It’s perhaps suprising given my constantly developing taste for ever more complex and ponderous music that this album arrived into my life several weeks ago and was filed in the “too damn daunting for where my head is at currently” pile after a single listen. After a several week long odyssey into drone (Earth, Sunn O))), Boris) this suddenly didn’t seem so intimidating any more, so I gave it another whirl.

Apparently lumped into the post-hardcore bucket with the likes of *shels (who also don’t belong there) The Pax Cecilia wafts evanescent over the sorry arse of any dreary musical subgenre they damn well please. Labelling them anything containing the epithet ‘core’ seems painfully beside the point. These slow building arrangements melt effortlessly from from folk to caustic hardcore to sparse drone to proggish melodic interludes. Anyone sampling opening track The Tragedy would be forgiven for thinking that this isn’t even rock music. These lengthy tracks are peppered with baroque strings, soaring guitars and subtle melodic vocals which occasionally erupt into a harrowing scream.

The sheer array of ideas and undisguised talent on display here is astonishing. That this band have done little to bother the popular consciousness is both a testament to the bravery of this album and a self fulfilling prophecy – The Pax Cecilia may well have “too damn difficult for their own good” chiselled on their tombstone, something that wouldn’t be said for the aforementioned Enio Morriconeists *shels who have the potential to really break through.

This album is made to be loved and cherished and played alone on rainy days (perhaps on long train journeys like the one from which this article is being written). This is not a happy album, and not one that you will truly grok in few listens, but like all truly exceptional albums it’s worth the effort. What’s more astonishing is that an album of this quality is being given away free. Yes, you heard me right, if you want to grace your world with this work of loveliness then it can be downloaded in its entirety for free here. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

1 band, 5 questions, 1 minute per question...

Profile

Name: La la monkey Tasker and Rumble monkey Taylor

Band: Thracia

From: Northampton, UK

What you do in Thracia: Singist and basserer

Label: Unsigned

Website: http://www.thracia-uk.co.uk/

The Questions

Describe Thracia in exactly 3 words

naughty but nice

Name 3 albums you could not live without

1. Green day- Nimrod
2. Therapy- Troublegum
3. Turbonegro- Ass Cobra

Tell me something I don’t know about Thracia

We like to have sunday dinner together.

What is Thracia doing at the moment?

writing new songs, gigging, preparing to press new CD (Sea of Tediocrity) doing lovely interviews…

You have 5 minutes alone with Simon Cowell, how will you use them?

Have a nice cup of tea and ask him what he would do if he was given five mins alone with Louis Walsh..

Matanza - Countrycore?

A common misconception, when people first become conscious of their presence to the search engines, is that just be getting inbound links and acquiring page rank (of the type found on the Google toolbar) you will magically be found by people looking for you. These things certainly help, but you’re not going to get found by the people that you want to find you without thinking a little first about how you want to be found.

Assuming you have reasonably distinctive name, then you’ll probably rank well against people typing that term into a search engine (if it’s at an early stage, then this is most likely with your Myspace page). This covers getting found by people looking for you (more on this in later articles) but doesn’t really help getting eyeballs on your pages from people not looking for you specifically, but stuff like you. Many people look to track down new music by looking for bands in the genre occupied by other bands they like. It’s worth giving some thought to what genre and sub-genre(s) you belong to.

Now this may outrage some bands who consider themselves ‘outside’ any genre. This may be the case, but it’s worth considering that a) other folks will not see it that way and, if you don’t begin ‘branding’ your band in a specific genre, will do so for you and b) you are shooting yourself in the foot in the short to medium term. Bands like Opeth and The Dillinger Escape Plan may be able to eschew the genre constraint these days but they started out as progressive death and hardcore (or any number of over *cores subsequently) respectively.

So if you’re Funeral Doom, Glam Rock, Blackened Thrash, Deathlike Thrashy Dronecore with Crunk tendencies then call it – loud and proud! For a while at least, this forms a vital part of your band’s identity.

So what’s the aim here? When someone types in “blackened countrycore” into Google, you turn up in the first page of results. Depending on the prevalence of the genre to which you belong, then it may be advisable to niche down to the closest sub-genre. If you are just ‘rock’ you’re unlikely to rank well against that term unless you sell a few million CD’s – better to be ‘hard rock’ or ‘melodic rock’ or whatever. It’s possible to go too far here. If you are the only ‘vikingpiratecore’ band out there, then people aren’t so likely to searching for that term, and you loose the benefit of genre proximity.

Once you’ve decided what this is, then start advertising it. Myspace is good place to start. Resist the urge to state ‘other/other/other’ as your genre. Find the one that closest suits your band, and if it still doesn’t fit, the state your true genre everywhere else on that page. Search Engines have a concept called keyword density – basically they use the frequency of a particular word or term to divine what a page is about. So you shouldn’t be afraid to mention it a few times. Be careful with this though, as Google expects to see human readable text, so cramming your blurb with your chosen term will likely cause your page to be delisted as spam.

Secondly, the search engines will give precedence to words and terms in prominent place on the page. So, assuming it doesn’t screw up the design or flow of the page, it’s worth stating your genre in any or all of these:

• Page title
• URL
• <H1> and <H2> tags
• Description tag

Next, search engines try to divine what your pages are about by the company they keep. So if you link to, and are linked from other Depressive Drone Hair Metal pages then that will have an influence on what terms you rank for (more on link building in later articles).

Finally, get people talking about you in the context of your chosen genre. Search engines pay attention to the words used to link to your site, and those surrounding these links (also pictures and video of your band), and if you leave it to other people to decide which genres you belong to then when they do they may use different terms. This means that you’ll struggle to gain pagerank against any specific term and end up spreading your search engine love too thinly.

As ever with SEO, there’s mountain of ambiguity, differing permutations and exceptions. What’s certain is that it’s different for everyone. If you find something that works, then do more of it. The key to SEO is consistency. If you’re clear about who you are and what you represent then this will come naturally. If you prefer to appear obscure, then from a search perspective that’s the way you’ll probably remain.

SEO for Metal Bands #1: Name your band wisely

Necro Deathmort’s name suggests “death death death” and their Myspace classification is set to “grunge/grunge/grunge”, however their music is not even remotely either. In fact, if you dig deeper, the London duo consider themselves more drone doom than anything else quoting a major influence from early Earth. However, Necro’s eclectic pseudo-style is closer in spirit to the creepy electronica of Aphex Twin or cut and paste trip-hop of Coldcut although the predominant influence here would seem to be that of breakbeat alchemist DJ Shadow (from the Endtroducing era). The album’s title – This Beat is Necrotronic – clearly nods towards the retro-beat-electronica that saturates this collection.

Necro’s drone nestles quietly beneath the loops and breakbeats creating ambient tones reminiscent of a hip-hop inflected take Sunn O)))’s spookyscapes. Technicolour Minstrel Show is pure ambient, minimalist drone, while Hurt Me I’m Bored is a much more traditional doom affair with guitars and real drums dominating the lightly electronic undertones. On the brief Origami Werewolf the styles seem to mesh more cleanly and this is perhaps the coherent edge that this album needs to really shine. Final track The Ultimate Testament takes Boris style drone to its logical conclusion and is perhaps an allusion of the entropic nature of the universe in which we live.

It’s clear that Necro take their art with a pinch of salt. The Beat is Necrotronic is certainly creative, and its originality comes from the mix of styles, rather than the music itself. It is a playful work of ADHD genre noodling that will no doubt irritate the hell out of the genre purists (of all the various genre’s this record references) which is always a good thing. But if you alienate everyone, then what are you left with? Is this album just too damn erratic to be anything other than very niche? Or could this genre hopping opus please the wider audience?

All this aside, this motley assemblage of loops and doom really put a smile on my face, and it’ll certainly get heavy rotation on my iPod. Given I’m a fan of pretty much all the genres and artists mentioned here, this was guaranteed to entertain me. There’s a legion of folks out there with similar tastes out there, but we’re hard to pin down. If you stumble across this expecting drone, then keep an open mind. If you’re merely looking for something really fresh and thoroughly entertaining then look no further.

Listen to Necro Deathmort on Myspace

Buy the album here

1 band, 5 questions, 1 minute per question...

Profile

Name: Craig Scott

Band: Photonic

From: Aukland, New Zealand

What you do in Photonic: Sing, play guitar, write the music and lyrics

Label: Unsigned

Website: http://www.myspace.com/photonicmusic

The Questions

Describe your band in exactly 3 words

psychedelic riff storm

Name 3 albums you could not live without

1. Black Sabbath Vol. 4   Under the Sun rules.
2. The Beach Boys/ Brian Wilson, Smile. Piecing together various forms of the album from the old recordings and fan-mixes.
3. Slayer, Decade of Aggression Incredible live sound and energy, the crowd response to South of Heaven intro chills my blood.

Tell me something I don’t know about Photonic

Photonic is an on-going experiment in creating songs from non-down tuned riffs. My search for writing new riffs and lyrics is slow… I only finish four or five songs a year…

What is Photonic doing at the moment?

Photonic is touring through Europe during September and October as a solo show…  then a couple more gigs in London late November before I return to NZ to tour and write.

You have 5 minutes alone with Simon Cowell, how will you use them?

Perhaps, if I could be bothered to talk at all, I would try to talk about the psychological and sociological difference between Business Music and The Music Business… though probably the only thing he hasn’t heard before is how much money he could make from Photonic, but I’d say that he could never persuade me to get involved.

Some bands are amazing on record, but can’t pull it off live while others are spectacular live, but don’t manage to capture this magic on record. Electric Wizard tend towards the latter category – somehow their bass laden, toxic cacophony never packs the punch it should on record. Live, on the other hand, they’re simply stunning.

Last night’s double dose of doom begun with label-mates Blood Ceremony from Canada. Basically Sabbath, if you swapped Tony Iommi with a flautist and Ozzy with a fit bird, they played an entertaining set of old school psychedelic doom. Singer Alia O’Brien dominates proceedings with her sultry pagan chants and multi-instrumentalism, although the band deliver some convincing old school noise, albeit with some Jethro Tull style jazzy flute. Blood Ceremony delivered a great performance, and the crowd really seemed to appreciate it, but it would be difficult to not be somewhat squished by what came next.

Electric Wizard don’t play live very often, and it’s not hard to see why. This short set of bludgeoning noise is delivered with immense amount of energy and conviction – with portly singer/guitarist Justin Oborn playing like his life depended on it and the commanding presence of sumptuous second guitarist Liz Buckingham adding a touch of class to the overall sweaty dingefest. Their music, hernia inducing on record, really comes alive on stage, and wow, that bass – I think it may have triggered the onset of osteoporosis for those in this little hall. The noise these guys create with their instruments is magnificent – the feedback they generate alone is worth turning up to hear – and where they can sometimes be ponderous on record, I found myself wishing these songs wouldn’t end.

This is a pretty big venue for the Wizard, but they dominated it like a band used to arenas. Strangely, the Scala is well lit, which  distracted from the overall ambience, and the folks enjoying the show the most were doing so with their eyes closed. The show ended after a hour and a quarter with (apparently typicaly) no encore – with the amount of energy they put into their performance it’s not hard to see why. Being left wanting more is better than being bored shitless, and although I left feeling slightly short changed, it’s hard to complain after seeing such an awesome show.

Never having seen the Wizard live before, they provided an amusing, but not essential, diversion on record, but having seen this show you now find me a convert. All hail the Wizard!

<unfindable>

I’m going to start at the beginning, with one of the first things that a band does: Choose a name. Now, this may be redundant in most cases, as you probably already have a band name that you’re happy with, but if it’s not too late to change (your band is, like, Metallica or something) then heed these words, as you could really benefit further down the line.

So you want to name your band ‘Apple’. Let’s think about this one for a minute. Isn’t there a company named Apple too? Well, they’re not a band so no problem, right? Well, when naming your band, it’s probably a good idea to go type your shortlist into Google. The term ‘apple’ is not only dominated by the ubiquitous technology company, but it’s also one of THE most fiercely contended terms by every man and his dog on the internet. Unless you become VERY popular VERY quickly by other means (basically you are Arctic Monkeys, which is, incidentally a great band name for SEO) then you’re always going to have trouble ranking for search terms relating to your band name.

Another gotcha is using non-standard characters in your band name. Avant garde black metalers <code> may have a cool name, and make fabulous noises, but they’re a bitch to find in search engines and ecommerce sites using the correct spelling of their name. They’re also making life harder for bloggers like me who have to use special characters in subject lines if we want to use the correct spelling. What’s worse is that the angle brackets “<>” are widely used in internet markup languages like HTML, and this will confuse the hell out of many web applications and in some cases could actually cause the site to malfunction on less well built sites. This is not the end of the world, and I’m sure <code> are doing quite well for themselves (they at least have a record deal) but you’re just making life hard for yourself at a time when you least need it.

The best choice for a band name from an SEO perspective is probably a made up word (eg. Skronkgornak – I couldn’t think of any real bands off the top of my head, so I just made on up) or a mis-spelling (eg. Def Leppard). Assuming someone else didn’t beat you to it, it’s really easy to ‘own’ these sorts of terms with very little effort and get almost immediate results. This is one of the reasons I chose the phrase “the inevitable nose” as the title for this blog. There were a few medical related pages ranking for this term, so it only took me a week to rank #1 for that term in Google, and only a couple more weeks to get 2, 3 and 4.

So stick your preferred name into Google before commuting to it and make sure you’re not going to be buried from day 1.

This is the first of a series of articles on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for metal bands.

In my experience most new bands don’t know or care about SEO or perhaps assume that the record labels will deal with when they get signed (which they probably won’t). I think this is a mistake. SEO isn’t hard, and following a few simple principles will pay off in dividends.

Why should you, as a band, care about SEO? Well, the one thing that bands need most when their starting out is exposure. Getting found or noticed isn’t easy. In our internet saturated age the first place people go when looking for something is the search engines. If you want to be found then you need to pay attention to how the search engines perceive you.

It’s important to acknowledge that just because you are on the web, doesn’t mean that you can be found. Depending on how you present yourself, you may be very hard to find, which would be bad for you no matter which way you look at it.

Also, this is not aimed at improving your band’s website, although this is part of it. The aim here is to make your band findable and discoverable, and for this Myspace, last.fm, Wikipedia and countless other sites are equally (and in some cases more) important.

There are three key aims to this exercise:

1) Get found by people who are looking for you

2) Get found by people who are looking for stuff like you

3) Get found by people randomly (perhaps while they’re looking for, or doing, something else)

By making sure you have your bases covered here you will make getting your band found a whole lot easier. The key thing to understand about SEO is that nothing happens quickly. Search engines take time to react to changes, and there’s no silver bullet that will boost your rankings over night. By applying best practice you will see improvements over time that will add up to impressive results over time.

I’m eating my own dog food with regards to sticking to niches, hence the metal slant, but the same principles should work for any genre of music.

If you have any questions, or need advice on your band specifically, then feel free to leave comments and I’ll endeavor to help out.

Another couple of UKMU unsigned reviews for your delectation.

The frenetic Tharcia:

The legacy of what once was punk has been blurred by an array of mutations and countless stream of frequently turgid *cores. Punk, as an attitude of DIY, cheap and rough as hell anti-music, has been eclipsed by polished, platinum money spinning behemoths and countless cookie cutter copyists.

This is why it’s refreshing to find a band that (for the most part) is keeping the old punk flame burning – albeit in a modern kinda way. Tharcia’s sound is resolutely rooted in England at the beginning of the 80’s. Shades of Oi! and bands like The Exploited saturate these songs, but more modern influences blend effortlessly with the old school.

Read more…

The needing to try harder Numblocq

Just because you record your music, no matter how good the songs may be, that doesn’t mean that it’s ready for general consumption. Your songs are your art – a projection of your soul, and deserve the best start in life possible. Providing you’re reasonably good players and you put on a good show, then playing your songs live is likely to do them some justice (worse case scenario your crowd are wearing their ‘beer headphones’ and think anything you play is good). But recording these beloved songs is an entirely different discipline, that, if you’re a young band, you’re probably not that good at. Your songs deserve more than a swiftly thrown together demo constructed using Cubase in your mate’s bedroom. It’s really worth spending a moderate amount of cash to make the best job of it before unleashing them on the general public.

Numlocq didn’t do this. The sound quality is terrible. Some music lends itself to more lo-fi recording (Black Metal purists swear by this) but not this type of music.

Read more…

Fun, comfortable, unchallenging. Should these words be applied to something calling itself Thrash Metal? It’s not easy to say this, but that’s how I perceive Municipal Waste.

Harking back to the early days of Thrash, when it was as much a product of Punk than Metal, Municipal Waste make a heady, energetic noise that does exactly what the likes of DRI and Exodus did nearly 25 years ago. This is all nice and lovely, but certainly not essential.

The Waste spearheaded the recent thrash revival, which I greeted with utter enthusiasm at first, followed by nervous anticipation ending with mild disappointment. This style of thrash is fun and really gets your head nodding, but it’s so lacking in substance. While Exodus were making Bonded in Blood, Slayer were churning out the seminal Reign in Blood, Metallica Master of Puppets, Megadeth Peace Sells. These albums tore up the rulebook and pushed boundaries. That the recent Thrash revival seems to stop dead at this paradigm-shift is typical of flagrant lack of adventurousness displayed by Municipal Waste and others. If the bands that MW reference so heavily didn’t already have their tongue’s lurking in cheek territory, then we’d be talking about them is the same context as The Darkness and Steel Panther.

Massive Aggressive sounds like their previous album and has some utterly superb old-school riffage. The lyrical themes are stoopid and overall this is totally unchallenging, but that’s OK, you weren’t intending to listen to this sober anyway were you?