New Vinyl Roundup--Coalesce--Ox

I remember when I was just a wee little lad in high school; it was a fanciful time where my musical tastes were deplorable and my penis may as well have been nonexistent (other than the excessive amount of attention I myself gave to it, of course).  In those days, I was always searching for the newest, bestest thing that coincidentally always sounded like Children of Bodom (surprise, there aren't that many of those things floating around in the early-internet age), and my main new music conduit at this time was my friend Ed.  You've probably read about Ed before, and if you've visited this site more that just this one time, you probably are Ed.  But I will still elaborate; Ed is the dude who helps me with Interwebs.  He sends me cool links and downloads and shit, and when we were both discovering the amazing things that metal could give us, he was the main guy who would find something that would blow my mind and then immediately move past it, panning it as "dumb and/or for homos."

In our formative years, Ed handed me a collection of burned CD's, which at the time were relative novelties.  We all knew about dubbing cassettes, but dubbing CD's?!?  How very droll!  So he gave me a handful of CD's that he had burned for me, and I immediately went home and starting listening to them.  I want to go ahead and state right now, for the record, that my musical taste was slow to bud; indeed, I was a late bloomer, one who couldn't identify good music from a hole in the ground I dug to hide my report car.  Also, I had no pubic hair.

In the collection of those albums Ed burned for me was my first exposure to Coalesce, in the form of 0:12 A Revolution in Just Listening, as well as some Kandiria album (and I'm not confident that I spelled Kandiria correctly).  Needless to say, with my metal muscles so underdeveloped and stupid, I hated both albums (though, inexplicably, I stand by my assessment of Kandiria to this day).  My tastes were so primitive in those days that, for the longest time, I was unable to differentiate between Coalesce and Kandiria, constantly confusing the two until I finally heard Ox, Coalesce's latest full-length album.

This makes me hate my younger self even more than I already do, which is a lot.

Ox is a masterpiece, and I say that with no hint of irony.  I loved this album so much that I wish I could travel back in time and punch my 17-year-old self in the dick until my younger self spontaneously understood how great Coalesce actually is.  This would achieve the same effect as my underwear purchasing.  If I buy irregular underwear from Ross, that means that I have two crotches per pair of underwear, which means that I have 1/2 the urine stains per crotch if I follow the proper rotation.  And if they forget to sew the ass on to any of those underwear, it saves me the embarrassment of leaving skid marks (though it sets me up for the far more embarrassing "skid marks on the jeans," which is much more horrifying but infinitely easier to hide from one's spouse).  That's a long, drawn out way of saying that I could have saved myself the embarrassment of saying stupid things like "Coalesce raps too much on that one album I heard by them," by hiding the fact that I didn't like them at all (like my denim skidmarks). 

Coalesce is another band that I feel gets tagged with a pejorative genre tag (in this case, *groan*, metalcore) that makes little to no sense.  I had the same feeling the first time I heard the Red Chord referred to as a "deathcore" band, or the first time I heard someone say that my sister is "less manly than [my] description would lead [the subject] to believe."  None of those things make sense, but since I didn't say them, and two of them caught on with the greater population (Sorry, Melissa), I have to therefore defer to them.  But still, almost nobody says that my sister isn't as manly as I make her out to be.

Ox is a fantastic album by a totally great band that doesn't rap at all, and you should go listen to it right now if you have it.  If you want to steal it rather than having Will give it to you for free (Thanks, Will!), you should follow your nose to a magical place where you can sample it for free forever.  But you should buy it; I have spoken to Sean Ingram a couple of times (after seeing Coalesce live), and he said that people who steal their album have "teeny little pee-pees and no moral constitutions**."  And I'm inclined to agree.

**= May not actually be a quote from Sean Ingram