Greetings from the suburban wilds, folks. We are a little over halfway through 2025, and a lot has changed since we last spoke. Things are better than they were, yet still difficult in a lot of ways. I’ve been thinking of bringing this back for a while, but managed to continually find an excuse to avoid it. Fuck it. No more laziness. The world is still going to hell around us but we don’t necessarily have to go with it. I hope you’ve been well, wherever you are. Let’s talk about some music.

Missive

We haven’t heard from each other in a while but know that the itch has remained, lurking in the shadows, trying to coax me into re-emerging. Most of the bits that follow first appeared sometime last year. I’ve been playing with them off and on, but the time has come to commit and get the shelves cleared. Thus, I tried not to go too wild with this opening salvo, both to keep me on task and to help us all ease back into things. There are a few other old things that’ll be cleaned up and submitted in due time.

I think a few of you will get a kick out of at least a couple of the entries here.

A Life Once Lost - Ecstatic Trance (Season of Mist, 2012)

I haven’t had any kind of moment with Pennsylvania’s A Life Once Lost in 20 years. If memory serves, the last thing of theirs that made my blood pump was ‘Vulture’ when Hunter came out back in 2005. I remember Iron Gag coming out sometime in the late 00s and immediately writing it off after hearing a snippet of ‘Firewater Joyride.’ Ecstatic Trance wasn’t even a blip on my radar on its initial release in 2012. From my vantage point here in the future, though, I kinda dig it.

But let’s start at the beginning. What I’m talking about when I talk about A Life Once Lost starts at the band’s second LP, A Great Artist. The initial releases (Open Your Mouth for the Speechless and The Fourth Plague: Flies) are mathy metalcore that sound vaguely like everything else from the early 00’s: breakdowns, breakneck melodic death metal runs, hairpin tempo changes; the works. A Great Artist trades all of those elements in for repetitive off-time riffing that reminds one of nothing so much as a poor man’s Meshuggah. The difference in eras is stark to the point of causing whiplash if you listen to the records back-to-back; vocals aside, it’s hard to believe you’re hearing the same band.

I consider myself to be an A Great Artist apologist. Musically, it is about as specific a statement as a band could hope to make. It does exactly one thing, commits fully to the bit and pulls no punches while doing so. Its atmosphere is heavy and all-encompassing. It’s also the only album the band ever created with this singular a focus; everything released after sounds like the band attempting to combine their signature lazy Meshuggah riffing with other elements, and not always tastefully.

Hunter, for instance, felt like the band were trying to take those Meshuggah riffs and make riff rock songs out of them. The tempos are roughly the same, the riffs are in a similar wheelhouse. But you need barely a minute of ‘Rehashed’ to notice that the vibe is very different. Gone is the alien foreboding of A Great Artist, replaced with a swagger that…I dunno, cheapens it somehow? It rocks plenty but feels like it loses depth of conceptual focus by putting more emphasis on rocking. The same thing happened on Iron Gag, which moved into even groovier territory.

Thus, it is the most pleasant of surprises that on Ecstatic Trance the band finally figured out how to marry the atmosphere of A Great Artist with more sophisticated songwriting, and to phenomenal effect at that. Everything feels like it flows cleanly and the proceedings do indeed rock, but that dread and foreboding that were absent from Hunter and Iron Gag are back. ‘Madness is God’ is a good example of what I’m driving at, even injecting some melody without ever sacrificing that overarching feeling that something bad is gonna happen. If you needed something much more akin to A Great Artist to be comfortable, ‘Miracle Worker’ has you covered. They don’t really deviate from the template at all so if you dig either of those tracks, you’ll like everything else (though the off-time feel kinda fades away on ‘Empty Form’ and it’s excellent). And I’ll say that Ecstatic Trance is sonically easier on the ears than anything since A Great Artist. I especially love how the solos came out, with just enough modulation to make them sound unearthly without going into Fredrik Thordendal territory.

I’m surprised by how much I like it, and ended up listening to it a lot last year. Rather than simply feeling like a Meshuggah ripoff, it feels like a Meshuggah ripoff written by Devin Townsend and that somehow sells it a little better. I’m still not sure I understand how you go from The Fourth Plague to A Great Artist. I see how you get from A Great Artist to Hunter, but no clue about the first transition. Maybe I’m not put here to understand.

Anyway check this out, you might dig it.

Gridlink - Coronet Juniper (Willowtip, 2023, )

I’ve never hidden my belief that extremity of tempo (in either direction) is a virtue, and still I never gave this album its due when it dropped in 2023. And I know that it’s because I vastly prefer Discordance Axis, to the point where I have to intentionally remind myself that this is a different band with different music that is no less deserving of my time and attention. I’m glad I gave this a shot because it rips.

While the chosen style never wavers from album to album, Gridlink’s new releases always come across as leaner and tighter than the previous offerings, their technical grindcore sharpened to a keen and blistering new edge. It happened going from Amber Gray and Orphan to Longhena, and it happens again here with their first new album in nine years. Takafumi Matsubara employs melody in his guitar parts such that it almost feels like you’re not listening to an aggressive grindcore record, even as songs are blasting by. The tones are phenomenal, especially the drums; the way Bryan’s snare pops is nothing short of explosive. It’s precise and concise, with an exceedingly tight production and a nineteen minute runtime (expanded to 38 minutes if you count the karaoke version included with the digital release). In short, it’s everything a Gridlink release should be and nothing it shouldn’t. If I may quote the blurb from the original CD release of Amber Gray: “twitch grind core. One take. No scratch tracks. No punching in. No slow shit. Fuck you.”

This would be the second release to bring Jon Chang out of retirement, the first being 2020’s No One Knows What The Dead Think (which would’ve been the long-awaited fourth Discordance Axis LP, had Dave Witte not declined to be involved). The recording of this album took place over a week in February 2023, capped off with a show at St. Vitus in Brooklyn. I watched all of the prep and execution for the recording and shows in realtime via Instagram, and it helped me begin to grasp just how monumental a task it is to execute something like this at the level that Mr. Chang requires. I think we’d be extremely lucky if we ever get to see him live again, after the February performance and the two back catalog shows that took place the following October.

Initially I passed on this band because it’s not Discordance Axis. I still do sometimes, but this is somewhat unfair of me. Matsubara-san is a much different guitar player than Rob Marton and while the speeds of both projects are similar, Gridlink is its own beast, drawing way more from traditional metal than the admittedly more abstract material that Rob came up with for DA and No One Knows What The Dead Think. If you enjoy high speed, you could do a lot worse. Recommended.

Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I (Southern Lord, 2011)

Earth 2 is awesome and all, but this is my favorite Earth record. Some contingent of the fandom might want to burn me for eschewing drone Earth for sad cowboy Earth but fuck ‘em. The sprawling desert vistas of latter-day Earth are delicious. I remember buying this sight unseen when it came out and being surprised at the lack of straight drone. Simple, mournful melodies unfurl slowly over each track; loud and clean guitars sustaining notes that seem to stretch out to the horizon, held up by funereal drums. If you’re into that Earth EP Hibernaculum (also highly recommended), this is like that but more sparse. I do remember liking this one more than Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II, but I haven’t revisited that one in a minute so maybe we’ll give that a spin in the near future.

I understand that for the uninitiated, this is a hard sell at five tracks running ten to twenty minutes at a whack. If it ain’t you, it ain’t you, but if it is then you should really own this already. ‘Old Black’ is the standout for me and will tell you pretty quickly whether or not you’ll be into the record as a whole (happily enough, they played that song when I saw them at the Armory last May. Earth. At the fucking Armory. With maybe 100 other people. For shame).

I went to California over Memorial Day weekend 2024 to play on a friend’s record. The studio was out in the desert to the north of LA, and I listened to this a lot while driving around. Still hits hard. Recommended.

Fu Manchu - Hell On Wheels (Mammoth, 2000)

This was the other major player on that Cali jaunt. Those of us of a certain age probably remember the awesome Fu Manchu track ‘Evil Eye’ from Tony Hawk 2. That song’s not on this record, but Hell On Wheels absolutely fucking rips. Fuzzy guitars, murky production, lyrics about cars; everything about it is as on-brief as you could want. The title track and ‘King of the Road’ are phenomenal points of entry, but I think the album hits a high point during the solo in the middle of ‘Over the Edge,’ so definitely check that out if you feel so inclined. Great music for a road trip in an arid environment.

I was under the impression that this was a band Brant Bjork started after leaving Kyuss, stepping out from behind the drum kit to lead a new desert rock project. Turns out, the leader here was another guy named Scott Hill, with Mr. Bjork joining as drummer after producing their debut album and remaining with the band until the early 00’s.

If you dig Kyuss, you will almost assuredly dig this. Recommended.

Terminally Your Aborted Ghost - Suicide as Self Expression (Permeated, 2006)

Brother Richard Wm. got this EP back into my rotation for a little while last summer, and I spent most of those listening sessions wondering why bands don’t try to sound like this anymore. Self-pigeon-holed as ‘experimental brutal death/grind,’ Suicide as Self Expression is basically a series of Eternal Suffering slams bridged together with short blasts of grind and occasional clean sections in what seems to be an effort to be as chaotically violent as possible.

The ‘experimental’ part of the tag absolutely has to be in reference to the fact that there isn’t any obvious structure to the music. A requisite creepy noise intro will give way to ominous, discordant clean guitars and then drop into a slam, followed by a fast section and then back into another slam, repeat ad nauseum. None of this is a knock, because even with the disjointed song structures Suicide as Self Expression feels consistently heavy and intense for the entire ten-minute runtime. The brevity works in this record’s favor, and I’d maybe go so far as to say that it’s a quintessential release in this style. It’s also got arguably the best/most appropriate production of the entire TYAG catalog.

I’m sure pockets of bands existed elsewhere but my perception of what I guess we’re calling ‘brutal death/grind’ is as a uniquely New England thing that existed briefly in the early 00’s before vanishing. I usually refer to bands like this as “Return to the Pit bands”: bands that take brutal death metal riffs and blasting but apply them in a more hardcore context, AKA to give people an excuse to go nuts and beat the shit out of each other at shows (RTTP being that fantastic community resource run by Rev Aaron for the last like 25 years). Aside from TYAG, Tears of Avarel is a band that comes to mind; In Dire Need to a slightly lesser extent. I’m not sure that I’ve heard a newer band attempt to sound like TYAG or their contemporaries.

So this EP is fucking incredible. It’s the remastered reissue of their original 2002 demo, minus one track and plus a noise remix. The follow-up, Slowly Peeling the Flesh from the Inside of a Folded Hand, starts off promising but proceeds to suck pretty quickly; it also reimagines most of this EP in a not flattering and borderline offensive way. The EP after, Inanimately Soundless, sucks. It has absolutely zero teeth. Apparently TYAG is reformed and they posted a teaser of a new track, about which I felt similarly. We’ll see what we think when it actually drops.

Five songs, ten minutes. You cannot fuck up with a listen. Highly recommended.

And that’s our show! I’ve been reading a bunch this year so maybe that’ll sneak its way in here at some point, but so far so good. Planning on the first Monday of the month from here on out.

Be well, see you.

Joey