Blissfucker, Alone

Don't let that moron from The Needle Drop fool you: Blissfucker is great.

Darker Handcraft was a record I liked because it wanted you dead and wanted to get to killing you immediately. Since people in genre can recognize Left Hand Path but not Suicide Invoice, Darker Handcraft is a record that got defined with the idea of crust, those three grind-ish songs everyone praises but no one listens to, Evictionaries, and The Facts.

Blissfucker is more sludge. Now, sludge isn't new to Trap Them. Dead Fathers Wading In The Bodygrounds is the most obvious one to me, but Drag The Wounds Eternal and Scars Align are also precursors. Maybe Gutterbomb Heaven On The Grid also? What matters is that Trap Them is de-emphasizing grind on their most recent record. And it's hardly that, they're just writing longer, fuller songs!

Yes, there isn't the pulverizing four minute triptych at the end of Blissfucker. There's just that two odd minute blast beat frenzy as the second fucking track. And also the opening to Lungrunners? (And the first two thirds of Former Lining Wide The Walls!) If you want it, Blissfucker's still got you, but it's also doing different things. Ryan McKenney's broken glass yawp is still an assault on the listener's ears, but against the longer, more traditional metal of Blissfucker, his yawp changes the proceedings from ominous to actual danger.

Put differently, his vocals maintain a high threat profile. You can hear producer/engineer Kurt Ballou get more adept at recording by virtue of how clear Mr. McKenney's vocals come through. Mr. McKenney now fully sounds like the night terrors of whatever New Hampshire town he was born in. Mr. Ballou uses the old metal trick of burying the vocals in the mix, giving the listener the impression that they're struggling to get through.

My bandcamp download did not come with a .pdf of the art (and even if it did, band hasn't been putting lyrics in those things since Seizures…), but I'll throw a ten spot on the guess Mr. McKenney is yelling about the empty formalities of family/community ties, the horrors of violence and the broken humans left in the blast radius of war. Maybe zombies? That part I'm less sure of.

What I am sure of, and couldn't tell you why, is that Blissfucker feels like guitarist Brian Izzi's opus. Maybe it's the length. Maybe it's the fact that there's moments of solos, or something like them. Blissfucker feels new, even if I can point to places in earlier records that suggest this shift. Shift is the right word, but I ought to be careful on the emphasis. Trap Them remains a Swedish-style thrash band, anchored by a hardcore punk vocalist.

Blissfucker, as a whole, feels, strange to say, imperial. There's a grandness and scope to Blissfucker which previously was only an ambition in the band's discography. And if metal/hardcore/punk fans hate anything, it's ambition. The storyline of "grind/d-beat band makes another fast, obliterating full length" is easy. From Seizures... into ...Handcraft into Blissfucker, the songs have been getting longer, while maintaining that energy. Seriously. I listened to Seizures... for context. Blissfucker's got it.

It is a shame, of course, that drummer Chris Maggio is no longer with Trap Them. Whether it is my imagination or something approaching truth, his drum work on Darker Handcraft seemed to be hyperactive and kept the Trap Them machine moving at an exhilarating speed. Brad Fickeisen, the new guy, is no slouch himself (is that the second ex-The Red Chord member Trap Them's rotated in?) His steady work in my imagination makes it easier for Mr. Izzi to write his epic, but Mr. Maggio unleashed Trap Them in a way that leaves an impression. At the live show, of course, he fed off of and into Mr. McKenney's boundless, evil energy.

tl;dr Mr. Maggio is missed. Mr. Fickeisen is capable.

Former Lining Wide The Walls hides a melody in the final 40 seconds of the song that is worth the price of admission, upstaged by Mr. Fickeisen's delirious drum fills. The first two+ minutes is a thing I'd like to hear played at half time just to figure out how the hell they do it so precisely.

Seeing Blissfucker as a statement is seductive. Mr. McKenney abandons the "Day [NUMBER]:" portion of song titles, it's been three years since the last one, It's one and one half as long (roughly) as the previous record, there's maybe solos, and there's verbiage in the press release to support the theory. I'll agree, to a point. Less a statement than a reminder?

I know two things: I know Blissfucker isn't what I expected and I know I like it. Blissfucker is the full metal record that they've been threatening to write since The Iconflict. Blissfucker is what we believed and hoped they had in them.







Former Lining Wide The Walls, this time around. I've described it before, but just wait for that glorious, glorious swing.

The Wicked & The Blissfucker

The time period is late 2010-mid 2011. I am running around Europe, but not nearly enough.

I have two things in my head, Phonogram and Trap Them. I am lost and confused and more or less alone. I go out to Thought Bubble in November 2010 to see the Phonogram team, and some Borges style magic happens. I return to England in April or May 2011,  to see them again at a London comic book convention called Kapow, but to do so, I must miss Trap Them when they come through Rome.

While in London, I have the new Trap Them record Darker Handcraft, and it keeps me settled and together while I navigate the hamster habitat of the Tube. My review of Darker Handcraft ends up being one of the reviews I'm proudest of ever. I got a gift of 10 pounds from Kieron Gillen in November, and felt obligated to pay him back, which was largely the reason I attended Kapow. When I wasn't with friends in London, I had Darker Handcraft and not much else. I found bookstores and waited.

I have to talk about both Blissfucker and The Wicked & The Divine at the same time before I will ever figure out what I think of either of them individually.

The time period is now mid-2014. I live in the United States, but not nearly enough.

 

I believed Blissfucker and The Wicked & The Divine came out the same week and wrote this hurriedly. A quick Google search tells me Blissfucker came out the week before, meaning I held off on Trap Them for Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie again. Blissfucker is more sludgy than Darker Handcraft, but turbocharged by Ryan McKenney's crusty/d-beat yawp. You will not mistake any part of Blissfucker for drone. The Wicked & The Divine is a more refined (and vulgar) version of that team's recent works.*

In The Wicked & The Divine, heads explode in a pop art fashion, in what I believe highlights the intrusion of visible, but not fully graspable magic into the story's real world. Producer Kurt Ballou understands Blissfucker is a guitar record and lavishes attention on Brian Izzi's instrument. Matthew Wilson's colors on The Wicked & The Divine are flawless. When called upon, they're not merely bright but vivid. I find The Wicked & The Divine's first issue cliffhanger to be underwhelming. A judge (less a character than a object against which Lucifer [nee Luci] can monologue) dies and it appears Lucifer did it. Lucifer claims innocence.
Blissfucker slows down and it works. Darker Handcraft was a record that went for the open, unguarded throat in the first quarter second of the first song. That sets a precedent that Blissfucker does not maintain. The first track, Salted Crypts, introduces itself with a dirge that is all menace. The Wicked & The Divine opens with a full page splash of a hand on a skull. The comic manages to go through a couple different fonts, each feeling correct and precisely placed, so I'm assuming that means letterer Clayton Cowles did his job well.

I didn't know what I was expecting with The Wicked & The Divine, but I ordered it sight unseen. Since then, I read too many interviews so I knew what was coming and that lessened the blow. By comparison, I'd heard three, maybe four songs from Blissfucker and I love it, especially the sludgy parts that aren't what the public thinks of when they think about Trap Them. Trap Them's discography is broader than most people realize (Dead Fathers Wading In The Bodygrounds prefigures the 7+ minute Savage Climbers, Bad Nones could be described as a palate cleanser made a full song, see Sordid Earnings) so Blissfucker doesn't entirely wreck the line of best fit. In short, they're still a Swedish thrash band before they are anything else.

But Blissfucker is new and it isn't what a lot of critics were expecting. A crusty/d-beat thrash metal band is not unknown to our ears and is easy to put in a neat little box. (The box is marked "fast drums, no solos, do not color outside the lines.") The Wicked & The Divine is new and it is, with scientific accuracy, what a lot of critics were expecting.

Mouthy dandies with superpowers? Check.
Who happen to be gods? Check.
Meta-commentary on creators and fans? Check.
It's probably about myth**, the importance of producing the largest volume of /your/ work before you die and a few really good costumes? Check, check and check.

Blissfucker is a new taste or at least a different taste from a group known for something else. The Wicked & The Divine is a superior edition of a taste I was expecting. A different review would say that it synthesizes the lessons from Kieron Gillen's more hype Marvel bibliography. But what I really mean is it's an easy jump from Young Avengers into The Wicked & The Divine.

A major piece of the first issue doesn't connect with me for ideological reasons. ("She's looking right at me! I swear, she's looking right at me!" v. "These are three chords, now form a band"***) It connected with a lot of other people, though. And those people love it. It hits their notes and not mine. I suspect that I'll like the comic when it gets more wicked and less divine.

At bottom: I didn't know what to expect with Blissfucker and I liked it. I knew what to expect from The Wicked & The Divine and I criticized it. They're both constructed meticulously. I'd recommend either to casual (and hardcore) fans of the metal genre or the medium of comics. For my part? I'll need to stop reading so many interviews.








One of the conceits of The Wicked & The Divine is that it is about gods that live for two years and then die, to be reincarnated every ninety or so. I'm of the opinion a character called Lucifer has a nefarious plan, so, I'm waiting for that other shoe to drop. While not on Blissfucker, Dead Fathers Wading In The Bodygrounds has a line that while it doesn't fit perfectly, fits just nicely enough: "We are the old graves, digging the new." For those people who actually want to listen to Savage Climbers (find it above) and then Dead Fathers... (find it below,) enjoy.

*And yes, I know the next problem is that Blissfucker arrives as a complete package whereas The Wicked & The Divine is one issue of something much, much larger. I'm aware.

**There is a thing here that I am asked to keep quiet about, but I think a friend of mine has the team figured out on a major thing in the comic. I'll copy paste it in when this friend gives the all clear.

*** Before we get to "there's more to music than things with guitars," pretend it reads "here's Fruity Loops and a YouTube tutorial, now write some songs."