Song to Start Your Week With 1: Deafheaven-From the Kettle Onto the Coil

With a new segment that shall hopefully continue, I will try and start the week off with a song that has successfully wowed me from the week before. If I am unsuccessful, I will start the week off with a song that stuck out as unfathomably bad. Either way, you will get a casual take on a new track of any genre. Let’s just hope for more good songs than bad!

We start off with one of my favorite songs of the year thus far. Deafheaven are proving time and time again that they are one of the best current bands in metal with a single track that can coast you through more emotions than many full albums can. With the Adult Swim singles program, which you should look into if you haven’t, there have been new songs every week from some really big names for a lengthy period of time. With 2014’s list so far, we’ve had new songs from Gorgio Moroder, Sleep, Speedy Ortiz, Tim Hecker and more. With more songs to come (including a new song from Mastodon), Adult Swim have done an exceptional job, as always, with bringing light to musicians that truly deserve the focus.

Here are the released songs thus far:

http://video.adultswim.com/music/singles-2014/

Deafheaven contributed a new song for this project that is out officially, and for free, tomorrow. Their new song, From the Kettle Onto the Coil, starts out in traditional black metal fashion. This sound jumps back to the kind of structures they had with their album Roads to Judah rather than last year’s Sunbather. The speed doesn’t overtake the beautiful progressions Deafheaven are now associated with, where the guitar riffs at the start of the song don’t sound overwhelming but rather overwhelmed. The emotion stays with the music the entire trip as it begins to calm down. The drumming slows, the pacing is taken down many notches, but the feeling of impending doom never leaves. With very traditional guitar solos by Kerry McCoy, the song is roped to a post and is anchored down before it digs too deeply within itself. Daniel Tracy’s drumming is perfectly on point; He pummels his kit during the song’s earlier moments with such precision, but he can also splash the kind of emotion many metal drummers lack during some moving fills from the middle of the song towards the end. George Clarke’s vocals sound as tortured as ever, and they fight to be heard above the wall of sound that is so eager to pull him under.

This song is tortured and it tells a complete story during its entire duration. It was a song that the band felt didn’t fit on any album but works well as a stand alone piece; This opinion is shared by me. Many singles songs are used as throw away opportunities to have fun or just release some sort of a b-side for fans to chew on before the main course finally arrives. Not with Deafheaven. The song may start off ferociously, but it slowly becomes a shoegaze whirlwind that shows its true colours. Even with a single song, Deafheaven have opened up the capabilities of black metal-infused music while opening themselves up like dissected cadavers that know their fate. Metal has been associated with anger for so often, but it is the new wave of metal acts that have showed the public that metal can encompass any emotion. From the Kettle Onto the Coil doesn’t inflict pain, but it shows its own anguish. You hear the kettle get hotter and hotter, then experience the kettle being removed from the stove but still contain boiling water inside. The song was named after the painful experience of water dripping from the kettle and hitting the coil beneath it. That, combined with the dizzying Vertigo of last year where the blazing sun forbid someone from reaching their dreams, is enough proof that Deafheaven are masters at painting emotions.