It’s done: a comprehensive survey of the relevant musical recordings of the Jan 2010-Dec 2010 period so that future historians can look back and hear the sounds that had us all shaking our leg-warmers in the disco-clubs.
I didn’t go with a ‘cut’ (or is it ‘joint’? I can never tell. Rap is hard.) from Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It was, as Pitchfork pointed out, a very good record, a career best, but I’m sure that anybody who would appreciate it has heard it already.
The track list is as follows:
Swans – You Fucking People Make Me Sick
Xasthur – Broken Glass Christening
High On Fire – Bastard Samurai
Earl Sweatshirt – Earl
Deerhunter – Desire Lines
The Body – Lathspell I Name You
WU LYF – Heavy Pop
Alcest – Percees de Lumiere
Tennis – Marathon
Zola Jesus – Run Me Out
Das Racist – Ek Shaneesh
Amanda Palmer – Idioteque
Wrnlrd – Death Drive
Gonjasufi – She Gone
Salem – Killer
Agalloch – To Drown
The last song is significant not only in allowing me to close the album with enough grandeur and majesty to reanimate Richard Wagner, but because Agalloch’s The Marrow of the Spirit is my Album of the Year. Yay.
With Marrow Portland Oregon’s Agalloch have pulled off the difficult feat of releasing the greatest album of their career fifteen years after the band formed. Try to envisage MGMT or Vampire Weekend’s magnum opus arriving in 2022 and you’ll see the magnitude of Don Anderson, John Haughm, Jason William Walton and Aesop Dekker’s achievement. It is fitting that a band who are so heavily influenced by nature would obey nature’s rhythms as opposed to those of the music industry. Like the songs on Marrow, the shortest of which is nine minutes and forty seconds if you don’t count the album’s intro, Agalloch have grown and evolved. This is not to say that their first real album, 1999′s Pale Folklore is by any means primitive- Agalloch are not Ulver, who started out as folk-influenced Black Metal and ended up in unclassifiable electronic weirdness by way of a two disc William Blake inspired concept album, or that they have mellowed with age- Into the Painted Grey from Marrow is closer to Black Metal than anything they have recorded previously. Their progression has been, appropriately, organic.
They aren’t just getting this accolade for releasing a career best album- Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest is their finest recording to date, Malefic closed the books on his Xasthur project and said goodbye to metal with a record that will be hard to top no matter which genre he uses next. The Marrow of the Spirit would be the best album released this year if it was a debut by a previously unknown cadre of mountain-men who had just wandered down from the Cascades covered in mud and deer gibbets. As with any great piece of art its greatness is multi-dimensional, but I would like to venture something: part of what makes it great is that it is accessible. This term is almost prejorative when discussing music, one step away from ‘pandering’, and there is often an undertone of dissapointment when a beloved band release an album that could be described as ‘accessible’. Imagine if Radiohead’s next album was written primarily as a jumping-on point for teenagers who missed out on The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. Marrow will appeal to many people who wouldn’t normally listen to Black Metal, though I doubt your kid sister is going to make the jump from Ke$ha based on the mournful minor-key acoustic strumming in The Watcher’s Monolith.
There are people out there for whom The Marrow of the Spirit will be the first Black Metal album that they will hear. Looking through the rest of the Black Metal genre they will find genuine progress being made by a few outsiders and a deluge of Mayhem cover bands staffed by fascist lunkheads. The few of them who start bands will bring what they learned from Agalloch with them whether their musical is explicitly metal or another genre (indie-rock is in serious need of blackening). Music will get a little bit better for The Marrow of the Spirit being made.
Gnaw Their Tongues – Le Chant De La Mort Triomphante (with bonus awful Dimmu Borgir video!)
I’m busy putting together a Best of 2010 compilation and realizing that a lot of great music will have to be cut if I’m going to keep it all under ninety minutes. Then there’s the question of including something from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy- should my remit be to simply list the best releases of the past 365 days or show that there were amazing things happening in places you wouldn’t expect? Does Girl Talk count? What about covers? Why can’t I just give the 1-9 spots to Agalloch and make everyone else joint 10th?
Gnaw Their Tongues didn’t make the cut, so I’m putting them here. Gnaw’ is Netherlander Maurice de Jong and what sounds like every symphony orchestra in the western world. 2010 has seen more neoclassical elements work their way into black metal than in the past decade. Every corpse-painted misanthrope and his goat is getting a cellist into their parents’ basement to lay down mournful soundscapes. As with any sudden bandwagon jump there is bound to be more music produced simply to be part of a trend rather than in reverence of the artistic impulses that started that trend (I’m looking at you every single bedroom Witch House producer on Soundcloud). GTT has been doing this a lot longer than most and a lot better than almost anybody. Looking at you Dimmu Borgir. Because you are the worst. Evidence below.
According to Wikipedia that wasn’t Robyn doing the female vocals in that video, but you can’t really believe a source that can be edited by just anybody so I’m going to assume that it was. Also, I’d much rather look at grainy static images of an album cover (even that Scorpions album with the naked ten year old) than pretentious Kerrang! TV fodder. On a more positive note, I would be very happy if I got a Squid Crown for Christmas.
The Weight of Darkness – Agalloch’s The Marrow of the Spirit
“The initial point of departure for this album was cinema,” says Agalloch bassist Jason William Walton. “We had a specific feel, imagery and pace that we communicated with each other through cinematic references long before musical references. That has long been the case, but much more so with this album.”
Reflecting on the majestic, 65-and-a-half-minute journey on Agalloch’s fourth full-length album Marrow of the Spirits, one can’t help but feel that it’s been as much a cinematic experience as much as a musical one. The Portland, Oregon band has always created grand, sweeping sonic landscapes over the course of their career, but there’s something about the new record that feels like it could lend itself brilliantly to the visual imagery of, say, Alejandro Jodorowsky or Werner Hezog. From the subdued overture of “They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness”, to the vast, epic overtones of “Black Lake Nidstång”, to the striking climax of “To Drown”, Marrow of the Spirits would practically beg for a visual complement were it not already powerful enough for the listener to conjure mental images on his or her own.
“It wasn’t until we told [Steven Wray Lobdell, producer] that we were thinking of the album as a film that he understood immediately what we were often trying to do,” adds guitarist Don Anderson. “Strange how a medium that is purely visual can communicate so perfectly. We would regularly reference Sergio Leone, or Bergman and everyone seemed to instantly know the necessary mood.”
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix also plays in Liturgy, one of the best (that is, most progressive) BM acts to have emerged during the Great North American Wave of the early 21st century.
I avoided that whole DJ phase when I was a kid- there’s no branch of Cash Generator out there with the pair of Numark decks and cheap crossfader I sold a year after buying them. Maybe I’m experiencing a late adolescence because I’ve gone and made a DJ mix. It would also explain the pubes.
The Anti Christ Suite is mostly Drag, or Witch House, with a significant contribution from the genres that inspired chillwave’s dark twin, chiefly black metal and new wave. There’s even two cuts from the soundtrack to Inception, which you really ought to have seen by now.
Although I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a ‘concept album’ or claiming any sort of inspiration, it does have a set of samples from Lars Von Trier’s film Anti Christ. When I first saw the film at Norwich’s Cinema City in 2009 there was not only screaming and several walk-outs but a ghost caught on camera.
Click the image above to play or this link to download (134mb).
Full track listing after the jump: Continue reading
Back in March a new Xasthur record came out, Xasthur quit being Xasthur and absolutely no motherfucker has told me. Thanks a lot liberal media.
The Artist Formerly Known as Xasthur is releasing Portal of Sorrow on his own Disharmonic Variations label- it features his collaboration with alt-folk chanteuse Marissa Nadler and is already sold out.
I’m going to go kill myself and listen to Xasthur. You’re going to listen to Xasthur and read Cold World, by Dominic Fox, out on Zero Books, which will explain why Xasthur is essential.
I don’t normally go for bands with a schtick (it brings on the Mudvayne flashbacks) but I am interested in seeing bands do something interesting with Black Metal (I’m looking at you Ulver), and I am particularly interested in bands who are trying to find a British way to do something interesting with Black Metal.
As usual, I have a theory: Black Metal is at heart a nationalistic musical genre. Yes, that does mean that it will attract more than its fair share of Fascist meatheads who see the idea of national culture as a battle royale when it should be a potlatch, but it means that there are more creative possibilities available to the Black Metal musician than ‘try to sound like Darkthrone did in ’91′. So you get innumerable Scandinavian and Eastern European bands (even some of the aforementioned Fascist meatheads) using folk instrumentation on one side of Atlantic and on the other acts like Wolves in the Throne Room using the Cascade mountains for inspiration or New Yorkers Liturgy tipping their hats to Lower East-Side experimentalists like LaMont Young and Glenn Branca instead of the usual slurry of Tolkein and the Cotard delusion. Continue reading
Terror and Fabulous are two words that sound unreasonably good when put together, so there's no reason that they should be monopolised by an acclaimed 90s Dancehall DJ and can't be used as the title of a blog by Gareth Watkins of near to London, England.
There's no theme.
Okay, there's a theme: Things Are Not Okay, but this site will ignore the way things are and promote the work of artists and intellectuals who show us hints of how things could be.
I post MP3s. I do this to promote awareness of certain artists and to encourage critical engagement with their music. If you are an artist whose work I have featured or the owner of any copyrighted material that appears on this site then your first step should be to consider how I've advertised your product for free and how sending me further .mp3s to feature would be good business sense, or to send an email to terror.fabulous(at)gmail.com requesting the removal of specific songs from the site, which I will respond to as quickly as I am able.
