As much as I have attempted to explore it, I cannot say that I have been able to decipher — much less appreciate — the trend of deathrash metal. There have certainly been bands in the style that I have greatly enjoyed, but as a whole, I cannot understand its fixation with speed and soloing over what I perceive to be musicality, not to mention the fact that so many of the bands seem content to mirror the existing sounds of the style. On that note, I see a world of potential when the aggression of thrash is melded with more progressive sensibilities. Voivod pulled it off beautifully, and now Riftwalker — a prog deathrash band from Vancouver — is taking these genres and going somewhere interesting with it. True enough, Riftwalker’s debut album “Green & Black” is not revolutionizing the sounds of the genre by any degree, but the band’s greater depth in their composition makes them one of the best bands on the current scene.
From the album artwork alone, I get the feeling that Riftwalker is taking after more classic progressive outfits. The music generally follows suit with this, although there is certainly a drawn influence from the more straightforward acts like Slayer and Exodus. The music is fast and furious for the most part, relying on riffs that immerse themselves in technical finesse as well as a rawer aggression that I sense often in the style. Balancing this out though is a dynamic, not only from heaviness to softer moments, but also in tempo. Often, the band will go from a blistering foray of furious soloing and likeminded rhythms, and then break down into something more atmospheric and doomy. The fast parts are admittedly fairly generic from an instrumental standpoint, but the fact that these compositions are given more than one-gear speed is enough to make Riftwalker stand apart from most in my books.
Maybe the best thing about Riftwalker are the vocals, performed here by all three members. Leading Riftwalker with higher pitched rasps, the sheer range that the guys are able to take their voices into is astounding.
Riftwalker’s “Green & Black” is a very good debut, taking the best parts of thrash metal and making an album that is both intelligent and a hell of a lot of fun.
“Riftwalker” can be purchased here.
The Lamb is ONE, right? It’s a unified, singular work of art. It’s a “concept album.” There is a narrative, there are dramatis personae. It is a MANY in some sense, since there are two albums’ worth of songs (plural). But that’s secondary, is it not? It’s “beside the point,” perhaps?
apart” that matters here. The Look here is not simply equivalent to that prior Look, though they may be related.
A teacher of “great figures” (philosophers, for example, like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel) runs into a rough equivalent. Is the “thought” (how odd, when what we have are texts) of this or that author ONE? Is it somehow undermined or refuted if there is some clear, evident, obvious (to whom?) way in which some particular “part” is wrong (mistaken? bad? evil?), does that reduce its ALL to NOTHING? If it is a MANY from which we might (perhaps inexhaustibly, if it is indeed a “great” author) draw, does that mean that there cannot be a ONE there, or an ALL?
Ah, but now think about those pictures you see, often associated with “Gestalt Psychology,” where it could be seen as a rabbit or as a duck. You could see two faces, are a vase. You could see a young woman or an old one. Seeing a Gestalt, a configuration (roughly), involves something like the flick of a perceptual switch. Once you know it’s that kind of picture, you can go back and forth between the possibilities at will.
The answer would seem to be no. Surely you can be aware of both possibilities, but can both possibilities be simultaneously actual? Whether or not the latter is a real possibility, it is really, ultimately, my suggestion.
The traditional folk music community — the collectors and pedagogues in the first half of the 20th century who defined the boundaries of the vernacular music fueling the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s — probably had little use for a John Jacob Niles, scholar and singer of traditional and local songs whose work bore an imprint so unique that his interpretations took on a life of their own. Armed with giant lutes and dulcimers of his own devise, he would sing in a classically-trained impassioned vibrato whoop (Henry Miller described it as “ethereal chant which the angels carried aloft to the Glory seat”), investing in his songs a Kentuckian-by-way-of-France mondo spirit that channeled, intentionally or not — for Niles was a Modern — what Greil Marcus would later call the Old Weird America, inspiring a young 
Progarchy 