Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Live to Get Rad by Pointbreakdown.

The 1991 action flick Point Break was built on incredulousness. The government does not normally infiltrate rings of criminals that rob banks to support their international surfing habits. Trained FBI agents do not jump out of airplanes without parachutes, and when they do, they die. A sassy Lori Petty would never, EVER fall for a zero-dimensional toolbag like Keanu Reeves, and as we all know from his many public battles with drug addiction, Anthony Kiedis can’t actually be killed.

Perhaps the viewing public that made Point Break a box office smash didn’t pick up the film’s inherent ridiculousness, but the millions of people that embrace it as a cult classic must have. Certainly the creators of Point Break Live, a theatrical version of the film that features a different Keanu drawn from the audience during each performance, get it. And Owen Thomas also gets it. He’s the man behind Pointbreakdown, a deathcore project whose every song is based around a dialogue sample from Point Break.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out three recent releases from Throatruiner Records.

Just because you’re offering your music for free doesn’t mean that presentation is unimportant. French label Throatruiner Records understands this better than most. Their press materials are thorough and totally professional, the bands they are all quality, they offer all of their albums for free download, and insist on awesome packaging to incentivize actual purchase. Since Throatruiner give us the goods gratis, we’re dedicating an entire installment of Freeloader to them.

As We Draw – Lines Breaking Circles

I washed my hands of “post-metal” long before Isis broke up. What began as a new way of writing songs, with process at the fore instead of structure, devolved into empty stylistic signifiers and soporific build-ups. As We Draw do it different. The French three-piece has some guitar atmospherics and climactic moments in common with yer Rosettas and Cults of Luna, but they offer a far more energized, varied take on post-metal than most of their contemporaries. The band uses its three-piece lineup smartly, making guitars subservient to the rhythm section on songs like “Shield” and “Draft,” pitting textured guitars in opposition to anchoring bass in “Shield” and “Drowned in Flames,” massing their vocals into gruff gang chants on “Sin of Addiction” and “Scum of the Earth.” Parts remind me of Cave-In’s Jupiter, parts remind me of ‘90s screamo. All reminds me of stuff I will listen to again.

(4 horns up)

Get it free here.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the debut release from Derek Roddy’s Serpents Rise.

It seems like only yesterday that MetalSucks posted the he said/he said account of journeyman drummer Derek Roddy’s departure from Today Is the Day. We know from Steve Austin’s marathon bitch session with Axl back in 2008 that the TITD frontman found Roddy to be a whiny, egomaniacal toolbag that hated his fans and only cared about money.

While I don’t know enough about Roddy to confirm or deny those accusations, the distribution plan for the long-awaited debut by his instrumental Serpents Rise project paints Roddy as a lot more fan-friendly than Austin’s criticisms would suggest. Roddy’s talked to the press about his intention to release the album for free since 2006, the same year he left Hate Eternal; he released a number of free demo tracks via his website in 2008, and followed through with a free finished product in late 2010. And he’s also up-front about involving fans in the project. Quoth the Rowdy Roddy on his website forum: “Serpents Rise….is an instrumental entity…But, this does not mean that we are opposed to hearing what vocal possibilities exist….Whether in your car, in your bedroom, on stage covering one of our songs, posting clips of you singing our tunes on YouTube OR….in the event that we show up in your town…..you sing with us on stage! Have fun…create!” Does that sound like the sentiment of an egomaniacal toolbag?

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Quarter the Villain’s Regicide EP.

“Right from the start I need to make it clear that your total lack of ambition disgusts me in general,” screams Quarter the Villain’s lead vocal dude at the beginning of “Choking A Sloth.” There are enough different vocal styles on the Orlando band’s recent EP, Regicide, to suggest he’s just playing one role of many in some tech-death multiple personality fantasia. But that phrase does a fine job of summing up Quarter the Villain’s music. Everything about this EP feels maxed-out and deliberately challenging. Stop-on-a-dime arrangements interrupt blastbeat sections with waltzes. Squiggly bass lines dry-hump deathcore chugs. Epic keyboard arpeggios, time-signature fuckery, frantic guitar filigree like good ol’ Dillinger used to make. “Choking A Sloth” even quotes the Super Mario Bros. underworld theme. This EP finds the uncomfortable spot where über-serious brutality meets ultimate dweebiness.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from Hesper Payne.

There’s more to proper doom metal than guitars tuned down to Z and anaesthetized wooly mammoth paces. You gotta have feel if you’re gonna rise from the muck. Actually, that’s a bad metaphor. Doom metal belongs in the muck. But the best doom is more than just a bummer. It’s an air-sucking slowing down of the world to its own pace, a convincing that there is no point in moving any quicker – the blackness is coming to get you, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you better just revel in it. Burning Witch got that. Winter got that. Corrupted and Electric Wizard and Samothrace get that. And Coventry, England’s Hesper Payne sure as fuck get that.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Subterranean Fishmen’s Departure EP.

In his first e-mail to me, a member of Evanston, Illinois’s Subterranean Fishmen wrote of the band’s new EP, Departure: “It’s all self-produced and although I’m an asshole and I wanna re-mix it, it sounds okay.” It doesn’t take an asshole to recognize that this release seriously needs a remix. I can’t hear the bass or the guitar leads, and from what I can tell, the drummer’s kit consists of a bass drum and a crash cymbal.

HOWEVER: I cannot stop listening to this EP. Partly as a display of gratitude for Subterranean Fishmen’s gift of my favorite metal lyric of 2010. About one minute into the second song, “C.B.,” the band’s vocalist death-belches the following string of non-sequiturs: “I am a meat popsicle / I am a club banger / Don’t forget my name / It’s Steve.” Silliness within extreme music is nothing new. But Subterranean Fishmen set this bout of absurdity (the only moment of levity on the album) amidst some of the most deadly-serious riffing I heard in 2010.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Mortiferous Scorn’s Masochistic Therapy.

I feel for the one-man death metal project, I really do. In addition to the logistical difficulties of touring, a one-man DM act has no bandmates with which to pound beers and nobody else to contribute sick riffs. The one-man black metal project works because the isolation of the music is often the point. Death metal, on the other hand, is a music of power and outward force. And while death metal tends to prize the power of the individual, you can’t fight the facts: more people = more force.

And so it follows that part of the work of a one-man DM band is to sound as little like a one-man DM band as possible. Such self-annihilation used to be impossible when drum machines still sounded like drum machines. Nowadays, solitary standard-bearers like Putrid Pile and Insidious Decrepancy can do a credible imitation of a full band. They work because their music is fully-formed enough, their ferocity direct enough, to overcome both the synthetic edges of their drum machines and the inherently silly image of a single guy playing four instruments simultaneously.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the debut album from The Unravelling.

When last we met with Calgary’s musical journeyman Steve Moore back in 2009, he was helming prog-metal band Inner Surge and goth/industrial creepsters Post Death Soundtrack. The former went tits up after releasing the respectable An Offering back in 2008; the latter continues its dark electronica unabated. Not much bound the two projects together other than Moore’s charismatic vocals, which evinced a heart-on-sleeve sincerity whether he was screaming or, more likely, crooning in his flexible baritone. His lyrics could be fiercely political or totally personal, and in either case Moore preferred ideas that were communicated straightforwardly and efficiently. Put simply, Moore is a working man’s thinking man’s metal singer.

Moore has met his aural complement in Gustavo De Beauville, the founder and main instrumentalist of The Unravelling. The Barbados expat is a fine guitarist and arranger, but his biggest talent is for synthesis. On The Unravelling’s debut album, 13 Arcane Hymns, Tool’s layered textures and Machine Head’s grooves are streamlined into free-flowing compositional nuggets. De Beauville keeps the transitions tight and the styles varied, and he and drummer Casey Lewis have the chops to handle the burbling atmosphere of “Becoming Chaos,” the straightforward aggression of “Where Will it End,” and the ethnic overtones of “In the Safe House” and “Arjuna.”

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from Colombian Necktie.

Canyon-carving guitar trowels. Spittle-flying throatscrapes. Thwack-a-doodle-doo drum kit. Bang, zoom, bristle. Swinging elephant nutsack bass bombs. Bash! Pow! Gag! Colombian Necktie’s first demo flies by in ten minutes of action verbs and comic book interjections. You’d think music this visceral would be the most common thing around. It ain’t. Only folks like Trap Them and Converge make metallic hardcore as raw and cathartic; you only get the kind of electricity that courses through “Morse Code” when Kurt Ballou is behind the boards. And these five dudes from Los Angeles did it all themselves.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from Brent A. Petrie.

It says something that Mesa, AZ’s Brent A. Petrie uses his rather account-like legal name for this project, rather than something more descriptive like “Refracted Bionosphere” or “Celestial Mitosis” or “Djentleman Scholar.” Petrie’s just a regular dude. He posts regular dude pictures of himself on his website. He posts his personal e-mail address on his website. He plays everything on Vary Us, Artist himself. On one hand, this exploratory album is all about Brent A. Petrie, Creator of Music. On the other, I hear very little ego in it. No vocals, no flashy solos, no epic song lengths. Just deeply textured, often very heavy soundscapes.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from Deafheaven.

Black metal is a music of destruction, but not as an end in itself. Just as devastating fires are necessary to maintain the evolution of a forest, the outsized musical gestures and inflammatory rhetoric of black metal are aimed at razing the world so that we may begin anew. Strange, then, that it’s only been in the last five years or so that we’ve seen black metal sprouting so many new branches. It’s a sad irony that a music so opposed to orthodoxy should be so concerned with notions of purity.

San Francisco’s Deafheaven are one of a growing legion of young American black metal bands (also including Krallice, Velnias and Liturgy) whose music captures that duality perfectly. There’s plenty of violence in the outpouring of blastbeats and guitars on their self-titled demo (briefly introduced by Vince here), but the violence feels transformative, baptismal, even comforting. Deafheaven’s arcing guitar harmonies lead to conventionally beautiful places; they even fly directly into the sun for the major key flashes of “Daedalus.” It says a lot that the acoustic instrumental “Bedrooms” feels totally at home among the beautiful carnage that surrounds it. It’s just as emotionally complete as the louder tracks.

While Deafheaven’s music shares surface characteristics with the classic black metal sound, this demo is so distanced from Mayhem and Immortal as to be another kind of music entirely. It engulfs rather than tramples, shimmers where so much black metal rattles. These descriptions alone do not make Deafheaven good or bad. But they do amount to an important shift in aesthetic values, one that makes black metal more listenable without taming its spiritual thrust. It’s a shift that has clear predecessors in Weakling, Wolves In the Throne Room and Agalloch. Do Deafheaven offer a take on this strain of black metal that the others don’t? Not really, though they do streamline the sound a bit. Do they offer that same feeling of cleansing that I get when I listen to the aforementioned? Oh, yeah.

(3.5 Horns Up)

-SR

Download Deafheaven’s demo over yonder.

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from The Serpent & The Siren…

When Vince blurbed this Canadian band of bro-dudes about a year and a half ago, he neglected to mention vocalist Clint Homuth’s formidable burping ability. Any deathcore vocalist worth his weight in gorilla shit knows how to “bree-bree,” but on The Serpent & the Siren’s third EP, Orbital Psychosis, Homuth is in a class of his own. There’s no functional difference between his subsonic gutturals on “Vaporizing the Subspecies” and “The Xenophage” and proper, full-voiced belching. Make all the fun of him you want. Nobody is working harder to unearth the 10-year-old humor in death metal culture than The Serpent & the Siren.

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All signs point to “me likey.” Merkaba have their roots in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just like the supremely awesome (and very non-metal) J.J. Cale and Leon Russell. Their lyrics engage Kabbalistic thought and the limits of perception, both non-standard tropes in metal. Their design aesthetic and nomenclature bizarrely combine commie symbols with kabbalistic and occult insignia – rad! Their website provides total transparency through dorky “making of” videos, outspoken diatribes on a variety of social/political/environmental causes, and spiritual manifestos. The four men of Merkaba are nice, smart guys, and they want you to get to know them. They’ve posted their ambitious The People’s EP for free. And why not? Merkaba’s music is their message, and why would you charge for something that you want to disseminate as far as possible?

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‘Cause two excellent free samplers have been released within the last 24 hours:

• Good Fight have released a free sampler featuring songs from Cancer Bats, Son of Aurelius, The Contortionist, This or the Apocalypse, and more. None of the music is new, but if you’re not familiar with these bands, well, here’s your chance to become familiar with them, all for the the low low price of free. Get it here.
• Adult Swim and Scion A/V have also released a free sampler, and this one includes a new Withered song, “Extinguished with the Weary,” plus “rare or unreleased” tracks from Jesu, Skeletonwitch, Death Angel, Kylesa, Torche, Ludicra, and more. I haven’t had a chance to listen to any of it yet, but, again, it’s new or rare music from a bunch of awesome bands and it will cost only the energy it takes for you to click the “download” button, so go get it here.

-AR

It used to be so simple. Bands would approach a music writer, give him a copy of their album, and hope that he’d like it enough to convince readers to buy it. With the advent of file sharing, the equation has changed. The journalist’s role is still to introduce you to great music, and your role is still to acquire that music if you like it. But these days, you can instantaneously get an illegal copy on your computer for free, with no negative ramifications other than a droplet of guilt, easily dismissable.

We could bemoan how the ease of acquiring recorded music for free has made it no more than a loss leader for a band’s merch or live show. But that would be ignoring the fact that illegal downloading is here to stay. Besides, there’s so much goddamn music to listen to than an underground metal band is far more likely to achieve obscurity than commercial success.

As a result, we’re seeing more and more bands giving away full-length albums like they used to give away stickers or demos. And if bands have accepted the album as a promotional calling card, and quality metal labels like Works of Ein have done the same, who are we at MetalSucks to stand in their way? It’s a promotional concept as extreme as the music it involves.

That’s why we’re launching “Freeloader.” Each installment, we’ll review a metal album that the band has opted to let you download both cost and guilt free. If you dig it, return the gift by sharing it widely and often. Deal? Deal.

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