bucks. And none of it was spent on gear. It was spent on getting myself and Neil from Krieg and Scott from Xasthur out to San Francisco to try and make a record happen. Once it did come out, and people actually seemed interested, we all got excited and wanted to make another one, but that’s also when I was running my record label [Battle Kommand], that was really dominating my time and Nachtmystium was becoming more of a priority to me, and everybody involved had personal lives, so that’s why the second album didn’t come to fruition until years later. At one point we broke up, too, because Scott from Xasthur didn’t want to be involved in the project anymore. He’s kind of a head case in general, as I’m sure you know. He doesn’t like to work with other people and this and that. And basically we put the whole thing on ice. But Wrest from Leviathan is a tattoo artist, and he told me he was coming to Chicago in February 2009 and asked if he could stay with me for a couple of weeks while he tattooed. I was like, "Sure, you can stay here, and since you’re gonna be here for a month, instead of rent why don’t you make a record with me? Let’s do the new Twilight album." And he was all for it, so we just kinda started writing in the evenings when he was done working, and we put that record together in about a month. And we went into the studio and cranked it out, and brought the other people in last minute, and it worked out really well.

Nachtmystium’s developed a reputation as a pretty strong live act. What's your live show like?
Basically, we just go out there and try to be Motörhead. It’s a rock show. It’s a little more stripped-down than the albums. We don’t bring all the electronics into the live show, though we’ve done that a few times, Roadburn [festival in Holland] being one of those times. We did a special psychedelic set, which basically means we do what we normally do but we have a Moog player. But live it’s a lot more raw and more of a fuckin’ kick in the teeth. Everything’s a little faster, and I think we look a little more like a black metal band, and sound a little more like a black metal band, just because everything’s that much more intense and that much faster and more aggressive. There’s definitely a very aggressive approach visually from the four of us, assuming we’re having a good night.

For a long time, Chicago didn't have much of a reputation for metal—all you had was Usurper and Disturbed. But lately it seems like with you, Minsk, Yakuza and Lair of the Minotaur, the city’s metal rep has really been rehabilitated. How organic and unified is the scene there?
To be honest, it’s incredibly unified. Everybody in those bands you just mentioned, with the exception of a few oddball members who aren’t from this immediate area, I can walk out my front door right now and go five minutes in one direction and be at Sanford’s studio, I can walk five minutes in the other direction and be at his front door, I can walk ten minutes in another direction and be where all the guys from Pelican live, and then everybody else kinda lives in between those points. The entire Chicago metal scene, we all live in the same neighborhood, we all record at the same studio, we see each other all the time. It’s really fucking cool. It’s a really interesting time to be here. The Wicker Park and Humboldt Park areas of Chicago are just where everybody’s at. Everything happens here. Our mastering studio’s here, our recording studio’s here, most of the venues we play at are rock-throwing distance from our homes, and we all live in the same neighborhood and all hang out quite a bit. I think it’s the only time since the Touch & Go Records era of Chicago in the late 80s and the early 90s on the indie scene where there’s been this wild explosion of creativity coming out of a bunch of bands that are linked not only by geography but by what they do.

MORE AMG REVIEWS

Here's the latest batch...

At the Soundawn, Shifting
Decrepit Birth, ...And Time Begins
Decrepit Birth, Diminishing Between Worlds
Dodsferd/Mortovatis, Until Your World Go Down
Harvestman/Minsk/U.S. Christmas, Hawkwind Triad
Lightning Swords of Death, The Extra Dimensional Wound
Little Women, Teeth
Rafael Toral, Space Elements, Vol. 2
Yakuza, Samsara
Yakuza, Transmutations