Martyr - Feeding the Abscess
It’s been a good five years since the last album by Canadian technical death metal band Martyr, but in a way Martyr are looking farther back for their inspiration as Feeding the Abscess is a distinct look back at early forms of the genre. It may just be that it’s been a few years since I played any of the first three Martyr albums and remember at least the second album and following live one were both better produced and recorded than Abscess. In fact Abcess seems to desire that old Morrisound death metal sound and the whole thing sounds like a throwback to the 90s. The technicality is still at play here, but if Death was always one of Martyr’s main templates, we’ve moved from Symbolic to Leprosy in terms of the style. After a first listen, I’m wondering whether or not any of the songs here are likely to make an impression with repeats, which was certainly the case for the previous two. Who knows maybe I’ll feel different later. As it turns out, Martyr was recorded by Pierre Remillard who has done great work with Cryptopsy, Gorguts and Krisiun, so I’m hoping to take a closer listen to the sound next time.
Titan s/t
It’s fun to see experimentation with packaging, but Paradigm records has made something of a mess with this release. It’s basically brown paper with a stamp of the Titan logo wrapped around a small slip case with the CD, except that when you first get the CD you have to open the completely sealed brown paper (those who bought the Igor Wakhevitch box set of the original albums will have some idea), a difficult thing to do while keeping it pretty, in fact it’s only the way it all folds up that prevents one from seeing the damage when the package is closed up. Anyway, the music is a little more primitive than Titan’s massive follow up, I’m feeling like the interface between producer and consumer is a little too wide and the instrumental technology obviously a bit too primitive (or perhaps not enough given the style) to make me feel like I’m listening to classic German acid rock. This is an issue that haunts most throwback bands from Damenbart to Golem and one which Titan would go on to fix later. Still, with all these criticisms aside, it’s still very enjoyable stuff. It’s not just that Titan are going for the right sound, but that they’re experimental within the confines of the sound, which is generally the missing ingredient for retrokrautrockers who slavishly imitate the style rather than the spirit. Yes, I was probably very inclined to like this after hearing the second, which is the one I’d recommend anyone start with first. This is great modern psychedelic music.
Steve Hillage - Fish Rising (remaster)
Given that much of this album was written during the Khan years, it’s quite inaccurate to call this Radio Gnome Trilogy Part IV, but in a way it’s something of a coda to the Daevid Allen years in terms of lyrical content and the album’s very similar line up to Gong. In fact the Gong band toured much of this material as early as late 1974 and over the years I’ve kind of mushed them together. Needless to say Fish Rising is not only the best record Steve Hillage ever released, but it’s a classic in cosmic and psychedelic rock music, so buying the remaster was an imperative, especially with a Mark Powell remaster and two fabulous bonus tracks to sweeten the deal. The remaster, like many coming from the EMI stables, is a lot more subtle than the yank and crank method that’s in vogue these days and it’s enough to bring out some of the subtleties of the sound without making them equal in volume to what you’re familiar with. This is an album that drones, twitters and spirals with Tim Blake’s synth work, a large line up with a guest appearance or two - basically a hell of a lot going on. It features Hillage masterworks like the riffy “Salmon Song” and the glorious paeon to the new age, “Solar Musick Suite” which features a climactic unison riff that would have made Mahavishnu proud. I wasn’t all that surprised to see Hillage call out both Hendrix and Coltrane as his primary influences, as both are so often for those cosmically minded, although Hillage was one of the few who actually advanced the psychedelic guitar past the Hendrix years.
For bonus tracks we *finally* get the “V” compilation gem “Pentagramaspinn” (I don’t think I could spell this right if my life depended on it) but apparently the original was not up to stuff so Hillage remixed it last year for inclusion. A fabulous little piece that I wonder if it was ever played live, in some ways it’s a microcosm of Hillage with Gong. The surprise over the “power trio” version of Aftaglid is mostly that it’s not as different as I would have expected, just a bit heavier in parts.
Overall I’m quite pleased.
Plants - Double Infinity
Another Paradigms release, this artist hailing from Seattle, Washington. This time the label packaged it in a DVD case, very similar to the Discordance Axis releases, which is something I find a little unnecessary. The music also seems krautrock and psych-folk inspired, spending quite a bit of the length on droney electronic explorations, before reaching the end, a rather Popol Vuh-ish finale. In fact I wasn’t left with too much of an impression, except that there seemed to be a lot of analog synth work at hand.