Hosianna Mantra - Popul Vuh

German group Popul Vuh created a style of rock that seems to be an anachronism. Their music harkens back to a spirituality, a meditation, that seemed lost after the Sixties abused Eastern mysticism for it's own end. Perhaps what makes Popul Vuh's music such a rejuvenation is that it is not exploitative. Instead it is a meeting of Eastern and Western spirituality, owing it's languid tone as much to Christian mysticism as Hindu and Buddhist mysticism. The atmosphere of each piece blends the ascetic tendencies of the East with the opulent majesty of the West. The group allows equal room for both aspects to flourish, bridging the two in their metaphysical connection with nature. The result is a hypnotizing beauty. The angelic sound of the album is completely detached from any era or nation or culture. Instead it becomes a universal hymn dedicated to the most profound meditations, an arcane testament to the universes vast mysteries and mysticisms. Every facet of the album seems to convey this. It is as detached from the fads of the time as one can be, abandoning almost all electronics (electronics being the hallmark of German rock). It disregards the stark aesthetics of German expressionism which categorized almost all Krautrock groups of the time. The universality of the composition is further augmented by it's disregard  for conventional rhythm. Each piece, as literally as possible, becomes timeless. The delicate mantras and gentile instrumental play are stretched out to infinity and then compressed back down to a digestible format of rock and classical music. Hosianna Manta will finds itself among the great sacred and spiritual music of the time, alongside such visionaries as John Coltrane and Arvo Part.

Black Monk Time - The Monks

The Monks were likely the first proto-punk group of all time. Though short-lived they created one of the earliest examples in rock music of experimentation with droning and cacophony. Their pieces were dissections of popular culture, as filtered through the eye of a demented revolutionary. The dementia is quite prominent on this album but the question is not "how demented are these people?" but rather "how did society produce such demented people?" The viscous semi-parodies on this album attack all facets of society, attacking a culture which allows war, misogyny, apathy, corruption, addiction and oppression to occur. All of this is done with the vitriol of punk music, only a decade ahead of its time. As the group spews military chants against all these wrongs, percussive crashes and clattering noise signifies assaults each of these targets with a relentless anger. The stand-outs of the album include I Hate You, one of the most percussive tracks, as thumping drums, guitar and organ rattle the bones of the listener. Monk Time places furious chants over hideous droning and monstrous cacophony. Shut Up launches vicious amounts of vitriol, in some vague parody of those who try to stifle free speech. The rough growl is almost cringe worthy in how sinister it sounds. Complication sees the group making a more direct attack on the oppressive authorities who create war. These are the same sorts of mantras that ended the Vietnam War. Ultimately it's the Monks unwavering sense of justice that turns their blind rage into a focused weapon to oppose the evils of society.

The Parable of Arable Land - The Red Crayola

While many psychedelic groups of the Sixties had some claim on the term "experimental music", few were as experimental The Red Crayola, later known as The Red Krayola. They applied a new form of psychedelic cacophony to their music, where the chaos was not an expression of violence but instead the vision of an evolving dreamscape. They fully abandoned lucidity and transformed each piece into a hazy symphony of noise and metaphysical combustions of emotion. In-between each individual piece of this album, rests a what the band has christened a "free-form freakout." These wild freak outs best display the psychedelic transformation of The Red Crayola. The pieces are simultaneously spectral and wildly kinetic. Each piece is a skeleton barely held together by the thin wire of a rhythm, while explosions and tornadoes whirl around it. The first piece, Hurricane Fighter Plane begins with such explosions, only these detonations do not destroy; they create. The swirling noise takes the form of a genesis, shortly before a steady universal pulse emerges, setting the tone of the whole album. The second piece Transparent Radiation introduces a folk-rock element into the mix. Mayo Thompson recites the delirious mantras over the aching backbone of a rustic beauty. The third track, War Sucks, boosts the violence of the album to it's peak. The music thrashes back and forth in a spasm, as if it wants to regain consciousness. The fury reaches such heights that it`s direction becomes uncontrollable and can only be spewed at vague entities and ruinous ideals. It culminates in such a ferocious clash that it seems to be attempting to awaken an apathetic deity. Pink Stainless Tail introduces a persistent drive, only it's been twisted beyond recognition. The vibe is reminiscent of a wild animal, albeit one that is being tamed. The title track unveils a penchant for true avant-garde music. It uses sound to paint a surreal, abstract painting, similar in aesthetic to the works of Jackson Pollock. It blurs the line between noise music and ambient. It becomes paradox of moods, calm but harsh, deranged but subdued. The final piece, Formal Reflection Enduring Doubt, is a mediation on the catharsis of the whole experience. It is the eye of storm, a place of quiet surrounded by chaos. As the piece finally fades out the parable is completed.

Trout Mask Replica - Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

The full scope of Captain Beefheart's music is unimaginable. His demented genius is so skewed and manic as to be almost completely incomprehensible. Perhaps the only real snapshot of what the Cap was doing is the following quote by the great rock critic Lester Bangs: "Captain Beefheart is the most important musician to rise in the Sixties, far more significant and far-reaching than the Beatles, who only made pretty collages with material from the public domain, when you get right down to it; as important, as I said, for all music as Ornette Coleman was for jazz ten years ago and Charlie Parker 15 years before that, as important as Leadbelly was for the blues Cap teethed on. His music is a harbinger of tomorrow, but his messages are universal and warm as the hearth of the America we once dreamed of. That's a combination that's hard to beat." The music of Captain Beefheart is a demented deconstruction and reconstruction of virtually all contemporary styles, ranging from blues to jazz to rock to the avant-garde. Trout Mask Replica defines his art. Short blasts of insane crooning permeate the album, fully showcasing his revolutionary style of twisting frenzies and surreal Dadaist mantras. This revolution defies any conventions to the point of completely redefining the mental state of the schizophrenics and psychotics. It is, of course, his vocals which serve as the cornerstone of this effect. His growl blends the melancholy of the bluesmen before him, the twitching insanity of a mental ward and the primitive roar of the cavemen. This violent hurricane is situated in the middle of an impenetrable vortex of sound categorized by the blend of rock's hard edged noise, the intense rhythms of jazz and the ugly humanity of blues. It's superficial to discuss the components of his music however when the effect is what defines his art. His work is simultaneously hideous and mesmerizing, a natural disaster of sounds and moods. Beneath all this though, his circus freak exterior and his anguished calls of wild animals, there is buried an intimately human dissection of our varied phobias and delusions. He becomes less of a musician and instead becomes a tour guide through emotional war zones,a mad scientist carving monstrosities out of humanity and above all a shaman for the dejected and destructive. As a consequence of Beefheart's unwavering disregard for societal custom and tradition, he became a messiah for a generation who desperately wanted to break free. His music became a catalyst for the left-behinds and the discarded, who would go on begin a revolution that would later be known as "punk." His genesis of creativity virtually inspired all rebellion in rock music. This is ultimately his badge of honour and why his music belongs in the annals of rock's history and music as a whole.

The Doors

While rock has always been a genre practically defined by being a melting pot of other styles and ideas, The Doors were certainly the first to perfect and apply the idea to create a single focused and powerful piece. They created a style that blended an aggressive, fierce interpretation blues best expressed through John Densmore's drumming, the vaguely ethnic, exotic tones of Hawaiian, Indian and Latin music played through Bobby Krieger's guitar, the keyboards of Ray Manzarek, which showed a predilection to a reinterpretation of psychedelia through the lens of jazz and classical and, finally, the voice and lyrics of Jim Morrison, who was a melodramatic and menacing shaman who hid this behind a deep and seductive voice. His lyrics became a ground breaking style that seemed to be Freudian (i.e. psycho-sexual) vision of traditional tragedies;Oedipus Rex placed in the light of modern times.

 The first track on their self-titled debut is Break On Through (To The Other Side). The song is a spasm full of dangerous aggression, the exact type or aggression of aggression that would define punk a decade later. Morrison's voice tosses the song with enough momentum to carry it by itself and the rapid-fire percussion of Densmore only adds to this. As that track finishes burning up its fuel we move into Soul Kitchen. An atmosphere of occult rituals permeates throughout this piece of blues desperation complete with spiritual chants and mantras that invoke visions of world-weary clerics and travelling preachers, though with a Mephistophelian twist. The next track The Crystal Ship is a trance which creates visions that are romantic, pristine, desperate and fearful. Twentieth Century Woman is a another piece of blues, although this time it's re-imagined as a sarcastic ode to a woman  who encompasses all the modern trends of fashionable attitude. The first half of the album ends with one the groups more famous tracks, Light My Fire, an opulent, mesmerizing  hymn dedicated to the most primordial pleasures and fascinations (sex, fire, death). It weaves it's savage instinct around an anxious, albeit refined, tone. I Looked At You reveals a romantic inclination that is buried beneath a mountain of desperate chants and pleas that create an underlying danger;the romanticism is directly tied to the distress and anguish. End Of The Night is nocturnal hypnosis, enticing with it's beckoning melodrama and no less paranoid about it's reality than the more feverish pieces. Take It As It Comes is another melodramatic vortex of passive-aggressive despondency that serves as a recap of the whole album as we move into the final track. The End is the 11 minute opus that all the previous songs have been building up to, set pieces meant to create the mood and exacerbate the devastation of the final song. It begins with the light brushing of faint, exotic guitar while the nervous, schizophrenic percussion serves as the ultimate expression of neurosis in rock. Keyboards sound off in the distance like the warning signals of some unseen tragedy. The guitar picks up, rising and falling as if it too wants to send a message of foreboding danger. Morrison reads off a poem of romantic, sexual and dangerous tension. The imagery is apocalyptic, only the cataclysm is personal , the destruction of the ego. Mystical phrases and assortments of ghostly landscapes are carved out of this eternity. The piece stretches itself to the distant past and back to the present. As the song crescendos the percussion becomes more unpredictable;the guitar acts up in a frenzy. The tension comes to a fever pitch and all the sound engages in a melee, colliding and exploding before all energy is expended and the piece slowly descends into unconsciousness, before finally snuffing itself out with a final rattling moan.

The Velvet Underground & Nico

When creating a retrospective on the history of alternative rock there is no better album to look at than the one which arguably created the entire.There's really no other way to phrase that alternative rock as a genre in it's own right was created the day this record was cut. No other album in this history of rock music as a whole, has had the same impact of this one. Every stream of thought related to the alternative rock scene can be directly traced to this album. Recorded in '66 this album created an entirely new idea of what it's music could do. The attitude was subversive, independent, esoteric and aggressively nihilistic. These traits would, of course, undergo a metamorphosis that would leave the genre of punk in it's wake. There's almost nothing new to be said about this album that hasn't already been said. It's reached a point where any group that even tries to be "alternative" owes an intrinsic debt to the The Velvet Underground, whether they know it or not. This significance is less the result of the sound they created and more by what the album represents. It would superficial to talk about the sound without mentioning this. The Velvet Underground created a work which exposed and dissected the psyche and the mentality behind any urban child. It wanders aimlessly at night though back alleys and it unveils a world where decadence and debauchery are the yin and yang of it's existence. Every hedonistic pleasure ranging from drugs to sex are transformed into nauseous rituals and every second of existential aching becomes a new rite of passage for the souls who stumble through their haze.

 Aesthetically, the album is composed of haunting, spectral ballads and rabid, frenzied jams. The opening track Sunday Morning is a seductive ode to the pleasure of gentle coming off a high. It is, essentially, the promise that happiness is the only prize for entering this realm. It hides its scars and lures the curious in. It is from this point that album is characterized by much more grim visions of humanity. The work has quickly revealed that it is not a paradise and we are left with only blunt, informal visions. The second track I'm Waiting for the Man is a percussive and obsessively rhythmic piece which serves as a look into the desperate, daily life of a junkie. The tone is simultaneously desperate and apathetic, the key to understanding "Reedian" poetry. The third track Femme Fatale serves as our first real encounter with Nico, whose gentle lullabies betray the sinister intentions she has. The effect is that we are left not sure is she an angel or a demon or simply the remnants of some ghost from some other time. The result is hypnotizing. The next track Venus in Furs delves us into much more uncomfortable territory. It unveils the mind set of the sexual sadists and masochists. It is debauchery at it's highest and it's lowest. The austere grating of viola and the slight touch of raga strip away the sexual appeal and leaves only a raw libido. This decadent display is followed by Run Run Run, a perfect expression of how desperate these lives are. It is, essentially, a series of short, but effective fables from the city. The mantras are chanted here with a new sense of energy. It is the trance of the city being broken, while the pulse remains intact, driving the piece forward. The first half of the album concludes with All Tomorrow's Parties, which serves as both another ritual dedicated to the nihilistic hedonism of this lifestyle and as a funeral for all the people involved. The second half of the album begins with Heroin, a clear contender for the most cathartic song on the entire album. It serves the orgasmic release of the all the tension, neurosis and paranoia that has been building up to this point. It creates a tone that is both warm but also hurtful, mimic the delirious sensation of it's title. The track is gentle one moment then destructive the next, blurring the line between the abrasive, ugly dirges and the gentle, comforting ballad. We continue into There She Goes Again, another parable, this time detailing the brutality and violence present in this world. The tone similarly detached from it describes, demonstrating the same apathy that has come to characterize the tone of all these stories. The next track, I'll Be Your Mirror, is another ballad from Nico, who gives of the same lascivious character. She is still an unknown creature, either a predator or a saviour  The personality is as ambiguous as before and she still begs us to follow. The underlying simplicity of the track and it's folk leanings only  make us more entranced and wary. The penultimate track is The Black Angel's Death Song, practically the definition of a funeral rite. It's fable on morality, told in all it's bleakness and paranoia. It is litany that plays as the Black Angel comes and it's grating delirium weakens us and begs us to follow. All the sickly and poisonous atmosphere is then shattered by the final track, European Son. This final piece is monstrous attack on everything we've seen up to this point. It attempts to destroy  this entire creation through sheer aggression and engages in a cacophony that is the final chaos of this draining album. Ultimately, the album is an expression that is equal parts grim, violent, decadent and sensual; a paradox that is, essentially, the pieces leitmotif.

Introduction and Explanation

The purpose of this blog is to help foster and promote an appreciation of rock music that falls within a more "alternative" domain. That's not to say that every topic of discussion is going to highly esoteric and obscure in nature, but rather to create a better understanding of the thoughts I feel lay behind the idea of "alternative" acts. There are several reasons I chose to focus my attention on this. First of all, more mainstream acts already have a wide variety of coverage, simply as a by-product of being mainstream. Secondly, I personally find alternative acts to be more more interesting. Rock music as a whole is not a particularly artistic genre of music. It's "innovations" (or rather, pseudo-innovations) are usually derived from entirely different genres of music. In a sense rock music is less a genre in it's own right and more an assimilation of various ideas that originate from entirely different schools of music. By this point, rock has already adopted ideas and principles from electronic music, classical, jazz ,blues and the avant-garde, to name a few. I believe alternative acts help push rock beyond simply adopting the inventions of other genres and instead promote a much higher degree of original thought and aesthetic development. Consequently, a rather low bar of quality is placed on rock music and the idea of assimilating other genres ideas is considered as ground-breaking as actually coming up with entirely new ideas. This is, of course, promoted by the fact that the average rock listener has absolutely no knowledge of rock's history, let alone music history, and, thus can't distinguish between invention and convention. This is group of people who believe that psychedelic music is made up of whimsical pop tunes and people who equate commercial success with actual talent. Most importantly it's a group of people who, despite professing a love of rock music, still think of it as mere entertainment and not a real form of artistic expression. With this blog I hope to increase awareness of less well-known acts and, hopefully, promote an appreciation of rock's alternative side.