Loincloth – Iron Balls Of Steel (Southern Lord Records)
Anybody who's done time in a band knows that one of the challenges is confronting one's own sonic aspirations – you get together with some other people, you want to sound like Slayer meets Dexy's Midnight Runners with a little touch of Digital Underground in the breakdowns but you just end up sounding like Coldplay on a bad day. Or worse, you start a hardcore band because you just fucking love Hatebreed and you actually succeed in sounding like them. It's tough. Try describing your own band and not sounding like you're full of shit. Try. What's doubly difficult is finding somebody to shell out a few grand to put your music on wax in a way that can adequately sum up what it is you're trying to bring about.
That little introduction was not intended as any sort of slight against Loincloth or Southern Lord, but everything that has accompanied the release of Iron Balls Of Steel mentions the band's desire to strip metal down to its bare essentials – no keyboards, no quiet parts, no lead guitar, no breakdowns, no blastbeats. No vocals, for chrissakes. Just a dedication to the sort of bludgeoning suggested when a band is named after a piece of animal hide used to cover the genitalia. The question then is whether Loincloth succeeds in attaining their goal. And having listened to this album several successive times, I feel like I can offer a conclusive, definitive answer: yes and no.
Again, lest this sound like I'm talking shit, this album rules. Each song possesses so many ideas that it's easy to get lost. Weird time signatures and off-kilter riffs abut each other with a fluidity that's uncommon for bands utilizing this degree of technicality. Anchored by the thunderous yet fluid drumming of Steve Shelton (formerly of oddball tech-doom pioneers Confessor), guitarists Tannon Penland (whose recent work with Gauchiste makes a good argument for him being one of the most interesting guitarists in heavy music) and Cary Rowells (also a Confessor alumnus) consistently come up with material that sounds like Celtic Frost playing a medley of all the weird parts of Voivod songs. And anybody who likes metal should probably be sweating nervously at that proposition. In a good way. It's twitchy and unsettled, cerebral without sacrificing heft.
But it's a little more difficult to say whether the band achieves their goal of a sort of metal median, stripped of aesthetic outliers. What they do isn't really accessible, and doesn't exactly (for lack of a better qualifier) rock – it seems more inclined towards a nervous, agitated pacing if we're going to be assigning corporeal metaphors to the music. It manages to steer clear of coming off as self-indulgent or excessive (we can thank whatever dark powers are behind the best metal that Loincloth lays off the guitar solos which they could so easily provide), but it's technical enough that the intellectual side of the music often seems to take precedence over the visceral.
And maybe it's just that so much heavy music has relied on standard tropes that to even suggest a return to a sort of fundamental aesthetic will immediately prime a listener for some Neanderthal lowest common denominator shit. Maybe the listening public has underestimated the music itself. Maybe Loincloth's vision of this music is the real standard to which the genre should be aspiring. Who the fuck knows? I can't really say that Loincloth succeeds in distilling metal to its barest essence (unless it's the basic fundamentals of the style in some alternate dimension where King Crimson informed more of the music than Black Sabbath), as per their apparent goal, but sometimes an artist's intended end result can act as a starting point, a step along the path to something more substantive than their initial intentions might have allowed.