Reviews: Laibach, Sleep and more.
I haven't listened to a Laibach album since 1988's Let It Be. But after hearing WAT, their first release in seven years, I'm happy to report that everyone's favorite quasi-fascist gay Slovenian disco band hasn't changed a whit.
The same three elements that seem to make up most any Laibach recording are present and accounted for. You have your cheap electronic dance track overlayed with martial beats. You have your chorus sounding like the mutant church service in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. And, most importantly, you have your gravelly voiced lead singer with his comical Eastern-European accent, intoning (in both English and German) bad poetry about, y'know, war and death and honor and what have you. Over the past quarter-century, they've clearly learned what's expected of them.
"They'll come out of nowhere/They'll enter your states/The nation of losers/The tribes full of hate," the singer growls on "Now You Will Pay." "With knives in their pockets/And bombs in their hands/They'll burn down your cities/And your Disneylands." Meanwhile behind him, the mutant chorus is singing something about barbarians.
Yes, it's all pretty goofy, and trying to guess what the next rhyme will be always makes for a pleasant diversion. The fact that the band members clearly don't think any of this is goofy at all, well, that just makes it all the funnier.
?Jim Knipfel
The story is now infamous amongst heavy-music heads, but still deserves a recap if for no other reason than it's funny as all hell. Sleep, the kings of grinding stoner doom, released two albums that attracted a very loyal cult following in the early 1990s. Someone at London Records took notice of the band's seminal album, Sleep's Holy Mountain, and decided to sign them to a record contract.
The boys spent two years smoking away the better part of their record advance and writing what turns out to be one carefully crafted hour-long song dedicated to smoking weed. Lines such as "Drop out of life with bong in hand, follow the smoke to the riff-filled land" certainly touched off the record execs to this fact. London, of course, flips out, citing the un-marketability of an album that has no hope of a radio single when the only track is 60 minutes long. The label tries to force the band to split the song into separate tracks, or edit it down into a more radio-friendly format. They refuse. Dopesmoker is left on the cutting-room floor.
Sleep breaks up. By this time, they've smoked away their entire record advance. Guitarist Matt Pike goes on to form High on Fire, bassist/singer Al Cisneros drops out of the music business and Chris Hakius eventually reunites with former Sleep guitarist Justin Marler to form the Sabians. In 1999, Rise Above Records releases a somewhat truncated version of Dopesmoker under the title Jerusalem?it gave a sampling of the overall feel, but still sounded incomplete.
Sleep has finally released the complete and full version of Dopesmoker.
And?
At first listen, Dopesmoker seems to be a bad joke perpetuated by a bunch of spleef-heads. The lyrics are all but laughable, describing an ancient caravan that goes off in search of weed and features absurdities such as "Proceeds the weedian, Nazareth." As originally heard in the Jerusalem format, the song seemed redundant in parts and, well, like an eight-minute song stretched to 50-some minutes. What's made most apparent by this re-release is that the original release was poorly mixed and edited (badly re-done by D. Sardy after being mixed by Billy Anderson, the band's producer).
Anderson's original mix is what makes this long-bastard of a song work. Al Cisneros' bass, reduced to a low level on the Jerusalem mix, plays a large role on Dopesmoker?adding a ton of weight and density to the sound. Matt Pike's guitar sound seems to sit better, as opposed to overpowering the other instruments, as it did on Jerusalem. This gives Dopesmoker a far cleaner sound and yet a better rumble to it, that massive wall of sound that at that time no one could dare touch. The unedited version also has a better flow to it, really delivering the stream-of-consciousness/Gregorian chant style of the song. This is crucial, since the song was designed to function in that chant style as opposed to a verse-chorus-verse-setup.
Finally, even if you've heard the Jerusalem version, you'll immediately pick out the things you missed: Hakius going off on his drums at the 35-minute mark, breaking the boom-thud-crash sound, Cisneros creating texture behind Pike's pummeling chords with flowing bass lines at the 44-minute mark, the guitar solos lowered in the mix and echoed-out to produce a more other-worldly effect that fits the mood of the song.
If nothing else, Dopesmoker is an amazing testament to the power of Sleep's sound and how underrated they were during their time. It's also a reminder of one of the funniest debacles in music history.
? Ken Wohlrob
Combining archival audio recordings, crunching, explosive electronic noise and abrupt, guttural vocals, G.R. follows Ridgway (mostly in the first person) from his childhood, through a failed marriage, and into a 20-year career of savage rapes and killings until his arrest and eventual incarceration.
I can't say that I'm much of a fan of hardcore industrial in any form. I'm also way past my serial-killer phase. But I must also admit that Canady's first-person lyrics were at times very effective and disturbing, illustrating a level of psychological insight not often found in bands of this nature.
?Jim Knipfel
The Gomma label, which brought us the Anti NY compilation, here serve up their second installment of lost tracks from this era, an unapologetic mixed bag of Electro, Neu Wave and the odd bit of bierkeller pfunk bound together by gothic austerity. I was amazed by how little interest was generated by the first compilation, which included incredible tracks like Carmen's "Schlaraffenland" (atonal sex kitten atop clipped funk) and Exkurs' "Natur" (Blixa Bargeld setting rasping and wheezing). Although the second volume sports the same dearth of information about the tracks, highlights include the phonetic English and huffing drum machines of Instant Music's "My Boy" (Young Marble Giants trapped in a corridor) and Camilla Motor's "Gefahr Im Tivoli" (jack boot on the wrong foot).
This music is the conceptual twin to the great NYC No Wave rock experiment, and you'll not find icier chops anywhere outside a butcher's refrigerator.
?Matthew Ingram