GLOOM-GAZE

Flitting between blogs to seek out new tunes can be equal parts reward and head-banging frustration. The best blogs have such a fierce musical identity that you soon feel like you 'know' the blogger and his or her idiosyncratic tastes in tunage. However, it appears the sole function of many blogs is to poop out redundant copies of the same 'leaked' flavour of the month promo MP3 in the hope that it will generate hits for the site. When I look at how crushingly predictable the top blogged bands sidebar is on the hype machine website, I get a sense that the more clever indie labels now have a controlling touch on the "buzz." This is not a bad thing. It just indicates that many blogs are tired, clichéd, similar and don't really express an individual or critical taste in music; just a knack at being spoonfed by those sacred tastemakers over in pitchforkmedia. So its a treat to be able to knock into somewhere like mp3hugger and consistently find outstanding new tracks by bands I've never heard of, but generally end up liking a lot. Recently, the 'Hugger posted a track 'sleds' by a band called Pyramids, which I am going to post up here 'cos it properly grabbed my brain-goolies and gave them a pleasant squeeze.


MP3: Pyramids-sleds

This spiderweb of free-floating voices and soft dissonant drifts of glide-guitar leaves its trace long after you've finished listening to it. A bit like the spectral glow left on a turned off TV screen in a dark room. I looked into some more of this band's music expecting more of the same spaced out drones and was surprised to find a thrilling mixed bag containing much heavier and doomier sounding music than the present evidence might indicate. Pyramids are not quite shoegaze and they are not quite metal either. They inhabit fraught psychic wastelands somewhere between My Bloody Valentine and Sun O))). They'd fit nicely on an ATP Nightmare Before Christmas bill, sandwiched between Pelican and Throbbing gristle. The rest of their music is cathartic stuff, attacking hard with crescendos of industrial drumming and distorted moans before releasing into the ambient celestial stuff. Brilliant altogether.

As part of my continuing realization that I actually know fuck all about music, I discovered today that there are a whole bunch of great metal(ish) bands that utilize the gliding dynamics of shoe gaze and ambient music to add a psychedelic depth to their sepulcheral rawk. Pyramids are but an interesting brick in a dark wall that contains Pelican, Isis, and Jesu. I'm not even going to dare pronounce on this genre 'cos I know nowt about it, not even what its called. Gloom-Gaze? Doom-Prog? Post-Sludgecore? I have mates who would laugh off fuck buttons for being too commercial and who have been listening to this stuff for years. I'll consult them and get a primer CD made. In the meantime, here's another MP3. This time from Jesu. Its called Farewell.


MP3: Jesu-Farewell