One good, one bad, this week. Funny how it's often the 'big' names doing the least impressive work.
Kerry King - From Hell I Rise
I fully understand that not every musician is capable of a world of diversity. Many of us are good at one thing only, and we don't want to show our failed experiments at anything else to other people. Believe me, the impulse to stay in your lane is strong and relatable. Yet, when it comes to Kerry King going solo after all these years, it isn't so much the lack of a new direction that frustrates me as it is how much this feels like he's intentionally cloning Slayer.
We know his writing is going to sound the same as it ever has. He's even warned us that what came after Slayer would essentially be more Slayer. What we couldn't have expected was that he would recruit a vocalist to essentially do an impersonation of Tom. That was the one place where Kerry could have given his new music some degree of differentiation from Slayer, and he decided a new voice wasn't necessary. Maybe so, but when the songs are exactly the same, and the voice is almost the same, so too will be how little I'm going to care. A couple of these songs are nearly identical clones of vocal lines and riffs from Slayer records, which only makes the echo ring louder.
Later Slayer was hit-and-miss at best, and much of the missing the mark came from Kerry's diminishing lyrical IQ. When he finally gets around on this record to writing that he's "in mental retrograde", I don't know if I can come up with a better way of saying how utterly unnecessary this record is to anyone but the most devoted of Slayer fans. I can't even say I'm disappointed by any of this, because it's exactly what I expected. Oh well.
Marisa & The Moths - What Doesn't Kill You
I remember finding charm in Marisa & The Moth's debut album, which was bringing back some of the tones of the grunge age, filtered through a Paramore reality. For album number two, the band has upped the ante across the board. With more songs, more music, and more focus, they have tilted their approach and pocketed the eight ball on the break.
We have talked before about the cyclical nature of music, and how we're due for a grunge revival any day now (it is underway, but it hasn't yet broken through). It will require more than a complete recreation, and instead update the feeling for a new generation. That's what Marisa & The Moths can do, and are able to do, with this record. The guitars are appropriately thick, and the atmosphere gloomy enough, but they remember that Kurt Cobain was essentially a pop songwriter at heart.
Marisa and her cohorts deliver a record that carries the tone, but on tunes that largely dig their hooks into you. Sixteen might be a couple too many, and I don't like the choice to start the record off with a slow ballad, but the core of the record is a lovely throwback to the kind of rock I remember from my younger days. You can hear some Seattle in their sound, and some "Blue Album" in the guitar tone as well, girding a nice collection of hooky and heavy rock.
They have grown, and improved, and made a fine record here.
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