White Light! White Hate!

Album: White Hate
Artist: Beta Popes
Genre: Death Metal
Year: 2008
Label: Veal

The Beta Popes are going to destroy you. A Power Doom Trio, The Popes are what happens when three Jazz heads form a Death Metal band. The result is a crushing sound that will sunder your soul and reduce you to rubble. With Bobby Previte (drums,) Jamie Saft (guitar) and Skerik (vocals and saxophone) you’d expect things to be a bit less sludgy and a bit more jumping. But no, the Popes are not Jazz. They’re METAL. IN ALL CAPS, BABY. They’ve been born of Satan to deliver the world into a new dark age of frogmen and carrion crows and no one can stop them. They don’t care if you like their music and, quite frankly, probably want you to go deaf listening to it.

Besides being Death Metal played by Jazz heads, Beta Popes is an unusual band, in my opinion, because of the instrument and vocal assignments. There’s nothing strange about the guitar/drums/vocals setup, it’s who’s on them that’s different. I know Saft for his organ and keyboard work, not his guitar, let alone Metal guitar. The sound of it is like butter being churned in the pits of hell, with a rusty iron rod. But stranger than Saft’s guitar are Skerik’s vocals. This is a recurring problem I have with Skerik. He’s one of the best saxophone players I have ever heard, but finding him actually playing the saxophone can be a bit difficult at times. He often filters his horn through various electronic effects, giving us a saxophonic sound, and that can be hard to distinguish from other electronic atmospherics of his main band Critters Buggin’. But here, I’m even more confused by his place as vocalist. Skerik! What are you doing man? A Death Metal band with a deep, resonant sax blast is just what the doctor ordered. But no, instead, we have his warped and distorted vocal delivery, buried pretty deep in the mix. With a sax man like Skerik in the band, it seems like a waste to put him on something like vocals. With the Beta Popes, Skerik does play the sax occasionally, but it’s on the high and squalling end of things, and not too coherent.

But this isn’t Skerik’s show; it’s Previte’s. The drums are like a brick wall breaking apart and falling down all around you. They’re the most dynamic element of the music, as Saft’s guitars get a little too repetitive. I have no real technical drum knowledge, but I know what I like and these are some thunderous beats that Previte’s chunking out. The album these men have created is far from what I would call accessible. It’s four tracks, but 50 minutes in length. The shortest take, “Burning Witch”, is roughly 7 minutes long. The three main pieces of the album, “Zondervan”, “Kabla” and “Chalice of Death” are all over ten minutes long and they love to grind. There isn’t much variation here and “Chalice”, at nearly twenty minutes, is a lengthy, tough listen. Ironically, it’s also got the fastest tempo of any of the tracks.

The basic formula is this: Previte lays down a beat, which is subject to alterations, Saft layers his thick guitar lines on top of that and Skerik howls his heart out somewhere in the middle. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from these musicians but it strangely works. If you like Avant-Garde Death Metal, then this stuff is for you. If you like your music to have pop sensibilities or melodies, I suggest you look elsewhere.

Fireworks. In The Form Of Rock 'N' Roll

Album: Body Language EP
Artist: Monotonix
Genre: Garage Rock
Year: 2008
Label: Drag City

My first experience with Monotonix was a short one. At Bumbershoot last year, I was reading The Stranger, trying to figure out what band to see next when I ran across a full page spread on Monotonix, an Israeli Garage Punk band from Tel Aviv who were known for wild antics beyond compare. The more I read, the more intrigued I became. The drummer who played the kick drum with his face, the wild front man, the fires… the fires… I knew I had to see this band. I looked at my watch; we had fifteen minutes to get all the way across the Seattle Center to the exhibition hall. I quickly rallied my friends and we took off for the show. When we arrived in the exhibition hall, I realized that the band had set up on the floor and that actually seeing them was out of the question. But we could still hear them.

In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure what I heard, a wall of punk sound and front man Shalev’s howling. At one point, Shalev climbed up on the stage and mooned the crowd. The only sight I had of the band was when guitarist Gat and Shalev started crowd surfing. They played for about fifteen minutes, when suddenly, the lights came back on and everything stopped. The show was over as suddenly as it had begun and people began to file out. It was weird. I later found out that the band had made a deal with the fire marshal not to crowd surf, which they went ahead and did anyways. This got their show canceled. When I got home, the first thing I did was purchase their Body Language EP.

The music of Monotonix is unsophisticated, uncomplicated Rock. Just three guys, two instruments and a voice. It’s a formula you hear repeated a lot, but Monotonix do it so well you couldn’t ask anything else. It’s catchy, it rocks, it thrashes and afterwards, you want to do it all over again. The producer did an excellent job of capturing the bands high energy in this recording. It’s hard to be energetic in the studio and these guys bring fire and brimstone to their sound. It’s not a long EP, twenty-three minutes, but that way the band doesn’t wear out their welcome. Six tracks is the perfect length I think and each one is a keeper. The best take though, is certainly the head banging opener “Lowest Dive.” Gat isn’t a flashy guitarist, but it’s not about flash, it’s about the dirtiest, loudest riff you can manage and that’s really all you need, fuck stunt guitars. Drummer Haggai Fershtman’s style isn’t glamorous; it’s simple, steady and punk, though that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get to show off from time to time. A perfect example is the furious conflagrations of percussive sound early on in “No Metal.”

With music this loud and in-your-face, you need an obnoxious, in-your-face vocalist to antagonize and entertain your listeners. Monotonix has that in Ami Shalev, a wild man who was clearly meant to live and die for Rock N’ Roll. His songs are outrageous and uplifting. His delivery is out of control. He’s like a hairier, crazier, Israeli version of Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello, from hell. I’ve read tales of him lighting himself and everything in his sight on fire, in the name of Rock N’ Roll. In many ways, to me, Monotonix feels like the legacy of Iggy and the Stooges made manifest: a band with fury, fire and a front man who’ll do everything and anything for Rock. The world needs bands like Monotonix, just like we needed the Stooges, and we’re lucky to have them.