Album Review: Swanwriter - Melodies of Despair

Vancouver multi-instrumentalist Koda clearly conveys a fair warning about what to expect when cracking the casket on one of their releases under the Swanwriter moniker. No half-truths, prevarications, or distortions (other than in the guitar mix) are present to muddy the refrain on their latest LP, titled Melodies of Despair- a pronouncement of sickly succor you can feel in your bones. This gallery of roguish tunes sounds like an outro that accompanies a slow curtain draw on a reenactment of some gruesome Slavic folk tale where a series of unfortunate events leads to a small pack of adorable children meeting an untimely and tragic end- each a swan song for the unfortunate, hapless, and calamity-inclined. And if you think this is me simply being illustrative and evocative (thank you, by the way, I do try my best), this is literally the context of the opener "The Painted Valley," which recounts an orphaned Hungarian girl's ill-fated adoption and later encounter with the vampiric noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, which resolves with a conclusion that is, let's say, beyond the pale. Much of what you're going to encounter on these dissonant lullabies could safely be described as progressive metal, embracing a philosophy of composition that is less like traditional scoring or pop peddling and more like reverse-engineering a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle- layered, intricate, even confounding at times, and liable to trap you in a head-exploding cage with a nefarious riddle as your only key to survival (sorry, wrong Jigsaw, but still accurate to the material). Far from being bereft of ideas, Melodies of Despair is decidedly baroque in its orchestration, incorporating many stylistic and structural inspirations from composers like Johann Sebastian Bach and others of a similar pedigree, which bestows upon these renditions of woe a weighty mantle of gravebound gravitas. The specificity of its more classical components can get somewhat overwhelmed by the spiteful spur of the album's most manifestly heavy metal-oriented passages, but only in an initial listen, as they often surface like a black iceberg in the sea lane of a pristine, white Victorian yacht and floating hotel, angling to claim its passengers as a fresh crop of human barnacle beds in the trench of the abyss- icy collisions of blackened death, finding harbor in the shadowy shelter of Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse, more so than the deformed theatricality of a Fleshgod Apocalypse. Melodies of Despair is the sound of a final breath caressing the fleshy petals of a black rose before descending to mingle with the miasma of Erebus.

Album Review: MoonDoctoR & Surly - 10 Days in San Antonio

I'll often listen to interviews with DJs for their music recommendations. DJs are essentially professional music appreciators, after all, and will often be more honest, upfront, and concise about their tastes and interests than most recognized critics and cultural commentators. It's a fruitful pastime, and I have no regrets. Although there are times when the subject is somewhat of a blemish on humanity. I remember one guy recently who was being interviewed for a localish metropolitan outlet, and it's hard to believe what the producer was thinking having him on. From his put-on affect to his dated, ill-fitting wardrobe, he did a poor job of concealing that he was one of those failed entrepreneurs and former tech hucksters who fell into disc jockeying as a pivot and alternative model of getting paid for producing nothing of measurable value. Everything he recommended was straight buns, just full-on cheeks. It was astounding to see someone gas for 10 minutes while batting that many strikes in a row. It was like he never actually listens to music for the pure pleasure and simply builds his playlists based on some data-driven hallucination of audience segmentation in an Adderall-induced, algorithmic trance. I suspect that the only thing keeping this guy rolling in ice rather than being laid up on it is his final recommendation, "Scare Em to Death" by Surly. Somewhere along the line, he got clued into the fact that this was a pretty hot track, and it's probably been his saving grace ever since. Regardless of how many bougie bottom feeders attempt to hitch their wagon to it, Surly's 2017 EP Trip to Warsaw is still a rock-solid slice of non-standard juke and footwork, one that seamlessly interlaces Chicago styles of high-energy house and the producer's familiarity with Central European jazz as encountered through his father's career of playing music with experimental musicians hailing from a certain former Soviet republic. While his Polish jazz and Chicago-style jungle bounce fusion is easily his best-known work, he did produce another album's worth of material around the same time that was lost until very recently. Mixed and maestro'd over a little over a week's time in collaboration with his friend MoonDoctoR at the latter's home, the bones of what would become 10 Days in San Antonio solidified after successfully scoring a dance battle in Chicago. According to MoonDoctoR, they were mostly just kicking it down in Texas at his place, and the music just percolated up and out from the ether of the low-key rager they were wading through. Comparatively, 10 Days is a more conventional collection of footwork, infused with a dark intrigue that boldly traces the unquantifiable qualities that separate and blend dance floor and back alley, basement and skydeck, constantly in motion like a shark, inhaling the particulated grit of UK garage, rattling thrums of ravey synths, and hydrophilic diffusions of soul, and exhaling a glowing cloud of syrupy, incandescent composure- a placid romantic melancholy that can't resist coasting in the moonlight on the chromed reflections of low-riding G-funk pump- a fantastic collection culminating in the key collaboration "The Friends," a hypnotically ponderous gyration and intimate looping concord that rings in a finally casting call of the pair's combined potential with its dense layers of dependable vocal brushes, heart-skipping basslines, and brassy blushes of devotion. The session tapes for this record were misplaced somewhere along the way, making it very unlikely to have ever surfaced in any form until some technical solutions were discovered that permitted the dynamic duo to reconstruct it from previously discarded demos. It could have been a real loss, but in salvaging these sessions, we can see that those 10 Days in San Antonio were not spent in vain.

Freshly squeezed moon juice does a body good (Freshmoon).