LUDIC LIVE

By this point — 21 years into their career, and six into their remarkably rewarding and productive stint with Southern Lord — you know pretty much what to expect from Earth.  Droning, syrupy riffs delivered in a heavy-minimalist style, echoing guitars over a humming bottom, a crushing low end over a wavering high end repeated in a way calculated to abet altered states of consciousness.  That’s been the pattern especially on Hex and the fantastic The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, and their new LP, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light Volume 1, due out later this month from Southern Lord, doesn’t disrupt it too heavily, although the entire experience has just enough of a parallel-universe vibration to make it distinctive.  Five tracks, none shorter than seven and a half minutes, all with ragged, fuzzed-up guitar and stuttering drum accents, make what’s meant to be a double album (with Volume 2 scheduled for release sometime this spring) sound more like a companion piece to Lion’s Skull.  Dylan Carlson has talked in interviews about the debt Angels owes to British folk and native African music, but while the international flavor is definitely present, to my ears it’s more traceable to Ennio Morriconne’s psychedelic Western compositions, Dirty Three’s outback minimalism (particularly on “Old Black”, with its fatal-sounding strings), and Carlson’s own collaborations with Richard Bishop of the Sun City Girls.  A few of the longest pieces (the title track and “Father Midnight” especially) could almost be mistaken for some of Neil Young’s bleaker, heavier guitar excursions; there’s definitely an electric-Western vibe that puts one in mind of Morriconne and Dead Man.  Arguments over influences aside, though, this is another terrific album from Earth, a worthy follow-up to Lion’s Skull and heavy enough (listen to the guitars on “Descent into Venus” if you don’t think Earth is still a metal band) without sacrificing their unique identity.  I can’t wait for the second volume.

BONUS: Released late last year but unfairly slept on, Magrudergrind’s Crusher EP deserves a lot more attention than it got, particularly since you can get it for nothing.  It was released as a free download to promote the debut of the Scion A/V label; while a blistering grindcore band might not seem like the best fit for a remix-happy boutique label sponsored by a car company, it’s a better fit than it seems.  The DC trio have always been madly eclectic as far as grind goes, tossing in whatever influences, from hardcore to death metal, amused them at the time.  Crusher continues that strategy to good effect:  the first track, “Cognition”, is a near-epic five minutes long and features some insane Electric Wizard-style soloing over its bedrock grind-doom; other songs, while much more brief, mix in Euro-style crust punk, and “Heaviest Bombing” even features a rapped coda, because, well, why not?  Worth getting even if you had to pay for it, there’s no reason not to have this on your hard drive for the price of zip.

DOUBLE BONUS: One of the fun things about being a craggy old fuck is watching history repeat itself.  Only a few years after the thrash revival swept Europe and the west coast of the U.S., it’s already beginning to mutate into various something elses, just like it did when it was just plain ol’ thrash all those years ago and the people involved in the revival were just vague hopes in their fathers’ groins.  One of the things that happened back then was Slayer’s giving a nasty, brutal edge to thrash, while retaining the original form’s irresistible propulsive energy.  No one’s ever going to accuse Norway’s Nekromantheon of being as good as Slayer, but they’re doing something similar with the thrash revival, adding elements of death and speed metal to make something immensely fun and satisfying; if their new album, Divinity of Death (released late last year in Europe, but due out later this month in the U.S.) isn’t anything you’ve never heard before, it’s at least something you’ll want to hear again, as they careen recklessly between thrash and guttural death.  They also make up for their terrible name with amusing song titles like “Alcoholy Terror” and “Gringo Death”, and guitarist Arild Torp (ex-Obliteration) lays down riffs like he’s about to expire.

TRIPLE KITTY BONUS:  The Destroyers of All, the new album on Willowtip from Kiwi extreme-death outfit Ulcerate, finally hit these shores last week.  Since their 2009 album Everything is Fire was one of my favorites, I was pretty excited, and it didn’t let me down one bit.  Some personnel shifts signaled a change in the band’s sound:  Ulcerate maintains the smart, complex, and absolutely powerful death-blast sound of their previous work, but they’ve added a ton of forward momentum; the overall sound is slower and more deliberate, but Michael Haggard’s guitars have started to creep into some extremely heavy, but progressively more fascinating, atmospheric sounds.  The Destroyers of All obviously lifts plenty of cues from the post-metal of Isis and Pelican, but this band is not even a little bit interested in softening up or spacing out.  What they’ve done (anchored by the exquisite timekeeping of drummer Jamie Saint Merat) is to incorporate the screaming, flaying power of their previous work into a framework that allows them to flex their compositional muscles and fill out previously empty spaces with complicated and savage noise.  Incredible work from a band that’s well worth watching.

Judging a movie by its potential is probably skirting the edge of fairness, but the creepy 1947 carnival-noir Nightmare Alley tempts pretty strongly in that direction.  The feeling it finally leaves you with is an unsatisfying one, both in the way it frequently opens up possibilities it doesn’t quite live up to and in the way its final scene, which should be a funereal stroke of fate, is turned into a studio-mandated happy ending.  But it’s still got so much ambition, and takes such a bold and different approach than so many other post-war noir films, that it seems insufficient to leave it with its established reputation as a second-rate crime drama.

Much of the credit for this can be given to the cast, who imbue a fairly predictable story with emotional highs and lows that they wring out of their characters with great skill.  Tyrone Power, playing the cut-rate hustler Stanton Carlisle, had been looking to break away from his reputation for playing swaggering, heroic matinee idols, and saw crime drama as a chance to do that; his performance is more impressive here than in most of his action-hero roles, and shows a willingness to take mean advantage of his lover-man image that’s alternately brave and disturbing.  Joan Blondell, years past her wise-cracking doll years, heads up a collection of top-shelf performances by the women of Nightmare Alley; she imbues what could have been a blowsy stereotype or an easy victim with a sense of intelligence, self-reliance, loyalty, dignity, and, ultimately, reluctant degradation.  But there are other virtues as well:  the movie has quite a striking look, quirky and weird, with director Edmund Goulding and cinematographer Lee Garmes taking full advantage of the sprawling traveling circus set FOX constructed for the film. And Jules Furthman’s screenplay isn’t in the same league as the ones he turned out for Mutiny on the Bounty or his collaborations with Hawks, Bogart and Bacall, but it’s still a solid piece of work.

Power’s Stanton is a sweaty, insinuating hood, simultaneously absorbed with and repelled by the carny life.  In every scene he’s in, he knows people are looking at him, fascinated by his muscles, his cruel good looks, and his patter, and he makes no bones about feeling superior to the rubes in the audience.  He’s forever on the make for new ways to milk them.  Blondell is Mademoiselle Zeena, the show’s resident fortune-teller, running a water-tight act with her dissipated husband (Ian Keith), using a series of coded signals to pull just the sort of hustle Power is looking for.  Still lovely and statuesque in her early 40s, Blondell has settled into a lived-in beauty that sends out waves of familiarity, the intimidating sexuality of a woman who knows she’s past youthful adorability but has still figured out a way to make it so men can’t take their eyes off of her.  The two have an instant and uncomfortable attraction.

Using his easy charisma on fellow carny “Electra” (portrayed by the beautiful Colleen Gray*, who was only an average actress but brought tons of charm to the role, sipping on Cokes and plucking at her fraying fishnets like a fussy teenager when not hypnotizing audiences with her lightning act), he learns about the code used by Blondell and Keith — and its enormous potential earning power.  Blondell won’t sell the act, reckoning it’s her only chance at a comfortable retirement, but Power sets out to pry it from her. This sends the machinery of the plot into action, and Power and Gray, now on their own, begin using the act in increasingly reckless ways.  Once they fall in with manipulative psychologist Dr. Lilith Walker (a magnetic Helen Walker*, the third of the movie’s superb female performances), the tension begins to stretch beyond toleration.  Before pulling back from a brink rarely seen outside the likes of Freaks, Nightmare Alley sends Power into a spiral of doom predicted from the very first shots of the movie.

I don’t mean to overpraise Nightmare Alley; it’s got more than its share of problems.  It’s too long, for one thing, and slows down considerably when it drifts away from the carny setting.  There are moments of excellence in the script (a scene between Power and Blondell in the front seat of a truck is absolutely gorgeous, as is a moment where Keith displays his cold-reading powers to a credulous Power), but it lacks the gritty pop of great noir.  But it’s far better than it has any right to be, and its direction and cinematography hover at the upper edges of good, if they never quite make it to excellence.  It also deserves credit for taking a lot of chances it didn’t have to take.  The construction of the carnival set, and the exploitation of it in some key shots; the risky implication that hulking strongman Bruno (Mike Mazurki) is a homosexual; shading the perfection that was Power with creepy self-destructive tendencies; the gifting of hardworking Joan Blondell with a remarkably deep and meaty role — all of these contribute to making what rightfully ought to be a forgettable noir into something special.

*:  Both Gray and Walker had fascinating histories.  Gray, a real-life farmer’s daughter type, starred in a handful of well-known westerns and crime dramas (noir fans probably know her best as Sterling Hayden’s girl in The Killing), but after having a family, she took herself out of secular Hollywood, making only religious films after the 1950s and once appearing before Congress to lobby for prayer in public schools.  Walker, too, had a promising career (she plays Richard Conte’s wife in The Big Combo, one of my favorite noir films), but she was behind the wheel during a drunk driving accident in 1947 where one of three hitchhiking soldiers she’d picked up was killed.  She never really recovered; she retired from acting at 35, and within a dozen years, she was dead of cancer.