Author: Steed

The Rabbit Hole, Vol. 7: Post-Something Something Something

The definition of a Rabbit Hole is similar to this: Used to refer to a bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.

While listening to music doesn’t seem like something bizarre or confusing, what I do can often be nonsensical and difficult to get myself out of, so I think it fits many of the treks I do through the Tidal streaming service. This series should be no different.

What I’m simply planning on doing with this series is having someone recommend a starting record, listening to that on Tidal and then using the “Similar Artists” algorithm to go down the rabbit hole and see what records it leads me to. The trek will continue until I hit an album that is either A) so great that there’s no reason to move forward, B) so bad that it derails me or C) feels like a natural end point. In the end, we’ll see how the records hold up and how solid the connections are.

So, to begin:

  • An Autumn For Crippled Children – Try Not To Destroy Everything You Love

I’ve been really getting back into post-(black)metal and post-rock lately and the latest release from one of the leaders in post-black metal, An Autumn for Crippled Children, really got me wanted to dive back in. And so the last three or four AAFCC albums have been very similar but it’s this record, their 4th from back in 2013, that’s widely considered on the peak moments in the genre and I haven’t listened to it for years to see if it’s held up, until now. And it has and it truly is a great record.

For those not familiar with the genre – you’re looking at typical black metal vocals – grim, indecipherable and basically the sound of someone strangling you while singing. Musically, dark, repetitive cold riffs but with mellow passages mixed in, sometimes with an electric guitar, sometimes with acoustic guitar but mostly with pianos/keyboards. That’s the shoegaze part of the music. Shoegaze itself was made to almost be a depressing type sound (hence the label, where you walk around with your head down all the time) and then the black metal elements kind of twist the knife in deeper. And while I’m listening to these records while on our stay-at-home Covid-19 orders making them all the more depressing, the elements described above work just perfectly here. The combination of memorable riffs and somber passages make this one a must listen if you like the genre at all.

  • Alcest – Spiritual Instinct

Another leader in the post-black metal genre is France’s Alcest – who were black metal at first, then moved to ambient/shoegaze and now fall somewhere in between the two of them. I chose this record from 2019 as for some reason I never bothered to listen to it when I have heard all their other albums. This is also a pretty great record – the perfect combination of their styles and personally I’m happy to see them get back to the metal again. There’s an interesting track on here that stands out to me from the rest – “Sapphire” which is most post-rock than metal, with clean vocals and quite different from everything else on the album.

  • Pelican – The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw

I knew I would always get to Pelican and somewhere down the line Isis will show up as well – I mean you can’t have any sort of post-whatever without these guys but I didn’t think I was going to get there so soon. The Tidal “similar artist” algorithm admittedly isn’t too strong with post-metal. I mean the service encompasses all types of music but let’s face it, this is still and R&B and Hip-hop focused streaming service. I mean, one of the recommendations to go to next was Metallica for heaven’s sake. I feel like they just get tagged with all metal because, well, they are Metallica. So instead, I chose the Pelican path now, which likely means I’m off the black metal portion of this trip.

This is supposedly one of the best Pelican records and it still doesn’t do much for me. In this genre, I either need fierce riffs of which this record has good rock riffs but more mellower shoegaze passages than I would like or needs some killer vocals and Pelican are an instrumental group. This was decent background music while I worked but didn’t interest me beyond that point.

  • Isis – Celestial

And just like that we go from Pelican to Isis. The similar artist algorithm is going in two directions – metal bands that have very little to do with post-rock or the obvious choices in post-metal. So I’m sticking with the post-metal direction and going to the most well known band in the genre, Isis. I went back to their first full album in 2000 because “Celestial (the Tower)” is one of my favorite songs in the genre. When I mention above that I need fierce riffs, this track and the album in general has it in spades. But it’s really not as good as an album as I remember it being – maybe that track in particular made me thing the album is better than it really is but the mellower passages simply aren’t as mesmerizing as some of their later work and really just plod along without direction.

  • Jesu – Silver

Similar artists to Isis could have taken me down an alt-rock path or down a sludgier route – so I took the latter choice and went with Justin Broderick’s project – Jesu, which is the sludgey/doomy/shoegazy companion to Godflesh’s industrial aural torment. And I went back to 2006 for the Silver EP. You might ask why choose a four song EP and the answer is two fold. It’s only four tracks but nearly a half-hour long so it’s not like I get five minutes of music and secondly, Jesu’s sound changed over time but if you go back to the beginning – anywhere between 2004 and 2008 or so, you get the sound that fits here. Later you get drone, rock, instrumental ambient but this little EP is the top of the line of early Jesu material. A masterful blend of beautiful melodies and clean singing and Broderick is the king of effects and loops and getting the most out of individual riffs before moving on to something different. The four tracks are easy to get lost in and mark the more subdued side of the genre.

  • Envy – Recitation

From there, there were only two choices, get on the shoegaze train and hit up My Bloody Valentine or stay on the post-something-something track with Envy and since I love these Japanese masters of post-hardcore, I went their with their record from 2010. Envy started out as a punk band and gradually evolved into post-hardcore and shoegaze with screamed vocals, clean singing and spoken word. This is the only album with no clean singing on it though and what they do is kind of different than most bands in the style. They do play shoegaze and post-hardcore in almost every song but they keep them separate. The post-hardcore material contains the screaming, the shoegaze contains the spoken word (and on other records, the clean singing). Most other bands layer the two on top of each other at points but these guys simply move from mellow and dreamy to screamo without missing a beat. It’s a style that’s tough for a lot of people to get into and all the words are in Japanese so I can’t understand a word of it but the melodies are out of this world. I fell in love with the band a while back when they were an opening band for the huge post-xx band, Deafheaven. Go to one of their shows – it’s fucking life changing.

  • Heaven in Her Arms – 白暈 / White Halo

Well, never back an animal into a corner, right? But here I am in the corner of the rabbit hole with only three choices to choose from – Mono (Japanese instrumental post-rock), Hot Cross (post-hardcore) and Heaven in Her Arms (Japanese post-hardcore/screamo). Heaven in Her Arms was the only band I hadn’t heard of here and the genre made it sound like they would be most like Envy, so what the fuck, right? And sound like Envy they do. Or maybe Envy sounds like them? Or maybe all Asian post-hardcore has a similar vibe – I don’t really know and Tidal won’t take me down a very specific Asian post-hardcore rabbit hole, so I might have to hunt things down on my own but if this is what the genre brings overall, I’m sold. 100%.

And from here, I have to stop. Not because I want to, nor have I met my criteria to stop that I talked about in the introduction but because Tidal has ZERO recommendations of similar artists. And staying true to the purpose here, this becomes the first rabbit hole that has stopped because I’ve hit a dead end.

Tidal Catalog #40: Genesis

Introduction: For those of you that have stumbled across this website and are interested in reading about my trek through the universe of the Tidal streaming service, let me tell you a bit about what I did. Back in 2016 I thought it would be kind of cool to listen to an artist’s catalog from start to finish and rank them from best to worst. After all, who doesn’t like a good list? I thought I might do a few of them and see what happened, hoping it would introduce me to records that were foreign to me in the arsenal of an artist I was familiar with. I also thought that it would be pretty cool to get out of the “one off” mode of listening to a new record, years after the previous one, in order to get a true sense of how the artist matured over time. Fast forward to June of 2019 and 250 catalogs later, I ended the trek. I posted these all on Facebook over the years as they were completed but I’m going to move them all over here, starting with #1, in order to expand them out a bit more. Facebook doesn’t exactly allow for too many details.

As with all my catalogs, to be considered in the ranking, an album has to meet certain criteria:

  • The artist must actually perform on 80% of the tracks (soundtrack and rap provision)
  • No compilations of previous released material will be included.
  • However, compilations of previously recorded material will be included if they are remixes, bonus tracks, outtakes… mostly music that hasn’t been part of a main release before.
  • The album must have been released officially and within the realm of the label that the artist would have been on at the time or official releases posthumously (normally applies to a slew of live records)
  • Any EPs must contain new new music and be relevant to the catalog, not be more like a single with a b-side or two.

Entrance Point: I had heard everything from Genesis going into this and despite never really being into progressive rock, Genesis is one of my rare exceptions in that I can equally enjoy their 70s output as much as the poppier material from the 80s forward.

All albums ranked on a 10 point scale:

  • The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (10)

As you see, I’ve given this 1974 opus a perfect 10 score and it would actually be somewhere in my top 5 albums of all time – but that said, it’s a weird record for me. The double disc 94-minute behemoth of prog rock, is a sometimes bizarre narrative of a boy named Rael from NYC who goes on a journey and encounters odd things along the way. Peter Gabriel’s story line is great and it flows nicely from song to song and the music is outstanding. Songs like the title track, “In the Cage” “The Carpet Crawlers” and my favorite on the record, “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging” are simply mesmerizing. The weird part of this one for me is that while most of the times I listen to it, I feel it warrants my top five placement and then other times I wonder what I was thinking. It’s an album that I really have to be in the right mindset for considering that prog-rock isn’t what I’m into but when I am, it’s a brilliant damn album.

  • Genesis (8.5)

There’s no other perfect album in the catalog for Genesis and I guess at this point (1983) you probably still liked Genesis if you were able to accept that they became a more pop/rock group and abandoned their prog roots. And I hear this all the time – “when they became a pop band” – well, they never really became a traditional pop band. If you listen to any of the records from the 80s, you hear pop songs for sure, but the songs Phil Collins’ writes are typically a bit darker, which you can hear in his solo work and the band and there are prog touches, if not full prog songs on every record.

With their self-titled record, you get all of this – the dark, percussion heavy “Mama” which contains one of my favorite moments in rock music, the points where Phil goes “ha ha hey, ooohhh” – creepy as shit and totally amazeballs. There’s the straightforward singles “That’s All” and “Taking It all Too Hard” and the prog element with “Second Home By the Sea” the almost instrumental progressive companion to “Home By the Sea” right before it. The weirdest single in the catalog is also on here – “Illegal Alien” where Phil sings in his bad Mexican accent which frankly, sounds vaguely racist and definitely wouldn’t fly today. But the record also tails off at the end, finishing with three dull songs. And this the problem with so many Genesis records – they have great moments and some really dull non-singles. But this record has the least of the “filler.”

  • Invisible Touch (8.5)

Invisible Touch is of course the commercial peak of Genesis’ career with the fantastic singles that take up the entire first side of the disc, “Invisible Touch” “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” “In Too Deep” and “Land of Confusion.” Some of those singles, if you listen closely simply aren’t as basic as some people tend to think. The album version of “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” is more than 8 minutes long with some nice progressive passages in the middle and while “Land of Confusion” is remembered for the video more than anything else, the bass line and Tony Banks’ keyboard work are pretty intricate if you listen closely. The 10 minute, two-part “Domino” suite is good but a bit out of place on this album though and while album closer, “The Brazilian” is a great instrumental, it also seems like it should have been a B-side rather than included here.

  • Nursery Crime (7.5)
  • Wind & Wuthering (7)
  • Selling England By the Pound (7)

Of their prog-rock output when Peter Gabriel was still in the band, Selling England By the Pound has to be the most critical acclaimed of the bunch. Again, as a guy who grew up listening to nothing even close to resembling progressive rock, this was a bit foreign to me for a long while but I liked Genesis a lot more as I grew up and my tastes matured. Personally, I still find this one a little overblown in the end, as “The Battle of Epping Forest” and “The Cinema Show” seem a bit pretentious to me. But it does contain “I Know What I Like (in Your Wardrobe)” and the awesome “Firth of Fifth” which Tony Banks wrote most of and as such there’s some great keyboard work in it.

  • Foxtrot (6.5)
  • Duke (6.5)
  • Trespass (6)
  • Three Sides Live (6)
  • We Can’t Dance (6)

I really wish this album was better because it’s a pretty fascinating record for 1991. Despite the upbeat and silly “I Can’t Dance” as the hit single on the record, nothing else sounds like it on the disc. Instead you get mostly three flavors of music. There’s plenty of darker tracks like they have been known for, there’s straight adult pop ballads and there’s progressive tunes – and none of them blend well together. Those adult contemporary ballads like “Since I Lost You” that sound like a band going through the motions, don’t work well. A song like the 10 minute “Driving the Last Spike” or the slightly progressive “Way of the World” are both great tunes but in the context of this record, don’t work well. It’s a bizarre mix of sounds on a record that has a lot of potential but in the end falls flat more often than I would like.

  • And Then There Were Three (6)
  • Abacab (5.5)
  • Genesis Live (5.5)
  • A Trick of the Tail (5)
  • Calling All Stations (5)

The reason I stop here to talk about their final record from 1997 is because it’s that unique outlier in the catalog thanks to Phil leaving the band after the last tour. This is the infamous Ray Wilson record that exactly four people other than myself have listened to and for good reason. Dull. Dull. Dull. Tony and Mike held auditions for a new singer and somehow this was the best they could come up with. His voice is fine but he has the personality of a slug and it doesn’t help that the only trait of any Genesis record that’s present here is the dark, mid-tempo pop. And with the shortest songs being just under 4 1/2 minutes – you get meandering, dull tracks that go on to long with a singer that makes them even duller. After listening to this again, I’m not sure what I even gave this a 5. It’s listenable but you might only hear half before you fall asleep.

  • The Way We Walk, Vol 1: The Shorts (5)
  • From Genesis to Revelation (5)
  • Live Over Europe 2007 (4.5)
  • Seconds Out (3)
  • The Way We Walk Vol 2: The Longs (3)

I saw Genesis live in concert at one point late in their career and they were pretty solid but they don’t translate well at all to disc and nowhere is it more evident than here on “The Longs” which is as it sounds – performances of their long progressive numbers. The “Old Medley” that starts off the album is 20 minutes of Phil singing on five tracks from the Peter Gabriel era and not pulling them off well. The albums ends with a “Drum Duet” with Phil Collins and Chester Thompson that’s just not worth anyone’s time. In between you have just 4 other songs, for a whopping 70 minute, 6 track record with no power, no energy and zero balls anywhere on it.

  • Summary: 21 albums, average 6.1