April 5, 2024

04/05/2024 - 8:44 AM

I reset the balance of the arm on my record player this morning after some household cleaning. To test the newly calibrated pressure, I started playing Lady Day: A Collection of Classic Jazz Interpretations by Billie Holiday.

Listening to vinyl crackle and Billie Holiday's warm voice is an immediate infusion of atmosphere in a physical space. Like steam from a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of bread from a loaf that is still warm.

And this day, in radical juxtaposition, the UK band Iron Monkey's new LP Spleen & Goad was released, and I'm still waiting on the nearly 2GB lossless audio download from Bandcamp.

So, with the warm, baked good fizzle of Billie Holiday's voice in the background, I choose to write about sludgy nihilism from Nottingham, England today, and a band that I learned about five to six years ago and count as one of those that my life has been different since the point of discovery.

Their Relapse debut 9-13 was the first of their music I heard, and I now understand they have a lot of longevity past that release, the band reforming years after the death of their original singer.¹

At the time I heard 9-13 I was deeply inspired and consumed by sludge from the American South. A love for Mastodon and Baroness had escorted me to Crowbar, and EYEHATEGOD, and more recent bands like Kylesa or the humid crust band Black Tusk. Relapse Records was also a tastemaker at this point in my life, so I probably had a steady feed of their releases, and at some point heard Iron Monkey's single "Omegamangler."

It was possibly the most anti-social sound I heard at that point, and thus something I wanted to listen to a lot. The vocals are unintelligible. The guitar is down-tuned, with the low-E dropped to facilitate one-finger power chords. Everything is just blown out, compressed, explosive. It sounds like the singer is eating the microphone and singing at the same time, as if the diaphragm were shoved into his esophagus.

Go watch the music video for the title track from this album and just revel in the homages to New Orleans Sludge (the black and white imagery supported by the background graveyard). Again, the vocals are beautifully void of any kind of relatability, and are instrumental, as in the vocal performance stands out like another instrument, distorted, rhythmic, and besetting us with the sonic mood: no rest.

The sound of sludge metal has always appealed to me, I think mostly because it conveys a recurring psychological state of being: thoughts being unintelligible, swarming, soupy and heavy. And the only sensible way to reason or physically express my way out of this is to scream and yell without meaning, and just exercise the humid, negative mental inertia. Sometimes the art that matches the existence is best to purify it.

So today, Iron Monkey's new LP Spleen & Goad is available from Relapse. And now that Billie Holiday is done warming the house, I can get to less friendly music, but nevertheless healing.

---

If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail

HERE TO LISTEN LLC

PO BOX 725

BRATTLEBORO, VT 05302

You can listen to the radio show on Brattleboro's community station WVEW every Sunday at 12pm EST

Here to Listen show archives are available here

You can buy Here to Listen merch here