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New Shit, The Webernets

HELP AXL FIGURE OUT THE APPEAL OF EHNAHRE’S TAMING THE CANNIBALS

 Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 1:00pm by

At the risk of sounding, like, all cheesy and shit, I really look up to the Decidudes. When they say something is good, I really, really, really wanna understand it — that is, I won’t listen to it and, if I don’t like it, just say “Well fuck this” and throw on some IWABO in protestation. I’ll listen to it again and again and again so I can at least have some comprehension of what it is they appreciate about the music in question.

So. Earlier today, The Deciblog posted a full album stream of Ehnahre’s Taming the Cannibals, which reluctant Decibel/MetalSucks go-between Andrew Bonazelli calls “a late contender for mind/face-fuck of the year.” Things is, I’ve been listening to it all morning, and I just do not get it. It’s right up there with Bloody Panda in the “Things Intelligent People Tell Me are Awesome but I Just Find Totally Soporific” club. And I loves me some Portal, so I feel like my tolerance for noise masquerading as music is pretty high. But this shit is just way, way, way the fuck over my head.

Go here to give the album a listen, then come back and tell me what I’m missing. Taming the Cannibals comes out on Crucial Blast, uh, soon I suspect!, and features members of Kayo Dot. So, there’s that.

-AR

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  • Perpetual Black Screen Name

    Hahaha I’m right along with you on this one man. That is some strange and abstract stuff. Too much for my ears to comprehend on a Tuesday morning. And I like some strange music.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Greg-Kennelty/100000324595253 Greg Kennelty

    I dig weird, creative stuff… but this is just bad dude. Like, really bad.

  • Jon Miguel

    I don’t get it at all.

    Back to Tool.

  • GoingDeaf?

    Perhaps you lack the ability to pretend you like something because you think it will make you seem more esoteric and intelligent?

    • Eddie Von Fuckenstein

      +2,000,000,000

      The thought that anyone tries to convince anyone else that this kind of total shit-smelling dreck is viable puts me in a bad mood. I may go on a verbal rampage.

  • yetzer hara

    as out of my mind as i’ve been for the last week, this is some next level shit and is really doing the job for me right now. i wish i could pronounce the name so i could tell other people about it.

    • gas cloud nine ightfall

      Ehnahre is pronounced:
      “Pseudo-intellectual garbage” (soo’-doh in-tl-ek’-choo-uhl gahr’-bij)

    • pronounced

      “N R.” and it is fucking great.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Etan-Rosenbloom/601426 Etan Rosenbloom

    These dudes are working with a lot of the same techniques (serialism, untethered drumming, tensions between improv and composition) that a lot of free jazz and contemporary classical composers have been using for decades. With the notable exception of Behold…the Arctopus, It’s really rare to hear that in metal — as obsessed as death metal can be with dissonance, it’s still really big on structure, and Ehnahre aren’t (Ehnahren’t?) — so I can totally get why it just sounds like cacophony to a lot of people. But I really don’t think there’s anything more metal than saying “fuck you” to so many conventions that metal holds dear. Can I headbang along with any of this? No. But I do find it more expressive than almost any other band I can think of, and in terms of face-scraping dread, few does it better.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Etan-Rosenbloom/601426 Etan Rosenbloom

    Few “do” it better, I meant. I wrote a couple reviews of their last couple albums, in case anyone’s interested:

    http://www.prefixmag.com/reviews/ehnahre/the-man-closing-up/21344/

    http://www.cerebralmetalhead.com/2010/07/ehnahre-alphaomega-12-fun-with-asbestos.html

  • Eddie Von Fuckenstein

    There’s nothing to get. It’s pure suck. Y’see, there are people held in high esteem by their peers that say “hey this is great” and everyone believes it.

    Don’t believe it. This is unadulterated rubbish – literally the black pigment from the ink on the price label ripped off the lid of a can of fuck.

    I hope that by putting this out as a ‘serious’ release, the butt-plugs that created it (and the reviewer who says he likes it) find themselves stuck in their day jobs forever. How fucking stupid do they think we are?

    • http://theofficialmetalshowmetalblog.blogspot.com/ Randy

      No one would make music like this thinking they were going to make it big. Unless they are mentally insane. However, I also agree that I wouldn’t want to add this to my iPod for regular rotation.

  • Dr. Brazil

    Khanate + Ornette Coleman. What’s not to get/love?

  • Lady Scanner

    I like it.

    Etan has it right. This just isn’t your cup of tea, but its not “made by butt plugs”. Its fair to say you don’t like it of course, but some of the comments above go a bit too far. They certainly can play and are doing something powerful, its just too abstract for your tastes. Its not a toe-tapper, but no one is trying to pull the wool over your eyes or anything. Its not a scam to rape the huge abstract metal “market”.

    There are some “industrial” and “noise” bands out there made of people who can’t play their instruments, but that’s not what we are talking about here.

    Its like John Cage, Albert Ayler, Matt Shipp, Mattisse, Pollock, or evan Sunno)).

    If you want something from these guys that is more “normal”, try the Bath and Body Map albums from Maudlin of the Well.

  • Genial Gentile

    I was about to say that this sounds like something Scott Seward would recommend and then I read the Deciblog article and lo and behold…
    I’m not typically into his taste in noisy abstractions but this isn’t entirely without merit, I just have a hard time imagining the mood/situation I’d have to be in to listen to this for very long.

  • http://www.myspace.com/thestarsthrewdowntheirspears Tim

    Just listened to the whole thing… pretty chaotic, but good. I like Kayo Dot much better than this, though. Whereas Ehnahre seem to paint their abstractions in chaos, Kayo Dot covers their structurally similar pieces in softer tones, which certainly lets the “untethered” feeling of the rhythm shine through better.

  • http://deleted Ken

    I tried, I really did. I do not like any of it. Just another example of something someone will use to make themselves feel superior to those who don’t get it. It’s like listening to a drum circle, absolutely no point.

  • sYgnal

    I’ve listened to a lot of strange shit in my life but at least it was interesting…. This is a complete snoozefest. I think Fantomas covered enough of this terrain, brilliantly, 11 years ago… To be fair, Kayodot pretty much bore me to tears as well. No offense to either band, just my opinion…

  • Milkman

    i dig it

  • Seb

    “… and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth…)

    Firstly, the cries of “this is the shit smart people use to make us normal folk seem inferior” is a self fulfilling prophecy. Quit the phony anti-intellectualism ranting. Your making yourself seem stupid all by yourself.

    Second, the music itself is brilliant. If you say you’ve “listened to some weird shit” and don’t get this, you obviously need to crawl out the shallow ditch your lying face down in and explore the world a little more. Then again very few people are predisposed to putting any effort into understanding something that doesn’t immediately serve up all the easy answers.

    I entirely agree with the above statement that this is more metal than any “metal” i’ve heard in many years (since the Mare EP was released anyways) in that it’s a complete fuck you to the trendy pitfalls and vapid clichés that litter heavy music today. As far as i’m concerned the appeal of heavy music is that a) it’s barely listenable to the average person to begin with (and any push further in that direction is a push in the right direction), and b) it’s supposed to be an extreme and intense expression of aggression, despair, and all things angry, etc. This shit has all that in spades and it’s done much more organically and realistically. It’s the relentlessly chaotic meeting the discordantly unsettling, which serves as the perfect musical parable/symbolism for what I imagine to be a human beings darkest states of mind.

    Heavy music is full of bullshit claiming to the “the heaviest most br00talestly awesome shit EVER”, when in fact it is flaccid and formulaic.To put it in more colourful terms, heavy music today is as a lone man goosestepping on the sidewalk when what it should be a cavalcade of limp corpses flung of a cliff, such as Ehnahre is.

    • N/A

      @Seb
      I’m glad to know someone feels the way I feel about it. To me, metal always was a means of extreme expression to me and, that is to say, expressions of negative feelings. Any kind of subgenre that wasn’t extreme but rather boring, predictable and full of clichees, was not of any interest to me. Well, I guess you can fight the argument about the clichee because, as you can see, Ehnahre seem to fit the clichee of sounding oh-so-dissonant-and-pseudo-intelligent to some people who posted here.

      I fucking love this band and their first record. I don’t even know how you can blame musicians of this and similar genres for fooling the listeners because this music has no meaning and “there’s nothing to get”. I can’t think of anything more emotional and honest and therefore also somehow vulnerable than the music of Ehnahre. I just hope this band don’t let the opinions of the dislikers make any compromise in their following music.

      Does anyone know when the new album will come out?

      • shubnig

        Seb: very well said. I have nothing more to add, really. For me, metal has always been about violating rules, and bands like Ehnahre are just taking metal’s deviant tendencies to their logical extremes. The polarizing effect this band is having on listeners only reinforces my feeling that they are doing something right.

        I find statements like “Just another example of something someone will use to make themselves feel superior to those who don’t get it” incredibly presumptuous. If you don’t like it, fine. Move on. This has nothing to do with you.

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Travis-Conquest/550494220 Travis Conquest

          I agree with these statements.

          To make such a gross leap of logic is at best foolish, and at worst it is deceptive and manipulative.

          I am a recent convert to this band, but I’ve been doing stuff like this out of Seattle for a while now. The people who are doing this, are certainly NOT doing it for anyone else… We do it because its the truest expression of our emotions. It is an incredibly vulnerable position, as someone has stated.

          I have also participated in many more ‘traditional’ extreme bands, as well. They don’t preclude one another, that is, I can be part of a 3rd rate Bloodbath worship band (check.) and at the same time pursue the same thing with a 3rd rate version of Ehnahre (check.)

          Those who REALLY make music or any art for that matter will know that there are many many many reasons people make art, but very rarely does anyone make art solely to lord it over others.

          There are many more petty, less creative and less time and money intensive ways to do that. Such as getting stuck in middle management in some bumfuck tech job and sitting online and posting rude remarks about people who are just trying to express themselves and explore music.

  • mugen

    Expecting to “get” this band over the course of a single morning is only setting oneself up for failure. Listen a few times at best, take a rest, then come back. Then again, if you’re impressed by Iwrestledabearonce’s gimmickry, maybe it’s in best interest not to bother with this.

  • Dana

    Wow.. reading this review and these comments are really really making me want to hear this more than any other review that says that something is “amazing” or “album of the year” or calls the musicians “talented” because usually it ends up being crap, so I have have hopes for this one.