Converge, "Homewrecker"

11 Days to Find a Home



I don't know what word Jacob Bannon screams two seconds into "Homewrecker", from the certifiably classic Jane Doe, but I'd rank it with metal's most brutal interjections, up there with Tomas Lindberg's "Go!" in "Slaughter of the Soul" and Ozzy's "Ooh!" in "I Don't Want to Change the World."

What he says doesn't really matter. As with almost every Converge song, it's all but impossible to decipher what Bannon is screaming. Not that his lyrics don't matter--they do, and are often quite good. But as with Frank Zappa or Mike Patton, there's more of an emphasis on the sounds of the words and the vocal melodies than the lyrics themselves. Even without being able to comprehend the words, I'd rank Bannon with young Henry Rollins as one of the world's most ferocious frontmen, "Homewrecker" being a prime example.

Lou Reed

The tributes pouring in to Lou Reed over the past few weeks keep reminding me of Lou's incredible 2000 album Ecstasy (the one with the 18-minute song about the possum). On the title track, Lou sings "I see a child through a window with a bib and I think of us and what we almost did." Then there's the almost unbearably sad divorce song "Baton Rouge"--"You wanted children and I did not/You might get a laugh when you hear me shout 'I wish I had.'"

Decades into one of the most remarkable careers in all of recorded music, Lou Reed was still making something beautiful from his dissatisfaction. He probably wouldn't have taken any comfort in the knowledge that his progeny, which includes Bono, Thurston Moore, Morrissey, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Michael Stipe, Beck, Nick Cave, Frank Black, Henry Rollins and Debbie Harry, would all give him the printed equivalent of a standing ovation this month. He's called the Godfather of Punk, but more than any other musician he's the Father of Underground Rock, all of which, loud and soft, fast and slow, good and bad, should remind you of what an innovator he was.

The amount of boundaries that he demolished and music that he inspired with a few chords ("One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.") and a flat but self-assured voice is just staggering. The fact that he still sounds fresh and singular after his entire discography was raided by the aforementioned artists is almost unbelievable. When was the last time you heard a hip new band that didn't owe something to the Velvet Underground? Never, and you also never heard one that was nearly as good.

Sometime in high school, I became obsessed with Lou Reed. That's not out of the ordinary, seeing as how obsessions come easily to both high schoolers and Lou Reed fans. But it felt different to this high schooler, whose other obsessions centered around punk anarchy and metal nihilism. Lou Reed could be as aggressive or atonal as anything that I was seeing at Jaxx in Springfield on the weekends. But Lou was also the one who made me want to be an adult. I read along with the lyrics to New York and decided that I had never heard a smarter, tougher artist, or a cooler one. Those poetic, literate stanzas contrasted with the depictions of junkies, transvestites and murderers, which brought me to some of the most affecting love songs that anyone will ever hear. If you weren't the kind of person that he'd want to meet, he wrote about you anyway. I hadn't made any plans to stop being a kid, but Lou Reed changed all of that by portraying the kind of grown up that I wanted to be.

Maybe I never got there, and maybe he never did either. Lou Reed was constantly Growing Up in Public, usually trying something wildly different from his last adventure. In his final years, he was still crazy and brave enough to make Lulu, a Frank Wedekind adaptation with Metallica that sounded like nothing the rest of us had ever heard. It's as admirable and loathsome as anything that he recorded in the previous 50 years, and in a more intelligent world, it would have won all of Spring Awakening's Tonys.

Lou Reed exemplified all the freedom that people love about rock n' roll, taken further than anybody this side of Bob Dylan had ever dreamed. He saw rock n' roll as art, something that should be in a museum or a library. But unlike many of his acolytes (and if you've written any rock music since the 1970s, you're an acolyte, whether or not you know it), Lou Reed always knew how to rock. This wasn't "more of an art project than a rock band," like the bloat that regularly pops up on Pitchfork's Best New Music feature. This was a guy who could tear it up on "The Blue Mask" or "The Last Shot," just as well as he could write tender, 11-minute, violin-laden suites. His characters were heatbreaking, hilarious and all him, part of a guy(?) who defied any sort of categorization.

That hard-boiled, Dirty Blvd. hero of New York? Can't find him in the gender-bending glam of Transformer, or the doo-wop swoons on Coney Island Baby. In the four albums that the Velvet Underground made together, there are more moods and guitar magic than in other bands' 40-year-careers, which is why we believed him when he said "My week beats your year." Those of us who never got to side four of Metal Machine Music have learned to love that it exists. That defiance was part of what endeared him to all of us, and what dared so many writers, musicians, filmmakers and painters to try to figure him out.

Many obituaries have already noted that Lou Reed made rock criticism more important than maybe any other artist, since he gave us so much to write about and so much to contend with (his public fights with Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau did more to confirm the journalists' significance than a Pulitzer ever would have). But the best thing he ever did for rock criticism came last summer, when he wrote the best piece of music journalism of the year. Could he have done it all along? Probably, but what we got instead was already beyond astonishing.

I've tried so hard to keep this blog impersonal, to write about the music that I love without infiltrating my life into these thoughtpieces, lists and reviews. But Lou Reed had a way of pulling things out of the world that people didn't want to address, and I can barely write anything about Lou Reed without thinking of the dozens of ways that he's enhanced my life. In my first baby-sitting job, I was helpless with my toddler until I learned I could calm him down by singing "After Hours" any time at all. I introduced myself to most of my college friends by playing "Walk on the Wild Side" at a talent show. I still lose sleep over the characters in The Bells and Berlin, and wonder about who delivers the speech in the last movement of "Street Hassle." Any of my friends who move to or leave New York City get a copy of New York from me. Anytime I mourn someone, I console myself with Magic and Loss. October 27 was no exception.

Thank you Lou Reed, for teaching me that between thought and expression lies a lifetime. Thank you for writing "You won't be young forever, you should've written fifteen," and for "There's a bit of magic in everything and then some loss to even things out." Thanks for Sha-la-la-la, man. Thank you for being our mirror.

A Band Called Death

Faithful readers here have probably seen quite a bit about Death, the Floridian death metal pioneers lead by the late Chuck Schuldiner. But before Scream Bloody Gore, and more impressively before the Ramones, there was another band called Death.



The earlier Death, a Detroit garage band from the '70s, star in the stellar documentary A Band Called Death, which is now streaming on Netflix Instant. The film has been getting positive comparisons to the Oscar-winning hit Searching for Sugar Man, but unlike Sixto Rodriguez, interest in Death had been noticeably picking up before the film's release. Seven songs from the band's unfinished first album were released on Drag City as ...For the Whole World to See, and Jack White cited Death as a influence in a New York Times article. The surviving members have even reunited for a few performances.

The fact is, as Henry Rollins, Alice Cooper, Questlove and Kid Rock all testify in A Band Called Death, that this is a band that deserves your ears. Songs like "Keep on Knocking," "Let the World Turn" and "Politicians in My Eyes" hint that the band could have found a place in history alongside fellow Motor City protopunks as Cooper, the Stooges and the MC5 had they just been able to stick around. In one scene of A Band Called Death, the musicians remember being offered a deal with Clive Davis at Columbia Records, on the condition that they change their name. The band turned it down, and we're left to wonder what could have been.

Therapy with RuPaul and Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins vs. Iggy Pop

13 Songs to Ring in 2013

Other than 666, no number is more metal than 13. Its bad luck powers are revealed in musical tributes from several respected metal bands, many of whom have stumbled in mediocre musical salutes to Jason Voorhees' signature number. Better to honor the new year with a drink at the Lucky 13 Saloon than a slog through Cruelty and the Beast.

Few songwriters have survived the 13 curse, and even fewer have done so with a reasonable amount of decibels. Here's a brief audio history of 13.

1. Anvil, "This is Thirteen"

Interestingly, this is where Anvil's luck started to change--thirteen albums into their career, when a coinciding documentary gave them by far the biggest success of their lives. All their talk of wizardry and superstition couldn't hold a candle to watching them get lost and broke in Europe.



2. Anthrax, "13"

What the hell is this? Basically a short exercise for Anthrax's rhythm section, and a reminder that Anthrax were the first good thrash metal band to be intentionally silly on record.



3. Black Flag, "Room 13"

"Keep me alive!" screams 20-year-old Henry Rollins, making that effort sound like a struggle for the last time in his career. "I need to hang on!" is the part that everyone remembers.



4. Cradle of Filth, "Thirteen Autumns and a Widow"

Cruelty and the Beast is often regarded as COF's peak, but even Cradle's best songs are better remembered than reheard. Throw it in the mix for the 13-year-old in all of us.



5. Danizg, "Thirteen"

Written by Danzig originally for Johnny Cash's best studio album, American Recordings. He didn't release his own version until years later on 6:66 Satan's Child. Cash's folky reading and Danzig's goth-blues version both hold up, although it's abundantly clear whom was doing the other one a favor.



6. Megadeth, "Thirteen"

By album number 13, there was no defense of Dave Mustaine's political or social positions, but also no doubt of his chops or longevity.



7. Mercyful Fate, "Thirteen Invitations"

Mercyful Fate's influence on metal was flourishing when they reunited for 1993's In the Shadows. The result suggested that they'd ignored the last ten years of black metal.



8. Motörhead, "Cat Scratch Fever"

"First time that I got it I was thirteen years old," Lemmy amends the lyric in Motörhead's take on Nugent's staple. "Ours knocked his out of the fucking loop--of course, nobody remembers ours," wrote Lemmy in his autobiography. He's half-right.



9. Pantera, "13 Steps to Nowhere"

Anselmo was a good sport to sacrifice his lyrics to a song where all anyone can pay attention to is the drumming. A lesser guitarist than Dimebag would be trampled, but even he knows better than to stand in the way of one of Vinnie Paul's greatest intros.



10. The Pixies, "No. 13 Baby"

Frank Black honors a girl with a special tattoo, who at least had the sense to get it somewhere she can cover up for job interviews.



11. Social Distortion, "Bad Luck"

"Thirteen's my lucky number," laments cowpunk hero Mike Ness in this gem from Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell, years before another country crossover would make the same claim. Hey Taylor, is it too late for your to pick a tourmate for next year?



12. Suicidal Tendencies, "Emotion No. 13"

Lights...Camera...Revolution! completed ST's first transition from hardcore to metal, with hits like "You Can't Bring Me Down" and "Send Me Your Money," plus thrashing deep cuts like this one. If "Emotion No. 13" had been released today, it would have taken the e-word back from Chris Carrabba.



13. Venom, "13"

Not bad, actually, out of context with the 300 other Venom songs that sound exactly like it.

Lemmy

One of the best documentaries that I saw last year, and one of the best metal movies that I can think of, is Greg Olliver and Wes Orshoski's depiction of Lemmy Kilmister. I didn't want it to end.

It's no surprise to watch Lemmy being a badass. People who never have heard a Motörhead song can tell you that. But Lemmy does a terrific job of revealing what a pro he is--practically living on the road, touring and putting out albums for 40something years and leaving any room that Motörhead plays in tatters. Watching everybody from James Hetfield to Steve Vai, Ice-T, Joan Jett, Slash and Henry Rollins show up to fawn over Lemmy reminds me of the quote about how The Velvet Underground's first album sold only ten thousands copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band.

Enjoy the performances, anecdotes and insights in Lemmy right below.

Henry Rollins on Dating

"If you're not much of a reader, I'm not much of a dinner-buyer."