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SPK - Zamia Lehmanni: Songs of Byzantine Flowers, 1986 Following the group's early harsh industrial music and sandwiched between two more pop oriented albums, already a drastic shift in itself, is this album. And it's almost like a miracle in many ways. It has a beauty about it that words really can't do justice, and while it combines subtle influences from their other material, it is a far cry from that and pretty much any other artist's work. A fitting title, as the music here has a somehow Byzantine quality to it, as if you could really apply the term to sound. That aesthetic shines through in the neoclassical undercurrent that sweeps away the tribal/industrial ambient stylings, giving it a feel unlike anything else entirely. |
Alpinist - minus.mensch, 2009 Among the greatest and most essential examples of neocrust (translation: false and melodically brutal artcore for posers). The whole scene is marked by Tragedy and His Hero is Gone plagiarism combined with screamo and dark crunchy post rock atmospheres. Extra poser credentials for the groups that incorporate strings (see: Oroku, Ekkaia, Nux Vomica, Fall of Efrafa, Downfall of Gaia, Cwill, Dead to a Dying World) as is well known among ***s like me, false genre > true genre like 95% of the time, and you can't spell neocrust without at least two letters of the word epic. |
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Bassnectar - Mesmerizing the Ultra, 2005 Not sure to what is owed the injustice of this album's ratings but it's some of the most imaginative sounding breakbeat to ever be broke. It transcends breakbeat really, doesn't sound much like it at all, with an omnipresent sheen of chillness and bouncy sound carbonation. The production is completely distinct and spellbinding. |
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Usurp Synapse - Disinformation Fix, 2003 I explored the harshest sorts of screamo early on, and this album is such a vicious ripper. Reversal of Man - This is Medicine, 2000 After Orchid and Circle Takes the Square, RoM was like my third screamo band. Another shredder but more riffy and erratic with the tempos. Noisy Sins of the Insect - Discography, 2007 Totally random and Turkish screamo that puzzles me to think I've loved it for so long. |
The Olivia Tremor Control - Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One, 1999 Easily the best release from the Elephant 6 label, blows In the Aeroplane Over the Sea out of the water. The Olivia Tremor Control were perhaps the most experimental of the bunch aside from of Montreal, with a good emphasis on field recordings and other such collages of whimsy. The album goes all over the place but never ever loses its flow from neo psychedelia to bits of musique concrete and back. Quote:
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NEU! - NEU!, 1972 I like NEU! better than Kraftwerk, the former is a more complete package. Kraftwerk's earliest pure krautrock material is great, and so is their electro oriented music to come, but NEU! do it all at the same time. It is amoebic. https://i.pinimg.com/236x/70/a6/28/7...m-my-music.jpg Stereolab Quite impossible to leave just one album here, so Stereolab gets a full spot. Their music emanates a bliss so retro-contemporary and loving and warm. They're like a drug (Sha La La). They make time stand still to bless upon the soul a euphoria unattainable in the passing of seconds inside daily life, and leave you rejuvenated and glowing, knowing that no time has been wasted in the meantime, and life moves on a bit longer. Flying Saucer Attack - Flying Saucer Attack, 1993 A force of great insurgence of neo-psychedelia and an almost enlightened journey. How anyone could listen to this and not experience anything short of aural ecstasy is beyond me. A sonically sacred descendant of Spacemen 3 and the like, but this ritual has a deeper and organic message. |
Plutocracy - Dankstahz, 1992 If ever a band should be revered, Plutocracy are a good way to go. Very old school deathgrind that manages to be off-kilter and unstoppable. |
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Nanuchka - A Carefully Planned Accident, 2006 Cuz this album means more to me than a tiny blurb in the other journal allows. Of course anything of this ilk is bound to be fantastic but Yula's voice is something of another world. The World/Inferno Friendship Society - Red-Eyed Soul, 2006 Probably along with Devotchka as a top perennial cabaret punk group ever, and this is their most realized opus. Mischief Brew - Smash the Windows, 2005 MB would get lumped into that whole edgy folk punk scene by way of association but they truly stand above the rest in pretty much every regard. Heavy assortment of eclectic instruments, virtuosic ability and songwriting, great voice, original. They work many styles into their brand but a gypsycore air remains constant. Erik Petersen's death came as such an immense shock to me, and had it's bit of impact because his music has played an important role in the development of my being. |
time for some of the other Nick Cave albums
From Her to Eternity, 1984 I guess it could be natural that this debut album is unquestionably the most difficult in the catalog, hot of the madness of the late Birthday Party. A bunch of elements still remain, with no-wavey guitar skronkage and a general form of formlessness, but also incorporated now is some off kilter blues and long and meandering, harrowing minimalistic bouts of terror and catharsis. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...rn_Is_Dead.png The Firstborn is Dead, 1985 The blues is in full effect on this album now. Raw and downtrodden atmosphere and among the groups best tracks with the constantly rolling drums and frantic guitar of Tupelo Your Funeral, My Trial, 1986 The first album where it became clear that branching out was indeed inevitable. Early in this transition more eclectic influences are surfaced, somewhat more of a gothic air, but still holding onto the early and menacing stylings. I think The Carny is my favorite track here, for whatever reason. It's more of a tale of a song, in the way of older brooding ballads like A Box for Black Paul. It goes strangely hard in a way I can't quite articulate. Gloom and crash. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Tenderprey.jpg Tender Prey, 1988 Logically the pinnacle of creativity thus far. This album of course expands their style to something quite original. It's got the gothic rock, the blues, the ballads, the intimidation, and now bundled together with art rock and industrial influences. All this makes for a very realized album. Plus it contains perhaps their best track, and one of the most badass and epic ever written by anyone, with The Mercy Seat. Let Love In, 1994 After Tender Prey the band tried on a softer approach with the Good Son, then another thorough and succinct and all around rocking go with the previously mentioned Henry's Dream. Let Love In just continues the logical evolution and is regarded often as a definitive work. It's quite lovely, if you will. Very full of it. It lets it in. Hypnotic and deep. Murder Ballads, 1996 Stylistically still in the vein of its predecessor, with heavy focus on atmosphere and story telling. Opens heavily with the immense and cavernous Song of Joy, it's deep from the start. A lyrical showcase here that demonstrates the versatility of the songwriting, from chilling and heartbreaking to humorous and ridiculous and generally vulgar, it all makes me happy. Stagger Lee and O'Malley's Bar are pretty much as gangster as it gets. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....pL._SY355_.jpg Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, 2004 No More Shall We Part is perfectly painful in all the best possible ways, another soft ballad oriented album with great writing all around. After that came Nocturama, which is good too, surely, but it was followed by perhaps the group's most eclectic release in their entire arsenal with this double doozie. Overall an artsy and folksy bit of coolness with satisfying noise rock elements coming through over vast arrangements of instruments both acoustic and electric, and even some gospel here and there with choirs for days. I luv |
p.s. eliot - Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds, 2009 such wonderful and lovely power pop that will never cease to make me happy. Some of my favorite vocals, very genuine in cadence and tone. Bad Banana - Crushfield, 2010 p.s. eliot is comprised of two lovely sisters and each of them has branched out with other projects to create something of a family. Bad Banana is exponentially more lo fi |
Circle Takes the Square - Decompositions: Volume 1, 2012 With an album this good it's unfair to leave my CTTS input at As the Roots Undo. Should it be blasphemy to prefer this one? They're quite different beasts all in all, this one is refined immaculately. In my opinion it's a metal album on the whole, but people would probably disagree. But tightening the screws of ATRU and polishing the quality, creating new and more expansive bouts of maximum music, writing very complex suites of atmospheric/progressive sludge metal, well it's great. |
Bone Awl - Meaningless Leaning Mess, 2008 Aside from sporting one of the absolute greatest album covers of all time, this is savage. Bone Awl acted, naturally, as a catalyst for getting into this very raw and very monotonous form of primitive punkened black metal. It's so simple but compelling and catchy. https://www.sputnikmusic.com/images/...273.jpg-thumbl Ythogtha - False Faith, 2007 somewhat obscure for another introductory group but after Bone Awl I levitated towards this thing. Arnaut Pavle - Arnaut Pavle, 2013 My favorite, probably, one off release from this widespreading style I now am the master of. Sejr - Demo, 2013 From Denmark and the Posh Isolation family tree comes one of the more shredding and badass groups. |
Left For Dead - Splitting Heads, 1998 This is some feral hardcore that looked at all the other hardcore at the time and thought it was all some weak ****. So Left For Dead shred metallic and often fast thrashing business with heavier breakdowns than perhaps any given moon. |
Pg Heart Transplant - Hope You Enjoy Heaven, 2008 I was taken by the name and proximity to Iron Lung and I checked this out, one of the first I suppose noise oriented things I was about. It's disgusting and abrasive and sludge gushing like especially early Swans had they really wanted to hurt people with their music. |
Cold Sun - Dark Shadows, 1970 this album occupied a lot of atmosphere while at my former mountain top camp, playing this and watching the routine of the hill's surprisingly diverse populace through a telescope. It's fantastic psych rock that demands the attention of psych fans. |
Bucket Full of Teeth - Discogaraphy BFOT's discography actually consists of several EPs but with a run time of 49 minutes I can call it an album. They're something else. With screamo becoming more or less of an event, the populous needed more brutality, more unhinged chaos, more teeth. BFOT play the most grinding screamo you could imagine alongside Combatwoundedveteran. Except the former has a much higher concentration of eccentricty, incorporating psychedelia here and there, but never not raping. |
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https://pygmylush.bandcamp.com/album/bitter-river Pygmy Lush - Bitter River, 2007 Pygmy Lush hold a special place in my heart, just like literally every single other artist in this journal. A band sculpted from the remnants of screamo godfathers pg.99 (who'd given the world unsanctioned chaos in the most **** you sort pf way), they offer a lush feast of slow folk with the requisite sadness of groups like Red House Painters. Bitter River here isn't my favorite, in fact it's their weakest offering, but it's a transitional album, with the acoustic style quite sparse and independent and simplistic, and intertwined with loud noise rock tracks akin to a more emotive Jesus Lizard. They don't trade off very well in all honesty, and the album suffers slightly from inconsistency, but I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it's not great. https://img.discogs.com/qBxjcQojLTr5...85331.jpeg.jpg Mount Hope, 2008 But now we have the true lush, strictly folk oriented and positively (negatively?) somber. There wasn't so much to the clean portion of Bitter River, but Mount Hope is folk finally realized. Downtempo and nostalgic for things that never were, never will be. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....1fSTzHi91L.jpg https://pygmylush.bandcamp.com/album...lp-w-turboslut Split w/ Turboslut, 2009 So the post-skramz freckled throughout Bitter River wasn't completely abandoned when we look through their whole discography. The Pygmy Lush side of this split alternates between raucous takes much superior in their own right to the early stuff, and a still evolving malady of stark folk music, and it's all some of their greatest material. The split is home to the definitive number one PL track right here. Haunting, gorgeous, dreamy, smooth, hopeful, hopeless, hopelessly hopeful, fullyhope lesshope, and now there's no more pages left in the thesaurus. I chose this song as my spirit guide in the midst of a DMT trip and I simply can't imagine life without it Turboslut is cool too, like neo-grunge |
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Alice Cooper - Love it to Death, 1971 Some time ago my dad had made me a small batch of mix CDs for certain artists (the others being Deep Purple, Judas Priest, the Scorpions, and Ted Nugent, but the Alice Cooper mix was my favorite by far. As of now his/their music is an integral part of my youth, so many tracks that I can't ever rid from my mind. Love it to Death begins the critical era, obviously regarded as a massive classic. The Ballad of Dwight Fry (censored by those posers), is a cathartic track, one of my favorites ever. Caught in a Dream too, simple yet so arresting for me. Killer, 1971 At the time I can imagine the reception of Love it to Death and its shocking and dark content, but Killer becomes even more sinister. It also rocks even harder. The atmosphere is that of shady dealings, and Halo of Flies is the masterpiece. Another great cut, Desperado, speaks of the methods of a hitman, coupled with brooding haunted dynamics. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....ZL._SX355_.jpg School's Out, 1972 Massively underrated. Barring the title track, none of these songs get the recognition they truly deserve. This album contains a good portion of my favorite Cooper tracks. Experiments in acoustic stylings give way to a unique sound. I dunno why it's not unanimously on par with their other monuments, because it's something quite special and intimate. Luney Tune appeared on the mix CD, and I'm thankful for that, it's an amazing track of madness. Honestly it's probably my favorite alongside Killer. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....RL._SX355_.jpg Billion Dollar Babies, 1973 The most revered yet, and perhaps ever. It continues the style associated with its predecessor but is apparently a better commercial effort. |
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Buster Poindexter - Buster's Happy Hour, 1994 So David Johansen of the New York Dolls went ahead and released some novelty alcoholic lounge calypso pop under this name, even procuring a one hit wonder with Hot, Hot, Hot I guess it's silly and whatever but I love it. This album is a vicious earworm. This tracl is the jam forever. |
The Builders and the Butchers - Salvation is a Deep Dark Well, 2009 Fantastic group that models itself after Country Death Song by the Violent Femmes Evil and murdery |
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Stinking Lizaveta - Slaughterhouse, 1997 Grew up with this CD. It's an older release from a band that would definitely go on to top it but its atmosphere is much its own. Jazz infused experimental stoner rock with mind spaghettifying musicality on all fronts. Soon they'd be more overtly math rock inspired and take on an electric upright bass. |
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