Music Review - Stone Titan - Scratch 'N' Sniff

This one's a heavy sumbitch, I tell you what. Stone Titan are a heavy, sludgy, doom-inspired Metal band that combine everything from Punk to Psychedelic music. Last month, Stone Titan put out a small album (8 songs) of just pure sludge-laden Metal, named Scratch 'N' Sniff. I've found it both entirely different and off-puting, but I keep coming back for more, and I'm finding myself enjoying the madness a little more each time.

Scratch 'N' Sniff certainly isn't for everyone. It's abrasive and offensive. The album cover has a man using a toilet and slitting his wrists, with rainbows and all sorts of brightly colored objects flowing outward. And with song titles like "I Wish I Was Fucking Dead" and "Alaskan Thunderfuck" they certainly aren't looking for anyone else's approval.

The album opens with "I Wish I Was Fucking Dead" and it just slams you right in the face, with a heavy riff and screamed vocals. Then it goes into "Groovy Warhead Commander" where the vocals are mostly growled...until the last minute or so where it just becomes weird guttural screams and noises. After that is my favorite song, "Alaskan Thunderfuck" and instrumental. The riffing and groove on this song have me going back to it the most, it's a fun, noisy raucous. If there is one song you listen to, it's this one. Next is "Faul", and it hits like a kick in the teeth with it's growled vocals and immediate, hard as nails riff. Are you starting to see a trend here? The next song up is "Can O Worms" and it brings in some Hardcore like blastbeats before settling down into a noisy groove. Feedback as part of the riffs in these tracks I think is ingenious, and is a nice technique borrowed from Noise Rock. As soon as "Can O Worms" starts, you have just enough time to headbang a couple dozen times and then it's over, coming in at only 2:18, and then it bursts right into the next selection of aggression, "Miles Away From Sober", which is all of 1:19. It's pure noisy goodness, right up until the end, which is all just...fart sounds. After that display we get "A Brief Overview of Overweight Men", which returns back to the sounds earlier on the album of combining screaming and growling with real doom-y, fuzzed out riffs, and a heavy ass beat. Then we round out the album with the self-titled track, "Scratch 'N' Sniff", which at 6:23 is the longest song on the album. It runs through all the previously explored concepts and just lets them flow through until they've explored them all they could, which turns out to be about 6 1/2 minutes, give or take the 2 minutes of silence before a blast of nothing but noise that finishes out the track.

I've found reviewing this album to be a bit difficult because I'm having a hard time figuring out why I've been connecting with this album so much when usually something like this wouldn't be my style. Truthfully, if you hear one song you've heard them all, all 8 songs on Scratch 'N' Sniff sound roughly the same. Some have different riffs, some have different drum beats, some have more or less feedback, but they mostly sound the same. And I think that's kind of why I like it. Since it's coming in at approximately 27 minutes in length, it's not long enough for me to get annoyed at the same-ness. Instead, Stone Titan come in and just blast pure testosterone at you for just under a half hour and then they're done. Another thing that stands out to me is that the vocals are never in the fore-front. The vocals are 99% of the time screamed or growled, but they aren't mixed in the front of the tracks, they're mixed more like another instrument, while the super fuzzy and distorted guitar takes more of a front seat. A lot of the times with Hardcore music where all they do is growl or scream, my ears will get tired of it real quick because it's all I can focus on. But with Scratch 'N' Sniff, I can focus more on just the experience of the song, blasting me in the goddamn face like a bag of bricks. This isn't something I would recommend for everyone. In fact, even I don't want to listen to the individual tracks, save "Alaskan Thunderfuck", unless I listen to the whole thing and just soak it in.

I looked Stone Titan up, and they're about as Indie as can be. Up to this point, they've released everything themselves. I decided that for an experience like this that is so unique to me, I had to support them, so I went to their website and ordered Scratch 'N' Sniff on vinyl, of which they've only pressed 300 copies. What I did find interesting is that they didn't press a cd. You can either buy the vinyl or you can go to their Bandcamp and buy the digital copy for $10. At any rate, if you're into Doom Metal, Noise Rock/Metal, or just want a new experience, check out Scratch 'N' Sniff.




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Music Review - Dark Tranquillity - Fiction

Dark Tranquillity are one of the most influential Death Metal bands around. Their style is generally classified as Melodic Death Metal, a sub-genre that attaches sensibilities from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal to the rough and tumble genre of Death Metal. Dark Tranquillity, along with At The Gates and In Flames, helped launch a whole style of music, named Gothenburg Metal, after the city in which they're from.This specific offshoot of Metal would later influence would be called the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, that was prevalent in the late 90's and early 00's, with notable bands being Killswitch Engage, Otep, Mudvayne, As I Lay Dying and Avenged Sevenfold.

Fiction is Dark Tranquillity's 8th album, and marks their 18th year as a band. With each release, DT seem to open up their sound more and more, bringing in different elements into the fold that you wouldn't think fit, but are executed so elegantly and effortlessly that it just flows right on through, showing off the versatility of these Swedes. Fiction is 10 tracks of heavy riffage. the riffs in tracks like Nothing to No One, Terminus (Where Death Is Most Alive) and Blind at Heart are as heavy as they come, really showing off that Neo-Classical influenced NWOBHM style. One of the things that first attracted me to DT is that lead singer Mikael Stanne's vocals are understandable, even though he's all over the place, going from guttural growls to raspy screaming, to even clean singing on Misery's Crown. You might have difficulty understanding everything he's saying, but you can tell there is some real depth to the lyrics, and understandable enough to be able to sing (or growl) along with him, which is something that has always distanced me from the Death Metal and Black Metal genres. I might enjoy a song technically, but if I can't understand what the singer is saying then I just can't get into it, and Stanne avoids that in his work with DT.

One of the things that keeps me interested in DT is that they are never content with finding one formula and sticking with it, they expand their sound while still making solid entries in the genre. On Fiction, you'll find an uncommonly large amount of synth and piano work, plunging along these beautiful melodies with the riffs and blast beats hitting hard,  and I think it does nothing but add wonderful texture to the songs. On Misery's Crown, Stanne does most of the song in a pretty nice sounding clean singing voice. In a genre like Death Metal that can easily get stagnant, it's really nice to see these guys playing around with these ideas. Opening up their sound without selling out. Just because Icipher has a really prominent piano doesn't mean you can call it anything other than a solid Death Metal track.

I really, really like Dark Tranquillity, and it was hard for me to pick which album of theirs I wanted to recommend the most, but Fiction has been with me the longest, and I find it one of theirs that I return to more often than others. If you've never stepped foot in the Death Metal genre or you're a die hard fan and are looking for something new and different, you'd be hard pressed to find a better gateway than Fiction.

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