Lurker of Chalice – Lurker Of Chalice

Wow, what an insane month it has been. Things I have come to notice and learn: that a caffeine withdrawal headache feels like your brain is being slowly peeled off your skull, that the vigorous passage of bouncing traffic down the hill outside one’s window makes for a much better waking alarm than any clock radio, that palm hearts come in cans, that an entire can of palm hearts may be consumed in one sitting without any intent or conscious desire on one’s part to do so, and then whammo, all you’re left with is an empty can and a vague sense of mid-level indulgence. Moving on.

The Pirate Slut business cards will look like this album cover.

WHO?

First off, we’ve got my good friend Bob to thank for this requested, out-of-sequence, review. Back in the hazy days of early college, I was in my hometown on a brief furlough, and as per usual soon found myself poleaxed by food and THC, reclined in Bob’s cranked-back passenger seat, left about as graceful and quick to move as a sack of potatoes. Bob was driving us back up Whitney; we’d enjoyed a revelatory pizza and buffalo’ed chickentender dinner at Yorkside, leaving me completely at his musical mercy. As I’d ridden in Bob’s car before, but been previously contrary to any sign of guitar crunch or dissonance, or the slightest hint of shrieked or growled vocals (“how can you even tell what they’re saying?” I’d ask, “and moreover (I didn’t actually say “moreover”), doesn’t it all just sound like noise?”), I’d managed to avoid metal. But before I had the presence of mind to grouse, he set to blasting me with some black metal, Emperor to be specific, harsh as snapped cartilage and loud enough to back-score Gotterdammerung. His speakers are adjusted deliberately that all midrange is swallowed up by a raging mudslide of drum and bass and treble drone that fills up the car and seals you in like vacuum packing, leaving you blast-beat-rattled and breathless.

We were somewhere around Grove Street when the drugs took hold. I could hear pristine production and furiously skilled musicianship fighting its way out of the mire, and soon my brain reshuffled every musical note and layer into something else, something that was melodic, complex, and truly exhilarating. It’s the way other people hear Shostakovich. It was like finding a dumpster that was in fact filled with pristine cheesecakes. All I could do was lie there and soak it in, and croak “this…is…amazing.” Something else, too, piggybacked into my brain that day, astride that music, and wormed into through the eardrum. And that was: the blinking realization that extreme music was, well, good. Great. You didn’t have to harbor some churning dark puddle of hatred, or enjoy getting bounced and kneed around at shows by sweaty hulks with intent expressions, in order to appreciate it on a deeply satisfying level. It was only a matter of time, then, that I’d leeched a portion of Bob’s music library, and that’s where I come to Wrest.

This is the artist, as well as the world’s most effective emoticon.

“All I do is go to work, come home, make music. Not much else worth doing.” – Wrest, re: his prolific output

“I fucking hate this life.” – Wrest, re: the power of positive thinking

The facts are these:  Jeff Whitehead, late of drumming in psychedelic band Gift Horse, and professionally known as Wrest, has most notably recorded 12 demos (that we know of) as well as a handful of albums and compilations under the name Leviathan, all of some of the most crushing and bleak and extreme metal this side of the Atlantic, or as he puts it, “the most strange, harsh satanic, depressive musick I could, with the recording gear I had”. He plays and records every instrument himself, due to his “lack of time and interest in dealing with others”, and he plays his favorite instrument (drums) using electronic drum pads so he won’t wake the neighbors in the next apartment. He works within a scene of the San Francisco Bay Area black metal scene, and within THAT scene are several other one-man-band setups with names like Crebain and Xasthur. But don’t get me wrong; Leviathan as an act, and Wrest as an artist, and in turn Lurker of Chalice (which I should mention is Wrest’s other, more relatively ambient, project), might not have existed at all if one of Mr. Whitehead’s friends hadn’t suggested he release his recordings for public consumption. Which is to say: Jeff Whitehead could very well have continued churning his darkness and grimness out through silenced instruments and unrecognizable undecipherable filtered-to-the-point-of-tectonic vocals and making tape after tape after tape, and then going to work as a tattoo artist. And I could be writing about someone completely different, were it all for some helpful soul I’ll never know. Thanks, bro. It’s your effort that’s given me the opportunity to have an album called “Massive Conspiracy Against All Life” and a song by the name of “Fucking Your Ghost In Chains Of Ice”, all resting quiescently on my hard drive, just waiting to flense me from the eardrums out.

Lurker of Chalice has four other unreleased albums, one of which loops the audio from this lighthearted scene over and over again. This particular album, his only official album-length release under the Lurker name, was intially released with a one-time pressing of 777 copies, but lucky for you (not so much for ebay sellers), it’s been re-released. It sounds like Leviathan slowed down, stretched out, and atmosphericized to the nines; folk-songs-sung-by-a-dying-ghost-on-a-snow-pounded-mountain, to guitar-armies-trudging-forth-to-battle-an-army-of-orcs, to creepy and unsettling vocal samples, some from really fucking random sources, that slip into the music out of nowhere, with the effect of seeing a hanging bathrobe when you’re going to the bathroom late at night and thinking it’s a person, and then you drown in clanging adrenaline for half a second before you realize it’s just a bathrobe, then you feel somewhat silly and looking around to see if anyone saw you panic, then remembering for chrissakes it’s 3 AM no one’s around. You hope.

WHAT?

I. THE MUSIC or, THE PROBLEM OF SYNAESTHESIA

“A sweeping, grandiose vision of misery.” -R.B.D.

In addressing the actual music of “Lurker Of Chalice”, we face a significant hurdle. The album is an immersive and densely layered musical experience, and trying to sum up what it’s like, and its consequent appeal, is going to become a pretty big waste of time to those who haven’t yet heard it. I’ll toss around words like “cavernous” and “swirling” and “doomy” and “plaintive” and “epic” and it’ll be like trying to describe fuchsia to a blind person, and you’ll just skip to the end if I’m lucky, snatch the mp3s, listen, and see if I’m not totally full of shit.

With that in mind, “Lurker of Chalice”, though challenging to talk about with specificity, is very listenable. It’s got endless layers of ambient analog synthesizers and fuzzy blankets of guitar and Wrest’s artful and skilled drum work. Sometimes the kayboards put me in mind of 1980s horror films, which were always scored with a synthesizer. Like those made-for-TV Stephen King adaptations, you know the ones. At sufficient volume it’s like sinking into a deep dirty pool with no bottom. Which is not to say it’s relaxing. “Lurker of Chalice” is one of the most unsettling albums I’ve ever heard, and not in a skin-crawling, shifting-around-in-one’s-seat way. Rather, it’s like listening to the soundtrack to an epic poem or medieval war movie that’s not yet been made. Like what Lucifer would put on the stereo during an average day in Pandaemonium. The word I’m looking for here is “evocative”. Calling this music “ambient”, or even “dark ambient”, is doing it a disservice; ambient music plays in the background of crystal shops, it doesn’t snap you up and yank you away the way this shit does. Calling it “metal” or even “black metal” would also be disengenous; “Lurker Of Chalice” is to metal  as LSD is to moldy bread. From the martial tympani that begins the opening track (which is called a picture of a pitchfork, no kidding), to the final track “Fastened To The Five Points” which interrupts its tornado of groaning guitars and mushy piano with an acoustic whispery section of what sounds like the field recordings of a swamp recluse strumming a guitar, this album’s an aural smorgasboard. There’s no conventional song structures, really; “Paramnesia” turns into a loose jazzy jam (if it was being played by grim reapers), the 10-minute “This Blood Falls as Mortal Part III” (you ask, where are the first two parts? and I say, fuck if I know) sounds like about eight songs sewed together, a Song Centipede if you will. Shit goes from heavy to hushed in a second, more than half the songs stretch past the six minute range, and Wrest’s vocals are overdubbed and filtered and fucked with to within an inch of their existence, bringing us to:

2. THE LYRICS (?)

Spoilers: almost all the sung lyrics are completely indecipherable, and the bits that aren’t sound like the ravings of a lunatic in a crawlspace. You can briefly hear “I’ll fuck you with the sun” over “Piercing Where They Might”‘s whirlpool-like guitar riff; “This vapor city” during “Granite” amidst otherwise alien chanting that sounds like it was recorded across a church behind a wall inside a bathroom, and “Fastened To The Five Points” repeats the phrase “the retarded angel” more than a half dozen times throughout. The only other words you can make out come from samples, which slip eerily in and out while Wrest howls, croaks, mumbles, and chants his way around whatever black-skyed world he lives in; snatches of dialogue from “The Exorcist”, “The Omen”, wordless recordings of arctic winds and crow-filled swamps,Gwyneth Paltrow from the movie she made about Slyvia Plath dully intoning “sometimes I feel like I’m not…solid” and “all I want is blackness and silence” over “This Blood As Mortal pt. III”. Everything else is too filtered to make out clearly; what could very well be “rats eat his naked body” could also be any homophonic variation; “last aching for eeeaalllgghhh”, for instance, and the vocals become just another instrument, rather than the jumping-off point to figuring out what a song’s lyrically “about”, which would be impossible anyway because he doesn’t release his lyrics with the album, so, well, shit.

WHY?

I’ve talked a fair amount about “darkness” on this blog; albums that expresses anger, or sadness, or otherwise negative emotion through the music and lyrics. I’ve often said that in order to appreciate a huge amount of music, one must not be put off by this type of emotion driving the songs, but rather embrace it as part of the spectrum of emotion that music invokes and plays on in order to produce a strong and lasting impression. I’ve urged you all to go in there and find that twitchy, nervous, fucked-up, acid-gut of yourself and rather than deny it, to sit down and listen to an album with it.

So if you’re really intent on doing that, crank this album. Bring a flashlight, because you’re going spelunking. Dante ain’t got shit on you. Other people who’ll dig this album:

1) Black metal fans everywhere. also, United States Bay Area Black Metal Fans (USBABMFs, which is also the sound of an old man falling down the stairs)

2) People with a good pair of headphones.

3) Anyone adapting “Paradise Lost” to the screen.

4) Abstract artists who need background music while they paint a floor-sized canvas with cow’s blood and black ink in the middle of a snowstormed forest.

5) People who prefer their long dark night of the soul to be around 45 minutes, and want some tunes during it.

AND FOR ALL YOU HEAD-SHAKING-EYES-SCREWED-SHUT-FINGERS-IN-EARS…UH…HEDLEYS OUT THERE…

Someone forced me to listen to this, and it was very much worth it. Trust that I can be that person for you. Download this, this, and this. And since Lurker don’t perform live, watch this:

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