Three Ways to Improve Your Album

Five minutes from Sylosis' Monolith. 67 more to go.

Every year, my admiration for artists who pour themselves into creating and sequencing a full-length work of art swells. In the face of YouTube, iTunes, American attention spans and singles acts, a select few still care about making a great album. Imagine if most popular books only had two good chapters, or if most movies had a couple of good scenes. That's the state of albums today. Dependably creative artists like Converge are both rare and crucial to modern music, just as someone like Jonathan Franzen is to literature.

However, if we are going to keep putting great artists on a pedestal, we still need to hold them to high standards. There are many reasons why music isn't selling as well as it did in decades past. I'll argue that one reason is that in general, most new albums and artists, metal included, aren't as great as their predecessors. With music sales bringing in less revenue than ever for record labels, artists have enough creative control to indulge their best impulses more than ever, but also their worst. Bands as varied as Rush, Gojira and Baroness released good, even great albums this year, but with minimal effort they could have been much better. Here's how.

1. Keep it short.

This seems like the biggest problem for many of today's metal bands. A CD can contain up to 80 minutes of music, but that's no reason for your band to use all 80. If you're lucky enough to find an audience, you should leave them wanting more, not less. To paraphrase Lou Reed, 30 minutes is fine, 40 is pushing it, 50 and you're into jazz.

This isn't a recent phenomenon. Some of the world's finest metal bands have run out of steam over hour-plus long players. Guns N' Roses were the best band in the world when they recorded Use Your Illusion I and II, and even they couldn't get through two-and-a-half hours without "So Fine." But let's look at the good. Slayer's Reign in Blood, one of metal's only indisputable classics, doesn't make it to the half-hour mark. At the Gates reshaped death metal in 34 minutes on Slaughter of the Soul. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, all legendary for their epic compositions, found ways to end their best albums in under 45 minutes. Don't point out that you love all 65 minutes of Metallica's ...And Justice for All until you remind yourself that your band isn't Metallica.

2. Cut the interludes.

Hip-hop is the worst at this. Intro skits, outro skits, intermission skits, phone call skits--these are among the reasons why anyone with a considerable hip-hop collection dreads the shuffle option on their preferred listening device. Metal is also culpable, but instead of skits, they use musical interludes. This year, Veil of Maya, Between the Buried and Me and the Tony Danza Tap Dance Extravaganza littered their records with tossed-off, minute-long pieces that went from being entertaining to skipable over a few listens. Elmore Leonard once said of writing, "I try to leave out the parts that people skip." The best musicians record albums the same way.

3. Save some of the best for last.

Nearly every metal album I've heard in the past several years, even the great ones, are unarguably front-loaded. You don't play all your best songs in the first half of the show, and you also shouldn't play all your best songs in the first half of your album. Slayer ended records with "Raining Blood" and "Seasons in the Abyss." The Number of the Beast closes out with "Hallowed Be Thy Name." How many people who buy Lamb of God records can name a song on the second half of Sacrament or Ashes of the Wake? Those are both great records, but will anyone ever put either of them on a countdown near Rust in Peace? "Tornado of Souls" and "Lucretia" are on side two.

With most listeners sequencing their own playlists these days, some will contend that these gripes don't matter. But maybe listeners would be less inclined mess around with bands' intended tracklists if more artists proved that they knew how to make an album.

Song of the Day: Baroness, "A Horse Called Golgotha"

Best wishes for a speedy recovery, guys.

Meshuggah at Terminal 5

One of the best things about metalheads is that they pay to see bands like Meshuggah. In no other genre, except jazz, will you see a band with no conventional tunings, rhythms or choruses headline a 3,000-capacity venue. Meshuggah's compositionally-subversive non-metal peers probably don't whip their fans into the same kind of visible delirium, but that may have more to do with the band's intangible powers than the forces of death metal.

Meshuggah are death metal's Slayer. Entire subgenres--technical death metal, djent, deathcore, Gojira--have been founded on the idea of outplaying them, but no Summer Slaughter act has ever conjured up the ferocity amassed by the five guys that make up Meshuggah. Watching them wipe the floor with Terminal 5 last week under Godzilla-sized riffs was a reminder that Meshuggah are still at the top of the games that they founded.

Openers Decapitated, one of the better bands to stem from Meshuggah's shadow, drove the crowd into a floor-encompassing pit for the entirety of their set. Sticking to tracks from last year's Carnival is Forever, Poland's heaviest seemed to overcome the venue's stifling acoustics by sheer force. Guitarist Vogg has made a name on passing expectations, losing two members in a fatal bus crash and rebounding with their most consistent record yet, and drummer Krimh honored the mindwarping style of deceased drummer Vitek without imitating it.



Baroness, the evening's odd band out, are famous for classic rock-inspired beard metal. They'd be better suited for a bill with Mastodon or even Bonnaroo, but at Terminal 5 they were able to emphasize their stoner-prog melodies by offering the night's most drastic change of pace. Not once did they pander to the tech death audience, opening with a slow drone and and serving Kyuss-like riffage under often harmonized vocals. The crowd gave them their due, taking a 45-minute break from moshing to absorb the hypnotic progressions of "A Horse Called Golgotha" and "The Sweetest Curse." I'm not sure that I could enjoy a double album of it (as we'll find out when Yellow & Green drops July 17,) but I'd see them again and invite friends.



Impressive as they were, neither Baroness nor Decapitated could steal the show. From the bass-heavy first tones of "Do Not Look Down," Meshuggah unleashed a dizzying set, focused mainly on their two most recent albums, this year's Koloss and 2008's career-peak ObZen. The former's slowed tempos and the latter thrash touches melded into a cinder block-heavy show of horns-flashing music theory classes, graced with a congruent stained glass stage design and a nearly blinding light show. Who knows how much of Terminal 5 would've survived were the Meshuggah fans not relatively subdued by the flashes.

On record, Meshuggah's leaders are guitar wizards Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström and polyrhythmic master Thomas Haake, but onstage frontman Jens Kidman is the star. A good if not mind-blowing singer, his robotic movements and omnipresent samurai face are an unforgettable visual to the sci-fi nightmares behind songs like "The Demon's Name is Surveillance" and "Future Breed Machine." Under the frantic waves of "Combustion," he was the eye of the band's hurricane,  moving just slowly enough to make the case that he was about to destroy the room. Compared with other death metal frontmen, his performances are like his band's music--not the fastest or most dynamic that you can find, but all the scarier for their guile.

Meshuggah will be no one's gateway metal band, but for those of us who like our jazz to come with blast beats, we couldn't have asked for more.