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.”

RECIDIVISM

Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges is asking his readers which band or bands they've seen the most often. For me, the leaders are Iron Maiden, Einstürzende Neubauten and Cecil Taylor in a three-way tie. I've seen each four times, with my fifth Maiden concert coming up on 7/12.

Right behind them are the groups or artists I've seen three times each: Amon Amarth, Arch Enemy, Borbetomagus, Clutch, Fishbone, the Flying Luttenbachers, High On Fire, Isis, Machine Head, Motörhead, the Rollins Band, Slayer, Slipknot and Social Distortion.

Then there are those I've (only) seen twice: AC/DC, Black Sabbath (once with Ozzy, once with Dio), Butthole Surfers, Ornette Coleman, Dio (as a solo act), Exodus, Ice-T, Jane's Addiction, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Orthrelm, Pantera, Iggy Pop (once solo, once with the Stooges), Radiohead, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Sword, and Rob Zombie.

I'm probably forgetting some, too—bands I saw open for several different headliners, or other unmemorable circumstances. If you're reading this, are you a recidivist? Do you see the same bands over and over? Are you always happy you went?

MAN ON THE STREET

[When I was in Austin for South by Southwest, I was stopped on the street by a blogger from some advertising agency/PR firm and asked a few questions about street marketing, etc. I forgot all about it until today, when an unrelated Google search turned up the resulting blog post. Here 'tis.]

The Dailies: March 18
Daily Person
Phil Freeman, metal blogger for MSN Music is at SXSW to do a live, onstage interview with Lemmy from Motörhead. He also does freelance writing about heavy metal for the Village Voice and other New York area publications.

What are you excited about seeing this year?
Well I’m hoping to get to the in-store performance for High on Fire (editor’s note: we saw High on Fire last night and it was fantastic). Also, I might try and get in to see Maldita Vecindad, this Mexican rock band who are amazing.

What brand-sponsored parties are you looking forward to?
I tend to avoid the heavily-sponsored types of events. There are only a couple of metal shows tonight so I’ll probably be bouncing back and forth between those.

Have any promotional items or events stood out to you so far?
Not so far. But today’s only my first day. It’s my first time in Texas so I’m just kind of wandering.

Do you think street marketing works?
At a thing like this I’m not sure it does. Honestly, I’m trying to figure out the point of SXSW because most of the bands are already signed. I do think street marketing works for bands as a general approach- hand out a cd, a card, a sticker, whatever. I think that can convince people to look at your music or download something. At a place like this I don’t think it works that well because there are too many people competing for your attention.

THIS WEEK IN SF/NEXT WEEK IN TEXAS

SXSW 2010 Showgoers' Guide to Bay Area Acts

Between March 17 and March 20, thousands of musicians, some signed and many more hoping to be signed, will descend upon Austin for the annual South by Southwest music conference. Nearly three dozen of these acts call the Bay Area home, so here are our picks for local bands worth checking out while in Texas. There's no way you'll be able to catch them all, but any of these recommended acts will put your night into the "win" column.

The Morning Benders
The Morning Benders have a mellow, drifting take on acoustic-guitar-and-organ–driven psychedelic pop, with occasional drum machine outbursts to imply modernity. That'll make fans of Badfinger and the Flaming Lips very happy, as well as groupies for Grizzly Bear — whose Chris Taylor coproduced the Benders' new record, Big Echo.

Hunx and His Punx
Hunx, aka Seth of Gravy Train!!!!, plays humorous and homoerotic garage-pop songs like "Hey Rocky" and "You Don't Like Rock 'n' Roll," splitting the difference between Shonen Knife and T. Rex, sonically speaking. The group offers first-take amateurism and juvenile humor — plus plenty of handclaps, which are always a plus.

High on Fire
The heaviest band since amps were invented, Oakland's High on Fire recently released Snakes for the Divine, the trio's most stylistically varied and assured album to date. Live, they'll celebrate by tearing your face off with pure metal fury. Matt Pike's gargling-gravel vocals and post-Sabbath guitar riffs will roll over helpless (and happy about it) audience members like a square-wheeled truck speeding downhill.

The Jacka
If the Jacka's lyrics are to be believed, he likes girls, going out to clubs, showing off his clothes and his car, and earning money in various extralegal ways. It's been a long time since hip-hop was about what you had to say in this way. Here, it's also all about how you say it, and the MC's voice adds a slight edge of gruffness to a 50 Cent–ish delivery, to impressive effect.

Mistah F.A.B.
Hyphy rapper Mistah F.A.B.'s minimalist electro beats and subdued delivery (not to mention his ultragarish MySpace page) can serve to mask real lyrical talent. He's known to fans as a Lil Wayne–level freestyler — and he serves his fans well. Though he's signed to Atlantic, he offers free downloads of almost his entire discography, from official albums to mix tapes, at his own site.

Sonny and the Sunsets
Sonny and the Sunsets are a low-key "beach pop" (imagine a cross between early Beach Boys and a bunch of dudes strumming and singing around a campfire) ensemble that includes leader Sonny Smith and Kelley Stoltz. There are dashes of Jonathan Richman and the softer side of the Velvet Underground in their songs, and they always seem to be enjoying themselves, a point in their favor.

Moon Duo
Moon Duo is a project featuring keyboardist Sanae Yamada and Wooden Shjips singer and guitarist Ripley Johnson. The music the two make is gentle, occasionally muffled drone-rock in the spirit of Silver Apples, Suicide without the hostility, and/or Stereolab without the pop hooks. It offers lots of oscillating hum and occasional stabs at melody.

Grass Widow
Grass Widow is a female trio making don't-mind-us garage-pop in the post-Shaggs spirit of Slant 6 or Shonen Knife, without the Japanese group's overemphasis on cuteness. Its members all sing in a way that combines Nico-esque calm with folky harmonies, while the music jangles along, occasionally revving up to near-rockingness.

Lyrics Born
Japanese-American rapper and producer Lyrics Born has made quite a name for himself as a solo artist, a member of Latyrx, and one of the founders of the Quannum label alongside DJ Shadow and Blackalicious. In addition to his continuing solo work, he most recently served as executive producer on Love and Understanding, the debut solo album by his wife, powerhouse R&B vocalist Joyo Velarde.

Lazer Sword
Production duo Lazer Sword makes "future bass" music — basically, electro with analog synth zaps flying in all directions and a goofy sense of humor. As DJs, a typical set may encompass Dr. Dre, Mr. Oizo, Keak da Sneak, and a dozen or so artists you haven't heard of yet, but soon will.

Wallpaper.
Wallpaper. is an AutoTune-happy, Chromeo-esque electronic duo that writes silly lyrics ("I'd hit on myself if I could") and song titles ("I Got Soul, I'm So Wasted," "A Million Dollars," "Pool Party"). So, you know, don't come looking for earnest pleas for world peace, but do expect to dance — and perhaps leave with less clothing than you arrived with.

Sleepy Sun
This six-piece band has found a unique and highly worthwhile path through the tangled, overgrown jungle that is the region between psychedelia, stoner rock, and proto-metal. It combines both sides of Led Zeppelin — the bombastic and the acoustic — with SubArachnoid Space's lysergic drift and pastoral folk, winding up with something quite beautiful and sometimes surprisingly heavy and rockin'.

Ty Segall
Ty Segall is a doctrinaire, minimalist garage-rocker. He started out playing shows as a one-man band, cranking up his distorted guitar and kicking a drum with a tambourine attached. You can hear echoes of Jon Spencer and Billy Childish in his sound, but he has a talent for hooks, too, even if he buries them under noise and reverb.

Thee Oh Sees
If you still don't know Thee Oh Sees, the group's name should provide a hint as to what it sounds like. Yes, like Thee Headcoats and Thee Mighty Caesars, they practice primitivist garage-psych with a slightly shambling rhythm section, bare-bones melodies, and seriously echoed and reverbed guitars. Thee Oh Sees add male and female co-lead vocals to the setup, though, for an X-ish feel.

Souls of Mischief
Souls of Mischief are Bay Area hip-hop royalty. Their debut album, 93 'Til Infinity, was named one of the Top 100 Rap Albums by The Source, when that magazine still had credibility in such matters. They're cofounders of the Hieroglyphics collective, and released their latest CD, Montezuma's Revenge, in December.

A WITCH, A WIZZARD AND 10 MORE

Not quite as epic as last Tuesday's 20-disc downpour, but here's what I got in today's mail:

Africa, Amanaz (Shadoks)
Thomas Fehlmann, Gute Luft (Kompakt)
Gama Bomb, Tales from the Grave in Space (Earache)
Gamma Ray, To the Metal! (E.A.R. Music)
High on Fire, Snakes for the Divine (E1) (this is the Best Buy version, with the exclusive studio track "Mystery of Helm" and bonus live versions of "Eyes and Teeth" and "Cometh Down Hessian")
Jóhann Jóhannsson, and in the endless pause there came the sound of bees (Type)
Thomas Savy, French Suite (Plus Loin Music)
Secondhand Sureshots, Secondhand Sureshots (Stones Throw)
Stigma, Concerto for the Undead (Pivotal Rockordings)
Jacky Terrasson, Push (Concord)
White Wizzard, Over the Top (Earache)
Witch, Lazy Bones!! (Shadoks)

HIGH ON FIRE POLISHES ITS METAL WEAPONRY

[From the SF Weekly.]

Oakland's (and possibly Earth's) heaviest band, High on Fire, is ready for its close-up. The trio's fifth studio album, Snakes for the Divine, is its first for the E1 label after several years on highly regarded metal imprint Relapse. The musicians also worked with a real producer for the first time in years.

On Snakes, the band's sound was shaped by Greg Fidelmann, who has worked on such high-profile metal discs as Metallica's Death Magnetic and Slayer's World Painted Blood. "He's actually a producer producer," says guitarist and vocalist Matt Pike, contrasting Fidelmann with Steve Albini and Jack Endino, who worked on 2005's Blessed Black Wings and 2007's Death Is This Communion respectively. "Greg's a lot more hands-on."

The result is High on Fire's cleanest, most accessible album to date. Of course, the members keep their trademarks. Pike's vocals are a hoarse roar somewhere between Motörhead's Lemmy and the Melvins' Buzz Osborne with throat polyps, and the rhythm section of bassist Jeff Matz and drummer Des Kensel thunders like an avalanche. But each instrument occupies its own space, with room for subtle ornamentation. And Pike's guitar, one of the fiercest and most punishing axes in modern metal, has moments of surprising clarity. Indeed, from the album's first few moments, it's obvious this is a new stage in High on Fire's evolution — even if the title track begins with a high-pitched, buzzing riff that's naggingly similar to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."

Pike laughs and owns up to the borrowing. "Not intentionally, but yeah, I kinda lifted a little bit of that," he says. "I thought it was so cool, and it's such a fun thing to play."

For the rest of its eight-minute running time, the song is a vintage High on Fire gallop, riffs landing like body blows from a 9-foot-tall steroid abuser. The album is jammed with the band's longest and most punishing songs (five pass the six-minute mark, and two run more than eight minutes). It also offers greater variation from the High on Fire crew. "How Dark We Pray" and "Bastard Samurai" are slower than anything the band has recorded since its 2000 debut, The Art of Self-Defense. "Every now and then it's good to slow down some," Pike acknowledges. "Jeff and I had a really wide span of tempos."

Pike is busy preparing for the band's first headlining U.S. tour in several years. "The way our management and booking agents are, they want us opening constantly," he says genially. Indeed, the group has been the first act of choice on Megadeth's 2008 Gigantour outing and on the recent Dethklok and Mastodon co-headlining tour, but Pike would like the chance to play for an hour straight for a change.

He'd also like to play fresh material this time out. "I'm two-thirds of the way through learning all of 'em so I can play and sing 'em live," he says of the new songs. "We're still working out the quirks. But by the time March rolls around, I'm pretty confident everybody will have their end of things in order."