Goatwhore - Blood for the Master

What follows, gentle reader, is my experience of their newest LP, Blood for the Master, wherein it may be safely assumed that your narrator is most thoroughly on said New Orleans-based  black/death/thrash 'n' roll band's proverbial dick.

Short version: Goatwhore are a blackened, thrash 'n' roll Mötorhead. Blood for the Master solidifies this assessment.

Take that as you will.

(And call me over-analytical, but it amuses me that a band from the bottom of the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans, my home, can sound so much like an evolution of a band from the chilly Midlands of England, Birmingham.)

Track one, "Collapse in Eternal Worth," (which continues the Goatwhore tradition of seemingly/probably blasphemous yet-incredibly-vague song titles) opens with blast beats and segues to D-beats, but at around 2 minutes hits a
memorable, maudlin chorus (it's even  hummable)... like something from a lost Celtic Frost demo....

Track two, "When Steel and Bone Meet," (which, along with the above album opener, was pre-released) is a 3-minute D-beat, raspy-vocaled Satanic Discharge-fest.

Track four, "In Deathless Tradition," opens with that roar-of-roars-- and reiterates the necessary place of a great vocalist --including the line, "Forgiveness is the failure of your faith," again a wildly-vague yet sinister pronouncement in that rasp-of-rasps....

"Judgement of the Bleeding Crown," next, again with its opening blast beats, then Mötorhead-ish double-bass and D-beats, manages to sound like a heavier, early-career Ministry (think The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste)... track six,

"Embodiment of This Bitter Chaos," opens with an Atheist-like acoustic intro, complete with melodic guitar solo, only to segue to a lurching, forebeat-ish riff at around 1:00...

Track seven, "Beyond the Spell of Discontent," actually sounds like, in its chorus, memorable black metal, or the background of a Michael Mann film (analyze that commonality at your leisure)...

Song eight, "Death to the Architects of Heaven," adds a NWOBHM-ish flair to their Lemmy-and-co. sound before taking off into blast beats and minor verse riffs. It sound like something Metallica would've covered on Garage, Inc. or the $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-visited.

"An End to Nothing" is a full-on rager, starting at double-bass out the ass D-beat velocity and never letting up, and track 10, i.e. closer "My Name Is Frightful Among the Believers," continues this blast-the-shit-out-of-the-ending-of-the-album tradition, alternating from blast beat to D-beats and back again

The fact is --perhaps memorably, and this, ironically-- these tracks are not at all memorable for the most part.

They're nearly all interesting (from a metal/musician standpoint), but pretty much none of them will linger in your ears (i.e., brain)-- they're so remarkably non-memorable that I wonder if this wasn't intentional.

--But again, I love to overanalyze stuff--

Is is good? Yes, very much so--

the sheer ferocity of Blood For the Master brings to mind the best Behemoth-- as played by Mötorhead.

Tell me that doesn't sound like fun.

Feeling disillusioned? By nearly anything? From organized religion, to society in general?

Put this on.

The sheer rageful rejection of All will fill your soul (ironic thing to say, isn't it, of something so obviously Satanic)....

You may not remember the riffs, but you'll remember the visceral feeling you got from the record, played loud and drowning out your problems.

--Horn

Ripple Field Trip - Live Review: Goatwhore, 2-6-12

The Vernon Club, just off the interstate in Louisville, Kentucky, is about the space of a really spacious apartment. It's under a bowling alley.  A double Jack Daniel's cost $12 (£ 7.5). Not much compared to Boston or New York, but still....

(Maybe) interestingly, this whole endeavor became, at least while wading through the opening bands, a sort of amateur sociological study:

At a casual glance, band members and audience members tended to look like metal fans tend to look-- i.e.,  homeless and probably suffering from at least several personality disorders: old black clothes, dreads, very long hair and beards, et cetera.

What might not be as obvious is how much money they spent to look this way-- by my estimation, there were thousands of dollars' worth of tats (full color sleeves, back tats, everything) and musical equipment ($2000 Hamer, Paul Reed Smith, Fender and Gibson guitars --and two or so of these per musician), not to mention the amps and electronics through which they played them.

It's the John Cougar Mellancamp haircut issue: an hour on your hair, spent to look like you just got out of bed.

The dress code, too, was even more narrow than the first time I went to a metal concert-- I was wearing, comically literally, the only white t-shirt and white shoes in the whole venue (and after noticing this after about an hour, I consciously scanned the place to see if I was being paranoid-- nope).

And I am NOT giving up my Hanes v-necks. Fuck YOU.

Of all people, I would argue Billy Joel summarizes this phenomenon the most succinctly:
      Where have you been hidin' out lately, honey?
      You can't dress trashy till you spend a lot of money.
Ah, metal-- 25 years after my first concert, still a fashion show. (Not that other genres aren't.)

I drove two hours to see Goatwhore and have been standing this whole time because chairs are apparently not metal. Don't get me wrong-- I'm in good shape and I work out five days a week-- but I'm essentially middle-aged and after five hours of just standing, watching bands, my goddamned feet hurt.

They still do, as I write this.

And so after five (fucking five!) local opening bands, one of whom I'll write about later, New Orleans' Satanic-blackened-death-thrash-metal outfit Goatwhore go on at 11:15 pm.

At this point there was so much smoke from the smoke/fog/haze machine my sinuses are still nearly completely blocked-- but Goddamn...

it looked COOL.

Black (ened) metal needs theatrics... it needs features that highlight and exaggerate the ceremonial aspects of the performance... just ask Watain and their blood-fests. They set the stage.

I would argue, anthropologically-speaking, that they play up an essential human need to connect to the Divine, and are accoutrements we find psychologically necessary to facilitate that process.

But that's just me.

You know... it's whatevs, as the kids say today. (So I hear.)

So with no curtain, Goatwhore walked onto the stage and started talking, via the PA, with the sound engineer: they were particularly (in my experience, anyway) specific and demanding about their "wedges" (i.e., stage sound monitors)-- noticeably the specific combination of what they wanted to hear as they played: guitarist Sammy Duet, in a rather intimidating tone, I venture to say, needed snare and bass in his; singer Ben Falgoust wanted the vocals way down in the mix, but wanted the guitars way up; and bassist James Harvey, all six foot four of him, never said a word-- just kept gesturing up and down until he nodded approval with whatever he was hearing.

Once this was settled, Ben Falgoust looked at the other members of Goatwhore, a few seconds passed...

...and with a subtle gesture from the singer-- shit EXPLODED.

I mean, surprisingly so, considering the band members were discussing trivialities for about a full five minutes in front of the audience.

But once they started playing... they became-- Something Else.

In all seriousness... irony aside:  fucking... WOW.

THIS is why you see bands in person.

Maybe the openers were there only to reinforce the star power, for lack of a better word, of Goatwhore.

The other bands were fine, very technically and musically competent-- but there was always that seeming hesitation, that subverbal lack of confidence: and after five bands' worth of this, you start to think maybe it's just you.

And then Ben Falgoust starts singing, and his sheer stage presence is comically obvious compared to the previous five other bands.

Metal doesn't use the term "star power" or "stage presence" that much (thank God), but here, it's genuinely deserved-- once Goatwhore started playing, it was obvious they had that certain something (particularly Falgoust):  you wanted to watch him; you wanted to hear whatever he had to say, you wanted to do what he told you to do (generally involving screaming HEY and fist pumping)--

it

was

fucking

COOL.

What'd they play, you might've asked, droolingly...?

Let's see: "Collapse in Eternal Worth" and "When Steel and Bone Meet," from the upcoming Blood For the Master; what I think was "Into a Darker Sun," from The Eclipse of Ages into Black; "Alchemy of the Black Sun Cult" from A Haunting Curse; "Blood Guilt Eucharist," from Funeral Dirge for the Rotting Sun; "The All-Destroying," "Carving out the Eyes of God," [see below] and "Provoking the Ritual of Death," from Carving Out the Eyes of God.

Falgoust's stage banter between numbers was funny and/ or hilarious: a bit about Blood For the Master being released on Valentine's Day --"Maybe it's a reference to your significant other's time of the month," got a lot of laughs; and when he asked if anyone had pre-ordered the upcoming album, one guy screamed something-- after this Falgoust said, "Hey listen, I don't care if you buy it, I don't care if you steal it, I'm not here to accuse you, I just want you to rock the album... I got an idea: everyone [here], just borrow that guy's copy, and in a couple of months, when we come back, everyone'll be on the same page."

AND they played the intro to Sab's "Into the Void," causing an embarrassing amount of THRILL on my part.

Finally, they closed with "Apocalyptic Havoc." When they hit the line in the second chorus--

"Who needs a god, when you've got Satan?!"

Which EVERYONE, from the bouncers, to the kids up front, to the bartenders, knew--

it was practically liturgically ecstatic-- (perhaps ironically)... but the thrill was still there in screaming the line, with both hands making the HORNS.

All in all, there were about 100 people there at the end (about 25 of whom, no exaggeration, were in opening bands)-- not bad for a cold Monday night with no other major bands playing.

I recorded about 30 seconds of "Carving Out the Eyes of God," which you can see below (I would've recorded more, but I'm not a fucking documentarian-- I came to rock out, baby).

--Horn

Goatwhore - Carving out the eyes of God

What with their (as of this writing) upcoming album Blood For the Master, I revisited Goatwhore's previous LP, Carving Out the Eyes of God, playing it on tank-like, if outdated, speakers at jet-engine volume.

At its best, in other words.

"Apocalyptic Havoc" the lead single (see below) opens with all out Venom/Celtic Frost 32nd notes updated for this year (which actually is a pretty good synopsis of the entire album), and contains the immortal line "Who needs a God, when you've got Satan?!"

"The All-Destroying," next, is blastbeats then D-beats then flat-out downbeats, and contines the Goatwhore tradition thusfar, of grimly-satisfied-nodding-to-riffs, rather than out-and-out funky jams... and I love every time singer Ben Falgoust says "Ooooh!" à la Tom G. Warrior.

"Carving out the eyes of God," has a cool, melodic blastbeaten chorus (and is pretty hummable), and on the right sterio/headphones, the triplet bass drum patterns are Alex Van Halen on "Hot For Teacher" cool.

"Shadow of a Living Knife," in its middle section fires up a great triplet-bass-drum blast beat and segues into a sweet semi-sweep-picked solo... "Provoking the Ritual of Death" opens with tribal drums and sludge riffs before its blastbeaten percussion returns... "In Legions, I am Wars of Wrath," with its refrain of LIES! is fucking Epic... "Reckoning of the Soul Made Godless" slows down and rocks out in 4/4, "Razor Flesh Devoured" is pure fury, blastbeat to D-beat to-blastbeat, ad infinitum, wherein it fades out (officfially ending the album), although...

"To Mourn and Wander Forever Through Forgotten Doorways," a bonus track, comes up next, ominous minor-chorded arpeggios leading to a spoken-word invocation-- easily the moodiest track here, not unlike "Lucifer" from Behemoth's Evangelion. I can see why it wasn't on the official LP, but it probably should've been, maybe right in the middle as a tempo-velocity respite....

The entire album is perfect "blackened death metal," i.e., the guitars are detuned (i.e., bass-y as hell) and there are as many hyper-kinetic D-beats as there are blast beats, but the lyrics and imagery is occult/Satanic.

Overall, generic but completely invested in what they do.

--Horn

Goatwhore, Carving out the eyes of God

Tyrannosorceress – Demo 2011

Tyrannosorceress is a 5 piece Blackend Doom Death band out of the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas area, aka for me they are some hometown dudes. I found out about this band while clicking around through facebook pages. Honestly, there awesome name is what made me stop and take a listen to them. Tyrannosorceress, that's just an awesome fucking name! Boy, am I glad I stopped to take a listen.


There new 2011 Demo simply titled Demo 2011 is pretty bad ass. This three track demo begins with my favorite song on this demo, “Age of Vice”. Simply put, it is amazing, it's dark and it's slow methodical metal. Musically this track sounds like classic black metal mixed with a little doom. It contains double bass filled drums and simply awesome dulling guitars. The addition of blackend doom vocals gives this track a little something special. Vocally the lyrics are easily understood adding a real “I want to stand in front of this band while they play and bang my head and sing along” feel.

“Thunderous Drums Emanate in the Distance
Their Echoes are Carried Into a Vortex of Fog
Cold Void Drapes Itself Upon the Earth
To Reap Souls of the Impure
Beings of Spectral Light Beam from the Cosmos
Chanting the Death Knell; Hymn of the Great Demise
In the Era of Malice, Discord Awakens the Age of Vice
Once Buried by Time it’s Unearthed to Feast Again
Reaching Toward Skies of the Stillborn World
To Behold its Infinite Fallacy
Devourer of Light; Spews Darkness Unto Me
Reveling in its Blackness I Writhe, Writhe Eternally
Fires Consume the Forests Oceans Absorb the Shores
Fault Lines Erupt and Quake the Earth
To Sanctify the Impure
Beings of Light Surround Us
Chanting the Hymns of Death
Ascending Beyond the Gates
Cycles of Death Reborn In Another Plane of Existence
Where Knowledge of Life and Death Exist No More “


The Dallas area is not too well known for producing any black metal style bands....”this is Dimebag country” said in my most hick Pantera loving voice. Did I mention I'm not really a big Pantera/Dimebag worshiper.... Anyway, Tyrannosorceress is a band to be on the lookout for in the coming years. I see a big future in this band, not just in the Texas metal scene but nationwide.

Tyrannosorceress goes good with: Abigail Williams, Vader, Aborted, Baring Teeth, Goatwhore, Kill The Client

-Cicatriz

Stream here: http://listn.to/Tyrannosorceress/player#t=0&pos=0&p=

Get the Free Demo here: http://tyrannosorceress.com/