#jonathan shaw

Load up Danny Boyle with a massive dose of Adderall and lock him in a room with a Super 8 camera and a semi-functional Tyco slot car racetrack. Soundtrack sourced from field recordings of the Ford River Rouge Complex, Dearborn MI, December 1977 (mixed by Lou Reed in a very surly mood).

Animate Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for the opening highway scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). Let Roger Corman direct. Soundtrack with forgotten practice recordings from the Trans-Love house in Ann Arbor, c 1968.

Create a filmstrip of rejected drawings from Philippe Druillet’s La Nuit (1976) and project on the wall of an abandoned petrol station outside Brighton, UK, while a damaged dub of Voivod’s War and Pain (1984) plays on a battered Toshiba boombox.

Curate an exhibition of John Chamberlain sculptures for display in the entry area of a Costco in Memphis, TN. Audio guide playing on distributed headphones features the opening guitar solo from Saxon’s “The Eagle Has Landed” (1983), 1:07-1:28, at 3x speed in a continuous loop.

Assemble a replica of a 2005 Harley-Davidson Road King out of empty Coors Light cans, Cheez Whiz and whatever you can scrounge from the Army Navy Store in Schenectady, NY. Find the top of the nearest hill with a 17% grade. Mount replica. Set it on fire. Roll.

(Please note that these stunts have been performed by professionals. Do not attempt at home. Do obtain a copy of Äxe’s Autogeddon if any of the above sounds like your kind of a good time.)

Check out the first nine or so minutes of Mortuary Cult, and, absent the above info, you’d likely imagine you’re listening to a crossover band or maybe a hardcore-adjacent grind outfit. The pace is punishingly intense, in part set by the excellent percussion of Nadia Tydings-Lynch (who also drums for grinding death metal monsters Blood Monolith, grind band Deliriant Nerve and powerviolence purveyors Brain Tourniquet). Vocals from Matt Scott are harsh but more hoarse than glottal, in the mode of a hardcore or crust act. The dominant sensibility is muscular and ruthlessly fast.

On the longer songs — like “Corpse Candle” or “Earth Inferno,” which cluster at the middle of the record — Goetia’s death metal ambitions are somewhat clearer, especially in the tunes’ compositions. The dive bombs come heavy and hard, and the riffage and soloing are appropriately gruesome. But it’s still the case that the sonic sensibility rides a (hugely pleasurable) line between crisp and ragged, an aesthetic well fit for underground thrash.

However we wish to split hairs, the principal object at issue here is the music. Goetia makes a variety of hybrid heavy music that’s replete with the excellent time the band seems to be having playing the songs. Their excitement is infectious. Mortuary Cult provides a listening experience that we could characterize as “fun,” if fun didn’t seem entirely beside the point.

Some listeners might demur: hasn’t there always been a decidedly metallic quality to hardcore? See the arc of the Bad Brains’ music (hardcore’s most influential band, excepting perhaps Black Flag), or in the UK, that of Charged GBH. Some accounts of hardcore’s emergence argue for a kind of refining process, in which punk’s interest in properties like speed and snarl were intensified, making them sonic ends in themselves. Early tunes like the Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” or GBH’s “Knife Edge” provide compelling evidence.

But we should keep listening, to important songs like “Big Takeover” from Bad Brains’ transformational self-titled ROIR cassette or “Big Women” from GBH’s “No Survivors” 7-inch. Neither song would have been possible without records like Black Sabbath’s “Symptom of the Universe” or Motörhead’s Bomber. Stingray carries on in that fashion, with plenty of flash, nasty guitar soloing and riffage that conveys a terminally bad attitude.

Those necessary, negative qualities noted, Enemy is a very pleasurable record. For this reviewer, the EP’s last song, “Failed Harvest,” is its best. The overall sensibility gravitates toward death metal, replete with dive-bombs, throaty gruffness and a winning breakdown about two-thirds of the way through. There’s a surfeit of brawn in the song, and throughout the record, but somehow no fat. Like the best of the NWOBHM, assembled deep in Thatcher’s England, Enemy is lean and mean, hard music for austere times.

The musicianship and production values on display throughout both releases raise questions about how we should understand IV as demo material. Ayloss (stage name of Chris Daritsis, who has at least a half dozen other metal projects going and plays just about every note of the music he releases as Spectral Lore) is stretching himself, musically and compositionally, on IV, incorporating ambitiously proggy keyboards and horns into the band’s already grand and dense atmospheric black metal. The results are mixed, but the music feels very polished and complex, not qualities commonly associated with demo-level recordings.

The progressive elements are particularly emphatic in the release’s initial 20 minutes, and this reviewer is not moved. Demo opener “On the Threshold That Separates Two Worlds” sounds like a mash-up of Tangerine Dream’s electronic sensibility and the overheated grandiosity of Trevor Jones’ Excalibur soundtrack. “Desert of the Real (The Expanse)” recalls the fussiest sorts of late-1970s fusion; it’s all a bit mannerly and self-regarding, and the addition of conventional black metal textures collapses the song into risible dramatics. Still, the eruption of “Chaos Is a Grand Adventure” into the soundscape is nearly worth the wait. The song recalls the force of Sentinel (2012), perhaps the band’s most aggro release, and most of IV (Part 2-Demo) gravitates toward the black metal that has dominated Spectral Lore’s considerable output.

At the close of the demo, Ayloss departs more profoundly from his genre roots. “What could have been, the burden of here and now, deathless” is a 17+-minute track that commences in an indie mode. A little Johnny Marr, a little Sisters of Mercy, a little Aztec Camera, the first four minutes of the song are fairly pleasant. Soon a repetition of the principal melodic line commences, all languid strumming and gentle electronics; the strum overstays its welcome by at least two minutes, and the track threatens to fall into a stupor. This reviewer did.

Then, after about five additional (and interminable) minutes of clean strings and digital effects gesturing toward ambient music, an assertive voice emerges. It’s a recording of Mario Savio, delivering one of the climaxes of his 2 December 1964 address during the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and what a speech that was. Savio paraphrases Bayard Rustin. It’s stirring. Soon Ayloss mixes in other voices from contemporary speeches on Gaza and the genocide. It’s hard to tell what the intent is: validation of an ongoing leftist tradition of dissent? Sadness that these voices are not more prominent in our political discourse?

Perhaps the strange combination of sounds, musical modalities and sensibilities, the decidedly uneven success of the songs — perhaps these are the way to understand the demo quality of the release. Ayloss seems to be woodshopping in a very public way. It’s hard to argue with so much free music, and with the concept of freedom (of speech, of culture, of creativity) that may be driving all the experimentation. But this reviewer believes there is a good record in all this sometimes baggy and saggy output. It’s a record he would like to hear.