Another turn of the seasons, another late Alice article. Eternal recurrence of the same, so on, so forth. The world plunges further into hell but this year, I’ve found a depressing lack of music that really speaks to the weltschmerz I feel. Ten albums, five honorable mentions. Onwards:
Love and loss. World’s End Girlfriend doesn’t make music in half measures, and Resistance & the Blessing has something to say during all 150 minutes of its runtime. It's two and a half hours but I consistently feel the draw to revisit. Sometimes, feelings take a lot of music to express, and that’s fine.
I caught Tunic live in 2023, and while their skronky take on noise rock was appreciated, I didn’t feel it was anything special. My mind still on the high from God’s Country, I threw a 6/10 their way and moved on. But Tunic wormed its way into my head due to its strange lyricism and flatpan vocal delivery of lines blunt but strange ("It’s can-cer-ous!") I’ve heard a lot of noise rock this year, but Wrong Dream managed to wrest precious listening time from everyone else. A disease I’m unable to shake. Oh, also—their sweaters are great. Leave it to a band from Manitoba to have actually good cold weather clothes!
Typical. A mathcore band gets popular, decides they’re not making mathcore anymore, and end up making a scenecore album. Hmph. Haven’t heard that one before—oh wait, this one is lyrically based off of critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV with unlimited free trial up to level 70 including the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion and the less award-winning Stormblood expansion? Well, shit. I cautiously gave this a 7/10 when it came out, expecting to downgrade it—but every re-listen made me like it more. The profoundly depressing year didn’t give me many opportunities for fun, but I’ve never regretted spinning Blossom when the time came.
One of those albums I put on my to-listen list on release and never got to until December. Big fucking mistake. I’ve been listening to a lot of Turkic folk music and MENA guitar-based music (Gabriel Marin’s Social Assassins, Hashshashin) and this scratches that itch crazy well. Groovy, melodically memorable, with drumming that knows when to back off to let the guitars shine as the star of the show. Just don’t call it dissoblack, or we’ll have a problem.
If you told me one of my favourite J-pop acts of recent memory would be R&B I would not have believed you, but here we are. Ako melds the meditativeness of city pop revival with an emotional intensity and propensity for catchy vocal melodies from yakousei. Steal Your Heart feels good to listen to without being saccharine. It’s just a good time. Now make it available in FLAC for people not in Japan, cowards!
I’ve been a fan of Montréal-based atmospheric black metal duo Gris for a long time. Miserere Luminis’ first album, a collaboration with fellow Quebecois Annatar (Sombres Forêts) was an excellent one-off project—or so I thought. Ordalie continues where the self-titled left off, combining Annatar’s simple yet effective slow blackened doom with Icare and Neptune’s unmatched (classically trained!) orchestrations for five extended songs that all feel like emotionally satisfying journeys. My pure black metal album of the year.
Starting its life out as one of many underground visual kei bands, Sex Virgin Killer released two EPs in 2017, then quietly fizzled out of existence. Upon reactivation, they were promoted by prominent members of Tokyo’s underground music scene, with live shows featuring guest performances by members of Endon, Gridlink, and Boris. With a new vocalist and a newfound traditional metal/punk sensibility, Devil had to live up to some big expectations for a debut album. A thoroughly strange album, jumping between post-punk, indie rock, trad metal, punk, it is nevertheless anchored by Aisha’s distinctive vocals and a love for the sound of the electric guitar—not dissimilar to Boris. The sound may be alien, but give it some time. Sex Virgin Killer will bedevil you.
I am unabashedly biased in favour of Tzusing. An acclaimed hardcore techno producer from China/Malaysia (ethnically Chinese but splits his time between the two), Tzusing has never shied away from exploring Chinese cultural identity in his music, most notably in the 2017 EP 東方不敗. 绿帽 continues where that EP left off, but with samples that are much more impenetrable to a Western audience to the point of seeming comical. Opening up with a sampled English voice in the tone of English listening tests for school (English is a mandatory subject in China), the album melds his signature Motoko Kusanagi-at-the-club sound with more vocal sampling than ever before. The synth pads morph in tone throughout the album, reducing the amount of sonic fatigue one may have when listening to 42 minutes of industrial techno. Might be a hard sell for metalheads—check this out if you like JK Flesh.
Khanate’s last release, the posthumous Clean Hands Go Foul, ended with the monstrous 33 minute "Every God Damn Thing", which featured 28 minutes of lowercase noise before the band’s signature drone/death/noise assault kicked in for a precious mere 4 and a half minutes. Recorded in 2005 but not released until 2009, the band was presumed dead by all. "Like a Poisoned Dog" starts off where the jam session for "Every God Damn Thing" left off, acting as an extended explosion of sound after 28 minutes/14 years of waiting. "It Wants to Fly" features guitars that sound almost pretty, mirroring "In That Corner" from Clean Hands Go Foul. Where this ranks in Khanate’s legacy remains to be seen, but To Be Cruel is a worthy addition to their catalog—like they never left.
+1476+ are an utterly singular band. Their 2017 release, Our Season Draws Near, melded crust punk, post-punk, neofolk, and first-wave black metal for an experience that seemed scattershot at first but has stuck with me in the six years since. In Exile is all that and more. Opening with seven minutes of what is undeniably straight black metal, the music shifts to folk rock with an aggressive metallic edge provided by the drumming and trashy garage rock guitars. Fittingly, just like how the cover art is much less desolate than the aggressive wintry blue hue on Our Season Draws Near, In Exile feels much more alive, with much more energy even on the folk rock parts. Hear this and be transported to the strange and magical world of Massachusetts.
What is this C that the band is trying to find? The clitoris? A cure for cancer? With decidedly eyeroll inducing look-at-me-I’m-so-clever titles such as "Tony Bennett's Tape Machine Does Not Like Mathcore" and "BabyOil.wav", I braced myself for mediocre scenecore wearing the flayed skin of cybergrind. Instead, “Corpse Party” knocked my teeth out, ground it into dust, and snorted it. The music contained in The Mirror, My Weapon, I Love You is distinctly serious, violent, and forgoes that thrice-damned Car Bomb guitar tone for something much dirtier and nastier. Euclid C Finder focus on riffs over guitar tone skronk, and even at its most danceable ("My Glutenous Son You Need to Get a Job") the breakdown that sounds like a malfunctioning power tool immediately gives way to an immensely satisfying Discordance Axis major key riff backed by frantic drumming. This product contains 18 minutes of music with enough skronky riffs for a black metal album triple its length. Just don’t listen to this next to your work computer—the urge to smash your monitor can be hard to resist.
Laster have been one of my favourite black metal bands to walk the earth. Like a less serious Imperial Triumphant aesthetics wise, they are every bit as weird as their getup suggests, from the post-punk of Ons vrije fatum to the loungey Ved Buens Ende of Het wessen oog, Laster are shapeshifters that aren’t content to be bound to the black metal mould. Andermans mijne sees the band return to the post-punk of Ons vrije fatum, but with mostly clean singing, and swirling melodic guitars much more rock-oriented and energetic than that album. Occasional synth melodies rise beneath the bass, not merely audible but prominent, pleasantly reminding me of Thy Catafalque’s Sgúrr. Andermans mijne may not have the pure atmosphere that seeped out of Ons vrije fatum like incense from a censer, but the immediate melodicism and danceable rock beats are very easy to like. Never stop evolving, Laster.
Obsessively listening to this album in preparation for my review made it hard to judge what its staying power would be. After the article ran, I was no longer bound by obligation to listen to this on repeat; giving it some distance ironically made me more appreciative of it. It may not be the landmark achievement of Longhena, but the scent of desperation on Coronet Juniper might be even stronger than that album owing to Matsubara’s beautiful flowing melodies on standout tracks such as "Pitch Black Resolve". I am confident that this album stands proud among peers in such a flawless discography, and I’m looking forward to spending time with Juniper for years to come. Forward—with pitch black resolve.
The other ex-SubRosa project after the band disbanded on good terms, The Keening is the project of vocalist Rebecca Vernon. Featuring many of her ex-bandmates and others from the Portland metal scene, Little Bird achieves the sense of crushing melancholy and doom SubRosa was able to evoke, all with very sparse distorted guitar usage. Every track on this 5-song album features sing-along moments that never feel hackneyed, and Vernon’s haunting murder ballad lyricism leaves a clump in your throat, from the uncomfortably sexual ("he entered me well, he entered me fine, he entered until I lost my mind" from "The Hunter I") to the accusatory ("tell me: did the truth set her free?"). Parallels to SubRosa’s acoustic sets in Utah could be made, but Little Bird is much more "full"-sounding and not stripped down in the slightest. This album is heavy.
NULL nearly topped my end of year list in 2022, narrowly losing out to Moreru and Chat Pile. A pulverizing blend of Swans-esque sludge and their own My War style hardcore, made all the more potent by the inclusion of Kathryn Kerr’s saxophone. "NULL is like you fighting, VOID is you losing." My expectations for VOID were high, but the descriptions given left me with little idea of what the album was going to sound like. The four pre-release singles all were seemingly the same style they used on NULL, the melodic synth-led bridge on "He Was a Good Man, He Was a Taxpayer" being a notable exception. Deliberately taken out of context from the album, the album ended up completely re-contextualizing those songs for me. As the album progresses, the fight slowly dies inside the band as the tempo drops and screams give away to quiet laments, until the nearly lounge-like "Not Today, Old Friend" closes the album out with a bitter, mocking smile. A soundtrack to profound disillusionment and disappointment, there is no better album this year to face the fact that you’re a pathetic nothing barely a cog in the machine burning to death. And if you think you’re otherwise, you’re either delusional or evil.
