Friday Heavy: May 27, 2022

Cliff: Welcome to Friday having your guy to a world of aggressive and abrasive and loud

music brought to you by the folks behind

day. I am

cliff.

Kyle: And I’m Kyle, we’ve got a few of these under our belt at this point, but for those of you just joining us for the first time, welcome. However you got here. We’re glad that you got here. Get in the pit and try to love someone. Stop it

Cliff: now it just got Rockefeller

explosion in my

head doing

Kyle: derailed immediately. The heaviest thing we could recommend to you this week is the rock of fire explosion band wired up to play love in this club by usher and Jeezy. This has been Friday heavy. We’ll see you in two weeks.

Cliff: Emphasis on the

Friday.

Kyle: anyway. we don’t normally derail this

early in the

normally very short and punchy episodes that are that way on purpose.

Each episode, we try to quickly and concisely cover three things, one brand new release in the world of heavy music, and more importantly, why we think it will be worth the spend one playlist we’ve curated to explore a heavy sub genre or artist or scene oftentimes, but not always related to the four minute.

New release and our favorite part. I think one organization doing critical culture impacting work in their community. So you can do something with you. Can, you can match your way to change Rockford for light. we’re a little slap happy today, cliff, what is the new release?

Cliff: yeah, we’re going to be slap happy. Cause last time we did one of these podcast episodes for Friday heavy.

Kyle: heaviest

Cliff: It was the opposite. Yeah. So that’s fine. We’re going to lighten up on purpose. So speaking of prior episodes so far in this project that we’ve called Friday heavy, we’ve gotten to bring a lot of younger bands to you for the new releases, which is awesome.

Definitely part of why we wanted to do this stuff at all. And that’s probably with the obvious exception of who’s new release. We covered a couple episodes. Today’s release is more in the vein of that and more about knowing you’re seeing elders. So today is decapitated and their new release called cancer called.

So decapitated is a band that was founded in the late nineties by brothers who were at that time literal children. Okay. We’re talking about 16, 12 year old brothers. Okay. so the capita is a technical death metal band from Poland, but they’ve spent the 30 years since then becoming known as innovators in masters of that sub genre.

So even when their debut came out in like 2000, they’re still like 16, 18 years old. And within a couple of years they were playing stuff like the Polish Oz Fest tour. I had taken on like huge tours in years following. one reason is they were one of those classic metal bands who somehow magically knew how they wanted to play aggressive, heavy, wild music as children, and got really good at it.

But then also kind of hit that wave of, heavy music, maintaining a level, or creating a level of popularity that allowed bands like this to become more well known off the backs of it. Uh, and so decapitation was one of those, for sure. But also worth bringing up that in 2006. Uh, without focusing too much on this, the band had a pretty tragic car accident while they were touring and Bellaruse and one of those brothers who founded the band lost his life.

up until that point, it was, a sibling band, right. That they’d put other folks in. And so that was a huge deal. This band got back together. The surviving brother put a new crew together a couple of years later and just felt it was the right thing to keep things moving forward and carry the band.

I just, I love that, being able to come out of that level of traffic. With a refreshed commitment to what music does and to have been doing it for, 15 additional years on end at this point is pretty great. Uh, and they’ve done an awesome job. Like I’m glad that they came back together because they have kept death metal pretty technical over the years, uh, and resisted the urge to go where a lot of the, those genres gone.

Kind of core type stuff deathcore and all that. is fine, but I love hearing bands like the capitated key technical death metal in, because I love hearing how modern production techniques have caught up to this like wild stuff, whether it’s decapitated or a band like arch Spire, who plays so quickly that it feels impossible to produce.

it’s a real treasure

to watch people try to make this music palatable, uh, in

modern

Kyle: You really got to love the genre, the sub genre and the songs to go back before a certain time before like 98 95. Because if you hated the way St. Anger sounded, you certainly would hate all good early death metal of, uh, of a certain Stripe. When we get into the playlist, we’ll get into that.

But yeah, the production value going up has been nothing but good for this corner of the heavy world.

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah. If it sounds like all old metal

sounded like it was recorded and I’m like a four track recorder. That’s. Cause

it

was,

Kyle: remember when you gave me the showdown CD and you were like your exact words were these songs rip, but it sounds like it was recorded in the back of a moving station wagon.

Cliff: a significant portion of the scene felt no need to improve upon the basic

four track tape, direct recording set up. They were like,

this

is

tight. Like we’re

good.

Kyle: Isn’t it like, why, why sound good? No need sound good.

Cliff: Mainly, mainly comes out anyway, no

matter what.

Kyle: We still do murders

of crowd.

Cliff: I’m so glad Metalocalypse is coming back. decapitated has released three singles so far. The most recent one we’ll play right now is called just a cigarette.

 

Cliff: And if you’re like a huge dork at this point in your life, I don’t know, like me, like that’s pretty recognizable to capitated stuff, right? Like I would be able to guess that in one to three um, raw guesses just from hearing that first 30 seconds. And so there’s a lot of good stuff and we bring that up, especially on Friday, heavy wind bands are keeping on keeping.

That’s good. As far as we’re concerned, that’s more good music. They’re ripping it. Uh, they’re doing cool, you know, songwriting around whatever their genre is and we dig it. Uh,

raw guesses just from hearing that first 30 seconds. And so there’s a lot of good stuff and we bring that up, especially on Friday, heavy wind bands are keeping on keeping.

That’s good. As far as we’re concerned, that’s more good music. They’re ripping it. They’re doing cool, you know, songwriting around whatever their genre is and we dig it. But another one of the singles that they have called hello, death pushes some of the boundaries of their existing, you know, music in pretty interesting ways.

 

Cliff: And we mentioned miss sugar earlier in like the first 30 seconds of this song could have come straight. Like KSP or, that thrashy, but decisive, overly complex sounding rhythm. That’s actually just kind of for, for, like that whole feel. And then the real kind of sharp trebling guitar.

That’s sharp with the rhythm like that. Classic early 2000 stuff. But what kind of brought up to date with some more modern production? And then later in the track, they integrate a guest spot from the vocalist of the band called ginger, J I N G J I N J E R a Ukrainian metal core band. And I think probably not much more needs to be said about the inclusion and support of a Ukrainian band who kind of.

Stop touring cause of war and need a little bit of help. And it’s pretty clear that that the scene

has gathered around them a little bit,

In not only this guest spot but making sure bands like that got

taken care

Kyle: And the guest vocal spot, is a little bit of a surprise pallet wise from the first part of the song. I would encourage anyone who’s a little like Ooh, not sure to push through that part and get to the end of the song because it’s definitely post credit scene satisfaction. The end of the song is that is a dead.

A rocking chair, lean forward, harder, lean backward, harder, and ended up in kind of.

a full body headbang, a breakdown ish thing at the end. It’s it’s super sick. For those tracks and more, we encourage you to check out cancer culture out today on the almighty nuclear blast records, go listen to it, however you want, and then send this band, your money through going to their shows picking up their merge, which will make you look scary and, or a direct donation to the band.

Cliff: Yeah.

the decapitated it’s still got that aesthetic of no, for

real, I liked this late nineties death metal

band.

Kyle: Yeah.

Yeah. If you, if you’re about our age, it’s the kind of shirt that if you, if somebody was walking towards you in the mall wearing it, your mom would be like like clutch you a little more closely. That’s the kids are scary.

Cliff: All shirts are sleeveless trouble by default, that sort of vibe. Yeah. So as a kind of like weird or meta aside about the next section of this episode, We keep making these killer playlists. And when I say we mostly, Kyle makes them and then

Kyle sends them to me and then I go, oh, this is, this is a wicked playlist.

I

appreciate that,

dude.

Kyle: like that, girl opening Christmas presents where they hell yeah. Yeah.

Cliff: Yeah.

But w we were talking about how seeing the playlist themselves kind of accumulate was sort of becoming its own phenomenon because you can, you really starting to get to where of these Friday heavy playlist. You can get a real mood inside each one of them pop between them. Maybe even put some of them back to back.

Uh, and you’ve got some real great

self to listen to you. And so I think that’s leading to. Even taking the pressure off a little bit of everything needing to have a super particular topic and instead just going with, all right, we got a new release this this, you know, this week, what’s this make us think of what sound, what feel, what vibe, whatever, what are we feeling off of this and not perpetually just making a playlist full of bands that sound like the band that we’re talking about, but taking an aspect of whatever band we’re covering in finding something new to

kind of dive into.

So I think we did that for sure, with this

Kyle: Yeah, that’s right. Whereas last week with primitive man, or last episode was slow, textural, expansive. This is. Tight mid range fast normally not quite thrash, not quite tech, whatever. I know. I’m always the person that’s like, I hate words about sounds. So to boil it down, I guess the thesis is, this is a playlist that If you shared it with someone, they’re almost guaranteed to be a little scared of you. Like it, it’ll give you a little edge at parties. It’s not like, oh, I’m into heavy music. I listened to Metallica and Megadeath. If you’re like, oh, I listened to deicide and obituary, people are like, oh shit, this person is the real deal.

Like I, I need to pay the $10 online to check their criminal record.

Cliff: Are they like bring me the horizon,

you know, that sort of vibe. Yeah.

Kyle: That’s right. You definitely can’t talk to squares about this playlist. It’s a line in the sand for sure. Who’s a narc at this party. So it’s bands really like with ridiculous logos and names and definite motifs in the song, titles, very visceral ones, typically things like flesh, blood, fire, burial disease, God, the apocalypse. When you look at the, we look at the song titles as a list, it looks like one person could have brainstormed them all.

So that’s what we call a culture. I struggle and I’ve always struggled and we’ve, we’ve joked about this for years. I struggled with metal for metal sake and anything that feels like it exists to be a genre ornament and like belong to the culture for the sake of death. Metal is one of the coolest Janrus to me, but it’s also littered with those types of bands.

And, and what we really tried to do with this one is have this list of this playlist not be that. So these artists are all pushing into their own thing. And or have been for a very long time. Like usual, we opted to focus on great sounding stuff. So we have a mix of long-time players in the space, cannibal corpse, cattle D cap deicide.

The deicide song is my favorite one on this playlist. It’s it’s super repin emulation zoomed obituary grave, and the newer bands like blood incantation to mold a feather and bone. And one of my favorite newer bands temple avoid And in the case of the

former, I tended toward newer stuff for the greater production value and more overall heaviness that we talked about earlier in the episode. I also included a couple of just for us under appreciated joints between friends. So the red cord, which is a favorite of Cliff’s dad, who is a former Atlanta favorite of ours and cliffs, old friends and becoming the archetype, a song called necrotizing fasciitis.

little peek into their, their humor does north Georgia boys.

Cliff: Which that song was released only as a single, that never had anything to do with any other records because

they never wrote anything else that could,

Kyle: they, they wrote it because one of the members actually

got it. Right. Or something like that. Or

is that all right? Well, that’s how I’m remembering it in my head. That’s the lore now.

Cliff: That

would be

Kyle: Yeah, it would be amazing.

So it’s like I mentioned, it’s almost entirely fast. It’s lots of double bass and straight up ripping, so it’s, it’s good.

Get outside and do something music. It’s like, ah,

Cliff: Yeah. A ton of like technical double bass work, a lot of blast beats.

Just a lot of that super kind of rhythmic fast type stuff here, but all of these bands and all of these songs,

don’t just lay back when the speed is happening. If that makes enough sense, right. It may not all be the most technical of everything, but everyone here is doing work onstage at all points during the songs.

Right. And if not, Blood incantation is probably a good band to draw out of here. I have observed that. That seems to be the new bands band of this kind of scene. Everyone who’s been touring for 10, 20, 30 years likes to talk about how blood incantation has taken off how that record with the alien on it was like the tightest thing that they’d seen for a while.

And then I, yeah, I really watched the scene kind of support them. Like they went from playing sized shows to like

pretty, pretty quickly getting a good crowd there anytime they wanted to play

around

around

Kyle: The record where the alien on

the cover is called hidden history of the human race. It’s

super sick. The really interesting thing that I learned while putting this playlist together is that they shifted gears and they made an ambient album called TimeWave zero is their latest thing. And it’s awesome too.

It’s very different than this, but if you like blood incantation, Band’s trying to do really different things. That’s what makes them advanced band is that sort of fearlessness and ability to go anywhere. So lot of great bands, really cool. bands on this playlist that are in, in such kind of a a narrow trench that we probably won’t come back to them again for quite a while.

But definitely inspired by the spirit of decapitated and all definitely worth checking out. And speaking of checking out shifting gears to our final portion of the evening, so to speak every week, we talk about an organization doing meaningful work in their community. And our hope I do in that is to make you aware of an underlying societal situation, and then show you that the people around you are often the most powerful partners in making change happen.

that’s our favorite part of being part of the, the. Self-identified punk rock metal, heavy community. Uh, so cliff, who are we talking about today?

Cliff: Yeah.

Okay. Last episode, we talked about abortion funds because everything is in a nightmare, but despite our collective dread, not every important issue has to have like Handmaid’s tale vibes, uh, all the time. Okay. So this week we’re going to intentionally highlight an organization. That’s just honestly like a favorite.

Okay. It’s an organization local to Atlanta that tirelessly advocates for a, another form of bodily autonomy. Which has safe, inclusive, and thriving public streets and spaces so that people can walk safely so that they can ride bicycle safely. And so that they can get around on wheelchairs and other assistive devices safely.

Now Atlanta unfortunately is for all of the good things that we love about it is a terrible. Terrible place to be a wheelchair user is a terrible place to be a bike rider. I say that is one, who’s been a bike rider in the city of Atlanta for 20 plus years. Okay. It’s rough. There’s nowhere to walk across the street in a lot of places in Atlanta.

It’s it’s tough. Right? an organization formerly known as the Atlanta bicycle coalition merged with another and is now propel ATL. So that’s their new branding just, just announced like very recently recent days. and so they’re the new form of the organization that’s been advocating for this sustainable transportation in transit, right?

Being able to get around no matter how you need to be able to get. Without a car. So, you know, like our featured band today, the capitated, which I’m sure is the first time they’ve ever been compared to this band, they have also been around for 30 years and they’re showing up to do the work they show up to do the work.

I’ve personally been a member of Atlanta bike coalition for years, because specifically they’re super effective at. Usually kind of distinct tasks and we’ve, we’ve talked about organizations like this before. It is really hard to do the civil work and the community work at the same time. And yet propel ATL gets involved in city and state politics and advocates for meaningful and way overdue changes in.

Budget’s getting projects funded, getting ballot initiatives done. I mean, I really see their work and it’s stuff that really matters. We, me and Kyle just voted for stuff recently to go fund it and get new projects done. So they do that part well, but then they also empower communities and interrupt.

Through programs about bike safety and commuting and navigating Atlanta sidewalks as a real tear user, being able to report sidewalk issues like all that sort of. And they also run programs like, uh, what they call it, Atlanta streets alive, which are, you know, regular events throughout the year where basically they get the city to shut down blocks.

And it becomes a safe space for people to walk around and bike and all that stuff without car traffic coming through. And it really helps our city specifically envision a less like car crazed future of community and to the point to where people get very emotionally invested, once they see. Feels like to be able to safely walk around and not, this may or may not be specific to Atlanta, but not watch somebody take a turn at 70 miles an hour in a 25 zone while your family’s trying to cross the street in the crosswalk.

It’s just, it’s rough stuff. And so being able to change the conversation around this, but also advocate for change on the civil level makes a huge difference. you know, safe transportation and access matters. All of us,

And Atlanta has, you know, decades of Carson Tricity to undo

for

sure, but,

Kyle: we ever.

Cliff: oh man.

Yeah, it hurts. It really does. And so that’s why we wanted to highlight propel ITL. They’re one of the leading voices of advocacy and change to make this stuff more inclusive and safe and give us the future that we want to see. So it’s worth bringing them up and talking about that because. That’s important too.

The stuff that makes a difference in our everyday life, we need to pay attention to anything that has to do with the way that our bodily autonomy is affected. The way that our safety is affected in the way that we can choose to go outside of our own doors and make decisions about our life. That doesn’t end it.

All those things matter. So you can learn more about propel ATL at let’s propel,

ACL dot, or you gotta love when you got to get a new domain name this late in the game, you know, it’s rough stuff. but consider becoming a member. You can become a, a regular individual. Or organizational member of them, uh, like I have been in, you can support their mission that way you can also, if you’re not in Atlanta or around our area, you, go find your community’s version of this.

I can assure you you’ve got one because near. Every community worldwide, quite honestly can approve, uh, it’s non-car access and safety. And if you’re a dork in another direction, like I’ve already called myself on once this episode, if you’re like a transit and biking dork,

You probably

already know like Amsterdam, the thing that we think of as like the easy place that we can all run around on beach cruisers without helmets, because it’s all such a pedestrian friendly city.

Go look at a picture of Amsterdam from the second. It’s packed with cars. They did that. Like we create the communities. We want people make the changes that we want to make. And we force other people to make those changes our number half. So we have the community that we want. So I think this is always something worth bringing up and something worth paying attention to cause whether it’s you on a bike or whether it’s your elderly neighbor who needs to be able to get on the bus to go to the doctor, the way you get from place to place matters and affects your life.

Anything else?

Kyle: No, I’m so glad that we highlighted

propel love the rebrand and excited about what they’re doing. And if you grew up in a scene or you’re coming up in a scene right now, you know, nothing matters more than the community that you can see and feel, and touch and experience right outside your door.

So, take every opportunity you can to be part of a scene part of a community. That’s the only thing that’s. Keep this fragile fucked up world together between now and the end of the world. So take care of yourselves, look out for each other as always. This has been Friday heavy and we will return in two weeks.

Cliff: 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.