farts from hell, lighting the place up

this is a transfer from the white vinyl version.

Thralldom were a side project of ryan from unearthly trance, a new york blackened doom band. the simple description is that Thralldom dispenses with the doom and goes for straight black metal in an early darkthrone or hellhammer/celtic frost vein, but that hardly does it justice. you get the same hateful vocals and visceral guitar sound UT is known for, throw in noise elements and so-crazy-it-works early bathory style guitar solos, and finally add a frenetic pace that never seems to relent, even when hitting a more mid-paced stride. definitely worthy BM from a sadly defunct band, though ryan has a newer project called the Howling Wind that treads similar territory with equal panache.

here

you might have wanted me to take you to dinner first.

well, here's a couple of solid rockers.

this here artifact has been out of print for a few years now i believe, so i'm sure nobody is going to bitch about me posting it. it sure does harbor a lot of nostalgic feelings for me. Carrion was my first band to stabilize and take steps creatively, after many attempts and misfires. my first tour (a gigantic failure but a hell of a time) was in support of this release. as a matter of fact, this was the first thing i was involved in to be "released" by anyone (thanks, josh). Nate Simms, who would stay thru all of Carrion and continue with Nick Skrobisz in The Wayward to the present day, made his debut as drummer here.

this stuff was the first batch in a series of songs employing a more byzantine songwriting technique, culminating in our final, unreleased (but soon to be blogged) 6-song demo, which were a practically riffless uber-composed orchestration. at this early stage we still let things calm down with Sabbath-style riffs occasionally. many parts are variations on themes stated earlier, but stop-start rhythms betray where we were headed.

get it here

avant shoe-salesman prog music

time has not been easy for my relationship with robert fripp. when i was just hitting puberty, "in the court of the crimson king" played continuously and i thought this guy could do no wrong. here was a guy who demanded to sit down while playing, tuned his guitar in 5ths (and in fact had a whole musical philosophy and accompanying workshop i later learned about), and was the principal creative force behind some of the most challenging music i've heard before or since.

but sometimes even old friends can have idiosyncrasies that wear down the nerves. i mean, this guy obviously thinks that rock n' roll should feel like a trip to the dentist. he waxes philosophical about redemption and whatnot in publications like Guitar Player. he claims that the idea for an album came to him in a sauna. he dresses like middle management. but the proof is in the pudding, and what a complex and robust pudding it is. exposure is unemployed fripp, literally between jobs in that one can find parallels to both preceding and subsequent works.

some of the stuff is in the "lark's tongues" tradition (breathless, ny3), others are laden with his patented frippertronics (basically a pretentious term for a tape delay). several feature enticing vocal cameos from peter hammill (van der graaf generator), and peter gabriel. the only one i find inexplicable is "you burn me up i'm a cigarette," which basically is the unholy union of fripp's warbley vocals over a little richard rave-up. but this bizarre turn is still enjoyable, as is the rest of this record.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SRZ4C53N