This almost perfectly reflects my own in-head ranking system. There's usually one clear winner, several second-tier favourites, and a whole bunch of things that were also brilliant but cannot be arranged into any kind of order.
Here are the many, the mute. All fantastic records. In no particular order. Tomorrow, the wan & tu.
...
WILL HAVEN
OPEN THE MIND TO DISCOMFORT
(ARTERY)
Bleak and full of despair, Will Haven’s latest adds a
haunted, sorrowful air to their relentless bludgeon. The riffs here are
absolutely monstrous, but weirdly ill-defined, fuzzy around the edges, like
cirrus clouds made of cast iron.
MELECHESH
ENKI
(NUCLEAR BLAST)
Utterly dazzling Assyrian/Armenian death metal, bringing
together Mesoptomian melodic influences and razorwire riffs. It’s a perfect
synthesis, without a hint of gimmickry. Astoundingly adept, savage and
innovative. One of the best metal albums of the year.
JUTE GYTE
SHIP OF THESEUS
(JESHIMOTH
ENTERTAINMENT)
One-man DIY doom/black metal project, rendered utterly
nauseating by the use of microtonal scales. Sounds like a recording of several
bands slowly sinking into a swamp, being played back on a broken turntable.
Uniquely horrible, in a brilliant sort of way.
LIBEREZ
ALL TENSE NOW LAX
(NIGHT SCHOOL
RECORDS)
One of the more indefinable and unsettling releases of the
year – haunted location recordings, woozy beats, layers of fuzz and grime,
alien skronk, clattering improv, folky riffs and caustic guitar noise. It’s
like a radio half-immersed in honey in an Egyptian cafe, picking up two
stations at once. I’ve no idea who these people are or what they’re trying to achieve,
but I like it. A lot.
KNIFEWORLD
HOME OF THE NEWLY
DEPARTED
(BELIEVERS ROAST)
Bringing together Kavus Torabi’s ambitious prog ensemble’s
two previous EPs (Dear Lord, No Deal
and Clairvoyant Fortnight) and adding
one new, drifting, nigh-ambient track, Home
of the Newly Departed is likely to be familiar to existing fans. However,
it does brazenly illustrate that, far from being stop-gap throwaways, this
band’s EPs have been among their strongest work. At least four of these seven
tracks – the urgent and ebullient ‘Pilot Her’, the good-natured rolling groove
and fractured climax of ‘In a Foreign Way’, the Magma-esque stomp of ‘Prime of
Our Decline’ and the thoroughly unhinged 14-minute modular monstrosity ‘HMS
Washout’ – would surely dominate any semi-respectable Knifeworld top five.
(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla magazine)
MASTER MUSICIANS OF BUKKAKE
FURTHER WEST QUAD CULT
FURTHER WEST QUAD CULT
Designed
to be played simultaneously with 2013’s Far West, though I have never done so
and it sounds great as a standalone entity. Entrancing sounds that take John
Carpenter’s synth aesthetic, marry it to Maryanne Amacher’s head music and
bounce sounds around your skull, or build beautiful drones packed with drama
and romantic yearning. Another left turn from this inventive, ever-evolving and
curiously emotional band, sadly and incongruously saddled with one of the
worst, most crass and stupid names in the history of music.
KOWLOON WALLED CITY
GRIEVANCES
(NEUROT)
Originally reviewed on The List:
https://www.list.co.uk/article/74861-kowloon-walled-city-grievances/
https://www.list.co.uk/article/74861-kowloon-walled-city-grievances/
JASON MULLINAX
HOME WORLD
HOME WORLD
(self-released)
Full disclosure: Jason is a friend and occasional collaborator, but that doesn’t mean I felt duty-bound to laud his latest album. On the contrary, Home World is undeniably appealing – a delightful collection of low-tech DIY electronica and virtuosic live percussion that’s just brimming with charm, verve and originality. Look out for a remix album in 2016.
LIGHTNING BOLT
FANTASY EMPIRE
FANTASY EMPIRE
(THRILL JOCKEY)
After losing interest in LB after Hypermagic Mountain, Fantasy
Empire picked me up by the scruff and dumped me back in front of Brian
Gibson’s monstrous amp stack, soaking up the octave-jumping abuse. Nothing
particularly new from camp Bolt, but it’s always a colossal pleasure to hear
them at full force.
CIVIL ELEGIES
FOR THE CONSIDERATION
OF AMATEUR JOCKEYS
Probably one of my favourite Glasgow bands at the moment, another
project from the ever-prolific Hamish Black. This is the band’s second album, recorded
live in a day. Lean and nasty, it’s a short blast of really inventive,
punishing and immediate noise rock/hardcore, with a constantly surprising
rhythmic and melodic sensibility that will leg you up and steal your shoes.
AUTHOR & PUNISHER
MELK UND HONING
(HOUSECORE RECORDS)
MELK UND HONING
(HOUSECORE RECORDS)
The mad scientist of industrial doom, Tristan Shone has a
unique approach to his craft – building an array of scratch-built
noise-making machines in what one can only assume is a subterranean workshop
filled with robotic bats. At its heart, Melk
en Honing (with harrowing artwork from Black Sun’s Russell MacEwan) is a
heavy, grimy work of cybernetic aggression, starkly impressive on its own bleak
terms. But what makes Author & Punisher special is something that
occasionally pushes through the mechanical filth like a weed through concrete –
an unexpectedly lavish and poignant melodic sensibility: ‘Shame’ coats a
bludgeoning trudge with incongruous beauty and layered harmonies, ‘Future Man’s
yearning lines soar desperately over a tar-pit trawl, and ‘Void, Null, Alive’
climaxes in a surprisingly elegant choral mantra.
(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla
magazine)
DARK BUDDHA RISING
INVERSUM
INVERSUM
(NEUROT)
Two sides of long-form ritualistic, psychedelic
trance/doom/drone from Finland. Low, slow, heavy, sensual and unashamedly
portentuous, this ebbs and flows between looming ambience and planet-crushing
riffs with deceptive ease.
BJÖRK
VULNICURA
(ONE LITTLE INDIAN)
GUAPO
OBSCURE KNOWLEDGE
(CUNEIFORM)
Astonishingly, Guapo have now been at this heavy prog thing for 20 years. They’ve mutated considerably in that time, shedding people, gaining others, evolving from a two-piece to the current quartet – and they’ve also been pretty consistently brilliant. Like their 2004 opus Five Suns, Obscure Knowledge is a single, album-length composition divided into movements. However, curiously, the three tracks’ running times and overall structure almost exactly mirror their last album, History of the Visitation. Whether this signifies coincidence or deeper conceptual significance is moot, as the resultant album grooves, thunders, confounds and mesmerises in all the right ways. Driven inexorably onwards by James Sedwards’ serrated basslines and the deft, subtle drumming of Dave Smith, it gallops magnificently from big-riff bombast through cosmic mind-drift and lithe, nigh-funky strut to a climactic wall of noise-rock.
Astonishingly, Guapo have now been at this heavy prog thing for 20 years. They’ve mutated considerably in that time, shedding people, gaining others, evolving from a two-piece to the current quartet – and they’ve also been pretty consistently brilliant. Like their 2004 opus Five Suns, Obscure Knowledge is a single, album-length composition divided into movements. However, curiously, the three tracks’ running times and overall structure almost exactly mirror their last album, History of the Visitation. Whether this signifies coincidence or deeper conceptual significance is moot, as the resultant album grooves, thunders, confounds and mesmerises in all the right ways. Driven inexorably onwards by James Sedwards’ serrated basslines and the deft, subtle drumming of Dave Smith, it gallops magnificently from big-riff bombast through cosmic mind-drift and lithe, nigh-funky strut to a climactic wall of noise-rock.
(originally published in Rock-a-Rolla
magazine)
ZEUS!
MOTOMONOTONO
(THREE ONE G)
A third outing from this Italian bass-and-drums duo. While
2013’s Opera was an impressively
complex and thoroughly pulverising experience, as dense and heavy as it was
disorienting, Motomonotono offers
some measure of refinement. It’s still ridiculously energetic and powerful, but
the emphasis has shifted slightly from bludgeoning, sculpted chaos to precision
and repetition, with the pair locking into agile, trance-like offbeat rhythms.
Luca Cavina’s bass has a more spidery, multi-layered tone this time around,
with chorus and synth effects broadening his formerly brutish palette. Allied
with drummer Paolo Mongardi’s lethal pinpoint polyrhythms, the results are
remarkable and instantly appealing – complex but flowing, hypnotic, full of
groove. Fans of Ruins and Zu will lap this up like thirsty dogs in a paddling
pool.
KEN MODE
SUCCESS
SUCCESS
(SEASON OF MIST)
Originally reviewed on The List:
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