(written by Islander)
Welcome to the lucky 7th Part of this infectious song list. To see and hear the preceding six and to understand what this list is about (if you don’t know), go HERE.
JOB FOR A COWBOY
After spending Part 6 with some very obscure groups I’m beginning today with a better-known outfit, who, after a decade-long hiatus, released what many of us think was their best album last year in a career that has now extended past 20 years, and an album that probably even re-defined their career.
Among my closest friends in our site’s collective of writers, Andy reviewed it and named it to his list of the year’s Great Albums, and DGR put the album (Moon Healer) in the No 3 spot on his year-end list. I’ll excerpt what each of them wrote about it. First, after identifying many of the album’s oddities and marvels, Andy wrote:
All of this, ultimately, adds up to what may well be the band’s most challenging, and most rewarding, work of their entire, almost twenty year, career, proving once and for all that being rejected by the rest of the herd doesn’t always have to be a death sentence… sometimes it simply sets you free to walk your own path.
And now from DGR:
Moon Healer picks up the baton from Sun Eater nearly a decade later and sprints off as if there had never been a wait between albums. It is a confident and daring album that hones its older sibling into an even sharper blade while delving even further into the LSD nightmare that is its cover art. This is a release filled with such sharp groove, such winding songwriting, such impressive performances on all fronts…. [It] is an album of complicated layers and interwoven songs and yet they make it seem like it’s the easiest thing in the world for them. The result is a wild near-forty minutes that is one of those albums I would love to see done all the way through live.
Of course, those two weren’t alone in their praise; Gonzo and Vizzah Harri, as well as many readers, also had Moon Healer on their lists. Moreover, the album included more song suggestions for this list from both readers and a few other writers than any others, save two, who equaled its number of nominations. The song I chose is “The Sun Gave Me Ashes so I Sought Out the Moon.”
There’s really no song on the album that isn’t demented, including this song, but as crazed as it is, it does have hooks, including the sizzling riff that blurts its way to the surface throughout, the head-butting grooves and rapid bunker-busting detonations, and the little bits of dismally writhing melody — and the guitar soloing is a hook all its own. It’s powerful proof that getting your head thoroughly spun can be an infectious experience.
https://jobforacowboy.bandcamp.com/album/moon-healer
https://www.facebook.com/jobforacowboy/
SPECTRAL WOUND
As you well know by now, making lots of year-end lists isn’t a qualification for this particular list. I’ll happily choose songs from records that didn’t make even one list we published in our year-end LISTMANIA series, and have done so already. But as it happens, Spectral Wound‘s 2024 album Songs of Blood and Mire, like JFAC‘s, did get a lot of attention in year-end lists around metaldom, and for good reason.
At our site the plaudits began last June with me frothing at the mouth over the album’s first advance track, the wonderfully named “Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal,” and continued with Andy Synn‘s extensive review of the record last August. There, Andy commented on almost all of the songs on the album, including this:
…nor are they afraid to wear their bloodiest, fieriest Bathory influences loud and proud during the equally thunderous “At Wine-Dark Midnight in Mouldering Halls” (whose massive “drink deep!” hook truly needs, and deserves, to be heard in equally massive halls rather than dingy basements and back-alley clubs… though it’ll probably kill there too)….
Of course, I quote that because “At Wine-Dark Midnight in the Mouldering Halls” is the Spectral Wound song I’m now adding to this list, though fans of the album might justifiably have chosen others.
Honestly, I was sold on this one from its first 30 seconds of blaze and bombast, but the way the wildfire continues to burn (while changing the mood in more distressing directions) strengthened the conviction, along with the song’s hard-pulsing thrusts and the blistering vox. But I was also captivated by the song’s whirling, dance-like phase near the end, and the truly extravagant finale.
https://spectralwound.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-blood-and-mire
https://www.facebook.com/spectralwoundcontramundi