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The New Heavy

Electric Wizard, Boris, Sleep and the Hidden
Hand

BY PHIL FREEMAN
What is Heavy? Many bands are described as Heavy
by record company PR departments, but very few truly achieve true Heaviness.
Joe Carducci spent significant portions of his invaluable book Rock
and the Pop Narcotic attempting to define Heavy, with some success.
Heavy
is all about the rhythm section, specifically the bass and drums. Keyboards
are never Heavy, unless they’re pipe organs, and when’s
the last time you heard a pipe organ in a rock song? A guitarist can
downtune until his strings hang in loops and sway in the breeze, but
without the bass, and more importantly the drums, behind him, he’s
got nothing. Tony Iommi would never have become what he did without
Geezer Butler and Bill Ward behind him. This is why a band like Korn,
whose
guitar and bass strings are practically falling off, are not Heavy.
They create a static throb, like some sort of large machine, and after
about
five minutes the sound is intolerable — listening to one of their
albums is like working in a metal shop.
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After about
five minutes the sound is intolerable—listening
to one of their albums is like working in a metal shop. |
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Listen, instead, to Led Zeppelin’s Physical
Graffiti. “When
The Levee Breaks,” from Led Zeppelin IV, is commonly cited
as a landmark achievement in Heavy. And it is that. But “The
Rover,” the
second cut on Disc One of PG, is that track’s equal, and then
some. John Bonham and John Paul Jones take the simple blues-funk
groove, nominally
led by Jimmy Page’s guitar, and walk it straight through your
chest cavity. “The Rover” is a lesson in how to strut
wearing two-ton concrete shoes. Virtually
every song on Black Sabbath’s
Vol. 4 album, “Changes” and “FX” excepted,
is paradigmatically Heavy. Even “Snowblind,” which
in its early moments seems to share the rhythmic stasis of the
wildly
overrated “Sweet
Leaf” from Master Of Reality — a perfect example
of a crowd-pleasing lyric camouflaging musical weaknesses—kicks
in halfway through with a double-time riff (right when Ozzy sings, “Don’t
you think I know what I’m doing/Don’t tell me that
it’s
doing me wrong/You’re the one that’s really a loser/This
is where I feel I belong”) that’s just crushing. Bands
can go their whole career searching for a moment of glory like
that; Black
Sabbath Vol. 4 is almost overstuffed with them.
But these records
were made in the mid-1970s. Who are the masters of Heavy today?
There are many low-profile Heavy bands, each with
their
partisans. Lots of hep folks speak well of the Queens Of The Stone
Age, but they’ve always fallen short of the mark, because
they’re
actually a bass-guitar duo, bringing in ringers to fill out the
sound in-studio and on the road. For all the hype surrounding Dave
Grohl’s
drumming contributions to their last album, Songs For The Deaf,
there was little or no actual Heavy feel. A visit from a Special
Guest almost
always implies that no time has been spent building an organic
symbiosis between bassist and drummer. There’s a locking-in
that happens after six months of touring, or constant practicing,
that no session
man, however ace, can walk in cold and replicate. It’s that
simple.
Many acts working with Heaviness these days fall into
either the “stoner” or “doom” metal
categories. Doom, which is all about keeping holy the Sabbath,
has its virtues. Too often, though, bands become convinced that
slow and low
is enough. Witness the recent rise, and embrace by arty types,
of Sunn 0))), a band whose sound consists of incredibly low-frequency
drones
spiced up with the occasional sub-Sab riff. One or two tracks have
drums, but there’s never any attempt at forward movement,
let alone the almost-swinging blues-groove that’s the foundation
of classic Heavy. Electric Wizard are much better — they’re
just as obsessed with sludge and rumbling drones as Sunn 0))),
but they’re a power
trio, and exist not to ooze, but to rock. Their Dopethrone album
adds feedback, menace and paranoid hostility to the Sabbathian
formula, and
slaps one of the best covers in all of metal (a van-art painting
of Satan doing bonghits) on the front, creating a modern classic
of Heavy.
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Their music makes them sound like they’d
be thick-necked guys the size of weightlifters gone to seed, with
bushy
brows above eyes like red-hot ball bearings. But not only are they
all skinny Asians, their guitarist is a girl with an Orange amp
taller than
she is. |
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Somewhere between Electric Wizard and Sunn 0)))
is the Japanese trio Boris. Their music makes them sound like they’d
be thick-necked guys the size of weightlifters gone to seed, with bushy
brows above
eyes like red-hot ball bearings. But not only are they all skinny
Asians,
their guitarist is a girl with an Orange amp taller than she is.
The Boris to own is Amplifier Worship, recently released
in America on the
Southern Lord label (a prime source for all things doom). Some
songs are in the 15-minute range, but others are short and punchy.
The vocals
are an indecipherable caveman roar, and the guitar chews its way
out of the speakers — but the rhythm section, unfortunately,
often falls flat. The drummer hits hard, but the bassist isn’t
given enough freedom to swing. Boris, like Sunn 0))), are too fascinated
by the ground
beneath their feet, and forget to keep moving. Their other Southern
Lord release, Absolutego, contains only two tracks, one of which
is 65 minutes
long. Boris are at their best when they pare their songs down to
a core of sludgy tempo, overamped guitar, and pile-driving, low-gear
bass and
drums. Sleep’s “Dopesmoker” is another hour-plus
track, and it comes with one of rock’s greatest true stories
attached. The band released two albums, one independently and one
on the early 1990s’ best
metal label, Earache Records. They were then snapped up by Polygram
subsidiary London, and given a major-label amount of money to record
a follow-up.
Sleep vanished into the studio with their co-conspirator, producer
Billy Anderson. Over the course of the next two years or so, they
spent virtually
the entire recording budget on weed, stonewalling the record company
all the while. Finally, they turned in “Dopesmoker,” a
63-minute song about weed which they insisted on making the entirety
of their third
album, with no edits of any kind. Quite unsurprisingly, they were
dropped, and the song/album vanished into music-biz limbo. A few
years ago, though,
an edited version (56 minutes, chopped into six “movements”)
was released by The Music Cartel, retitled Jerusalem. Now, it’s
been remixed, and restored to its full, single-track glory.
“Dopesmoker” is long, slow, and Heavy. But it’s never
boring, even during those first ten minutes before the vocals come
in. Bassist
and vocalist Al Cisneros, and drummer Chris Hakius roar and throb
like a supertanker’s engine room, keeping the vast bulk of
the track in motion. Guitarist Matt Pike is currently leading one
of the loudest
bands on the planet, the power trio High On Fire. His sound was
already in place on Dopesmoker; a thick, distorted roar you can
practically feel
congealing on your skin. Anybody who wants to understand the true
sonic legacy of Black Sabbath needs to hear everything Matt Pike
has recorded,
and Dopesmoker is a career high point.
Another totemic figure in
modern Heavy is Scott “Wino” Weinrich.
For just under a quarter-century, he’s been writing and playing
some of the most gut-churning, awe-inspiring riffs anywhere with
a string of bands — the Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan,
and now Place Of Skulls and the Hidden Hand (yeah, he’s in
two bands at once these days). When Washington, D.C., was ablaze
with lightning-speed hardcore
bands like Minor Threat and the Bad Brains, Wino was grinding out
post-Sabbath riffs with the Obsessed. Later, when he joined prototypical
doom metal
outfit Saint Vitus and began touring with Black Flag, punk audiences
nationwide thought the band was a Spinal Tap-esque joke. They were
dead wrong — the best proof of that is the fact that Wino’s
still going, still doing exactly the same thing he’s always
been doing. For a few years in the late 1990s, he led Spirit Caravan,
a power trio
that allowed him to bark his weed-fueled lyrics about earthly squalor
and spiritual transfiguration, and play one Iommi-meets-Hendrix
guitar solo after another. They released the Dreamwheel EP, and
followed that
with two albums, Jug Fulla Sun and Elusive Truth, all of which
are better than 90 percent of the “stoner” rock scene’s
output.
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Where Spirit Caravan seemed to want
to take the listener to a higher plane, the Hidden Hand gets bogged
down in pointless political
hectoring. |
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When the Caravan broke up, something must have snapped
in Wino, though, because his new band, the Hidden Hand, is weird.
Their
debut album,
Divine Propaganda, has a reading list inside its booklet
that includes muckraking
journalist Greg Palast and British nutjob David Icke, among others.
The Icke book, And The Truth Shall Set You Free, is an early
work, so it’s
unlikely that Wino believes the world is being taken over by 12-foot-tall,
shape-shifting lizards. But the turn towards overt politicizing
is troublesome nonetheless, as politics is nearly always the death
of art, and rock
especially. Divine Propaganda features a lot of the same
ultra-Heavy doom riffs Wino’s been playing for 20-plus years,
but a few songs also speed up to punk tempos, and that’s
not necessarily a positive change — when combined with the
sloganeering lyrics, it makes the music one-dimensional. Where
Spirit Caravan seemed
to want to take the
listener to a higher plane, the Hidden Hand gets bogged down in
pointless political hectoring. Still, many of the album’s
tracks do reach the old heights on an instrumental level. Wino
may not know what he’s
talking about politically, but he’s never forgotten how to
play guitar, and he always knows how to pick a rhythm section that
suits him.
Wino represents the old guard these days; he’s younger than Iommi,
but older than Matt Pike, and he’s probably got at least another
decade of power-trio amplifier worship in him. Pike’s High On Fire
are just getting off the ground, having only two albums to their credit
so far. Boris have been around for awhile, but they’re extremely
productive (as are lots of other underground Japanese bands, many of
which are quite eardrum-damaging and great) and show no signs of slowing
down. And these are only three of the literally hundreds of bands across
America and the world who are attempting to create a whole new Heavy
universe of sound. As long as there’s electricity, there will be
guitarists, bassists and drummers consumed by low tones and high volume.
Heavy never dies.

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