DANCING UPON THE GRAVE OF 2022: THE DGR YEAR-END LIST: 40-31

(Today we continue the week-long rollout of DGR‘s year-end list with Part Two, encompassing his picks from 40 through 31.)

Day two keeps us in the upper reaches of the 2022 year-end party wherein the world burns and I keep typing away because I don’t know how to do anything else. It took four years to get breathing right and another six to understand walking, so someday I’ll figure out how to be a functioning adult, but in the meantime I’ve got heavy metal navel-gazing to do and ain’t nothing going to get in the way of that mess.

This section of the list handles the bulk of your rank thirties and things remain as chaotic as ever in this here segment. A little less artsy than the upper segment was but about as heavy, because the subgenres of death metal start to arrive strong here. There’s a good 80% of this subsection that could just be cateorized as fast and violent. and to be honest with you, thats perfectly fine by me.

Most of these are albums that powered me through my year by the sheer force of ‘dumb’, with only one being a progressive show-piece, which – if you know anything about my listening habits – you may have already guessed. If not, you certainly will not be surprised by the name that does show up. Let’s continue our tumble down the year of 2022.

 

 

40 – After Life – Gates Of Madness

After Life were a pleasant surprise early this year and quickly launched themselves into becoming of those albums I listen to because it’s a landslide of guitar riffs and fast-moving music. When there’s no room left to breathe and things move that quickly, much of the listening session is an exercise in getting knocked over again and again, and I am prone to enjoying albums like that.

Every year finds a few of that style of disc working its way into the lineup and After Life‘s Gates Of Madness – which was released on February 14th – was the beneficiary of that sentiment this time around. Previous years have seen names like Kronos, Cytotoxin, The Kennedy Veil, Gloria Morti, Sepiroth and even Dormant Ordeal inhabiting that particular spot throughout the year, so After Life are in good company in the high-speed and hard-hitting death metal world.

There’s something to be said for an album that is just unceasing in its assault, other than the part where it gets overwhelming at times. After Life at the very least try to break it up a bit by dragging in a bunch of different styles throughout Gates of Madness, if not just to ram them all into one specific song.

Gates Of Madness is only After Life‘s second album and it arrived after a near seven-year gap after the first one, so in some ways this was almost like a relaunch of the band. I found it worked out to be pretty successful, as every song was like strapping yourself to a rocket and launching into orbit. Every song stands different from one another on Gates Of Madness so there isn’t a tremendous throughline but instead nine different attacks and about thirty-six minutes worth of music.

I dove deeper into the Bilbao-based group’s sophomore album a little bit after its release over here if you want a deeper guide to the snarls, bellows, and relentless guitar attack than what I’m allowing myself room for in this year-end party. If you want highlight songs though, you could take any random smattering of tracks and do pretty well for youself. Quality on Gates Of Madness is pretty evenly spread but I found myself drawn more to the opening triptych of “Gates Of Madness”, “Walls Of Delusion”, and “Behind The Mask”, though I appreciated the lite-Meshuggah influence that popped up within “Architect Of Demise” – you won’t see it coming but you’ll notice it real early on in that opening bit.

Of course, much like I did in the review, I also feel the need to give another push for the song “Drowned In Memories”, which happily drags the listener by the hair at ludicrous speed through three-and-a-half minutes of everything After Life has in the chamber.

Gates Of Madness is a promising release from a promising band and I would not be shocked to see After Life picking up a lot of steam soon. They’re built for it and their polished and precise heavy metal attack could hold a lot of appeal for people. I certainly kept going back to Gates Of Madness just to get knocked over again and again.

 

 

39 – Null Valley – Null Valley

While discussing Fit For An Autopsy and the appearance of their album Oh What The Future Holds in the year-end archive entry prior to this one I noted that every year tends to have a handful of deathcore bruisers that find their way into the party one way or another – though I half suspect it may be by elbowing security now. Even though heavy metal as a music style is leagues heavier than most of what gets played on the radio – even at its most simple and approachable – I think the idea of certain genres of heavy metal occupying the mindshare that a pop music act might’ve has some validity to it.

I have no idea who is popular on the radio any more but I often approach genres like deathcore the same way I would’ve approached the top 40 back then; it’s zero-pretense and easy to understand and follow, and often that simplicity allows the music to gets its hooks in you rather easily. So while deathcore may be frighteningly heavy to many, the music underneath is fairly simple in blueprint and barbaric in execution. It’s the single-minded focus on brutality that is often the selling point of these acts.

Which is an incredibly fucking long-winded way of saying I recognize Indiana’s Null Valley and everything they are doing and I am also going to recognize that their musically playing to the DGR cheap seats still worked just as well even when I could tell it was happening.

Null Valley joined my collective discography as a result of one of our rather stacked ‘Things You May Have Missed’ articles that went up throughout the year. The linked-to edition covered stuff that hit in April and it contained a solid amount of potential year-enders for me, but as the year went on I gave in to my more base instincts and just admitted that I like music that can effectively boil down to ‘individual punches wall repeatedly’. Not saying you shouldn’t give a listen to the releases from The Chapter and Disharmony in that specific article but if we’re talking releases that I listened to the most out of that particular grouping… then the award is going to go to Null Valley‘s oppressive atmospherics and earth-shaking guitar chugging.

You can identify all of the parts that make up Null Valley‘s sound quickly and even identify some of the influences of the band right away, but where the originality meter may not be spiking, the one that measures execution of the blueprint surely is, because throughout their self-titled release Null Valley show off just how well they have that formula down. The album both opens and closes strong on “Thought Is a Virus” and “Anthropocene” respectively, but there’s also some solid continent-movers in songs like “Die High”, “Devour By Context”, and the two-minute immolator that is “Systemic”.

I’m definitely curious to see where Null Valley take their sound in the future and how they fight it out with an increasingly packed subgenre of the -core scene, because right now they’ve clearly figured out how to take a perfect snapshot of this musical movement as it presently exists.

 

 

38 – Svart Crown – Les terres brulées

One of a few EPs to clear the hurdle for year-end celebration this time around, Svart Crown‘s current swansong Les terres brulées is five songs of fiery death and black metal hybrid that contains a few surprises, some interesting guest appearances, and even a cover track.

Much like tends to happen with EP reviews, this little summary will be shorter than the rest of the whirlpool laps that we’ve done, since there’s only five songs to talk about here. There is, of course, a much deeper exploration of the release by yours truly on this very site but the end point of it winding up here is to say that the short, quick-moving, and surprisingly fiery burst was enjoyable all the way up to the end – even if it’s the end point of the band as well. I mused in my review that Svart Crown‘s prior album had been on the divisive side on this site – I enjoyed it for all its big grooves – but I feel like the EP the group unleashed was undeniable in its ferocity and one that likely won a few people over.

The Converge cover – the song “Dark Horse” – is a pleasant surprise, played fairly straight save for being sung in French, and it arrives closer to the end of the release, but it’s the three songs prior where the band are effectively in musical blowtorch-to-the-face mode. “Geoulah” kicks things into high gear and for a large part of this EP the band stays there up until its brooding closing number in “An Open Heart”, and it shows that perhaps Svart Crown were at their strongest whenever they were incredibly intense. Even though “An Open Heart” broods for part of its eight minutes, it matches those first four songs’ high-speed intensity in overwhelming atmosphere up until it too becomes something of an explosive blastfest.

Les terres brulées may represent the current last release for the band, but I’m now on the fourth or fifth band I never thought would get back together since I’ve been writing for this site, so maybe we can hold out hope that there’s more stuff like this in the hopper for the Svart Crown crew many years down the road as time takes its tolls and maybe the spark that had dimmed for this project re-ignites.

 

 

37 – Omophagia – Rebirth In Black

If you were to ask me which of the hundreds of tech-death groups out there these days are consistently underrated I’d say that Switzerland’s Omophagia are among that group. Granted, we’ve been following them for some time, but if you consider the group’s two most recent releases, 2019’s 646965 and now 2022’s Rebirth In Black, you would find that they have been on a tear of consistently great death metal, filled with groove and high-speed melodic guitar leads that could throw down with the best of them.

Rebirth In Black refined upon this formula, especially by adding a bit of blackened atmosphere to change things up and a much larger sound than the group had been playing with in 2016’s In The Name Of Chaos, whereas 646965 did a remarkably good job with its technological theme by keeping them so blindingly precise that the band came off as inhuman at times. Rebirth In Black has the band returning to a bludgeoning core that is a little less singularly focused but certainly just as expansive. Omophagia know how to groove and bludgeon and they spend the forty-six minutes of Rebirth In Black doing exactly that. I wrote about the album back in September if you would enjoy a much deeper dive into it.

Rebirth In Black may be somewhat in the upper reaches of the year-end festivities but in part that’s because 2022 was a surprisingly strong year, and even to be mentioned is laudable. There was a lot of fantastic music out this year and being able to hang in the fight since a mid-September release in a back half of the year that was surprisingly packed is one hell of a trick to pull off.

Omophagia are a group that I’ve gone back to numerous times simply because they’ve locked on to a lot of sharpened rhythms that could snap necks during headbanging sessions. With vocalist Beni Rahn yelling over the top of it, nearly everything within Rebirth In Black has the impact of a bag of hammers being thrown at you from a passing car. Eleven songs are in the lineup here and save for the obligatory “Intro” – which the band have done with every one of their releases – there’s plenty of densely packed music; Omophagia recorded their fourth full-length as if they’d never get the chance to record music again.

Karl Sanders even finds some way to sneak into the year-end list again since he guests on the song “Redemption In Self Destruction”, though I’d also recommend songs like “All For None”, “The Plague”, and “Thoughts Of The Earth” as equally worth your time to give the album a quick shot. “Time Tells” also helps to kick plenty of ass on the way out.

Though I’ve been following Omophagia for a bit, I have yet to be disappointed with the group and Rebirth In Black comes with an easy recommendation for year-end lists, especially if you want a lot of tech-death groove without it veering into the overbearing territory.

 

 

36 – Abaddon Incarnate – The Wretched Sermon

Now, we reach the part of the list where things fall a little more into the deathgrind range, and it’s here I’ll own up to having maintained a soft spot for the genre – and grindcore as a whole – for some time now. Ireland’s Abaddon Incarnate have been around for a bit as well, but the group’s newest release The Wretched Sermon marks their return to full-length releases after having last put out an album eight years ago in 2014’s Pessimist.

The Wretched Sermon marks a subtle genre shift for the group, as the album brought all the grind influence for the band right to the forefront, resulting in an album that weighed in with thirty-six minutes worth of music across thirteen tracks, with a lion’s share of the songs hovering in the two-minute range. Rarely do the band shy away from the frenetic pit-riff approach either on this album; it’s only on the near-seven-minute epic of “Isolation And Decay” that they decide to slow down a bit. Otherwise, it’s one grinding riff after another. Sometimes it’s chaos from moment one all the way to the end, like what takes place within the song “Into The Maelstrom”.

I came to The Wretched Sermon late after its release, when I had finally found some free time outside of the day job – which you’ll note became a pretty common theme around here as the world lurched back to ‘normal’ – and wrote about how it felt to have a cannon politely fired into your face here.

Abaddon Incarnate were the providers of many a good rock-out session in the latter part of the year due to The Wretched Sermon. It was punchy and struck fast, with a hefty low-end which made sure that when the band weren’t darting from one death metal attack to another, they were throwing their weight around with sizeable force. It’s not like Abaddon Incarnate spend much of the release pretending to be one of the headiest groups in the world either, happily portraying all sorts of visceral carnage and murder throughout the album. When you have songs rerpresenting mass graves and a literal “Killing Spree” song, the idea of all killer no filler gets left in the dust in favor of a more determined approach towards auditory destruction.

The Wretched Sermon even camps its longer-running songs in the back-half of the release, with the two tracks over three minute and the previously mentioned epic song laying close to the end. Everything before it is just Abaddon Incarnate lobbing one molotov cocktail after another. You hit play on “Rising From The Lights” and the group just dish out grinder after grinder up until “Shrine Of Flesh”, wherein the band goes, “Alright, now we’ll do a longer more death metal focused song”. It was that sort of activity that I kept coming back to The Wretched Sermon for during the last few months of the year. I needed something that was gnashing at everyone around it and this was a release more than fit to do the job.

 

 

35 – Fragda – Damnation Is Inevitable

I won’t act like Hungary’s Fragda and their album Damnation Is Inevitable were a discovery of mine. I feel like I spent the first few weeks of January in a stupor while struggling to adapt to the fact that it was now 2022. However, there are compatriots of mine who are better in their services of humanity and thus this January review of the album by Andy was how I came across Damnation Is Inevitable. If this smaller writeup doesn’t do it for you, maybe that one will.

Before going into it, the thing to keep in mind with Damnation Is Inevitable is that it is very current with the deathcore scene, but whereas the ‘blackened’ influence for a lot of bands has been more on the symphonic and suffocating side of things – like a Dimmu Borgir planetoid crashing into a deathcore Earth and forming the current scene’s Moon – Fragda took that influence, heard the high-end favoring of the genre, and figured instead that the music needs be knives out and abrasive all the time.

While we’re prone to flights of fancy like describing an album as being able to ‘sand your face smooth’, Damnation Is Inevitable is an album full of enough sharp, pointy ends and fine enough grit that it may actually be able to do so. They certainly have the part where it sounds like the vocalist is trying to tear their own throat out down pat.

You get the sense earlier on what Fragda are going for after the album’s third song “Wendigo” wraps up. You’ll have already weathered the intro song “The Happening” and “Five Pointed Symmetry” that follows – but if you haven’t quite figured out how this has held out since a January 15th release date, Damnation Is Inevitable is an album I made a note to hold to early, and kept going back to, as part of the burly bruiser block that finds itself interspersed throughout this year-end list.

Songs are thick and move slow, with the force of a rolling thunderstorm, and leave behind the tipped over garbage bins and neighborhood destruction to match it. The Fragda machine spins up in these songs and the world burns, then just as quickly spins down whilst the breakdown behemoth bestrides the Earth for a few moments. You don’t really have to wonder how a band like this makes a song last for five-plus minutes, you can spot the doomed-out overtures coming from a mile off, so when a big, noisy and skin-peeling beast like “Cult” hits in the middle of the album you’re more than well aware of the musical destruction coming with it.

While it didn’t get a shoutout in the initial review, I would pay some mind to the three-and-a-half-minute excavator that is “Earthquake”, if not just because it clears the runway for the two closing numbers that are Fragda at their most ‘grand’. Sometimes a release like this makes the year-end party simply by being angrier sounding than all the others. Andd if you had asked me why things like this always seem to hit in early-January, I wouldn’t have a good answer for you. But given that it’s been a pattern for the better part of two years now, perhaps I should set a few spots aside for something as biting as Damnation Is Inevitable in next year’s affairs.

 

 

34 – Witchery – Nightside

Witchery are one of those groups – and a few are actually grouped together in this 2022 listing – wherein the core formula of the band is so strong that even when they do the most expected version of what you’d want from them it still kind of kills. With Nightside, I as actually a little wary of the release at first simply because the chosen singles didn’t really ring a bell with me at the time.

I come to the group for the blackened death/thrash hybrid that they’ve long been known for and frankly it’s when the group are dishing heaping helpings of that out that I’m at my happiest. The early singles from Nightside weren’t really in that wheelhouse, instead choosing to favor mid-tempo numbers or the oddball infernal blaster where things just didn’t quite land. It wasn’t until I actually sat down with the full album that I realized how much I actually did like the damned thing and for all my pissant worry-warting about how I might actually go through a period wherein Witchery bellyflop on my personal tastes, they were still going to come through and give me plenty of ass-kickers to go home and write about.

Now granted, it’s not like I wasn’t prone to enjoy a song simply called “Popecrusher” anyway – and it was one of the lead singles that kept my interest up in this release – but a man can get by on the strength of a riff like the one that drives “A Forest Of Burning Coffins” all on its own.

Nightside represents Witchery‘s eighth album and arrives nearly five years after them going year over year with In His Infernal Majesty’s Secret Service in 2016 and I Am Legion in 2017. Given how quickly the turn and burn was on those particular releases it made sense that Nightside would play out to be a little bit more experimental musically, but overall the album still demonstrated that the band know where their bread is buttered and kicked out just as much thrashy guitar wallopings so they could buy themselves a little freedom to then do a mid-tempo stomper like “Storm Of The Unborn”.

Also appreciated was the increased bass guitar presence, which has slowly been fighting its way into the overall sonic tornado that is Witchery‘s sound. There’s plenty of room for Victor Brandt to rumble along on this album but when the call comes for Patrik Jensen and friends to feed the guitar-furnace with another high-speed chestripper of a song, they’re more than happy to answer. It’s just that instead of that being the only thing the group do on Nightside, they’re a little more spread out.

The five-year gap gave the band plenty of time to play around with ideas and sometimes they result in instrumental bits like “Under The Altar” and other times you get a more tried and true Witchery-party in a song like – and this may be the most trademark thing they could’ve done – the two and a half minute “Churchburner”. This is absolutely one of those times where this being a personal list needs to be taken into account, because Witchery placed here by essentially creating a fucking strong Witchery album. As mentioned above, when you have a formula that works that well, sometimes that is more than enough to appeal to an idiot like me.

 

 

33- Bloodbath – Survival Of The Sickest

I’ll be honest here, I’m actually somewhat proud of how I approached Bloodbath‘s newest release Survival Of The Sickest in my review. Looking at it now, the actual amount of words dedicated to the album proper is less than I would’ve liked, but given that it’s hard to spend a few paragraphs going “It’s Bloodbath and they’ve been around long enough that you know what you’re in for here”, I was able to delve into the history of the group and how we find ourselves at a point when it seems like the band have now cycled back around into not just being a tribute act to their own influences, but reckoning with the fact that they’re now competing with a lot of those influences reunited for the nostalgia circuit, or they themselves through sheer refusal to quit having become part of the old guard.

Granted; a lot of how you approach a specific era of Bloodbath will come down to whomever is fronting the group – which it turns out holds a surprising amount of power over which death metal era and region the band plant themselves in at any one time – but it’s inarguable that they’ve gotten pretty good at striking a pure vein of old-school flavored death metal with each release.

For many, Survival Of The Sickest is the strongest that Bloodbath have been in a long time – I get to be the spoiler and say I’ve enjoyed everything of the Grand Morbid Funeral-era up to now – but in order to do that it seemed like the band would have to go back to the start. Which means that the black metal atmospherics and the unholy parade of UK death metal legends of The Arrow Of Satan is Drawn is gone and the grim-kvlt terror and buzz of Grand Morbid Funeral is left on the back-burner in favor of a classic chainsaw guitar tone and a solid-thud that could have Bloodbath being transplanted right back to the Swede-death days they sought to emulate when they started out.

With Abaddon Incarnate earlier in the fray here, it’s pretty clear that Bloodbath is not another high-minder with whom DGR has his feet kicked up before the fire while sitting in his bathrobe nodding along in appreciation. This is about as red meat death metal as you can get from a band whose career was founded upon being the most red meat death metal band they could feasibly be. You’re talking about an album wherein half the song titles contain an explicit reference to death, at least two of them reference zombies, and the rest are taken up by mentions of flesh (and the power that it holds) in its varying forms. Barring that you also have the fucking brick-stupid “Carved” that’ll be there for you as death metal comfort food any time of the week.

Considering that Bloodbath themselves have now found their way among the old-guard of the world, it’s fitting that they’d call in reinforcements from that branch as well. So when you have Marc Grewe, Barney Greenway, and Luc Lemay – on two songs even! – helping out in your celebration of gore, it’s hard to be steered wrong. Hell, when you have a song simply called “To Die” become one of your highlights of the album, then it’s pretty clear what sort of path an album like Survival Of The Sickest has charted for itself.

So yes, even though it’s Bloodbath kind of turning the old school death metal scale back to zero on their sixth album, it works out well.

 

 

32 – Miseration – Black Miracles And Dark Wonders

I don’t think it ever really occurred to me that it had been close to ten years between albums for the Miseration crew. I had always just figured that the project was going to forever be in hibernation simply because the members had kept themselves incredibly busy elsewhere, between Jani finding himself busy across a handful of different projects and Christian keeping busy between Solution .45, Svalvelvinter, his own solo release, and still popping up for guest appearances on albums.

When your reach extends that far out it makes sense that at least one of your projects would sort of get back-burnered, and while it sucked for me that it was Miseration that caught that bullet – I really liked the clusterfuck that was Tragedy Has Spoken and the relentlessly heavy The Mirroring Shadow before it – it at least made sense. But, when the group rumbled back to life with news of Black Miracles And Dark Wonders I couldn’t help but be excited.

I had a sense of what to expect from the band overall because I had figured they’d likely continue down the path that Tragedy Has Spoken had laid the groundwork for, but instead Black Miracles And Dark Wonders turned out to be an entirely different and immense monster. Even though it was only eight songs; the forty-one minutes of music that the band would pack into those eight songs was incredibly dense and felt like their entire musical career being slammed into one CD. If the band were of the impression that they were only going to get one shot at recording new music, then Black Miracles And Dark Wonders is the obvious result, because holy shit is there a lot here.

Now I would be remiss to not point out that we wrote this bad boy up way back in April but you’d also be forgiven for mind-wiping the better part of this year. To be fair; that’s what I’m here for. To drag back all those memories, all of the black miracles and dark wonders alongside them.

Miseration‘s latest is of the class of album that, given its aforementioned densely packed songwriting, is a release that you have to gird yourself for. Each song is a big grand adventure in hammering music, background orchestration, humongous roars, and darting from way out of left field melodic sections that call to mind the gall of them using a quiet piano piece and rain to close out the monstrous “Cinephes” from Tragedy Has Spoken so many years ago.

“The Seal Of The Eight Pointed Star” and “Fed By Fire/Led By Blood” are both suitably epic tracks that are worth turning your attention to, but there was also a lot of draw for songs like “Enuma Elish” and “Shah” within the time that Black Miracles And Dark Wonders asks of you. The fun part about this is that with just four songs I’ve already recommended half of the tracklisting to you, which should give you a damned good idea of how this thing was one of those that I continually went back to.

Yes, all of the songs are absolutely gigantic but it’s that denseness that kept me coming back to this release. I like how Miseration‘s branch of the death metal tree seems to have just settled on gigantic, and my one real hope is that maybe the gap between releases this time won’t be almost a decade.

 

 

31 – Persefone – Metanoia

This was the prog-metal release I was referencing way back in the opening paragraphs of this segment of my year-end list, by the way. How else are we to describe the many-genres- hybrid that the everything and the kitchen sink with a spiritual bent style of music that has become the Andorran group Persefone‘s calling card at this point? Their 2022 album Metanoia saw the group further rappeling down the cliffs of tightly-wound songs, deft-music playing, and intricate songwriting that continued to hybridize so many genre styles of prog and melodic death metal that often the group simply wins people over on first impression by being ‘alot’.

That tends to only work one time if there’s no substance there, but as my review from around the time of the album’s release found, that’s not the case. Persefone have done so again and again, having really found their footing on Shin-Ken and then firmly etching it in stone with Spiritual Migration. Since then the group have unleashed Aathma upon the world – which I also wrote about — and now Metanoia refines even further upon that. For a lot of bands this sort of music would be the most adventurous and complicated stuff they may have ever written, yet for Persefone the constant musical avalanche has simply become their standard and one that they’ve effectively polished to a blinding shine. Metanoia may not have surprised as much as previous releases have, but it did manage to pack in plenty of music and, for the first time in a long time, clock itself in at just under an hour.

For a lot of people, Metanoia almost feels like an album written in two halves. In the first half every song is its own separate adventure, so once you get past the intro song with guest Leprous vocalist, you have “Katabasic”, “Architecture Of The I” and “Leap Of Faith” there for you to satisfy the urge for wall-of-notes guitar and keyboard playing and multi-pronged vocal approaches that seem to make use of almost everyone in the band. The album of course shifts once you reach “Consciousness (Pt.3)” because from there, the band have once again seen fit to create a multi-part movement of songs that are an adventure in their own right.

While the move has been executed slightly better on earlier Persefone releases, it’s still enough to leave someone in awe as the band move seamlessly through an absolute musical buffet that is likely to leave many listeners in awe anyway. It makes a perfect sort of sense that Persefone have started to land on the tours that they’ve been able to latch onto at the moment, because they could just as easily slot in right alongside an Obscura and their impressively catchy tech-death as they could any odd-time-signature-fueled and scale-upon-scale prog band. They inhabit a very strange sort of Venn diagram and you can’t help but be left wide-eyed anyway as Persefone plow through song after song.

Metanoia may have lain more along the expected route than I wanted out of things, but it is still  an album I listened to a ton throughout 2022 because Persefone are one of those bands who can’t help weaving together as many intricate parts as possible, and I’m just enough of a music nerd to have some idea of what the hell the band are doing.

 

With that and the small ten or twelve piccolo petes that I just dumped into a two liter soda bottle, lit a match in, and ran as fucking far as I could from, I bring this subsection of my year end festivities to a close. Assuming the deafening bang that is about to follow won’t get the police called on me, tomorrow’s edition should see us getting dragged by the hair through the 20s, wherein quite a few musical adventures await and even some clean singing – which I’m sure will get us our usual slate of ‘wait, aren’t you guys called No Clean Singing’ in the comments section around the internet. Thus, I bid adieu to Day Two and… something… something will see you at the opening of day three. Maybe then I’ll have some good wordplay for you, although the coffee runs low and the brain no run as good when bitter liquid runs out. Thinking hard.