Make - Pilgrimage of Loathing

By Karen A. Mann. After playing and recording on and off for years, Chapel Hill, NC, trio Make suddenly ascended to a higher level with last year’s The Golden Veil. That album showcased the band’s ability to play opposites against each other: clean and sludgy, natural and mechanical, stark and lush

By Karen A. Mann

Cover Art by Fritz Silberbaur

After playing and recording on and off for years, Chapel Hill, NC, trio Make suddenly ascended to a higher level with last year’s The Golden Veil. That album showcased the band’s ability to play opposites against each other: clean and sludgy, natural and mechanical, stark and lush.

In the year since that release, much has happened in the US, especially in their home state of North Carolina. Mass shootings have made us weary, Donald Trump has a legitimate shot at becoming our next president, and in North Carolina, a law was enacted that (among other things) dictates that transgender people use toilet facilities that correspond to the sex on their birth certificate. The members of Make are pretty angry about all these things, and have made no secret of their disgust with their government and those who applaud the government’s actions. With laser-like precision, they’ve managed to channel all this seething anger and hate into their latest release, Pilgrimage of Loathing. The result is like a sledgehammer wrapped in gauze.

Pilgrimage of Loathing begins with "The Somnambulist," which sets the scene for the entire album. The song begins with foreboding, atmospheric guitars, and angry rolling drums. Suddenly there’s a calming interlude with clean vocals. The song reaches a sludgy climax with bellowed lyrics, "YOU, you were wrong!"

From there the album veers from unrelenting noise to the types of soothing melodies your yoga instructor might play during a session. A prime example is "Two Hawks Fucking." While the name is rather ham-handed, it’s a pretty good description of what the song actually sounds like -- sensual and majestic. Meditative. I made the mistake of listening to this while driving through an empty landscape, and had to turn it off because I could feel myself going into a trance.

If that song lulls you to sleep, you’ll be slapped awake by "Human Garbage," which angrily bursts open from the first note, with sludgy bass and guitars, and screamed/bellowed vocals. At 3:23, it’s the shortest song on the album, but it packs a lot of venom in a small package.

The album ends with "Nothing," which opens with a repetitive guitar delayed guitar, slight drums, exotic melodies, and chant-like singing. But like almost everything else on Pilgrimage of Loathing, this song doesn’t stay calm for long, as it builds to a crescendo of frenzied screaming and ends with angry white noise.

Make - In Pursuit

By Karen A. Mann.

By Karen A. Mann.


I wrote last year that The Golden Veil by North Carolina’s Make was the best album I’ve ever heard by a North Carolina band. I am lucky to live in a state with a very strong music community (not just metal), so I knew that was a strong statement, but months later I still agree. A trio from Chapel Hill, Make has been active for years, but seemed to burst into greatness (and garner a lot of well-deserved praise in the process) with that one release. That album is a brilliant mixture between unstructured distorted, instrumental ambience and pure lumbering, bellowed rock songs.

In December, the band suddenly released a two-song EP, In Pursuit, which picks up where The Golden Veil left off.

Photos by Karen.

The EP begins with “Always Waiting for the Bigger Axe to Fall,” an 11-minute instrumental piece that gradually moves between pure noise to a simple, slightly distorted, melody, that grows into a slightly funky groove.

“Between the Ocean and Your Open Vein” is shorter at 5:28 and is also instrumental, but begins with a structured beat that gradually becomes more layered and shimmering.

With only two songs, In Pursuit leaves the listener just slightly unsatisfied, which is one reason why it’s best as a companion to The Golden Veil and is perfect either as a precursor or a coda to that release. Hopefully it’s also a bridge to another transcendent release from this remarkable band.

Make - The Golden Veil

By Ulla Roschat. Three piece band MAKE from Chapel Hill/NC have released their 2nd full length album The Golden Veil. The album can roughly be labeled as post-rock with sludge, psychedelic, doom and drone influences…

By Ulla Roschat.


Three piece band MAKE from Chapel Hill/NC have released their 2nd full length album The Golden Veil.

The album can roughly be labeled as post-rock with sludge, psychedelic, doom and drone influences…, roughly, because MAKE use even the typical post rock/metal elements in a way that makes them totally their own. The loud-quiet contrasts, the slow build ups and cathartic release, we all know well. MAKE drive them to unusual extremes at times and they manage to surprise within the well known patterns.

Beautiful, unhurried dreamy melodies provide a sense of abundance of time and space, often steeped in compelling psychedelia you can easily lose yourself in, but the next crushing riff will find and destroy you before you realize what just happened. All contrasts are extreme, be it the dense and the spacious, the loud and the quiet, the frail and the crushing.

Into this abundance of time and space MAKE complect different musical styles and layers of textures easily and smoothly. There are bits of spaced out psychedelia, acoustic folk, noisy ambience, drone, doom, and touches of progressive, black and death metal. All this is used in a thoughtful and unobtrusive way that this sense of abundance of space is retained. The vocals are used in the same vein, diverse in themselves, harsh and clean, but modestly dosed.

The album is best listened to in the given order of the songs. Right from its start the first song feels like an intro and there's a flow between the songs that builds an overall coherence of the intricate soundscapes that allows the nearly one hour and seven songs to evolve and expand their dark and cold, but irresistible atmospheres. And it's, most notably, MAKE's sense for creating spellbinding atmospheres that makes The Golden Veil outstanding.

The song "The Immortal" is featured on The Wicked Lady Show 94

Make - Axis

Review by Aaron Sullivan.


One year after the release of the fantastic album Trephine. MAKE continues on their genre mixing quest by releasing the three song Axis E.P. Like all music they make, progression is the name of the game.

The title track is a slow burner instrumental that gains speed as is goes. Going from Drone, to hypnotic shoegaziness, to an all out guitar assault in the span of 17 minutes. Chimera starts with a Sludge heavy riff with screamed vocals, moves into Black Metal rasped Sludge, and then into guttural voiced Sludge. With each new vocal style also comes a shift in the music’s tempo. Are you getting the point that these guys never end the way they start? The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters sees the bass and drums locked in a groove while the guitar is creating all kinds of atmospheric sounds. Then 4 minutes in shifts into an Ambient Drone piece as the drum and bass slowly fade out giving way to piano.

This three song E.P. does a great job of showing how versatile and progressive this band is. Their songs are constantly shifting in the most fluid ways allowing all their influences to be heard without songs feeling bloated. MAKE blew me away with their full length and have done it once again with this E.P.

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]

Make - Trephine

Review by Aaron Sullivan.

MAKE take bits of Sludge, Drone, DOOM, and Post-Metal. Wrap it up with a nice Stoner feel, and serve it up hot. Like Horseback, Earth, and Neurosis were put in a blender.

Speed is not the name of the game with this band. Instead they allow the music to crawl. Not only in pace, but into your brain until your body has no choice but to sway with the music. The atmosphere created by the band is what stands out, allowing the listener to get lost in the songs. Vocals range between BM rasps, Sludgy barks, and clean sing alongs. Guitars jangle while the bass lines crawl up and down like a pulse. But just as you’re getting lost and comfortable, the band brings it all back into focus, while also bringing the heavy. As Heavy Blog Is Heavy said:

Trephine is basically a collage of all the things I look for in this genre of music; huge riffs, pensive atmosphere, and an air of psychedelia. It’s all done quite well for a band of their size, and I see them going places if they keep pushing forward with what they’ve got going on.

Could not agree more.

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]