Pitchfork Application
Dear Pitchfork,
My name is Chase Macri. I am 26 years old. I am from Hampton, Virginia but currently reside in St. Louis, Missouri. I have been married for a little more than 2 years. I am a musician and songwriter and am currently in two bands, and have played in many others. I’ve been into music since I was 12 years old, and found a knack for writing about it in college while working at my school’s student newspaper. Since school, writing had been mostly for catharsis and as a way to organize my thoughts, but for the past 6 months I have been pursing writing positions very seriously and started contributing to a local St. Louis music magazine called Eleven. I enjoy writing and work hard at it and I would love to write for Pitchfork.
Let’s get on with it though. Thanks for considering my application. Here is some of my work.
Nails – Unsilent Death
To any given carpenter, nails are good for one thing: getting hammered on. Southern California’s hardcore grind outfit Nails aren’t your typical stainless steel variety because they hammer right back.
Nails are a band that knows how dish out abuse and they don’t mess around. Unsilent Death‘s 10 songs have only three that clock in over a minute and half (and one is only 1:31) with three that just barely make the 30 second mark. Every excess has been cut. Indulgence be damned.
Having come of age in bands such as Betrayed, Carry On and Terror, Nails music share many similarities to the hardcore they grew up playing. Barked vocals, lyrics exploring staunch individuality, righteous anger against repression, and feelings of alienation. Their songs follow the verse/chorus/breakdown format common in hardcore but with speeds even the seasoned dancer couldn’t pick up change to not to mention having very few parts repeated long enough in order to get down. Nails get in, make their point and get out. Hardcore dancing be damned.
Nails are not always so brief though. On “No Servant” they find the time to squeeze in a guitar solo the song would be lacking without and during “Depths” the final breakdown seems to extend endlessly without ever hitting bottom. Even the wordless minute and a half of chugs and noise on the title track feel utterly necessary to underpin the idea that Nails “will never die a silent death.” The unchecked anger and emotion is fist-pumpingly intoxicating. While listening to Unsilent Death all I want to do is take a crowbar to somebody’s head. Unlucky bystander be damned.
The relentless aggression heard on the record is very much encouraged by Kurt Ballou’s (Converge) masterful production. The guy is without peer these days in terms of getting the nastiest, heaviest, and most massive sounds out of every band he puts to tape. Each instrument shines individually and pummels collectively and the few studio effects used are subtle, which is right in line with Nails’ modus operandi of no bullshit excess. Ross Robinson be damned.
The length of Unsilent Death is in itself a testament to Nails’ appreciation for straightforwardness. 10 songs that last 14 minutes. Despite being a young band, Nails avoided the pitfall that many bands who perform shorts songs do not by resisting the temptation to compensate for play time with a higher track count. Nails are not blind with rage, they are cold and calculating. Mistakes be damned.
<br />
Seldom does one come across a band as intensely furious yet composed and put together as Nails. Check out Unsilent Death, or you be damned.
This next review is of a band I have been following for the past 3 years. I had anticipated this record, and I judged it based on their biography and previous work.
Trap Them – Filth Rations
“We are the old graves digging the new.”
The lyrical conclusion of the third song from Trap Them’s latest musical assault, the 12″ EP Filth Rations is an apt insight to Trap Them’s overall sound: Swedish death metal, Manchester grind, Cross-over thrash, pissed-off punk and abrasive hardcore. Trap Them are a summation of old styles filtered through a new lens. Whether dredging old graves or digging new, Trap Them always leave bodies behind.
Filth Rations is 4 songs, and 14 minutes of all out rage. Capitalizing on the song-writing chops honed on 2008′s excellent Seizures in Barren Praise, the new EP is without a bad track. Guitarist Brian Izzi’s song craft is reminiscent of the death metal band Carcass in the way Izzi deconstructs a riff. Instead of laying parts together, songs are created by the complete realization one or two ideas. As a result, the songs have a logical flow and feel unforced. The process works really well for the first two thrashers “Carnage Incarnate” and “Degenerate Binds” especially. Trap Them know how to bring the hammer down, but on the third song, “Dead Fathers Wading in the Bodygrounds,” is where they let the axe fall.
Like “Mission Convincers” from Seizures and “The Iconflict” from 2007′s Seance Prime EP, “Dead Fathers” brings the brood as much as it does the wrath. While the first two tracks are more Georgio Romero in their violence, the feeling of utter dread in the third song is like Dario Argento’s Suspiria. This place (i.e. this town, this country, this life) is fucked and inevitably so because the cycle of exploitation will always repeat. “We are the old graves digging the new.”
It is this dismal viewpoint that sets Trap Them apart from both the hardcore and the metal scene. Vocalist Ryan McKenney’s lyrics have been united conceptually on each record by the story of the down-trodden, fictional town “Barren Praise.” McKenney’s bleak lyrics and the aggression in the music symbolize the anger and anguish felt throughout small-town America. Despite great, prophetic even, lyrics and quality songs, Filth Rations feels too familiar.
McKenney has said that Trap Them aspire to push the envelope and really experiment with their sound by releasing an EP in between each full length, however I feel this EP does not experiment enough. Trap Them outdid themselves on their previous record, which was one of the best releases of 2008, so it is no surprise that this EP sounds more like B-Sides than new material. Great songs that just blaze old trails.
On the upside, Filth Rations leaves me wanting more, and with a full length promised to be released later this year on Prosthetic Records, hopefully I will not have to wait too long. I also hope they dig new graves rather than dredge the old, even if those plots in the ground do feel so good.
For the review of Daughters self-titled record, I wanted to place the record within its immediate context. I briefly mention the band’s biography, and include quotes from the artist to help illustrate how the band has grown. I feel like it gives the record and the review a bit of leverage, but their style is rather bizarre even for regular listeners of metal and hardcore, so I felt it was necessary.
Daughters – Daughters
What most of us who seriously enjoy and pursue listening to music have realized over the years is: bands change.
People quit. They grow and mature. They start listening to different stuff. New people are added which changes the dynamic in the band. Many things happen.
Often this is hard to accept. It is especially hard if a band puts out a really great record that you particularly love or if they are the soundtrack to memories of 9th grade. Sometimes bands begin their career at the top of their game but quickly outlive their relevance and fade away like tv sitcoms with nothing left to say. However, like a sitcom that needed a season or two to really find itself, Daughters have hit their stride.
Daughters newest self-titled album is supposed to be their last. They’ve already announced they’re not going to tour this record, and that they’re pretty tired of the kind of hardcore they started out playing originally. They’ve even thrown out the word “progressive” when describing their evolved sound. It fits. Hopefully that admission doesn’t make you cringe because, as vocalist Alexis S.F. Marshall describes, bands need to change. “You witness bands from when they’re 17 until they’re 40. It’s silly and lazy for them to play the same shit over and over again. We’re constantly discovering more about ourselves musically and emotionally, so we’re ever-changing. To say that Daughters is gonna play 30-second songs and scream for the next 25 years is skewed. We’re becoming different people.”
The evolution is obvious. Listening to the self-titled record released in 2002 versus the one in 2010 is like listening to two different bands. Gone is the spastic, barrage of chaos and high pitched shrieking that was their Ed Gein/Locust-esque early period and in its place is David Yow approved howling, groove filled guitar callisthenics and songs that are as sexual as they are powerful. The sexuality is rough and dirty but isn’t clumsy. Their playing is intentional and precise. Dissonances now have melodic movement that feel so good. This is a band that has mastered their craft. They have their technique down and they don’t be tickling or nothing.
8 songs that are a feast of hooks not lost in the technical prowess of each of the individual musicians. I have caught myself humming the chorus to “The First Supper” ever since I first heard the song. The riffs in “The Hit” are immediately infectious and the swirling, looped guitar on the final track is a dramatic way to build tension to the album’s ultimate release… erm, conclusion. And believe me, it’s satisfying.
Daughters are a band that have changed for the good. They’ve evolved, matured, and come into their own. And if this record is their final partnership, they couldn’t have picked a better bedfellow to take to their grave.
In this last review I attempted to describe how the record sounds in the way the piece is actually written. I wanted the sentences to read like how the music sounds. There are a few abrupt changes, a lot of commas and semi-colons that were intended to feel as abrupt as the record in review.
Psyopus – Ideas of Reference
Backwards it begins, and backwards we end. As though blind, we walk with our hands out, feeling our way through the mess of cacophonous noise while following notes that dart and dive and make every effort to remain unseen. Notes that are not restricted by meter and seem to travel free of the restraints of time. It is like witnessing the creation of Michelangelo’s David but in reverse. Psyopus do not write songs; they dismantle them.
Psyopus‘ 2004 debut album Ideas of Reference is an in depth study in regression. Contrary to other technical metal albums released in 2004 (Dillinger Escape Plan‘s Miss Machine, Pig Destroyer‘s Terrifyer, as well as less-tech Converge and Mastodon with You Fail Me and Leviathan respectively) which, in one way or another, were more progressive and dynamic, and begged the listener to gape in awe of their massive scope and depth and be terrified of the monstrous wall of impenetrable sound they created; Psyopus ripped open a black hole.
Beginning with the vacuum that is “Mork and Mindy (Daydream Lover)” and through all 9 songs that comprise Ideas of Reference, Psyopus make void, as opposed to leaving behind destruction and dead bodies, erasing what each previous section was building with the one that would follow; breaking it down into small parts and examining each for fitness.
While their complexity at first listen seems like random, mashed together parts, each song is an actual song which was a serious anomaly in the aftermath of the “breakdown-core” and “part-core” bands in the early part of the Aughts. The songs contain repetition, unity of key centers, rhythmic and melodic repetition and variation, inversion; like Stravinsky at his more chaotic moments, Psyopus is full of Ideas and fleshes each out nicely in the 9 tracks.
From blast beats to syncopated grooves, to punctuated rhythms that require a calculator or a slide rule to count, Psyopus’ beats are in their second semester of calculus in the school of mathcore bands. But the drums do not build in complexity so much as they work through current problems, rhythmically tearing the song apart as it plays. The melodic instrumentalists move in similar fashion. The guitar and bass are both working out problems of their own, often intersecting, than chasing down separate strands only to intersect again but inverted. Often too bass and drums relegate themselves to the background so the guitar can explore variables only it is fast enough and small enough to fit into. You see this throughout Ideas. Despite the proficiency of Psyopus bassist and drummer, it’s obvious that the guitarist is the real Einstein of the group.
Psyopus’ guitarist Christopher Arp is a quadruple armed, eight fingered mammoth handed man whose fingers can stretch 12 frets and his pinky can move independently of his ring finger. He is the love child of Dillinger Escape Plan‘s Ben Weinman and Morbid Angel‘s Trey Azagthoth that was conceived while on methamphetamine. Arp’s guitar playing is faster than imagination on Ideas and is at times chaotic and discordant, moving minor 2nd notes up and down the neck, to jazzy and progressive playing 9th, 11th, 13th and 211th chords but it is never stagnant. His secret weapon is placing both hands on the fret board and playing two set of melodic lines at the same time sounding as though a second guitarist is present. Do not be mistaken, he is one and he really can play that fast. It is that speed and two-handed technique that give Psyopus such a distinct, almost obsessive compulsive sound. Their minds seems to justify the notion that playing every note possible, as quickly as possible, is the only way to keep the demons away. And if challenging Psyopus is anything like how Charlie Daniels says it is, the demons would do good to stay away.
Pysopus’ Ideas of Reference is an escape, an exercise in reversal, an attempt to erase. With each step forward the band creates backwards momentum, and moving backwards is the future.
—————————————————————————————
In the job posting, you asked for my top ten albums and songs of the year so far. As I am sure you can imagine, each of these lists was over 30 deep before having to sit down and decide what makes the cut. This is what I have really dug so far.
My top 10 albums of ’10 so far:
Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
Mumford And Sons – Sigh No More
The National – High Violet
Rotting Christ – AEALO
Jonsi – Go
Daughters – Daughters
Fuck the Facts – Unnamed EP
Harvey Milk – s/t
Peter Gabriel – Scratch My Back
Nails – Unsilent Death
My top 10 songs of ’10 so far:
Goldfrapp – “Rocket”
Titus Andronicus – “Richard II Or Extraordinary Popular Dimensions And The Madness Of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem)”
The Tallest Man on Earth – “King of Spain”
Nails – “Unsilent Death”
The National – “Afraid of Everyone”
Jonsi – “Hengalis”
Local Natives – “Airplanes”
Cataldo – “6’6″”
Mumford & Songs – “Sigh No More”
Beach House – “Norway”
Thanks for reading all of my application. If you’d like to read what I’ve been working on lately click here. The articles that I have written for Eleven Magazine are hosted on my site too, and you can check those out here. Lastly, back in December (in part motivated by Christopher Weingarten) I did a bunch of 140 character album reviews of new albums I was listening to via Twitter. You can read a selection of those here.
Thanks again. Hope to hear from you very soon.
Chase Macri
