By Ian
Almost all my picks are from this year. It was a fantastic year for music. The following are in no particular order.
Kathryn Mohr, Waiting Room.
Powerful, bleak, and punishing. An isolating work that puts you in a dark room with the artist.
Tetragrammacide, Cyber Tantric Paradigm of Radical Sri Vidya.
Blast beat good. Blast beat life. Something something cyber nuclear Kali Om Kring Kalikaye Nama. (It’s really good!)
Omar Hound, OLDWORLD.
An extremely textural work of drone/ambient. I felt near the end of the record that the work itself is somehow profoundly spiritual. How, I can’t say. Just something you might catch on the wind when this album is playing.
YHWH Nailgun, 45 Pounds.
The hipster darlings have outdone themselves. An album of left turns and lurching vocals, while the synths seem almost tropical in comparison. So many genres of underground mashed together it’s no wonder it calls to horn-rimmed glasses wearing trendsetters like the Green Goblin mask from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man.
Sumac, The Healer.
Though it came out last year, I had the pleasure of seeing them play this entire album live this year. And it was incredible. I’d not heard it ‘til I saw them, and I was totally floored, and bought the record then and there. It was like being beaten by a caveman under a deafening cacophony of incredible musicianship. A few years ago, I’d seen them at the DLC in Salt Lake City, and they topped that performance by miles.
Cities Aviv, Electric Chair.
Something I’ve always liked about Cities is that his music has a deteriorating quality to it. Crooning poetry over static hissing while the electrical pops of the samples make it sound like the song might be a little more distorted upon the next listen.
Cross Record, Crush Me.
I feel like I could use the word “texture” over and over again in these blurbs, but again, this album is so heavily textured in interesting ways that I had to keep guessing what certain sounds were. On top of that, it’s a great indie/alt-rock adjacent record that rewards a listener with subsequent listens.
ece era, Bedside Tunes (Lights On).
I’m a sucker for any electronic, glossy record with vocals buried so deep in the reverb that lyrics may as well not matter. Snowfall on neon lights, fun, dancy beats and ethereal synths.
Evoken, Mendacium.
I’m glad that, even in the tidal wave of great doom metal that came out this year, Evoken continually seems to occupy their own little corner of the genre. The funereal stalwarts put out a record that is both meditative and catchy, despite its glacial pace.
Primitive Man, Observance.
Primitive Man seems to have mastered the art of distilling actual human despair into something sonic. Where I prefer the more frantic uproar of the vocalist’s other band Vermin Womb, this album seems a great inverse sibling record to the latter project’s Retaliation.
Suffering Hour, Impelling Rebirth.
Suffering Hour has one of my favorite guitarists in the metal game right now. The guy is like an actual spider, seeming to crawl over the fret board, casting maniacal spells that I only wish I could figure out in my own playing. This effort being their comeback after their drummer’s battle with cancer is like all the more aggressive pieces of their previous records cranked to 11.
Hannah Frances, Nested in Tangles.
Dare I call this my album of the year? This is one of those records I found by accident, clicking on it in the sidebar of whatever service I was on. I don’t remember because the album was just too good, I saved it on everything, listened to it maybe a hundred times over. It’s wistful and melancholy, celebratory in key moments that seem to pass by with the horns and bird calls, and I can simply find no faults with it other than the album ending and having to press play again. It’s an atmosphere I could inhabit for long stretches of time.
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