Tag Archives: album reviews

The Music of 2022 So Far

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Well, it’s already May, and I haven’t updated the blog for a while.

What is new and exciting so far? There are a few new things to be sure, but not very many have caught my attention. I haven’t really had the time to dig in and listen to stuff, let alone search out new things.

That being said, some singles have hit in anticipation of new albums:

 Porcupine Tree: “Of the New Day”

Steven Wilson and crew follow up the first single from 2021 with this one, much slower and more contemplative, but still managing to sound like a mash-up of earlier Wilson solo albums and Porcupine Tree — which is not to say that it is a bad or derivative song. It is not. Maybe not as instantly compelling as “Harridan”, and a bit more of a grower, but the two singles together suggest the upcoming album may be a pretty good one, whatever the reasons for its release.

 

Killing Joke: Lord of Chaos EP

There are two new tracks on this EP, and a couple of remixes of things from 2015’s Pylon. The new tracks are “Lord of Chaos” and “Total”, and these are worthy follow-ups to the angry melodic industrial post-punk of Pylon. It is, however, not clear whether a full-length album is to follow.

 

Decapitated: “Cancer Culture” and “Hello Death”

Technical death metal from Poland, beat-and-riff-heavy, relentlessly energetic, reminiscent of beloved early albums. “Hello Death” stands out because of guest vocalist Tatiana Shmayluk (Jinjer) who adds a whole level of richness with her soaring clean vocals, in opposition to Rafał Piotrowski’s angry growls.

 

Kellermensch: “6705”

The angst-ridden Danes are back after several years, with a new album in the works, due to be released on May 27th. The single is very much in the vein of songs from 2017’s Goliath: darkly melodic and orchestral, dealing with loneliness and broken relationships. Christian Sindermann’s plaintive voice may be an acquired taste, but it does fit the mood of the songs.

 

Shearwater: “Xenarthran” and “Aqaba”

Jonathan Meiburg has been busy: he released his first book last year (the very excellent A Most Remarkable Creature — a book that has nothing at all to do with music) and is still promoting it; and he also managed to finish the latest Shearwater album (The Great Awakening) which will be released in June. The album was released to crowdfunders early this year, so I have been listening to it for quite some time now.

 The singles give a taste of what the album is like. Slow, contemplative, rather more acoustic than the previous album, and it can sound deceptively sparse, but it isn’t really. It hearkens back to earlier albums: in fact, “Aqaba” has very much the feel of “The Snow Leopard” from Rook, and if you know that song, you know that is not a bad thing at all.

 

Mariusz Duda: “News From the World”

 This song does not presage a new album, but winds up the Lockdown trilogy of albums that Duda composed and released over the past two years. And it is an interesting song to end with; rather than being more of the sparse, jittery electronica of the Trilogy, it is dense and analog, with the three-part structure common to Duda’s best Riverside or Lunatic Soul tracks. It is certainly full of electronic washes and soundscapes, and it even begins in a deceptively Lockdown-ish way, but soon a slightly jazzy bass riff and actual drums take over. Piano dominates the middle third, before heavy rolling bass-and-drum riffs return. There are bits reminiscent of Lunatic Soul, and Eye of the Soundscape; it is by far the strongest track of the entire Trilogy, probably because this is where Duda’s strengths lie. I could stand a whole album like this.

Albums

At this point most of the albums I’m interested in are in the future. I’ve only picked up three new ones to date:

 Author and Punisher: Krüller

 Author and Punisher is the nom de plume of one Tristan Shone, industrial musician who takes the genre descriptor literally: he builds machines that make industrial music. No guitars or drums on his stage, just huge metal contraptions that he works with hands, feet, and voice, to produce enormous swathes of massive sound. He came to my attention a few years ago via the Spotify algorithm, back when it seemed to actually work — for some reason it suggested I might like this stuff.

It was not wrong. Author and Punisher makes brutal, dense, angry electronic noises, at least at his best. I’m not sure, alas, that Krüller is his best: this album sees his material somewhat more melodic, and less brutal, and somehow less effective. For me, only “Centurion” really stands out as indicative of what he can do, perhaps followed by the title track.

 

Amorphis: Halo

 The Finnish folk metal masters have released an album that is very reminiscent of Under the Red Sky, and that is fine with me, because I liked that album very much. These guys present deeply melodic and heavy folk metal, full of catchy riffs, and really the best part of these songs is how well Tomi Joutsen switches between growl vocals and a rich clean tenor voice throughout the songs. He’s one of the best in the business at that. This is a nice and easy album to listen to, head-banging all the way.

 

Marillion: An Hour Before It’s Dark

Marillion, the long-standing neo-prog outfit, is a band that never did much for me. The level of adoration from many of my friends does lead me to occasionally try out yet another Marillion track, just to see if something has changed — and since I tend to find Fish and Hogarth both annoyingly mannered vocalists, it shouldn’t really matter what album I pick. Pretty much every attempt has resulted in a bemused “meh”.

So yeah, I was rather surprised (as were most of the people I know when I mentioned it) when I actually took to the new album. I can’t remember why I listened to it — I think I just liked the cover — and somehow, despite Hogarth’s nasal whine, the album itself works. Now it is not one that is ever going to make my all-time best list by any means — it doesn’t have that kind of depth or thoughtfulness or originality — but it is certainly accomplished, smooth, with some pretty lush moments. It is a good album to put on and just play.

And no, I won’t be attending any Marillion weekends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Year-end Windup: The Albums of 2021

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This past year was an excellent year for music, much better than the travesty that was 2020. Right from the beginning with the early releases it promised to be a strong one, and quality-wise it never really let up. The music did come along in fits and starts: a bunch of late winter/spring releases, a bit of a lull through summer into the fall, and then a final surge very late in the year. It was this last bit that proved problematic, because the late releases were so strong they threw off all the calculations I had made up to that point. By mid December I had to completely rethink my top-tier albums.

In terms of genres, what attracted me is largely divided between various forms of instrumental ambient electronica or industrial, and good ol’ rock‘n’roll/metal. A bit of proggish and alternativey stuff is sprinkled throughout, but not too much. There were certainly surprises along the way. I ended up with an even dozen albums that stand out; I think this is the strongest year for music in a while.

Gary Numan released his crowd-funded album early in the year, and Shriekback did the same thing in December. Industrial legend Bill Leeb gave us two offerings: one from Front Line Assembly and another from the long-quiescent Noise Unit. Mariusz Duda, who has an inordinate fondness for trilogies, also released two albums to complete his latest, which was begun in 2020 with Lockdown Spaces. The Tea Party emerged almost out of nowhere to demonstrate that they are still very much alive and a force to be reckoned with. The long-awaited new album from post-metal masters Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster finally appeared.

Anyway: on to the list. Continue reading Year-end Windup: The Albums of 2021 →

Interior Drawings: Mariusz Duda

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Release date: December 10th, 2021 on Bandcamp;  December 17th on all other streaming services, and on cassette.

Mariusz Duda: all instruments and vocals

 Tracklist

  1. Racing Thoughts
  2. Interior Drawings
  3. Shapes in Notebooks
  4. Prisoner by Request
  5. Dream of Calm
  6. How to Overcome Crisis
  7. Almost Done
  8. Temporary Happiness

Interior Drawings is the third album in the Lockdown Trilogy that was begun back in 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic, and added to in the spring of 2021 during some subsequent wave. The first two albums are rather existential in theme, dealing with the emotional response to literal lockdowns and enforced isolation. This one is not.

This time around, Duda has presented us with an exercise in recursiveness: he’s made a fascinating attempt to use music to represent the process of creating music – at least, Mariusz Duda’s mode of creating music. Each song represents a step along the way, from initial inspiration (“Racing Thoughts”) through battling creative roadblocks (“How to Overcome Crisis”) to the final product (“Temporary Happiness”). This makes Interior Drawings a much more literal album than the others. There is isolation here, but it is the kind of self-isolation required in order to complete a project, and not imposed from outside. It’s an intriguing approach, and it will be interesting to see (hear?) if he has succeeded.

Each track tries to evoke the mood and experience suggested in the title. While I don’t plan to discuss each song on the album, some of them really do give us a sensory glimpse into the process of creating. The first track, “Racing Thoughts”, is piano-heavy, and fast — we feel the initial swirl of ideas, and the intensity of trying to capture them,pinning them down. There is a palpable sense of the excitement of starting a fresh project.

“Interior Drawings” starts with the sounds of drawing – literally. Duda has even posted a short video of this: pencil in hand, drawing a square, circle, triangle, over and over, a visual representation of the musical representation of the making of this music (did I mention the recursiveness of the album?); then bass and electronic percussion start to build. Clearly these are the initial ideas taking shape; the song winds up with a rather beautiful piano theme, something that would not be out of place as an outro on a Lunatic Soul or Riverside track.

At the moment my favourite piece is “Almost Done”, a track of impelling forward movement, dark and full of synths and electronic drums, with little familiar themes tracking in the background. This really does give the feeling of the end in sight, racing towards the goal.

 The album (and our journey into the making of the album) ends with “Temporary Happiness”: more upbeat and brighter, a nice smooth melody and soft vocals – appropriate given that the project is finally done. It ends – again literally – with the sounds of someone locking doors, street noises, steps walking away as the last repetitive theme fades into the background. A final soft chuckle, and it’s done.

 As with the other albums in the trilogy, Interior Drawings is minimalist, mostly instrumental, mostly electronic, created largely on digital instruments. However, Duda makes great use of analogue piano and adds more vocals. There is also more straight melody here – in fact, there is much that is reminiscent of Lunatic Soul, or at least of Under the Fragmented Sky, in its moody electronic jaggedness. It does remain distinct though – the whole trilogy does – from Duda’s other projects.

Interior Drawings is a richer, denser, more melodic album than the other two in the Lockdown Trilogy. While I think that it lacks some of the overall diversity of Claustrophobic Universe, the addition of real piano and vocals adds depth to it: the album feels more grounded, more accessible. It is quite a personal album, too: we don’t often get an inside look at how creativity works, so we are privileged to go on a musical tour with Duda as he walks us through his process.

 Interior Drawings, and the whole Lockdown Trilogy, give us a side of Mariusz Duda that he hasn’t had much chance to show us before, his main focus being on Riverside and Lunatic Soul. With this trilogy, he has reached back into his past, to his early influences and first musical loves, bringing them forward to this new reality. I think it is safe to say that Duda has a lot of ideas left to find and shape, and we look forward to hearing them for many years to come.

 

Album Review: Score by Upcdownc

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Released: August 28, 2020

 Personnel:

  • Chris Garth: guitars, effects, synths, piano, percussion, saw
  • James Bridges: bass, synths, effects
  • Dale Forster: drums and percussion

 Tracklist:

  • 1. Power of Three
  • 2. Arc
  • 3. Eternals
  • 4. A Bundle of Limbs
  • 5. Miar
  • 6. A Conversation About Fire
  • 7. Cold Harbour

 Upcdownc is a U.K. band who has existed for close to 20 years, which gives them a rather impressive history and a lot of experience.  Kudos, frankly, to any band who has slogged it out for nearly two decades in an increasingly unforgiving industry. They currently slot into the sludge/doom metal genre, with lots of post-metal crossover (especially in earlier days). Their latest album, Score, distills a lot of that sound and experience into a solidly atmospheric package.

 Score is an album of mood pieces and often intense riffage, and unlike the last offering (I, Awake from 2017), it is entirely instrumental — or at least as close to it as makes no difference. The tracks are based on repeated themes that build slowly, dark and unsettling, charge ahead, and then drop back into slow contemplation. There are separate songs, but the album should be taken as a whole — the tracks slide seamlessly one into the next, and while each piece does evoke its own mood, they work better as part of an overall experience — and that experience is one of building unease, a vague anxiety that drifts through the whole album, and is finally softened by the last track, “Cold Harbour”.

 This, of course, makes it more difficult to focus on a specific “best” track, but if I had to choose one, I’d go with “Arc” — the longest piece on the album, and one that reflects the structure of the album as a whole: a slow, guitar-based build into a heavy-duty headbanging chordfest, then back to moody contemplation. The single “Miar” takes a similar trajectory.

 Overall, Score is a strong offering from these guys, with lots of atmosphere, slow and heavy by turns, and nicely succinct. And the title fits: the album could easily work as the backdrop to some unsettling Netflix drama. If you like your stoner rock doom-laden, or your psych rock sludgy and intense, Score may be for you.

Albums of the Decade: 2010 to 2019

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An ambitious project, to be sure, and there is every chance that if I look back on it, say, in three years, I’ll probably disagree with myself, but at the moment, this is my list.

 The albums I considered were the ones that I had already chosen in my yearly lists — most of them, anyway. Occasionally an album came along after the fact that I realized should have been included had I heard it at the right time. The chore was to figure out which of them were good enough to make The Final List. I began with about 45 albums, gleaned from my listening over the years — I had no set number I was aiming for, I just went year-by-year and chose what I considered to be the standouts from my list for that year. In the end, I narrowed it down to fifteen albums: some years were simply better for great music than others, and I see no reason to ignore that fact.

 Of course, there is the obvious question: What makes an album good enough to be an album of the decade?? It is a question that is harder to answer than I anticipated, since I have to have criteria that includes perhaps some … unexpected entries.

 It comes down to a couple of essential qualities. The first, naturally enough, is sheer staying power. It has to be an album that can stand up to repeat visits and retain the power and appeal that made it a favourite in the first place. There are lots of albums that grab me and make me play them a lot, but eventually I drift away, and whatever it was that drew me to them has gone.

 The best albums continue to be able to hit all those same triggers that snagged me in the first place: that ineluctable rush of joy, the goosebumpy thrill, forcing me to pay attention. They manifest the transcendence of the best music to me, whatever idiosyncratic stimuli I require in order to consider an album something of lasting value. It’s difficult to explain why I feel that particular set of responses for any record, given the variety of genres these albums represent — obviously the oriental-folk syncretism of Lunatic Soul is very different from the pounding hard-rock of Pretty Maids — but albums from both those outfits are capable of transporting me.

 I guess it comes down to this: whatever the music is, it must feel authentic. I am not attracted for very long to stuff that sounds forced, or derivative, or self-absorbed, or that emulates something else even with the best of intentions. The best music should feel natural, unselfconscious, emanating, as it were, from a place deep in the soul of the creators.

 In terms of the artists who made the cut: certainly there are The Usual Suspects, the ones I tend to find consistently satisfying, but I am always prepared to be surprised, and I surely have been over the years. There are albums on this list that literally came out of nowhere. There are candidates from bands that I have found unlistenable at times; there are albums that are not consistently great — that have a few tracks I don’t play very much — but the overall impact of the album as a whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. I hope at least you will find the list interesting.  

Continue reading Albums of the Decade: 2010 to 2019 →

Riverside: Wasteland

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Released September 28, 2018

 Personnel

  • Mariusz Duda: vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, piccolo bass, banjo, guitar solo on “Lament” and “Wasteland”
  • Piotr Kozieradzki: drums
  • Michał Łapaj: keyboards and synthesizers, rhodes piano and hammond organ, theremin on “Wasteland”

 Guests

  • Maciej Meller: guitar solo on “Acid Rain – Part 2: Dancing Ghosts”, “Guardian Angel”, “The Struggle for Survival Part II – Battle Royale’” and “River Down Below”
  • Michał Jelonek – violin on “The Day After”, “Lament” and “Wasteland”
  • Mateusz Owczarek – guitar solo on “Vale of Tears”

 Tracklist:

  1. The Day After
  2. Acid Rain: Part I – Where are we now?; Part II – Dancing Ghosts
  3. Vale of Tears
  4. Guardian Angel
  5. Lament
  6. Struggle for Survival: Part I – Dystopia; Part II – Battle Royale
  7. River Down Below
  8. Wasteland
  9. The Night Before

 If you have been reading reviews for Wasteland, you already know how they tend to start, so I will not repeat all that. In summary: Wasteland is probably the most fraught album in Riverside’s career, awaited with enormous anticipation, apprehension, trepidation…and so on. As fans, we all know why.

 The big question is: Did the decision to continue as a trio, with no permanent replacement for the beloved Piotr Grudziński, actually work? Did they pull it off? The responses have ranged from enthusiastic “absolutely!”s to carefully worded versions of “nope”, and everything in between. The only thing we knew for sure about Wasteland was that it wasn’t going to be the same as the previous albums, but Mariusz Duda always says that. I did have a hint of the sound to come, hearing something early in the spring albeit in an unfinished form, and I liked it very much; but auditory memory being what it is (bad), I wasn’t willing to bet the farm on that few minutes of a demo heard once.

 Three singles were released in the weeks before the album hit. Promotion, marketing – it is an understandable practice, but it is fair to say that for the most part, these songs caused more consternation than relief among the fanbase. I was certainly among those consternated. The first, “Vale of Tears”, despite some interesting moments, came across as a rather cliché poppy mashup of … well, everything. What on earth was that all about? There was a gradual improvement with the next two such that by the time “Lament” appeared, folks had gotten their hopes up again…but still, doubt had been sown.

 Then Wasteland arrived. And all my doubts were vaporized. Well, after about the third listen…but gone. Continue reading Riverside: Wasteland →