DECKARD CAIN’S MALADIES OF THE EAR – 2023

(For the years 2012 through 2015 an NCS supporter from India who went by the name deckard cain contributed some interesting year-end lists that we posted as part of our annual Listmania series, and he reviewed songs and albums for us too during that same interval. Then he drifted away, but returned with a year-end list in 2021, then drifted again, and returns once more with another very interesting 2023 list below.)

Greetings all!

These year-end lists are indeed great spaces to think through the year that was. Personally, it was a year of tumult. Moments of happiness of being able to spend time with family after many a year of living abroad were great and so were deeply harrowing experiences of loss and unwarranted suffering. Nothing new here! For life always gets back at us all with a sense of pendulous certainty.

Going full elegiac on the state of the world is beside the point. But the albums on year-end lists? Well, they fit in as signposts, reflective of one’s state of mind then, linking them in turn, to events and feelings. Perhaps a version of chronologically mapping your emotional states. And to that end all these records mattered one way or another, whether as anodynes to one’s pain, as chasers downed after moments of elation. and everything in between. In no particular order or rank and…..and as the last of the Horadrim says:

Listen bruvs!!!!

1. Рожь (Rye) – Всё (Independent release)

Tough to get down the name of the band, they are also usually called Rye in English so I’m just gonna go with that. Rye’s an atmospheric black metal band however loosely you’d want to use that term. A lot of ambient soundscapes and sometimes the lumbering pace of funeral doom are at the extreme ends of this one-man band. I wrote about the release earlier in the year and let me quote myself here:

“Rye yet again channels nature’s wonders (of the landscape of Russian Karelia) into an elegiac mode that seductively lulls the listener into a pervading sense of loss and reflection. You can’t listen to this and not pine for some yearning of a better past/tomorrow. It’s like the theme from Gladiator by Lisa Gerrard and Hans Zimmer tuned to the despondent. It’s haunting, poignant, and beautiful all the same.”

 

2. Inherits the Void – The Impending Fall of the Stars (Avantgarde Music)

I think this is some of the finest modern melodic black metal that has graced my ears of late. It does not succumb to being a mere copy or variant of Sacramentum or Dissection. What’s special about this is that each new listen of the album in its entirety leads you to find new melodies. Something Sacramentum did for me, and the void inherits as well. Hah!

 

3. Thronehammer – Kingslayer (Supreme Chaos Records)

Inspired largely by the Candlemass school of doom and yet bringing in a lot of the gravelly weight of earlier Paradise Lost, Thronehammer has been a constant in my playlist for the last few years. Kingslayer is yet another catchy album that does not for a moment bore you despite its long-ish run time.

 

4. Inculter – Morbid Origin (Edged Circle Productions)

Fatal Visions was probably their high point, this time around they turned things down a notch slower. But oh boy are these riffs as tasty! Fantastic thrash that has a keen ear for melody and composition rather than merely bursting out the gates (or perhaps in addition to).

 

5. Blood Star – First Sight (Shadow Kingdom Records)

Now this might be a bit of an oddball. Clean singing for sure. Blood Star seems to play this kind of heavy metal that is more around the turn of the ’80s. NWOBHM sure, but less that and more of say an early Ratt, Riot and Dokken sound. One of their releases does cover the latter and Uriah Heep, so that might be a better focus. Along with Christian Mistress, and last year’s equally great Sanhedrin, Blood Star falls squarely within that style. I secretly wish they retained that rougher and perhaps even clearer(?) sound on their debut 7”. But this is such a strong release that focuses on hook after hook, and that’s never a bad thing!

 

6. Chepang – Swatta (Independent release)

Chepang is that cloud of arrows that block out all sunlight before descending on your body. This is an ambitious (a concept record at that) grindcore record that has like four sides (2 12”) and each side has a distinct style and flavor, connected as they are to their respective thematic focuses. The last side (side D) being entirely AI processed. Phew!

This mattered when I thought the latest and last Gridlink was a tad underwhelming by their own usual standards. But hey Takafumi Matsubara guests on two of the tracks here! So hellyeah!

 

7. Melancholia – Ode to Ruination (Brutal Panda Records)

Sounds a lot like a midway tradeoff between Bølzer and Mantar, and they’re a two-piece too. So yeah. But they differ from their contemporaries in how they bathe their sludge in a sort of blackened goo that sort of sticks perfectly. Good luck getting out of this bog!

 

8. Ironsword – Underground EP (Alma Mater Records)

To have former members of Manilla Road (the last known rhythm section of the band) join Ironsword, who are a great band in their own right, and taking perhaps the massive mantle of Mark Shelton’s legacy forward isn’t easy. This EP offers a glimpse to perhaps a good future and I just love it. Tann sometimes sounds too much like Shelton at places, but for me that’s the charm.

 

9. Terminalist – The Crisis as Condition (Indisciplinarian)

Voivod-inspired thrash, much like Vektor of course, but showcasing far less of the experimentation in the former and choosing instead on riffcraft within a much narrower range of sound. They sometimes straddle the line between death (primarily due to the vocals) and black metal, but never dip too much into either. Fantastic stuff!

 

10. Howling Giant – Glass Future (Magnetic Eye Records)

Damn! Everything stoner/doom used to be my jack back in the early 2010s. Of course, the flurry of shitty bands that pretended to do a Colour Haze (love their earlier stuff) and just do extended jams and release whatever was accidentally recorded usually did the trick. But I did ask myself why I was instantly attracted to Howling Giant’s latest release. The answer is probably Torche (and their sad split), and mix that with the regular yet extremely potent dose of stoner/doom/psychedelic stuff and you’ve got yourself a winner!

 

11. Ostraca – Disaster (Skeletal Lightning)

I’ve been following these guys for the last few years, and they lean more towards the emo/hardcore (not the cheesy kind) side of heavy music. But with their latest change in production, their sound seems to have been gifted with an added weight. The weight is not entirely dissimilar from bands like Fall of Efrafa who tip-toe the line between the very same genres. Deeply despondent and yet not losing the capacity for introspection has always been like the general mood of the genre, and things aren’t so different here either.

 

12. Hellripper – Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags (Peaceville Records)

This band was on a huge hype train when Coagulating Darkness came out. The new Joel Grind/Midnight equivalent? Well, it sounded promising for sure, but it didn’t hit me like it did for others. Follow up release, The Affair of the Poisons, was a dullard to be honest. But this release though, Hellripper rips hell into its bare molecules all the while never losing sight of the bit of fun that is always in these new black/speed hybrids.

In an interview over at IO, James suggested something interesting when inquired about the influences for the new record: “So as well as the usual bands like Bathory, Metallica, Darkthrone, I went further afield to Agalloch, Opeth, Type O Negative and Edge Of Sanity, stuff like that.”

Interesting and perhaps that’s why.

 

13. Underdark – Managed Decline (Church Road Records)

This was a new find. A concept record that re-tells the story of living in the Midlands (the British rust belt) and its economic and social decline over the years by weaving it all within a deeply personal narrative. Sounds post-metal-ish? It truly is. Such a cause deserves no lesser treatment, and lived reality of the people speaks through these songs.

 

14. Desecresy – Deserted Realms (Xtreem Music)

In the realms of bias, I’d say. I mean at this point; I’ve purchased physical copies of all their albums (save the first two) and more or less the entire discography on Bandcamp. But who’s to say that liking a band that puts out, more or less, variations of the same album every 2 years is a bad thing? Nay! It isn’t an invective on the band’s oeuvre in the remotest! The reason why I love this band is because I always come back for their hypnotic sense of melody amidst all the plodding, mid-tempo, Bolt Thrower-ey death metal.

 

15. Malokarpatan – Vertumnus Caesar

Slovakia’s answer to the folky, Denner/Shermann inflected outputs of Czechia’s Master’s Hammer and Root and even Hungary’s brilliant Tormentor (Attila’s best work? Screw the label that shelved Anno Domini!). This time around they’ve dialed the catchiness up to eleven.

 

16. Sulphur Aeon – Seven Crowns and Seven Seals

Still getting it right! Still getting better with each release. I absolutely love this album. Better than Behemoth and their clones on any given day by a long shot.

 

17. Hanging Garden – The Garden (Agonia Records)

Babylon be damned. The lackluster choice of album title aside, there is little to not like here. To me they’ve finally found a niche between the melodic death-doomier archetype they nailed in Inherit the Eden and the gothic whatever of Katatonia/latter-day Anathema-esque of the last few albums. This sound was hinted at early in their earlier albums At Every Door and Blackout Whiteout, only to lose it down the line. Never better to recapture it then!

 

18. Dodheimsgard – Black Medium Current (Peaceville Records)

I’ve always struggled to get into them, including Vicotnik’s classic work in Ved Buens Ende. But this album single-handedly caused me to revisit some of that work and see them in a better light. This is probably because here they are at their most accessible best.

 

19. Dirge – Dirge (Independent release)

I’ve always wondered what listening to post-metal (I know it’s a catch-all term for god’s sake) in India is. I mean at the risk of sounding stupid here, to me it has always sounded very urban. Probably because I’ve always listened to post-metal while living and growing up in my fair share of Indian cities. But probably more so because of how easily I associate the musicality of the genre with the jarring sense of numbness that a city life might bring up at times. The urban sprawl and confined living, big dreams and its shattered remnants, the ensnaring glitz of it all and yet a longing for one’s real home. Conflicting thoughts, abstract thoughts. Perhaps it’s because the genre always does a tightrope walk carefully balancing between the edges of the mundane and the monolithic. Dirge’s latest release embodies that for me and reserves a special place in my heart for the same reasons.

 

20. Church of Misery – Born Under a Mad Sign (Rise Above Records)

Stop watching Mindhunter and listen to this instead. Doom on!