Two from Tortuga

Old Man Gloom
Christmas
Tortuga
Tusk
Tortuga

These are the days of hybrid musics, when all that was once solid concerning genre musics has continued to melt into air. Anyone who grew up on hardcore and metal back in the day knew roughly where one genre ended and the other began. Despite all kinds of cross-cutting influence, nobody would ever mistake Iron Maiden for the Dead Kennedys. But over time, things have got nicely weird, first with the multiple genre blendings popularized in the late 1980s and continuing through regular cross-pollination of heavy music. Tortuga specializes in this kind of hybridity, and if people want to stick it with the moniker post-hardcore (whatever that means), you still can’t deny the range of expression found on it (and, for that matter, kindred spirit label Hydrahead).
Consider these two latest releases.

Old Man Gloom is a collective comprised of members of a lot of Boston-based groups and like-minded friends. For many years, they have released occasional documents (they take their time between releases, which are usually distilled from a year or two’s worth of recorded material) which are steeped in long, hypnotic, heavy trances that seem to have some kind of quasi-ritual significance. They don’t quite create the sonic headfuck of an old Earth recording, but they can approach that level of transformative listening. The lineup for Christmas is Nate Newton (not the old Cowboys lineman busted for mass quantities of dope, but the guitarist/vocalist from the mighty Converge), Caleb Scofield (bassist/vocalist from Cave In), Luke Scarola (electronics), Santos Montano (drums), and Aaron Turner (guitarist and vocalist best known from Isis).

Though they’ve always boasted an intriguing mix of inwardness and brash brawn, of swirling textures and chugging riffs, those elements are integrated better here than on previous releases (though I still have a fondness for the Zozobra EP, I confess). From the opening track “The Gift” – with its high lonesome acoustic strumming, dense electronic hums, and massive guitars – you get a sense of the combinative approach Old Man Gloom takes, the cinematic feel that they work so long to construct. There are also places where the explore a single feel, usually to great effect, with brief snippets of punishing thrash (“Skullstorm” or “Viking Song”) or long, vocal-less noise tracks (including the nearly 20-minute mind control closing track). Whether doomstruck dirges, vast apocalyptic riffery, or ominous glitchy miniatures, a sense of weight suffuses these tracks but shot through with an odd lyricism (which, unsurprisingly, recalls the primary bands of each of these players). The weight and power of the best of these tracks generates the feel of the ancient rock formations of the Southwestern deserts that so captivate this band; and the dissociative qualities of the electronics, the sweet release of the melody, pulls upward to the open expanse of sky.

Tusk is made up of ¾ of sludgemeisters Pelican and a grindcore-influenced vocalist: drummer Larry Herweg, bassist Laurent Lebec, and guitarist Trevor De Brauw (who also plays bowed mandolin, banjo, and keyboards here), team up with vocalist/instrumentalist Jody Minnoch. The brief, five-track EP – Tusk’s second release – apparently recounts the journey of a drifter stranded in a forbidding wilderness of some sort. Not your typical concept-metal record, these pieces are more like separate evocations of a sinister, disorienting terrain, thick with ominous portent that chokes you like the monster riffage of the band.

Like a lot of the more interesting heavy bands around these days, Tusk combines an appetite for punishment and destruction with a convincing sense of pacing, space, and texture. That’s not easy to pull off, for sure. There’s stoner sludge here, alongside grind sensibilities, and epic post-Neurosis sound constructions. Swirling atmospherics are almost always prelude to a speaker-shredding chugfest or a wicked grindcore blast (particularly on “Starvation Dementia”). Yet there are occasionally bizarre touches such as the glitchy guitar frenzies that are quasi-Dillinger or the long psychedelic sprawl of “Ursus Arctus – Walk the Valley.” Ultimately I don’t find this stuff quite as satisfying as Pelican’s music, both because the trio is slightly less convincing with the speedy stuff than they are with sludge, and because Minnoch’s vocals don’t seem top-notch to me (at times he sounds too much like he’s emulating Converge’s Jacob Bannon). But it’s certainly something that fans of this music should check out. The disc also comes packed with multimedia, and if you’re of a mind to do so, you can follow the claustrophobic path of the protagonist through some creepy video accompaniment.