Do you like lists? I like lists. One of my very favorite books is Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and inevitably, around year-end list-making season, I think about its first chapter. Calvino describes stepping into a bookstore to look for a particular volume, but immediately being distracted by all the other books leering at you from the shelves:
“…you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too” (Calvino 1979, trans. William Weaver 1981, p. 5).
Therefore, whenever I make my own list, I suspect that there are countless drafts of other lists just beneath the surface, such as:
- Albums That Are Good But You Cannot Decide Why
- Albums You Were Sure You Would Like But Which You Did Not
- Albums From Literally Any Other Year Than This Current One That Are Upset You Continue To Display A Presentism Bias
- Albums That Are Bad But By Which You Are Nevertheless Fascinated
- Albums That You Suspect Are Excellent But You Were Maybe In A Weird Headspace The First Time You Tried To Listen To Them And As A Result They Alienated You So Thoroughly That You Began To Question If There Is Ever Any Merit Whatsoever In The Patina Of Objectivity That A List Such As This One Carries Even When It Wants To Address Directly The Inherent Subjectivity Of Art And How We Respond To It Which Is Another Way Of Saying That This List Is No Better Than Any Other One
Do you like music? I like music. I suppose any honest list ought to lead with that legal disclaimer, because I think if you are a person who does not like music, you might not find the remainder of this article very useful. For any other music-likers out there, though, here’s another question: do you ever think about music as worship? It can be a tricky term, worship, because it’s so difficult to separate from a religious context. But to me, music is a practice of worship. Why does anyone create music? Why does anyone listen to music? Why does anyone write words about anyone else’s sounds? Yes, there are reasons – psychological, economic, evolutionary, aesthetic reasons – but those reasons are not an answer. To me, the why of music is worship: a practice through which we step outside ourselves, glorify the experience of living in this world in these bodies, foster a feeble but courageous trust that some faint, murmured fragment might echo beyond the fluttering blink of our briefness here.
Here are some lists about some music. I love you and hope you are well.
IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT SEVERAL HEAVY METAL ALBUMS
Because I like lists and because I like music, I feel compelled to mention the excellent albums that fall just outside my top 20 of the year. They are presented in alphabetical order, because what kind of maniac would spend time agonizing over how to place albums 21 through 50? [hastily closes several open spreadsheet tabs]
These Bands Made The Whole World Sing, Except Not Really, That Would Be Weird, Instead They Were Just Responsible For Making Some Very Cool Music: Arnaut Pavle, Baazlvaat, Blood Oath, Carnosus, Cirith Ungol, Crimson Dawn, Deathcode Society, Demoniac, Dozer, Evermore, Garoted, Gateway, Lost Harvest, Lyrre, Negative Vortex, Oksat, Paroxysm Unit, Petrale, Restless Spirit, Sick Sinus Syndrome, Sonic Poison, Suffocation, Tanith, Tentacult, They Watch Us From The Moon, Thy Catafalque, Tomb Mold, Twilight Force, Verminous Serpent, Witch Ripper.
20. Pest Control – Don’t Test The Pest
Some lovable ragamuffin had this to say about Pest Control back in March:
“Just like James Hetfield’s picking arm lobbing a steak and kidney pudding at Maggie Thatcher’s grave, Pest Control are A) thrashy, B) British, and C) excellent. Don’t Test the Pest is brash, snotty, aggressive crossover thrash in the lineage of DRI, Cro-Mags, Crumbsuckers et al, but there’s an even meaner metallic Slayer edge at times (as on the almost “South of Heaven” opening to album closer “The Great Deceiver”), and vocalist Leah’s ferocious performance is indebted to Détente’s Dawn Crosby and Sentinel Beast’s Debbie Gunn. This debut LP is 21 minutes of uproarious, no-bullshit, fuck-you thrash energy. The title track and “Struck Down” are particularly mighty, but even when Pest Control rolls into rudimentary punkish hollering, the songs are mighty, the production powerful, the performances oozing with sass.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
19. Dødheimsgard – Black Medium Current
Two core truths keep me coming back to Black Medium Current: 1) I have no idea exactly what the band is doing at any particular moment, and 2) I am convinced that they know exactly what they are doing at every single moment. Avant-garde black metal is still, of course, the order of the day with DHG, but Black Medium Current seems to wander even farther afield and with less advance telegraphing of its intentions than even previous head-spinners like Satanic Art and A Umbra Omega. Vicotnik’s vocals anchor the whole show in a sort of manic conviction, but whether these songs are lurching from Ulver-styled lounge and trip-hop to whirlwind-quick black metal tremoloing, or from industrial breakbeats and noisy squelches to piano-led melancholy, there’s a feeling that Dødheimsgard lived inside of these songs for so long that they discovered all their hidden seams and angles, then spent the rest of their time chasing after those phantoms, those reflections, those vanished dreams.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
18. Endless Exam – Voice Of Passion And Agony
Some irrepressible lunkhead said this about Endless Exam back in September:
“Although the picture of Endless Exam on Bandcamp might lead one to believe that this is some kind of circus metal, Voice of Passion and Agony is, at its core, a crunchy, high-sheen modern metal album with touches of a slightly avant-garde take on symphonic power metal. These songs are filled with huge hooks and rich atmosphere, all of it driven deep into the brainpan by the massively charismatic vocals of Nina Kuronen. Jukka Saarinen’s guitar sometimes steps out with flashy, melodic leads and solos (as on the excellent “Consealed Truth”), but more often leans back with the bass and traces out a rock-solid structure for Kuronen’s voice and some synthy textures to paint more vividly. The band’s heavy modern crunch that flirts with prog means that one of the best points of comparison might be Norway’s Madder Mortem, but there’s also a bit more of the Nightwish or Epica school of grandiosity… Despite the vocal fire and instrumental acrobatics, the main selling point of Endless Exam’s staggeringly accomplished debut is its rich emotional depth…”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
17. 7H. Target – Yantra Creating
Some unstoppable jerkoff shared these thoughts about 7 H. Target in March:
“Please do not seek your sex education from a slamming tech-death band. Having a well-qualified instructor can really make a vas deferens. Hey, also, there’s some music here. Thirty-five minutes of it, but probably about two hundred minutes’ worth of notes, and about a billion minutes’ worth of stank face. If you cannot tell, the point is that Yantra Creating is rowdier than your neighbor’s dog after scarfing a 10-pack of Viagra and getting loose in a department store to hump all the mannequins to death. The album’s greatest asset, really, is that it is both smarterer and more stupider than you think it is. Listen to the 4-minute mark of “Askeza” and tell me you could do that. You couldn’t! Listen to the ritualistic diversion of “Shiva Yajur Mantra,” with its Indian percussion and vocalization atop a background of squiggling guitar and tell me you would do that. You wouldn’t! Listen to the entire fucking album and tell me you shouldn’t listen to it again right away. You should! You could! YOU COULD DO IT RIGH T F U CKI N G NOOOOOOOOOOW.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
16. Gorod – The Orb
Some limp-dimpled armoire said this about Gorod back in March:
“The Orb is dense, furious, cunningly melodic, and punishingly precise. But if almost exactly the same could be said about Suffocation or any other brutal death metal A-listers, the real difference I’m talking about is that Suffocation makes me scratch my head and say, “What are they doing?” Gorod makes me scratch my head and say, “How do they do that?”… Gorod touches on such a range of styles and moods here that while they surely belong to the same class as other modern tech-death greats such as Obscura, Necrophagist, Spawn of Possession, et al., The Orb should also appeal to fans of Meshuggah, Gojira, Soilwork, and modern Enslaved. The chorus on the album’s title track is a rhythmic marvel, a tightly wound staccato bruising that features deftly melodic guitar tapping as pure background, and the elegant solo that emerges in the song’s last minute is a perfect nightcap.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
15. Coffin Mulch – Spectral Intercession
Some un-chill-out-able knob cupper had this to say about Coffin Mulch back in November:
“…the reason you should listen to Coffin Mulch’s debut album of cantankerous hollering and loud instrument noises is that…Spectral Intercession is overflowing with danceable rhythm. Please don’t misunderstand: this is entirely putrid, classic-styled old-school death metal, all the way down to the HM-2 buzzsaw tone and vocalist Al, who sounds like a walrus impersonating Martin van Drunen with a really bad toothache. But these haggis-humpers know their way around movement, so each riff-obsessed song on this punkily belligerent album is stuffed with boogieing, shimmying, high-stepping, and soft-shoeing. It is fun as shit and you can’t convince me otherwise.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
14. Moonlight Sorcery – Horned Lord Of The Thorned Castle
In a perfect world, it would be enough for me to tell you that Horned Lord of the Thorned Castle is an excellent symphonic black metal album. Things being what they are, however, I feel compelled to echo my chum Captain in pointing out that Moonlight Sorcery’s debut full-length is both an excellent symphonic black metal album AND very truly a power metal album. Now, of course it would be silly to say that any album with a sufficient amount of shred is somehow magically a power metal album, but not only does Thorned Horn of the Castled Lord shred every single instrument like a bag of iceberg lettuce on white person taco night, but it does so with a sweeping, theatrical, neoclassical, and notably positive disposition. Sure, there’s a bit in “The Secret of Streaming Blood” that sounds very Cradle of Filth, but then a tune like “Fire Burns the Horizon” is only a major key away from Rhapsody of Fire. Castled Thorn of the Lorded Horn is like a waterfall: fast, loud, and not unwilling to leave you standing in a puddle.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
13. Majesties – Vast Reaches Unclaimed
Here at Strawman & Ad Hominem, Inc., we would like to register a formal complaint with the idiots out there trying to dunk on Majesties for releasing The Jester Race pt. 2. (Not a real company, not a real complaint.) If you were inclined to be a busted-up old sink about it, I suppose you could carp about how closely this Minnesota quartet (featuring members of the similarly sleek and melodic projects Obsequiae and Inexorum) hews to the classic mid-90s sound of melodic death metal, but, I don’t know man, wouldn’t you rather spend your time zooming along with these chewy riffs, bouncing off burnished bronze melodies and swift, ping-ponging rhythmic runs? As far as I’m concerned, there are too few albums that aim for the apex style of such classics as The Gallery and The Jester Race, so when a class act like Majesties comes along and runs the damn board, why not enjoy the ride?
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
12. Mansion – Second Death
Some cram-hammered dickwad wrote this about Mansion in February:
“Mansion’s music is inspired by a small, obscure Christian cult from early to mid-20th century Finland, but if you are thinking you need to read an invisible ink bible or wear special underpants to listen to Mansion you are WRONG and I wish you would stop EMBARRASSING YOURSELF… [T]he music operates in a doomy, occult rock style in the same sauna-park as Messa, Sabbath Assembly, or the Devil’s Blood, with hints of Electric Wizard or Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats. The songs are mostly slow and low, with rich, detailed production and a profusion of different vocals (male, female, overlapping, whispered, crooning, threatening, choirs) that gives the album a liturgical feel. And the thing is, if you really sink into these songs, you’ll see that Mansion does better than just about any other band in this style at evoking both the menace and seduction of a cult.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
11. Sorcerer – Reign Of The Reaper
Some jingle-jangled flimflammer said this in October:
“On album number four… Sorcerer’s epic doom is truly firing on all cylinders, and at 47 minutes, it is the leanest album by far. This relative brevity is a very smart move, particularly given that each of the preceding three albums was longer than the one before. Thus, even though the blueprint here is largely unchanged, the album feels tighter, more elegantly constructed, and powerfully energized. Power, by the way, is a critical word here, because epic doom metal, especially in the way that Sorcerer wields it, is often more or less the same thing as slow power metal. In particular, the guitar tandem of Kristian Niemann and Peter Hallgren consistently light up the album with fiery leads, sleek harmonized lines, and buttery-smooth soloing, such that even when a song is centered around a stout, trudging doom riff, there’s always a searing lick or counterpoint just around the corner.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
THOUGH THEY MAY SPEAK WITH BRAVEST FIRE
10. Sacred Outcry – Towers Of Gold
Friends, there’s really no two ways about it: Towers of Gold is simply majestic as balls. The album unfolds as a single, narrative arc, with several of George Apolodimas’s songs flowing directly into the next. This means that, even though snappy wallopers like “Into the Storm” will fit just fine into your playlist of “power metal songs triumphant enough to help you benchpress a dozen dragons,” the experience is enhanced when you sit from start to end with these golden, carefully orchestrated epics. Daniel Heiman’s impossibly clean and bell-tone pure vocals are undoubtedly the star of the show, but they never feel like showing off. It’s just that, well, if you’re going to put together an album as balls-majestic as this one, you’d damn well better find the perfect vocalist. It’s kind of a dick move, laying down a flat-out commandment such as this, but my goodness, if you aren’t moved by the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”-esque acrobatics of the album’s title track, it’s quite possible that you don’t actually like heavy metal.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
9. Xoth – Exogalactic
Some slick-knuckled bamboozler wrote this about Xoth in November:
“Jeremy Salvo’s drumming is both frantic and precise. Ben Bennett’s bass is delightfully forward in the mix, with its chunky twang that sounds like the snapped and flailing cables of a suspension bridge accident. Woody Adler and Tyler Sturgill, meanwhile, play their guitars not just like it’s their job, but like the whole damn universe might just up and die if they stopped for even a second. Exogalactic is absolutely littered with heroic guitar leads, several of which actually end up doing more of the narrative and rhythmic work of the songs than the vocals (courtesy of Sturgill). Each song seethes with crackling energy, like the wailing, treated main lead on “Sporecraft Zero” or the rather triumphant gallop that “Reflective Nemesis” works its way up to. This is truly an album for you if you are the sort of person who enjoys listening to guitars making excellent sounds.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
8. Pupil Slicer – Blossom
Pupil Slicer’s 2021 debut LP, Mirrors, was jagged, frantic, spastic grinding metallic mathcore. Now, on Blossom, the UK band feel like they are picking up those same shards and reassembling them to create a new frame. If anything, the fact that Pupil Slicer has played up some of the more atmospheric elements – keys, clean vocals, electronic effects – makes their scything, chaotic metallic hardcore hit all the harder. Kate Davies’s snarling vocals are as savage as ever, but the contrast (and occasional overdub) with her clean singing makes for many of the album’s most striking moments. If you came up listening to Deftones and the Dillinger Escape Plan, Pupil Slicer are singing your song, but regardless of its genesis or your perspective on it, Blossom is beautiful, feral, desperate music.
• Bandcamp
7. Begravement – Horrific Illusions Beckon
Some besotted jabberwocky wrote this about Begravement back in August:
“Across Horrific Illusions Beckon, Begravement’s songwriting is consistently tremendous, with catchy riffs, repeated motifs, and complex structures that never feel like calculus homework. And although the guitar work from Ezra Blumenfeld and Owen Hiber often takes center stage, each instrument gets ample opportunity to step out and take the lead (like on the pummeling snare work from drummer Grady Westling on the midsection of “Stifling Excruciation”). Matt Schrampfer’s fretless bass often pops out to counterpoint the guitars or add a third melodic line, but his tone is mostly tight and frantic rather than overly elastic and ponytailed… Always be suspicious of anyone claiming that such and such band is “saving [whatever].” Begravement is not saving death metal; a band like Begravement is living proof that death metal will never need saving. Death metal was created by people who wanted to play the fastest and coolest shit they could because it sounded excellent, so put that in your morally compromised pipe and smoke it, Jefferson.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
6. Excalion – Once Upon A Time
On album number six, Finland’s Excalion have damn near perfected a style that I hope you will not murder me for calling “Goldilocks power metal.” By this, I mean that Excalion’s rich, multifaceted power metal is never too much of any one thing: never so much speed that it detracts from melody, never so much of the keys that they overwhelm the guitars, never so much shredding that it smears the compositions, never so vocally overpowering that the musicianship pales, heavy but not chugging, light-touch but not wimpy. Everything in the (just) right place.
• Last Rites Review via We Have the Power
• Bandcamp
5. Vórtize – Desde Bajo Tierra
Javier Ortiz’s magical second album with his (mostly) solo project Vórtize is traditional heavy metal that doesn’t sound like most trad metal you might be thinking of. What it does sound like, however, is the pure, unbridled joy of heavy metal filtered through one person’s particular vision. These eight songs are fiery, wildly catchy, kinetic bursts of galloping, chest-thumping, sprinting to the finish line metal, with key assists on guitar solos and backing vocals from other members of the Chilean underground. The first time I saw Iron Maiden in concert, ol’ Bruce took a minute to ask the audience how many people were at their first Iron Maiden show, and the upswelling of enthusiasm and support, the idea that we had all joined an unstoppable community, was palpably uplifting. Desde Bajo Tierra doesn’t sound anything like Iron Maiden, but it sounds like the kind of heavy metal you might make if you felt yourself buoyed by that energy of an Iron Maiden concert and just knew you had to do whatever you could to bring your own version of that into the world.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
4. Autopsy – Ashes, Organs, Blood And Crypts
If I told you that Autopsy’s latest album was an album-length deathrock interpretation of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, you would (rightly) tell me to go screw. So if, instead, I tell you that Autopsy’s latest album is one of the very finest albums of the year, and Autopsy’s best album since 1991, would you please be kinder? One of the key elements of Autopsy’s sound has always been that they play tight, smartly written songs in a way that sounds loose, casual, and demented. Reifert’s scene-(and sinew-)chewing vocals contribute in no small part – just listen to him enunciate a weirdly perfect line like “Ancestral innards fill my teeth” in “Well of Entrails” – but Corrales and Cutler just keep on churning out Hall of Fame-level death metal riffs with the relaxed ease of a flock of geese shitting on your lawn, while Wilkinson’s bass often swings out front to act as a third lead player. If you don’t like Autopsy, I am (rightly) telling you to go screw.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
3. Angra – Cycles Of Pain
Depending on how you classify a certain powerhouse Greek debut album (see below), Cycles of Pain is probably the very best power metal album of the year. Angra founder and mastermind Rafael Bittencourt has steered the ship through large-scale personnel change, but although every era of Angra has triumphant highs, with 2018’s Ømni and, especially, now with Cycles of Pain, the Fabio Lione-fronted era is firing on all cylinders to produce some of the best music of the band’s 30+-year career. Angra’s power metal remains steeped in prog, but they also continue to pull in elements of world music and a much wider range of rhythms and textures than most Euro-style power metal. The bass solo and tumbling percussion on “Tide of Changes (Pt. II),” the sneaky rhythmic change-up about halfway through the massive “Dead Man on Display,” the echoes of Awake-era Dream Theater on the wonderful “Faithless Sanctuary,” the operatic guest vocals and stark drama of album closer “Tears of Blood”… Cycles of Pain is gem after gem after gem. Don’t miss it.
• Bandcamp
2. Afterbirth – In But Not Of
In But Not Of is a death metal album in much the same way that Moby-Dick is a book about a whale: [yes] but not [only]. The New York quartet’s third album is, yes, jaw-dropping and head-spinning and brutal and technical and gurgly and lurchy and all that, but the thing that most stands out – whether on listen one, two, or ten – is its essential seamlessness. By the time “Hovering Human Head Drones” rolls around about halfway through, with its aquatic clean guitar echoes and additional percussion like something out of Isis’s Panopticon, it’s a tribute to the breadth and fluidity (ick) of Afterbirth’s vision that instead of thinking, “Hey, what the hell is THIS?” you won’t think anything at all, because of course this is where the band has taken you. In But Not Of is not only staggeringly accomplished, but it’s just one hell of a pleasure to listen to. Some bands of this level of complexity and dexterity really make you work for it as a listener, but Afterbirth lays it all out like the most perfect map of a utopian sewer system you could ever imagine. An annoying thing I have sometimes said about music like this is that it’s either the dumbest possible smart music, or the smartest possible dumb music. Either way, In But Not Of is an… ugh, goddamnit… it’s a whale of an album.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
1. Triumpher – Storming The Walls
Some bespoke knucklehead had this to say about Triumpher back in March:
“Triumpher play with a huge range of tones and influences, but you still can’t really call their style much other than epic metal with a capital FUCK YES. These ten songs touch on weighty doom, speed-leaning power metal, trad-infused death metal, melodic black metal, and windswept Viking metal. The epic prefix is important, though, for the dramatic and sometimes cinematic way that Triumpher craft their music. Storming the Walls is a masterclass in guitar pyrotechnics, mesmerizing vocals, rich, independent bass, and inventively monstrous drumming, but it also overflows with instrumentation and detail that elevate the already powerful songwriting to a place of grandeur, battle, and triumph. Acoustic guitars, piano, gold-toned choral vocals, timpani, and subtle synths…deepen the album without ever overpowering its core of thunderous heavy metal.”
“After sitting with Triumpher’s outstanding debut, I feel like I have an answer forming to the question, “Why do you like heavy metal?” Through the bracing steel of Storming the Walls, I realize that the reason I like heavy metal is that it fortifies me for victory… If you think it is important for me to retain my objectivity and avoid hyperbole, then let’s just pretend I am joking when I say that if you do not like Storming the Walls, it is possible that you do not like heavy metal. If ever you have loved heavy metal, love it here, love it well, love it now.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
LEANING FROM THE STEEP SLOPE OF EPS & DEMOS
Over the course of the year, I did a lot of deep digging through Bandcamp for the recurring feature/non sequitur factory known as “Fuck You Friday.” This exercise accomplished a couple things: it reaffirmed the notion that there is just an absurd amount of awesome music in the world, but it also underscored a truth that we sometimes forget, which is that a 70-minute conceptual architecture about the invention of yogurt or whatever is all well and good, but sometimes what we really need is to get our hair blown back by a band that pops in for 10 minutes, burns the joint down, and gets the hell out.
10. Sequestrum – Pickled Preservation
Copenhagen’s Sequestrum did not include “Carcass” as a Bandcamp tag on the Pickled Preservation EP, but friends, it is implied as hell. These half-dozen or so “tunes” (a word that is here being stretched to near its breaking point) are smeary, clotted, gurgling blurs of heavy-as-a-hippo goregrinding death metal. Sure, you might be momentarily dazzled by a bluesy swinging riff in “Preserved to Last,” but at any given turn you’re about a hair-breadth away from a slip and fall straight into the toilet. Great fun!
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
9. Stangarigel – Metafyzika Barbarstva
“Compared with last year’s Na Severe Srdca, Metafyzika Barbarstva makes even more space for acoustic folk, synthy interludes, and cinematic atmosphere, but Stangarigel’s core sound is still a devout, traditionalist worship of the more atmospheric end of black metal’s second wave. Satyricon’s Dark Medieval Times, in particular, looms large in the haze, as does Dimmu Borgir’s For All Tid. Stangarigel’s music, in keeping with the atmosphere of its forebears, is almost aggressively distant, as if the more you crank the volume up, the more it seems to stalk away and recede into a forest shrouded in mist.”
• Bandcamp
8. Primitive Rage – Enemies To Crush
“Enemies Left to Crush is a ruthless demonstration of bile that cycles between furious grind/powerviolence and unapologetically ignorant hardcore beatdowns. The whole thing lands somewhere in the vicinity of Shai Hulud, Dephosphorus, early Pig Destroyer, and Converge’s When Forever Comes Crashing… If you tried to do an interpretive dance to Enemies Left to Crush, the interpretation would probably be ‘person having seizure is crushed by falling piano and also the piano is on fire and also the person is speaking in tongues.’”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
7. Scud – III
This Israeli trio plays a mangled sort of sludgy, crusty, feedback-sluiced grindy death metal. Over the course of these eight songs in about fourteen minutes, they stomp, squeal, trudge, blast, and sprint from grinding riff to juddering breakdown and back, along with likely the filthiest, meanest cover of “Into the Crypt of Rays” you’re likely to hear in this year or any other. Strap in and get scudded, chump. Get scumped, chud. Whatever.
• Bandcamp
6. Scalp – Black Tar
“Scalp plays a pointedly rude type of grinding metallic hardcore that paints its corners with feedback and corrosive noise but also indulges in some of the most ludicrously enjoyable beatdowns one can imagine. The Fuck You-balls on the grooving swagger of “Endless Relapse” is basically like Scalp’s version of a “Where the heck is Wall Drug?” bumper sticker, in that it will probably both piss off and mystify your neighbors. Did you ever wish that Entombed’s Wolverine Blues built a time machine and kidnapped Nails’s Unsilent Death and then came out as a split on Victory Records but also came out of New York’s early 80s no-wave scene with Swans?”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
5. Caustic Vomit – Eloquent Requiems of Necrotic Decadence
“This pleasantly named Russian four-piece releases a second demo of lurching, shambling, antagonistically belch-y death/doom. In between a brief intro and a Thergothon cover, Caustic Vomit wallops through two lengthy pieces with the quivering momentum of a rubber tank rolling over rotten molasses. The starting point is death dragged through doom rather than vice versa, so the low-key Demilich vocals and Gothic-esque searing guitar solos point the way. The production here is virtuous and impeccable for this type of rotten and unrushed muck, so if at some future point you say you “only liked the demos” I will not immediately roll my eyes so hard they rocket out of my head and bounce into a game of ping pong played by those Easter Island statues.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
4. Kryatjurr Of Desert Ahd – Underestimate Climate Systems And Suffer Incomprehensible Losses
So yes, a leeeeettle bit of cheating here, but the bit I wrote early this year about one Kryatjurr EP applies just as well to this later (and ever so slightly better) EP:
“Australia’s Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd have proven disquietingly adept at conjuring hellish soundscapes… of our planet choking on the ashes of its heat death. Really hilarious stuff! The band…is… ferocious atmospheric black metal. Hey, when I said atmospheric black metal did you think I meant some sad dweebs playing black metal karaoke to Explosions in the Sky songs? WRONG. Kryatjurr of Desert Ahd’s black metal is a dense, punishing maelstrom that feels much closer to Darkspace or even Axis of Perdition. The mechanical blasting of the drums against the frantic writhing of the guitar, the muffled banshee vocals struggling to emerge from the constant undercurrent of harsh noise and synth ambience: everything works together in unflinching defiance to paint a mental scene that is stark, beautiful, and terrifying.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday (sort of)
• Bandcamp
3. Régicide – Immortels
The Swiss metalpunks in Régicide have made one of the most curious but immediately satisfying EPs of the year with Immortels. It’s a pretty simple formula, really: rough and ready, crackling-raw epic-leaning heavy metal blended with Oi! punk influence. The Oi! comes through mostly in the vocals – epic choirs and gang shouts – but there’s a rock and roll bounce to the riffing that treads a sneaky little line between metal and punk. Bonus one: the extra phlegminess of the French pronunciation matches the snotty punk vibe perfectly. Bonus two: these Swiss cats are avowedly antifascist. Bonus three: the bass guitar swings out front in some awesome spotlight jams. Six songs, no Nazis, and about a hundred pumping fists. Good, right?
• Bandcamp
2. Pestigor – Baptized in Pus
“This Danish band’s debut 12” is a riotous, rumbling, apocalyptic, thrashingly great time. Because of the Warhammer theme and overall crusty muck, you will surely think of early Bolt Thrower, but the feral, wildly mangled female vocals hollering and wailing atop city-leveling crunchy crust/thrash puts this right in the same sweet spot as Sacrilege’s Behind the Realms of Madness (or perhaps a scuzzier take on Détente’s Recognize No Authority). Will you find splashy cymbals, cuttingly precise riffs, reverb-drenched vocals, bits of early Slayer, gobs of Hellbastard, jets of more straightforward Discharge-style punk (as on “Chronicles of Blood”), and plenty of other gruesome goodness? Thou willst. Thou shouldst. Thou mufft.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
1. Polterwytch & Balberskult – Hexenwerk Am Appenberg
“This, erm, bewytching split is 22 minutes of so much fun that you might involuntarily reach for a cigarette afterward. The name of the game is, more or less, horror sleaze rock goosed along by organ and punky black metal rawness. I don’t know why you can’t just leave it at that, but if you insist, I guess it’s sort of like Malokarpatan after grinding up a mountain of early 1980s horror VHS tapes and snorting them like several hundreds of lines of cocaine. “Obacht!” sounds like Darkthrone playing “The Monster Mash.” If you squint at it, maybe you’ll see Type O Negative’s October Rust as played by Black Flag… [W]hat if you just stuffed all those idiot words into a dumpster and remembered how much goddamned fun you can have listening to mean ol’ rock and roll like the Stooges or the Misfits or the Murder City Devils or Rocket from the Crypt or w h a t e v e r.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
IF [JAZZ] CAN HELP SOMEBODY, [ITS] LIVING SHALL NOT BE IN VAIN
Last Rites: Generally impressed with William T. Riker
Do you like jazz? I like jazz. My family (mostly) doesn’t like jazz; just the other week I had some music on in the car and my daughter said to me, “It’s like this music is trying to be annoying.” So anyway, I have since abandoned my home and family and now I live as a drifter, riding the railcars, trying to work out the circle of fifths by banging a stick against several tin cans filled with varying quantities of beans.
25. Adam Birnbaum – Preludes
I won’t lie: the idea of an album like Adam Birnbaum’s Preludes that has the potential to irritate both classical music dweebs and jazz fussbudgets is delicious catnip to me. In practice, though, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting bent out of shape over this delightful jazz trio session interpreting selections from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Most of these versions are recognizable as Bach’s keyboard exercises only in brief moments when the players coalesce around a familiar figure or arpeggio, but Birnbaum echoes Bach by eschewing most big, blocky chord-work in favor of fleet and interlocking single-note runs. Even if you come to get mad, why not stay to get glad?
• Bandcamp
24. Frog Squad – Special Noise
The Memphis band Frog Squad blasts through a rambunctious set of fusion jams on Special Noise. The crucial nexus of the band is the wailing guitar of lead composer David Collins and Jon Harrison’s drumming, but they are backed by cosmic keys, congas and other percussion, and a heavy horn frontline. On a twitchy song like “Talons,” the band almost flirts with soulful drum and bass vibes, while on “Porch Couch” they sit way back into some dirrrrrty funk grooves. Special Noise covers a whole lot of ground, but it sounds at every moment like it’s primed to bring the house down.
• Bandcamp
23. The Vampires – Nightjar
Nightjar is lush and almost impossibly laidback; if the bass and drums leaned any farther back on the beat, they might be playing in reverse. The shapeshifting Australian quartet the Vampires are joined on Nightjar by Chris Abrahams, pianist for the lauded Australian trio the Necks (whose 2023 album Travel also comes highly recommended). Abrahams provides additional structure, color, and melody on these winding tunes, but the driving melodic force is typically the unrushed elegance of Nick Garbett’s trumpet and Jeremy Rose’s tenor sax and bass clarinet. The songs draw from ambient, Afrobeat, dub, and reggae influences, with the resulting brew a pillowy blanket of rich, lived-in texture.
• Bandcamp
22. Phi-Psonics – Octava
If you’ve ever run into anything released on Gondwana Records, you may have a pretty keen idea of the hushed, lilting spiritual jazz that awaits on Phi-Psonics’s Octava. Melodies hover in the air and drape themselves around big squashy furniture, with hushed drumming and twinned lead lines from bass and woodwinds. This year saw a number of excellent albums in a similarly reverent vein – from Mammal Hands, Ancient Infinity Orchestra, Atlantis Jazz Ensemble, and Gondwana Records head Matthew Halsall – but Octava is the most prayerful.
• Bandcamp
21. Allison Miller – Rivers In Our Veins
Allison Miller is a great, intuitive drummer, but on this diverse, playful ensemble album she continues to shine even more as a composer and arranger. Jenny Scheinman’s violin brings a freewheeling folk influence to a song like “Fierce,” while pianist Carmen Staaf also provides additional instrumental shading on Rhodes and accordion. The most unique aspect of Rivers in Our Veins, though, is that Miller’s six-piece ensemble is joined on several songs by a five-person tap dance group, whose percussion blends seamlessly with the dancing, reel-like energy of Miller’s eclectic compositions.
• Bandcamp
20. Angelika Niescier – Beyond Dragons
Beyond Dragons is a thrilling display of hard-charging, free-playing energy from leader/composer/alto saxophonist Angelika Niescier, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Savannah Harris. Even on quieter numbers like “Tannhauser Gate” and “Oscillating Madness,” the trio maintain a taut, coiled energy, with Harris’s skittering cymbals laying out the ground for Reid and Niescier to lob countervailing runs at each other. A fierce, fun, funky, free riot.
• Bandcamp
19. Michael Blake – Dance of the Mystic Bliss
Dance of the Mystic Bliss is a lovely tribute to Michael Blake’s late mother, but despite the loss that informs it, the music is searching, graceful, and ultimately uplifting. Blake’s reeds are the only front-line instrument here (he plays multiple saxophones and flutes), but his ensemble has the unusual configuration of bass, violin, cello, guitar, and percussion. With no piano, the trio of strings does a lot melodic, contemporary classical work, but the two percussionists add a lot of Brazilian flavor to the rhythms and the electric guitar adds not only texture but the occasional skronk. Blake’s compositions are fluid, twisting, circular motion, but they can also be unassuming and plainspoken, as on the ballad highlight, “Love Finally Arrives.” A rich, engrossing, deftly emotional album.
• Bandcamp
18. Joshua Redman – Where Are We
Joshua Redman’s discography is enviably wide and varied, but perhaps because it comes hot on the heels of two intimate, conversational albums with his quartet of Brad Mehldau, Brian Blade, and Christian McBride, Where Are We feels like it covers even more ground than usual. A key aspect of this, of course, is that it’s Redman’s first album with a vocalist. Gabrielle Cavassa’s voice is elastic, rich, and resonant, especially in its stretches of breathy, low-alto range. Redman’s saxophone is particularly lyrical across this searching set of covers and interpolations that is sometimes reminiscent of Charles Lloyd’s turn of the millennium albums. Redman quotes “This Land is Your Land” on the opener, lays far back and lets Brian Blade’s vanishing blues beats guide Cavassa through a downcast take on Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia,” briefly interjects a Sufjan Steven melody on “Chicago Blues,” and dives headlong into the low, long lament of John Coltrane’s “Alabama.” A stirring, prismatic album from one of modern jazz’s most self-assured leaders.
• Full album stream via Blue Note YouTube
17. Sexmob – The Hard Way
“Sexmob’s latest album is a dank, sweaty, electronic-leaning jazz album that flirts with humid funk, industrial twang, and licentious looseness. Steven Bernstein’s slide trumpet sometimes sounds like if Miles Davis’s On the Corner hijacked his In a Silent Way album after taking several fistfuls of downers, but the shimmering, percussive racket from bass, acoustic drums, and electronic beats and loops are like a heat mirage of Tom Waits’s Real Gone. Is it metal? No. Is it jazz? Probably. Is it excellent? Yes. Is it my goddamned job to sit here all day long and answer shit-stupid questions from some imaginary mealymouth on the internet?”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
16. Jalen Baker – Be Still
The second album from this Texas-based vibraphonist is a classically minded swinging bop outing that nevertheless surges and bursts at the seams with youthful, modernist fervor. Baker penned five of the eight songs here, with nods to Bobby Hutcherson and Joe Henderson in the choice of covers feeling quite on the nose. Baker’s vibes and Paul Cornish’s piano trade lead duties, but it’s Gavin Moolchan’s drumming that almost steals the show here, with tight, snappy, busy, yet never overpowering swinging breakbeat workouts.
• Bandcamp
15. Peter Brötzmann – Catching Ghosts
The music world lost a real titan with the death this year, at the age of 82, of free jazz powerhouse Peter Brötzmann. Recorded at JazzFest Berlin in November 2022, Catching Ghosts captures a fiercely hypnotic, meditative set from the trio of Brötzmann (on tenor saxophone and clarinet), Chicagoan and frequent Brötzmann collaborator Hamid Drake (on drums and percussion), and the Moroccan musician Majid Bekkas (on vocals and the guembri, a two- or three-stringed lute instrument). Bekkas’s guembri functions much like a double bass, but the melodies are a touch lighter and the percussive thud of the instrument’s body becomes its own rhythmic force, against which Drake (the quickest and most physical performer in the set) pops and counterfills. Brötzmann, meanwhile, prods and interrogates with bleats and wails, but for much of the performance you can almost hear his careful, active listening, which then blossoms out with curling tendrils, a plaintive and sympathetic cri de coeur from his reeds.
• Bandcamp
14. Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band – Kings Highway
Brian Blade’s Fellowship Band is the kind of band that plays their silences and rests just as thoughtfully as their notes. Their latest album, Kings Highway, is perhaps the gentlest and most melancholy yet. Blade wrote or arranged five of the seven songs, with pianist Jon Cowherd bringing the other two, and it’s on the two longest pieces – “Migration” and the title track – that the sense of the collective’s fellowship broadcasts most freely. “Migration” is built around a slippery, shapeshifting rhythm from Blade, but it’s Kurt Rosenwinkel’s guitar solo around the midpoint that grabs the song and runs off down a parallel alley. But if the album opens with a whisper in “Until We Meet Again,” it closes with a resolute hymn and the impossible bass hush of “God Be With You.” Make time to slow down with these tender devotionals.
• Bandcamp
13. Rudy Royston – Day
Rudy Royston is one of the finest, most quietly precise drummers currently working in jazz, and on DAY, the second album from his band Flatbed Buggy, the loose, folky melodies and tumbledown textures are an invitation to sit and stay a while. Royston’s airy, titter-tatter cymbal work and Joe Martin’s bass direct the scenes, but the unique confluence of the three front-line tones – accordion, clarinet/bass clarinet, and especially Hank Roberts’s cello so often played in a high-enough register you might mistake it for violin or fiddle – chews every corner.
• Bandcamp
12. Lakecia Benjamin – Phoenix
If you manage to get both Angela Davis and Wayne Shorter (RIP) on your album, the world had damn well better pay attention. Of course, plenty of folks were already paying attention to Lakecia Benjamin, especially with 2020’s stellar all-Coltrane set, Pursuance. On Phoenix, the alto saxophonist has written nearly every song, and has put together an invitingly diverse modern jazz album featuring a dizzying ensemble and plenty of special guest spots. Phoenix covers sleek, R&B-influenced jazz/funk, straight-ahead post-bop, political spoken word, and spiritual jazz, all with a polyglot ease that will surely also appeal to fans of Kamasi Washington or Chief Adjuah.
• Bandcamp
11. Bokani Dyer – Radio Sechaba
The chorus to “Move On,” from South African composer/pianist/vocalist Bokani Dyer’s Radio Sechaba, is a convenient way to summarize the album’s overall vibe: “Life is too short to worry / Don’t try control it just move on / And be strong.” Dyer’s smooth, silk-funky, vocal-heavy jazz is a natural fit for Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings, with its elements of Afrobeat, R&B, political spoken word, and spacy Rhodes/piano interplay. What a welcoming, full-hearted album.
• Bandcamp
10. Irreversible Entanglements – Protect Your Light
International Anthem Recordings alumni Irreversible Entanglements kick up consistently fierce, funky, militant, danceable free jazz noise for the storied Impulse! Label (home, for example, to late-period John Coltrane). Moor Mother’s declaratively rhythmic spoken word vocals improvise within and around the knotty bass and drum grooves and with snarling, powerhouse horn punches from trumpet and saxophone. If you had to rank a jazz album this year as “most likely to give sniveling, piece of shit white nationalist crybabies a hissy fit,” you could do one hell of a lot worse than Protect Your Light.
• YouTube
9. Meshell Ndegeocello – The Omnichord Real Book
The Omnichord Real Book is about the farthest thing you can imagine from a pure jazz album, but Meshell Ndegeocello’s Blue Note debut is a far-reaching, genre-agnostic delight. Her soulful and elastic vocals anchor the album, but stylistically, she touches on pop rock, acoustic folk, futurist R&B, straight jazz ballads, light-touch fusion, and hell, “Omnipuss” is almost some kind of disco Tropicalia. Despite the album’s diversity and loooooong run-time, though, its arc feels naturalistic and compelling, a wondrously crafted world you’ll be eager to come back and live inside again and again.
• Full album playlist via Blue Note YouTube
8. London Brew – London Brew
A riotous who’s who of the London jazz scene, London Brew’s sprawling double album is a direct homage to Miles Davis’s 1969 masterpiece, Bitches Brew. Featuring players like Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia, Tom Skinner, Shabaka Hutchings, and more, the 12-piece ensemble alternately floats and blasts their way through some 90 minutes of dank, heady, sassy, explosive jazz-funk fusion. Just like Miles’s longtime producer and collaborate Teo Macero would cut session tape to mix and match sections and performances, there’s a feeling throughout London Brew that you can drop in where you like, find something wild happening in the mix, then zoom out somewhere else and find another style altogether. There’s heavy dub, aggressive breakbeats, modal drone, back-slanting accordion funk, and plenty of other shit that maybe Miles would have hated or maybe would have loved, but that was then and this is the NOW-then. Once you hit Theon Cross’s tuba bass line on “Mor Ning Prayers” you might end up in the ring with Jack Johnson or on the corner, but either way, you’ll be having so much big fun you won’t be able to help but get up with it.
• Bandcamp
7. Donny McCaslin – I Want More
The tagline for I Want More might be “album-length space funk from the same band that backed Bowie’s remarkable Blackstar album,” but that’s a reductive disservice to Donny McCaslin’s rubbery, alien jazz fusion. It’s a hard-hitting, electronics-suffused contemporary jazz album, shot through with straight-ahead intensity and nervy left turns. Jason Linder’s synthesizers coat the album in a grainy, constantly shifting texture that McCaslin’s tenor sax writhes out of and then recedes (as on the sinister funk of “Fly My Space Ship”). Sometimes the band plays in a swampy, spaced-out dub, like when Tim Lefebvre’s bass and Mark Guiliana’s drums punch and counterpunch on the rude, shit-kicking strut of the sound system-begging “Landsdown,” but at other times I Want More is fast, sharp, and confrontationally intense. On “Turbo,” for example, the synths whip up such a frantic fervor that it’s almost closer to a modern prog fusion bank like Krokofant. “Turbo” and “Body Blow” are the heavy highlights, but the thumping heart of the album is its slippery soul, which comes through even on the delicate bustle of the ballad “Hold Me Tight.” I Want More is a deep, powerful headtrip.
• Bandcamp
6. James Brandon Lewis – Eye Of I
The fact that this remarkably taut yet wide-ranging album is not even James Brandon Lewis’s best album of the year speaks both to his breadth and vision as well as to the strength of jazz as a whole. Lewis leads a ferocious trio on Eye of I, with Max Jaffe on drums/percussion and Chris Hoffman on cello. Hoffman’s cello is fed through effects pedals, so that while sometimes he’s plucking cleanly like a traditional upright bass, at other times he’s pealing out waves of heavy distortion. Kirk Knuffke plays cornet on two of the most hymn-like tunes here (including Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We’ll All be Free”), and the ex-Fugazi trio the Messthetics guests on the sprawling, ecstatic closer “Fear Not.” Eye of I is bold, stunning, lithe, vital music.
• Bandcamp
5. Chief Adjuah – Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning
Chief Xtian aTunde Adjuah (and in all previous iterations of his name) is one of the most fascinating, shapeshifting figures in contemporary jazz, and his newest album, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, is an unstoppably powerful testament to the roots of jazz in America, to the soul and spirit of deeply local musical and cultural practice, and to the limitless possibilities of Black music. In contrast to previous albums, Chief Adjuah forgoes most traditional jazz instrumentation (including the many varieties of trumpet he plays), and the album instead is built from chanting, call and response vocals, layers upon layers of percussion, and several custom-built stringed instruments. The outcome is alternately meditative and joyous, trancelike and propulsive, with a heady blend of New Orleans dance and West African rhythms, joining traditions of African and Creole music, Latin percussion, the Mardi Gras Indians and parade culture, and even some trap music beats.
• Bandcamp
4. Yussef Dayes – Black Classical Music
There are at least four albums on this list that, at some point during the year, I was entirely convinced were the best jazz album of the year. Black Classical Music makes a powerful case with its sprawl and scope, an album that sounds just as rooted in 1970s poly-genres like fusion and spiritual jazz as it is thoroughly modern and forward-looking. Dayes’s drumming guides each track into a liquid, malleable slipstream, with Rocco Palladino’s bass a tautly rubbery counterpart. Dayes’s ensemble is absolutely stacked with guest stars, and the music invites such varied contributions with its wide palette of styles, from laidback funk groove to Afro-Caribbean rhythms to hard-swinging spiritual jazz melodicism to Afrobeat, reggae, and about a hundred other things. And yet, nothing ever feels fussy or labored over; each song flows to the next like back porch music, dance floor music, open windows music, Black classical music.
• Bandcamp
3. Vicente Archer – Short Stories
A sizable majority of the jazz albums on this list trend towards maximalism, collectivity, large ensembles with big energy. Short Stories, bassist Vicente Archer’s trio album with Gerald Clayton on piano and Bill Stewart on drums, works its powerful magic on a deliberately smaller scale. This is Archer’s first album as leader, but songwriting credits for the originals are split between the three players. Archer’s bass is often spare and impressionistic, sketching out the frame but then pushing gently outward, while Clayton’s piano is warm and painterly. Although the album spends most of its time with carefully melodic, inward restraint, on a highlight like Archer’s bluesy funk composition “Bye Nashville,” you can feel the band smiling as their bouncing strut kicks up dust off the studio floor.
• Bandcamp
2. James Brandon Lewis – For Mahalia, With Love
James Brandon Lewis reconvenes his Red Lily Quintet (last heard on 2021’s remarkable Jesup Wagon) for this jaw-droppingly beautiful treatment of gospels, spirituals, and hymns, particularly as sung by the queen of gospel, Mahalia Jackson. Lewis’s tenor and Kirk Knuffke’s cornet dance around the joyful incantation of these simple melodies atop Chad Taylor’s free drumming, which is loose and swinging like fistfuls of sand thrown into the wind. The sinewy core of the arrangements, though, might just be the knotted tangle of Chris Hoffman’s cello and free jazz legend William Parker’s bass. The quintet treats these old songs with appropriate reverence, but never with preciousness; Lewis in particular breaks them down to see how else they might be built back up. The nexus of blues, gospel, and other forms of Black Americana is at the heart of a lot of jazz, and in that respect For Mahalia, With Love echoes back through history alongside JD Allen’s Americana albums, Charles Lloyd’s Lift Every Voice, and Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity. As added incentive to pursue this tremendous album, physical editions of the album come with a bonus second album, a performance of a Lewis composition called “These Are Soulful Days,” commissioned by the National Forum of Music and premiered (on this recording) at the 2021 Jazztopad Festival in Poland. “These Are Soulful Days” is performed by Lewis on tenor and the Lutosławski Quartet on strings, and it is a fascinating textural departure from Lewis’s jazz ensembles, even as his saxophone anchors it in the same tradition. You’ll hear, for example, some of the ideas captured on both the For Mahalia and Eye of I albums being worked out here, with Lewis taking off into a high-register squealing rendition of “Wade in the Water” on Movement III, and Movement IV quoting the Lewis composition “Even the Sparrow,” recorded in trio on Eye of I and as part of a medley with “His Eye is On the Sparrow” on For Mahalia’s opening number. The epilogue to “These Are Soulful Days,” titled “Resilience,” opens with a chiming, folk incantation that sounds like something out of Aaron Copland. Taken together, these three album-length explorations from JBL weave an indelible pattern of inspiration, invention, and joy.
• Bandcamp
1. Jaimie Branch – Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))
The first and last word on Jaimie Branch’s final, posthumous, and yet life-affirming Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) should be, “Damn.” As in, damn, what a tragedy that such a bristling young talent is gone. But also as in, godDAMN, what a beautiful, unkempt, impatient, fiery, perfect album. Branch, the trumpeter, composer, visual artist, and vocalist, leads her Fly or Die quartet (with Lester St. Louis on cello, Jason Ajemian on bass, and Chad Taylor on drums) across a marvelous unspooling of genre upon genre, with each player subbing in on alternate instrumentation and several guests joining in so that everything feels like the work of a messy, lived-in, family collective. With Branch’s unifying vision, though, the album unfolds in a masterful arc, from the organ/keyboard introduction and trumpet mutterings to the laid-back funk of “Borealis Dancing” and onto a Meat Puppets cover that is transformed into the stirring, haunted bluegrass ballad “The Mountain.” The leaping, lunging punk energy of fire-breathers like “Burning Grey” and “Take Over the World” remind me of the Canadian record label/artistic collective Constellation Records (and, in particular of late, Matana Roberts’s recordings on that label), with the feeling that everyone found themselves together in a room and just started making music with whatever tools happened to be lying around. This is an astonishingly urgent album, but it never feels like a chore – it feels like dancing.
• Bandcamp
LOOKS DOWN IN THE GATHERING AMBIENT
This felt like a very personal troll, thank you very much
If you have the idea that ambient music is mostly, like, a guy who passed out on his keyboard with a nature documentary muted and flickering on a television in the background, I… would still listen to that album. Probably rate it, like, a 3.5 out of 5. Anyway, ambient music can be a lot of things but it usually is not loud and angry, so please keep your voice down.
15. øjeRum – Snow is Absence Singing
Paw Grabowski (aka øjeRum) is an extremely prolific musician, with a compellingly unique visual artistry that accompanies his varied modes of ambient sound. Although any of his half-dozen or so releases this year is worth your time (Månen I Mine Hænder for treated solo guitar, Coiled Souls for slo-mo Ian Curtis singing Elliott Smith vibes, Vågnende Jeg Ser De Døde for piano minimalism), Snow is Absence Singing is the most singularly focused. Two 30-minute pieces of glacial, crackling lo-fi synth/drone foster a vision of hunkering down in the cover art’s snow-dusted cabin, huddling into oneself and embracing the cold stillness while praying for the thaw.
• Bandcamp
14. Pjusk & Arovane – Svev
Just like the arresting cover photography, the music on this collaborative album feels like a high-powered lens attuned to the microscopic structures underlying the lived environment. Through glacial drone and burbling synth, with distant thuds and bell tones and winking lights, Svev seeks to submerge the listener in the immaculate grain of the universe.
• Bandcamp
13. Takashi Kokubo & Andrea Esperti – Music for a Cosmic Garden
This collaboration between a Japanese ambient/”environmental music” artist and a Swiss/Italian trombonist is a languid drift across vast, interstellar terrain. The unhurried elasticity of Esperti’s trombone is a natural twin to Kokubo’s expansive, meditative field recordings, sounding bells, and twinkling synths. If you are for some reason the kind of self-serious bum who needs ambient music to be free of any whiff of New Age, kindly pass this one by, but also: quaso birrias?
• Bandcamp
12. Purelink – Signs
It is every bit as accurate as it is reductive to point out how keenly Purelink’s Signs should appeal to fans of the classic, deep ambient dub approach of the Basic Channel and Echospace/Deepchord collectives. Purelink’s music tilts even farther into weightlessness, though, with beats often buried deep and whisper-smooth beneath slowly panning waves of pillowy synth-drone. Less abstract than Pole but slightly more beat-oriented than early Loscil, Signs is a beacon to all the ships at sea, all waves and undulations and a kindly beckoning home.
• Bandcamp
11. Polypores – Praedormitium
When I was in a particularly dour mood a few years ago, I wondered why nobody had written a scathing, Winnipeg is a Frozen Shithole-styled album called Any Asshole Can Make A Modular Synth Record. Friends, I’m not proud. Praedormitium, if the context clues escape you, is a modular synth album, but it floats throughout its wondrous expanse in a bubbly, thoroughly tactile New Age space such that it is always active and engaging while remaining ambient in effect. It’s a record so purely beautiful that it can hush up even an incorrigible crank like me.
• Bandcamp
10. Hollie Kenniff – We All Have Places that We Miss
Hollie Kenniff’s latest solo album is a sort of Platonic ideal of ambient, the sort of album that dorks like me can’t help but refer to as “beatific.” The album is built in equal parts around treated guitar delay, swells of synth, piano, and hushed, wordless vocal fragments, but more than any specific sound is the fact that We All Have Places That We Miss feels like a practice of restorative healing. “Amidst the Tall Grass” is representative: quiet arpeggios, layers emerging from the air, vocals like Enya or Julianna Barwick, a huge, almost overpowering crescendo, and then quiet, calm, peace.
• Bandcamp
9. Anagrams – Blue Voices
Anagrams’s pithy Bandcamp page lays it all out for us, really: “jazz / not jazz.” It’s not (really) jazz, honest! But just what exact sort of “not jazz” it is, that’s the question. Blue Voices is, at a minimum that I do not wish you to argue with, very excellent. It’s just, for lack of a better word, a really neat album. There are sufficient numbers of synthy, ambient passages to make it a sellable candidate here in Ambient Land :™:, but the album also teems with declarative woodwinds and, frankly, oodles of both jazzy and classical minimalist touches, including acoustic guitar, Moog, pedal steel, and gosh, probably a whole lot else. If you want to get cheeky and call it “ambient / not ambient,” that’s fine with me, but I sure do hope you listen to it.
• Bandcamp
8. Dynastor & Innesti – Meander
I shouldn’t really claim to know what you are thinking, but I will say nonetheless that I think Meander is exactly the sort of sound that most people imagine when they think – which is rarely – about ambient music. Low droning bass, wispy, floating synth pads, tinkly piano bits, glacially shifting tones, static repurposed as gauzy midrange. You know, ambient. Thing is, though, there are approximately eight million home producers fiddling things out onto Bandcamp every day, but Dynastor’s and Innesti’s collaboration here puts them all to shame. How? Composition, pacing, and the sheer overpowering beauty of it all. The treated, rhythmic synth on “A Tentative Understanding” is a small miracle on its own, but the duo nestles it so perfectly, you can’t help but stick any cynicism in a microwave set to “Nope.”
• Bandcamp
7. North Americans – Long Cool World
It can seem like any ol’ rock you kick over, there’s a dude with a beard and a guitar who wants to show you some finger-picking. The Los Angeles-based duo North Americans may or may not have beards, but they definitely have guitars, and on Long Cool World they pluck, stretch, and slide them into the upper echelon of ambient country, cosmic Americana, instrumental outsider folk, or whatever else you might like to call this lush, stately brew of resonant desert hymns. Acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and a horizon beyond all reckoning.
• Bandcamp
6. zakè & Tyresta – Drift
In any accounting of “ambient music moves that this particular writer is a total mark for,” the style of somnolent drone poems that typifies most of Past Inside the Present label boss zakè’s music is pretty damn high on the ledger. Joined on this collaborative album by PITP alum Tyresta (whose solo album from this year, Small Hours, is also a beautiful little gem), Drift presents five compositions which each approach their own core of sustained zen weightlessness. “Monuments at Sea” is anchored to lower tones like a cello echoing from under the waves, but the title track is more like hovering inside a rain cloud at the precise moment when the sun crests behind it and its silhouette flares.
• Bandcamp
5. Between – Low Flying Owls
When you notice that some of the performers on Low Flying Owls are credited with providing, among other instrumentation, “field recording,” “bamboo wisk [sic],” “small objects,” and “seashells,” what do you expect the album to sound like? If you said, “I expect it to sound a lot like the Ramones,” then I am terribly sorry to hear about your traumatic brain injury! For anyone else familiar with Taylor Deupree’s label 12k, the delicate, experimental, found-sounds-turned-into-ambient approach will hardly be a surprise. Deupree and Stephen Vitiello are the prime musical instigators for Between, but the end result features another half-dozen or so musicians from the 12k umbrella, and the album covers a wonderful range of textures and instruments, including guitars, clarinet, drones, field recordings, piano, chimes, and more. Even more to the point, though, is that Low Flying Owls feels like the closest an ambient album has yet come to a jam band.
• Bandcamp
4. Purl & Sinius – Embryology
Embryology, the latest collaboration between Purl and Sinius, is reserved, reflective, quavering music. Taking long stretches of time to spin out layers of synth, wordless vocals, piano, and gentle washes of noise into tidepools of calm, these eight songs are so delicate as to approach evaporation. The experience as a listener, though, is one of being asked to lean in close, to quiet your body, to relinquish yourself to these tender frequencies.
• Bandcamp
3. Arrowounds – The Slow Boiling Amphibian Dreamstate
The Slow Boiling Amphibian Dreamstate is the second in a quartet of albums from Ryan Chamberlain’s Arrowounds project, all released through the reliably excellent Lost Tribe Sound label. Although the fourth album is available only to Bandcamp subscribers of the project, each of the three currently available installments is well worth your time. Amphibian Dreamstate is the best of the bunch, though, with its terrifically dark, murky, subaqueous ambient/drone cut through with gothic undertones. These haunting songs are both sparse and overpowering, and at their absolute best they tip over into subterranean sort of dub/ambient, as if Gas’s Zauberberg album sat in the dark with Basinki’s Disintegration Loops and the collected early works of the Cure until it morphed into an acre-wide sentient mycelial colony. That means it’s great!
• Bandcamp
2. Eluvium – (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality
Matthew Robert Cooper’s first album as Eluvium, 2003’s Lambent Material, is the earliest time I can remember being physically transfixed by ambient music. Since then, Eluvium’s music has been a steady companion and a consistent balm for the agitated mind. (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality is much more actively engaged with contemporary classical music than traditional ambient sounds, but what has always been the throughline for me with Eluvium remains just as vibrant as ever, which is that this is overwhelmingly – even overpoweringly – beautiful music, not the kind of beauty that makes you say, “Wow, that’s really pretty,” but the kind that jolts you out of whatever else you’re doing and makes you say, “I am not sure how much more of this I can handle but I will not look away.” There are delicate piano instrumentals that recall An Accidental Memory, and then there is “Mass Lossless Interbeing,” which feels like Copia’s arpeggiated space-waltzes thrown against the third rail. By the time Cooper closes the album with “Endless Flower,” which sounds a little bit like Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” being Doppler-shifted as it thumps out of speakers on the last survivors’ spaceship leaving a disintegrating Earth, you might just feel both exhausted and thoroughly, electrically alive.
• Bandcamp
1. Circular – Kimono Kaleidoscope
Jostein Dahl Gjelsvik (aka Pjusk) appears for the second time on this list with Circular, as one-half of a duo alongside fellow Norwegian Bjarte Andreassen. Kimono Kaleidoscope also wanders much farther afield from typical ambient tropes, with Circular pulling in a dizzying array of tones, textures, instruments, and samples that call to mind everything from modular synth to dubbed-out beats to field recording abstraction to angelic keys and drone. It is a stunning, tactile album that refuses to stay in one place but rarely succumbs to a sense of hyperactivity. In a way, the comparison that keeps coming to mind across its hour-long span is the stone-cold 1991 classic of psychedelic ambient/house, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. Kimono Kaleidoscope feels like a modern classic in the making in no small part because every return trip feels a little different than the one before, with endless textural depths to wander through and let your mind be at playful ease.
• Bandcamp
NO STORM CAN SHAKE MY INMOST CALM / WHILE TO THAT [ELECTRONIC MUSIC] I’M CLINGING
Bleep blorp cult eternal
Probably I have said this before, but how much I love electronic music is almost exactly the inverse to how much I want to go out dancing. Mostly I like to sit at home and listen to these excellent sounds, but if every now and then I tap my toes or imagine a community of smart and sexy people dancing somewhere to the very same music, you can hardly blame a guy for making connections where he may.
15. Fanu – Classy Coffee Cuts
I know it can be hard to believe, but science has proven that it is good and cool to have fun listening to music. The Finnish producer Fanu is one such scientist, and Classy Coffee Cuts’s 14 tracks are like 14 separate burbling beakers boiling above Bunsen burners. Fanu’s approach on the album explores all different manner of breakbeats, from slower, downtempo rhythms to breakneck junglism. This syncretic approach puts the album in a sweet spot middle ground of electronic music, roughly halfway between the early templates of drum and bass/jungle and the later anarchic eruptions of IDM/drill and bass. True science fact: it’s fun as hell!
• Bandcamp
14. Eomac – Water Tracks
The Irish producer Eomac has had a busy several years, with the excellent Cracks LP in 2021 followed by two collaborative albums with Saint Abdullah in 2022 and 2023. Sandwiched in between those two collaborations is the tantalizing digression Water Tracks. As the name lays out, these six tracks (plus two tracks that compile source recordings) are techno/ambient experiments built up from a myriad of watery samples and field recordings. There’s a lot of the playful mischief of Matmos and the rigorous sample curation of Yosi Horikawa, but some of these tracks have an even harder edge to them, like a choppy squall dashed against corrugated metal.
• Bandcamp
13. Paul St. Hilaire – Tikiman Vol. 1
This bedrock-deep set of productions from Paul St. Hilaire makes even more explicit than usual the reggae/dub origins of so many of the Berlin and Detroit touchstones of ambient/dub music. Familiar to bass and space heads from his collaborations with a diverse range of producers (and most notably, for the particular knucklehead writing these words, with the Deepchord/Echospace project Intrusion’s The Seduction of Silence), Tikiman Vol. 1 features St. Hilaire alone producing absolutely oceanic techno/dub creations, concrete heavy but still whisper-soft, immaculate and inscrutable.
• Bandcamp
12. Kölsch – I Talk to Water
Kölsch has consistently been one of the most emotive, yearning artists in Kompakt’s roster, and the stunning I Talk to Water is the most beautifully melancholy album yet from the Danish producer. Kölsch’s style sculpts melodic techno and trance into gorgeous swells of emotion, as with the keening vocal snippets on “Khenpo.” But the beating heart of the album is the fact that on three songs, Kölsch interweaves samples of recordings from his father, a musician who died 20 years earlier of cancer. A lovely, vulnerable, soul-filling album.
• Bandcamp
11. Jade Cicada – Pressure Gamut
Pressure Gamut came across the desk billed as a beat tape, but it’s heavier and a lot glitchier than that would lead one to believe. At times, the Massachusetts-based musician’s tunes are close kin to the snarling synth-squelch of late-period Squarepusher, with all the attendant density and overwhelm. From stem to stern the album thumps and glistens, and although “AcidTripAdvisor” is the best song title on this tight, 35-minute set, it’s the absolutely incredible “Wrapped in Echoes” that wins the day.
• Bandcamp
10. Rites of Fall – Venoms
Venoms is a dense, jittery album that is surprisingly nimble for how dark and clotted with industrial decay it is. “Four Billion Thorns” rattles the speakers with a gothy, heavy synth take on dubstep, while the title track undergirds its chiming melody with distorted beats in a way that’s reminiscent of Trent Reznor’s and Atticus Ross’s soundtrack collaborations. A diverse, cinematically harrowing vision from this Polish producer.
• Bandcamp
9. Indopan – Yupana
Yupana is house music through and through, but Indopan (aka Irish producer Andrew Morrison) comes to the genre with a panoramic view, embracing lush tropical vibes, skittering nerves, vocal samples, and tumbling layers of additional percussion. “Breaking Down” is borderline breakbeat, while album closer “When Will This Storm End” rides out on a soulful groove. Tightly focused maximalism might seem like an oxymoron, but not here.
• Bandcamp
8. Andrea – Due in Color
Due in Color, Andrea’s second LP, is a little bit like a photographic negative of drum and bass. If traditional drum and bass and jungle music foregrounds the, well, drums and bass lines and then uses space and silence for contrast and drama, Due in Color foregrounds the ambient, leaving a chill, jazzy, hazy vibe hanging in the air, and then (ahem) coloring the edges with intricate but understated breakbeats. Even on “Chessbio,” with its ostensibly straightforward drums, the closest it comes to d ‘n b is if you imagine LTJ Bukem’s landmark Journey Inwards smeared across a windshield as you tear, silently, across a desert highway, the sunset streaking fast to dusk.
• Bandcamp
7. Basic Need – Chromatic Resonance
The keyword for Chromatic Resonance is “unhurried.” Basic Need, the duo of Swedish producer Alexi Delano and Venezualan producer Pablo Sanchez, make supremely languid, mellow electronic jams that pull from deep house, ambient techno, jazzy dub, and downtempo. At times there’s a shuffling, almost motorik version of the space disco of Lindstrøm and company, while other elements reminiscent of Ricardo Villalobos, Gui Boratto, or even Fenessz intrude. It’s a sprawling, chewy, spaced-out balm of an album.
• Bandcamp
6. Sofia Kourtesis – Madres
So, like, maybe it’s almost too on the nose, but Madres has a song called “How Music Makes You Feel Better,” and truly, on Sofia Kourtesis’s debut LP, the music is a balm. The Peruvian artist (now based in Berlin) makes joyful, world-influenced house, with echoes of fellow Ninja Tuners Bicep as well as Ellen Allien, Pantha du Prince, and Four Tet. These songs hardly shy away from the dancefloor, but there’s an uplifting, indomitable spirit at the heart of each one. (Incidentally, The Field’s Axel Willner just might eat his own heart out at the high-wire act Kourtesis pulls off on the delirious “Funkhaus.”) Don’t miss the buoyant, inclusive, infectious lightness of Madres.
• Bandcamp
5. Speaker Music – Techxodus
Though it draws from a long lineage of ideas and sounds, there is precious little else to which I can compare Speaker Music’s exhilarating headtrip of an album, Techxodus. The album is a spiraling throughline of dense, busily percussive experimental electronic music, rippling and pulsating with elements of grime, footwork, ambient, IDM, acid, heavy bass, and cosmic synth, but anchored throughout to a highly conceptual engagement with the Afrofuturism of Detroit legends Drexciya and with Black electronic music more broadly. Brilliant, baffling, boundless music.
• Bandcamp
4. Maara – The Ancient Truth
The Ancient Truth, the debut long-player from Montreal’s Maara, is a sumptuous feast from start to finish. Though it moves from downtempo bliss to deep house movement and stargazing drum and bass breakbeats, nothing ever feels disjointed. The album finds its way into a deeply sultry, humid groove, a smeared palette of sound and sweat, and then rocks back and forth on the balls of its feet as if to say, “This right here is my space.”
• Bandcamp
3. Gonima – Escapism
Montreal’s Gonima crafts lovely, wistful IDM that effectively splits the difference between “clicks & cuts”-styled abstraction and warm, melody-focused beatmaking. A key historical reference point is Autechre’s uncharacteristically cherubic LP5, but the synthesis of low-key melodies and twitchy beats hews a little closer to a more fractal approach to the sound of artists like Apparat or Telefon Tel Aviv. True to its name, Escapism also revels in the rubbery playfulness of early Mouse on Mars, and as a whole the album feels a little bit like observing a polyhedral disco ball rotate slowly in a darkened theater of unknowable proportions.
• Bandcamp
2. iNFO – Alkaline Glades
iNFO’s Michael Richardson can hardly be accused of seizing some burgeoning zeitgeist on Alkaline Glades, because these nine tracks are an absolutely pitch-perfect evocation of the early ‘90s boom where rave and acid and electro coalesced into IDM. iNFO’s production feels especially indebted to Autechre’s Incunabula and Amber and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, but more in the sense of deep inspiration than rote imitation. These songs are melodic, peculiar, warm-hearted little music boxes just waiting for you to brush off the dust and make them sing again.
• Bandcamp
1. Akasha System – Phytopia / Ancient Path Complete / DJ Panthr – Jade District
Is it a little bit of cheating to count three albums as the best electronic music of the year? Sure. Once you sit back and learn to vibrate on the frequency that Hunter P. Thompson achieves with each of these releases, will you still be sore? If so, buddy, then that’s on you. This 2023 bounty from Thompson entails two LPs from Akasha System – the brand-new Phytopia and the revisited Ancient Path Complete, originally a four-track EP from two years ago now with an extra four turns – and one LP from DJ Panthr, his (ever so slightly) more club-focused alias. Each release, however, is an immersive, gentle, generous trip into ambient house and synthy atmospherics. There’s a world/tribal element in the percussion, a New Age sensibility in the melodic haze, and such a general warmth to these lightly tripping grooves that it feels like, well, this music just wants you to be okay.
• Bandcamp
WHAT [OTHER] STORY DOWN THERE AWAITS ITS END?
Marvel at the unfinished wood, the unevenly driven screws, the lumpen stuff of life
For a guy who supposedly likes lists as much as I claim to, it’s kind of a silly cop-out to tack on a list of the best… “Other” music down here at the bottom. But – and this is true – you are not the boss of me. Here are twenty more albums that I like very much and that I thought maybe you would like to enjoy as well.
20. Miqedem – Eshkona
Miqedem’s Eshkona is an infectiously lovely little album of folky, indie/world music from the Israeli band. I do not know what they are singing about and I cannot even identify several of the instruments being played, but the lilting, tripping rhythms, the gentle vocal harmonies, the strings and acoustic guitars and careful, calm drumming convey a message deeper than language can speak. I suspect I am alone in imagining that Miqedem sounds a little bit like early Broken Social Scene filtered through the Putumayo World Music aesthetic, but if you would like to listen and imagine that too, then we would be neither of us alone.
• Bandcamp
19. The White Blinds – Presheatecha!
What has six legs, two sides, and more wafting funk than a middle school locker room? If you said “Presheatecha!, the second album from L.A. trio The White Blinds,” then let this serve as notice that I would like to evict you from inside my head. The White Blinds play a devilishly smooth kind of soulful jazz/funk with a straightforward lineup of drums, guitar, and jazz organ. On their more raucous tunes, there’s a definite kinship with the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, but when they pull back into sparser, psych blues grooves (as in “On the Clock”), there’s a flavor of Texas’s Khruangbin as well. Heady comparisons, but Presheatecha! ain’t bothered, because there are too many toes out there waiting to tap, too many hips just itching to shake.
• Bandcamp
18. Strider – Midnight Zen
“Midnight Zen is one of those albums of such fuzzy, psyched-out blues bliss that although each song moves in its distinct orbit, the whole is a unified, working model of a solar system designed for the express purpose of opening those stubbornest closed doors of your mind and blasting your consciousness to a plane where all that is and ever was lives to ride a groove that limns the ever-expanding universe… The confidence and fluency of this Turkish five-piece is so great that you might actually be mad to learn this is their debut album. I mean, does that make you mad? Probably it should make you glad, because it is nice to enjoy fine music. Why are you yelling?”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
17. Acid King – Beyond Vision
“Scene legend and linchpin Lori S. brings San Francisco’s Acid King back from an eight-year break with the band’s first album recorded with two guitarists. You can still hear the distant rumble of motorcycles and smell the long-haul exhaust of the band’s past, but Beyond Vision is a deeper, subaqueous trip of space and suspended time. Lori S.’s guitar tone still flattens mountains, but the album feels like a through-written suite, a pushing out and a burrowing in. Get with this if you dig the righteous groove of walking a faultline as it trembles in slow motion.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
16. Wilco – Cousin
You know Wilco, yes? The alt-country Chicago stalwarts are almost always a balm to the world-weary, but last year’s double album Cruel Country was, at least to these busted old ears, far too much of not enough. Cousin, at least at first blush, is still a mostly restrained affair, but the songs are consistently more engaging, and the band has rediscovered that uncanny knack for injecting curious bits of experimentation in a way that never overtakes the song. It’s still pretty early days for sweeping statements, but sitting with this album this fall, it feels like it might end up to be Wilco’s best since the magnificent Sky Blue Sky.
• Bandcamp
15. Nightosphere – Katabasis
“Katabasis is a moody album, often hushed but sometimes coiled and tense. The basic terrain it stalks is informed by slowcore, early Midwestern post-rock, and shoegaze… The guitars sometimes turn into decaying fuzz, punctuated by feedback (as on “Dead Man’s Curve”), and sometimes the trio whips into an agitated, mathy fervor (like on “Faim Devorante”), where they come across a little bit like a Rites of Spring or a Don Caballero on, well, Codeine. But mostly, they move in a captivating niche alongside forebears like Rodan, Mojave 3, very early Low, and Slint.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
14. Anohni & the Johnsons – My Back was a Bridge for You to Cross
Anohni’s music has taken on many different forms around her coiled, malleable voice, and on My Back Was a Bridge she hearkens back to some of the more straightforward pop/rock instrumentation of the early albums with the Johnsons. Here, though, she has described the album as an intentional conversation with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and the instrumentation shares the buoyant melancholy of that classic 70s Motown sound. On songs like “Rest” and “Scapegoat,” though, the music crests and lashes out with an explosive, dirge-ing energy. Anohni’s music has long used fragility and vulnerability as its most powerful tools, and this album is particularly effective at pulling the listener in close to break their heart in loving community.
• Bandcamp
13. Cleõphüzz – Mystic Vulture
“Mystic Vulture has, quite frankly, dominated the ‘albums with cowboy hat-wearing birds of prey’ space this year. More importantly, though, Cleõphüzz’s cello-drenched, psychedelic desert rock is engrossing, wide-ranging, and tremendously tactile. The guitar twang evokes vast, desolate plains, the vocals are both gritty dust storms and alluring trade winds, and the bass plumps and gallops like a Pacific-bound train. If you put your goddamn ears to it, you might hear sympathetic vibrations with SubRosa, Across Tundras, Grayceon, Solstafir, or Witch Mountain, but you know what? You might not, because your life is your own. Cleõphüzz rides out every furrow and glorious groove in the knowledge of that same precious truth.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
12. Polymoon – Chrysalis
“Polymoon’s second album is a stream overrunning its banks, a chiming, volatile, wildly primal yet still somehow delicate kinetic current. Pushing the psychedelia through both wall-to-wall synthesizers and fast, sweeping repetition, Chrysalis at times feels like the modern, emotional prog of Anathema or Airbag played by a few dozen hummingbirds, while at other times it feels like something far more alien. The second half of this beautiful, electric churn of an album really ramps up the intensity, with the climax of album closer “Viper at the Gates of Dawn”… approaching a full-on space-psych shredfest. If thinking about fellow Finns Kairon; IRSE! isn’t enough of a reference point, you might imagine Jupiter-era Cave In and current prog Opeth by way of Ancestors. Or you might not! The world is wide and full of wonder.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
11. Agusa – Prima Materia
“Agusa’s music is classic-styled instrumental progressive rock in the mode of Jethro Tull, Yes, and early Genesis, full of Hammond organ swells, breathy and overblown flute, nimble and often dancing instrumental interplay, and heady, multi-part songwriting. Much like some of their fellow travelers in contemporary bands like Wobbler, Anekdoten, and Tusmørke, Agusa adds a lot of Scandinavian folk influence to the sound. Beyond any those particulars, though, is the fact that Agusa is simply fantastic at nailing everything from the songwriting to the production to the performance. Each song is wrapped around indelible melodies and taut, playful instrumentation, and if you can listen to these sunnyside-up tunes without cracking a smile, then please close the door behind you because we are trying to have a good time.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
10. Diego Caicedo – Seis Amorfismos
Seis Amorfismos is one of the least easily classifiable albums of the year. Spanish composer and electric guitarist Diego Caicedo leads a six-part suite that touches on avant-garde metal, contemporary classical, free jazz, and confrontational noise. The instrumentation on Seis Amorfismos is a string quartet, Caicedo’s guitar, and bellicose guttural vocals from Carlos Jorge. If you imagine something a little bit like a late Shostakovich string quartet, Mary Halvorson’s jazz guitar playing, and the primal roar of Nile’s “Khetti Satha Shemsu,” you’re at least part of the way there. “Días de Ira: El Vientre del Desierto” is a fascinating tactile experience that eventually resolves into a gathering storm of ominous, muffled taps, which could be either Caicedo messing around with a pick, or it could be oddly mic’d and reverbed tapping on the body of the cello or bass. The album includes the six-part suite with quartet but it also closes with three solo guitar pieces. “Axis of the Void” is the most outwardly metal piece with its distorted riffing, but “Letania de los Apestados” is more pensive, occasionally erupting into noise rock staccato. The final solo piece is a humming blizzard of slow-motion black metal tremolo and squalling feedback. Seis Amorfismos is a thrilling, adventurous, iconoclastic piece of work.
• Bandcamp
9. The Keening – Little Bird
Rebecca Vernon’s solo debut album as the Keening continues many of the threads she had explored in her previous band, SubRosa. Little Bird is occasionally heavy enough that it might have merited inclusion on the top metal albums list, but it spends the majority of its time in sparser, more atmospheric regions, with haunting Gothic folk, dreamy darkwave, neofolk, and post-rock dynamism. Vernon handles primary guitars, drums, piano, organ, and vocals, but is joined by a bevy of guests, including Billy Anderson (also responsible for recording Little Bird) on bass, plus string players, harp, French horn, and guest vocalists. The album proceeds in a mesmerizing hush, like the rustle of branches as you follow a footpath into a dusk-dim forest. There is a clearing along the path, but you might be changed by the time you reach it.
• Bandcamp
8. Kanaan – Downpour
Kanaan is a Norwegian psych-rock trio, and on Downpour their primary message seems to be, “Hey, nice ears you’ve got there. Sure would be a shame if someone stuffed ‘em into a rocketship filled with pure righteous fuzz fury and blasted it to the goddamned moon.” Kanaan leans into the heavier side of stoner/psych jamming, but with plenty of synth overdubs and effects pedals on the guitar, you’ll hear not just Hawkwind pummeling but also Causa Sui meandering. Still, on piledriving cuts like “Orbit” and “Black Time Fuzz,” the mission is simple: get in, ride a fuckton-heavy, swaggering groove for all its worth, and get the hell out.
• Bandcamp
7. Night Verses – Every Sound has a Color in the Valley of the Night: Part One
“Night Verses are an instrumental trio from Los Angeles, and on this engrossing, cinematic album, they play a chunky, proggy style of heavy math rock with a pronouncedly dreamy shoegaze edge. Their style is a bit like a less techy Animals as Leaders, so it lands somewhere in the neighborhood of Cloudkicker via Red Sparowes. The drumming in particular, though, often breaks out into surprisingly brutal sections of flailing, and the climax of “Arrival” sounds like Deftones via Meshuggah. In the battle of you versus Night Verses, you lose.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
6. Bruxa Maria – Build Yourself a Shrine and Pray
“This four-piece band plays a sludgy, industrial, pummeling brand of noise rock that is swathed in blankets of feedback and mangled synth, while vocalist, guitarist, and band leader Gill Dread sneers and mutters and wails like a woman who, frankly, has had just about enough of your shit. Each song on their powerful new album Build Yourself a Shrine and Pray is equal parts meditative and confrontational, sometimes settling into an almost Neurosis-level churn (as on “Totalitarian Pissing”) and at others needling through a psychedelic trance that feels like a version of Oranssi Pazuzu that came up through grungy noise rock instead of black metal.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
5. Edena Gardens – Agar
“The three-piece (two guitars and drums) dives headlong into meditative, loose, improvised psych-rock grooves that are often closer to proggy post-rock than anything else. There’s a bit of Constellation Records-type abstraction mixed in with Causa Sui’s fuzz-jazz psych, but it’s also not hard to see Agar through a pre-dawn mist where Earth’s late-period clean twang and Dirty Three’s Ocean Songs walk along the beach with Mark Knopfler in a Pink Floyd t-shirt. Short version: it’s deep, it’s rich, it’s now.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• YouTube
4. Slowdive – Everything is Alive
It was already improbable enough that sad sack, dream-pop shoegaze pioneers Slowdive reunited after more than 20 years for a comeback record in 2017, and unlikelier still that the album was such an accomplished and fresh return. On this year’s Everything is Alive, Slowdive stretched credulity near to its breaking point by crafting an album that is very close to overtaking their previous pinnacle, the immaculate Souvlaki. These songs are both driving and drifting, right in your ear and way off in the distance, acoustic and electronic, real and imagined, finished and unfinishing.
• Bandcamp
3. Molten Gold – Futures Past
“Molten Gold plays bracingly vintage hard rock full of organs, synths, and piano, bringing the full-on ‘70s vibe of Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, early Yes, and even a bit of Allman Brothers. The tones are right. The tunes are righteous. The vocals come courtesy of Magister Templi’s Abraxas d’Ruckus. Did I stutter? If you have heard Magister Templi and you did not just immediately shit out your credit card number in the general direction of Norway to order this album then what the HELL. Abraxas sings the everliving SHIT out of these songs, and the guitars soar and noodle and the bass thwobs and thrumps and the drums shimmy shuffle shwoop and simmer.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
2. Home Front – Games of Power
“Home Front, like Leonard Cohen, are Canadian, but it is a very large country and it is rude of you to draw any other conclusions… The basic frame here is post-punk, but there are aspects of goth, punk, new wave, and synthpop, which means that your cleverest of ears, (d)ear listener, will pick up on the Cure, New Order, very early U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Model Army, and Joy Division (particularly on the cheekily named “End Transmission”). Songs like “Nation” and “Crisis” carry a rougher street punk attitude, while on more synth-forward songs like the title track there’s an early Depeche Mode vibe. Influences aside, Games of Power is an incredible album in its own right, with impeccable songwriting that unspools anthem after anthem, brilliant production, and desperate, impassioned performances. I have tried, in my way, to be free of foolishness, but fuck you, please listen to Home Front.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
1. Mammatus – Expanding Majesty
“Though their music is every bit as densely virtuosic as peer groups like Earthless or Elder, Mammatus’s latest album is patient, mellow, and supremely confident, happy to take its time exploring each angle of whatever particular sunbeam it finds itself in from moment to moment. Synths and guitar arpeggios scatter off each other, the bass builds and rebuilds a house against the ocean’s sun-shattered mirror. Mammatus’s instinct feels searching, restless, spiritual, like a psychedelic rock analog to John Coltrane’s Meditations. Expanding Majesty can’t do the work for you, but it wants you to be healed.”
• Last Rites Review via Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp
Thanks for reading, all. Be kind, find what sustains you, and be well.
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
“shred … like a bag of iceberg lettuce on white person taco night”
And the award for Best Epithet of the Year goes to-
Dearest Danminster,
I absolutely love reading you, so let me take this opportunity to say THANK YOU for your service in the name of music. God knows we need it, the world sucks.
Cannot wait to dig into your list.
You are right about Triumpher, by the way. You are absolutely right.
I’m still sorting out my list, but it’s gonna go something like this:
Ascended Dead – Evenfall of the Apocalypse
Midnight Odyssey – Biolume Part 3: A Fullmoon Madness
Omnerod – The Amensal Rise
Rubio – Venus & Blue
Triumpher – Storming the Walls
Enslaved – Heimdal
Tanith – Voyage
Cannons – Heartbeat Highway
Fires in the Distance – Air Not Meant For Us
Sulphur Aeon – Seven Crowns and Seven Seals
Lamp of Murmuur – Saturnian Bloodstorm
Conjureth – The Parasitic Chambers
Haxprocess – The Caverns of Duat
Majesties – Vast Reaches Unclaimed
Megaton Sword – Might & Power
Valdrin – Throne of the Lunar Soul
Redemption – I Am the Storm
August Burns Red – Death Below
Olde Throne – In the Land of Ghosts
Dream Unending & Worm – Starpath
VoidCeremony – Threads of Unknowing
Den Saakaldte – Pesten som tar over
HELP I CANNOT STOP. THIS YEAR WAS SO GOOD.
Hey! Thanks so much for the kind words, and for reading any of this foolishness. Great stuff on your list, too. I didn’t hear the Sulphur Aeon until very late in the year, but it’s really good. Love that Tanith, too – maybe even more than their debut.
Isn’t music just basically excellent?
This list is wonderful. Thanks Dan
I am stunned by the depth and bredth of your palette. Rubs hands slowly , aha!