2021 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE EPs

 LISTMANIA 2021, SHORT BUT SWEET  15 Responses »
Dec 102021
 

(Next week Andy Synn begins his annual roll-out of year-end lists as part of his ongoing attempt to cover as many different albums from the last twelve months as possible – but, before then, he’d like to draw your attention to some of the shorter, but no less sweet, releases from 2021) 

Well, well, well… it’s been a whole year since we last did this little dance hasn’t it?

Sure, it might seem like it’s been longer than that, for a number of different reasons that we really don’t have time or space to go into here, but it’s actually only been twelve months.

Those twelve months have been absolutely packed with music though, and today we’re going to be taking a look, and a listen, to some – not all, of course, just as many as I managed to actually hear, so don’t get too upset when you realise that this isn’t totally comprehensive – of the EPs that were released this year, beginning with a general round-up of everything that I can remember and recommend, and closing with a countdown of my ten favourite short-form releases of the year.

So let us begin… Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: OTHRS, BURDEN MAN, MORK, BLURR THROWER, FLOOD PEAK

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Jan 172021
 

 

I’ve gone off on a tangent in this week’s column. Nothing here will strike you as conventional black metal, and in many of the songs the black metal ingredients are dwarfed by others (among other things, rock beats dominate over blast-beats). But all this music struck a chord with me (many of them, in fact), and I also thought they made a pretty good playlist all joined together like this.

OTHRS / BURDEN MAN (Australia)

I have Rennie of starkweather to thank for spending time with the songs that are now streaming from this new split named Grievance, two songs by each band.

The first two are from a band named OTHRS, which is a project of Melbourne-based M.R, known for his work in Spire. Here is he joined by vocalist V.S., also a member of Spire as well as Void Stare. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SEAR BLISS, NINE INCH NAILS, NABERUS, LUNAE ORTUS, LESSER GLOW, FLOOD PEAK

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 182018
 

 

Yesterday I exercised rare restraint and didn’t attend the annual Syttende Mai parade in Ballard, Washington, reportedly the largest celebration of Norway’s Constitution Day in the U.S. So, instead of doing what I’ve done in past years, i.e., getting pleasantly wasted in the company of hordes of actual and pretend descendants of Norwegian immigrants to the Pacific Northwest, I did what I try to do most nights: I crawled through the slag heap of the NCS in-box and scrolled the endless stream of my FB news feed looking for new music that might be worth sharing.

I added links to more than 20 new songs and videos to my ever-expanding list, most of those from albums or EPs that haven’t yet been released. That’s a sign of how much new metal is revealed every day, and that’s not counting stuff I omitted because I suspected it wouldn’t do anything for me. Then I started listening. Some nights that goes faster than you might think; if something doesn’t grab me pretty fast, I skip past it and move on.

Last night the first six songs I listened to are the first six songs you’ll find in this round-up, heard (and seen) in exactly this order (most of them are presented through music videos). And the last item here is an EP I heard right after those six. I never made it to the rest of the list. Obviously, all of this new music grabbed me — though in very different ways. Because it’s such a broad scattering of genre styles, I’ll be surprised if anyone else likes all of it as much as I do. But you might find at least one thing you like.

SEAR BLISS

I really, really, really like how this Hungarian band have evolved over a career that’s now roughly 25 years old. On the occasion of their last album, 2012’s Eternal Recurrence, Natalie Zed’s review at Angry Metal Guy included some lines that I thought were astute in capturing the band’s accomplishments on that album: Continue reading »