The second episode of Metal Up Your Tap: Des Moines Chapter was this past Friday. It’s a pretty cool event, but it does get me thinking about what defines “metal” these days. The term seems to have gotten looser than it once was. For instance, recently the organizers seemed to be trying to get Fetal Pig to open next month’s episode being headlined by Nachtmystium. I guess Dan wasn’t into the idea. I’d have been up for it, but I’m up for a lot of crazy shit if it has to do with music. Also, by the way, kudos for snagging Nachtmystium.

Anyway there’s no disputing Druids’s doom/sludge metal cred once you hear them. I like that they switch it up with a few fast songs, which makes them more varied than the typical stonery outfit. They had a bassist this time, that was new. But welcome, since it opened things up for Luke to do more guitar solos. Some really good new songs in the set.

On second was The Mighty Acceleratör, from Ottumwa, and this is the second part of my point about the fluidity of the term “metal” these days. Acceleratör play a kind of 70s throwback riff-rock, intentionally exercising little or no Sabbath influence, with songs about drinking beer, ogling women, and driving trucks. I observed that the crowd thinned out slightly for their set, but only slightly, and the people in the place were not just respectful but actually pretty enthusiastic. Accelerator’s brand of hard rock is all fun and no bullshit, but is it metal? Well if metal fans are into it, why not? Certain metalheads will also staunchly proclaim their love of Aerosmith’s Rocks, or Rainbow, after all. Plus, Andy’s guitar tone does sound almost exactly like that on Napalm Death’s From Enslavement To Obliteration — or did, as since the show he’s purchased another amp. He also used to run one of the most extreme grindcore/noisecore labels around and brought along what’s left of his distro to the show. And, The Mighty Acceleratör’s ranks include the drummer of Grand Old Lady and A Well Dressed Man.

Heaving Mass, from Chicago, gave us a solid set of heavy head-nodding midtempo power-trio doom riffage reminiscent of Crowbar and a little bit of Sleep but also with a bit of that southern feel. This was definitely shaping up to be MUYT’s “doom edition.” They also have the flyest looking t-shirts I’ve ever seen offered at a $10 price point, a gorgeous multi-color design, and if you bought one you got their CD free.

Finally, Skin Of Earth was the big surprise to me. I’m told they’re local but had never heard of them before, but heard people tell me things like “last time I saw these guys it was eight years ago.” They brought their own lighting in the form of one low-wattage floor lamp, providing an ambience that transformed the Mews into a basement show. They played epic, crushing instrumentals with lots of apocalyptic atmosphere. I’m kind of a sucker for this type of thing. That whole supposed post-rock/metal hybrid that gets called “post-metal”, I guess, but I got the feeling these guys didn’t set out to start a “post-metal band” so much as they got together and started playing/writing and this is just what came out. Anyway I don’t know what kind of scene these guys play in but I want in on it.

I’m also long overdue to write a little something about the Joe Jack Talcum show. Zach was looking a little worse for the wear many days into a tour plagued with automotive breakdowns and injuries. He did a more rock-focused one-man Coolzey set with a lot of guitar including a couple nice blues-inflected numbers, and brought up a couple of his tourmates for his classic “Old Machine.” Dan B claimed he was tired too but you definitely couldn’t tell it from The Bassturd’s set. The Samuel Locke-Ward Lo-Fi Spectacular featured Jeff Mannix on guitar, Zach on bass (which I have to say, he can really play the hell out of!) and a drum machine.

Christopher The Conquered took the unorthodox route of performing in the Mews’s foyer on an upright piano, accompanied only by Kate Kennedy on saxophone. It was an unusually low-key and intimate performance for a CtC show but went over well with those who were around for it, having a very piano-bar vibe. I was worried however as it seemed like the crowd had thinned out a lot and I really wanted Joe Jack to have a good crowd to play for.

Fortunately, such a crowd appeared. I don’t know if they started filtering in from the DJ set just ending at the Mews’s outdoor “PBR Bar” or what, but suddenly there were a lot of people around rocking out to Joe Jack Talcum And The Powders. The Powders, made up of Sam Locke-Ward on keys, Grace Locke-Ward on drums, and Rachel Feldman on bass, make a darn fine backup band for both Joe Jack’s post-Dead Milkmen tunes and the Dead Milkmen covers sprinkled into the set, some requested by the audience. In response to one showgoer’s shouts for “Nutrition,” the band gave it an off-the-cuff shot having never played it before. If they messed it up any, none of the people shouting along seemed to mind.

After the main JJT/Powders set, Joe Jack stuck around onstage for two solo acoustic encores of requests of Dead Milkmen songs, and seemed to be having a good time. It was overall one of the more fun shows I’ve been to in a while.

No doubt if the profile of Zach Lint, a.k.a. Coolzey, increases, publicity will give some attention to his back-story and persona, as it’s an unusual one in the field of hip hop/rap music. A kid from a farm town north of Des Moines, Iowa who moved to Iowa City and turned himself into a DIY juggernaut as a rapper, songwriter, and rock musician, launching an independent label and adopting the DIY ethic of underground rock towards all his projects, especially his rap/hip hop work, then took to touring the country relentlessly in a van, changing his city of residence frequently while running all his own business affairs as an underground artist. Despite the relative lack of the usual adversities that similar stories play on — Zach is, after all, a healthy middle-class white kid from one of the friendliest parts of the country — it’s his work ethic, which has enabled him to build an underground career from next to nothing in resources — that inspires in a “you could do this too” kind of way, no matter who you are or what you come from.

That work ethic has a lot to fo with the story of Coolzey And The Search For Hip Hop Hearts Vol. 1: He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper. In the summer of 2010, even as he continued a hectic schedule of touring and making up the rest of his living in the remodeling business, Coolzey embarked on an impossibly ambitious project: over the 12 weeks of summer, he would complete an album of 12 songs, one per week, each based on a beat from a different DJ, and each with its own music video created in collaboration with his Public School Records partner and video producer Jason Hennesey. Each track and video was released online, right on schedule, and the album available for free download from the Free Music Archive.

And that might have been as far as the project went, but it became evident that there was demand for a hard copy. So earlier this year Zach put up a Kickstarter campaign to fund having the mixes cleaned up and the album and videos mastered and pressed to a CD-plus-DVD package; the campaign was successful and the resulting product can most likely be acquired at the merch table at dates of Coolzey’s upcoming package tour with three other heavy hitters: Joe Jack Talcum, a singer-songwriter best known as the member of The Dead Milkmen who sang on “Punk Rock Girl”; Austin-via-Iowa City rapper-singer-songwriter-composer-keyboardist-improviser-raconteur The Bassturd; and Iowa City’s maestro of the disturbing Samuel Locke-Ward. Said tour hits Vaudeville Mews in Des Moines on June 18 (and The Blue Moose in Iowa City the night before, for those of you out that way). This show promises to be amazing and you would be a fool to miss it.

There are those, and I occasionally claim to be among them, who profess to miss the fun vibe of the early rap and hip hop of the 1980s and their youth as we find ourselves now so many years deep into the tuff-guy gangsta era wherein each artist tries to appear more “hard” than the last. Perhaps some of this sentiment has latched on to the underground phenomenon where you find Coolzey, and through Coolzey I have been turned on to the likes of Rashaan Ahmad and I’m not sure if there’s a rap peanut gallery that degrades this kind of thing as “hipster rap” the way there is in the metal scene, but if so I could give a fuck about that kind of talk. At the end of the day what matters is quality, and while there may be some hearkening back to the attitudes of classic hip hop, you’d be mistaken to consider this material as merely throwback or retro, as the sounds are new and varied, and you’d be even more off the mark to pigeonhole Coolzey into “nerd rap” with some of the other outsiders, even if he does look like he would fit in with their crowd.

I can’t claim to be much of an expert on hip hop music but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Zach is a hell of a lyricist. The way he puts words together makes me as a songwriter a bit jealous. He has obviously devoted himself in a big way to honing his craft. He also manages to sound positive even when while he’s savagely dissing lesser/lazier MCs and doing it more cleverly than anyone else around. He delivers his criticisms in a way that makes him sound above the fray even as he participates in it: “If I don’t eat their lunch, they’re in the next room chumpin’ me / Sizing me up, trying to figure out the best way to get at my cheese / Here’s an idea: ask me / I wouldn’t put it past me to give it up for free / My soul is infinite, so there’s no way to outlast me.” Zach’s values and ethic as an artist and toward life itself make it to the forefront of most of his lyrics, and the philosophy he espouses is that life is too short to waste hating on others or expecting anyone to come around and hand you anything for free.

Elsewhere Zach extols the virtues of creativity and the DIY hustle and devotes an entire track, “Put Me Away,” to an extended metaphor about how he just likes to stay busy and bring joy to people any way he can, by portraying himself as some kind of all-purpose As Seen On TV helper robot. The track, like much of the album, is clever and hooky, and Zach backed up its concept in his Kickstarter campaign by offering as a premium at the $3000 level that he would come live with you for 5 days and clean your house, babysit your kids, do remodeling, or anything else you ask for (there were no takers but he definitely would have followed through). Most of the music has a laid-back feel but there are darker, more sinister tones as well, especially the spooky yet inspirational examination of human mortality “Faces Of Death” and the tough-talking “Ten WA” and “Keef.”

The variety of approaches however, does result in some moments that seem out of place and throw off the album’s overall focus. “No Reply” is an intriguing though incongruous mix of a Coolzey rap over some avant-garde electronic sounds by The Rhombus, a bit hard to follow, and while fairly enjoyable to a noise-head like myself, is likely to get the skip button treatment from most. “No Solicitations” also comes off out of place, but taken on its own terms works well, Zach portraying a dull office-drone character who we’re not sure whether to laugh at or sympathize with or both. And on some tracks the lyrics can veer disorientingly from philosophical meditations and on the human condition to political issues. But for the great majority of its running time, The Search For Hip Hop Hearts is a collection that once again showcases Coolzey as an artist capable of making you laugh, dance, and think all at the same time.

Also, not enough has been said about the videos, which come on a second disc in this package. Writing about videos is if anything even harder than writing about music. Jason Hennesey definitely plays up the fun aspect of these songs, featuring Zach rapping with a plush puppy dog hand puppet, Grace Locke-Ward’s cats wearing graduation caps, drunken camera shenanigans, live show footage and vintage educational films. You can watch all of them on Vimeo.

Coolzey has started a Kickstarter project to get a CD/DVD combo pressed of his 2010 online video-album, and one of my own favorite albums of the year, Coolzey and the Search for Hip Hop Hearts: He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper. If you missed out on it at the time, basically Zach released 12 songs, one a week, over the summer, each with beats made by a different producer/DJ, and each with a video produced by his Public School Records partner-in-crime Jason Hennesey. You can watch all the videos in The Search For Hip Hop Hearts and download the album from Free Music Archive — check the Coolzey page at the Public School Records website.

Here’s the official lowdown on the Kickstarter project from Coolzey’s email list:

I made this Kickstarter fund-raising page with the intentions of raising the money to create a DVD / CD combo of the remixed and remastered album Coolzey and the Search for the Hip Hop Hearts. We released the rough videos and songs on-line last summer, and I think most of you are familiar with the project. Please follow this link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/515987855/coolzey-and-the-search-for-the-hip-hop-hearts?ref=email

I have been urged to officially release this and make some copies, so that’s what this is about! There are also a bunch of other prizes for pledging certain amounts that I’m excited about, including show tickets, physical Coolzey albums and discographies, postcards, charcoal portraits, and more!

The standard thing that most of you who end up pledging will probably want to do is $25, which will basically be buying a copy of the DVD / CD combo plus postage and an extra little something personal. Please check out the other options though! You can pledge more or less if you’d like.

I have 1 month to raise $3000 for this, and if we don’t meet the goal, nobody will have their card charged, but we aniticipate that this shouldn’t be a problem. One month from today. Please do your best to pledge early on if you can, it really helps the momentum. Above all, I’m keeping this email brief, so please go check out the comprehensive link!

I’m rooting for this to happen… there’s only a little under a month left to go so I urge you all to head on over there and get in on it. If you put in $25 like I just did, you get a copy of the CD/DVD when it comes out; if you pledge more, Zach promises some pretty nifty extra rewards, and if you can’t quite manage $25, anything helps.

Update: here’s an embeddy widgety thing:

Just out today the latest video, number 8 in the weekly Coolzey and the Search for Hip-hop Hearts series, is drop-dead hilarious. A must-see.

Just wanted to remind you that Coolzey’s song-and-video-every-week album Coolzey and the Search for the Hip Hop Hearts – Volume 1: He’s the DJ I’m the Rapper is still going on. It’s up to three songs now and going strong and you should head over to the Public School Records site to check it out and keep up on it. Also, RapReviews did a really cool interview with Coolzey about the project.

Super-active Iowa rapper/songwriter/musician Coolzey has a new summer project. You’ve heard of this concept before: put out a song online every week. Except he’s also doing videos for them. For 12 weeks. Here’s the first one.

Check out Public School Records website for a download of the song, including a clean version suitable for radio.