Okay guys. It's time for me to embrace the music bloggers right of passage and slap together a list of my favorite albums of the year. It's a silly tradition but hey, it's fun and I get to post about bands that a lot of people don't hear, and I feel that a lot of these groups are woefully under appreciated. With that said, I still feel kind of douchey posting a list like this, as it always comes across as a massive circle jerk over hip music, but whatever. No releases are in order, except for number 1.
Yoshiko Ohara- Ringing in Our Wrists
Drowned in ambience, filled with chanting, and littered with subtle, almost subsonic noise swells,
Yoshiko Ohara's post-
Bloody Panda debut album is a strange one. It hovers somewhere in the middle between purposeful and hauntingly beautiful and aching and shambolically put together and that uncertainty gives it a sense of excitement. It feels like it is going to run off the rails in a very personal and sad way. Apparently Yoshiko recorded hooks and instrumentals and then chopped them up and released it without listening to it. With guts like that, she's the person to watch in the experimental music scene in 2014.
Bat- Primitive Age
"Primitive Age" goes down as the most accurate title of the year. This album
is primitive, analog, proto-necro, badass speed,thrash metal with sweet twin guitar leads and perfect bass riffing. The album just sounds old, like it could have brewed in a backwater pub circa 1984. The players must have been fed a steady diet of bullet belts, whisky, and
Diamond Head. Give this a spin, it'll brighten up your day.
Beastmilk-Climax
For a lot of people, post-punk seems to begin and end with
Joy Division and I think that's a serious shame. The "movement" (it was more of a loose conglomerate of slightly more poetic punks) spawned a whole lot of great bands. Luckily, the genre seems to have had a resurgence of sorts in recent history, with
The Strokes and
Interpol reaching mainstream success. While those bands are great, they were a bit too polished in sound for my taste. Finland's Beastmilk a bit of grit and looseness to the music. It feels emotional instead of impersonal. It also has some
muscle. Songs like "Love in a Cold World" and "Death reflects us" have rocking backbeat that makes the bands sound border on deathrock. This isn't original stuff, but it's exceedingly well done. These guys are going to explode.
Triac/D.O.C split
Nowadays, it seems quite easy for a band in the grind/powerviolence scene to play for a short time, buy some cheap recording equipment and bash out an ep or do a few splits without ever really progressing or improving as a band. So, when bands like
Triac or
Disciples of Christ a split that outshines 80% of their contemporaries, it's a wonder that they're not bigger than they are.
Disciples of Christ are a tad bit heavier than
Triac, and they include elements of harsh noise and sludge metal, all rooted in blasty, riffy grind.
Triac are a bit more melodic, keeping one food in grind/powerviolence and the other in hardcore, while making fantastic use of samples.
What gets me about this split is the fact that these guys can write good fucking songs, and that's very hard to find in this scene. Righteous.
Cold Cave- 7 inch singles
It was a good year for Wesley Eisold. American Nightmare/Give up the Ghost reunited, undoubtedly causing a swath of fashion conscious, young hardcore kids to faint in ecstasy, he organized a tour with Nine Inch Nails, his most high-profile one to date, and
Cold Cave, his post-punk, new wave, synth-whatever project, released three 7 inch singles. Entitled
Black Boots, God Made the World, and Oceans with No End. All of these songs, like every other Cold Cave song, are fantastic but what makes these releases special is, hear me out now, the aesthetic. All artwork is confined to black and white. All designs are sparse and economical, often containing just a picture of Eisold or, in the case of Oceans with no end, only a black square. All this makes me think that Eisold is setting himself up as a kind of Boyd Rice-esque, enigmatic figure and rarely am I as captured by an artists as I am with artists who create archetypes for themselves and commit to them wholeheartedly.
1. Water Bullet/ Tween Heat split
This is it, the album of the year. The record that clearly stands above everything else I have listened in 365 days. This album is perfect and it is perfect because I know almost nothing about it. I received it in the post by accident. It had no information or recording details, it had no discernible cover art, the only thing it came with was a small button from
Rainbow Bridge Records. A quick google search revealed nothing but the title and I had no desire to delve any further. I popped it into my cassette player and I was treated with some of the most challenging, yet accessible music I have ever heard. It's noise, it's ambient, it's music concrete, field recordings, all of it so warped that it is near unrecognizable. The other side was similar, sounds of indeterminable source slapping of of each other.
What makes this release for me, is that it seems to change with each listen. Sometimes it soothes and sometimes it punishes. Sometimes it make me think about wonderful things and other times it makes me think of very bad things.
You see, in the internet age, when we can instantly know almost every fact about a recording, or a band, or the intent of an artist, to have a recording with nothing but the music to hold on to, it allows the listener to come up with his own thoughts and opinions about the music. It can become yours in a very special way. The artist can be anybody you want and the art can represent whatever it is that you want. It's art with no preconceptions and we need some of that. It's freeing, in a way.
