(We’re half-way through the week and half-way through DGR‘s round-up of his favourites from 2023)
Part three is where this list starts to journey up its own ass a little bit [Starts? – Andy].
In between my penchant for Death and Grind truly starting to show itself here, you’ll notice a lot of the critical favorites that’ve been going around maybe poking their heads up.
I don’t consider myself truly in touch with “the scene” as a whole – I’ve happily ensconced myself in a comfortably corner here – yet occasionally one or two do land on these far shores and get noticed.
This one has a couple of odd blocks to it – you’ll see them right about the time I call them out – there’s multiple forms of insanely dumb on here as well as insanely smart, and if you like some high peaks and some low, guttural valleys, I think I’ve got a pretty even spread on this part of the list.
Thirty or so is where things start to harden a little more when it comes to exact number placement so now you can start your arguing as if what’s written here is written in stone. Just remember that stone can be blown up too.
30 – Turbid North – The Decline
If you had placed a gun to my head and told me to describe Turbid North without falling into the galaxy-sized black hole of underground heavy metal sub-genrefication you would’ve shot me by now.
Turbid North are a band who, as simple as they appear – three dudes – are surprisingly hard to pin down.
They’re commonly found among the death and groove metal listings (like where Metal-Archives has them) but every album has been different from the one before it, and The Decline keeps that trend going.
Turbid North are part of the unholy hydra of ‘a little of a lot of things‘ that I’ve brought up before – a little less complex than the soup that makes up Witch Ripper, where I proposed this idea before in a previous instalment – smashing together Death and Grind, Sludge and Groove into an album that is intentionally bleak but also very artistically ‘free’.
A certain, potentially maybe, kind-of, sort-of, okay at this, stronger individual probably did a better job at describing it than my stuttering opening paragraph, but the part that appealed to me with The Decline was that it uses ferocity like a timed explosive.
It’s not an ‘always’ and constant factor for the band – hence why things seem so bleak and moody across this album – but when Turbid North “unleash”, they’re absolutely murderous this time around, chanelling the DeathGrind genre as if it were a mace to be swung at enemies (even challenging Misery Index for the yelled shout-chorus championship on a few songs).
Everything builds here and often The Decline is an album of simmering anger rather than the aforementioned overt explosion.
But precisely because The Decline is this constant boiler of a disc there’s even room for surprises throughout, like the near nine-minute instrumental of “A Dying Earth” close to the end (which is also where Turbid North position some of the longer songs on the disc as a whole).
There’s a mechanism that is always being built in the background of the album and you can tell Turbid North are always headed towards something, and the ebb and flow of The Decline is what keeps it interesting and makes it one to recommend.
29 – Konsensus – Life Deprived
I’ve gone to bat for Greece’s Konsensus before on this site, so it there should be no surprise that the project’s newest full length release wrestled its way into my constant listening rotation.
Life Deprived doesn’t move too far from the seeds that had been planted on its predecessor EP, New Age Of Terror, and instead does what you’d expect a project to do after its initial ‘sound has been found’ moment, which is expand upon it.
Thus, Life Deprived grows in weight from six songs to ten and still keeps things firmly rooted in the sub-twenty minutes camp.
The two year gap between the New Age Of Terror EP and Life Deprived‘s full length status also means that this was ten new songs being issued forth with no carryover between the two.
What makes Konsensus work as a project is that it is one of those largely sticking to an established blueprint and just happens to be really fucking good at following it. I find a project like this every couple of years and have them collected into a nice, bundled up nest at this point and always appreciate coming across a few more.
Out of the thousands of Grind projects out there each year, it’s nice to come across one that yes, is engaged in a pretty obvious act of playing a very recognisable style, but is also so studied in doing so that it doesn’t fall into the ‘plug and play’ disposable segment of the genre and instead issues forth some solid circle-pit igniters and moshier tracks.
Konsensus does break it up enough that it isn’t all wall-to-wall grinders- although Life Deprived is an album where it is mostly wall to wall grinders – which makes sense given that you do sometimes want to break up the twenty minute blastfest, fun as it can be.
I threw on the helmet and LED light for this one way back in July, but if you’re seeking immediate prime cuts I’d recommend “Voiceless”, “Life Deprived”, “Devoured By Humanity”, “Suicide Contagion”, and “Martyrs”.
Good thing they’re all right next to each other… given that I basically just recommended half of this release!
28 – Ironmaster – Weapons Of Spiritual Carnage
Ironmaster are one of a growing slate of projects uniting Death Metal musicians together from various projects and/or vast distances to release something that often hits with the force of a mountainside being blown up for strip-mining purposes.
Weapons Of Spiritual Carnage is a style of album that I love, which is like a guitar-avalanche where the group pick one speed very early on and lock into that mode for the entirety of its run time.
Ironmaster‘s second album in two years – following last year’s Thy Ancient Fire – roars to life and doesn’t shut off until thirty-eight minutes later.
It’s one of those releases where there’s barely any room to breathe since this three-piece are launching wave-after-wave of parts after you and since many of the songs sail well over three and a half minutes and often into the near-five mark, you can expect that to be ‘a lot’ of music.
Ironmaster is comprised of a few names you’re likely to see across the list this year if not their projects – especially from previous years. Drummer Janne Jaloma (Dark Funeral, Night Crowned) has found his way into the mix, with Jonas Kjellgren (former Scar Symmetry, Carnal Forge) handling the stringed segment of the group and vocalist Roberth Karlsson (Scar Symmetry, Facebreaker. plus a handful of guest appearances now that people have realized what a weapon that dude is as a vocalist) are your main suspects here and the result is a musical bulldozer.
I try not to pull too much from my review of an album when I crash into it again at years end, but the best way to describe this is the way I did back then, as “Death Metal weaponized and singularly focused on the constant aggression.”
Weapons Of Spiritual Carnage‘s first three are a solid block if you want to figure out if this’ll be a release for you – “Solemn Pestilence” stars things off damn strong, and if the lead moments of “Ocean Of Searing Hatred” and the titular “Weapons Of Spiritual Carnage” song haven’t won you over yet, then the rest of the discwill just keep hammering away at you until it does.
Weapons Of Spiritual Carnage is not a huge seismic shift in sound but instead one where Ironmaster are exceeding their mission statement of Death Metal annihilation.
This was one of those albums that powered me through the year by the sheer force of velocity and stupidity in equal measure and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
27 – Wormhole – Almost Human
As of this writing I remain convinced that part of the reason why I continually go back to Wormhole‘s latest release Almost Human is because it fascinates me – which is way more thought than you’d usually see proscribed to a Slam/Brutal Death album.
Yet there’s something to the nature of Almost Human – wherein it sometimes sounds like Wormhole are at war with themselves over the nature of who they’re going to be – that keeps drawing me back in, even as it eventually plays it safe and cleaves the fucker right down the center.
Granted, Wormhole are not in a sudden multi-genre knife fight and are still recognizably Wormhole, it’s just that I am as weirdly intrigued by this album as I am enamoured with simply putting it on and going a few rounds with it (as my review will show).
You have to consider that Wormhole albums prior to this basically took Brutal Death to its logical conclusion and combined it with Slam’s penchant for throwing down to create something that was at times a hyper-complicated chugging guitar fest… and other times simply music to get punched in the face to.
Almost Human is something else and part of that may be due to the shifting line-up of the band, but it also may be due to the fact that Wormhole are pushing real hard against their musical bounds and have gone on one hell of an Ulcerate binge in the interim.
You’ll still hear a lot of the recognizable Wormhole tropes throughout, and the vocals still sound like the slow churning of a gravel pit, but its song like “System Erase” and “Elysism” and the titular “Almost Human” that tend to be the bigger curiosities.
You can get your ass kicked whenever you want by songs “Spine Shatter High Velocity Impact” and “Bleeding Teeth Fungus”, but it sure is a weird split how half of the album is this form of Wormhole exploring dissonance and (lightly) avante-garde progression and then other times is nought to sixty in zero seconds flat on absolutely brutality.
Like I said, the new artistic-leaning Wormhole is a fascinating creature simply because you want to see how it navigates the current musical scene, with all of its shambling gait and awkward lurches in full view.
Almost Human is a hefty beast of an album, with only eight songs that moves by shockingly quickly, and the back-and-forth between different incarnations of Wormhole may be half the fun of listening to it.
They’re going to have to work a tiny bit harder to ever get me to call this “Tech-Slam”, though.
26 – Absolutism – Asynchronous
Hey, it wasn’t that long ago I was writing about Absolutism in review form! Man it sure is fun how time means nothing these days, right?
Much like Ironmaster earlier on in this continuum of devastation that I refer to as the ‘2023 year end archive’, Absolutism are of a branch of Death Metal that is relentless.
The review I linked to is able to go much deeper into it, so I’ll try to avoid parroting it too much here, but this is one of those albums that picks a speed very early on and sticks with it the whole time.
Absolutism blur through the Extreme Metal spectrum by sheer velocity, rapidly achieving light speed by the end of their first few songs and laying right into their sci-fi concept.
The song titles are absolutely a mouthful of word soup at times but its fitting given how much is launched at you from song-to-song across Asynchronous, what with the music within being a genre-soup.
For the most part, Absolutism are plowing their way from song to song and rarely leap out of that initial launching mechanism – sure songs like “Asynchronvs Sentience” and “Uppständelse” will catch you off guard, but for the most part Absolutism are moving at hair on fire pace.
There’s a few good pairings, if you’re looking for a quick sampler, in the openers “Lost Wavelengths” and “Ophivchvs Fortress” and likewise later on in “The Hidden Svns” and ”The Eleventh Parsec”.
In reality though, that just feels like paying lip-service, because you’d be just as well suited to hit play on Asynchronous and watch as Absolutism aim for full planetary annihilation.
25 – Svalbard – The Weight Of The Mask
Welcome to a block of three (maybe four) albums that I’ve jokingly had in the back of my head marked as the ‘for those who want to get deep into their feelings’.
Svalbard are a pretty well known name by now and one that I’ve featured before for their previous releases up to this point (after all, naming albums stuff like It’s Hard To Have Hope and When I Die Will It Get Better? is a pretty good starting point with me).
The group’s blend of Hardcore, Post-Metal, and Shoegazing material – coupled with lyrical work and song titles that are about as subtle as taking a sledgehammer to the crotch – has held strong for a bit now and that still didn’t completely prepare me for some of the material on The Weight Of The Mask.
This may have been an album that had one of the more misleading lead ups to its release that I’ve seen since first hearing the mostly clean-sung single “How To Swim Down” (which is pleasant enough on its own but fits so much better than you’d might expect within the context of the full album).
At the time; I remember thinking “Ah, finally, they’ve gone the full Post-Metal and Dream-Rock route they seemed to be hinting at previous, good for them!” and then being satisfied that I could let the disc just drift by because it’d be one that is completely out of my wheel house.
Then Andy reviewed the damned thing as part of his ongoing Synn Report series and my dreams of getting to the album on my own time and my own pace where thus shattered.
I had figured between “Faking It” and the aforementioned “How To Swim Down” that the disc would somewhat split the difference between the previous two but I hadn’t expected – which in hindsight makes me a massive moron given my jokes about subtlety earlier – them to take the heavier parts of their sound and blow them out even more.
The Weight Of The Mask takes each element of what the band have done and amplifies it, so the various strains of DNA that people have picked apart over the years that comprise the Svalbard formula are all amplified.
Things are punchier, heavier (and, in one case, even more Dream-Rock) than expected, and I immensely enjoyed the hell out of the album for all its ferocity and quiet segments.
Yeah, the band are at this point a bit of a known factor and are driven by passion to the point that sometimes song-writing will take a kick in the skull, but it still wins me over.
Given my taste in certain subsections of Grindcore that’ve popped up time and time again across my year end wraparounds, hopefully you can see how there’d be a little room for bands, like this one, that have ‘something to say’.
24 – Harboured – Harboured
Colorado’s Harboured may have put out one of the more underrated releases this year in my mind.
Granted, I could also just be incredibly jaded when it comes to music listening these days but Harboured seem perfectly in tune with the modern Metal scene and all of its introspective Post-Black Metal and tree-humping trappings.
Yet that gorgeous cover art seems to be coasting under a lot of people’s radars, and I don’t fully understand why.
Maybe its just due to the relatively new nature of the band, or that they don’t quite shine without the requisite label markers on them. It’s hard to tell.
Maybe we’ve all settled on a surface level number of bands and sounds and for some reason Harboured have been moved into the slow-burner segment of that crowd, or maybe the disc is a little too cleanly produced since people love that aesthetic of releases sounding like they were recorded in a cave about six hundred feet away from the person with the microphone.
Sure, they’re still gaining steam, but Harboured are the sort of group I think should’ve had a rocket strapped to them, and I imagine they’re going to be big because a release like their self-titled full length is hard to deny.
I just don’t like being the first snowball in an eventual avalanche – it feels weird when other people catch up to me – but Harboured‘s self-titled doesn’t ask much of your time either, clocking in at six songs and a little over thirty-three minutes.
It’s a release that I’d risk being called lush, for as distant as the band sound there is a lot of restrained beauty being played up in the music.
Harboured shift from the occasional sharp groove to these floating, quiet and longer segments like nothing and they’re not afraid to break out the much vaunted quickly-picked guitar riff and blastbeat section alongside those.
I know I linked to the reveiw above but I’d highly recommend checking that out if you want a more full explanation of everything happening within Harboured‘s bounds since I think I did an unintentional song-by-song there.
Here though? I just recommend you give the thing a spin, especially if the pre-described introspective Black and PostMmetal hybrid has been well within your aesthetic realm these days, and I’d expect to see a lot more from Harboured in the future as people catch on.
23 – Rosa Faenskap – Jeg Bler Til Deg
Chalk this one up as a win for Andy [what, another one? – Andy], much as I am loathe to give him any sort of credit lest he think he’s good at this or something.
There is a lot to be said for continually bringing up a band again and again and again though, since at some point I will likely hit the ‘play’ button on it if only out of morbid curiosity.
In this case, I did so after the review so at the very least every time I saw the name and album title pop up I at least understood why.
One of a few Black Metal releases – though of the different variety than your classic corpse-painted second/third wave generation than you’d expect – that managed to crack this hardy shell of mine, Jeg Bler Til Deg is an album that I think does a damned good job setting out to be an experience alongside just being a damn good collection of music.
It’s a little bit – like, a tiny bit – more of a time investment than a few of the releases that I’ve recommended up to this point, but you’d never notice the time passing since this is a disc where its hard not to be entranced with it from moment one.
I know that it was a later in the year release, yet this is one of those where my own integrity would be on the line if I didn’t say I’ve thrown it on as both ‘go-to background noise’ as well as one I’ve intentionally sought out.
I know that had it been earlier in the year it likely would’ve climbed higher, but claiming a spot where it does on the ole’ year end wall-o’-words, right about where my rankings start to crystalize, is a feat strong enough on its own.
“Neonlys”, “Paradis”, “Reform” and “Aldri” ate up a lot of my time, and the last one especially deserves high marks given that its a nine-minute number that kept a dude normally inclined to Grindcore’s “over, out, done” stylings interested.
Though I feel like you do need the titular “Jeg Bler Til Deg” song if you’re going to fire up “Aldri”… and at the point, you’re just listening to the whole release anyway.
22 – October Tide – The Cancer Pledge
On a different spectrum of being lost within your feelings or full blown introspection why don’t we check in with a band that have long trafficked in abject misery?
October Tide should be pretty well known by now – especially if you’ve followed this site for a while – but if not, welcome to the party, as gloomy as it may be.
Since their reactivation in 2010, October Tide have scored pretty high with me, and The Cancer Pledge is no different.
There may not be a lot of room in my heart these days, but it seems that October Tide can still find their way around those calcified barriers – although they’ve done so this time by becoming absorbing more Death Metal into their sound since their previous album.
It was either going to be this or something from Thenighttimeproject but, one way or another, one of the Norrman team was always likely to place somewhere within the year-end extravaganza.
The Cancer Pledge is a follow up album in the truest sense in that it near-directly follows up on what the band were doing on In Splendor Below.
If you liked how the tempo was picked up a little bit and the slow, crawling through the muck style misery was traded in for a gloomier hostility then The Cancer Pledge will keep you warm and happy.
October Tide try to split the difference a bit throughout The Cancer Pledge so the music stands firmly on the pedestal that the band have built over the years, but it’s still exciting to see them excel in a heftier side of things as well.
My review of said album tackled all things ugly and miserable – and not just me, heyyyooooo! – within the boundaries of The Cancer Pledge so I’m free to just hand out songs to listen to here.
The title-track scores high, as does “Blodfattig” just prior to it. “Season Of Arson” grew on me throughout the years and I would still recommend the more hostile “Unprecedented Aggression” as well.
My review also has me tackle how “Peaceful, Quiet, Safe” may be one of the more traditional October Tide songs within the album, but as a whole The Cancer Pledge remains swathed in a black haze that’ll shake you around for a few, and “I Know Why I’m Cold” takes a similar tact.
October Tide seem to have found some new vitality in the current sound and are doing impressive work with it, and the slightly “deathier” take on their melodically-minded Doom hybrid is doing well for them.
21 – Werewolves – My Enemies Look And Sound Like Me
You know that part where I was joking about how I had a solid chunk of the list that was dedicated to “getting lost in our feelings?”
Yeah, well fuck all that. Burn it to the ground, salt the earth, and torch any bystanders along the way.
You’ll recognize this name by now and you’ve likely seen them pop up year-on-year for issuing forth a block of music that is purposefully built to be both similar and blindingly stupid
It probably wouldn’t shock me to hear that they do these all in one gigantic session and then just cackle like lunatics as more and more of it gets released upon the world.
In case you’re wondering, we’re discussing the Australian Death-Grind vehicle Werewolves and their fantastically named 2023 release My Enemies Look And Sound Like Me.
Remember how I mentioned earlier on that having a bleak and hopeless outlook as an album title tends to work well on me? Well so too does sarcastic and nihilistic pessimism it seems.
This may be why I still hold What A Time To Be Alive as the peak of their particular naming conventions so far, although My Enemies Look And Sound Like Me is making a damned good run for it in the meantime.
Werewolves have long specialized in the idea of ‘stupid’ as being a reference to a musical dynamic so singularly focused on velocity as a form of brutality that the idea of mood or tension gets tossed out of the door.
Things start at one thousand and stay camped out there for much of their album’s particular run times, and I remain convinced the only breaks they might take is so that they don’t cause their drummer to pass out from exhaustion in a live setting.
Given that Werewolves are in familiar territory you could understand that I have them a little higher up than I’ve listed them previously, and the reason they’re still so ‘present’ in the empty catacomb that is my head is because they’re also still really good at what I go to them for.
My latest analysis of their album still found me having a pretty good time with it, even though it’s a mission statement long since made clear by the three albums prior to it.
But this is also a band that named a song “I Knew Nothing Then And I Know Less Now” so you can kind of take any sort of serious looks at Werewolves about as far as you can throw them.
Really, this is an album that is meant to sandblast the brain clean, and is tailor-made for the back half of a year when you need something to clear your skull of the usual inane holiday bullshit.
Yes, My Enemies Look And Sound Like Me is basically neck and neck with its predecessors, but arguing over how high one might rank over the other feels like arguing in shades of subtlety that Werewolves frankly doesn’t deal in.
It’s fast, it’s heavy, and it is still landing with me.