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Three Lobed

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Body/Dilloway/Head (Three Lobed, 2021)

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Past experience has taught me not to get too excited about promising-sounding collaborations between great artists, but the allure of this particular project was admittedly damn hard to resist: Body/Head is consistently the most provocative and intense of Sonic Youth’s descendants and Aaron Dilloway seems absolutely incapable of releasing a disappointing album these days. Still, there is never any way to predict which threads will assert their dominance when distinctive visions collide, so there are a number of possible shapes that this album could have taken. 

To my ears, it is Dilloway’s broken, murky, and obsessively looping aesthetic that mostly steers the ship, but the balance between the three artists is sufficiently unpredictable and shifting to make this trio feel like something quite different from either Dilloway’s solo work or past Body/Head releases. Matt Krefting already did a fine job of summarizing the trio’s shared vision with “over and over one gets the sense that the music is trying to wake itself from a dream,” but it is also more than that, as this trio have a real knack for slowly transforming gnarled and challenging introductory themes into unexpected passages of sublime beauty.

The album is comprised of two longform pieces separated by a shorter piece (“Goin’ Down”) and each one feels like a different direction or even an entirely different band. In fact, the album art does a remarkably great job at conveying what the music is like: a handful of recognizable elements chopped up and re-assembled into a nearly unrecognizable abstraction. The opening “Body/Erase” is the most “Dilloway” of the three songs, as it features a long, slow fade in of subtly oscillating drone and warped tape warbles that feel like an unsettling dream where conversations are slowed and smeared into something inscrutable and vaguely sinister. Gradually, the gnarled tape loop fragment become more frequent and violent, blossoming into a jabbering, splattering phantasmagoria that starts to become even more unhinged shortly after the nine-minute mark with the appearance of an ugly repeating buzz and an insistent pedal tone from Nace’s guitar. Once all the elements are in place, “Body/Erase” becomes a massive, seething juggernaut of layered cacophony.

In the wake of that slow-burning tour de force, some more recognizable and expected elements surface with “Goin’ Down,” which initially sounds like a classic Sonic Youth single that has been stretched and deconstructed into abstraction. I dig the repeating howl of warbling guitar noise, but the real payoff is the squelching, wobbly, and ruined reverie of the final minute. The album then ends with its wildest, most go-for-broke piece, as the shapeshifting 13-minute epic “Secret Cuts” alternately sounds like the slow boinging of a massive cosmic spring, a noise guitar show frozen in looping suspended animation, and the hushed voice of an angel speaking from inside my head (“do you want?” is the only phrase that I can reliably make out). 

Some of the transitions between segments can be a little jarring (purposely, I presume), but all of the segments themselves are compelling and lead to a lovely set piece of warm, swelling drones and flickering voice fragments. It is damn lovely while it lasts, but an earlier noise guitar motif unexpectedly claws its way back from the grave to end the piece on an ugly, gnarled note. I cannot say that I am particularly surprised that Nace and Gordon were so game to let Dilloway drag their vision through a meat grinder or that the end result was so good, yet I was legitimately caught off guard by the ephemeral oases of beauty that occasionally surface. While this can admittedly be a prickly, difficult, and potentially room-clearing album at times, it is also a singular and unusually memorable release for all involved (no mean feat, given the massive, highlight-filled discography of the trio).

Samples can be found here.

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Six Organs of Admittance, “The Veiled Sea” (Three Lobed, 2021)

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My relationship with Ben Chasny’s discography has always been a hit-or-miss one, as some of his albums are very much Not For Me, yet I can think of few other artists who are as intensely committed to endlessly evolving and trying out bold new ideas. This latest release is a prime example of that, as The Veiled Sea can be glibly described as “the album where Ben Chasny unleashes some absolutely face-melting shredfests.” In characteristically open-minded fashion, Chasny drew inspiration for this album from an extremely unusual source: “’80s American pop shredder” Steve Stevens, who I knew primarily as Billy Idol’s guitarist, but who others may recall from the theme from Top Gun (or Michael Jackson’s “Dirty Diana”). 

Given that Top Gun and contemporary psychedelia seem like a truly deranged collision of aesthetics to bring together, I was a bit apprehensive about this release and expected an audaciously over-the-top album that I would probably only listen to once. Instead, it was something considerably more soulful and compelling than I ever expected, as Chasny swings for the fences on a couple of songs and connects beautifully, crafting a pair of the most perfect pieces of his entire career. There is also a wild Faust cover and some more ambient-minded pieces rounding out the album to varying degrees of success, but the only crucial thing to know about The Veiled Sea is that “Last Station, Veiled Sea” may very well be the “must hear” song of the year in underground music circles.

There are technically six songs on The Veiled Sea, but the party does not begin in earnest until the third piece, “All That They Left You.” To my ears, it sounds like Carter Tutti Void and A Certain Ratio are jamming with Appetite for Destruction-era Slash, as it is a feast of jangly post-punk guitars, brooding industrial thump, and indulgently fiery hard-rock shredding. There is a catchy song lurking in there too, as the soloing frequently breaks to make room for a haunting, processed-sounding vocal hook (Chasny sounds a bit like a sultry but lovesick robot). For the most part, though, it is simply Chasny ripping shit up on his guitar over a cool, heavy groove and it rules. 

A brief and likable interlude of tender piano ambiance follows (“Old Dawn”), then the album hits its zenith with “Last Station, Veiled Sea,” which unexpectedly resembles This Mortal Coil at first (languorous drones, vaguely androgynous-sounding vocals, a dreamily melancholy mood, etc.). After about three minutes, however, Chasny unleashes an absolute supernova of a guitar solo that is equal parts movingly gorgeous and viscerally violent (it features plenty of Orcutt-esque scrabbling, slashing, and gnarled flourishes). Sadly, it only lasts about ten minutes, but Chasny sounds absolutely possessed and I am sure he could have gone on for another half hour with absolutely no dip at all in soulful intensity at all. 

Not much could follow such god-tier brilliance, but the surprise Faust cover that closes the album is quite satisfying nonetheless. Notably, the bouncy, playful original version of “J’ai Mal aux Dents” sounds like a bunch of mischievous art weirdos jamming on a fake Velvet Underground song. In Chasny’s hands, however, it becomes a heavier, more trance-like juggernaut, as he uses a tumbling drum pattern and chanting backing vocals as a propulsive backdrop for a roiling, spacey guitar solo. It is quite a delight, but the main reasons to hear this album are the twin highlights of “All That They Left You” and “Last Station, Veiled Sea,” which unavoidably eclipse everything around them.

Samples can be found here.