Greetings from the suburban wilds, where it’s been a bit of a whirlwind but things are pressing forward. I had a lovely break in Antigua at the beginning of February, and then it was work at sites in NH and RI for the rest of the month into March. I finally got back out on the road a couple of weeks ago. The last two weeks were KY/OH and NH, and this week is NJ and NY; I arrived in NJ this morning and am just rolling back to my hotel now. Allegedly I’ll be home until mid-May after this. I feel a little fried, honestly. More than a little disconnected. Unfortunately I don’t see much other choice but to keep grinding for the foreseeable future. It is what it is. I hope y’all have been well.

The discography I’ve been working on is taking a little longer to cohere than anticipated, so punting that into the future. For now, here’s a smattering of unrelated reviews of some other things that have built up since February.

It Dies Today - The Caitiff Choir (Trustkill, 2004)

Metalcore from back in the day makes me feel incredibly nostalgic, especially if it’s been a minute since I’ve heard the band in question. In this instance, Brother Nunzio had put on ‘A Threnody For Modern Romance’ at some point in the last eight-ish months, and I could remember words and drum parts before I could remember the band. This album has been in regular rotation since, for the first time in close to 20 years.

This fucking record. The Caitiff Choir is a solid, possibly quintessential presentation of this particular brand of metalcore, rivaling the great Killswitch Engage themselves. Production is brutally present; the drums especially remind me of the second Bury Your Dead record. You definitely can’t say that it sounds like anything other than a mid-00’s metalcore record. The clean vocals are appropriate and never abused. And the riffs are really good. The chorus riff in ‘A Threnody’ is especially good. ‘Marigold’ is a ripper. I’m not gonna stand here and try to tell you that the breakdowns are inventive or anything, but for the individual who was there during the time when this was popular, putting this album on is like slipping into your most comfortable clothes.

I dunno, man. It’s a solid listening experience. For that variety of metalcore with Swedish death metal riffs and clean vocals I think The Caitiff Choir’s gotta be top three, right up there with Alive or Just Breathing. I was also reminded that it came out 20 years ago and I remember being excited for it. I’m reasonably confident this tour had a date at the Bombshelter with The Acacia Strain. Worth a revisit or two.

Olhava - Sacrifice (Avant Garde, 2024)

We talked about Olhava’s last opus, 2022’s Reborn, shortly after it appeared. You may recall my particularly high praise. I saw this new one dropped back in January while I was away for work and decided to check it out during a hike one weekend.

It’s exactly what I expected: the same long-form, droning atmospheric black metal, though with much shorter track lengths and more filler than the previous behemoth. My big gripe is that the production on Sacrifice lacks the maximal grandeur that made Reborn such an enthralling experience. I guess that says a lot of nothing good about the music because without that wall of sound, 90% of Sacrifice is mind-numbingly boring, to the point where I debated even bringing it up in this edition. There were several points of the hike where I was actively checked out of listening, though I left the music on for some background filler. Ultimately I’m glad I did because when the title track eventually arrived at the very end, it packed an emotional wallop. I almost stopped walking because I was dumbfounded. I do think it’s the kind of thing where you need to sit through everything else to make it land correctly, which sucks because the lead up to get there is a slog.

If you hated Reborn I’m gonna say that sorry, there isn’t much here for you. You might be more receptive to the shorter song lengths, but the sameyness of the material will likely be a turn off. The title track is cool, though, so maybe give that a whirl.

Tewksbury - Floes (self release, 2024, 4xCS)

I pre-ordered this a couple of weeks before the release and got the limited 4xCS box ^_^. Here we have another very ‘me’ thing: a three and a half hour collection of really good loop-based ambient in exactly the right zone.

There are sixteen tracks, all of which weigh in between ten and fifteen minutes. It’s VERY cinematic. Like early Eluvium vibes with the Celer sonic pallette. Also, apparently all generated from a Moog One synth recorded one note/chord at a time onto long-ass tape loops (and inclusive of the audial imperfections of the tape, which is always kinda fun). I’ve been dipping in and out of the various tracks over the last couple of weeks and they all have the same vague sense of longing attached to them, ideal for music like this.

Excellent rainy day/Sunday morning music.

The Yussef Dayes Experience - Live From Malibu (Brownswood/Warner, 2024)

Yussef Dayes is a London-based drummer who I became aware of via the excellent Yussef Kamaal record Black Focus a few years ago; a record that I find incredible when I listen to it but somehow never think to listen to. It’s like every electronic genre of British origin but played like jazz. Anyway, I’m assuming that my familiarity with that album is why this new release happened across my radar a month ago.

It’s real good. The first track is like jazz DnB before things settle into more of an r&b groove. The musicianship is top notch across the board but the drumming in particular is sublime. There isn’t a single note that feels out of place. I strive to be able to give songs momentum like this. It’s also a feat how all of the instruments sound so perfect with production as un-hyped as this. There isn’t one bad track but if you dislike ‘Tioga Pass,’ you probably won’t like anything going on here.

I enjoyed this so much I bought a copy. This is worth whatever time you can give it, trust me (bro).

108 - 18.61 (Deathwish, 2010, yellow)

Finally grabbed a copy of this from Brother Adam at the second Bridge/Constant Disappointment show in mid-February. I’ve never really been like a 108 guy or anything but I like this album. Solid, relatively chaotic hardcore (‘Crescent Moon’). Minimal and inoffensive experimentation (‘18.61,’ ‘Fallen Angel’). Short, to the point, doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Here’s some shit I’m learning about this album just now. It was recorded in Boston with Alex Garcia-Rivera and mixed at GodCity. It was also 108’s first recording with Mike Justain of Unearth on drums (I originally thought this was the dude that played on Stings of Conscience, turns out that that was Mike Rudberg. Whoops). Also, no idea that Vic DiCara was in Inside Out. I feel like that’s a pretty big fact about 108 and I had zero idea.

This album turns fourteen this month. Worth a spin.

Thou - Tyrant & The Retaliation of the Immutable Force of Nature (Gilead, 2018, 2xLP)

Also grabbed this from Brother Adam to satisfy the completist in me, even though Tyrant has never been my favorite Thou release. It’s plenty heavy, covering most of what’s possible in the lower ends of both the tone and tempo spectra. I dislike Tyrant for being like Pelican in that the songs feel like they shift gears too frequently. Brother Richard Wm. occasionally gives me a big bag of shit about not liking ‘Fucking Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean’ but oh well. The last pair of songs make up the attached EP and I’ve got the same gripes about them, but ‘What Blood Still Flows From These Veins’ is heavy as fuck for the first couple minutes.

I’ve harped on it at length but Heathen is, thus far, the ideal of which Thou is capable. On Tyrant it’s easy to hear where they would eventually end up with Heathen, but the whole enterprise was still being refined and the experience is a little disjointed as a result. Still, solid document and worth a spin or two.

Stuart Dempster - Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel (Imprec, 2023, 2xLP, clear, ltd to 100)

I picked this up on March’s Bandcamp Friday after a quick listen. Good, deep, rich drone. It’s nine trombones, Tibetan bells, and a didjeridu recorded in the same cistern that was used for the Deep Listening album with Pauline Oliveros. I said it’s a drone album but there’s a lot of movement in the pieces, such that you’d probably dig it even if you were not a huge drone fan (provided, of course, that you can deal with the exact same tones over the course of the album because there is essentially no deviation from the very specific instrumentation used). Sometimes the trombones rise up above everything else and it feels fucking HUGE. It reminds me a lot of that music for interstellar travel album I was into a while back. Every piece is kinda samey but the long ones tend to be more enjoyable, and are usually where the trombones get into some triumphant territory. I’d recommend any of the tracks longer than, say, eight minutes.

According to the liner notes, this was recorded back in 1994 and was originally released in 1995, with this new LP edition appearing late last year. The cistern in question is a ‘two million gallon, 186 foot diameter water tank about 70 miles northwest of Seattle.’ The composition was based on a frankly insane-sounding piece composed in France in the early 80s: four (or more) trombonists surround an audience with a solo trombonist at the center. While the solo trombonist slowly spins around and the peripheral trombonists follow their own pre-arranged cues, the audience is ideally humming/singing a drone pitch. This seems insane to me because I feel like there’s only one specific type of audience that could be trusted with following said instructions and making the piece complete, and that it’d be bedlam trying to get any other group of people to do it. Anyway, for this recording the 45 second reverb of the cistern is intended to act as the audience; the excessive reverb time is also why everything has to be done extremely slowly to prevent excess buildup of audio information.

Obviously not for everybody but a cool piece of art nonetheless.

Antigua was a nice break from everything. We (myself and my girlfriend) flew out on 2/3 and had a painless pair of flights down. I had considered renting a car but bailed after learning that driving is on the left; upon arrival I found out I dodged another bullet because the roads were in exceedingly rough shape. Our lodging ended up being relatively far from everything, so we had to rely on taxis to get anywhere. After getting settled and cleaning up we went to a restaurant that turned out to be reservation only, but the owner kindly let us post up at the bar for a couple of hours so that we could eat and drink. It was the best dinner of the entire trip.

The next couple of days were solid beach days, with not a whole lot else going on. Up, breakfast, beach, lunch, nap, dinner, sleep. I attempted to cook saltfish the first night but didn’t know to soak the fish to get the excess salt out, so that ended up being inedible. We went out the second night.

Tuesday we got up early and, having neglected to schedule a taxi, walked the three-ish miles to catch the ferry to Barbuda. It was us and a bunch of stray dogs in the pre-dawn darkness of downtown St. Johns, with people steadily appearing the closer we got to the docks. The 90 minute ferry ride was a little rough but not unbearable. Upon landing in Barbuda we took a bus to another dock and then boarded two smaller boats to cross a lagoon and check out the largest colony of frigate birds in the world. We managed to arrive in the middle of mating season. It was a trip sitting in a small boat while frigate birds swarmed directly overhead.

After checking them out we hit up a beach, though no swimming occurred due to the roughness of the water. We re-boarded the boats and headed back to the bus, where we then drove across the island to climb through a sulphur cave. The island was basically levelled by Hurricane Irma and there wasn’t a whole lot to see over the course of the 20 minute drive. We hiked out to the cave and climbed a path through it up to a cliff overlooking the crystal-clear waters. After hanging out for a bit we climbed back down and got lunch a short ways away, then headed to another beach to hang for a few minutes. The beach segments were meant to be longer but the whole schedule was condensed to get everyone back to the ferry ahead of bad weather moving in. The ride back was hellacious, easily the roughest water I’ve ever been on. I ended up passing out briefly. When we got back to dry land we caught a taxi to our flat and immediately passed out.

The next two days we laid low after the drama of Tuesday. It started raining Wednesday afternoon and didn’t let up until Friday, so we lazed about and enjoyed some much-needed downtime. The travel out on Friday was also painless, and we managed to get upgraded to first class for the second flight from Miami to Boston.

Solid trip, but as always not nearly long enough. Someday I’ll be able to cut out of my life for a month at a time, but that time is not now.

2/17: We had a date day that consisted of Monster Jam and Japanese food in Worcester, followed by the second Bridge/Constant Disappointment showcase at Deep Cuts. The lineup was The Endorphins, Karate Steve, Crowfeeder, and Bedtimemagic. Everybody ripped. I bought some new stuff from Brother Adam.

3/5: KOC played O’Brien’s with The Stress Balls, Academy Order, and Bar Chord Betty. I was surprised that people actually came out on a Tuesday. Decent night, not over terribly late. We got Habanero’s again, much recommend.

3/15: The final Bridge/Constant Disappointment show, this time with Billy, Psychic Weight, The Freqs, and Miracle Blood. It was my first time seeing Brother Nunzio with Psychic Weight. Everybody ripped. These shows were a lot of fun, I saw a lot of the same people at all three and everybody in attendance looked like they were having an awesome time. I think cool shit like this should be happening more often.

3/22: Brother Nunzio and I went and caught PWRUP at Faces in Malden. They were really good. Justin called me out for yawning during their set.

I snagged tickets to Hope Con in June, which should be fun.

Alright I’ve still got work stuff to go wrap up so that’s it for this month. Unsure when that discography is gonna surface, I just need to figure out how it comes together and that answer is continuing to elude me. Nothing left but to keep chopping.

Be well, I’ll talk to you again soon.

Joey