17. Fin - Arrows of a Dying Age
16. Priests - Nothing Feels Natural
15. Pallbearer - Heartless
14. Jason Moran - BANGS
13. Craig Finn - We All Want the Same Things
12. Satan's Hallow - Satan's Hallow
11. Kamasi Washington - Harmony of Difference
10. Death Fortress - Triumph of the Undying
09. Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society - Simultonality
08. Cameron Graves - Planetary Prince
07. Tchornobog – Tchornobog
06. Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up
05. Elder - Reflections of a Floating World
04. Black Cilice - Banished from Time
03. Archspire - Relentless Mutation
02. Cleric - Retrocausal
01. Myrkur - Mareridt
(Write-up below)
17. Fin - Arrows of a Dying Age
This release is (as far as I can recall), the only straight black metal album that I have ever been able to put on during a workout. This may seem like a pointless reason to like an album, and a ridiculous reason to put it into a top albums list, but I think this fact sheds light on an interesting ability Fin possess in comparison to other black metal bands. To get at exactly what I mean by this I will have to take a quick step backwards. Metal, while often called harsh and dissonant by people who dislike the genre, is not Schoenbergian 12 tone music. While more dissonant than the mainstream, to be certain, like almost all genres of music, it has it's own peculiar brand of consonance, it's own system of producing pleasing sound that embeds itself into the subconscious of listeners and thereby perpetuates itself when said listeners turn to start bands of their own (sometimes without them ever realizing it). Now, some metal bands employ metal's particular styles of consonance more than others, and, while any attempt to divide this along subgenre lines will produce tons of exceptions, certain styles are more apt to aim for this consonance than others. On the one end of the spectrum you have traditional and power metal, on the other end you have black metal and tech death. In between these points, though typically a little bit closer to the dissonant end of the spectrum, are the melodic brethren of black and death metal.
If we look at the songwriting of a representative example of melodic black metal as compared to it's traditional cousin, say Dissection's "Storm of the Light's Bane", we see a couple distinctions that push the genre into more consonant territory. The first is that, as a whole (again, exceptions abound), melodic black metal has a stronger tendency towards the major scale and it's modes over either the chromatic, the other non-traditional scales, or the major scale with the addition of dissonant notes. The second difference is more important, though both are required for a true melodic black metal sound to form. Where traditional black metal typically tries to stick to as steady and regular a rhythm as possible in the guitar lines, often tremolo picking a single note for the exact length of a beat, or even a whole a bar, and then looping this simple pattern for the majority of a song, melodic black metal will make some slight but significant alterations to this approach. They will keep a fairly steady rhythm but change it just enough to give one note a greater emphasis. For instance, where a traditional black metal band might have played a riff similar to what Dissection used on "Where Dead Angel's Lie", written in the E minor scale (E, F♯, G, A, B, C, and D), and, on the opening tremolo riff, made up of a E, G, A, F# pattern, played evenly spaced sixteenths notes and switching up each beat, perhaps even breaking from the scale a bit to give the music a greater sense of hostility, Dissection instead shape the pattern into sixteenth note triplets, giving the E and A (the tonic and fourth) a greater amount of riff time than the comparatively harsher F# and G (the major second and minor third). This allows the sound a bit more consonance without sacrificing much of the black metal's trademark harshness.
So where do Fin fit in with all this? Well that is where things get interesting. I think the metal community as a whole was right to label this a black metal release and not a melodic black metal one, because, all in, the songwriting is mostly built around the more traditional style of riff writing, but the pseudonymous M.F. has a gift for finding just the right moment to jump over to something out of the melodic tradition. Now I don't want to give the impression that the band have invented the idea of blurring the lines between the two subgenres. It is rare to find an act on either end of the spectrum that doesn't push at least a little bit towards the other side every once in a while. It is not the idea of further blending these two closely related subgenres that makes "Arrows of a Dying Age" great, it is the way they go about doing it.
So the foundation of this release is traditional black metal. Taking a rough guess, I would say that about half of the riffs on this album are straight BM fare. Typically either the aforementioned steady tremolo picking held fairly hard to the rhythm, or the kind of riff that starts off in a similar way but then switches to either an oscillating back and forth pattern at the end, typically via hammer-ons, or else doubling the rate of note change during the second stage. Bread and butter black metal stuff, almost always fairly dissonant. But then Fin will introduce a little flourish at just the right point. Perhaps a scale pattern in one of the major modes at the end of a tremolo riff, they might put a greater emphasis on the tonic (the note the key is in) a la the Dissection riff I mentioned above, perhaps a traditional bm riff but using intervals that are a bit more consonant than usual, every once in a while (but very rarely) they will introduce a riff that follows a easily discernible melodic line. Fin never lean too hard into these flourishes. They implement them at just the right moment so that their sound can retain the discordant qualities of traditional black metal, but use them just often enough to replace the typical sense of murky atmosphere native to their genre with a sense of drive and momentum. Also, the homage to Morricone's western soundtracks on the album's closer was something I never thought I'd here on a black metal album.
16. Priests - Nothing Feels Natural
The first point of comparison that comes to my mind is X Ray Spex, both groups use the rough primitivism of punk rock as a launching point for a far more eclectic brand of assault than their contemporaries. The band combines Dead Kennedys-esque surf rock playing with a broad swathe of stylistic techniques from the modern (and pre-modern) indie rock scene: everything from the hooky-but-a-little-bit-dissonant bridge melodies to the Television inspired interlocking bass and guitar melodies to the Joy Division-esque rumbling-bass-line-with-the-guitar-playing-chords verse transition to rumbling-bass-line-with-complementary-riff chorus techniques
The biggest link between Priests and X Ray Spex are their respective vocalists. Both Katie Alice Greer and Poly Styrene employ a style of singing, vocal phrasing, and lyric writing that at once borrows from and mocks advertising slogans. Both feature a surprisingly soulful vocal approach that at the same time just drips with punk's defiance, but filtered through an unconventional, unhindered, and unabashed femininity. I try to avoid reading interviews and other similar write ups on band's personal lives because I find it tends to interfere and does not add to the quality of the music, so I could be wrong about this, but I am pretty sure the track "Pretty White House" is a deliberate homage to Styrene on Greer's part. Everything from the vocal timbre to the subtle phrasing seems deeply inspired by X Ray Spex. The one thing about this release that I am not a big fan of is the fact that Greer has traded Poly Styrene's beautiful, self-depreciating sense of humor for a sense of introspection that fits in a bit more with the contemporary rock mores, but all in it is an great album.
15. Pallbearer - Heartless
This one took a while for me to really lock into. At first I thought it was significantly weaker than their preceding two masterpieces. I tried really hard over the summer to like this album as much as the rest of the metal community seemed to, but I just couldn't. Then, around November, I decided to give it another go and suddenly I found that I was listening to an amazing album. A real danger of funeral doom is that the steady throbbing can lead to a sense of monotony, and I think Pallbearer's grandest achievement is that their gifted command of the art of songwriting allows them to take, what is my opinion one of the more constricting subgenre's of metal, and really wring everything that can be wrought from it through careful craftsmanship. I think one of the reasons that this album flew past me for so long is that the varied elements are so seamlessly interwoven that they can pass you by if you aren't paying close attention.
To my mind, their songwriting approach, which uses gorgeous interlocking melodies which are in turn intimately tied to a slow relentless advance of thudding guitars, is reminiscent of Baroness. However, where Baroness seek to go for something like a blitzkrieg that comes from nowhere with an onslaught of destruction, Pallbearer's approach is more like that of the Red Army, or perhaps more fittingly Alexander I's army during the Napoleonic Wars, ever moving, but always just behind your field of vision, unleashing a trail of destruction that, unlike that of the German army, is tainted by the dark melancholy that comes with burning your own fields, yet always possessing absolute confidence that, sooner or later, its sheer monolithic size would overwhelm all who would seek to enter it's desolate, sprawling terrain. It's a shame we as music listeners don't spend as much time on broader retrospectives as we do on the "right now", because I could easily see this album creeping significantly higher in a hypothetical 2022's best of 2017 list.
14. Jason Moran - BANGS
I find it a bit difficult to write about what makes Jason Moran unique and special because he is one of the benchmarks against which I compare other modern jazz acts. I will readily admit that I find my jazz listening almost exclusively centered around the period from 1950 to 1970, and that I only tend to check out modern acts that have received a decent amount of attention. That being said, to my mind the biggest defining feature of modern jazz is that, like the Indie Rock scene, the 21st century has been characterized largely by the decision to look backwards and see what new things could be done with the heritage that brought the music to this particular point in time (largely owing to the fact that, with both genres, it became all but impossible to push things in the direction of any particular extreme).
In this regard, what makes Jason Moran special is the sheer scope of what he can incorporate into his playing and songwriting. What makes BANGS so interesting to me is the effortless way it infuses such a broad variety of jazz traditions into it's sonic palate, particularly many of the oldest styles of jazz. In that regard this release reminds of of Mingus' "Ah Um", in that neither release abase themselves before nostalgia or homage, but both pull something inexplicably fresh and modern from traditions that are old and storied even by the standards of jazz. Of course, in Mingus' time, the kind of music he sought to emulate on “Ah Um” was on the opposite end of the jazz spectrum from the kind of experimentation he employed on “The Black Saint and Sinner Lady”, wheras for Moran both extremes are components of a far reaching traditional that can be mined for his needs. Thus the consummately traditional “My Father's House” is preceded by the avant-garde “White Space” and followed by “Conspiracy Blue”, a composition unlike any I have ever heard before.
13. Craig Finn - We All Want the Same Things
I have no love for the (apparently now former) New Yorker music writer Sasha Frere-Jones, but as much as I hate to admit it, his assertion that The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle and The Hold Steady's Craig Finn are the two greatest lyricists outside hip-hop was accurate when he made it about a decade ago, and, to the extent of my knowledge, remains accurate to this day.
While my heart has ample room for both songwriters, my preference is decidedly towards Finn. I regard The Hold Steady's "Boys and Girls in America" as the greatest rock and roll album of the millennium thus far, so you can take that as an acknowledgment of my bias. It is obviously impossible to provide any objective assessment of music, as there is no aesthetic criteria that can be established as valuable without reference to other aesthetic criteria (or if there are, they are very broad and foundational, like Pound's literary take on Occam's razor). However, there are certain consensuses that exist, and, paradoxically, when one dives into the more educated circles of musical knowledge, both the amount of stylistic disagreements and the amount of fundamental consensuses rise.
Because of my close personal connection to Finn's music (which is something very different from liking or even loving a release) you would be right to be a bit guarded with any grandiose assertions on my part on his abilities. However, I really do think that, so long as you accept some of baseline assertions regarding the art of wordcraft, ideas like "the more vivid an image that can be produced, the better", and "that which expresses something of depth and complexity is greater than something that expresses banalities", it can be said that Finn is a masterful lyricist.
The reason this is so important is that, unlike The Hold Steady, where Finn's words are bathed in glow of Springsteen-ian grandeur and Meat Loaf-ian bombast, his solo material pulls back that full band sound so that Craig's lyrics really take center stage. You can listen to any of The Hold Steady's releases ten times before you even start to notice the lyrics and another hundred before their depth and power really sink in. "We All Want the Same Things", by contrast, leaves you with no choice but to confront Finn's words, so if slice of life pictures of the deep pain and transcendent beauty of America's underbelly just don't appeal to you, this release will probably will not either.
This does not necessarily make this a weaker release than the best of The Hold Steady's output (though it is). If a song were to come out with the greatest bass lines, guitar riffs, piano melodies, the most intricate drum patterns of all time, the end result would be convoluted mess. Drawing one element to the spotlight allows that element, assuming it is done properly, to shine in a way that it would not even with magnificent accompaniment. This is why "God in Chicago", which features, for a vast majority of the song, nothing more than spoken word lyrics and a two chord piano accompaniment, is not just an album highlight or a career highlight, but a high watermark for music as a whole. I'll freely admit that some of the other songs on this release don't merit the kind of heightened attention this style of songwriting enforces, but the moments when Finn is really firing on all cylinders more than make up for the lulls.
12. Satan's Hallow - Satan's Hallow
This self titled debut is of such uniform quality that I believe one could use it as a constant in a mathematical equation, which would look something like this:
E/S = O
Where:
S = Satan's Hallow: The rating, on a 1 to 100 scale, that you give this release.
E = Eighties High Quality Average: The rating you would give a typical upper echelong traditional metal release from the eighties. I'm not talking about the absolute cream of the crop, the "Painkiller"s, "Holy Diver"s, and "Powerslave"s (or "The Number of the Beast" if that is more to your taste), but that rung immediately below it. The "Piece of Mind"s, "Fighting the World"s, and "See You in Hell"s. Obviously this is the trickiest number to produce, so I would suggest factoring out the bands you hold in particularly high esteem in comparison to the rest of the metal community, but, at the same time, these should be releases you highly value. A good benchmark would be to take your top thirty traditional metal albums of the eighties, cut out the top ten, and average that. As with S, this is on a 1-100 scale.
O = Overrate Multiplier. This is the number that shows how much you tend to overrate albums from the 1980s as compared with new releases.
So if a person gave straight 100s across the board to every Maiden release from "Killers" to "Seventh Son", and likewise to all of Judas Priest's eighties output save "Turbo" and "Ram it Down", but only gives "Satan's Hallow" a 70, their Overrate Multiplier would be 1.42857142857. This means that you would have to either multiply every modern release by this number or divide every eighties release by it in order to get ratings that do not overvalue the golden age classics.
All of this is a long and convoluted way of saying that I believe "Satan's" Hallow deserves to be compared side by side with the absolute best traditional metal releases.
11. Kamasi Washington - Harmony of Difference
When it comes to the saxophone, I have a strong bias towards those who approach the instrument like a Norse berserker*, charging in to meet the chord changes head on and letting their battle cry ring wildly over the field. Think Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, and of course my beloved Saint Coltrane. Naturally this affinity gives me a strong bias towards Kamasi Washington, but the amount of attention this man has gotten from outside the jazz world should speak to the fact that he is not a man who has only niche appeal.
The compositions on this album are interesting to say the least. The biggest criticism I have heard of it is that many of the them have a light, pleasant, almost poppy reliance on repetition, and I think it is true that in the hands of a lesser act these songs could have been rendered into elevator music, but if you take a Grand Caravan and shove an engine with as much kick as Washington and his band, particularly pianist Cameron Graves, have, the thing is still gonna fly.
One of the most interesting trends in 2017 has been an interest in a very particular style of 60's soul arranging that was brought to it's apex in Marvin Gaye's classic "What's Goin On?". The influence of that album can be seen in as diverse a selection as Kendrik Lamar's "DNA", Fleet Foxes' "Crack-Up", and this album's closer, "Truth". While Washington explored these styles on "The Epic", "Truth" has the feel of a grand crescendo, a point where these ideas were brought fully into fruition.
Meanwhile, songs like the album's opener "Desire" and "Integrity", explore the potential of what can be done with a single, brief phrase. Again I've seen him take some crap for this from critics, but nobody give Beethoven shit for his 5th Symphony, and anybody who dislikes Coltrane's later-period interest in exploring just how much can be wrought from brief melodic ideas obviously shouldn't be trusted.
Elsewhere, you get tracks like "Humility" and "Perspective", which stick firm to the hard bop tradition and showcase a band that clearly know it inside and out. "Knowledge" is interesting for the way it recontextualizes a theme that is remarkably close to the previous track in a totally different backdrop, and thereby provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between melodic ideas and their harmonic context.
The only fault I can find with this recording is that the brief songs, all less than four minutes save the opening and closing tracks, do not allow for as much opportunity for exploration as I would like, but this also makes "Harmony of Difference" an excellent album for people looking to get into jazz who may be intimidated by the ten plus minute songs of it's heyday.
10. Death Fortress - Triumph of the Undying
It might seem weird for me to say that the merits of such an aggressive album lies in its subtleties, but I believe it to be true. There is no single quality I can point to that led me to return to this release again and again while other black metal albums were quickly forgotten, but it's overall execution is phenomenal. The band I have heard them compared the most is to Immortal, and as far as Aversario's guitar playing is concerned here, the comparison is apt. He definitely picked up what I would call, lacking of a better term, his hopscotch tremolos, from the Sons of Northern Darkness, but there is more to Death Fortress than the ability to ape the gifts of one of black metal's great forbears.
It is difficult for me to put my finger on exactly what it is that sets Death Fortress apart, but, despite the style of playing being a very traditional black metal approach, there is a sense of grandeur here that is heard more often in the genre's melodic cousin. This may sound similar to my description of Fin's release, but the practical results could not be more different. Fin's modifications to the tradition bm palate seek to give the music a more visceral sense of movement, while this music aims at a somewhat modified version of black metal's trademark sense of atmosphere. To my ears, it suggests vast, desolate, snow covered mountains rather than dank forests and forgotten caves. I think it can be partially traced to the riff writing, the very impressive drum work, the production, and a certain difficult to quantify command of the nuances of their chosen genre.
09. Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society - Simultonality
"Maroon Dune", this album's nine minute opener, gives the listener a working blueprint on what to expect from this album. The bass riff, which is the song's source of regularity and stability, confines itself entirely to two notes, but this is not some punk rock exercise in minimalism. Rather, like the great Krautrock pioneers of the 70's, Abrams and co. are interested in exploring how the steady regularity of a bare bones rock and roll rhythm can be used as a launching pad for experimentation. One of the most interesting things about "Simultonality" is the beautiful sense of subtlety in the experimental elements. This is not a traditional jazz release, where each soloist takes a turn in the spotlight. Rather different elements will flit in and out of the foreground: the guitar will add a simple accompaniment to the bass line and then hop into a few chords and jump back out, while the the various pianos, autoharps, harmoniums, etc come in with these brief, shifting phrases. The end result of this beautiful mixture of steady rhythm and delicate experimentation is an album that has all the intricacy of a free jazz release but with a regular groove that allows your mind to lock into it's pattern and ease itself into a trance-like state of receptivity.
08. Cameron Graves - Planetary Prince
This, like Cleric's "Retrocausal", is a late edition to my list, since I was not able to discover this album until mid December. Unlike Cleric's album, this was not due to it's late release date but my own inability to keep tabs on the world of Jazz. Nonetheless, despite not having as much time as I would like to really dig into this work, I still feel confident placing it on my best albums list. This because, while this is my first time hearing Graves fronting his own project (this is his debut as a bandleader), I have developed a significant appreciation for his playing style via his contributions to Kamasi Washington's latest two masterpieces. On "Planetary Prince", we see that Graves' innovative musical ideas are just as present as on Washington's work, including, among many other things, his very unique approach to melodic lines, long stretches of unyielding forward momentum, moments of classical influence, lightning fast arpeggios, and his tendency to drive his playing on until the notes come in piled one on top of each other.
That just leaves the songs themselves, and on that front this album is just as interesting. "El Diablo"'s theme is a two note pattern on the horns and a single chord played in a steady staccato style. Then, on the proceeding track, "Adam and Eve", we are presented by a lovely melody that incorporates a steady, pulsing note into a grand, beautiful melody. The pattern progresses into one of the most ornate introductions before transitioning into a theme with a traditional horns-shifting-a-single-phrase-up-and-down-in-pitch theme. There is something in these sparse thematic structures that reminds me a bit of the Canterbury scene's Soft Machine, and something in his arpeggios that reminds me of classical music, but at the same time, despite the influence of rock and classical on a structural level there is no denying that this release is a jazz record through and through, and an amazing one at that.
07. Tchornobog - Tchornobog
One of the things that really strikes me about this release is the unified vision behind it. The band have really committed themselves to going after this Slavic-deity-re-imagined-as-a-neo-Lovecraftian-horror idea, and everything about this album works towards this goal. From the lyrics to the music. From the band and album's title, to it's cover and packaging, which are some of the best I have see, featuring a really cool mural spread over both sides of the folding digipak, along with two beautifully produced booklets, one of lyrics and a "Dream Journal" that is really reminiscent of Lovecraft.
I don't know what it is about this (at least once) obscure Eastern European pagan God that has proved so fertile for creative endeavors, but besides being the most compelling and memorable of the deities in Gaiman's American Gods (save perhaps the One-Eyed One), there are like 10 metal bands named after the various spellings of his Tchornobog. But, besides Gaiman's excellent novel (seriously read it if you haven't), none have succeeded in this endeavor like this group.
As befitting a release dedicated to a deity, "Tchornobog" features vast soundscapes that all break the ten minute mark. The general term used to describe this album is black/death/doom metal, but as is befitting a release built around a non-Satanic, non-Norse diety, this music doesn't really fit within any established subgenre. Rather, the band present the different styles of metal so well dispersed that the mind never quite locks into a steady way of processing the release. They will hold onto a black metal styled riff for an obscene amount of time, and then shift into what I like to call death metal break-ups, where the music shifts to a simpler passage melodically, but unlike a breakdown, things are sped up instead of slowed down, only to choke the air out with a fuzzy doom passage, followed by a nightmarey (as in dreamy, but with an ever present sense of darkness) solo.
Another great thing about this release is the way it subtly implements instruments beyond the big three. Saxophones, trumpets, and cellos all make very slight appearances, typically just adding a brief touch of the odd that further enhances the sense of disorientation this release seeks to cultivate, the sense that you are in an alien realm, without ever drawing your attention to them. Finally there is Markov Soroka's (the songwriter and performer of all the main instrument parts) vocal performance. Here we see lyrics (and song titles) that owe quite a bit to Demilich being performed in a style that, like the rest of the music, is something I have never heard before, reaching at times into the realm of the most bizarre extreme metal vocals and then twisting just as easily into a more conventional approach.
06. Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up
I often find myself sounding a bit more Nietzschean (or heaven forbid, Randian) then I would like when discussing Fleet Foxes. My belief that the world of music, when looked at from a macro level, is composed of a series of shifting, dragging tides that most acts spend their careers either swimming with or against while a small minority make for a far off shore of their own imagining and an even more select group, by sheer force of creative will, manage to an erect an island of their own making amid the crashing waters, has all the markings of some half-baked, second rate Ubermusician theory, but I believe it all the same, and I think Robin Pecknold's work with Fleet Foxes is as good an exemplar of that final group as could be asked for.
As befitting a release that took six years to complete, "Crack-Up" moves at it's own pace. The sparse arpeggiation used on "The Plains" and "The Cascades" in 2011's "Helplessness Blues", have been expanded from brief portraiture to sweeping landscapes that stretch out before the listeners ears in all directions. Simple, stark arrangements of delicate chord sequences slowly unfurl themselves at their own pace, and then suddenly give way to grand, breathtaking crescendos. One of the great pleasures of the Fleet Foxes' music is how Pecknold is able to look over the vast expanse of popular music and then draw from it's depths and nuances the exact sounds that are needed to perfect his vision, almost like DJ Shadow's gift for finding beautiful passages that line up perfectly amid incredibly obscure old LPs, but on a cosmic scale. Of particular note is his decision to use the gorgeous instrumentation of late 60's soul, particularly Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin On?" beneath his gentle strumming patterns and eclectic instrumentation, especially on the second half of the album, to give the music a complex, ruminating sentimentality.
Yet one never feels, listening to Fleet Fox's music, that they are making a homage, or some motley collage of their favorite releases. This music is wholly Pecknold's, and it's Mariana depths, regardless of the make and design of the submersible used to plumb them, are the product of one of our greatest songwriters.
05. Elder - Reflections of a Floating World
The phrase "floating world" references a Japanese term for the isolated and decadent lifestyle of the Imperial (and later Shogunal) courts in medieval Japan. It is a fitting title, because just as the unparalleled decadence and cultural ostentation of this period of Japanese history stood out all the sharper in comparison to the meager, brutish lifestyle of the countries peasants, so too this album is made up of two separate worlds that combine to form a singular whole that is almost as complex and intriguing as they cultural tradition they named their album after.
There is nothing new about combining the droning assault of doom metal with melodic ideas from the psychedelic and progressive rock of the late 60s and early 70s, but Elder and particular have a real knack for creating inventive guitar guitar melodies that, when combined with the heavy, plodding bass, feel like an infusion of King Crimson's mythic dreamscapes with Black Sabbath's nightmarish visions. The whole effect reminds of of the image Yeats used in his poem "The Second Coming" of a falcon swirling about a great whirlwind as the falconer, caught in the middle of the funnel, struggles against the surrounding forces. We as listeners too find ourselves buffeted on all sides by the pummeling bass guitar while high above us, well beyond our reach, the guitar performs gorgeous arabesques.
04. Black Cilice - Banished from Time
Black Cilice have what I believe to be the most fitting band name I have ever encountered (save perhaps Crass). The medieval device for inflicting pain and discomfort on the wearer through small little spikes on the band that dig into the skin, accurately describes what Black Cilice are going for. As the cilice itself was meant for the extreme fringe of the Christian community, so is this music meant for the kind of person who responds to a perfectly innocent question about why someone would listen to something like this with a long rant about how metal is a reflection of the horror and suffering of existence rather than just saying that they like the riffs.
The first thing that one will notice about this album is the production. The big point of discussion in most comment threads about this band that I have seen is the low production value, which, strictly speaking, is not true. Access to poor quality production undoubtedly contributed to the abrasive sound of early black metal demos that inspired the mysterious man behind Black Cilice (I am assuming the project is by a single man based on the photos and album art), but in the year 2017, I can, armed only with a Warlock I got for 150$ at a pawn shop, a 130$ Indiana bass from a secondhand store, a 250$ R16, a 150$ Korg synth for drum programming and extra effects, less than 100$ worth of pedals, and a 60$ copy of Reaper, produce music that, while shitty sounding, at least has that "sort of almost passable" quality associated with modern low quality demos. However, I have no fucking clue how to even begin making music that sounds like this. I once accidentally plugged my bass into a mixing board with a built in bass distortion effect on while forgetting my line was still hooked into all my guitar effects, and the sound came sorta close to what can be heard here, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire mix is clouded by a such a haze of fuzz that I legitimately believe it required more ingenuity on his part to create this then it would have to learn how to mix and master the album properly. There are places where I can't even tell what kind of instrument I am listening to, like that weird thing that pops up every once in a while on "Boiled Corpses" that sounds almost like he ran a synthesizer through a bunch of guitar distortion pedals (maybe he just routed the master through a distortion pedal).
There is more to this endless barrage of hostility than just the production though. The guitars will often hold incredibly simplistic (structurally, not technically) riffs for long stretches of time just to let the monotony drone into your skull. The drums, while competently played, are presented to the listener in a choppy sluice that is diametrically opposed to the crisp clear, easily identifiable even at 200bpm style recording typically used to capture such a blast-beat heavy style of playing. The vocalist, meanwhile, never seems quite sure whether or not he wants to line up his banshee shrieks to the meter of the music, typically coming in at the start of the measure but then just going on for as long as he feels like without any regard for consistency or whether he will line up with the bars.
All in, "Banished from Time" is one of the best pieces of unrepentant hostility I have ever heard.
03. Archspire - Relentless Mutation
In my entry for Satan's Hallow, I was a bit dismissive of the tendency of the metal community to overvalue classic releases in comparison to newer ones, but the reality is it is difficult to really get a grip for how certain releases will stand the test of time. Five years from now I may regret making such a claim, but I sincerely believe that Archspire's "Relentless Mutation" stands with the absolute upper echelon of technical death metal. Yes, I'm talking "Nespithe", "None so Vile", "Onset of Putrefaction", and (everyone calls in progressive death metal now a days but I still consider it tech death) "Unquestionable Presence".
Guitarists Tobi Morelli and Dean Lamb are fond of taking these brief little circular riffs that loop back on themselves and throw them into complex sequences and permutations that are endlessly inventive, which are then interspersed with hyper-speed scale run fills. While neither technique is unique to Archspire, they way they combine them and construct grand sonic monoliths is.
I think bassist Jared Smith may be my favorite second favorite Death Metal bassist after Atheist's Tony Choy (most of my favorite Death Metal guitarists are on the more traditional end of the spectrum, but when it comes to bassists I lean more towards tech death). He has an uncanny ability to anchor down the guitars at just the right moment and then unleash these absolute deluges that seep into the sound and produce an effect not unlike soil liquefaction, where the solid structure that rest upon his foundation suddenly gives way to total chaos.
Oli Peters' vocal work is far from a weak link in this presentation. I'll admit that to a certain extent, as the complexity of the instrumental sections rise, my regard for the role of extreme metal vocalists as compared with the rest of the band diminishes, perhaps unfairly. This is probably related to the fact that, unlike the instrumental musicians I have known over the years, I have never known the one close friend I have who does extreme metal singing to actually practice. Peter's vocal work acts as an excellent rebuttal to the opinions I have formed based on a single piece of evidence. While, unlike the guitars, bass, and drums, there are some people that have a natural knack for death metal vocals without any serious effort on their part, it takes the same disciplined control of the diaphragm and larynx required of a clean vocalist to produce these rapid machine gun lines he uses in time with the guitars, but with the additional risk of vocal cord damage that comes with this style of vocals.
Spencer Prewett's drumming does not stand out to me as much as the other parts, but it does not let you down either. Perhaps this has more to do with my lack of appreciation for drumming as compared with the other dominant components of music, but at the same time the mere fact that he is able to hold down the line in a band of this caliber speaks volumes for his abilities.
02. Cleric - Retrocausal
This year has seen me turn back to metal fairly hard after having spent a number of years immersed in jazz, krautrock, experimental rock, and other avant-garde kinds of music, so I was overjoyed when I first head Cleric's beautiful effort at bridging these worlds. If avant-garde, as the term was originally used, indicated the advance force of an army that does all the dangerous front line work, then Cleric are a rogue scouting party, who, on a covert mission to France, decided to say fuck it and launch an invasion of Turkey.
That word "avant-garde" is often used to refer to acts that incorporate a bit of electronic experimentation, but this, my friends, is the real fucking deal. It infuses the aggressive, bursting assaults of mathcore and tech-death with the expressive spirit of Albert Ayler and the complete disregard for convention of James Chance and the Contortions. The fact that it features a cameo by John fucking Zorn should speak to its experimental credentials, but it does not do justice to how well the band pull this off.
I am one of very select group of oddballs who plays mostly metal stuff on the guitar and bass and mostly jazz on the piano. While I myself have never been able to get the idea put to sound, I have always had a conviction that it would be possible to infuse jazz keyboards with metal guitar playing in a way that didn't water down either tradition, so you could have heard the sound of me peeling the jizz-encrusted underwear from my skin after I heard the almost Alice Coltrane-esque keyboard playing that opens up "The Treme".
This album, however, is far more than an infusion of jazz and metal. It incorporates elements from damn near every fringe tradition of extreme music. I already mentioned free jazz, technical death metal, no wave, and mathcore, but you can add to that post-hardcore, experimental electronic music, progressive metal, LaMonte Young style avant-garde classical, musique concrète, and whatever the hell you want to call John Zorn's unique brand of experimental music. Yet the end result is not some Twelve Foot Ninja style hammering together of a bunch of ill-fitting puzzle pieces, but a work that stands on it's own.
This is a release that really requires some time to dig into, so it is unfortunate that it came as late in the year as it did (it was released on December 8th, and I didn't have the chance hear it until the 19th), because it put me in the position of having to rush out a judgment without having listened to it for as long as I would have liked. Since I did not have a lot of time to dig into this release, and I have not yet had the pleasure of hearing Cleric's previous album, this is the first time I have encountered anything even close to this kind of sound, and it has been something I have always believed could be done, but never had any evidence to back that claim up, so unlike other times when I have severely over or underrated albums that have come out at the years end, I do not think that I will find myself regretting having listed this release as high as I have.
01. Myrkur - Mareridt
"I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"
-Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer's quote is one of the most misunderstood things that is regularly quoted by the general public. He is not saying that he himself had become the reaper, rather he is saying he felt just like Prince Arjuna the moment he witnessed the stunning manifestation of a God in all his divine might. When I heard Myrkur's gorgeous voice open this album: a melodic wail which transitions into plaintive folk-styled dirge, and then, after a few minutes of reveling in her splendor, leaps into the grating shriek that comprises the best female black metal vocals I have ever heard, I too realized that I was in the presence of the divine. This is not the benevolent, "all-loving", "creator of the best of all possible worlds" God common to the monotheistic west, but a God in the old traditions as seen in the fickle whims with which Homer's deities bestow boons and great suffering on a helpless humanity, or Kali, with two of her four hands holding a bloody saber and a severed head, while the other two made protective gestures and offered great gifts to humanity. Myrkur is at one the serpent spoken of the song of the same name, casting a spell of great misfortune on any who would dare approach her, as Actaeon bore the wrath of Artemis when he happened to glance upon her bathing, and at the same time she is the the all-mother who grants her unimaginable beauty to those who prove themselves worthy, as King Niall of Ireland discovered when he, dying of thirst, encountered and old hag who demanded to be kissed in exchange for water, and in doing so found himself confronted with the island's mother divinity.
I have heard few vocalists who impress me as much as Myrkur has. In her stunning ability to reach the upper echelons of classical, folk, and traditional black metal singing, she is able to infuse the best elements of all these traditions into a sonic palate that fits perfectly with the music she is making while sounding like absolutely nothing I have heard before. The infusion of clean, pleasing vocals that are not derived from folk traditions very rarely pans out, but much of this has to do with the fact that most vocalists have a specialized style that they will not try to stray from, whether it be clean or harsh. This will inevitably lead to clean vocalists encountering music that requires something harsh and being unable to match the mood of the music, or harsh vocalists growling over a sprawling, folk or electronic influenced passage that seems designed for a soaring high pitched voice. Myrkur not only possesses the ability to command all these various styles of singing, but she can infuse them into something that sounds whole and complete within itself, unlike many bands with a clean and harsh vocalist, who always give off the sense of being at odds with one another.
In addition to these amazing vocals, Myrkur also does all of the other instruments on this album, and here too she exceeds beyond my wildest expectations. Like her voice, her songwriting shows a breadth of knowledge that is amazing to behold. Her album never locks on one particular mode of expression for too long, but instead dances around a swirling gyre of influences too long to name. While their are no shortage of bands like this, the vast majority who attempt something like Mareridt create something that never captures the full might of the many differing genres they touch on. This is not the case here.
The album's opener, the titular "Mareridt", gives you a taste of he sublime operatic vocals, and her equally beautiful folkier singing, while the airy synths present one end of the massive spectrum of sound this release covers. In the sudden, punch-to-the-face jump into "Maneblot", we get to see the other end of the spectrum, with Myrkur's harsh black metal screeching, which is as good as black metal vox I have ever heard, coming in on top of a very traditional instrumental performance. The kind of steady, rhythmic tremolos, on-off alterations with a bar of trems followed by a bar of hammer-ons/pull-offs, and pounding blast beats that defined early 90s black metal. The fact that she is then able to bring back her singing voice in a manner that heightens rather than dilutes the beauty, as if one were walking through a gloomy forest and suddenly encountered a band of naked and bloodied wood nymphs, utterly perfect in their physical forms, dancing over a bound and gagged human sacrifice.
"The Serpent" strips the guitars down to bare bones chugging and tremolo patterns so that the attention to provide a sparse, open backdrop of Myrkurs dreamy, phantasmic vocal performance. "Crown" brings things down to a dreary, bass-heavy flat-line so that the stunning beauty of the chorus becomes all the more transcendent. Here we also see some more of the grand instrumental breadth of this album, with a two note violin pattern doing an incredible amount of work in heightening the atmospheric trance. The crescendo the song reaches at the end is worthy of special notice. "Elleskudt" is a return to black metal, but this time the approach is more in line with the melodic branch of the genre, with the interplay of the steady trems and oscillatory patterns reconstructed to be less steady and more riff-like. As always, the inhuman capacities of Myrkur's voice takes center stage, but the way in which she shapes the various subgenres of metal to craft the ideal field of battle marks her skill as a songwriter.
Painters will say that the empty space of the canvas is just as important as the subject. In a similar vein, Myrkur's decision to open "De Tre Piker" with nothing but her voice and then slowly build into a very open number with very low guitars, pounding war drums, and an alternation between her vox and folk instrumentals uses what it lacks to create an incredibly suggestive sonic portrait. On "Funeral", the guitars, fittingly, play a droning, bare bones dirge as Myrkur switches between the closest thing to conventional singing we see on the album and a lovely wordless backing harmony. "Ulvinde" moves to a sound that is closer to folk metal as Myrkur switches her vocals to a more fitting folk-derived style, occasionally stepping out to break into harsh wails or passionate surges in pitch.
On "Gladiatrix" we see Myrkur combining ambient electronic drones, folk instrumentation, almost doom metal heavy guitars, thudding war drums, classical violin interludes, and a shoegaze inspired singing style that all come together to a gorgeous collage of ethereal beauty. The following track "Kaetteren", a folk duet between a violin and a nyckelharpa, somehow feels like it is the perfect fit between the previous track and "Bornehjem", the album's haunting, droning, closer that features low plainchant and beautiful synthesizers beneath a distorted and demonic spoken word passage.
Throughout these varied stylistic approaches, the one constant is Myrkur's gorgeous voice, which reaches beyond the fragile limitations of genre and, like Helen of Troy, is of such beauty that it allows the human being behind it to ascend into the realms of divinity.
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