HYLI Vol. LXVII - Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean and Guided by Voices
Andy sends Patrick some Boston sludge metal and Patrick sends Andy some 90s Midwestern power-pop
Hello. Welcome back. Sorry we missed a week. Your Dads (Andy and Patrick) were supposed to meet up last week but my kids (Andy) were extra filled with boogers and Patrick’s kid is still small and tiny and we don’t want them to get real boogers yet. Oh well, next time. I took my kids to the beach this week/end. My 2-year-old can basically swim now which is awesome. She still won’t let me build a sand castle without intentionally destroying it which is not awesome (Patrick: sounds great). My wife and I also had a date night to see Traitors (the best beatdown band around) and Attack Attack! (the pioneering crabcore band) (Patrick: jesus christ). I have absolutely no idea why they’re on tour together. I’m confident that the Venn diagram has just my wife and I in the overlapping part but I’m not complaining. Had a blast. Live music is great. Hope You All Missed Us, Sorry, We Missed You.
Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean - Obsession Destruction
Andy: Hello. Congratulations on being introduced on this year’s Album of the Year: Obsession Destruction by Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean. 8 songs at 1 hour and 7 minutes. Sorry, not sorry. Each minute rules (Patrick: I was prepared to be ticked off by this but you are so right). Just the absolute antithesis of the album Patrick picked. I love Chained. Fantastic sound. Fantastic name. They are, and I don’t say this lightly, perfect at what they do. Just perfect sludge. “In the Feral Grace of Night, May the Last Breath Never Come,” is in the running for Song of the Year.
They, like their namesake Thou, have a semi-inscrutable release strategy of primarily singles and EPs. Almost begrudgingly, we finally got another banger of a full album. The guitar tones and feedback here are hypnotizing. "Summer Comes to Multiply" sits at 8 minutes and goes from a slow riff to an even slower one, then it somehow gets even slower. This is as nasty as it gets. Long ass tracks with relentlessly heavy slow riffs and the absolute best harsh vocals. Vocals here are leagues better than your normal deep yell vocals that typically associate with sludge music. Just all-time great stuff. Basically, the type of vocal I want 90% of the time.
Might be blasphemous to the sludge truthers out there but Chained has usurped Thou as kings of the genre. Hope You Like It.
Patrick: It seems like extreme metal has been on a bit of a sludge-leaning kick in 2023. I’m all for it, it’s my favorite sub-genre of metal and, no disrespect to Andy and nerds like him, but I’d rather the big metal albums of the year sound like this than like black metal or death metal etc. (Andy: *shocked gasp*)
Our buddy Drew tweeted this to Andy the other week and I was like “hmm cool art but Andy is making me listen to some bullshit at the moment so I will wait to listen to this.” I’m actually kind of surprised Andy likes this so much. In the past, he’s told me that he doesn’t love sludge stuff (Andy: I don’t love boring sludge of which there is a lot) and this is so sludgy. It’s slow and my dude Andy loves something that’s fast as fuck (Andy: I also love slow you know nothing about me). But I’m glad he seems to love it so he can share it with me because, boy, do I love this.
The vocals on Obsession Destruction are insanely cool (Andy: Literally GOAT status). It doesn’t seem to be similar to a lot of the sludge metal I’m familiar with, but I think that’s part of what makes this so cool. Just wildly unique. It also has so much feedback on seemingly every track. Those of you who remember last year’s EOTY list from Andy will remember the Toadeater album similarly employed feedback almost constantly in a way I loved. “The Chalice” begins the song with several blasts of feedback and immediately sucked me in. It’s immediately followed with such an awesome riff accompanied by a simple but alluring drum beat. The drums are pretty slow here and don’t carry a ton of fills but when the fills hit, they really fucking hit. The album also finishes with two 12-minute songs in its final three tracks, with both “Ten Thousand Years of Unending Failure” and “In the Feral Grace of Night, May the Last Breath Never Come,” (Andy: such great names) with the former utilizing what almost sounds like a synth squelch and the latter featuring a repeated drum groove that almost feels roughly proggy mixed with the sludge. As if Tool got way heavier, cooler, and sounded less like a band with serious opinions about the moon landing. I really love this. I love sludge. I want more.
Guided by Voices - Alien Lanes
Patrick: This band was my favorite “discovery” during the early parts of lockdown with COVID. Just sitting around miserable and stir-crazy in March 2020 listening to Midwestern power pop. Great times tbh. Guided By Voices feel like a band that, on paper, I should have been a fan of my entire life, but the sheer amount of albums they have always was kind of off-putting and daunting to me (Andy: A valid anxiety imo), not exactly knowing where to dive in. Alien Lanes was my eventual starting point and is, to this day, 1a/1b tied for my favorite by the band, which is saying a lot considering they have 37 albums with the 38th on the way lol (Andy: that is too many, jesus).
This record is just kind of perfect music to me. 28 songs totaling 41 minutes. That’s the stuff. Every song gets in, delivers an insanely catchy hook, and gets right the fuck out. Instrumentally, the influences here are all pretty clear, working with the template from British Invasion bands and just kinda making them more Midwestern and scuzzy and lo-fi. I love it. “Motor Away” would be on my shortlist of favorite songs ever. The verses are insanely catchy and frontman Robert Pollard, who threw a no-hitter in college baseball (sports tidbit for my friend Andy) (Andy: wow great for him congrats), delivers the hook with so much goddamn intensity that it drives me wild. “Striped White Jets” is another fave here, such cool distortion on the guitars, making them sound totally unhinged. I also love the little shoddy-sounding drum machine part on “My Valuable Hunting Life,” giving a kitschy feel to one of the catchiest songs of the 90s. Bob has so much attitude with the “Come on!” going into the second chorus. What a little brat, I love him so much.
I’m not going to pretend to love every one of the 28 songs here. A few of them are under half a minute long and I couldn’t tell you one thing about them (Andy: because they weren’t good). But the ones that are great are just about everything that’s good about music. I can’t tell if Andy will like this. I think it’s just weird and left-of-center enough to hook him in but he also hates music that’s catchy and good so who knows? Hope You Like It.
Andy: The biggest problem with having an album that is 28 songs in just 41 minutes is they can’t all be winners. Some of them suck (Patrick: I’d say this is an issue with any album with more than, like, 12 songs regardless of the length in minutes lol). Not all of them, there are some great tracks here. But, this was a very shotgun approach, quantity-over-quality type record for me. Please, hire an editor. “Gold Hick” stinks, get it out of here. I have deleted many sentences of me complaining about specific things. We don’t need that.
With my whining out of the way, there are some great tracks here, notably “Motor Away,” as Patrick said (really felt it was a Pat song before reading that). “Strawdogs” rocks. “Little Whirl” rocks. “Alright” rocks. I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed this album if we listened to it during our first year of this newsletter. But today I do, and I think that is growth (Patrick: absolutely!). I’m doing a good job, thank you (Patrick: settle down). This album is full of great ideas and catchy tracks. Again, like Patrick said, they really get in, do the thing, and get out. They messed around with some weird ideas, like “Ex-Supermodel” with the strange little groaning in the background, and they usually worked. It has a bit of a lo-fi “who gives a shit” vibe that I love. Almost like someone just hit play on a recorder while they were jamming in their garage (Patrick: there is literal video evidence of this happening). I’m here for most of this.
If they didn’t have 300 albums I’d be interested in exploring a bit more but, at this stage in my life, I just need people to link me to specific songs. I can’t handle that much. I liked it, I didn’t love it.