Summer Series Part 12: The Grasshopper Lies Heavy - Gun
The relative merits of music that's "tight" vs. music that's "not tight" has raged for as long as young folks have found it more entertaining to pick apart the various minutia of their favorite records than, say, go to school or work.
Among metal kids the debate is usually soundly won by those advocating a decidedly "pro-tightness" stance, if nothing else, by their sheer numbers.
To be good, one would surmise, a band must be tight, which means playing everything perfectly, and having it sound the same live as it does on record.
Now the second part of this, to me, is a false dichotomy as records and live shows are two different beasts entirely, so I've never been particularly concerned if a band sounds the same on record as they do live, as long as both are good.
The first part is a little more of a given, though. Tight is supposed to be good as it implies practice and skill. Looseness implies the opposite of this. Unpractice and unskill, I guess, or something equally icky.
A lot of real tight bands, however, are real fucking boring. A lot of sloppier bands are mesmerizing. When I saw Sonic Syndicate open for Amon Amarth and Himsa they were a drilled machine, with each note, beat, and synchronized jump practiced to perfection. They also sucked harder than just about anything I've ever seen, and I've seen Alien Harvest, so that's saying a lot.
Charles Bronson could, officially, barely play their instruments, but were a fucking blast every time I saw them.
So obviously, there's no hard and fast rule, but metal kids generally seem to hold "the tight" up for reverence.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy pretty much trample all over the notion of tight, preferring a sort of lurching, amorphous power to any kind of precision attack.
And, I should point out, it works.
Many of the songs on the "Gun" e.p. have a loose, almost improvised quality to them, especially with regards to the drumming, which goes for a pummeling cacophony revolving around asymmetrical beats that sound less like a series of compositions which have been practiced to perfection and more like a genuine expression of anger.
The album also has a sort of tinny, flat sound which works for them in kind of the same way that a flat sound works for Amenra. Whereas most bands of this genre tend to go for real deep and thick sounds, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy has a sort of lo-fi sound which compliments the loose nature of the record nicely.
The songs are also pretty short and punchy for this genre, giving it a feeing that's less epic than other slow, heavy bands, but more urgent.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, when compared to other bands like this, is sort of like what punk rock was to classic rock, or what black metal was to, uh... regular metal. As the genre becomes more professionalized, settled, and technique oriented, they subvert all of the general codes of the sound to create something a little more raw and stripped down, turning everything on its head.
This e.p. is a few years old now, but it's just been remastered and rereleased, and they haven't put out anything more recent, and I really like it, so I thought I would go ahead and include it in my summer series anyway. If you haven't already, I would strongly suggest checking it out. It's been in pretty heavy rotation for me for a while, now, and I imagine that anyone who likes the kind of stuff I've been reviewing lately will dig it too.
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login or register to post comments Submitted by herry on Fri, 2010-07-30 12:15.