The Great Old Ones - EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy

I've been hearing about EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy, the latest release from French black metal outfit The Great Old Ones, from other metal bloggers and fans for what seems like forever.  The hype around this album is real, and while I'd never heard of the band before catching an advance track for this album, I'm a sucker for hype when I know nothing about the band.  So I decided to check it out and see if the hype was justified, or just a bunch of noise.

If These Trees Could Talk - The Bones of a Dying World

If you ask a dozen different people to define instrumental post-rock/metal and give you a band that best fits that definition, chances are you'll get some different answers.  From the heavy riffs of Pelican, to the proggier leanings of Scale the Summit, to the ambient/intense duality of Explosions in the Sky, to any other band you can think of, the post- genre seems to lend itself to a litany of sounds while defining none of them.  Personally, my baseline for post-metal is ISIS, so my baseline for instrumental post-metal is "take Aaron Turner's vocals away from ISIS, and go from there."  It's a fascinating genre that allows for quite a bit of experimentation, subverted expectations, and deviation from the norm (like all music should), and I think it's cool that so many different yet similar sounds can fit under one umbrella.  Now that you know how I feel about post-metal, let's talk about If These Trees Could Talk and their new album The Bones of a Dying World.  If These Trees Could Talk hail from Akron, OH, and have been around for a little over a decade.  They first crossed my radar when I heard some songs from their second album Red Forest, all of which I enjoyed.  The Bones of a Dying World comes at a perfect time, as post-metal has seen a lull in quality releases this year compared to years past and other genres.

Sarin - Burial Dream

It seems crazy to think about, but 2015 marks five years since Isis called it quits, leaving the metal world without one of its most important and influential bands.  Just as crazy to think about is that post-metal as a genre is doing at least as well now as it was when the world lost Isis.  Part of that is due to the members of the band pursuing other projects with the same insane level of talent they brought to Isis; another is a new wave of post-metal bands following in Isis' wake.  Pelican continues to defy expectations and improve on every album they release, and I've written before about my love for Cold Blue Mountain and their phenomenal 2014 album Old Blood.  Now another disciple has stepped forward to spread the good word, in the form of Brampton, Ontario's Sarin, and their new album Burial Dream.

Cold Blue Mountain - Old Blood

The metal blogosphere is much like the American political media, in the sense that buzz words are used to carry much of the weight and attract the most attention.  Where a Senatorial Candidate may tell the people that he's for "lower taxes" or "anti-gun control" to try and quickly give you a sense of his beliefs, metal bands rely on the increasingly hyper-specific sub-genres like "doom" or "sleepcore" (something I really read the other day).  While these words usually mean nothing when applied vapidly, when chosen carefully they can indeed give the voter/listener a pretty good idea of whether or not they want to proceed in checking out this politician/band.  For me, those words typically include "sludge," "post-rock," "doom," or "blackened," so when I saw three of the four attached to California's Cold Blue Mountain and their second album Old Blood, I decided that yes, this would potentially be someone I'd like to learn more about before voting.  Er... a band I would like to listen to.

Skinny Jeans and Blast Beats

Let’s play a quick game.  It won’t take long, and it won’t be hard.  Here’s how it will work: I’m going to ask you a question, you think of the answer, and then we see if you’re right or not.  Sounds fun, right?  Let’s give it a whirl.  Who won the World Series in 1984? Did you say the Detroit Tigers?  If you did, you were right.  Here’s another one, just for kicks: Which came first, Blackwater Park or Leviathan?  Blackwater Park you say? My, you’re good at this.  Ok, enough practicing, let’s break out the real deal.  What’s a name for a sub sect of society that is pretentious, overbearing, and spiteful toward those who think differently about pop culture than they, dresses in a manner deemed to be “weird” to the mainstream, and often views music, movies, et al in terms of absolutes rather than subjectively?  Cue the “Jeopardy” theme… ok.  Got your answers?  Raise your hand if you said “hipsters.”  Well that’s cute, and somewhat accurate, but it’s not what I was going for.