What have I been listening to this year? A few things have come out that I might go so far as to recommend. I have to say, what I’ve heard up to this point is better than a lot of what I heard last year; 2024 was one of the more mediocre years for music I can recall. I have a lot of hope for 2025.
The way things are going so far, this year looks to be one of those instrumental years. Not everything obviously, but there seems to be a fair amount of post-metal/post-rock, prog/jazz fusion, and atmospheric ambience/electronica in the pipeline. Speaking of upcoming albums, of course the BIG anticipatory release for 2025 is the new Lunatic Soul, which, last I heard, is supposed to be long enough to make into an old-school-style double album, 90 minutes worth of music (as opposed to a regular-length album stretched over two discs) and will hit in the fall. I expect we’ll learn more about that at some point (trust me…I’m a LOT more excited than I sound here!).
For some of ya, the BIG album is already out, the new Steven Wilson solo. Yeah, I’ll say some words about that.
Hello folks, it has been a while since I first announced that I am writing a biography of Mariusz Duda (back in August if you missed it). I want to give you some more recent information. Sorry for the length.
First… well, I made a mistake. I worked on the manuscript over the summer of 2024 when I had a lot of free time (I was a teacher, so summers off) and got to the point where I felt I could reveal that this project existed.
I stupidly assumed that I would continue to write the book once I returned to work in September–that is, work during the day, write in the evenings.
Hahahaha….Yeah, no. That didn’t happen. Writing for me (at least writing well) is very mentally taxing: it takes a lot of brain effort. Things had changed at work, I had a longer commute than before, so I had to leave earlier in the morning and got back home later in the evening. I would sit down, open the book files, and then write very little. My brain was too fried by the end of the day. There were other things happening as well. That means for the fall of 2024, not much got done. It was stressing me out.
As a result I’m behind, and the hoped-for release in or near September ain’t gonna happen. That was pretty tentative anyway, because I know that the whole process of writing, editing, etc. etc. always takes longer than you think it will, but yeah–it definitely won’t be ready by then. That actually may work out better for the book, though. See below.
So…I made some changes. The biggest one is simply that I retired from my job. I’d always enjoyed my work but not lately, growing stresses and anxiety had stripped the fun away, and it was time to leave. This happened at the end of January.
I certainly have the time now, and I am writing a lot.
The book itself: where are we?
I didn’t tell you the title the first time because it was probably going to change. It did change, but I’m still keeping it a secret for now because it might change again.
You have a glimpse of chapter titles though–you might notice a pattern. At the moment there are 8 plus an Introduction and a couple of Interjections. Not sure how stable that is; a couple of the chapters are very long and might have to be broken up.
Some of these chapters are pretty complete (in terms of information), but the later ones need a lot of work. The last couple of chapters especially that deal with the most recent few years are very incomplete. I am waiting on the last Lunatic Soul album of course, and other information. I want the book to be as complete as I can get it for 2025. Of course at some point I will have to stop writing.
The Introduction, Chapter 1, and a part of Chapter 2 have been formally workshopped: that is, other writers/potential writers (who have no knowledge at all of the subject of the book) have read them in an academic setting, and provided feedback and critiques. Overall the response has been positive, with some even saying they would like to read more about this person they have never heard of. That is a small win.
Next steps: for the book is fact-checking. Someone else gets to read it to make sure I haven’t made up too much of it.
Looking for a publisher: that is a terrifying and difficult and soul-destroying process. I will be focusing on small, independent, probably specialist publishers–no big house will be interested in such a niche topic. I probably won’t be successful (most people aren’t) in which case–self-publishing and Print-On-Demand. Ugh. But that’s how it works these days.
Completion and a first copy-edit passthrough by me (that is, correcting as many grammar, spelling, sequence mistakes that I can find. There will be a lot of those).
Then off to what are called “beta readers” – people who will read closely and make critiques and comments and recommendations. Please don’t ask me; I have folks in mind.
Then a developmental edit by an actual professional editor. That is a very important edit that looks for overall flow and sequence and makes sure that things are in a sensible order and everything that should be in there is in there.
Eventually: cover design. That’s also a big deal and will need a professional.
Will there be photos inside? Not sure yet–most of that is not up to me. Getting hold of interesting ones, and permissions yadda.
Now for the important part–you guys. Quick question:
The way Meta is going… well, all I will say is that it is hard to find anything worthwhile showing up in feeds lately. I will be posting about the book on other platforms in addition to here. Possibilities include:
Bluesky
Substack–it would be free, no worries, and it allows me to create a mailing list, so you wouldn’t miss any news.
Anywhere else?
I will NOT be using Xitter…. ; I’m not a video person so probably not TikTok
Every year I complain that I didn’t really listen to as much music as I wanted to, and every year I manage to scrape together some sort of list of music that I did listen to. This year was not different except that I was even more distracted than usual for most of the year and I often found that I was not in the mood, or did not have the opportunity to really explore new music. Work and some personal matters were kicking my ass, and when I was in the proper headspace a much more important project took my focus. Somehow though I ended up with a long list of about two dozen albums, so I guess it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
However, I have to say that I found this year’s crop of releases less than compelling. Nothing really blows me away. This is not to say that there aren’t good albums on the list, but overall The Year in Music feels a bit underwhelming. However, it is also The Year of the Vocalist: man, there are some great singers on some of these albums! Manuel Gagneux, Yann Ligner, Patryk Zwoliński… you guys killed it.
In terms of genres: 2024 has made up for last year’s dearth of metal. I heard quite a bit of it this year, along with prog and prog-related, industrial, and some art-rock. There was no Steven Wilson this year, so no pop. (/jk)
I have nine solid contenders, and if I had to pick one more to make it an even 10… well, there are four leftovers of roughly equal merit so I might say something about those, too. I’m still not real sure about the order though, or which album I would make “Number 1”. There are two or three that could take that spot.
It seems ironic to have a section on concerts, because I went to so few of them. For the second year in a row I managed to attend a mere half-dozen shows. I think my gig-going days are winding down: the physical toll is getting greater, and the cost…! Sure I love to support the bands but we are ticket-fee’d to death before we even get in the door, and then the merch cost…. As much as I regret not doing it, I haven’t bought a shirt for over a year. But that’s an old story and I can’t see it changing any time soon.
These days there has to be a really good reason for me to hit the venues, and frankly there are fewer and fewer bands coming this way that I really want to see (most of those are small-to-medium European acts and are unlikely to be able to afford to tour over here).
The shows I did see were scattered throughout the year: Earthside opening for Caligula’s Horse in February; Ministry/Gary Newman/Front Line Assembly in March; VNV Nation in April, Riverside in June; Billy Idol in August; and Zeal and Ardor in November. I’ll start in third place and work towards the top.
Riverside Live at Torwar Arena. June 1, Warsaw.
This show was the grand finale to a huge (year-and-a half, all told), and hugely successful world tour in support of the band’s 8th album, ID.Entity, released in January of 2023. We can acknowledge the somewhat divided opinions about the album within the more established Riverside fan base, but I do believe it gained them more new fans, especially overseas, than any of the other albums. The gig was planned for June 1, to be recorded as an official live release, and in a bigger venue than they had heretofore played anywhere outside of festivals. They were going to go out with a bang, figuratively and (given the confetti cannons) literally, not to mention the massive laser-heavy light show. There was no way I was going to miss this gig: these are my boys, after all, and I love them dearly.
I had a marvelous time. It was reminiscent of the February 2017 shows when Riverside returned from their year’s hiatus after the death of Piotr Grudziński, and the fans came together in remembrance and celebration. Everyone was there, from all over Poland, Europe, the UK, and farther afield. It was an opportunity to reconnect with the Riverside Family, most of whom I had not seen since 2017, and a bunch I had never met before. It was a concert meet-up at its best.
Given all that, why is it Number 3?
Unfortunately, despite the elaborate hype and promotion and all the initial excitement, the show itself struck me as somewhat flat. It felt over-rehearsed and suffering from a lack of spontaneity that the guys didn’t seem able to overcome. I had certainly seen the band put on better, more dynamic shows: the incandescent gig in Chicago in 2015; the monstrous show in Warsaw in October 2018 to start off the Wasteland tour; the Montreal gigs in both 2022 and 2023. All of those were Riverside at their energetic best, truly the live band Mariusz Duda insists they are. June 1 in Torwar was not one of those shows, which is why I never said much about it at the time or afterwards.
Zeal and Ardor. Opera House, November 28th.
I didn’t know a whole lot about these guys except that they were out of Switzerland, and had some interesting-sounding songs: metal, but on a foundation of southern spirituals and slave protest songs. I liked what I’d heard of their latest album, but hadn’t played it a lot–in fact, I don’t think I had played it all the way through when I bought a ticket on a whim. I had no other gigs planned for the near future, and they sounded intriguing enough to take a chance on.
I am very glad I did so. It’s a big band, with six guys on stage. Along with the regular metal-band two guitars/bass/drums lineup, there are two guys who are straight vocalists, along with the lead singer/guitarist. The music has a great emphasis on intricate vocals, strong harmonies, and call-and-response amongst the growls (it is, after all, a metal band). And as heavy as they occasionally get on the album, they ramped it to a whole new level live: intensely powerful and raw, much more than the studio stuff would lead you to expect. Dynamic, energetic, and yet in between songs the leader, Manuel Gagneux, is funny and personable, and unexpectedly American (given his name and where the band hails from I guess I was expecting to hear at least a French accent). They did not play a long set which was a bit disappointing but it was thoroughly immersive and I’d go see them again in a heartbeat.
Front Line Assembly/Gary Numan/Ministry. History, March 16th.
Sometimes, you see the lineup for a tour, and the information is hard to process. Is this really a thing, or is it someone’s fantasy show and I’m just looking at a meme? These three acts all on one bill, every one of them a headliner, an industrial lineup of such legendary proportions–it hardly seemed possible. And yet there we were.
They were on the second leg of this tour by the time March 2024 rolled around, having taken it across the US first. I knew FLA and was a huge fan of Noise Unit, one of Bill Leeb’s other projects. I had seen Numan three times before on his own tours, but had never managed to catch Ministry. There was no possible way I was going to miss this show, even if it killed me, and given it was General Admission and standing, it just might. It was at a venue I didn’t know (the relatively new History), and it was gonna be packed because it had sold out almost instantly.
I got there early enough to be pretty close to the front, if not right on the rail, and the crowd was electric with excitement. And this show did not disappoint: crazy and intense and over the top, a crowd almost overwhelmed with joy and energy; even the security was good-natured, handing out water bottles as the heat and excitement grew, manipulating surfers over the rail, keeping an eye. I’ll give the venue kudos for that (it is a pretty nice place, actually). The individual sets must have been shortened but they didn’t feel that way–we certainly got our money’s worth from everyone. The show lived up to every expectation and then some. Gigs like this don’t come along too damned often.
Walking on a Flashlight Beam turns ten years old on October 13, 2024. This album has a special place in my heart, and I want to explain why. It was the first Lunatic Soul album that was released after I became a fan, but that is certainly not the only reason or even the main one. Of course, what I’m about to say are my personal observations, and you may disagree with me–but you’d be wrong. 🙂
I’m not going to talk about the songs, so if you want to read about those, I have a full review here.
When Walking on a Flashlight Beam came out in 2014, it was almost immediately recognized as something very special in the Mariusz Duda discography by many reviewers and fans. It was the fourth Lunatic Soul release, a solo project which originally was supposed to consist of only two albums (Impressions is an instrumental supplement), but at some point, happily for us, Duda decided to keep the project going.
It was an album that was made during a very dark time in Duda’s life. Personal and emotional issues weighed on him; and when he first went into the studio, things didn’t go well. In order to recapture inspiration, he had to re-adjust his thinking and change the ideas, the approach, sounds and mood. Originally there were to be guest musicians, but he abandoned that idea: only Wawrzyniec Dramowicz remained on drums. There would be much less of the lush orientalism of the first three albums, and much more in the way of electronics. Shifting creative gears worked because this masterpiece came out of it. And it is a masterpiece.
There have been three subsequent Lunatic Soul albums in the decade since, so how does Walking on a Flashlight Beam hold up?
WoaFB is one of those albums in my collection that is of such importance that I cannot play it very often. I feel that when I do play it, I must give it my full attention, to honour it with nothing less than my entire listening presence. I own a few other albums like that, but not many.
For me, it is the most inspired, the most cohesive, the most nuanced, and indeed most intellectual of the entire Lunatic Soul project, and perhaps of Duda’s entire output.* After ten years it has lost none of its power; in fact it has gained stature as the other LS albums have been released. WoaFB reached a pinnacle in terms of flow, vision, and thematic integrity that the other albums did not quite achieve. In the wider context, it pulls the first albums (LS I, LS II, and Impressions) together, and provides an anchor point for the whole project. It is an album that is much greater than the sum of its parts.
There are LS albums that I play more often, that I consider “favourites”: the astonishing Lunatic Soul I; Impressions; and the joyous Through Shaded Woods; but I will state outright that by any objective measures, Walking on a Flashlight Beam is the best. It is a true showcase of Mariusz Duda’s creative powers, an album where all the elements–the music, the lyrics, the mood and atmosphere–came together in a perfect storm of inspiration.
*with the possible exception of “Transition II”, to which I have much the same response as WoaFB but this of course is not an album, and is a bit of an outlier in the LS canon.
There will be much more about this album in my upcoming book.
Back in April when I posted the first look at early releases, I mentioned that I have been busy and haven’t had a lot of time to really seek out new music (or old music, for that matter, apart from the ‘old’ music I’ve been listening to as research). That situation has not changed much. Over the summer I focused more heavily on writing my book, so I continued to not hear much new music; now I am back at the wage-earning slog and trying to write my book and …yeah. Even less time.
Still, in the months between April and now I have managed to squeeze in some new stuff, and here’s what I got so far. Up for brief comment this time around:
Albums
Airbag: The Century of the Self
Bent Knee: Twenty Pills Without Water
Elephant9: Mythical River
Bill Leeb: Model Kollapse
Loma: How Can I Live Without a Body?
Oceans of Slumber: Where Gods Fear to Speak
Wretchgod: Suffering Upon Suffering
A few singles from:
Body Count, Klone, Front Line Assembly, Kanaan/Meller, Amplifier
In this post I’ll do the singles. It takes longer to review albums and I’m not done yet. This is not a ranking, but alphabetical order.
Amplifier: “Guilty Pleasure”
A single in advance of a new Amplifier album, apparently called Gargantuan, to be released some time this year. Their last album came out in 2023, and I ranked it pretty high for the year, tied with Riverside’s for the top spot, despite a couple of rather messy songs. The rest were lovely.
“Guilty Pleasure” sounds like one of those messy tracks, wherein everything seems to be happening everywhere all at once, which is okay if you like that sort of thing, but I am not overly fond of it. I like a song that has some kind of recognizable direction to it, or at least not sounding like it is galloping madly off in all directions (hat tip: Stephen Leacock). This single barely holds it together. Which means I have to wait to hear the rest of the album before I decide to buy it.
Body Count: “Psychopath” and “F*** What You Heard”, released in advance of their new album apparently called Merciless. This is supposed to drop sometime this year, but so far there has been no word on when.
These are both solid offerings, the first reminiscent of tracks like “Carnivore” and “Here I Go Again” from earlier albums, Ice-T rapping about unrestrained predatory violence: it’s not bad but we’ve already heard it. The second though is a rap-metal monster, political and angry, and I swear the duo of Will Dorsey (drums) and Vincent Price (bass) is one of the heaviest, most thunderous rhythm sections in the business.
Front Line Assembly feat. Seeming: “Molotov” (remix)
“Molotov” the original comes from the 2018 FLA album Warmech, which is the OST for the video game Airmech Wastelands. Seeming is an indie/post-punk/industrial duo with three albums out so far: in my blog I ranked their Sol: A Self-Banishment Ritual as the best album of 2017.
FLA has released a few remixes of pieces from Warmech, and I noticed “Molotov” because it is one of the best tracks from the original album, and, well, Seeming. It is remixed to dial back the synths and include lyrics, written and sung by Alex Reed, on resistance politics: “Revolution is not a mood/revolution is not a vibe/…revolution is showing up” he declares. It really works: Seeming skillfully redirect the energy in the original piece and create a powerful new song.
Kanaan/Meller: “Olympics”
A joint track between Robert Kanaan, a Polish electronica musician, and Riverside’s (and ex-Quidam) guitarist Maciej Meller, celebrating, well, its title. It is a soaring, melodic instrumental piece with lots of synths, nice guitar, and well-worth the few bucks to buy it on Bandcamp.
Klone: “Interlaced” and “The Unseen”
These are out in advance of the new album The Unseen, to be released on November 8th—a bit of a surprise, really, since their previous album was released just last year. Anyway, there is no mistaking Klone, with their orchestral, guitar-rich heavy prog and Yann Ligner’s soaring voice. Both these tracks are strong, the first one featuring a couple of jazzy sax solos, the second getting pretty metal with Ligner almost growling. They bode well for the album, but also suggest we aren’t going to get anything radically new from the band in terms of sound or direction. That is, there isn’t a lot to say specifically about the songs because if you know what Klone sounds like, you know what these tracks will sound like.
As noted, I’ll post up comments on the albums when I have time to finish listening/thinking about them. I did in fact sample more than just this, but so far these I’ve listened to enough to have something to say. Who knows… I may be able to add to the list as time goes on. Stay tuned.
The past few months have been very slow on my blog–not, probably, that anyone has noticed, but still…I’ve let it slide. I have not been talking much about new music, because I haven’t been listening much to new music, and there is a reason for that: something else has taken precedence.
Here’s a bit of context:
A few years ago (well, more than a few, but let’s not talk about how quickly time is passing…), I started a series of posts in which I ranked and reviewed all of Riverside’s studio albums and EPs. I meant to do the same thing for Lunatic Soul but somehow it didn’t happen: this project is of such profound importance to me that I struggle to express how I feel about it. I have written reviews for all the LS albums from Walking On a Flashlight Beam to Through Shaded Woods, but I always felt at a loss when I tried to explain the whole project’s impact.
Then something entirely unexpected happened. I mean, completely out of the blue, I never saw it coming, never in a thousand years would it have occurred to me, all of that.
One day I responded to a text message, and in the middle of the conversation, the sender suddenly said: “You know what I think? One day you should write a book. About Riv/LS, maybe MD stuff. I can help you.”
It’s time to update what’s new in music in 2024 that has at least caught my attention (or enough of the attention of others for me to try it).
It’s been a bit slow this year, but I’ve also not been actively looking – several other things are keeping me busy. I’ll save or bookmark something, but it might take a week or three for me to get around to focusing on it, so right now, there is not much here. Anyway, in no particular order….
Limited Edition of One: How to Succeed in the Music Industry Without Being Part of the Mainstream, bySteven Wilson with Mick Wall. Constable, 2022. 375 pp.
I don’t often do book reviews, but lately I have embarked on a heavy schedule of reading music biographies (for reasons), and this is one of several in the pipeline. Since I’ve reviewed some of Wilson’s solo albums on this site, I figured I’d extend the favour to his book.
Limited Edition of One is Steven Wilson’s chance to talk about himself in long form, touching on all sorts of topics along the way. The style is informal and accessible, not all that different from long interviews, or articles that he has written: I have no doubt that this is his voice. Apart from his annoyingly persistent habit of using the first-person-reflexive pronoun as a subject pronoun, it is relatively error-free, so there was probably some kind of editorial eye cast on it. There aren’t a lot of pictures, and the ones that are there are black-and-white and relatively low-res, scattered throughout the book. This review is for the paperback.
It is that time once again, when I gather together the music that I have liked over the past year, and give a brief explanation of why I like it.
This year feels like a good year, and that is because most of the albums I’ve included feel like they may just stick around longer than the time it took to get to know them well enough to talk about them. Other of my year-end lists do include entries that never made much impact beyond the listening and inclusion; as much as I thought I liked them at the time, they ultimately made no lasting impression, which is not what I hope for. This year, either the albums are better, or I have made more of an effort to exclude the ones that might be short-lived. Or both. Still, there are a handful at the bottom end of this year’s list that are unlikely to be long-term players, but that do have some good songs, so hopefully I will continue to sample them.
There are fourteen albums here that represent a relatively narrow set of genres compared to other years. There is a fair amount of prog, or at least a fair amount of music from bands with a proggy reputation, which might be a bit of a surprise if you know me. I do not consider myself a fan of modern prog and do not seek it out, mostly because I find the vast majority of it tedious and entirely predictable. However, there are a handful of bands who fall under that (admittedly rather broad) umbrella who can manage to sound fresh, so I can’t write the genre off completely. A few of them released pretty good albums this year. There is some industrial/industrial-related, some post-rock, and straight-up rock. No metal or post-metal this year, and no oddball genres.
In terms of the ranking… I’ve put numbers on them but except for the three or four at the bottom, those numbers don’t mean very much. It’s crowded at the top. There are some clear distinctions among some albums, but there are also places where making a choice is largely arbitrary.
