Ghosts of Glaciers, Decay

When a band does post-metal right I’m happy. Like, really, really happy. Sometimes I just want to hear badass guitars and bass and drums rock out super hard for 10-15 minutes at a time and blare loud noises out from my car. Ghosts of Glaciers, a local band here in Denver, Colorado, pretty much nails what I like about post-metal. I first caught them live when Scale The Summit was doing their first headlining tour and they basically blew me away. They played as well at Scale did, and they were the opener and knocked the next two bands down a solid notch (including Scale’s tour mates Elitist). I also saw them open for East of the Wall and Black Tusk. It’s been a while since I caught them live though so I’ll have to try to get to something more recent, especially since they’ve had a new album, Decay, come out mid last month.

Decay is an entirely instrumentally driven machine that flies out of the gate with it’s first song, and while it slows down pretty quickly it knows how to build itself back up. The first two songs, “Maelstrom” and “Feeding The Maw”, both have parts that dip down into moody and slower post-rock territory, which is almost like the breathing point for each song, but “Inversion” really makes that kind of thing the whole point. I feel like it does a lot of stringing you along until the big payoff that finishes the whole album, which isn’t a bad thing; it’s kinda classical. I’d also love to see that drumwork at the end of “Inversion” live. It sounds brutal.

Ghosts of Glaciers puts out a very powerful sounding album for just three guys. I like it, I want more of it. I’d like to catch them at a show before the year end. Decay is available off their Bandcamp for $5. Click the album cover above and git it.

Nathaniel Noton-Freeman, Cloud Machines

Nathaniel Noton-Freeman is an acoustic musician from Cape Neddick, Maine. I found out about Nathaniel after he posted his first album, Whorl, on r/post-rock, calling it “sort of like post-rock on acoustic guitars“. I liked it a lot. It was a very whimsical album, while a lot of post-rock can be super serious and even grimdark at times (GSY!BE), and at that time in my life I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. Whorl came at a time where I really needed nothing more than something to calm me down. I’ve been bumming music from him since. Cloud Machines comes out in the wake of a Kickstarter back in October which I backed, payment for a few years of getting great music for free. Between Whorl and now, Nathaniel has released a few more albums and single that feel like they’re moving from “whimsical” to “thoughtful”, and I would definitely call Cloud Machines a thoughtful album.

99% of this album is nothing but guitars. In the final song there is a small stretch of accompanying drums but that’s is. Maybe I don’t listen to enough acoustic music, but I find it amazing to have created something so quiet and contemplative. It takes a lot my previous “thought music”, that is doom and drone and all this big music that’s loud but very airy and tends to leave a lot of space for itself, and really put it in it’s place. There is an ambience throughout the album that just complements every song. It makes me want to do nothing more than lie on my floor and stare at the ceiling. I could do with some deep thought processing sometimes.

Cloud Machines, and all of Nathaniel Noton-Freeman’s music, is free on his Bandcamp. Click the cover above to get it.

Deafheaven

Deafheaven are a black metal/post-rock/shoegaze whatever band who probably doesn’t need whatever teeny, tiny exposure this blog is going to give (about one and a half page views) but I’ve been listening to them again and I have nothing better to fill time with, so screw it. The internet certainly already knows about them since I found them through a friend who found them through a thread on /mu/. I don’t know what the reaction to them was on there at the time but if it was anything like Deafheaven’s tag page on Last.fm, with such tags including, but not limited to, “approximately 1000 times less pleasant than extreme anal caving” and “i would rather eat shit for the rest of my life than listen to this”, I’d guess they’ve fallen out of favor. That’s a fun comment box to read too and if I ever meet Kerry McCoy I know exactly how to kick off a conversation. Who gives a shit about 4chan though? I fucking love Deafheaven.

Their debut demo is ok, and I think Daedalus is the only stand out song on it because there is a tambourine smack in the middle of it, but it’s still a good album that introduces you to their style.  It’s a very clean and well recorded kind of black metal thing with post-rock influenced interludes with start and stop like you’re jamming on the break and gas pedal of a car. That’s one reason why I like Deafheaven so much: they’re well recorded. If more black metal didn’t sound like it was made in the back of a cave using a microphone older than it’s band members on a tape that’s been recorded over for the past three years…I might like black metal. However, it’s one of black metals “things” to have that low-fi sorta thing to it and, despite how much I don’t like it, I’m not going to sit here and think I can change it.

I have a hard time trying to find another song I like more than “Violet”, off their second album Roads to Judah. The intro to it just kills me every time I listen to it. While the rest of the album is good and shows more of that “clean black metal with something else” style, and it’s better than their demo, Roads to Judah still isn’t a 100% likable package. “Tunnel of Trees” is kind of a weak song despite being the longest on the album and the final song. It just doesn’t jive with me.

Sunbather, however, is easily their best album, and I don’t think it needs to be said more than it already has been. It was the highest rated album on Metacritic for 2013 after all. “Dream House” was the first song I heard from Deafheaven and it just struck me as exactly something I wanted to hear. With reckless abandon I bought all their albums and gave them a spin and Sunbather is easily the most comprehensive album for Deafheaven. They recruited a new drummer for recording the album and Daniel Tracy definitely shows his chops and stands out above the previous albums efforts. The three interludes that weave the album together in one, flowing listen are that right touch that makes me listen to it from front to back whenever I can. “Vertigo” also has a slick intro which I could listen to a few times over and absolutely tears ass eight minutes in. The closing song isn’t bad either! While I dislike final songs that fade out and sort of leave you hanging, “The Pecan Tree” nails everything about how an album should close out otherwise so I don’t even care.

I’ve gone on long enough. Deafheaven is good stuff for a lot of right reasons and I hope to hear more new material from them in the future. I also plan to drive nine hours across Kansas to catch them live later next month, God help me, but they’re also playing with Pallbearer and Wreck & Reference so that’s more than one reason to go on a cross-state exodus.

Barrows, Red Giant

So I’ve been listening to this little post-rock band from LA called Barrows since 2012. Their first release, Imprecari Island in 2011, was a really fun album that got it’s point across: music about shipwrecked pirates is awesome. That was the whole point of the album was making a story about a shipwrecked crew through instrumental presentation. It was pretty great and “Lost in the Woods” has a melody that gets stuck in my head all the time. It was also a really distinctly clear sounding album because it still sounded very clean during the most breakneck songs, like “Wrath of the Sea” and “Pirates”.

Red Giant is their second album that came out earlier this month and it still keeps up with the creativity they had in Imprecari Island. This time they’re making jams about SPACE! and the life and death of a star in it. They still have that super clean sound and fast pace, for a post-rock band, but it starts out in kind of a standard, tenuous post-rock fashion. The pedal doesn’t get floored until the second song, “Red Giant”, but after that the album really takes off. That song practically requires loud volume to enjoy. You don’t really get any breaks until the last song, “Beyond”, before to starts into a very long finale that leaves you floating off into another part of the universe. If you keep the album on repeat it practically loops back into itself.

Also, God damn does bass have some presence. “Black Hole” has one of the gnarliest bass lines I’ve ever heard to kick it off and it just pulses throughout the whole song. I love it. The whole album has a bass player you just can’t ignore.

Barrows has the album for free download off their Soundcloud account, but it’s available for $5 directly off their Bandcamp page and I didn’t hesitate in throwing down a little bit of lunch money for a stand out album. I hope these guys do an expansive tour at some point and come through Colorado because they seem like they’d kill it live.