American Heritage - Why Everyone Gets Cancer

Label: The Rosewood Union

Year: 1999

Even though it's been a couple of days since we last spoke, I'm still on the topic of instrumental music. Aren't you? Well, cool, let's talk about it then.

Our last post was Kinski, who come at you from a post-hardcore direction, ebbing and flowing, bringing in the big dynamic wallops when needed. That's one way to do it.

Another way to do it is by creating this big, twisting, gnarled nest of riffs, tempos, drumming, and general aggression. You take that mess, and you throw it straight at the listener and let them work their own way out of the dense thicket. Takes a minute. Maybe takes longer. It's not easy work trying to trace sounds back to their source as the sounds themselves are rarely settled long enough to take root. It's not chaotic for the sake of being "difficult", or to impress you with their "chops", it's just a roiling ball of ideas that have been competing for some time within the minds of its creators, and those ideas are fighting to breathe. Unlike the mathy hardcore bands (Dillinger Escape Plan comes to mind) who seem content attacking the listener with change after change after unrelated change, American Heritage threads their ideas together into a cohesive tapestry. Sure, it waves in the wind, and it can get all knotted up, but it always unfolds to reveal itself to you in a way that is universally understandable. Maybe that has to do with a rhythm section who actually play a rhythm?

If you like loud and heavy and manic...this works.

Members of Yakuza, Brass Knuckles For Tough Guys, Grout Villa, Heaving Mass, Target, and probably ten other bands you, your friends, and I have never heard of.

*Originally posted 01-01-14, reposted 09-25-14

DL