(It’s fitting that the last installment in our main LISTMANIA series comes from one of our newest contributors, who made his first NCS appearance in early February of this year. Of course, this being Vizzah Harri (born in South Africa, now living in Vietnam), this isn’t a conventional list, but more like an ongoing diary of the year, which isn’t musically limited to metal nor even limited to music, though it begins with reflections from the present.)
It’s been a year of bi-polarities and absurdism. The Onion bought Infowars and Vice started writing Onion articles. The level of fakery doesn’t even matter anymore because it seems like reality has itself been augmented into a surreal hellscape. It takes but one lie to fool one man or a thousand for a lifetime; it is immeasurable how hard it is to turn back that lie. Randi and his partner once tried to prove how easy it is to fool people, and they succeeded but proved unknowingly that people didn’t want to know the truth in the end, they wanted to remain suspended in fantasy. The cognitive dissonance was too tough to reconcile.
In brighter news, there will be new music from our favorite caterpillars in öOoOoOoOoOo and the teaser they dropped way back on April 1st is alluring as fuck:
If you did not know about this band, well, check out one of the best openers to an album ever:
The coolest, most anticipated list, even more than all the wonderful lists by the regular NCS staff, is that of the most infectious songs. There aren’t really any other outlets that do this kind of thing and it’s one of the reasons why I got to reading this site more over the years. There have been some really long additions, but you can’t exactly have a whole track of Morphinist’s 2018 album, it’s the whole bloody album, and you can’t exactly just pinpoint a timestamp for people to go click on, but that’s why the best part of the year musically is in the safest hands.
I don’t generally make lists, other than the endless to-do variety; Islander also wisely didn’t solicit one from me. I love a deadline, I missed it. It was supposed to be an end of year writeup aspiring to cover ideas relating to art appreciation and subjectivity.
It ended up being a trip through a 2024 memory lane of what I found on the internet. Apparently humans found the oldest known melody, and then this musical historian went and put out this recording of the supposedly oldest piece of music that we have words for.
I found out about the most insane piece of music that was created to be unplayable and then a ton of pianists went and tried to play it.
Even in the highest AQI (urban air quality index) in levels of pollution, brightness, and color can shine through. I was driving in the heaviest traffic after covering for a colleague the one day. Drove through the whole city, irritated and exhausted with jostling for position to get out of the ocean of smog my fellow commuters and I shared.
As I got to the last light before my turn, I looked to the south at the dyke where there’s an opening like a gate of sorts for cars, bikes, and trucks to go through. The sun was just setting and one could see this lemony yellowish-green willow of a tree also covered in vines with its leaves like the hair of a forlorn chiffonier hanging in the streetlight that itself was raised above a condor’s nest of phone/wifi and electric cables next to the flood wall on a road named after a fairy next to the flower market with the scythe of a crescent moon but hair follicle’s breadth above it.
And in all the smoke and dust and movement one could dare a glance at a fellow commuter, crinkle the eyes into a smile above the mask which 9.9 times out of ten results in a reciprocal response; there in those small moments of big-city life one remembers how beautiful the universe can be. Even in the endless construction cacophonous droning one can find solace in that quintessential building canvas that be-drapes all nascent buildings for at night with the wind coursing through and over them, while slapping against still-wet walls one can hear the ocean as if a shell was gifted from the shore of the endless and stunning coast of Vietnam to your doorstep.
Side note: The future is here. Snort and squirm at your provisional protoplasmic peril, or take a gaspy breath between each finite engorgement of flesh. Sidenote: silk worms have the necromantic quality of containing more buttered-essence flavor within than their volume would suggest. Positively scrumptious. Something about über umami with a touch of dimension-shattering zest. I tried new things this year.
Today I’m plagiarizing the fuck out of myself, and borrowing words from smiths more experienced in shaping lasting spells. These are my b-sides in words for the year: If dissimulation out of spite of the great echo of astounding odious spirits gnawing at the primordial seed is having you reeling today, then succor can be found at these shores of purgation.
Density pack(ing) heat
Staying senescence to a
Curbstomp obsolete
Seeing as the screen changes with the music with your eyes closed, that screen. And then channeling what an artist would have in their brain as channeled through said filter with that music. For you it might seem that all the colors just blend in together with still just a blank slate as far as sculpture would be concerned, the world is bland, void not of substance, the potential is right there, it is but to be harnessed.
Which if you were to take more robotic, mechanistic, even more animalistic ways of thinking to the problem of what to do with this mass of biological aberrance: see the whole unadulterated seething, throbbing and stultifying immensity of all as: untapped potential. The avuncular veneer alternates with polite, casual menace.
The fast-thinking instinctual part of the brain operates, informs, and is informed by muscle memory and the body-mind and mind-body (if that makes sense) being self-aware if it allows itself to be: will eventually wake the fuck up when normal everyday motor responses don’t function the same anymore. Like, balance, the sixth sense – and most underrated – when it is off: you would fucking Knooow. A shivving of agency right in the bermuda triangle of youthful exuberance. Picture disillusionment, not apathy but physiologically manifesting and endured apathy.
They say we have to be careful what we wish for. The daemon that is the universe is indifferent as to the manifestation of the grant however tenuously linked to said wish. It delivers, and when vague: u might not notice, or it incrementally yet also exponentially at times amplifies.
Do you feel like 2024 just doesn’t want to go away just yet? Are you ready to just switch off from all streaming and music as well as the internet so you can just enjoy some absolute silence for once, or is your brain so fried from the deluge of quality and quantity of quantum entangling chord transmogrification this year that all you want is some baseball sleep music?
Trying to remember all the music one listened to in a year can be fixed by a solid organization system, which I don’t have. Trying to cover all the good music you ran into is either like this man trying to keep not just the tide out with a broom, but a friggin tsunami – or your name has to be alluding to that which is completely immersed within a body of water. I may be a small-town boy from a ‘humble’ fishing village on the south coast of South Africa, but none of us are islanders. The list that follows is like a greatest hits of each month that then devolves into notes on what stood out and what I couldn’t get to writing about. And the best album of the year.
On the first of January last year I was jamming Anti-godhand’s incredible Blight Year, Tetragrammacide’s mind-warper of a soporiferous assault in Typho-Tantric Aphorisms From The Arachneophidian Qur’an, and Anoushka Shankar, probably because I only realized then that she was responsible for the beautiful sitar work on my favorite electronic album of all time, Dark Soho’s Light in the Dark (it’s guitar trance from people with an ear for mood and with a metal background, so if you like electronic and somehow don’t know about it, enjoy).
As for new music, the month of January belonged to Hauntologist and 山神廟 (SrenHlinMrews), as well as the album of the year, which features a bit later in this mess.
山神廟 – 雲山夢樹 (Clouds, Mountains, Dreams, Woods)
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. “Complex and sometimes multiple ideas can be conveyed by a single still image, which conveys its meaning or essence more effectively than a mere verbal description.” “Hearing something a hundred times isn’t better than seeing it once” – Wikipedia. Writing about music can therefore be seen as a form of ekphrasis, the description of a work of art, though I’d veer from this claim towards music, and especially this album existing as medium interpreting visual art. From the original: “A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.” This act then becomes art and elevates further into immortality that which came before. Instead of paying homage to forebears in sonic movement, here 山神廟 invite us into visual masterpieces of Chinese pastoral landscapes.
If you had a rough week, and post-atmospheric black metal wasn’t calm enough for you to unwind, then the EP released by the same band might be what the witch doctor ordered. No distortion, vocals, or blast beats in range, 山神廟 go full acoustic in the direction one would first imagine looking upon the majestic cover art they chose. With the only percussion found here from a piano, this unplugged EP dials in the folk hard, with the traditional Chinese instrument the Dongxiao also making a continuous appearance on the 4 tracks acoustically reinterpreting the full-length album.
Hauntologist featured in my third article for NCS and I’ll drop some of those words for “Ozymandian” here as to how I felt about it and the whole album at the time, and still do:
“Ozymandian was ever just a prequel to the Autonomy/Gardenmoen jab-delayed-telegrammed-haymaker.
The cosmic dancer level fills and banksy-level feelings for agency in a philosophical sense which they for-fucking-sure are more erudite in choice compared to any reference to yesteryear’s lamentations for that which has unfortunately stood the test of time. There are always going to be voices pining for their idea of golden-ageism, and however inane or vacuous the idea is of thát ‘now’ being the time of THE best music. So instead of taking which is deemed to be comical in its derivation of stereotypical essence-lessness, we bring you the hubris of your pulchritudinous superficiality.
These sonic mixologists of the psyche pulled together a superlative strumming imbuement. There’s a lot of foreplay about keeping things short, yet each song seems to still have essays’ worth of exposition sans what we really want.
2023 had a drum god’s filling of what we have come to expect as a given in the world of avant-black-prog-deathy-jazzed-up to the fusion of genres that you just have to sometimes be like, damn I missed me some Darkside.”
In February I found out about the Chaser’s war against everything, revisited some Andre Antunes that were so good that his followers have requested a whole album of this mashup and I mean, the man has a great ear for melody and it’s showcased in awesome fashion in this mashup he made with two sisters singing, so infectious. And, I gotta say that his Master of Puppets in the style of Muse is the kind of thing I did not know I needed in my life.
I later found that everything will be in its right place if I just listen to this song by some unknown British rock band called Radiohead on repeat, and yes, I did use it as a link many a time this year.
Necrowetch inspired Islander to pen these words about an album that was a serious contender for best album art of the year and as far as title tracks go, the blood doesn’t just get pumping through the veins, it’s got riffs licensed to drain the very life-juice out of your meat suit:
“The guitars ring like chimes, albeit chimes crusted with blood, clarion-toned but not too clean. They shiver in waves of frenzy, swirl like the heated air around an oasis, soar with raptor talons bared, and blare like hellish fanfares. They cut like sandstorms and spin the mind like carriers of exotic spells, sometimes joined by even more exotic and ancient acoustic instrumentation for added mesmerization.
Backing these whirling knives and beckoning incantations are momentous rumbling and wrecking bass lines and the kind of extravagant drum performances that threaten to steal attention away but are also very effective at getting heads moving and hearts racing.
Fronting these changing musical manifestations, Vlad expels strangulated regurgitations, rabid snarls, and explosive, fanatical screams at the red edge of extremity, all of them with a serrated edge too.
The tempos change relentlessly, allowing no room for a listener to get too comfortable with what’s happening, and the songs also prove to be both perpetually dynamic and wonderfully elaborate in other ways. The music channels racing and ravishing viciousness, spectacles of dire and daunting grandeur, troughs of hopeless agony, and… to repeat… intriguing but perilous spells born from demon depths.”
February was also a month for surfing, Amphibian man hit it out of the park and then some; here’s what I thought about it in nebulous obfuscation of essence, purple pacman is looking to devour some souls and they’re gonna do it into an endless summer:
“Rising does open with what can be deemed Middle-Eastern inflected guitar tones; however, the intent of Zenith becomes clear around the 1-minute mark when the true nature of Amphibian Man spy-hops through that thin veil of perceptive judgement. This is compact even for an EP length, but not just for the runtime. Zenith is layered with an energy rarely found outside of tempests home to the tropics. Ivan Semeshchenko’s Bandcamp shows releases dating back to 2015’s Tsunami and which range from progressive thrash to desert-inspired surf rock. You read that right.
“This new offer could be said to peak at the eponymy of its title track, yet the final two tracks of Fall and Africa offer up no less furious riffing and ecstatically addictive drumming and not once does one wonder, where are the vocals? If instrumental music is done this well and someone still asks that question, you should reconsider your associates.”
February, however, belonged to Job for a Cowboy. Probably one of, if not the most replayed album this year for me. I personally can’t listen to it while driving because the urge to crank the ear of my motorbike is just too forceful. They wrote such a good opening track as far as escalation of a hook is concerned that I’ve been walking around with a friggin harpoon through my empty skull with an old-timey wanted sign dipped in a bucket of brown lysergic acid diethylamide impaled on my bald pate for months.
What I noticed in March was Limebócx, Hanoian local folk/pop/electronic alchemists dropped “Dung Họa” featuring a soul aching violin solo by Mỹ Hương (sorry, no review as with many of what is to follow for the sands of time having run out)
Necrophobic was quite the sleeper hit, for not many people mentioned this riff-packed monster, except DGR penned not one but two exceptional reviews of it, with also twice mentioning how catchy many of the songs are: “Criminally ear-wormy at times…They’re dangerous when they’re at their most earworm-esque, and In The Twilight Grey has more than its fair share within the time it asks of you. It’s always enjoyable to go on the infernal thrill-ride with the Necrophobic crew and see how close the coaster goes to sailing completely off the rails this time, waiting on edge to see right when the pin will drop and the fiery fun will end.”
Deeper in the underground there looms music that might seem like a joke, a gambit, an absurdity to scoff at. I AM THE INTIMIDATOR was forged in the name of Dale Earnhardts’ final day in a revisionist fantastical hell ride. The player should start on the second track called “Gasoline.” It’s four minutes and 20 seconds long. Whether you indulge in the devil’s lettuce or not and whether you partake in it prior to pressing play, you won’t be ready for what comes. It’s glorious, keeps on giving, and is the best thing that should not have worked on paper, but did.
Cemetery Trip. Here’s a short excerpt of my review of their neuron-noclipping breathe of fresh filth of an album:
“Death visits us unknowing at times. Like when a filling drops, and everything tastes like a decomposing rat stuck between the drywall and ceiling of your mouth. Described on their media as: “anti-psychiatric blackened punk. 30 minutes of abyssal despondency and primal sonic decay.” Cave Beast is like infusing the cyberpunk of Blade Runner 2049 with the bestial psychedelic dreams of a carnivorous worm feasting on the recently deceased by psilocybin overdose.
“Just one glance at their Bandcamp page would suffice to waylay fears that this is some punked-up black metal project that have never dabbled in psychedelics. Cemetery Trip, it must have something to do with their name. The coloring on that logo is trippy af. Look at that album cover and then scroll upwards with your eyes to the logo. See that pigment alteration that fades in? That’s such a good rendition for what the music is. Until you get to track 8 that is, when that pink neon effervescence goes full blown.”
In APRIL we had KLONNS strum up a cyclone storming right into an alternate reality of euphoria and I still stand bythese words:
“Grind and other short forms have a universe of possibilities to fuck with expectations and for innovation in the different shades of asperity we deal with in extreme music. KLONNS just gave everyone a lesson in spacing and vitality as Heaven is over in less time it takes to read this review, less a heaven than a heaving for more.
“Static-laced trip-hopped-chipmunked outro is not what you’ll expect either, and it’s exactly how the album should have ended. Plenitude attained. KLONNS’ll knock any other hardcore album this year the fuck out. Inveterate beings of insatiate musical consumption need not look further than Heaven to scratch that itch in the search of riffs of providence.”
We also had Conifère, a band that I stated would feature in this list, and here it is because it’s a damn fine album of perspective-shifting black metal. From the review:
“Urgency slays enervation in the way that the best black metal drummers know how to do. With an understanding of stadium arcadiums and having the self-assuredness to then actually throw in a rock solo. It ain’t punk black, but it certainly is punk-rock as all fornication….The surging leads give precedence to the runtime as the band nearly go into Obsequiae-territory of melody before a serenity only a band named after trees (Conifère=coniferous) can deliver as outro to the storm that preceded it. Conifère succeeded in creating an album with 5 chapters presented in 4 concise tracks of extremely re-playable excellence.”
In May I got reminded of how deaf I already was back in college. This is a video of when there was a police raid on a student hangout called Bohemia way back in 2008. I’m the semi-oblivious person in the red Mastodon shirt.
Going on with aural blinders to nearly have missed this riff-packed monster from the stalwart in Vredehammer: a band that didn’t get enough love this year but still produced some of the most riff-packed and slicing melodies of this year – “Dragon’s Burn” is just one example that has got the most foot-stomping blackened death groove. The keys are done in a way that it sounds more like the instrument was specifically constructed for that sound and that everything else was built around it.
And you know you’re not metal when you’ve even got a spoken-word album to recommend, if that’s your thing. The lyrics are available here; they’re in Afrikaans so the Dutch might understand some of our funny bastardization of their language. It’s quite meditative, I’d be facetious if I’m saying Kobus Kotze is just kinda good with words. He’s like if you mixed Burroughs, Pound, Bukowski, Kerouac, and Thompson with the eye of Lynch and the heart of Wong Kar-wai.
Akvan – Sometimes it should suffice to just have a look at the art, read the name, peruse the title, and follow the instructions of: this is an immersive listening experience, headphones, comfy chair, eyes closed, sit back press play and enjoy. There are creations that motivate the mind to draw images within and our editor is the kind of sorcerer that can even conjure up formidable reviews under the head clamp of a hangover:
“ …the music is mournful as well as wrathful, both tormented and defiant, both spellbinding and exhilarating, epic as well as feral.
“Once again, Akvan has seamlessly integrated musical traditions from its homeland, exotic to western ears, with the more globally widespread tropes of black metal, and the results are transportive — perhaps especially the third track, performed entirely on traditional instrumentation (identified as the tar).
P.S. For those new to Akvan, Vizaresa uses the word “Aryan” in the band’s lyrics to mean ‘people from Iran”, the historically accurate definition, and not in the way Nazis stole and mutated the term.’”
For May though, Saidan definitely took top spot in my playlist at the time. It still holds up, but that Akvan above has seen much more rotation of late:
“Now for something not completely different, as in, not if you’ve been following black metal of the divergent kind closely. There is a refreshing movement in black metal towards something of a vaporwave aesthetic, which I for one can’t get enough of.
“I’m never that good with FFO recommendations, but if you imagine what it would sound like if you put Trhä, Stormkeep, middle-era Deafheaven, Skeletonwitch and Sigh as an algorithm into the Red Dwarf Vending Machine, you might get an idea of what Saidan is up to. Unhinged vocal delivery, high-point of thrash slash hard core-ish breakdowns, stadium-anthemic licks, punk esthetic and appeal, and dare I say vaporwave perception.
“Saidan don’t just submit to the altar of one particular influence, but their music certainly has the propensity to compel one to kneel at theirs, for Saidan means altar in Japanese (祭壇).”
JUNE. One cool thing about going down YouTube wormholes is that you sometimes find really cool content like negative harmonies and audio palindromes.
In lieu of new Ulthar a brilliantly outlandish album by Thanototherion dropped June 7th and for an album as unclassifiable in sound, it’s packed with a density and inflaming force fit to burn your face off. Andy Synn spilled more eloquent words here.
ÆTHĔRĬA CONSCĬENTĬA’s THE BLOSSOMING was recommended as being similar to Hail Spirit Noir…well not quite. Andy wrote about it here.
And the band locks themselves into the Schrodinger’s cat’s box of experimentalism summed up aptly as: “Ætheria Conscientia is a progressive black metal band formed in 2016. Quintet with varied influences not wishing to be locked into stylistic constraints, the group offers a unique blend of extreme, progressive and psychedelic sounds, at the crossroads of Oranssi Pazuzu, Mastodon and Enslaved.”
And then for the power metal fix with riffs for days that you were unaware your hp count was pining for in recession of, there was Nightmare’s Encrypted:
Other musician-curated releases of note from June (I’m in a huge debt to Pan Merakli, Seb Painchaud and the members of 3 groups of wide-ranging influences that seriously broadened my horizons this year):
Ulcerate – Cutting the Throat of God
Julie Christmas – Ridiculous And Full Of Blood
Hail Spirit Noir – Fossil Gardens
I went through Hail Spirit Noir’s entire discography on a search that ended up being the Mandela effect in metal. Going through HSN’s discography is a great trip though. One can find beautiful little easter eggs like “Into the gates of time”’s secret track at the 10:47 time-stamp amongst the crickets for 50 seconds.
And listening to that 11-minute masterpiece nestled within such a masterpiece of timeless art, made me realize how careful HSN has been in their history, their entire discography about attention to detail. That question of: which albums would you recommend as perfect from start to finish? Well, pretty much every album HSN has ever put out falls into that category. Oi Magoi was released 10 years ago. It ties perfectly together with this release then. I can’t press play on it or it will just keep looping.
JULY – OCTOBER was a weird stretch so I’ll just unload a pinch of the links I found to be fun and intriguing. If you like weird internet sounds and pre-2000s aesthetic: Windows 96. And I was today years old when I found out about PBS space time:
In October the biggest comeback of the year was not of a musical variety because the best notification to have ringed was that of Every frame a painting, the best film and editing analysis on youtube:
Their absence led me to other wonderful channels like that of Breadsword, specifically.
If you are into sports and love analysis, every sport needs a Squidge team in their life. This is one of the best analyses of any game in any sport, it just so happens to be the biggest upset in rugby’s history of when Japan defeated the now 4 times world champions, South Africa.
Going further down the visual warp, I learned about the existence of this excellent trip back in time with all sorts of grindhouse/exploitation vibes going on in the baddest of b-movie marvels, and that is bad-ass Kung fury, and if you were looking for similar weird filmic references then Danger 5 or Garth marenghi might be down your alley, or if you weren’t able to download or stream everyone’s favorite spaghetti western trilogy, it’s free on the tube! And if you’re into DIY movie goodness, check out lawmen. And then there’s also Duel, such a good movie.
Albums that came highly recommended between July to October from musicians, but that I personally did not give enough listening time towards:
NOVEMBER:
If you missed you some Tinariwen for that true desert sound of the Bedouin, then have no fear cos they dropped another one in November:
and if you like that vibe then you’ll certainly enjoy Etran de L’Aïr
and Mdou Moctar
Batzorig Vaanchig brought back the fan-favorite Chinggis Khaan , this time in France:
If you were not aware of the old one, this is epic folk music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_5yt5IX38
And I couldn’t resist but to drop the trap mix
There was no way I was not going to include Bedsore’s Dreaming the Strife for Love. I think I spent longer working on that review than any other, hence the dearth of words in this article of my own new scribblings; here’s the money shot:
“Bedsore brought us a truth statement in sonic form. Antiquity that has vanished from our present, other than the records we keep in vellum, tape cassettes, and compact discs, and if you’re extremely old school – on floppy disks, parchment, or on digitized ineffable clouds that may be as delicate as the faintest of cirrus clouds evaporating in the sun that will eventually swallow our little globe filled with strife and eros.
On my way to Moc Chau in Son La province, Vietnam, ideas were bouncing around in my head as to how I could finish off possibly the last article I’m writing this year. Pulling over at a rest stop for a smoke I at first thought the white cloud I saw peering over a wall was that of trash burning, but the sickly-sweet smell of life-supporting death, that of pesticides, hit my nose. Having worked in the lawn care industry for 3 years, the illusions and delusion of ‘organic’ lawn care, it was unmistakable. It got me thinking about what toll it takes in death to bring forth life. Driving out of Hanoi at first through plains and then mountain passes covered in vegetation, the most striking feature of the landscape is how utterly cloaked in dust it is.
One can almost hear the collective skirl of the dust-draped greenery displaying the fruits of development and progress in the sprawl of prodromal Hanoi. The passes through foothills covered in vines and broad leafy foliage absolutely slathered in powdered clay for a thirst not slaked for months. So dry, not so much a carbon footprint as a dust footprint. It brought on the question of how much has to be transformed and moved, how much disproportionate labor demanded for the advancement of a burgeoning power.
Change has a price, and I thought also of the old and new, of friendships rekindled and others moving on. Of grieving the passing of not just loved ones transfiguring on to the aether, but those that diverged onto other paths. People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lesson, as my aunt Liz loves to say. So too with art.
I mused on the transience of existence, of the finity and the fickleness, and of the brittleness of it. Yet, also the resilience if we choose to see it, grasp it, and hold it dear. And of love. Dreaming for a strife towards that what may have come if we should have chosen it. But also, to reflect on and appreciate what came before, so we can cherish what we have at this moment.
So, to sign off, listen to this album right now already. Now is the only time cos the future is but a dream.”
DECEMBER hit and you’re probably thinking what’s this dimwit holding us up for?!
Well just a few more links to good content, if you are electronically minded, then you’ll love what this channel is pushing out in analysis:
For people learning about metal, this channel is really cool:
And then there is by far the best content creator, Bobby Fingers. This is like the Dionysian jester of the avant-garde stoner punk Ned Flanders band but actually dominating hilarity that takes the piss out of ASMR videos and content creation in general and then takes ideas to their fullest extent. You will not be disappointed, and he fucking dropped a video as I wrote this! (check out his older stuff, it takes a long time to do and he collaborated with some cool cats from MythBusters and the Slo-Mo guys on this one about Fabio):
Some other happy discoveries:
ZAÄAR dropped Ovules earlier in December and if their split with one of the most captivating covers of last year was anything to go buy, then it was a must-listen. If you’re into the avant-garde stylings of surrealist jazz. Hit play. Some stuff way out of left field for what I usually listen to like Chuck Prophet and his band served up some really spiff tunes.
I quite often look for the name Vredensdal to remind myself of their passing, like scratching that old wound open to bleed again. Clicking on the members on Metallum to see what they’ve been up to led me to Cranial Vortex and Ho Ly shiitake mushrooms dipped in whiskey distilled DMT…Silence is eternal for sure after you blast that opener and hear the Vredensdal signature all over the riffage, twangs, thrusts, and breaks. I couldn’t have been today years old to figure out that his previous project was in fact named after him haha.
I was a huge fan of Silence is Eternal and the tones, progressions, and feel Vredensdal brings to his guitar, and with Cranial Vortex, it’s like meeting an old friend again down the road. Their interests have changed a bit, they’ve got a new set of clothes, but their essence is still there and they still know how to rock the fuck out.
It’s music but it ain’t metal
VENNART – included because I didn’t write enough about drums this year. So many times, I submitted an article and then a while later I think “shit, I didn’t say squat about the fucking percussion” yeah, that or the bass. I am sorry, rhythm sections. Truly.
I went through this other magazine’s best albums and songs list of 2024; they kept popping up in my feed on Facebook, like a lot of reviewers do now too, seeing as all I do on Facebook is look for music, and memes. I mean, Oranssi Pazuzu made it to number 9 and Blood Incantation made it to number 65 on a list of 100 albums of all over the spectrum. Judas Priest was also listed. Higher than Nick Cave and the bad seeds haha. I have not listened to the latter. For a chill-out album that bridges into noise, ambience, and doomy sections at times, it’s interesting that such a hipster magazine didn’t pick up on Mike Vennart.
Anyone harmo-sonically referencing Long gone before daylight in a song called ‘R U The Future?’ just made a Goods of Desire level fan… Bandcamp algo-rhythms got that way to shed light on the most delectable of obscurities… and damn but does this one not just hit plethoral levels of yasss? About VENNART – Alt-psychy-mathy-droned-Manc-rock. It is understandable that people could have adverse reactions to having the crystal ball trolling them so hard you could hear the impact of the rock, having fell from under ameno-ukihashi for transmogrifying, hitting their ego.
Glass Beams – Mahal
I didn’t get to review this enigmatic trio’s album, but I spinned it quite a bit and it should be on a lot of lists in the world of music. They’re supposed to blow up already. If you ever played this game and thought that the menu music of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit (remix) should be made into a full album.
Time to get your Om face on, not ya ohm face, cos this is the most disarming dance-inducing shit since St Vitus’ self-titled, and got ordained by the saint himself. This band’s single that’s possibly catchier than the whole EP below plus at least 2 of the other best singles of 2024 can be found here.
For the post rock/metal fix:
КУЛЬТОДИНОЧЕСТВА – мёртвое дерево Blackened postpunk
Oh Hiroshima – All Things Shining (holiness movement is a tribute to Teardrop by massive attack in the bassline…no???)
‘Local’ stand outs:
Absence Of The Sacred – The Hand that Wounds was coverer here
CÚT LỘN – Bắc Thảo
Fecundation – Moribund and Obscurial – Heretic were covered here
Imperatus – At the Mercy of the Wind was covered here
Putrid Vomit Christ – Perpetual Intercourse
GAI 荄 – various singles this year, one of which was covered here
Favorites that I didn’t get enough time to spill words over:
Throne beckons us with knowledge
Birds are the answer
With beautiful dreams
That peer o’er the horizon
Falling down in mist
Liminal nocturnes
Of sky-keeps, cerebral pests
A wolven credo
Veilburner has done it again, this time numerology-izing the ever loving tone and atmosphere of a vibrant and enjoyable apocalypse.
TOP 2 of 2024
Cosmic Putrefaction – If one were to meditate on the very essence of what Cosmic Putrefaction were to encapsulate, then it can be nigh impossible to evince as much fealty to sonic representation than of what is represented in “[Entering the Vortex Temporum] – Pre-Mortem Phosphenes”. “I should greet the inexorable darkness” is deliciously offbeat with a refinement in percussive layout accompanying the dirge/mayhem/atmospheric railment/ effrontery and embrace of chaotic overture made manifest.
This is, was and will remain to be one of the most awaited and acclaimed releases of this year. This is prog-death with cosmic leanings done how only G.G. can. Ever morphing, ever ascending and expanding, ever granulating and disconcerting, hypnotic and dissociative, yet associatively fleeting with a permanence. I wrote somewhere that this reminded me of Midnight Odyssey meets Haunter meets Thanatotherion meets Blut Aus Nord… I might have been sleep-deprived, but this album is musical catharsis achieved.
The album that stood out the most this year was Παραμαινομένη (Paramainoméni) by Ὁπλίτης (Hoplites).
Their brand of what some call experimental blackened thrash was just the most addictive thing I’ve come across this year.
Andy Synn called it earlier this year with his excellent review of the album with these words:
“adding even more mind-bending technicality, Grindcore-level intensity, and gloom-laden groove (plus some sinuously strange saxophone) to their existing amalgam of Black Metal, Death Metal, Chaotic Hardcore, and more.
“Whereas the band’s previous records have drawn comparisons to the likes of Serpent Column, Suffering Hour, and Converge (the former especially), Παραμαινομένη‘s increasingly complex combination of outlandish extremity, off-kilter unpredictability, and eagerness to smash through genre-boundaries situates the latest evolution of Ὁπλίτης somewhere between the visceral violence of Anaal Nathrakh and the avant-garde experimentalism of Sigh.
“This is, of course, no small thing, as the dynamic duo of Dave Hunt and Mick Kenney have been annihilating eardrums for over 20 years now, while Mirai Kawashima and co. have been going above and beyond the norm for over three decades, so to place Ὁπλίτης among their ranks this early in their career is a huge endorsement of both their abilities and ambition.
But there’s no doubt, not in my mind at least, that tracks like the Blackened Tech-Grind of “Παραδειγματιζομένη μουσική” – whose gloomy mid-section, demonstrating an increasing willingness to explore some moodier and more sombre sonic textures – and the utterly ferocious, stylistically voracious “Συμμαινόμεναι Διονύσῳ Ἐλευθέριῳ” (whose heteroclite second-half really pushes the band’s sound towards the more abnormal end of the Extreme Metal spectrum) showcase exactly the sort of weirdness and wildness which practically guarantees that Παραμαινομένη will go down as one of the best, and most blisteringly bizarre, releases of the year.”
Ὁπλίτης reminded us that they’re still here and they achieved what many bands could not in penning a succinctly trenchant eardrill of biological weapons-grade piece of filth that did not even serve as the final track but as the penultimate showstopper in Συμμιαινόμεναι Διονύσῳ Ἐλευθέριῳ with the one lyric
ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ
ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ
ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ
ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ
ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ
ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ ΕΞΙΤΕ
(‘Exit’ repeated 24 times, and once the charms of the riffs truly start unfurling their majesty, you’re gonna play it more than that number)
Not to be confused with “Συμμαινόμεναι Διονύσῳ Ἐλευθέριῳ”, which forces one to remember that the creator of this most astonishingly sorcerous and mind-warping slab of sonic crack is a trained linguist and is messing with plebeians like myself who did not at first see the slight change in character between the two titles, one small shift that completely changes the meaning of what seems on the surface, or at a glance, to be the same.
When the apotheosis hits harder than the guitar progressions you thought were the height of the song, every other band this year heard that and were like “you’re going to start the year off with that!? And you’re gonna chant “exit!” in a reverb shower?” Song of the year on the album of the year. I’m so continually dumbstruck by the attention to detail, clarity of expression and force of intent that this opus started hitting me with back in January that nothing came even close to it. And probably won’t until ὉΠΛΊΤΗΣ drops another bestial necromanced freak of beauteous visceral quintessence.
Safe travels, hibernations, libations, and contortions, until tomorrow-ish
