It was difficult to know what to do with this album. Clearly it is the number one album of my year, but it didn’t take too many listens to realize that this was an album I could not in good conscience stick into the same list with the other, mere music offerings – it was hardly fair to them. At any rate, since it transcends just about everything else I’ve heard—not only this year but maybe for the last decade, I decided to put it into its own category. So yes, my list goes to eleven. 😀
The actual review for this album can be found here. Please read it if you want a detailed, somewhat rational take on it.
I have to admit, I was somewhat anxious about how this album was going to fit in with the other three Lunatic Soul albums. It is difficult to describe what this music means to me–hell I wouldn’t even call it “music”…whatever it is that is at the heart and soul of Lunatic Soul: the approach and sounds, the musical philosophy and vision…it absolutely enmeshes itself into me. It is essential like blood and bone and breath. I am astonished that something like this even exists out there, and abjectly grateful to whatever fates might be at work that I was able to find it (or that it found me…there is a case to be made for that).
But enough of that.
I needn’t have worried. WoaFB is different, but only in the details. The essence of Lunatic Soul has not changed, in fact maybe even more Lunatic Soul-ish…likely because its creator was more focused and it is a true solo album, with no dilution of vision through other people (yes, there is a drummer, but clearly Mariusz Duda and Wawrzyniec Dramowicz are on the same wavelength).
However…now I worry that if ever I am stranded on that Desert Island, forty percent of my album allocation is already accounted for. I wonder if I can pretend it is a single item….
This is just a summary list of the albums I have reviewed and the gigs I went to this year. Please visit the previous posts if you want to read what I said and listen to select tracks. If not…then this post winds it up (almost…).
The Top 10 Albums
10. Sounds Like the End of the World: Stages of Delusion
9. John Wesley: Disconnect
8. Knifeworld: The Unravelling
7. Rival Sons: Great Western Valkyrie
6. Tuber: Desert Overcrowded
5. The Pineapple Thief: Magnolia
4. Tune: Identity
3. Katatonia: Kocytean
2. Seven Impale: City of the Sun
1. Salt of the Chief Cornerstone: Intelligent Design
This was one of those albums that came out of the blue. A recommendation from a friend, he also provided the warning: “give them a chance” – which can be regarded as either a challenge, or a red flag. And the first time I played the album, I knew exactly what he meant: I spent a lot of the time thinking, “What the fuck is going on here??” But I also got that feeling…the one where I have no idea if I liked what I heard, but there was something. Albums that start out that way, that leave me bemused and intrigued, that demand revisiting in order to make sense of them, often end up being long-term winners.
Who are they? A six-piece from Bergen, Norway. What are they? Well, it is hard to describe what they do. Psychedelic jazz-rock-fusion, lots of saxophone winding all through prog-like songs, they sound deceptively loose and crazy, but don’t be fooled. What we have here is masterfully-controlled chaos.
While they do not really sound like any of those bands, they are reminiscent of Soft Machine, Quiet Sun, a bit of jazz-era Crimson. Each song is a surprise, the way the elements are all intertwined, sliding smoothly from raucus disorganized noise to nice melodic themes, changing up the time signatures but not in that self-referential way that modern prog bands tend to do—when it happens, it’s like it takes everyone by surprise, listener and performer both.
Every time I play this album, I am surprised how much I like what I hear, because otherwise every musical instinct tells me this is not the kind of thing that holds my attention. But these guys are the real deal. They don’t sound quite like anyone else, and sometimes they sound less like a band than a loose collective of people wandering in and out of the songs at random. If you do choose to listen…well, give them a chance.
The Pineapple Thief had never struck me as especially noteworthy before this on the few times I had sampled their stuff. I found them pleasant but somewhat conventional, and not memorable enough to convince me to investigate more fully.
Magnolia is a different kettle of fish: here we have a dozen shortish tracks that are more than just pleasant timewasters, they are quite substantial, with very powerful melodies and great hooks, moving easily from soft ballad-like passages to heavy driving dense guitars in the same song. The songs are lush, memorable in feel, they can be quite orchestral, very nice songwriting happening here. This is exactly the sort of thing I need when I’m not looking for a musical challenge, nor do I want drony background sounds, but I also want music that is interesting in its own right if I choose to pay closer attention. I’m not sure if it is enough to make me run out and buy the rest of the discography, but it’s one of those albums that serves its purpose above and beyond the call of duty, fine enough to make it into the top end of the list.
So here we are, the albums that made the cut for the year…
Number 10
Sounds Like the End of the World: Stages of Delusion
Sounds Like the End of the World is a 5-piece instrumental post-rock outfit, recently formed, from Gdansk, Poland. I had never heard of them, until one of them (or maybe their manager, I forget) popped up in my Facebook chat with a link. So I checked them out and pretty much liked what I heard.
They tend to play at the more sedate end of post-rock, and that tends not to be my favourite part of the genre, but they can turn on the heavy when they want to, enriching the guitar/bass/drum sound with keyboards which adds an nice textural element to their sound. However, after a while it does begin to all sound similar, and I find that my attraction to the music depends on my mood. Sometimes it does not work, and sometimes it does. For that reason the album was in and out of the Top 10 like a yoyo, until I finally decided that it really is more satisfying to listen to than the other contender for the spot. And I certainly enjoy it more than most of the stuff I have heard this year.
Since this is more than an Album of the Year…it gets the full treatment.
Released October 2014 on Kscope and Mystic Productions (Poland)
Personnel:
Mariusz Duda: vocals, bass and acoustic guitars, ukelele, keyboards, percussion
Wawrzyniec Dramowicz: drums
Tracklist:
Shutting Out the Sun
Cold
Gutter
Stars Sellotaped
The Fear Within
Treehouse
Pygmalion’s Ladder
Sky Drawn in Crayon
Walking on a Flashlight Beam
Pages turn in a book…we hear the sea: slow waves rattling on the shingled beach, an echo-y one-note bass-line, deep in the background, begins….Walking on a Flashlight Beam, the new offering from Lunatic Soul, starts where “Impression IV” on the third album left off –with the rolling hiss of waves on the shore, a deep ominous pulse of electronics in the background. It is an album where books, the sea, impressions, imagination, dreams, and fears figure large; an album that its creator struggled to make and almost didn’t. But it is here, and what a gift it is.
Walking on a Flashlight Beam is the fourth Lunatic Soul album, the solo project and eponymous alter ego of Mariusz Duda, the leader of the Polish prog outfit Riverside. It works as a “prequel” to the lyric story arc of the first two Lunatic Soul albums, although that may not have been the initial intent when Duda went into the studio. He has been uncommonly forthcoming about the difficulties he experienced: The creative roadblocks and the subsequent withdrawal into personal reclusion eventually inspired the core idea of the album — the self-imposed isolation by individuals for creative or psychological reasons (such as hikikomori – young Japanese men who choose to seclude themselves and experience the outside world through a virtual filter). This phenomenon becomes the central motif of the album: Duda does not simply help us to imagine such isolation, he leads us straight into the agonized heart and soul of loneliness, solitude, the dark terror and desperate hope of someone who has chosen to cut himself off completely from the world. Despite that, it is a haunting, poignant, and heartbreakingly-beautiful journey we embark upon, with Mariusz Duda as our Ferryman.
It is difficult to convey how remarkably cohesive this album is. Each song fits exactly where it belongs, and there are very few wasted moments. Mood, music, lyrics are all perfectly intertwined and complementary, masterfully controlled; this consistency gives the album an organic ebb and flow that makes the 64 minutes seem like the shortest hour in the world. It is also truly a solo album: Duda has written every word and note, and played every instrument except the drums, which he has left to the almost preternatural skill of Wawrzyniec Dramowicz. This gives the album a sort of single-minded intensity not present in the other Lunatic Soul albums, and the result is almost cinematic in its vision and feel.
The album begins with “Shutting Out the Sun” and “Cold”, with their eerie ambient rhythms, winding synthesized bass lines and haunted vocals, slowly building up an unsettling sense of foreboding and unease. In “Cold” there seems a faint hope of redemption: the protagonist of the lyrics has shut himself away but still longs for human contact. Alas the soul-consuming terrors return in “Gutter”. This is a monster of a song. With its hypnotic eastern-flavoured themes, a dense, intricate bass line, and pounding, implacable rhythms, this astonishing track is perhaps the most primal and erotic music ever to come from the creative imagination of Mariusz Duda — it is damned near pornographic. No wonder it is a fan favourite.
At the end of “Gutter” our hero triple-locks his door. The largely instrumental middle part of the album carries us into an internal world of anxiety, isolation and imaginings. The briefly ambient “Stars Sellotaped” transitions into the jagged orthogonal rhythms and intersecting trancelike themes of the aptly-named “The Fear Within”– then a surprise: The gentle, upbeat and downright conventional “Treehouse”. This song is certainly an attention-grabber, a bright light against the dark, angst-driven mood of the rest of the album.
The last third of the album kicks off with “Pygmalion’s Ladder”, the longest and most complex track on the album, with echoes of “Gutter” in its structure: driving rhythms and oriental themes, and what may be some of Duda’s most delicate and moving singing yet. The moods in the song flit from acceptance to resignation to a final astonished terror—this is the climactic song for the protagonist, for whom a line is crossed, a fate sealed….
And with the last two tracks the mood lifts: no more fear and isolation, but the unnerving electronic buzz that cuts through the otherwise delicately beautiful “Sky Drawn in Crayon” reminds us of the darkness that lies beneath. The magnificent “Walking on a Flashlight Beam” winds up the album. This is arguably one of Mariusz Duda’s finest compositions–calming, reflective, with heartbreakingly-gorgeous singing, a ray of light to end the journey.
Walking on a Flashlight Beam is very much an electronic album, more than any of the previous Lunatic Soul offerings, and this gives it a very different feel. It is dark and downright disquieting at times, but somehow never bleak: There are very ambient trance-like moments, delicate acoustic passages, and drivingly heavy industrial moments. It is dense, textural, restless with percussion. As with all the Lunatic Soul albums, there is no electric guitar, but there are overdriven effects that mimic the sound. With Mariusz Duda at the helm we can count on two things: his silky distinctive vocals, and a focus on melody—and on this album Duda has surpassed himself. As fine as his vocals have been on all previous albums, both Lunatic Soul and Riverside—apparently that was all just practice. There are vocal and melodic moments on this album that beggar description.
In short, Walking on a Flashlight Beam is a magnificent work of art. Whatever demons drove its creation, the result is an emotional tour de force of utterly inspired songwriting and performance. It compels attention and grabs onto the soul: Duda has said that his solo project is “music for the Souls whether they be Lunatic or not”—and anyone with any kind of musical soul will be unable to escape its enormous relentless capacity to make you feel. It is definitely my album of the year, and it is likely to place very high on many year-end lists.
In the last post I presented the albums from 2014 that I played through once or twice; however, it was difficult to come up with a reasonable Short List because so few of those albums tweaked any real interest. I like to create a short list of albums wherein most of them have some kind of shot at making the final Ten, but this time I had to add a few no-hopers just for padding. It really was pointless, but…oh well, I did it anyway.
This seems to be a fitting way to open up my blog to the world, it certainly encompasses one of the main themes. In the next couple of posts I will present my list of albums and shows of 2014: not only the Top Ten albums, but the near misses, the complete losers, and the gigs I attended. It should also serve to provide an indication of the kind of music I listen to and like; rather than try and explain it, you can just see the process in action.
It is unfortunate however that it was not a better year for music. Certainly there were plenty of releases, there always are: but the proportion that interested me, even for a brief time, was very low, compared to the year before—at least, that is how it seems. A few other people I know also complained of finding very little of interest as well, so maybe it wasn’t just me. In the end, I could not even put together a shortlist of 20 albums to whittle down, and for most of the year I didn’t even have 10 in total to work with, let alone a Top Ten. Thankfully the latter part of the year was better than the first half and brought in some serious contenders.
So let’s get down to it: In alphabetical order are the albums I considered, however briefly, over the past year. It might not seem like a lot, but there were other issues, not relevant to this post, that prevented me from spending as much time with my music as I otherwise would have. In the next post: The Short List
