Wave of Disorder
When doom was too much
Sometime in the Summer of 2018, I can't remember which month, I was detailed to support US Army recruiters in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina. Their station was based out of Chapel Hill and I would be planted at a hotel in Raleigh. From this "base" I went out to the different malls in the area, community colleges, and other social centers with the aim of encouraging civilians to enlist in the Army.
Overall this was a really strange month. I was living at a DoubleTree during the week, and then I would drive home to Stedman, the rural town we lived in east of Fayetteville, over the weekend. Weekday afternoons and evenings I needed to keep myself positive because life by myself in a hotel room was equal parts fun in a childlike "I GET FREE BREAKFAST" way, but also aggressively sad because hotels are one of those liminal spaces that feel like way stations en route to not existing anymore.
I got a drop-in membership to a YMCA in Raleigh and my afternoon-to-evening routine consisted of taking my uniform off, changing into gym clothes, driving to the Y, working out, then stopping at Whole Foods to get dinner from the Build-Your-Own bar. Someone needs to write a book on the specific heaven-on-earth that is the Whole Foods hot bar.
For the few years before this point, I was on a steady diet of Relapse's catalog. Inter Arma's Paradise Gallows. Baroness's Blue Record. Cough's Still They Pray. And trying to listen to Primitive Man's Caustic all the way through and still have the motivation to pay basic attention to self-care. Most of the albums I was listening to were slow and loud.
Loudness wasn't an issue for me, but constantly listening to sluggish doom songs started to conform my physical and mental state of being to the music. Even still, I'm never clear if the music I listen to affirms my depressive disorder and creates a catharsis or I have a depressive disorder because I listen to specific music. Stay tuned for winter when you'll just get a deluge of entries on tin can black metal.
Hyper-ness started to make its way back into the music I was listening to. I started watching Audiotree's live sets and reached back into their archives for their metal-adjacent artists. These were where I found out about two artists that would dominate the rotation at the Alexander Family YMCA gym and in the car on the way to get herbed baked chicken from Whole Foods. Yautja and Cult Leader.
First off, Cult Leader's Audiotree set is exceptional. They are such a brilliant and screwed up combination of grindcore, sludge, powerviolence tempos, death metal gutterals, Converge-y riffs. Anthony Lucero's vocals are perfect. This is what I mean by hyper-ness coming back into the music I was listening to. Cult Leader musically and vocally is just constantly keeping the listener off balance. Tempos, vocal presence, drum fills, riffs, are all shifting so frequently that it just feels like a wave of disorder. In "I Am Healed", Lucero shifts from black metal screeches to death growls between almost every syllable. The guitar riffs project as a mid-range bed of noise. And the breakdown section where Lucero just bellows "HEAL ME HEAL ME HEAL ME HEAL ME" as the rest of the band just thuds forward with a unified chug chug is life affirming.
The other band that was dominant for me in this weird month of my life was Yautja. Again, due to an Audiotree set.
Even though it was a few years passed the release date, I would listen to Yautja's Songs of Lament album frequently all the way through during a session at the Y. Compared to Cult Leader, Yautja is more straightforward only in the sense that the terrain feels consistent, but it's still full of roots. As a three-piece, Yautja projects with a very large body of sound. The instruments are not muddy and coagulated even though the all sort of occupy the same frequency space. But they all conform to some kind of giant bubble of jagged rhythms and chainsaw-tone grinding out of one singular voice.
The unifier between Cult Leader and Yautja, and these spastic sludge-grind type bands, among them KEN Mode, is that each member no matter the instrument seems to be playing lead but all within a defined rhythmic focus even if that rhythm is moving constantly across the song. Sometimes the guitars will hold the low end and the timing while the drums explode in fill after fill.
If doom means a sedate body and cathartic mind, bands like Cult Leader and Yautja create a catharsis for the body in constant movement.
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