Ceremony - Still Nothing Moves You (Album)
How to perform the first song on Still Nothing Moves You, entitled Dead Moon California (Midnight in Solitude) in a few easy to follow steps:
1. Insert ominous sounding reverb
2. Thump out a simple-ish bass line
3. STRUM!
4. Go ning ning ning ning ning on the guitar
5. Then, yell about some philosophical sounding stuff – make it as depressing as you can.
6. Do the last three steps, but slightly faster towards the end of the song.
Too easy!
The whole album goes for a staggering length of 20 something minutes – indeed I think I spied one song that went for about 45 seconds. From the outset Still Nothing Moves You assaults you with an onslaught of metal-slash-punk. That is to say, the album has the speed and vitality of punk and this is lovingly mixed with the deranged anger associated with metal. Somehow it seems more intelligent though, albeit in a suicidal arts student kind of way.
Lyrically, it fascinated me. I had to read the cheat sheet though, because the instruments largely drown out the vocals. One lyric I managed to catch was ‘spreads fear and disease’. A similar sentiment runs throughout the rest of the tracks. I can never quite gather why people want to make music that is so desperately bleak and despairing.
Still Nothing Moves You, despite being the shortest album I own, manages to be very monotonous. I can’t tell one track from the other. I do like this album more than some of the other metal out there that I’ve made myself listen to, but that may well be related to its brevity. It’s such a sweet relief when the fifteen tracks are over. That’s not to say the music is bad, per se, but it’s just so vicious, almost sadistic.
Whilst I was lying in bed listening to Ceremony, I was feeling like crap and had some sort of gunk dribbling from all of the holes in my head – I realised that they weren’t making me feel any better about life. They were actually making me feel drastically worse. I can’t wait to finish writing up this review so I can put something infinitely perkier on my poor baby CD player. I imagine that it is feeling very messed up having to spin this particular album around and around and around.
Now I can’t leave without offering a horribly commercialistic journalism ‘ism’. Are you ready? Yes? Ok - “I’ve got to say that Still Nothing Moves You, will, certainly, move you”....I’ll be a proper journo yet...
