Behold...The Arctopus: Horrorscension (Black Market Activities)
Purchased from David Kuzy at the Spirit Record Fair
One of my co-workers from my teaching days at CAPA High School insisted I listen to a CD he had brought in. He played guitar, Fugazi fan, had a kind of hard rock/metal band himself. I left CAPA in 2008, putting this sometime shortly before that. I had a stereo in my room with a CD player (wish I still did in my current CMU classroom) and would often try to attract the cooler teachers to hang out in my room by playing hip music.
He put on Skullgrid by Behold...The Arctopus. And it was ridiculous. The opening, title cut is a string a fast (mostly) eighth notes, with little discernible order, yet clearly organized and played bionically precisely. The other tracks were just as ridiculously tight and unpredictable. If there's such a thing as a groove with this band, it never settles for long.
I was impressed and would later get a copy for myself. In some ways it amazes me. I can only image how much time they spent working up the material; practice sessions must have been long, frequent, and over many weeks or months.
Is it music to enjoy though? I'm definitely a defender of the idea of music not as entertainment. These guys are definitely not trying to entertain anyone, they're testing limits.
A band somewhat in a similar spirit from Pittsburgh was Don Caballero. I never developed a taste for them, despite being a tight unit with their own sound and ideas. It sounded like an endless string of King Crimson riffs played back to back to me. To be fair, there's a lot of their music I haven't listened to, and I don't offer this as a criticism. It's about me, not them.
So how is this band different? If the ideas rarely settle into place, the meters only occasionally stay the same phrase to phrase, how do I not have the same comment? Well, I do have the same comment. It's kind of an endless stream of ideas, often not looking back. But this trio is so severe, almost ludicrous, that I have to appreciate both its craft and determination.
Horrorscension followed Skullgrid by five years. I think a lot happened in that time. I read that they had broken up, each player involved with other project. I guess they reunited, but with Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers on the drum seat here. It's too easy to use the descriptor "more traditional" when describing this album, but it does not have the extreme turnover of material and ideas that its predecessor had. The pieces sit on a time signature longer, then even then nothing's going to last for very long. Is it due to Weasel's influence? I don't know.
I have the occasional metal head in my classes at the university. I'm thinking of one in particular who was generally surly, acting out the cliche of the pessimistic metal fan. Once when I referred to Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, he chose to speak up to call him a "pompous jerk." (A pompous thing to say, considering this student's work wasn't especially good.) Another time I mentioned my admiration for this band, and he said, "Oh, THOSE assholes."
Which only makes me more in this band's corner, if that's the sort of reaction straightforward metal fans have.
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