Friday Heavy: July 22, 2022

Cliff: welcome to Friday, heavy your guide. Once again, to the world of aggressive and abrasive and music that is loud, feels loud and you feel loud while listening to it, brought to you by the folks behind tuned. I am cliff.

Kyle: And I’m Kyle, are you trying to say we got that loud

Cliff: Oh, yeah,

Kyle: Friday heavy. We got that loud.

Cliff: there was a TikTok where there was a recent, very small fire at the masquerade in Atlanta. Did you see this?

Kyle: I did not.

Cliff: And somebody’s doing a fake news report and they, ask one of the officials, it sounds like there was a fire inside. Can you confirm? And they said, listen, we’re still investigating.

We can’t tell you anything.

TikTok Video: Excuse me, sir. Can you comment on what happened with the fire? It’s still under investigation. We’ll get back with you later at the very least. Was it because someone was smoking Reggie .

Cliff: Thanking to my buddy, Josh, for sending that to me.

Kyle: It’s just a human person off the street. Borrowing Brent Heinz’s Halloween cop costume

that he probably legitimately stole from the trunk of an APD car.

Cliff: absolutely. Plus it’s a funny joke cuz you you’d be hard pressed funny Reggie. Anyway, so go ahead.

Kyle: not in this

city, not since the, not since the very early odds we heard. that little piece of discourse aside that I really do hope we leave in and don’t edit out Friday heavy. For those of you joining us for the first time. Welcome. We always love new friends in the world of heavy music.

If you’re in this pit with us, here’s the premise. Each episode, we cover three things. First, one brand new release in the world of heavy music, which we love and appreciate and have dedicated our lives to at the dark alter one brand new release and why we think it’ll be worth the spin. Secondly, one playlist that we’ve curated to explore. Uh, usually related sometimes not heavy sub genre or artist or scene. And thirdly, and most importantly by far one organization doing critical culture impacting work in their community. Cuz that’s what punk rock is all about. Let’s get into it. Cliff. What new release are we talking about today?

Cliff: Yes. So today we’re gonna talk about wake in their new release thought form dissent.

Kyle: which to me just sounds like the magnet words that you put on your fridge and they just got three together and they’re like, yeah, yeah.

That’s it. That’s the one, but no disrespect, cuz that’s a sick name and the album art work is sick and it all works.

Cliff: Actually love that the abrasive word collection that you could put on your fridge. That’d be great.

Kyle: They’re all in black metal logo font. So they’re very hard to read.

Cliff: No use, this is great. This is a great idea that this is my new retirement plan. So in the words of, uh, botch today’s episode features some of our great friends or friends in the great white north. So we’re gonna talk about a band from Canada because, uh, we are losing the country wars here in America.

So the only thing we have left to do is loosely make fun of Canada when it comes up. So.

Today on metal blade is thought form descent from wake stylized, all capital letters, w a K E they hail But I, I can’t say the band name without feeling like I’m in a trash talk song though.

Kyle: Yeah,

Cliff: Right? So wake hails from Calgary, Alberta and has been cranking out, honestly like a heck of a lot of grind core since 2011, actually. And what’s cool about this band.

Kyle: filling the dead and the dirt shaped hole in your heart

Cliff: We will forever stand that band as hard as

we possibly

Kyle: possib. Yeah. Cause they fucking ruled our IP dead and the dirt.

Cliff: man. So, but Wake’s style sort of shifted in 2020 that year they released a full length in an EP in the same year, the full length was called devouring rain. Uh, and that dropped first and it kind of signaled a new shift in the direction of the more kind of.

Atmospheric blackened sludge. That is a phrase that might not have meant something particular 10 or 15 years ago. And now very much does for heavy music fans, that’s gonna bring a sound to your brain pretty quickly. And then the confluence EP that they released quickly after that had even more of that kind of post metal lean.

You started to feel a little bit more of the like cold of Luna ISIS, San type stuff. Um, and it’s.

So the two singles that they’ve dropped off of thought form descent indicate that that course out from grind towards fuller sounding, progressive death metal and all that stuff is well on its way.

And just to throw out some shape to this band, especially if you’re not as familiar, like you’re about to hear

Singles that an indicate an album. That’s probably gonna touch on anything from like, imagine I’m making like a constellation now, right. Of like GoGets ulcerate artificial brain ISIS buried inside deaf heaven.

Kind of all those big touch points of like bands that started pushing on a weird angle and made it work. So the first thing we wanna hit is infinite inward and we’ll jump about 30 seconds into it. So you can get an idea of the buildup.

 

Cliff: And the next up is another single that they release called swallow the light. And frankly, you could convince me this was an intra not song. If I couldn’t be looking at the album art or the artist, and that for me is a very positive thing. I mean that very well.

 

Kyle:

So if you dig that, check out, thought form descent again, out today on metal blade, go listen to it. However you want, and then send this band, your money through shows through merch or through a direct donation. I. Was not hip to this band at all. Prior to you throwing them in the DMS. And I can’t, I personally can’t wait to go see this band live.

I, I would put ’em in the conjure slot where it was a band I had not heard of. You sent me the record and it was like, oh shit, this is the thing that I want to see how they pull it off live. So kudos to you. Wake, rip a new record. We’re we’re very excited to see where it goes from.

Cliff: And speaking of real quick, I know we covered candy in a recent episode and they’re playing tonight at 5 29 in Atlanta. And that is another band that I think we both pretty quickly went. Let’s see this life. Let’s see them do this life. Cuz I wanna

see

that chaos in person.

Kyle: I was so looking forward to that show and still have a faint line COVID positive after two years of outrun it. So I hope they rip, but they’re coming back with vain in a couple of months. So we’re very excited to check candy out.

Cliff: Thank you, Kyle, for being a decent human being and not taking your positive. COVID bullshit to a show in an enclosed space with a bunch of unasked people.

Kyle: Does require a thanks. Just fuck anybody who would even consider doing that. That is insane. I hope you get kicked out of every Applebee’s forever.

Cliff: Oh, the analogy of getting kicked outta Applebee’s will never not make me laugh when I’m looking at your face when I hear it. Okay. So I tipped you off to this band. It sounds like. What direction did you take with the

playlist this time around.

Kyle: I’ll be honest. This is the farthest outside of my heavy comfort zone that we’ve gone so far, nor like for the first 10 episodes. We’ve stayed pretty directly in the middle of the VIN diagram. So it, it wasn’t something that like grabbed right at me right away.

Infinite N word, at least swallow the light. I was like, okay, this is tight. I’m into this. I think it was mostly cuz it was very hard to pin down genre wise for me. What are they going for? And it’s for all the reasons that you said in the intro, which is a, it’s a great thing. And it’s very exciting.

So after a few listens, what jumped out to me was the Christmas of the sound. so really all I did was use, wow, this sounds good as a filter which as we know is sometimes more of an exception than a rule in heavy music. It’s very hard to pro to record and produce and mix and master heavy music. Very well.

There’s a lot of ways that it could go wrong. But using, wow, this sounds good. As a filter, I pulled some sighted inspiration, some bands from. The list that you mentioned earlier some touchpoints that you and I both think they evoke beyond that, a little post to this, a little black, that and voila.

Noel is in there. I think Noel is a band that we’re also very excited about. If for no other reason, then they have the sickest merch right now. I’ve not put an arch Byre song in anything, also an Nu Nero or what it. Dragon’s breath. Something’s breath, snakes, breath. I an all Nero Irish for snakes breath.

That was a fun one to look up. And then a, a handful of just for cliff winks the city and the sea from Olian by ocean, a shared heavy music record that we both loved for a long time. Some, a little, little bit of old ISIS little, three inches of blood, some black Dahlia murder. R I P Trevor.

And then. Some newer BT band, which I think is still the high water mark for production quality in terms of recorded heavy music. So a little bit all over the place, but all of it sounds really crisp. And I think this is one of the best opportunities to like, not think about genre or energy so much as focusing on.

Wow, this sounds really good. I want to explore this artist on. Some more like technical dynamic merits. I also wanna point out that we’re 11 playlist in, and we’ve almost entirely avoided repeating artists certainly albums or songs. And we’re really trying to avoid combinations that feel algorithmic or like repeating a lot of the same little niches over and over.

We really wanna serve you up different stuff every time we’re always going for that magic that comes from, well, I wouldn’t have necessarily put these artists together. These sub genres together. So I can’t quite describe why it works as well as it does, but it really does. That’s, sort of the like motivation behind these playlists each episode,

Cliff: I love it. And you know, a couple of. Little Canadian connections as well. Like I know Kenya, Canada’s a massive area, right. So it’s not surprising. We get a lot of good music from it, but there are some really unique metal acts that come outta there,

but to, yeah. So to be able to touch on not only wake like we have today but then, three inches of blood is from Canada, arch spires from Canada.

I mean, those are, you would probably put those on really different ends of a, of a metal spectrum. But they, you know, three inches of blood, especially they’ve been around forever just

committing to bits. Like so many of these bands commit to whatever their bit is so hard and then allow it to evolve.

Uh, and, and that’s a lot of what we’re seeing here awake. So that’s why that’s, I think you nailed this playlist relative to that. It really gives us sensation of like an arc of letting things

develop. And then

Kyle: Very, very evolutionary acts, all very, very original bands. Like no two of these bands, I think have an analog anywhere else. Whereas some of these in previous playlists, a lot of the stuff you’re like, yep.

Put five of these on a bill and it all makes a ton of sense. All these bands are super, super different to me,

Cliff: Plus it’s nice to see the black Dahlia murder in the playlist. R I P Trevor.

There’s. Yeah I tried really hard to come up with a way to like, oh, there’s a person worth having a dedication to, and saying some words about it’s not our place. Other people have said much better words. But listen and shred some black value of murder as much as you can appreciate what that band has done and what Trevor has done specifically and, and what he did while he was kind of blessing us on this planet with his very passionate look into.

Especially death metal. No one cared more about that whole scene than he did. Uh, he was a true efficient auto of the whole thing. So

Kyle: well said.

Cliff: as well. Yep.

Kyle: Well said, speaking of planets, this one and others let’s get into this cause.

Cliff: This one’s fun. as the world competes to present each day’s edition of, uh, the worst news possible, we had a bright spot in the last couple of weeks that reconnects us to our sense of wonder and humanity. There is no sarcastic, but coming we really mean that. And

Kyle: and no, don’t hold your breath. Just feel good for a minute. Just allow yourself to feel

Cliff: Yes

Kyle: one, minute. Yeah.

Cliff: So we saw our first images from the James web space telescope, and hopefully they are once again, reminding you how, like cosmically, infinitesimal, you all are. I mean, we’re not even looking at countless galaxies and stars and planets. Like we’re looking at little dots that existed 13 billion years ago.

In a lot of modern space exploration rate has been driven by, especially over the decades. By really passionate and highly intelligent and dedicated people who really care about the raw potential potential that space represents. Right? It’s not just like the, oh, when we pay billions of dollars to send people to the moon, we, it wind up with space pens and Tempur-Pedic mattresses.

Like it goes to like way further than that. And so even though we were really driven as a country, uh, in the us early on towards space exploration and what that produced for. Investment in NASA did not really thoughtfully keep up with that. And so in 1980, Carl Sagan Lewis, Friedman and Bruce Murray founded the planetary society which is a us based nonprofit.

They saw that there was like a lot of public interest in space, but that interest wasn’t reflected by government investment. Uh, and they kept seeing NASA’s budget being cut over and over. And so, you know, just a little tidbit, cuz this really isn’t about him, but it’s, it’s fun to place it. The current CEO of the planetary society, nonprofit is bill

NY, right?

Kyle: hell yeah.

Cliff: the, literal science guy, um, and. So the planetary society as an organization, not only this is another one of those orgs that does a really good job of doing both the advocacy and the sort of building up of the community around the idea, like actually doing work, but then also, you know, putting themselves to work to advocate.

And so they definitely educate folks and they’re advocating for the public through policy, but they also do their own programs that they. One program in particular was called light sale. They crowdfunded a project designed to successfully prove that sunlight alone can power a small spacecraft. And they did it, they did it.

It’s awesome. And actually they had to try it multiple times because the rockets that they kept attaching it to kept. Failing and it wasn’t their fault it was someone else’s. But like all of that’s critical or like the, the lifestyle project is an example of something that’s critical work because it sort of actively undermines the urge of the growing commercial space industry to turn everything into a profit center.

It’s it’s the same story over and over again. The light sail project. Helps bring down the cost of space exploration for future teams. By for instance, here, proving that you can power a spacecraft through solar power instead of, combustion and everything else that’s being used currently.

So I felt like that was such a good example of I hate the word disruption, cuz it normally means something so stupid, but this is a really good example of like we advocate for good policy. We want people to care about space, but also if we need to, we’ll do a project to prove to you that we can move this stuff

along

further.

than private contractors can.

Kyle: Yeah. But you nailed it on the head.

I think the reason that we love the planetary society and, and things like it. Is because it represents an ongoing opportunity to let something in this case, space exploration, improve the lives of every human being equitably and to do it in a really meaningful and focused way, allowing it to turn into another like free market is not a foregone conclusion.

We don’t have to let capitalism run wild with this thing. Like we have with almost everything else, space represents something even more significant to the oppressed. And, you know, this is something that I’ve been very like turned onto for a long time because of my musical influences and really from no other source other than music and artist.

If that is not something that you are also hip to, I would encourage you to go down the rabbit hole, reading about Afro futur. There’s a lot of incredible writing that we’d be happy to point you to. You can go back to our outcast or Janelle Monet or childish Gambino or Funkadelic episodes of tune, dig to get hip on that stuff.

One artist that we love and we haven’t covered on tuned. Dig is sun raw, who sort of the master of spaces, the place and the possibilities of equitable beyond. It’s really all about how the infinity of the unknown universe reaches back into historical mythology and cosm. And helps us envision a better world for all people.

So if you’re psyched on all that, to learn more about the planetary society and to support their mission, visit planetary.org, you can donate to specific programs like light sale, which is rad, or you can just become a monthly member, which is also rad. Ultimately though, just let those James Webb images rock your insides in a year like 20, 22, when your insides may be crumbling a little bit, just remind yourself that you’re at once infinitely small and you don’t matter, but that’s the best possible thing because you’re also a cosmic part of one of the grandest scenes that we’ve ever witnessed everything together collectively matters.

And that’s the best thing.

Cliff: I love it. We don’t matter, but we’re made of all the stuff that does.

Kyle: Hell. Yeah.

Cliff: Well, I love it so much. Oh, I’m glad we got to talk about space. Uh, and the, the difference that all of that stuff makes it was really inspiring for me personally, to see those images I’m really impacted by ’em. But I’ll also leave you with, Kyle I ruined your day with this, but you know, if you wanna see somebody really integrate these images into a visual performance, you’ll have to check out the latest Coldplay , which was a, a true both moment of excitement and let down because they ki they nailed everything about integrating these images into a giant stage show.

That looked really cool. But it only really worked if your phone was on.

Kyle: It’s Coldplay like a Tesla. I mean, it’s, it’s beautiful, beautiful production on the outside and just kind of a horrible core product on the inside. God bless it. I mean, Coldplay’s doing their thing. I can’t fault ’em they have an amazing live show and people love their songs. It’s just not for us.

You could also think of on a much on a, not James web quality scale, how sleep opens their shows by playing actual NASA recordings in the 20 minutes, leading up to their deafening sets.

Cliff: Oh, yeah.

Kyle: Now cold play and sleep are linked in your minds and you’ll probably never forgive us, but hopefully that won’t be too much to bring you back to the next Friday, heavy coming your way two weeks.

Cliff: This has been Friday happy. We’ll see you then.

Go to tunedig.com or follow us on Instagram and Twitter for links to the new release, the playlist and the organization that we talked about today.