When I started uploading my original writing to this blog just over a year ago I did so with the understanding that I wanted this blog to be different than the ones that I read in high school and college. I didn't want it to be chasing the trends set by ad-supported publications and I didn't want to write about music out of any sort of obligation to incurious readers or advertisers. I wanted to write in order to share my love and appreciation of music with people and I'm very happy with the way that I have been able to stick to this guiding principle over the past year.
Now, as 2020 sunsets I want to extend my self-guided mission into the next year, not with a year-end recap, but something that I can actually feel good about writing (and something that you'll hopefully enjoy reading). Instead of rehashing my positions on past works I've covered, or god forbid, arbitrarily ranking them, I've assembled a shortlist of reviews for albums that I thought were really special or enjoyed quite a bit but didn't get around to covering in any capacity throughout the past year. This was a surprisingly busy year (traumatic as well) and as a result not every release got the love it deserved. Hopefully, this article corrects some of these oversights.
Without further preamble, please enjoy I Thought I Heard A Sound's 2020 Invitational. Have a safe and happy New Year and I'll see you in 2021! - Mick R.
I've been thinking a lot about how stunningly iconic the picture of that tiger is on the cover of billy woods and ELUCID's new album Shrines. Like, we're all kind of that tiger, right? Like even before the pandemic hit and we were all stuck inside for 9 months with limited human contact, with nothing to do but rewatch Tiger King, scroll Twitter, and peel the wallpaper off the living room, one methodical and symmetrical square at a time. Ok, that last one was just me. Well, anyway, my point remains valid. We're majestic creatures. Transcendental Kings and Queens, and kick-ass Nonbinary Monarchs. Celestial beings living in seclusion on isolated planets, divorced from our essences, living like our lives are not our own in a dream-like state. Unable to affect our surroundings. Pacing in place with our misery on display via social media. Like tigers on a chain, in a 5x3 pen. Waiting for some institution to see us as too much of a threat or a burden, and put a tranc in our necks and drag us off to be disposed of humanely behind a woodshed. These are the things that I think about while I listen to the sobering symphony of beats, painstakingly paced and pilfered from our native traditions of garage and soul, for maximum, lysergic effect. woods and ELUCID straining to make sense of the senseless with phrases and doggerel, infected with ennui and backlit with anger. Our pain makes our conditions more abstract than they actually are. But the right words can help bring things into focus, and clarify what stripes are our own, and which are the shadows cast by the bars on the windows of our cell.
Petridisch - Amaranth Loops (Euphonium Records)
I've always been pretty enthusiastic about video-game music. Whether it was the final boss battle theme from Metal Gear Solid on PS1, or literally the playlist to any GTA radio station, up through San Andreas (I would even listen to Liberty City Hardcore on unapproved YouTube channels in the '10s, even though I never played GTA 4), I think games impacted my tastes in music more than anything else during my nascent years of pop-cultural awareness. Am I embarrassed to admit that games and gaming culture used to be a solid discovery zone for me musically during an earlier period of my life? Fuck no. I still game all the time! I've just found other ways of learning about music. I may make a concerted effort to write about more game music in the future, but for the time being, my one and only recommendation for 2020 is Petridish's Amaranth Loops. These short, sugary, and chill little tunes were composed for an actual game (Amaranth Event), but I think they stand up pretty well on their own as brief, moody, hip-hop-inflected vignettes.
Sweet Baphomet, where do you even start with Bütcher? As a concept, the Antwerp metal band is easy enough to wrangle; they're essentially playing a version of '80s speed metal injected with the obsidian ooze of first wave black metal. But it's in the execution where things get complicated. Bütcher are not treading on the footpath of past giants... they are the giants! And the path they make is their own. Even though you can point to identifiable scorch marks that bare a resemblance to Merciful Fate fingerprints on some of these tracks, or taste the steel of an Enforcer lick on others, Bütcher is far from the sum of their influences. In fact, I'm not even sure they have any direct influences. It often sounds like they are giving birth to the genre they are playing as they are playing, like an uncanny ouroboros, except instead of eating itself, the beast is slithering forth from its own scaly punani. 666 Goats Carry My Chariot is only the band's second LP and it already feels like the band is carrying a blazing torch that was once believed to have exhausted its fuel. In their hands, it becomes like a bonfire whose tip breaches the canopy of an ancient pine forest, beckoning all manner of wickedness to come hither and rejoice. If you needed any reassurance of metal's excessive health in 2020, you need not look any further.
Zora Jones - Ten Billion Angels (Fractal Fantasy)
Ten Billion Angels is the debut LP from producer and graphic artist Zora Jones and exists as an exploration of net native art movements and the culture they occasion. As a result, it's a highly visual album, that is maybe best enjoyed with its accompanying visuals, hosted over at her and her partner's website, Fractal Fantasy. And yes, the album's visuals have a shokushu goukan theme. Although in her hands, the imagery of a woman intimately entangled with a tentacled creature becomes something other than prurient. In her mind, shokushu and other species of expression that have proliferated on the internet are a symptom of the uninhibited, free-form creativity that the internet enables. The way she discusses the germination of memes, animations, and yes, even porn, as they spring up and are manifest on the world wide web is not unlike the way that Situationists used to discuss détournement, as spontaneously forming stages on which the outflow of human expression can spill over in actuation of their species essence in absolute eruptions of freedom. Her ideas about the exuberant art-making on the internet informs not only the visuals of her album, but also the music, which feels like it comes from everywhere, and nowhere at once. A warm influx of silicone-wired, cybernated R'nB, that captures the dense atmosphere and sound that characterizes Chicago drill while not replicating its bpm. The whole album feels like you've booked an Air BnB inside of an android's dream and are not scrolling through a copy of an Isaac Asimov novel on your phone while a Roomba-like creature gives you a foot massage. I can't claim to share Zora Jones's optimism concerning the web or her view that it has the capacity to liberate humanity... but I do agree with her that the internet makes some pretty weird stuff possible, and that weirdness can be delightful more often than it's not.
Atomic Action releases a stupid amount of great hardcore in 2020, of which Barbed New Religion was only one of many to see the light of day this year. Like so many amazing punk records though, I may be one of all of thirty-six people on the planet who have heard it, and for this, I count myself lucky. Barbed New Religion is the debut LP from Kansas City, Missouri's Devils Den, a group that shares members with Blindside USA and the notorious Spine. Devils Den is unabashed in their worship of 80's Japanese hardcore punk, and you can definitely hear the smutty influence of bands like GISM, and to a lesser extent Zouo, but also, just raw, American d-beat saturated with irradiated reverb. It's also fairly clear from the substance of the music (and the album's gritty, monochromatic album art) that the "Religion" referenced here is the ruthless way society is currently organized. I'm going to go out on a limb (not a long branch mind you) and say that it is a comment on capitalism as currently conceived under neo-liberalism, but you're welcome to draw your own conclusions.
I feel like every time I watch Banger TV, Blayne Smith recommends a new Traveler album to me. This either means that I don't watch enough Banger content, or that these Calgary speed metallers have a lot of material out there... but since Termination Shock is only their second LP, I've got some Banger reviews to catch up on. But I digress. After finally dipping my meaty little toes into the black inky pools of Traveler's Termination Shock, I can honestly say that I'll be wading through the deep end of their lido more frequently from here on out. I've always been a huge fan of Iron Maiden, and I'll be damned if Traveler isn't the next best thing in the contemporary landscape of up and coming, North American shredders. Matt Ries and Torying Schadlich's guitars are simply mind-annihilating on the opening track "Shaded Mirror" and the melodic twists and death-defying cascades of JP Abboud's vocals on "Foreverman" are absolutely extraordinary. It's amazing to see the band accomplish these complicated compositional maneuvers while flying at light-speed on the blasting overdrive of "Deepspace." Termination Shock is real rock 'n roll!
Everything I've read about this album starts with the line, "The unlikely collaboration between blah blah blah..." It's a statement that reads like the opening line of a press release trying to head off criticism from people most likely to dismiss the work out of hand... and people need to get off that shit. Maybe artists know what they're doing and hear stuff in each other's music that you don't and no one should need to head off people's haughty takes about who they should, or shouldn't, be working with. Further, maybe orthodox opinions on what's "good" and "acceptable" in popular culture are shaped less by the merits of individual works of art, and more by the prejudices and biases of those who have the biggest platform with the most ad buys. Ergo, disregard your presumptions about what a vaporware artist and the lead singer of 311 might sound like together and just listen to it and allow your own reception and resulting impressions to be the barometer of what is "good art." Of course, you can always just listen to me too. My opinion is very valid, possibly the most valid. And I say that the new collaboration between nostalgia miner George Clanton and reggae-rock superstar Nick Hexum is really amazing. The vibes are so crisp, bright, and clean, and the way Clanton's compositions overlay with Hexum's inviting tropical guitar work and the rinse of his vocal melodies is an inalienable confluence of talent and temperament. The entire album has the effect of producing a melting sense of calm, like viewing the sun setting over the ocean on a clear summer evening. Just as that great eye of fire winks before becoming submerged in the horizon, you too will want to sink into the affable wavelet of these tracks.
Get a copy of the collaboration here.
Kahil El'Zabar - Kahil El'Zabar's 'Spirit Groove' ft. David Murray (Spiritmuse Records)
Recorded part live, part in the studio, the spiritual jazz pioneer Kahil El'Zabar's 'Spirit Groove' a set of collaborations between himself and saxophonist David Murray, is maybe not the best example of Kahil's work ever set to wax, but it's one that I can't shake the feeling of and feel compelled to talk about. Kahil states on the record's Bandcamp page that 'Spirit Groove' is an exercise in bebop that is meant to move people, in the hope that in moving them together, it will awaken other things in them, and allow them to access each other's humanity and unlock their subjectivity. It's a sentiment that I subscribe to and hope that all music can, to some degree, accomplish. Despite the difference in energy between these tracks and performances that can make a straight listen a little jarring, Kahil's natural fluidity as a percussionist consistently achieves a transportive quality that allows for the forgiveness of most, if not all, of the album's flaws. When Kahils ebullitions are at their height, they are like the living heart of some ethereal being, coaxed from the cosmic ether and incarnate in a capsule of space-time, blessing us with its presence and reassuring us with its indulgent grace. The live tracks from 'Spirit Groove' stir something in me that feels almost religious in nature and I have to recommend it in the hope that you too will reap the benefit of this profound discourse in sound.
This was an excellent year for bands inspired by Japenese hardcore, but if you also like your amphetamine guitar grooves, crispy production, and bestial, regurgitated vocals with a kick of d-beat by way of Anti-Cimex, then by Odin, you are in luck. The second album from Melbourne-blackened, psychedelic hardcore band Geld, downplays the hippy headrush on Beyond The Floor in order to deliver a lucid nocturnal trial of your courage and constitution. However, I would hazard that they still earn the descriptor "psychedelic" during long, pounding bridges like that of "Wild Boar," and the extended outro of "Prison & Guard," in which they indulge in the same brain-boiling experiments with downer blues riffs in the same way Black Flag used to when cribbed from Black Sabbath. But for the most part, this album just feels like you're being pulled through a frozen forest after having your ankle snared by an Oskorei raider. Tracks like "Blood Circle," "Nocturnal Hand," and "Red Mist" are pure, spinning roulette wheels of fast times and sudden death stops. If you come away from this album with all your skin still fused to your muscles, I won't believe that you made it through the whole thing.
Masked and painted with runic writing, the sigil-dwelling Portuguese black metal band Gaerea gifted us with a vision of the damned in their writhing, perpetual angst on their most recent album, Limbo. Grasping the rhythmic potential of the genre and feeding it through a fog machine, these dark players have once again produced an album of weighty and cathartic black metal, whose visual aspects cannot be overstated. The album is an oracle's ball for the living to view the torments of those who have passed as they wallow through the mires and crypts of the underworld. In much the way that early Christain visionary texts presented such trials, I like to think that Gaerea's efforts are instructive, not only in how to avoid the anguish of perdition but how to help those who presently find themselves condemned to the drainage traps of the River Styx. I could be off base here, sure, but I like to think that Gaerea's long, lustral passages and stirring, melodically complex, Mgla-esque grooves have a potentially cleansing quality to them. After all, witnessing the misery of others can only ever make you feel, at best, marginally more secure in your own status and standing, and the extent that you see yourself in the those who god's wrath has landed on like a hammer, there can be no rational response but fear. True security and catharsis can only come from keeping each other on our feet and standing with an earned sense of dignity, and the best place to start in this mass reclamation of the human soul is with the fallen.
Get Limbo on Season of Mist.
Sonia Calico - Simulation Of An Overloaded World (More Time Records)
Machine Girl - U-Void Synthesizer (self-released)
It always feels a little weird writing about dance music because, more than any other genre of music, whether or not you will like a particular album or song is determined by whether or not it moves you (figuratively, literally, literally-figuratively, etc...). I could write ten thousand words about how thoughtful the composition of the tracks are, or how interesting the sampling is, but if it doesn't get your toes tapping three seconds after you smash play, nothing, NOTHING, I could write will be likely to overhaul your initial impression. It's an intensely emotional and intuitive variety of music, and when someone gets it right, you... just... know! Someone who I think really nailed it this year is Sonia Calico from Taipei. Her debut album Simulation Of An Overloaded World beautifully blends trance, break, dancehall, and the off-beat hustle of gqom into a vividly realized statement about our overloaded neuro-networks in the information age. The album justifies its universalist themes with adroit, globe-trotting production and adamant disregard for genre borders. If you don't want to start from the top, let me suggest you begin with "Club Simulation" with its dry, cool, oscillating Eastern-inspired sting samples and brisk, drilling, break-clatter percussion, if you like that, then bounce on over to the rubbery slap and marshall chop that undergirds the hushed and wary melodies of "Neo Tokyo Funk." Wherever you start with this one, I hope you get off your tush and into some flats and leg warmers (or whatever you like to dance in, it's your body, express your damn self)!
Machine Girl - U-Void Synthesizer (self-released)
This album is actually my introduction to Machine Girl (aka Matthew Stephenson and Sean Kelly) a digital hardcore band that retains many of the jungle and break influences that helped found the genre back in the '90s. I tend to be someone who likes extremity and maximalist songwriting, and my only real complaint about this album is that it kind of holds back too much. I keep waiting for it to get really ugly and shocking, but it just never gets there for me. However, my experience of the album as a whole was a positive one, especially the manic, break-session "Splatter!" which will just spill sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek cynicism all over the carpeted floor of your head cave, like suds and broken glass from a champagne bottle that had been clumsily opened with a knife, as well as the bashing beat barrage "Suck Shit," and the iconoclastic clash and reverent, oceanic, sonar-spread of closer "Batsu Forever." Everything else feels like it could have been ratcheted up another notch or more. When it's all said and done, this wasn't a bad introduction to their sound and I'm looking forward to their next album... or, maybe I will just get really big into MSI again and never look back. THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN! HAHA!
Get this album here.
Miasmatic Necrosis - Apex Profane (Goatgrind Records)
Joell Ortiz & KXNG Crooked - H.A.R.D. (Mello Music Group)
Two of the butchers from the Slaughterhouse gang stacked some of their best cuts this year for a grinder that will be sure to satisfy the discerning rap connoisseur's appetite for juiced up and savory bars and lean, well-seasoned hooks. H.A.R.D. is thick with heavy rhymes that will come at you fast enough that they'll barely have time to catch one before another comes careening for your noggin, like a game of lyrical dodgeball. Even though it's only an EP, H.A.R.D. feels like it has a double album's worth of jams and prose in it. Some of my favorite bits come early, like with the bombastic, bling-fling of the opener and title-track which features a sonorous MRK SX hook that begins with, "I have been way too humble for way too long..." Which is a line that I just love. The world is always trying to put ropes and chains on you and yoke you with an albatross, but in surviving, regardless of how people and circumstances try to rip your guts out, we all should feel so encouraged to stand up and shout "Fuck you, world! I am the greatest, and I know it!" Ortiz recalling his early success of appearing on the Source's cover as a young upstart, and Crooked recounting how he grew up needing public assistance and now spends his days shopping for designer shoes, demonstrate ways of translating their self-worth into a form that is intelligible to others. They didn't just earn this success and these things, but they deserve them, simply because of who they are, and talking about the good things they enjoy should inspire you to want them for yourself as well. The good things in life do not only belong to a few of us, but to everyone. Ortiz and Crooked are two dudes who know that they should have good things coming their way, and I hope you are inspired by this record to feel the same.
I mentioned it earlier, but I'll say it again here: I am a junkie for extremity. Most metal bands attempt to create an extreme experience with their music, but it's often difficult to be heard above the racket of a thousand bands attempting to make an unpleasant stir of emotions and sound. But when I find a group that is doing something that sounds particularly revolting I am compelled to shout them out. Miasmatic Necrosis is a goregrind group who have taken that early Exhumed aesthetic, consumed it, regurgitated it, and left it to stew in a pressure cooker overnight. Absolutely putrid, nausea-inducing death metal. The vocal work literally sounds like a hog sifting through a troth of bruised meat and piping hot bile, and I can really feel the pulse of the down-tuned guitars in the lining of my large intestine with each maddeningly deep and penetrating stroke. Their album Apex Profane is pretty straightforward in its intent, make the grossest sounding music the band can write while problematizing the sanitized nature of Christain sacraments, especially the eucharist, which if Church doctrine surrounding the transformation of bread and wine into flesh and blood is to be believed, then every Christain mass literally concludes with a sanctified act of cannibalism. Totally gruesome and extreme with lyrics and songwriting that will be sure to provoke some uncomfortably perverse thoughts. Thoroughly recommended, although you may want to listen to it within sprinting distance of a toilet.
Get it here.
Wagner Ödegård - Om Kosmos och de Tolv Järtekn (Brugmanziah)
Om Kosmos och de Tolv Järtekn is the fourth full-length record from Swedish one-man black metal band Wagner Ödegård. My original impression of the bedroom-black-metal genre was that it all landed within the circle of harsh black metal ie Moonblood, Katharsis or Satanic Warmaster. I've since abandoned those presumptions. One dude-metal bands are going to land all over the place in terms of style and content because they're not answering to anyone but themselves. Nowhere is this clearer than on Wagner's new record, which twists through post-punk, darkwave, and ruthless blackened rock 'n roll. There really isn't a gothic texture or eldritch sensibility that he doesn't manage to include on his latest bewitching, sonic hex-tome. A darkly captivating release, that captured my attention in a way that few others managed to this year.
Nnamdi - Krazy Karl (self-released)
There are a lot of folks who strain against expectations in the arena of pop music these days, who will shovel their strange and raw experimental works onto Bandcamp as soon as they feel 3/4ths finished. There are also a lot of rappers out there who have made hip-hop and R'nB a vanguard mode of expression in recent years, beyond even what seemed possible in the pre-golden, post-disco era of the early '80s. Honestly, god bless all these folks! The world would be a duller place without them. Nnamdi's Brat from earlier in 2020 sits at the cross-section of these beautiful cultural trends, and Krazy Karl siphons many of the artist's now-signature moods and sounds into the outlandish and irreverent world of animation, taking on the role of Carl Stalling and soundtracking an imaginary cartoon, titled Krazy Karl. This album is as close to derivative as Chicago hip-hop artist and alternative pop bopper Nnamdi get and it's still astonishingly original. Everything you hear on this record was written and performed by Nnamdi himself, from the pensive, post-funk riffs and intrigue peaking strings of "Coochie Cannon," to the wacky, bebopping piano on "Pigeon Spikes On a Park Bench," to the disorienting harp ripple of "Kitty Can’t Decide." There may be a little Undertale in the opener "You are Here (For Now)" and the delightfully twisted and moody "Have Mercy, Take Mercy" feels like its own self-contained narrative. If you have any interest in the brazenly wonderful directions that underground pop can reverse, then you'll do yourself no service by neglecting to give this EP a spin.
There are really few albums that impacted me as deeply as Kiko Dinucci's Rastilho did this year. The Brazillian guitarist's starkly sparse homage to the samba and candomblé records of the '60s and '70s is a persuasive commentary on the present state of Brazilian politics and society in 2020. Following a bureaucratic coup against Workers Party president and man of the people Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the election of far-right, proto-fascistic Jair Bolsonaro, the country has been in a state of perpetual crisis while foreign "investors" happily drain the country's resources to pad the margins of their offshore accounts. A beautiful country, with more than enough land and resources to feed its people and lead the world in culture and comradery, Brazil appears to be spoiling before our eyes. These lamentable conditions are told with sober and precise guitar work and Dinucci's heavy, damp, and melodious prose. Most of the songs only feature Dinucci and his guitar, but his strumming is so percussive that it easily fills the space of each mix with enough deeply textured sound to grab hold of and maintain your attention. This is especially true of "Olodé" where the rhythm of his playing almost takes on the qualities of a bongo drum, and the loose, plodding shimmy of "Dadá" which features a studdering and slightly deranged vocal performance by Ava Rocha. Rastilho feels like an album that exists exactly as it was meant to, a portal that extends from his country's rich history, through the afro-anchored work of Gilberto Gil and evocative thrum of Jorge Ben, into a present that needs the light of past flames to ignite the torches of present potential and to see a people through to the promised land of a future they were meant to reach.
Nonlocal Forecast - Holographic Universe(s?)! (Hausu Mountain Records)
There is a rumor going around that Angel Marcloid's Nonlocal Forecast was started in an effort to replicate the soundtrack of The Weather Channel and other convenient-in-concept information services of the '80s and '90s. I have no idea if that's true, but it makes a good story. Its untruth would lend itself as well to framing the project's accuracy, frankly. Nonlocal Forecast reproduces, in a dream-like, midi-mastered, multi-dimensional, time-displacement of sound and sensibility that may have once existed, or may have only lived in the hovels of our collective imaginations. A synthesis of fusion-jazz, Japanese environmental music a la Kankyō Ongaku, and electronic composers who only ever issued position papers on theoretical sound, but never commercially viable albums, Nonlocal Forecast is a much more constrained and focused project than Angel's other (arguably more "famous") project, Fire-Toolz. Holographic Universe(s?)! sees her demonstrating a commitment to refining the core elements of her roused somnambulist sound to make its otherworldliness not only more apparent but also more relatable, even as its tightly sequenced drum-programs spiral out and divide into independent, constitutional republics. It has all the aggressive tendencies of a Fire-Toolz album but with an overriding resolve to heave its disparate elements back into a functioning whole. Every record Angel releases quickly becomes my favorite of hers and with what she's been able to accomplish on Holographic Universe(s?)! the streak of critical reassessment continues.
Source is the debut LP from London saxophonist Nubya Garcia, who has collaborated with Makaya McCraven for his Universal Beings project, and, really, that is enough to just get me talking about her, but then there is also the fact that what's she's doing on her own is unparalleled. Nubya is a master of her instrument, and what's more, she is clearly capable of assembling a band that complements her talents, but it is that extra bit of nuance that made Source leap out at me this year. Nubya's spiritual jazz is combined with Afro-Caribbean elements in a way that evokes the sensation of having roots running through the cleavage of your cranium until the body of whatever plant she has encouraged to flower on the top of your head has become an inseparable part of your body. She's a gardener of the soul and the hybrids she fosters are as ravishing as they are elegant. Usually, elements of African-diaspora and music of the central American islands are given their own, relegated space when integrated into albums that follow so closely in John Coltrane's elevated foot-steps. This is not the case on Source. As I have previously explained, there is no separating the sounds of one diasporic tradition from another. These sisters all live under one roof, and it is a happy, loving home they have built together.
Marlowe - Marlowe 2 (Mellow Music Group)
This is the second album from the hip-hop hail-storm, Marlowe, comprised of rapper Solemn Brigham and producer L’Orange. It's about as old school as you can get while still managing to land as fresh and original. Hip-hop's golden era put a heavy emphasis on bars and busty-beats and Marlowe drops both with such precision and regularity you'd swear they were training in anticipation for rap-battles being declared an Olympic Sport. I honestly feel out of breath trying to keep up with the rhymes that Brigham spits in ripping succession. It's a god-send that his pronunciation is so icy-dry and clear and that he can stay on rhythm like a metronome, or else I'd be spending nights and weekends until mid-2021 trying to decipher his messages, which are highly metaphorical, so I'm having to put in quite a bit of work anyway and I'm thankful for any accommodations I can get. L'Orange's beats stay on a punchy, boom-bap, dummy-rolling, demolishing tour cut with whiplashing samples of yo-yoing jazz instrumentals, tension torquing Bollywood smash-cuts, and surprisingly illustrative strands of dialog from grainy, film reels, all of which flat-out floor my ass for the better of the album's run time. I feel like hip-hop is becoming more of a vanguard genre for innovation by the day, but albums like Marlowe's prove that there is still room in the yearbook for those who believe that the classics never go out of style, because they demonstrably don't.
Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas - III (Smalltown Supersound)
The third collaborative EP from Norwegian producers Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Thomas Moen Hermansen may not seem like an event for some, but I spent a lot of time indoors this year and I also got in the habit of staying up until odd hours in the morning working, and their brand of motorik, outworld electronic music perfectly matched my mood while drinking coffee at 3am while pecking away at a project on my laptop with a cat resting next to me and leaning into my thigh. As horrible as this year was, moments of tranquility like that which I just described were some of the more peaceful moments I've experienced in my entire life, and Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas's latest EP helped to soundtrack more than a few such nights since its release. Is this the "best space-disco album ever"? I have no idea. Do I really love the wide wet beats and ringing key trills of "Martin 5000" and the refreshingly crisp, sensually rounded, and starlight-skinned frisk of "Oranges"? Unequivocally! Do I think that the album opening with a song titled "Grand Finale" hilarious? Yes, yes I do! Do I feel like I need a special reason to recommend the loungy, twilight-smeared, quasar-skip of "Harmonia" to strangers on the internet? Not at all! III helped me through some long nights this year, and it might just do the same for you in 2021.
Lauren Bousfield - Palimpsest (Deathbomb Arc)
Lauren Bousfield returns after a short hiatus with her third studio LP, Palimpsest, her first release since the Ghost Ship tragedy tribute EP Fire Songs, which she wrote while recovering from an unrelated accident involving fire that robbed her of most of her possessions and severely damaged her hands and upper arms. Lauren continues to compose tightly sequenced, breakcore-influenced monster-pop on Palimpsest, which borrows heavily from the visual aesthetics of LA's glitch art scene as well as the more conventional music worlds of smooth R'nB and alternative metal. The album is both personal and global in scope, focusing on Lauren's own experiences of disillusionment and mounting trauma in a world that is incapable of correcting course from a Brazil-esque, late-capitalist dystopia, a fact illustrated with song titles like "Adrift," "A Joke Poorly Told," and "Clean Strategic Narratives With Relatable Messaging Murder Them Violently Make Their Children Watch." That last one really hits disquieting accuracy in light of how corporate incentives and governmental messaging have clearly melded together in recent years, both on the internet and meat space, to make everyone feel like their being both tricked and guilted into believing and doing horrible things roughly 80% of the time they're awake and conscious. After all, order must be maintained and someone has to pay for society's failings, and it's not going to be shareholders or politicians, that much is for certain. The palpable discontent of the album is alarmingly relatable, especially on the cold and quiet, ghostly howl of "Another World Is Possible - Presented By US Bank" whose beats and grooves feel caged by a ring of icy, blue light and a crippling, pacifying fear of an onrushing, unavoidably despotic future. "Administrative Violence" is riddled with crisis shaken clatter and strangled, clawing string samples. "Birds Falling Out Of The Sky" feels like it is desperately scrambling for cover through a tropical-fuck-storm of shattering, break-percussion and the nerve pushing pressure of a piano melody that lurches and strikes like a wifi-enabled cobra in the simulacra of moonlight. Someday soon, when we've all been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor at either an Amazon Fulfillment Center or a reeducation camp sponsored by Google for failing to make the minimum payments on our student loans, we won't be able to say that no one warned us that this fate was coming.
