KATATONIA - Dance of December Souls (CD)
This is an album about which I am utterly uncritical, since it was first released and digested by myself when I was at that age when permanent fixtures are assigned to the mental Classics Gallery never to go away. Apart from the amazingly awesome pink cover, which I loved then and love now, there are a lot of interesting things going on here. For a listener checking this out these days I am not sure that the unique feeling of the thing comes across, given the amount of slow, doom-ish sad metal that has been produced in the past twenty-something years, but that is really that listeners problem. Extremely characteristic drum work, great, sorrowful string melodies, decent levels of synthesizer work, and hysteria infused vocals screaming psychedelic lyrics about literal worlds of depression. An additional bonus is a certain inconsistency between the tracks, which has been masterfully glossed over by the producer to make the album coherent (I seem to remember reading something about Dan Swanö taking a very active role in shaping the Jhva Elohim Meth demo, and perhaps there was something similar going on here). No matter what you think about the two hundred goth influenced albums Katatonia released later, this (along with the demo mentioned above, and also the For Funerals to Come... EP) is essential. Funeral Metal, dude.
V/A - Gelbkreuz: Silent and deadly
Well, then! A harsh noise/HNW compilation that manages to get just about everything moving in a direction I like. Two CDs (that's CDs, not CDrs) of constant, relentless noise goodness. Limiting the track length to a maximum of five minutes per track may have been largely motivated by the limitations of the format, but it also has significant and mainly positive aesthetic consequences. Some of the featured HNW stalwarts, like Vomir, would only very rarely consider making a track this short, and all static-wall stuff is re-contextualized in a way by appearing in short bursts alongside other noise assaults. Some of the more bandcampy acts feel like they've been taken from the useless anarchy of digital, potentially infinite, temporality and, and unwillingly shunted into a proper musical uniform for the greater good, if you will. The fact that much of the material is static also means that you don't really get the feeling of "excerpts" either; the noise is there and you have time to grasp it. You lose the meditative sense of disembodiment stemming from hearing the same distorted rumblings for forty-five minutes, but you gain a fun (yeah, FUN) experience. The pure noise/HNW stuff is broken up by more dynamic offerings too, like Cutcutcutcut's "Observer (Drop the Bass)", which borders on instrumental power electronics. To be overly clear: style wise there is a mix between the comparatively speaking recent form of ultra-focused, minimalist generic HNW alluded to above, and more traditional (though usually still very wall-y) harsh noise. The other mix worth mentioning is the one between established artists - Macronympha, Bastard Noise, the aforementioned Vomir, etc - and more recently established and obscure acts - among whom I will only mention Stoa, not to insult anyone's self esteem or reveal ignorance of some internationally famous artiste. All in all, it makes for a great listen that at least simulates the sense of a scene overview that you'd get a few decades ago from compilation tapes. Obviously, there are so many noise people making so much so easily available music (?) these days that this sense is largely an illusion, but it still works very much in Gelbkreuz' favour. How you can print a 2CD in just 100 copies and still get any kind of profit, I'm not sure, but that's German efficiency for ya.
