Last year's highlights

So, I thought I'd list some records from last year I picked up and enjoyed.


Alcest: Écailles de Lune
Brilliant post rock tinged with black metal (or vice versa). Contains some melodies I wished would never end. Also saw them live, brilliant!

Burzum: Belus
Already reviewed this one, but I think it deserves a mention. Read the review for more words.

BXI: BXI
Boris and Ian Astbury of Cult fame. What can I say? Atmospheric and very cool.

Earth: A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
Some of Earth's earliest recorded work, remastered into something amazing. Good, meaty drone.

Electric Wizard: Black Masses
Some of the best stuff happening in doom right now. Delirious and trashy, brilliant!

Hooded Menace: Never Cross the Dead
I enjoy the dirty, rotten sound of Hooded Menace immensely. As I do their uncanny sense of melody to spice things up.

Kowloon Walled City / Ladder Devils / Fight Amp: Lose / Lose / Lose
Already reviewed this as well. Good, rockin' sludge.

Lisa Cuthbert: Obstacles
Ever since I saw Lisa Cuthbert open for Antimatter (actually, Mick Moss & Duncan Patterson playing Antimatter, Anathema and Ìon) I'd been waiting for this album. Absolutely beautiful stuff.

Sailors With Wax Wings: Sailors With Wax Wings
This had flown completely under my radar until a friend told me to listen to it. Goes well with the BXI ep.

The Abominable Iron Sloth: The Id Will Overcome
After getting acquainted with The Abominable Iron Sloth's debut album, I'd been waiting eagerly for some more material from them. A snappy dose of aggressive sludge this is.

The Sword: Warp Riders
Good riffs all around, it's what stoner metal is all about, really.

Thou: Summit
Depressive and dark sludge with searingly beautiful melodies. My personal album of the year for 2010.

Throes of Dawn: The Great Fleet of Echoes
Beautiful, atmospheric metal. It bugs me, that I've managed to not see them live throughout the year.

Triptykon: Eparistera Daimones
If you liked Celtic Frost's Monotheist, this should be right up your alley. Tom G. Warrior has ditched the unnecessary ballast and is doing the best thing yet in his career.

Tuvalu: Tuvalu
With this, their latest, Tuvalu prove again their ability to write excellent music with aspects of everything that's good about progressive rock.

Ufomammut: Eve
Approaching psychedelic doom from a completely different angle than Electric Wizard, Ufomammut sound very much like their name, which is pretty awesome.

Kowloon Walled City/Ladder Devils/Fight Amp - Lose Lose Lose

Some time ago I got this brilliant idea about reviewing records that probably don't make it very widely out of their country of origin, and as quite many of the underground acts I've become acquainted with are from the USA, I'll offer you something from across the pond. I thought I'd start with a new release, and therefore selected the three-way split between Kowloon Walled City, Ladder Devils and Fight Amp, Lose Lose Lose.

The split is available on vinyl, with 1 song from each band on both sides. That makes up for the first 2 new tracks for Kowloon Walled City and Fight Amp since their last year's albums Gambling on the Richter Scale and Manners and Praise respectively and Ladder Devils' first ever released tracks. All the bands play a sort of similar style of punky, rocking sludge and there isn't much variation on the record, although you can clearly tell the bands apart. Nevertheless, there is massive amounts of appeal, at least for yours truly, in their crushing brand of sludge from the brisker end of the spectrum.

Kowloon Walled City opens the album with ”The Busker”, which is a continuation of the style they did on their full-length last year. Ladder Devils then ups the groove with ”Get OK” after which Fight Amp kicks up the gear with a more aggressive ”Thankless”. The second side begins with Ladder Devils' fast and groovy ”Leavers”, followed by Fight Amp's ”Old Soul” and is concluded by a slower number from Kowloon Walled City, ”The Commuter”. Despite from jumping to and fro between bands, the tracklist sounds really well-balanced. Clocking in at a bit over 25 minutes, this split album makes for a sweet, albeit short, soundtrack for a sludge party.

Oh, and best of all, it can be downloaded for free (endorsed by at least Kowloon Walled City): click here!

4/5

Burzum - Belus

For people my age, Varg "Count Grishnakh" Vikernes, incarcerated in 1994 for the murder of Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, guitarist and leader of the band Mayhem, has probably always been "that black metal guy in jail". His release on parole in early 2009 therefore brought up the hopes of a new Burzum record for those into his older stuff. And we didn't even have to wait that long: Belus, Burzum's 7th full-length album, came out in early March 2010.

Stylistically, Belus is a continuation of the style of metal, whether you choose to call it black metal or not, displayed on Filosofem, the last Burzum album to be recorded before Vikernes's incarceration. The album is built on slowly undulating, layered guitars and opts to appeal to sense of hypnotism rather than all-out aggression, as opposed to what a lot of black metal bands are prone to do. By the middle of the album the tempo creeps up (in the songs "Kaimadalthas' Nedstigning", "Sverddans" and "Keliohesten") and while Vikernes has certainly succeeded in writing fast songs before, these aren't really up to par with the slower songs. Were there no faster songs, however, the slower ones might sound duller, therefore justifying the faster ones.

Production-wise, Vikernes has gone for a cleaner sound than many of his earlier works. Or at the very least, a better balanced one. Calling this album over-produced would be a mistake, but it's not like Filosofem either, where Vikernes, for example, specifically asked for the worst microphone in the studio to record the vocals and the guitars were recorded through a stereo set (I do love the sounds on that album, nevertheless). The result is an organic sound that supports the music.

Lyrically, the album is a return to the myth of Belus, or Baldr, who was the topic of Dau­ði Baldrs, the ambient album from 1997, and is told by Vikernes to be the metal version of said album. The myth states that the death of Baldr is an omen of Ragnarök, the end of the world, in which the gods will be destroyed. Afterwards, Baldr is born again in the new world, which also concludes the album.

While I can see how this album might alienate the fans of Burzum's older material, however much they might like Filosofem, I have to place it on par with the "classical" albums. On the other hand, Belus doesn't compare with all the majesty and perfection of the 4 first tracks of Filosofem, but its lack of a 25 minute, boring-as-all-hell ambient number such as "Rundgang um die transzendetale Säule der Singularität" totally makes up for it. And while some people say Vikernes has done a shoddier job composing hypnotic, yet evolving songs, the doom enthusiast in me does not mind the occasional stagnation, because, for those prone to get carried away by hypnotic music, this album is a state of mind.

4/5

The expectation of new albums

Lately I've been expecting new albums from My Dying Bride, Mastodon and Isis, to name a few. The former two have already come out and I've already got them in my record collection and the latter I've already pre-ordered as well. Since all these bands are kinda big in my book, I'm typing this to communicate the feelings with which I've been waiting for these albums to come out.

My first reaction on hearing about these coming releases was joy. After all, it'd been a while, though by no means an eternity, since the previous albums came out. However, this soon changed into indifference and passive waiting. As teasers were posted into myspace and albums leaked, I decided I'd wait until I can get my hands on the physical release knowing that I'd buy them despite a teensy bit of doubt being born when following certain conversations concerning the albums.

The ones who prefer the early work of Mastodon and Isis seem to be bent on bashing the new albums as being too soft. These people I also seem to find are the majority of those who've voiced their opinions, while there are those too, who value the new albums the best the bands have ever made. For me Blood Mountain and In the Absence of Truth were the first Mastodon and Isis albums respectively and perhaps for that reason I've never been able to deem them bad albums in any way, but in spite of this the puritans' "Hurrrr, shit!" opinions mixed a spoonful of doubt into my eager expectation.

And as for My Dying Bride, while largely ignored in the conversations I followed, being an older band they've already released their best work (in my opinion) in 1993. Therefore my stance in expectation was that the new album would not be revolutionary but it would suffice if it was at least good. I was both concerned and relieved when thinking about their previous effort A Line of Deathless Kings, since at first it was a bit of a letdown for me, but later opened up and turned out to be excellent. Still, I was aware that I'd need to buy the new album, come whatever may.

So, was the wait worthwhile? I wouldn't know about Wavering Radiant due to it not having come out yet, obviously. Instead, I'm awaiting it with heighted expectations, since I pre-ordered it last night (a nice way to boost the personal eagerness, the same goes for Khanate's Clean Hands Go Foul which I hope will find its way here this week). And even though it's difficult to know what my opinion will be later on, based on just a few listens, I think My Dying Bride's For Lies I Sire is a solid album. Mastodon's Crack the Skye caused reactions a bit more varied. There's a lot going on in there that I like but also a lot that I could do without. Then again I suppose it just takes a few more listens to get into it.

P.S. The next things to wait for (so far at least) are full-lengths from Spiritus Mortis and The Puritan. Also the new Wolves in the Throne Room is probably out already, so regarding that I'm waiting to afford it.

Metallicatastrophe

Shitallica, Metallicocks, Metallicunts... There must be thousands of these around. Metallica has, this side of y2k, raised lots of emotions, both positive and negative, but has hardly left cold anyone with an eye on the world of heavy music (bullshit! There are zounds of those who just don't care). A common topic in the last couple of years has been the band's previous studio outing St. Anger, which was a regular couple of turds coated with vomit. Therefore yours truly has little or no expectations whatsoever regarding Metallica's new album Death Magnetic, of which I still haven't heard a single note. Some people do say it's "the best Metallica since 1991" but this hardly says anything, since Metallica's 1991 outing Metallica aka "The Black Album" was the beginning of a long and hard downhill for the band, though I personally did like the album back when I was 15.

In IRC conversations I've recently been hearing a lot of comments such as "Metallica sucks ass!" and "Lars can't play for shit!" every time Metallica is mentioned. Yours truly thinks, though, that while a band is only as good as their latest record (which would have made Metallica utter shite after St. Anger came out) Metallica's back catalogue contains some splendid records from 1984 to 1988. And however lousy Lars is and has always been, the bigger picture is what matters and it did work in the older recordings. And (to begin yet another sentence with 'and') because it is hard to top the shittiness of St. Anger, I've decided, despite the rubric, to give Death Magnetic a chance some day. It will not have the power to move me, though, because my years of Metallica-fandom are ancient history.

Hello and welcome

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