HYLI Vol. XXXI - Old Man Gloom and Mono & World's End Girlfriend
As we switch it up this week, Patrick sends Andy some doom metal from New Mexico and Andy sends Patrick some post-rock from two Japanese bands
Hey gang. It’s Patrick here, of course. Who else would it be? Andy never writes these things (Andy: Untrue). That isn’t true, I believe he literally wrote the last one, but who is counting? Did y’all get into any tunes this week? I finally got around to the new-ish Spiritualized (it fucking rocks) and the new Chat Pile (not for me, absolute sicko music). Also, my grandmother passed away on Saturday. I haven’t been particularly close to that part of the family (my father’s mother) for years, but I am driving to rural Florida this weekend for the funeral. Dying sucks shit, huh. Perhaps while I am in Florida, I will see my fellow newsletter writer Andy and meet his children. That would be nice. Hope y’all have a good week. I need some sort of sign-off catch-phrase here. I’ll think on it for next week. Goodbye.
Old Man Gloom - NO
Patrick: I first got into metal when I was a young boy with hardly any facial hair at the age of 13. This band that used to be called ISIS and is now called ISIS (the band), even though they’re broken up, had just dropped an album called Oceanic that, for a long time, was my favorite metal album (Andy: great album). I think I heard about it because I was reading one rock mag or another and saw someone (probably Chino Moreno) big up this band and the album. I figured, what the heck, CDs only cost $25 and I have to bug some 18-year-old working at Best Buy to pry the CDs out of their Fort Knox-styled security cases, let’s give this thing a run. Turns out it fucking rocked me then and still rocks me to this day. Anyhow, as a 13-year-old, I was just learning the ways of the internet. Among other websites, I would frequently peruse Wikipedia.org, a website I still frequent to this day. When looking up the ISIS (the band) wiki, I saw that frontman Aaron Turner ran a record label called Hydra Head Records (RIP) and had another band called Old Man Gloom. Are you seeing where I’m going with this? Can you fill in the blanks? Let’s move on.
Flash-forward a decade later and Old Man Gloom dropped their most accessible album to date, 2012’s NO. In the interim, I would find out that Old Man Gloom also shared members with Converge, a band I enjoy, and Cave In, a band I LOVE. Aaron Turner, Nate Newton (Converge) and Caleb Scofield (RIP; Cave In) all three share vocals on this album and they all fucking rip at doing the thing they do. Newton kinda brings a hardcore/crossover element to the vocals, Turner goes extreme metal and pretty gnarly with his, and Scofield kinda fills the space in between the two. The best thing about this “supergroup” of sorts is that they bring the fucking riffs. All of them. All the riffs that can be brought are brought on this album, specifically on “To Carry the Flame,” one of my favorite tracks of this scene of metal. Just a fucking barrage. Also, as the only member of the band not in another, more successful band, I feel like drummer Santos Montano could probably go overlooked, but that would be a mistake, as he is an absolute freak behind the kit, absolutely holding his own against his bandmates. This album rocks. The ones that come after it also rock. I love this band and I love metal, some would say more than Andy does. Hope You Like It.
Andy: Pat out here really just nailing it lately. Old Man Gloom more like Old Man Fuck Yeah (Patrick: boomer humor, man). Really just a band that I was destined to love from the first listen. Absolutely monstrous ambient passages just hitting my exact vibe. Weird noises man, hell yes. Always give me more. I love the slow build of “Shadowed Hand”. The actual musicianship is A+ also. Great riffs, gnarly vocals. Really…exactly what you want when you pair Converge and Isis (the band). Absolute chaos from every angle but in a good way. “To Carry the Flame” is just a perfect slice of this album. Give me 10 “The Forking Paths” please. I bet this is a banger of a live show. I have basically nothing bad to say. Sorry. No notes. This is a perfect album for what it is trying to be. Is there a better sludge album (Patrick: yes, it’s called Oceanic by the band ISIS (the band))? I’m not sure there is. This is probably the best. I Loved It (Patrick: <3).
Mono & World’s End Girlfriend - Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain
Andy: With our prompt this week my immediate “What’s a non-metal album you love?” is to go to Portishead but Pat is cultured enough to know them. My follow-up is Getz/Gilberto and Bill Evans Trio which Pat is familiar with, as well. I also know if I went with a Ceschi album, Pat might get physically violent with me so I wanted to think on it a bit (Patrick: that’s goddamn right).
It was actually pretty easy to end up on Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain by Japanese musicians Mono and World’s End Girlfriend. These two post-rock bands collaborated to make something that sounds exactly like neither of them. I discovered this sometime around 2009-ish while in college. I was deep in a spiral of deathcore/grindcore/whatever-core (Patrick: you’ve grown so much) and needed something polar opposite to pull me out. It was able to elicit something from me that none of the other bands I was listening to at the time could. The melancholy strings of “Trailer 1” are permanently etched into my brain.
I know the general gripe with this album is it’s too long (Patrick: noooo) and drawn out but that is exactly why I find it has a place with me. It plays its part without compromise. The ultimate slow-burn. I just love it. It hits the same nerve that a good black metal record hits. Hope You Like It.
Patrick: Of course, I give this motherfucker a prompt of “hey, for the newsletter this week, wouldn’t it be fun if we flipped the script and I picked a metal album for you and you picked a non-metal album for me? haha, that would be such a blast, we’re such good friends!” and he comes at me, when selecting from the vast history of recorded music that isn’t metal, with some shit that has zero lyrics. What the fuck, man? What are we doing here? This dude is so broken. (Andy: Pat is out here wanting me to pick an Erasure or Katy Perry like he hasn’t known me for forever. OH SORRY. Should I have picked Mayday Parade?)
This was good, I guess. I like post-rock, but I tend to like post-rock that has some dynamics to it. People, disparagingly, tend to call this “crescendo-core” with stuff like Expolosions in the Sky, which can admittedly get a bit corny on occasion, and Caspian, but I love that stuff. Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain strikes me as more similar to ambient music, in that the songs (of which there are only five totaling AN HOUR AND FIFTEEN MINUTES) tend to have their one idea, which gets stretched over the course of 10+ minutes without much addition to the structure (Andy: ooohhh yeah baby the gooood stuff). They just kind of … meander. I like some other Mono albums (You Are There and Hymn to the Immortal World) but this one didn’t seem to scratch the same itch for me and just seemed, to be nice, to just have less going on, perhaps purposefully so.
With the exception of “Trailer 3.” “Trailer 3” rocks. It’s over 17-minutes long (come on) and doesn’t really get going until 7+ minutes into the song, but once it gets going, it hits the beats that I tend to prefer from post-rock when I listen to that genre. I wish the other four songs, totaling just under an hour, had a bit more of that energy. I don’t think I’ll be saving this as a whole, and will probably just save “Trailer 3,” which on its own is basically the length of a Joyce Manor album. I Didn’t Really Like It.