REVIEW: COUGH / WINDHAND SPLIT (REFLECTION OF THE NEGATIVE)

Reflections of the Negative features two colossal doom bands from Richmond, VA, both on Relapse Records. I just listened to this split album a couple times on repeat and I’m pretty sure the music impregnated me and a baby demon is now forming in some egg of sulphur in my tummy. Not gonna be fun shitting that out, but this split was totally worth the future discomfort.

The opening of Cough’s 18 minute track, “Athame,” sounds eerily similar to the music created by the coven of black-toothed witches in The Lord of Salem, a film I found tedious and completely uninspiring. This song, which plods defiantly into oblivion for nine minutes before switching gears into an even more unpleasant circle of hell, features more suspense and chills then that film mustered in 101 minutes. The connection to witchcraft isn’t just a convenient bridge into mentioning my recent film reviews either, as an “athame” is a ceremonial dagger used in many neopagan witchcraft traditions. Like the dagger, the percussion cuts through the suffocating fog of black smoke just enough for Parker Chandler’s strangled vocals to sneak through the forest of briars. Halfway through the song, when the lyrics announce “the time has come for sacrifice,” you can picture a procession of hooded figures lead by a single dying lantern flame to a black altar crafted from burnt bones and warped wood. The droning chant, soaked with reverb and haunted to the core, accompanies pummeling drums that rejoin the heavy groove of the main riff leading into the thirteenth minute. It’s all entirely captivating, a testament to the power of one ungodly riff and a whole lot of phantasmal atmosphere. Try listening to this in some woodlands after dusk without something dead rising from the rotten leaves and muck.

As the album’s chaser, Windhand is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, if the medicine is actually laced with the blood of a leprous monk and poison sumac. The riffs are similarly massive and leaden, but while Cough just try to get through the woods alive, Windhand seem to have found the safest clearing and stroll there a little bit. Sure, they’re surrounded by the skeletons of ill-fated travelers, but the way the light bounces off their skulls and femurs is kinda pretty at this hour. “Shepherd’s Crook” features some soaring lead guitar and Dorthia Cottrell’s vocals wind between the pine trees to awaken some ancient evil. But of the two songs “Amaranth” leaves the largest impression in the mud, with resourceful drumming from Ryan Wolfe powering the attack. it turns out that Amaranth is a blossoming weed that has symbolized immortality reaching back to early Greek mythology. Windhand’s music is similarly everlasting, as you can find roots of this music in ancient incantations and the rawest forms of blues. Both of these bands show up at the top of their form on this split, making it essential listening for fans of doom, sludge, or extreme occult rock. When that demon egg hatches I’m gonna name it Coughand, and this album will be his lullaby.

Listen to the album over at Bandcamp and feel the black magic consume you:  http://coughwindhand.bandcamp.com/album/reflection-of-the-negative

And order the beautiful vinyl LP from Relapse over at:  http://www.relapse.com/label/catalog/product/view/id/83006/s/reflection-of-the-negative-lp-white-and-black-splatter/category/52/

REVIEW: EVIL DEAD / LORDS OF SALEM

I moseyed down to a local cineplex yesterday for a twin-bill showing of Evil Dead, the remake (re-imagining, whatever) of the Sam Raimi classic, and The Lords of Salem, Rob Zombie’s newest flick. I just wanted to share a few thoughts on each movie.

Evil Dead establishes early that the viewer should not expect shlock or camp. Apart from a few minor bloody fingerprints of dark comedy, this is deadly serious start to finish. The screenplay (collaboratively written by four people, including director Fede Alvarez) works hard to illustrate the dramatic weight of each relationship impacting David, played by Shiloh Fernandez. From his junkie sister to his nurse friend with sexual tension to his childhood friend who has since soured on him, there is plenty at stake when most of these people die. Interestingly enough, his girlfriend seems to carry the least dramatic significance, which just never bodes well for a character’s fate. The dialogue in these early scenes is pretty stilted, and you can feel the wheels churning as they rush to introduce all relevant information before the bloodshed kicks in. When it does, where your ponchos, ‘cause it gets messy. This movie has a serious vendetta against human limbs. There are some really solid set-pieces with nasty FX and slimy sound, like Jessica Lucas’ creepy, cringe-inducing turn. Evil Dead aims to terrify, disgust, and delight gorehounds. While the scares aren’t as effective as the gruesome effects (which mostly avoid the trappings of bad CG), this is still a genre offering I would encourage horror fans to give a chance, even if they are reluctant due to the pedigree of the original film. But Evil Dead is a totally different animal. For instance, it doesn’t have “The” in the title. Jane Levy, who plays the recovering addict Mia, steals the show with her deranged, physical performance. She drools, crawls, screams, and creepily grins her way through violent personality shifts in the most crucial role of the film.

I then used my stealth skills to crawl on the ceilings and jump shadow to shadow to find my way to The Lords of Salem theater. Rob Zombie is one of those directors (like Tim Burton, David Lynch, or Alejandro Jodorowsky) that has his own stamp of style, a mark (of the devil) that is undeniably his own. Unfortunately, his trademark gallows humor only pumps out in inconsistent spurts, and we’re left with a film that is both thematically sprawling, physically claustrophobic, disinterested in narrative clarity and the relationships between its characters after the second act, and equates to a long stare at a painting. As the lead character, a radio DJ with a mysterious connection to Salem’s bloody history of witchcraft persecution, Sheri Moon Zombie is entirely passable. The range required for the role isn’t tremendous, but she’s appropriately amiable to receive our sympathies, and a victim of circumstance entirely beyond her control. The real trouble is that all the work to develop her character is discarded as the “LET’S SEE HOW CRAZY THIS CAN GET” approach takes lead, resulting in an eye-rolling number of dream sequences and inexplicable location changes. It feels like this was written in the same day-to-day manner as Lynch’s Inland Empire, a similar occasionally captivating but mostly deeply flawed film that left me disappointed. Most of The Lords of Salem felt like a reason to see how hot Rob Zombie’s wife is, and how awesomely her character’s apartment is decorated. Stylistically this film definitely aspires to be The Shining by way of Rosemary’s Baby, as directed by Jean Rollin, who never saw a lady draped in sheer cloth he didn’t feel compelled to film. I have long admired Zombie’s passion for film, his jubilant cinematic voice that brings a refreshing, approachable quality to a grindhouse mentality, but this lumbering, tedious film was barely worth my sneaky zero-dollar admission fee. But hey, genre heroes Ken Foree and Dee Wallace camp it up and have some fun, so that’s cool, right?