Ken-Ma 研磨 Reviews: December 2018

Monday, December 31, 2018

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Top Albums 2012-2018

I went back and rounded up all my year end lists since 2012 and also made a Top 20 for the past 7 years. Maybe I'll write some reviews for the ones appearing on that list that I haven't covered before.

2012

1. Deftones - Koi No Yokan
2. Between the Buried and Me - The Parallax II: Future Sequence
3. Periphery - Periphery II: This Time It's Personal
4. The Contortionist - Intrinsic
5. Sleigh Bells - Reign of Terror
6. Abigail Williams - Becoming
7. Ne Obliviscaris - Portal of I
8. The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza - Danza IIII: The Alpha - The Omega
9. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles (III)
10. Cattle Decapitation - Monolith of Inhumanity

2013

1. Paramore - Paramore
2. Gorguts - Colored Sands
3. Chelsea Wolfe - Pain Is Beauty
4. Deafheaven - Sunbather
5. Protest the Hero - Volition
6. Washed Out - Paracosm
7. múm - Smilewound
8. Fallujah - Nomadic
9. Astronoid - The Stargazer
10. Maeth - Oceans Into Ashes

2014

1. The Contortionist - Language
2. The Red Threat - Violent Love
3. Job For A Cowboy - Sun Eater
4. Lana Del Rey - Ultraviolence
5. Nobel - The River’s Rise
6. iamamiwhoami - Blue
7. Animals As Leaders - The Joy of Motion
8. Fallujah - The Flesh Prevails
9. Whispered - Shogunate Macabre
10. spookyblack - Leaving

2015

1. Senses Fail - Pull the Thorns From Your Heart
2. Deafheaven - New Bermuda
3. Veil of Maya - Matriarch
4. Native Construct - Quiet World
5. The Dear Hunter - Act IV: Rebirth In Reprise
6. Clarence Clarity - No Now
7. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly
8. Marianas Trench - Astoria
9. Pyramids - A Northern Meadow
10. So Hideous - Laurestine

2016

1. Slice the Cake - The Odyssey
2. The 1975 - ILIWYS
3. Fallujah - Dreamless
4. The Dillinger Escape Plan - Dissociation
5. David Bowie - Blackstar
6. Sleigh Bells - Jessica Rabbit
7. Mei - Partura
8. Mistki - Puberty 2
9. Moor Mother - Fetish Bones
10. Departe - Failure, Subside

2017

1. The Black Dahlia Murder - Nightbringers
2. Sleep Token - Two
3. Violet Cold - Anomie
4. Chaos Moon - Eschaton Memoire
5. Paramore - After Laughter
6. Planning For Burial - Below the House
7. The Contortionist - Clairvoyant
8. Carbon based Lifeforms - Derelicts
9. Paleons - Hyperborean
10. Morbid Angel - Kingdoms Disdained

2018

1. Lychgate - The Contagion In Nine Steps
2. Black Tongue - Nadir
3. The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships
4. Pale Waves - My Mind Makes Noises
5. The Ocean - Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic
6. Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
7. Between the Buried and Me - Automata
8. Irreversible Mechanism - Immersion
9. Ihsahn - Ámr
10. Toby Driver - They Are the Shield

Top 20 2012-2018

1. Slice the Cake - The Odyssey
2. The Contortionist - Language
3. The 1975 - I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it
4. Senses Fail - Pull the Thorns From Your Heart
5. Between the Buried and Me - The Parallax II: Future Sequence
6. Paramore - Paramore
7. Lychgate - The Contagion In Nine Steps
8. The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships
9. Violet Cold - Anomie (Instrumental)
10. Veil of Maya - Matriarch
11. Chelsea Wolfe - Pain Is Beauty
12. The Dillinger Escape Plan - Dissociation
13. Black Tongue - Nadir
14. Gorguts - Colored Sands
15. Fallujah - Dreamless
16. Cattle Decapitation - Monolith of Inhumanity
17. The Contortionist - Clairvoyant
18. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly
19. Marianas Trench - Astoria
20. Carbon Based Lifeforms - Derelicts

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Review: Lychgate - The Contagion In Nine Steps

Lychgate - The Contagion In Nine Steps

This was a very unexpected pick for album of the year. I thought The Antidote For the Glass Pill wasn’t bad, but didn’t give it too much attention. And at first, I was pleasantly surprised by how much of a step up The Contagion was, it was somehow simultaneously more complex and yet more accessible, but still didn’t give it too many spins.

But slowly, a tendril of darkness crept into my brain and wouldn’t go away. Bits of the album would float out of nowhere and latch on to me.

I partially blame Bloodborne for this, as the atmosphere between the two is uncannily similar (though chief songwriter Vortigern has confirmed for me that he hasn’t played the game or was even aware of its existence). I apologize in advance for how much I’m going to talk about the game in this review, but hopefully it makes sense as I go and will aid in your own enjoyment of both.

Every time I listen to this album, I feel I am following a hunter on their journey through the Yharnam night, seeking paleblood and attempting to transcend the hunt. The album deals with a “contagion”. Though Bloodborne deals more directly with a literal blood contagion infecting the population of Yharnam, turning them into horrid beasts, it can also be interpreted in the same manner as Lychgate’s titular Contagion; a psychological and social contagion, infecting populations in swarm behaviour and crowd psychology.

In Bloodborne, this can apply to three targets: the Healing Church, spreading its doctrine and vanquishing beasts while being beastly in their own right, the population of Yharnam, accepting the word of the church and condemning its fellow citizens to their doom, and finally the Mensis and Byrgenwerth scholars, where philosophical ideas infect them so that they too turn into nightmarish creatures and dying husks trapped within their own mind as they attempt to transcend their bodies.

In The Contagion, this can apply to all major social and cultural infections of the mind over mankind’s existence. Religions, especially those with a persecutive nature or history, strange customs and rituals, superstitions, popular discriminations against race, sex, and ability, and in the present day, the swarm behaviour of social media and online witch hunts which often spiral out of control long before any evidence has surfaced and damage innocent people.

Just as the Healing Church is infected, so are all religions, with ritualistic customs and predetermined prejudices and values being foisted upon worshippers. Just as the Yharnam populace is infected, so is the population of all societies, prone to quickly adopting fads and persecuting/ demonizing based on hearsay and the ideas of others. Just as the scholars of Mensis and Byrgenwerth are infected with philosophy which traps them in their minds and pursuit of knowledge, so too are many academics and students in the world who become cemented in their ways and weaponize this as superiority, paradoxically producing both elitist misogynists and social justice warriors, who both feel their position is so fundamentally correct that they hunt for opportunities to demonstrate it and care more about the appearance of caring and being knowledgable than the pursuit of truth they claim to adhere to.

But that’s enough reaching, let’s get down to some actual facts. The Contagion draws from many philosophical works, chief amongst them being Stanisław Lem’s The Invincible, whereby a planet is depicted with micro-machines who have evolved to operate in swarms. Independently, they are feeble without much power, but when bundled together into large swarms, they have the power to dominate and overthrow humans; this is not done for a necessarily great purpose, but when the idea of a threat resonates with enough individuals, the infection spreads and primitive herd behaviour rules the mob. This can be seen in every group persecution, genocide, and massacre throughout human history, and continues today as all of those horrors, as well as in the modern digitized version of social media witch hunts, where the click of a share button can destroy a persons life. Just like in the usage of all armies and munitions, this is a weapon which can be used for good or evil. The flaw in those afflicted with swarm behaviour though, is the instinct to resort to primitive retaliatory reactions and fire a weapon without thinking or fully understanding what it is they are attacking. The individual does not necessarily understand what they are attacking, but the collective consciousness of the group fills in the gaps enough for each individual to assume they are doing what is right. The troubling truth of this, of course, is that a collective consciousness cannot think rationally, and so there is no central intelligent analysis of what the overall goal is, which has permitted many individuals throughout history to contribute to atrocities they had no notion of being a part of.

Musically, this album is an absolute tour of extreme, goth, avant-garde, and progressive metal. It lies somewhere in the inky darkness of doom with the cold bleakness of black metal, while gothic overtones haunt mind-bending experimental chords and melodies. I’m not sure I can call any of the melodies necessarily memorable, nor are they catchy. The experience itself rather is the hook, as there are far too many melodies and progressions to latch on to a single one. This is akin more to exploratory jazz where there is little in the way of landmark refrains, and instead a continuous story being expressed by constantly new developments and interactions within the instrumentation. Piano, guitar, drums, bass, choir, and vocals expressed as shrieks, howls, growls, and Gregorian drones create six landscapes which timbrically flow beautifully into one another, yet all have distinct personalities. Again, I think of Bloodborne and the oppressive gothic and cosmic horror which drenches its visual and aural identity, yet every area manages to feel unique. Even the musical journey itself feels like a mirror of the hunter’s journey, taking you through cathedrals, tombs, swamps, crypts, lecture halls, nightmares, and culminating in the penultimate title track’s music box outro which overwhelms with the feeling of facing Mergo’s Wet Nurse as the celestial child haunts at the fringes of the nightmare. Then everything gives way to closer “Remembrance”, which has an oddly soothing air as one finishes their journey and transcends the nightmare in a glorious finale.

I still find it difficult to believe this is my top album of the year, and I admittedly don’t listen to it nearly as much as others on the list because it’s frankly not music one listens to casually. But every time I put it on, the moment “Republic” kicks in and I am taken back to this hybrid of album and Yharnam I have built in my head, I know in my heart there is no other album as masterfully crafted as The Contagion this year.

Review: Black Tongue - Nadir

Black Tongue - Nadir

Black Tongue have had a bit of a rough go. Starting out playing deathcore certainly didn’t set them in the best spot, but over the course of their career they managed to make the most of it through stylistic changes that resulted in the surprisingly adequate The Unconquerable Dark. They even found themselves on a major metal label for that release, their debut full-length. And that’s when they hit their real bad run of luck.

For reasons still unknown, the marriage of Black Tongue and Century Media did not seem to work in either parties’ favour. It could be the label didn’t believe in them, as evidenced by just how damn difficult it was to find their CD for sale anywhere, even Amazon. It could be the band didn’t realize the amount of legwork a band has to do even when on a sizeable label, or perhaps fell into an advance trap that a contemporary death metal album could never pay back. Whatever the case, CM left the band to starve to death and their career dwindled into obscure non-existence, incredibly embittered and despising the music industry.

This brings us to Nadir. Going from the triumph and happiness of being signed to a major metal label for your debut album to being dropped and forgotten like unwanted trash can really bring a person to their knees. As was the case with the band trying to pick up the pieces falling Unconquerable Dark, feeling they were at the absolute rock bottom of their career and lives, in a terrible depression of failure and feeling utterly lost. They no longer found passion or joy in playing and writing music. All signs were pointing towards giving up on their dreams entirely and settling for something more mundane. But instead, they took that bitterness, anger, depression, and absolute hopelessness, struck out once again on their own with a DIY and underground attitude that had made music fun and worthwhile to begin with, and channeled it into an absolutely seething pit of darkness and despair.

Nadir means the absolute lowest point of something. The darkest, deepest, fathoms, be it in the form of a band hitting rock bottom, a mind sinking into a nihilistic depression, the most sinister and unforgivable act a person can do, or the very depths of the earth’s inky crevices, kissing the gates of hell. This album was birthed from the first, and deals at length with the other three, told through a story of what lies beyond the end of life. Be forewarned, this is a full on tale that I will do my best to now interpret. If you want a simple review, or don’t like speculations which may contain spoilers, it’s best to skip the next big chunk.

You are dead. And there is indeed an afterlife. But what greets you isn’t the shiny gates of paradise. Instead you spy in the distance across an abyssal plain of limbo a dark cathedral. Before you stretches a line of all the other recently-departed pitiful souls waiting to be judged. You are forced to stand in horror as each queuer approaches the judge within, every terrible thing they’ve ever thought or done recounted in full and their damnation spelt out for all to witness. Those who have led a good natured life are given the key to the gates of paradise where they may finally rest their weary soul. Those who know they will find no such peace when they meet their judgment sink to their knees and weep. A sinner receives his sentence, a deep, dark bell tolls, and they hear the dreaded words: “Follow me down”. You have all heard the tortured screams, felt the rumble of Styx flowing somewhere beneath your feet, witnessed a lake full of souls submerged in boiling urine whilst unable to drown, and shuddered as a collection of damned souls is beaten by a dark tormentor, bellowing at them, “Your pathetic shells will crack. I want you all to suffer”. Now you feel alone in the corridor as you wait your turn before the final door. The hall and time itself both seem to stretch into an infinite void and the time you wait, already knowing your fate, has become a hell unto itself. You can no longer tell how long you have been there, there is only waiting and fear. You occasionally glimpse a glimmer of light in the dark, but just as quick as you consider there may be hope for you yet, you suddenly feel the eyes. The eyes that have always been watching. Since the moment you arrived, countless eyes have bored their way into your flesh, watching your every move. Your fellow dead have been watching you, assuming the worst of you, and hidden spirits judge you, already knowing what you have done on earth. You feel their eyes even in your memories as you recount all your misdeeds, each terrible secret now accompanied by a hidden audience. Every step you’ve taken, every word you’ve written, every moment of your life, a shadow hung over you watching with eyes unclosing. Your skin crawls beneath this now-remembered presence.

And now it is your turn at last. Your crimes are numbered, but you are not told of your official judgment. You suspect the worst, begging and pleading with the judge, hoping there has been a mistake even while knowing you are likely damned for eternity. Your feet are shackled to a heavy weight as you are moved on for processing, slowly trudging to an infinite grey horizon. As you feel the weight of your endless, gruelling task, you recognize you were never a person, but an empty void of a human now receiving exactly what you deserve. You dare to look to your surroundings instead of straight ahead at your goal and find everywhere you look, grotesque figures have been contorted and ripped apart by chains. Now the silence which you thought so terrible before is replaced with the even worse din of their screams, retching coughs, and rattling bonds. Along your path you are witness the Temple of Smoke where the tormented asphyxiate in an attempt to distract from their torture. They also pray before the Altar of Needles, attempting self-mutilation to forget their broken bodies. You carry on along the road which leads to the Garden of Death. You collapse before the tombstone of the person you loved most in life, trace your fingers upon their grave as you witness their shade waiting across an eternally still lake you cannot cross. You feel the reaper behind you and beg to be taken to a different doom. Then you see it, a raft upon the lake, and you pray that the next passage upon it is meant for you, to take you anywhere but the endless nothing of limbo. There is no such indication, and the raft begins to leave. You fight with all your strength against your bonds, muscles tearing open, bones splintering and ripping through your skin. You collapse and beg death to carry you to the lake. By some divine grace, you are placed on the raft and sail into darkness.

You awake and cannot believe your eyes. Before you lies the gate of paradise. You served your sentence in limbo and attained the glory of heaven. Yet as you try to move, you realize your body is still broken, your muscles and bones useless. Feebly, you crawl to the gates and push against them, but they will not budge. You scream for the gates to open, but no one hears your cries. You beat your limbs against the fence and only serve to further cripple yourself.

You are treated to your final and permanent hell: isolated and broken before the dwelling place of god with no chance to enter the kingdom and no way to leave. As you were in life, shunning all those who tried to love or know you, you are damned to be forever alone. Even the ceaselessly watching eyes have removed their presence. Finally, you feel the eyes of god himself close against you, the light replaced by endless dark. All you have left is the memory of your death, and that final fleeting kiss of the divine which pulled your soul from a husk hanging by a noose in some dark room.

THAT is Nadir. If it sounds dark and depressing, that’s an understatement. This is perhaps the bleakest album I’ve ever heard. But what good would that be if the music couldn’t cut it? This is where Black Tongue really surprises, as they’ve somehow created a sonic statement to perfectly match the tale they’ve woven. On The Unconquerable Dark, they had already begun to eschew the more pedestrian and boring cliches of deathcore and incorporate a unique blend of their old beatdown brutality with cavernous doom metal and searing black metal. This formula is essentially perfected on Nadir with no traces of generic -core to be found, just slow sludgy death metal grooves. The enormous breakdowns no longer resemble a time in the music for kids to mosh and throw down to, but rather a moment where everything freezes in a yawning void of echoing timeless horror. And the blackened fast bits flay the skin of those who look upon them with scathing nihilism. An advisory if you happen to use delicate or sensitive headphones/ speakers - this album has some very abrasive and very low bass register notes that could break anything not built to handle stress. That being said, I absolutely recommend listening to this album on the most detailed set up you have at your disposal, preferably in a quiet and isolated environment. The echoing reverb and subtle details hidden in the album’s quietest moments plunge you straight into the void they illustrate just as well as the towering and thunderous riffs do.

I would recommend to experience this with the above set-up configuration, and in a single sitting. The individual tracks themselves, while impressive, complement each other better than what they can offer you on their own, and beg to lead you down the path of limbo in a continuous telling.

Let Black Tongue show you your doom as you contemplate your own life’s karmic balance.

Follow them down.

Review: The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

This is one of those albums that makes no sense and perfect sense at the same time. Coming off of an impressive build-up of their self-titled debut and sophomore I Like It When You Sleep…, their trajectory seemed both somewhat easy to read but also incredibly impressive. But their next stage of evolution expanded so dramatically on two particular aspects of their identity that they’ve nearly reinvented themselves while still bafflingly making total sense. While previous staples of smart social commentary in their lyrics and juggling a multitude of genres on a micro-scale took place as smaller pieces within a fairly solid and more dominant signature framework of R&B/pop/rock, that mold has entirely broken under the weight of those elements and the balance has skewed, likely beyond recover. Social commentary and every genre in popular music within reach are the new shape of the band with their old sonic identity being wrapped around it to fit, and it’s likely they’re not turning back for next year’s Notes On A Conditional Form.

The opening track alone says it all before you even realize what you’re getting into for the next hour. Like their two previous albums, we are greeted with the band’s eponymous theme song, and just like those two releases, it is a re-interpretation within the style and theme of the album it is introducing. Their debut’s version took the form of a dreamy shoegaze mood stretching into infinity with guitar gently plinking in the back before giving way to “The City”’s rock beat. ILIWYS took that same tune and injected it full of soul and atmosphere with a choir and thick synth bed to rest upon before building into the twisted 80’s riff of “Love Me”. This new interpretation starts with gentle lo-fi jazz piano trying to find the song, along with Matt Healy trying to sing a melody, as if a musician were sitting at the piano trying to write things as they come to mind, playing with the notes and seeing what takes shape. This lasts for a few seconds before the piano is joined by a thunderous auto-tuned Matt, delivering with no discernible sense of time signature or tempo, bringing strongly to mind Kanye West’s vocoder solo during “Runaway”. This then disappears and the fizzing guitar and post-punk beat of “Give Yourself A Try” kicks things off. There are 15 songs on this album, and that doesn’t even begin to describe what you’re in for.

There’s dance pop (“TooTimeTooTimeTooTime”), ambient music straight out of the early múm playbook accompanied by a robotic vocoder speaking about learning how to draw that curves into an upbeat glitch/ EDM track with a down-pitched warped voice (“How To Draw/ Petrichor”), dramatic rock/ pop/ R&B with a blast of soul (“Love It If We Made It”), acoustic ballads (“Be My Mistake” and “Surrounded by Heads and Bodies”), neo-jazz/ soul (“Sincerity Is Scary”), desperate and pleading trap-infused electronica (“I Like America & America Likes Me”), humorous yet hauntingly beautiful spoken word/ ambient/ orchestral (“The Man Who Married A Robot/ Love Theme”), 80’s John Hughes-drenched power ballad (“Inside Your Mind”), bubblegum pop (“It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)”), smoky down-tempo jazz balladry (“Mine”), an 80’s love ballad straight out of Michael Bolton and Lionel Ritchie town (“I Couldn’t Be More In Love”), and finally a shocking and stunning 90’s alt-rock ballad burning the album to the ground in its final moments atop the shoulders of Oasis and Blur (“I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)”).

Lyrically, this is the story of 2018. This is a snapshot of the time we live in right now, viewed honestly and unapologetically, not truly condemning or praising anything, but describing it so straight-forwardly that to read it is to already know how you should feel about it. It is the story of people living on the internet, their entire lives, social interactions, news absorption, romances, entertainment, all playing out on electronic devices, connecting us to an infinite supply of stimuli and replacing meaningful action and life in the real world. We read and react to headlines about shocking and terrible things happening in our news feed while ignoring the actual real world event itself. Our eyes are simultaneously drawn to both advertisements for products we desire as well as news of us hating each other and killing the environment, both displayed on our screens at the same time with the same prominence and given the same amount of attention, though out of the two, the first is much more likely to get an investment from us. This is the world where a man can fall in love with the internet and believe it to be his best and only friend who will always protect him and agree with him and show him only the things he wants to see, a world where we no longer need other people to think we have a happy life, where we don’t need to talk to someone who doesn’t believe what we do, where we an construct our own electronic bubble. And within this bubble we lose all sense of what it means to composedly confront that which we don’t agree with, the things that scare or worry us, and thus what may have once been something to build strength, character, and learn more about the world is now transformed into a tidal wave of anxiety and perceived existential threat. This is the life of millennials and beyond.

There are four core tracks that tell this story on a readily identifiable level while the rest of the album is a more indirect and personal take for Matt Healy. “TooTime” tells of a world where all of our relationships happen through social media, and the lines between friendship and romance are more blurred than ever before, resulting in a couple fighting over how they comment on other people’s posts, who and how often they’re calling and texting, and whether or not they should have liked each other’s posts. “Love It If We Made It” is comprised almost entirely of headlines ripped from social media over the past few years, with line after line of absolutely shocking material that just flashes past us as we numbly scroll down our screens, yet shows a genuine optimistic hope that in spite of how awful we can be, it would be really great if we as a species survive a worsening global situation. “I Like America” is a frantic and confused take of someone surrounded by gun violence, destruction, and hatred who is scared of dying and wanting to find a place to lay down (this last bit could ambiguously be either a safe place to rest, or asking a police officer where it is they want them to be on the ground to avoid further escalation). Finally, there is “The Man Who Married A Robot”, which tells the story of an internet troll who finds comfort in the internet, the two fall in love and get married, and spend the rest of his days with the internet maintaining his electronic bubble of only seeing the things he likes, having food delivered to him, and not having to be a part of the real world.

Personally, I think that ILIWYS is the stronger album between the two, and the one I much more prefer. Musically, ABIIOR isn’t up to the same high calibre, and I think that the band’s less direct lyrics showed a more skillful delivery than the attention-grabbing present social commentary here. That being said, it does manage to do what ILIWYS did in terms of forming what I like to think of is a proper album, where all of the tracks contribute to and support the central theme or story. ABIIOR, however, does it in a completely opposite manner. Whereas the previous album had a natural flow and consistency of timbre, mood, and lyrical tone, while still allowing every single track to stand entirely on its own as a quality work, this new release has a vast array of contrasting and varied styles and tones, a collection of songs which really don’t flow or work together, with some tracks being markedly stronger than others, and yet together they form a central motif so strong that it transcends any weaknesses and holds it together as an artistic statement. None of these songs belong together like ILIWYS’s did, they are all very much stand alone and individual thoughts plucked out of a restless mind turning its attention to a myriad of all the things assaulting the senses of any young person who lives on the internet of today. And yet the overall tapestry painted by these individual stories woven from the fabric of now, despite the incongruous nature of all of these isolated tales, describes the same world from different viewpoints and issues, and it all coalesces into the shape of what it means to live in the world today. And though musically inferior on most accounts, it achieves a higher plateau of artistry than ILIWYS, eschewing an album of enjoyable and well-crafted songs in favour of a grand statement that can live on longer than a single’s lifespan on a music chart.

Time will tell where this album belongs in the overall narrative of music and social history; it’s quite possible, if not likely, that ILIWYS will in the end be the more fondly remembered statement of the band when the sociopolitical climate which birthed this work is gone and forgotten. But it is unquestionably the essential statement and snapshot of this moment in time which no other work of the last few years can claim - 2018, all of its ups, downs, outright insanity, and all the people on this planet trying to live through it and figure it all out, is ABIIOR. The 1975 have created an album for a generation feeling lost and grasping for sense and identity, not unlike American Idiot, OK Computer, Born In the USA, Dark Side of the Moon, or The Beatles.

And now we wait for Mr. West to lay some ridiculous unfounded claim to the mastery on display here.

Thank you, Kanye, very cool!

Top Albums and Songs 2018

After a long year of cataloging and ranking everything I've been listening to, I've finally finished it! I ended up writing lengthy reviews for my top 3, but I'll post those as their own individual threads to avoid clutter, as one of them was 1000 words and two of them hit 1700 words and just give very brief reviews of everything else.

Top albums

10. Toby Driver - They Are the Shield

A really beautiful work by Toby which is a huge return to form for him following his other solo albums and most of Kayo Dot's post-Blue Lambency content. It feels like the spiritual sequel to Part the Second.

9. Ihsahn - Ámr

I'll admit the only Ihsahn album I liked before now was After, but there's something captivating about Ámr. It feels like I'm poking around in an old haunted house, uncovering some secret lost to time and preventing a spirit from passing on.

7. [TIE] Irreversible Mechanism - Immersion

These guys really stepped it up from Infinite Fields and carved out their own niche in the progressive metal realm. A lot of comparisons were drawn to Fallujah and Rivers of Nihil, but IM keeps enough of their own identity and plays so masterfully that they can easily stand alone and amongst those giants. In fact, I thought their experimentation which much bolder and more confident in execution than "Where Owls Know My Name", which seemed to dip its toe into trying new things like clean vocals and saxophone and just as quickly hop out and rely on the same boring and monotonous bludgeoning we've already heard a hundred times from RoH. The atmosphere IM creates here is really quite special.

7. [TIE] Between the Buried and Me - Automata

I've been pretty disappointed with BTBAM since Coma Ecliptic's huge let-down which destroyed their Parallax II momentum. This album was an improvement, but not a big one. Still, it entertains well enough, especially if you put yourself in kind of a West World mindset and try to play along with the plot. Breaking it into two parts, however, was an utterly stupid move and killed all momentum for the album and separated the identities of two things meant to be a continuous tale. There was no space given for part I and part II to naturally join with each other. Instead, everyone listened to part I for a couple months and settled into it being its own thing and giving it a space that can't just be attached to another thing released months later. It has enough exploration of the band's sound that they haven't done too much yet that it has moments of refreshment for the BTBAM catalogue, but I still really hope they try harder next time.

6. Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

This was an unexpected turn for the band following 2015's blackened New Bermuda. They finally fully embraced their surfer lifestyles and let it shine through in the music, pumping their blackgaze trademark full of surf rock, classic/ glam/ hair riffs, and indie music, along with a softer side of the band like in their duet with Chelsea Wolfe. It's still not the band in their complete form, but it is definitely the mould for it, and I can't wait for them to write for real now that they've experimented their way into a real identity.

5. The Ocean - Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic

I was convinced for the longest time based on the singles (which form over half the album) that this would be album of the year for me. Then it turned out the three singles were the best tracks and the other four (two of which are short instrumentals) weren't up to the same level of quality. It's still an enjoyable album, and a welcome continuation to the ending of Precambrian, but this is of course really only half the album, and thus feels like only half of what we're intended to hear. Hopefully the next chunk which covers the appearance and timeline of dinosaurs will be much more well-rounded and complement part I enough to raise its score.

4. Pale Waves - My Mind Makes Noises

This was a real back and forth for me. When they first appeared on youtube with their single "Television Romance", I thought they were the hot new thing in new wave-influenced pop-rock. Then after listening to their singles as they continued to release them, the singer's voice began to grate on me. She was so nasally and slightly off-key that music became almost unlistenable. Then the album came out and I happened to give it a chance just to see what they were capable of. Thankfully, they appeared to have re-recorded her vocals for every single and apply this to the rest of the album, and her delivery was spot-on. This is a great batch of pop songs with some surprisingly well-crafted songs for a young band writing a debut.

3. The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

See full review posted separately.

2. Black Tongue - Nadir

See full review posted separately (added onto the thread I made before).

1. Lychgate - The Contagion In Nine Steps

See full review posted separately.

Top songs

1. Jaws - Sleep Token

2. Love It If We Made It - The 1975

3. I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) - The 1975

4. There’s A Honey - Pale Waves

5. If there is light, it will find you - Senses Fail

Honourable Mention

Rolo Tomassi - Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It