Music Video Monday hits the mini-links!
Memphis two man metal band Namazu are dropping a new album this week, and to celebrate, they went for a round of mini golf. In their music video for “Bactine”, they are having entirely too much fun. Aren’t metalheads supposed to be serious and scowly? Whatever, dude. Let’s hit the bumper boats.
Music Video Monday: Namazu
If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
Today’s Music Video Monday brings you a message from space.
This is the world premiere of “Not Of This Earth”, the solo debut from former Strengths frontwoman Alyssa Moore, who wrote, recorded and produced the chewy chunk of space prog. She was joined by Strengths shredder Will Forrest. Legendary Memphis underground filmmaker John PIckle played drums on the track and directed this mind-pounding video. Call it Close Encounters of the Metal Kind.
Music Video Monday: Alyssa Moore
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
Looking at the last three decades of underground rock and metal reveals the undeniable truth that the Melvins deserve a seat at the same table with bands like Sonic Youth, Neurosis, Fugazi, Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies, and other undeniable pioneers that exacted an influence well beyond their immediate, real-time surroundings with serious and ongoing longevity that remains today.
In broad, simplistic terms, the Melvins’ chronology has two artistic peaks; albeit ones surrounded by an ocean of noteworthy-to-great releases. From 1989 to 1994 and across five full-length albums and several EP releases, the Melvins blazed (perhaps the wrong word for it) a trail that left a major impression on the future of heavy underground rock and metal that reverberates to this day. The Melvins more or less invented and then refined a very particular, wholly unprecedented and boldly experimental form of metallic post-hardcore that should be seriously studied as a ground zero for the modern idea of heaviness in sound and essence.
This era and the band’s surface-level legacy has gone on to be incorrectly defined by the most obvious sonic characteristic at hand: the most intimidatingly huge guitar riffs that had ever emerged from any faction — metal or otherwise — played at the slowest possible crawl. Endlessly imitated and found throughout the realm of doom/sludge metal, the best examples of what the Melvins perfected during this time can be found on most of the Lysol album, Bullhead’s opening track (“Boris,” from which the similarly trailblazing Japanese band would later derive its moniker), and the anomalously riff-free crawl of live staple “Night Goat” (track 2 on the Houdini album and one of the band’s best-known singles). It’s worth mentioning that the two latter albums released during this stretch, 1993’s Houdini and 1994’s Stoner Witch, might also be the band’s best pre-Y2K documents, and both were released on major label Atlantic Records.
The Melvins’ next creative (and first real critical) highpoint was made possible when they landed on then-fledgling Ipecac Recordings, the label of Faith No More/Mr. Bungle singer and well-known stylistic chameleon Mike Patton. With Kevin Rutamis (previously of the Cows) and former godheadSilo frontman, Mike Kunka, serving the cause as part of the Melvins’ constantly rotating bass position, they released a disparate trifecta of full-lengths in quick succession — The Bootlicker and The Maggot in 1999 and 2000’s The Crybaby.
These individually themed releases (heavy/metallic-crunch, Ween-like weirdness and electronica, and an all-covers album) appeared to spark a growth spurt in the Melvins’ fan-base and gave it a cult-like status, helped significantly by the band’s focus on road-dogging due to their now well-known notoriety as a live band of singular, sometimes mind-shattering intensity. In fact, the Melvins’ command of a stage translates beyond the heavy music and metal fan demographic, as it is not uncommon to find folks with much different taste in music that will nonetheless never miss a chance to see the band live.
The Melvins hit their second and much more complex stride around Y2K. Circumnavigating the static core of Buzz Osbourne (singer/guitarist/all-around strong personality) and drummer Dale Crover creates a tendency toward lineup adjustments and ever-frequent collaborations that have stuffed the band’s catalog with themed albums in recent years. But the best was 2006’s absorbing of the two-piece band Big Business (drummer Coady Willis and bassist Jared Warren). This gave the Melvins a not-so-secret weapon of great live presentations: double drummers. And 2006’s (A) Senile Animal features the “consummately Melvins” centerpiece of “A History of Bad Men,” a song used to great effect in the first season of HBO’s True Detective.
For the 10-year anniversary of this membership addition, this summer’s Basses Loaded album takes the band’s fondness for lineup adjustment to its logical extreme by featuring every member that has played under the Melvins banner over the last decade, including Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, Jeff Pinkus of the Butthole Surfers, and Steven McDonald of Redd Kross. Another great Melvins’-related development this year was the vinyl reissue of the band’s three major label albums (the best two are mentioned above), originally released between 1993 and 1996, by Third Man Records.
The New Daisy has already had some of the biggest names in metal come through their doors this year, but Friday’s show that features grindcore legends Carcass along with Night Demon, Crowbar, and Ghoul might be the biggest metal bill of 2016. Formed in 1985, Carcass have been at the top of the grindcore food chain for most of their existence, mostly due to the unprecedented success they experienced for the album Heartwork, the record that essentially landed the band a deal with Columbia Records. Carcass broke up in 1995 but re-formed in 2007, and as they are considered by many to be the fathers of grindcore, the reunion was highly anticipated by new and old fans alike.
Carcass
While all the supporting acts on this full U.S. tour are capable of filling the headlining slot on their own, Night Demon are certainly the newest band on the bill, having formed in 2011. With their massive fan base, they certainly belong on this all-star bill. New Orleans sludge masters Crowbar are no strangers to Memphis or the New Daisy, and their loyal fan base should make up most of the crowd at Friday’s show.
Rounding out this insane lineup is Ghoul, the punk/metal band that features members of Phobia, Exhumed, and Wolves in the Throne Room. Ghoul come from the same school of thought as GWAR, meaning they adopt stage names (Cremator, Fermentor, Digestor, and Dissector, to be exact) and often use props during their performance. This one should get nasty.
North Carolina stoner-metal band Weedeater return to Memphis this Sunday for a show at the Hi-Tone. Formed in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1998, Weedeater found underground success with their 2001 album …And Justice for Y’all, released on their then-record label Beserker Records. As far as stoner-metal band names go, Weedeater might get the top prize, with their only real competition being Madison, Wisconsin’s Bongzilla. Singer Dave Collins was the leader of the band Buzzoven prior to forming Weedeater, and his signature scary warlock-style vocals are the band’s main calling card. Joining Weedeater is Author & Punisher, the one-man industrial metal machine from San Diego, California. The main project of Tristan Shone, Author & Punisher makes industrial doom metal fit for any horror-movie soundtrack, and he’s been effectively creeping out audiences since 2004. Phil Anselmo (Pantera, Down) produced Shone’s latest album.
Weedeater
Also set to play are Nashville noise rockers Today Is the Day. Formed in the early ’90s, Today Is the Day helped shape the sound that their early label, Amphetamine Reptile became known for. Lord Dying, the Portland, Oregon, metal band that released last year’s Poisoned Altars round out this impressive bill.
Don’t call today’s Music Video Monday a comeback!
Actually, you can call it a comeback. Long before Dethklok ruled the basic cable mindspace, there was another band known as the Four Horsemen of the Metal Apocalypse. Mung was a tongue-in-cheek group of metalheads consisting of Joey “Joecephus” Killingsworth, Josey Van HellSing (Wade Long), Zim (John Pickle), Varmint (Mike Matthews), and Suzy Savage (Rhiannon Smith). Under the direction of Memphis underground video pioneer John PIckle, the band shot a pilot intended to sell to network TV. “We did a VH1 Behind The Music sort of thing about Mung,” Pickle recalls.
The pilot effort was not successful, and much of the raw footage was lost for years, until Pickle accidentally uncovered it and edited this video together out of some of the recovered material. “I saw this old footage and thought, there’s no sense in letting all this stuff go to waste.”
The director says the video for The Spell Song—Mung’s theme song—was shot in his living room. “We put a bunch of garbage bags up over the walls and windows and just went at it,” he says.
This Wednesday night, Mung will return after an eight year hiatus to open for Mac Sabbath, the McDonald’s themed Black Sabbath cover band, for one can’t miss night of metal and comedy at the Hi-Tone. “We picked up right where we left off eight years ago,” Pickle says.
Music Video Monday: Mung
If you would like to see your video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
Visual Cues, Ms. Chen, Ting-Chun
This Sunday, December 13, from 2-5PM, the Metal Museum will host an opening ceremony for a new traveling exhibition, the 2015 Taiwan International Metal Crafts Competition. The exhibition, which will remain on view through March 13, 2016, features the best of Taiwanese metalwork as judged by the The Gold Museum of Taipei City.
Soliloquy, Ms. Ou, Li-Ting
The artworks featured in the exhibition draw from both modern and more traditional tropes of metalwork, combining eastern and western craft sensibilities to create a selection both broad and masterful. Work by Li-Ting Ou and Ting-Chun Chen (both featured above) stands out.
Flavour, Ms. Chen, Siou-Yi
The Metal Museum is one of few museums in the world devoted exclusively to fine metalwork. This will be the first exhibition from Taiwan that the Metal Museum has hosted.
This Music Video Monday promotes itself.
Two summers ago, El Dorado Del Ray, Joey Killingsworth, and John Pickle asked me to play heavy metal with them in a band called Super Witch. I hadn’t had a band to play with in a while, and while I had played jangle pop, indie, punk, noise, and all kinds of guitar rock since I first took up the bass when I was 15 years old, I had never actually played heavy metal before. So I said yes, and I’ve been glad I did. I’ve learned a lot from these guys, made some new friends, and become a better bass player for it. We’ve been slowly recording an album with Dik LeDoux’s Au Poots studio and Rocket Science Audio’s Kyle Johnson, and now it’s finally ready for public consumption. Along the way, we also made some music videos.
John Pickle is not just a great drummer, but he’s also a Memphis filmmaking pioneer. For years in the 1990s, he created the legendary public access TV show Pickle TV, which brought gonzo insanity to unsuspecting cable subscribers all over the land. He’s made two Super Witch music videos. The latest is “The Need”, in which he used some footage of us recording the song in the studio to demonstrate what a great editor he is.
Music Video Monday: Super Witch (2)
The first Super Witch music video was “Army Of Werewolves”, where Pickle took the opportunity to create a video based on a simple concept he had been tossing around for a long time. All four members of the band shot our segments separately for this one, but one thing I can tell you is that if you detune your bass so the strings flop around enough to capture on camera, you’ll probably break your nut. Thanks to John Lobow for fixing it for me afterwards.
Music Video Monday: Super Witch
And finally, here’s a Super Witch video I directed. Last year, we played an awesome show at Black Lodge Video that was captured on film by Christopher Woodsy Smith. Around the same time, the Maiden protests in Kiev, Ukraine were going on, and I noticed that some videos I was seeing from the street riots had a very similar color pallette as the Black Lodge footage. So my wife and editor Laura Jean Hocking and I cut together scenes from the two sources into this video for “House Of Warlocks”. I’m very proud of it, and I hope you like it, too.
Music Video Monday: Super Witch (3)
You can download our album Super Witch Has Risen over at Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-can basis.
Thank you for indulging my conflict of interest. If you would like to see your music video in this space next week, please email me at cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
No resurgence of a venue that has a long history of catering to metalheads would be complete without an appearance from a band like Cannibal Corpse. Cannibal Corpse might not be the type of band you put on your car stereo while taking your grandma to Kroger, but the band’s longevity is definitely something to behold. Personally, I’ve been a fan of Cannibal Corpse’s extremely recognizable artwork since I was old enough to appreciate the artistic genius it must take to depict zombie corpses performing medical experiments on each other. While most bands that have been around since the ’80s have gone through some kind of aesthetic makeover, the artwork created by Vince Locke for Cannibal Corpse is one of the few examples of a band’s presentation being more recognizable than the band’s music.
Cannibal Corpse
Shocking artwork aside, the Cannibal Corpse résumé is pretty impressive. Since forming in 1988, the band has released 13 albums, were accused of undermining the integrity of the United States by Bob Dole, and even made a cameo in the 1994 Jim Carrey movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. They’ve also sold over two million records, making them the best-selling death-metal band of all time. Not bad.
Touring with Cannibal Corpse is Soreption, a Swedish tech-metal band celebrating a decade of existence this year. Soreption’s 2014 album Engineering the Void was released last year on Unique Leader Records, and the band has been touring extensively overseas and in the U.S. since then. Also on Wednesday’s bill is Cattle Decapitation, who released their seventh studio album The Anthropocene Extinction earlier this summer. If grind, death metal, tech metal, (or just plain death) are words you use to describe your musical interests, the New Daisy is the place to be on Wednesday.
House of Lighting play the Hi-Tone this Wednesday.
WRONG (yep…all caps) and House of Lightning are newer names in the all-things-heavy underground, but boast impressive membership pedigrees that their respective sounds each expand upon. WRONG is a quartet some readers may have caught opening for Nothing and Torche at the Hi-Tone back in March. Torche’s drummer, Rick Smith, is in this touring version of WRONG, which also features Eric Hernandez, formerly of the great and sadly overlooked Capsule. WRONG covered Nirvana’s “Stay Away” on this year’s Whatever Nevermind tribute compilation, released by Robotic Empire, and that label is also responsible for last October’s four-song debut 12” EP, Just Giving. Freshly signed to Relapse Records, as per a press release issued on June 17th, WRONG is probably sick of reading references to early Helmet, but with a sound this reminiscent of the Strap It On (1990) and Meantime (1992) albums, from riffs to vocal delivery, what did they expect? They are clearly super-fans of the noise-rock/alt-metal pioneers.
House of Lightning is a duo (known to tour as a 3-piece w/ a keyboardist) that was founded in 2012 by Henry Wilson, longtime drummer for Floor, one of the many members that went through Cavity’s revolving-door lineup, and founding guitarist in the mid-00s band, Dove. Wilson, who covers guitar, synth, and vocals in House of Lightning, is joined by his former Dove band mate John Ostberg on drums. Though the band previewed tracks online as early as 2012, activity surrounding Floor reunion shows and the trio’s amazing comeback album Oblation put the House of Lightning debut full-length, Lightworker, on hold, though it was finally released last October on Fair Warning Records. House of Lightning recalls Floor and Torche only in the sense that the riffs are huge and the vocals soar with a golden-throated grace. While touches of Torche, Floor, Dove, and Capsule can be heard on Lightworker, the album is defined by what it miraculously manages to invoke while avoiding the high risk of overt, try-too-hard failure: Van Halen’s last three albums during the original David Lee Roth era, late-70s Rush, Thin Lizzy, the busiest riffing of original Bay Area thrash, the sadly overlooked and misunderstood late-90s/early-00s post-hardcore enigma Party of Helicopters, and more playful Melvins moments (along with that band’s rhythm section, Big Business). In truth, the band sounds unlike anything operating within the topical, forward-thinking heavy music scene.
House of Lightning and Wrong, 9 p.m. at the Hi-Tone Cafe. $10.