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The Dead C Patience (Ba Da Bing) LP

Have a little patience. Yeeaaahhhh. Fuck that noise. The Dead C remains the most potent rock band on the planet. Patience is their blumpteenth splatter of meditational groove skree since the DR503 tape dropped nearly 25 years ago. Like '08's Secret Earth (Bad Da Bing), it also features four songs -- two long ones, two short ones -- and it's all killer, no filler. Clocking in at 16 plus minutes, "Empire" is a bleary-eyed trudge through the waste we have wrought. Its diffusion of guitar fuzz decay and lost in the dark riffage is as potent and hypnotic as anything the trio has released yet. Robbie Yeats' heavy-as-a-bag-of-bricks drums are unrelenting and omnipresent while Bruce Russel and Michael Morley ring every ounce of desolation and trance-inducing rot from their respective 6 strings. Then come the shorter but no less enthralling "Federation" and "Shaft" before the final "South" offers some almost-solace across nearly 15 mins of stagger and drift, bringing to the fore just how much of an influence these lads have had on Bardo Pond, Sonic Youth and other like-minded souls over the years (or vice versa). Who knows at this point? It's all starting to bleed together. The Dead C is as proper a place as any for ground zero of modern avant noise fuckery, and its shadow still looms larger than ever.

Ghost Opus Eponymous (Rise Above) CD

Ghost (not the Japanese band) is yet another Swedish import in the retro doom scene, a scene that has by now become so saturated with lightweight pretenders and progressive pagan hucksters, that I'd all but given up on its vitality. I still like Electric Wizard and a lot of the heavier side of things (Salome and Monarch kick ass), but I take issue when doom tries to get all witchy and progressive in a cutesy retro fashion, which is what makes this Ghost such a breath of fresh air.

Opus Eponymous is kind of a joke. It's a record enamored of the dawn of the Satanic age in pop culture when rock and metal were inching ever closer to the slope of grim blasphemy. The hilarious/awesome cover art (itself an homage to black metal and the cover of Stephen King's Salem's Lot) is the first hint. The bewitched retro harmonies found all over the record are the second. Their theatrical live show the next.

Somehow these lads actually deliver on the promise of said cover art with a sound firmly entrenched in '70s hard rock and proto-thrash, right on the verge of emergence of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Yet their primary influence isn't British at all. It's none other than the mystic masters of Blue Öyster Cult (who I've always had a soft spot for, of course). This is so much the case that these guys probably should thank Buck Dharma in the liner notes. All bands should probably do that now that I think about.

Combine these post BÖC harmonies and Sabbathian cult fixations with memorable proto-thrash riffs, solid/tight rhythms, some psych and electronic flourishes (remember, Kraftwerk were all the shit in '75) with a virulently Satanic streak that almost feels like camp, and you've got yourself something quite interesting to bang your head to.