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Recent Articles By Randall Roberts

  • Rebuilt to Suit
    SLU won't say what it has in store for the Locust Business District.
  • I Want My MP3
    Digital music just gets better. See ya later, major labels.
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    Monarch, 7401 Manchester Road, Maplewood; 314-644-3995.
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    The Duck Room at Blueberry Hill, 6504 Delmar Boulevard, University City; 314-727-4444.
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    Lester's Sports Bar & Grill, 9906 Clayton Road, Ladue; 314-994-0055.

Recent Articles By Roy Kasten

  • The Campbell Brothers
    8 p.m. Friday, February 15 and 11 a.m. Saturday, February 16. Edison Theatre, 6445 Forsyth Boulevard
  • Nina Nastasia
    8:30 p.m. Saturday, February 9. The Bluebird, 2706 Olive Street.
  • Richard Thompson
    8 p.m. Monday, February 11. The Pageant, 6161 Delmar Boulevard
  • Parachute Musical
    9 p.m. Friday, February 1. The Bluebird, 2706 Olive Street.
  • Giant Bear
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Recent Articles By Annie Zaleski

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    8 p.m. Saturday, February 9. Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center, 3301 Lemp Avenue.
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    9 p.m. Monday, January 14. Bluebird, 2706 Olive Street.
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National Features

Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac (Capitol): She's been waiting her whole adult life to make this record, and by the end of the final elegy, she sounds deeply relieved. When Cash's father and mother died, part of the soul of country music — in June Carter, its vaudevillian gaiety; in Johnny, its gravitas — was diminished. Their daughter evokes them, especially her father, through interior recollections of flaws and virtues, and in music that's as inevitable and meaningful as the tragic sense of life.

Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti-): A friend likened this album to consuming an entire bag of organic malted-milk balls, and then licking the bag clean. (Like that's a bad thing.) Sweet and airy and not as good for you as the impeccable indie credits (musicians include Calexico, Giant Sand, the Sadies and Garth Hudson) might suggest, Case's melodies and voice sail just above a reinvented girl-group sound and her strange-noir obsessions.

Metal Health
Devil horns up, 2006
BY PAUL FRISWOLD

In the pale light of the false dawn, our lord lies dead and enemies surround us — so lamented the old woman in the final stanzas of Beowulf, the original heavy-metal song. Eight hundred years later, the song remains the same. But to all those who fear the worst, we advocate repeated listenings of the following albums. Best to put your motherfucking horns up and go out swinging.

Celtic Frost, Monotheist (Century Media): All the classical aspirations, esoteric mysticism and electronic twitchery the Frost flirted with in their long-ago youth finally come together, girded around brutal, beautiful thrashing metal. Magnificent from start to finish, Monotheist demands to be taken as a whole, like any other great work of art; one surrenders to the world and philosophy of the Frost once "play" is pushed. As the last strains of "Triptych: Winter" fade, the world you return to feels changed. Less interesting, less majestic, lessened on all counts simply because this wondrous sound has been stilled.

Khlyst, Chaos Is My Name (Hydra Head): Guitar sorcerer James Plotkin allies with Nordic warrior-seer Runhild Gammelsaeter to create a most-sophisticated vision of internalized, relentless torment. Gammelsaeter's phenomenal pipes serve as your eyes in the endless dark: She wails and screeches, growls and keens, chanting a saga of death and loneliness that festers in the pit of your stomach. Plotkin's guitar spurts and staggers into blind corners, scrapes against beslimed things, splinters fingernails on the unyielding stone of the sarcophagus the duo has built in the cold heart of a lost barrow. Essential listening for the inner-cosmic voyager.

Motörhead, Kiss of Death (Sanctuary): Lemmy is 60 years old, an admitted Viagra user and still — still! — the most metal person on the planet. Consider Kiss of Death: rude lyrics, killer riffs, Phil Campbell's finest guitar work in his long tenure with the band, and the boozy rasp that is Lemmy's head-toward-Valhalla vocal style. Fuck Dick Clark and his antiseptic "eternal teenager" shtick; Lemmy is the eternal teenager. Almost every song he writes is about booze, pussy, fighting or rock & roll itself — and they're all gloriously raucous and loud. In 2007, let's discard the term "rock & roll" entirely and simply use "Motörhead." Same thing, my friends. Same thing.

Harkonin, Ghanima (self-released): Meaner and more ambitious than anything Harkonin has done to date, Ghanima bristles and slays with inventive songwriting, drop-dead-killer riffing and the jawdropping drumwork of Clayton Gore. From the blistering vitriol of "L.ost C.ause" to the sardonic cruelty of "Caligula" to the epic "Sons of War," Harkonin have never sounded better — or more determined to bang your head. They've honed their blackened thrash sword down to a wickedly sharp edge. Glorious and profane, Ghanima is the finest metal album to come out of St. Louis. Ever.

Gorgoroth, Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam (Candelight): Sathanas Gloriam is another maelstrom of whirling steel and steaming blood half-seen in the long twilight of the far North. Infernus' hack-'n'-slash guitar slows briefly during "Sign of an Open Eye," as he churns out a martial riff that kindles a fire in the liver. Of course, this is followed by the merciless "White Seed," a scything attack propelled by the hammers of demon drummer Frost. Gorgoroth's blend of sinister majesty and rawboned hate mark them as Satan's most zealous shocktroops, even after fifteen years in the trenches.

Lair of the Minotaur, The Ultimate Destroyer (Southern Lord): If you open your album with "Juggernaut of Metal" and close with "The Hydra Coils Upon This Wicked Mountain," you'd better bring it like a goddamn apocalypse in between. Indeed, Lair of the Minotaur stomps its collective iron hooves up and down the craggy slopes of Mount Olympus, pulping skulls and grinding various mythological figures to powder with its thrashy, ancient war metal meets filthy black metal overload. Oh, and "Hydra Coils" is vicious and exhausting, a running battle fought in black-and-white at slow-motion, nightmare speed — the perfect end for a grisly Minotaur outing.

Katharsis, World Without End (Southern Lord): A chaotic, bleary, cacophonous riot of an album, purely evil and brilliant. A swirling fog of distortion and catacomb-grade reverb, the vocals and guitars hiss wickedly, the drums thud and snap like a distant murder — and this makes Hellhammer sound polished. And yet there's a sophisticated intelligence to the composition, as songs shudder towards the ten-minute mark with malicious intent. Genuinely disturbing and thrilling, a black mass by and for the deranged. Lovely.

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