bone awl is actually really lame

Bone Awl play a raw, noisy, hyper-minimalist hybrid of black metal and hardcore punk. On the basis of this description, I expected them to be my new favorite band. In this case, however, it was my new favorite band that sucked! Over the last year and a half I have listened to a number of their eps and demos. I tried very hard to like them, and for a long time said that I liked them, but recently realized that I never listened to them, and asked myself why.

Their newest release, the demo "Sunless Xyggos," distills their minimal style down to the most minimal minimum. As usual, there are a maximum of two riffs per song, and the "middle" riff, which works something like a mosh breakdown or a chorus, is usually a kind of variation on the first riff. What they have stripped away is the vocals...I may have heard a faint distorted yowl or two in the background, but there is pretty much no screaming going on here. In a sound that is purely drumbeat, riff, and vocals, this seems like it's a pretty serious reduction.

In this reduction, we are getting the core of the Bone Awl style. The band is supposed to be driven by the power of pure repetitive riffage, surging over an unrelenting rhythmic assault. The guitar/bass and drums are supposed to speak for themselves. The problem is that they don't. For the amount of racket this band is making, the music is pretty limp. The instruments don't usually work together to create a sense of onrushing motion, which is crucial to this kind of stuff. The riffs are not very fun or interesting to listen to. For the most part, the chords don't push and pull at each other, and the lack of any rhythmic variation whatsoever becomes a real problem at the plodding midtempo these guys always use (except in the one obligatory really slow godawfully boring song they stick at the end of each album).

The lackluster riffage might not be such a huge problem if we were given more than just a riff or two, sitting on top of a beat that does little more than keep time and give direction. The obsession with minimalism prevents this, so that the music undermines itself. If you're going to write a song dominated by one riff, it better be a fucking monster, and it's best if it engages with and plays off of other elements in the song. The Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog," Metallica's "Am I Evil" (yeah I know it's a Diamond Head cover), and Discharge's "The Final Bloodbath" are all great examples of this.

"Sunless Xyggos," by giving us the purest instantiation of the Bone Awl concept, reveals what was going on all along. It is simply the most fully realized aesthetic statement in a discography that is nothing but a series of aesthetic statements. In other words, Bone Awl aren't really anything aside from their hypothetically cool sound. The songs are just collections of sonic elements, selected because they are cool. The construction of their songs, and the musical work these songs accomplish, is incidental to their primary goal, which is simply to be a raw, noisy, hyper-minimalist hybrid of black metal and hardcore punk. This is nothing but style.



Anyway, if the empty idea that is Bone Awl sounds appealing to you, I really encourage you to check out a couple bands that do something similar, only much much better.

1. Malveillance also do punk/black metal, but have more to do with real punk and more to do with real black metal than Bone Awl. This may be some of the most gnarly, nasty punk-metal that has ever been recorded. Here's a link to a good mp3 blog that has their second latest full-length, "Insignificance." I own a copy of the newer one, "Just Fuck Off," and it slays. So buy their stuff if you dig, it's surprisingly not that hard to find.

INSIGNIFICANCE

2. Disfear are a Swedish band who used to play really crushing hardcore punk with vocals that are a lot like black metal. Here's a random link to their first EP, "A Brutal Sight of War." If you like this, buy their album "Soul Scars." Some of their new shit is great too, it's heavy party music.

A BRUTAL SIGHT OF WAR

3. Ildjarn are the Norwegian black metal "band" that Bone Awl is kind of ripping off. The thing is that Ildjarn's riffs are usually much nastier and more abstract, and there's actually really interesting and subtle variation going on. It's certainly punk-influenced, but there are no catchy hardcore riffs. The songs are meant to be listened to as part of the flow of the album. I don't really enjoy listening to this music, but it's good, and it does what Bone Awl totally fails at doing. I'm not going to link you to Ildjarn because it's on tons of blogs and you can google it yourself.