SOUNDTRACK: ENDON-Through the Mirror (2017).
Endon’s Through the Mirror is one of the most punishing musical experiences I’ve ever had. They opened for Boris a few months ago and their live show was incredibly intense. It’s no surprise that their album is, too.
When I was looking at their merch, this guy came up behind me and said, that their debut album, MAMA made him want to kill himself. But this album was different, more enjoyable. I thanked him for saving my life.
Endon hail from Japan and call their music “catastrophic noise-metal.”
The first song is the five and a half-minute “Nerve Rain.” It is, simply put, a wave of noise. The guitarist plays a loud distorted guitar–very quickly. Non-stop for 2 and a half minutes. It is accompanied by fast pounding drums. In the background there are all kinds of warbling electronic noises. After two and a half minutes the noise ends abruptly. It starts again exactly the same after a few seconds. This continues for the rest of the song, stopping and starting at more frequent intervals. It is relentless. Somebody please put the entire Republican party into a room and play this at them for 24 hours.
The second song, “Your Ghost is Dead” introduces a singer, Taichi Nagura. The drums are twice as fast, the guitar is also incredibly fast and when the singer comes in, he uses a complicated mix of cookie monster vocals, screams, wails and desperate lashing out. I have no idea if there are any words to these songs or if he’s just making noise. Sometimes he’s buried under the rest of the noise. Interestingly there’s even a cool somewhat mellow guitar riff in the middle of this song–if you removed it from the noise surrounding it, it would be very catchy. About half way through the song, the noise stops, the riff comes through clean and then Taichi Nagura can be heard crying. And then it all takes off again.
“Born in Limbo” slows things down with an interesting drum beat. But the bulk of the song is manipulated sounds and effects–primarily screams, from both tapes and the lead singer. In fact Taichi Nagura’s screams are rhythmic and strangely catchy. There’s a Mike Patton component to this song for sure. The middle of the song even has a somewhat traditional (wailing) guitar solo.
“Pensum” is only 90 seconds long and it is 90 seconds of pummeling noise. It’s followed by “Postsex” which is more of the same with extra focus placed on Taichi Nagura ‘s vocals which are varied and run through a gamut of pain.
“Perversion Til Death” is 10 minutes long. It opens with some crazy fast drumming and a slow melodic guitar melody that’s more or less buried under a wall of noise. This song is a lot slower and more ponderous than the others, with some heavy drums, squalling guitars and screamed vocals just done at a different pace. Until the final two minutes which are just heavy pounding.
“Through the Mirror” has some interesting guitar ideas buried under a wall of squealing feedback. Just before the song turns into a breakneck hardcore pace there’s a ten second respite with an interesting riff and nothing else. And then pummel. Around three minutes the noise drops away and you get super fast drums with some electronic sounds and Taichi Nagura all-out screaming but in that strangely melodic way again. It lasts for about 30 seconds before ethe breakneck noise (and growling takes over). The song slows down with him weeping as pleasant guitars take over. While these pleasant chords continue playing through, he starts screaming at the top of his lungs in mortal pain.
“Torch Your House” ends this disc with a 9 minute epic. The song begins quietly, with some pretty guitars and gentle washes of sounds. They explore chords for about 2 and a half minutes before the drums and noise take over, but the guitar solo is able to pierce through the wall of noise. Taichi Nagura screams throughout in bursts, but the guitars stay largely guitar-sounding not noise-making. Around five-minute the whole things turns into a rocking metal song. For the last minute or so, it all mellows out with an acoustic guitar playing the melody. Until the last 30 seconds when the noise returns over and a five-beat drum pattern as the song crashes to an end.
Musical endurance.
[READ: September 23, 2017] “Who’s Laughing Now?”
I have enjoyed most of Tom Bissell’s writing in Harper’s He writes about a wide array of things, including entertainment. A while back I read a lot of his older articles and it was enjoyable to read things hat were not current anymore. And that may be why I didn’t enjoy this article as much. It is too current. Too painful. I can’t believe he hasn’t been impeached yet.
Bissell suggests that trump and SNL were made for each other. He was the rare novelty guest to have hosted twice. Once in 2004 to promote The Apprentice and again in late 2015 to soften perception of a presidential campaign widely seen as alarming. Some would accuse SNL of normalizing him after this (although his being a celebrity of three decades certainly had something to do with it).
Both Times he was on ratings were great so… who used whom?
Like trump, SNL has had woman problems. I did not know this but apparently John Belushi wouldn’t perform sketches written by women. He said women were not funny. Asshole. SNL has also struggled with race (obviously).
trump was profiled in the New York Times in 1976 (a year after SNL premiered). He claimed he was worth $200 million (even though his taxable income was $2,200 week). He claimed to be Swedish, but he is German. He claimed he graduated at the top of class at Wharton, but he received no honors from there. “Three lies, none challenged. And off we go.”
Through guile and chutzpah he pulled off some brilliant development deals in Manhattan–even though the properties were technically controlled by his father.
Then there was a series of failures–a lawsuit for discrimination, a disastrous foray into Atlantic City, a lawsuit against the NFL, near bankruptcies, and divorces.
He began his foray into politics in 1988 when he wandered into New Hampshire and people liked him even back then. He even said “If the right man doesn’t get into office, you’re going to see a catastrophe in this country in the next four years.” Not sure who that right man would have been at the time, but as Bissell points out, “All that was missing were boats of his investigators scouring the Kenyan highlands for clues.”
Phil Hartman played trump in 1988. It’s not a good skit. Hartman sounds nothing like him and it’s all about being rich. The following year Chevy Chase spilled popcorn on trump in the audience.
This was an interesting observation:
“How sincere trump’s political aspirations have ever been remains an open question, but it bears noting that his flirtations with the electoral process have tended to coincide with personal downturns.”
In the 90s trump was nearly destroyed–he as in hock for close to a billion dollars and had to borrow money from his siblings to cover office expenses.
NBC saved him (damn you, NBC). He made $50,000 an episode for The Apprentice: “he would role-play the world’s greatest business man for NBC.”
“NBC chose to depict the trump Organization as a firm with global wingspan and trump himself as a chiefly executive with a peerless eye for talent. This squares with the estimation of few outside the trump Organization.” In the opening narration, he claims that he is the largest real estate developer in New York. But he wasn’t and never was.
In that 2004 monologue he was kind of charming and seemed in on the joke–they audience even liked him.
At the end of that episode “he can be seen embracing Seth Meyers who thirteen years on would emerge as one of his chief comedy antagonists..and then there’s trump shaking hands with, of all people, Questlove from The Roots. And then there came a great earthquake and the full moon became like blood and the stars of the sky fell to the earth.”
Despite the liberal nature of SNL, Lorne Michaels has said half the country voted for Trump and our show is for those people as well. Indeed there are many jokes bashing liberals as well especially in Weekend Update.
But Bissel is more interested in the portrayal of presidents.
Chevy Chase did Gerald Ford with no make up. Akroyd’s Carter sometimes had a mustache.
Reagan introduced prosthetic comedy: Piscopo, Hartman and Harry Shearer all did Reagan.
Darrell Hammond’s Bill Clinton was more accurate but Will Ferrell’s Flinty yet childlike George W. Bush had the strange effect of making the man himself seem more sympathetic.
Alec Baldwin’s trump has been most like Dana Carvey’s H.W. Bush–an impression of an impression. A presidential impression that begins in a place of phonic approximation but escalates to spasmodic, recursive mania. The difference is that Carvey was silly and affectionate while Baldwin’s every gesture and tic as trump seems shaped by scalding bile. He describes his impression as that of a man “who’s always searching for a stronger, better word and he ever finds it.”
When SNL invited him to appear in 2015 he was polling at 25% among Republicans and about 6 to 8 % of the American public–about the same amount of people who thing the moon landing was faked. “The idea that seven months later Trump would clinch the G.O.P. nomination, much less become president, still seemed like it belonged to cryptozoology.”
They satirizes a trump presidency by showing Ivanka trying to gild the Washington Momentum: “Its strange watching dystopian satire unblinkingly performed by the very people it is attacking. Is this what descent into autocratic kleptocracy looks like, with thieving mountebanks joking about what they’re going to do while an audience overwhelmingly opposed to them politely applauds?”
Bissel says that this year’s past season was its most relevant and funniest in decades. Weekend Update has been sharp and the short films and fake commercials were better than ever. “But the live sketches fell short. An SNL sketch often turns on a single idea and works it to the point of sublimity or exhaustion.” Of course it is live so no one will know if it will work until it is going.
I did not know this: Many fully propped and staged sketches are cut after the dress rehearsal, when they’re tested before a live audience.” How do they still have so many bad sketches then???
Bissell ends with this sad idea.
The left keeps wondering whether satire might save the day, having mistaken it for a potent for of counterattack…. But trump’s brand of comedy–cruel and joyless and denuded of laughter–has become his cultural revenge.”
Bissell says that when trump makes fun of people and subjects that liberals have walled off from ridicule that “he knows perfectly well what he’s doing, the table he’s turning.” I’m not entirely sure trump knows what he’s doing at all.
And I just want him gone, in whatever way is the quickest. #RESIST #ITMFA
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