mick barr has a black metal band!!:krallice
 

mick barr (orthrelm, etc..) the prog-guitar sorcerer started a black metal band called krallice. colin marston of dysrythmia fills in on rhthym guitar, and liv weinstein of bloody panda is behind the kit. im real excited about this. ive always though mick would be perfect in some kind of extreme metal band, and this shit is definitley legitimizing that thought. listening to a the track 'wretched wisom' right now, i can already tell this is gonna be a very neat project. sorta like a mid period darkthrone, with some of the ambient sounds popular in contemporary american black metal (leviathan, wolves in the throne room, xasthur), maybe evenj a tiny bit of hardcore influences, and of course a progressive bent. barr's lead guitar is of course mind blowing as usual, no denying he is one of the most innovative and skilled guitarists in the world right now, and this stuff is some of the coolest riffs hes ever come up with. his vocals are surprisingly great, raspy shouts that remind me of the classic black metal vocalists. very cool stuff. im loving it.

i wonder if mick's buddy and extreme metal lover weasel walter will ever join up with these guys. ive read in iterviews that they love collabing together (which they have on thier 10 inch with hillmer, and the luttenbachers records 'cataclysm' and 'spectral warrior mythos'), and a brutal progressive black metal band would seem a perfect place to do it.

Cool, I bet this'll be great. Though I'm not a fan of Orthrelm (besides the brilliant "Ov"), I love Crom-Tech... Octis and Ocrillim are okay, and I thought Mick Barr/Zach Hill's album together was one of the worst things I've ever heard.

But I bet this will be great. I hope he ditches that ear piercing tone at some point...

i bet i won't like it one bit

go wank off to kardashian then

crom-tech is still my fave mick barr project. ocrillim-ov is fucking awesome as well. and, i love orthrelm, i dont really see anything not to like about that band. creative, extremly technical buy not wank off-ish, amazing riffs, emotional.

hey sonic, you heard the collab betwen mick, weasel, and sam hillmer? its really cool. weasel is on drums and smashes through complex rhythm patterns ands a healthy dosage of blast beats, mick is in top form as always (you cant really define how he plays, but you just know how fucking good he is), and hillmer plays skronky sax. its not the best record around, but its certainly fun listening to three of the most talented guys in modern music fuck around and make crazy ass lo-fi progressive/avant-jazz/noise sounds.

Orthrelm did OV, not Ocrillim. I'm sure you know that but typed it wrong.

yeah, fuck.

anyways, ocrillim-annwn i really like as well

Yeeah. Mick's alright, he just often does the same exact thing on every single thing he's ever done. Not a huge fan of his style (tremolo picking the bottle 2 strings on frets 12-20 all the time), though he's participated in some great work.

I'm downloading the Krallice album right now.

i would have guessed it was his band from the name alone.

Just listened to the album.

It's good, though a bit exhaustive of course.

Will check it out, thanks.

Colin Marston, awesome!

Anyone want me to upload this?

I just listened to this on iTunes. It's great, and it's come along just when I thought I'd burnt myself out on black metal.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ahqgig

If you like it, buy the album!

^Thanks!!

thanks

This is some pretty good shit.....it's a shame the production wasn't better.



EDIT - Actually, this is some DAMN GOOD shit....really digging it.


Have you guys seen Orthrelm live? They were insane. I saw them for the first time when they opened up for Fugazi.

Definitely a great live band. I just don't think it's fun to listen to for very long. Definitely a good band to put on your mix tapes.

...................except "OV", which is one of the best albums of all time. Notice they haven't done anything since then (except Behold the Arctopus split). I mean, really, what else can they say after that?

This album is really fucking good!

Yeah, Orthrelm are def. a band I throw on like once a year.

This album is incredible, THANKS ADAM

The first track might be the weakest, but after that it just gets better and better.

told you this shit was bad ass

badass to the bone

why does this sound so much more uhm.. developed than Mick Barr's other projects? It's way better than Orthrelm or Ocrilim.

i duno if its better. maybe it has more direction? like, there is an idea of what the music is gonna sound like, and then the band tries to fullfill that idea. where as mick's other stuff, with the exception of cromagnon, is him just playing and then seeing what comes out. not improvising obviously, but not exactly composed. i have no idea what im talking about. mick is really good, incredibly creative, skilled, and disciplined. hes easily in the top 5 for rock guitarists that have came around in the last 10 years or so. regardless of what you think about his music, no can deny his talent. same thing with someone like zach hill, sure 'there is no 666 in outer space' sucked hard hard hard, but no one in thier right mind can say, "zach hill is a bad drummer".

Zach Hill is a great drummer. Easily amongst the best.

Mick Barr is a good guitar player, but I never really thought he was one of the "best" and I still don't know if he really is; he is one of the more interesting guitarists around though.

Derek, I think it sounds more developed because the production is better and the songs are longer haa.

I'll bump this one more time in case anyone wants the album.. it's awesome, one of the best of the year definitely.

i absolutely love this album...besides the gas reissue its pretty much my fav. thing this year...going to see them at the knitting factory in oct. with watain

Well it just seems light years away from Orthrelm's repetitive noodling (which I guess is the point of them but still). I can definitely listen to this way more than I can listen to Orthrelm.

Yes.

bump

Crom-Tech is still the ultimate Mick Barr band. But this is close.

yes!

still diggin this band, caught them live, i could watch mick barr noodle for 6 hours. this album i realized isn't really black metal though, it actually reminds me more of swedish melodic death metal and the later at the gates albums albeit in a way more progressie fasion with all sorts of bokers progressions and melodies.

i mean, mick barr probably is the best guitarist going right now. the guy has sooooo much skill, but he never loses emotion and energy. he just sounds like a madman who is totally locked into his instrument totally sheltered from the outside world, melting our minds with those all over the place, light speed notes so we could maybe try and understand what he hears.

and yeah, Crom-Tech was awesome. If anything because they were still very punk and underprocuded and everything so it has like this ugly sound at war with Barr's ridiculously complex playing. Thier "S/T" was real important to me as a player, basically proves that you can throw together a bunch of scattered and diverese and rare notes, play them together super fast and in repetition, and then come out with something resembling "structure". I like the Ocrillim album, but i never wanna hear it anymore, Mick needs a drummer to lock into.

Krallice just sound exactly like Weakling to me. But if you're going to ripoff a band, that's probably the best black metal band to ripoff.

Mick Barr's an interesting player, I don't know if he's the BEST guitar player; I mean, I can play like he does and most guitarists can, at least for a few minutes. I'm sure his wrist gets tired though, which is interesting... he's a very physical player, something you don't usually see with guitar players... his technique is lots of tremolo picking (obviously), almost always chromatically, up and down every fret of the bottom two strings (not in Krallice, of course), with some simple tapping here or there. I think it's a cool technique and it occasionally produces a cool riff or two but I don't know if I'd really say he's the best guitar player around. I mean, could he play a slow series of notes that sounded good? Probably not. Could he write a really catchy, repetetive riff? HIGHLY doubt it. Besides Krallice, he has showed no real diversity or range over the course of hundreds of songs. He's perhaps the most UNDERRATED guitar player around, as I doubt any mainstream (or even most underground) magazines would latch onto his ability but his main strength in guitar playing is definitely his excellent memory, in regards to what to play at what time. I wish he'd occasionally change the MusicMan amp guitar tone he's used on every Crom-Tech, Octis, Ocrillim, and Orthrelm song.

Either way, I can't see what he does next.

I just had this in my car last week.....still good shit!!

somethign is wrong when the vivian girls post has three tiems the amount of discussion as this one...that is all

I love the drums on the third track.