Primitive and Deadly
Earth
Southern Lord
Clearing the Path to Ascend
Yob
Neurot
Earth and Yob are both trios from the Pacific Northwest led by middle-aged men with some kind of attachment to the riffs and textures of early metal, a preference for slow tempos and some implicit understanding of songs as life-forms, with all the action at the deep center.
Which is to say that sometimes in Earth’s Primitive and Deadly and Yob’s Clearing the Path to Ascend — most times, really — the beginning and the end are phases of warming up and warming down, while the middles are rich and complicated. And so, the listening experience is always a gradual procedure, never everything at once. You approach, you engage, you get down to the good stuff, you withdraw. You almost want to shake hands with each record after you’re done.
Earth, from Seattle, is the more stubbornly slow and droning band — its drummer, Adrienne Davies, often sounds as if she’s picking up and restarting in the middle of a bar — and a bit broader in its range of suggestion. Led by Dylan Carlson for 25 years as a mostly instrumental trio, Earth became a mellower operation after 2000. It had already followed hard rock back to root causes, but it started letting in blues or country or folk or ambient elements, sometimes adding a cello or a piano or the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, sounding like a cross between Neil Young with Crazy Horse and Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way.
Now, Earth is reconciling its two moods, rugged and contemplative, and doing something it hasn’t done since 1996: Hire vocalists. Mark Lanegan, once of the Seattle band Screaming Trees, appears on a few tracks, sounding like dread and survival and the white blues; when he sings, you almost feel a crust forming. But the clear-voiced Rabia Shaheen Qazi, of the younger Seattle band Rose Windows, suggests something fresher on From the Zodiacal Light, a long song at the record’s tasty heart, essentially a series of long approaches to beautiful choruses, with dark words and uplifting chord changes.
Yob, from Eugene, Oregon, led by the singer and guitarist Mike Scheidt, likes slow tempos but doesn’t necessarily need them; it puts more emphasis on technical flourishes and stays a bit more within the minor-key, semi-operatic and philosophical traditions of doom metal. (In the lyrics of one track, there’s a reference to Rigpa, the Tibetan Buddhism concept of awareness; in another, bits of recorded Alan Watts lectures on consciousness.) Scheidt puts rhythmic flourishes into his guitar playing even when the tempo drops below 60 beats per minute, and sings in a high, almost Geddy Lee-range voice, letting phrases tail off into vibrato, and drops into guttural barking for contrast.
There’s lots of opportunity for contrast. This is a record with four tracks, each 11 to 19 minutes long; a bridge might not arrive for eight minutes, and there might be a quiet section lasting for three or four. But like Earth, it’s a stealth band, working on the rack of riff and repetition, moving slowly toward loud, intense, orange-sky beauty. In the passages where a song’s energy and information really lives, when it all matters most — listen to the middle of the track called Marrow, and think about its title — few bands deliver as completely.
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
Seen It All: The Autobiography
Jeezy
CTE/Def Jam
Jeezy — back when he was Young Jeezy — was an insurgent once, a challenge to hip-hop norms. In an Atlanta that was becoming extremely lyrically minded — thanks to T.I., Gucci Mane and others — he was obstinate in his reliance on character, avoiding punch lines and complex rhyme in favor of sheer urgency and tons of vocal charisma. His rasp and his directness have always been his greatest strengths.
That rasp connoted gravity and rawness, but modern Atlanta has found new ways to express itself. In an era of eccentric vocal stylists like Young Thug and Migos, and melodic-minded hybrid rap-singers like Rich Homie Quan and Future, Jeezy is an elder statesman, purveyor of an outmoded style.
In that case, Seen It All: The Autobiography, his fifth major-label album, is a nostalgic document harking back to bygone days, not too different from the mid-2000s albums on which he made his name. It shows Jeezy as he’s always been — not a clever rapper, but an urgent and convincing one — and stoically avoids bowing to the sounds of the moment.
That means drug-dealing boasts (“‘Bout to get a cooking show on Netflix!”) and street life memoir (“Phone ringing all day and night like a telethon”) delivered in that reliable purr. This is a strong, if unimaginative album — Jeezy is confident in what he’s done, and uninterested in tweaking it. He may not drag his words out as alluringly as he once did, but the sternness of his delivery is intact.
In moments, you hear Jeezy betraying the slightest bit of concern about the city’s changing sound, like on the dreadful AutoTuned hook on 4 Zones. He’s far better on Seen It All, a duet with Jay Z about hardscrabble beginnings. And Enough is a motivational anthem on par with some of Jeezy’s best early work, a song that relies on the firmness of the message, not the quirkiness of the delivery.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
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