Old Corpse Road - The Bones Of This Land Are Not Speechless/The Meads Of Asphodel - English Black Punk Metal (Godreah Records, 2010)

By Jimmy "Explosive Diarrhea" B.

If you read this blog regularly, you may have noticed that I tend to write reviews of music from the 80s. It was in the decade of Ronald Reagan, big hair (fuck, I miss big hair!), and MTV that I cut my musical teeth. In that sometimes terrible, sometimes wonderful decade, I went from a young boy to a young man, and my musical tastes migrated from The Eagles and Styx in the first part of the decade to Metallica, Exciter and Metal Church by its closing. Everyone’s life, I believe, has a soundtrack. Events, places, time, and emotions are tied together with music. For example, on an immensely silly night in 1987, I got drunk for the first time with Plainzero while listening to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, which was also a first. When I hear songs like Paranoid, or War Pigs, I can smell the froth of Budweiser tallboys and see the illumination coming from the dashboard of Plainzero’s Gran Torino.  How can music from other decades compare to this kind of sentimentality? 

I am about to take a bold step, two bold steps actually. First, I will review an album that has only been available for a few months, second, I will write the review while listening to the album for the very first time. Reviewing the album this way presents some problems; first, it may be unfair to the artist(s), since I will be forming opinions based on a single listen - many musical intricacies will be missed - some albums require multiple listens to allow the listener time to adapt to the artist’s style (See Null’s Evisceration Plague review for an example of this).  Second, most sentiment has been removed, very little happened between my mailbox and my CD player. I say “most sentiment” because The Meads of Asphodel (hereafter referred to as The Meads) are already part of the soundtrack of my life.  The pages, paragraphs, and words that follow are merely the notes I took while listening to the CD, and are not meant to be viewed as a properly constructed or well thought out music review. Take a minute and get comfortable, while I remove the cellophane…  

The album cover is typical for The Meads of Asphodel; it portrays a battle scene. The cover is an interpretation of David’s victory over Goliath. The cover seems apt, since The Meads are an established band, albeit in the metal underground. They are, in my opinion, a powerful force to be reckoned with, much like the biblical Goliath.  Old Corpse Road (David) is a new comer in danger of getting overwhelmed by The Meads. Will Old Corpse Road conquer The Meads of Asphodel? Let’s find out together.

Old Corpse Road - The Bones of this Land are not Speechless

Before hitting the play button on my CD player, I read the lyrics, and Old Corpse Road can fucking write. All three songs are based on old English folktales of witches and demons. There is nothing original about this material in metal, but I am stunned at how well and how poetic the songs are written. There are none of the lame rhyme schemes we see in so much popular music. Each new stanza introduces a new action or provides us some psychological glimpse into the mind of the characters. It may be too soon to pile on this kind of praise, but Old Corpse Road’s lyrics put them in the upper echelon of metal lyricists.

The first song, "Hob Headless Rises", opens with a bit of keyboard and a fast black metal riff. The singer alternates between a screech and a growl. The song slows down into a bit of guitar plucking and piano, the vocals settle momentarily into a Gaelic folk cadence, before the whole thing blows up again into pure black metal noise.

There were some interesting moments in track one. I enjoyed the smooth timing changes, but was irritated by the overuse of keyboards.

Next up is "The Devil’s Footprint." The song starts with a nice guitar melody with clean and whispered vocals, but the cookie monster and screeching vocals start again. The melody and groove the band was establishing is quickly extinguished as the band again overuses keyboards.  I suspect Old Corpse Road have been influenced by Borknagar.  I am entirely dissatisfied with this song. The clean vocals were a welcome addition, while they lasted. Much of the vocals were in the form of screeching, and the overuse of keyboards is really starting to annoy me. Overall, this rather ridiculous song is fatiguing to the ear.

The last Old Corpse Road song is "The Witch and the Wookey Hole," which sounds dirty. What the fuck is a Wookey hole, and what did the witch do with it (or to it)? Holy Shit! This song starts out balls to the fucking wall. The drumming is in double time, the screeching vocals actually work here, and the ever present keyboards don’t feel as dominant or as out of place as they did in the other two songs. Oops, I spoke too soon, the aggression slowed down and the keyboards took over again. Fuck! These guys cannot seem to keep a groove going for more than thirty seconds without fucking it up. 

"The Witch and the Wookey Hole" is Old Corpse Road’s best song on the split. The ending is cool. Near the end of the song we get a glimpse of what this band can do; the arrangement improved. We hear a group of monks or priests performing an exorcist chant; the song transforms into a spoken word piece that sums up of the story of the witch (who is conquered by an angry Dirty Harry style monk). The spoken word part is backed up by acoustic guitar, which finally ends in a heavy metal dirge driven by drums and piano.

Old Corpse Road has a lot of potential.  They are very good lyricists. The songs are varied, and interesting at moments. Unfortunately for every part of the song I enjoyed, there was another that annoyed the shit out of me. Those fucking keyboards have got to go. If the point is to use them to set the vibe/mood, then for fucks sake put them back in the mix, out front they are distracting. 

I tickled my taint for  6.0 minutes.

The Meads of Asphodel - English Black Punk Metal

The Meads might be the only metal band who can overuse keyboards and effects and get away with it because the songs are so fucking interesting. Keyboards are a weapon the Meads use to help us, the listeners, understand that there is something in the song requiring our attention. In one of their songs (on another album) all music stops other than keyboards and effects while a simple chant is played over and over, “God, is fucking with you,” which after many repetitions becomes “God is fucking with you” which becomes “God is fucking you.”  This, my friends, is genius, pure genius. But, that is for another review at another time. The five songs on this split are all punk rock covers, which the Meads have, "fucked about with."

The first song, "The Embalming of Gods," opens with about two minutes of typical Meads of Asphodel, keyboards and an anti-religious rant. Then the Meads go to work. I love their vocalist, Metatron; if Lemmy ever decides to do black metal, he would be a dead ringer for Metatron.  The Meads of Asphodel like to mix things up in a weird way. Rather than having parts of the song merge into each other, they will often just come to a dead stop in the middle of a song and take off again at a different speed, sometimes with different instruments. This song has several of these dead stops, making it a little hard to follow. 

Next up is "On the Surface." This song opens with what I assume is dialogue borrowed from a horror film. I wasn’t listening close enough to catch all of it, but it has something to do with the “destroyer of worlds” – either a religious reference of some kind or perhaps a jab at organized religion’s destructive tendencies. The Meads frequently venture into religious politics. The song is a rocker, with another one of those abrupt stops in the middle where Metatron makes a speech about robes made of maggots, and smoking the pipe of peace, rape and war “until we breathe no more.” The word “more” is repeated a couple of times, then, with no warning, it’s balls to the wall metal again. This is a very entertaining song.  

The third song, "Same Mind," is a fucking rocker; the Meads go for it immediately. The speed here is much faster than we normally hear from them, and Metatron’s vocals are pushed to their limits; they are very strained. I feel like the Meads overreached on this one, their style just doesn’t lend itself to this kind of aggression. 

I don’t know what to make of the next song, "Nazi." It is driven by a nice guitar crunch and abused keyboards. I know it’s a cover song, and they are probably trying to stay true to the intent of the original performer, but the keyboards overtake the other instruments. But, it is only temporary, towards the end of the song the keyboards disappear and the guitar finally comes forward. Now it sounds a little like Iron Maiden.
  
"Protest and Resist" starts with a slow groove, but explodes into The Meads interpretation of a hardcore punk song, which means growly vocals. The lyrics seem to be about how to organize a mass into a political force, but I can’t make out enough of the lyrics to understand it. This is a cool song.  

"War Drum," is almost unrecognizable as a punk song. I am unfamiliar with the original song, but I feel like The Meads have introduced enough heaviness and speed to transform bring it into the metal realm. The vocals work well here. The speed of the vocals is not nearly as fast as the accompanying music. There is some exceptional drumming on this song. War Drum is quite good, and The Meads version of it reminds me of some of Motorhead’s faster moments.

Warning! Kinks fans may want to stop reading at this point. The Meads cover "You Really Got Me." If you are a fan of the Kinks then you will hate this song. On the one hand, the Meads butcher it. On the other hand, they are just having fun and it is obvious. I suspect they decided to fuck it up on purpose; Metatron uses more of a guttural cookie monster vocal style than usual.

There are some fun moments on The Meads of Asphodel’s part of this split CD. But, it is far from their best work. For The Meads, speed kills. Their style is somewhat clunky and the vocals do not work well when pushed forward at break-neck speed as they were on this album. 

I tickled my taint for 7 minutes.