Check it out in the sidebar over there, I added a calendar of shows I’m playing. My next one is a solo gig in Decorah.

Latest classic Iowa/midwest band to come to my attention as having a bandcamp account is The Slats. Led by Brian Cox, The Slats started out in Cedar Rapids, hit their stride in Iowa City, and then ended up scattered between various parts of Iowa and Minneapolis, and over those years developed into a powerhouse trio with a unique sound that blends skronky, trashy, sludgy noise guitars with mad Cars-y hooks. To what extent The Slats are still an active band is unknown here at the Farm but theslats.bandcamp.com is the place to get a bunch of their albums (noticeably (to longtime fans) absent is their scrappy debut Car, a fine chunk of rock worth seeking out if you’ve collectory inclinations). Go check that shit out.

Bruce Lamont is best known for Yakuza, a band that’s been around a number of years, and whom I think I might have been MySpace friends with as long ago as ’07, but which I only really began paying attention to last year upon seeing some blog love for Of Seismic Consequence, and also for his collaborative involvement in bands that lie pretty firmly in the metal genre while being creatively expansive: Nachtmystium, Locrian, Brutal Truth, Minsk, Bloodiest, and so on. With his solo release Feral Songs For The Epic Decline, Lamont presents rather different settings for his rich voice and ominous saxophone playing, and gives us something that’s heavy in another way.

Solo albums by people in known bands are frequently a catch-all for experiments, genre exercises, and oddball ideas that don’t fit within the established style of the musician’s main gig, and as such have a high tendency to be unfocused, patchwork sounding affairs. Feral Songs, however, evades this lack of focus, presenting a variety of sonic colors within an overall framework of mystical drone-folk and noise collage, likely to appeal to fans of Michael Gira’s various late-Swans and post-Swans works. Woodsy, culty chants, meditative drones, dissonant acoustic guitars, and a distinct lack of drums are prominently recurring sonic elements, but there are a wealth of other ambient sounds less immediately identifiable fading in and out of the mix, with the dial being regularly tweaked along a continuum between the album’s folkier side (“Year Without Summer”) and its ambient side (“Book Of The Low”).

Two interesting departures stand out in the second half. “Disgruntled Employer” begins by laying a foundation as a saxophone and looper piece — listen closely before the synths and percussion come in, and you can even hear the click of the looper’s footswitch buttons; “Deconstructing Self-Destruction” begins with a gentle electric guitar fantasy that sounds a bit like Dylan Carlson idle between rehearsal takes, then fades in a lulling industrial drone that quickly erupts in a brutal noisecore section featuring distorted screams over a mechanized blastbeat, made even better by how it abruptly breaks off into the acoustic guitar strums opening “2 Then The 3″ which takes us back into folk territory to close out the album. Feral Songs shows Bruce Lamont to be a skilled architect of sound and mood, and it’s a beautiful sonic artwork.

Yakuza seem to be going for the “iconoclastic brainy heavy band” Voivod kind of thing, and last year they released the very well-received Of Seismic Consequence. They’ve got a pretty distinctive style of their own. I had rather been under the impression that they kept to an aggressive sound, so I was a bit surprised by how mellow a lot of Of Seismic Consequence is, but now, having heard Feral Songs it sort of fits. Opening track “The Ant People,” built from drones and tribal drumming on toms and rim-clicks, wouldn’t sound at all out of place on Bruce’s album.

“Thinning The Herd” gets the heavy shit going. Within a few seconds I was concerned about the harsh hyper-compressed guitar tone, the same kind of sound that seems to have popped up on a bunch of metal stuff in 2010, particularly of the “black” or “post-black” variety. It’s a sound that can quickly become fatiguing in a loudness-war kind of way. Fortunately, it turned out that the album makes use of it tastefully in the louder sections; a surprising amount of the guitar playing on the album is in fact done with little or no distortion at all. “Thinning The Herd” is probably the album’s most aggressive moment, built on a furious odd-meter riff reminiscent of the old Faith No More tune “Surprise! You’re Dead!” mixed with a bit of Today Is The Day circa their self-titled.

So-called “clean” vocals (i.e., “singing”) are an element that has started to feel refreshing in a metal album these days with the trend being for each singer to try to out-demonic-snarl the last. Bruce Lamont has real vocal chops, making the vocals in Yakuza not merely an evil sound effect, but something that contributes melody and emotion to the music. The next few tracks move into much mellower territory, alternating heavy passages with spacey, swampy psychedelic post-rock sections that employ Bruce’s saxophone. It’s nice to hear heavy music with some dynamics and contrast.

It makes me feel a little weird to name too many other artists or genre labels in a review, but music is difficult to write about without referencing other music, even though it feels a little wrong to do so. I’m just going to throw a few things out here that elements of the rest of Of Seismic Consequence brought to mind: that new Lantlôs album; atmospheric black metal; slinky Morphine-esque baritone sax; Killing Joke; a dash of Nick Cave; Today Is The Day; soaring slow emocore. It’s another highly varied, yet also highly coherent, album from some exceptional musicians. Hard to say how much of the respect this album is due it will actually get, as it goes against as many of the big trends in metal these days as it nods to. But that has a lot to do with making it a standout that seems likely to still sound fresh and interesting years from now.

If you’ve followed Captain 3 Leg for a while you know that they’ve generally done a gore-noise-grind kind of thing, but that they’ve also never shied away from following their muse when it’s led them to prog, ambient electronics, and instrumental riff-rock. And you also know that head honcho Andy Koettel announced that the 100-band Small Doses compilation would be the final release of the Mortville label but that he is by no means quitting music and plans to continue putting out lots of stuff in download form. The low overhead of going digital can be really creatively freeing, and I think that jives well with Andy’s inclinations, given this EP recorded by Captain Three Leg a year and a half ago and just released last week on the Captain 3 Leg bandcamp site: three songs plus an alternate take of bluesy-funky classic-rock-inspired party rock’n'roll with some babbly lyrics that almost seem to find an intersection between Sockeye and ZZ Top. For further insights check out the post on the Mortville site.

There was more of an underground metal/hardcore vibe at Vaudeville Mews than usual. There was a huge merch area with a lot of distro stuff set up, which got me thinking about the what the difference between this kind underground/punk commerce and the usual commercialism we all see all the time. It’s a different vibe, a grass-roots, bazaar kind of thing, but there was definitely a lot more money being exchanged for stuff than what you typically see at an indie rock show, which was interesting and seemed like a positive thing overall.

The first four acts got set up and torn down super fast, even adjusting for the fact that Die Mutts and The Creepy Kids shared a bassist and Catheter and Black Market Fetus shared a drummer, or maybe just the drums, and all kept their sets rather short, being just as excited to get D.R.I. on the stage as anyone in the crowd was.

Die Mutts and The Creepy Kids (who are way too old to be calling themselves The anything “Kids”) both had a pretty basic fast punk rock or old-school hardcore sound. Both have been around a good long time, such that, even adjusting for the relative simplicity of the music style, their playing was tight. In modern punk I think a lot of the job of giving the music some texture and sonic interest falls to the bassist, and the bassist that played in both bands was on it, probably my favorite aspect of that part of the show.

Catheter are from Denver I think? They do a kind of death-metal-influenced grindcore thing with low-tuned sludgy guitar sounds, growl vocals, short songs, breakneck switches between slow parts and blastbeats. Sort of reminded me of when I first heard Suppression on cassette back in ’93. Quite good. Nate Fetus used to sing for them for a while, and did a song or two with them at the show. These kind of vocals can seem sort of silly, but I’m less likely these days to be down on a band for using them, even if I don’t always entirely get it myself. I enjoyed their set. For as long as they’ve been around and as much as I’ve heard about them over the years, this was the first time I’ve gotten to see them live.

The wild raucous fun energy of Poison Control Center’s shows is often mentioned in press about them, and everything they say is true. But less talked about is that another central Iowa band, Black Market Fetus, are capable of inspiring just as much frenzy. Their set was nuts with stage-diving and the crowd yelling all the lyrics along. Musically they’re more metal than the punkier opening bands but more punk rock sounding than even much of D.R.I.’s material.

D.R.I. had a nice long set. They must have worked through something like two-thirds of their entire discography. I listened to a lot of D.R.I.’s albums in the couple weeks before the show, kind of puzzling this out, and I think their more metal-sounding stuff post-Dealing With It! is sometimes criticized unfairly, especially by us indie types. All their material was going over well with this crowd, and with me as well. Perhaps the crossover they started is only really starting to be understood now, or maybe it’s a matter of some things working better live. This band is going on 30 years together; sure, they started young, but they aren’t lacking for energy in any respect. It was good times.

Got to hang out with Andy K a little bit too, which was cool. We’ll have to get together again sometime when we can talk more.

Previously: The Black Keys – Brothers

The Black Keys were ubiquitous in 2010. Liven up your next TV party with the Black Keys drinking game: every time you hear a Black Keys song on TV, take a number of drinks equal to how many albums ago it’s from. Bonus drink if the song is heard in a context other than a commercial. When Captain Beefheart died they even got mention in a couple news articles about it for having covered a few of his songs. It’s possibly a bit much.

In their early days, if you were paying attention, you might have noticed that they tended to have better songs than the average among their peers, but generally you could be forgiven for having overlooked The Black Keys among the glut of two-piece gritty-blues-rock outfits that seemed to appear in the wake of the sudden success of The White Stripes (about whom I’m obligated to mention their breakup, but presumably you already heard about it). Then you might have started to notice that they seemed to put out an awful lot of albums. Turns out they were getting better with each one. They began to really set themselves apart from the crowd in 2008 on Attack & Release by trading in blues orthodoxy for 1960s R&B/soul elements that give Dan Auerbach more room to use his smooth, agile vocals and stretch his lyric writing, and those new degrees of freedom allowed them to put tremendous emotional depth into the songs. Adding in a bit of extra instrumentation on record didn’t hurt either. Having established this formula, they pretty much stuck with it in 2010 for Brothers, and delivered one of the best albums of the year yet again.

(As for 2009, Dan Auerbach released the excellent, somewhat overlooked solo album Keep It Hid — it pretty much sounds like a Black Keys record with some folk leanings, definitely worth checking out.)

Harvey Milk: “A Small Turn of Human Kindness”: These Seans over at Crustcake called this “possibly the most miserable record ever recorded” and meant it as a compliment. The whole album plays out as a concept/story piece, with each song titled after a first-person line of dialogue (“I Just Want To Go Home”, “I Know This Is No Place For You”). After an instrumental intro track that features strange, nauseous dissonances between the guitar and bass, a brief, bleak story line plays out over the course of 6 dismally slow songs with a descending melodic motif recurring frequently throughout. Bonus track “In The Ground” makes a fitting coda. A gorgeously bleak album.

The Howling Wind: “Into The Cryosphere”:
This band is a duo of Ryan Lipynsky from Unearthly Trance and some drummer I don’t know much about. I never heard of either band before this past year anyway. Unearthly Trance also put out an album last year, but I didn’t get much chance to hear that, so I’d feel odd about trying to go too in-depth with this one if I have nothing to say on that one. Stylistically this has more of a black-metal sound where Unearthly Trance are more doom-oriented. You can take that to mean generally faster tempos, guitar sounds that are more trebly instead of bassy, and more intricately-textured guitar chords with close and extended harmonies in them. The vocals are of the raspy, reverbed-out, low in the mix variety, which usually causes me to appreciate something more as instrumental music; I’ve always had a little trouble understanding lyrics in music anyway. This has great atmosphere, seemingly built around a concept having to do with the arctic. Sometimes they convey the stillness of the desolate tundra, but more often it’s about the violence of arctic storms and freezing wind blasting in your face. There is plenty going on in the songs to hold my interest, but not so much that it’s disorienting or doesn’t hold together. The drumming is solid and not excessive. It’s kind of short, but its economy feels welcome. This album is pretty rad all throughout.