Personal Jesus

I wrote the following story earlier this month after seeing this young man’s name pop up in our paper for years. An Elvis tribute artist that’s a dead ringer for the real guy, and is soon becoming one of the top Elvii in the country. No kidding. 

The story was fascinating to me: what it takes for someone to want to do this, what they have to do to get better. But even more, it fascinated me that every day, this man wakes up and always has this other person — regardless of life or death — walking alongside them. 

The headline is a Depeche Mode song — which I found out is actually based on Priscilla Presley’s book, Elvis and Me. Martin Gore, from Depeche Mode says: 

It’s a song about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care. It’s about how Elvis was her man and her mentor and how often that happens in love relationships; how everybody’s heart is like a god in some way, and that’s not a very balanced view of someone, is it?

My story is a true story of acting, singing and getting famous for what you do. But, even more, it’s a story about believing, unwaveringly, in the spirit of someone you admire. Even if you’ll never ever meet them.

—-

Ben Klein had a secret. His parents had no idea what he was doing downstairs. They heard him — watching videos, listening to music — but even today, nine years later, his mother still sounds shocked when she thinks back.

“We had no idea,” Gwen Klein says. “We just thought he was playing his music.”

Her only son had fallen under the spell of another man. And now he wanted to tell his parents.

Klein, then 22, waited until they were sitting down at the Golden Corral on North Division, having just filled their plates at the buffet.

He announced that he wanted to dress up, sing and dance like Elvis Presley.

For months, as his parents went about their day-to-day lives, Klein had been watching Jailhouse Rock and G.I. Blues in their basement, over and over. At first he was just interested, burned out on the stuff on the radio and looking to indulge in some classic music. He turned to his dad’s CD collection and found Elvis.

But then he started mimicking what he saw, not really thinking about it. He tried out Elvis’s signature leg wiggle and the way the man would windmill his left arm as he back-peddled across a stage.

Soon, Klein became entranced by the raw, young Elvis Presley of the mid-1950s — the poor Mississippi boy who sang gospel ballads alongside pop hits and had girls squealing with the mere shake of a knee.

Klein started to memorize everything that made this charismatic performer the King: the way a strand of his black hair curled over his forehead, the way he tucked his acoustic guitar under his right arm to get closer to the mic, the way his voice hiccupped and soared as he sang “Love Me.”

Klein’s parents were shocked.

“Who are you and what have you done with our son? Are you crazy?’” Gwen Klein recalls thinking.

“But he goes, ‘No, you guys don’t know this, but I’ve been working on it … I can do this, and I just really have fallen in love with Elvis Presley,’” she recalls. “He said, ‘I can do this, you guys, but will you help me get started? I can’t do it on my own.’ And we said, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re serious?’”

Klein was serious. He realized he wasn’t just any old converted Elvis fan. He could look and sound and act just like Elvis. And maybe, he hoped, being Elvis would help launch his own music career.

“It was like, ‘Man, maybe I’ve found my niche, you know? Maybe I’ve found something that I can really sink my teeth into,’” he says.

And for almost a decade, that’s what he’s done. A boy who grew up singing with his mom and dad at church, Klein now finds himself dodging underwear onstage as one of the top Elvis tribute acts in the nation.

When he started, he couldn’t have predicted the world of big egos, big money and plastic surgery. Or that his friends would fall away, confused by his interest in Elvis. Or that he’d feel himself growing closer and closer to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, trading parts of his own identity every time he got onstage.

But, in some ways, Ben Klein was born into this. 

Every mother calls her child a miracle, but Gwen Klein really means it.

“I wasn’t supposed to be able to have any children. We were four years into our marriage when we had him. It was a total complete surprise,” she says.

From the beginning, Klein was extremely close with his parents, who were themselves embedded in the Spokane music scene by the time he was born. Gwen performed with the popular local band Daybreak, and Randy Klein made a name for himself as the singer in Randy Klein and Big Brother. At the time Gwen fell in love with her husband, he was known for performing a few songs onstage with his band in a sparkly jumpsuit — singing selections from his favorite artist, Elvis Presley.

The family also sang together on gospel radio and television programs — with Ben Klein first appearing on TV at age 2.

“All of his years growing up, he would be involved in musical programs and concerts,” Gwen Klein says. “The first drums he ever played were my pots and pans on the kitchen floor.”

But when Ben Klein broke his news about Elvis, and asked for his parents’ help in putting on a local variety show, their involvement with the music industry was long past. They had given up rock ’n’ roll for worship hymns nearly 30 years earlier. Randy Klein became a pastor in the early ’90s and ministered at Living Water Christian Fellowship.

“We totally put the secular music world behind us,” Gwen Klein says. “We were led to give it up and put it behind us. And here Ben brought us back into it.”

Locally, the Kleins became known for putting on shows that cast Klein as young Elvis, his dad as old Elvis, and his mother as Patsy Cline.

“I would not even do it if the Lord hadn’t let me know in a certain way that it was OK,” says Randy Klein, who also performs as Johnny Cash. “I believe that things happen for a particular reason, you know?”

When Gwen Klein talks, her tone is devout — religious, almost — as if Elvis Presley, to the Kleins, has become some kind of spiritual figure.

“Never in my wildest imagination would I think that I would come to the day where I married a man who loved Elvis and tributed him and sounded and looked like him in his prime,” she says.

“And then that we’d have a son who looks like Elvis and sings like Elvis…”

Randy Klein has started to think the same way: “When [televangelist] Rex Humbard went to see Elvis before he died, his wife told Elvis … ‘I prayed for you ever since you came out that you would be a bell sheep — the Lord’s bell sheep.’ And Elvis says, ‘What’s that?’ She says, ‘One sheep has a bell around his neck and other people follow it. I have prayed that through your gospel music, and your music, that people would come to the Lord.’”

The Kleins believe Elvis has helped their son spread the good word to others.

“Every day I thank God, Elvis has paved the way and we walk on it,” Gwen Klein says. “To see how [Elvis] was brought up in such a mere, poor situation. And thousands, millions of people have been touched by his music and his life. And look at the way that he has provided for all of these guys — and even some women, believe it or not — to tribute him. He’s made a way, a means, a livelihood for them.”

The signs were there all along, and when Gwen Klein started paying attention, she realized that the connections between their lives and Elvis Presley’s were too numerous to be coincidental. Randy Klein’s mother’s name was Gladys — so was Elvis’s mom’s. One of Elvis’s best friends was named George Klein, which is also Randy’s brother’s name. Elvis Presley Day in Memphis, Tenn., is on Feb. 25, which is Gwen Klein’s birthday. Elvis’s daughter, Lisa-Marie, has a son named Benjamin.

“When you see all of the likenesses in our lives … you just kind of scratch your head and go, ‘You know, this is meant to be. This is really meant to be,’” she says.

Elvis Presley died on the bathroom floor of his Memphis home 35 years ago, but his following gets bigger each year.

Kevin Kern, director of public relations for Elvis Presley Enterprises, says Graceland sees around 600,000 visitors each year. They offer tours in eight languages to accommodate people who come from around the world, which Kern says is interesting considering that Elvis never performed outside of North America.

“He was the shot heard ’round the world, in terms of a music revolution,” Kern says. “Elvis is a pop-culture phenomenon. He really started a revolution musically, sexually, culturally.”

Kern says his organization expects 2012, the 35th anniversary of Elvis’s death, to be a huge year for fans. The buzz began in late December, when the five-disc Young Man With the Big Beat: The Complete ’56 Elvis Presley Masters was nominated for a Grammy for best historical album. “He’s an entertainer who continues to have earning power that living celebrities would love to have,” Kern says.

But perhaps the most devoted Elvis fans are the tribute artists — a population often referred to in the plural as “Elvii.” In the book Race and the Subject of Masculinities, Eric Lott contributes a chapter entitled, “All the King’s Men: Elvis Impersonators and White Working-Class Masculinity.” In it, he says there are “heavily-bearded Elvises, four-year-old Elvises, and Elvis duos; Italian Elvises, Greek Elvises, Jewish Elvises, a Lady Elvis, even a Black Elvis.”

Kern says Elvis Presley Enterprises began embracing the impersonation phenomenon six years ago when it started the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist contest, bringing in the best Elvis tribute artists — not the most bizarre, but the most accurate — to face off in Memphis.

“We’ve embraced the ETA community and made it a part of Elvis Week, and it’s proven to be popular,” he says. “But we don’t mix the real Elvis with those paying tribute.”

Kern says Ben Klein has become a familiar face to his organization. And while they “try not to play favorites,” he was one of a few tribute artists to represent last year’s competition with the media.

“Both on and off stage, Ben is a great representation of Elvis’s legacy,” he says.

But what also makes Klein unique among tribute artists is his breadth. Though he got his start replicating young Elvis — the black-and-white, fresh-faced “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes” days — Klein can now replicate every era of Elvis’s life. On the upcoming 29-city Elvis Lives Tour, he’ll replicate the leather-clad Elvis of the 1968 Comeback Special. And lately, he’s started squeezing himself into a white jumpsuit to tribute the later, crooning, pop years of the older Elvis. That ability to recreate 1956 Elvis and 1975 Elvis side by side is a rarity in the tribute business.

“There’s different songs, there’s different times, there’s even different hairstyles,” Klein says. “There’s all these different aspects.”

Klein also stands out because of his guitar work. Most tribute performers take the strings off their guitars and simply pretend to play, but not Klein.

But perhaps the most unique thing about Klein is that he does not believe he is — or ever will be — Elvis Presley. That, he says, is the key difference between Elvis tribute artists and Elvis impersonators.

“A tribute artist is somebody who goes onstage, does their part and comes offstage and is themself,” he says, sitting outside a north Spokane Starbucks in a red T-shirt, ball cap and sunglasses last August. “Like me right now — I’m not dressed up, I’m not trying to pretend I’m Elvis. There are a lot of guys who go to the hilt.”

Nose jobs, implants and facial reconstruction are realities in the tribute world. Klein says that oftentimes the people who are willing to modify their appearance are the same people who want the screams from fans to continue long after they’ve stepped offstage.

“I don’t try to talk like Elvis offstage. I don’t try to act like Elvis offstage. Because that’s just creepy. It’s just creepy. It’s like it takes method acting to a whole new level of insanity.”

All those stigmas — the freaky fans, the guys onstage living in an imaginary Elvis dream — have made getting into the business difficult for Klein. “Every day I thank God, Elvis has paved the way and we walk on it.”

“It took a long time for my friends to actually not only support, but understand,” Klein says. He said most of his friends didn’t realize that the Elvis world was actually a massive business. “It’s not just dress up, it’s not just a Halloween costume.

“I’ve gone through a lot of cynicism and a lot of sarcasticness and just … a lot of people just saying, ‘Why are you doing what you’re doing?’” he says. “They’re like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ People just don’t understand it. It’s not a normal thing. Let’s face it.”

Today, Klein has gotten used to emphasizing to people — volunteering it, almost — that he’s not Elvis. As he sees it, it’s his job to shake the right leg at the right time, snarl in just the right way and act — onstage, only — the way Elvis did. The tributes and impersonators who get an ego about it get under his skin.

“How can you even become prideful and egotistical in a business when you’re not even yourself? You’re tributing someone else,” he says.

Over the past nine years, there have been plenty of times when he’s wanted to cast Elvis from his life altogether — and just be done with it. Return to his own life, with his wife, his music.

“There’s a point at which I’m like, ‘Don’t call me Elvis. That’s not my name. My name’s Ben and I have my own life, and I’m my own person. I’m not Elvis. And I don’t want to be known as Elvis.’”

When ladies throw their underwear at him, Klein has learned to take the attention — even if it’s creepy attention — gracefully.

“I went out in the audience one time and I had like four women surround me and like rub all over me and stuff. Which was kind of weird. They were a bit on the drunk side,” he says, smiling. “It happens. You know, you’re flattered by it, but at the same time you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a little strange.’”

There are “sideburn chasers who just want to be with Elvis,” Klein says. “They can’t. They want you to be Elvis so bad because they love Elvis so much.”

He says he’s performed Elvis — from the gold-lamé-jacket years to the sequined-jumpsuit years — “hundreds, maybe a thousand” times in the past nine years.

It’s taken him around the country, paid his bills and had him square off against the best in the business.

Last year, he qualified for the third time to perform at the crme de la crme of tribute competitions: the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist Contest in Memphis, put on by Elvis Presley Enterprises itself. Not only does first prize mean you’re the closest thing to Elvis out there, but it carries a purse of $20,000.

Klein took fifth place in the competition in 2007 and fourth in 2008. He took a two-year break — to get married and live his “Ben” life — and returned last year.

At the contest, 26 Elvises are judged on how much they sound like Elvis, how much they look like him, how closely they resemble their given era of Elvis and how easily they generate that presence — that charisma — that the King cultivated.

Last year’s field of tribute artists was stacked.

“You’ve got hundreds of thousands of guys competing in these contests all over the world. You’ve got London, you’ve got Japan, you’ve got 20 contests in the states — all over the place,” he says. “And then when you get there, you’re up against guys who are really good. You’ve got to do well.”

At the 2011 competition, participants submitted a list of the top 20 songs they wanted to sing in order of preference. But since no one finds out their draw until they are backstage, Klein had to haul as many of his 25 Elvis costumes across the country as he could, hoping that he had the right clothes for the songs he’d draw.

His first was the bluesy, vaudevillian “Trouble,” from the 1958 Elvis film King Creole, a song that landed Klein in the top 15.

In the next round — in which performers sang two songs with an intermission to make room for a costume change — he drew two of the best songs from ’50s-era Elvis: the sing-songy 1960 pop hit “G.I. Blues” and 1957’s “Jailhouse Rock.” He slid into the top 10 and then had to sing two songs back-to-back. He drew his favorite Elvis gospel song, “Peace in the Valley,” which Klein sang at his grandfather’s funeral, and a song he’d been performing since the first time he put on blue suede shoes: “Hound Dog.”

His performance put him in the top five.

His next draw, “Baby, Let’s Play House,” is a dark and raucous 1955 rocker with the famous line, “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.” Klein did it well, but in the end, a young, talented Arkansan named Cody Slaughter edged him out for first.

An Aug. 12 Memphis Flyer blog pointed out that judges were looking beyond jumpsuit-era Elvis: “[Slaughter] defeated nine other finalists at the Orpheum Friday night — eight of them wearing white jumpsuits. … The runner-up, Ben Klein, wore a gold jacket and also had some nice moves, but his comedy routine went on too long and fell flat.”

Klein took second place — an honor, but one that pays $17,000 less than first prize.

“Second place is… it’s better than 10th,” he says. “It’s not first, but top three is huge.”

Today, he says he’s glad he didn’t win. When you win, there’s no going back.

“You don’t compete after that ever again. You just don’t,” Klein says. “You don’t go backwards from this contest, you go forwards from it.”

The winner, Cody Slaughter, was cast as Elvis in the touring Broadway musical Million Dollar Quartet.

Klein says he’s not sure if he’ll compete in the 2012 competition.

He feels like he knows Elvis now. He quickly defends him — a man who died before he was born — saying that he’s sure that Presley never did illegal drugs. He says, with certainty, that Elvis was a good man who never took himself too seriously. And when people talk about “fat Elvis,” it offends him.

“That’s really disrespectful,’” he says. “It’s kind of disgusting, to be honest.”

But even Klein can admit that he would never want Elvis’s decadent, lonely life.

“Not that he had a bad lifestyle, but he was pretty much a shut-in for a lot of his life,” he says. “He paid these people to be around him. And I don’t know if he ever really felt like they were truly his friends or if they were just there because there was a paycheck.”

Elvis couldn’t maintain his own lifestyle. And so following a sustainable path, Klein says, is important to him. He has to eat well, exercise — take care of himself.

“All these things are part of the epiphany that you have when you get into this business — you realize that your time is limited,” he says. “There’s only so long you can do [it].”

But even if Klein moves on and becomes an original musician — and drops the Elvis gig altogether — he says it feels like Elvis Presley has become a part of him.

“You know how … when you’re married to someone for a long time, you take on traits of them?” he says. “Even sometimes you start to look like a person.

“Well, that’s how I feel like with Elvis.”

RIP, old friend.

I still remember the day we got it. It was a summer day after a cross-country move. I was 9, and probably in shorts, busy doing the business of a 9-year-old: checking out the nooks and crannies of the new house, eyeing the other kids in the neighborhood, figuring out what which kid I’d play on the neighborhood stage. 

My mom worried first about it, after she read it aloud: 5-2-6 OH-7-3-1. There were no patterns. No doubles. A string of numerals we’d have to remember in exactly that order. In this strange place, this mild green state that we couldn’t seem to pronounce right. The place with no relatives within 3000 miles. If we didn’t remember that number exactly right, who would we call?

Those numbers became a part of us: a seven-digit strand that was keyed in to tell us that Grandma was sick. They were the code that I gave boys so we could talk after school, and the numbers not dialed that would lead to my broken heart once, twice. That number was the one that called the radio request line over and over and over again. A number that was tied up by a screeching modem half the summers, and that when dialed rang a bulky cordless, a see-through 90210 bedroom phone, a fax machine, a copier. It was a sleek cordless in its later years.

Slowly it too would be a simple relic, only to get calls from schools and universities and hospitals and foundations asking for money. For donations. For time. For help.

When all that time it had been there when I needed help. Or money. Or time from my parents’ day when adulthood and college and friends and marriage and jobs got a little too hard — a little too real. When I just needed something close to home — a seven-number code that tied me to those days of tree climbing and radio requests and giggly late-night phone calls.

Isn’t funny that now I have no idea my parents cell phone numbers — which they swapped the old number for when two cell phones just made more sense than one cordless land line. Today they’re on speed dial: Mom at second most-called on my cell phone, BBJ (my dad) right below.

Today I realized that I remember another patternless number these days: one which I just ordered a pizza with, and that I seem to call first for help instead. The one I dialed frantically when I thought I poisoned the dog, when I needed a hand with the groceries. The number I’ve called when I want to laugh from faraway, the one I’ve hung up on and yelled at before.

2-9-OH 7-6-8-1. I guess it’s just the code to a whole new set of memories.

Live Review: Totalfest X

I wrote this little number for Decibel — you’ll see an abbreviated version in this month’s edition. 

TOTALFEST X

When: August 18-20

Where: Badlander/Palace, Missoula, MT

It’s barely 10 pm, and outside a very drunk midget is in the process of unzipping his pants. And around him, bands and people who look like people in bands go on smoking their cigarettes, barely deeming the wondrous situation a glance. Because there’s a lot to take in — more so this year than usual: It’s the tenth annual Totalfest, an underground, non-profit music festival in the middle of nowhere that’s converted followers nationwide over the course of the past decade, including some of this year’s headliners: Thrones, Big Business, Helms Alee and ’90s unsung AmRep band, Hammerhead. It’s a place where bands and fans eat festival-wide barbecue side-by-side in volunteer’s backyards before the shows, where everyone floats the Clarkfork River by day and where you can catch 20 bands each night by literally walking up and down a staircase. And seeing that it takes everyone no less than three hours to get here (unless you’re a local), no one’s here to see a midget’s dick.

Inside, there’s always a little bit of shit to wade through — bands like the one that closed its set with “a song about love” or the stream of dance-rock bands that I hear someone comment “Missoula loves this shit, I don’t know why.” But TFX proves itself early on despite a few foibles. San Francisco’s Kowloon Walled City — a grimier, less vocal-heavy Unsane — delivers one of the first explosive heavy performances of the festival. Its bass player is wearing a shirt that reads “San Franfuckincisco” (and later, I see him with his arm in a sling). He helps drive the band in and out of power-driven hardcore-esque songs and thick, sludgier ones.

Later, Big Business takes to the downstairs stage: a space that’s more like a basement rec room and that, right now, reeks of pit stains and spilled beer. Sound is iffy (drummer Coady Willis tells the sound guy between songs, “yeah I just need my vocals in the monitor”), but the packed house is stoked. Midway through the set, a kid stage dives and crowd surfs for a minute before his legs slam into the stage lights. The ceiling can’t be more than 10 feet high here, and if this place is up to firecode, I might not trust Montana laws.

I ditch watching Thrones in the same space the next night (Joe Preston’s here most years) to catch Helms Alee upstairs. They played Totalfest two years back and I swear they must have brought the same fans to scream “that drummer is hot!” then, too. If I were her, I might tell her friends to shut it: the catcalls undersell how much Hozoji Matheson-Margullis’s rips on the kit. She, Ben Verellen, his stacks of Verellen Amps and Dana James’ rolling, thunderous bass pound out the first three tracks from Weatherhead, and it’s some hair-raising stuff. I don’t think anyone was expecting it, and the longer they’re onstage the crowd gets tighter, the room gets muggier and the cheers between songs turn from yells to guys going “fuck yeah!” I know my ears will be buzzing tomorrow — but this is the stuff that makes losing your hearing worth it.

REVIEW: Totimoshi - Avenger

Totimoshi is, frankly, not extreme. Known in the past for it’s stoner-y, sludgey sound, the band has largely strayed into clearer waters over the course of its last couple of records — and Avenger is no romp back to the murk. Totimoshi makes a rock album — and in its weakest moments, an unsophisticated bar rock album. Across Avenger, Totimoshi proves to be a less-dynamic, less-interesting Melvins. And, being that this band is more than a few albums deep, comparisons like that shouldn’t be so easy to make.

Because now all the Totimoshi fans totally fucking pissed, lets talk about the positives for a sec. The album’s closer, “Waning Divine,” featuring Scott Kelly (Neurosis, Shrinebuilder) and Brent Hinds (Mastodon), is the reason to purchase Avenger. It’s a track that looks back towards the band’s roots. And that track, unlike any others, sees vocals swelling to a roar and shows sensible, technical guitarwork. “Opus” and “Rose” are decent standouts in the blues-rock/metal department. “The Fool” is about as catchy, sing-able and poppy as a track from a band like this can get. And it’s precisely where the Avenger dilemma comes in. “The Fool,” is an oddly-placed bright note following the heavy title-track, and it’s a strange opener to the next one — the raucous, confused “Mainline.” People say that Totimoshi is a masterful heavy band. But Avenger shows a band with a lot of skill meandering all over the place, cobbling too many ideas into one very average album.

Hey, maybe they’re simply happy to entertain the tavern crowd.

REVIEW: Catapult the Smoke - Born in Fire

I don’t know much, but I do know a lot about the joyous combination of marijuana and stoner rock. It’s a special type of rock in that it doesn’t need to be overly technical to be good. And it certainly allows for a lot more give and take than other types of heavy music. But there are two key things that are absolutely necessary for a stoner band to be successful:

1.     A good bass player — given that, your guitars can jam and noodle off for ridiculous amounts of time without losing many listeners.

2.     Your vocalist had better not be harshing any mellows.

And Catapult the Smoke achieves one of these two things very well. The musicianship of this Swedish stoner rock band (I don’t know enough about Northern European stoner culture to comment) is anchored by its solid bass lines. The band builds up thick, commanding walls of noise around those — calling to mind a breezy Fu Manchu sound (check out overlay of thick guitars with cowbell on “Lord of the Broken Throne.”)

But then, without fail, the vocalist happens in every Catapult the Smoke song. It’s like that scene in To Kill a Mockingbird when Walter Cunningham pours syrup over his entire dinner. The band, here, builds up perfectly spot-on stoner rock, only to be rendered practically unlistenable by its vocalist: a sort of grunting, wailing lovechild of Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell. It’s a shame, too, because there are times when these Swedes are onto something totally rad — like the foreboding pace of “War Bring Enemies.” But then that vocalist shows up to dinner with a gravy boat of syrup and makes a goddamn mess.

REVIEW: Whitehorse - Progression

It’s not so much the feverish, rabid, frothing at-the-mouth imp-vocals that make Progression horrifically dark. It’s the murk around them that does it: the dragging static and hanging distortion, the echoing empty spaces and rolling waves of sound.

On its latest studio effort, Melbourne, Australia’s Whitehorse kicks the bottom out of doom and sludge, creating a whole new tier of sound that’s scarier, slower, stranger and rawer than anything else you’re listening to. Progression is a five-track fortress, an album built around its Xasthur-esque howls, textural samples and plodding, skulking guitars.

I guess you might say that purest sludge should be sparse, right? Sounds few and far between, space to breathe, time to let everything really sink in? Whitehorse, across its album, peddles that in thick doses here. Slow and methodic — it’s the backbone of each song. And it’s in the nothingness – the deep, dark abyss they’ve dug – that the band gets creative. Whitehorse reworks the spaces that usually define the genre, never really allowing pure quiet seep in around them. Instead they fill it with static — like on “Time Worn Regression” — or the slightest, faintest taps and high-pitched squeals. The distorted remains of minutes-gone guitars hang in the air long after they’ve been played.

The problem is, when you write it out on paper like this, it sounds like a pure havoc. And it is. But Whitehorse handles havoc deftly, in a covert, convincing manner that could influence an entire genre of musicians.

REVIEW: Great Falls - Fontanelle

Perhaps the greatest risk of noodling is getting your hand ripped off by a goddamn alligator. Noodling: nothing to do (in this context) with Yngwie Malmsteen, it’s what Southern rednecks — the types who tromp around in gator infested swamps with camouflage-can beers and giant nuts — call their backwoods catfish “fishing” technique. Shove your arm in a catfish hole, pull a fish out for dinner or lose a limb because a gator lives there now. Noodling.

Listening to Great Falls’ Fontanelle is kind of like noodling: each track a dive deeper into the dankest, darkest, most cockeyed waters of hardcore, noise and ambient rock. The Seattle band (whose members — including resident dB ballbuster, Shane Mehling — boast Kiss It Goodbye, Playing Enemy and Jesu on its CV) produces a thick, viscous wad of muddy guitars, washy reverberating cymbals and howling in the distance.

Across the record, these three vets take their sweet time, replacing the rush of hardcore with wide-open marshes of fuzz and murk. “Frank Apple” breaks momentum more than once to make room for spacey drums and bass, before the band throws itself into a one-minute face punch, “Untitled Women.” It’s there — in the pause between that track and the next — where you believe to have Great Falls pegged. But then you don’t: the band turns its head 360 degrees, yanking out the anthemic “The Bank Agnostic,” before, again, changing. “Another Starving Excuse” is light, angular and edging on upbeat. As the band shifts from beginning to end here, though, they are unshakeable in trafficking a deep, dark aesthetic. Fontanelle is hardly a cheap noodle, but it captures the idea behind it: a desire to plunge headfirst into the abyss.

REVIEW: City of Ships - Minor World

You come here for extreme: the plucked eyeballs, shrieks of the impaled, pickled fetuses and blood borne pathogens of the musical world. Right? And if that best describes you — and your disinterest in anything that lacks even the slightest whiff of Satan — move on. City of Ships is gonna piss you off.

The band, which has gained serious nods from Decibel in the past, makes music that is decidedly more human than a lot of the other stuff you usually find in these pages. And that’s both good and bad. City of Ships — avid subscribers to the post-hardcore sound — are emotional. But the problem with being emo is that people stop caring after awhile, Debbie Downer. And a few songs into Minor World, you’re looking at your watch.

There is no doubt that City of Ships is a band of skilled players, but they’re strolling a well-trod path here. And in the end it’s not really paying off for them. When the band bends the equation a little — like on “Tantric Engineer,” with its soaring wall of fuzz and harmony — a bit of their unique impression on the genre is able to shine through. And, thankfully, the band strays from glomming unnecessary technicalities on here in order get their point across. They’re smart to lean on simplicity (“Celestial Occasion” and “Darkness at Noon”), something that seems to add true emotion across an album of otherwise fake smiles and crocodile tears. But still, in the end, you’re left with an ambling record that begs you to care about what they’re saying. And then if you don’t, the music doesn’t really make you care either.

REVIEW: Bringers of Disease - Gospel of Pestilence

Can I just say thank you? I want to shake your hands, Bringers of Disease. I am personally addressing you — you guys. Thank you for not puffing up this EP with senseless story building and mood-building? Thank you, you dear things, for not fucking around.

There is a lot about the band’s latest to like. But what Gospel of Pestilence made me realize is how goddamn much foreplay we — listeners, critics, consumers — have to suffer through. The mood building. The atmosphere creation. The whispering of stories. The weaving of aural-fucking-tapestries. When really, that’s asking a hell of lot of our hyper-sensitized, media drowned little minds. As listeners, sometimes we just want to be fucked. No candles, no Enya, no special undies. Please, just fuck us.

And that’s what these little satan mongers do. They get down to business — fast. “Doomed to Flames” is a flash flood: an immediate onslaught of screeching and earthshaking riffs. And the second track, “Your Prayers Remain Unheard,” backs off the gas ever-so-slightly in order to let the bass player steer the song. Vocals, drums: they follow in step — and so when the band does decide to open it up (I’ll just leave the fucking analogy here), it exposes a whole other dimension of the Dayton, Ohio band. In two songs, you understand that this band is both indisputably brutal and undeniably talented: putting their own unique mark on black metal. And if you’re not convinced in two songs — skip directly to track three: “Our Final Reward in Hell,” a riff-y, balls-to-the-wall song that climaxes when the singer is just screaming — screaming — SATAN!!!!!!!

Fucking thank you. 

REVIEW: Ghostlimb - Infrastructure

On its third full-length effort, Ghostlimb (fronted by Graf Orlock guitarist/vocalist/Vitriol owner Justin Smith) presents hyper-intelligent hardcore — songs that last only a minute or two, but ones that could, welcomingly, sprawl on longer. You can see through Infrastructure why Graf Orlock — a band that says something about America’s cultural retardation by co-opting and regurgitating it out again — might not be satisfying enough for a chap like Smith. “Extreme Duress” questions the possibility of understanding large-scale violence from a first-world point of view. “Substructure” ponders the policing of ideas. And “Unending Ache” yearns for a passionate youth culture. They’re not just songs. They’re not even opinions, really. They are, however, discussions of perspective: songs that literally stand in the shoes of those getting the short end of the stick.

You wouldn’t know any of that, though, if you didn’t read the lyrics — hardcore is kind of a bitch like that. Ghostlimb’s not making music to change the minds of the masses. The people who care, though, will stop to find out what this band is making such a fuss about. Because you can tell that something is gnawing at them on Infrastructure. It’s an album full of urgency and youthful aggression. “Eight” is a driving, pre-riot rally song. Some tracks rise to borderline “oy!” moments. But all of the messages and mayhem on Infrastructure — even the slightly out-of-place Leatherface cover at the end — make it an excellent contribution to modern hardcore.

This review first appeared in Decibel No. 79.

REVIEW: True Widow - As High As the Highest Heavens…

Last time we heard from True Widow, they’d only dipped a pinky-toe in the waters of sludge rock. But things get much grimier here: on the bands second album, they thicken and muddy the sounds they started on the band’s 2008 self-titled record. Everything is slower, lazier, and even more severed from reality and consciousness. The Denton, Texas “stonegaze” band clearly dusted off their old Earth records since last time.

As High as the Highest Heavens… changes the entire aesthetic effect of True Widow. Told through a shroud of static and fuzz — as if the mic was miles away — this is an album with no flashy peaks or sharp rises. Instead, there are miles and miles of rolling landscape. Snapshots of the mundane. True Widow slows to a stroll, presenting a droning, strung-out record that is, frankly, almost perfect.

“Night Witches,” the most upbeat number here (though it, too, is in a coma compared to the rest of the records reviewed in these pages), toes a line between pissed off and strung out. And on “Doomseer” the band risks slipping into a persistent vegetative state.

True Widow, here, proves themselves not only relevant, but as seers realizing the power of their own music. This album is an exercise in opposites: a survey of what this band isn’t. Of what they don’t do. Of where they don’t go. And in some ways, True Widow is saying more than any band that’s screaming it. 

This review first appeared in Decibel No. 78.

REVIEW: Imbroglio - Sleep Deprivation

I’ve spent plenty of nights lying awake, getting more and more pissed off — at life, at sleeping people — with each minute that ticks away. The less I sleep, the more I get pissed.  You know the feeling.

All I’m saying is that if I was a dude (I’m not) and if I could grow a beard (I can’t) and if I had any shred of musical talent (I don’t), I think I would channel my insomnia-inspired rage just like Imbroglio does on its second record, Sleep Deprivation. They’re tired, man. They live in Syracuse, and — have you been there? It snows like a motherfucker. Mass snow makes people insane — I’m telling you from experience. But anyway…

Sleep Deprivation is an excellent record front to back — but the track that first caught me was the third: “Cement Shoes.” It is a song dripping with rage. One where you can feel the band’s blood boiling. Imbroglio shoves you into a fistfight, two singers shouting orders (it feels like at each other) while drummer Nathan Harrah keeps a breakneck pace behind them. At the end, they’re panting. You’re panting. And when you think it’s over, Harrah comes back beating the drums like a goddamn animal. He jerks his bandmates awake and back into battle.

It’s a record that gets progressively more delirious, too. “Cellar Door” — over halfway through — is on the verge of nodding off. The band relaxes only slightly, then lurches to back to reality: red-eyed with a bone to pick.

It’s as if Imbroglio is tired of getting pushed around. And Sleep Deprivation is the result. A product of weeks, months, years without respite. It’s a declaration for anyone whose been fucked with. Imbroglio airs its shit list and takes aim at its enemies. They want to remind every single person who hears them of how good it feels to be pissed off.

REVIEW: The Swan King - Eyes Like Knives

They called him the Swan King. The Fairy Tale King. Ludwig II, a long-dead monarch of Bavaria, was an eccentric who opted for castle-building over nation building. The theater over social gatherings. Who preferred a life of solitude to a wife nagging for a kid. They say he preferred dudes to chicks. But mostly, they say, Ludwig preferred fantasy over reality. For his peculiarities, he was branded insane.

So it’s a fitting name for the Chicago three-piece, the Swan King — a band with its head firmly planted in the clouds. On its Seventh Rule debut, Eyes Like Knives, the band (comprised of ex-members of Planes Mistaken for Stars and Asschapel) effortlessly and mindlessly smash together rock and hardcore — forgetting where they are, drifting out to sea and expertly, unexpectedly, paddling in again. The record is a mindful experiment in limits: grating — even irksome — guitars define the record. But what sounds slightly sour at first, the band morphs into harmony. And at the same time, the Swan King tests the limits of repetition here too. The plinking guitars that go on almost too long on “Good Deeds.” The driving, nagging force behind “Staring Through Skulls.” The band, which supposedly subscribes to the Robert Fripp Guitar Craft, offers a plaintive, introspective look at what rock and punk can be. They teeter everything at such a slight angle, you wonder if the whole record will crumble. When it doesn’t, you realize this is a band not just making music, but truly paving a new path for all to follow.

This review first appeared in Decibel No. 78.

REVIEW: Serpent Throne - White Summer Black Winter

The teenager living in you — the one taking bong rips in your parent’s basement and blowing the smoke out the window through a dryer sheet — is so fucking stoked right now. Because Serpent Throne, the instrumental, riff-heavy Philadelphia band — to that kid — is the best band walking the planet right now. And only because Black Sabbath isn’t.

Serpent Throne are unapologetic headbangers in the church of Sabbath and Judas Priest. Ripoffs? Maybe. But, honestly, if something shreds, do you really take the time to give a fuck? What Serpent Throne will get you thinking is that maybe all those other bands didn’t actually need a vocalist. Maybe the riffs could have been doing the talking all along. 

From the very beginning of White Summer Black Winter, the band flips the calendar back to 1972. And it stays there, never daring to include any tool that a hard rock band during the Nixon administration couldn’t have used. But that, arguably, could be the only thing holding Serpent Throne back. Are they restricting themselves by not adding their own, modern touch to a sound that has been proven successful long before their time? Perhaps. Either way, this band not only revives a sound of a bygone era, but they’ve reanimated the corpse and are happily walking around in it again. 

This review first appeared in Decibel No. 77.

REVIEW: Everscathed - Still Screaming World

In no time, Everscathed is chugging faster than a pack of frat boys on a party porch. And at the very beginning of their latest album, Still Screaming World, songs have about the same amount of brains — AND as many balls. Don’t judge an album by its first track; here “Always Close At Hand (Never Within Grasp)” is a shapeless, tinny seven-minute mess from all the manliness and jizzery they’ve sprayed all over it. 

Things perk up though: on “Nothing Above Lies,” the band’s stripped down, frill-less sound sounds less amateur and more like old school death metal — not stale, but honest. The band shakes its hangover off completely on “Master Obscene,” a track that’s one of the most cohesive on the record and one that wanders off into some tasteful Sabbath-like musings at the end. “Absence Inside” is an actual head nodder that finally gets the album moving — but it’s the last track. For every great thing here (vocals, some cool guitar solos) something else drags it down. Still Screaming World is never slow enough to be sludgy, fast enough to be thrash or forward-thinking enough to be original. And not that we need a file folder for it, but it’s kind of hard if the band is trying to be obtuse or if they just have no clue what they’re doing. 

This review first appeared in Decibel No. 76.